Yet I recall that under ’snowball earth’ conditions over 500 million years ago, when there were glaciers close to sea level at the equator, apparently the continents were clustered around the equator.

I’m afraid the “Stefan-Boltzmann law” has me stumped at present, being untutored in methematics. Is there a layman’s explanation?

To my unscientific mind the trend as shown on the 65 million year graph in Paul Monk’s piece looks very powerful and I’d accept that Hansen’s call that future ice ages have been cancelled is a brave call. Yet what is happening now is quite exceptional. Tim Flannery points out that we are warming 25 times faster thatn we did coming out of the last ‘ice age’ and it has been calculated that we are putting carbon into the air 30 times faster than happened 55 million years ago, when, according to Lovelock, the temperature rose 5C at the equator and 8C near the poles (from memory). He also tells us that it took 200,000 years for the planet to recover from that methane burp.

But that little event doesn’t show on Monk’s graph because it is a mere moment in geological time.

Similarly I heard a reef specialist talking the other day. He says the coral reefs have been cooked before and have always re-established themselves. It is just that it usually takes about 4 million years – not long as these things go.

So I’m still worried about the next couple of thousand years. It all seems to be happening with lightening speed. There hasn’t been anything like it, except perhaps the big one of 251 million years ago when just about everything died.

I’m a bit pressed for time at present and would like to do some more research. In particular I’d like to see your exposition or at least the ideas it is based on critiqued by people who know more science than I do. Meanwhile I hope Hansen is wrong, as does he btw, but I truly suspect he’s nearer the mark in terms of the near-term unforeseeable future, if that makes sense.

Right.

And we can see the effects of this. But other then a small amount of anomylous warming in the last two decades of the twentieth century its not showing up in any serious way in the total scheme off things.

That is to say we can see it locally. Particularly in arid places and particularly in the night-time.

Warming weighted to arid conditions and to the night-time is a clear sign of greenhouse warming.

But it isn’t showing up in the global scheme of things and it is not to be taken for granted that this process creates a net warming effect within the oceans.

Now the data has come in and what we can be very sure of is that the warming effect is not nearly as powerful as was earlier expected on a decadal level.

It was a good theory but it didn’t pan out on the decadal level.

And its most disturbing that people will not face up to that.

If it works much more powerfully on the multi-millenial level that is a great and wonderful thing indeed.

Now the next charge…. The idea that it makes things more unstable. I cannot see why that would be the case. Since the warming is weighted to REDUCING HEAT DIFFERENTIALS we expect the opposite effect.

Now it is true that there is nothing to say that this effect cannot be strong over many hundreds or thousands of years.

But it is not getting out of hand and I’ve shown why.

Actually the CO2 on its own is only growing at less then .4% exponentially.

pointy bracket open, then a href equals then your url open quote close quote close pointy bracket > then put in word link or click for the punter to use as mouse clickthrough then open pointy bracket put in / followed by letter a and close with point bracket

I wonder if I tricked the beast. Sorry Graeme. In the meantime Larvati fixed your linking anyway. I think I’ll go and have scotch and a cigar.

It is very simple to create a link.

1. In the text where you want the link put in a pointy bracket like this:
6. Now put in a word that you want to use as the click point, ie. click or link
7. Now to tell the machine you have finished linking put in open point bracket
It will then look like this in your preview Like this link

It is very simple to create a link.

1. In the text where you want the link put in a pointy bracket like this:
6. Now put in a word that you want to use as the click point, ie. click or link
7. Now to tell the machine you have finished linking put in open point bracket
It will then look like this in your preview Like this link

I enjoyed the post Continental Layout and Ice Ages on your site: A Better World: Graeme Bird For High Office. (With regard to the latter, I think you would make a fine cardinal).

Anyhow, about this climate change business. You’re the rocket scientist, I’m merely a humble remittance man living on my estate on what’s left of the family fortune. But as you showed, where it comes to heat, the earth obeys Stefan-Boltzman law, in radiating heat out as a black body.

But gases in the atmosphere – carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, ozone and halocarbons – absorb much of this heat in the form of infrared radiation. Some of the heat is radiated away from earth, but some of it gets rotated downwards in counter radiation back towards earth. This traps the the earth’s infrared radiation like a greenhouse.

There is an observable trend in the increase in C02, CH4 – about 0.9% per year and about 4% for halocarbons.

The argument by the commie scum is that an increase in these so-called greenhouse gases is having an adverse effect on climate. So note, it is not just warming, but destabilising the climate to such and extent that it may cause flora and fauna to disappear and maybe even us as species.

This would be due to a vastly increased climatic variability leading to a change in frequency of extreme events. This has actually been verified by long-term modelling at the MIT.

The effect on climate is caused by a change in radiation flux caused by the absorption of either solar or infrared radiation and is defined as radiative forcing.

This can happen either when there is direct radiation, or when there is a chemical reaction between the gases introduced into the upper atmosphere by us cooking some bacon or farting. That is lots of us, over a long period of time.

The oceans serve as gigantic heat sinks and literally reflect, after some delay, what happens in the atmosphere. While current circulation around continents plays a huge role in climate, so do the variables in in sea surface temperature (SST).

And SST has been rising steadily over time. This destabilises the climate and as the weather system is essentially chaotic, we could tip the current relationship out of balance, as seems to be borne out by hard evidence of an increase in extreme weather pattern. So, why rock the boat?

While I have you there, Graeme, do you suffer from Tourette’s Syndrome? If this were the case then it would make a lot of people relax a bit on blogs as they would take that into account and take your occasional lapses into calling them naughty names with a bit more forbearance.

You need to put two browser pages up side by side and cut and paste the links to the pictures of the historical continental layouts of the planet.

Make the left-hand browser as skinny as you can and use that to read my commentary. Then make the right-hand browser medium-skinny because the maps are pretty wide.

This is a nasty kick in the nuts for the alarmists so make sure you link it everywere you go in the interests of international brotherhood and peace.

http://graemebird.wordpress.com/2007/01/27/continental-layout-and-ice-ages/

“I know that you are aware that we have been in a long-term cooling trend for at least the last 65 million years (see the third graph in this Paul Monk piece) even though the sun is warming. I’d love to hear a theory as to why this is so.”

Here is the reason:

http://graemebird.wordpress.com/2007/01/07/you-heard-it-from-me-first/

You see the continental arrangement has been growing worse in terms of allowing the free circulation of water between oceans and most paricularly between the equatorial and polar regions.

The water still circulates of course but in a less uninhibited way.

When this consideration is matched up with the Stefan-Boltzmann law it means that more energy will be radiated out into space giving us a permanent bias towards catastrophic cooling.

Sacha….. would be just the person to help me show the following: That no amount of greenhouse gasses that we are plausibly likely to release could possibly change this one-way cooling bias to a catastrophic heating bias.

Its just implausible because of the relative joules involved.

But we ought not give up hope that the extra CO2 might not help us retard glaciation as I explain here:

http://graemebird.wordpress.com/2007/01/08/despite-co2-being-a-weak-medium-term-greenhouse-gas-it-might-still-prevent-a-glaciation/

If you read all the climate science pieces I’ve written lately you would notice that I’ve become positively Lovelockian in my outlook and that I reject the former slurs I made against the great scientist.

I also acknowledge that you were right about sea-life exploding during glaciation. Its just white death for terrestrial life.

“But James Hansen assures us that the only way we’ll get increased glaciation now is if Homo Sapiens goes extinct. We’re stoking the fires.”

Hansen is wrong. He does not have the data for such a contention. What he suggests would be impossible. If anything the cooling will get worse unless we at all times work against it.

Sepside, great reporting sites like ThinkProgress and firedoglake are largely patronised in the comments sections by Bird-brains. What’s the point of feeding jam to pigs? I’ve never got back more than a “way to go” or some some other equivalent of a half-hearted air punching, so I rarely bother to comment there these days, although as a source of news and inside skinny from the site’s posters, they are hard to top.
LP is an entirely different kettle of fish. Great ideas get chewed around. There’s usually someone home who gives a toss. The US and Oz political discussions are informative and great fun.
Sin bin big bad bird till Feb 1. Having fallen off his perch into ankle deep guano, he may take the hint. This is one wingnut who requires wing clipping. Maybe, like Count Vronsky around Anna, or the former Jet Jackson(god rest his adventurous soul) around stray p—y, it’s a snake-brain kind of thing and poor Birdie just can’t help himself. In that case, the cerebrally challenged troll may well have to go find his very own disparate band of misfits and stop wasting our time. This isn’t a Wiemar era Munich beer hall. It’s an excellent Oz web-site on the verge of sabotage.

derrida derider said…
Yeah, it’d be fun to see a Harry Clarke post written in the style of Graeme Bird (though more seriously I wish Graeme Bird would wrote in the style of Harry).

I reckon it would make an amusing (and instructive) post sometime to get a competition going where we try and parody well known commenters’ styles while maintaining our own political positions.

11:35 AM

Sir Henry Casingbroke said…
Bird’s commentary is nasty, racist and so illogical it verges on deranged.

Because of his scatological notoriety, many blog administrators chop off his comments at entry point or have him on permanent moderation.

Nevertheless, it seems he serves as form of amusement for people who treat him as a blogosphere village idiot. As a blogger who comes from the right on most topics and issues, he is also a very easy target for left-wing and green-left bloggers, who feel superior in publicly humiliating him.

I’m in two minds about his output: on the one hand, he argues ad hominem in a particularly vicious way (witness his recent attack at Larvatus on Kim which was extraordinarily gratuitous and gross). Should this be tolerated on a blog for the sake of free speech? Such personally hurtful invective does tend to spoil and intimidate people from having a full-range but fun discussion.

On the other hand, by recognising him as a “personality” blogs may be offering him an outlet and a social life/notoriety he may not otherwise enjoy. Denying him this opportunity may be a disproportionate “punishment” for some form of tourettism, whuich he may not be able to help.

A true dilemma.

The dilemma is this: if you banish (resisted a pun) Bird, that leaves a funny taste in the mouth. If Bird comes back, all mealymouthed, then we have collectively engaged in dubious social engineering. Hmmmm…

BTW. Derrida Derider is right. Harry Clarke on his blog is a most delightfully good mannered, generous, decent interlocutor and he has all the dry-economic, denyalist, right-wing views anyone could ever wish for. A Bird without tears. It is a rare pleasure to go there and give Harry a decent argument. The range of topics is mind-boggling, something for everyone.

It’s a while since I’ve read them myself, but the shorter version goes something like this.

Of course water vapour has a large part to play in making the planet inhabitable through it’s greenhouse action. All serious climate scientists know this. But it is what is happening at the margin the matters. Here the story seems pretty clear. Increases carbon reflects heat producing global warming and climate change. The action of the carbo triggers certain feedbacks which augment the effect. One such feedback mechanism is water vapour.

If you look at the increases in carbon output in say the last 50 years and look ate the corresponding temperature charts the coincidence is stunning. This doesn’t prove causation, of course, but the physics and chemistry that explain the causative link is well-established and not too mysterious.

You’d be brave or foolhardy and worthy of genius status if you can demonstrate that the story is otherwise. That having been said there is much still to know and understand and the future is always open.

It’s not true to say that the earth has been warming since the last ice age. After a few wobbles the temperaturte has been pretty even for 8,000 years (arguments over the size of bumps in the handle of the hockey stick are strictly a red herring), but then has moved sharply upward since we started chucking all that carbon up into the atmosphere in recent times. The pattern is so striking that any child could see it.

I’ll repeat my usual warning about not being a scientist myself, but that is how I have come to understand the matter at hand.

It is not necessarily true that we are to blame or that we cannot grow ourselves to a cleaner tomorrow using market forces just like we have always done…. In fact, water vapor is more to blame for global warming than CO2.

I call bullshit. Are you paid by the oil industry or the coal industry?

Back on the topic of the post, I wouldn’t be surprised if the current US President is seen as an absolute failure for his response to what people think is happening with climate change – a waste of at least 6 years. Hopefully the next US President will be inclined to do something positive. Perhaps Bush is a reincarnation of Calvin Coolidge, who famously proffered, “The business of America is business.”

My late night efforts of that length always come off a bit ranty, especially with a couple under the belt, so nice work!

Much as I dislike astrology, can’t help asking – are you a scorpio?

TEH ADVANTAGE IS MINE!!

“Why don’t you just…. FUCK OFF!!!!!!!”

You know, it was a giddy thrill the first few times when I was 14, but really I don’t want to hear it that often any more.

It was moderately exciting to hear it from Mark though. Nice guy finally snaps, eh?

Quick question, will Bird be given the opportunity to “fuck off and not come back” voluntarily or have it thrust upon him? I just don’t think I could bear his whiney protests at every other blog on earth if he were banned, not to mention the inevitable Paxton moniker madness that would ensue.