What If Greenhouse Gases Weren’t Invisible?

I love the shot of the GW bridge over the FROZEN Hudson river. Good Job.

This should be clearly marked as opinion, as this piece isn’t journalism. Let the Middle School science lesson begin? Ask any middle schooler? Precisely, indoctrination since they were toddlers on this hoax of an issue will surely give this “reporter” the answer he is looking to confirm.

What about a camera that identifies liberals for their true views on any subject. That would be newsworthy.

The power plant shot is a little misleading it two ways. The heat signature the camera would pick up is from the hot gases coming from the combustion in the power plant, not from greenhouse effect heat. That is why is dissipates so quickly, you are catching the steam plume. The amount of CO2 coming from those stacks is much more than reflected by the rendering, but it is in a rural area and quickly diluted by surrounding air.
A possibly useful comparison might also be showing a field of cattle and a forest, or field of corn and other wilderness areas. Anyone in the city knows we have smog still, but they don’t really know how it compares to other places, the suburbs and rural areas.

LOL The flat earthers are out. Right “steve” You guys kill me with your ignorance.

Wind, Solar and hydro-electric (and other creative sources such as geothermal, waves etc) must be our primary goals of future energy. In the meantime use coal, oil based and nuclear to get us there. This gives us a short window with a clear goal for energy usage and tecnological development in all areas. This will help cure one of the our worlds sources of war and oil imbalance world wide- let’s have a “can do” attitude– we can do it.

What if “greenhouse gasses” were exposed for what they are, a complete fraud! Al Gore has a 4 year degree in Government where he finished in the bottom fifth of his class, yet is making millions of dollars in luscious profits from his “carbon credit” scheme. This entire FRAUD presumes that not only do Americans cause changes in the earth’s climate, but if we bankrupt our society so that people cannot afford to heat their homes in the winter or drive to work, the ENTIRE EARTH WILL GET COLDER. This FRAUD claims America CONTROL’S THE EARTH’S WEATHER. THIS IS A FLAT OUT LIE, yet not only does the uneducated press “believe” it, but so does obama and the democrat party. So if you think your standard of living is far too high in the obama economy, keep supporting democrats and that will change as America DECLINES.

John

You are not supposed to use facts, that will confuse the true flat earthers (the people believing in the unproven idea that man is responsible for climate change)

What a bunch of idiots. How many of you even know who first SHOWED that CO2 was a green house and he/she showed it? If you claim to know that this Science is a fraud you should at least know who the first fraudster was.

P.S. you are just being fed misinformation by oil, gas and power companies with obvious vested interests in pumping more fossils into your air.

“NATURE’S EDGE NOTEBOOK”

“Observation, Analysis, Reflection, New Questions” By Bill Blakemore”

The above is how this article is billed. It is not factual reporting, and ABC doesn’t present it as so. It is simply a science article penned by some guy named Blakemore. That’s all. You can take it or leave it.

Global warming is caused mostly by our population growth. Take a million acres of rain forest to plant crops and make homes and you stop carbon from being removed from the atmosphere. We are doomed because you tea party idiots do not understand science and would burn witches if you could find some. Some day the remaining people of Earth will play tapes of your speeches and shake their heads in wonderment. Also, for those who point out how COLD the pictures look. PLEASE do not confuse weather with climate change . Fox and Drudge does this all the time during the winter, and ignores the glacier melting and encroaching deserts the rest of the year.

Amusing to see Gerry here completely unaware that the GRANT MONEY FLOWS TO THE GLOBAL WARMING LOVERS. When was the last time any grant was issued to critically study the global warming fraud? Universities only get THE BIG MONEY – now in the BILLIONS OF TAXPAYER DOLLARS to promote the global warming fraud. If they’re not on board – they get ZERO DOLLARS. The reason universities are bought and paid for is that GLOBAL WARMING = DEMOCRAT POLITICAL POWER TO DENY FREEDOM TO AMERICANS THRU “REGULATION” “FOR OUR OWN GOOD”. Obama is now in the process of shutting down 20% the lowest cost producers of energy in the United States in 2012 BECAUSE HE THINKS THE EARTH WILL GET COLDER AS A RESULT. ….and YOU WILL PAY for this nonsense. ENERGY COSTS ARE ABOUT TO SKY ROCKET SO YOU BETTER GET A RAISE THIS CHRISTMAS TO PAY FOR IT. …and hope you break even – plan on an extra car payment to cover Pelosi and Obama’s energy schemes.

You want to really read something frightening – he democrat party not only BELIEVES THIS NONSENSE, but is writing economic and energy assuming it’s FACT. …and the UNITED STATES will continue to decline as a result. When you read that obama is the worst president in a century, this is only one of the many reasons. ….when you go ask your boss for a BIG RAISE this Christmas to cover the costs imposed by obama-care and the democrat energy schemes, figure a car payment for each. …SO YOU BETTER DEMAND A BIG RAISE!! LOL

This is a passionate argument. Just like opinions around goverment, religion, politics, etc. I think you need to ask yourself, “Why do I believe?”, no matter which side of the debate you are on. What unquestionable evidence has someone shown you to cause you to make up your mind that global warming exists, or that it doesn’t? Was it a TV show?, movie?, news articles like this one? Have you, yourself. become self-aware of the global temperature around the world being a small fraction of a degree warmer that it was 100 years ago? Do you feel it in your bones?

The truth is… you have chosen sides on this debate for your own personal reasons. But not based on the data, or your own intelligence. You believe the most compelling story told on television, by actors and reporters who get paid very well for their sensationalism. In reality, there’s no way to know for sure whether the earth is warming or cooling, because you don’t possess the resources to test it yourself. You can only rely on scientists, funded by government and big corporations, to report their findings, in support of their own economic agendas.

And when this data is reported to the public, we find corruption in the ranks, and manipulation in the data to support an predetermined outcome. When did the notion that ‘the earth’s temperature must always stay the same, and if it does, humans must be at fault’, become a scientific fact anyway? Hasn’t this planet cooled and warmed thousands of times over the past several millions of years? I seem to remember that idea being put forth in elementary schools. So why now, just in the past 50 years or so have we suddenly discovered that we humans are the cause of a temperature spike? Who caused the last temperature spikes and ice ages before we arrived? Use your favorite search engine and research the coming ice age foretold in the 1970′s.

Even scientists can’t agree on their own “peer-reviewed” data. They accuse each other of manipulating the data. And we now attack each other for being believers or non-believers when neither side has 100% factual data to support their side. We fall back on the practices of our childhood… name-calling and ridicule to put down anyone who believes differently than we do.

I think the believers and non-believers on this global warming issue can be identified, not by their intellectual prowess, but by what TV channels they watch, what newspapers they read, and by their political affiliation. And this has very little to do with what the temperature is outside.

STEVE: “Global warming based solely on CO2 emmissions is a scam and deception.” – - – EVIDENCE? Where is your repeatable and verifiable objective empirical evidence? Patently erroneous statements like this only illustrate either how ignorant someone is or how dishonest someone is. NOBODY except deniers try to incorrectly frame the entire GW issue as being ONLY about CO2. The human activity part of GW is about CO2. The primary focus is on CO2 and other greenhouse gasses that are a result of human activity because those are the ONLY greenhouse gasses that human activity produces in large enough quantities AND which have a long enough half-life to effect climate on a long-term time scale AND which have a positive feedback (i.e. they can cause warming which releases more greenhouse gasses which can cause warming which can release more… etc. etc. so the more there is the faster it can build up from natural sources). Human activity adds negligible amounts of water vapor (the most abundant greenhouse gas by far) and water vapor has a relatively short half-life (months verses years) and it has a negative feedback (i.e. the more vapor there is the faster the atmosphere gets rid of it). Consequently, water vapor is relatively stable over the long-term while CO2 has being steadily increasing since BEFORE 1800 and around 1820 CO2 levels surpassed the two highest levels ever seen naturally in the previous 650K years – and it has been steadily rising ever since.

STEVE: “Global warming based solely on CO2 emissions is a scam and deception.” Why won’t you write about this? Why don’t you talk about the great 12,000yr solar cycle?” – - – Patently erroneous statements like this only illustrate precisely how ignorant someone is about this topic; especially when there are actually at least three different individual Milankovitch Cycles. Then, when more than one of the individual cycles are synchronous we see more than three cycles. I believe four of the cycles occur on periodicities of about 21K, 26K, 41K, & 95K years. Also, those cycels don’t just impact the timing, intensity, and duration of Ice Ages, they also change when seasons occur. So, in about 12K years, winter will start in the Northern Hemisphere in June and Summer will start in December. If I remember correctly, according to the Milankovitch cycles we are supposed to be entering the beginning of an Ice Age – i.e. NOT in a warming trend.

WI RESIDENT: “John – You are not supposed to use facts, that will confuse the true flat earthers (the people believing in the unproven idea that man is responsible for climate change).” – - – ROFL. Too bad some of John’s supposed “facts” and thus John’s conclusion are flat out wrong. And too bad so many people insist upon playing an intellectually dishonest game of semantics by using any variation of the word/s proof/proven. Insisting upon a beyond a shadow of a doubt 100% certainty level of confidence is NOT scientific. Insisting upon an unrealistic and ambiguous level of confidence good enough to satisfy most deniers is disingenuous because it will NEVER happen since deniers will ALWAYS insist the evidence is not good enough. Deniers will always find some irrational way to rationalize away and discount any and all evidence as not good enough. They will ALWAYS insist something is “not proven” if they don’t like the conclusion. The more likely than not standard will NEVER be good enough for them. The preponderance of the evidence standard will NEVER be good enough for them. The beyond a reasonable doubt standard will NEVER be good enough for them. And no amount of evidence will ever reach the beyond a shadow of a doubt 100% certain level of certainty that they dishonestly insist upon. Science rarely if ever reaches that level of confidence in every aspect of a theory. Theories just about always have holes in them and thus they always have some level of uncertainty in some way.

KEVIN SMITH: “So why now, just in the past 50 years or so have we suddenly discovered that we humans are the cause of a temperature spike? Who caused the last temperature spikes and ice ages before we arrived?” – - – ROFL. Ah, because we know some things we did know 50 years ago. We understand some things we did not understand 50 years ago. We understand some things better than we understood them 50 years ago. For example, we know that CO2 levels have been steadily rising for well more than 200 years. We also know that for about the last 130 years CO2 levels have been higher than they ever got naturally in the previous 650K years, and now they are about 25% higher than they ever got naturally in the previous 650K years. We also know that the average global temperature TREND has been rising since about 1880. We also know that peak temperatures in the last 30 years are higher than they ever got naturally in the last 650K years. I suppose it is all just an amazing coincidence all that has happened since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The last question is asked and answered.

SHEPARD245: “EVERYONE IGNORE THE RECORD SNOW FALL AND COLD WEATHER” – - – Talk about dishonest cherry picking. Yes, SOME places have had record snow fall and/or cold weather WHILE OTHER PLACES HAVE RECORD DROUGHT AND WARM WEATHER at the same time. Individual weather events in relatively small regions are MEANINGLESS by themselves. What part of global do you not understand in global warming or global climate? Every single time there is a story about some record setting Fall or Winter blizzard deniers are in here disingenuously commenting about how that single event somehow disproves GW theory while they conveniently ignore other places in the country or world that are simultaneously experiencing record setting warm and or dry weather. That kind of intellectual dishonesty is pathetic.

What a total mis-use of science, only 3,9% the atmosphere is CO2 and of that 390ppm , 3% is created by humans. If human emitted CO2 was totally black you would not even see it!
And what about the exhaled breath of humans? CO2!

Posted by: John |
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So what do you want to do John? Since human have to breath, do you want to gas all of the humans the way Hitler tried to gas the Jews? That should do away with the CO2 problem

A wise man once said, “If you believe in things you don’t understand, then you suffer.” I doesn’t matter what I say, or Michael Mann or James Hansen or Steve McIntyre. You must do your own homework on global warming and reach your own conclusions. If you can’t follow the math, science and unfortunately, politics involved with climate change then you are left at the mercy of others do decide where the truth lies. If that’s your situation, you have my sympathy.

IVAN: “Not according to the graphs i saw. It was FAR warmer thousands of years ago than it is now. .. “ – - – BULL hockey pucks. Great big stinking piles of BULL hockey pucks. There are no such graphs that I have ever seen and I have seen a lot of graphs from more than a few sources. Someone has a serious graph reading problem. Please cite a credible source for such graphs. According to the dozens of graphs I have seen on more than a few Websites, including one of the denier sites, it was far warmer MILLIONS of years ago, not thousands of years ago or tens of thousands of years ago or even hundreds of thousands of years ago. In the last 30 years the highest temperatures have been higher than they ever got naturally in the last 650K years – according to every graph I ever seen. – - – IVAN: “and by your own science, the temperature of the earth has actually cooled in the past twenty years but that’s beside the point.” – - – Actually we have been in a relatively mild cooling trend (i.e. mile relative to the previous 12 or so) since about 98/99, NOT the last 20 years. And considering how exactly the same thing (i.e. a peak in the five year average temp graph) has happened about 12 times before the most recent peak is meaningless at this time. Graphs clearly show temperature VARIATIONS. It goes up for a few year and it goes down for a few year. But the overall TREND since 1880 has been a steady RISE. Only three of the brief cooling trends in the five year average temperature graph lasted longer than five years, and that includes the current. The longest one lasted about 15-20 years. Before this current cooling trend (IF it is still happening since the last graph I saw only went to 2009) is statistically meaningful it will have to last longer than the previous longest one and/or dip even lower. One of the cooling trends in the 19th century lasted even longer than 20 years. Guess what, we are warmer than that one too.

Kevin, I believe that man-made global climate change is happening because of facts and my own observation.
The most important fact is of climate scientists, 98% of them believe this climate change is happening, is happening much to quickly to from any natural cycle, and they have tons of proof from shrinking glaciers, to melting tundra to record-breaking storms, floods, droughts, all things that will happen in a climate change attributed to more greenhouse gases.
The observation is my own as a gardener. For the last 20 years my towns first frost date has move forward an entire month. The first frost date has been fairly consistent since they were first recorded. For it to change that quickly is not natural. Warming and cooling periods of the earth have taken 10,000 years to change a climate. What we are seeing now is going to make large parts of our planet newly untenable for farming or human habitat which will be catastrophic.

Woody, I am not a climate scientist and neither are you. Why wouldn’t I trust the experts in their own field? Why wouldn’t I trust my own eyes that read news reports of record-breaking droughts, floods and storms? Why wouldn’t I trust my commonsense to see that all of these changes in established weather patterns aren’t ‘normal’ as climate changes take ten thousand years to occur naturally?
If you’ve ever traveled from the country to a polluted city in the summertime, you would quickly realize the powerful greenhouse effect that pollution has.

Absurd story, what if O2 wasn’t invisible or what if nitrogen wasn’t invisible. Absurd, so what?
From a scientific standpoint H2O gas is the strongest greenhouse gas by far and it IS visible in clouds, so what? CO2 is very small and as a moderate greenhouse gas, this is nothing. CO2 is NOT a pollutant.

Martin: “From a scientific standpoint H2O gas is the strongest greenhouse gas by far and it IS visible in clouds, so what? CO2 is very small and as a moderate greenhouse gas, this is nothing. CO2 is NOT a pollutant.” – - – Try learning enough to actually understand a topic before trotting out a tired red herring and lame straw man. While it is indeed true that water vapor is the most dominant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere it is also true that water vapor stays fairly stable (i.e. in equalibrium) over the long-term because it has a short half-life (months verses years) and provides its own negative feedback (i.e. the more vapor there is the faster it leaves the atmosphere to resotre equilibrium) to help it stay fairly stable over the long-term. CO2 on the other hand has a relatively long half-life (i.e. years verses months) that allows it to build up over the long-term AND it provides its own positive feedback to help it build up faster over the long-term. Thus CO2 is far more important over the long-term because of how CO2 levels are far less stable than water vapor AND between those two it is the ONLY greenhouse gas we contribute in huge quantities. The amount of water vapor human activity can add in the short-term is insignificant. Plus, because of water vapor’s negative feedback and short-half life whatever we add only causes water vapor to leave the atmosphere faster and thus return to equilibrium.

IVAN: ‘Now let’s not forget exactly what your goal is. Your goal is to make sure we see that natural cycles are NOT happening now. . . ” – – – That is patently FALSE and nothing more than another one of the pathetic straw men you people fabricate. The general GW theory makes no such claim. It only holds that human activity will make whatever happens naturally WARMER than what would happen naturally. Even IF we reach a tipping point to cause a runaway greenhouse effect natural variations would still occur.

Posted by: B-K KnightRider
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I guess when your man Obama forbids an oil pipeline pipeline from Canada to the United States for global warming reasons, probably causing rises in gas prices and more unemployment, he does so because he believes that natural cycles are happening now, not because he believes WE cause it. That is NOT the case and you know it. The guiding foundation of the global warming movement is that WE cause it.

You mentioned the so-called “tipping point”. In other words the hockey stick. The hockey stick graph or the hockey stick prediction says the temperature will rise unbelievably FAST and that the north pole will melt putting entire nations underwater. The goal IS to scare us and to make us feel GUILTY over causing it.

well, MY fear is of the very REAL possibility that our economy will collapse because of the so-called “precautions” your party is taking such as the decision made on the oil pipe. An economic depression such as the one in the 1930s would be a TRUE apocalypse. .

Ivan: NO ONE has predicted that the “the temperature will rise unbelievably FAST” OR “that the north pole will melt putting entire nations underwater.”. The current rate of temperature rise (for the last century or more) has been dT/dt=0.069ºC/decade – hardly “unbelievable fast”. It is, however, more rapid than natural phenomena can account for. And as for the North Pole melting, the Arctic Ocean ice pack is already reaching near complete melt during the summer. This very unusual phenomenon has become so routine now that nations are starting to plan on using the Arctic Ocean for routine commercial shipping – the fabled Northwest Passage is becoming a reality. And the Russians and others are laying claim to the sea floor as it becomes commercially exploitable as the ice pack disappears. But sea level has not risen one centimeter because of this, because the ice pack is already floating on the ocean and displacing EXACTLY as much water as it produces when it melts. Are all your \science claims this faulty? The rest of your post is simply a political diatribe – what a surprizse.

Kevin, that claim by you flat earthers has been beaten into the ground so often and so long ago that you should be ashamed to still be bringing it up. There was a single paper by three scientists in 1965 that posited a cooling trend. It was immediately repudiated by the scientific community and was never heard of again, except by people with no shame (like you) who still bring it up as ‘proof’ that ‘scientists’ got it wrong – except they didn’t.

Last year’s eruption of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajokull is estimated to have spewed 150,000 tonnes (a tonne is a thousand kilograms, or about 1.1 ton) of carbon dioxide each day into the air, about the same rate of emission as a second rate economy – say Portugal or Belarus. But it actually produced a net DROP in carbon dioxide in the air since it prevented an estimated 2,800,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide from being released into the atmosphere by grounding just the European component of air traffic activity. The real thing to remember is that overall, while there are some years with more volcanic activity than others, over the long hall (decades) volcanic activity is relatively stable and is in a natural balance with the atmosphere oceans, and flora in the carbon cycle that has held the Earth’s atmospheric carbon dioxide level at 270 ppm for centuries. It is man’s activities that have raised that level over the last hundred years or so by 45% to 390 ppm.

Ivan: You can find various Global Temperature plots at the Goddard Space Flight Center’s GISS page. I will be happy for you to point out ANY of those plots that show that the current temperature “is relatively close to what it was at the beginning of the 20th century.” Until you do, yours is just another of the fallacious and unfounded claims made by the deniers.

Posted by: WilliamDawesJr.
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Rather than showing a “plot”, why don’t you just tell us what the average temperature is right now? You DID say it was 58.1 deg F. The temperature in 1900 was roughly 57.9 deg F. which is not far off.

If the temperature is really HIGHER, it must be in the 60s and 70s by now. You should have absolutely no problem just stating what it is right here an now without a graph.If you can’t, you’re hiding something.

Some of the comments are to surreal to be believed. How can you all read the same article and draw so many ridiculous conclusions. Not once did the article state the U.S. was responsible for global warming. They said, U.S pulled out of the Kyoto Treaty on Climate Change and yes, Bush did this, first thing. The entire article is about the emissions we are putting in the atmosphere that can’t be seen. The belief that if we could see them, our attitudes would be different. Animals, plants & people are all part of the natural cycle of life and the planet is evolved to accommodate it, otherwise, there would be no life here. Long before our arrival, the planet was permanently re-cycling these gases into the interior of the planet. We been releasing it, faster and faster, while we are cutting down the forest that the planet uses to scrub the air of carbon. What would our air be like if the gases were not permanently stored in the ground and oceans. Could we breath it. Would it be hotter than h—ll or colder than space. We don’t know, no one does. This was the arqument in the 70′s and we’re still having it today, all the same statements pro and con. We know what we will do if they are wrong on what they are saying about the effects. We will continue business as usual. This who’s to blame stuff, does it matter? What do we do if they are right? If you believe they are wrong, common sense says you should consider the possibility they could be right also. The question is…what do we do. From what I’m reading, scientist are saying by the time we figure that out, it’ll be too late to do anything.

IVAN: “The goal IS to scare us and to make us feel GUILTY over causing it.” – - – No, fear does not have to have anything to do with it. A rational person can rationally decide that the potential consequences of making a certain choice are not worth the risk of making the only choice that could cause the worst case outcome. Similarly, a rational person can rationally decide the potential consequnces of not wearing a setabelt are not worth the risk of not buckeling up and therefore choose to always wear a seatbelt, and make that rational decision without fear ever being a factor in the decision making process. Making decisions about choices we have relevant to GW issues is no different from applying the principles of Operational Risk Management (ORM) to any other decision. ORM involves more than a simple cost benefit analysis.

IVAN: “YOU were the source of my data. I’m sure you wouldn’t consider your OWN claims to be one of the “fallacious and unfounded claims made by the deniers”. – - – While William may have been the source of data/graphs you may or may not have looked at, William is NOT the source of your failure to understand or correctly interpret the data. YOU are the source of your inability to correctly read a graph or understand what a graph means. And if you are playing an intellectually dishonest semantic game with the meaning of “relatively close” then that is also YOUR responsibility. According to the dozens of graphs I have seen current average world temperatures, and the temps for the last 10 years, are NOT “relatively close” to what they were around 1900. According to the graph I am looking at right now the five year average temp is a littlee more than .7 degrees MORE than 1900. That is NOT “relatively close” and they have NOT been relatively close for about 30 years.

If such a camera could actually exist, wouldn’t it be fun to take it into Congress or any “global warming” conference so that we could see the greenhouse gasses these people emit.