Stop Global Warming With Smog? 361
lkypnk writes, "The AP is reporting that Nobel Prize winning scientist Paul Crutzen has suggested deliberately spreading a layer of particulate matter in the upper atmosphere to help reflect some of the sun's energy in an effort to combat global warming. He reminds us that the eruption of the volcano Pinatubo in 1991 cooled the planet by as much as 0.9 degrees; he believes his computer simulations show a similar effect from deliberate injection of sulfur into the atmosphere by humans. Whatever the feasibility of the idea, as the president of the National Environmental Trust has said, 'We are already engaged in an uncontrolled experiment by injecting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.'" From the article: "'It was meant to startle the policy makers,' said [Crutzen]. 'If they don't take action much more strongly than they have in the past, then in the end we have to do experiments like this.' ... Serious people are taking Crutzen's idea seriously."
The Matrix (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The Matrix (Score:5, Insightful)
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Highlander II: The Quickening (Score:2)
Finally a use foor the space elevator (Score:2)
The problem though with any clever ideas like dumping reflective stuff in space is that, if the modelling is wrong ("oops! missed a minus sign!") then the clean-up efforts to go fetch all the stuff back is going to cost quite a bundle and make more environmental problems than we had before we started.
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But anyway, that's my point. If we design the thing from scratch, we can come up with more convenient cleanup methods built
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Re:The Matrix (Score:4, Insightful)
NOVA episode (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:NOVA episode (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:NOVA episode (Score:4, Insightful)
Instead of getting rid of the greenhouse gases, we are going to continue to literally mask the problem.
And think of the potential. Countries like China, could claim carbon credits for the copious particulate matter they produce, thus cancelling out their escalting C02 emissions! I hope Cutzen's attempts to "startle policy makers" doesn't backfire in this fashion.
Next we'll have some bright spark suggesting using Nuclear Winter, in a similar fashion. You know kill two birds with one stone ... take out the largest fossil fuel burning population centres and cool the planet at the same time. Ooops, I just suggested it, didn't I?
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Because we know how to do this. Getting rid of already extant greenhouse gases is going to be a much trickier problem. I've heard an awful lot of moaning and doom-and-glooming over global warming, and precious little in the way of actual solutions. Especially the type of solutions that are implementable. Telling everyone to stop driving their cars and stop using e
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Re:NOVA episode (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is solely socio-political. It costs more to prepare, obtain, and shepherd through a totally uncertain legal system the required permits for construction than the actual construction itself. Add the decade long lead time to ground-breaking for which interest on capital is charged but not recouped. As icing on our heaping pile of fecal matter pie here, toss in unknown legal liability concerns due to the unresolved waste repository issue. No ration economic actor will engage in construction of such plants. Actually, given what I know about the problems that we will also be facing with fusion plants, I firmly believe that we will never construct any for civilian power production in this country either. So much for that man on the white horse.
The best we can do from absolute recycling of all wastes for power production, assuming 100% recovery of energy with no recovery energy costs (yeah, right, just toss the second law of thermodynamics) is just under 5% of total power production in this country. Wind power, which is problematic at best, however let's again assume it is perfect, gets you another 5% assuming you cover this country with wind farms even in inappropriate areas. Forget tidal, it's a non-starter even if you capture all the tidal energy for the coastal US, total recovery less than a tenth of a percent. Solar is out even before it leaves the gate. The best sites for massive solar arrays, ignoring space, are our deserts and that won't fly against our 'environmentally-minded' 'friends'. Frankly, there is no way to come up with the rest of the power this country needs to function without increasing nuclear-based power production. [I'm leaving OTEC out of this as it would not be based in the US if maximum efficiencies are desired.]
One hopes that we will get a radical breakthrough in the near future. We engineers can actually solve the problems in front of us as is, nothing new required. Just lots of capital investment. Although I wouldn't turn down some breakthroughs.
[Disclaimer: Former member of Greenpeace who broke from the membership over nuclear power. I was the only one at the meetings that could even explain what the various types of radiation were or their health hazards.]
Re:NOVA episode (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, this ties in with the decline of science and engineering candidates, and programs, in this country. I deal in the real world. I don't give a damn about ideology, belief systems, even social morés actually. The anti-nuclear wing of the environmental movement isn't rational (you should have heard one of them attempt to explain alpha radiation). I could discuss, what I can discuss publically, Cherobyl until I'm blue in the face. The plain fact of the matter is that such an accident as Chernobyl cannot occur over here, period. We do not even have an operational breeder reactor (Chernobyl was a cadmium moderated breeder) in this country, let alone any reactor without a containment dome, nor are we idiotic enough to bypass all the engineering safeguards and then conduct experiments on the reactor. [Or at least I hope the NRC isn't on that last point. I sometimes wonder.] I'll just leave it there.
Nature blessed us far beyond anything we deserved giving us a huge endowment of fossil fuels for cheap energy production and radical new materials, equally large endowments of uranium-235, -238, and if we would design towards it, especially thorium. But these are simply down payments. Fission and even fusion are simply a stop-gaps. We've had the technology now for over thirty years to build OTEC, SPS (Solar Power Sattelites), achieve break-even on fusion, improve the efficiency of plants for conversion to ethanol (plants are barely 1% efficient), and especially to engage in extremely heavy duty, Manhattan Project level, research into what makes our planet's complete ecology tick, and investments to achieve energy (and materials) independence for everyone, not just those of us in the 'rich' west. Instead what we face our challenges from the uninformed, or the ill-intentioned, to block any and all potential approaches to breaking out of this deadlock. Remember the windmill farm over the horizon from the Kennedy Compound?
As it stands right now, your children's children may curse the people living today to eternal damnation for squandering our endowment. We are well beyond the scientific research stage, it's (relatively) simple nuts-and-bolts engineering. As I've said elsewhere, not my problem. I don't have long left on this planet (alive anyway). What continues to amaze me is that when I break the numbers down for the actual spending required, even accounting for 500% inefficiencies typical of NASA and other government agencies (you can tell I was in government), it's cheap. Dirt cheap. [Total] Highway Spending Bill 'Pork' cheap. If we have to spend money on pork, lets do it here.
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Re:NOVA episode (Score:4, Informative)
There is a global process called the "carbon cycle" that I invite you to research on your own. Essentially, all organisms excrete carbon dioxide, which is then reused by plants during photosynthesis, releasing oxygen and storing the carbon. What you may not realize is that plants are not exempt from the first part of the carbon cycle; they still release the carbon they absorb. A closed system that included plants, but no animal life, would still have airborne Co2, which would be absorbed by plants during the day, and released during the night. Planting more trees adds a carbon "sink", since it's that much more carbon locked up as biomass, but they don't magic it away.
As long as the amount of carbon in the system doesn't change, the greenhouse effect will remain where it is (at least over human timeframes). What we've done with fossil fuels is taken hydrocarbons that were outside of the carbon cycle, and burned them (increasing the amount of Co2 in the atmosphere), thereby increasing the existing greenhouse effect.
To solve this permanently, we'd need to create carbon sinks that are outside of the carbon cycle, to replace the fossil fuel carbon sinks we've already burned. This is possible, but not as simple as planting trees; such artificial carbon sinks would have to be inorganic if they're to be permanent. Any carbon locked up in in organisms is going to find it's way back into the air.
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It would buy us some time. But if continued would just be like ingesting more and more antidote to tackle an increasing toxin ... sooner or later something is going to go badly wrong. It would lead to an unstable situation.
One scenario: after a couple of decades of this strategy we have a few big volcanic eruptions (they're not that rare) which cause a considerable dimming globally, enough to affect global food production, I mean there has already been a lot of dimming by this time anyway. Which triggers a
Wrong, sir, wrong! (Score:2, Insightful)
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If I had mod points it would be -1 for "Utter Bullshit".
There is much evidence of a general warming trend occurring in the southern hemisphere, pretty much the same amount as that occurring in the northern hemisphere. There are also many recordings of record freak occurrences associated with the gentle warming that appears to be occurring all around the globe; record sized icebergs breaking off from Antarc
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erm, I meant "drought" rather than "draughts". I do not personally know of any evidence of a recent increase in the playing of the game draughts within the Amazon rainforest.
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Darn, and I thought they had invented a bigger beer mug down there.
"The lucky country" (Score:5, Informative)
We are currently experiencing the "worst drought in 1000yrs" [google.com], the Murray-Darling Basin has dried up, our major cities have permenant water restrictions and some rural towns are being abandoned. This years forecast grain harvest has been reduced by 50% (-12,000,000 Tonnes), our dairy herd has been culled by 20%, and half starved livestock have flooded the markets in expectation of an even drier summer.
We had a record heat wave in october (37C) followed by two cold snaps with snow falling on bushfires and hail the size of cricket balls. The unseasonal frost killed, apples, pears, grapes and other temperate fruit crops that flower in spring. Oh yeah, a cyclone wiped out our bannana crop earlier this year.
As for TFA: The Earth is not a fucking toaster, the last thing it needs is a "darkness knob".
Re:NOVA episode (Score:5, Informative)
We now wait for the traditional round of excuses.
We'll save the excused for actual facts, shall we? The Southern hemisphere is warming, despite recent assertions to the contrary from certain unreliable sources.
graph [ornl.gov]
context [ornl.gov]
You are entitled to your own opinions but you are not entitled to your own facts.
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What a wonderful idea. (Score:4, Insightful)
Although there is probably some good science behind the idea, there was also good science behind the idea of using the Cane Toad to kill the Cane beetle, and that worked out well for everyone didn't it.
Actually, it is when you look at ALL the effects. (Score:3, Interesting)
FWIW, I came out for something like this last April [blogspot.com].
Shading the Earth won't get rid of the direct effects of excess CO2, such as ocean acidification and preferential growth promotion of undesirable plants like woody vines vs. trees. But the beauty of injecting a few million or tens of millions of tons of sulfur in the upper atmosphere is that it spreads out much more widely, the effects will reduce drought and heat stress which are killing plants and turning land into desert, and you might even cut the or
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I find it funny that you mention ocean acidification right before discussing "the beauty of injecting a few million or tens of millions of tons of sulfur in the upper atmosphere"
FTFA: A massive dissemination of pollutants would
In the long run, it's a payoff to Arm and Hammer.. (Score:5, Funny)
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Throwing that much SO2 in the air is indeed asking for trouble. For starters, it won't save the Greenland and West Antarctica ice caps from melting (a planet with SO2 + CO2 will be much warmer at the poles and slightly cooler at the equator). There's probably plenty more wrong, but that alone should be reason enough shelve this proposal.
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There might also be something of an instructive parable in the lives of people like Emperor Ch'in and Howard Huges, who died of their attempts to remain alive.
KFG
Photosynthesis (Score:3, Informative)
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Literally, controlled burnings and backfires can be used to stop forest fires.
Cancer-causing agents such as X-Rays, BrdU, Taxol, and Thalidomide can be used in chemotherapy to kill cancer.
Immunizations often use attenuated pathogens to build up body's immunity to the real thing.
Even cities have to at times be destroyed in order to save them. [wikipedia.org]
Global Dimming (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Global Dimming (Score:4, Funny)
Oh noeeeeees!
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It's also going to be a place where everyone whinges about everything but does nothing about it. And nobody will be able to play cricket.
Like England.
Oh great (Score:2)
So why not make matters "better" by starting a second, uncontrolled experiment?
Not this again? (Score:5, Insightful)
What part of "the earth is 2/3rds water, which evaporates, naturally, the warmer the planet gets, covering the planet in CLEAN, NATURAL, REFLECTIVE, WHITE, FLUFFY, clouds of water vapour" do these brainiacs not get?
Ever been outside? On a hot day? And had a cloud drift over. Ever felt the blessed relief as you race your bicycle up a 12km, 7% incline, maxing at 22% and felt the cooling effect as the sky becomes more overcast, shielding you from the burning rays of the sun and providing a UV protection of up to 50% compared with clear skies?
Quit trying to add stuff to the atmosphere, it's where the problems started in the first place.
The only thing they should be adding to the atmosphere is the leaves of the trees they plant. And lots of them.
Clouds cut both ways (Score:4, Informative)
Low-level clouds shade the ground but the reflected sunlight just warms up the lower atmosphere on its round trip. Very high clouds have a cooling effect, though.
Fortunately, the work on climate change is being done by people who understand these effects and who observe and refine numbers for them.
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Ummm..., yeah..., right. Sorry to disillusion you but that is not the case. Clouds and there effects within climatological systems, especially all the positive and negative feedback loops, are the most badly broken area of the computer models and unfortunately the area where we need the best answers. Clouds may very well determine whether we face an ice age or a Venu
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Please forgive my ignorance, but isn't the reason that Venus's surface is so hot because of the excessive cloud layer? (Or am I just missing an important detail?)
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Um, this is Slashdot. What is this "outside" of which you speak?
And when the Smog Monster causes problems... (Score:5, Funny)
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ObSimpsons (Score:2)
Maybe we should just accept the impacts (Score:2)
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we can fix anything - and then blow it up again...
Deja vu ... (Score:2)
If you follow the link in the old Slashdot story, you'll find out that it's indeed about Paul Crutzen's idea as well.
Re: Deja vu ... (Score:3, Funny)
Hell, we won't even read the current Slashdot story.
logisitcs (Score:2)
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The most common explanation for the 1940-1970 temperature plateau is particulate pollution.
We might not have to do anything at all (Score:2)
That cool enough for you?
In 20 years time, they'll be praying for global warming.
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The remaining uncertainties and where they come from [realclimate.org]
Bad article title - SO2 isn't smog (Score:4, Informative)
Will only exacerbate the problem (Score:2, Informative)
Oh Goodie (Score:2)
So we have the global warming research crowd which lives and dies by the research grant, and we have the anti-global warming crowd which lives and dies by funding.
And there's the global warming mitigation crowd who wants to create fame or money solving the problem.
Chemtrails? (Score:2)
A few years ago the government publically tested (google, you'll find government web sites covering this, and it's far less insidious than what the conspiracy nuts suggest) certain particulates and their effect on weather patterns. Between this and cloud seeding, there isn't really anything new or earth-shattering about the idea.
The question is: how do you spread enough particulate matter? It would take many, many aircraft and tremendous amounts of fuel t
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I know several "chemtrail" conspiracy nuts.
And I feel deeply sorry for them; they are unable to enjoy the simple beauty of a sunset, for them its 'evidence' of the 'chemtrail conspiracy'.
Sad...
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The answer is not the Futurama-esque "just create more garbage"
Reckless Driving (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to mention that producing all these extra artificial climate "enhancements" will produce a lot more pollution in their industrial processes. And use the existing political economics players, in manufacturing and energy, who have shoved us down the road to the Greenhouse with reckless abandon. They will screw up any complex/delicate procedure if it means more fast money, regardless of the worse consequences that they'll have to share (except the really old capitalists who'll die before their legacy is inherited).
Startling politicians, who understand Climate Change only as a buzzword tradeable on the open market, with visions of increasing pollution to fix the climate hazards that pollution has created is a terrible way to do business. It will just lock down their fear and greed. The reptile brains that survived the last climate change cataclysm, wrapped in mammal bodies. I don't want to go the way of the dinosaur, especially by voluntarily throwing myself to the Tyrannosaurus Rex who represents the fossil fuel industry.
Since nature is a complex beast... (Score:5, Insightful)
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"Well the good news is you wont need to wear sunscreen, the bad news.. well the bad news is you'll have to wear a gas mask"
GIA affect (Score:2, Interesting)
over the past few years as the ocean temperatures have increased, so has the techtonic activity. the number of earth quakes have been on the increase. i would speculate that an increase in volcanic eruptions will be next.
the question will be what effect this will have on humans?
what's the difference? (Score:2)
On one hand we're being told that having CFCs and other things around the earth produces "greenhouse effect" and traps heat. Now they are telling us that things in the atmosphere don't do that, they reflect away the heat.
So which is it? Or do some things reflect while other things insulate? Do we need to mix the coctail properly to get the desired effect?
Besides, if global warming is a problem, why are they looking for ways to make it warmer?
Tylenol (Score:5, Insightful)
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Didn't you mean to say, "...cures the symptoms, but doesn't cure the cause"?
Short term solution only (Score:2, Informative)
Uhm (Score:3, Insightful)
A parallel: patient is suffering from atherosclerosis. Do you:
Genius.
Weird. (Score:2)
Whats wrong wioth this picture? (Score:2)
I saw on PBS a show on the darkl ages of the 1500's that was likely a volcano explosion in teh indonesia area. It caused the darkening of the sky for some decade or three. Such that daylight was short and heavily masked by the cloud of sulfer covering the planet, It wasn't a healty or abundant farming time for humans.
a dedicated nutter writes..... (Score:2)
http://www.chemtrailcentral.com/ [chemtrailcentral.com]
I'm not saying that's the definitive website but I think it's worth thinking about. Ok, now reach for your -1:looney modpoints.
Global Warming on your own Laptop (Score:3, Informative)
This happens naturally, and for less. (Score:2)
Consider the ecosystem (Score:2)
Blocking off the sunlight used by the ecosystem, global agriculture, ocean/forests, orchards, etc, in order to stop the side effects of industrial pollution (e.g. global warming) sounds like a bad idea.
The world DEPENDS on sunlight: Sunlight feeds algae, algae feeds plankton, plankton feeds fish, fish feed US (as well as other fish, whales, birds), crops need sunlight, PEOPLE need sunlight...sunlight DEFINES the seasons.
If everybody prayed and asked the LO
Thieves ... ALL of them :) (Score:2)
Scienctists and politicians (Score:2, Insightful)
If getting less sunlight is the goal (Score:3, Informative)
The problem with SO2 global dimming strategy (Score:5, Informative)
Second, he did a further analysis of a practical mechanism to introduce SO2 into the upper atmosphere. I think he settled on balloons or artillery shells, and the cost was something like tens of billions of dollars a year. Since the stuff only stays up there for months, it would be a reoccuring cost.
Finally, it has the unpleasant side effect (per earlier replies) of raining down on the planet in the form of acid rain. Since the ocean is already getting more acidic due to increased CO2 levels (which combined with water get you carbonic acid-i.e. soda water), this might be a fatal drawback. The one thing worse than global warming is an oxygen deprived ocean, which ironically leads to sulfur coming back up as hydrogen sulfide (which at least once killed over 90% of the life on earth during a particularly spectacular episode of runaway global warming called the "Great Dying.")
Anyway, we probably won't have time or money to develop or impliment such a idea (nor another idea using a space shade to partially block the sun hitting the earth) because of abrupt climate change: when the climate is forced, it doesn't respond smoothly and gradually. Instead, proof in the form of ice core samples show that the climate at first resists changing, then abruptly changes to another stable state. In other words, it is predictable that within a decade or two our climate will abruptly change from the mild Holocene of the last ten thousand years, to a hotter dryer climate that has resulted in mass extinctions many times in the past. Here is a link to an article I wrote if you want a further explanation http://www.planetsave.com/ps_mambo/Independent_New s/Science/Abrupt_climate_change_predicted_within_2 0_years_200609117794/ [planetsave.com]
We won't have the resources to launch SO2 into the upper atmosphere, particularly repeatedly, especially if it didn't make an immediate dramatic difference. Furthermore, we aren't going to pull the hammer back by getting an "SO2" program all ready to pull the trigger if things get really bad. Instead, typically we'll wait until catastrophe hits, then we'll be looking for the silver bullet yesterday. Neither a SO2 program, or the space shade program will be seriously on track until after the resources are unavailable. Any resources will be used up for consequence management, not to institute some expensive technologically spacious global warming pie-in-the-sky program that won't have immediate results for years and years.
On the other hand, I have an alternate suggestion (the advantage is it wouldn't need a great deal of resources, a large team of scientists, or a great deal of time to impliment):
It is unreasonable to expect that mankind will so dramatically reduce their greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) fast enough to avoid abrupt climate change. A fast growing population combined with growing per capita energy use, plus trillions of dollars in fossil fuel infrastruction means we are on track to double our CO2 emissions by 2050.
Furthermore, a warming earth means that carbon sinks will become carbon emitters bigtime. In other words, it is predictable that soon the earth will start emitting far more GHG than humans, at the same time it is able to absorb less of mankind's CO2 pollution. Nature absorbs about half of mankind's 8 billion tons of CO2 emitted each year. By 2030 it is predicted that nature will only be able to absorb 2.7 billion tons a year.
The only solution for global warming is to remove the CO2 from the air after it has been emitted. I suggest using genetic engineering to improve nature's ability to absorb CO2. Perhaps seeding a GMO into the ocean.
Re: Simulations (Score:2)
So, what part of the physics of greenhouse gasses do you reject?
> We can't predict weather 5 days out with our current computer models, how could they possibly predict these other trends?
For a lot of phenomena it's far easier to predict the longer-term trends than the shorter-term details.
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Or, put another way, it's simply harder to disprove long-term claims by the global-warming crowd since their scare tactic is based on something that even they say won't happen for a long time. For now I'll stay firmly in the 'no way we can tell what's going to happen' camp; which i
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On the contrary, it has already been going on long enough for us to observe the consequences.
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When will people stop using this silly argument?
Do you know if in ten days it will be warmer or cooler than now? Probably not.
Do you know if the next summer will be warmer than the next winter? If you live in the northern hemisphere, at a sufficient distance to the equator, I'd bet on it.
So how can we know that the summer will be warmer than the winter if we can't even tell the temperatur
Re:Simulations (Score:5, Informative)
Predicting climate is different from predicting weather. I cannot tell you whether Chicago will have a white Christmas (weather prediction), but I can tell you with a lot of confidence that Christmas will be colder than the 4th of July even a million years into the future (climate prediction).
Climate models are not tricks. The physics goes in. The climate comes out. It's not a trivial curve-fitting exercise the way you seem to think. We call them "primitive equation" models not because they are primitive, but because we *don't put the answer in* in any way. The model isn't told that Chicago winters are cold and Florida winters aren't. It *figures that out* from the physics.
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Or, to be a little more accurate as to how the process works, when you program a computer model with the currently established physics (including things like, say, the absorption spectra of atmospheric carbon dioxide) and various known positive and negative feedbacks etc., the computer program tells you that the temperature will increase when you raise CO2.
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Weather != Climate: Climate is the long term statistics of weather.
Computer models: The computer chip that allows you to display your ignorance would not be possible without computer models.
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Two planets meet: "Hello, how are you?" - "Bad. I've got homo sapiens." - "Don't worry. That passes."
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This is slashdot, not a college campus.
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This website tends to derive its science mind by watching anime and playing Final Fantasy.
KFG
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And in other 'science' news yet another uninterruptible, interminable cut scene will be coming up any time now...
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They did, but the episode of the Simpsons where the rogue comet melted in the layer of pollution over Springfield was far more popular.
Remember: Simpsons reference > Matrix reference.
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