Topic: It's hard to know who to believe. - page 3. (Read 814 times)

please forgive my reading comprehension 

I was talking about concentration in parts per million. Concentration as a % of the atmosphere isn't a very useful metric, there are a million factors not at all related to CO2 that would affect it. For example, you could continuously increase the CO2 in the atmosphere but also, lets say add argon, and the concentration as a % of the atmosphere of CO2 would decrease. It'd take all day to list all of the reasons why concentration of CO2 in parts per million should be the primary metric used when trying to understand the addition or removal of CO2 from the atmosphere.

I was quite explicit.

If I meant % rate of increase, I would have said that. I didn't. You meant that, but are using ambiguous language to muddy the waters. If not, you're just really bad at expressing yourself clearly, and so have no business picking my words apart.


You know what I said, but still chose to go for the "oh I'm so confused, maybe you mean this alarming sounding statistic?" approach

Perhaps there was a misunderstanding with the language. When you are talking about % CO2, do you mean as a percentage of the entire atmosphere, or increase of CO2 by some % in parts per million?


source: https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/carbon-dioxide/

shows an ~ 8% increase in the past 14 years. I haven't looked over the data personally so I'm not going to defend this chart to the death, but the data is available for review.

that's the non-controversial part that (apparently nearly everyone) agrees on; 0.03% CO₂ pre 1900, 0.04% CO₂ at the beginning of C21st. It's frankly surprising that you claim never to have heard this, it is an often repeated pair of data points


if your friends are correct, then the alarmist perspective is also correct.

assuming a linear trend (which would be a conservative assumption seeing as energy production and vehicle use are in an upward trend), that's a 0.12% increase per year, in 50 years a 6% increase. That really would change the strength of the greenhouse effect, although the full effects are subject to decades of lag.


something tells me that the IPCC people would be screaming with blue faces about such a thing if that were really the case though.


Or, are you simply stating that CO₂ measurements oscillates by up to 0.01% in a given month? i.e. it increases or decreases by 0.01% about a longer term trend?

Fine, let me specify that to, I've never heard the immediate disastrous belief from anyone that I've spoken to. My conversations with people that you dont know and for all you know may not exist aren't supposed to sway your opinion one way or another, my statement was more a cautionary rant about who you listen to. People discard opinions by the guy who has spent 30 years researching a narrow topic because they once got paid from someone with a vested interest that lies somewhere, so instead we listen to a guy on twitter who spreads incorrect information.

As a side note, why do you think that atmospheric concentration of CO2 has gone up by 0.01% since the industrial age? I've worked briefly on aerosol studies with relation to weather mapping and satellite imaging and can probably say that atmospheric CO2 concentration has gone up by over 0.01% over the past month. I say probably, as that wasn't an individual variable that we had accounted for, but there was a factor of atmospheric change which some other department put together which accounted for "greenhouse gases" and other particulate matter as a whole.

*edit* That wasn't a pitch as to why you should believe me, that was my reason for being curious where you were getting that idea from.

scientists who refute the IPCC consensus don't "deny climate change" either (you appear to be putting words in their mouth)


those scientists agree with the basic science (almost all are former adherents of the IPCC consensus), but that the methodology for the temperature trends the IPCC people present is bad, and that their conclusions are biased towards the disaster-ist position as a result.

• Greenhouse effect is real
• and so then must be greenhouse gases
• CO₂ is a greenhouse gas
• CO₂ increased as a proportion of the constitution of the atmosphere since the industrial age, by 0.01%

all of the above is empirically factual or systemically demonstrable


but to say that we must all join a CO₂ death cult/middle ages sinners absolution based on the above is not at all clear. casually saying we should all do it because of an anecdote about some scientists someone met isn't even slightly meaningful, I'm sure they all had a favorite sandwich too, but I'm not going to start taking dietary advice from them either

I think that there is a problem where its hard to know who to believe, but more so because everyone has a platform to let others know of their revolutionary ideas, even if they are outright wrong. People seem to love the idea of "us" versus authority, when in a lot of cases, authority just means the best at their topic. What you consider common sense doesn't make it right.

Fractional reserve banking is actually brilliant, the stability and flexibility it brings to the table is vast compared to any other monetary system that we've ever had in the past. A reserve system sounds like it'd be monetarily sound, but do you know how many thousands of times they've failed in the past? Fiat and how it works is completely separate from Bitcoin and thats just lovely. Who would possibly be against more choices in their financial systems? I've spoken to research scientists on a daily basis for the past few years and not a single one has ever denied climate change. They are just a bunch of nerds arguing over who's model is 0.0017% more accurate based on data excluded from Silurian period in another model. Climate change "natzis" are likely just another wing of people who don't know what they are talking about.

Factual and well researched objective reports are what I'd say are common place. You are absolutely correct that every so often, studies are bought off or commercial interests are put ahead of safety. The reason why its such a big deal when it does occur is because its not usual. There are millions of studies going on every day over whether berries will make you immortal or you can knock over goats with your mind. They'll yield some sort of result if the procedures are done and reported properly. Then they get peer reviewed and torn apart.

Become an authority in your own field and believe yourself.

^^^ someone get some old British war movies out to keep Jet Cash quiet, he's repeating himself again

I scanned some of the reports mentioned here, and I tried to find a reference to water vapour, and I couldn't see any. Water vapour ( clouds etc. ) is the single largest creator of the "greenhouse effect", but it is excluded from almost all of the public reports. This is why I believe there is a political agenda behind the global  warming industry. A Carbon Dioxide famine is one of the factors that increase water vapour in the atmosphere. The effect of Carbon Dioxide is negligible, and is still within the bounds of historic records.

RE climate, just take a look at the very abundant public data. There is no "planet B"

so, you're saying that I misunderstood the carbon credit scheme


but your outline of the scheme is essentially identical to what I stated

• credits are created
• big polluters sell the credits they do not need

that's more or less exactly what I said.

what makes you think these highly dubious characters with bad reputations for corruption will not game that system? By adhering to this nonsense without due diligence (instead you believe the information you are given from known bad actors), you are doing the job of the energy industry to force it on everyone.

we won't need to buy any credits? well, possibly that promise will exist when the scheme begins. how reliable do you think that promise will be

---

but it's all moot when the science has been distorted (not wrong, distorted), and the data which motivated the whole field cannot withstand basic peer review.


there is a whole group of climate scientists that have done published studies that contradicts the basis of anthropogenic climate change. why would you ignore this, and just repeat 1 side of a 2 sided story over an over again? do you want to believe in an "end of the world" scenario? it is said that no-one ever went out of business selling stories that predict the end of the world

but hey, don't listen to me. just pay your exhalation (i.e. breathing) taxes!!! have fun with that

Banks, have you studied the issuance of the Carbon-Credit under the present system? It does not work the way you were telling earlier. The total allowable carbon credits is fixed at the start and then decreases each year. From my reading, this is how it works:

1. The total GHG emission in tonnes during the baseline year defines the total available credits.
2. These are allocated as allowances to polluting industries.
3. The available credits decrease every year to achieve the Emission reduction target (as taken up in form of NDC's under Paris Agreement)
4. Industries that use beyond allowable allowances need to buy credit.
5. Industries that implement clean-tech (at significant costs) stand to save some part of their allowance which they can sell.

There is nothing suspicious in this. These are the only industries that are covered under the scheme. There is no "us" to whom they can sell these credits. At least that is what people should know. Individuals aren't supposed to buy Carbon Credits as an investment. Those are generally just scams. They are to be traded among the polluters themselves.

Once again, I think we are reading from vastly different sources. Like i said above, there is no "power to print" carbon credits. Of course there is the power to buy and sell them based on how much a polluting corporation can save from its "annual allocated allowance".

I think that you are trying to tell me that the data is wrong and that there is not as much warming as people want to project (promoted by the big industries so they can create a market). This is a point i don't find convincing for the reason I explained above. Your understanding of the "Carbon Credit Printing" isn't how this works.

Also, Didn't i ask this to you first..? LOL..  I have been pretty clear on this that the Paris Agreement and Emission allowance market is the way to go. You cannot just force present corporations  out of business and usher in an era of only Clean energy corporations.
Steps are needed so that all countries/ companies have the incentive to make investments in clean energy. People will never do this out of the "goodness" of their hearts.  I am sure you know this way better than me.
We need a different thread.

EDIT: I think you mistakenly put my sentence in your own quotes in the previous reply. With all the "bots" going around, you should probably edit it..

so, the point is that someone must issue the carbon credits, and they must do it according to some rationale

and I outlined the rationale above. Although I missed out perhaps the most significant detail; those who produce most CO₂ are those with the most leverage to decrease their output.



think about it; the big oil and gas extractors & the fossil fuel based electricity production industries fit this profile more or less exactly. They create more CO₂ than anyone else, because they are the root source of all the carboniferous products.

and so they have been anointed as the carbon credit controllers, they control the supply, and the price. but none of this was in their interests all along, right? they just had to fight all this taking away bestowal of extra political power all through the 70's and 80's

it was probably (at least at some point in the development of this culture) a simple reverse psychology trick: "oh no IPCC!! please don't give us the power to print and sell carbon credits as a worldwide monopoly!!!! Noooooooooooooooo!!!"




there was other climate change news this week too


when you measure the average temperature change of the planet from suitably equipped satellites, not from a cherry-picked range of non-standard weather stations in unevenly distributed locations, there is no discernible or statistically significant warming trend over the last decade, despite the increases in CO₂

so, what do you think we should do about the problem?

Carbon Credit legislation (Kyoto Protocol et al) came out of the need to bring the developed and developing economies on board. The parties involved are Governments of developed countries whose interests align with those of major polluting corporations'. There are developing countries and others which deem it unfair to have themselves restricted in this way because their share of Global Industrial emissions (at that point of time) wasn't as big.

I have generally seen it as quite a clever way to bring these disparate interests together so that "selfish parties can be made to act for the common good because of Market forces". I respect your opinion but I'll have to see where your above mentioned belief is coming from? Or maybe I'll just google to see what I can find (despite having to face OP's Trust conundrum ). Lets see what new I can learn.

Say, if we agree that Copenhagen summit, Paris treaty, Kyoto etc. is a big farce, sponsored by the most powerful people, then what according to this school of thought is the solution? Isn't it well-documented that the oil industry actively worked against Climate change theories beginning in the 70s-80s?
They changed the track to dominate the renewable's market. This is because those who have the money to invest will do it anyways. After Tesla, there has been a host of manufacturers who have warmed up to the prospect of Electric cars and are thus coming out with models of their own.
Again, like i said, what is the solution if not these international treaties?? Its a global issue and compromises have to be made between countries.

I think we are reading from vastly different sources. Damn Google/ youtube suggestions!!

Yet, I am convinced that not everything is reported correctly, so their data is incomplete.
Maybe I am wrong, but if the industry or governments are the ones doing the reporting, the reality is much worse than most of that data.

no, this is incorrect

the fossil fuel industry is promoting the anthropogenic climate change agenda rather heavily, and they stand to gain, for this reason:


fossil fuel industry plan to benefit from these circumstances thusly:

• Promote carbon credits legislation
• Continue extraction and usage of fossil fuels
• Use new tech to slowly reduce the CO₂ output of extraction & energy production (scrubbers, sequestration etc)
• Record how much CO₂ emissions they prevented
• Sell the amount saved to us, as carbon credits

can we trust them, and the regulators who measure and certify their efforts, not to cheat? I doubt it, personally

if your point is (and it was): "we can't trust big oil or big energy in general", you'd be right. But look at what you're trusting them with when you accept the anthropogenic climate change position



can you see the greater political danger in giving this much more power to a group of organisations, who openly admit they are a cartel, over which significant armed conflicts have dominated the past 100 years, and all of that at the expense of everyday people whose political power is rapidly diminishing?

You are being tricked by these very powerful people, please get a grip before they institute any of this planned power-grab



it's not that simple

how much is bad? The fact that you are willing to use such open-ended, non specific expressions leads me to believe that you don't even care what the details of the pro anthropogenic climate change argument even are

because the pro-anthropogenic change argument is not "CO₂ is bad"

the argument is "this proportion of CO₂ is bad"


guess what? I agree with the latter statement. I disagree with anthropogenic climate change proponents on what the dangerous proportion is.

and the major flaw in the argument: reality agrees with me. cherry picked statistics, of course, do not, and that's the only way that anthropogenic climate change arguments can be made; using biased statistics and computer models that reinforce the anthropogenic hypotheses, but deliberately ignore the overall context that does not support the anthropogenic hypothesis

the evidence that biased statistics and computer models are being used to further the anthropogenic argument is abundant, and increasingly so

Those reports are there if you look for them, they're lengthy and they cite other reports and data, no one piece of information is without bias or error.

Here's one website for example: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emissions

They have reports on just about everything and from my limited time reading them they don't seem biased.


I'm very interested in climate change and it's a subject that takes nuanced thinking, which is at times counter-intuitive. You have to be truly open to new ideas and to understanding a little bit of physics.


Other than that, look for other critical thinkers that make facts and figures based arguments that you can follow yourself. My favorite one is ThunderF00t on YouTube. I really like his style of debunking nonsense and in the process I learn a little bit of science.

He debunks a lot of bullshit, including things that well respected people try to sell to the public, such as Elon Musk's hyperloop (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNFesa01llk), solar roadways, powedered alcohol and other nonsense that the media just repeats without giving it a second thought.


We're all wrong at times, but if you at least arrive to a conclusion by understanding the logic behind it you have a higher chance of being right and a lower chance of being misled.


In short here's where I stand:

The earth is warming and climate change is our greatest challenge yet (as a species).
Bitcoin is strong and as it keeps scaling and improving we'll see more uses.
I don't know enough about statins.
Fractional reserve banking is stealing. The banks can use money that doesn't exist, I don't understand what, if anything stops them from buying a bunch of stock in all of the companies, even the ones that fail, and basically owning most of the wealth without doing any of the work.



I'd also like to add that climate change requires an open mind to study it. You have to be open to learning a little bit of physics.

about 500 Million years ago the co2 ranged in the thousands (a high of about 5000ppm) but the sun wasn't as hot yet. More recently at a co2 similar to the one we have today, the earth was much hotter and the sea level was much higher. In fact New York and Miami and Tampa and my home would be many stories/levels under the sea's surface.


It's however easy to see that plants are not taking up all the co2 in the atmosphere and so it's going up. Plants eat co2 that much is true, but they also require a good climate. Climate Change will turn many areas into deserts.

Other areas that will thaw out will not necessarily become covered in trees simply because soil takes thousands of years to develop. The rate at which we're changing the climate is not the same rate is it would naturally change itself.


If we slowly had increased co2 to 400, or even 1000ppm but we did it over 1 million years all of our grain crops and forests could adapt, new species and ecosystems would arise.

This is not what's happening here. The rate of climate change is very important. Right now we're causing the six mass extinction.


Climate Change can also bring colder winters and more snow to a lot of people. More water in the atmosphere means more snow in certain areas. In certain cases there could be both devastating ice loss and snow falls at the same place.

The loss of ice limiting the area that the locals can hunt in and travel to nearby villages and the snow just worsening things.

Also who's to say that even if certain plants grow faster that that's a good thing. Bush-fires are scary, more water in the atmosphere, higher temperatures and more co2 means that unless people in areas prone to bushfires learn to manage the forests around them carefully they're risking losing their lives or all of their belongings year after year.


For the entirety of humanity's past in the planet co2 was much lower. We've fucked things up. Things will never be the same. Maybe if more people could understand the science a little better we could at least ride things out a little smoother.

Just a few billions of people dying happily dosed with pain killers in their 70s,80s and 90s rather than starving to death in poverty in their 20s.

You are absolutely right that Storage isn't mature enough to allow renewable sources to cater to base load requirements on their own. That is why we still need Coal/Gas fired plants. Yet, I meant it in a developing country context that why these parallel targets are necessary.

This is an on-going debate in India. Power equipment manufacturers have their order-books spread thin as Govt. has slowed down funding for conventional power plants owing to their climate change commitments. I believe USA under Trump pulled out of the agreement to safeguard mining, automobile jobs. Its much tougher for India to do so.

The problem with India and China is the sheer concentration of humanity here. The detrimental health effects are proving to be a huge healthcare cost in Indian cities. Indian planners have to balance between the need for additional power against the environmental/healthcare costs of going ballastic on conventional power plants.
Like I said earlier, Indian plants are more polluting compared to the well-managed power plants that Jet Cash is mentioning. The coal quality is low with a higher sulphur content, lower calorific value resulting in higher ash content. Compared to western/ European plants, few have Desulpharization or Catalyitc converters to take care of SOX/ NOX (Which as Carlton pointed out have severe immediate health effects). Investments in this direction have just started and that too is big business. Hope you can see why parallel renewable targets are important for a country like India.

That reply was more towards Fish as he pointed out carbon footprint of manufacturing solar panels and batteries, and then you said, "I agree that batteries"..Well.. LOL..You are right about the need for a middle path here. (Better management of conventional plants). I am not on the Climate change denial side which I guess even you are not, though it seemed to me that you are because of "Solar isn't renewable".

We probably disagree on the reasons and the ways to mitigate that. (Let me know if am judging this correctly.)
For the dilemma on science, when it is not known who is right, maybe we could look at the motivations. Those who deny climate change typically belong to the established coal, petroleum, automobile industries. It is but natural that they don't want anything to eat into their substantial profits. I feel that the renewable supporters (not the renewables industry) are the under-dogs here.

We have sufficient non-arable land to cover with Solar panels that will not lead to the affects that you are concerned about. In India, there are plans to install solar panels along railway tracks. There has already been efforts to use Water Canals for this purpose. Even train coaches with solar panels installed on roofs to cater to Lighting usage. So, Allow me to say that for incremental improvements, space is not the constraint.

Then again, most city-based pollution comes from automobiles. Consumer level actions like Roof-installed solar panels, battery vehicles can go a long way in reducing pollution in cities. Isn't that a desirable action? If someone denies it by saying that CO2 isn't that bad, which side should I err towards?

right, one almost never hears anyone talk about sulphur or nitrogen dioxide, yet they're directly bad for the health, and possibly have a detrimental effect on the overall ecosystem also (don't know enough about the consequential effects)



I don't totally agree with this

The storage technology for renewable energy is both required and immature (it's very immature considering how old the energy storage field is), if significant proportions of energy production is to be changed to renewable sources. It's the ideal, but until then, renewables are best used to smooth out peaks in demand, as that supply profile matches what the tech is actually capable of in the actual real world



the argument that CO₂ emissions even matter is similarly thin on the ground (as is the proportion of CO₂ in the atmosphere )


the foundation of the whole anthropogenic warming argument was rocked this week: the climate sceintist that produced the famous "hockey stick" graph of temperature rises over C20th lost his court case.


how did he lose his case? he refused to present his methodology that produced the hockey stick graph in the court room. think about that; the methodology that produced the famous hockey stick trend graph was not publicly available then, and it's still not available now

what sort of scientist does that? loses a court case, a civil libel case which he instigated, by refusing to present the evidence that proves his case? what sort of science cannot withstand the scrutiny of a courtroom?

I didn't refer to the use of solar panels, but the replacement of productive arable land with solar farms. We also have a CO2 drought at the moment, and this is affecting the plant life, and causing global warming for reasons that I explained above. We need to reverse desetification, and turn the current barren deserts into productive land.

One other point - algae is responsive for the creation of more oxygen than trees, and we are destroying algae as well as trees.

Countries such as China are building more coal fired plants to give themselves an economic advantage, and the western world is transferring manufacturing to them.  Wouldn't it be better if we used well managed coal fired generators to preserve our manufacturing, rather than allowing the coal burning to be performed in countries that have less interest in the welfare of the world.

As I stated in my opening post, it is difficult to know which reports one should believe. What I do know is that most of them seem to contradict basic scientific facts. Some people even believe that fractional reserve banking is beneficial to the consumer, and that high blood pressure is a disease, and not a healthy biological response.