Catastrophic AGW is a make-believe thing devised to rob taxpayers of $Trillions of dollars for 'Made-to-Order', "Scientific" studies that would find fault with Man for anything negative occuring in our weather/climate.
Pay no attention to it.
> I know there are many ways of reducing global warming ..., but are there actually ways to reduce global warming?
Perhaps you should ask your question more clearly. Yes you could plant more trees but the effect would be temporary as trees would die and send carbon back into the air. You could have more air pollution that would reflect sunlight. Or perhaps some satellites or balloons that reflect sunlight.
Overall, hybrid cars will not accomplish much. Transportation is only about 20% of emissions, and if hybrid cars reduce the cost per mile then more miles will be driven. Plus plug-in hybrids will be using electricity that will then produce more CO2. Wind and solar is useful if adopted globally, but they are currently too expensive.
If you pushed a boulder off the top of a mountain, how much harder would it be to stop it?
There are positive feedback cycles in nature, such as the methane and CO2 in the permafrost, when it warms up, much greater quantities of greenhouse gases will be released. There's the albedo of sea ice, ice is reflective but sea water absorbs more solar energy as heat so as the ice melts, the seas become warmer. There's the pine beetles, five years without a winter kill meant a burgeoning population of pine beetles in Canada which has now destroyed 80% of the pine trees in BC and the rotting trees are emitting five times the CO2 of the nation's automobiles.
Of course, we don't know all the cycles and there are negative feedback cycles too such as the melting of ice dilutes the salinity of the ocean currents, potentially stopping or slowing the thermohaline cycle hence stopping the ocean currents from being the heat at southern latitudes such as the Gulf of Mexico to the northern regions such as North, America or Europe, plunging them into a deep freeze ( yes, global warming was predicted to give us cold winters such as the one we just had ).
Hybrid cars will actually increase global warming as it takes energy to make cars and it takes more to make hybrid cars. Hybrids and electric vehicles are just a method selling new cars to people who don't need a new car. Batteries store energy chemically, guess what, so does gasoline and diesel. Fossil fuels are the stored energy of the Sun from millions of years ago. We've even known how to commercially synthesize gasoline and diesel from syngas ( a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen gases ), we even do it in our refineries, the oil from the Alberta tar sands is a synthetic crude made from the syngas produced by burning bitumen, Shell synthesizes diesel to dilute the high sulfur diesel to meet Federal ultra low sulfur diesel requirements. Sandia Labs with their CR-5 have shown that with an energy source, we can make carbon monoxide from CO2 and hydrogen from H2O. We can in fact recharge gasoline and diesel with roughly the same overall efficiency as charging batteries, probably better. A pre-existing gasoline or diesel car is more environmentally friendly than replacing it with a hybrid or electric vehicle.
Can global warming be reversed, we don't know but the efforts people think are environmentally friendly often are not. The best we could probably do is slow it down.
Not without making things a lot worse. Basically everything we could do to either pull CO2 and other green house gases out of the atmosphere, or cut levels of sunlight getting caught in the atmosphere, would do more damage than we've already done.
There is one last ditch fix, which we'll probably end up trying in 50 or so years, that could solve the problem; but would poison the oceans and deplete the ozone layer. Basically, we use high flying aircraft to dump huge amounts of sulfur aerosols into the atmosphere, which would form acid droplets. These would reflect sunlight, reducing the impact of global warming. The problem is this would increase acid rain world wide, deplete the ozone layer, and probably give half the human race skin cancer. But because it is a last ditch solution, it's probably what we'll do.
The temp has increased by 0.8 degrees over the past 100 years. As CO2 in the atmosphere double, the temp goes up by 1 degree celsius. We ahve seen a linear trend for the past 60 som odd years. So we are looking at no more than a 1.3 degree increasein teh next 100 years. We should look toward more renewable methods of generating power, but the world is not ending and this fake apocalypse crap is just a bunch of garbage.
In fact, warmers will entirely back me up on this. They will of course insult and belittle me, but watch their actions.
When they want to show temp increases, they will show you a linear regression. LINEAR. Not the exponential crap they are claiming but a linear increase.
Ask them how they figured outthe climate sensitvity. You may here things like tree ring data. The tree rings are interesting. To figure out the temp of the past, they us tree rings. Thicker rings mean warmer climates. Hold a tic... Thicker rings mean warmer climate. Warmer climate equals more tree growth. Sort of flies in the face of this apocalyptic nightmare, doesn't it???
Of course you can go with the John W. solution as well. AGW will mean warming cooling and everything in between. They are as entertaining as palm readers.
actually the thing about using hybrid cars and solar panels is that they're actually just as bad but in different ways. solar panels emit radiation into the air, and hybrid cars run on lithium batteries, a rare earth mineral mined only in asia, under working conditions so horrid that lithium miners never reach the age of 40. The real major cause of global warming that the media doesn't really talk about to much is that our solar system is currently outside of the milky way's arm. i could write an entire essay explaining the science but to put it simply the milky way is made up of spiral arms. when we're inside of a spiral arm, the earth is cooler. when we're outside of a spiral arm, like we are now, the earth is warmer. this happens every few hundred years, so global warming will go away in time. thing is, the main distributor of fuel source is the oil and fossil fuel companies. other competing alternative sources are trying to make oil companies the reason for global warming, when really it's just a naturally occurring thing. it's all about money. you can plant as many trees as you want, but unless you can plant an entire rainforest you won't make any difference, and the difference you would make would be less than 1 degree. it's a very complicated science quite honestly, way more involved than i can fit into an answers box. if you can take anything out of this, understand that global warming is natural, and there is no perfect fuel source, alternative or not.
Yes it can. The first thing that has to happen; humans are going to have to change their expectations of the planet. Or as has been said by the wise man. 'When you find yourself in a hole, Stop digging"
Humanity has to live on this planet in a more sustainable way. Responsible use of fossil fuels means a huge turn around, but get used to it because the cheap fossil fuels are gone anyway. We have the biggest brain of all the animals on the planet and for a change we are going to have to use it.
Only naturally. Nothing humanity can ever do to alter the earth's climate. There is nothing occurring now that hasn't happened in the past and the climate and world still exist.
Why anyone would want to reverse the warming is beyond me. The benefits of a warmer planet vastly outweigh any benefit of a colder one. Life thrives in warmer climates, not colder climates.
In terms of making a switch to alternative energy sources, look up algae biofuel, which is very promising (algae grows super fast and cheap) but needs more R&D. I hear that cellulosic ethanol, made from wood, inedible parts of plants, and grass is also promising; it can be made from low-cost cellulose from sawdust, farm residues like old hay, etc. and is energy efficient.
Just a note, melting of ice in the Arctic causes a couple major positive feedbacks: melting of sea ice decreases albedo by exposing dirt or ocean below, and methane release from permafrost as it melts.
For those people who say global warming is a hoax, Carbon-14 concentrations declined in the atmosphere since pre-industrial times, which is logical because more carbon from fossil fuel combustion has been emitted into the atmosphere since then. Carbon-14 (a radioactive isotope of carbon; has same # protons, different # neutrons) has a lifetime of about 50,000 years, and since fossil fuels are from crude oil that is millions of years old, it is devoid of c-14, so it makes sense that atmospheric concentrations have gone down.
Planting trees will not reverse or even slow down global warming, because the carbon dioxide that they absorb will just be re-released into the atmosphere when they die.
Unless you want to send mirrors into space or send aircraft up to cause acid rain, we can't cool Earth. But we can slow down, and eventually stop global warming by using zero emission energy sources, such as solar, wind and nuclear power.
No current proposals will actually reverse it. It is definitely possible to limit it, which limits the damage as well as freeing up resources which could be applied to future reversal techniques.
Edit - the raisin keeps saying that "warmers" claim temperatures show exponential increase. He hasn't backed this up. He also has failed to note what a linear response to an increasing forcing acts like.
I never studied Biology and Chemistry beyond Secondary School, I Study Maths and Economics and, as a result, I don't know much about global warming. I know there are many ways of reducing global warming such as using hybrid cars, building solar panels and wind farms and improving infrastructure to reduce congestion, but are there actually ways to reduce global warming?
I'm talking about the cooling of the Earth, as opposed to heating, as a result of human activity. I thought of maybe planting more trees to absorb CO2 but I'm guessing we would need many trees as more are being cut down as opposed to being planted, not to forget the time lag involved with the trees' growth.
So please educate me as I would like to know more about this topic. Feel free to link me to any good resources.
Thanks
Maybe in theory it could be reversed, but that cost would be more than the world could afford. The best we can realistically do is stop or even just slow it. Reversing it would require not only stopping ALL artificial additions of CO2 to the air, but also removing a lot of the CO2 that is already in the air, which is nearly impossible to do.
Nope...But it can be slowed by reducing the burning of fossil fuels.
Since the onset of the industrial revolution, humans have produced enough extra greenhouse gases for GW to go well beyond the year 2100. By reducing our personal carbon footprint, by advocating alternative power production and alternative fuel autos we can slow GW down and give hope to future generations
Theoretically, but it's unlikely.
If we reduce atmospheric CO2 levels below what they are now, rather than merely stop or slow CO2 *growth*, we will reverse global warming. You're right that aforestation (planting more trees) would be unlikely to cut it, both because there is deforestation going on in a lot of areas, and because there's only so much land we can plant trees on. But there are other ways to capture excess carbon--increasing ocean biomass, chemically capturing it in rocks, and so on. But most of those methods are either inherently limited in scope, or very expensive, or both.
Also, look up geoengineering. Many geoengineering proposals would directly reduce effective solar input, usually by reflecting away some of the incoming sunlight. But, again, they're expensive, limited, or both.
Some sources for more information (on global warming in general, not just your question):
http://www.skepticalscience.com/
http://aip.org/history/climate/summary.h...
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/...
http://www.realclimate.org/
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11...
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;... (I posted a question asking people to give links to information at varying levels of experience)
Even if we were to halt all greenhouse gas emissions today (which is practically impossible), we wouldn't see any significant reversal of global climate change trends for many years. In fact, it could take as long as 1,000 years to return to a climate similar to that of the Earth in its pre-industrial state.
Of course. Look at all the millions of years before there even were people on Earth. There were plenty of ice ages and warming trends, all without our help. We are currently coming off an ice age, so expect things to continue to warm up. Our own lives are hardly a blip in time compared to the way the earth and nature run things. Look at the big picture.
Uh-huh. Wouldn't it need to actually happen first ? before it could be reversed
We hope so. First thing to do is, responsible. We should be responsible for our mother nature, it helps that our nature be good.
yeah
may be yes
No They just want to raise taxes .
Wouldn't it need to actually happen first ? before it could be reversed
Global warming could be reversed using a combination of burning trees and crops for energy, and capturing and storing carbon dioxide
