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Methane may not warm the Earth quite as much as previously thought

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Re: Methane may not warm the Earth quite as much as previously thought

#311
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean have you looked at the charts showing the little ice age and the warm medieval period? The variation of temperature is orders of magnitude different to what we are experiencing now - I don't think that it's very relevant, is it? While climate hasn't been "stable" as in "hasn't changed", it has remained in a very narrow band of t°, of which we are slipping out of it at a much faster rate than all your examples.…

Hockey stick graphs are indeed alarming, but also fraudulent, and the IPCC has even accepted that in the past! Look into the history of these graphs, the Mann lawsuit, the work McIntyre did on showing how these graphs were manufactured etc. After it was shown how Mann did it the NAS investigated and hockey sticks vanished from IPCC reports for around 15 years. Then one snuck back in to the latest report but only in t…

I'm sorry, you're spewing nonsense.

For anyone having read this far: - "the mann lawsuit" is climategate, where some people found a single sentence out of context that sounded off out of years of emails. Mann sued the people that accused him of skewing the facts, and won a defamation suit. - while you write about things around the hockey stick graph, you dance around describing what they show. You can't "manufacture" a global rise in average t° of over 1°C. - I'm not even certain you are a real human being! Why argue all this, when you can just look at the graph?

Re: Methane may not warm the Earth quite as much as previously thought

#312
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this just isn't a rational argument. Taurine, Creatine, Carnosine, and B12 are not found in significant amounts in plants. Heme Iron is much more bioavailable than Plant Iron or Iron supplements. Plant-based diets can also inhibit the absorption of many more nutrients, including Iron and B12. You cannot get the right type of omega-3 fatty acids through a normal plant-based diet, either, you must supplement it with…

When people talk about reducing meat for environmental reasons they are usually implicitly referring to red meat. Chickens are great, they consume food waste and produce eggs. Yes there are some people who think that the best way to save the planet is to drink as much almond milk as possible. But that is not the strongest form of the argument.

The way to "fix" meat consumption is to ensure that the externalities are accounted for in their cost (which currently isn't). In fact, this applies to _everything_, not just red meat.

Meat that has less externalities will surely be cheaper then - such as chicken/poultry, and even fish or insect proteins.

The fact that the paid cost of red meat for a consumer is not reflective of their true cost is the meat of the issue to me.

Re: Methane may not warm the Earth quite as much as previously thought

#313
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean have you looked at the charts showing the little ice age and the warm medieval period? The variation of temperature is orders of magnitude different to what we are experiencing now - I don't think that it's very relevant, is it? While climate hasn't been "stable" as in "hasn't changed", it has remained in a very narrow band of t°, of which we are slipping out of it at a much faster rate than all your examples.…

Hockey stick graphs are indeed alarming, but also fraudulent, and the IPCC has even accepted that in the past! Look into the history of these graphs, the Mann lawsuit, the work McIntyre did on showing how these graphs were manufactured etc. After it was shown how Mann did it the NAS investigated and hockey sticks vanished from IPCC reports for around 15 years. Then one snuck back in to the latest report but only in t…

Oh and for McIntyre, here is a paper rebutting all his work :https://web.archive.org/web/20130124033049/http://www.cgd.uc...

Re: Methane may not warm the Earth quite as much as previously thought

#314
post #282
post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

B12 absolutely exists in many species of fish, it larger concentrations than in meat.

Fish is meat. But even if it weren't, it's still an animal so it doesn't matter when the discussion is about a vegan who won't eat them, either.

In the stores fish and meat are different aisles.

And the discussion is about carbon footprint, not veganism.

Re: Methane may not warm the Earth quite as much as previously thought

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The narrative is very misleading. There are two directions to look at it: convincing yourself via a convincing story, or convincing yourself via a convincing calculation. The story they tell defies basic thermodynamic intuition, and seems to skip over all the parts that would put the narrative in doubt. The premise is that greenhouse gases absorb black body radiation from the surface. First of all, greenhouse gas is…

> So what can possibly cause warming is only the effect of the difference in temperatures between the CO2 gas and the surface This is wrong. If you do the math, you actually find that you get warming from CO2 if the atmosphere is colder, the same temp, or hotter than the surface. When the ground emits a photon there are two possibilities. it either gets absorbed by an atom in the atmosphere or it goes to space. about…

The jacket is preventing heat loss via convection. You literally can't prevent heat loss from radiation. By the zeroth law, an object with specific temperature is at thermal equilibrium with photonic heat bath at the same temperature. If you look at the interface between them, whether there's CO2 there or a black body doesn't matter, because you could replace it with photonic heat bath. The comparison to greenhouse (convection) and to jacket (again, thermal convection / conduction) is misleading exactly because it evokes the wrong intuition.

The better comparison is to a black hole. Literally nothing can escape it - not even light - so it is much worse than CO2. Yet it still has a temperature, and it still emits radiation according to its temperature. You cannot absorb more than black body.

The "better than air at absorbing" isn't an arbitrary statement. It comes from extra degrees of freedom in the gas that can absorb the heat. And the difference in absorbing thermal heat between any two systems MUST be a result of their temperature difference, because they must be at equilibrium if they have the same temperature.

If any two systems of the same temperature had a difference in energy emitted by radiation between them, that would violate the second law, and you would create temperature differences between them (heat would flow) and extract work from the temperature difference without needing a colder reservoir.

Re: Methane may not warm the Earth quite as much as previously thought

#316
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like all the variations you mentionned are less than 0.5° average, while we are already over 1° now. I think it's almost disengenuous to use them to say that the present warming is nothing to be worried of.

No, the changes were much larger than that, but recall from the climategate emails that they spent a lot of time trying to find ways to cover up the data around that. Look into the history of "hockey stick" graphs to see just how far they go. Historical evidence from outside their field shows there must have been changes of many degrees in the relatively recent past, e.g. bison fossils at altitudes indicating 5-6 deg…

How large were they? With a source please, you say a lot of garbage that I'd like not to have to sift through. Every source I see shows clearly that both your events were much less than 1°.

Bison fossils? What about ree rings and ice core samples? How are bones a possible indiction of anything?

Climate gate had a single sentence that seemed off to someone who has never done statistical analysis, if taken out of contexy.

Re: Methane may not warm the Earth quite as much as previously thought

#317
post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you have strong scientific arguments, it does not matter even if the whole world is against you. That’s a nice idealistic thing to say. Academia has shown this to be false again and again. Most groundbreaking ideas or arguments which go against the current wisdom get buried in the best case, and the proponents scorned and driven out of research in the worst case. It has been like this since the beginning of orga…

According to your logic then, science should not have been able to advance at all from the very beginning

The idealistic view of scientists as unbiased arbiters is just not true. Science advances because:

1. Some of the time, scientists behave in an objective manner

2. Theories that are correct have predictive power and are therefore useful (i.e. get results, enable new technologies) and therefore tend to win out

3. "Science advances one funeral at a time" -Max Planck

Re: Methane may not warm the Earth quite as much as previously thought

#318
post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> some forms of protein... can't be realistically substituted by normally eating humans. uh... > Its a fact that ie vegans lack: B12, Most vegans consume enough B12 to avoid clinical deficiency by eating foods fortified with B12, including plant milks, some soy products and some breakfast cereals, and B12 supplements > D3, The vegan source of vitamin D3 comes from algae, produces the most body-ready form of vitamin D…

So, basically, to avoid eating meat which is what we have been doing for thousands of years, we have to eat all kinds of pharmaceutical products to compensate the deficiencies of a plant based diet. Are we accounting the costs of the production of these products in the comparison, and do we have conclusive, long term studies that suplements are as good as eating natural products? Apparently, the first suplements only…

> we have to eat all kinds of pharmaceutical products to compensate the deficiencies of a plant based diet.

Vitamin supplements are regulated by the FDA as food. They're not drugs or "pharmaceutical products."

Re: Methane may not warm the Earth quite as much as previously thought

#319
post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The narrative is very misleading. There are two directions to look at it: convincing yourself via a convincing story, or convincing yourself via a convincing calculation. The story they tell defies basic thermodynamic intuition, and seems to skip over all the parts that would put the narrative in doubt. The premise is that greenhouse gases absorb black body radiation from the surface. First of all, greenhouse gas is…

> So what can possibly cause warming is only the effect of the difference in temperatures between the CO2 gas and the surface. This shows you have a complete misunderstanding of the basic physics going on. If you have a source of radiation directly hitting a surface, some of the radiation will warm the surface by being absorbed by the surface material, but some of that radiation will be reflected back into space. Whe…

> That's what causes extra warming of the surface compared to the situation without air.

While this effect may be real, it's not what people are referring to as the "greenhouse effect". This requires the absorption and re-emission as IR. Methane and CO2 are considered greenhouse gases because they absorb thermal IR, not because they absorb reflected light from the surface.

In addition to the Wikipedia article machina_ex_deus linked, this might be a good intro: http://forecast.uchicago.edu/archer.ch4.greenhouse_gases.pdf. I'm not sure if I buy all of machina_ex_deus's conclusions, but I think his description of the effect is much closer to accurate than yours.

Re: Methane may not warm the Earth quite as much as previously thought

#320
post #240
post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

B12 is found in animal products because it's added to their diet. It doesn't come natural them. B12 you get from eating dirt, which we don't like to do.

Are you suggesting we should eat dirt instead of meat to get B12? Ist it even bio-available to us in that format?

B12 is not actually synthesized by animals, it is synthesized by bacteria. Most grain-fed livestock are heavily supplemented as well, with industrially fermented B12. You can just get the same industrially fermented B12 we inject livestock with. You don't have to inject it though.
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