More noise about climate

"HeyBub" wrote in news:ZbSdnbq3gZ6ZMfjWnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@earthlink.com:

I think you inadvertently switched them. Bu I do get the drift.

Concrete can be recycled as well, and I doubt that the cost differential is as big as you say. And I note you have come down from a factor of 10 to a factor of less than 7.

I don't care about Texas (smile!!).

IMNSHO a lot can be done by altering our approach for future work just slightly. This example is for moderate climates with freeze-thaw cycles, like around New York. For instance, a road surface on a local village road with good cracks in it (not HUGE, but just good cracks) can be rather easily repaired well, using a little extra effort. Not just slapping some asphalt repair stuff on it, and patting that down with a shovel, but heating the old surface, patching it and sealing it with liquid tar (whatever). The road could easily last another 10 years or more then while the slapping patching stuff just lifts in a year or two. Yes the initial repair is more than twice as costly, but it lasts much more than 3 times as long. You get what you pay for!

Then when real resurfacing is needed, a decision could be made to hae a lighter colored top layer. Many factors go into these choices, but albedo could easily be included.

Reply to
Han
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Ummmmm.... Don't look now, but retreating glaciers isn't anything new. About ten thousand years ago, the area where I sit as I type this was under half a mile of ice.

Good friend of mine has a master's in geology, and obviously know more about this than I do, but according to him, we're actually still *in* the last Ice Age -- "normal" conditions, on a geologic time scale, are a *lot* warmer than we have now.

Reply to
Doug Miller

The hospital I was born in, was right next to a 'Gas Fabriek" They made gas from coal and distributed to people's houses via pipes.... and I'm not that old. I do remember the smell of sulphur. It looked a bit like this:

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Reply to
Robatoy

snipped-for-privacy@milmac.com (Doug Miller) wrote in news:hk4e5j$qkr$ snipped-for-privacy@news.eternal-september.org:

Yes Doug, you are indeed indicating that everything depends on the time scale we are using. Greenland was named Greenland, because it was green when the Vikings discovered it, not white. Also intermittently there have been mini ice ages. So over what time frame do we average things out? And how do we extrapolate?

The retreating of the glaciers and the rising of the sea level at moderate latitudes has been explained by a rebound of the earth's (I am confused, is the apostrophe correct here or not) surface because of the lightening of the load of ice on Greenland and Scandinavia.

Reply to
Han

Robatoy wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@f11g2000yqm.googlegroups.com:

What you show in the picture is the reservoir of the gas, which went up and down as the supply increased or was used up.

This is a pdf of a story about Wageningen that you made me dig up (in Dutch):

Reply to
Han

On Jan 31, 12:37=A0pm, Han wrote: =A0

I am having a hard time getting my head around that theory. The earth's crust it (on a scale model) is thinner than the shell on an egg. All the ice and water at that scale would be invisibly thin. Earth, reduced to that size in scale would feel considerably smoother than an egg, in fact it would be impossible to find either the Mariana Trench or Everest by touch. Just the fact that we have shrunk the planet with communications, this is still Mother Earth.. a pretty big ball of stuff.

Reply to
Robatoy

Nice bafflegab. Now try it in terms of its environmental effect.

Reply to
J. Clarke

I'm not looking for "if we diddle with this or that", I'm looking for worst case--we make the worst plausible choices with fossil fuels, we use them all up, so there are no longer any fossil fuels in existence to put CO2 into the atmosphere, what happens to the environment? It's a simple question and if the climatologists can't or won't answer it then someone needs to hold their feet to the fire until they can.

Spending trillions of dollars "fixing" a problem when we don't know the consequences of not spending it is _crazy_.

Reply to
J. Clarke

Politics only needs to "steer economics" if not doing so results in something horrible happening. I want to know if that is the case, hence my question. Waffling about it doesn't answer the question.

Reply to
J. Clarke

It seems to me that those are pretty important questions -- that it never occurs to the AGWK proponents to ask. The whole notion of AGWK rests on two unproven, and probably incorrect, unconscious assumptions, in addition to the conscious, obvious, and equally unproven ones that the earth is warming, we're causing it, and we can do something about it. The unconscious assumptions are:

1) The current climate is "normal" 2) Any departure from the current climate is undesirable According to my friend the geologist, the current climate is definitely not "normal" when viewed at a geologic time scale. And there's reason to think that moderate warming is probably a good thing (think longer growing seasons).
Reply to
Doug Miller

Albedo be damned, if using concrete results in roads that don't have to be rebuilt every ten years or so then I'm all for it. The Romans built roads through swamps that Moshe Dayan could drive tanks over 2000 years later, but we can't build roads in a desert that you can drive a Jeep over 50 years later (try to follow the original path of Route 66 if you disbelieve).

Reply to
J. Clarke

On Sun, 31 Jan 2010 10:45:11 -0600, the infamous dpb scrawled the following:

Hey, nice definition.

Yeah, we're above the knee, alright. Do read it and let us know what you think.

-- Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will. -- George Bernard Shaw

Reply to
Larry Jaques

My rants? Your response totally ignored the text I was responding to.

Intelligence is an experiment that failed - G. B. Shaw

Reply to
Larry Blanchard

On Sun, 31 Jan 2010 10:10:09 -0600, the infamous Morris Dovey scrawled the following:

Otherwise, we'd be Up Shit Creek Without a Paddle, as it were. We'll have cold fusion before then, I'm sure.

That's highly probable.

As it always has. That's why Thomas Malthus (and his minions such as Paul Ehrlich) got it badly wrong each time.

Perhaps not "being a greenie", but "doing things greener" certainly does. As pollution controls age and die, newer, greener technology is put into its place. Old, dirtier cars die and are replaced by new, cleaner vehicles. Fireplaces are replaced by forced air furnaces which put out much cleaner exhaust. Old coal and fuel oil plants are replaced by cleaner natural gas and nuclear power plants. BubbaJoe now takes his old veeHickle oil/paper/cardboard/cans/glass to the recycling station, etc.

Yes, "green" definitely had gray areas. Peter Huber discussed that in depth in his book _Hard Green_.

And "How the hell do we develop those plans sanely, with all these damned Alarmists screwing things up?"

-- Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will. -- George Bernard Shaw

Reply to
Larry Jaques

On 31 Jan 2010 17:16:27 GMT, the infamous Han scrawled the following:

If the bean counters got their way, that would be the standard everywhere. But they can't get that kind of funding package together

-and- give all the payouts in the rest of the political infrastructure at the same time...and get away with it. If we could keep track of it (IE: keep it out of pols' hands) and get competitive bids for everything, it would actually cost taxpayers a lot less money in the long run. The question is: How do you stop the pols from spending every last cent in the kitty (and then some) every year?

That's a great idea. I really like the gold and ruddy roads in AZ and NV.

-- Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will. -- George Bernard Shaw

Reply to
Larry Jaques

Well, Mr. Clarke has posted many missives to this group since my post above, and none of those have responded to it. I assume that means he has no conflicting evidence and was merely spouting BS. Typical.

Reply to
Larry Blanchard

Robatoy wrote in news:5bc1ece5-6110-41a9-a8e8- snipped-for-privacy@z41g2000yqz.googlegroups.com:

This was a theory when I was in high school (in Wageningen). Late 50's to early 60's.

Reply to
Han

snipped-for-privacy@milmac.com (Doug Miller) wrote in news:hk4h68$5dg$ snipped-for-privacy@news.eternal-september.org:

Again, it's the time scale one uses to define normal. It was interesting to see the Nat Geo show on the cycling of the desert conditions of the Sahara. A 20,000 year cycle between lush greenery and desert, due to a change in the angle of the earth's axis relative to the sun, superimposed on the elliptical nature of the earth orbit. It was supposed to steer the winds so that rain falls in the Sahara or not. Not sure whether I express it correctly - please ask your geologist friend.

Reply to
Han

"J. Clarke" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@news2.newsguy.com:

You ask for absolute certainty, sir? Please help me hold my belly!! (figuratively, please!).

If there were certainty, we would be really wasting our bits here.

Reply to
Han

The ice age started something like either 20 million or 2.5 million years ago (depending on whether you count the start of Antarctic glaciation or of Northern Hemisphere glaciation) and has gone through a roughly 100,000 year cycle in which the Northern Hemisphere glaciers advance and retreat. Right now we appear, according to the ice cores, to be chronologically near a point of maximum retreat. The last time that point was reached, most of the glaciers in the Northern Hemisphere went away, including pretty much the entire Greenland icecap (that's why you can core down only 100,000 years or so in Greenland but more than half a million in Antarctica). Once they went away, the cooling started again and the glaciers started advancing again.

All that being the case, it's not surprising that the Greenland ice cap is melting and it doesn't seem to me to be anything to be alarmed about.

So, the question is not "is anthropogenic carbon dioxide causing the glaciers to melt"--they'd be melting sometime around now anyway, so who gives a damn other than alarmists? The question is "will the next glaciation be any different from the previous one due to anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions", and the possible answers there are "no, it won't", in which case who gives a damn, or "it will be milder than the previous one" in which case "goody-goody", or "it will flip the Earth back to the normal no-glaciers state that existed over most of its history" in which case it's going to be an expensive transition but should be stable for a few tens of millions of years at least, maybe longer. Of course it could be that the next glaciation will be harsher and colder and with much greater glacier advance than the previous one, but that's kind of difficult to reconcile with the notion of "warming".

Reply to
J. Clarke

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