flaja

Would any of these things help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and thus work towards reversing global warming?

1. Adoption of organic farming on a commercial scale by having the government at all levels mandate that a certain percentage of the foodstuffs and fiber purchased for the military, prisons and school lunch programs be produced without using petroleum-based fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, feed additives etcetera.

2. Widespread use of biodiesel fuel in government and commercial vehicles.

3. Eliminating urban sprawl and the corporate power that fosters it in order to reduce the need for and use of personal automobiles: New Urbanism, reduce business hours and maybe implement Blue Laws so large stores like Super Wal-Mart and Home Depot won’t be as profitable as they can be operating 24-7.

4. Adoption of waste disposal technologies that generate biogas/biomethane so the carbon that biomass and organic waste materials would put into the air anyway as they decay could be cycled through energy extraction processes.

5. Nationwide semi-public mass transportation system using trains and buses to provide transportation between and within urban centers that have populations of at least 5,000 people.


If any of these things would work to reverse global warming, why is it I have never encountered any environmentalist on any internet forum that is willing to accept them when they learn that I do not believe that global warming is a bona fide scientific fact?

I have a bachelor’s degree in biology from Emory University, so I know something about the scientific method. I am aware that for any hypothesis to be scientifically valid it must be tested through a controlled experiment. Since we do not have a duplicate of the earth to serve as a control group in an experiment, we cannot test the hypothesis that global warming is caused by manmade greenhouse gases. We don’t have an earth that is without manmade greenhouse gases, so we have no way of knowing what effect manmade greenhouse gases have on the earth we do have.

Furthermore, I am not convinced that the earth is truly getting any warmer as a whole. It is true that the air over urban centers has gotten warmer over the past 20 years or so, but there is some indication that the air over non-urban centers has shown no change in temperature over the past 50 years or so. Any increase in temperature measurements likely is due to the fact over the past 40, and especially the past 20, years, land-based weather monitoring stations have been overtaken by urban sprawl. Since urban surfaces (roads, buildings, parking lots) trap more heat than woodland or farmland or water does, it is only natural that recorded temperatures have gone up. But, since this stored heat has not traveled to non-urban areas, it does not add up to global warming.

I support the 5 options I have outlined here, but I do so to achieve goals other than combating global warming. I support these things in order to promote national security by reducing our dependence on oil imports from hostile countries, save money by harnessing nature to do what we now have petroleum and manmade chemicals do, promote local economic self-reliance and improve societal cohesion by promoting neighborhoods and communities rather than suburbs. But, because I don’t accept the left’s global warming dogma, I get nothing but hostility from left-leaning environmentalists. This tells me that the true goal of left-leaning environmentalists is not the saving of the environment, but rather the destruction of America through the worshipping of nature.

Sebelius for VP, not Hillary

Well, everything uses up petroleum. Pumping the gas to water the crops. The fertilizer (as you mention). The machines to plant the crops and till the soil. The machines to harvest, transport and process the crops. So, my first question would be if biodiesel yields more energy than it produces. I've heard that it depends on the crop, but I think this is an important question and I still have not heard a satisfying answer to it.

How does "corporate power" foster urban sprawl? What are blue laws?

Don't know anything about these concepts.

Well, I used to live in NYC and that is one of the largest mass transportation systems in the world. I've also lived in a mid-sized city a few college towns and a place that can only be characterized as suburban sprawl where you MUST have a car.

I think the answer to this question is difficult, since the very nature of urban sprawl reduces the efficiency of mass transit.

I guess in their eyes, you eliminate your credibility when you say that you have doubts about global warming.

I don't agree with your interpretation of the scientific method. You need not replicate the entire earth in a controlled environment to create scientific laws. We have laws about light speed, don't we? But have we been able to mainpulate light speed? Have we "clocked it" over the span of one light year, or even one light hour?

I believe we have what are accepted as scientific laws on many things which we have not replicated. How about how we know the center of the earth is made of iron. But no one's been to the center of the earth, right? So you think this is just a theory?

You can have controlled experiments that show the effects of greenhouse gases, and you can have other ways to measure what is happening. Through the use of data and statisical programs, I believe you can either arrive at science, or quasi-science which is practically the same as science.

I don't agree. What's all this I hear about polar ice caps melting and breaking apart? No urban centers up there.

Your conclusion seems to be an angry one. It doesn't logically follow from the premises you stated (even when they are accepted at face value).

flaja

I’ve heard that biodiesel has more energy value per volume than petroleum has, i.e., a gallon of biodiesel will take you further in a car than a gallon of petro-diesel will. I don’t know how the crop you use influences the energy value of biodiesel.

Consider Wal-Mart and Home Depot. Seldom do either of these companies get turned down by the government when they want to build a new mega-store because these companies have enough money to fight any and all citizen groups that oppose them. So when one of these stores is built on the edge of town it invariably attracts other stores and things like fast food restaurants and multi-screen movie theaters and then eventually housing developments follow, thus pulling people away from existing urban centers.

Blue Laws are laws meant to prohibit commerce on Sunday. Traditionally these laws were meant to uphold the Christian Sabbath Day, and when these laws were in place about the only places that could be open were drug stores and even they could only sell medicines when they were open. As big as individual Wal-Mart and Home Depot stores are they cannot be profitable if they are not open 7 days a week (and most Wal-Marts are open 24 hours a day). This means that smaller (usually locally or regionally owned stores) have to be open 7 days a week or loose even more of their business to the mega stores. Laws regulating business hours would discourage the Wal-Marts and Home Depots of the world from building such huge stores and this would reduce their market share, thus enabling smaller stores to compete and stay in business.

[quote]These technologies were being investigated in the 1970s and the Walt Disney Company has used water hyacinth to treat wastewater at his Florida theme Parks for over 30 years. These technologies are tried and readily available.

Is it true that you must have a car only when public transportation is inadequate? Could we build a public mass transit system that could eliminate the personal automobile? What if we had a high-speed rail network connecting every U.S. city that has a population of 5,000 people? Suppose we took half of the lanes in the interstate highway system and covered them with rails?

Here in my part of Florida you cannot hold a job without a car because the government-run mass transit system is so bad. Mass transit here is primarily bus-based; we have a small rail system, but after fighting over it for 20 years and now operating it for about 15 years it only serves downtown- which means no one rides it because very few people live downtown and most people work in suburban office parks. As for our buses: taking a bus route from end to end will easily take an hour’s time. And sine we have so few buses you can easily wait up to an hour to make a transfer from one bus to another. And seldom can you go anywhere without making a transfer. An hour and a half is not an uncommon one-way commute time.

However, the failure of public mass transit here is due to the failure of the local politicians to show any leadership or take decisive action rather than the nature of the urban setting.

There is no bona fide experimental evidence to show than human activity is causing global warming because we don’t have a duplicate earth to serve as a control group. Furthermore, climatologists have reason to believe that the earth’s climate has had drastic changed in the past without any substantial amount of human activity.

In other words your version of science deals with speculation. If you hypothesize that man-made greenhouse gases cause global warming you will have to completely eliminate man-made greenhouse gases from the earth in order to test your hypothesis, and even then there may be something else that is contributing to global warming- something that humans have no control over and may not even know about yet.

You are talking about making an observation, not making a hypotheses to explain an observation. You cannot use one observation to explain another and call it science. You can test an explanation for an observation only by conducting an experiment with an experimental and a controlled group.

But do these experiments eliminate everything else that can influence temperature readings?

Data and computer programs cannot be manipulated to give the results you wish to get?

The polar ice caps are not melting. It is true that they have thinned in some places, but they have also expanded in others. The Amazing Disappearing, Reappearing Artic Ice Cap by Robert W. Tracinski -- Capitalism Magazine

“The claims of Arctic thinning are based on thin evidence. Satellite observations from 1978 forward show a decrease in the total area of the Arctic ice cap -- but area alone doesn't mean anything. It's the volume of ice that matters, and to figure that out, scientists need to know how thick the ice is. American submarines have made measurements of ice thickness since 1958, but to be useful these measurements have to be made at exactly the same place, at exactly the same time of year, over a period of many years. At best, there are only 29 locations -- throughout the entire Arctic -- where useful comparisons can be made. These few locations are the whole basis for the claim that the ice caps are melting.

“And that's where Holloway's research comes in. The problem, he says, is that the Arctic ice is constantly moving, pushed along by Arctic winds. But there is natural fluctuation in the pattern and intensity of these winds. Sometimes they push the ice outward from the North Pole, causing it to jam up mostly against Northern Canada. At other times, the ice stays closer to the pole. This, Holloway argues, is the most likely cause for the apparent thinning. The submarine measurements, he says, were taken at just those spots mostly likely to be thinned by changing Arctic wind patterns. But the ice didn't disappear -- it just moved somewhere else. The total Arctic ice loss, Holloway estimates, is closer to 12 percent, of which maybe 3 percent can be attributed to warmer global temperatures. His conclusion: This small reduction is well within the range of natural variability and may have nothing to do with global warming.

“Holloway is not, I should mention, a committed global warming skeptic. Like many conscientious scientists I have talked to, he tries to shy away from political issues. He talks about being ‘sensible’ and ‘responsible’ and recognizing the limits of current scientific knowledge.”

I am angry because science is being used for political purposes.

RealClearPolitics - Articles - Cooler Heads Needed on Warming
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Climate legacy of 'hockey stick'
Policy Declarations
More Than 15,000 Scientists Protest Kyoto Accord; Speak Out Against Global Warming Myth by Douglas Houts -- Capitalism Magazine

Sebelius for VP, not Hillary

But how much diesel must be burned to produce one gallon of biodiesel? Does more energy go into producing the biodiesel than yielded by the biodiesel?

Wouldn't strung out Wal-Marts and Home Depots be merely replaced by strung out smaller stores?

I doubt the ability of even medium sized cities (what you are talking about sounds like villages practically with 5,000 people) to have decent public transportation. That's just from the experience I've had in a city with 300,000 people. The public transportation was completely lousy and unreliable. So, maybe that should be addressed before we talk about linking up all of the United States.

Yeah, I have lived in a two places like that. I did live in a very small college town which had an excellent transportation system though. Really top-notch.

Well obviously, the earth has had climate change before. That doesn't negate that we are changing it now. Two different events can both create a change.

To call it speculation is to advance a double-standard, that discriminates against environmental science only. You need not make all of those global experiments. You simply show that man made gases destroy the ozone layer. Then you would have to show that the ozone depleting substances have the effect of slowing down the production of ozone. This has been done.

You didn't respond to this last time. Why not?


I believe we have what are accepted as scientific laws on many things which we have not replicated. How about how we know the center of the earth is made of iron. But no one's been to the center of the earth, right? So you think this is just a theory?


We have arrived at much science without being able to replicate what is being scientifically described. Are our laws of gravity false? We have not been able to weigh the earth, yet our scientists say how m much the earth weighs and how much its gravitational pull is. The lives of many space shuttle pilots are put at risk due to this science. This data is verified and re-verified with every shuttle launch, but despite it being constantly re-proved, you would still call it a theory. This makes your definition of science very lacking in usefulness to people.

We know the distance from here to other planets, but no one has actually gone out and measured it. So, is that all speculation and not science?

It sounds fairly plausible to construct an experiment to see if greenhouse gases will prevent heat from escaping from a given area. That's a scientific test.

No. When we do tests for things like the trajectory of a bullet being fired from a gun, do the tests eliminate everything else that can influence the trajectory of the gun? When we do tests on the speed of an aircraft, do the tests eliminate everything else that can influence the speed of the aircraft? Yet we do still master the science of weapons and flight. It's no different from environmental science.

Anything can be manipulated, including experiments on genetics, weapons, aeronautics, etc. Environmental science is no different.

The article seems to have some faulty premises. It seems to be saying since we don't know the thickness of the ice that's disappeared, we have to assume that the total amount of missing ice is not great. This seems to be implied, and it doesn't make much sense.

So, let me ask you, where has the missing ice gone? Most of it is all jammed up North of Canada, like this article suggests?

I'd say politics is being used for scientific purposes, just like any other field of science (aeronautics, rocketry, space exploration, nuclear energy, etc).

Ygorl

Anyone interested can read the following. I've lost interest "debating" Al Bores idea of "global warming". Those interested IN such can use this in one way or another:


Analysis: Al Gore Ducks Northeast Blizzard


Al Gore Ducks Northeast Blizzard

Daewoo

This would help by significantly lowering the population of the planet earth due to increased food prices and decreased crop yield. This is one of the major problems likely to come with peak oil...in the US (and most other countries) food production is so dependant on fossil fuels (hydrocarbons from oil for production of agricultural goods such as pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, etc...). You are talking LARGE increases in food prices and quite probably starvation as symptoms of such a conversion. That makes the idea pretty unpopular. For whatever selfish reason, people are not real keen on the idea of starving to death.

This is, IMO, not a bad idea...provided the biodiesel process they use has a positive ROI and all energy inputs are considered. This is where the problem arises with most biodiesel schemes. If you make your biodiesel from crops that are specifically grown for the purpose fo generating biodiesel, the hydrocarbon input often negates any real savings. If, on the other hand, you create a large market for biodiesel from waste producte (used veggie oil, etc...) you end up increasing the cost of these waste products, which makes the biodiesel prohibitively expensive.

Eliminating urban sprawl would go a long ways towards helping the problem (assuming there is one) . I failto see how penalizing wal mart is going to help with anything. Wal mart is open 24 horus because it is more efficient for them. The stores are large enough that they have to run a full shift at night to restock the shelves (ever been to a wally world at 2:00 in the morning and noticed all the pallets of stock all over the place??). It does not cost them much (if anything) to keep somebody near the registers to ring up customers since the store is essentially fully operational anyway.

This is a fine idea....if you can figure out how to get around the scalability problems so it can actually be cost effective.

Another great idea. The problem with building such systems is cost effectiveness. People simply do not use them, making the per rider cost too high to be reasonable.

Have you ever TALKED to an environmentalist on any internet forum? In my experience, they spew off about this crap all the time and you have to get into debates on each one of them to explain that the measures they are suggesting are not good strategies. They also like to advance WILDLY optimistic plans involving solar, wind and tidal energy.

Look into the thermodynamic concept of linear scalability.

This is not possible unless you wish to argue that the earth is radiating heat at a faster rate than it has in the past (which is highly unlikely). Ultimatly, the earth is a closed system. If you introduce heat into a closed system, the entire system warms up unless there is increased cooling. It is axiomatic. It is not that much different from what you see in the engine cooling system of your car. If you take a 4 cyl engine out of a toyota and replace it with a small block chevy, but do not replace the toyota radiator, that chevy will run hot. Why? Because the radiator is only capable of radiating a limited amount of heat, and the small block chevy generates more heat than the radiator can handle.

In the global warming scenario, what advocates claim is not so much that we have swapped engines and are thus generating too much heat, but rather than we have slowed the rate that it cools....stuck a piece of cardboard in front of the radiator.

Are they right? I don't know. There is evidence that points both ways. To claim that temperatures have risen around cities but that it is a strictly localize phenomenon you have to discount most of what we know about thermodynamics and be prepared to argue that the earth is radiating more heat over those cities, which should be readily verifiable from atmospheric temperature measurements.

Troianii

No, none of them. Sorry, I didn't even read them, but I have to tip in that while man does effect global warming, the globe has been changing it's temperature long before man came along and so I don't think that a reversal, if that is really what you meant, is something that we are capable of... at least not yet.

flaja

None. Diesel engines can run on straight vegetable oil with no medification to the oil. Or you can recycle used vegetable oil for use as a diesel fuel. The recycling process is fairly straight forward. First you strain the used oil to remove solid matter. Then you treat it with both lye and methanol (I cannot remember in what order) and the result is glycerin and biodiesel fuel. The glycerin can be used to make soap or cosmetics and (I think) gun powder and explosives.

I cannot say for certain, but I doubt it. If you are delivering only a small amount of product to a retail store the longer you have to go to make the delivery the less economical it would become. Your delivery cost per item would make the item too expensive to sell. Delivering a Wal-Mart’s worth of product to say 10 smaller stores would be economically feasible only if the small stores are located very close to each other.

I live in a city of about 800,000 people in a metropolitan area of over a million and we don’t have decent public transportation. But this is due more to politics rather than economics- our public transportation system is wholly government owned and operated and the local government is owned by land developers, so naturally we focus on a road system meant for privately owned cars.

I am utterly amazed by MARTA in Atlanta. I rode MARTA while attending Emory University. Compared to what I have at home, Atlanta’s public mass transit system is great.

Previous climate change does show that the earth’s climate can change without man’s input, so why should we conclude that man’s input in behind any change that may now be taking place?

To conclude that a hypothesis is true without testing it with a controlled experiment is speculation.

Observation: The earth is getting warmer.

Hypothesis #1: Manmade greenhouse gases are trapping solar energy, thus raising the earth’s temperature.

Hypothesis #2: In the past 40 years urban sprawl has encroached on weather stations used to record temperatures and the resulting buildings, roads and other paved surfaces trap solar energy thus creating an upward trend in temperature measurements.

Which hypothesis (if either) is true? How would you tell without conducting an experiment?

Again you are confusing observation with hypothesizing. And when you are talking about the center of the earth you are talking about indirect observations that may yet prove to be inaccurate.

Again an observation. We know that gravity exists because we can measure it, but we cannot test any explanation for why gravity exists without conducting an experiment.

As far as I know the earth’s weight (or do you mean mass?) is merely an estimate and measuring the earth’s weight/mass would be conducting an observation. The same goes for the earth’s gravitational pull- something we can measure via observation, but not something we can explain without experimentation. Observation can tell us what?, but we cannot know why? without experimentation.

And such a test could very well leave out something that may end up being the real cause of global warming because it does not replicate that something because you either cannot replicate it or you don’t know to replicate it because you don’t know it exists.

Actually you can pretty much replicate things like wind speed, and weather conditions (gravity would take care of itself) to know how a bullet would behave under similar conditions. But the trajectory of a bullet would not be a global phenomenon the way global warming supposedly is.

So you admit that what environmentalists are telling us about global warming may be a bunch of lies?

Why must we assume that so much ice is missing when we can take such a limited number of measurements?

Again you are assuming that a certain amount of ice has gone missing. If you do not know with certainty how much ice there once was, how can you speculate how much ice is now missing? You are basing your conclusion on facts that want to prove are true. This is circular reasoning, not science.

flaja

Agreed. Mankind is not God and we have no power to destroy the earth as the environmental left maintains. However, for the sake of discussion I am willing to agree that mankind does have this power.

flaja

Actually the opposite is likely true and there are some field data to show that organic farms can be just as productive as any other. For example, a farmer can destroy the natural ecosystem by the indiscriminate use of pesticides which kill all types of insects- the ones that eat the crop and the ones that eat the ones that eat the crop. So when a pest population develops an immunity to the pesticide that is used (and no other effective pesticide is available) the insect population will bloom, thus making it next to impossible to raise a worthwhile crop. Reducing the use of pesticides allows predators that prey on insects that eat crops to survive and thus help keep the crop-eaters in check. A while back Indonesia’s rice harvest was falling year after year because pesticide use had disrupted the predator-prey balance. By cutting back on pesticide use and relying on organic methods Indonesia’s rice harvest increased.

See my previous post on how biodiesel is made.

Not really. Recycling would allow us to extract energy from biomass residues that are going to produce carbon dioxide anyway. And if you can use biodiesel fuel to raise a crop that you use to make biodiesel you may still not increase the amount of carbon dioxide you put into the atmosphere because growing the crop would take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere via photosynthesis. You would be recycling the carbon dioxide that already exists. It wouldn’t be the same as burning fossil fuel- which takes carbon dioxide out of “storage” and puts it into atmospheric circulation.

The waste products have to be disposed of anyway and this is expensive. Restaurants have to pay to have someone come haul away their used vegetable oil. It would better to sell this waste material to recyclers who will turn it into biodiesel.

Thus my point. If Wal-Mart couldn’t build such large stores they couldn’t afford to be open 24-7.

This technology couldn’t be too cost ineffective or Disney would not have been using it since the 1970s.

People won’t use public transportation as long it is more convenient for them to own a car (and they have a psychological attachment to their car). But this is my whole point; we subsidize personal cars by building road systems and allowing land development patterns that encourage their use.

Likely not; in the several years that I have been using internet discussion boards I have encountered only 1 person who claims to have a science background. I call myself a conservationist, not an environmentalist. I want to preserve natural resources for future use. An environmentalist wants to preserve natural resources because they want to worship the earth.

The earth is not a closed system in that it receives heat energy from space and can return energy to space. My thinking is that the heat that is absorbed by urban areas does travel to the surrounding rural areas, but it then moves up through the atmosphere to return to space. The heat does not stay over the rural areas long enough raise temperatures in these areas. This implies that either the greenhouse effect does not work the way environmentalists say it does or it is not as strong as environmentalists say it is.