Non-IT News Thread
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@jmoore said in Non-IT News Thread:
Well I am certainly no authority but i disagree that humans are the main cause.
It's obviously hard to say which causes are main or secondary. But human impact is enormous and far different from just heating and cooling. If the issue was only that it was warmer, that's one thing. But it's that animals and plants that traditionally help to regulate temps are now gone shows that human impact has interrupted everything else. Might it have warmed up on its own, sure. Does it from time to time, of course. But that's separate from the fact that "humans have made it even warmer, and totally changed how the planet can respond to change."
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@jmoore said in Non-IT News Thread:
@JaredBusch said in Non-IT News Thread:
High-fidelity record of Earth's climate history puts current changes in context
Scientists have compiled a continuous, high-fidelity record of variations in Earth's climate extending 66 million years into the past. The record reveals four distinctive climate states, which the researchers dubbed Hothouse, Warmhouse, Coolhouse, and Icehouse. These major climate states persisted for millions and sometimes tens of millions of years, and within each one the climate shows rhythmic variations corresponding to changes in Earth's orbit around the sun.
That is very interesting. I have long thought that humans aren't affecting the climate as much as we thought. I am sure we are a little. However, we really can't be sure how much until we have more data from the Sun. The Sun has solar cycles that it goes through. Some are shorter like every 9-10 years I think. There are longer ones though that are still being measured, such as hundreds or thousands of years long. These solar cycles have decreased periods of electromagnetism at their beginnings and increased levels at the end of the cycles. So what this means is that at the beginning more radiation (which is light in the various spectrums and ultimately heat) is getting to us from the Sun and warming the planet up and creating the hothouse effect. This eventually reverses and has the opposite effect where it corresponds to the icehouse effect because less radiation is getting through the magnetic field of the Sun.
Keep in mind that other planets, like Venus, have gone through similar changes and their local factors outweigh the solar factors by orders of magnitude, even while being far close (therefore more affected) to the sun itself.
Is the sun a factor? Sure. A bit one? There's nothing to suggest it has any ability to have any noticeable effect. It's such a dramatic non-factor and demonstrably so. The atmosphere isolates us from those variations almost completely. And on Venus, to the point of them probably being immeasurably small.
It's like saying that waves we see coming from a passing speed boat could also be caused by a distant fish farting. Well, okay, fish farts must cause some ripples, but we also know that they are tiny and far away while we can see the waves originating from the obvious speed boat right there.
Human impact on climate change is obvious and observable and predictable. Sun impact is non-obvious, non-observable, and predicted to not be a significant factor.
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@coliver said in Non-IT News Thread:
@jmoore said in Non-IT News Thread:
@coliver I am sure we are affecting it a little but I don't think its near as much as some think. Not sure I stated my opinion clearly or not before.
You may want to look at the mountains of research that disagree with your opinion, including the linked article. It's a fairly well known and accepted fact at this point that human activities are causing the current climate crisis.
Oh I am aware that my opinion is in the minority. I'm ok with that. I do understand the research, I just don't think we can have that universal opinion without having more data of all things involved. For example, the Earth has gone through the same thing climate-wise several times before humans were here. It goes back and forth between extremely hot and extremely cold constantly through its history. With that context, I just think its presumptuous to say we are mostly the reason for climate change. I might give it 10-20% but the rest of the climate change is the Sun itself in my opinion. I have not seen any research that takes this into account, it is all "the Earth is heating up and the correlation is increase in human population". I just think there are more variables in the situation.
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@jmoore said in Non-IT News Thread:
I have not seen any research that takes this into account,
Are you sure that they don't? I get this with research a lot... people say we are missing some factor, but often don't realize that we over-accounted for that factor to have ruled it out as much as possible.
Unless you have a model that shows why this is a factor, there's nothing to account for.
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@jmoore said in Non-IT News Thread:
Earth has gone through massive warming and cooling several time before humans were around.
Of course it has, as the article clearly states.
The point of "human caused global warming" is how it is changing the natural processes.
This science clearly denotes cycles on the 10's of millions of years. Yet, the current cycle is only 3 million years in and swinging away to a different level.
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@jmoore said in Non-IT News Thread:
@coliver said in Non-IT News Thread:
@jmoore said in Non-IT News Thread:
@coliver I am sure we are affecting it a little but I don't think its near as much as some think. Not sure I stated my opinion clearly or not before.
You may want to look at the mountains of research that disagree with your opinion, including the linked article. It's a fairly well known and accepted fact at this point that human activities are causing the current climate crisis.
Oh I am aware that my opinion is in the minority. I'm ok with that. I do understand the research, I just don't think we can have that universal opinion without having more data of all things involved. For example, the Earth has gone through the same thing climate-wise several times before humans were here. It goes back and forth between extremely hot and extremely cold constantly through its history. With that context, I just think its presumptuous to say we are mostly the reason for climate change. I might give it 10-20% but the rest of the climate change is the Sun itself in my opinion. I have not seen any research that takes this into account, it is all "the Earth is heating up and the correlation is increase in human population". I just think there are more variables in the situation.
Seconds later, here is research that addresses this specifically and points out that the sun influence is absolutely tiny and can't be the factor we are seeing...
https://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/solar_variability.html
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@jmoore It seems that people are definitely taking this into account in the studies.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/SORCE/sorce_04.php
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There are two things here. One is proving that humans cause the change. The other is proving that the sun doesn't cause the change.
While I think human interaction is obviously one, if not the only, factor to current warming, there seems to be a lot of strong research that absolutely rules out the sun as being a possible factor.
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@scottalanmiller said in Non-IT News Thread:
@jmoore said in Non-IT News Thread:
I have not seen any research that takes this into account,
Are you sure that they don't? I get this with research a lot... people say we are missing some factor, but often don't realize that we over-accounted for that factor to have ruled it out as much as possible.
Unless you have a model that shows why this is a factor, there's nothing to account for.
I will have to look around. I don't have a model obviously. This is just my gut feeling that I have. venus and Mars both used to have atmospheres I believe and they were burned away by the Sun. Neither had life that we know of. While Venus is pretty close to the Sun, Mars isn't that close. While I have not read anything that seems to take this into account, I certainly do not have time to read 24 hours a day lol. So sure I could have missed it.
After reading the article you quoted, our average temperature has only slightly gone up over the last century.
From article: "Over the past century, Earth's average temperature has increased by approximately 0.6 degrees Celsius (1.1 degrees Fahrenheit)."
While that is a change, it is very little. -
@jmoore said in Non-IT News Thread:
venus and Mars both used to have atmospheres I believe and they were burned away by the Sun.
Mars had something but no magnetism so yes, blown away. Venus was not burned away, but has so much atmosphere that it shows how easily greenhouse gases can become the only significant factor. Venus is "all atmosphere."
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@jmoore said in Non-IT News Thread:
Neither had life that we know of.
Mars is not believed to have been viable for life, for the very reason that it had no sun protection even when it had an atmosphere.
But Venus there is heavy suspicion of life because it shows what is expected from runaway greenhouse effect.
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@jmoore said in Non-IT News Thread:
From article: "Over the past century, Earth's average temperature has increased by approximately 0.6 degrees Celsius (1.1 degrees Fahrenheit)."
While that is a change, it is very little.That's actually huge. I'm not sure how you get "very little" from that. It's the largest and more unprecendented change since earth's environment stabilized. I think you are looking at climate like weather, and it's nothing like that. In climate, .1F is significant, 1.1F is staggering, 2F is like.... potentially civilization ending.
1.1F is so much it can disrupt life as we know it, and very, very obviously is already doing so.
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@jmoore said in Non-IT News Thread:
While I have not read anything that seems to take this into account, I certainly do not have time to read 24 hours a day lol. So sure I could have missed it.
I think the problem is.... you are assuming that the vast body of research DIDN'T take into account the obvious, and that something non-obvious is a huge factor making all research wrong because you didn't have time to look into it. That's a really bad approach. Imagine in the storage world saying.... "Well, all research says RAID 5 is dangerous, and I don't have time to look into it, so I'll assume all research is wrong because I imagine some factor that has been otherwise ruled out wasn't really considered and that it's significant without checking" and then base decision making on that.
Being skeptical is great, but there's a big gap between skepticism and not believing research based on a specific essentially made up hunch, without any checks that it's common knowledge and already addressed. Nothing wrong with bucking convention, but be wary of discounting all human knowledge and research because you just guess that they missed something that should have been obvious.
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@scottalanmiller said in Non-IT News Thread:
@jmoore It seems that people are definitely taking this into account in the studies.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/SORCE/sorce_04.php
After reading that article, I agree they are taking it into account more than I thought. However it does seem to me that they are also saying the sun's effect is more than minor.
I'm not saying humans have no effect, its just my feeling that it is less than most people think. I could certainly be wrong but I am looking for more information either way. I enjoy reading about it and writing about this topic too. Here are a couple articles I wrote about the Sun's radiation and How the Sun Works. It is basic stuff but was accepted as some alternate course material here for beginning classes. Later I added some conceptual problems with a touch of math in it for exercises.
So like I said I'm definitely no authority but I have read a lot. I will read these again when I get home.
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@jmoore said in Non-IT News Thread:
After reading that article, I agree they are taking it into account more than I thought. However it does seem to me that they are also saying the sun's effect is more than minor.
No, you are attempting to find an excuse where there isn't one. There are extremely clear, it's SO minor. Just look at the graph. The sun has a direct impact on a tiny, regular variation, but is and cannot be in any way related, in fact it is backwards, from the big changes.
You need to produce serious evidence that contradicts all scientific research or accept that all the research and researchers agree wholeheartedly.... the sun is unrelated to current warming, even to the point of being inverse at this point!
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@jmoore said in Non-IT News Thread:
I'm not saying humans have no effect, its just my feeling that it is less than most people think. I could certainly be wrong but I am looking for more information either way.
So two huge factors here....
- This is the same "you feel it is wrong" like you had about the sun. But that was backwards. So while it's a small case, we've just established that your "feel it is wrong" was just wrong about the piece that was your foundation of the next piece, so it's a pretty safe bet that since you built the second piece on the first mistake, that the second one is a mistake two.
- You say you are looking for more evidence, but you are convinced that something crazy and counter-intuitive is true without doing even 30 seconds of research that it took to come up with solid research on it. Like I said, it's fine to be skeptical, but that's not what you are doing. You are taking the position that a hunch based on already determined mistakes it true, and assuming all the evidence to the contrary is wrong, but not doing any research. In fact, you are avoiding the research. Just casually news or conversation brings up more than necessary to be "more than enough" to rule out your theories.
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@jmoore said in Non-IT News Thread:
I enjoy reading about it and writing about this topic too. Here are a couple articles I wrote about the Sun's radiation and How the Sun Works. It is basic stuff but was accepted as some alternate course material here for beginning classes. Later I added some conceptual problems with a touch of math in it for exercises.
But wait, didn't we just determine that you'd not looked into this at all yet and hadn't done even cursory research on the subject? Something is off here. You are writing articles and saying it's like a hobby of yours, but you aren't aware of the body of evidence and research that lay people know through casual interactions and is expected as common knowledge.
It's expected that every normal adult knows that humans are the primary cause of climate change and that the sun has little real impact on this, and that there is a body of evidence that is readily available and peer reviewed. That's the common knowledge. Can that be disputed? Of course. But can it be disputed before being known? No. To reasonably dispute the "body of human knowledge", you have to first be aware of the corpus of knowledge and then have knowledge above and beyond that to dispute it. You can't dispute it without being aware of what it even is.
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@jmoore said in Non-IT News Thread:
How the Sun Works
The sun isn't actually our only source of heat. It's by far the largest source, but rogue planets generate their own heat all on their own, as well, as well as getting heat from gravitational interactions with other bodies, radiation from other planets, universal background radiation and so forth. The planet does freeze without the sun, but it doesn't approach 0K without it, just very, very cold.
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@jmoore said in Non-IT News Thread:
Sun's radiation
I know waves are hard to define, but I'd be careful using a definition that requires a medium. Light waves do not use a medium for travel, photons pass through the lack of medium. The requirement for light to have a medium is æther theory, the ancient Greek belief that there was no empty space, but rather an undetectable medium called æther through which things traveled. This is considered non-scientific and just a religious belief of the ancient Greeks, nothing to be taken seriously.
Light is actually photon based, not wave based. Waves describe a behavious of photos, but it's not truly a wave. Light can be detected on a unit basis, photon by photon. It is digital, whereas a wave is continuous or analogue. What makes physics interesting is the wave-like behaviour that photons generally posses, but it's a behaviour without a medium.
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@jmoore think of it this way....
Flat earthers don't have any reason to believe that the earth is flat, as there is literally no indicators of this, none (because it isn't.) Yet they doubt the evidence that the earth is round - obviously because they've not looked into it since the slightest checking tells you that it is, in fact, round. It's trivial to observe this even with the human eye, at sea level (by the water.)
It's fine to challenge the concept that the earth is round, we need people to question assumptions. But to do so effectively, one would have to look at the evidence presented of it being round (like that we can fly around it, we can see it from space, we can see ships go over the horizon, and you can see the curve from a tall building, and so forth) and then determine how that evidence could be wrong.
That's where we are here. You think that there is going to be evidence that the sun affects the earth's climate (rather than its weather) but do so without evidence (because it doesn't, so there isn't really any.) And you then believe that all of the evidence that we have that humans are changes the climate are wrong. But you aren't looking into that evidence and then disputing it, you are just saying you think it must be wrong without any basis for that.
It's almost exactly the flat earth problem. There's no evidence to support your theory, and mountains of evidence that the obvious, common sense factors are, in reality, the actual factors. Without producing evidence to the one effect (because none exists) and by simply not looking at all the existing evidence (which is overwhelming) you are then presenting a belief that the things you've not researched, even to the expected "all members of society are supposed to know this to a certain level", are wrong. That's a pretty dramatic stance to take, given the total lack of supporting evidence, observation, or common sense.
