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Phantron
- 27, Male
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- Earthling, do you promise to follow the Zork Pledge to be green like Zork?
- Indeed
- Why have you joined the Zork Revolution?
- Because someone has to do something...
- How did you hear about Zork Planet?
- Through an Intermediary
- Please tell us about yourself and your life on this planet.
- Trying to enjoy life but not sure how. Upset about lazy, polluting rich countries that cry emo tears when someone tells them the facts of life...
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You should add it to your blog, look up there in the right corner "quick add" to put it in.
I think we should stop eating refined food too, the more I watch "How It's Made" the more I can see that we use ENORMOUS amounts of energy to make stuff like candy, soda and other junk food that just ruins our health, it's totally illogical.
First, I would consider slapping a dunce cap on his head. When I had calmed enough to emulate a logical argument to refute his erroneous assumption, I would say…
The first order of business is to decide if the climate is experiencing an abnormal warming trend. First, I would like to answer that question by asking scientists who are very intelligent, have spent half their life working on this problem, and are subjected to stricter peer review than anything you have experienced, “friend”. In fact, if you refute another scientist and prove his/her work incorrect, you can humiliate them in a way that endeavors a god-like feeling of power in yourself (the epitome of scientific discovery). A reputation matters most to scientists, and this is established by putting forth quality work. Long story short, you should accept the theories put forth by decades of research.
Now here is what the scientists say, “Yes, the Earth is warming significantly and abnormally, especially over the last 50 years.” They say this because of several pieces of evidence. One is the surface thermometer record, which has been kept for about 150 years. Everyone knows how a thermometer works, and when you average out all the data from all the thermometers you can find, it shows a warming of almost 2 degrees over the 150 years, with the graph that looks kind of like a flattened y=x^2 graph. This means that as time goes on, the temperature increases more and more quickly. Then they looked at glacier measurements and found the same pattern; glaciers are decreasing (an indirect sign of global warming since they can only exist in below 32 degrees) and decreasing faster as time goes on. Then they looked at sea level, which gets higher as the earth warms due to runoff of melting glacier water and expansion of water (it actually expands slightly when warmed, look it up) and found it has risen by 15 cm. over the past century. Then they looked at sea ice in the Arctic, and same story again. Sea ice is decreasing by 2.85 per decade and the melting season has expanded from 57 to 81 days, and the average thickness of sea ice has decreased from 3 meter to 2 meters. Then take a look at the water under the surface of the ocean, it shows a slight warming, comparable to the warming of the air temp. it has risen by about a third of a degree, which might not sound like much, but you will note it takes forever to boil a big pot of water on a stove, even when the burner is red hot on “high” . Then they looked at indirect measurements of climate warming such as difference in tree rings, corals in the sea, ice cores, etc. I’ll spare you the detail, but they show the same trend as the other measurements, and in addition show a repeating cycle; every 100,000 years is a long period of declining temperatures into an ‘ice age”, where large parts of the earth are covered in ice and snow, followed by an abrupt warming period. Point of interest- we are not in an upward spike in temperature according to this model, in fact we are just over the peak of the warm cycle and temperatures should slowly decrease over the next 100,000 years. We are experiencing a trend opposite to what we should be! And finally the advent of satellites and satellite temperature measurements provide a final piece of evidence for warming. Although there have been problems with consistency issues, the overall trend in temperature measurements for the last 25 years from these satellites is the same squashed y=x^2 graph. Now the chance that ALL of these measurements by these scientists over many decades is wrong is pretty much zero; this would be equivalent of every single educated person in the world proofreading this paper repeatedly over time and a spelling error still being in it.
“Okay, Okay. You don’t have to talk my ear off, “ my friend complains. But he says, with an air of superiority normally reserved for Rush Limbaugh, you still don’t convince me that this is natural. What if we are just warming to a new high naturally? What then? By now I am wondering just where I met this kid, but I plough on determined nevertheless…
So let’s start by ruling out natural causes of global warming. Now, we know that at one point in Earth’s time it was so warm there was no ice and snow on it at all, back when the dinosaurs existed, and yet 20,000 years ago ice sheets extended down past the great lakes. There are natural events that cause these changes. One thing to notice is orbital variation, the earth orbits around the sun not in a perfect circle (none of the planets do), but in an ellipse; and this ellipse can be slightly more elliptical or slightly closer to a circle. You can go through the math if you like, but it has been shown that this affects slightly the total amount of sunlight the earth receives from the sun due to Kepler’s third law, etc. over a period of about 100,000 years. Also, the time of years when the earth is closer to the sun varies; presently it is closest to the sun on January 3rd, northern hemisphere winter- but in 10,000 years it will be closest to the sun in early July, northern hemisphere summer. Lastly, the tilt of the Earth’s axis relative to the sun is currently about 23.5 degrees, but it varies from about 22-25 degrees over 40,000 years. Note the time period of these changes- they are not possible to affect the earth significantly over just 100 years. Also, if you combine these records you will find that the beginning of the ice ages from the ice cores mentioned above coincide to a time when the Earth has low axial tilt, is closer to the sun during the northern hemisphere winter, and more of an ellipse to the orbit. Meaning these orbital changes must CAUSE the ice ages- and in fact they do by facilitating cooler northern hemisphere summers which make the ice over the land linger longer, which reflects the sunlight better than any other surface, which cools the Earth, which facilitates even cooler temperatures, which means more ice, and so on. This is an example of a positive feedback loop, which turns out to be very important. And how do the ice ages escape from this cooling trend? By a sudden increase in CO2!!!!! due to lack of weathering of exposed rock (ice everywhere) which naturally removes CO2 at a very slow rate…so the CO2 builds up to high levels and the temperature gets higher due to its warming effect, ice melts, the cycle reverses but much quicker…again, it is important to note that conditions like those could facilitate rapid warming like we are experiencing now, but not right now. The ice sheets melted thousands of years ago, the warming cycle should be over by now; and it was-before the rapid increase in warming over the past few centuries the earth was slightly cooling just as the ice cores predicted…
But I digress. There is also continental drift on earth, where the continents move about the planet (South America and Africa were once connected), which can change the rate of weathering, amount of ice on Earth and so on. But same story, the changes are much too slow to happen over a few centuries. Volcanoes can also change the atmosphere, and sometimes dramatically due to the soot and gases they expel ( Here is a hint. How does the CO2 that has been weathered out of the atmosphere into limestone rocks ever get back to the atmosphere? The answer is Volcanoes- they liquefy the rock and expel the CO2 into the air, along with everything else). But it would take many volcanoes, much more than have been recorded, to produce the amount of warming we have experienced; and we would experience a short-term freeze of the Earth due to the other chemicals and ash blocking the sun’s incoming rays. Just a few major eruptions prior to 1816 put so much dust in the atmosphere it snowed in the northeast in JUNE. Then the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth varies because of the reasons listed above and the sun itself varies slightly in output, but the variation has not matched the observed temperature variations, especially the highest variations over the last 50 years. Lastly, the Earth is very complex and some have suggested the arming is some result of an internal process. But the evidence above for the ice ages, and the fact that the temperature variation on this scale has not happened for at least several thousand years, and the advent of high-powered computers that run simulations of natural climate variability- all these provide evidence that the warming is NOT natural. It stands to reason that if this was natural, it should have happened before when conditions were similar to that of 150 years ago…
“Oh my,…” my “friend” says…”But what DOES cause global warming exactly…”
The answer is human activity. We know that many human activities produce CO2, such as running factories, driving cars, etc. This goes back to the glacier-cycle described earlier, build up of CO2 during the ice age abruptly halted the ice age. There is pretty clear scientific evidence that CO2 warms the Earth by trapping the outgoing sun’s rays reflected back into space and reradiating them to the surface again, and the record of the past supports that. They have dug up ice cores from thousands of years ago during the peak of the last major ice ages that have trapped air inside them in air bubbles. They can chemically analyze this air, and they find average CO2 in the air drops to about 180 ppm during a glacier cycle (when the overall average air temperature is almost 10 degrees cooler) and rapidly rises to 280 ppm during an interglacial cycle. Currently, CO2 in the atmosphere is over 380 ppm, causing the warmth we are experiencing. And as more and more countries industrialize, more and more CO2 will be produced- it is a by-product of heating, transportation, and so on…So the CO2 level will go up and up, with larger and larger consequences resulting. And it is pretty much impossible to estimate exactly what will happen to the earth, exactly how much warming will result, or if a sudden unexpected change will occur. Meanwhile, the weathering to take the CO2 out of the atmosphere will take many thousands of years…
Now my friend is looking on in unabashed horror. He says, “Well why in the $%##* are people JUST SITTING AROUND ignoring the problem??!” “Because”, I respond, “We rely on fossil fuels for everything; change will be hard, not easy like the ozone problem. But we did work together and the ozone hole is decreasing, so maybe…?”
I like your name, newbie Zorkster. What does it mean?
Thank you for joining Zork Planet. It is your planet now too. Make yourself comfortable and be green like me.
Your beautiful planet is in major peril because of Didiot humans who continue to destroy it. One thing I have learned traveling the galaxy for thousands of years is that one person can make a difference in the future outcome of the planet.
The Zork Revolution, like any other revolution, is always started by a few individuals and groups who have a passion and desire to change things.
Every human can do simple things that could make a huge difference overnight in making this planet greener. Imagine if one million humans overnight made the Zork Pledge as part of their daily living. Imagine if there were 10 million humans. Imagine if it was 100 million. The consumption of energy would be substantially reduced overnight. That is the simple power of the Zork Revolution.
Meeree Eeree (ciao),
Zork