Arcata Forest signs on to new carbon program

[not your fathers DMV]

Middle-o-the-strea m wrote:

<quoted text>
The Earth will adjust itself. It always has. Temp goes up and down. Weather will change.

Yes it has and will, the problem lies in the fact that instead of changing over a period of hundreds of thousands or millions of years like it has, it has done it in decades, which is too fast for a lot of life on Earth to adapt. Plus, the article in question stated that the PGE program was voluntary, and fund was from PGE customers who "donated" to it's Climate Smart" program.

[reader]

This is nothing but pure baloney.

Anyone who believes one, the planet is warming and two, the warming is caused by the effects of humans should be laughed off the planet.

[reader]

not your fathers DMV wrote:

<quoted text>
Yes it has and will, the problem lies in the fact that instead of changing over a period of hundreds of thousands or millions of years like it has, it has done it in decades, which is too fast for a lot of life on Earth to adapt. Plus, the article in question stated that the PGE program was voluntary, and fund was from PGE customers who "donated" to it's Climate Smart" program.

Do yourself a favor and go research where the average temperatures on the planet have been for about the past 10 years.

[Jake]

hot under the collar wrote:

<quoted text>
That's for sure, all one has to do is some research, just look at the planet Venus, it's atmosphere is nearly all CO2 and it has the hottest surface temp of all the planets, even though Mercury is twice as close to the Sun as Venus it still come in second place.

that's funny, your boyfriend said Uranus was pretty hot!! Look how far that is away from the sun!!

[hot under the collar]

reader wrote:

<quoted text>
Do yourself a favor and go research where the average temperatures on the planet have been for about the past 10 years.

Do yourself a favor and look at the average temperatures on the planet over the past 120 years. There have been peaks and valley in temperature fluctuations,with a large downward spike between 1940 to 1950, but that's been totally erased. The average over the 120 year period is one of an upward trend.

[hot under the collar]

Jake wrote:

<quoted text>
that's funny, your boyfriend said Uranus was pretty hot!! Look how far that is away from the sun!!

Jake, you fail at forum etiquette, please use the door marked "Exit".

[Dhrama]

Former Sec. Treasurer Paulson (under W.Bush)and Al Gore are business partners selling "Carbon Credits".Fortune 500 companies buy these invented non-tangible credits and trade/sell them off to unsuspecting- or in Arcatas' case complicit-partners.

And yes the big corporations get a tax break- Haven't you been paying attention to who is stealing your country?

[My 2 Cents]

Middle-o-the-strea m wrote:

<quoted text>
M2C, you are a trole, or a real stupid **** e r. The Earth will adjust itself. It always has. Temp goes up and down. Weather will change. Get over it, and dont try to tax me to fix something that is not even broken. Dont you remember in the 50s and 60s, all the teepee burners? The fog and rain in then was much heavier then because of the particulate matter. Just like in London when they burned coal. The Earth reacted on a local leavel. Sunspots are a major cause of heating trends and there is nothing we can do about that.
You people have been sucking al gores wienny because he said it is a crack pipe.

First, just to make a minor refutation, I have a PhD. in ecology and have been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals and done research on related areas of climate change. So no, I'm not a 'trole' or a real stupid '***er' though your own credentials would look a bit better if you could actually, you know, spell.

Second, you've been listening too much to Rush or the Fox news entertainers who have no science training whatsoever. You've jumped into the mob that doesn't want to deal with the issue because it might mean you have to do a few things differently. Ostriches come to mind except they're a bit brighter on the whole than that particular mob.

Third, I never bothered to watch Gore's movie because I've read a lot of the original science and didn't need it interpreted for me by others.

Get an education and try to really understand the issue rather than buying into convenient sound bites that fit with what you already want to do. There was absolutely nothing incorrect in my previous post although you could argue with my analogy; I was trying to keep it simple for the masses like you.

[My 2 Cents]

Elmer Fudd wrote:

<quoted text>So why do the CO2 concentrations and past temps poorly correlate?........ radiance alone.

You raise some good points but seem to ignore a lot of others. I agree that global circulation models have weaknesses - a necessary effect of an incredibly complicated process. And I agree that there is a lot of inherent variation in year to year temperatures that can make long term trends difficult to parse out in the short term. I've always been leery of the oversimplification of both the processes involved and the downplaying of uncertainty in the popular media but most of the population has a double digit IQ so I understand the reasons. I don't agree with it, but I understand it.

There is however a lot of supporting evidence for increasing atmospheric energy retention. Receding glaciers and decreasing polar ice. Melting tundra and increased methane hydrate releases from polar oceans. Changes in plant phenology and long term trending data in both wood cores and glacier ice cores that correlate well with CO2 and temperature. And yes, CH4 is a more potent GHG than CO2 but both are important in overall processes. While CO2 might only be 380ppm at the moment, that's a 30% increase since the 1850's and a significant difference.

The biggest difficulty I see with the entire climate change argument at the moment is that there's enough variability that you are going to see what you want to see most. I would love to wait another 100 years to see what the data continues to show but the truth is that if you position is wrong, we'll have so dramatically altered the climate that your grandkids are going to have some serious problems to deal with. It's not like we can replicate the experiment on another planet to see which hypothesis is the better one.

I do see a lot of people refuting global climate simply because they don't want to start paying a relatively modest price to try and reduce the possible effect. The reality is there is no reasonable negative consequence of trying to reduce our global carbon footprint. The economy issue is a straw man argument that doesn't make sense. All of the new technology and actions designed to deal with the issue will just as likely create new jobs and stimulate growth as they are to decrease some current technologies.

It's easy to be a skeptic when you all you really want to do is continue the current model of externalizing the output of carbon because it's convenient and you won't live to deal with most of the consequences (nor will I for that matter). It's incredibly hard to get invested in change that you won't see the results of.

[Elmer Fudd]

hot under the collar wrote:

<quoted text>
Do yourself a favor and look at the average temperatures on the planet over the past 120 years. There have been peaks and valley in temperature fluctuations,with a large downward spike between 1940 to 1950, but that's been totally erased. The average over the 120 year period is one of an upward trend.

Probably only because that is about the agreed upon end of the Little Ice Age and a temperature rebound is the normal reaction. Pretty good correlations to sunspot frequency and periods such as the LIA and MWP where CO2(man-made or otherwise) had almost no effect on temperature.

[My 2 Cents]

Just a one of several reviews of the relationship of sunspots and climate, this one is from July of this year in Scientific American.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm...

[Robert]

Chank wrote:

Sounds absolutely useful! Don't burnt trees store even more carbon though?

Uh, carbon dioxide is a product of tree combustion. And they are now dead (i.e., no more growth, no more carbon sequestration).

Boy, there sure are some Kool Aid drinking, climate-change morons posting on this forum.