Heavier Rainfall Will Increase Water Pollution In the Future (nationalgeographic.com) 233
An anonymous reader shares a report from National Geographic: If climate change continues to progress, increased precipitation could mean detrimental outcomes for water quality in the United States, a major new study warns. An intensifying water cycle can substantially overload waterways with excess nitrogen runoff -- which could near 20 percent by 2100 -- and increase the likelihood of events that severely impair water quality, according to a new study published by Science. When rainfall washes nitrogen and phosphorus from human activities like agriculture and fossil fuel combustion into rivers and lakes, those waterways are overloaded with nutrients, and a phenomenon called "eutrophication" occurs. This can be dangerous for both people and animals. Toxic algal blooms can develop, as well as harmful low-oxygen dead zones known as hypoxia, which can cause negative impacts on human health, aquatic ecosystems, and the economy. In the new study, researchers predict how climate change might increase eutrophication and threats to water resources by using projections from 21 different climate models, each of which was run for three climate scenarios and two different time periods (near future, 2031-2060, and far-future, 2071-2100).
Surely they mean nitrates and phosphates? (Score:2)
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The word "nitrate" is apparently too complicated for the people who read nationalgeographic.com.
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I suspect it's more the writer and the proofreader. National Geographic isn't exactly Scientific American.
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Magazines mandate that writers write to a certain audience grade level.
Re:Surely they mean nitrates and phosphates? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's called synecdoche. Calling businessmen "suits" and supporters "partisans [wikipedia.org]" is referring to a whole by using a part. By the same token we refer to carbon dioxide as "carbon" and NO3- as "nitrogen".
In context is is perfectly clear to someone who actually understands what the whole is. To those who do not understand what the whole is calling the whole by its proper name is unlikely to be enlightening.
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By the same token we refer to carbon dioxide as "carbon" and NO3- as "nitrogen".
We do? Then what do you call carbon monoxide and NO2-?
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Carbon monoxide is rare and called "carbon monoxide" for that reason.
NO2 is called "smog."
Any other ESL questions I can help you with?
Re:Surely they mean nitrates and phosphates? (Score:4, Interesting)
Carbon monoxide is rare
Not in regions of poor combustion.
NO2 is called "smog."
Clean your glasses. I wrote NO2-, which is definitely not smog.
Any other ESL questions I can help you with?
Any other chemistry (and reading comprehension) questions I can help you with?
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Not in regions of poor combustion.
I have worked in steel mills. CO is definitely NOT rare.
LK
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And have you heard anyone calling CO or CO2 "carbon" when in the context of steel mills ?
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In the context of a steel mill, "Carbon" usually means either the element as it is contained in liquid iron/finished steel or the graphite that you get when you blow out with the liquid oxygen.
For those in on the environmental monitoring side of things; CO2 is sometimes called "Carbon", informally.
LK
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Come on, they didn't manage to hold the context in their little brains even long enough to directly respond, how can you expect them to keep the context in mind while explaining their counter-point?
If they can't comprehend that a rare thing can be locally common, what can you really expect from them? It is like expecting to be able to send your dog to college, it is just not a realistic expectation to place on them.
They didn't even manage to look up NO2 within the context.
Maybe working in a steel mill doesn
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Consider the word "Jack"; it can refer to a playing card, it can be a person's name, it can be an electrical socket, it can be a lifting machine, it can be a flag, or it can be a variety of cheese. On the face of it this should make the word confusing. But it's not.
Words are not like variables in a programming language. Just as human grammar is context-sensitive, so are the meanings of words. So people in-the-know understand that a "carbon tax" isn't levied on, say, a diamond.
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"I can't comprehend your words because I'm too much of an expert and you used plain English, which I'm allergic too because I'm so educated."
These people are always running around this place, with their neckbeards all braided into turtlenecks. I always wonder, "Doesn't that itch?"
It doesn't occur to them that if they can't understand the version that uses 10th grade English, they were probably only pretending to understand the college-level English that they're demanding.
Re:Surely they mean nitrates and phosphates? (Score:4, Insightful)
Bullshit. Look up the etymology of "partisan". Also this is supposedly science. If someone uses names of elements for chemical compounds in a scientific context, I must assume they don't know what they're talking about.
Herein lies the rub... This context is not scientific but political: "Carbon tax" is not science but politics, and the "Carbon" in question is carbon dioxide, not coal or diamonds. "Nitrogen" is similarly used instead of "nitrates" in this speculation about pollution and changes in water quality.
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Bullshit. Look up the etymology of "partisan". Also this is supposedly science. If someone uses names of elements for chemical compounds in a scientific context, I must assume they don't know what they're talking about.
Spoken like someone who doesn't know any actual professional scientists. You assume scientists talk like your middle school science teacher. They don't.
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We call them "Carbon Monoxide" and "Nitrogen Dioxide". If we are in a context where the only carbon compound we could possibly be interested in is "Carbon Monoxide", then among people who share that context and work closely together it is highly likely those will be abbreviated to "Carbon" and "Nitrogen", and in context it will be perfectly clear although obscure to outsiders.
This is a natural process called "polysemy" and it is part of how non-mutually understandable human languages eventually arise. Na
Re:Surely they mean nitrates and phosphates? (Score:4, Informative)
"Carbon" and "Nitrogen". If it is unclear in context, "atomic carbon" and "atomic nitrogen", or (if appropriate) "molecular nitrogen".
If this seems like a PITA, think of language as something like a compression algorithm. You want to represent the commonest cases in the fewest bits. This might make uncommon cases require more bits to represent. In other words people balance the convenience of omitting "dioxide" frequently with inconvenience of adding "atomic" occasionally.
This is how people *actually use language. Attempts to make their semantics less context-dependent have consistently failed in the face of convenience.
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Or, perhaps those who wish others to take a particular course of action should work harder to make sure that they communicate clearly
Depends on what you mean by "clearly", but most likely no. Those who wish others to take a particular course of action should work harder to make sure that they communicate in ways that are proven to make others to take a particular course of action. "Clear" communication need not be always the way forward - see why [ted.com] .
The simplicity of the word "carbon", as compared with that of "carbon-di-oxide" clearly makes it a winner. Especially when people who are involved (voters, shareholders etc.) have no clue what
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In other words, deploy propaganda.
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OK. I see it as axiomatic : if you want to post to Slashdot, follow the steps to post to Slashdot. If you want to eat food, follow the steps proven to cause food to be eaten by you. Same for making people to do what you want.
Interesting word choice, by the way. Propaganda became a bad word only in the last 70-80 years or so in very violent global conditions, before which the UK even had a Propaganda Minister. If conditions could kill millions of people, distorting a few words is not the worst deed they did,
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Somehow I doubt that will convince anyone. But if it did, that person wouldn't be the sharpest tool in the box.
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Nitrogen is the name used in describing the macro-nutrients in fertilizer. While you generally see something like ammonium nitrate used as the source of available nitrogen you also have stuff like urea which, while I'm not a chemist, I do not believe is actually a nitrate.
The end result, however, is that nitrogen is available to the plant which is the ultimate goal. Hence referring to anything in the N of NPK as nitrogen.
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Whilst they have focused on the nitrates it tends not to be the biggest problem. Increased rainfall also changes movement of moisture through the soil, taking away many soluble elements, increasing porosity of soil, so then larger particles are taken away and then major soil movements, both sink holes and landslips. Also means much more organic material to rot in rivers, sucking up oxygen and releasing methane, a far worse greenhouse gas. There is a real need to slow down the movement of moisture through wa
It's it (Score:2)
Yeah, but didn't we ban phosphates already? (Score:4, Interesting)
Phosphates have already been banned in dishwasher detergents since 2010 (that's why your glasses have been getting so cloudy and scale is building up), and phosphates aren't in hand soap and shampoo. And high phosphate fertilizer is already being banned in the US. So there isn't additional phosphates going into the water system beyond today's rates.
So basically, global warming is no longer causing droughts, but now 20% more rain. Again, it all points to conditions for increased vegetative growth, which means higher food stocks and more CO2 processing. Sounds great to me!
Re:Yeah, but didn't we ban phosphates already? (Score:5, Insightful)
So basically, global warming is no longer causing droughts, but now 20% more rain.
Earth has more than one place. More than one concurrent weather event. Furthermore, weather and climate are different. And drought and increased rainfall can happen together; less frequent rain, with heavier storms when it does rain. You'll still measure increased plant growth, but it won't be the food plants, it will be the pioneer (weed) plants.
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How is this insightful? Haven't we developed a set of technologies collectively called "Agriculture" that allow use to cope with and make use of variable weather to grow useful crops? What is changing so drastically that makes it impossible to adapt and improve our technologies to accommodate?
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No, Mr. Potter, that isn't the way farming works. You ask me some questions, there are answers that are very relevant and easy for you to look up. If you're really that ignorant, me explaining things like the "dustbowl" isn't going to make it through your thick skull, so I'll just self-righteously tell you to look it the fuck up.
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Well that depends on your definition of "Agriculture". Are we talking growing plants or are we getting into GMO? Additionally, it's not a nothing condition. I think parent of your comment might be stretching a bit, but there will be a decrease, and each 1% decrease in yield or 1% increase in cost to grow, goes directly into the cost you pay at the store.
Good example. Wheat in the US. The kernels inside of the wheat, where we get flour, need a pretty stable environment. Upset the environment too much a
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In my opinion, agriculture covers everything from canals and reservoirs to GMO and beyond. But fundamentally my question was that if we have more turnover in the water cycle and more CO2 in the atmosphere, why would we not be able to take advantage of those increased resources? Thank you for the thoughtful response. I see that some costs will go up predictably and raising the quality of life for the developing global economies to current western standards doesn't appear sustainable, but what can't be acc
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The problem is that weather is chaotic. As you add energy to the climate, hot places will tend to become hotter, the rainy places will tend to become rainier, but you will also get more freak events that do not correspond to the normal rules because adding more energy to the system makes new types of events possible. Droughts become longer... but may be punctuated by flash floods.
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it all points to conditions for increased vegetative growth, which means higher food stocks and more CO2 processing. Sounds great to me!
Yeah, and the million other tiny ancillary effects that cumulatively add up to devastation to our habitat and ecosystems.
I'll Buy This One (Score:2)
In related news ... (Score:2)
Drought or increased rainfall: are you baffled? (Score:5, Informative)
For those who are merely confused and ignorant, yet not fully deprived of intellectual honesty or interest in learning, here are two excerpts from Wikipedia that may help:
“Assuming high growth in GHG emissions (IPCC scenario RCP8.5), presently dry regions may be affected by an increase in the risk of drought and reductions in soil moisture. Over most of the mid-latitude land masses and wet tropical regions, extreme precipitation events will very likely become more intense and frequent.” (in “Effects of global warming [wikipedia.org]”).
“The warmer atmospheric temperatures observed over the past decades are expected to lead to a more vigorous hydrological cycle, including more extreme rainfall events. Erosion and soil degradation is more likely to occur.” (in “Climate change and agriculture [wikipedia.org]”).
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So more heat in the air means more clouds? The same clouds that cool the earth? It's almost as if the atmosphere has a natural mechanism to maintain a fairly even the temperature on the surface.
Oh, and "extreme precipitation events"? You mean these things we call "storms"? That's nothing new.
Sometimes it's wet, sometimes it's dry. Climate changes, no doubt about that. Not much we can do about it either.
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So more heat in the air means more clouds? The same clouds that cool the earth?
Water vapor is a greenhouse gas. This is not news. HTH, HAND!
By the year 2100? (Score:5, Interesting)
That's 80+ years from now, in other words we have time.
I hear that the sea levels are rising.... at about a foot per century. We can adjust to that without getting all in a panic.
I've been told that the corn belt is moving north. Unless this happens in the span of a single growing season then I find it hard to get worked up about this. Farmers already rotate crops for reasons of keeping soil in good shape. If over a few decades the rotation of crops needs adjusting then they'll figure it out.
Rain this, droughts that, hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, blah, blah blah. We got this figured out.
We've all been hearing this panic for decades now. All we are doing is getting the next generation stressed out over nothing. They are getting bombarded with climate change disasters in movies, cartoons, in the news, and on and on. Kids can't get away from this but when they grow up and have to deal with this on their own they will realize like I did that this is a big nothing.
A quick read of the comments on this article so far tells me that I'm not alone in how I feel on this. The climate change alarmists have been pushing the panic button so often for so long, with nothing to really show for it, that no one pays attention any more.
Here's the problem now. If this climate change that is coming is in fact a real problem then we're all screwed anyway because no one listens any more. Because the climate change alarmists would not police themselves and point out bad science when it came up no one can tell what is true any more.
Again, 80 years, we have time.
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Quick quiz, one inch in ocean level rise results in what increase in storm surge distances onshore?
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The corn belt is moving north. When it runs so far north it's no longer near any farmers or arable land or infrastructure, it ceases to exist. It also doesn't understand national borders, and will gracefully move past them like they don't exist.
Sea levels rising aren't scary because things will be gradually submerged, they're scary because they multiply storm surges, which can swamp even the most intense flood protection systems.
It's fine you don't want to pay attention to the science - just don't pretend
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I hear that the sea levels are rising.... at about a foot per century. We can adjust to that without getting all in a panic.
How are you going to protect Florida, where the ground is made from porous limestone, and the sea will penetrate underneath levees ?
Re:By the year 2100? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's 80+ years from now, in other words we have time.
Really? And how, do you plan to deal with the accumulated buildup of 200 years in the span of 80 when a good portion of the populace don't even understand the basic science and refuse to accept reality? Climate change is bringing about a whole host of issues, a number of which need to be dealt with far in advance. We're already 40 years behind the curve.
Furthermore, the climate system lags inputs by a good 30 years. In other words, if you think you have a problem now, it will be worse 30 years later.
I hear that the sea levels are rising.... at about a foot per century. We can adjust to that without getting all in a panic.
You "hear" incorrectly. Assuming no runaway feedbacks kick off, the expected increase by the end of the century is between 1 and 2 meters. As far as dealing with it, we're already FAILING. Places like Miami flood during high tide now. Salt water intrusion is already a problem. Even a 1 meter rise would present significant challenges, and shoring up thousands of miles of coast to deal with that (not to mention hurricanes) is neither trivial nor quick.
I've been told that the corn belt is moving north. Unless this happens in the span of a single growing season then I find it hard to get worked up about this. Farmers already rotate crops for reasons of keeping soil in good shape. If over a few decades the rotation of crops needs adjusting then they'll figure it out.
This is why ignorance is dangerous. You do not simply "move" the agricultural infrastructure that's been developed over the past century north. Such an effort would take decades, even if were feasible. There's are REASONS why the corn belt is where it is. Arable land, ideal climate, etc. allows for very productive farming. But what's north of that? Are there aquifers to support such operations? Will the sail be able to handle the stress? Will the climate actually be conducive? Can the crops handle the new conditions?
It takes more than warm weather to grow crops at scale. You have to have the right mix of conditions. There are very few places on our planet where mass agriculture can be done consistently and productively. Sure, you can move to a new area if prices get high enough to make it feasible to turn someplace like, say, the Canadian Shield into farmland, but I don't think paying $30 for a loaf of bread is "dealing" with the problem.
Rain this, droughts that, hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, blah, blah blah. We got this figured out.
No, we really don't. If you've been paying attention over the past decade, there are several prominent examples of exactly how NOT figured out things are. First to mind is the record heat/drought in Russia a few years back that caused them to cease exports. And that's just a taste. If a similar event caused the US to cease exports there would be significant global repercussions. If you think we're immune to such things, you're extremely naive.
We've all been hearing this panic for decades now. All we are doing is getting the next generation stressed out over nothing. They are getting bombarded with climate change disasters in movies, cartoons, in the news, and on and on. Kids can't get away from this but when they grow up and have to deal with this on their own they will realize like I did that this is a big nothing.
The only reason you think it's a "big nothing" is because it hasn't impacted you personally (it actually has, you just aren't paying attention). Climate change happens over decades. It's slow boiling a frog. You and people like you expect an immediate cause and effect. The climate system doesn't work that way short of major catastrophes.
A quick read of the comments on this article so far tells me that I'm not alone in how I feel on this. The climate change alarmists have been pushing the panic button
Science junk on both sides (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't know anyone that would not admit that pollution is a problem. Plastic waste from _all_over making up huge masses in the oceans is an easy example. TFA and AGW proponents both have the same problem, which is complaining about the wrong stuff. Nitrogen is fertilizer for plants, and CO2 is converted by plants into O2. If those two things are really a concern, simply allowing plants to grow is the best possible answer. Do away with Nitrogen or CO2, and all the plants die. With them, goes the human
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That's 80+ years from now, in other words we have time.
Translation: I'll be dead by then, so I don't give a fuck. Fuck the future.
It's very convenient (Score:4)
Actually, it's a pretty convenient theory.
If global warming is a thing, either it will get wetter or it will get drier.
If it gets drier, of course drought, sky falling, etc as per the news in California for the last couple of years.
If it gets wetter, as this article asserts, it will be terrible for all sorts of reasons.
It's a perfect theory: no matter what happens, it can be interpreted to be bad, and it's humans' fault.
It used to be that the weather just changed, and we didn't try to blame anyone for it.
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Natural processes emit and absorb about 440 gigatons of CO2. I assume that's the pollutant you're talking about, since you invoked Global Warming.
Humans? About 5% of that.
The assertion that a 5 BILLION year old complex system, which has sustained MUCH higher and lower temperatures, and whose primary components (such as solar activity, Milankovitch cycles, vulcanism (and/or plate tectonics, depending on the scale you're talking about), topological and ecosystemic changes, albedo changes (both natural and a
Hypoxia is not a noun (Score:2)
harmful low-oxygen dead zones known as hypoxia
I know Slashdot is full enough of pedants, but hypoxia is a name for the phenomenon/condition - not the name of the place. You could call it a hypoxic zone. You could call the state of the area hypoxia. You can't call the place hypoxia.
It's happening already (Score:2)
Then multiple things wrong with their models (Score:2)
Secondly, Farming is undergoing MASSIVE changes. by 2050, if not sooner, most of it will not only be automated, but possible green-housed. Regardless, we will no longer see the massive spraying of fields that we see today. Instead, it will
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You missed what they actually said, which was "more droughts", not a worldwide 100 year drought.
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It often seems that things we read a couple years back are a bit fuzzy in our minds. You should check a source when you're going to use it, or else just remember that it was a long time ago when you read it so by now you have no fucking clue. If you presume that you have no clue, then whenever you find having a clue useful you'll realize you have to look the shit up again. So for example when you're about to type some stupid moronic shit with some claim like "that lasted 100 years" you'll realize that "100
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In all fairness that is that site's take on the paper that was published. The actual paper [sciencemag.org] that they cite in it's paper states that a 40-year drought in the southwest region of the US (mostly CA), is roughly sitting at 12% a chance of starting within the next two decades. So sometime between when that paper was published (2015) and 2035, there is a 12% chance of a 40-year drought kicking off.
Lesson to learn here, you really shouldn't be taking a news site's ability to report science as fact. In fact, I'm
Re:Broken Logic (Score:5, Interesting)
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Where I live we have increased incidence of toxic algal blooms in mountain lakes that have no upstream agriculture or residences at all.
Having an anecdote provides you with negative knowledge; you didn't learn anything, but you thought you did.
Read it again (Score:2)
Increased nitrate runoff means that the waterways get choked with nitrates and algae growing so fast that it created an anaerobic environment when it dies. This is the reverse of what you were thinking it said.
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And with a given nitrate production, an increase in rainfall would tend to dilute the nitrates in the runoff.
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And with a given nitrate production, an increase in rainfall would tend to dilute the nitrates in the runoff.
Dilution doesn't matter because of concentration. Not just bioconcentration, which is one reason it definitely doesn't matter, but also the simple fact that like materials tend to concentrate in specific locations due to their physical properties.
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Dilution doesn't matter because of concentration.
Basic chemistry. When you dilute something, its concentration goes down.
Not just bioconcentration
You are mis-using this term. Bioconcentration is what organisms do inside their bodies with a substance once they consume it.
Water pollution is measured by the amount of solute in some quantity of water. Add more water and the concentration goes down. That's why you see more algae and pond scum in stagnant water.
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You are mis-using this term. Bioconcentration is what organisms do inside their bodies with a substance once they consume it.
I am not misusing the term. Bioconcentration is what happens in the food chain. The filter feeders get stuff out of the water, they get eaten by larger things, and so on and so forth. This re-concentrates the dispersed compounds.
Add more water and the concentration goes down. That's why you see more algae and pond scum in stagnant water.
You see algae and pond scum in stagnant or slow-moving water because it's not washed away, it has a chance to accumulate. But the speed of water isn't defined by the amount of water alone, it's defined by the amount of water flowing through a given point at any given time. You're tr
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It's both.
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It doesn't make sense with what I know of the real world.
Well, of course, most people know very little about things that are so complex that computer models are used for them. That's the whole reason for those models.
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Actually, I do computer models and I farm and I am a scientist. So I know a lot about the real world, computer modeling and such. Your attack is not valid. Try debating the issue rather than attacking the person.
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I can't tell whether or not you're serious, or contrived an excellent example of the anecdotal fallacy.
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"That's just math and I question its validity. It doesn't make sense [to me] with what I know."
It always cracks me up to find people on the interwebs who don't even know what a computer is. Don't worry, don't worry, you don't need to know what it all means. You don't need to worry about where pr0n comes from, or how the trucks get the data down the information superhighway. Just trust that there are kittens in the tubes and everything will keep moving, and if not, just click reload for a couple hours.
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It always cracks me up to find people on the interwebs who don't even know what a computer is.
It always cracks me up when someone with a 5 digit ID tries to be snarky and then falls flat on his face because he doesn't know that computer doesn't sprinkle magic pixie dust on mathematical models, miraculously making them super-duper awesome-accurate.
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Right, except that when you almost comprehended my point, instead of thinking, "Oh, yeah, you're right" you phrased it as me "fall[ing] flag on [my] face." That's pretty daft. You proved you can count to 5, but why is it that when I talk about what a computer does you start talking about magic pixies?
Are you that context-challenged? You just don't like me, so you presumed that I'm incorrect about everything, so you see me saying something and you just say the opposite. Only you don't realize my level of kno
Re:Why wouldn't more water dilute it more? (Score:5, Insightful)
If we were talking about pure rainwater falling directly into bodies of water, it would. But we're talking about runoff. After that initially pure water runs over the land it's not so pure by the time it reaches a natural water body.
Take an empty cup and fill it from a city gutter during a heavy rain. Now drink it. Not an attractive proposition, is it?
In the case of eutrophication, we're worried about fertilizers applied to crops and lawns. This is in the form of various highly soluble nitrogen and phosphorous salts which are highly soluble and readily washed away. People use these highly soluble compounds because they stimulate rapid plant growth. These do the same thing for microorganisms when they reach a marine or fresh water body.
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Some people will get more rain, mostly places that already get a lot of rain, and other places will get less rain. Mostly places that already only get a little bit.
You're confused because there is more than one place. Sorry it is all so confusing.
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If the scientists do not want people to react to the reporting of it they need to do a better job of calling out those who are using it to advance the political ideas they agree with and not just those who oppose their political preferences.
No.
1. Scientists (especially those not in cognitive sciences) don't know how to convince people to do things. Even those that do know how to, need not be skilled in doing it - like the aspects of thinking on one's feet, acting, emoting, judging the audience's emotions and reacting quickly to them etc.
2. Everyone need not know / do everything. There is a reason division of labour has helped mankind greatly.
So no, scientists do not need to do a better job of calling out those .... They just need to publish pa
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1. Scientists (especially those not in cognitive sciences) don't know how to convince people to do things. Even those that do know how to, need not be skilled in doing it - like the aspects of thinking on one's feet, acting, emoting, judging the audience's emotions and reacting quickly to them etc.
False, and even a cursory study of history proves you false. "Science" gets funding to come to certain conclusions all the time. "Scientists" write extensively on the dilemmas they face when their morality gets challenged by the "Science" they are paid to do. "Scientists" are not the majority of people out there selling political agendas with said "Science". Examples are so easy to find that any citation request will be met with riducule!
I take your word that what you are calling "False" must be false, but it sure is not my statement no. 1 re-quoted above.
A. Are you saying scientists are experts in convincing people to do things ?
B. Are you saying scientists possess the skills required to convince people ?
Any of these are not coming out in your words.
As for me,
Science" gets funding to come to certain conclusions all the time. "Scientists" write extensively on the dilemmas they face when their morality gets challenged by the "Science" they are paid to do. "Scientists" are not the majority of people out there selling political agendas with said "Science".
I agree to all of these, so I don't see which statement of mine you are saying is "False" here, and what evidence you are presenting for it.
I would be inclined to believe you are repl
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Your statements were exactly quoted from you. GO BACK AND READ! I didn't cherry pick fragments, I quoted your whole damn statement and split it based on YOUR numbers 1 and 2.
A. Are you saying scientists are experts in convincing people to do things ?
B. Are you saying scientists possess the skills required to convince people ?
Yes! See Tesla and Edison, or Flat Earth, or Nuclear Fission! Scientists DO know how to convince people and DO so all the time. They have to petition people for money, and loads of funding comes from THE PUBLIC as well as Government(s).
You don't make any sense after that. _You_ said that scientists don't need to present informatio
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I would be inclined to believe you are replying to some completely different post from what you intended, but you quote extensively from my post.
I often feel the same way when he replies to my posts.
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In as much as they possess the skills required to convince people, they are scientists *and* good petitioners. A person could play different roles even in your limited understanding of the world, I hope ?
Please quote when I said people don't need to know. I now rephrase to avoid the specific misinterpretation that you are drawing due to your limited understanding of the world :
1. Scientists do not need to know how to convince people
2. There exist other people who can translate scientists' papers into "peopl
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As individuals, they sure have political beliefs. As only scientists, they have zero skills to propagate their political beliefs.
As scientists as well as individuals, assuming at least 1000 scientists in this world, it is statistically impossible you will agree with political aspect of all of their statements.
But how does it mean all scientists need to do a "better job of calling out those who are using it to advance the political ideas they agree with and not just" ? I just demonstrated many of them are v
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OK, conclude that. Or you might try to find out what science means. I can hope, can't I ?
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Your thesis is that unless scientists are expert politicians, they'll be accused of being political.
That may or may not be true, but it contains nothing having to do with science, or any argument for a better way for scientists to communicate the science. You're just demanding that they also be politicians, and accusing them of being politicians if they refuse. They're not going to engage you in that discussion, because there is no benefit.
You will call scientists whatever pejoratives you want to. It isn't
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Awesome! I am eagerly waiting for a proof of your thesis. Beginning with a scientific definition of "cannot be trusted".
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Early predictions of climate change forecast drought everywhere.
The next data point will always be alarming. Its caught in the clutches.
Re:Baltic sea has this problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Eutrophication actually being reported is being caused by fertilizer runoff, not additional rain. Early predictions of climate change forecast drought everywhere. Now we're worrying about excess rain. Are liberals incapable of reporting good news?
Where do you get the "drought everywhere"? Droughts, yes, but not everywhere. Droughts will be an increasing problem in areas that already suffer from them. Other areas are likely to see more clouds and more rain.
Just stick to the truth (avoiding straw men) and you'll understand that it really isn't a liberal/conservative issue, it's reality.
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There were several years when the most common predicted effect of carbon warming was drought - endless drought, in every possible place, and there's nothing we can do about it! (Muahahahaha!). Articles like these have been typical:
WTF? Most of these articles are about droughts that were actually occurring at the time they were reported. Way to defeat your own argument.
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Most of these articles are about droughts that were actually occurring at the time they were reported. Way to defeat your own argument.
And which are no longer droughts today. That weather is cyclic does NOT disprove that carbon is a long-term problem we need to address; it disproves the idea that climate change is an unstoppable apocalypse that will do God's work of eliminating humanity.
Smallpox and starvation were long-term problems once. Then we put applied science to work.
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"These are a few of the usual suspects doing their typical unscientific scare mongering. "
Notice how they use their mod points as weapons.
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caused by fertilizer runoff, not additional rain
Are you aware of what moist entity causes it to run off in the first place?
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You're not representing the science accurately at all. Yes, droughts will be a problem, but they will be local. As we have seen.
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"Yet, the AGW theorists were telling us that we needed to worry about drought all over the planet."
Not.
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Before you criticize others just post a link for your claim rather than hand waving to some 'Akbar'.
"Yet, the AGW theorists were telling us that we needed to worry about drought all over the planet."
Not. It's obviously wrong that all climate scientists on the planet were making the same claim. That's what I was responding to.
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I thought "climate change" was supposed to cause worldwide droughts? If you can imagine just any fear you want as being the result of "climate change", then the entire concept becomes meaningless.
Of course, it's meaningless to begin with. "Change" is what the climate DOES, always has, always will. The entire Gore-ful panic is designed to separate the people from their money and to allow the politicians to fun things forever.
And how is it that you know that climate has changed in the past. Do you really believe the scientists who told you this? They are the same scientists who you don't believe when they tell you that AGW is a problem. Are you just going to cherry pick based on what you want to believe?
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I thought "climate change" was supposed to cause worldwide droughts? If you can imagine just any fear you want as being the result of "climate change", then the entire concept becomes meaningless.
Of course, it's meaningless to begin with. "Change" is what the climate DOES, always has, always will. The entire Gore-ful panic is designed to separate the people from their money and to allow the politicians to fun things forever.
And how is it that you know that climate has changed in the past. Do you really believe the scientists who told you this? They are the same scientists who you don't believe when they tell you that AGW is a problem. Are you just going to cherry pick based on what you want to believe?
When someone says 'according to my research, X seems to be the case', people will generally say, meh, ok.
When someone says 'X is the case and therefore everyone must do Y' people get very suspicious, especially when Y is something that enriches the speaker at the expense of the audience.
Add in bits like 'or humanity is domed' or 'even if I am wrong the risk is too great to ignore' and you lose even more credibility. Spokespeople who do not practice what they preach will quickly show any cause to be a scam,
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Unfortunately, even if AGW turns out to be an immediate existential threat to humanity, the politicians and other shysters have driven it's credibility so far underground that the name had to be changed twice(global cooling -> global warming -> climate change).
"Global cooling" was never really a thing. It got some attention in the 1970s but even then a survey of the literature from 1965 to 1979 found over 6 times as many papers on global warming as on global cooling.
"Climate change" is a term that has been around since at least the 1950s. In 1956 Gilbert Plass published a paper titled "The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change".
So nothing has really changed, just different things get emphasized at different time.
And the continued exaggerations and FUD are taking it past the point where for many people, an unwashed hobo yelling about martians on a street corner while wearing a placard saying 'the end is near' is more credible.
I see exaggerations and FUD from climate scienc
Re:Wait Just A Darn Minute Here! (Score:5, Interesting)
I thought "climate change" was supposed to cause worldwide droughts? If you can imagine just any fear you want as being the result of "climate change", then the entire concept becomes meaningless.
The term "climate change" is a kind of short-hand, which refers to the changes that are caused by human activities on top of natural climate variation. The one thing that more than anything else defines man-made climate change is the increased energy retention in the atmosphere, that we can measure as an increase in the average temperature across the whole planet and smoothed out over a relatively long period of time, which is above what we would have expected to find from natural causes. But locally, on a day to day basis, there will be big variations in temperature, and secondarily in air pressure, wind speed, humidity, precipitation etc - the tendency is to make these variations stronger, so droughts may become worse, rainfall may become heavier, storms more violent, heatwaves hotter and more frequent, and yes, you will in places see much more snow and more severe cold snaps.
There is an experiment that I think most will have seen in school at some point, which explains a lot about this: You take a large glass tank with water, place a Bunsen burner under it, and drop a crystal of some water soluble colour over the flame; what you see is the colour rising up, then curling back down - ie turbulence. If you measure the temperature in different places, you will probably get high readings in the column over the flame, but low readings in an area around the flame, where colder water is being sucked in - and high readings near the top edges as well; this also happens to our atmosphere: the flame is hot near equator, the air rises and blows up to the polar regions, where it is sucked down, because cold air is suck in near the ground at the equator. One of the major differences is that the atmosphere is a very thin layer: 10 miles deep, spread oout over a circumference of 25000 miles, which would correspond to the glass tank in your school laboratory being 10 cm high and 250 m wide, which means that any turbulence becomes much more localised, which translates into the much more chaotic system that is our weather.
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Let alone that science isn't done by consensus, It's done by repeatable testing and validation of theory.
You are right that science isn't done by consensus. Consensus occurs in science when a particular point is settled enough that scientists would be a wasting their time to continue contesting it.
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It's all global warming, regardless of whatever it is and it's all bad. Even if it is something that seems good like less drought.
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