Global Warming - The New Socialism

[lilphil1989]

Like you said it's not conclusive, so why bother? But then again, if it real, then we better start doing something quick.

It's a hard call, when there seems to be a lot to lose on both sides of the argument.

Just to point something out though, you said global average surface temperature is increasing. I think it is. But that's the whole problem. Global warming and the idea that the earth is warming is based on surface temps, but are these even accurate? With the amount of pollution, urban hubs and things like clouds increasing our surface temperature, it can hardly be the right thing to look at. We have too much influence on it, therefore it can look like the temp is rising when it is in fact not changing or even decreasing.

Have seen articles about this before, but couldn't find any right now, will look into it. But I remember the argument was that we should be looking at the overall temps of the atmosphere as read by satellites which are unaffected by heat sinks like cities.

I hope this sounds somewhat intelligible and not some pile of garble. I'll find more info soon.

Why bother? Because we might be absolutely fucking up our planet. I think that's quite an important thing to try to figure out.


But the "temperature" read by a satellite is a reading of the blackbody radiation of the earth. I don't know how much physics you know so i'll provide a simple analogy:


Imagine you want to measure the temperature of a hot iron bar. There are two main ways to do it:
1) stick a thermometer on the bar

2) use a photometer to measure the blackbody radiation of the bar. All objects above 0K (so, everything! :p ) radiates a spectrum, the peak of which is dependant on the objects temperature. So measure the wavelength peak of outcoming radiation and use Wien's displacement law to calculate the temperature.

These two methods give the same result.

Ok, now imagine you wrap the iron bar in some kind of semi-transparent plastic, that stops radiation at certain wavelengths (this is exactly what the earth's atmosphere does, and is the way it retains heat). You can still put the thermometer inside the plastic and measure the surface temperature of the bar, or you could try to fit a blackbody to an emission spectrum with lots of absorption, like this.
You'll (hopefully, assuming the absorption doesnt distort your spectrum too much) get the same result, but that with the thermometer gives the more accurate result.

There's no physical reason they would give different results, unless, as I mentioned before, your spectrum is so distorted by absorption that you can't fit a blackbody spectrum to it.

Your argument is that cities kick out more heat than the surrounding undeveloped land, but that would show up on the spectrum taken from space, and obviously would on thermometer measurements at the surface, so there's no difference.
The satellite measurement would also be measuring surface temperature, just in a different, and less accurate, way.


I hope this makes sense, I tend to write in a somewhat disjointed way sometimes, call me out if I've said something that doen't make sense :p