re: The low temperature in Baton Rouge hasn't been below 70 since June 9.

quote:

---

to get the CO2 levels back to normal now.

---

What's "normal" and who determines it?

quote:

---

Yeah well, how do you know this didn't happen back in 1776?

Don't give me "recorded history" crap. The recorded history of weather only goes back to the 1800s or so.

---

This is such a retarded point. It's just saying "Hey we didn't have as precise measurements of measuring temperature at the time, despite the fact we have a good general idea of what the temperature was, so unless you have a time machine, let's continue to ignore a growing trend and mountains of evidence that this is occurring."

quote:

---

Has not even been close.

---

quote:

---

adding over a week to the previous record.

---

=/=

What am I missing?

That's because New Orleans isn't shrinking because of global warming, but due to subsidence. Most of Louisiana south of Baton Rouge was built on delta, that delta was formed over thousands, and even millions of years of the Mississippi River overflowing its banks and depositing sediment, building up land.

After 1927, the Army Corps of engineers built levees to keep the river from overflowing its banks, so no new sediment is added. All of the sediment falls off the continental shelf deep into the Gulf of Mexico at the mouth of the river.

Over time, the soil gets compacted by the weight of the soil above, squeezing out the water, and causing it to shrink. Since the river is no longer depositing its sediment in the delta, the land is shrinking as the water is squeezed out.

To make matters worse, even if the levees were demolished and the Mississippi allowed to once more overflow its banks, it doesn't carry near the amount of sediment it once did due to the locks and dams constructed upstream on the river and its tributaries.

The threat to coastal areas from global warming is sea level rise caused by melting terrestrial ice sheets (water ice is less dense than liquid water, so its melting would actually cause sea levels to drop). If global warming was real, we would see consistent sea level rise everywhere, and in New Orleans, that sea level rise, paired with sinking land, would more rapidly inundate the city.

However, that's not what we're seeing. The sea level rise is highly inconsistent, and typically local around the world. New Orleans will sink without any global warming due to the man-made catastrophe that is the Mississippi River Levee System thrust upon us by the Army Corp of Engineers.

quote:

---

What's the perfect temperature for Earth?

---

It's relative, but we have a good idea what the average global temp needs to be for the average animal. If it goes significantly higher or lower than that, some will die and others will thrive. It's the nature of evolution. Unfortunately if we frick up the planet enough, I don't know if we'll evolve quickly enough to save ourselves.

quote:

---

Sounds nice. I bet there were a lot of mammals and human civilization with complex agricultural systems also, right?

---

No, there was none of that.

We are talking about 52 million years ago.

quote:

---

No, there was none of that.

---

Exactly.

quote:

---

You're probably right about deforestation and heat islands

---

Glad you concede this point. It is unquestionable that human activity has a profound effect on local climate and ecosystems.

quote:

---

So, why do you believe that other stuff and not in the greenhouse effect?

---

Like from water vapor? CO2?

The whole issue boils down to:

To what degree is man altering the global climate?, and

How much will it cost to slow/stop/reverse whatever degree we're altering it?

And, for my money, we're still talking about, at most, a few tenths of a degree Celsius - even if man is responsible for ALL the warming since the industrial revolution.

So, what to do about those few tenths? Starving a bunch of people to death and going back to a pre-industrial civilization seems extreme. Perhaps focusing on the positives associated with warming, accept that we are part of nature, too, and move forward seems far preferable to proposing solutions that will either only effect the developed West (a global energy "Marxism" if you will, and that is the transparent agenda of the AGW alarmists) or won't stop/slow these negative effects of CO2 emissions seem horrifically misguided, inefficient, as well as unable to actually solve the problem, even if we skeptics took the alarmists word for the causes, effects and consequences of AGW.

quote:

---

Exactly.

---

I think we agree

quote:

---

Perhaps focusing on the positives associated with warming, accept that we are part of nature, too, and move forward seems far preferable to proposing solutions that will either only effect the developed West (a global energy "Marxism" if you will, and that is the transparent agenda of the AGW alarmists) or won't stop/slow these negative effects of CO2 emissions seem horrifically misguided, inefficient, as well as unable to actually solve the problem, even if we skeptics took the alarmists word for the causes, effects and consequences of AGW.

---

I agree that the solutions proposed by the left are terrible policy, but guess what? If you either a) deny it's happening, or b) think the only solution is to do nothing then you will have zero say in what the policy actually is.