Climate Change Denier comes in from the cold: SCIENCE!!!

You're leaving a lot of loose ends there in terms of things you said that weren't true. It may seem perfectly logical to you, but it's your view, not the Democrats. Quit claiming that Democrats want to implement your ideas. And so it goes. Before responding adequately to your previous untruth that Democrats would try to regulate fuels by dividing them into essential and non-essential categories, you march onwards to make yet another untrue claim. There are no Democrat proposals for curtailing recreational vehicle use.You might try looking stuff up instead of going with your gut, else you'll just continue making more false claims, like that no one's trying to create new car companies in the US. Your suspicion meter is pegged. I have no special knowledge about lobbying by automakers, but neither do you. Your speculations are unlikely to be true. Like most of the things you and your fellow Republicans are concerned about, they're made up. US GDP is about $21 trillion, so our debt is only about a third greater than our income. Many people have mortgages and total debt that are far greater than that, like 2, 3 or even 4 times income. Why do you think the US debt is at a difficult point? You remember lots of things that never happened. What are you imagining happened with emissions testing 17 years ago? Here's some Tesla info. The Tesla Model 3 base model is $37,000, and the Model 3 Extended Range Dual Motor is $50,000. It can go around 300 miles on a single change, and it takes around a half hour to charge at a Tesla Supercharging station. The Tesla home charger takes about five hours for a full charge. It costs about half as much per mile to drive as a gas-powered car. It requires very little maintenance, allowing Tesla to use a different model where most of their income comes from vehicle sales, while only part of the income from gas-powered vehicles comes from sales, the rest coming from service. A Tesla has no radiator, no radiator fluid, no thermostat, no water pump, no spark plugs, no ignition system, no fuel injectors, no fuel pump, no fuel filter, no crankcase oil, no oil filter, no oil pump, no transmission, no exhaust pipe, no muffler, no crankshaft, no pistons, no valves, no pushrods. The drivetrain has 17 moving parts, 34 for the dual motor, and there's a battery along the bottom of the car that runs from front to rear. Tesla has no recommended maintenance period but suggests coming in for a checkover once every couple years. It has excellent power (0-60 in 4.2 seconds for the Extended Range) and handling (the position of the batteries gives it a very low center of gravity). There are federal subsidies for electric cars, but only so much for each manufacturer. The Tesla subsidy used to be $7500 but the funds ran out and it is now $0. You mean like the way the federal government become involved in automotive safety and cut the automobile fatality rate to a miniscule level? Deaths per billion vehicle miles traveled used to be 250 a century ago and now its about 10. Thank God there's no amendment sayng, "Transportation being essential to the economy of a free State, the right of the people to own and drive transport shall not be infringed." Marc, you are making things up again. No one has proposed restricting older vehicles. Older vehicles are always grandfathered in by whatever the standards were at the time. To get older vehicles off the road the government has in the past provided incentives for people to purchase new cars. What's a feel good measure? Restricting older vehicles? That's just something you made up.--Percy

They ceased operations in 2014.--Percy

If you have evidence that anything you said was true, this is the time and place to present them.--Percy

The effects of climate change will continue on for decades and decades because not enough of the world will rein in their production of green house gases, but I don't see a collapse of world civilization nor even of the world economy. Some regions will suffer, some will thrive, and along the way we'll adapt. We will eventually gain control of our green house gases, but by no means by 2050.Ironically the world's land area is increasing right now, but not for good reasons, e.g., Lake Mead, the Aral Sea, etc.--Percy

People should start ignoring your posts, and you're off-topic anyway. Preach somewhere else.--Percy

Nearly 90 countries join pact to slash planet-warming methane emissions | Reuters, says one headline. Over 100 countries vow to end deforestation, says another. A better headline: "Scores of Countries Hypocritically Pledge to Slash Methane Emissions and End Deforestation."Almost all countries have already demonstrated they're unable to follow such pledges, and even if that weren't true we're already screwed. Many analyses say the tipping point (the point of no return) is 2050 or 2060, but it's not. It's sooner. I don't have science behind me, but so far all the pie-in-the-sky scientific predictions are trailing the reality on the ground.The effects of climate change do not lie in the future but are now. Low-lying island nations are already beginning to disappear. Coastal regions around the world are losing land to the sea. Extreme heat is causing forest fires in the US, China and Australia. The western US is being hit by droughts that have brought reservoirs like Lake Mead to record lows.In the future the Gulf Stream will eventually be interrupted (because of melting glacial ice in Greenland) depriving Europe of its warm currents and sending it into a mini-ice age. Aridness and droughts will afflict some regions, high humidity and frequent rains others.The world will be overwhelmed by the consequences of climate change. Famine, floods and extreme weather events will kill billions by the end of the century. In the end we'll find that climate change is self-correcting as the contributors to that change are gradually eliminated by it.--Percy

You find an incoming tide scary? You should have stayed a few more hours to witness the tide go out, and then your fears would have abated.The rate of sea level rise differs around the world, but it averages around a third of a centimeter per year.Mindless indolence down by the docks is fine. You should be more concerned about the amount of mindless indolence you spend here.--Percy

You don't come right out and say it, but this implies that you believe that sea level rise will be the same everywhere (ignoring tides, storms, etc.). Likely you don't believe that since you live on an island continent where 85% of the population lives within 30 miles of the ocean, your member name is Dredge, and your avatar is a lake/harbor dredge.Anyway, whatever you believe, here's some information. The ocean is not just a giant swimming pool with the level the same all around the pool. There are a lot of factors at work.You probably already know tidal changes are not the same everywhere. As you travel a coastline the magnitude of the tidal change can vary enormously, governed by a number of factors. Some parts of the world have very small tides, like the Mediterranean and the Caribbean, while the Bay of Fundy's tide change is about 38 feet.Like tides, the amount of sea level rise will vary widely around the world. Ignoring lunar tidal influences, sea levels around the world vary according to currents, temperature, saltiness and land configuration. Because of these factors some coastlines will experience greater sea level rise than others. NOAA ( National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) projects that the US coastline will experience sea level rise that averages 10-12 inches in the next 30 years, varying regionally (see Projections through 2150 for all U.S. coastal waters). And at Sea Level Rise Technical Report the NOAA explains why sea level rise varies around the world:

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The first driver, stereodynamic sea level change, refers to changes in the ocean’s movement (circulation and currents) and its climate (temperature and saltiness). Trade winds and currents can push water higher, or lower, in different regions. Freshwater added from melting ice sheets and glaciers can shift ocean circulation patterns in different regions by changing the saltiness, temperature, and density of the water.
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Changes in land ice and solid Earth – also called gravitational, rotational, and deformational changes – can also affect regional sea level. When ice sheets and glaciers melt or lose mass, this adds freshwater to the oceans and changes the gravity, deformation, and rotation of the Earth, which then contributes to higher sea level rise at locations farther away from the ice melting source than locations close by. These patterns of sea level rise are known as “fingerprints” and are the reason that ice mass loss from distant Antarctica will impact the U.S. coastline more so than ice mass loss from Greenland.

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Tuvalu is only one of the more dramatic examples and definitely not the sole victim of climate change that has been written about. Here's a brief report on how Woodbridge, a coastal community in New Jersey, is dealing with sea level rise with a home buy-back program. This from my Message 62 in the Who's the bigger offender: Conservatives or Liberals? thread from last year: Even if Tuvalu didn't exist, even if there were no low lying oceanic island complexes, it wouldn't change the fact of sea level rise. It's not possible you don't know about the amount of water and ice flowing into the ocean from glaciers around the world, mostly in Greenland and Antarctica. Sea level cannot help but rise. Rising and falling sea levels have happened many times in geologic history. Around 18,000 years ago you could walk from Asia to Australia.--Percy

I found sites on the Internet that also said this, and I found a link to an IPCC report where the claim originates: Climate Change 2007This motivated me to do a little math. Average ocean depth is 2.29 miles, and at 50 degrees a 1°F increase in temperature causes a .00899% increase in volume (for pure water, couldn't find a figure for ocean water), which causes a 4.35 inch rise in ocean level, assuming vertical shorelines instead of the actual sloping ones. Surface ocean temperatures are supposed to rise around 2°F by 2050, so the accompanying estimated 1 foot rise seems right in the ballpark, with around 9 inches from thermal expansion of water and 3 inches from melting ice.All of Greenland's ice melting would cause a 21 foot increase in sea level, and Antarctica's would add maybe another 200 feet, and the rest of the world's ice maybe 15 more feet, but we know sea levels have changed hundreds of feet in the past. Even though thermal expansion of water is a currently a significant contributor to sea level rise, that can't be true in the long term because a hundred degree change in water temperature is only 36 feet. So I assume the geologic uplift and subsidence were also contributors.--Percy

Edited by Percy, : Mistakenly said "feet" instead of "meters" in part of last paragraph, so I've fixed it and rewritten the latter part of the paragraph to make sense in light of the new figures.

Thanks, I was reading meters and thinking feet. I'm going to fix my post.--Percy

According to this article, global warming is affecting Earth's rotation and may cause the addition of the leap second to be delayed from 2026 until 2029: The Earth's rotation is starting to interfere with time and experts are concerned.The melting ice caps are responsible. Somehow they're contributing to a decrease in angular momentum of the Earth's liquid core, and due to conservation of momentum that translates into an increase in angular momentum of Earth's solid portion. I would have liked to understand this better, but the article doesn't go into detail, and at one point I think the article mistakenly says "orbit" where it meant "rotation." It was perhaps written in haste or by someone with insufficient background.So to you climate change deniers out there: Don't worry about any stupid old leap second. It's all bunk.--Percy

Yeah, this was the part I was wondering about. How do melting ice caps on the surface affect the angular momentum of the ball of liquid surrounding the solid core at the center?A few months ago I came across a piece about plans to abandon the leap second, and while looking for it just now I came across an AP article about the ice cap and liquid core issue that's much more detailed: A faster spinning Earth may cause timekeepers to subtract a second from world clocksNormally at midnight clocks go from 11:59:59 to 12:00:00, but when they add a leap second the clocks go from 11:59:59 to 11:59:60 to 12:00:00. When they subtract a leap second the clocks go from 11:59:58 directly to 12:00:00.The liquid core was described as behaving in "unpredictable ways, with eddies and flows that vary." This can cause transfers of angular momentum between liquid and solid cores and can speed or slow the Earth's rotation. Recently it has worked to increase the rotation, but that has been counteracted by melting ice at the poles, which transfers water toward the equator and slows the rate, just as someone described in an earlier post as like when a spinning skater extends their arms. And there's also the constant presence of tidal friction slowing the rotation.According to the article, what was originally scheduled to happen in 2026 that might be delayed until 2029 was not the adding of a leap second but the subtracting. I found this very surprising. I'd never heard of the subtracting of a leap second. Won't this be the first time a leap second has been subtracted? The article implies this but doesn't explicitly state it.But it at least explains the mystery of how melting ice caps affect the angular momentum of the liquid core. They don't. The melting ice caps slow the rotation, tidal friction slows the rotation, and the behavior of the liquid core can slow or increase the rotation. How much each contributes at any given time controls how much the earth's rotation speeds or slows.One of the scientists doesn't believe a negative leap second will actually be needed. He says the slowing of the earth's rotation from tidal forces is a constant that won't change, and the melting of the ice caps won't change any time soon, while the behavior of the liquid core is capricious and unpredictable.But what about this transition away from the leap second. Apparently, a couple years ago the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, recognizing the problems created by introducing occasional discontinuities in time of one second, proposed a change. UT1 is the time of one Earth rotation, which is inconstant. UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) is synchronous with TAI (International Atomic Time) but is displaced from it by an integral number of seconds. Inconstant UT1 and constant UTC are kept in synchrony by the occasional addition or subtraction of a leap second.The proposed change is that the maximum difference between UT1 and UTC be increased to more than a second so that discontinuities are introduced not more often than every century. They didn't describe how this change would be accomplished, only that methods for accomplishing it be studied and then introduced sometime during the 2030's. See Resolution 4 of the 27th CGPM (2022).This sounds like trouble to me. Leap seconds occur often enough that all our current software is programmed to deal with it, but if leap seconds go away for a century then programmers writing software today are not going take into account a problem that won't occur for a century and whose solution has been left open anyway. It'll be Y2K all over again. But hey, it'll be our children's children's children's children that have to deal with it. It's their problem. For us it's just be happy, don't worry.--Percy

Tidal friction is planet-wide strain due to the gravity of an orbiting partner. Sea tides are just one small portion of it. Wikipedia's leading paragraph in the Tidal Force article explains it pretty well:

Wikipedia:

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The tidal force or tide-generating force is a gravitational effect that stretches a body along the line towards and away from the center of mass of another body due to spatial variations in strength in gravitational field from the other body. It is responsible for the tides and related phenomena, including solid-earth tides, tidal locking, breaking apart of celestial bodies and formation of ring systems within the Roche limit, and in extreme cases, spaghettification of objects. It arises because the gravitational field exerted on one body by another is not constant across its parts: the nearer side is attracted more strongly than the farther side. The difference is positive in the near side and negative in the far side, which causes a body to get stretched. Thus, the tidal force is also known as the differential force, residual force, or secondary effect of the gravitational field.

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--Percy