Hacker News Reader

Comment by dodo53 | Hacker News Reader

I think the greenhouse effect is totally uncontroversial. To what extent the climate will change due to that is slighlty more scientifically controversial, but as uninformed lay person I'd say is fairly broad consensus.

Which green energy choices are economically feasible is much more controversial - there's counterintuitive things like - is it better to subsidize solar/wind while not really feasible to subsidize technology development or build natural gas plants (which are proven to be economically feasible and cleaner than oil I believe - but obviously still a fossil fuel).

Edit: tried googling for gas-is-cleaner-than-oil citation, and found - http://www.propublica.org/article/more-reasons-to-question-w... saying earlier studies may be wrong and it's actually dirtier than coal.

View on HN

For some reason the global warming crowd doesn't talk about the fact that the primary greenhouse gas is water vapor. CO2 only makes up something like 10%, and the human caused part only about 4% of that, which is 0.4% overall.

At least according to the Wikipedia “Greenhouse gas” article, it’s hard to measure exactly how much each gas contributes to the greenhouse effect, because different gases absorb and emit radiation at different frequencies.

Regardless of how you work out the proportions, there used to be a homeostasis, where the biological and physical processes that put greenhouse gases into the atmosphere balanced the processes that took them out. The additional CO₂, CH₄, and N₂O from human activity is upsetting that homeostasis.

Perhaps, but at least proportionally water vapor significantly outweighs carbon dioxide, even more so when you just look at man-made greenhouse gases:

http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html

When you take water vapor into account, man-made greenhouse gases only account for 0.28% of all the greenhouse gas in our atmosphere.

global warming crowd

I don't know if that's the bes term, since I think you'll find it's the same as the evolution crowd and heliocentric crowd.

Your argument is specious -- we're also only talking about it getting a few degrees warmer. If you investigate, you'll find why that's a problem.

But is it? Where for instance does Doug Keenan go wrong? http://www.informath.org/media/a42.htm (an essay originally published in the WSJ 'What is arguably the most important reason to doubt global warming can be explained in plain English.'.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com