[Greenbuilding] [BULK] Re: [BULK] HCFC & HFC ozone & globalwarming

[YankeePerm at aol.com]

This could be true but it is not what Jeannie is saying.   I believe she is 
talking about the theory best propounded by John Hammaker, who, alas, was an 
awful crank and therefore his excellent reasoning wasn't taken seriously (and 
how is this for a run-on sentence.)

Here it is in a nutshell. First of all, it should be evident to everyone by 
now that "global warming" is minor compared with global evaporation.   Most of 
the 'extra' energy trapped by the atmosphere, temporarily, does not become 
atmospheric heat and increased air turbulence, though we see some of that as 
well.   Most of it is absorbed by the phase change energy of water, evaporation.   
The Hammaker-Weaver thesis (Don Weaver is still with us and has an 
interesting web site, I'm told) is that this energy accounts for the accumulation of 
glaciers.   Think of the energy required to lift a glacier from sea level, where 
the water evaporates, to a mountain top.   Millions of tons of water lifted 
hundreds or thousands of feet, in some cases a mile or more, and left there.  So 
the greenhouse energy becomes trapped as potential energy.   It's still 
around on the planet, but not doing anything.   Meanwhile, the extra snow pack from 
all this deposited water, in winter, reflects solar energy away from that 
region.   And you get a positive feedback effect and gradual accumulation of 
glaciers.   Since for the last few million years so called "ice ages" have been 
the norm and temperate intrglacials have been but brief pauses for the ice to 
catch its breath, we should think about the possibility that some such mechanism 
is correct, or at least what happens some of the time.   We are now at the 
end of the interglacial, if all the previous 17 interglacials are any measure, 
but we have this anthropogenic factor thrown in.   So the question is, will the 
next ice age begin on schedule (within our lifetimes, and I'm 67), or will 
the human influence on the climate overwhelm the recently normal (Meaning 1.7 
million years as recent) pattern and put us into a "steam" age.   If we hit 
either extreme, we can count on a major population reduction and possibly a return 
to earlier, more sustainable modes of existence (e.g., hunter-gatherer).   
Extinction of our species is more likely with continued "warming" than with an 
ice age, in my view, but even more likely if we manage to hover between either 
"ground state."   An interesting side not that I've never seen addressed by 
geologists:   It seems to me that any major redistribution of water (including 
especially ice) on the planet will change the center of gravity and may result 
in precession, where the axis of rotation shifts to keep the main mass at the 
equator (which of course shifts when the axis does).   Now we have wholesale 
erosion as well, shifting significant portions of continents to the oceans.   
If all this proceeds evenly over the surface of the planet, things will remain 
the same.   But what are the odds of that?
We'd need the mathematics of astronomy to figure them!

What we know for sure is that the climate for 1.7 million years has been a 
thermal pendulum, and that most of the swing has been in conditions cool enough 
to cover much of now temperate Northern Hemisphere in ice.   We have given 
this pendulum a big push toward the warm, we think.   But eventually it will go 
as far as it can in that direction (OK, it could also bust loose and create 
Venus-like conditions), and then it swings back.   Will it not perhaps swing back 
toward cold to an equally extreme degree?   I don't know, but we have messed 
with something that, for our own small purposes, would have been best left to 
itself.

Dan Hemenway

In a message dated 8/31/06 2:16:57 PM, geoedb at idiom.com writes:


> And one prediction is that global warming will cause Europe to go into
> an ice age. So some places will be too cold, others to hot and dry, and
> with too many people in the world we we be trying to eek out a living
> with less space and recourses.
> 
> Jeannie wrote:
> 
> >I forgot to say -- the idea of human induced global warming preventing an
> >ice age is faulty.  Ice ages are caused by global warming.
> >
> 





---------------------------------------------------------
Barking Frogs Permaculture Center
www.barkingfrogspermaculture.org

Our 11th Annual Permaculture Design Course Online begins Nov. 5, 2006. The 
protocol for our Annual Permaculture Design Course Online is at 
http://www.barkingfrogspermaculture.org/Protocol7_05_06.pdf


A list by topic of all Yankee Permaculture titles also may be found at

http://www.barkingfrogspermaculture.org/YPCpublicationsbycategory.pdf