[lug] Anyone else hate to get rid of old equipment?

[Maxwell Spangler]

On Tue, 2010-05-25 at 17:30 -0600, Nate Duehr wrote:

> There's a lot of evidence that the planet, being a closed system other 
> than the effects of more or less energy output from the Sun (cool data 
> on that too, lately... now that we're able to measure that!), will simply:
> 
> - Melt more of the icecaps, resulting in more water in the oceans.
> - Which results in more surface area of water worldwide.
> + higher temperatures, means more evaporation.
> - Meaning more clouds, and more rainfall where it never fell before.
> - Meaning more plants, which need CO to survive.
> - Meaning more CO scrubbed from the air, and put into the ground in 
> those areas covered in plant life.
> 
> * Is the melting of the icecaps a "disaster"? (Emotional answer, not a 
> scientific one from most folks... "Oh no, the polar bears may go extinct!")

You lost me on the first bullet because you failed to mention all of the
impact of melting icecaps.

Did you know, for example, that icecaps reflect 90% of the sunlight that
shines on them?

This was an amazing yet somewhat obvious fact when I learned it.  A cold
black rock at the same location would absorb all the sunlight's heat and
become warm.  But a block of ice and snow of the same size doesn't
absorb that heat and stays cold much, much longer.

Because of this, every time you see a huge chunk of ice cap fall off
into the sea, it means that square footage is now absorbing heat into
the water instead of reflect it back up and out to space.  So it's not
just ice turning to water, but geographic areas turning from heat
reflection to heat absorption.

What bothers me about the bulleted list of ideas above is that it is not
supported by science, but just a set of ideas.  Imagine if we computer
professionals let users set forth their ideas as fact about how
computers work.  Is it true that pressing the ENTER key when a program
is slow will make it wake up and go faster?  "Yes!" said the user
because that's what makes sense to them.

It makes sense to them because they don't understand much else and when
a human being is given a situation they don't understand they will often
fill the void with facts to make sense out of it.  Add some bias or
preference for a certain outcome and a distrust in science and you don't
get truth, you get rumors and falsehoods.

I mean no insult to you Nate, but your are a computer professional and
not a climatologist so I can't put much faith in the ideas you describe
above.   Very interesting ideas, but ideas, not facts.

-- 
Maxwell Spangler
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        Linux, Unix and Database Administration
        Currently: Boulder, Colorado
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