Nut Nut's Attempt At A Book About Politics & Society

I was kind of hoping someone would get to the point that H2O is the other byproduct of cellular respiration and is produced in equal quantities (by molecular count) as CO2.

Dihydroxide is poisonous to people at certain levels.

I thnk you meant dihydrogen monoxide.

You are right. I was always better at physics than chemistry.

Everything is poisonous at certain levels.

I think it's pretty clear that the audience here is trying to deflect from the pretty obvious truth that human civilization is in deep ****.

I've done my best to hold your hands and walk you through it in a methodical fashion.

But can anyone here explain the feedback loops inherent in Milankovitch Cycles which have caused the Earth to routinely oscillate between glacial maxima (ice ages) and interglacials ?

Will anyone acknowledge that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane are the ONLY thing which causes heat to remain in the atmosphere and not radiate out to outer space ? That the atmosphere which had just 1 part in 4000 of CO2 and 1 part in 2 million of methane was responsible for elevating Earth's temperature by 30C ?

And now we effectively doubled the GHG levels !!!

You can't debunk that scientifically. You can't do it with math because the math is pretty damn straighforward.

All you can do is come up with some spurious anecdotes about how people can get sick from a CO2 deficiency. Yes .... that's true. But we can also get sick from having too much CO2. In an atmospheric environment which is 8% CO2, humans will die. It's like Goldilocks .... it's gotta be just right. Not too little .... not too much.

Climate change is a math issue. If you can't engage in mathematical analysis, then your hopes of understanding the problem are non-existent.

Mathematics is a language with which to understand and explain the world around us.

The use of mathematics, like the use of all other languages, to make an argument does not automatically make the argument logically sound or grounded in reality.

In other words, the use of mathematics is insufficient to call an argument “science.” Indeed, not all scientific inquiries require mathematics.

Btw, the biggest contributor to green house effect is water vapor and effect of co2 concentration on green house effect is logarithmic, not linear. Doubling CO2 concentration does not come close to doubling CO2’s greenhouse effects.

The assertion that green house gases are what keeps heat in our atmosphere is tautological and completely useless.

Your CO2 tangent is getting increasingly asinine. Again, I never said any level of CO2 is safe for humans. I simply said we got a long way to go before the co2 levels in the atmosphere become unsafe for humans to breathe and you’re conflating dangerous to planet ecosystem with dangerous for humans to breathe.

I am trying to help you see your argument that co2 is a human “waste” product and therefore the lower the better is a completely awful one and costs you credibility on the more important point that CO2 is warming the planet to unacceptable degrees.

Yes .... it is logarithmic. Hansen's latest study estimates ECS (Equilibrium Climate Sensitity) to be 4.5C +/- 1C. That's the estimated increase from a doubling of GHG's. It won't be another 30C.

The paper also estimates that reaching equilibrium takes to a new GHG level takes over a century. So, we've only increased by 1.5C so far of the 4.5C eventually expected if GHG levels were to stabilize at their present level.

FYI - I never said the lower the better. If there were zero greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, there would be no life on Earth because it would be frozen.

GHG's must be maintained in a very narrow range for the stability of the version of the planet we depend upon. Moderation is key !!!

The issue of how CO2 impacts humans health is a tangential issue to the main point. All I can say is that we have altered the outdoor atmosphere and are breathing in a gas mixture that humans have never breathed in before outdoors.

As far as water vapor is concerned, it is indeed a powerul greenhouse gas on a per molecule basis .... but unlike CO2, methane, oxygen and nitrogen (the most plentiful gas in the atmosphere), water vapor is not well mixed around the globe. Water vapor is a local gas which is more abundant in damp and humid environments. There is almost no water vapor in the desert here in Las Vegas.

Moreover, GHG's are the driving force behind increases in atmospheric water vapor. For each degree Celsius that the air temperature increases, the water holding capacity of that air mass increases by 7%. That's why we have more have more experience of drought and intense deluges of flooding rain. The atmosphere is getting thirstier and sucking moisture out of the Earth and leading to parched land, When the precipitation events occur, they are more intense. We've seen that with hurricanes Harvey (TX), Florence and Helene (NC). Record breaking rainfall.

Well mixed GHG's like CO2 and methane along with Earth's orbital cycles are the master control of the Earth's climate system, including the relative abundance of water vapor.

4.5c over a century is not the headline you want to convince people it matters.

crickets

CRICKETS

This is the purpose of this thread.

Please provide an example ......

Which headline do you prefer ?

How about massive involuntary population reduction ? AMOC stoppage. Global starvation ? Loss of coastal cities ? Fresh water shortages ? Extreme weather in the form of wildfires, drought, flooding and heatwaves ? Novel diseases spreading throughout the globe ? The despair and misery of our children and grandchildren ? The consequences of no limits on microplastic and nanoplastic accumulation in our brains ?

What would it take to stir the love in the dark hearts of the zombies who have been taught that consumption is a virtue ?

I guess you just answered my question.
Good luck convincing anyone while being extremely shady on your background.

Snake oil salesman alert!

Practically any science with some combinatination of complex, unique, and historical phenomenon require tons of qualitative inquiry. They may become more quantitative over time but a whole lot of the hard sciences today trace back to purely qualitative frameworks and observations.

The scientific method at its core does not make math a requirement. At the core of science, which is just knowledge (or knowledge through systemic means), it's just observation, hypothesis, testing the hypothesis, conclusion, and then repeat. You could do that for a lot of things without math. And in fact, a lot of modern theories were built on fundamentally qualitative frameworks. For example, Adam Smith used qualitative observations and philosophical (axiomatic if you will) to birth capitalism as we know it today.

For another example, quantum mechanics was literally named after a qualititave assertion that energy is in quantas and is not infinitely divisible as previously assumed. They had no math to back this up... just a an observation that experimental results didn't match existing models.

Many fields still defy quantification. For example, to this day, much of geology and anthropology is purely qualitative work.

At any rate, what you (Nut Nut) fail to understand is having numbers, no matter how sophisticated or computationally difficult to derive (making the knowledge seem exclusive), you are not excused from the the duties of logic and ensuring the numbers stand up to scrutiny, especially if you want to call yourself a scientist.

That's all you have .... is character attacks.

No math. No science. No data.

And just what is it that you represent me as selling ?

Geology is quantitative.

The depth of a sedimentary layer is quantified. The rate at which a sedimentary layer is deposited is quantified. The chemical composition of the layer is quantified and distributed among its constituent ingredients. The elements in the layer are constructed from atoms bound into molecular compounds and various isotopes which have numerical values. The age of the layer can be dated with the help of understanding math such as the background rate of radioactive decay.

There is no science without math .... even a simple yes or no question has a binary response. A zero or a one.

If you want to understand the math of the greenhouse effect, here's Carl Sagan testifying before Congress on the matter 40 years ago. Do you question his command of the issue ? I'm not claiming to have done the original science work to quantify the greenhouse effect. I'm standing on the shoulders of giants like Tyndall, Arrrhenius, Sagan and Hansen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp-WiNXH...

Because basically everyone disagrees humanity is in "deep ****". With various degrees of disagreement, but no one among those who answered even remotely agrees with your estimate of risks.

Here's some math for you Lucifer.

The number of people who can explain the process by which they arrived at their conclusion of disagreement and the data they evaluated to get there is ZERO.

again, it's not like you are the only one discussing this topic. A lot of papers get published. And a lot of people are satisfied with peer review literature modeling 2100 as "actually not that bad" even in high emission scenarios.

That's how they arrive at that conclusion, by reading actual science (or reports done about the actual science).

Here's an article which describes the most recent study which attempts to monitor the prospects for AMOC collapse.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/28/collapse-critical-atlantic-current-amoc-no-longer-low-likelihood-study

the Guardian

Collapse of critical Atlantic current is no longer low-likelihood, study finds

If such literature exists, then people should be able to produce evidence of it.

Can you provide a link to an example of the literature you are referring to ?

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Proj...

For reasons that have to do with the optics of it, they still model vs 1850-1900 temperatures even if we are ALREADY at +1.4 as we agreed (and this is uncontroversial), so the purported losses aren't losses vs the path we *already are in* rather a path that *we never were in* at 0 celsius of warming over 1850-1900 (translated: the losses predicted are immensely LOWER than what they look like from there if you didn't consider we are at +1.4 ALREADY).

So basically what does that mean? what is science predicting?

Using the median SSP 3, and the median RCP 4.5 as the baseline predictions (we are already on a RCP 4.5 path basically, which would mean global emissions peaking around 2040), this means science (the consensus climate science) expects a reduction in gdp between 18% and 27% vs the "never existing" counterfactual of a world that never warmed since the 1850-1900 average, and a much lower reduction around 8-10% at most (with +3.something celsius) vs the path we are in if we stopped all emissions today.

But that's not an expected reduction from CURRENT LEVELS OF GDP. That's a reduction vs a counterfactual of gdp growing by 2% per capita every year.

So in 2100 gdp per capita would be expected to be 4.5x today levels (2% compounded growth for 75 years), and instead it would be "only" 3.5x (median estimate in the median scenarios).

That's if we don't do anything more than we are already doing to be clear, if we don't change anything anymore.

Now if science is telling me life will be *dramatically better than today for humanity* anyway , how can you come out here and claim otherwise against the worldwide scientifical consensus?