Re:In 1959, Edward Teller warned the oil industry about glob...
by nkkollaw on Monday January 01, 2018 @06:52PM
(#16048758)
You picked 2 unimportant points he made and totally ignored what he was trying to say.
The point was that many people said many different things that didn't happen at all, it makes no sense to pick one that guessed it right 59 years later.
Re:In 1959, Edward Teller warned the oil industry about glob...
by eesmith on Monday January 01, 2018 @07:06PM
(#16048814)
My complete answer is in several parts, based on the different threads which existed before I started.
This part of the thread was to focus on the incorrect reading by ChuckMcM.
I followed up on the "what [ChuckMcM] was trying to say" (I assume the 'he' refers to ChuckMcM and not Teller) at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16048733 , which was posted about 5 minutes before you posted your criticism.
I do not believe that a single wall of text would be a better way to get my points across.
That is a misreading of the text.
He said: "Our planet will get a little warmer. It is hard to say whether it will be 2 degrees Fahrenheit or only one or 5."
The change in the instrumental temperature record from 1959 to now is about 1C, or 1.8F - well within his range of 1-5F.
He also said "there is a possibility that the icecaps will start melting and the level of the oceans will begin to rise". He did not, as you summarize it, say that Greenland and the polar ice caps will have melted.
We believe the ice caps have started to melt, and the oceans begun to rise.
This is within the range of his estimate.
It's possible to calculate what the sea level rise might be if the ice melted. However, he did not give a time frame for what that would happen.
You wrote "we should have listened 100 years ago to Teller and taken action".
This event was in 1959, which is only 59 years ago. The "100" is because the talk was on the centennial of the American oil industry.
100 years ago would be closer Arrhenius's original research on the topic, from 1896, than it would be to Teller's talk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius#Greenhouse_ef...