Tilo ReberJuly 25, 2014 at 7:12 PM
I
will award, to Christopher Keating, 30,000 dollars of my own money, if
he can prove via the scientific method, that humming bird caused global
climate change is not occurring. The deadline for submission of proof
is July 31, 2014
To: Tilo Reber
I could do that, but you are just trying to hijack my blog and the post. Your challenge is very childish and doesn't prove any point. Not only could I prove that, but I am not going around making statements, contrary to science, that hummingbirds are responsible for climate change and that I can prove it. If deniers don't like the challenge, then either stop saying you can prove man made global warming is not real, or prove that you really can prove it, as you claim. It is just that simple.
I could do that, but you are just trying to hijack my blog and the post. Your challenge is very childish and doesn't prove any point. Not only could I prove that, but I am not going around making statements, contrary to science, that hummingbirds are responsible for climate change and that I can prove it. If deniers don't like the challenge, then either stop saying you can prove man made global warming is not real, or prove that you really can prove it, as you claim. It is just that simple.
Unlike you, skeptics are smart enough to know that anything, including hummingbirds, effect the climate. The effect may be so small that it cannot be easily meausured, but there must be an effect. The wording of your bet is a show of your cowardice because such a negative with no specific magnitude specified is impossible to prove. And since my bet is stated exactly like yours, you are simply blowing hot air, since you could never prove that hummingbirds have no effect on climate.
The real issue, which you did not include as the limiting factor of your bet is what everyone is talking about when they talk about AGW. In other words, is man producing a dangerous amount of CO2 based warming. Attacking straw man "denialists" based on the straw man argument that there is no change at all is simply you grandstanding for you sycophants.
If climate sensitivity is 1C per CO2 doubling or less, and given that the effect is logarithmic, then there is no reason for concern about man made climate change. Because that would mean that it takes 280 extra ppm for the first 1C, 560 ppm for the second 1C, 1120 for the third 1C, 2240 for the fourth 1C, etc.
At this point in time it has not even been proven that feedback is positive. And unless there is significant positive feedback, there is no climate danger.
Your bet is as childish and meaningless as your ideas about climate alarmism.
Response:
No, hummingbirds have no effect on man made global warming because they are within the energy system of the planet. They do not produce energy, they only transform it from a source that has stored solar energy. So, on that argument alone, we can say hummingbirds are not contributing to climate change. They are already part of the climate. Your claim that they must be changing the climate is a false one.
But, let's look at the question another way - how much energy they produce. For this exercise, let's assume that they are adding energy to the environment, not just moving it around. That, of course, is not a valid assumption because any energy they emit had to come from the environment they are in, but let's do it for the fun of it.
There is no data on hummingbird population size, but lets assume its 100 billion hummingbirds worldwide. That is an unrealistically large number, especially considering that hummingbirds are nearly exclusive to the American continents, but it will work for the purpose of our examination. These hummingbirds merely take energy in from their food and turn it into heat via their metabolic rate. This heat is radiated into the natural environment as IR radiation. Hummingbirds cannot store enough energy to survive the night at their daytime metabolic rate, so they go into tupor state and their metabolic rate drops by a factor of 100. So, we will just round it off to zero for the night and round up on the other figures. If each hummingbird radiated 1200 calories per hour, and we assume a day of 12 hours, we get 6 x 10^15 joules (100 billion birds x 1200 calories per bird per hour x 12 hours x 4.186 joules per calorie). Let's round up to 10^16 joules per day. Now, the amount of sunlight the planet absorbs every day is about 10^25 joules. That means the hummingbird energy emission is .0000001% of the total amount of daily incoming solar energy. In other words, in order to generate even one percent of the total solar energy input, there would have to be 10 million times as many hummingbirds as our unrealistically large number - 10^18 birds, or 1 quintillion birds. That would be about 6700 hummingbirds for every square meter of land area on the entire planet. We would literally be up to our armpits in hummingbirds! I mean, I love the little darlings, but there is such a thing as too much.
Still, this amount of contribution, even using inflated numbers, is way beyond out ability to detect.
So, we may safely conclude that hummingbirds do not cause global warming. In the words of the deniers - Where's my check?
I know you only made this silly bet to try and divert the challenge, but I proved the point for a reason. I wanted to show how these silly claims to try and undermine the challenge are irrelevant and are false arguments deniers make to try and get out of being held responsible for their statements.
The challenge is to people that claim global warming is not real and they can prove it. Now, what they want to do is convince people that it is not possible to 'prove a negative.' That is just another false argument. What is 'a negative'? Everything is a negative of something. I can prove the Sun is not in my backyard. That is a negative. I can prove that if a man gets his arm cut off, it will not grow back. That is negative.
Ultimately, deniers want to go around making statements they can't support and don't want to be held responsible for. That is why they don't like the challenge.
They should have thought about that before going around claiming they could prove man made global warming isn't real.
