Naked Science Forum
Life Sciences => The Environment => Topic started by: Christopher Johnson on 21/07/2009 17:30:03
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Christopher Johnson asked the Naked Scientists:
I am a huge fan of your show (http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/podcasts/), and I have a question about climate change and global warming.
I consider myself an environmentalist. I am concerned about the amount of pollution we generate, the animals we push to extinction, and the resources we exhaust. However, I don't believe that we are the driving force behind global warming. It concerns me that whenever we hear about the effects of global warming, it is always mixed with the message that we are irrevocably destroying the earth.
It can hardly be disputed that the earth is warming and the percent of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere is increasing. I would like to know, what evidence is there that humans are contributing to this significantly?
The earth's temperature rises and falls cyclically, and it has been on the increase since before the industrial revolution. We currently are not near the highest temperature that we know the earth to have reached. The polar ice caps have melted several times before. So, what percentage of the current warming trend are due to humanity and what percentage is natural?
Thanks,
Chris Johnson
West Virginia
United States
What do you think?
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It would be, at this point, impossible to state with any accuracy what the human induced portion of climate change is. The only accurate statement that can be provided is "less than we thought it was 10 years ago."
As far as humans contributing significantly to the level of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, this I would say is undoubtedly true. Soil and oceanic outgassing are contributors, but from all evidence that I have read, humans are responsible for the lionshare. Not just through carbon emissions, but also through mass deforestation. This does not necessarily mean that GHG's are the only contributor to climate change, though.
My area of research is in connections between solar variability and decadal/centennial scale migrations of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ). The research conducted in this topic is fairly recent and has not yet been widely considered in General Circulation Models, nor by the IPCC. By way of explanation, Ill post my term paper from last semester...keep in mind that it is written for a climatology class and may not be wholly self explanatory (The figures would not transfer, so I included them at a the bottom, but without captions):
Solar Forcing and Atlantic Climate during the Holocene
The sun is by far the dominant supplier of energy to the Earth’s climate system, and being a variable star, its energy does not remain constant. As far back as the 17th century, sunspot activity was thought to foretell the intensity of summer and winter temperatures, the length of the growing season, and the onset of disease. Though these claims would today be viewed as tenuous at best, the modern era has seen researchers beginning a more rigorous test of solar influence on climate. Trends can be detected between solar flux and paleoclimate records, possibly affecting even the rise and fall of ancient civilizations (Zhang et al. 2008), but the physical mechanisms influenced by the sun, that are internal to the climate system, remain almost wholly undiscovered. A proposed mechanism of solar influence, the effect of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) on Gulf Stream transport variability, will be discussed in this text.
To interpret long term climate trends and solar influence, it is necessary to look at Northern Hemisphere (NH) temperature proxies and to very briefly discuss their methods, strengths, and weaknesses. There is some debate within the climate community on the temperature variability between the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and the Little Ice Age (LIA), and how those two periods compare with the current warming trend. Two NH temperature reconstructions will be discussed, Esper et al. 2002 and Moberg et al. 2005, and were chosen because of their use in Poore et al. 2003/2004, Richey et al. 2007, and Lund et al. 2006.
Though generally considered as temporally accurate proxies for temperature reconstructions and radiocarbon production, researchers have had difficulty preserving low frequency climate signals in tree-ring chronologies. As a tree ages, it tends to create narrower growth rings that can obfuscate the climate signal contained within them, so sets of mathematical growth functions are applied to each individual ring-width chronology to detrend the signal over the tree’s life span. This has a tendency to remove not just the growth regressions as a tree ages, but because an individual tree’s life may span 200 to 400 years or more, it also compresses and effectively loses the long term climate signal over the life span of individual trees (Esper et al. 2002).
In an attempt to preserve low frequency trends in tree ring based temperature reconstructions, Esper et al. 2002 used a Regional Curve Standardization (RCS) method. After dividing tree ring chronologies into groups that exhibit linear and non-linear growth trends, an average growth function was fitted to detrend the groups of data as a whole rather than being fitted to individual ring-width records. The two independent chronologies, showing similar peaks and troughs, were then stacked to form one tree ring record. Low frequency trends were preserved, and a MWP and LIA were clearly evident from the data (see figure 1). Esper acknowledges that a lack of robust data sets from 800 to 1200 ybp may still contribute to a regional bias in the data, and that further individual ring-width sets need to be developed to strengthen our understanding of this era.
A separate multiproxy technique, wavelet transform (WT), was employed by Moberg et al. 2005 that included high resolution tree ring chronologies, as well as lower resolution sediment cores, ice cores, and borehole measurements. These data are calibrated, weighed, and stacked to produce an age independent NH temperature record that preserves centennial and millennial scale variability. Critics of this technique assert that WT overestimates the height and depth of low frequency temperature variability, and though Moberg has put forth some evidence to the contrary, no consensus has been reached on the effectiveness of this method.
Though the amplitude of paleo-temperature change is still under debate, many individual regional proxy reconstructions, much like the two widely cited NH temperature reconstructions previously discussed, show general agreement in a thermally elevated MWP, a cooler LIA, and a current modern warming period. Some researchers have cited variances in heat transport to northern latitudes via the Gulf Stream as one component that may be affecting Atlantic regional paleotemperatures. Lund et al. 2006 provides a detailed estimate of Gulf Stream flow over the past 1.2 ka.
Approximately 31 Sverdrup’s (Sv) [1 Sv = 1 x 106 ms-1] of water are transported from the Gulf of Mexico (GOM), through the Florida Straits, and into the North Atlantic (NA) via the Gulf Stream. This contributes a large portion of the warmth received in the northern latitudes in the Atlantic Basin. Using delta-18O of foraminiferal assemblages from a sequence of transecting, high resolution sediment cores, the density structure and discharge volume through the Florida Straits was able to be ascertained, at depth, for the past 1.2 ka.
Lund’s findings showed an overall transport reduction of ten percent throughout the LIA, with the largest percent reduction in benthic waters associated with the Antarctic Intermediate Water (AIW) (see figure 2). The AIW is the return flow for the North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW) and can be used to infer the strength of the Meridional Overturning Circulation (MOC). Given that the Gulf Stream presently supplies about 1.3 x 1015 W of heat to the NA (Lund et al. 2006), a ten percent reduction is a considerable amount of energy lost by the northern latitudes, and could explain at least some of the cooling during the LIA.
It has long been known that seasonal insolation differences drag the ITCZ toward the northern or southern hemisphere during their respective summers on intra-annual time scales, but until recently, little serious effort has been made to qualitatively and quantitatively measure the effects of long term solar variability on the average position of the ITCZ. Sediment cores from the GOM, the Cariaco Basin, and Lake Miragoane all show some agreement that the average position of the ITCZ has migrated on decadal and centennial scales. This phenomenon is also seen in speleothem records from China (Zhang et al. 2008; Yancheva et al. 2007). Though orbital parameters are thought to be the principal forcing agent on the consistent southward migration of the ITCZ throughout the Holocene (Haug et al. 2001), the mechanism controlling the centennial scale fluctuations remains in question.
As the Yucatan Current enters the Caribbean and flows into the Gulf of Mexico (GOM), it bifurcates into two currents, the Florida Current and the Loop Current. While the Florida Current continues along the arch of Cuba and through the Florida Straits, the Loop Current pushes with varying degree into the GOM before rejoining the Florida Current to form the Gulf Stream. This varying incursion of the Loop Current on centennial time scales is related to the latitudinal position of the ITCZ, with a higher average ITCZ position corresponding with deeper Loop Current penetration (Poore et al. 2004).
A box core taken from the northern GOM in the Pygmy Basin region (MD02 2553) provides a high resolution record that exhibits sensitivity to Loop Current position, and by extension ITCZ position, over the past 5000 years. The planktonic foraminifer Globigerinoides sacculifer can be found in many tropical regions around the world, but in the Atlantic portion of the Western Hemisphere Warm Pool, the foram rides the currents out from the Caribbean Sea, making their relative abundances in the northern GOM dependent upon Loop Current vigor (Poore et al. 2003/2004). As total solar irradiance increases, the ITCZ and the westerly trade winds are drawn to slightly higher northern latitudes. Because land generally accepts and radiates heat more readily than the oceans, this northward migrating effect of the ITCZ shows an exaggerated refraction over continental masses. This effect can be demonstrated by the NH summer and NH winter positions of the ITCZ in figure 3. As the NH rotates toward the sun during summer, the trade winds are effectively pulled across Central America, strengthening the Caribbean surface currents and pushing the Loop Current into the northern GOM. This effect allows G. sacculifer to enter the Pygmy Basin region and therefore become a proxy for general ITCZ position, trade wind strength, and Loop Current vigor.
Loop current strength in the GOM exhibits some correlation with proxies of NA climate, containing troughs that match well with ice rafted debris (IRD) events reported in Bond et al. 2001 (see figure 4). Most of the IRD events over the last 5 ka can be traced to large drops in northern GOM abundances of G. sacculifer, with paired events at about .4 and .6 ka, 1.1 and 1.5 ka, 2.9 and 3.2 ka, and 4.1 and 4.6 ka over the past 5000 years (Poore et al. 2004). In Bond et al. 2001, many NH cooling events are correlated to decades of heightened 14C production, indicating extended minima in solar activity, commonly called grand minima. If the findings of Lund et al. are taken into account, lower abundances of G. sacculifer might signify less overall Gulf Stream transport, which could translate into lower NA temperatures (Richey et al. 2007) resulting in IRD events.
Plotting G. sacculifer abundances directly against proxies of solar activity, such as 14C production, shows strong correlations over the past 1.3 ka. The MWP, lasting from about 1.2 ka to .8 ka, is noted to have extended periods of high solar activity with a single major punctuation event, a grand solar minimum called the Oort minimum, at about 1.1 ka. Abundances of G. sacculifer follow in good agreement throughout the MWP, dropping off during the Oort minimum and returning to previous levels when solar activity increases. The LIA is generally accepted to have begun around the onset of the Wolf minimum at around .8 ka, with two successive grand minima sending solar activity into depths that are not matched in Holocene solar records. The Spörer minimum is by far the longest of the recent grand minima, beginning between .7 and .6 ka, and lasting close to one hundred-fifty years. During this time period, Loop Current vigor exhibits a deep low, once again beginning recovery as the Spörer minimum comes to a close.
The first of the grand minima to be visually observed and recorded is the Maunder minimum, beginning at about .4 ka. This third successive minimum did not last as long as the Spörer minimum, the Maunders duration being about seventy years, but it is associated with the coldest period of the LIA. Relative abundances of G. sacculifer reached their lowest levels during the Maunder minimum and again began a recovery as the grand minimum ended. Throughout the LIA, Loop Current strength showed a general decline, agreeing with the aforementioned study by Lund, but the strengthening of Gulf Stream transport during the current warm period seen in Lund et al. 2006 cannot be corroborated because the Loop Current record in Poore et al. 2004 ends at around .2 ka.
Thus far, IRD events have been the only evidentiary link offered to connect wind and surface currents in the GOM with northern latitude climate in the Atlantic basin, but there are other NA proxies that are in agreement with these studies from the subtropics. Research reported by Richey et al. 2007 asserts that though fluxes in sea surface temperatures (SST) in the northern latitudes are decoupled from SST in the subtropical GOM, sea-salt-sodium (ssNa) from the GISP2 ice core still show a well correlated shift from more negative values to more positive values at about .6 ka, corresponding with a similar change in abundances of G. sacculifer and delta- 18Ocalcite from a second box core from the Pygmy Basin, GOM (PBBC-1). Changing atmospheric circulation and intensified winter winds from the Icelandic Low (IL), a dominant low pressure region in the North Atlantic, pick up sodium from sea spray and carry it inward toward Greenland, increasing the levels of ssNa in glacial ice deposits. As a climate proxy, ssNa is used to represent the intensity of the IL, which at higher values indicates heightened NA storminess. If this link can withstand continued rigorous testing, it would mean that fluctuating Gulf Stream transport into the NA, induced by solar activity, would be a major contributor to the variable climate of the northern latitudes.
Though a link between solar activity and climate has been debated for many years, modern technology has only recently allowed us to begin exploring these correlations in earnest. Radioisotope proxies have extended the limited knowledge of solar flux from the visual sunspot record of about three hundred years, to a more substantial time, spanning into the Wisconsin glaciation. Still, the cause of our sun’s variability remains elusive. It is understood that sunspot cycles such as the ~22-year Hale cycle, composed of two ~11-year Schwabe cycles, are solar magnetic reversals, but the mechanism governing the variable length and intensity of these cycles is not known. Even less is known about the rhythms of the longer solar cycles, the ~87-year Gleissberg and ~210-year deVries/Suess cycles. At least one study has attributed the 1470 ± 500 year periodicity reported by Bond et al. 2001 to harmonics in the overlapping Gleissberg and deVries/Suess cycles (Braun et al. 2005), but this periodicity is only very weakly correlated to the paleoclimate record, if at all.
There is a growing body of evidence from the GOM, as well as evidence from the Asian continent not discussed in depth here, that variability in solar insolation may have a pronounced effect on the average position of the ITCZ over decadal and centennial time scales. As with any area of paleoclimatology, questions seem to multiply exponentially. Aside from increasing the robustness of the present data, scientists might also ask why the ITCZ does not remain in a fixed, seasonal position. Seasonal migrations come from a change in the focus of the sun’s maximum radiation from the northern hemisphere to the southern hemisphere as the earth revolves yearly. Aside from minute changes in precession and obliquity, orbital forcings have largely remained the same since the MWP. Why would the sun, giving its maximum insolation to approximately the same latitude year in and year out, draw the ITCZ variably north in the GOM? Do centrifugal forces or Coriolis forces attempt to shift the ITCZ back toward the equator or is there some other mechanism at work?
Though grand maxima and grand minima have a tendency to group together in solar reconstructions, researchers will continue to ask if there is any other underlying periodicities. Even if a loose periodicity is found, how do such small changes in total solar irradiance, on the order of less than 0.2 Wm-2, have sweeping effects on the climate system as a whole? It seems that additional feedback loops are necessary to explain the variability in the data.
Much of the world depends directly on the predictability of the monsoons, and by extension the ITCZ, for their very livelihood. Paleoclimate records show that what was once lush and productive land can turn to desert in the span of a century, or even just a few decades. The sun and the ITCZ are each separately important factors in our climate, our agriculture, our water supply, and our culture. Evidence correlating the two creates an importance in understanding how an ephemeral monsoon linked with a stochastic sun will affect natural resources, and possibly even the rise and fall of civilizations, into the future.
Figire 1
(https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi481.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Frr176%2Ffrethack%2FMoberg-1.jpg&hash=65fa80425a4e5d4268fdae41517f9cc0)
Figure 2
(https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi481.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Frr176%2Ffrethack%2FLund.jpg&hash=5a0e22d358d1d3aae02561a6aa812e10)
Figure 3
(https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi481.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Frr176%2Ffrethack%2F2004gl019940-o01.gif&hash=27c03e85775b11c8ea1456cf65245b61)
Figure 4
(https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi481.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Frr176%2Ffrethack%2F2004gl019940-op02.jpg&hash=b8b8a86c5f1f928fcb2302d04a747f83)
Figure 5
(https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi481.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Frr176%2Ffrethack%2F2004gl019940-op03.jpg&hash=802043109c870315081917473fa6e061)
Figure 6
(https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi481.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Frr176%2Ffrethack%2F2005ja011500-o04.gif&hash=47f99ccb4eeec9961dc73876f2c1fbc3)
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Thanks for your response frethack. This is what I had in mind. Everyone hears about global warming, but rarely do we hear evidence. Everything I have seen online would lead me to believe our contribution is small. I am very interested in hearing the other side of the argument. Anyone seen any estimates on:
1. The contribution of the Greenhouse Effect to current climate change
2. The contribution of carbon emissions and deforestation to the greenhouse effect as compared to soil and oceanic outgassing.
Thanks again,
Chris
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One thing seems to be clear: We are running out of the stuff that may contribute to/cause global climate change. I am afraid the effects of not having fossil fuels any longer will be much more dramatic than global climate change.
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One thing seems to be clear: We are running out of the stuff that may contribute to/cause global climate change. I am afraid the effects of not having fossil fuels any longer will be much more dramatic than global climate change.
I whole heartedly agree with you...renewable resources are key to sustaining our energy needs. Even if it is proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the current climate change is mostly from natural effects, there is still urgent need to move to energy sources that do not feed social, political, and economic tensions (I know that statement is pretty broad, but, being in a science forum, Ill stop there).
Everyone hears about global warming, but rarely do we hear evidence. Everything I have seen online would lead me to believe our contribution is small. I am very interested in hearing the other side of the argument. Anyone seen any estimates on:
1. The contribution of the Greenhouse Effect to current climate change
2. The contribution of carbon emissions and deforestation to the greenhouse effect as compared to soil and oceanic outgassing.
There is plenty of evidence that the earth has been warming for over two centuries, but I am assuming by "...but rarely do we hear evidence" that you mean evidence that GHG's are the cause of the warming.
Be careful what you read online. There are ideologues on both sides of the debate that feed a lot of misinformation.
As to the contribution of the Greenhouse Effect to current climate change, no one will be able to say for certain because we still do not know all of the natural processes affecting the climate. There is still a LOT of research to be done in this area (future job security for me!). Ill root around and see if I cant find any peer reviewed papers over natural vs. manmade carbon emissions.
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Having written that the effects of running out of fossil fuels will have a huge impact on our society (it will probably bring the collapse of modern North American living), I prefer to err on the save side in regard to the effects of burning fossil fuels. We know it is bad (just turn on you car inside you garage with you in it and see how long you live), it is just a matter of scale. If it is disadvantageous to do it, why do it? Why do it if getting it wrong can cause so much mayhem?
My friends in Europe and Canada have a difficult time believing how many people in the USA still cling to the perception that humans have very little to do with the problem. They find it laughable.
One thing seems to be clear: We are running out of the stuff that may contribute to/cause global climate change. I am afraid the effects of not having fossil fuels any longer will be much more dramatic than global climate change.
I whole heartedly agree with you...renewable resources are key to sustaining our energy needs.
Sorry to disagree. There is no way that renewable resources without the help of fossil fuels will allow us to continue living as we are now in the USA/Europe/Australia. Nuclear power maybe if we construct a bunch more nuclear power plants and learn to live with the waste and accidents. If you just take a look at the food production, the current human population basically "eats" oil. Once it is gone, the people will suffer and millions will starve. Fossil fuels drive our agriculture and construction and mining industry. Wind, solar, and hydro power don't work without fossil fuels.
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My friends in Europe and Canada have a difficult time believing how many people in the USA still cling to the perception that humans have very little to do with the problem. They find it laughable.
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Laughable as they may believe it to be, there is plenty of evidence that both current and past climate change have a large natural component, and I do not know a scientist who can state with certainty the portion allotted to natural and anthropogenic factors. Climate science is comparatively a very young field and we have a fairly rudimentary understanding of how climate works in the long term. Erring on the side of caution is admirable, and I very much respect your position, but there is another side to the coin. What if we spend this money on cap and trade and carbon cuts for very little effect on regional or global temperatures? (a good number of nations that have signed the Kyoto protocol have missed their promised marks) The money spent would go a long way to building African infrastructure and improving their quality of life, as well as preparing for, if a large natural component exists, the inevitable effects of natural climate change in areas sensitive to sea level rise such as Bangladesh. (Historically, there have been many beneficial effects to currently underdeveloped regions during past climate optimums as well, but the effect of sea level rise in Bangladesh would be particularly catastrophic)
Sorry to disagree. There is no way that renewable resources without the help of fossil fuels will allow us to continue living as we are now in the USA/Europe/Australia. Nuclear power maybe if we construct a bunch more nuclear power plants and learn to live with the waste and accidents.
Im not sure why we have disagreement on this point. The switch to a majority renewable energy economy will likely take many decades to achieve, if not till the end of the century. I do not expect a magical change from fossil fuels to renewable fuels.
Please understand that I mean no disrespect to you in my opinions.
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Don't worry, I don't feel disrespected. And I hope you don't either.
My disagreement relates to the term "renewable resources are key to sustaining our energy needs". We cannot SUSTAIN our energy needs or life style without fossil fuels. The transition may be smooth if we begin now but as much as I would LOVE to see people beginning to live in ways that are sustainable, I fear that the transition will be rather rough, maybe even terrible. People have gotten used to waiting for miraculous technology solutions. People are not changing fast and I can understand why.
Erring on the side of caution is admirable, and I very much respect your position, but there is another side to the coin. What if we spend this money on cap and trade and carbon cuts for very little effect on regional or global temperatures? (a good number of nations that have signed the Kyoto protocol have missed their promised marks) The money spent would go a long way to building African infrastructure and improving their quality of life, as well as preparing for, if a large natural component exists, the inevitable effects of natural climate change in areas sensitive to sea level rise such as Bangladesh. (Historically, there have been many beneficial effects to currently underdeveloped regions during past climate optimums as well, but the effect of sea level rise in Bangladesh would be particularly catastrophic)
You are talking about getting more people stuck on fossil fuels and dependent on technology that functions only with fossil fuels and maybe nuclear power. Whenever someone says "improving quality of life" it seems to relate to the good quality of life as understood by Americans or Europeans. This is unsustainable. It will be better for a few decades and then it will be worse than now. Some areas on this planet cannot support many humans and in some of those places it will get worse. People will have to move. Better do nothing? I don't know. I am glad though that I am not in power to make such big decisions.
If burning fossil fuels is dangerous locally (your closed garage, your town, your country) and maybe globally AND if it results in a boost in population in places that cannot support this population without fossil fuels AND if fossil fuels are non-renewable, will not be affordable in a few decades (give or take a few), and there is no true replacement in sight, it seems to be reasonable to stop using them and unreasonable to worry about money and the end of development for some places. Development will stop in some places in any case. The artificial boost (based on cheap fossil fuels) some areas have experienced will not continue forever. Either because we will focus on the transition into the age of no fossil fuels at home or because we will run out of fossil fuels. Whichever comes first. One's own survival is often expensive for others.
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We cannot SUSTAIN our energy needs or life style without fossil fuels. The transition may be smooth if we begin now but as much as I would LOVE to see people beginning to live in ways that are sustainable, I fear that the transition will be rather rough, maybe even terrible.
I still dont think that there is disagreement between us. There will come a time, possibly in the next century, when fossil fuels will no longer be a necessity to create energy, but for the foreseeable future they will remain our staple energy source.
Whenever someone says "improving quality of life" it seems to relate to the good quality of life as understood by Americans or Europeans.
I am certainly not advocating a "Western" way of life for any other culture. When I say "improving quality of life" I mean providing means for clean drinking water to villages, sustainable food production, reducing the occurrence of malaria, and drastically slowing the spread of HIV.
People will have to move.
...it seems to be reasonable to stop using them and unreasonable to worry about money and the end of development for some places.
You are correct...people will have to move. This costs money...money that poor populations do not have. Bangladesh will also have to build a series of dikes and levees to prevent much of their coastal land from flooding entirely (millions of people live on this land and there is no room for them to just pick up and move). This will also cost money that they do not have...and will take time to build.
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You are certainly much more positive and optimistic than I am. We both agree that fossil fuels will not be used in the future. I just think that without fossil fuels as the convenient source for energy and resource for petrochemicals we will not be able to create as much energy as we are now. Cleaner forms of energy, energy factories, and many materials that are needed to create them and maintain them are not possible without fossil fuels.
So, while I can see the need for all those things you mention, I doubt that the energy for it will be there. Our technological abilities will be much less in the future. "Less" in the sense of "powerful". What do you do if you cannot operate large construction machines any longer? What do you do without concrete, steel, copper, glass, etc.? How do you maintain nuclear/water/solar/wind power plants without concrete or steel? How do you feed a world population when the industrial food production depends on oil to such a large extend? There are so many things we cannot do with electricity alone. Right now we cannot even make electricity with electricity alone at a large scale. And while we will one day have to learn how to do this (and I wish we would begin now while we still have the luxury of fossil fuels available), I fear that the areas that are not great for humans now will be worse in the future no matter what we do now. Water purification plants are a good thing. I have the feeling though that they would be constructed using fossil fuels and could not be repaired any longer in, say, 50 years. Same for levees and dikes. And this is assuming we can create food for 8 billion people without fossil fuels, the machines it operates and the fertilizers it allows us to create. Without the food we do not need to worry about the safety of large cities.
... for the foreseeable future [fossil fuels] will remain our staple energy source.
I am pretty sure that we will experience the decline of cheap fossil fuels at a significant level soon. One might say that we are already experiencing it if one looks at the high oil prices despite the fact that we are in a global economic recession and the oil producing countries WANT us to buy it. Just wait what happens when we feel good about our economy again. I would not rely that fossil fuels will be available as a "stable" energy source at all. But that depends on what you mean by "foreseeable". [;)]
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The one ace in the hole, technologically speaking, regarding the problems associated with fossil-fuel energy, is nuclear. It is by far the most capable alternative technology. The big obstacle is the waste problem, but that can be largely eliminated by using breeder technology and re-using the waste plutonium to generate more energy. The obstacles to that are chiefly political, not technological.
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One thing seems to be clear: We are running out of the stuff that may contribute to/cause global climate change. I am afraid the effects of not having fossil fuels any longer will be much more dramatic than global climate change.
You may wish to discuss that with the populations of, for example Bangladesh or Tuvalu.
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One thing seems to be clear: We are running out of the stuff that may contribute to/cause global climate change. I am afraid the effects of not having fossil fuels any longer will be much more dramatic than global climate change.
You may wish to discuss that with the populations of, for example .
Would a discussion with me change the science or the data or the predictions? Would a discussion change anything for the people who live there? Or would it merely change HOW it is said and how I will FEEL about their predicament? And how would that matter to the people in Bangladesh or Tuvalu?
Some areas will experience global climate change more dramatically (and sooner) than others. Right now we all (or at least some) seem to be searching for (and possibly offering) technology solutions and those solutions all require fossil fuels to come into existence and to function in the future. And now imagine the situation in 30 years with no more fossil fuel powered machines and fossil fuel materials to alleviate the situation. People will (have to) move.
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The one ace in the hole, technologically speaking, regarding the problems associated with fossil-fuel energy, is nuclear. It is by far the most capable alternative technology. The big obstacle is the waste problem, but that can be largely eliminated by using breeder technology and re-using the waste plutonium to generate more energy. The obstacles to that are chiefly political, not technological.
You currently cannot build and maintain nuclear power plants without fossil fuels.
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Karsten
Fossil fuels will be available for a long time, yet. the 30 - 40 year oil limit has been the figure which has been quoted for at least the past 30 years as I recall. That would give us 10 -20 years, if it had been correct.
In addition, there is a fantastic amount of coal down there (decades and decades, I have read). Whatever we do to the atmosphere, we don't really need to think in terms of running out of fuel.
As for who's to blame for the rising temperatures. Even that's not 100% certain. I still think we should assume it's down to us, though.
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Hasn't this topic strayed from the original question?
The only answer so far that does the job is this by Frethack
"It would be, at this point, impossible to state with any accuracy what the human induced portion of climate change is. The only accurate statement that can be provided is "less than we thought it was 10 years ago." "
yes man has contributed to climate change but we don't know the percentages and we will not know them for many years, if at all. What is a concern is that many weather events arebeing blamed on CC/AGW when there is no real evidence. The recent and ongoing fires in the USA and the heat in Australia are being used to promote CC when there is no evidence for it. Yet there is good evidence that it is cyclical. If scientists/weather presenters and the media keep insisting on blaming individual events on CC then many more people are going to become sceptics.
And for those who doubt what effects a degree or two increase in temperature can have, then you only need to look at the heat in Australia to see what 2 degrees above the seasonal average can result in.
As for running out of fossil fuels. This is many years down the line. Even the UK has 100 plus years of coal reserves and they will be mined again once the economy makes it viable. Even if/when we start to run out don't think for one minute thatwe won't start mining and drilling at the poles. The current push toward renewable energy by your local electricity producer has more to do with fooling the green consumer (sucker) than any concern for the environment or their carbon footprint.
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As for who's to blame for the rising temperatures. Even that's not 100% certain. I still think we should assume it's down to us, though.
Absolutely!
Global Warming is occurring at this point in our planets history.
There is a grey area about to what degree human activity is responsible for current global climate change.
Therefore, there are four future scenarios:
1. Global Warming isn't predominantly anthropogenic & WE do nothing.
2. Global Warming is predominantly anthropogenic & WE do nothing.
3. Global Warming isn't predominantly anthropogenic & WE squander our resources.
4. Global Warming is predominantly anthropogenic & WE seriously tackle it.
I hope it is self-explanatory as to the likely numbers for human mortality & suffering in each case. So, without wanting to appear callous, the question of risk-versus-resources should be analysed statistically.
So, with present CC-causation models (assuming one doesn't believe that they are a further tool of a green conspiracy) it would seem prudent to assume (as SC infers) that mankind is to blame. Of course, plenty of (unbiased) funding is needed to improve our climate models and thus, our strategies be reshaped as required. culpability of mankind's influence is revealed as exaggerated.
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Additionally, I am compelled to express my belief that not one of us (scientists, engineers or society in general) can afford to wonder blindly into a future of the 'green band-aid' solutions currently being sold to us by our governments or big business every day.
This will lead to an even worse case scenario:
Global Warming HAPPENS & our resources are squandered pretending to fix it.
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Peppercorn:
"This will lead to an even worse case scenario:
Global Warming HAPPENS & our resources are squandered pretending to fix it."
Climate change is happening. Worst case scenario; is it's cyclical and AGW is so insignificant that all our resources and effort were a waste of time.
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Peppercorn:
"This will lead to an even worse case scenario:
Global Warming HAPPENS & our resources are squandered pretending to fix it."
Climate change is happening. Worst case scenario; is it's cyclical and AGW is so insignificant that all our resources and effort were a waste of time.
Sorry, my mistake - for the overly literal of you out there - I should have stated 'preventable global warming HAPPENS'. I am in no way claiming that climate change is not happening or that it will not continue to happen (human intervention now can only, at best, limit these effects). I also, personally, would strongly support the proposition that human activity is extremely likely to be the predominant cause of climate change.
SkepticSam - I'm thinking you are claiming (via slightly ambiguous grammar) that human effects on global warming are not an appreciable factor in our climate's current instability. This is quite a bold claim and I, for one, would be interested to see how you would substantiate it.
Personally, I think it would be lovely if we could say, beyond doubt, that global warming is completely unrelated to human activity; then we could get on with surviving the effects without the worry of trying to fix it. However, in the world of practical science, the answers are not usually so clear cut.
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What I think people need to know, and what the press just can't get right is that there is a difference between a changing climate and (AGW) climate change.
I am all for a nice neat green option, but please don't shove it down my throat with the threat of fines if I don't recycle enough of my household waste.
Don't tell me that we only have 5 years (less than that now) before we reach the tipping point of no return.
Don't show me pictures of ice sheets collapsing and tell me that we can stop this and even maybe reverse it if we cut down on fossil fuel usage.
Don't tell me that we need to get back to CO2 levels of 1990, like it's a magical number whilst giving the air industry longer to reach their level of emissions.
Don't tell me that all disasters :Katrina: LA Fires: Hurricane Activity: Tornado activity and so on are all a result of climate change.
There is far too much that we still don't know. It's only recently that we figured out El Nino and La nina plus other oceanic movements.
Even at this stage we can not say with any certainty that any event is a result of climate change. Why is it that when one region has a statistically cooler yearly temperature that it's just a statistical anomaly and within the range of variation. Yet when the next year there is a warming event it is a result of climate change?
We need honesty, and unfortunately most people get their information from the "popular press". They are well known for publishing half truths or variations to suit the own thinking or that of their readership.
I know that Al Gore, Heidi Cullen and James Hanson, to mention just a few, have been invited to a friendly set of climate discussions and engage in open debate with so called skeptics. They have refused at every invitation. Why?
"What proportion of global warming is attributable to humans?"
We just don't know, but lets not kid ourself that all we need do is "Act on CO2". It's just not that simple.
Take in to account how we have changed the local and global environment by deforestation and covering the area with concrete and tarmac. Our use of domesticated cattle. The way we have changed the course of waterways and our use of dams. Diverting water to deserts (Las Vegas for example) and depriving the areas up stream or up pipe of the water they should have.
And that's just for starters.
And at the end of the day, those that say climate change is mans fault are in a no lose situation. AGW turns out not to be a factor/happening. Well that's because of the action taken as a result of the data presented by climate scientists reversed the situation. AGW is real and we end up screwed, see told you so.
Here are a few links: Nothing heavy or full of science but it may, just may, make you think.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2009/jun/22/greg-craven-climate-change
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/capitalweathergang/2009/09/a_skeptical_perspective_on_glo.html
http://blogs.chron.com/sciguy/archives/2009/09/the_more_i_study_climate_science_the_more_confused.html
http://www.accuweather.com/video-on-demand.asp?video=37129475001&channel=VBLOG_BASTARDI&title=Debunking%20Global%20Warming%20%20in%20California's%20Wildfires
At the end of the day all most people can do is read and learn. THis should be encouraged, but read from both sides or the argument and don't be fooled by statements that attribute one event or one yearly set of records to AGW climate change.
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I am all for a nice neat green option, but please don't shove it down my throat with the threat of fines if I don't recycle enough of my household waste.
I am sorry you equate local government's efforts to enforce recycling policy (in what, I hope, is a fair scheme) with shoving green issues down your throat. Recycling has more to do with good regional-resource management as with fighting global warming. Also, what is the nice neat green option you are for, if not recycling for example?
Don't tell me that we need to get back to CO2 levels of 1990, like it's a magical number whilst giving the air industry longer to reach their level of emissions.
I agree. Picking an arbitrary year for good CO2 levels is insulting to people.
Yes, it's deplorable to let industries (like air-travel) who can lobby the strongest off the hook.
Don't tell me that all disasters :Katrina: LA Fires: Hurricane Activity: Tornado activity and so on are all a result of climate change. Even at this stage we can not say with any certainty that any event is a result of climate change. Why is it that when one region has a statistically cooler yearly temperature that it's just a statistical anomaly and within the range of variation.
I don't think anyone here (or, I hope, any politician worth a damn) is trying to claim any of these things. The key point is that there is a finite likelihood of cause and effect (importantly in maths, we can say that the probability of a link is a real number even if the means of calculating it isn't know). In the case of global climate change there are a number of recognised models which factor in human influences, but none of them claim to be indisputable, just a model of likely outcome.
We need honesty, and unfortunately most people get their information from the "popular press". They are well known for publishing half truths or variations to suit the own thinking or that of their readership.
Again, I agree. If by the "popular press" you mean the tabloids and similarly dumbed down media then the only common motive would seem to be sensationalist reporting (good for punchy headlines) on either side of the argument.
{Al Gore, Heidi Cullen and James Hanson have been invited to climate discussions and engage in open debate with sceptics. They have refused at every invitation. Why?}
Definitely. More rational public debate should be encouraged as a large amount of misconceptions exist of both sides of the argument. I would suspect that a number of valid commentators from both sides have met for public debate over the years, but more needs to be done.
"What proportion of global warming is attributable to humans?"
We just don't know, but lets not kid ourself that all we need do is "Act on CO2". It's just not that simple.
Yes - To assume any fixed point of view is potentially dangerous: "Acting on CO2" & switching brain off. Deciding it's nothing to do with us & switching brain off is even more so.
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Peppercorn:
I don't have too much free time to go in to detail in my reply, Sorry for that. But I will come back as and when time permits.
I am sorry you equate local government's efforts to enforce recycling policy (in what, I hope, is a fair scheme) with shoving green issues down your throat. Recycling has more to do with good regional-resource management as with fighting global warming. Also, what is the nice neat green option you are for, if not recycling for example?
Recycling has more to do with local authorities trying to meet governments targets, and governments are trying to meet targets set by Europe. We are not running out of space for landfill, we are running out of licensed landfill sites and space. I have nothing against going green and recycling your household waste but lets start with the manufacurers of what you buy. Do they really need to pack your food with all of that plastic and cardboard? Why do fruit and veg, for example, need all that packaging? And don't mention things like Easter Eggs and other over boxed products. This is where legislation should start.
There is a real danger that there will be a green fatigue and a genuine backlash to being told what we can and can't do, and what action the local, regional and national governments will take against us if we fail to comply.
People mainly react to whats in their pocket. And many people need to see that they are benefitting from the actions forced up on them. Most can not see that the actions they do today will / could benefit their grandchildren. Instead of giving incentives to big industry, why not do little things for the little man? Can we not have a rebate on our council tax or rated depending on the volume by weight that we recycle in our bins?
Then we have the subject of forcing car manufacturers to increase fuel efficency to again save the planet. People don't want to lose their jobs or pay more for their car just because their government tells then what's what. It may seem a cop out but why are these ideas not packaged as a way for "us" to save money. Better fuel efficency means less at the pumps. More nuclear, wind and tidal power will lead to lower energy prices. Not the scare tactics of global warming, much of which is not understood by the public.
I don't think anyone here (or, I hope, any politician worth a damn) is trying to claim any of these things. The key point is that there is a finite likelihood of cause and effect (importantly in maths, we can say that the probability of a link is a real number even if the means of calculating it isn't know). In the case of global climate change there are a number of recognised models which factor in human influences, but none of them claim to be indisputable, just a model of likely outcome.
Unfortunately, these things are being claimed. It was claimed that the wildfires were a result of global warming. Other instances of claims where single events are a result of global warming. Hurricane Katarina it was claimed caused so much devistation to NO due to global warming. Again this was not true.
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We are not running out of space for landfill, we are running out of licensed landfill sites and space. I have nothing against going green and recycling your household waste but lets start with the manufacturers of what you buy. ... Can we not have a rebate on our council tax or rated depending on the volume by weight that we recycle in our bins?
Are you seriously suggesting that we should be increasing the number of licensed landfill sites? That's never going to fly.
"lets start with the manufacturers of what you buy" - An excellent point. Legislation should be radically tightened up on packing, as well as "food miles to market". Also, it seems sad that a whole generation has grown up with most not even knowing that fruit & veg is seasonal. The days of 'anything you want any time you want' are numbered.
Although in a ideal world, we could have recycling-related rebates (or fines - the old carrot or stick argument) to encourage households. In reality though, can you imagine the increase in fly tipping?
Better fuel efficiency means less at the pumps. More nuclear, wind and tidal power will lead to lower energy prices. Not the scare tactics of global warming, much of which is not understood by the public.
I think the government are wising up to this thought - Their 'Cut CO2' ads show a father who doesn't really care about 'green', but does care about lower bills!
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I consider myself an environmentalist. I am concerned about the amount of pollution we generate, the animals we push to extinction, and the resources we exhaust. However, I don't believe that we are the driving force behind global warming. It concerns me that whenever we hear about the effects of global warming, it is always mixed with the message that we are irrevocably destroying the earth.
If our leaders are right about humans being able to counter GW then many less species and habitats will be lost in the long run.
Original question: What proportion of global warming is attributable to humans?
It is likely to be, at least a significant amount (say more than half). It is quite likely to be a majority share. Obviously, terms such as likely & quite likely are problematic - especially as the majority of voters will be inclined to look for any doubt if there is an implied cost involved.
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Are you seriously suggesting that we should be increasing the number of licensed landfill sites? That's never going to fly.
I never said we should increase the number of landfill sites. I said we are running out of licensend sites. But yes, at some point there will be a need for more landfill sites. If not for domestic refuse then to extend fridge mountain and other waste sites. There may well be a local level stink about it, but as long as it's "not in my back yard" people will live with it.
...miles to market". Also, it seems sad that a whole generation has grown up with most not even knowing that fruit & veg is seasonal. The days of 'anything you want any time you want' are numbered.
Not as long as people want cheap food it not. Miles to market is just a fancy as is locally grown fruit, veg and reared farm produce. There is a small market for these goods but only to those willing to pay the high prices. The reason big supermarkets thrive is because we are poorer in real terms and need to watch the pennies. People want 2 for 1 on their veg and don't care about the farmer, they just want or need cheap food.
Although in a ideal world, we could have recycling-related rebates (or fines - the old carrot or stick argument) to encourage households. In reality though, can you imagine the increase in fly tipping?
The household waste recycling rebate is easy. If we can already have smart bins that tell the local authority the weight of refuse in our black bins it's easy to do the same for our green bins.
Fly tipping will increase as people are forced to use smaller "friendlier" bins.
Edit: post modified to correct a quote.
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I never said we should increase the number of landfill sites. ... But yes, at some point [I am saying] there will be a need for more landfill sites.
These two statement contradict each other, don't they?
If not for domestic refuse then to extend fridge mountain ...as long as it's "not in my back yard" people will live with it.
That depends on how many more are needed. People are already moaning about landfills near to their homes. I can't imagine any new site going through without some NIMBY action. Fridges, etc should probably be made the responsibility of the manufactures to recycle -so encouraging more green design in the first place.
Miles to market is just a fancy [term for local produce]. ... The reason big supermarkets thrive is because we are poorer in real terms. ... [People] don't care about the farmer, they just want or need cheap food.
"we are poorer in real terms" - compared to when? Those in work (still the vast majority) are averagely earning about what they were 2 years ago. Yes, utilities & fuel have risen substantially for maybe 5 years, but most wage packets have more or less followed suit. The supermarket monopolies having taken hold since the 80s meant that our bills (for subsistence foods) have been kept low. Thus, "the days of 'anything you want any time you want' are numbered"(my quote) as consumers are beginning to loose this shot-term luxury.
The household waste recycling rebate is easy. If we can already have smart bins that tell the local authority the weight of refuse in our black bins it's easy to do the same for our green bins. Fly tipping will increase as people are forced to use smaller "friendlier" bins.
It's not a question of ease of implementation, it's what will happen if councils introduce sliding scales of charges - that is many households will put the minimum in the bins, then dump the rest. Short of an Orwellian state where councils know what you bought & thus how much rubbish/recycling you'll produce, packaging waste is only controllable at source - supermarkets, etc. Forcing people to use smaller bins will indeed be encouraging fly-tipping, just as will charging by weight.
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Thanks for the reply.
I never said we should increase the number of landfill sites. ... But yes, at some point [I am saying] there will be a need for more landfill sites.
These two statement contradict each other, don't they?
My mistake. It's possibly the way I wrote it but I was trying to say that I didn't think I said we SHOULD increase the number of landfill sites. Although I think we will, at some point, have to.
If not for domestic refuse then to extend fridge mountain ...as long as it's "not in my back yard" people will live with it.
That depends on how many more are needed. People are already moaning about landfills near to their homes. I can't imagine any new site going through without some NIMBY action. Fridges, etc should probably be made the responsibility of the manufactures to recycle -so encouraging more green design in the first place.[/quote]
I don't think we will know how many more are needed until we need them. People moan and vote with their pockets. given the choice of greater fines for too much waste, they will live with more landfill sites. You are correct that the NIMBY action will be there but no matter what the proposal is be it Coal fired powerstation, nuclear powerstations or just landfill there will be a NIMBY action to suit.
Miles to market is just a fancy [term for local produce]. ... The reason big supermarkets thrive is because we are poorer in real terms. ... [People] don't care about the farmer, they just want or need cheap food.
"we are poorer in real terms" - compared to when? Those in work (still the vast majority) are averagely earning about what they were 2 years ago. Yes, utilities & fuel have risen substantially for maybe 5 years, but most wage packets have more or less followed suit. The supermarket monopolies having taken hold since the 80s meant that our bills (for subsistence foods) have been kept low. Thus, "the days of 'anything you want any time you want' are numbered"(my quote) as consumers are beginning to loose this shot-term luxury.[/quote
Yes utilities and fuel have risen but so have local and government taxation. For the growing number of unemployed or those in minimum wage jobs I believe they are poorer than they were. These are IMO the backbone of the supermarkets policies on low prices and 2 for 1 offers. No supermarket is going to change policies and stop selling cheap food.
The household waste recycling rebate is easy. If we can already have smart bins that tell the local authority the weight of refuse in our black bins it's easy to do the same for our green bins. Fly tipping will increase as people are forced to use smaller "friendlier" bins.
It's not a question of ease of implementation, it's what will happen if councils introduce sliding scales of charges - that is many households will put the minimum in the bins, then dump the rest. Short of an Orwellian state where councils know what you bought & thus how much rubbish/recycling you'll produce, packaging waste is only controllable at source - supermarkets, etc. Forcing people to use smaller bins will indeed be encouraging fly-tipping, just as will charging by weight.
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Do we not live in a semiorwellian state already? A sharing of data bases would allow any gov. agency or department to know who much you earn, what you out goings are and what and where you bought anything on your credit or debit card. Not to mention the fact the you are cought on CCTV throughout your day.
Just a thought: it would seem that we have strayed from the initial topic question, would you be happy to continue here or start a new, seperate topic?
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Just a thought: it would seem that we have strayed from the initial topic question, would you be happy to continue here or start a new, seperate topic?
Sure! We should move it to Just Chat!
What are we calling this new topic?
Maybe-'What's gone wrong with the direction of green policies and green advertising?'
Meanwhile I might try & remember what the original question here was!
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Call me mystic meg if you like but trying to have a sensible discussion in just chat can't happen. You will have a few good posts and then it will be lost in thenoise of people posting general chit chat.
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Call me mystic meg if you like but trying to have a sensible discussion in just chat can't happen. You will have a few good posts and then it will be lost in thenoise of people posting general chit chat.
mmmm, looks like you're right!
Is 'being green' being hijacked by policy-makers and advertisers? (http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=25821)
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Chris:
Don't waste your time disussing 'human caused' clobal warming. First, Warm is better then cold. Ask the Vikings who got frozen out of Greenland. Second, CO2 has varied from 3000 ppm during dynosaur era to the much lesser levels seen now. Over that entire span the climate Has swung from Sauna To Ice Age to the moderate climate we have today.
We are very near a climate optimum now. A bit warmer would be a comfort. However, the Carbonista Cult wants to cool things off. As if they are heading for the North Slope of Alaska to escape the excessive heat of Malibu.
The dumb son of a bitches. The cold era after the midieval warming, if I recall my history chronologically, exterminate about one half the entire European population. But if you live in Malibu, who's counting.
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Chris:
Don't waste your time disussing 'human caused' clobal warming. First, Warm is better then cold. Ask the Vikings who got frozen out of Greenland. Second, CO2 has varied from 3000 ppm during dynosaur era to the much lesser levels seen now. Over that entire span the climate Has swung from Sauna To Ice Age to the moderate climate we have today.
We are very near a climate optimum now. A bit warmer would be a comfort. However, the Carbonista Cult wants to cool things off. As if they are heading for the North Slope of Alaska to escape the excessive heat of Malibu.
The dumb son of a bitches. The cold era after the midieval warming, if I recall my history chronologically, exterminate about one half the entire European population. But if you live in Malibu, who's counting.
It's always interesting to see someone who can take account of the other person's point of view.
For example I'm particulalr impressed by your concern for people living in places like Bangladesh or Tuvalu. Presumably you count them among "The dumb son of a bitches".
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peppercorn - Christopher Johnson
"What proportion of global warming is attributable to humans?" The question is moot because the earth has been cooling for nearly a decade. Further, sunspot cycle 24 has been sleeping for nearly three years. If this trend keeps up you will need warmer cloths.
I reference you to the Maunder Minnimum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunder_Minimum
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Impressive :)
Let me see. "The only accurate statement that can be provided is "less than we thought it was 10 years ago.""
And "We cannot SUSTAIN our energy needs or life style without fossil fuels."
And Awh :)
Sounds like you're building yourself a mutual little circle of 'skepticism' here.
Well, don't let reality disturb you.
And this.
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/globalwarming/2009-02-25-warming_N.htm
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/01/21/eco.warmingantarctic/index.html
State of the Climate Global Analysis August 2009
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/?report=global&year=2009&month=8&submitted=Get+Report
If you're living in the States, check this.
http://www.globalchange.gov/publications/reports/scientific-assessments/us-impacts/download-the-report
"In the United States, the Global Change Research Act (GCRA) of 1990 mandates that every four years an assessment of the impacts of global change in the U.S. be conducted by the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP). Responding to this mandate, the USGCRP carried out during the late 1990s the first National Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change in the United States. Between 2004 and 2009, the Climate Change Science Program (CCSP), which incorporated the USGCRP, produced a series of 21 Synthesis and Assessment Products(SAPs)."
And all of those reports are actually optimistic :)
Whether you like them or not, they lean to the optimistic so called 'neutral side' as supported by all scientists but a very select few today.
http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=25747.msg276353#msg276353
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I am thankful that none of my colleagues or professors rely on Youtube, USAToday, or CNN for any of their data and evidence in their climate studies.
NOAA on the other hand is an amazingly useful source for data (I use it daily...in fact, I am downloading from the NCDC paleoclimate database as I type), but the climate report that you posted fails to mention the portion of warming that is anthropogenic.
As far as .gov and .org websites, treat them with a skeptical eye...politics and science do not mix...at all.
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Climate change is something that has been going on sense Earth began. To say it is human caused is like saying humans are responsible for the change in seasons.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Where is it? Human greenhouse emotions are insignificant compared to what happens naturally. Earth's climate is not well understood. I think if you look carefully at the claims you'll realize what's going on. It's nothing but anti-American and anti-west propaganda.
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The question is moot because the earth has been cooling for nearly a decade.
Interesting. Do you have a scientific source to support this?
sunspot cycle 24 has been sleeping for nearly three years. If this trend keeps up you will need warmer clothes.
I admire your ability to talk about a solar 'trend' of three years, at the same time as dismissing terabytes of scientific data correlating increasing levels of CO2 with climate change.
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Climate change is something that has been going on sense Earth began. To say it is human caused is like saying humans are responsible for the change in seasons.
No not at all, really!
Here's a SIMPLE analogy for you:
An oak tree that has been growing for seven times my lifetime has been changing naturally over two centuries. That doesn't stop me getting a chain-saw and chopping it down.
Now imagine six-billion chainsaws!
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Where is it?
The claims are neither extraordinary or lacking in evidence. CO2 levels have increased by one quarter in a century and CO2 is undoubtedly a greenhouse gas. Just what level of proof are you going to settle for? Of course there are detractors (a very very few of them real scientists!). There always are when the status quo is challenged.
Earth's climate is not well understood.
Our climate is incredibly well understood considering how complex it is.
It's nothing but anti-American and anti-west propaganda.
Eh? When you say anti-west are you aware that the major evidence for GW is being correlated in the 'west'! A large percentage of it in the US.
If you'd said anti-oil, anti-capitalist or even anti-Republican you may have sounded less paranoid.
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Is there any chance that people will stfu about sunspots?
They come and go with a period of about 11 years- we know about that.
Saying that they are a cause of climate change is like saying that night time is a cause of climate change.
The climate needs to be measured over a timescal long enough to average out the efect of things like that or they need to be modeled and taken into account.
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As has been said by others here, I don’t think it is possible to attribute the extent to which man contributes to climate change.
It is perhaps not so much a scientific problem in the evaluation, as a mathematical one.
The first problem you encounter is ‘where do you start?’ Our very existence, both as a species and as individuals, gives rise to an effect on the eco system, albeit microscopic in the case of the individual. Should this be counted as a contributory factor? Or should we discount this and label it as ‘the natural effect’ of each individual? But can you discount the individual? If you do, must you then discount the family group, the extended family group and so on and so forth. Go down this path and you could say man has no ‘natural effect’ on the eco system. Now we are getting into politics, rather than science or mathematics.
I may be a vegan who grows my own food, has no car, uses no electricity or gas, drinks only water from my own natural spring, lives in a mud hut and recycles everything I use. I buy nothing and waste nothing. I am 100% self sufficient. What is my overall effect on the environment? I inhale oxygen and exhale CO2. Do the food plants I grow (given that I grow only sufficient for my own needs and no more) convert that CO2 back into oxygen, or are there insufficient plants for this. I burp and fart. I wee and poo (and that pongs a bit, so there are gases given off). Do these gases contribute to my negative effect?
Surely each individual animal (humans included, regardless of lifestyle) must have a negative effect, which is countered by each individual plant with its positive effect. So if you take a 1 – 10 scale such as this:
- 10:9:8:7:6:5:4:3:2:1:0:1:2:3:4:5:6:7:8:9:10+
Animals | Plants
and place each individual at a point on the negative side according to the effect of a self sufficient individual; you could extrapolate the net effect of the entire human race at ‘natural effect’ level.
Now comes the monumental mathematical task of attributing the following, as a share to each individual, of:-
Extracting minerals, producing the equipment to extract those minerals, producing the machinery to produce the equipment to extract those minerals, producing the machinery to produce the machinery to produce the equipment to extract those minerals. Getting my drift here?
Trucks to move the machinery which is used to produce the machinery which is used to produce the equipment to extract those minerals. Trucks to move the machinery which is used to produce the equipment to extract those minerals. Trucks to move the equipment to extract those minerals. Trucks to move the extracted minerals.
Machinery to produce the trucks to move those extracted minerals.
OK, I won’t go on, but suffice to say this goes on and on and on and can be used for everything we eat, drink, wear, sit on, sleep in, build with, listen to, watch, dispose of………
Take a look around you. What do you see? Some letters, a clock, a pen and pencil, a cup of coffee, a biscuit (cookie), four walls (painted), a window, a carpet, the chair you are sitting on, the clothes you are wearing, your hair (you had it cut the other day with manufactured scissors) and washed over a sink with a shower head that had hot water; and towel dried, maybe even a hair dryer, which had to be manufactured and used electricity, which had to be generated, which needed generators, which ran on mineral oil. Oh yes, and the generators had to be manufactured.
The complexities of modern life mean that everything we have and everything we do adds to our negative effect, which we hope plants, with their positive effect, will offset.
Even a farmer, ploughing his field with an ox drawn plough is having a negative effect. He and his ox are using energy, which requires food and oxygen. They are producing waste, poo, wee, dead cells and CO2. He is wearing clothes which require cotton, wool, wood, rubber, leather and oil. They are made with machines, which require the basic raw materials to make those machines: Minerals. And the plough? Yes that too has to be made from minerals. So we come back to square one.
Would you fancy being the mathematician who tries to work out this lot and all the rest, of course?
OK, you can say I have taken this to the absolute extremes, but then the question I would ask is, ‘where do you start and where is the cut off?’ Because that button on your shirt/blouse, has had a significant impact on your negative contribution, as has that biscuit (cookie) you are about to eat. What went into producing it? For each ingredient (wheat, corn, oats, sugar, nuts, fruit, fats, eggs, milk, water) you must start at the beginning, the minerals to make the ploughs, tractors, seed separators and sowers, fertilisers, insecticides, fungicides, irrigation systems, harvesters, trucks, and then the ovens, baking tins, cooling racks, packing machines and very factory they are made in. The individual packet packaging materials, the bulk packaging packing materials. The trucks that deliver them to the shops, the building and fitting of the shops……… Oh good grief, here we go again!
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Karsten - You wrote: "... running out of fossil fuels will ... probably bring the collapse of modern North American living." This sounds more like wishfull thinking then fact. The US and China have so much coal we could go on for centuries. Right now, the US has shifted its coal sources to those with less sulphur. Plenty of that stuff as well.
Karsten - You also wrote: "My friends in Europe and Canada have a difficult time believing how many people in the USA still cling to the perception that humans have very little to do with the problem. They find it laughable."
I can only speculate as to what problem you refer? My suspicion is these individuals are entirely unaware CO2 is at a near global minimum; the temperature is at a near climate optimum; and the climate has been both warmer and colder in recorded history then it is now.
Do your chuckling freinds have ANY idea what a cooler climate would bring them? I have little sympathy for those who have not studied history.
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Pepper - You wrote: "Original question: What proportion of global warming is attributable to humans? It is likely to be, at least a significant amount (say more than half). It is quite likely to be a majority share.
I just ran across this solar output chart that seems to correlate with modern climate trends over a thousand year period up to the year 1900. In 1900 solar output was higher then at any time since about the year 800. Values since 1900 are not shown. I will continue to research this area, especially in regards to cosmic rays. I am unconvinced climatistas even know what is a cosmic ray...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Carbon14_with_activity_labels.svg
"Sunspot numbers over the past 11,400 years have been reconstructed using dendrochronologically dated radiocarbon concentrations. The level of solar activity during the past 70 years is exceptional — the last period of similar magnitude occurred over 8,000 years ago."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_variation
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"Sunspot numbers over the past 11,400 years have been reconstructed using dendrochronologically dated radiocarbon concentrations. The level of solar activity during the past 70 years is exceptional — the last period of similar magnitude occurred over 8,000 years ago."
Lit, can you point me to data showing a marked jump in mean global temperatures occurring exactly 70 years ago and continuing to present? I mean a major one.
Otherwise this data (if totally reliable) is interesting, but nothing more.
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I dont have a lot of time right now, as I have class in about 15 minutes, but I can provide evidence...lots of it. Ive spent the last few years collecting resources, so this will not be nearly comprehensive. I can also do a little better than 70 years...I can go back more than 400,000 years, and establish a very long trend. Ill start with the landmark paper by Gerard Bond. This particular paper doesnt equate temperature specifically, but it does relate North Atlantic ice rafted debris (IRD) events to solar activity over the past 12,000 years. IRD events are caused by glacial calving in Greenland, Iceland, and Northern Canada during times of marked glacial growth (cooling events). As the icebergs calve and spread into the N Atlantic, they carry LOTS of sediment within them that are dropped into the ocean when they melt. The latitude and concentrations of these glacial sediments in the oceanic cores can tell us a lot about sea temperatures and the extent of glaciation/sea ice.
The citation for the paper is:
Bond, G., Kromer, B., Beer, J., Muscheler, R., Evans, M.N., Showers, W., Hoffmann, S.,
Lotti-Bond, R., Hajdas, I., Bonani, G., 2001. Persistent solar influence on North
Atlantic climate during the Holocene. Science 294 (5549), 2130–2136.
I encourage you to look it up and read it if you can. If you cant find it, let me know and I will email it to you. Bond is a very well respected geologist/climatologist and is considered among the giants in the field. This paper alone has been cited over 700 times, and this is not even including his works helping to lay the foundations of plate tectonics during the 60's and 70's. Anyway...enough adoration :)
The black lines are abundances of different IRD sediments in oceanic cores (all originating from different areas of the N Atlantic). The blue lines are 14C concentrations taken from tree rings chronologies if I remember correctly, and the red lines are 10Be concentrations from Greenland ice cores (both proxies for solar activity)
(https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi481.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Frr176%2Ffrethack%2FBond2001.jpg&hash=349c963183e337349ceba186c0c3f387)
I have much more to post on shorter and longer time scales if you would like to see it in the future.
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Karsten - You wrote: "... running out of fossil fuels will ... probably bring the collapse of modern North American living." This sounds more like wishfull thinking then fact. The US and China have so much coal we could go on for centuries. Right now, the US has shifted its coal sources to those with less sulphur. Plenty of that stuff as well.
Karsten - You also wrote: "My friends in Europe and Canada have a difficult time believing how many people in the USA still cling to the perception that humans have very little to do with the problem. They find it laughable."
I can only speculate as to what problem you refer? My suspicion is these individuals are entirely unaware CO2 is at a near global minimum; the temperature is at a near climate optimum; and the climate has been both warmer and colder in recorded history then it is now.
Do your chuckling freinds have ANY idea what a cooler climate would bring them? I have little sympathy for those who have not studied history.
Litespeed: Yes, I ignore coal as a useful fossil fuel in the USA. I cannot imagine our cities being powered by coal-fired power plants or heated with residential coal stoves. Or our cars being moved with coal. Or synthetic fuels being created from coal with nuclear power (which we do not seem to plan to build). Or our food being grown with the help of coal. I thought you had a BIG problem with China using so much coal? Now you suggest that using coal is a solution for the USA? Talk about smog! I am sure we will use coal. We may have to. But it will change the USA and it sure will be much less comfy in this place that revolves around comfort. Oil and gas are easy. Wishful thinking that our civilization will collapse? I hate to be wrong, but in this case I hope I am. For my daughter's sake at a minimum. Please don't be rude and assume that I wish a dramatic an involuntary change in our society to happen. Just because I fear it may be does not mean I hope it to be.
(By the way, if I use future tense and the word "probably" I surely do not claim to present a fact.)
As for climate change, I trust professional science organizations rather than individual scientists. Somewhere you can find a scientist to provide data for almost anything. Not reliable. Not so with large professional science organizations. They are careful with what they say. And I do prefer to err on the safe side. I have not seen data that tells me that burning LESS fossil fuels results in damage to our environment. On the other hand, I turn on my car in my closed garage with me in it and can find out within minutes how dangerous this is. Of course this is simplifying the problem, but as I said, I tend to err on the safe side.
As for my chuckling friends, they know that we once upon a time had it hotter and at other times colder here. What does that have to do with anything? Of course we live in good times considering the planetary history. Well, this might actually depend on where you live. It is easy for a North American to observe the climate, consider the concerns about global climate change a bunch of hog wash, and promote and continue to enjoy their excessive life-style. It reminds me of goats and gardeners. Anyhow..., the global climate today is certainly pleasant for many. Why not respond to change in either direction, colder or warmer? Some people care about what happens to other people. And if what they do is wrong they try to change something. And they do find it hard to believe how desperately some Americans cling to straws that let them believe nothing is wrong (and continue guilt-free to consume, waste, and trash at world-record levels). Whether the European life-style is sustainable either is another story. I am sure it is pleasant to point at North America which is creating more damage than Europe. Always good to know someone worse than oneself. And I am also sure you can find rather strange-thinking Europeans.
That does not change that the USA needs to rethink how they live.
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Karsten
The planetary situation is just fine, and I will explain why. First, population will decline later this century. Specifically, as I posted elsewhere, the planetary population fertility rate is ALREADY approaching replacement level. More importantly, the industrial world AND China are already BELOW replacement level. [Further, I don't have any children so I am A Green Hero.]
In addition, this CO2 nonsense is just that. As I have pointed out elsewhere, plantetary CO2 is near an all time low, AND solar radiance is near an eight thousand year high. In other words, the climate is just about as good as it can get. A little bit warmer might even be better, but I will not quibble. Anyone with any sense of history within historical times should understand this. Anyone with any sense of planetary history should understand the threat to life on earth is cold weather, not warm weather.
Further, you wrote: "It is easy for a North American to observe the climate, consider the concerns about global climate change a bunch of hog wash, and promote and continue to enjoy their excessive life-style." First, even if it is getting warmer, that is a whole lot better then getting colder.
As for your Amused European Friends? Europe does not have a very good track record on just about anything that might improve the lot of The Unwashed Masses. Fortunately, the English Channel has, for the most part, kept European Political Emotions on the other side. On the other hand, Britain seems increasingly contaminated by the EU.
It does not matter much. Continental Europe will be banging its collective head towards Mecca in less then two hundred years anyway.
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In addition, this CO2 nonsense is just that. As I have pointed out elsewhere, plantetary CO2 is near an all time low, AND solar radiance is near an eight thousand year high. In other words, the climate is just about as good as it can get. A little bit warmer might even be better, but I will not quibble. Anyone with any sense of history within historical times should understand this. Anyone with any sense of planetary history should understand the threat to life on earth is cold weather, not warm weather.
Further, you wrote: "It is easy for a North American to observe the climate, consider the concerns about global climate change a bunch of hog wash, and promote and continue to enjoy their excessive life-style." First, even if it is getting warmer, that is a whole lot better then getting colder.
Why does the AAAS not agree with you regarding the "CO2 nonsense"? Are you one of those individual scientists I cannot trust?
You seem to be one of those Americans who look at the climate change with little worries since the change will not effect you much either way. It has been said before, 95% of the world does not live in the USA and may have to worry about what goes on. I hope the world does not judge US-Americans solely based on the carefree image you present.
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litespeed, why do you keep regurgitating the same misguided beliefs across approximately 762,000 other threads?
plantetary CO2 is near an all time low
This is a misleading statement. 'all time' is not really relevant to us considering homo sapiens have only been around 50 thousand years or so. There is evidence to suggest CO2 levels have not been this high for 2 million years.
It seems all I need to do to debate you now is quote myself from the aforementioned 762,000 other global warming threads you've participated in.
It is not only the level of CO2 that is a problem, but the rate at which it is increasing. Slow increases like those that have occured in history give life time to evolve and adapt, and ocean chemistry to buffer against ph decrease, but at the current rate this will be alot more difficult.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/03/09/2510699.htm
Dr Howard says that over time, the ocean may be able to counteract acidity by dissolving accumulated shells of dead marine organisms on the ocean floor, thus raising ocean pH and its ability to take up CO2.
But he says this will take a long time and come at the cost of living marine organisms.
"The buffering mechanisms in the ocean are quite slow compared to the rate at which we are putting fossil fuel carbon into the atmosphere and into the ocean.," he said.
http://www.coralcoe.org.au/news_stories/coralfutures.html
“When CO2 levels in the atmosphere reach about 500 parts per million, you put calcification out of business in the oceans.”
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071017102133.htm
New calculations made by marine chemists from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) suggest that low-oxygen "dead zones" in the ocean could expand significantly over the next century. These predictions are based on the fact that, as more and more carbon dioxide dissolves from the atmosphere into the ocean, marine animals will need more oxygen to survive.
the climate is just about as good as it can get. A little bit warmer might even be better
I have already argued against this astonishingly ignorant statement here: http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=22612.msg282336#msg282336
Anyone with any sense of history within historical times should understand this. Anyone with any sense of planetary history should understand the threat to life on earth is cold weather, not warm weather.
One minute you refer to 'all time' history, then you want to try to make examples of human history. If by this statement you are reffering to your comparison of today's climate with that of roman times I have already addressed this in this post - http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=26664.msg283276#msg283276
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the threat to life on earth is cold weather, not warm weather
LS, your like a stuck record! And the rest of your post, your overly dismissive attitude to other posters and, in places apparent close-to-racist attitudes seem most out of place on a science website.
You my friend are a bigot!
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pepper
My comment on Mecca was gratuitous, and I appologize for it. However, Islam is not a race, it is religion. And I doubt you are a biggot even though that was unfortunately implied by your post. As for broken records. I confess. I don't take these CO2 concerns seriously for several reasons.
First, it does not matter; nothing meaningfull will be done to reduce CO2 emissions until both China and India become prosperous enough to consider alternatives. In addition, I do not believe in out-of-control global warming catastrophy for the simple reason life flourished during eras of 3,000 ppm.
Finally, [broken record again] the climate was warm during both Roman and Midieval times. The reasons are obscure, but there does seem solid evidence of a 1,500 year cycle, but we don't know why. In any event civilization flourished during the warm eras. This seems to be related to excess food production available for non-agricultural work projects.
The most serious threat to life is the inevitable next Ice Age.
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What life flourished during eras of 3000ppm?
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You wrote: "What life flourished during eras of 3000ppm?"
I stand corrected. The CO2 curve varies from about about 1,500 ppm during the Triasic, to about 2,500ppm in the Jurasic, to as little as 750 ppm in the Cretaceous; a span of about 250 million years. Give or take a T-Rex or two...
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Carboniferous_climate.html
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I dont have a lot of time right now, as I have class in about 15 minutes, but I can provide evidence...lots of it. Ive spent the last few years collecting resources, so this will not be nearly comprehensive. I can also do a little better than 70 years...I can go back more than 400,000 years, and establish a very long trend. Ill start with the landmark paper by Gerard Bond. This particular paper doesnt equate temperature specifically, but it does relate North Atlantic ice rafted debris (IRD) events to solar activity over the past 12,000 years. IRD events are caused by glacial calving in Greenland, Iceland, and Northern Canada during times of marked glacial growth (cooling events). As the icebergs calve and spread into the N Atlantic, they carry LOTS of sediment within them that are dropped into the ocean when they melt. The latitude and concentrations of these glacial sediments in the oceanic cores can tell us a lot about sea temperatures and the extent of glaciation/sea ice.
The citation for the paper is:
Bond, G., Kromer, B., Beer, J., Muscheler, R., Evans, M.N., Showers, W., Hoffmann, S.,
Lotti-Bond, R., Hajdas, I., Bonani, G., 2001. Persistent solar influence on North
Atlantic climate during the Holocene. Science 294 (5549), 2130–2136.
I encourage you to look it up and read it if you can. If you cant find it, let me know and I will email it to you. Bond is a very well respected geologist/climatologist and is considered among the giants in the field. This paper alone has been cited over 700 times, and this is not even including his works helping to lay the foundations of plate tectonics during the 60's and 70's. Anyway...enough adoration :)
The black lines are abundances of different IRD sediments in oceanic cores (all originating from different areas of the N Atlantic). The blue lines are 14C concentrations taken from tree rings chronologies if I remember correctly, and the red lines are 10Be concentrations from Greenland ice cores (both proxies for solar activity)
I have much more to post on shorter and longer time scales if you would like to see it in the future.
I thought I didn't care about disputing with you 'skeptics' anymore but.
Ah well, changed my mind :)
Quoting a conversation in realcimate
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/muddying-the-peer-reviewed-literature/
Go there and look in the 'readers comment section', and please, read the rest of the comments following the quotation and see for yourself.
---------Quote-----------------
With respect to your statement that “No one calculates the surface temperature (which is well observed) using the atmospheric heat content”. I do not know how you made this bizzare interpretation of the quotes from the reports I provided to you!
[Response: Your quote stated exactly that the equation for determining T of the planet involved an equation using the rate of change of the heat content, the forcing and lambda. I do not recognise that anyone determines T in such a fashion. -gavin]
In your original post, you wrote
“Please point me to one study anywhere in the literature which has used the surface temperature record to infer changes in the heat content of the atmosphere”.
I have done that in the NRC (2005) report and the CCSP report which is in the chapter that Ben Santer authored.
[Response: Sorry, but no. I have no objection to the CCSP quote in the slightest. But it is completely un-responsive to my question since it does not address atmospheric heat content at all. And despite the NRC quote (on which you were a co-author) I still don't see anyone actually calculating H using T. Show me one such calculation. - gavin]
Now that I have answered your challenge to the question in your original post, you have changed the question to “”No one calculates the surface temperature (which is well observed) using the atmospheric heat content”. Of course, we don’t and no one has claimed this! You have mis-represented what I wrote with this later claim.
[Response: I just read what you quoted. I agree it would be a bizarre thing to do (progress!). - gavin]
The authors of the [with the"odd" quote] NRC report, besides myself, were Daniel Jacob, Roni Avissar, Gerald Bond, Stuart Gaffin, Jeff Kiehl, Judith Lean, Ulricke Lohmann, Michael Mann, V. Ramanthan and Lynn Russell. For you then to state that the “quote from the NRC report is, frankly, a little odd” simply means you disagree with it. The peer reviewed NRC report assessed the climate communities perspective on the surface temperature anomaly and what this metric means in terms of radiative forcing and climate system heat changes. Your disagreement with the statement in that report is with a wider community than just the authors of the Klotzbach et al 2009 paper.
[Response: Had I peer reviewed it, I would have questioned it. I didn't, and so there it is. I'm perfectly happy to be in disagreement with a few lines of an NRC report (these are good, but not infallible). However, there is still not a single calculation that uses this formulation that I can see. If this was so widely supported by the community, there would be an actual paper that used this equation to calculate atmospheric heat content anomalies surely? Yet there is not. - gavin]
On your statement that “Half of your paper using an incorrect expectation (based on the McKitricks’ inadvertently mistaken calculation) and the other half doesn’t address the issue at all (since no real physical process in the PBL can cause a bias in the surface temperature records)”
indicates that you still do not accurately report on (or understand) our paper. First, Ross McKitrick’s calculations were not mistaken but used a set of data from your GISS model output.
[Response: Unfortunately, it appears to be you that just doesn't understand. The subset of model output that McKitrick used (which was provided for a completely different issue) is not capable of giving the metric you want. It doesn't matter what model it came from. I did do the calculation that you wanted and let you have the full raw data to check it. The answer is very different from what you got from McKitrick. Did you find my calculation in error perhaps? If so, let me know and we can see what the issue is. In the meantime you appear to be arguing with me over what the GISS model shows for amplification of the MSU-LT trends over land. There is no argument here - McKitrick's answer is not correct (though his error was inadvertent). Your refusal to take the correction on board appears to be quite deliberate. Why? - gavin]
Moreover, to state that “half” of our paper depends on that calculation is wrong. Our results are robust even without using an amplification.
[Response: This makes no sense. What is your result then? Comparing two trends without having a reason to think about how they should be related allows you to conclude nothing. - gavin]
Second, the bias in using the surface temperature trends is in its interpretation as a metric of temperature trends above the surface. We have clearly shown (in several of our papers) that a systematic warm bias exists when the surface temperature measurements are in a stably stratified boundary layer, and the lower troposphere warms. The Klotzbach et al 2009 paper examined this issue and concluded this is a robust result.
[Response: But (and now we are apparently back to square one), no one has ever made that interpretation! If they had, there might be some point to this, but they haven't. The only paper I know that used the energy content of the atmosphere in a calculation (Levitus et al, 2001) used the energy content metric directly from a reanalysis. Perhaps you know of another example? - gavin]
As we have written before, we look forward to a formal exchange with you on this issue in the peer-reviewed literature as part of a Comment/Reply.
[Response: I tried really hard to help you guys out with this one, under the naive assumption that you would want to get it right all on your own. I didn't have to check McKitrick's calculation, let alone do the proper calculation myself and embroil myself in yet another pointless debate. You chose (are choosing) instead to persist in error despite having the right answer given to you, and the tools at your disposal to check the calculation any which way you want. Dr. Klotzbach said that you were going to put in a corrigenda and I urge you to do so and to make it substantive. - gavin]
----------End of quote-----------------------
And don't tell me it's humbug. We both know that this is one of the guys making the paper you cite.
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I thought I didn't care about disputing with you 'skeptics' anymore but.
Ah well, changed my mind :)
The label "skeptics" was always very amusing to me. I wonder when exactly skepticism became unnecessary to science.
As for what you actually meant by the label, that I do not believe that humans have an effect on the climate system, you are very far off the mark. The radiative effect of CO2 is at least qualitatively established (though not quantitatively), so I would be academically dishonest if I did not acknowledge that humans have altered the climate system to some extent. I have said such in many previous posts, and would become a very poor climatologist if I didnt. It is the degree of our contribution for which I am a "skeptic", and nothing more than that.
And don't tell me it's humbug. We both know that this is one of the guys making the paper you cite.
Im not sure if you meant to post a different link and accidentally included the wrong one. Please clarify. The person responding in the comments section is Dr. Gavin Schmidt, who runs the realclimate.org website, and is a colleague and co-author with at least one of my climatology professors. He is not associated with Bond et al. 2001...nor with any other Bond publication that I have ever read. The responses happen to *mention* Dr Bond once as an author of a National Research Council report, but Dr. Schmidts responses have absolutely nothing to do with the paper that I have posted. They do discuss McKitrick and McIntyre some...was this supposed to be in response to the thread below and accidentally posted here?
http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=26877.msg284908#msg284908 (http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=26877.msg284908#msg284908)
Gerard Bond has written MANY papers and reports, and his opinions were highly sought after until his death in 2005. This should serve to lend gravity to his body of work, which puts me at a bit of a loss as to your intention for posting this reply.
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I doubt you are a biggot even though that was unfortunately implied by your post.
How?
As for broken records. I confess. I don't take these CO2 concerns seriously for several reasons.
Not taking them seriously is one thing - that's dismissal or even apathy.
Repeatedly preaching the opposite is quite another!
Not being a bigot, I accept the possibility that I may be wrong to trust the body-scientific in their standpoint that:
1. The earth's eco-sphere is currently sustaining a warming trend.
2. That any rapid change is global temps is bad for life in general.
3. The vast majority of the change is caused of man's activities.
The one of these statements that lacks the 'knock-out blow' of truth is number 3. The other two are, by scientific bodies the world over, beyond doubt.
nothing meaningful will be done to reduce CO2 emissions until both China and India become prosperous enough to consider alternatives.
Quite right. We in the west have had our 'cake' for a long time. Now we owe it to the rest of the world to pay them back for the damage. India and China (& the rest) deserve the growth they are now on the verge of realising. We need to pay to ensure that they can do it cleanly; whilst cutting our growth back and concentrate on taking responsibly for our own poor & destitute. [obviously, what I've written is a massive oversimplification, but if it's a fair and sustainable world we want that's the general gist.]
...there does seem solid evidence of a 1,500 year cycle, but we don't know why.
Okay, I'll indulge you. How many times has this 'cycle' been repeated? On provable evidence that is (after all, you would only accept the most rigorous evidence from the other side).
The most serious threat to life is the inevitable next Ice Age.
Undoubtedly another ice age will occur some indeterminate amount of time in the future. Statistically, we are overdue for all sorts of planetary disasters - the Jellystone eruption, meteors the size of NYC, etc. So what! By your logic, we all should start building enormous towers now to get above the debris cloud that will be coming - Comparing this to your 'I'm going to drive around extra to combat the coming ice age'.
The difference is CC is happening now (the meteor is already in the sky -if you like) - let's at least attempt to try to slow it!
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pepper - You wrote: "Original question: What proportion of global warming is attributable to humans?" If the emails hacked from the Director of University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit are real, then GW for the last decade or more is directly attributable to specific individuals.
You may be better at math then I am. Perhaps you can figure out just how much of the reported GW is from these particular humans [emphasis added] they seem to have it all worked out:
-----------------------
From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley ,mann@XXXX, mhughes@XXXX
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@XXX.osborn@XXXX
Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow.
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
Thanks for the comments, Ray.
Cheers
Phil
Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone XXXX
School of Environmental Sciences Fax XXXX
University of East Anglia
Norwich
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/hadley_hacked/
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pepper - "Quote ...there does seem solid evidence of a 1,500 year cycle, but we don't know why." Okay, I'll indulge you. How many times has this 'cycle' been repeated?from the other side)."
"Scientists got the first unequivocal evidence of a continuing moderate natural climate cycle in the 1980s, when Willi Dansgaard of Denmark and Hans Oeschger of Switzerland first saw two mile-long ice cores from Greenland representing 250,000 years of Earth's frozen, layered climate history. From their initial examination, Dansgaard and Oeschger estimated the smaller temperature cycles at 2,550 years. Subsequent research shortened the estimated length of the cycles to 1,500 years (plus or minus 500 years)."
http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=2319
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pepper - You wrote: "... Now we owe it to the rest of the world to pay them back for the damage."
What Damage? All industrial nations have cleaner environments now then at any time in the last many hundreds of years. [Can you imagine living in a metropolitan area where chamber pots are thrown out of upstairs windows?] Further, the climate is far more docile then it was even 200 years ago. If you get The History Channel I recommend 'The Little Ice Age: Big Chill (History Channel)' this comming Wednesday.
At any rate, my basic point is that CO2 legislation in the Industrial World is entirely pointless:
"...wind and solar ... are just one-sixth of 1 percent of American ...consumption. Nuclear? ... rich nations endorse reducing world carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050. [however] if nuclear is to supply even 10 percent ... the world must build more than 50 large ... plants a year. Currently five a year are being built." http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/will112209.php3
Reducing CO2 from industrial societies is little more then self-flagelation and would have about the same effect as the midieval version during the Black Death. [Which, incidentally, was accomodated by above mentioned Little Ice Age.]
So. Planetary CO2 will continue to increase. Inevitable. PERIOD. The good news? It just might not matter all that much. And Get A Load Of This: we now have evidence the highest levels of climate research scientists have been [pardon the expression] cooking the books. In order to "...hide the cooling".
As 'The Church Lady' used to say. "Well. Never mind..."
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pepper - "Quote ...there does seem solid evidence of a 1,500 year cycle, but we don't know why." Okay, I'll indulge you. How many times has this 'cycle' been repeated?from the other side)."
litespeed is correct. At least the past two glaciations display Dansgaard/Oeschger (DO) events, and much of the reason we cant tell beyond that is because of resolution problems in glacial cores. They show up in every major proxy...ocean sediment cores (around the world), glacial cores (both Antarctica and Greenland), as well as speleothem records (around the world, though the best examples are in China). It is not yet known whether it is a true cycle, or an internal response from the climate system, but the period actually has a somewhat wide range in error at 1500 +/- 500 years. These also agree well with ice rafted debris events reported in Bond 2001 above (Ill send you the paper if you like...just ask). The Gleissberg (~87 yrs) and deVries/Suess (~220 yrs) solar cycles form harmonics with a periodicity that ranges at around 1500 +/- 500 years, which is also reported in the Bond paper, but a solid, compelling link between the two has not yet been established. It is possible that centennial scale cooling events during the Holocene are expressions of the DO events from the glaciations.
As for the East Anglia emails...It would be better to judge them in the context of the conversation, which we do not know, unfortunately. So far, the only definite wrongdoing that I can see is in circumventing FoI requests...which leads one to wonder exactly what they have to hide. McKitrick and McIntyre have really been a thorn in their sides, but that is not a reason to circumvent the law. (I actually think that McKitrick and McIntyre have done some pretty good work...the hockeystick fiasco...Goddard Space Institute having to change 1934 to being the warmest year on record instead of 1998)
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emails hacked from the Director of University of East Anglia
Good grief! The 'denialist' camp must be be in dire-straits if we have sunk to a level where commenting on one alleged email that can't be substantiated is banded about - on this site of all places. In any case, one bad egg does not a conspiracy make! This sort of thing is a distraction at best and should not be posted in the first place.
What Damage? All industrial nations have cleaner environments now then at any time in the last many hundreds of years.
I think you're confusing cleaner environments with better air quality.
Reducing CO2 from industrial societies is little more then self-flagelation
Do you want to explain that rhetoric, please?
It is not yet known whether it is a true cycle, or an internal response from the climate system, but the period actually has a somewhat wide range in error at 1500 +/- 500 years.
Thanks for the offer of sending the paper. I'm sure it would be interesting, although being out of my field I will take it's rigour on trust at present.
That said, I have some a couple of queries that you might be able to illuminate on.
First, what do you mean by "internal response"?
Second, a fifty percent error margin - how can anything be analysed or predicted from that? And even that assumes that the extrapolation for the core samples is valid.
Thirdly, let's just say, for arguments sake that this analysis is right on the money, what does it give us as a prediction of future climate trends? Does it indicate in any good-science way a climate maxima is happening?
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fret - You wrote: "First, what do you mean by "internal response"? I don't have a clue, but also have the epistomological advantage of not having written it.
You also wrote: "Second, a fifty percent error margin - how can anything be analysed or predicted from that?" 1,500 years plus/minus 500 is not fifty percent, and it is not an error margin, it is, I THINK, an observed variation. None-the-less, those who argue this point tell us they observe this particular cycle in historical times, and we are now due for a warming. Which, IMHO, is WAY better then the alternative.
As for the embarrassing email? There is not just one. There is an entire sequence. I don't know how serious it is. But hell, the guy flat out says he is manipulating the data.
Flagelation? The industrial world can begger itself back to huddling in caves without fire at all while India and China, about half the world population(?), build thousands of coal plants without even modern SO2 scrubbers. Its entirely pointless. Farting into a hurricane.
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Flagelation? The industrial world can begger itself back to huddling in caves without fire at all while India and China, about half the world population(?), build thousands of coal plants without even modern SO2 scrubbers. Its entirely pointless. Farting into a hurricane.
Depends on what you want to achieve. Do you want to stop or slow down the hurricane or do you want to get better at farting? I for one think that it would be wise to practice farting. We (in the USA) are lousy at it and it would be of great advantage to be so skilled that it will allow us to live entirely without hurricanes. Or at least smaller storms. We could even become one of the world's leaders in farting technology. Although it will be hard to catch up with the Europeans. Great farting going on there. I believe even the Chinese are practicing farting while they are building up the hurricane simultaneously. Now that we have created a hurricane ourselves, we just sit on our asses, expect to reap the benefits, and do nothing. Not knowing how to fart at a really big scale leads to "Developing County" status.
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First, what do you mean by "internal response"?
Sorry, the term is a little vague. What I meant by "internal response" is the climate system reacting to a number of forcing agents that just happen to culminate about every 1500 years rather than a direct response to a single (or a few) forcing agents. Say that Greenlands continental glaciers begin advancing because their accumulation rates overcome ablation (melting...sort of). Because of this advancement, large ice rafting events occur in the N Atlantic as the glaciers calve off icebergs, which causes a freshening of the normally dense, salty water in the N Atlantic, and pushes the overturning circulation slightly southward (the meridional overturning circulation "recycles" surface water into deep water currents, somewhat like a conveyor belt). This in turn would also cool the northern latitudes because heat is no longer carried as far north by the surface currents, and allow sea ice to extend further south...perpetuating the "cycle".
This is a very brief (and likely poorly written) synopsis of one hypothesis for Heinrich events. DO events and Heinrich events are related in that DO events are warming periods lasting on centennial time scales with intermittent cool periods. Some of these cooling periods have very large ice rafting events called Heinrich events, which appear to have a loose periodicity.
Second, a fifty percent error margin - how can anything be analysed or predicted from that? And even that assumes that the extrapolation for the core samples is valid.
Thirdly, let's just say, for arguments sake that this analysis is right on the money, what does it give us as a prediction of future climate trends? Does it indicate in any good-science way a climate maxima is happening?
You would be very surprised at the error margins involved in almost all areas of climate research. This particular one is not 50%, but about 33%. As for the extrapolation from the core samples...DO and Heinrich events are repeated over many different types of proxy records from all over the world. The timing and degree of climate system response varies somewhat from region to region, which is to be expected, but it is pretty certain that they have occurred.
*If* solar activity is the main forcing agent for these events, as well as the cooling and warming events during the Holocene, it would be expected that the very high solar activity of the past 150 years or so would produce a climate optimum. Even if this is proven the case (which could take many more years of research) that still does not mean that *all* of the warming being experienced is from natural sources.
Sorry it took me so long to reply...I love the holidays :)
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Hi Kartsten,
I understand Indians [from India] do a lot of loud farting, and may actually be a sort of status symbol for being well fed. Cows and other ungulant animals are WAY good at this. Thus the term 'Holy Cow'. I believe some people support various types of vegetarianism in order to cut down on cow methane.
On the otherhand, trash dumps have become so technically efficient that methane is sometimes harvested from rotting trash. Further, human farts are also ignitable. As a college freshman we tried to convince one of our room mates of this. He was skeptical but agreed to lay back on the lower bunk, put his feet on the underside of the upper bunk, while we held a butane lighter in the proper location.
He really let one go resulting in a perfect six or seven inch blue flame. This scared the living hell out of him and he ran from the room like, well, his butt was on fire, and quenched it all in the shower nearby. One of the better stories of my long accademic life.....
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fret - Your observations on margin of error are well taken. Its one reason I am a skeptic in general. During the 1970's oil embargo we were assured natural gas supplies would be exhausted in ten years. For Sure!
I noticed unused tennis courts and office buildings brightly lit late at night and actually considered starting a small buisiness to provide specialized lighting management for such things. We would contract with businesses and government to ensure lighting was turned off late in the evening after every one was gone. The Lighting Police! Now natural gas supplies are estimated at two hundred years. Decorative outdoor lighting in metropolitan areas is routine. Jeeze......
Also during the 1970's we were assured the signs of a New Ice Age were 'everywhere'. Over time I began to understand the social dynamics of hysteria. These hysterias range from poisoned Jack in the Box Taccos, to 'give up colesterol eggs' to the various statins to reduce cholesterol.
For decades I have challenged my physicians to provide studies showing statins routinely increased life expectancy in healthy people. HA! Talk about tortured science. They never even argued with me very much. Sort of shuffled their feet and mumbled about this or that advantage. In fact, EYE was the one who informed them of studies showing Simvistatin apparently has a huge impact on reducing dimentia in Veterans Administration studies. It seems to be the only LARGE advantage, and is limited to this particular statin. But mums the word.....
So. I get suspicious when people support GW by showing photographs of forlorn Polar Bears, or seem entirely ignorant of actual cyclical ups and downs within historic times. And of course they do themselves no service in trumpeting this hurricane, or that hot summer, or a cluster of toronadoes as support for their views. Its just rediculous. More specifically, the Little Ice Age endend in the mid to late 1800's. And it got warmer. What in the living hell did they expect?
Now its getting cooler. For now. I just hope it does not get COLD, like the Little Ice Age.....
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fret - In addition to the very large margins of error in the variables we know, it seems clear we do not have anything near a complete list of variables. For instance, I believe most vocanic activity takes place in the oceans. I have never even seen this listed as a variable, much less a quantification of the effects, or if these effects change over time.
It reminds me of The Drake Equation used to estimate the number of advanced civilizations in the Galaxy. I think Drake plugged in some Wild Ass Quesses, and came up with less then twenty. Over the years, on a routine basis, some SETI reasearcher or another expresses absolute confidence we will discover such a civilization within x number of years. This usually happens after plans are made for ever more sophisticated detection methods.
Then actual data started coming in. Two things happened. First, the number of variables in the Drake equation started increasing. For instance, he never considered the importance of our specific, and very weird, moon. The equation for that variable adds orders of magnitude AGAINST the advanced life. Seems you need just the exact size of an impact planet impacting the earth at just the exact angle and speed. Without this you do not get a stable climate on the planet. Think a four bumper bank shot on a pool table to sink the eight ball.
Further, the original equation did not include consideration of Gas Giants. It turns out you really really need at least one Gas Giant in the outer solar system to police up potential catastrophies such as Shumaker Levy Comet. But it gets worse. We have now detected perhaps three hundred extra solar planets, and quess what. All but one of these systems have Gas Giants in their Inner Solar systems. Scratch 299 Goldie Locks orbits.
And the one rocky planet detected is too close to its sun. I know something about statistical sampling, and all this is really really bad for the Drake Equation.
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What I meant by "internal response" is the climate system reacting to a number of forcing agents that just happen to culminate about every 1500 years rather than a direct response to a single (or a few) forcing agents.
Thanks for the explanation, frethack.
So, if my understanding is correct, this very general climate trend could either be related to some sort of long-term variation in energy input (most likely solar) OR a purely climatic feedback loop of one kind or another (I.E. influenced by many factors perhaps including northern sea salinity cycles).
I'm sure you would agree that the single outstanding conclusion that we can draw from this sea ('scuse the pun!) of observation and analysis is that our world's climate approaches one of the most complex and hard-to-predict systems Man has to deal with.
There is, at the same time, some very fundamental aspects that affect our atmosphere. They include very well understood chemical interactions, including the spectral absorption of atmospheric gases. It just seems foolish in the extreme to add Our own random impacts to a system we are still in the infancy of understanding.
*If* solar activity is the main forcing agent for these events, as well as the cooling and warming events during the Holocene, it would be expected that the very high solar activity of the past 150 years or so would produce a climate optimum. Even if this is proven the case (which could take many more years of research) that still does not mean that *all* of the warming being experienced is from natural sources.
Even the most direct sampling from ice cores, etc seem to give a far from decisive image about what the Earth's climate looked like in any one period. It would seem folly to claim as anything more than conjecture that this ambiguous evidence points to more than a bit-part for solar variation in the overall climate history.
Under the current circumstances of our known impact, I hope it will take a great deal more proof than this for any scientist working in the field.
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So, if my understanding is correct, this very general climate trend could either be related to some sort of long-term variation in energy input (most likely solar) OR a purely climatic feedback loop of one kind or another (I.E. influenced by many factors perhaps including northern sea salinity cycles).
It would very much surprise me if it were an either/or situation. The solar effect is very obviously there. The radio nucleotides produced by variations in solar activity are very well correlated with major IRD events, but there are a few excursions that appear to be solely within the system. There are more than a few papers on this subject, and if you would like, after finals are over I can compile a list.
I'm sure you would agree that the single outstanding conclusion that we can draw from this sea ('scuse the pun!) of observation and analysis is that our world's climate approaches one of the most complex and hard-to-predict systems Man has to deal with.
Yes, absolutely. Without question.
There is, at the same time, some very fundamental aspects that affect our atmosphere. They include very well understood chemical interactions, including the spectral absorption of atmospheric gases. It just seems foolish in the extreme to add Our own random impacts to a system we are still in the infancy of understanding.
You are mostly very correct. However, I am still waiting to see a paper that can quantitatively measure the radiative properties of the various greenhouse gasses. We know that it happens, but its the "how much" that I want to know. There are other gray areas as well, such as cloud nucleation, which we understand next to nothing about. The importance of understanding this process cannot be overstated, as clouds are a major factor in the earths albedo.
Even the most direct sampling from ice cores, etc seem to give a far from decisive image about what the Earth's climate looked like in any one period.
One core cannot do much on its own, but a multiproxy approach that establishes a very large body of evidence can begin to reveal the big picture. We know a lot more than we did 20 years ago and can make some educated assertions, but much more work is necessary.
It would seem folly to claim as anything more than conjecture that this ambiguous evidence points to more than a bit-part for solar variation in the overall climate history.
If this were the only major evidence for solar influence, I would agree with you. As I said, there is MUCH more to post, which I can return to after finals are over. In perspective, the sun effectively provides the earths climate system with 100% of its energy. There are other sources of energy input (cosmic radiation, volcanism (general tectonics), magnetism, etc.), but they comprise only a very small fraction of a percent of the total energy compared to that received from the sun. In my opinion, the folly is in thinking that variations in the single source of energy to the climate system would have little effect here on earth.
Under the current circumstances of our known impact, I hope it will take a great deal more proof than this for any scientist working in the field.
As I stated above, this is not a single, lone paper that researchers are basing their findings on. It was merely a paper by a scientist (who is very well respected on both sides of the debate) that can serve as a starting point to post more evidence. It is worth stating that there are a good many reputable scientists researching solar influences on climate. After finals are over I can begin posting the larger body of evidence (which by no means will be exhaustive...there is more out there than I can feasibly post).
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After finals are over I can begin posting the larger body of evidence.
Well, until then, good luck with those finals!
I will take on the generally valid points you've made - It is good to ensure that no unfounded assumptions have slipped through the net for either argument.
When you are talking about radiative properties of GH gases, I take it you mean their emission spectrum. I would be surprised if those data are not easily found... I will start by Googling it...
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When you are talking about radiative properties of GH gases, I take it you mean their emission spectrum. I would be surprised if those data are not easily found... I will start by Googling it...
Not necessarily their emission spectrum. What I am looking for is a reproducible experiment that can show that X ppm of CO2 produces Y W/m2 of radiative forcing with Z W/m2 of incoming solar radiation.
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IN GENERAL
Climatologist and the climate models are entirely incapable of modeling the last decade of plantetary cooling. The guys in Bolder Colorado seem entirely perplexed by all the snow shoveling that has come their way. The actual words they use are something like 'inexplicable'. Perhaps they used the word 'travesty' or some such to describe climate modeling failures.
It does not matter much. The CO2 guys are looking more and more like Pope Urban whats his number and Galaleo. My quess is these maniacs are PRAYING for more signs of warming. Unhappily I hope for the same. The alternative is cooling, famine, pestulance, and all that comes with cold climates.
Who woulda thought....
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IN GENERAL
Climatologist and the climate models are entirely incapable of modeling the last decade of plantetary cooling.
You can shorten that even further. How about:
Climatologists and the climate models are entirely incapable of modeling the climate.
If you dont understand or cant even account for all of the input parameters there is little hope of getting anything meaningful from the other end. That being said, models will hopefully be far more useful once processor capacity and our knowledge of climate progresses.
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Hi Kartsten,
I understand Indians [from India] do a lot of loud farting, and may actually be a sort of status symbol for being well fed. Cows and other ungulant animals are WAY good at this. Thus the term 'Holy Cow'. I believe some people support various types of vegetarianism in order to cut down on cow methane.
On the otherhand, trash dumps have become so technically efficient that methane is sometimes harvested from rotting trash. Further, human farts are also ignitable. As a college freshman we tried to convince one of our room mates of this. He was skeptical but agreed to lay back on the lower bunk, put his feet on the underside of the upper bunk, while we held a butane lighter in the proper location.
He really let one go resulting in a perfect six or seven inch blue flame. This scared the living hell out of him and he ran from the room like, well, his butt was on fire, and quenched it all in the shower nearby. One of the better stories of my long accademic life.....
Litespeed- my comments about farting where supposed to be understood as a metaphor. If we don't do the little things now ("farting into a hurricane", as you put it), we will fall behind developing technology that will help beginning today but later for sure. Especially since China is trying real hard to become the global leader in clean-energy technology while we in the USA still bicker whether it is really necessary and look for novel ways to get entertained.
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litespeed, the email you quoted about "hiding the decline" was referring to the temperature data based on tree rings, after 1960 there began to be discrepancies between tree ring data and thermometer data. (The tree ring data declined, whereas other data did not) "Mikes trick" refers to Dr Michael Mann, one of the worlds leading paleoclimate experts, famous for his reconstruction of global temps based on different sources such as corals, ice cores, historical data and of course tree rings, and overlaying all the data onto the same graph.
So the decline he was hiding was from temp data based on tree rings from 1960 onwards. We have instrumental data from this period anyway so unless you believe that tree ring temperature data is more accurate than every other source we have from 1960 onwards, there really is no argument against global warming from this cherrypicked sentence from a stolen email. It is only tree ring temp data that shows a decline, all other indicators follow each other to correlate with instrumental records.
Don't you see how weak it is though that this non-evidence has been bandied about by deniers who don't even understand what it means, as if it's the holy grail of evidence against global warming?
IN GENERAL
Climatologist and the climate models are entirely incapable of modeling the last decade of plantetary cooling. The guys in Bolder Colorado seem entirely perplexed by all the snow shoveling that has come their way. The actual words they use are something like 'inexplicable'. Perhaps they used the word 'travesty' or some such to describe climate modeling failures.
It does not matter much. The CO2 guys are looking more and more like Pope Urban whats his number and Galaleo. My quess is these maniacs are PRAYING for more signs of warming. Unhappily I hope for the same. The alternative is cooling, famine, pestulance, and all that comes with cold climates.
Who woulda thought....
Regardless of the accuracy of climate models, how does it change the fact that actual instrumental data shows a steady warming trend? This isn't an argument against global warming.
And again you parrot your notion that "warm is good, cold is bad". I'm all for things being conveiniently simple but it's absurd to suggest this of global climate. But I and others have already tried to get this through to you, why do you keep parroting arguments that have long been refuted? It leads to circular discussion.
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So the decline he was hiding was from temp data based on tree rings from 1960 onwards.
Its called the "diversion problem", and it is actually very important because its still unknown why measured temp records would diverge from tree ring records. The problem presented is that we dont really know when this may have happened before because there are no instrumental records with which to compare. Other than asking if this is the *only* divergence, you would also have to ask: If there have been more than one, is the current event a shorter/longer divergence than normal, or is the amplitude of divergence shallower/deeper than normal. Is this a naturally occurring phenomenon (and if so, do all trees record it), or could it be an artifact of data processing and standardization (such as growth detrending). Also, would any existing past events show postive divergence...where proxy data is higher than measured data. Its not really known. Tree ring chronologies make up a substantial part of the whole data stack in the Mann and Jones papers, so this is not a trivial problem.
Acknowledgment of the diversion problem wasnt included into the IPCC TAR until the final draft was presented, which didnt exactly leave much time for peer review. Obviously, a majority of scientists believe that anthropogenic forcing outweighs natural forcing (though a slow shift is occurring now that records are more robust), and the UT paleoclimate department is no exception, but if I were to cite MBH98 (or any of the "hockey stick" papers) in a paper meant for review, my advisor would likely ask that I use a different temp reconstruction.
That being said, taking a few lines out of an email from a series of correspondences is somewhat shaky ground to make a staunch judgment on, but there is nothing wrong with a good independent review of the CRU/IPCC/NOAA/NASA. If there is nothing to hide, then a little daylight should only serve to strengthen their argument.
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Christopher Johnson - You wrote: "What proportion of global warming is attributable to humans?" The long and the short of it is that not one single human on the entire planet has even the smallest clue. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a knave. In fact, we may actually be in a global cooling event. [Research Sunspot Cycle 24].
Further, the Global Climate Scientific Community has aligned itself with the Global Climate Jackass Community and now deserves whatever the hell will befall it. I await in quiet anticipation.
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Christopher Johnson - You wrote: "What proportion of global warming is attributable to humans?" The long and the short of it is that not one single human on the entire planet has even the smallest clue.
Nonsense. There's a bundle of 'clues'. What there isn't is the sort of knock out blow that man is prominently responsible.
My view is the same as it would be if I found myself in the following circumstances. I have entered (for the first time) the engine house of a large, complex machine that appears to be slowly, but surely heading for a runaway condition. I also know that someone has recently (but long enough before to be the cause) moved one of the dozens of regulator valve controls to a new, higher setting. At this stage I can't be sure that the adjustment is the cause, but I would immediately put the that valve back to it's earlier state & then see what happened next.
Is the CO2 issue not like this?
I await in quiet anticipation.
If you're waiting in quiet anticipation, there seems to be a fairly constant level of background noise emanating from your direction!
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pepper - You are a good adversary. However, you wrote: "...the engine house of a large, complex machine that appears to be slowly, but surely heading for a runaway condition."
I am unaware of any dangerous runaway condition. For instance, the planet was TEAMING with life at CO2 levels of 2,500 ppm. In recorded history we have Britain exporting drinkable wine in the Roman Era with CO2 level lower then now; [Incidentally, someplace I have a URL where-in one of the Low Countries is now celebrating its revived wine industry. It actually references ancient British vinticulture, and observes Britain has yet to recover its previous reputation.]
Warm is good, cold is bad.....
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I am unaware of any dangerous runaway condition.
From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_climate_change
Estimates of the size of the total carbon reservoir in Arctic permafrost and clathrates vary widely. It is suggested that at least 900 gigatonnes of carbon in permafrost exists worldwide.[21][unreliable source?] Further, there are believed to be around and another 400 gigatonnes of carbon in methane clathrates in permafrost regions alone,[22] and 10,000 to 11,000 gigatonnes worldwide.[22] This is large enough that if 10% of the stored methane were released, it would have an effect equivalent to a factor of 10 increase in atmospheric CO2 concentrations.[23] Methane is a potent greenhouse gas with a higher global warming potential than CO2.
And the less ice there is the less sunlight the earth reflects.
There is also the effect ocean acidification has on phytoplankton which will reduce uptake of CO2 by the ocean.
The high temperatures also increase the risk of bushfires which release more CO2.
the planet was TEAMING with life at CO2 levels of 2,500 ppm
Were 6.8 billion humans part of this life?
Homo sapiens have only been around 50 thousand years or so. There is evidence to suggest CO2 levels have not been this high for 2 million years. You can't say what's good for life 2 million years ago will be good for life today.
If you're going to repeatedly regurgitate your long rebutted arguments i'll just continue to regurgitate my original rebuttals.
It is not only the level of CO2 that is a problem, but the rate at which it is increasing. Slow increases like those that have occured in history give life time to evolve and adapt, and ocean chemistry to buffer against ph decrease, but at the current rate this will be alot more difficult.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/03/09/2510699.htm
Dr Howard says that over time, the ocean may be able to counteract acidity by dissolving accumulated shells of dead marine organisms on the ocean floor, thus raising ocean pH and its ability to take up CO2.
But he says this will take a long time and come at the cost of living marine organisms.
"The buffering mechanisms in the ocean are quite slow compared to the rate at which we are putting fossil fuel carbon into the atmosphere and into the ocean.," he said.
http://www.coralcoe.org.au/news_stories/coralfutures.html
“When CO2 levels in the atmosphere reach about 500 parts per million, you put calcification out of business in the oceans.”
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071017102133.htm
New calculations made by marine chemists from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) suggest that low-oxygen "dead zones" in the ocean could expand significantly over the next century. These predictions are based on the fact that, as more and more carbon dioxide dissolves from the atmosphere into the ocean, marine animals will need more oxygen to survive.
In recorded history we have Britain exporting drinkable wine in the Roman Era with CO2 level lower then now;
So what?
Warm is good, cold is bad.....
And concerning the advantages and disadvantages of global warming (from http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-positives-negatives.htm (http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-positives-negatives.htm) )
Advantages:
Agriculture
* Bumper crops in high latitude countries like Greenland, Canada
* Higher rice yields in Northern China
Health
* Fewer deaths from cold exposure
* Record profits for pharmaceutical companies
Arctic Melt
* Shippers get an Arctic shortcut between Atlantic and Pacific
* Access to North Pole oil (hmm, good or bad?)
* Thriving mammoth trade
Environment
* Greener rainforests due to higher sunlight levels due to fewer rain clouds
* Animals in Greenland can graze longer
* Save grey nurse sharks from extinction
Glacier Melt
* Access to more mining areas as Greenland's glaciers recede
* New extreme sport of glacier surfing (riding waves when chunks of glaciers fall into the sea)
* Longer grazing for sheep in Greenland
Economical
* Increased summer movie box office
* Lots of work and money for lawyers (not sure which column to put this one in)
Disadvantages:
Agriculture
* China's grain harvest will be cut by 5 to 10% by 2030
* Africa's food production will be halved by 2020.
* Decelerating tropical forest growth
* Increased conflict over resources
* Dislocate millions (with subsequent economical and military ramifications) - an estimated 50 million by 2010
* Coral reefs are dissolving due to CO2 turning seawater acidic and bleaching due to warmer waters
* Increase of wildfire activity
* Water shortages in the Mediterranean, flash floods along the Rhine and summers so hot that nuclear power stations can't cool down, more than half of Europe's plant species could risk extinction by 2080 according to EU paper
* Increased range and severity of crop disease
* Encroachment of shrubs into grasslands, rendering rangeland unsuitable for domestic livestock grazing
* Diminishing fresh water supplies for coastal communities
* Decreased water supply in the Colorado River Basin (McCabe 2007)
* Decreasing water supply to the Murray-Darling Basin (Cai 2008)
* Decreasing human water supplies, increased fire frequency, ecosystem change and expanded deserts (Solomon 2009)
Health
* Increased deaths to heatwaves (5.74% increase to heatwaves compared to 1.59% to cold snaps)
* Increases in malnutrition and consequent disorders, with implications for child growth and development.
* Increased deaths, disease and injury due to heat waves, floods, storms, fires and droughts.
* Spread of malaria into wider regions
* Increased frequency of cardio-respiratory diseases due to higher concentrations of ground level ozone related to climate change.
* Spread of mosquito vectors and dengue fever in Singapore.
* Spread of dengue fever throughout the Americas.
* Increased pollen levels (due to more CO2) leading to increased allergies
* Increased spread of flesh eating disease
* More heart problems
Arctic Melt
* Decrease in Arctic albedo, further accelerating warming
* Loss of 2/3 of the world's polar bear population within 50 years
* Positive methane feedbacks from mammoth dung (you can't make this stuff up)
* Melting of Arctic lakes leading to positive feedback from methane bubbling.
* Icebergs risk to shipping
* Rising sea levels due to melting land ice over Greenland and Canada
Environment
* Rainforests releasing CO2 as regions become drier (from the 'greener rainforests' study)
* Encroaching deserts displacing tens of millions
* Drying of arctic ponds with subsequent damage to ecosystem
* Vanishing lakes
* Tibetan plateau warming at twice the global average, so that all the glaciers in the central and eastern Himalayas could disappear by 2035 at their present rate of decline
* Skinny whales (I always thought they stood to lose some weight)
* Acidification of the ocean that violate EPA standards for ocean quality, threatening ocean ecosystems (eg - harming coral and plankton)
* Threatened extinction of British shellfish
* Gradual extinction of leeches (someone's gotta love em)
* Dwindling penguin numbers
* Disappearance of the low-lying island country Tuvalu
* Disruption to New Zealand aquatic species
* Oxygen poor ocean zones are growing (Stramma 2008, Shaffer 2009)
* Increased mortality rates of healthy trees in Western U.S. forest (more...)
* More severe and extensive vegetation die-off due to warmer droughts (Breshears 2009)
Glacier Melt
* Flooding of low lying Asian rice fields
* Water supply cut off for China and South America
Economical
* Billions of dollars of damage to public infrastructure
* Reduced water supply in New Mexico
So either you really really like Grey Nurse sharks, or you haven't really weighed up the pros and cons.
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madi - I really do appreciate the effort you put into your posts. However, you seem to have a very limited range of thought on these topics. For instance, you wrote: "... Disappearance of the low-lying island country Tuvalu.."
Frankly, you seem to have chosen dozens and dozens of catastrophic events pulled out an an algore hat. Specifically, you claim Tuvalu will actually disappear. I have posted on this same topic for the Maldives citing specialists: "We both know that the 1,200 islands of the Maldives are all low-lying with the highest point only some 2.5m (8ft) above sea level. Hence, your nation is vulnerable to extreme storms, tsunamis — and, of course, any possible sea level rise.. "
"[However]By the end of this century, sea level may have risen by between 30cm and 50cm according to the various IPCC scenarios. Our records suggest a maximum of 20cm. Neither of those levels would pose any real problem — simply a return to the situation in the 17th and the 19th to early 20th centuries, respectively." http://www.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/5595813/why-the-maldives-arent-sinking.thtml
May I suggest your extensive list of cataclysms is counter productive to your own cause? You and The Goracle make comedy of your own positions. Yap Yap Yap. There are more polar bears now then twenty five years ago. Neither the Maldives nor Tuvalu are going to disappear. What IS disappearing is any credibility either you or the Gorical might once have had. Essentially, we are onto your game.
Further, the recent Climate Gate scandals have simply diminished the entire effort. And it does not even matter whether the science is discredited or not. The 'scientists' themselves have been shown as venal, vindictive, manipulatory, confused and vengeful individuals. Yeah. Like THESE are the guys I really really want to set my utility rates.
IMHO, they suck hind teat.
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you seem to have a very limited range of thought on these topics.
My range of thought is limited? And your absurd notion of "warm is good, cold is bad" isn't?
Frankly, you seem to have chosen dozens and dozens of catastrophic events pulled out an an algore hat.
Frankly, you seem to ignore dozens and dozens of potentially catastrophic results of global warming.
Specifically, you claim Tuvalu will actually disappear. I have posted on this same topic for the Maldives citing specialists:
I don't know about the Maldives but much of Tuvalu is less than 1 metre above sea level, and even before flooding occurs the rising saltwater table could destroy deep rooted food crops such as coconut and taro.
Anyway regardless of the fate of Tuvalu, it is as you say only one of dozens and dozens of potential catastrophies.
The two that effect me most have already had drastic effects, the decreasing water supply to the Murray-Darling Basin and the ocean acidity problem.
Further, the recent Climate Gate scandals have simply diminished the entire effort.
I'm sure you'd like to think so. Others know quotemining when they see it. Out of hundreds of emails they found a few sentences to take out of context? I wonder what picture the other thousands of sentences painted?
You accuse me of losing credibility, I think the fact that deniers have to quote-mine stolen emails for material they can ad-hominem climate scientists with to try to make their case throws all the credibility they never had out the window.
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Madidus_Scientia - You wrote: "Frankly, you seem to ignore dozens and dozens of potentially catastrophic results of global warming."
Human history IMHO, has flourished during times of warming and suffered mightily when it got cooler. Not to mention when it really got into Cold Ice Ages. I have already posted URLs showing plants flourish with 500 ppm CO2. The dynosaurs flourished with 2,500ppm.
And, as I have already demonstrated, increased CO2 from fossil fuels is inevitable anyway. China already may be the most prolific CO2 emitter and is building coal plants at the rate of about one per week. In an historic irony, almost all the advanced economies are in serious financial deficits. Accordingly, they will need to borrow money to give the third world places in some sort of reparations scam.
Much, if not all that money, will be borrowed from CHINA! You just can't make this stuff up......
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Human history IMHO, has flourished during times of warming and suffered mightily when it got cooler. Not to mention when it really got into Cold Ice Ages.
If you're refering to the medieval warm period, that was a regional effect, not a global effect.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period
I also have a general predilection for warm anyway. My general point is human civilization does better in warmer times such as The Roman Era and the Midieval Warming, and does less well when weather cools. Such as late Roman Times, the post Midieval Warming period [famine, plaque and general mischief) etc.
Your general point is invalid considering we are in vastly different times to the romans, and more is at stake now. What was good for maybe a hundred million romans may be different to what's good for 6.7 billion odd people today.
I'm not denying that an ice age would be bad, but so would the opposite. If we're to endure ice ages at some period in the future maybe we should save our fossil fuels for then?
And, as I have already demonstrated, increased CO2 from fossil fuels is inevitable anyway. China already may be the most prolific CO2 emitter and is building coal plants at the rate of about one per week.
You may be right, but whether we will or won't decrease our emissions is not the point i'm making, it's that global warming and ocean acidification is due to our emissions and we should try reduce them.
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I have already posted URLs showing plants flourish with 500 ppm CO2. The dynosaurs flourished with 2,500ppm.
Plant life has also flourished at around 350ppm during the Carboniferous period.
And, as I have already demonstrated, increased CO2 from fossil fuels is inevitable anyway.
While this is likely so, it doesnt necessarily provide an open invitation to pollute in the same fashion. CO2 itself is not a pollutant, but there are a number of other pollutants created that are associated with industrialization and anthropogenic CO2 that should be kept in check.
If you're refering to the medieval warm period, that was a regional effect, not a global effect.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period
The regionality of the Medieval Warm Period was used to explain the lack of temperature variability in the hockey stick graphs when compared to the previous IPCC work. Dendrochronology was rather new and it was not yet understood that when you detrend a trees growth curve from the record as a whole that you also squash much of the low frequency variability as well...especially when you use exceptionally long ring-width chronologies such as the bristlecone pine. This is why RCS (regional curve standardization) began to be used (though it has its own shortcomings as well).
The MWP is very pronounced in the N Atlantic basin because of the sensitivity and variability of the Gulf Stream, but it is not the only region with a pronounced signature. Now that China has begun to produce very high resolution proxy records, the MWP (and Little Ice Age) is very evident in south and southeast asia, which is an exceptionally large geographic region. Recent high resolution records from Australia and S America also show the MWP and LIA. It is not generally accepted that the MWP was a N American and European phenomenon.
I would be automatically suspicious of the objectivity of a video entitled 'Climate Denial Crock of the Week - "The Medieval Warming Crock"'
If you would like to read some recent peer reviewed literature, I would be happy to send the PDF's to you, as always. If you have access to a university library, Ill even post the links here to save time.
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Fret
You are one of the few serious persons here about. In particular I take note: " CO2 itself is not a pollutant, but there are a number of other pollutants created that are associated with industrialization and anthropogenic CO2 that should be kept in check."
Chlorofloricarbons and SO2 may be among those industrial products and by-products that should be kept in check. Interestingly, the Electric Utility industry initially bellyached SO2 scrubbers would be expensive. This may actually be true. However, the resultant product from said scrubbing turns out to have a market value of its own. If I am not mistaken, it is used in road construction.
China, and soon India, will be almost the entirety of these issues. I do not know if China installs SO2 scrubbers, but I doubt it. And I don't know if R-12 is still produced outside the US. However, the industrialized nations are entirely impotent in this regard. The very idea of borrowing money from China for climate reparations to Zimbabwe while China builds one or two coal plants per week belongs on Saturday Night Live.
IMHO, there is only one option available for the GW crew. They need to jump out of the box and begin thinking about ways to cool the planet, because there is no way in living hell they are going to reduce CO2 emissions in the next 50 years at least. Further, the technologies to do so do not appear all that difficult to me, as I have posted elsewhere.
And I do not object. If climate warming continues, and if it turns out to be a bad thing, I am entirely open to employing cooling mechanisms. These include stratospheric SO2 delivery, sort of like volcanos. Seeding the Pacific with Iron filing to produce CO2 sequestration through algae plumes. Perhaps doping jet fuel with inert reflective nanao particles.
But the CO2 game is up, over and gone. Copenhagen was worse then a circus. I have even heard rumors algore tried to buy ten Polar Bear Hunting licenses just to get back at the buggers for over population ;).
Later....
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Chlorofloricarbons and SO2 may be among those industrial products and by-products that should be kept in check. Interestingly, the Electric Utility industry initially bellyached SO2 scrubbers would be expensive. This may actually be true. However, the resultant product from said scrubbing turns out to have a market value of its own. If I am not mistaken, it is used in road construction.
Good point. I dont know enough about environmental tech to know how effective SO2 scrubbers are, but I do know that sulfuric acid has a very wide industrial use. There would be money to be made here to help recoup the costs of installing the technology. I would still prefer to work toward using a much larger percentage of renewable energies though.
China, and soon India, will be almost the entirety of these issues. I do not know if China installs SO2 scrubbers, but I doubt it. And I don't know if R-12 is still produced outside the US. However, the industrialized nations are entirely impotent in this regard. The very idea of borrowing money from China for climate reparations to Zimbabwe while China builds one or two coal plants per week belongs on Saturday Night Live.
Maybe not the entirety of the issue, but a very large fraction of it. And I completely agree that the other developed nations (especially the US) will be in no position to demand any changes in the way that China conducts its business if we are over a trillion dollars in debt to them.
IMHO, there is only one option available for the GW crew. They need to jump out of the box and begin thinking about ways to cool the planet, because there is no way in living hell they are going to reduce CO2 emissions in the next 50 years at least. Further, the technologies to do so do not appear all that difficult to me, as I have posted elsewhere.
Geoengineering scares the hell out of me. I think that it would be a good idea to understand MUCH more about the climate system before we actively begin tampering with it more than we already have. I have a decidedly alarmist view on this subject, but it is difficult to see an endeavor like this ending well with our current knowledge.
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Fret - You wrote: "I think that it would be a good idea to understand MUCH more about the climate system before we actively begin tampering with it more than we already have. I have a decidedly alarmist view on this subject, but it is difficult to see an endeavor like this ending well with our current knowledge."
It seems clear to me there will not be any substantial tampering for generations to come. First, CO2 emissions will continue to grow, not decrease. This seems an inconvenient truth and the GW crowd needs to intellectually understand this and begin working on Plan B. Specifically, identifying ways and means to deploy cooling technology should things come to that.
One of the areas that bugs me is the GW crowd seem silent on warming that occurred after the little Ice Age and long before major industrialization. Isn't that nearly the entire 1800s? For instance, didn't the Thames stopped freezing over at the very begin of the industrial age?
And there have been other warming spells that took place before ANY industrialization. I see no discussion on these warming spells, or how the compare to the current climate. In fact, I get a sense some climatologists would just a soon deny Roman Warming or Midieval warming ever existed. And the Little Ice Age was the norm from which subsequent dreadful warming has evolved from CO2. It drives me nuts.
How do they expect to be taken seriously with these giant blind spots that seem positively willful in nature. Incidentally, there is a similar wilfulness concerning ocean levels. The Maldives want our money, and display a frogman in fishtank at Copenhagen.
And the formost expert on Sea Level and the Maldives writes to the Maldavian's thus: "...By the end of this century, sea level may have risen by between 30cm and 50cm according to the various IPCC scenarios. Our records suggest a maximum of 20cm. Neither of those levels would pose any real problem — simply a return to the situation in the 17th and the 19th to early 20th centuries, respectively."
Exasperation begets skepticism, begets cynicism, and is now turning to hostility in much of the population. And for good reasons beyond algor and his stupid war with the thriving Polar Bears. Geeze. Some of then need first to get a life, then all of them need get working on a reasonable Plan B, since Plan A is already too late and won't happen anyway. Is that really so much to ask?
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Plant life has also flourished at around 350ppm during the Carboniferous period.
Rate of change is the key thing - as has been pointed out many times.
CO2 itself is not a pollutant, but there are a number of other pollutants created that are associated with industrialization and anthropogenic CO2 that should be kept in check.
I was under the impression that any chemical that became too abundant in an eco-system is a pollutant. CO2 is no where near the levels where it is directly poisonous, but clearly that is not the whole story.
The regionality of the Medieval Warm Period was used to explain the lack of temperature variability in the hockey stick graphs when compared to the previous IPCC work.
Excuse my lack of knowledge on the data collection methods for the MWP and the LIA, but where those climate variations not a combination of natural factors? - Volcanic activity, Ocean Conveyor slowdown, Solar activity, human influences (growing with population).
Further, even if the MWP was not purely a regional effect, is there any valid figure for what the global mean temperature might have been? Since we are talking about figures around 2.x degC - what variation is the MWP predicted to have been?
What I want to establish is are we even talking in the same ball-park?
pepper - You are a good adversary. However, you wrote: "...the engine house of a large, complex machine that appears to be slowly, but surely heading for a runaway condition."
Fret - You are one of the few serious persons here about.
Looking at these two quotes side by side is an illustration of what it means to LS to be a serious person or an adversary. "Serious" seems to mean having views broadly supportive of LS in terms of being (in the case of Frethack) sceptical about the present validity of climate science. "Adversary" seems to be (possibly) a grudging respect for you enemy. [obviously MS has already explained how we are likely facing a runaway condition - That is not for me to reiterate for an untold time].
Can I ask Litespeed, seriously - Why? Why has every post on the Environment section got you making more or less the same statements over and over again? Do you believe there is a crime being perpetrated by the massed ranks of climatology? Do you care so much for your fellow man & believe so unflinchingly that lives will be sacrificed in a pointless charade that you have to speak out so varmontly? Really, just wondered.
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Pepper - You wrote: "Can I ask Litespeed, seriously - Why?
1) Why has every post on the Environment section got you making more or less the same statements over and over again?
ANSWER: The GW faithful make the same arguements over and over again. For instance, I continuously point out Roman Era Warming, with citations. I have yet to find much in the way of serious rebuttal. In fact, Roman Era Warming seems clearly warmer then now since the UK can not grow Roman Cultivars. It has warmed up enough for the Dutch to grow hybrid cultivars, but not enough to grow the original Roman vines.
2) Do you believe there is a crime being perpetrated by the massed ranks of climatology?
ANSWER: Yes, the conspirators who deliberately erased data prior to audit seem to have commmited a crime. However, mostly I don't like being treated like a fool by climatologists. Specifically, 19th Century Warming followed at least a two hundred year cooling 'The Little Ice Age'. Yet climatologist repeatedly seem to use that as the norm from which CO2 has forced warming. THERE IS NO FRIGGN HOCKEY STICK.
3) Do you care so much for your fellow man & believe so unflinchingly that lives will be sacrificed in a pointless charade that you have to speak out so varmontly?
ANSWER: Historical climate records seem unequivocal to me. Warm is Good and Cold is Bad. The Roman and Chinese Empires of the time benefited greatly from excess agricultural production. How else do you explain how the Romans fed Legion Upon Legion and built all their monumental arcitecture. During the same era the Chinese continued to build The Great Wall using at least half a million peasants. All these workers were fed by excess agriculture made possible by climate optimum.
The Midieval cold era led to famine, the black plaque of death, and lots of witch burnings. More then one historian implicates cold wet weather for psychotropic ergo poisoning from moldy rye in both the old and new worlds.
Besides, CO2 reduction is SO 1990's. It is unstoppable. Accordingly, I advocate, for insurance purposes, investigation of various non-CO2 mitigation methods to potentially cool the planet, if that becomes necessary. I have proposed my own; inert reflective nano particles in all jet fuel. Others propose SO2 dopining of the Stratospher. http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2511875/nathan_myhrvolds_anti_global_warming.html
Its REALLY REALLY time to consider Plan B. Plan A has become a running fiasco from accademia to Copenhagen. If algore shows me one more polar bear, or if the maldivians put one more scuba diver in a fish tank I will become nauseated.
PS: Further, the Nature Magazine rebuttal to the hacked emails cements my position. Those duplicitous, bigoted, and condescending THEOCRCRATS sealed their own fate, as far as I am concerned.
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Litespeed, you don't really make much sense. You say that warming isn't happening, then say you're glad it is because warm is good, then say we should look at cooling technologies.
You also seem obsessed with Al Gore - noone else here talks about him, why you?
We get the point though, you're a climate change denier. Can we just move on now please?
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BenV - You wrote: "You say that warming isn't happening..."
ANSWER: Clearly the climate has warmed since The Little Ice Age. What else would you expect after an ice age of any sort. According to the hockey stick guys, the climate has been on a straight up increase ever since. However, significant industrial age CO2 is primarily a 20th century phenomena.
According, the increase should in no way be linear since much of it happened in the 1800s prior to the massive CO2 emissions of, particularly, the last half of the 20th Century. IMHO, the hockey stick guys tried to pull a fast one.
And yes, we are in a climate optimum which I believe is a good thing. However, since the GW maniacs are both a menace and a nuisance, I simply point out to them the climate can be cooled in a variety of ways I have mentioned and referenced. That simply means the hysterical GW crowd is myopic, and not very intellectually active.
You also wrote: "...you're a climate change denier." You are a Silly Little Name Caller. You bore me. Go light a candle or two at East Anglia. Then genuflect.
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But you are a person who denies anthropogenic climate change - that's what climate change denier means - its' not an offensive term, it's a starement of fact.
And please don't even consider calling me silly again.
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BenV
My only recommendation to you is to give up the hopeless task of reducing CO2 enough to make any difference in the next several generations. Not with the Chinese building one or two coal plants per week. I encourage you to face reality and begin a Plan B: planetary cooling by artificial means.
I support research in this area for the simple reason it will accomodate everyone. The methods are many, are testable at low levels, can be scaled up, and reduced as required. Why beat the dead horse of reduced CO2 emissions in the next 40 years when we know that won't happen. To give you an idea how silly THAT is our own President promised reductions per capita to the rate we had in 1885.
If you really believe the planet is in grave danger from warming, it is incumbent on you to encourage ways to plan an actual intervention for cooling. Thats all....
PS: We all know the term 'denier' is an epithet. Like holocaust denier. The proper term is skeptic.
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You are a Silly Little Name Caller.
Man, you are pushing it rather far with this one. An insult addressed at one person who posts here. Hmmm.
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PS: We all know the term 'denier' is an epithet. Like holocaust denier. The proper term is skeptic.
I bet there are many holocaust deniers who consider themselves holocaust skeptics.
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BenV - You wrote: "You say that warming isn't happening..."
ANSWER: Clearly the climate has warmed since The Little Ice Age. What else would you expect after an ice age of any sort. According to the hockey stick guys, the climate has been on a straight up increase ever since. However, significant industrial age CO2 is primarily a 20th century phenomena.
According, the increase should in no way be linear since much of it happened in the 1800s prior to the massive CO2 emissions of, particularly, the last half of the 20th Century. IMHO, the hockey stick guys tried to pull a fast one.
And yes, we are in a climate optimum which I believe is a good thing. However, since the GW maniacs are both a menace and a nuisance, I simply point out to them the climate can be cooled in a variety of ways I have mentioned and referenced. That simply means the hysterical GW crowd is myopic, and not very intellectually active.
You also wrote: "...you're a climate change denier." You are a Silly Little Name Caller. You bore me. Go light a candle or two at East Anglia. Then genuflect.
So those who are in disagreement with you are (at this point) maniacs, a menace, a nuisance, hysterical, myopic, and not very intellectually active? Wow! I have to say, I have enjoyed some of your other posts much more than this one. It feels not quite the same to have discussions with you any longer. Your latest attitude has pushed the issue in a direction and area that is not pleasant or reasonable any longer.
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Want to know why so many protest Global Warming :)
Well, to me its the same people that somehow got the notion that we somehow are different from all other animals..
Like the 'crown' of evolution, and made in the mold of our 'shaper' :)
Hang with me for a moment here ::))
And then we can't be, can we, cause we're 'good'?
After all, we're the ones 'revolutionizing' Earth with 'science' and 'stuff'.
And if 'Global Warming' was man-made then?
Where would that leave us?
And our 'inventions'.
And our jobs.
To me it's about being scared, really scared. Like when the mob rules your neighborhood, or that 'religion' defines what you're allowed to think.
But here it's our inability to face the fact that we ain't the crown of creation.
We're more like rats multiplying over a shrinking territory.
And the end result of your denial will be a war.
So why not accept that life doesn't care for us, we're just animals amongst animals.
Very clever, and mimicking, we learn quickly.
But only to maximize pleasure.
And this time it won't work.
Earth doesn't care for us.
Which seems only proper considering the mess we made.
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yor_on - You wrote: "To me it's about being scared, really scared."
Scared about what, precisely? Do you fear personal starvation? Do you not have shelter? Do you not have adequate heating in the Winter. Is your water supply drying up and you fear death by dehydration. What in the hell do you have to be scared of? The price of automobiles and gasoline?
Methinks you have much excess time in hand to ponder catastrophies that are entirely irrelevant to your own situation. I suggest you sign up for a survival class that will dump you out into the middle of nowhere from which you use an axe to cut fuel for warmth, and branches for cover. Where you must fish, snare rabbits, or eat grubs for food.
You will take chances with the water supply. If you break a leg you simply die, or radio to be extracted from the exercise. And if you don't break a leg, what is your general situation? Adequate food, shelter, warmth and water? No doctors, no dentists, no pharmacies. People do this sort of thing on purpose these days to test themselves against their ancestors.
But you seem scared to death in the very middle of civilization. Get a grip, already.
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yor_on - You wrote: "To me it's about being scared, really scared."
Scared about what, precisely?
(...)
If you do not rip a sentence out of context (or read it all) you might find what yor_on finds scary. It is written right after the sentence you quote. Same line even.
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"To me it's about being scared, really scared. Like when the mob rules your neighborhood, or that 'religion' defines what you're allowed to think... Which seems only proper considering the mess we made." The only mob that tells us what to think these days seem to have birthed in the now discredited climate fiction factories of Denver and East Anglia. And of course I think the laughable hockey stick farce originated in Pennsylvania someplace
And What Mess? The industrial world has reduced or eliminated all the great plaques of the past. Small Pox is gone from the entire planet. There are no cholera epidemics in London UK, Europe, or North America anymore. I'm not sure how far North Malaria was endemic in Europe, but much of the South Eastern part of the US was known for it. Polio, Diptheria, and almost all serious bacterial infections are no longer near automatic death sentences. And the only famines ARE man made.
Much of this progress was made through industrializing water and and sewer systems within the span of just a few long lifetimes. The same thing for industrial discharges into the water systems and into the air. As for global warming? The planet started getting warmer long before humans introduced large amounts of CO2 into the atmoshpere.
The Climate is, apparently, not as warm as Roman Times, and about the same as the Midieval Warming period. Further, if the planet DOES get too warm, whatever that temperature might be, we have testable, scalable, and reversable methods to cool the place down. Since we know CO2 emissions will continue at high levels from China, India, and mush or the rest of the world for, probably generations to come it seews incumbent to move on to such a PLAN B.
However, I don't see the GW Crowd vigorously moving in that direction. Mostly what I see is hand-wringing about the evils of the Western World. Finally, I have actually seen the ravages of past uncontrolled coal and peat burning in Eastern Europe back in the 1980's, and have heard first hand accounts of Pittsburgh it the bad old days. Things are much better now then the smog ridden cities of the mid 1900's.
A lot of that phase of industrialization is now taking place in both China and India. I see now way to stop it until both places reach GDP levels of about $10,000 per year. Further, I am not convinced the climate might not actually cool down as time passes. After all, it has cooled down perhaps three times in the last two millenia already.
The most recent cooling lasted about 200 years or so, if I am not mistaken, and ended in the 1800's, prior to massive industrialization. We are now about as warm as it was during the Midieval warming era, and still a bit cooler then Roman times. And then there is Sunspot Cycle 24 which may have gone missing. Google Maunder Minimum. Cold was bad.
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The Climate is, apparently, not as warm as Roman Times, and about the same as the Midieval Warming period. Further, if the planet DOES get too warm, whatever that temperature might be, we have testable, scalable, and reversable methods to cool the place down.
Not meaning to nitpick.
The Roman Warming was cooler than the Medieval Warming by a significant amount. Also, the Medieval Warming *may* have been warmer in some regions than the modern climate optimum, but that is still under dispute at this time. There is a lot of work being done by Poore, Quinn, and Richey in the Gulf of Mexico that shows that at least the Caribbean during the MWP may have been warmer than present.
The most recent cooling lasted about 200 years or so, if I am not mistaken, and ended in the 1800's, prior to massive industrialization. We are now about as warm as it was during the Midieval warming era, and still a bit cooler then Roman times. And then there is Sunspot Cycle 24 which may have gone missing. Google Maunder Minimum. Cold was bad.
The Little Ice Age began about 1250 and ended around 1800, so it lasted somewhere around 550 years, but as with all things in paleoclimate, the exact dates are different regionally. Dont count solar cycle 24 out yet, either...the cycle looks like it is beginning to ramp up a bit.
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Fret,
Thanks for the correction on the little ice age. There was a good presentation on the topic awhile back ... "The Prosperity of the Medieval Warm Period was Followed by the Horror of the Little Ice Age..." http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/286237/must_see_tv_the_little_ice_age_big.html
As for Roman Warming etc being local events, I believe evidence is is accumulating the other way including your helpful citation on the Caribbean. I know this following citation is becoming a bit long in tooth concerning REA. Here is a compendium of studies on the subject. http://www.co2science.org/subject/r/summaries/rwpeuropenorth.php
I have, however, a growing sense of indifference for a number of reasons. The most recent reason is CO2 introduction from fossil fuels will continue unabated for generations. Accordingly, those who wish to take precautions need PLAN B. I hear almost nothing about Plan B. This is very suspicious for it seems to indicate a mental fossilization in the climate community.
Also, I do not trust the science community as far as I can through a Polar Bear. This all began back in my days as a congressional investigator, first at The National Science Foundation, (total concealed plagerism) followed by my study on metrification at the beureau of weights and measures. And so the incidents at East Anglia et all were hardly a surprise to me.
More generally, the hysteria of the whole thing positively reaks. For instance, one poster provided me with a link to a Sonorous Shakespearean actor. This 'actor' was totally convinced in human caused GW when someone or another showed him the hockey stick graph and simply told him industrial CO2 grew during that time. "I am now totally convinced" or some such pontificated the famous stage actor. And the less said about algore the better.
However, I still have some interests. Cosmic Rays have been a subtext for a long time and so I plan to research both their variability, and how much energy they impart directly through kinetic impact and then conversion to, I believe, X-Rays. Cosmic rays are implicated in both cloud cover variations and lightning strikes.
In addition, their is some indication the earths magnetic field may be in the early stages of a reverse. This means less protection from extraterestrial energy sources. I have heard none of these discussed at much length. And of course there is the enigmatic Sun Spot Cycle 24.
Lastly, I have seen nothing on variability of deep ocean volcanism. Terrestrial volcanism varies greatly, and so I may research that little corner of the subject. For strictly entertainment purposes I provide this quote from the UK:
"Britain facing one of the coldest winters in 100 years ... The cold weather comes despite the Met Office’s long range forecast, published, in October, of a mild winter. That followed it’s earlier inaccurate prediction of a “barbecue summer”, which then saw heavy rainfall and the wettest July for almost 100 years.
Too many East Anglia interns, perhaps.....
I know its anecdotal, but turn about is fare play. After all, wasn't all this CO2 gong to produce so many category 5 huricanes the Southern US would become all but uninhabitable;)
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To use an equation to analyze an event, we need to have accurate data regarding the different variables present in the equation.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/gases.html
"Water Vapor
Water Vapor is the most abundant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, which is why it is addressed here first. However, changes in its concentration is also considered to be a result of climate feedbacks related to the warming of the atmosphere rather than a direct result of industrialization. The feedback loop in which water is involved is critically important to projecting future climate change, but as yet is still fairly poorly measured and understood."
How can we have highly accurate climate models if we admittedly have neither highly accurate data, nor understanding, of the most important variable in our equation?
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Water vapour is a feedback, not a forcing.
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Water vapour is a feedback, not a forcing.
So are you saying the overall effect of water vapor on climate is static?
I'm not sure I see how this could be possible. I understand the idea of a feedback loop, but it seems to me that water is being removed and returned to the feedback loop at varying rates constantly. Wouldn't water being held in ice caps be removed from the loop for a period? We know that ice sheets, glaciers, etc., masses vary from year to year; wouldn't this mean that the effect of our primary source, for the greenhouse effect, on global climate can't possibly be static? That doesn't even address the issue of rising or declining populations. I don't mean just humans, is the biomass of the Earth static? Doesn't a lot of biomass retain a lot of water? What about evaporation rates, and the effects of water redistribution?
What about the large shift in weather every 20,000 years which causes the Sahara green belt; what long term effect could that have on ice caps and the feedback loop. If CO2 can wreak such havoc and it only represents a tiny fraction of the greenhouse gases on Earth, shouldn't the most abundant greenhouse gas(95% of all greenhouse gases) be able to wreak more havoc? On top of that, water vapor is supposed to enhance the greenhouse effect of CO2, so shouldn't that increase the effect even more?
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Chis J - You wrote: "It can hardly be disputed that the earth is warming and the percent of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere is increasing."
According to Phil Jones [the Climate God from East Anglia] the earth stopped warming about 15 years ago, and may have been cooling a little bit over the last decade or so.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1250872/Climategate-U-turn-Astonishment-scientist-centre-global-warming-email-row-admits-data-organised.html
The Climate, however, had been warming from a peak cold spell since about 1,400 AD or there abouts when the Little Ice Age was at its worse. This warming continued on and off till about 1995.
You asked how much warming is due to humane activity. Ok. Not much till the 20th century, of course. Now we get into controversy. I have seen estimates that 2/3 of 20th century warming is due to increased solar activity and the resultant decrease in cosmic ray cloud production. Others claim it is primarily due to CO2 increases from human activity. The science on this IS NOT SETTLED! And since the climate has, according to Dr. Phil Jones, slightly cooled over the last 15 years the question is moot for the recent past.
This does not mean there is no reason for concern. Specifically, sun spot cycle 24 has gone missing for several years. That means a solar decrease of at least 1% over what it would otherwise be. Google Maunder Minimum for information on extended periods without sun spots. It is not a pretty picture.
To Quote myself: "Warm is good, cold is bad."
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Water vapour is a feedback, not a forcing.
So are you saying the overall effect of water vapor on climate is static?
No, the opposite. Regardless of the effects water vapour has, the vapour itself is a feedback from climate forcings. Warmer air holds more vapour, colder air holds less. So the amount of water vapour present is at an equilibrium with the other conditions of the atmosphere. Change these condtions, and you change the amount of water vapour, and therefore the effects the water vapour has.
For example, if you snapped your fingers and removed all water vapour from the atmosphere, after a short while and some interesting effects, more water would be evaporated again and after a while the water vapour conditions would return to equilibrium. Or the same if you instantly saturated the atmosphere with water.
But if you snapped your fingers and altered a climate forcing, for example if you doubled the CO2 level and output or solar radiance then you're stuck with a hotter planet.
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Chis J - You wrote: "It can hardly be disputed that the earth is warming and the percent of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere is increasing."
According to Phil Jones [the Climate God from East Anglia] the earth stopped warming about 15 years ago, and may have been cooling a little bit over the last decade or so.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1250872/Climategate-U-turn-Astonishment-scientist-centre-global-warming-email-row-admits-data-organised.html
The Climate, however, had been warming from a peak cold spell since about 1,400 AD or there abouts when the Little Ice Age was at its worse. This warming continued on and off till about 1995.
Disregarding the bias of the article, let's say this Phil Jones really did say the earth has been cooling for 15 years. Does he have both evidence for this and an explanation why every other scientific institution has measured the opposite?
All the graphs i've seen look like this:
(I found them on the wikipedia page on global warming. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming )
(https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fcommons%2Fthumb%2F8%2F8b%2FNasa-giss_1880-2009_global_temperature.png%2F800px-Nasa-giss_1880-2009_global_temperature.png&hash=24cb632307c550365240ad3e3bce60c2)
(https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fcommons%2Fc%2Fc1%2F2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png&hash=ccf78f9603679c5a58c030abf224a7bb)
I have seen estimates that 2/3 of 20th century warming is due to increased solar activity and the resultant decrease in cosmic ray cloud production.
This graph shows solar irradiance over 30 or so years:
(https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fcommons%2F0%2F0d%2FSolar-cycle-data.png&hash=422e3efe7036dd53110a1cbabcc525b4)
Seems to steadily go up and down, whereas global temperature seems to go steadily just up.
To Quote myself: "Warm is good, cold is bad."
To Quote myself, in response to your constant regurgitation of this notion:
http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=22348.msg282411#msg282411
http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=26664.msg283647#msg283647
http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=22612.msg282086#msg282086
http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=26664.msg283276#msg283276
http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=24403.msg289864#msg289864
http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=22612.msg282336#msg282336
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More generally, the hysteria of the whole thing positively reaks. For instance, one poster provided me with a link to a Sonorous Shakespearean actor. This 'actor' was totally convinced in human caused GW when someone or another showed him the hockey stick graph and simply told him industrial CO2 grew during that time. "I am now totally convinced" or some such pontificated the famous stage actor. And the less said about algore the better.
Your ignorance is turning into lies, which in my opinion reaks more than what you percieve as hysteria.
Hopefully BC won't mind me quoting him, he said it best the first time you mentioned this.
I guess it's a matter of deffinition but I think muddling up the two Attenboroughs is pathetic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Attenborough
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Attenborough
If you can't tell the difference between a film producer/ actor and a anturalist then perhaps your other postings should be brought into question.
Also I note thet you chose to belittle the IPCC as unscientific.
I presume that your definition of unscientific is anything that doesn't agree with you.
Why would you be so dishonest as to tell this story when you were already shown to be plainly wrong?
Not the first instance of dishonesty i've found in the thread either:
According to Phil Jones [the Climate God from East Anglia] the earth stopped warming about 15 years ago, and may have been cooling a little bit over the last decade or so.
Here is the actual interview http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8511670.stm#
He does not say the earth stopped warming.
BBC: How confident are you that warming has taken place and that humans are mainly responsible?
Phil Jones: I'm 100% confident that the climate has warmed. As to the second question, I would go along with IPCC Chapter 9 - there's evidence that most of the warming since the 1950s is due to human activity.
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According to Phil Jones [the Climate God from East Anglia] the earth stopped warming about 15 years ago, and may have been cooling a little bit over the last decade or so.
http://www.dailymail.co.UK/news/article-1250872/Climategate-U-turn-Astonishment-scientist-centre-global-warming-email-row-admits-data-organised.html
Hi Litespeed,
Just a note to be careful of your sources - you're relying on the Daily Mail's interpretation of a BBC interview. As you can see, the mail put a hearty spin on it to tie in with their political opinions. Consider it to be like getting your science from Fox News, if an international comparison helps.
Also, Why do you call Phil Jones a "Climate God"? Are you hoping that by elevating individuals to deity status, their (human) failings will have more impact - like creationists do with Darwin's mistakes/misunderstandings? It's a bit like your constant referring to Al Gore - you're the only person here who ever mentions/seems to care about him.
Madidus has a good point about your Attenborough confusion - You either don't bother reading other people's posts, or you ignore their meaning. Is this intentional deception or simple forgetfullness on your part?
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Water vapour is a feedback, not a forcing.
So are you saying the overall effect of water vapor on climate is static?
No, the opposite. Regardless of the effects water vapour has, the vapour itself is a feedback from climate forcings. Warmer air holds more vapour, colder air holds less. So the amount of water vapour present is at an equilibrium with the other conditions of the atmosphere. Change these condtions, and you change the amount of water vapour, and therefore the effects the water vapour has.
For example, if you snapped your fingers and removed all water vapour from the atmosphere, after a short while and some interesting effects, more water would be evaporated again and after a while the water vapour conditions would return to equilibrium. Or the same if you instantly saturated the atmosphere with water.
But if you snapped your fingers and altered a climate forcing, for example if you doubled the CO2 level and output or solar radiance then you're stuck with a hotter planet.
The problem with your argument is that it assumes a simplistic view of the climate. The fact is, global climate involves an incredibly massive number of variables, all affecting each other. The scientists at the NOAA and NCDC obviously agree with me, otherwise they wouldn't say that measuring and understanding water vapor is critical to future climate models. Obviously, measuring the quantity of water vapor in the atmosphere is beyond our current abilities, but the response seems to have been "We can't understand or measure it, so it must have no effect". This is obviously highly flawed logic.
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Of course understanding it is critical to climate models. Where did I say it has no effect?
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The question which started this post was "what proportion of global warming is attributable to humans?"
My response, was to show that we really have no clue, because we don't have anything remotely close to enough understanding of even water vapor, which is responsible for the vast majority of warming which allows us to even live on the planet. We also don't have good temperature data going back nearly long enough to be sure of a trend, especially since this trend is supposed to be less than 1 degree. No matter how much you "homogenize" data which was first measured with inaccurate devices, like a sailor dropping a bucket into the ocean and measuring the temperature, you are really just guessing.
We have no idea, whether the claimed "warming" trend is natural, natural cyclical, anthropogenic, or any combination of the three. We also can't be sure our "homogenized" data from long ago is any good at all, especially for something as exact as tenths of a degree. How do you take bad data, which could be off by several degrees, and somehow come up with anything resembling "highly accurate"?
I asked how we could come up with a highly accurate model, without accurate data or understanding, and the response seemed to imply it didn't matter. If it does matter, I reiterate the question: How can we possibly have highly accurate climate models, without accurate data or understanding of the most basic element of the climate system?
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norcalclimber
The entire thing is a fiasco. First, we have Phil Jones [East Anglia Climate God] telling us there has been no warming in the last fifteen years. What The F**k is THAT! Even as a GW skeptic I never encountered anything more then ten years. Now the IPCC Climate God says: "Never Mind". Perhaps his mind became focused as he escaped criminal prosecution on Freedom of Information grounds due only to statute of limitations anomilies now being corrected. Funny how a close call with prison-time awakens a sense of Karma in some people.
And the IPCC is found to reference "Rock Climbers Monthly" in support the Himalaya glacier melt, and absentmindedly reports 55% of the Netherlands is now below sea level when the actual figure is 26%. And of course The Guys From Boulder report "It is a travesty..." their models do not account for recent cooling "...but just to be on the safe side we deleted the data as suggested..."
It is simply time to ctrl/alt/del the entire enterprise. It has become just so so tedious.
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norcalclimber
The entire thing is a fiasco. First, we have Phil Jones [East Anglia Climate God] telling us there has been no warming in the last fifteen years. What The F**k is THAT! Even as a GW skeptic I never encountered anything more then ten years. Now the IPCC Climate God says: "Never Mind". Perhaps his mind became focused as he escaped criminal prosecution on Freedom of Information grounds due only to statute of limitations anomilies now being corrected. Funny how a close call with prison-time awakens a sense of Karma in some people.
And the IPCC is found to reference "Rock Climbers Monthly" in support the Himalaya glacier melt, and absentmindedly reports 55% of the Netherlands is now below sea level when the actual figure is 26%. And of course The Guys From Boulder report "It is a travesty..." their models do not account for recent cooling "...but just to be on the safe side we deleted the data as suggested..."
It is simply time to ctrl/alt/del the entire enterprise. It has become just so so tedious.
I completely agree, don't forget about the 50% decrease in Africa's crops which wasn't based on anything peer reviewed. I focused on the water vapor aspect of the whole fiasco because it's something we can just step outside and see, and because it illustrates so well the error factor. There's also the nice little document called Agenda 21 which you can find at http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/ which clearly illustrates the political push which is a huge driving force behind global warming alarmism.
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Ben - Your source on Phil Jones concerning global warming since 1995 seems to report exactly the same as the one I used and which you disparaged: "B - Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming Yes, but only just."
Further, I never mentioned Attenborough, but I will stipulate it was he who made an absolute ass of himself in that video clip. It was one of the most childish presentations I have ever had the misfortune to witness. In fact, it was so bad I replayed it several times simple to ensure I was had the proper URL. It was so bad I became suspicious it was some sort of debating ruse. But no, alas, there are those among us who find it compelling. Road Runner Cartoons have more intellectual content - seriously.
As for Fox News Cable [FNC]? I read it has more viewers then the next three cable networks combined, and better demographics to boot. But I don't know. Maybe, maybe not.
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norcalclimber
Your point is well taken. Specifically, the huge number of climate variables have not even been adequately enumerated, let alone quantified. But at least the GW hysteria 'bubble' has now collapsed. Fifteen years of unrequited and non-existent GW seems to have been just one Polar Bear Too Far. So far, in fact, that actual prison time was at risk when things did not warm up as expected.
Perhaps some level headed and sober analysis will now emerge. It may take some time, however, before the inebriated among us recognize they ever had a problem in the first place. And it will certainly be a very very long time before the general public will give the next crop of 'climatologists' so much as the time of day.....
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Ben - Your source on Phil Jones concerning global warming since 1995 seems to report exactly the same as the one I used and which you disparaged: "B - Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming Yes, but only just."
You then go on to claim that he says there may have been cooling:
According to Phil Jones [the Climate God from East Anglia] the earth stopped warming about 15 years ago, and may have been cooling a little bit over the last decade or so.
So when he says there hasn't been statistically significant warming you accept that, but ignore the bit where he says there hasn't been statistically significant cooling? This is a lie on your part, as evidenced by even a casual glance at the BBC interview. Why bother lying whe you're going to be so easily caught out?
Further, I never mentioned Attenborough, but I will stipulate it was he who made an absolute ass of himself in that video clip.
So you referred to Sir David Attenborough as "a Sonorous Shakespearean actor" despite it having been clearly pointed out to you before that you have got the wrong Attenborough - again, either a lie or forgetfullness on your part.
As for Fox News Cable [FNC]? I read it has more viewers then the next three cable networks combined, and better demographics to boot. But I don't know. Maybe, maybe not.
Demographics are irrelevant. I'll admit I may be subject to confirmation bias with Fox News, as I don't receive it here, and probably only see the selected clips of complete right wing insanity and propaganda. Maybe the rest of it is less biased? Either way, based on the small samples I have seen of their coverage of climate change, vaccination scares etc, I wouldn't trust it as a news source for as you could throw a polar bear.
Yes; there are problems with climate models. Yes; the IPCC isn't perfect. Yes; some climate scientists may have made mistakes. Yes; the sun's activity is gearing up again which means we're going to see additional warming on top of any anthropogenic warming that may have occurred. Yes; everything we can do to reduce CO2 emmisions is a good thing, ushering in an economy based on efficiency and less reliance on non-renewable fuel sources. Yes; every column inch of disinformation, ad-hominem attacks etc from climate change deniers delays and hampers our development.
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BenV, you argue that anything we can do to reduce CO2 emissions is a good thing, and yet exactly the same argument can be made against Dihydrogen monoxide as can be made against CO2. The fact is CO2 is no more poisonous than water when viewed from a global perspective. And we don't actually even know how much CO2 can even affect the temperature: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v463/n7280/full/nature08769.html here is the crux of the conclusion as written in the abstract "Our results are incompatibly lower (P < 0.05) than recent pre-industrial empirical estimates of ~40 p.p.m.v. CO2 per °C (refs 6, 7), and correspondingly suggest ~80% less potential amplification of ongoing global warming." Assumptions are sometimes necessary in science, but when you build an entire theory based on 90% assumption you have a good chance of being at least 90% wrong.
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I say that not from a climate perspective, but a sustainability perspective. Anything we do to reduce co2 emmissions will be the result of greater efficiency (a good thing) or less reliance upon unsustainable fossil fuels(a good thing).
Should it also turn out that we protect our environment in the process (even if we ignore warming, there's ocean acidification to consider) that will also be a good thing.
Reducing co2 emmissions, therefore, would be a good thing.
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I say that not from a climate perspective, but a sustainability perspective. Anything we do to reduce co2 emmissions will be the result of greater efficiency (a good thing) or less reliance upon unsustainable fossil fuels(a good thing).
Should it also turn out that we protect our environment in the process (even if we ignore warming, there's ocean acidification to consider) that will also be a good thing.
Reducing co2 emmissions, therefore, would be a good thing.
We should look to developing sustainable technology, fossil fuels will clearly not last. Equating that with limiting CO2 simply wrong though. CO2 is primarily released by nature, not humans. Humans only account for ~3% of all greenhouse gas emissions globally, the other 97% is natural. Pollution should clearly be limited, but CO2 is a gas necessary for life on Earth not a pollutant.
You also have to pay attention to the "new" technology as well, since many times it turns out the new "green" solution is worse for the environment than the original technology. Look at the subsidization of solar technology, it sounds like a perfect idea on the surface doesn't it? Solar panels are expensive, but sustainable so with a little government help we can move toward sustainable living. Government subsidies around the world for solar systems have helped to create a massive solar market, and a shortage of polysilicon. The production of polysilicon produces 4 tons of toxic silicon tetrachloride for each ton of polysilicon, which in the US for instance must be recycled. The recycling process is extremely expensive though. China has joined the polysilicon market, and at least one of the polysilicon factories decided to just dump the waste...near a school, and homes. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/08/AR2008030802595.html to read the story.
My point of all that, and how it relates to CO2 legislation, is that we should always think before we leap and any CO2 legislation is based on poor assumptions and not nearly enough science at this point in time.
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Humans only account for ~3% of all greenhouse gas emissions globally, the other 97% is natural. Pollution should clearly be limited, but CO2 is a gas necessary for life on Earth not a pollutant.
It's the 3% that tips the balance. If CO2 output is greater than intake, it doesn't matter how small the percentage is, it will accumulate.
And it depends on how you define pollutant.
Not nearly enough science? It is fact that CO2 levels are increasing, and that increasing CO2 levels will increase greenhouse effect and ocean acidification. It is not a poor assumption that reducing CO2 output will dampen these effects.
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BenV - Remeber the rules. "Family Friendly" discourse. I will not report you as an abuser however, since I have family members who behave much as do you! For instance, my brother-in-law has a strange predilection for the dangerous dog breed known as Akitas. Dogs 101 on Animal Planet reports half of all Akitas end up in shelters, and they will drive up your home insurance rates. My brother-in-law obtained his insane Akita from a shelter, I believe.
He should have known better for the simple reason several previous 'well behaved' Akitas killed all the neiborhood cats, raccoons, and Four H project animals and wounded some expensive doggie pets for miles around. Akitas were, after all, bread to hunt down Japanese bears. His dog bit me twice down to the bone when I visited a year ago. I poured rubbing alcohol on the wound with a bandage and let it go at that.
However, my brother-in-law, far from being concerned or appologetic about the matter, got all huffy and defensive about his dog. I told him I was afraid of the dog, and unless he got a muzzle for the thing I would go stay at a motel. After much weirdness he subsequently muzzled the dog after which it became big time submissive to ME. Layed on its back and wizzed, in fact. My brother-in-law was perplexed.
So, why are you so defensive about this or that Atteburogh guys video? The video was the worst sort of simple minded embarrassment the likes of which are generally seen only from algore. You should be apologizing to forum members simply because you continue to aid and abet and continue to inflict this dog of a video upon the members. And you don't even get Fox News.
Seriously, do you have much in the way of higher education?
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So when your lie/repeated mistake is pointed out you proceed to question my education? Note how I didn't comment upon the video itself, in fact, I'm not even sure that I've seen it. I commented on the fact that, despite having been previously informed of your error, you continued to make what is either a foolish mistake or a misleading lie.
So you repeat your previous errors and have the audacity to question my education? Nothing I said was in any way non-"family friendly", so feel free to report me to the moderators, I'm sure they will appreciate it.
Coincidentally, that's the second time you have been directly offensive to me. The next one will result in you being banned.
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BenV - Please list and NUMBER my lies and I will take time in the next couple of days to consider them. I am perplexed by your accusations and if you put them all in a nice list I might understand what you are talking about. For instance, in what way have I lied about the video that you are not certain you even have seen? I believe the video is inconsequential. Thats all. Go view the video and give me your assessment of its probative value. That would be a good start.....
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Are you intentionally not reading my posts? It was pointed out to you some time ago that the Attenborough in the video you refer to is not, and has never been, an actor. You continued to refer to him as such. Madidas pointed this out to you, and I opined that it was either a lie or a mistake.
So was it a lie, or a mistake?
The content of the video, which I have never commented upon, is entirely irrelevant.
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Not an actor? He clearly gave quite a performance in that video. You should look it up! But you are right. I incorrectly referred to him as a sonorous Shakespearian actor when in fact is is a sonorous narrator for his TV nature films.
Which is actually worse. It is worse because one does not expect an actor to be much of a scientist. However, I have now reviewed this guys credits. He should have known better then to make such a silly video clip. It does not add to his reputation.
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But do you see the problem I have? You referred to him as an actor earlier, and were corrected. The fact that you later referred to him as an actor again suggests that you aren't taking on board what people are saying to you, or that you did so on purpose to misrepresent his opinion.
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I think this thread has run its course. It is blatantly obvious by now that lightspeed seems to perpetuate his own opinion when clearly shown that the facts differ from his personal opinion.
I am therefor locking this thread.
Persistence to not discuss the hard science and refute evidence with evidence, will be assumed to be evangelizing and be dealt with accordingly.