Climate change protest done right

[magnemoe]

Like others have said, ad hominem attacks are no way to push a point of view.

Furthermore, there has always been extreme weather, regardless of climatic conditions at the time.

In any case, i'm surprised the whole AGW thing is still kicking on. The beginning of the end started with Climategate. Leadership of developed nations have been backing away from it since then. Big money behind carbon credits have pulled out. Developing nations were never onboard, since it's always been a secular western thing.

No climagate had lite impact, the game ended then the period where politicians could get money from co2 taxes ended and the roadmaps indicated it was time for very expensive programs. This matched well with the time the economy crashed and it was time for cutbacks not new expenses.

Suddenly all politicians started talking about global warming in any way who could be connected to real politic, still part of party programs something else would be very political incorect, you still show up in the international meetings but with the environment minister if he is not busy.

Note this is actual politic the last 5 years. Not related to if global warming is an real problem or not.

Regarding hurricanes, it was commonly believed that global warming would give more and stronger hurricanes. I also found this plausible as you would have more energy in the weather system, however IPCC find no relation between hurricanes and global warming.

However New Orleans was an entire man made catastrophe, city was build in the hurricane belt, below water level with inadequate protection.

Flooding is another event who is made worse by humans, not global warming but by drying up swamps and other areas who absorb water then straighten and deepen rivers so the water get nice highways to move in. Now then you get an flood you blame it on global warming and demand money to rebuild the houses next to the river.

[Stochasty]

Basically, altitude at which IR equilibrium is achieved is more sensitive to CO₂ levels than H₂O levels.

Is this true?

It's true that the effective blackbody temperature of emitted radiation in the CO2 bands is considerably lower than than for the H2O bands (~220K versus ~270K), and therefore that the atmosphere becomes transparent in those bands at a higher altitude (or, more accurately, that the mean free path is shorter), but it also means that less energy is emitted in those frequencies than in the H2O bands. Increasing the CO2 concentration will increase the altitude at which the atmosphere becomes transparent in those bands, but this doesn't seem to be directly related to the altitude of thermal equilibrium since most of the emission is happening in other bands; at the altitude at which thermal equilibrium is achieved, the atmosphere is still opaque in the CO2 absorption bands.

I've seen arguments both ways on this, but it's a complicated problem and I don't really have any intuition regarding what should be the dominant effect here.

[ElJugador]

Like others have said, ad hominem attacks are no way to push a point of view.

Furthermore, there has always been extreme weather, regardless of climatic conditions at the time.

In any case, i'm surprised the whole AGW thing is still kicking on. The beginning of the end started with Climategate. Leadership of developed nations have been backing away from it since then. Big money behind carbon credits have pulled out. Developing nations were never onboard, since it's always been a secular western thing.

Some gems from Climategate...

What kind of science where they doing exactly?!

I (edit: probably) won't involve myself in this thread beyond this, but let me say this: The Climategate quotes were mined (taken out of context).

Edited August 29, 2013 by ElJugador

[Mr Shifty]

all that passion they felt for that single silly model, may well have blinded them to the 1000 other issues that had all along been contributing to climatic changes and/or other forms of environmental degradation: nitrogenous wastes, heavy metals waste, wasted precious metals in electronic, continued expansion of invasive species and pathogen, extinction of species that we could've saved (gray and little brown bats, African wild dogs to name only acouple that are likely goners within the next 20 years) . . .

(Sorry no post link in the quote above. For some reason, my Replay and Reply with Quote buttons aren't working since the forum 'upgrade' yesterday.)I think you are seriously misunderestimating how wide a net we who care about preserving our interstellar lifeboat for human habitation are willing and able to cast. Climate change simply ain't the only issue that 'environmentalists' care about. All of those things you mention are issues of concern: along with monoculture agriculture, soil erosion, water salinization, aquifer depletion, etc. Thinking people are also concerned about energy. Fossil fuels are like a battery that was charged by solar energy for hundreds of millions of years. When we've used them up (within decades for oil, a couple centuries for coal), they're gone. They aren't coming back before our species is a long forgotten footnote in geologic history, and there's no alternative that offers even close to the same portability, energy density, and reliability. Regardless of CO2, it seems like there should be a whole bunch of economic might working on ways to shore up our infrastructure against the inevitable end of fossil fuel energy. Nation-states that manage that will have an unquestionable economic advantage in the decades to come. Species that manage that might be able to continue a technological civilization.

[lajoswinkler]

Voice of reason, K^2 and DicheBach.

I can't believe how far we have gotten with this climate change thing. When it was just starting out, there was still some open discussion, now there's just name-calling and popularity contests. I can tell you that the 97% metric, so often cited by the alarmists, is completely bogus. I work with scientists every day, they are our customers. None of them simply says "yes" or "no", the discussion there is ambivalent in the same way it is ambivalent in the general public. The data is unreliable or the models are wrong. Heck, the whole idea is based on turbulence, one of the last unsolved problems of classical physics.

What I dislike is when people call CO2 a pollutant. That to me is just evil tactics. If anything, it's an elixir of life, you and I wouldn't live without CO2. Plants build 90% of their body mass from CO2 through photosynthesis. We eat plants. CO2 levels used to be much much higher historically and they've been so low in the past couple million years that plants are actually suffocating - they had to evolve a more efficient method of extracting CO2 from the atmosphere (C4 photosynthesis). CO2 have been so low because all the carbon has been deposited underground and there is not enough to go around in the biosphere. There used to be rain forests in Antarctica. Barring anthropocentric arguments, rising CO2 levels is actually good for nature. If you double the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, plant size doubles as well.

By the way, the Earth has been actually getting colder in the past 10 years. I am not an antienvironmentalist, I think the environment is important. But I think science has been taken hostage by political forces trying to hold people down in this matter.

DicheBach kind of is, K^2 not at all.

So you think science is about "yes" and "no"? Then you obviously don't understand how science works. It works with levels of certainty, and the certainty for the anthropogenic factor as the greatest factor is the highest.

The whole idea is not based on turbulence and theory of chaos. It's based on the fact we've measured an astounding correlation between the global average temperature and the speed of releasing anthropogenic CO2. That's a fact. Yes, there might be another explanation, but this is the best one we have.

Who calls CO2 a pollutant? Enviromentalists? You do realize there's a difference between them and scientists that measure and develop models? In the world of science, CO2 is not a pollutant. In the world of politics it sometimes is, but that doesn't matter because we're trying to talk about science here.

Your argument about the plants is ridiculous. Of course they eat it. Of course they thrive in elevated concentrations of it. But what does that have to do with the fact that more heat energy in the atmosphere/hydrosphere means more turbulence and more crappy time for us?

You accuse others for fixating on details, yet you fixate on how the plants like to at CO2 and ignore a mountain of problems above.

And of course, the conspiracy theories.

Because the only nation on the Earth is America, the only scientists are Americans, so naturally, the whole issue is made up by the American government. Nobody else on this planet measured any problems and nobody else is studying and developing models.

I'm not an enviromentalist, I'm not a doomsdayer and I really don't like things like Greenpeace and other nutters, but I think it's a shame what politics does to laymen.

Unfortunatelly, this is one of the problems of democracy. It lets the uneducated masses vote for ignorant people. It's the best system we have (on a long term scale), but it's so damn slow.

Do you have evidence to support the cooling? I bet you don't. It's a lie manufactured by tabloids, and its foundation is in the statements made by the Met Office, which said that the rate of warming is slightly lower than the earlier models predicted.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2013/jan/09/global-warming-met-office-paused

It's still getting warmer. It's not getting cooler, it is not pausing. The rate of warming is simply a bit lower than expected, but the global average temperature is still going up.

The explanation for the lower rate of warming up is the change in the response from the oceans, which act like thermal accumulation units. Higher average temeprature leads to more heat, different salinity and density of the global currents.

The crackpots immediately started using this lie and it soon started to circulate around the web.

[PakledHostage]

In any case, i'm surprised the whole AGW thing is still kicking on. The beginning of the end started with Climategate. Leadership of developed nations have been backing away from it since then. Big money behind carbon credits have pulled out. Developing nations were never onboard, since it's always been a secular western thing.

Some gems from Climategate...

- Mike Mann refuses to talk to these people and I can understand why. They are just trying to find if we've done anything wrong. – Phil Jones

- We also have a Data Protection Act, which I will hide behind. – Phil Jones

- It would be nice to try to "contain" the putative "Medieval Warm Period". – Michael Mann

- The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't. – Kevin Trenberth

What kind of science where they doing exactly?!

And what kind of misrepresentation are you perpetuating exactly?! The UK parliament's Science and Techology Committee cleared the CRU scientists who were at the centre of "Climategate" of any wrong doing in their report on The disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Between the original peer reviews and the inquiries that followed "Climategate", the CRU's work must be among the most heavily scrutinized body of scientific research anywhere, yet its veracity remains intact.

From the UK Parliament's Science and Technology Committee's website:

On the much cited phrases in the leaked e-mails "trick" and "hiding the decline" the Committee considers that they were colloquial terms used in private e-mails and the balance of evidence is that they were not part of a systematic attempt to mislead.

Insofar as the Committee was able to consider accusations of dishonesty against CRU, the Committee considers that there is no case to answer.

[Jackissimus]

(Sorry no post link in the quote above. For some reason, my Replay and Reply with Quote buttons aren't working since the forum 'upgrade' yesterday.)I think you are seriously misunderestimating how wide a net we who care about preserving our interstellar lifeboat for human habitation are willing and able to cast. Climate change simply ain't the only issue that 'environmentalists' care about. All of those things you mention are issues of concern: along with monoculture agriculture, soil erosion, water salinization, aquifer depletion, etc. Thinking people are also concerned about energy. Fossil fuels are like a battery that was charged by solar energy for hundreds of millions of years. When we've used them up (within decades for oil, a couple centuries for coal), they're gone. They aren't coming back before our species is a long forgotten footnote in geologic history, and there's no alternative that offers even close to the same portability, energy density, and reliability. Regardless of CO2, it seems like there should be a whole bunch of economic might working on ways to shore up our infrastructure against the inevitable end of fossil fuel energy. Nation-states that manage that will have an unquestionable economic advantage in the decades to come. Species that manage that might be able to continue a technological civilization.

I am pretty sure that the technology necessary to sustain a technological civilization will come from the minds of scientists and engineers, not environmentalists. But I am all for the environment, I just don't like it to become the central issue, and I also don't like malthusianism, which is so often tied to it.

[Mr Shifty]

I am pretty sure that the technology necessary to sustain a technological civilization will come from the minds of scientists and engineers, not environmentalists.

How odd that you conclude those two categories are mutually exclusive.

[Nibb31]

But I am all for the environment, I just don't like it to become the central issue, and I also don't like malthusianism, which is so often tied to it.

I don't like spinach, but it's healthy.

[Jackissimus]

OK, I should really make it clear now that I am mostly fighting against the kind environmental ideology that borders on political propaganda. I come from a postcommunist country, I hate propaganda, it stinks. I am not fighting "honest" science. I would never fight that, but it has to be honest, not tinged with premeditated intent. I am now going to reply to Lajos's post.

So you think science is about "yes" and "no"? Then you obviously don't understand how science works. It works with levels of certainty, and the certainty for the anthropogenic factor as the greatest factor is the highest.

Exact science should be about "yes" and "no". If a you encounter one event that is against a physical law, then the physical theory is gone, forever. But that is beside the point really. What I was hinting at is that it's really misguided to hide your argument behind some percentage. It's not like 97% of scientists agree to whatever the environmentalist agenda has to say. It's usually a "yes, but", or "no, but".

The whole idea is not based on turbulence and theory of chaos. It's based on the fact we've measured an astounding correlation between the global average temperature and the speed of releasing anthropogenic CO2. That's a fact. Yes, there might be another explanation, but this is the best one we have.

The models are very unreliable to solicit such a surefire response. Look at this chart:

I was wrong about the lack of warming, and I really am sorry, see I am learning too. But this graph reminded me of another interesting phenomenon. In the 60s and 70s people were alarmed about global cooling the same way they are now alarmed about global warming. This shows that maybe a bit more patience and less panic should be employed.

Who calls CO2 a pollutant? Enviromentalists? You do realize there's a difference between them and scientists that measure and develop models? In the world of science, CO2 is not a pollutant. In the world of politics it sometimes is, but that doesn't matter because we're trying to talk about science here.

As said above I was merely voicing a concern that the political debate is not balanced anymore. You should really live in Europe for a while. They banned the sale of incandescent light bulbs recently. I will not, in my life, see a light bulb again unless I travel to the US or China. You should see my country, we are a solar superpower now, there are fields of solar panels everywhere here, and the local yearly precipitation is on the level of Seattle.

Your argument about the plants is ridiculous. Of course they eat it. Of course they thrive in elevated concentrations of it. But what does that have to do with the fact that more heat energy in the atmosphere/hydrosphere means more turbulence and more crappy time for us?

You accuse others for fixating on details, yet you fixate on how the plants like to at CO2 and ignore a mountain of problems above.

My post says "barring anthropocentric arguments". I clearly said that if it weren't for our livelihoods, higher CO2 concentrations are actually good for nature. I was merely driving my point that CO2 should not be called a pollutant. But as was stated in the posts above, the heat->turbulence link has actually not been proven.

And of course, the conspiracy theories.

Because the only nation on the Earth is America, the only scientists are Americans, so naturally, the whole issue is made up by the American government. Nobody else on this planet measured any problems and nobody else is studying and developing models.

I honestly don't know what you are referreing to. If you knew me you would know that I hate conspiracy theories. My boss believes Americans have torn down the WTC themselves, the jews are controlling the world, he believes he has seen a real UFO and he believes that he has experienced astral projection. If he didn't have a lot of money, I probably wouldn't be working for him now (luckily for me, I love my job).

I'm not an enviromentalist, I'm not a doomsdayer and I really don't like things like Greenpeace and other nutters, but I think it's a shame what politics does to laymen.

Unfortunatelly, this is one of the problems of democracy. It lets the uneducated masses vote for ignorant people. It's the best system we have (on a long term scale), but it's so damn slow.

Do you have evidence to support the cooling? I bet you don't. It's a lie manufactured by tabloids, and its foundation is in the statements made by the Met Office, which said that the rate of warming is slightly lower than the earlier models predicted.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2013/jan/09/global-warming-met-office-paused

It's still getting warmer. It's not getting cooler, it is not pausing. The rate of warming is simply a bit lower than expected, but the global average temperature is still going up.

The explanation for the lower rate of warming up is the change in the response from the oceans, which act like thermal accumulation units. Higher average temeprature leads to more heat, different salinity and density of the global currents.

The crackpots immediately started using this lie and it soon started to circulate around the web.

You sort of went on a tangent there, but the end is somewhat coherent. Nevertheless you also hang on to the single point you know is right, and I don't blame you, I like to do the same. So the earth is warming now a bit, it might even be partially anthropogenic, I don't deny it. What really interests me though, is the next question: What do you want to do about it?

Edited August 29, 2013 by Jackissimus

[Diche Bach]

(Sorry no post link in the quote above. For some reason, my Replay and Reply with Quote buttons aren't working since the forum 'upgrade' yesterday.)I think you are seriously misunderestimating how wide a net we who care about preserving our interstellar lifeboat for human habitation are willing and able to cast. Climate change simply ain't the only issue that 'environmentalists' care about. All of those things you mention are issues of concern: along with monoculture agriculture, soil erosion, water salinization, aquifer depletion, etc. Thinking people are also concerned about energy. Fossil fuels are like a battery that was charged by solar energy for hundreds of millions of years. When we've used them up (within decades for oil, a couple centuries for coal), they're gone. They aren't coming back before our species is a long forgotten footnote in geologic history, and there's no alternative that offers even close to the same portability, energy density, and reliability. Regardless of CO2, it seems like there should be a whole bunch of economic might working on ways to shore up our infrastructure against the inevitable end of fossil fuel energy. Nation-states that manage that will have an unquestionable economic advantage in the decades to come. Species that manage that might be able to continue a technological civilization.

Oh I agree 100%.

Did you perceive me as saying something contrary to what you have said here? It sounds to me like we are in agreement: a single minded and highly politicized focus on a single 'explanation' for the world's environmental woes doesn't seem to serve these broader and longer-term concerns that you describe.

ADDIT: and btw, I consider myself to be an ardent "Environmentalist" though I am a skeptic when it comes to the prevailing models of anthropogenic climate change. I also find myself to be at odds with the way certain environmental groups ostracize half of the political spectrum. For example, Sierra Club made a point of vilifying Republicans for some reason. That to me is stupid. Everyone, of all ideological, and political orientations, races, creeds, colors, religions, etc., MUST BE AN environmentalist or we are in the long-term 'screwed.' Playing the "environmentalist" card by vilifying 'the other' is contrary to the essential spirit of environmentalism.

It's still getting warmer. It's not getting cooler, it is not pausing. The rate of warming is simply a bit lower than expected, but the global average temperature is still going up.

The explanation for the lower rate of warming up is the change in the response from the oceans, which act like thermal accumulation units. Higher average temeprature leads to more heat, different salinity and density of the global currents.

The crackpots immediately started using this lie and it soon started to circulate around the web.

In my opinion it is largely irrelevant whether it is "getting warmer" or not, for the simple reason, it has got warmer, and colder, and then warmer again, and then colder again numerous times in the past, and long before humans initiated industrialization.

I am simply not convinced by a simplistic univariate correlation in a context where a pre-existing multi-variable dynamic process is known to have been in operation. By that I do not mean to "deny" the possibility that anthropogenic forces are in part (or in full) responsible for the observed warming; I merely ask "What about the Earth and cosmic forces that have been causing climate change for hundreds of millions of years previously?"

The reason that "correlation does not equal causation" is not because correlation is irrelevant; it is because it does not offer a clear basis to show mediation, much less moderation between two variables. To do that you need additional forms of data, ideally experimental data.

Correlations between the outcome variable "observed global median temperate" (OGMT) and the predictor variable "carbon emission" (CE) could in fact be a result of myriad causal processes. The simplest of course being:

1. Increases in CE are directly causing OGMT and are _the only_ factor that is having _any_ influence on OGMT. In this model, we can say that CE is both a necessary and sufficient cause of OGMT. It fully mediates the outcome of OGMT. This is, as I understand it, the model that is put forward as the prevailing model at present, and IMO it is completely untenable for the simple reason that we know beyond any shadow of doubt that CE is not the _only_ factor that can have any influence on global climate. There are myriad other anthropogenic and natural factors that must be accounted for, and no, the strength of the correlation coefficient is absolutely NOT sufficient to discount the need for solid quantitative estimates of (at least) the most important of these other factors. That is just simply not how multi-variable causal systems work. Maybe physicists can get by with that sort of simple deterministic model, but is simply does not work in ecological or meteorological systems.

2. Increases in CE are a result of some other variable that is causing both OGMT and CE to change in parallel. I think we can safely rule out this sort of model; it is obvious that humans have been pumping out a lot of carbon this past century.

3. The correlation between CE and OGMT is in part or in whole spurious and a substantial proportion of the observed variation in OGMT can be accounted for by other variables. Here we come back to the myriad of other anthropogenic and natural factors that need to be considered. Industrialization has brought with it incredible changes in human impact on the planet and a wide range of these seem tenable to me as contributors to OGMT, including just as an example: methane emissions, the heat sinks of major urban areas, the sheer number of heat producing vertebrates on the planet, degredation of ecosystems more generally.

In sum, I share concern about the welfare of the Earth and all of its life. But I am not convinced that the Politco-Scientific Movement that we could call "Anti-Global Warming Activism" is in fact the best way for us to go forward in understanding the threats to our planets welfare and the ways that we can realistically and ethically reduce or mitigate those threats.

Edited August 29, 2013 by Diche Bach

[Mr Shifty]

The models are very unreliable to solicit such a surefire response. Look at this chart:

That chart has been thoroughly debunked:http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/03/18/global_warming_denial_debunking_misleading_climate_change_claims_by_david.html

[Jackissimus]

That chart has been thoroughly debunked:http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/03/18/global_warming_denial_debunking_misleading_climate_change_claims_by_david.html

As much as I like Phil Plait, I can hardly expect him to run a balanced article on this.

Now look again at the graph, and note the measured temperatures are still within that band. Sure, it’s at the low end, but even if the temperatures fell outside the band it doesn’t mean “the world isn’t getting warmer†as Rose so incorrectly claims. It just means the temperatures weren’t quite as high as predicted. They are still within the expected range, though, and still running at a high confidence level.

Why do the predictions always overshoot reality, why don't they undershoot sometimes? Why don't the models sometimes predict cooling and then get a surprise warming?

[Stochasty]

Why do the predictions always overshoot reality, why don't they undershoot sometimes? Why don't the models sometimes predict cooling and then get a surprise warming?

The second part is easy to answer: the models don't sometimes predict cooling because they can't - not on scales longer than about ten years, so long as CO2 continues to rise. The models have a built in dependence on CO2, and when you look at multi-model averages the way the IPCC does you find the correlation between global temperature and CO2 levels to be close to 1 (because CO2 forcing is just about the only thing the various models have in common; their predictions are otherwise incoherent on decadal and sub-decadal timescales).

As for "why do they always overshoot" - well, it's because temperatures have been flat for fifteen years and most of the model predictions that we're attempting to validate were made during that period. The models are incapable of predicting a 15 year hiatus in the face of rising CO2 levels, which is why we have very nearly fallen out of the temperature envelope predicted by the model ensembles.

This isn't really surprising. The models are junk, and everyone who's taken time to really look at them (even many of the people who work on them) knows this. They are completely useless at predicting temperature variations on a year-to-year basis, because those variations are primarily controlled by sea temperature cycles (the PDO and AMO, chiefly) which are not accounted for in the models. If the models have any validity at all, it will only be on century-plus timescales, where the oceanic cycles tend to average out. Of course, this is rather convenient for the modelers and the politicians; they don't have to worry about being proven wrong until the far future.

That said, all of this discussion is about the models and the validity thereof, and not about the actual behavior of the climate. The climate itself has seen alternating periods of warming and no warming over the last century (warming from the mid twenties through the mid forties, then no warming until the late seventies, then warming until the late nineties, and now another period of no warming). Who knows what it will do from here on out? It's much easier to predict psychology than the weather. Here's my prediction: if it goes up, the modelers will trumpet their successful "prediction," and if it goes down some other group of doomsayers will start trumpeting the start of the next ice age. Either way, people will claim something must be done, and that "something" will look a lot like the things people claim to need to be done right now (namely, giving the government more control over your wallet and lifestyle).

Edited August 29, 2013 by Stochasty

[SargeRho]

One thing many seem to fail to see: The problem is not that it's getting warmer. The problem is that it's getting warmer at an insane rate.

[Diche Bach]

Rapid changes in climate over the span of decades and centuries, as well as years with extreme weather are nothing new. The best archaeological and historical evidence indicates that "insane" changes have been with us humans for tens of thousands of years and likely longer than that.

One version of climate during the last 2000 years (don't ask me if it is or is not perfectly accurate, I don't know. The point is it is published and it reflects empirical observations stretching back decades)

Holocene temperature variation (the last 10,000 years).

and Phanerozoic climate change (the period during which life has exploded alternately shown periods of adaptive radiation and mass extinction)

Unless historical geologists, paleoclimatologists, etc., have been engaged in a massive conspiracy for the past 50 years, there is ample basis to regard fears of the current patterns as being "insane" as being excessive.

ADDIT: here is another wiki page I just stumbled onto which is quite interesting, and may suffice to convince skeptics that the climate during Earth's past might not have been so invariant after all.

Timeline of environmental history

A page I spotted with a rather dramatic figure . . . Meltwater pulse 1A

15,000 years ago most of northern Europe, northern North America and Russia were covered in massive ice sheets up to a couple thousand meters thick. At that time sea level was so low that one could have walked across the Bering straits that presently separate Siberia from Alaska and also large portions of the Indonesian archipelago were connected via dry land.

When these masses of ice melted (for whatever reasons, and I can guarantee you that humans had almost NOTHING to do with it), sea level began to rise and it did not stop until it had come up by some 120meters, where it has largely stayed for the past few thousand years. In light of these massive fluctuations in temperature and sea level, current observations may well be nothing more than trivial and ephemeral fluctuations over-interpreted as indicators of long new cycles.

Edited August 29, 2013 by Diche Bach

[SargeRho]

Your first graph shows exactly what I mean. The temperatures changed over the course of many centuries. Then came the industrial revolution, and suddenly, temperatures went NUTS. Heating up more in 150 years than in the 2000 years before.

Nobody (that I know of) is saying that we are to blame for all of climate change. I am however, saying that we have a lot to do with the current insane warming.

[magnemoe]

Rapid changes in climate over the span of decades and centuries, as well as years with extreme weather are nothing new. The best archaeological and historical evidence indicates that "insane" changes have been with us humans for tens of thousands of years and likely longer than that.

One version of climate during the last 2000 years (don't ask me if it is or is not perfectly accurate, I don't know. The point is it is published and it reflects empirical observations stretching back decades)

Holocene temperature variation (the last 10,000 years).

and Phanerozoic climate change (the period during which life has exploded alternately shown periods of adaptive radiation and mass extinction)

Unless historical geologists, paleoclimatologists, etc., have been engaged in a massive conspiracy for the past 50 years, there is ample basis to regard fears of the current patterns as being "insane" as being excessive.

About the first graph, its probably correct, however climate on Greenland was far warmer than today then the vikings settled it, yes the name Greenland was illegal marketing however both on Greenland and Iceland they was able to do farming impossible today.

About the second, during multiple times after the ice age climate in Norway was far warmer, as in they dig up remains of trees from old forests where trees don't grow today.

This one was in an graph in schoolbooks back in 1980, I found it unfair that kids in the stone and bronze age had nicer weather than me (but as I grow older I realize they had far worse housing and heating so they deserved it)

Yes both farming on Greenland and forests in Norway is single data points. However any dig in suitable location in elsewhere in the world will show climate over time, pollen works nice here. However that is archaeology not climate science so I wonder about the measure points for the two graphs. I would not accept ice samples for Antarctica as its has an special climate who is far less typical than the north Atlantic.

We all know scientists cherry pick the data they uses, this is an major issue in medicine where you use a lot of statistic and people fewer people die if you are right.

We all did in lab on school where an failed experiment did not affected our grades as long as the documentation was good, now would you cherry pick if your funding and income depend on it?

The last one is pretty uninteresting if you compare to today, the continent locations was different, measurements from Antarctica would be a bit misleading as it was not at the south pole yet

However it shows one fact, during the age of the Dinosaurs temperature was far higher than today and they had an amazing ecosystem with lots of rainforrest. +3-4 degree Centigrade will not make earth like Venus.

Yes it would have major impact on human activity, but it's another issue Lots of other species would love it like snakes and mosquitoes.

----

For myself I think IPCC predictions are pretty accurate but around 50% to high.

Yes that is the fun stuff, compare the boring serious guys like IPCC with the doomsayers like Gore and Hansen and you don't see much consensus. You could put in some pretty serious cooling if you expended the gap the other way.

(Greenpeace is not serious, after their 1990 predictions, sea level would have increased more than 3 meter today)

However media love any doomsayer, they bring lots of clicks. (notice the current batch of doomsayers who say the Syria conflict will end in WW3, same with the Libya war and any other conflict)

[magnemoe]

@Diche Bach: You cheater added the sea change graph while I wrote my post (and killed another kerbal testing my 9 ton eve lander)

Some probability that we are in an cooling period who end some time after we get fusion working well. The puppeteers claimed humans most important attribute was luck.

And yes the global warming was the boring news, the asteroid paths was downright scary.

[lajoswinkler]

OK, I should really make it clear now that I am mostly fighting against the kind environmental ideology that borders on political propaganda. I come from a postcommunist country, I hate propaganda, it stinks. I am not fighting "honest" science. I would never fight that, but it has to be honest, not tinged with premeditated intent. I am now going to reply to Lajos's post.

Exact science should be about "yes" and "no". If a you encounter one event that is against a physical law, then the physical theory is gone, forever. But that is beside the point really. What I was hinting at is that it's really misguided to hide your argument behind some percentage. It's not like 97% of scientists agree to whatever the environmentalist agenda has to say. It's usually a "yes, but", or "no, but".

The models are very unreliable to solicit such a surefire response. Look at this chart:

I was wrong about the lack of warming, and I really am sorry, see I am learning too. But this graph reminded me of another interesting phenomenon. In the 60s and 70s people were alarmed about global cooling the same way they are now alarmed about global warming. This shows that maybe a bit more patience and less panic should be employed.

As said above I was merely voicing a concern that the political debate is not balanced anymore. You should really live in Europe for a while. They banned the sale of incandescent light bulbs recently. I will not, in my life, see a light bulb again unless I travel to the US or China. You should see my country, we are a solar superpower now, there are fields of solar panels everywhere here, and the local yearly precipitation is on the level of Seattle.

My post says "barring anthropocentric arguments". I clearly said that if it weren't for our livelihoods, higher CO2 concentrations are actually good for nature. I was merely driving my point that CO2 should not be called a pollutant. But as was stated in the posts above, the heat->turbulence link has actually not been proven.

I honestly don't know what you are referreing to. If you knew me you would know that I hate conspiracy theories. My boss believes Americans have torn down the WTC themselves, the jews are controlling the world, he believes he has seen a real UFO and he believes that he has experienced astral projection. If he didn't have a lot of money, I probably wouldn't be working for him now (luckily for me, I love my job).

You sort of went on a tangent there, but the end is somewhat coherent. Nevertheless you also hang on to the single point you know is right, and I don't blame you, I like to do the same. So the earth is warming now a bit, it might even be partially anthropogenic, I don't deny it. What really interests me though, is the next question: What do you want to do about it?

Sounds weird, but everything falls under "maybe" if we think of the world or probabilities. Remember the thought experiment where two containers, one empty and one with gas, are connected and then opened, and nothing happens in the first second or... ever? It is possible, but highly unlikely. The probability of such scenario is so low, it would take an incredible number of universes worth of time to ever happen. And by "incredible" I mean really... really incredible.

In everyday talk science puts that aside and says "impossible", because it's boils down to it.

What enviromentalists say is not relevant to this discussion. They say all kinds of things. Some of it is politically inclined crap, some of it not.

Scientific consensus about the whole issue is that it's anthropogenic and that the consequences will likely devastating in the long term period - devastating for our current way of life. The nature will not cease to exist. It will change and adapt, but our asses are the problem.

Enviromentalists then use all this to do whatever they do.

So, of course you'll hear "yes, but" from a scientist. That just means he's a good scientist, taught to be careful about the stuff he says. Scientific skepticism is absolutely nothing like pathological skepticism (people who deny there is a climate change, holocaust deniers, and all other nutjobs).

During the 60's and the 70's we had sliding rules and huge nomograms, and very slow computers. Global cooling was one of the earliest efforts to model the whole atmosphere. Today we have additional 40-50 years of empirical data, more knowledge and vastly more powerful computers. So we're sort of in a better situation.

The graphs are indeed showing a slowdown, yet the fluctuations are perfectly normal. It didn't came as a surprise to people who presumed the oceans might play a large role. They're indeed dampers. Thermal and chemical dampers with feedback loops.

I do live in EU (yes, ex-communist country, I hate propaganda). I have nothing against the ban of incadescent lights except cultural nostalgia. Those lamps are very inefficient. Enormous amounts of electricity are wasted as heat, so you get less light for the same amount of invested energy. As most of the energy we get is extracted from fossil fuels, lowering the number of incadescent lights will lower the amount of power spent. Sounds like a paradox, but it will also lower the amount of mercury in the environment, because the amount that exits the power plants' chimneys is much greater than the amount than the amounts inside the new lamps. Less radioisotopes and carcinogenic chemicals, too. Coal is a nasty thing.

What I agree with is the thing with the solar electrical power. It's a growing industry which has a net negative impact on the planet. The energy it puts out is ridiculously small, the energy density is small, and the manufacturing industry that produces them is incredibly polluting. But as long as it's in China, as it is, politically inclined environmentalists can fool everyone they want. I understand what you're trying to say. We Europeans think of ourselves as environmentally conscious, and at the other side of the planet whole regions are contaminated with wasteproducts of our "clean" devices. China burns lots of coal so they could make shiny things we buy to feel better about ourselves.

Even if we take our society out of the equation, elevated CO2 levels don't have a net beneficial effect. Lots of species will perish. Species perish all the time, it's the normal way of nature, but in these conditions, it's sped up. I've mentioned jellyfish before. They will become a huge problem. They like warm water and elevated levels of zooplankton (which is thriving because there's lots of phytoplankton, which thrives because of CO2). More jellyfish, less ecological diversity. They eat baby fish.

Less diversity, worse overall feedback.

Of course, after some time, things change again, that's how nature works. It won't be gone.

You have a crazy boss, I must admit it.

What to do with the warming? I honestly think that if we would cease to exist, it would take few millenia until things went back to normal. Clearly, we aren't going anywhere, so the solution is to lower our carbon footprint and other footprints. But it has to be done sensibly. There's a whole spectrum of possibilities between doing nothing (what American oil field republicans want) and enforcing drastic measures. EU can't do much compared to USA, Russia and China, neither of which seem to give a **** and release lots of CO2.

America had the chance to develop new nuclear fission technologies, but after Three Mile Island and the whole hippie movement, public support has failed. USA now uses very old powerplants, unlike France which made new generations of power plants and continuously works on improving the technology and sells excess energy to neighbouring stupid governments (Italy, for example).

Supposedly China is making a progress in the field, but who knows... Maybe it's just propaganda.

We all know scientists cherry pick the data they uses, this is an major issue in medicine where you use a lot of statistic and people fewer people die if you are right.

We all did in lab on school where an failed experiment did not affected our grades as long as the documentation was good, now would you cherry pick if your funding and income depend on it?

If that happened most of the time, the consequences would be drastic. Yes, it happens sometimes, but there's the peer review method. If you publish something, sooner or later someone else is going to repeat it to check it out. If they prove you're a cheater, you'll lose a lot more.

You sound like it's a normal, everyday thing. It isn't.

Edited August 30, 2013 by lajoswinkler

[rryy]

I watched the video, and based on what it sounded like, I thought it was just satire and everyone was just overreacting. Apparently not.

On a side note, it probably is very difficult to convince someone who thinks global warming is false to think it is true (with the exception of me ) and vice versa because one side will say that the graphs and data are made up/incorrect and the other will say that the graphs are based on hard evidence and the data cannot be incorrect.

[Diche Bach]

Your first graph shows exactly what I mean. The temperatures changed over the course of many centuries. Then came the industrial revolution, and suddenly, temperatures went NUTS. Heating up more in 150 years than in the 2000 years before.

Depending on which colored line you decide is "the right model" in the Holocene graph, Earth might be hotter now by 0.2 to 0.5 C than at any time during the past 2000 years. However you'll note that there are plenty of episodes during the preceding 2000 years where the slope is approximately equally steep to the current upslope. Certainly the idea that there is something unusual going on and that anthropogenic factors are contributing to it is an important hypothesis that deserves serious attention. But this standpoint, a calm rational and scientific standpoint, is many orders of magnitude less pronounced than the standard "sky is falling" Al Gore rhetoric complete with political party affiliation, taxation policy and moral high ground hyperbole. Not to mention that the observed change does not (as I argued in the preceding post) prove the cause no matter how strong the correlation coefficient. If we are going to do the right thing, then we need to know what the right thing is. If we go whole-hog on policies that turn out to have been "partly the right thing to do" while we ignore other potential policies, then we have not done the best thing.

The observation of a very strong correlation between estimated temperature and carbon emissions since the industrial revolution begs the question of: what about right before the industrial revolution (ca. 1840)? Based on that fairly low resolution graph (which is based on fairly low resolution measures as we go back in time) it sure looks to me like temperature has been rising since about 1800 (esp. if we take the red line model). If recent changes are explained primarily by carbon emissions, then why were temperatures evidently rising before carbon emissions went up? This of course is to say nothing of how industrial carbon emissions can explain every other hump and bump in that graph.

When we go back further in time the alarmism about current observations becomes even less rational. Looking at the Holocene graph and again, depending on which model (which colored line) you favor, we might at present be getting into the "highish" range but there is not a single model there that shows clearly we are "way off" relative to past fluctuations. Also note again: plenty of very steeply sloping and rapidly oscillating up and down fluctuations over the past 8 or 10 thousand years cine the end of the last Ice Age.

Look at the red, blue and turquoise lines at about 5000 before the present . . . all three show a major increase in temperature that (based on the lines on the graph) were equally as rapid and even larger in maximum amplitude than we think we might be experiencing right now. Lots of other ups and down all the way across the graph.

Are we 'out of bounds' relative to the last 2000 years? Maybe by a fraction of a centigrade. But in geological terms 2000 years is nothing, and if we look at a broader picture, 10,000 years (and excluding the last Ice Age which is obviously a huge outlier period) it becomes quite obvious that what we are experiencing right now (and assuming it is accurate given it is a hyper precise measures for the last ~30 years trailing on an additional 100 years of decreasingly good measures back to the mid 19th century) is not the least bit anomalous.

So what about when we expand our view to a truly broad scale: the entire Phanerozoic, the last 550 million years since life really began to flourish on Earth? "Current" patterns (meaning those over the last 500,000 years) exhibits far more fluctuation than at nearly any time previously . . . well, actually that graph doesn't show you that, so you'll just have to take my word for it until I can find one that shows it . . . however overall trend for the last 100 million years or so (the black line in the last graph) has been a pattern of distinct cooling, albeit with at least two major warming events.

Based on that, we are cooler now than at any time during the past 100 million years, so it shouldn't be a big surprise if things are warming up a bit. Whatever was driving all those ups and downs in Earth's climate and temperature over all those millions of years is unlikely to have just "stopped" working once human beings started burning coal in factories and running steam engines and stuff.

Edited August 30, 2013 by Diche Bach

[SargeRho]

I don't see any of that. What I see is a slight wave over the course of 1800 years, and then a massive spike twice as high over 150 years.

[Stochasty]

SargeRho, something you must understand when interpreting the historical proxy temperature reconstructions is that they systematically underestimate short-wavelength variations in past temperatures, and that underestimation gets worse the further back in time you go.

Partly, this is due to physical effects: large magnitude high frequency temperature variations lead to large gradients in the ice core samples, and the rate of diffusion of gases in ice is dependent upon the gradient, therefore diffusion preferentially destroys high frequency data. This means that the ice cores are not capable of providing information about temperature variations on time scales shorter than a century, and if you view the current temperature rise with the same resolution you can get from the ice cores it looks like nothing special.

The other part of this has to do with some truly, truly atrocious statistical methods used by multi-proxy historical temperature studies. In all of those papers (at least all of the ones I have looked at, which includes most of the famous ones), they use a method whereby they select which proxies to include in their study based on how well those proxies correlate with the surface temperature record over the past century. They then determine the sensitivity to temperature of their selected sample based on those same correlations. This is an unacceptable and statistically indefensible practice which will lead to an unavoidable (and mathematically provable) suppression of fluctuations away from the mean over the range of the sample which does not overlap with the modern temperature record. In other words, in that first graph that Diche showed, everything prior to 1900 has been artificially flattened; furthermore, it's difficult to estimate how much flattening has occurred, because we don't have access to the full (pre-selection) data set used in the studies which make up that graph.

Edited August 30, 2013 by Stochasty