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Climate Data Re-examined (updated)
An anonymous reader writes "An important paper that re-examines historical climate data was published on 28 October in the respected journal Energy & Environment. (The paper is also available here.) According to an article in Canada's National Post, the paper shows that a "pillar of the Kyoto Accord is based on false calculations, incorrect data and an overtly biased selection of climate records." (USA Today also has a story.) This paper will undoubtedly be controversial and should stir a vigourous data review." Update: 11/05 14:54 GMT by T : newyhouse points out a similarly contrarian 2001 Economist article by Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist .
Nooooooo!
"just about the only journal which gives a platform to all sides of the global warming debate, especially on the policy issues".
Check out the funding behind this.
GWB will use this as an excuse to drop the whole hydrogen economy thing and further increase America's dependence on Middle Eastern oil. Whether the climate gurus are right or wrong, this is a Bad Thing.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Now I don't want to respond to the article's claims, since that'll only spark a flame war I don't want to fight but:
Only in Canada does one see a graph with a flat line then sharp spike and instantly think "Oooo, a hockey stick!"
This just cracks me up because it is absolutely true of most of my Canadian relities, they are just nuts over hockey and I'm sure this doesn't strike any of them as the least bit odd comparison.
It however doesn't mean that we should not pollute.
A friend of mine is prepairing a PHD in geology.
He often climbs on top of the Mont Blanc (4807m) where he analyzes the ice cap.
He found out that ther chemicals that impregnated the ice are similar only to the ones which emanates from the General Motors factories, in Detroit, US.
There is a serious issue, there.
It is not because it won't make rain more that it is not a bad thing.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
The poblem with most of these policies is they put rules in place on 3rd world countries that can't afford to put in technology to fix the problems they have, then they sell of thier clean air units to other countries to make cash.
basically it works like this. every country has to make quotas. but the stupid thing is you can TRADE them. Lets say the US it polluting too much, it can buy "clean air quotas" from another country who doesn't pollute as much. It's kinda interesting but lame at the same time.
We shouldn't stop protecting the environment just because some analysis was wrong. Its funny that we even need justification in the first place to preserve the planet.
Moderation Totals: Flamebait=2, Troll=1, Redundant=1, Insightful=6, Overrated=1, Underrated=1, Total=12. (not mine)
This science is brought to you by the Bush & Cheney energy commission...
Question everything that you've accepted without thinking.
Questions:
1. Who are these guys. There are no affiliations listed and the research sponsor is not listed.
2. MBH98 is not the only paper. It was one of the first ones. After that more detailed research was done and it did not refute any of the claims.
3. Is the ice melt in the arctic a figment of my imagination?
4. Is the retreat of South American Glaciers a figment of my imagination?
5. Why doesn't NOAA put all the data for public consumption so that anyone can see who is right and who is wrong?
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
... your vehicle's exhaust won't make any harm to the nature. You can try it: lock yourself in the garage and run the engine for an hour. You won't feel anything bad, serious, it's all harmless stuff, everybody knows that, right? D'oh..
You're comparing filling a very small space with a very toxic poison to putting a tiny bit of pollution into a very vast atmosphere.
The analogy doesn't even come close to being correct.
About twenty years ago, there was a conference on global warming held at Caltech. The gist of the results presented was that adding energy to the atmosphere seemed to make it more chaotic. That doesn't imply local warming must occur, but rather that the weather becomes more unpredictable. I think we're seeing that now in the data.
The "hockey stick" graph has been roundly criticized for years -- and yes, legitimate scientists criticize it, not just "neo-cons" or whatever.
Unfortunately there is immense political pressure placed upon anyone who says something that could be seen as weakening the Kyoto protocol or the "global climate consensus." I expect the authors of this paper will see quite a lot of heat about this.
This is a shame, because the fact that the "hockey stick" graph is flawed absolutely does not imply that human-influenced global warming isn't a problem! Sure, people may misuse these results to argue that global warming is somehow disproven, but the potential misuse of a result is no reason to suppress it. On the contrary, pressuring people to keep quiet about their findings will only hurt the credibility of the entire field in the long run. So it is very good to see that this is published.
And remember -- there is no "final word" in science. The most vital element of science is results can be tested and disproven. Nothing is above criticism, including the hockey stick graph, this paper, and any other paper written about climate change or any other scientific subject. That is what science is all about.
I wonder if the results are skewed because of mistakes, or if the numbers have been wilfully embellished. Neither would surprise me: almost every lobby group for every side of every issue, from Greenpeace to the car industry lobby, have been known to juggle the books a little in order to support their own beliefs. In some cases, outright fraud has taken place.
What scared me about Kyoto is not so much the conclusion that was drawn, nor the way scientists had arrived at that conclusion, but the zealous belief of many governments in these conclusions. In Europe, scientists or governments (the US) who were sceptical about the Kyoto paper became the brunt of scorn and vilification in the media. It again showed how deeply environmentalists have become entrenched in the decision-making bodies of government... it reminds me of the case where two scientists were fired from the Dutch government environmental agency, for publishing reports that proved the official line on acid rain was wrong.
The reactions to this article will tell us if the political climate has changed... if the policy-makers are still only accepting opinions that fit their own world view, or if we have a more open climate where scientific discussion rather than dogma holds sway.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
"Corrections to the Mann et. al. (1998) Proxy Data Base and Northern Hemispheric Average Temperature Series" ...
Energy and Environment 14(6) 751-772.
By Steven McIntyre & Ross McKitrick
They seem to have misspelt "Corporate right-wing crony apologist" there - otherwise fine..
Taking this referenced paper as being on the mark, do look at their corrected temperature graph. One can't say that the recent warming has been unprecedented based on that graph, but you could claim that there's been nothing like it in 500 years.
...) as a good reason to dispute the need for CO2 emission controls. Yet they would still (IMO) be misguided. As evidenced by the hole in the ozone layer, human industrial activity can have significant long-term effects on the global environment. Given that we only have the one planet, it seems only good sense that we should be cautious when it comes to activity that has the potential to seriously change the environment.
It seems almost certain that this news will be welcomed by certain governments (US, Australia,
The warming trend in the last 100 years may have very little to do with industrial emissions - but as yet we can't tell. That there is a correlation indicates we should err on the side of caution: if it is indeed a matter of causation, then we're essential pissing on our own future.
Regardless of quality of life issues, it makes sense as an economic one, when viewed in global terms. We will have to deal with the effects of climate change whether it be due to human activity or not, but if there is a significant component that we're responsible for, continuing in this behaviour is going to make a very large problem a great deal worse, with attendant very high costs to amerliorate it. It is risk management. Putting heads in the sand and saying that there's doubt about the link, does not make the risk of that link magically disappear. Even a 5% chance of the link being actual may be sufficient for a purely economic assessment to indicate that emissions should be sharply curbed.
If there were alternative policies being adopted by those governments against the Kyoto accords, then that would be an indication that their objections were based on more than short-term economic growth (or worse, given the somewhat incestuous relationships between governments and industry.) Yet Australia for example has not even managed to reduce its rate of growth of emissions (not the emission levels themselves!) to targets that had been set earlier.
If the Kyoto accords are not a step in the right direction, then the continuing increase of CO2 emissions is certainly not a preferable alternative.
A recent study by Arctic researchers showed that the polar ice cap isn't just shrinking in terms of land mass, it's shrinking in terms of depth too, by 4cm a year.
All that water's going somewhere, and that somewhere is the oceans. Global sea levels are rising, and you only have to look at the situation in Tuvalu in the Pacific or Venice, Italy to see that the threat of rising tides isn't a myth.
People can harp on about "not enough data" or "inconclusive evidence" all they want but if entire nations vanishing beneath the waves or historic cities sinking isn't a wake-up call then I don't know what is.
Frankly, there are some people who will bury their heads in the sand over this issue just as long as they can make a profit by ignoring it. Oil companies and big business are never going to recognise that they are part of the problem until the last possible moment, at which time they'll just shrug their shoulders and say "Who knew?", just like the tobacco industry before them.
But, unlike tobacco, this isn't a problem that will affect just a handful of people, or a problem that will be easily settled by the courts - billions in punitive damages are useless when your country is underwater. The last time I checked there wasn't a court on the planet that could push back the tides.
I'm sure there are dozens of readers out there that will right off this comment as yet more half-baked environmental doom-mongering but I find it funny that these same people will demand more money to scan the heavens for deadly meteors - it seems that extinction Armageddon-style is trendy but the possibility of extinction because of our own actions just isn't sexy enough.
If you really want to be objective about these issues try to look beyond the smoke and mirrors. Ask yourself how objective the research is - there are far more people out there funded by big business than you'd imagine. Ask yourself who stands to profit by presenting a negative picture of climate change? Who stands to lose if the problem is tackled head-on? And who stands to profit if it's ignored and the situation is allowed to continue unchecked?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
I visited a Glacier in Norway once (at Olden) and they have actually signposted the glacier boundary at various previous times for the tourists - ie. "Glacier boundary 1850" etc.
I can tell you its a long climb from those points until you get to where the glacier is today..
Just because you can spot the odd anomoly in a bunch of data does not render the whole thing untrue..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
After Canada's ratification of the treaty in late 2002, environmentalists had every reason to believe that few climate experts would dare continue to publicly oppose Kyoto's science, Russia would quickly ratify the accord and it soon would become international law. Instead, as illustrated at this month's World Climate Change Conference in Moscow, exactly the opposite has happened. The growing number of scientists who dispute the treaty's scientific foundation have become increasingly vocal, regularly pushing their case in the media as groundbreaking studies continue to be published that pull the rug out from under Kyoto's shaky edifice.
Sounds to me like the author of this story on USA today probably never did any scientific research or even understood the basic theory of it; it's entirely expected that they'd continue to dispute it even more. The whole function of science is to "disprove" rather than "prove" things, that's why you have that carefully crafted thing called the "null" hypothesis, that people agonize over for ages, and that sounds something like... "there is no difference between A and B" (simplification) that you set out to disprove, so that if you get a difference you calculate the likelihood that such difference was the result of chance, and if such likelihood is very small and chance very improbable then that's the best of your evidence. The whole idea of "scientifically proven" is such a complete misnomer, there's nothing that's "scientifically proven", it's more that it's "null hypothesis" is "disproven", which again is no certain terms and just an exercise in probability and correlation, in engineering it might be up to 99% and in medicine it might be as low as 80%.
The other thing is... those of you who might find this story interesting might wanna have a look at the controversial work of Danish Statistician Bjorn Lomborg and his book; "the skeptical environmentalist, measuring the real state of the world". Just notice two things... like the key figure in this study, an economist, lomborg was neither an ecologist or an environmentalist, and just like him, if you read the reply of Professor Mann who aims to discredit the work of the authors of this study with quite apparent anger, Lomborg's work has been disputed heavily, and he even had things physically thrown at him by an academic scholar when he was invited to speak at Cambridge.
and I believe it is.
There are plenty of other good reasons to reduce emissions, not least reducing consumption of precious and dwindling fossil resources. Oil is great, really great for making things from and we insist on burning it to get around and to heat ourselves. It doesn't grow on trees you know whereas trees, well, do.
Don't even get me started on commercial aviation.
In case it isn't obvious, the National Post is a very right wing paper, at least in Canadian terms. That doesn't mean they are wrong, but they have a history of taking any opportunity to attack the Kyoto Accord.
As a case in point, I offer the title, subtitle and byline for the article:
I would say, for instance, that a more cautious interpretation would be that an important new paper suggests flaws in the research, not that it reveals it. Particularly if I were a writer for a business & economics paper, not a climate change researcher. And then there is the title itself...
To give credit where it is due, he does tend to use the phrase 'climate change' rather than the older 'global warming', which is a more accurate description of what the body of research underpinning Kyoto actually suggests. Usually you can spot biased participants in debates like this by their choice of language.
Personally, I have never taken sides over whether climate change is likely to be a reality or not. I don't need it as a justification for my environmental leanings. I think there are many national security and economic justifications for taking such actions as improving energy efficiency throughout society without relying on theories such as climate change that are far beyond my ability to competently analyze. So go ahead and tear Kyoto apart if you care to, but don't use that as an excuse to increase dependence on Middle East oil, for example.
And I haven't seen a big appetite for new nuclear or coal power plants in the US as of late either.
If you say, "now I'll be modded down because of X", I'll happily oblige.
What the Mann paper claims is that there is an observable trend showing global temperature increase. This is not by all means the only argument pointing to a danger related to releasing "green house gases". These are not affected if the Mann paper is found to be flawed. I think it's extremely premature to assume at this point that we have no problems.
You seem, however, to have left out your scientific criticism of their methodology and results.
The original 1998 paper by Mann, Bradley, and Hughes was not in error. McIntyre and McKitrick screwed up their data when they published this paper. Somebody exported the raw data in the original paper to Excel but somehow exported 159 columns of data into a 112 column spreadsheet. M&M did not compare the spreadsheet and produced a "correction" to the original paper that was based on nothing but errors, since the full paleoclimatic data series of 159 columns is required to properly audit the analysis done in the 1998 paper. More information here and here. The world really is melting.
The authors of the original paper have already published a rebuttal to this M&M paper with further details about how M&M faithfully replicated neither the data nor the procedures in their audit.
Various blogs have been talking about this recently. It seems too early to say who's right here --- the original authors have issued a vigorous interim rebuttal [pdf] of the charges, so it's hard to say what's happening. But let's not let that get in the way of a good bit of enviro-sensationalism, eh?
This is irrelevent anyway. Unless it says that continuing to exploit non-renewable energy at the current rate (or faster) and emitting carbon dioxide at the current rate is actually good for the environment.
People need to look at the big picture and stop arguing over the small print.
"XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, use more." - Anonymous Coward
When a man is wrong and won't admit it, he always gets angry. ~ Thomas Haliburton
I have found many people will get angry when you say that global warming isn't real. Are you one of these people?
Do you hold on so dearly to this notion that evidence to the contrary outrages you? Isn't this a symptom that just maybe you might be wrong?
When I look at any of the graphs used to back up the global warming story, I do not see evidence of warming. Usually the graphs are zoomed in and incorrectly based. People like to imagine that they can 'see' a signal in the noise just like the stock graphs on the nightly news. But its not there, it is an illusion. Weather is a chaotic system so you will see fluctuations. Fluctuations are indicative of nothing.
Making the case that just because there is no evidence of a problem that reducing CO2 emmisions is still a good idea is an invalid argument. There are many things that might be true but have no basis, such as the idea that you should give me all your money if you want to go to heaven. Taking action on imagined crisis is foolish.
Just because the neo-cons are assholes does not imply that everything they say is wrong. In this case, the evidence is on their side.
It is of course obvious that earth currently is in the middle of the most swift mass extinction ever seen. The loss of 90% of species when the dinosaus went extinct was gradual and small compared.
Human activity do of course affect the climate, and the Kyoto agreement was a spit in the bucket trying to just slow this down. Was is a 5% reduction in the annual increase? That is still an increase in emissions! It's a joke, and not even that are we able to do.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
Basically they debunk the claim that current average temperatures are unprecedented in the last 500 years.
The researcher basically states that it was warmer in 1400 than previously estimated. I have read that the end of the Viking Age (~800-1100 AD) was mainly due to a large drop in global temperatures. The Viking colony in Greenland lasted until 1380 AD when the Summer thaw that allowed them to travel by ship stopped occuring, for example.
He does not refute the fact that it is getting warmer - and rapidly so. He simply says it was pretty warm in 1400 too, in contrast to prior conslusions. Note also that, according to his data, we have already reached his pre-1400 temperature levels and the trend continuing steeply upward.
Thank god I live in Sweden. We love global warming. Vroom vroom!
Damn Yankee
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Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
William Shakespeare
See the authors' reply hereE PaperP roblem.pdft ml
http://holocene.evsc.virginia.edu/Mann/Eand
and Kevin Drum's comment here:
http://www.calpundit.com/archives/002564.h
"In laymen's terms, they say that their critics are completely full of shit and wouldn't know their ass from a hole in the ozone layer."
My personal arbitary list of bookmark'd climate change stories now includes the "Polar Bears likely to become extinct as North Polar icecap will melt completely in summer".
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2001/ast07se
http://earth.agu.org/revgeophys/s
http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/english/world/americ
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http://www.whoi.edu/home/a
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2002
http://www.guardian.co.uk/u
http://www.observer.co.uk/interna
http://www.spacedaily.com/news
http://www.nationalpost.com/search/story.html?
http://science.slash
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"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
And considering we're still technically in an ice-age, just on the receding end of one, this makes alot of sense that you'd see that.
Yes, the Earth is getting warmer, sort of... (been unnaturally cold the past four years where I live) but at the same time this should be expected. This always happens at the end of ice ages. They wouldn't be called 'ice ages' unless they were periods where the Earth was unnaturally cold.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
While climate change may or may not be caused by human activity, there is other much more obvious and pressing proof that we are in fact destroying this planet. For example, there is little doubt that the mass extinction and loss of biodiversity we are currently seeing is unprecedented (save maybe for the extinction of the dinasaur era 65 million years ago). The danger here is that some may be tempted to use the results of this climate study as some sort of proof against environmentalism in general.
While a reduction of CO2 emissions is nice, the real effect of Kyoto would have been to boost renewable, non-polluting sources of energy. The benifits of this go far beyond just greenhouse gasses. By getting off oil we could do everything from reducing cancer rates (less air pollution), to decentralizing the power grid, to shifting global power away from terrorist states like Saudi Arabia. It really is a win-win situation for everyone -- except those who are currently in power.
This is another Microsoft sponsored review isn't it?.
You're _always_ taking chances. Like I said, if you invest all your efforts into reducing CO2 output, you can't at the same time do other things. We might end up with a lot of CO2 stored under the seas, in order to limit CO2 emissions, while we had better had spent our efforts on doing _other_ things. It's all about priorities, and keeping to the Kyoto agreements will certainly cost us a lot. What other things can we do with that money/time/effort?
An 'important' paper written by a scientist employed in the mining industry.
Oh yes and the university guy. Don't know exactly what financial links exist between the university and the people who don't like the news of global warming spreading.
Move along please. No global warming to be seen here.
... if you read the reply of Professor Mann who aims to discredit the work of the authors of this study with quite apparent anger, ...
I'm not sure that comment is quite fair to the author of the original paper under criticism, who alleges (with quite a lot of supporting detail), that the new paper gives a 'gross misrepresentation' of the original work that is criticized, and he also says that contrary to normal practice of scientific journals, the authors of the original paper under criticism were not given an opportunity to respond.
I'm not an expert in this field but I did try to read the recent paper. The point on which it is all said to be based is data integrity. I wondered how all of the alleged data errors had been verified, and more importantly, how the outside world could repeat that verification. To me, the original author's reply certainly reinforces those concerns about verification of the alleged errors, in part because it raises issues about what makes for the difference in the conclusions -- is the difference significantly due to data errors, or was it due to intentional re-selection of data which appears to be a matter of judgement rather than of error.
Either way, it may all be a local squabble, the content of the 1998 paper under criticism clearly has not been the only evidence for climate change.
It is a pity that the original MBH paper you link to states (page 1 top right) "112 indicators back to 1820" and (page 3 middle right) "the reconstructions from 1820 onwards based on the full multiproxy network of 112 indicators". 159 does not appear in the paper except in the date 1599.
at least not in the conventional sense. It is a natural and necessary part of our ecosystem. And increased levels of CO2 are not a direct threat to our ecosystem, it will increase plant growth which is usually thought of a good thing. More plants will feed more anaimals, including us.
Increasing CO2 levels are only a problem if the increase is large enough to increase the temperature of the Earth, due to the greenhouse effect. An increased temperature will have good and bad effects, but it will change weather patterns and increase sea level, which will certainly cause problems both for us and the rest of the ecological system.
This is a normal part of the peer review. We will have to see if this new paper stands up or has flaws itself. Don't hold you breath. The way we view the world has not suddenly just changed. There is just a new strand to the science to be looked at and investigated in more detail.
I'm sorry to break this to you, but there isn't a government on the planet with the slightest intention of modifying their political agendas to assist the planet in any way at all. (I'm not actually saying that they should, but merely pointing out that they are not.)
Very occasionally you hear a little pro-conservation posturing when it may help raise someone's fading political profile by a small amount, and occasionally grand gestures like Kyoto are organized, but you need to understand that all of these are just gestures, and they fade from the agenda the instant that they are over.
The problem is simply that politicians are by their very nature uncommitted to anything except their own electoral future. A hypothetical politician that is committed to doing good for others simply will not last within our first world's political systems, even if he or she manages to gain entrance once. The few that manage to stay become compromised --- "corrupted" may sound harsh but the label is not entirely inaccurate.
To those who are interested in (for example) reducing the amount of C02 that is accumulating in the atmosphere, I would suggest that a far more profitable avenue than relying on politicians is to actually do something about it directly: get into the forestry business, convert farms to high-CO2 consumption crops, promote, develop and market electric vehicles, and so on.
Relying on politicians is a dead loss. If you want something useful done, just do it.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
well... that's what i meant... Professor Mann is the author of the original paper under criticism... with whom i agree that the method of the those guys is suspect as it relies on data that they admit was provided to them with some difficulty, with the misleading and deceiving claim that the intention was to "replicate" the study, which usually doesn't mean the mere reanalysis of data, but the application of the study methodology on a new set of data to see if the same outcome can be replicated.
Nooooooooo....
I believe we're still waiting for the documents relating to the oil companies' 'consultations' with Archduke Cheney over energy policy, aren't we?
Why do people think environmentalists would be biased, anyway? What are they biased towards? Not dying? Is there some secret Globex-EnviroCorporation Inc in which all tree hugging hippies have undisclosed shares? Or is it possible that they simply understand the value of erring on the side of caution when the stakes are so high?
I love it that people think that they are able to be so 'skeptical' about the environment. Can't you see that the logical way to be skeptical about it is to assume that the warning signs mean something significant until you can be sure they don't? Otherwise you're acting like someone with half the symptoms of cancer who wants to wait until they have them all before getting it checked out. After all, you can never be sure so better to do nothing, eh?
Don't worry, go ahead and doubt environmentalists. I'm sure businessmen whose entire job is making profits for their own companies are *much* more reliable at telling you what the state of the environment is.
Read Pynchon.
If ice is less dense than water, a given amount of ice will take up more volume than the same amount of water. You describe the bottle-cracking effect of water expanding once it is frozen - consider what happens when ice melts.
A slight correction: SOME current earth models. The current science for climate prediction models is pretty shaky.
First of all, there are probably unidentified factors that need to be taken into account for any decent model. Second, weights for these variables are hard to assign, and there may be some unidentified feedback mechanisms, both positive and negative.
The models are getting better, but it is an intrinsically very difficult problem, and there is insufficient data to thoroughly evaluate the model.
Also, the rate of recent temperature rise is a subject of debate. "The problem essentially is that observed average global surface
temperatures over the period 1979-1997 show an increase of approximately 0.2oC
whereas downward micro-wave soundings from satellites reveal zero temperature
change through the lower atmosphere or perhaps a slight decrease." http://www.apec.org.au/docs/tucker.pdf
10 percent of the volume of ice sits above the water level. What bit of that is hard to understand?
If you don't believe that the water levels will rise try out the "melting ice in a glass" experiment I described. If that doesn't convince you then I don't know what will.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
If you follow the links provided in the parent post, you will find the rebuttal by the authros where they state:
We did not ask for an Excel spreadsheet nor did we receive one.
If you read the rest of their rebuttal, it becomes clear that Mann just made the excel error up! No really! Go read!
Why doesn't NOAA put all the data for public consumption so that anyone can see who is right and who is wrong?
/ ITRDB/NOAMER/), and a list of their papers is here.
.... ?!
Well, it was said that the data have been online since 2000. The recent paper cites to here as a source for the original data. The original authors cite to a lot of data here. They also cite to a doubtful/dead link (http://holocene.evsc.virginia.edu/pub/MBH98/TREE
Personally I'm not sure how to make anything of the data, but I hope independent reviewers who can will weigh in on it
Your understanding of Archimedes' principle is flawed. Perhaps *you* should try your little experiment. If that sounds like too much work, try researching your claim a little.
"The Skeptical Environmentalist" raised a real $hitfit in the environmentalist community two or three years ago. Some of his chief points were a his perception of a complete disregard of statistical honesty used to calculate the treaty. Interesting (if long) read.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
In the 70s, scientists were saying that they had definite proof that the earth was heading back into another ice-age. What happened to it?
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
"but the stupid thing is you can TRADE them"
Um, I think the point being that this makes renewable energy a tradeable resource, even though you can't physically trade it due to power transmission limitations. Instead, you can replace your 'bad' energy with clean power, then sell the equivalent bad energy to the US (ahem, or someone else I guess) for money. Result: there is a real economic (as opposed to moral, ethical, logical and all those other types that don't matter) reason to invest heavily in renewable energy.
The thing that is really sad is that we have the tech RIGHT NOW to use renewable energy. We could move to it in a couple of decades and never look back - and up there in the sky, and in the oceans, and in the wind, is an energy source that will never run out in a billion* years or so.
The way I see it, it's a race between the carbon-based energy stocks and the planet's ability to survive - hopefully we will run out of coal and oil before we have actually managed to kill ourselves.
*actual years may vary according to use
Read Pynchon.
Want to try again? Besides, it was a joke, not a bash. Hockey is THE game up there and basically all my relitives are nuts about it.
It's counter-intuitive, but warmer temperatures can cause increased snowfall - the warmer air can carry more water, you see.
Clear, Dark Skies
...there isn't nearly enough oil left to do the damage. See dieoff.org
This points to one of the big problems in science. The method in which funding is aquired. If you produce a thesis that says "The sky is falling, but we can prevent it" you attract attention, and due to the potential acatstrophe that awaits man kind if we don't understand WHY the sky is falling, you get money. If you say "The sky looks like it's going through a natural cycle it won't fall" - you don't. The fact that a lot of the studies appear to have willfully ignroed data that didn't support their thesis is also equally as disturbing. Can you smell political agenda driven science here? See sig for final thought on the matter
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
As others have pointed out much better than I have, only part of the ice is floating in the seas and supported by displacement, much of the rest of it is supported by land. Where this is the case, there's no equivalent volume of water that's being replaced by an equivalent volume of melted ice.
Sorry if I was too dense (no pun intended) to have made myself clearer. I've been up for almost 30 hours now and I won't be hitting the sack for at least another 10-12.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Because the same thing could be applied to anything that lacks proof, but would have a consequence if true. The oldest example I know of this kind of thing is Pascal's wager. It's an argument for the belief in god that goes like this:
There is a 2x2 matrix, where you either believe or don't believe in god and he does or doesn't exist. You then fill in the boxes with values for benefit or penalty for the situations. Now what Pascal argued is that in the "does exist" column the values are infinite, positive for belief, negative for disbelief since teh reward and punishment are infinetly greater than anything in this world. So it doesn't matter what is in the "does not exist" column since it will be finite. Well, you don't want to risk it, so you should jsut believe in god.
This is, of course, hugely problematic and easy to poke holes in. There are tons of other cases we could argue including that it ISN'T infinite in the "does exist" column, that god can tell between real and faked belief, that there is a different god, etc.
Now the problem is applying that kind of "you can't risk it" logic to everything lets psuedo science get teh same creedence as real science, and in that, swindlers. Like suppose I come to you with a bunch of graphs n' numbers n' daigrams and stuff. I tell you that this is data on my new drug that can cure all forms of cancer. All I need is $10 million to develop it. You look over my data and realise that it in no way justifies my claim. My response? "Yes, but can you really risk it? I mean what if my data IS right and I CAN make the drug? Can you risk on missing out on that oppertunity, not to mention depriving society of that benifit?" If you find that compelling, well then I have some graphs n' numbers n' daigrams to show you...
Basically, before comitting to something as a fact, and making large changes becaues of it, it needs to pass scientific (strong inference) muster. Otherwise, we get into a really bad situation.
I don't understand how somebody can care so little about the environment.
LOL, if you think that government and politicians care about anything at all except themselves then you haven't been around much.
A few politicians do start off as idealists, but it rarely lasts long, and it never lasts beyond the point where they acquire political office. You see, it can't last beyond that, because the first-world political environment is one where only hyenas thrive. A dove will only survive by circling high out of reach, but inevitably, without any effect whatsoever on the politics of government.
My advice to the environmentalists (or indeed to any faction without major $$$ lobbying power) is not to waste time on government and politics, and to put your resources into changing the world directly through your own actions. One tree planted by yourself is vastly more than you'll ever get your president or prime minister to do for your planet.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Historical climate data is pretty much irrelevant to the question of whether we can safely emit greenhouse gasses. Emission of greenhouse gasses would be unsafe even if we were currently heading into a new ice age. Its lack of safety doesn't derive from historical data or complex climate modeling, but is a consequence of elementary thermodynamics: if you keep pumping those gasses into the atmosphere, sooner or later you are going to get large climate changes. The only thing that people are still debating is whether it's already happening or whether it's going to happen a few decades from now.
Kyoto may or may not have been justified to the public using historical climate records, but that doesn't matter. Kyoto is a meaningless band-aid anyway.
Why supposedly intelligent people keep being so hostile towards what is pretty much the consensus opinion of climatologists is beyond me. There seems to be some irrationally libertarian world view going around that basically states "apres nous le deluge", in this case, quite literally, a world view that was as self-descructive during Louis XIV's reign as it is today. And what is beyond me, too, is that people who want to engage in absolutely unprecendent experiments with our global climate and health call themselves "conservatives"--maybe they are just talking about their power and bank accounts when they are talking about being "conservative".
Noooooo - btw I really think we should restore death penalty for abortion, homosexuality and blasphemy.
Thomas Miconi
In assuming that a correlation implies a causation. It doesn't. There is no argument that temperatures have been rising in recorded history (a short period actually) nor is there an argument that human output of CO2 has risen since the IR. However that those two happened together does not mean that one caused the other, that is a seperate issue.
Finding causation is much harder than finding a correlation since all sorts of things are correlated (and it's simply to measure) but the causal link can be much more complex.
For example:
You can get the causal link the wrong way. There is a positive correlation between weight and height. There's aslo a causal link. However if you say that increasing weight will increase height, you've got teh direction of the link wrong.
There can be an outside factor. There is a positive correlation in the United States between being white and scoring well on standardised tests. However if you say that being white CAUSES you to score well on tests, you'd be wrong. The real cause is much more complex and has to do with general trends in educational and economic background.
Then there are just things that are incidental. For awhile, there was a positive correlation between one of my friends attending football games and the team winning. Every game he attended, they won, the couple he missed, they lost. Well of course he didn't cause them to win, nor did their loosing cause him not to attend, it was just random luck.
So, just because we have found a positive correlation between an increase in temperature and an increase in CO2 does NOT mean we've found a causal link.
Is that by bottling up the sub industrial nations with environmental regulations, and thereby slowing their advance through the industrial stages, we may be making the problem worse in the long run.
The best way to get people to care about the environment is to get them beyond the point of having to worry about food, clothing and shelter. People worried about their next meal really could care less about pollution.
Kyoto and similar measures threaten to force sub-industrial nations to submit to burdensome restrictions that will make it harder for them to blossom into a wealthier economy.
Furthermore, it's grossly unfair to prolong the poverty of such nations by dictating how they can and can't develop so that we can sleep easier at night.
Remember, we didn't have any such restrictions when we went through this stage.
Posted by Hemos on Wednesday November 05, @04:20AM
So this is what Hemos was doing while hitting his first joint of the day?
/bin/fortune | slashdotsig.sh
a healthy ecosystem cannot. Preserving our only earth does not have an intrinsic cost. It's only a question of priorities if every familily needs their third SUV or if the money is spent on projects like cutting down on air pollution or cleaning poisened rivers. In both cases, workers get their salaries and nobody has to starve. In fact, usually a larger portion of cost seems to be associated with personnel for ecological projects than either for consumer products or fuel.
Please note that the editor of "E&E" is one of the few environmental scientists who agreed with Bjorn Lomborg "Skeptical Environmentalist", and a self-confessed environmental sceptic. As stated there, the journal itself has a "stance [that] is critical of conventional wisdom".
Now, I don't read E&E (I tend to read the mainstream geophysics journals: GAFD, JGR(Oceans) and GRL -- "E&E" is not a mainstream geophysics journal), but I am slightly concerned about work published in a journal with an agenda. One may also be concerned about the suitability of referees selected by an editor out to prove a point, rather than to publicise good science.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Because I'd like Canada to be tropical so I can wear shorts year round when I move there.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
This journal does not say it is peer-reviewed. Hmm, with that many data sets and obscure methods, can we trust it?
Actually 7 of the 10 last Summers have been the warmest on record ever in Sweden. My first Summer here was 1995 when temps were 85-90 from June through September. 1994 was even hotter according to friends. The last two years Summer weather has come in March and April and lasted until late September (unheard of for Sweden pre-1995!!)
Also Stockholm no longer gets deep snow like it used to. In a somewhat funny side-effect of global warming, the Stockholm town government cancelled all the old contracts for Winter snow removal a few years ago. When it did snow for two weeks last Winter, there was no one to remove it. It piled up for days causing chaos until they could arrange emergency removal.
-Damn Yankee
Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
William Shakespeare
"Except that China and India are the big polluters of the day."
0 1/Gree nhouse/Fig1P19.gif
s f/cont ent/emissionsindividual.html. gov/oar/globalwarming.nsf/cont ent/EmissionsInternational.html
Check out:
http://www.ioe.ucla.edu/publications/report
Compare the population one with the energy use one, and the per capita one. The US is EASILY the biggest per capita AND net user of energy.
If you prefer a measure of straight pollution to energy use, try:
http://yosemite.epa.gov/oar/globalwarming.n
http://yosemite.epa
USA totally dominates others in pretty much all respects. Try basing your posts on actual math next time.
Read Pynchon.
While 159 and 112 do not appear in the original paper there is this criticism from the rebuttal:
"(b) Incorrect representation of the MBH98 proxy data set.
MBH98 calculated PCs of proxy sub-networks separately for each interval in their stepwise
reconstruction. This is the only sensible approach, as it allows all data available over each sub-interval to
be used (i.e., first for 1400-1980, then separately for 1450-1980, 1500-1980, and so on). This requires 159
independent time series to represent all indicators required for reconstructions of all possible subintervals,
even though the maximum number ever used for a particular sub-interval is 112. By not
following this protocol, MM appear to have eliminated in the range of 100 proxy series used by MBH98
over the interval 1400-1600."
Now I can use hairspray again! Seriously, I looked at the data for the mid to late 1980s and there are distinct spikes in atmospheric GHG that coincide with Poison concert dates.
Over at space.com I noticed this interesting article. Sun's Output Increasing in Possible Trend Fueling Global Warming. The upshot is that the sun seems to emitting 0.05% more energy per decade since the 1970s. My quick calculation suggests that this rise in energy flux should create about a 0.15 degree C change in temperatures each decade (but that rise will probably lag as oceans equilibrate).
Its not surprising the the Sun might be causing this. After all, oscillations is solar output are probably responsible for Greenland being green around 1000 AD and may also end up being responsible for Greenland being green in the future.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Do some digging on the Piri Reis Map. The accurate coastline of Antarctica is convincing evidence that the ice caps were once nonexistent.
Of course it was also colder in the past. A Google search reveals this quickly enough.
Working from ~100 years of climatological data is myopic when there is ~1000 years of other evidence available.
My spin? The environmental movement is wacky. It has taken laudable ideas of conservation and made them oppressive to the people. Sounds a bit like communism to me.
--- "1.21 Jigawatts!" -Doc
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Cloud cover plays a big role in repelling solar radiation and keeping the Earth cool. For better or for worse, many sources of pollution help increase cloud cover. Sulfate emissions and jet contrails are two good examples as both stimulate cloud formation. Whether man-made cloud-based cooling is "good" depends on if you think this phenomenon mitigates or masks the problem of global warming.
It will be interesting to see if global warming kicks into high gear once more countries install sulfate scrubbers on coal-fired plants. It would be ironic if attempts to ameliorate one form of environment damage (sulfate emissions) actually exacerbates another form (global warming).
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
One day they're frozen solid, next thing you know they'll be putting up palm trees and we'll be importing ice from them. Mark my words, boy! Mark my woooooords!"
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Mod parent up please. It deserves to be +5 just like the grandparent.
One simple rule for its versus it's
For the past decade tree huggers and eco liberals have managed to stiffle scientific debate on climate. They have tried to foist their own wierd view of a peasant future onto an unwilling world through the Kyoto treaty. They found ready allies in the Eurocrats and others in the "international community" who would benefit from a hobbled U.S. economy. I am glad to see that the coersion that is the Kyoto treaty is failing and that there is a return to a healthy scientific discussion of these important matters.
an ill wind that blows no good
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
"How long can you thread water? Ha ha ha"
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
I don't think that the process of mountain-top removal mining is particularly friendly to the environment, no matter how cleanly you can burn the stuff once it's been shipped elsewhere. If you are going to promote more coal consumption, you've got to have a recipe for reducing its impacts from one end of the chain to the other or you're vulnerable to criticism and even injunctions.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Comparing the agendas on both sides may well be valid, but what about comparing the consequences if either side is wrong ??
If the tree huggers have got it wrong we see smaller profits, disgruntled share holders and short term job losses. Boo-hoo.
If the Megacorps have got it wrong (or more likely are simply covering up) then we've screwed up the planet.
The stakes are a little bigger.
Yeah, yeah, it's a rant and all, but it's probably the most insightful and on-target post in the whole thread.
Especially the bit about Big Bidness farming out the dirtiest parts of their operations via Koyoto to the desperate and poor parts of the world to bolster their bottom line.
Brak: What's THAT?
Thundercleese: A light switch.. of TOTAL DEVASTATION!
If you look at most of the complaints surrouding Kyoto, you will see much annoyance over the fact that the most rigorous controls were being imposed on the more developed nations. This structure was proposed largely to avoid the type of trap that you set out.
But it didn't half annoy the U.S - and some other developed nations.
A robust response from the authors of the original paper is here. In general a paper like hte one noted here should really be put in some kind of context.
'- just about the only journal which gives a platform to all sides of the global warming debate, especially on the policy issues.'
Now, this may just be my cynicism talking, but most publications that claim to represent all sides of a debate usually don't. Often, they represent the view that is against the mainstream, and so there may be bias against global climate change. The second, and MUCH LARGER red flag is the the phrase "Policy issues". In other words, the journal is overtly political. It's very hard for a political publication to sit on a fence. (Excepting of course the obvious, such as Hansard which are just records.)
On the other hand, like any other area of science surrounded by controversy, it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. All sides will reach for anything that supports their position, no matter how tenuous, and so you get a lot of bullshit, making real, hard science hard to find and hard to do.
As for my own position, so that you know where I am coming from, is this:
The 'hockey stick' graph is probably dodgy. It may reflect reality, but the nature of it's derivation makes it suspicious. There is, however, other data on global warming, such as the shrinkage of the world glaciers, ice shelf collapse, more intense weather, etc, etc. How much of this is natural variation and how much is human induced, it's hard to say. One side would have you believe it's nearly all our fault, the other thinks it's just another cycle. I don't know where we could get the data to make a rough estimate at the proportion, but I suspect taking a core from some really really old trees might help, such as the giant sequoia.
Additionally, this is an area where there are monied interests, and they can and will fight the new order if their interests are threatened. (For a more extreme example, look at how much FUD Big Tobacco threw at smoking related diseases.)
Is climate change going to wipe life off the planet? No. Other forms of environmental disturbance might, such as a massive toxin leak, but that too would have to be pretty big. The earth has been warmer in the past, and it will probably be warmer in the future. It's also been a lot colder. Life is remarkably able to withstand knocks. If all but the most primitive bacteria were wiped out by a comet strike, I'd be willing to bet there'd be life back on the surface within one hundred million years, and certainly by one billion years.
Individual species, however, become extinct quite readily, and often in groups. What possibly very rapid climate change will do is make the biodiversity of life plummet. As the climate of an area changes, all the specialist species, adapted to various niches, will find those niches disappearing, and will die out. If we lose the ice caps, we'll probably lose many seal, walrus, penguin, polar bear and artic fox species, and many more. Of course, given how interlinked an ecosystem is, there will probably be flow on effects. Essentially, some species won't be able to cope with the new conditions, anything that depends on those species will also die out, whether it's through a broken symbioses or from starvation. The effect of those lost species ripples through the ecosystem, causing species to go extinct, especially the highly specialised ones.
But why is losing biodiversity bad? Apart from the loss of the individual species, a system with low biodiversity is a lot more fragile, and a lot less efficient, and a lot less stable than one with great diversity. It's more fragile, because biodiversity acts as an ecosystem's buffer against stress. A good analogy is that game where you have a tower of blocks, and you pull out blocks one by one, until the tower collapses. Except now you're doing it with deeply interlocked blocks, and you also can't see all the connections. When you have a lot of blocks, the loss of a single block is not as likely to cause collapse as when you have only a few.
As for the efficiency of diverse ecosystems, when you have more ways of using the resource
http://www.newscientist.com/hottopics/climate/clim ate.jsp?id=ns99992958
m ate.jsp?id=ns99992249
http://www.newscientist.com/hottopics/climate/cli
As the rest of the replies to your post said, it's not about "the planet is not getting warmer!" (which in absolute terms it is, duh!), it's about WHY, and we don't really have a clue about how the complex system works, far from enough to make any reliable "models".
---- Take the Space Quiz!
Just so all of you are aware of some things surrounding Kyoto and the National Post up here in Canada. They my help you access this information in context.
1. When Canada ratified the Kyoto agreement last year there was a huge controversy in the country about whether it was based on facts. This was led by the ultra-conservative Premier of Alberta ("Red Nose Ralphy") Ralph Klien. He was supported by many right wing, neo-conservative business people. They tried to claim Kyoto would cost Canadians jobs - it was also going to cost Alberta Oil and some big industies profit, but I'm sure they were more concerned about the jobs. These conservative elements in Canada trotted out a few "scientists" (not climatologists mind you, but a biologist, I beleive...the ones with the fake names on their online petitions) who claim there is no global warming, contrary to the opinion of most mainstream scientists, including most climatologists.
2. The National Post is NOT the populist pap that USA Today is. The National Post is a very conservative, right wing newspaper (formerly owned by Conrad Black, an ultra-conservative icon up here and now owned by Can-West Global, the media company of the late Issy Asper, another conservative icon). To say that the National Post might be supporting an anti-Kyoto agenda is an understatement. They are willing to latch onto anything that might cast doubt on global warming and claim a " pillar of the Kyoto Accord is based on false calculations, incorrect data and an overtly biased selection of climate records." - at the bidding of the bussiness and political interests that support them.
So given that, consider source of this story.
As for the scientific paper cited, well, it's been out for about a week. Why not let the scientific community do what it does best - review the facts and try to verify the data. Perhaps it is the study that contains the errors, not the original. Even if it's correct, it is only one of the hundreds of studies conducted by scientists for the past 20 years that support global warming.
Try a Google searh ans see how many more you can come up with whose evidnce is NOT based on extrapolated climate data from the 1400's....then decide if Kyoto is bogus.
"Pillar" indeed. Kyto is standing on a lot more scientific ground that this study, even if it is correct.
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
... the rebuttals from the authors of the original paper are here.
That there can be so much controversy highlights the fragility of the "models" that have been developed to support the varying points of view. It seems we really don't understand the climate process yet so maybe, just maybe, we shouldn't leap at any proposed solutions (like Kyoto) because maybe there isn't a problem.
How come not jumping to solutions based on scanty knowledge of the problem makes sense on the small scale (e.g. advice from a sysadmin to a user) but gets lost on the large scale issues (global warming)?
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
2) Re-read the sites you linked to. Here's a blurb from the page regarding Tuvalu:
And for Venice, the problem is the rise in relative sea level, primarily because it is the land that is sinking, not the sea rising. And then there is the mistaken assumption that sea levels are supposed to remain constant in the first place. Sea levels and shorelines have been constantly changing since the oceans have been in existence-- but this has only become an issue now that humans have started building structures by the shore.
"I'm sure there are dozens of readers out there that will right off this comment as yet more half-baked environmental doom-mongering.."
That is self-evident, based on items #1 and #2 above.
Posting this as newsworthy less than a week after it was published in a journal is silly. Research takes time, debunking research takes more time.
The authors of the original paper have posted their rebutal already (as linked to by Millionth Monkey. At the moment its still a virtual mud-fight, each side calling the others' data and method wrong.
The abstract from this paper reads like a shotgun attack on the original paper, if your going to critique another author's work it helps not call their data obselete and their method poor, at least not in the abstract. You have a better chance of cooperation and admission of error then.
Both authors of this paper also seem to be first time authors in the field (not that the data should be discounted on that fact alone), McIntyre has no apparent affiliation with a university and McKitrick is an Economist (who has published before, albeit in book form).
For further backup of their theory, more sources are needed (they don't appear to include any supportive references). For example, we have John Daly's account of the hockey stick. There's also Massan's critique, showing essentially the same thing (medieval warm period being ignored by Mann et al.) This data seems to have been sourced from The Greening Earth Society, which, conveniently, is a Oil lobbying organisation.
We can find even more Oil funded rebutals to the original Mann paper, 1,2 (a tenuous link to the Greening Earth Society and General Motors...)
Citing a paper, published in the last week, submitted by an Anonymous Reader (to Slashdot), using the National Post and USA Today as supporting material isn't the proper way to do serious science. The USA Today article opens with " An important new paper in the journal Energy & Environment". The paper is a week old!
Anyway, at least I have some fun reading tonight, ooh, and some data to play with.
Considering that Mars is experiencing global warming as well, maybe the situation is entirely out of our control? Perhaps we, as humans, have overrated our ability to affect our planet? Or would the extreme environmentalists claim we are somehow screwing Mars over too?
Of course, if this does indicate more of a pattern throughout the Solar System, then we have no control over it whatsoever. Which is probably why it's not really discussed.
Oh, and if you don't like the ABC link above, try it straight from the horse's mouth.
WWJD?
JWRTFM!
The paper says the method used to calculate temperature trends is called "multi-proxy", where a number of observational sources are combinded to estimate a temperature, e.g. tree ring growth and coral calcification presumably happen at known rates with certain temperatures, so you can merge the indicated temperature from both observations (perhaps with some Bayesian component?).
;)
Well ironically, it looks like we're witnessing a meta application of that methodology. Where 1 reserach team yields one time series, and another yields another, both based on different calculations of multi-proxy estimates and different levels of certainty, we the public/policy-makers must yield another multi-proxy estimate on these results.
Perhaps after a few teams have reviewed the results we can just pick a point in the middle and go with it. Scientific method 2.0?
it sadens me that in spite of the mountains of evidence there are still people like you (and Mr Bush) that will go to any lenghts to descredit something on which there is a general concensus in the scientific community: there is global warming, perhaps made worse by human activity, something should be done.
When the overriding short term policy is to "protect American jobs" no matter what, we know that long term vision will not be in long supply in certain countries.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The whole global warming dispute seems to focus on the last 150 years. As this is from when accurate records began. The 1-2 degree centigrade rise in global temperature in the last century is undisputed, but how much of this is due to mankind. The finger of blame quickly points at the Industrial revolution and the use of fossil fuels. This is a contrubuting factor no doubt but how much is natural process? Ice Ages have recorded as every 20-60 thousand years and it would seem we are due one. Prior to such events there has been massive global warming recorded. Palioclimatology has suggested that mini ice and warming events can occur between these massive global events. Samual Peeps recorded in his 17th Century diaries that the Thames had frozen over and locals roasted a whole ox on the ice it was so thick! The point is we are coming out of a mini ice age which occured in the middle ages, sure the manmade greenhouse gases are going to add to this and possiably speed it up but as for glaicers and the pole caps melting i would`nt be to worried as given x years the ice sheet will encroach to the tropics and man will really have something to worry about. That is if we are still here. In stead of fighting a losing battle aganst tempuratue and CO2 increase, we should be learning how to adapt to these conditions. Our influnence on the planet and its processes is a mere glitch in the whole scope of things.
You skirt around the issue of the human impact of global warming and don't even give us an alternative explanation. No, I don't think all these "evil companies" should be dumping nuclear waste into the ocean, but the onus is on an accuser (that is to say YOU) to make the case. Your appeal to emotion and invocation of FUD is precisely the type of fear mongering that is getting individuals in trouble in the first place.
But that's ok. When these companies have to reduce their CO2 emissions on the basis of useless environmentalism, I'm sure the only people who will pay for it are millions of lowly employees, creating further social problems. Are you going to be there screaming at how so many people are out of work and the government needs to take care of it?
I'm sure you will be. But the government will have created that problem as well. Rest assured, the only person that stands to profit from that sequence of events are people like you.
At one end of the spectrum, you've got Greenpeace, various environmentalists like ex-biologist turned enironmental crusader, David Suzuki who cries environmental foulness when big business wants to do something.
At the other end, you've got the National Post, Albertans (like Texans) who might as well claim they've debunked global warming, business plans should go full steam ahead while a minimalist study (if any) is done to monitor impact.
Given the track record of big business and our world, I'm leaning more towards the side of the crazy tree huggers.
I must say I have my doubts about the "respected journal Energy & Environment". Looking through the list of abstracts they all seem to be of the greenhouse sceptic camp. I've never heard of the journal before it is published by a very little known publisher. Certainly not on a par with Nature.
The editor is interesting on her webpage she quotes "Environment becomes fashionable and I turn sceptic". Could I expect an unbiased paper in this journal. Only one editor? Most journals I know have half a dozen if not more. A lot of her own papers are published in her own journal, just a little bit odd!
The first author is not attached to an institution, the second is in an Economics department (not where I would expect to find an experienced climate modeller). No funding was recieved for the study.
The tone of the paper is strange, not what i typically expect to see. It seems intent on rubishing the data in every way possible. Most of the errors seem to be minor, a one year slip in time (as data is agrigated over a year it could be argued that this slip could just be a sampling error). Some questions about missing details of methodology used (if you've ever written papers with tight page limits you'll know that some details always get left out).
The main results fig 7 and 8 are interesting. Their results show broard agreement with the critisied paper for years 1575-1980. It is only the years pre 1575 where there is marked disagrement. Its no suprise that most errors appear in earlier years when the data is presumably less relaible. I must say I'm sceptical about their pre 1600 data that is one heck of a temprature drop, do other sources show similar results?
In particular the paper backs up the Mann's results from 1600 onwards. Especially the last 100 years where both show a rapid increase in temprature. Amounting to .3 to .5 degree change in global temprature
in the past 100 years.
So is this another slashdot classic from the bottom of the barrel? Let me know when it appears in nature.
There are four sorts of people in the world: fools, lunatics, idiots and morons. - Umberto Eco, Foucaut's pendulum.
I mean, nobody has ever questioned any of this before....
I had a chance to ask an expert on climate change and Nobel Prize winner about the climate change controversy. His response, summarized was:
1. Evidence of some warming is incontrovertible.
2. This warming may or may not be due to C02 emissions.
3. At this point in time, since evidence is still preliminary, he estimates the chances of the greenhouse effect being a real, scientific fact at about 10%.
4. In day to day life, we buy insurance for, say, a house fire, at much lower odds than that (chance of your house catching fire is 0.01%).
5. Hence he supports a moderate version of the Kyoto protocol as insurance against the possibility of the greenhouse effect being real.
6. That was his recommendation to President George W. Bush: sign Kyoto.
7. Bush chose not to follow his advice.
It seems that every so often, on an increasingly regular basis, industry pundits put out "evidence" that global warming is a myth, or at the least that such temperature fluctuations that we are now experiencing have historical analogs. Looking over the article, I see very little real science about it. They cite ring width analyses as a measure of current climatological conditions, yet there is so much more to dendrochronology than just temperature (I myself have done a research project using dendrochronology). Also, they say that they replicated MBH98's procedures "as closely as we could using publicly available documentation." If this were a true scientific paper, the authors would have been in contact with the authors of the paper in question, receiving help and guidance in replicating their procedure. Science is not a secretive venture like business. Perhaps what concerns me most is the fact that this journal is not peer reviewed. Neither of the authors have any sort of background in climate history research, or atmospheric science for that matter. One is an economist and the other has been an officer on mining expeditions. Their concerns do not seem to lie in contributing to a larger body of science, but promoting their viewpoint for business interests.
Per Square Mile, a blog about density
David Appell has been tracking the story and has reports here. Moreover, the authors of the original study have published a response here. The original story should be updated to reflect these important facts, not just to report the fact that another crank published a similar paper two years ago.
Maybe next you're going to tell folks that the CBC is an unbiased organization. I haven't heard of CBC broadcasting or publishing any contrary evidence with regards to global warming. David Suzuki and his ilk are the rah-rah people within that organization, and it's amazing how people who disagree with typical left-leaning points of view are regarded as second-class in Canada. Openly disagreeing with things like legalizing gay marriage or marijuana often gets you dirty looks from "average" people based on their false intellectual stoicism and superior enlightenment in Canada. That is precisely what you are doing in this case as well.
Bear in mind the following, however. I don't know if you live in Alberta or not, but you better be sure that a great amount of Canada's wealth lies in Alberta. All those federal transfer payments and taxes on oil and gas up here are basically holding the country afloat. If Canada loses those, then one of two things will happen: either Canada will go deeply into debt and mash the economy, or the already half-rate social programs like medical coverage and eduaction will go the way of the dodo.
Just because people are starting to speak out on Kyoto and human-induced global warming seems to make you incredibly uncomfortable. The onus is on the accuser to prove their case, and the social climate in most countries makes that difficult if not impossible due to the fear of losing government funding for their research (i.e. Canada and Europe). Couple that with an overall left-wing media, and it's easy to see that the only "climate cooling" is the one in which people are willing to challenge the scientific establishment.
Conrad Black isn't just a pawn of big business, he IS big business. (Not to mention that the National Post is one of the downright dumbest rags I've ever read. It's on par with the freekin' Toronto Sun with it's half-nude girl on the inside front cover.)
Anybody who takes this kind of research without any comparative thought, or any digging into the allegiances of its authors, publishers and promoters, is being foolhardy. --Many people do not realize that having a well-researched and ground-breaking paper is only half the battle; you need to promote it or it will simply vanish into mist. And who, typically, has all the money for promotion. . ?
The point of Kyoto was to reduce industrial air pollution. To say that reducing industrial air pollution is a bad idea because, "We don't have reliable proof that air pollution causes environmental damage," is either fraudulent or outright insane. --I'm not sure if there is a difference.
-FL
So were all the 15th century records of cold weather and advancing ice phony? Was the world really warmer and milder than today? Was there a vast conspiracy in the late 1400s to record phony accounts of the weather in order that 20th century environmentalists would believe in Global Warming? I don't think so!
Problem 1. A rectangular vat 2mX2m in floor area is filled to height 2m and thus contains 8 cubic meters=8200kg water. A cubic meter block of ice is lowered into the vat; since it's mass is 917kg, where is the water level now? Ans: The block displaces 917KG liquid water, the volume of which is 0.89 cu m. The total volume of the liquid and displacing ice mixture is now 8.89 cu m. The height is 8.89/4 = 2.22 m. Problem 2. A rectangular vat 2mX2m in floor area is filled with 9117 kg of water. How high is the vat filled? Ans: Since water density is 1025 kg cu meter the vat contains 9117/1025 = 8.89 cu m of water. With a floor area of 4 sq m the height will be 8.89/4 - 2.22 m.
Mann, Bradley & Hughes (authors of the definitive 1998 study attacked by McIntyre and McKitrick) responded today with:
"McIntyre and McKitrick ("MM") have [...] used neither the data nor the procedures of MBH98. Thus, it is entirely understandable that they do not obtain the same result. Their effort has no bearing on the work of MBH98, and is no way a "correction" of that study as they claim. On the contrary, their analysis appears seriously flawed and amounts to a gross misrepresentation of the work of MBH98."
Scientific observers await the peer review of the MM publication to determine whose science-fu is stronger. Meanwhile, greenhouse deniers have yet to pull rabbits out of their (*ahem*) hats to explain how the Workweek Causes Climate Changes. Or they can join Timothy in celebrating propaganda like the obviously corrupt Economist. Just remember to wear your sunscreen.
--
make install -not war
Just a minor point. The whole north polar ice cap could melt without affecting sea level, because north polar ice is floating. Water expands when it freezes, which is why a small portion of an iceberg sticks up out of the water. As the ice melts it shrinks again, occupying the same volume that it displaced when it was frozen. The water level around it will not rise.
Of course, Antarctic ice is a different story.
...as a "no, I don't care."
The difference has gotten worse in the last five years because China has reduced its use of coal in that time frame. (Note that India has not achieved similar reductions.)
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
The National Post is barely better than a tabloid. Seriously -- this is a "newspaper" that has Celebrity gossip as its frontpage headline almost 50% of the time. This is not a newspaper with journalistic integrity.
Lomborg is the poster child for "Lies, damn lies, and statistics."
Well, apparently, you only have to fool the majority of people for a little while.
...but if this paper turns out to be wrong Bjorn will be quoting this research long after it's been discredited.
That's his methodology.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
You're kidding me, right? How much of the Arctic ice cap is supported by land? You do know the difference between north and south, right?
Incidentally, others pointed out much better than you because you didn't point out anything of the kind! And you're still wrong because the volume of the ice doesn't matter. It's the MASS!
-h-
This guy made all the right points.
Let's face it - climate IS changing. It doesn't take a PhD to realize that each and every person on this planet converts chemical energy into thermal energy (those who have a car to a much higher extent than the others). Even without the greenhouse effect, that would still be a lot of heat.
The Raven
...in a variety of ways, many them biased to greater or lesser degrees. It is true that catastrophic consequences increase the likelihood of funding. It is also true that catastrophic consequences increase the chances you'll get funding for a counter-study. This is a good thing. The reasons: catastrophic consequences are more important (both for society at large and for those who might be causing them).
While it is true that ego is a big motivator in science (anyone who has read anthing about Newton would know this), it is also true that search for truth and knowledge is the best way to achieve this (as Newton also demonstrates).
My rule of thumb is: If you see bias only on one side, you are perceiving your own bias, not the bias of the system. That's related to my sig as well.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
Many environmentalists are not the wealthy type because they are closet slackers.
Would you kindly point us to your sources, or are you just psychic? Or does "closet slacker" mean "not greedy enough to make a few bucks poisoning the planet"? I guess I must be full of jealously too.
Their beef with the United States is the culture of consumption, the notion of of consumer capitalism.
That's a bit empty for a culture, but it would only arouse pity if it wasn't so retarded for a long-term strategy; the planet just can't support permanent growth of the economy because it is finite. And consumer capitalism is not privative of the USA, but I have to admit it's there where it's most extreme.
Environmentalists just hate people too much for people to trust their advice.
If that was the case, why would they be fighting to ensure our continuity as a species? They could just sit and watch the show, as we blithely kill the planet off. I admit they get carried away in places, but by and large I'd have less hedonism and more chances of survival as a species.
And, as long as we are correcting false impressions about sea level rise:
The vast majority of current observed sea level rise, and projected sea level rise over the next century, is actually based on thermal expansion of the oceans. Eg, as the oceans warm, they expand.
Some amount of current and near term projected rise is due to melting glaciers outside of Greenland and Antarctica.
The total projected rise from the above causes by 2100 is between 20 cm and 1 m.
In the longer term (multiple centuries), we may have to worry about melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, which would cause serious sea level rise (the Ross Ice Shelf collapsing might lead to several meters of rise by itself). However, in the short term increased precipitation over the centers of those land masses is actually projected to balance out increased melting at the edges...
-Marcus
So, most rational people make decisions based on "expected value". You weigh the cost of your preventative measure against the probability of your bad outcome times the value of your bad outcome. Anybody who pays for insurance does this all the time - there is a small chance of me getting into a car accident. I am willing to spend some money every year so that in the (unlikely) case where I am sued for (potentially large) damages, my insurance company will cover me. Now, I don't have infinite money, so I am not going to buy 100 million dollars worth of coverage. But it might be worth it to buy 100 thousand dollars worth of coverage.
So, we don't know how much damage climate change will cause yet. But it seems like there should be some amount (perhaps small, perhaps large) that we should be spending today to reduce emissions because there is a chance (perhaps small, perhaps large) that climate change will cause damages (perhaps small, perhaps large).
And that amount spent should be designed to be equal to the reduction in the sum of (Probability(damage)*Amount(damage)) across all possible futures.
(Of course, a policy has uncertain cost too... but how to incorporate that I leave as an exercise to the reader)
(The controversy about the Mann study might imply that we should adjust our probabilities or projected damages down - however, keep in mind that it is only one study out of 100s, and this is only one critique...)
I heard very similar arguments when in first year environmental science in 1995.
Truth is, the vast majority of scientists working on the issue all agree: we're fucking up the climate. They disagree on details, but on the whole: we're putting a bunch of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and this is NOT going to be a GOOD THING (TM).
I don't even bother to check a scientists' funding anymore when they come out with such studies. There's been too many that were bought and paid for by the oil lobby that I don't trust a single one of them.
So what if we're wrong? BIG DEAL. Some people chose not to expose their kids to second-hand smoke at a time when some doctors still insisted it was good for you. In the absence of complete information, do what seems sensible. Besides, people are already dying in measurable numbers from air pollution.
Plus, our governments heavily subsidize (both directly and indirectly) fossil-fuel use, leading many to believe that we can exceed Kyoto targets at a profit.
If we can make money and have cleaner air, why the hell are we worrying about models for?
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
So, when's the correction coming out, now that the original authors and others have demostrated that these "biases" were artifacts created by the re-examiners importing a 159-collumn spreadsheet into a 112-collumn Excel document?
#1: The knee-jerk reaction. People get going on the "BUT THINK OF THE CONSEQUENCES!!!!!111111" People get caught up in the alarmism of what allegedly could happen that they loose sight of the reaitly of the situation. Not so common when it's just a computer crashing.
#2: Agendas. Eco groups have an agenda, and often more than one. It is often to their advantage to push a view, even if the facts supporting it are not there.
...he also gets angry.
Huh.
The environmental debate comes down to competing conceptions of how mankind scales against natural forces. For almost all of mankind's existence, we've been very small indeed. Logging, burning, hunting, foraging, agriculture changed local climates (logging in North Africa many centuries ago is thought responsible for much of the current size of the Sahara) and ecologies (the loss of the Wooly Mammoth is one I regret) but nature was still essentially so much bigger than humanity that the Earth on the larger scale wasn't much perturbable.
Religions based much of their authority on the benevolence of the gods, as shown by the relative stability of the seasons. A big flood, for instance, would be taken as a sign that mankind had considerably fscked up in some god's eyes. The legacy of this is that many people still have a background belief that the constancy of nature and the weather is a gift from the supernatural, and that if we are virtuous it will all just work out.
But the problem is that mankind has achieved much greater scale vis-a-vis the Earth, so that we really can do stuff like double the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, or log off the rest of the rain forests - and in fact are well on the way to doing so. Papers like the one we're discussing seem to have the background belief that we can do all this stuff, and still some god will take care of us by controlling the weather, if we just remember to pray and avoid offenses like birth control and abortion.
But that's hardly a scientific view. Scientifically, large-scale changes in system variables are bound to create large-scale changes in system behavior. Mankind's actions control much larger-scale variables than ever before, and our capacity to create effects is increasing rapidly. While effects in complex systems can be hard to compute, it's only in a dream world that actions have no effects. If our science isn't up to predicting what large-scale effects will be caused by our ongoing large-scale changes, the conservative thing to do is to put the brakes on our changes until the science can catch up.
For those who believe that a god will assure the constancy of the weather and ecosystems no matter what we do, take away their gasoline and let the god power their cars. Surely a god omnipotent and good-willing enough towards them to do the first can do the latter with no trouble.
Meanwhile, let those who understand the premises of science be the ones trusted with technological processes.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
The "only" fair metric to use?
It is certainly a metric to take into consideration. But I will point out that most of what we produce so generously, we also consume. If I generate 1000 tons of CO2, produce a widget worth $1000, and then use that widget myself for my own pleasure, is that really better than Bob producing 10 tons of CO2 and producing no widgets whatsoever?
GNP is _not_ a perfect measure of "good for society". (A standard example being that GNP includes both the sale of cigarettes and the hospital treatment for the cancer those cigarettes cause)
Having said that, I don't actually think that the idea of using "intensity targets" (improving the CO2 to GNP ratio, not necessarily reducing CO2 emissions) (ala the Bush administration proposal) is necessarily a bad idea. Of course, the target he chose was practically business as usual, which I do object to...
I would like to make several points that are only loosely related...
If humans are causing global warming on Earth, then who is causing the global warming on Mars? That's right, over the last several decades the Martian polar caps have been shrinking at an unprecidented rate. This comes from the European Space Agency, not a suspect US government report.
Human-caused CO2 from post industrial nations is an interesting scapegoat. No I'm not saying that CO2 is not a greenhouse gas. My point is that there are other greenhouse gases that have hundreds of times more effect than CO2. Then there is the fact that a large amount of the CO2 released into the atmosphere each year comes from natural, not industrial sources. Rotting vegitation (when not replaced by equivalent new plant growth) is a source for CO2. Supposedly ruminants (bovines, cows, deer, etc) are a large source of greenhouse gases. (Who is going to pay to put special gas-trapping diapers on all the cattle in India?) The forest fires in Indonesia a few years ago were the source of about 40% of the worldwide CO2 releases for the whole year. The fires in the Amazon might be another 10-15%. A single eruption of Mt. Pinatubo a few years ago released as much greenhouse gases as 10 years of industrial output. The CO2 output from manufacturing in developed nations may be only 10% of total CO2. On top of that, the manufacturing in developed nations tends to be much more effecient than the manufacturing in non-developed nations, producing a lot more goods per unit of CO2 released.
If the Koyoto Agreement was really about controlling greenhouse gases then the "developing" nations would not have been excluded. If China can put a man in orbit, then why should they still be considered exempt from the agreement? The dirtiest industries have already migrated from the developed nations to the developing nations because of environment regulations (and the lack of them in the developing nations). The Koyoto Agreement is instead based on a view that there is a theoretical acceptable worldwide CO2 "pie" that is currently divided unfairly to the advantage of developed nations.
All global weather simulations contain a "fudge factor" that is used to represent the unknowns that also contribute to the weather patterns. One interesting fact about the current simulations is that the fudge factor is more significant than the CO2 levels. If you take the various simulations and start them up from the year 1900 they do a very poor job of predicting todays weather. If you take two simulations that both assume global warming and start them up from the year 2000, one may predict that North Dakota will become a swamp, while the other says it will be a desert.
Lawnmowers, ATVs, other 2 & 3 cycle engines, and *bar-b-ques* produce more polution in the US than cars made after 1990. I don't know about greenhouse gases, but they definitely produce more polution.
One of the predictions for global warming was that the sea levels would rise with catastrophic results for the costal cities and island nations. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your perspective) the sea levels have been dropping instead of rising. There are certain cities like Venice, Italy, and New York and New Orleans in the the US that are sinking, but that is a different issue.
None of this says that global warming is not happening. It does seem to be happening, but not in the ways the scientists expect, from the causes they have identified, or with the effects that they predicted. Throughout history, when humans have tried solving one problem they have usually created other problems. Sometimes the new problems are less severe than the original ones and sometimes they are worse. Most of the time it is a mixed bag.
It is one thing for you to decide that you are willing to give up some of your comforts for the betterment of something else. It is an entirely different thing to start dictating to everyone else that they should give up whatever t
because you failed to know that dihydrogen monoxide (h20 or water as you may know it) is a spoof. the website you linked takes about 2 nanoseconds to know that this is a spoof site. taking an additional 2 nanoseconds to look it up at snopes.com would have confirmed this as a spoof. so tell me why i should even listen to anything coming from your ignorant piehole about environmental issues being hijacked by socialists.
i doubt you can even define socialism.
The powers that be rejected this a week ago. Its a paper which will appear in PRL that did a reconstruction of Be data in polar ice to reconstruct sunspot data back an additional 800 or so years, to AD 850. They show that the period since 1940 has shown uniquely high solar activity . This too hits at the greenhouse theories. See the paper here
Tune in next week when corporate shill plastic-surgeon writes a paper showing cigarette smoking cures emphysema.
You know, a lot of environmentalists decry American consumption on one hand and then vote to sustain a non-market ideology that lets people continue to believe they can do exactly what the environmentalists say they should not.
The classic case in point is electricity. In the USA, there is this notion that electricity is a fundamental right and it should essentially cost for nothing. It doesn't. The price of electricity varies wildly based on the fuel supply and the amount of demand. It's pretty academic: the cost of power rises every day as everyone turns on the air conditioners and drops as night falls. Most consumers are shielded from these price fluctuations by their "democrat" friends. If people actually paid market prices for their power, they would probably be so horrified that that noontime A/C cost them an extra $50 a month, they wouldn't use it. Instead, you have utilities scrambling to build more power plants, to burn --all the time---, just to satisfy people running their air conditionrs at noon. It's insane.
And, another thing, why shouldn't utilities be allowed to brown people out. You want to avoid new plant construction? Fine, at peak days, just shut off areas of the city.
The same issues go for every other natural resource. Christ, the dems bitch about the price of gas and blame it on bush, but, right now, any real enviornmentalists would tell you that if Bush raised the price of gas to $5 a gallon to really soak the poor, it would be a dream come true for conservation.
You can't have your cake of cheap energy for the poor and energy conservation at the same time. If you want people to conserve energy, it has to be valuable.
This is my sig.
As an economist, I agree that all costs need to be represented to make a truly best-case assessment of the right outcome. Where you will find the difficulty is deciding the cost per unit of CO2 gas emissions etc... and the consequences of our choices.
What would you do if the result of your study said "Cows are the biggest drain on the environment due to their CH4 production"? Would you slaughter all cows?
The second challenge, and a reason I am opposed to international government mandates, is deciding what enforcement process will come out of the analysis. Some allege that UN resolutions are passed by the many to punish the US for its success. I won't take that dramatic a stance, but will ask why the Kyoto Protocol ignores developing nations' contributions to pollution. As any tax collector knows, the more exemptions we create to our assessment structure, the shakier a foundation we have for collecting that assessment (i.e. a reduction in global pollution).
first response
Greenland, actually, but I don't see where anyone was distinguishing between Arctic and Antarctic warming in this thread.
mt
On page 18 of the PDF file of the report found here, there is a graph of temperatures that struck me as odd. So, I went and dug up some other information.
Starting sometime between 1350 and 1450, the Northern Hemisphere at least (and indications are that the entire world did, see this reference article for more information) experienced an extended period of cooling known as the 'Little Ice Age'. This extended until somewhere around 1850. However, the graph in the paper shows the period from 1400-1500 to be the warmest period experienced, even warmer than the 20th century (with peaks about 1425 and 1485).
So how did these folk come up with this, when climatologist using different methods (tree-rings, ice cores, isotope deposition in stalactites, etc) and cross-checking each other come up with an entirely different answer.
The paper appears to have som valid points, but without an explanation of this serious anomaly, I must suspect that their data is 'spun' to match pre-conceived needs.
Of course, when one considers the existance of the Little Ice Age, one must also wonder if the 'Global Warming' phenomenon is simply a return to a more normal average temperature. Is the 28% increase in CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere attributable to the intervention of mankind? Do the other Greenhouse gases that are released by mankind (particularly Methane) the real cause? Is it a combination of causes?
All I can say for sure is that, if there is any significant chance that mankinds actions have caused the change in temperature, and that this increase will continue as projected, then expenditures now to limit or reverse these changes will be more economical than will letting the projected changes occur. If, for example, reductions in CO2 emissions for the next century would cost a projected 100 billion dollars, but would potentially prevent one trillion dollars in damages (how much would have to be expended to replace all seaside cities liable to oceanic flooding if the ocean's average level is raised by 5 feet?), then a 10% chance of the CO2 explanation being the true one is a break-even cost. If the change is 25%, then the CO2 reduction is, on the whole, a winner. Expend now to minimize your costs later.
We are the Music Makers, and We are the Dreamers of Dreams...
Look at the parent post that started all of this:
A recent study by Arctic researchers showed that the polar ice cap isn't just shrinking in terms of land mass [bbc.co.uk], it's shrinking in terms of depth too [bbc.co.uk], by 4cm a year.
All that water's going somewhere, and that somewhere is the oceans. Global sea levels are rising, and you only have to look at the situation in Tuvalu in the Pacific [bbc.co.uk] or Venice, Italy [veniceinperil.org] to see that the threat of rising tides isn't a myth.
"Arctic researchers", "polar ice cap". Pretty clear to me. Oh, and I think that somebody already mentioned that Venice's major problem is subsidence, not rising ocean levels.
-h-
Sing along:
Coincidence does not prove causality.
you should read everything on the internet as if it had "but I'm probably talking out of my ass" appended to it.
The environmental movement has done a lot of good in making us take stock of how we're disposing of our waste. Los Angeles air and San Francisco Bay are a lot cleaner today than they would have otherwise been had it not been for the hoopla. But at the same time, you have to be very skeptical when someone tries to tell you we're going to destroy the earth if we keep doing what we're doing. In geologic terms, we've been around for a brief moment and the earth has managed some amazingly self-destructive feats without us and yet here we are.
The greenhouse effect of CO2 is extremely well established - Arrhenius wrote about it over 100 years ago. That means that increased CO2 in the atmosphere acts as one force (among all the other things influencing climate) to increase temperatures. The logic that is involved here is: Humans have increased CO2 concentrations; increased CO2 acts as a force to cause temperature increases. Therefore human actions have acted to increase temperatures.
I.e. the logic is A implies B, and B implies C, therefore A implies C. No question of correlation here, it's a logical truth.
The logic you are assuming leaves out the "B implies C" part, i.e.
A implies B, A B and C are all true, therefore A implies C. That's not logically valid, although used very frequently by so-called "conservatives", so it is easy for people who listen to those radio shows to get confused.
The key point is, increased CO2 DOES tend to increase temperatures. Decreasing CO2 would tend to decrease them. Humans have increased world CO2 levels by 25% since the 1800's, and are on a trend to double world CO2 by 2050. Given that first B implies C statement, that's not good, not good at all.
Energy: time to change the picture.
> humanity is part of the environment
Thank you. That is the primary reason I don't consider myself environmentalist in any way. Because I am the environment. The "whackos" don't seem to realize this.
What I find most shocking is how people who claim to be real environmentalists are so against review of scientific work in this case. I personally think that manmade global warming may be a factor in our climate change, but I am keeping my mind open. Scientific breakthroughs are based upon people questioning theories that are in the mainstream. Questioning of prevailing theories also helps us root out the truth, one way or another. Mann may be right, but if he is, his work should be grilled by all. This includes people with an opposit agenda. Maybe Mann had an agenda? Who knows, thats why there is scientific review. There is absolutely no reason to shoot down this opposing body of work before anyone has even looked at it. I think the USA today article explains my point better than I can put it into words. "In an interview, McKitrick said, ''If a study is going to be the basis for a major policy decision, then the original data must be disseminated and the results have to be reproducible. That's why in our case we have posted everything online and invite outside scrutiny.'' Mann never made his data available online -- nor did many of the earlier researchers whose data Mann relied upon for his research. That by itself raises questions about the U.N. climate-change panel's scientific process." Questioning is the key to learning.
As was mentioned elsewhere in this thread we have to stop being so damn nearsighted on this topic. You show me a trend of a couple of millennia or even several hundred years and I will start to take it seriously. You'd think people actually believe the Earth just popped into existence a couple thousand years ago.
"Trying is only the first step towards failure." - Homer
Every time some miniscule issue comes up that doesn't have any significant bearing on the main question of humans=>CO2=>warming, like this (rather dubious) article, it gets trumpeted in headlines all over the place. Where are the headlines for the thousands of mainstream articles and studies that show every single climate model with increasing CO2 resulting in increasing global temperatures, greater warming in the north, greater instability in weather generally, and in short exactly the pattern of change we have seen for the last decade?
This is a really serious issue - there is OVERWHELMING scientific evidence for human causation of global temperature increases over the last century, and for an acceleration of the change in the last ten years. Take a look at this graph of CO2 concentrations over the past 1000 years, from the site of an organization that looks at the "positive side" of climate change! Anybody who doesn't find that graph extremely worrying has been drinking way too much of the happy juice.
Energy: time to change the picture.
Of course, the argument can be even simpler than that depending on the flexibility of suppliers. Suppose that OPEC's ability to reduce production is about 10% of US demand, and that the world demand will pick up that 10% if the price of oil falls from $30 to $20/bbl. If we reduced our demand by 20%, the net demand reduction would reduce our expenses from 1 * 30 to 0.8 * 20, or about $16 per pre-cut barrel. The marginal saving would be $14 saved / 0.2 barrels saved = $70/bbl. You can consider that the true economic cost of oil, and that's not including the cost of fighting terrorists financed by oil money, cleaning up oil spills, and any other ecological problems which result.
You don't need a shortage of a raw material for it to cause you problems. For instance, London woke up one day and found that their plentiful supplies of coal were literally choking the city to death with the smoke. There was no shortage of phosphates to soften water for laundry detergent, but the amount being dumped into rivers was killing Lake Erie.Los Angeles found that the hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides generated by the cars there, combined with heat and sunlight, made very nasty smog. Fortunately it was a local phenomenon, and engines could be altered to either generate different products or convert them to non smog-generating gases. But when the problematic product is CO2 and the area affected is the whole planet, you don't have those options.
You are making the assumption that our use of oil has no costs that they'll have to bear, that the continued investment in oil infrastructure won't be an even greater financial hurdle for them to leap, or that the lack of experience with alternatives won't impose greater expenses and more onerous difficulties than beginning the process now, when we recognize the need and have the ability. I believe that all three of these assumptions are questionable at best, and the first is definitely false for both ecological and geopolitical reasons. That's true to a point, but some "resources" can only be used so fast without being overwhelmed or destroyed. Examples include the ability of a forest to produce wood, the ability of a river to break down organic matter, or the capacity of the earth's systems to sequester carbon dioxide. Overuse of the resource for one purpose can deplete or destroy its capabilities to produce other goods (wildlife, fish, a consistent and livable climate). It behooves us not to push things too far, especially before we've got good reason to believe it won't do any harm (as opposed to the current situation of having good reason to believe it will).Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
http://www.solcomhouse.com/yellowstone.htm
I'm in no way an expert in this field, I just happened to read this a few days ago...
I'd rather be sailing...
If you assume that it is +40 C at the equator and say -50 C at the pole, thats one degree centigrade per degree of latitude. Now a degree of latitude is over 100Km. So if it all averages out over a long time and you have an icesheet on level ground then the edge of the ice moves 1km for every hundredth of a degree change in long term average temperature.
Any claim about a glacier depends on local circumstances making it less hyper-sensitive that icesheets in general.
Just take a look at "Some Realism about Environmental Skepticism: Bjorn Lomborg's 'The Skeptical Environmentalist'" by DOUGLAS A. KYSAR.
I wanted some ice to put in my drink and to my surprise, when I opened my freezer, the ice as melted!!!! Is this due to global freezer warming?
I'd rather be sailing...
Looking at my post, it's apparant that I've simply responded to Cally's unsubstantiated arrogance by adding my own sarcastic arrogance. That wasn't very helpful of me, and thank you for not continuing the trend.
What I'd like to see instead, is some evidence on the topic. In particular, I've run into the theory that solar variability changes the Earth's temperature, which changes the CO2 solubility in the oceans, which causes the striking correlation we see between prehistoric temperatures and CO2 levels. I like this theory because it gives a possible explanation not only for our recent 1 degree/century warming, but also for the fact that the planet has been, even in geologically recent times, much warmer and much cooler than it is today despite the lack of any anthropogenic causes for that variation.
So is there strong evidence contradicting this theory that I don't know about?
...How much of global warming is due to human activity?
And the only honest answer you can get is "Gosh, we just don't know." Is the earth warming? There is a preponderance of evidence that it is. Yes, an argument could be made that global warming may be a statistical artifact. But I tend to think there is plenty of reason to be concerned.
The problem is that we don't know what to do about it. We can't just shut down our dirty industries and go live in caves. We can only work our way out of it. That is why I think the Kyoto accords were bad medicine.
Those who are really concerned for the environment will take care to build cleaner, and more effcient processes and put the dirty ones out of business. You can't regulate this problem away, folks. The fix has to be economically viable. And it can be.
So STFU and get to work.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
Maybe the main thing that's "going on" is that the sun has gotten warmer lately. After all, Mars is losing ice coverage too...
I play Nerd-Folk!
> YOU CAN SEE THEM WITH YOUR OWN EYES!
Really? I can't see any. Where are they? Point them out.
A rebuttal to the commentary ummarized by a friend of mine at the Union of Concerned Scientists:
1. The journal Energy & Environment is not a science journal and does not follow standard practices of scientific peer review. . The journal has the explicitly political agenda to be "a forum for skeptical analyses of 'global warming'".
2. The author of the paper, Steven McIntyre, has no prior track record of research on climate issues or any record of training in this field.
3. The paper is said to be a direct criticism of Michael Mann, et al's paper "Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties, and Limitations" published in the mainstream climate research journal, Geophysical Research Letters in1999. In stark contrast to standard peer review practices, neither the authors of this study nor any leading paleoclimate scientists were asked to review Mr. McIntyre's paper.
4. Contrary to this non-peer reviewed paper in a non-scientific journal, a number of studies have been published over the last several years by independent scientists using different data sources and methodologies replicating the basic finding that the late 20th century Northern Hemisphere average temperatures are anomalous in the context of the past 1000 years.
Bradley and coworkers in the prestigious journal "Science" published the most recent study coming to this conclusion only a couple weeks ago. The list of recent studies supporting this conclusion includes, but is not limited to, the following:
Bauer, E., M. Claussen, and V. Brovkin, Assessing climate forcings of the earth system for the past
millennium, Geophys. Res. Lett., 30 (6), doi: 10.1029/2002GL016639, 2003.
Bradley, R.S., M.K Hughes and H.F. Diaz., Climate in Medieval Time. Science, 302, 404-405, 2003.
Briffa, K.R., T.J. Osborn, F.H. Schweingruber, I.C. Harris, P.D. Jones, S.G. Shiyatov, S.G. and E.A.
Vaganov, Low-frequency temperature variations from a northern tree-ring density network. J.
Geophys. Res., 106, 2929-2941, 2001.
Crowley, T.J., Causes of Climate Change over the Past 1000 Years, Science, 289, 270-277, 2000.
Crowley, T.J., and T. Lowery, How Warm Was the Medieval Warm Period?, Ambio, 29, 51-54, 2000.
Folland, C.K., T.R. Karl, J.R. Christy, R.A. Clarke, G.V. Gruza, J. Jouzel, M.E. Mann, J. Oerlemans, M.J.
Salinger, S.-W. Wang, Observed Climate Variability and Change, in Climate Change 2001: The
Scientific Basis, edited by J.T. Houghton et al.., pp. 99-181, Cambridge Univ. Press, New York,
2001.
Gerber, S., F. Joos, P. Brugger, T. F. Stocker, M. E. Mann, S. Sitch, and M. Scholze, Constraining
temperature variations over the last millennium by comparing simulated and observed atmospheric
CO2, Climate Dynamics, 20, 281-299, 2003.
Hegerl, G.C., T.J. Crowley, S.K. Baum, K-Y. Kim, and W. T. Hyde, Detection of volcanic, solar and
greenhouse gas signals in paleo-reconstructions of Northern Hemispheric temperature. Geophys.
Res. Lett., 30 (5), doi: 10.1029/2002GL016635, 2003.
Jones, P.D., K.R. Briffa, T.P. Barnett and S.F.B. Tett, High-resolution palaeoclimatic records for the last
millennium: Integration, interpretation and comparison with General Circulation Model control run
temperatures, Holocene, 8, 455-471, 1998.
Jones, P.D., M. New, D.E. Parker, S. Martin, and I.G. Rigor, Surface air temperature and its changes over
the past 150 years, Reviews of Geophysics, 37, 173-199, 1999.
Jones, P.D., T.J. Osborn, and K.R. Briffa, The Evolution of Climate Over the Last Millennium, Science,
292, 662-667, 2001.
Mann, M.E., Jones, P.D., Global surface temperature over the past two millennia, Geophysical Research Letters,
30 (15), 1820, doi: 10.1029/2003GL017814, 2003.
Mann, M.E., Ammann, C.M., Bradley, R.S., Briffa, K.R., Crowley, T.J., Hughes, M.K., Jones, P.D., Oppenheimer, M., Osborn, T.J., Overpeck, J.T., Rutherford, S., Trenberth, K.E., Wigley, T.M.L.,
On Past Temperatures and Anomalous Late 20th Century Warmth, Eos, 84, 256-258, 2003.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Well, you wouldn't want to slaughter ALL of them. But you might let some of them re-evolve toward their natural state (not to their natural state...we don't need something more dangerous than a buffalo around). And you might tax them heavily to pay for repairing the damage they do. And you could consider applying that tax at a place where it would be spread evenly over all beef sellers, so that you wouldn't penalize domestic farmers over importers.
Just because something has bad properties doesn't mean that you don't want any of it. You die without Selenium, but that's a poison. What you do is limit the amount, so that you balance "almost optimally" between the benefits and the costs. *If* you can figure where that point is.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The conservatives (really the wrong name in this case as conservation isn't their deal) who argue that global warming is a liberal plot are reminiscent of the unfortunate citizens of Hy-Brasil as it quickly sinks in Eric The Viking. Remember, as the water starts collecting around your ankles, "Stay calm! This is NOT happening...I've already appointed the Chancellor as Chairman of a committee to find out exactly what IS going on, and meantime I suggest we have a sing-song!"
= 9J =
Not slaughter them, just raise the cost of beef to reflect the damage they cause, thereby reducing demand and eventually reducing the number of cows.
The reason developing nations have looser targets in Kyoto is because we in the west have already been through our industrialisation phases where we move from agricultural societies to mass production societies. Asking the developing world to stop in their tracks would basically mean we have taken a hugely disproportionate share of the world's wealth and then we expect others not to develop to try to take their share.
Read Pynchon.
My point was that 112 did appear twice but 159 did not appear.
Not quite. The biggest sources are herd animals bred largely for meat, and the land that they're run on can no longer support the dense and biodiverse foliage that once bound up those gasses. If you are simply after low greenhouse emissions, mandate strict vegetarianism. No meat, no dairy.
IRL, you also want to go after outright poisons. Good luck shutting down Monsanto and getting all of the farmers to revert to hardier and seed-savable but less productive crops so they don't need so many poisonous fertilisers and *icides. After that, you can start in on getting people to abandon their cars by doing stuff like arranging accomodation so that almost all workers can live near their factories and/or offices.
But before that, you'll have to shoot all of the economists, because 99.9% of them confuse chewing up resources and generally "doing stuff" with being productive and producing lasting, functional goods. Their idea of a healthy economy is one that's producing mountains of useless and disposable crap instead of one twenty times smaller that's carefully producing stuff that lasts forever.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Also, theirs is not the only paper that supports the 'hockey stick' graph anyway -- there's quite a few others, too.
But anyway -- we're jumping the peer-review process heavily here. USA Today stories are supposed to happen after the peers do the reviewing ;)
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Pinatubo was spectacular, but its CO2 contribution wasn't even a blip on the scale. Worse, even a trivial amount of research would have dispelled your misconceptions. Don't you know how, or don't you care?
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Ah, the beloved Chewbacca Defense: if we don't like your science, we'll take you into a fractal realm of debate over increasingly small issues. This issue is - at least on this page - now hopelessly muddied, which is what they wanted: they can now say "see, there's no consensus."
Here's some clarity: global warming projections are not based on one paper, nor on one excel spreadsheet. Those who dispute the theory of human-induced warming are outnumbered by those who used to dispute it. Scientific debate increasingly supports the viewpoint, and the only remaining force opposing it is money.
Feb 1997
Wired: The Doomslayer
Aug 2nd 2001
Economist: The truth about the environment
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
As I stated in a reply to a sibling post, I was in error about the CO2. I meant total pollutant gases. For that, I apologize.
However, your assumptions on coal are suspect. It assumes that the total amount of carbon in coal is converted to CO2 during combustion. Is none of it converted to other chemicals? Is there no "soot"?
While I easily confirmed your Pinatubo emissions in several places, I could find no references on the amount of industrial CO2 emitted per year. The closest I got was to a percentage change of CO2 ppm, and it included non-industrial sources.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
There is a saying in England about "teaching your grandmother to suck eggs". Of course its hard to say that global temprature rises are 100% for sure connected to CO2, but the bulk of credible scientific opinion concurs that it is *probably* the case.
..
And why are we taking the risk, especially when we have good alternatives (wind power, etc) which are starting to offer pollution free cheap energy?
The US position on the Kyoto treaty is appalingly short sighted
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
Kyoto holds the promise of a goal.
-- Stephen.
I wonder if there is enough of a open dialog yet for the whole earth/human condition to be fully appritiated. Our cultral memory is still stuck in a synical stretch. Are we yet ready to critisise that what we own dear to our lives,(your cars?) Until we evaluate our own lives in both a linear and cyclic fashion, with both short and long term objectives fully balanced, not until then will we deliver a better anthill for the next generation.
You did check out the links provided by the parent poster, didn't you? Turns out this paper is a total sham, and the supposed warming in the 15th Century is only apparent when you censor out that data that shows it wasn't so. In an argument about climatic science between climatic scientists and economists, the scientists win, go figure!
It's a bit of a moot point really, since most scientists prefer to go by the instrumental record, which only dates back to the mid 19th Century, excatly because of the methodological uncertainties inherent in divining 'global' temperatures before that time.
In any case I wouldn't be banking on calmer weather any time soon ...
Environmentalists are biased for a very simple reason, common to all human beings: self-interest. Levels of government funding and charitable donations are directly related to the perceived threat posed. Environmentalists, whether working in academia or Greenpeace, obtain more money, and increase their job security, by overstating the threat. Another, non-financial gain is the increased respect and appreciation society affords individuals working in this field, which is also proportionate to the perceived danger.
This happens without overt personal malice necessarily involved, since individual environmentalists may feel it is justified (as well as their jobs and status) in order to avert a catastrophy they really believe lies in the future. However, the effect is still malicious, since the data does not support the increased funding and higher social status.
However, you're still clinging to a false impression here:
There you're certainly wrong too. 17 megatons of SO2 doesn't appear to be much, when you consider that the Wabash River plant in Terre Haute recovered about 11,000 tons of pure sulfur per year from a coal-burning plant that only produced about 260 MW net. If we take a rough figure of 500 GW for the coal-fired generation capacity of the USA and scale accordingly, that would be 22 million tons of sulfur per year which would make about 44 million tons of SO2 - close to 3 times the emissions from Pinatubo's 1991 eruption. So no, it would take a LOT of volcanoes to equal human outputs even of SO2.Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
It doesn't matter whether current temperature trends are due to human greenhouse gas emissions. What matters is that greenhouse gas emissions will, in the foreseeable future, cause warming. That's not anything people are debating, it's elementary physics. The only question is how soon and how much.
Why do people like you want to submit the entire world to this kind of risk? How can you justify that given that any benefits are distributed very unevenly? And, in fact, where is the factual evidence that continued increases in greenhouse gas emissions even help our economy?
The unproven and dangerous thing is what proponents of the current economic policy are advocating: emitting climate-changing gasses into the atmosphere, putting the world at risk, and without any clearcut evidence that it is either safe or economically beneficial to do so. Show us your proof and evidence.
Global warming believers and deniers alike should welcome the paper from McIntyre and McKitrick, and the argument it has started. This is normal science at work: observation, accretion of data, and the formulation and challenging of theories. Here at Worldwatch Institute we're hoping people will remember that the data "M&M" refer to are but one element of a much larger case, built up over many years, supporting the conclusions that the Earth is warming and that human economic activity (especially burning fossil fuels) has a lot to do with it. Even without the threat of climate change, there are so many other reasons for a rapid conversion away from fossil fuels--local pollution, health effects, impending shortages, security--that it would still make great sense. (Incidentally, the claim that the disputed Mann data were "a pillar of the Kyoto accord" is not true; they were published the year after the Kyoto Protocol was drafted.) A lot more information on these topics is available via our website (www. worldwatch.org); click on Energy.
What's worse is making statements like know with certainty when there are so many unknowns. The only people who know with certainty are charlatans selling snake oil.