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Humans are Causing Global Warming

Posted by Zonk on from the we-know dept.

Big_Al_B writes "A Times Online article discusses a new study comparing 7 million real world datapoints with several computer models of global warming. Each model had a possible cause associated with it." From the article: "It found that natural variation in the Earth's climate, or changes in solar activity or volcanic eruptions, which have been suggested as alternative explanations for rising temperatures, could not explain the data collected in the real world. "

9 of 1,342 comments (clear)

  1. Old news by Pi_0's+don't+shower · · Score: 5, Informative

    Even the Bush White House has said over six months ago that humans are responsible for global warming. Unfortunately, there are many people who will refuse to let your overwhelming evidence influence their dogma...

  2. Re:An idea by Kenja · · Score: 5, Informative
    "If you can't, you don't know anything about climate dynamics, and you're not smart, you're just recycling someone else's opinion."

    No, it just shows that you know how to use Google.

    i) The propagation mechanism for Rossby Waves
    ii) The primary sources of deep water formation in the Atlantic
    iii) How a western boundary current is formed
    iv) What Meddies are.
    v) What a pycnocline is.

    --

    "Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
  3. Re:And... by 3waygeek · · Score: 4, Informative

    Actually, President Clinton signed the Kyoto treaty in 1998. However, under the US Constitution, all treaties must be ratified by a two-thirds vote of the Senate -- no such vote has ever been scheduled, because there's not enough Senate support for the treaty.

    In 2001, President Bush "withdrew" the US signature on the Kyoto treaty -- I have no idea if such a withdrawal is legitimate, not that it matters much.

  4. Re:Accurate weather simulations?? by 0x461FAB0BD7D2 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Weather is not climate. Climate is based on long-term trends. Weather is unpredictable.

    An analogy would be that if you flipped a coin once, you wouldn't be able to tell if it would end up heads or tails, but if you flipped it a thousand or a million times, you'd notice a general trend of 50-50.

  5. Re:Indeed... by phoenix.bam! · · Score: 5, Informative

    We have climate data from ice cores drilled into miles of ice in the ice sheets covering Greenland and Antarctica. This data goes back hundreds of thousands of years. The method uses stable isotopes Oxygen-16 and Oxygen-18. Using the ratios of those two isotopes a scientist can determine climate as old as the ice he is sampling.

  6. Re:The science behind global warming (essay) by IvyMike · · Score: 4, Informative
    The scientists at RealClimate.org have posted several articles examining the science in Cricton's new book, and also posted an detailed examinination of Crichton's speech mentioned above. I highly recommend the article, but if you're too lazy to click through, here's their conclusion:
    We find it disappointing that a prominent individual such as Crichton did not take greater care in acquainting himself with all of the facts before making such rather inflammatory public pronouncements as those detailed above.

    Also worth reading is their original article examining the science in State of Fear.
  7. No facts here by MoebiusStreet · · Score: 4, Informative
    Your link points to the much-hyped and rarely-apologized-for debunked Mann "hockey stick". It's now well known that the data going into this graph was wrong, and there were procedural errors. Here's the latest nail in its coffin:
    Canadian scientists Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick have uncovered a fundamental mathematical flaw in the computer program that was used to produce the hockey-stick.
  8. Re:Indeed... by DShard · · Score: 4, Informative
    As Seen Here --
    It is time for students of the evolutionary process, especially those who have been misquoted and used by the creationists, to state clearly that evolution is a FACT, not theory, and that what is at issue within biology are questions of details of the process and the relative importance of different mechanisms of evolution. It is a FACT that the earth with liquid water, is more than 3.6 billion years old. It is a FACT that cellular life has been around for at least half of that period and that organized multicellular life is at least 800 million years old. It is a FACT that major life forms now on earth were not at all represented in the past. There were no birds or mammals 250 million years ago. It is a FACT that major life forms of the past are no longer living. There used to be dinosaurs and Pithecanthropus, and there are none now. It is a FACT that all living forms come from previous living forms. Therefore, all present forms of life arose from ancestral forms that were different. Birds arose from nonbirds and humans from nonhumans. No person who pretends to any understanding of the natural world can deny these facts any more than she or he can deny that the earth is round, rotates on its axis, and revolves around the sun.

    The controversies about evolution lie in the realm of the relative importance of various forces in molding evolution.

    R. C. Lewontin "Evolution/Creation Debate: A Time for Truth" Bioscience 31, 559 (1981) reprinted in Evolution versus Creationism J. Peter Zetterberg ed., ORYX Press, Phoenix AZ 1983

    To use comments out of context is a disengenous ploy. Willful ignorance and deceit are not virtous behaviour.
  9. Re:Indeed... by Scarblac · · Score: 4, Informative

    And the other fact you need to face is that modelers spends hours and hours tweaking their models until they "look right", and if "humans are the cause of global warming" is what looks right to them (and they get paid to get that result) then that is what the models say.

    Perhaps this is true. But those on the other side do it as well - they also train their "there's no problem" models to fit all the weather data that is available.

    Which is why this particular study is so very important - they didn't tweak the models, they took a bunch of existing tweaked models and applied them to another set of data. The models made predictions about ocean temperatures, but hadn't been tweaked with them.

    And it turns out that the predictions of the "the greenhouse effect is currently causing warming" models were very close to the actual measurements, and the predictions of the "it's volcanic activity / a solar cycle / natural fluctuations in weather" models totally failed.

    This study addresses exactly that criticism of yours, and it blows it away.

    --
    I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.