Slashdot Mirror
Humans are Causing Global Warming
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. "
Both sides of the debate are too set in their thoughts that no amount of data will change their opinions.
and I thought it was the crab people that was the cause of it all.
You mean like the fossil records going back billions of years?
Did the include the millions of farting cattle in this model? and what about Guinness drinkers? Are they covered?
Despite that the US the has not signed the Kyoto treaty [yet].
Humans cause global warming? Get out! Next they'll say "humans cause polution" and other cockamany "problems".
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
No way!!! And all this time I was blaming the sun...
Sorry Sol.
I'm not good in groups. It's difficult to work in a group when you're omnipotent. - Q
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...
Before stating how you believe that Global Warming is a myth perpertrated by scientists after funding money, demonstrate your knowledge of the area by describing, briefly, the three of the following five things :
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.
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.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Don't be silly. Those data points do not match the political talking points. Politics trumps science nowadays, so ignore this article. Put your fingers in your ears and hum loudly "America the Beautiful" until you forget this article.
I mean, it isn't even a topic of debate outside the US, people accept it as fact.
Bush won't take a stand against our ability to pollute because of the difficulties it would have on our economy... Yet if we don't at least try to do something about it we won't be here to have an economy to worry about... So which do we choose? The economy or longer existance on this planet?
http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speeches _quote04.html/
Interesting speech by Michael Crichton on whether global warming is science or politics and what the difference is. Highly recommended no matter what side you are on.
Of course, who wants to be on the side of ignoring or supporting the widespread destruction of the planet by humans? Therein likes the rub...
-- stream of did I lock the front door consciousness
It's funny when you read the articles arguing against Kyoto, though: they always end with "Kyoto is fatally flawed, and it'll cost too much to cut CO2, so we should wait to do it." Do you think it's going to be any easier to cut GHG emissions even more drastically in 10 years, just as we're realizing oil is getting more expensive and having to switch back to coal?
The funny thing about all of this is that Canada stands to make out really well. Our four-month growing season will probably become more like the American midwest's 6 -8 months, and our boreal forest ecosystem will shift to a St.Lawrence-Deciduous style forest, which is much more habitable for humans. Also we have a ton of oil here.
Of course, there's the problem of Prince Edward Island probably being under water by then. And oh yes, countries like Bangladesh or the Maldives which will be entirely under water if Antartica (i.e. Ross Ice Shelf) starts to melt. My view is that the best thing to do as an individual is a) bike to work (which I intend to do for the first time this summer), b) keep your house colder than you normally would, and c) evangelize energy efficiency. I don't really see that I can do anymore (aside from reading everything I can) as an just one person with no government connections.
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
Not that facts often change politics-based opinions.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/warming/etc/graphs.html
Here's a hypothesis.
1. Global warming will result in colder temperatures in some currently heavily populated regions.
2. People tend to stay inside when it is colder.
3. Staying inside increases the likely hood of procreation.
Therefore, global warming will cause humans.
I'm sure once again we'll see more pointless deabate as opposed to thinking over the issues involved.
Me? I look at it this way. There's a lot of good information out there and a lot of experienced people have made very sober arguments about the issues of global warming. So, I give them credit, and figure that the efforts to reduce global warming, even if they do nothing, are unlikely to have a significant negative impact.
I'd say global warming appears to be one of those things like evolution . . . but I'd be right in more ways than one.
I do find it amusing to see people argue that a large number of experienced, intelligent, educated people are somehow irrelevant because some pundit shoots off his mouth. I'd like to start a talk show, then begin discussing how only egghead crackpots believe seatbelts save lives and that eating fried lard is unhealthy. I wonder how many people I could decieve into terribly unhealthy habits just by shooting my mouth off long enough.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
I find it hard to believe that computer models can't tell me whether or not it will rain on Thursday, but can suddenly "absolutely nail" the predictions for temperature patterns of oceans.
Your point reminds me of idiots who get overly shook up over 'record highs', 'record lows', 'record snowfall'. . .
"OMG! Did you hear the Weather Channel guy? He said it's NEVER been this cold in February before! That's AMAZING!" -- like they're living a part of history.
Um, pretty sure it's been colder. And hotter. And wetter. And you name it. Just not that we're aware of.
Sweet informative mod.
You're being pedantic. The animals that place 2nd and 3rd behind man in terms of altering the environment are the dam-building beaver and the bush-stomping elephant. Man's changes the environment are many, many orders of magnitude greater.
I'm not sure where you get the idea that damming a river or strip mining or clear-cutting forest can't be defined as "negative" to our surroundings, but I'd like to know. Positive to man's economy, sure. But positive to the environment? Are you for real?
Check out http://www.realclimate.org/ for blog response by climate scientists to stories in the media that often miss the facts. No response to this Times article yet, but they're usually pretty quick.
Care to through some analysis or evidence around your assertion of irrelevance, or does evidence not factor into your "logic"?
Do you have any knowledge of statistical models? (I'm not asking to be a jerk, I'm just wondering). Basically if you have data subject to seasonal variation, you'll need multiple periods' worth of data to correct for this. As far as climate goes, its period is similar to geologic timescales, or in other words, thousands and thousands of years. We don't have thousands and thousands of years of climate data, let alone multiple periods' worth. That makes modeling changes fairly difficult, because you don't know if what you're seeing is just part of the seasonal effects or not. Please note that I'm not using the word "Seasonal" to mean spring, summer, fall and winter here. Seasonal refers to the natural periodic varation that occurs in the data. That's why the person who made this comment says the model may not be accurate.
I have an article from the April 14th, 2003 Philadelphia Inquirer. In that article, it tells me that, prior to that time, the amount of energy from the Sun wasn't been recorded.
Excuse me for being skeptical, but I know output from any star can and does fluctuate. If, prior to 2003, this data wasn't being collected, and if as far as I know, this data isn't being used in studies...I will remain skeptical.
I'm sorry. But little things like energy from the Sun are important variables I would like to have mapped against warming trends before I come to any conclusions.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
How long until the warming trend corrects itself? If this has been building for decades, and it seems reasonable that it has been at least since the industrial revolution, then I think there is a sort of catastrophic momentum in play that we can't stop. Assuming that this study is on the mark, nothing we can do at this point is going to save us from decades of negative effects. Things like Kyoto or even more drastic measures might slow things a bit, but it's still going to get worse and I can't see how we'll be able to reverse the trend short of some scientific silver bullet.
Even if this idea of 'catastophic momentum' is true, I suppose it may be hyperbole on my part to say we're screwed. We'll probably adapt and survive as a species (although many species won't), but it will be a new world.
I'll tell you what the 'effect' is! It's pissing me off!
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.
Somehow I don't think dolphins released tons of CFCs or added an extra protective layer of polutants to the atmosphere.
Yep, pretty sure we screwed it all up...
Not a single thing in the article other than "We proved it".
Frankly, climate simulations should always be taken with a huge grain of salt. Such simulations when run into the future are virtually always wrong when checked with the facts later on. Second, any data points collected are from an insanely short periods of time and/or from an insanely small areas. The data is extremely two dimentional.
This is nothing more than people setting out to prove something they wanted to prove based on statistical models that they came up with and, surprise, they go the numbers they wanted, yet again.
The scarey thing is how they claim that their simulation should "lay to rest any argument". What utter rubbish! Such things are said all the time and decades later are virtually always refuted. Making such a claim in itself is all the evidence needed to completely discount the research as they were certainly "absolutely convinced" about their model and it's outcome.
Complete and utter BS.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
The replys to this thread are highly predictable, and one thing is certain: this issue will never be resolved in any kind of way that leads to a constructive, global course of action. There are far too many pseudo-scientists out there with a political agenda who will cloud the issue, and the average person will in the end be left clueless. And I don't expect that what passes for a news media will do anything to help clarify the debate either. These times are just to fractious for anything constructive to be done. In short, we may be screwed.
I just hope that those who have children think long and hard about what kind of world we want to leave for them.
-G
www.pixelstatic.com
This study has not been peer reviewed.
There will be plenty of time to work one's self into a lather once the article has been reviewed.
BBC coverage here, probably a bit more detail than the Times. No, I haven't RTFA, it's just a gut reaction based on 20 years' exposure to the rotting carcase of a once-great newspaper, rotten with the maggots of the parasitical MurdochWasp that impregnated it with it's eggs... (yep, I don't like Rupe, does it show? :)
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
How many of the 'Independants' get their money from (or are members of) GreenPeace, the Audobon Society, the Sierra Club and other environmentalist organizations?
Next question, How much study has there been over whether or not the warming will actually cause harm? Not from an "All warming is bad standpoint" but from a "this are is getting warmer, lets figure out what will happen" point.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
It is not worth the paper it is written on. If a treaty's goal is to reduce greenhouse emissions and other pollution then why does it create system to buy or sell the right to pollute? That one part alone makes this treaty trash.
Worse two of the bigger economies, economies driven by industries that pollute heavyily, of China and India essentially immune to it?
Also, by 2012 when the treaty comes up for renewal what happens when no one meets their goals? Both Canada and Japan don't have real plans to meet the goals as neither do a few European countries. We all know the glacial pace of politics, are you really thinking they can do it?
This is nothing more than a song and dance treaty. It makes people feel good and gives them villains to put the blame on for increased pollution. It is not based on real science instead it is based on consensus.
The US will never sign the treaty because it does nothing to protect the environment worldwide. Worst case scenario is that it simply transfer pollution from one part of the world to another.
If you want to reduce pollution then come up with a system that applies fairly to ALL countries and get them ALL aboard. Hell, India and China have already expressed concern - as in they won't agree - with the proposed followup treaties in 2012.
Kyoto is politics at its worst. It was only written to score points in the internation cooties game.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Weather prediction and climate trend analysis are two very different things. I cannot predict whether it's going to rain on my little corner of the planet this time next week, but I sure as hell can predict with extreme accuracy that it's going to rain here somewhere between now and one year from now. And I can look at data from the past in order to find out whether the probability of it raining here is changing.
Linux user since early January 1992.
I find it funny how many americans choose to believe the stances pursued by energy interest groups who have money to loose on tighter regulations concerning global warming, rather than the independant scientific community.
This guy is from an oil company...let's believe him.
This guy is an objective scientist...he must be lying!!
Will code a sig generator for food
(B) + (D) + (B) + (D) = (K) + (&)
You are correct. There is a disturbing notion that scientists are infallible and their conclusions unquestionable. This is clearly not the case as scientists often disagree with each other!
I would consider myself a scientist, or at least a strong thinker with a lot of scientific knowledge, and I am very uncomfortable with how far we are willing to extrapolate our knowledge. By the time you make a fifth degree indirect measurement and mix in a handful of assumptions (reasonable though they might be) you just can't be too sure of your conclusion. Yet many people seem very comfortable doing this on a regular basis and standing VERY firmly behind their findings. I question the scientific depth of those people.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
While I generally believe that human activity is a non-trivial factor in global climate change, as someone with experience in computer modeling, I have to object that this is not a scientific conclusion.
"In the study, Dr Barnett's team examined more than seven million observations of temperature, salinity and other variables in the world's oceans, collected by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and compared the patterns with those that are predicted by computer models of various potential causes of climate change."
Let me get this straight: The group assumed that certain factors were relevant to global energy input, output and flux, that the measurements of these factors were both accurate and comprehensive, and that, most importantly, because THEIR OWN MODELS said that these other factors did not a significant impact, that only anthropogenic CO2 emissions could be the cause of the modeled behavior?
As a graduate student in the 90s I built much simplifer models (geographically) that sought to replicate and predict groundwater transport and the evolution of jet fuel spills at airports. One of the fundamental tenants of such models is that the output depends on both the input data provided to the model and the way that the modeler has programmed phenomena to operate in the model. You do not compare a model against another model to validate its results. You compare a model against the real world and its ability to predict conditions in the future.
Furthermore, you cannot be confident that your model is complete and accurate when conditions change outside of the ranges of calibration data (the histortical data and present conditions produced by your model) that are provided to the model. I can guarantee that the solar flux and deep ocean circulation data used to calibrate the model before the advent of weather satellites and computerized oceanographic probes is of pretty poor quality before, say, 1970. So we have data through say, three solar activity cycles, and data that doesn't even cover a single instance of some of the longer term astronomical cycles. Yes, we have long term carbon dioxide data from ice cores, as well as the basic physics that say that CO2 increases net capture of infrared radiation, but to say that we have complete knowledge of the system is pure hubris.
Mind you, I buy that CO2 emissions play a role, I just don't buy that we know the system so well that we can say, in effect, that nothing else matters. The economic changes and generational sacrifices that must be made will change radically depending on whether 33% or 100% of the anticipated "warming" (really, change in regional conditions) is anthropogenic or otherwise.
"Dr Barnett said the results, which are about to be submitted for publication in a major peer-reviewed journal, should put further pressure on the Bush Administration to sign up to the Kyoto Protocol, which came into force on Wednesday. "It is now time for nations that are not part of Kyoto to reevaluate and see if it would be to their advantage to join," he said."
I'm also hoping that this particular paragraph is an example of poor quoting and writing by the reporter. If the lead scientist of the group is taking this strong of a public political position before the paper has even been peer reviewed, it is only going to hurt the perceived quality of the results.
I'm always slightly suspicious of these dumbed down news stories. That talk about undeniable evidence and "no reasonable" person could object to the claims, seems heavy handed. Ultimately, we haven't seen any proof and we're relying on a reporter and a scientist to analyze, interpret, and apply the findings for us. We all have to do this to some degree because we're not experts in every field, but it'd be nice if there was some unbiased fair report of the findings that discussed the weakness and strengths fo the report, and helped answer questions about what the model itself was based on, and hwo trustworthy models are, and what the actual statistics where and what that means to us.
The CNN website can be read by people in countries where science is respected for what it is.
Even in the US, the overwhelming scientific consensus is that climate change has been caused by man.
And even the big European oil companies are coming around to that view.
humans cause global warming. this is as much fact as cigarettes cause cancer.
we're at the stage when the public knows about cigarettes and the conspiracy to cover up the data. but for global warming, we're still in the "don't listen to those commie environmentalists, everyone else drives SUVs, don't YOU want to be cool too?" stage.
the only problem is by the time global warming is a big problem we'll ALL be fucked.
We've had conclusive evidence for several years that human activity causes immediate direct changes in the weather. People who continue to deny the cumulative effect, or its larger impact in longer timeframes, are desperate to deny our responsibility for our own destiny, our survival. And have to get out of our way as we work to do something about it, to save ourselves before it's too late.
--
make install -not war
Yeah, and that wacky "theory" that CO2 is a heat insulator? That can be countered with a simple, "No it isn't."
f u cn rd ths u cn gt a gd jb n cmptr prgmng
Both sides of the debate are too set in their thoughts that no amount of data will change their opinions.
Not really.
I, for instance, have been a major skeptic on the "humans caused it all" claims. In part this has been because of claims that the global warming models don't match the data, while other explanations fit much better.
For instance: It's well known that we're on our way out of an ice age and haven't yet gotten to the between-ice-ages temperature. Solar variations have been measured that correlate with weather and (at an equilibrium temperature well over 400 kelvin degrees warmer than the sky background temperature) it doesn't take much solar variation to swing us half a degree. And so on.
According to the Times, this study compares measurable details of the WAY each of the proposed alternative mechanisms would heat the ocean, and found a very close match to the human-emitted greenhouse gas models and broad divergence from the models of the other explanations.
If that is accurate (and the study holds up to scrutiny and its approach continues to match well as more data is collected) it could easily convince me that human activity is a, or the dominant, or possibly even the only, cause of the observed global warming. One or two studies using other approaches that produce similar results could clinch the issue, too.
Science CONSISTS OF making alternaive models, comparing them with data, and abandoning those models that don't match in favor of those that do.
But that alone won't get me to make the leap from "We're heating the planet enough that, over the next century, the ideal regions to grow each crop will be about a quarter of a tier of states farther north than it is now." to "The world is about to end unless we gut all industry and drive the economy down to the hunter-gatherer level."
Especially since China, with several times the US population, is just leapfrogging from farming to full deployment of heavy industry on a level comparable to the US - while other parts of the world aren't far behind. The US could shut down everything and freeze in the dark and it wouldn't be a tenth of what was needed to reverse such trends - IF reversal is actually needed.
If action is actually needed, it seems to me that it will have to be in terms of improved technology and subtle changes, rather than luddite shutting down of all technology. Energy production that doesn't emit greenhouse gasses (such as improved solar, space-based solar, nuclear fission, or fusion) seem like good starts. (We WILL switch to one or more of those as soon as it's cheaper, too. We already are, in some applications where "alternative energy" IS cheaper. Look around you as you drive.) Albedo management and ocean-farming that results in large-scale carbon sequesteration are two more. Or just orbit a few sun shades. (That could freeze the whole planet if it were overdone. B-) )
Meanwhile there's a lot of dots to be connected to get from "humans really ARE the cause of global warming" through ".... and we've got to DO something about it" through "do THIS" to "do it NOW!".
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
While we can gather some information from ice cores, there are MANY potentially HUGE sources of error in this method. Contrived tests with known values have shown that these samplings can yield wildly innaccurate data. Unfortunately, that data is usually discarded because "everyone knows this is one of those erroneous readings that doesn't fit the trend." The resulting data may or may not be correct - which isn't much to stand on.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
That works great for Greenland and Antartica, but what about America, Europe, and the rest of the world... Unless your telling me the ice sheetes from Greenland and Antartica are able to tell us what the weather was like everywhere, I just figured it would tell us about what the weather was like there...
Please tell me if I am wrong, it's just what makes the most sense to me
I have worse karma than M$.
Take a step back for a moment. Being right on this one SIMPLY DOES NOT MATTER.
What does matter is this:
As we reduce greenhouse gases--even if they're not a threat and/or causing global warming: Conversely, if we wait too long because no one can agree on data points to study then on data validity then on data modeling, etc., etc., at least we'll make great pets.
Running 'Nix is like owning a Lightsaber. It's "a more elegant weapon for a more civilized time."
You people just don't get it. Climate data is irrelevant because we don't even KNOW HOW THE DAMN PLANET WORKS. Global climate is probably one of the most complex abstractions scientists are currently working on. Much as they love to preach otherwise, no one has a fucking clue as to how this planet actually operates. Sure we know bits and pieces. We know CO2 levels change. We know there are jet streams. We know there are el ninos that drastically alter expected climate patterns. But when it comes down to it, we don't know shit about how this stuff actually happens. Hell, these people can't even get general trends right. They can't even tell me what the weather will be like tomorrow.
--------
This isn't the sig you're looking for. Move along.
...is looking more and more attractive.
And that salesman thought he was ripping me off.
(Nunavat is Canada's newest province on the Arctic Ocean.)
Funny. I don't recall either affirming ot denying the existence of global warming. All this time I thought that my reply was a comment about how too many people think that because a statement comes from a scientist that it's 100% indisputable.
I think that you need to upgrade your browser. The one that you're using is apparently not displaying text properly as it's putting in words that aren't there.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
Kind of off-topic, but what the heck...
I have a friend who worked as support staff at McMurdo Station in Antarctica, and he said the scientific staff had an "Ice Before Christ" party, where they used ice from some core samples that were dated to several thousand years ago to make margaritas and use in their cocktails and such. Kinda neat, if a little silly.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
Depends on which "christian" point of view. Arguing that "you shouldn't treat others as you want them to treat you" won't get too far. Arguing that "an invisible spirit created the universe 7000 years ago", because you read it in your favorite version of a 2,000 year old book, will get you about as far as arguing that "the Sun revolves around the Earth". As for other christian points of view, like "homosexuals and witches must be stoned to death", YMMV. You're not in the kind of company that gets to pick and choose which POV anyone else should adopt, on the basis only of pure faith, and your book - among whom the buzz these days is "use it up, Jesus is coming soon". When you've got a way to back it up with evidence and logic, you have a better chance of saying it in public.
--
make install -not war
Rise and fall my ass!
Just because you sold your soul to the devil that needn't make you a teetotaler. --The Devil and Daniel Webster
I find it interesting that his conclusion was that the Bush administration needs to sign the Kyoto Treaty. Not that we as a planet need to do this or that. This isn't so much a scientific study as it is "hey, we have a computer model we can bash the U.S. with now." Nevermind the fact that the U.S. has done so much to cut emissions already in the last 30 years. Any article that includes "the Bush administration needs to do this or that" is highly suspect to me. If you want me to take you seriously, then give me the science, not the neo-political crap. It only shows that you indeed have an agenda.
I'll be interested to see the fallout of this once the details are published. If it indeed shows it's humanities fault, so be it. Understand it's just as much the rest of the worlds fault as anyones.
That works great for Greenland and Antartica, but what about America, Europe, and the rest of the world.
The scientists are talking about climate, the overall weather on the planet. You're talking about weather, as in it's going to be 37 degrees and sunny today in my neighborhood.
To look at climate trends over a long period of history, scientists don't need to know that it was 83 degrees in what is now Los Angeles on July 23rd, 397,421 BCE. What they can do is look at the average temperature in one location on earth over that very long period. The averaging reduces the variations, and they can say things like, 50,000-75,000 years ago, it was colder here. They don't know if a normal day in June was 40 degrees or 30 degrees.
(Note: All temperatures in F)
Until you understand the difference between "fossil records" and "climate data", you will never understand the debate. The simple fact is that we don't have climate data for more than a very short period of the earth's history. The rest is guesswork.
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. Models need real data to work right (which we don't have) and real understanding of the processes (guess wrong and you get the wrong answer.)
I remember one NOAA model that came out a few years ago showing a sudden upturn in temperatures just about to happen. CALAMITY! WOE! This was supposed to be the latest and most accurate model. Proof beyond all doubt that we were ruining the planet!
It didn't happen.
Insightful indeed.
The biggest problem that the anhtropogenic global warming scenario has with the public is that some of them remember the world is headed toward a new ice age theory from the early Seventies. The other problem is that first your told that carbs are good, then your told that carbs are bad. First your told that stress causes ulcers, but come to find out ulcers are caused by a type of germ.
People really are suffering from information overload. They live busy lives, and it's all they can do to keep up with their own lives, and that that of their families. It also does not help that 'The Academy' has become so heavily populated with folks with very left-wing social, and political agendas. Large sections of Americans do not trust institutions that they view as hot beds of neo-marxist pointy-headed, ivory tower bound granolas. Most of all they don't trust the chicken-little, 'doom is at hand' rhetoric that so many advocates (those who advance the theory of) of anhtropogenic warming. They have seen this pose before, and it's has become a pose that they very deeply distrust.
It's also not helpful that the whole dooms-day asteroid scenario has gotten so heavily played up by the Discovery Channel, etc.. In fact the dooms-day via natural event thing has completely out of control on several of the cable "science" channels, and in the general media as well. Many Americans see global warming as just another of the scenarios, and like the others interesting but not relevant to daily life. Indeed, it seems to me at least that the shows that draw big ratings on the cable 'science' channels are really nothing more that 'scientific' soap-operas. Drama! Drama! Drama! Will the world survive the crash of the asteroid?!?!!!!!! Tune in tomorrow, and find out!
Computer models are not going to change the publics mind. Hey you can use a computer model to generate FX such as in the Matrix and other movies to produce whatever scenario you'd like.
Hard data, analyzed by trusted, and calm minds is the only thing that the public will take seriously. The chicken-little presentations must get flushed, and solutions, plans, etc. must be presented with a 'can do' attitude. i.e. 'we've got a problem, and here's our options.' 'The problem is serious, but not insurmountable.' Until such time as those who believe in the anhtropogenic global warming scenario come to this realization very many Americans will view this theory with deep skepticism.
"Oh drat these computers, they're so naughty and so complex, I could pinch them." --Marvin the Martian
The Poll at CNN which you didn't link doesn't say ANYTHING about if the changes are 'man-made'. The Poll says:
Do you agree with climate experts that global warming is well under way?
So I guess the CNN website can be read by people in countries that CAN'T EVEN FIGURE OUT WHAT THE POLL QUESTION IS ACTUALLY ASKING.
Now, I believe that 'global warming' is going on, since we are coming out of an Ice Age but I don't believe it is man-made.
CNN words the questions in this way on purpose, they lead you to a conclusion by asking a question that will have the result they want.
Archaean and Proterozoic fossils are billions (with a B) of years old.
Archaean & Proterozoic fossils on Google.
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
The previous issue (Feb 12) has some good summaries of global warming, particularly addressing a number of "tipping point" dangers - problems that will be much more difficult or impossible to fix once a threshold had been passed. See http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg185248 64.300
for a teaser. You'll have to get the magazine for the full article. However a brief summary runs as follows:
Ocean conveyor belt shuts down=much colder climate for Western Europe.
Greenland's ice cap melts=higher sea levels (7 meters) over a long period (1000-3000 years). However, the problem is that a tipping point could be reached with only a 2.7 degree C rise - this means the meltdown would begin but not necessarily reverse even if temperatures subsequently dropped.
Methane released from undersea sediments (methyl hydrates)->accelerated warming because this is a greenhouse gas. The estimate is that there is something like 5 trillion (10^12) tonnes of methane under the ocean in this form.
Oceans become more acid because of dissolved CO2. This could disrupt CO2 sequestration by interfering with sea organisms like corals and shellfish.
Rate of CO2 buildup may increase because, after a little warming, organic material will decay more rapidly. The short-term effect of more CO2 is faster plant growth, hence more absorption. However, this trend can reverse at some temperature as decay speeds up.
If you would perhaps be so kind as to engage brain, you would realise that not all Christians believe the Creation theory exactly as written. I am a Christian, I believe Creation theory is fine. I also believe evolution is fine. Why? Because evolution was simply given the occasional prod in the right direction by an entity, lets call it God.
Just because the book says it was 6 days doesn't mean literally 6 days, why not 6 ages? The average arab 3000 years ago wouldn't have understood the concept of 600 million years if it came up and slapped them in the face, let alone the idea that the world could be made from subatomic particles.
After all, your confidence in big bang, gravitational theory and evolution is based purely on theory when you get down to it. Observed theory yes (A quick google should come up with a fair few pro-religion observations on reality), but theory none the less. I very much doubt your personal radio telescope array has picked up the gamma radiation echos.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
as did many of the founders of the USA
Yes, because we all know what religious fanatics they were. People like Franklin and Washington. Good, god-fearin' men! Not. And, if god is so loving, why do you need to fear it anyway? Franklin, at least, wanted nothing religious to do with the founding of these United States. This is evidenced not only in his writing, but the manner in which he so violently scratched out "sacred" and wrote "self-evident" in the initial draft of the Declaration of Independance.
the infallible inspired word of God
In order for something to be infallible, it needs to a) not be self-contradictory on pretty much every page and b) not subject to millions of re-interpretation which would lead to dramatic fracturization of its followers. And, I'm not talking the millions of variations of christianity (such as the Branch Davidians in Waco or the KKK. Yes, they're a christian organization), nor even the dozens of differet translations of the book (King James, New Modern, Bob's Happy Bible, etc) but Judaism and Muslims and even THEIR multiple mis-re-interpretations.
Let's see how infallible it and the churches spawned by it are: what color was Jesus?
Which is more painful? Going to work or gouging your eye out with a spoon? Find out!
http://www.workorspoon.com
So basically it evolved liked this:
1. 1970's... Here comes an ice age!
2. 1980's... No ice, in fact the problem is the ozone hole and global warming!
3. 1990's... Well, satellites don't really seem to be showing any significant warming, but check out these massaged surface records from lots of stations in urban heat islands of varying quality over the last 100 years.
4. 2000's... Well, the temperature doesn't seem to be rising that much, but that's because global warming might actually cause regional cooling. If temperatures seem warmer, that's global warming. If temperatures seem cooler, that's regional cooling. And if storms are more or less and intense than they used to be, that's even more proof. Droughts are now because of global warming when they used to just be droughts.
5. 2004... Watch out, the ocean conveyor belt is going to shut down and Europe is going to get cold. Oh, and check out this cool movie, Day after Tomorrow (audience snickers).
6. 2005... Ok, so stop looking at the atmosphere for evidence of global warming. The ocean is the proof now. And that cinches it.
Could this be any more silly? Next they're going to point to a 5 degree rise in average temperature on the moon as evidence of global warming because of atmospheric expansion which is going to cause 10 molecules of our atmosphere to hit the moon every year instead of the 5, currently.
But the most ridiculous thing of this article is their absolute conclusion that humans are to blame, that there's no other explanation because the models they wrote say so. Arrogant pricks.
"Every Reputable Scientist on the Planet" believed in Global Cooling in the 70s and early 80s.
Does that make them more reputable, that they were apparently all wrong only 30 years ago?
But not to worry. Despite the Bushie's insistence that "more research is needed", the new federal budget cuts back sharply on climate research. Funding for the Climate Reference Network was eliminated completely, and NOAA took a 44% reduction for climate research. More research may indeed be needed, but they're not going to risk letting it happen.
Oh, wait! Just 30 years ago we were supposed to be entering a new ice age because the scientists said so!
So you read George Will's column too; he quoted a single article from Science Magazine in the 70s speculating about the possibility of another Ice Age. Here's a news flash: Even if that represented consensus scientific opinion at the time (and it didn't), the fact that scientific thought changes over time is a strength, not a weakness. Maybe your understanding of the universe comes from Theology rather than Science, but even the Roman Catholic Church ultimately apologized to Galileo (like, 10 years ago!). George Will knows better, or at least should. Reading that column convinced me that the "culture war" being waged by conservatives is no less than a War on Reason itself.
To use comments out of context is a disengenous ploy. Willful ignorance and deceit are not virtous behaviour.
Burning Coal/Oil/vegetable Oil for power are all bad.
I am not sure that they have GLOBAL effects, but the local effects are bad enough that
I don't want them up wind of me.
Solar/Wind are small potatoes.
We need nuclear power. Pebble beds are wasteful.
They should be ultra clean, breeder reacters that minimize the waste.
Minimize the amount of fuel needed,
minimize the spent product to send to AZ.
Be Efficient, not stupid or superstitious.
More Nukes LESS Kooks!
The increase in earthquakes and volcano eruptions also correlates with increased human activities, yet most of us don't confuse correlation with cause there, I hope.
Not that I think that we (humanity) don't affect our environments in many ways.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
I'd hate to be a conservative these days. Either the world is only 6000 years old and there is definitely enough historical data to confirm that global warming is man-made, or it's millions of years old and there isn't enough evidence for us to be completely certain.
Either way, they lose...
As for me, whether global warming is man-made or not, I'm still going to work to make the earth cleaner and more hospitable, by trying to use less energy or use it more efficiently, find cleaner fuels, not dump junk into the air and water and basically try to be a good steward. Have conservatives just completely lost the desire to be good like that? Is the quest for money so overwhelming that it blocks out all those other desires? What's going on, and when did it become wrong to try to do good for Mother Earth?
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
You are entirely correct. And that's precisely why it's easier to extrapolate climate than it is to predict tomorrow's weather.
The computer model is based on certain variables, and upon receiving live data, attempts to calculate the consequences of the incoming data. This is based on rules of thumb (sort of), which are not always valid.
However, climate predictions are based on statistical methods. This is the key difference. Climate studies assume that if certain factors or parameters persist, trends will continue.
Weather and climate, as well as studies and predictions of the two, are not inherently related. Simply put, the variations in the atmosphere are more random in a shorter timeframe.
"Every Reputable Scientist on the Planet" believed in Global Cooling in the 70s and early 80s.
... wait a minute, I'm thinking ... hold on ...
There's a word for this argument. It's on the tip of my tongue
Oh yeah! It's called a "lie."
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Wow. Every single sentence in your post is wrong. How you even manage to breathe is beyond me:
Why is it that anyone who goes against the common, left-leaning attitude here on /. regarding politics or science is automatically branded with either "troll" or "overrated"?
They aren't. I see plenty of posts which go against the common, left-leaning attitude on /. which have been modded insightful or interesting.
The parent is 100% correct!
He is not.
We have practically no climate data of any real value beyond a few hundred years or so, yet we're expected to just ooh and aah every time some simulation from some scientist comes across that purports exactly how climates change over eons.
There is plenty of climate data beyond a few hundred years or so, such as ice cores, the fossil record, geological evidence, etc.
Our own weather forecasters can't even get the weather correct 48 hours in advance most of the time (save for areas like the equator and extreme north/south, of course). Yet, we're supposed to believe that the climate can be accurately simulated for millions or billions of years by having a few hundred years of data and some simulations?
The one has nothing to do with the other. Weather is small scale (in space and in time) and chaotic, climate is large scale. It is much easier to predict large scale behaviour due to the law of averages. Don't make the mistake of thinking that climate must be chaotic because weather is; climate causes weather, not the other way around.
We're going to have global warming because the scientists so!
No, where going to have global warming because of polution of the atmosphere.
Oh, wait! Just 30 years ago we were supposed to be entering a new ice age because the scientists said so!
First of all: no scientist ever said that we definitely were going to enter a new ice age. Scientists don't talk like that. They speak in theories and likelihoods. If a scientist says an event is likely, and it doesn't occur, that doesn't mean he was wrong. You clearly don't understand the first thing about science or scientists.
Secondly: we still might get an ice age. The global warming might trigger one because it may increase the cloud cover of the Earth, causing more sunlight to be reflected back into space.
Sailors from hundreds of years ago reported the unusually warm, Pacific waters hundreds of hears before the Industrial Revolution! Oh, wait! El Nino is actually being caused by global warming because the scientists said so!
Nobody says that El Nino is caused by global warming. Nobody actually knows what causes El Nino, since it is caused by an incredibly complex and diverse set of circumstances. All scientists ever said is that the likelihood of El Nino occurring seems to be increasing as the Earth warms up. That doesn't mean that El Nino couldn't be occurring already hundreds of years ago.
An asteroid is going to slam into us in 30 years because scientists said so!
No scientist ever said that. They said as far as they could tell with the available data, it was possible that it would hit the Earth.
Oh, wait! It's actually going to miss us by about 1 million miles because other scientists said so.
Wrong again. They were the same scientists, and the reason they were now saying it was probably going to miss the Earth is that they now had better data (since the asteroid was closer) so they could determine more accurately what the probably trajector of the asteroid was going to be.
And now ... humans are the cause of global warming because some scientist said so, and the parent is a troll because some moderator said so. Oh, wait! ...
Not some scientist said so, the majority of scientsts say so. Just not the ones in Bush's cozy little world...
Dumbass...
How much peer review have these models been subjected to? What assumptions are built into these models? How exactly do we control solely for sea temperature changes?
There's definitely way too much "we're right so shut up" attitude in this one.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
Sorry, you can't have it both ways. Either the fossils are faked, and Earth is 5000 years old, and we have observed the climate for most of it's history (because climate has been observed, and recorded by mankind for most of its 5000 years history), and therefore we are able to make accurate scientific guesses, or the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, and the fossils are valid, and therefore provide valid scientific data.
You don't get to first assume that Earth is 5000 years old, and therefore fossils are invalid, then to claim that because of that we can only study the Earth's climate as recorded by mankind, and then say that because Earth is 4.5 billion years old we can know only tiny, irrelevant fraction of climate's history.
By the way, although I'm a Christian as well, we must believe in two different Gods. Mine for example wouldn't create Earth, and then just put some fake fossils in there just to mock and have a laugh at His best creation (I mean us). Is it really so difficult to accept that Bible should be read in a similar way to poem, not as if it was a scientific paper?
Hmmm. Interesting you are saying there is an organized conspiracy by scientists to commit fraud upon the entire planet. It's amazing how these scientists have been able to co-operate on such a massive scale. All over the world the scientists are working hard to carry out their conspiracy and are doing it very effectively.
"I remember one NOAA model that came out a few years ago showing a sudden upturn in temperatures just about to happen"
There was an uptrun in tempratures. Species are suffering, the ice caps are melting, the glaciers have all but gone away. I guess none of that qualifies as a calamity in your book though.
evil is as evil does
A really good weatherman is someone who knows how to "lie" with statistics.
Accurate weather statistics in a single locale have only been kept for the last one hundred years or less. That's a pretty short time relatively speaking. Imagine the 1910's when everybody was in heart-stopping panic because nearly every day was a new record high or low in temperature. But we're a hundred years out now, so the frequency of records breakers is much much less. But that frequency still isn't zero.
Go play with the numbers yourself. Generate 36,500 random degrees from 0F to 100F (or 50F to 70F, depending on your climate). Put all those on a one hundred year calendar, and then look at the number of record breakers in the hundreth year. Okay, that's a bad model, temperatures aren't random. So put a function in your random degree generator that only allows a small fluctuation (only two degrees from day to day). Now plot them again. You're STILL going to have record breakers in the last year!
I started thinking about this topic back when I realized that one "hottest day on record" was actually cooler than the non-record-breaking day before. After a hundred years (less in my case) of temperature keeping, a "hottest day ever" is pretty damned significant. But the "hottest June 13th in Jackson Hole, Wyoming" isn't anything to get excited about.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
I find it interesting that so many people are able to dismiss a study they haven't read when they have virtually no knowledge (or whatever they read on Google) about climate change at all. What they do seem to have are some very nice right wing talking poinst, or whatever they have invented (everybody knows you have to have millions of years of climate data to know anything about global warming! Otherwise whatever you find is irrelevent!)
Maybe the HIV virus is made up too, right? You don't know anything about it, and you don't like how it sounds, so I'm sure you can come up with some vapid criticism about how it just doesn't add up.
The disagreement seems to be more of an ideolgoical nature. A majority of americans don't really care about the scientific debate because they don't see a need to change even if global warming is happening. Not surprisingly, they care even less when you add an agreement that financially rapes the US while leaving out countries like china. Also not surprisingly, discussion about the stupidity of americans isn't going to change that
> We have climate data from ice cores drilled into miles of ice in the ice sheets covering Greenland and Antarctica.
Also sediment cores from lake, sea, and ocean bottoms, and tree-ring samples. In some cases even the geological record can be useful, since annual deposition rates can tell us about freezes, melts, and droughts.
The amazing thing is that you can find this stuff out by simply reading a magazine or watching a television documentary now and then, and yet many intelligent people remain completely unaware of it.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
goddamn straight. they couldn't win the cold war fair and square and now they're trying to punish us with environmental regulations. Pollution is the last of the great communist mythologies up there with Lenin is a great leader and Stalin. Global warming my ass -- seriously it is "warming" so goddamn much why is the car seat in my egregiously large truck always freezing my big balls in the morning??? YEAH u herd me i SAID I WASTEFULLY DRIVE A LARGE TRUCK WITH A BIGASS AMERICAN FLAG take that u libral fuxs!!!. What u expect me to take a commuter train?? HA let me tell u a little secrete: commuter = communist. Get it? That's u, Go listen 2 ur NPR AND assfuk fatass Michael More and DIE U FUX!!!!!
Method 2: Match a marker in the ice (such as a layer of volcanic ash) with the corresponding marker in an ice core that has already been dated. Sure, any error in the original dating will appear as an uncertainty in the new ice core too. Your point is?
Method 3: Without more concrete data, I can't comment much on what you say. But as a scientist myself I can say that if the method is really as unreliable as you claim, then it simply wouldn't be used. In fact, your comment sounds suspicously like the typical creationist argument "radiocarbon dating sometimes gives incorrect answers due to contaminated samples; therefore all radiocarbon dating is wrong; therefore the Earth is 6,000 years old."
Method 4: given rainfall (err, snowfall;) data, self-consistently determine the age of the ice core from the rate of accumulation of ice. Your refutation of the method is...?
You say: About the only thing you can conclusively say is that an ice section below another ice section is probably the older one. And an ice section a lot lower is probably a lot older.
In geology, it is usually true that lower layers of earth are older than upper layers. Factors that can alter this are earthquakes, folding, volcanoes etc etc. In almost all cases its pretty obvious by looking around the area that something has caused the inversion. This occurs is on timescales of millions to hundreds of millions of years.
The time scales relevant for ice cores are much shorter than this, so such geological formations in ice should be rather rare. But even so, wouldn't this be obvious from an examination of the area?
Finally, error analysis is a rather basic part of any scientific method. What makes you think that ice core climatologists wouldn't do error analysis?
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.
There used to be an ocean in the middle of North America.
What the uninformed masses used to believe is hardly evidence of flaws in current scientific observations and study.
There are records that show thru out geo-history great freezings and greater warmings.
Yep. And analysis of these records yields evidence that humans have impacted the rate of recent warming significantly beyond former warming rates.
Yes, I know we have millions of cows releasing flatulants...but didn't we have millions of buffalo before we killed all of them? So that kinda balances out.
Uh, I'm going to ignore the whole cow-fart angle. It gives me gas.
Have we released green house gases. Yes. Have they had an affect. Probably....but when you read how black the skies were in London 200 yrs ago from all the wood burning and carbon emissions.
Yes, but don't you think the borders of London may have been quite a bit smaller back then? The population was magnitudes smaller, so the amount of black in the skies was probably not too significant compared to the collective output of greenhouse gases we currently have. I might be wrong, but I'm not.
And so although I believe there could be a global warming I am very skeptical about whether that is due just because of mankind or natural occurrences.
I'm skeptical that your skepticism is based on sound evidence.
The simple fact is that we don't have climate data for more than a very short period of the earth's history. The rest is guesswork.
Not quite. We don't have weather data for more than a very short period of the Earth's history. We've got millions of years of climate data.
To say the Earth was warmer when the dinosaurs roamed, we don't need to know that the high was 97 degrees in what will become Los Angeles on January 19th, 2,619,847 BCE, and it rained 2 inches. Instead, we can look at the fosilized tropical plants and thus know it was warmer and wetter.
I remember one NOAA model that came out a few years ago showing a sudden upturn in temperatures just about to happen.
Yes, one model was wrong, therefore all future models should be completely ignored. The geocentric model of the solar system was wrong, therefore this new-fangled heliocentric model must be wrong too.
In all seriousness, predictive models about the climate are really in their infancy...but this story is not about predictive models. These models are being compared to historical trends in the earth's climate, in order to figure out which one matches what we can already tell about the climate.
The fact the closest match was a model where human activity did cause global warming does lend some support to the idea that we do cause global warming...but it's also possible that it was a combination of the natural factors instead of individual factors that caused it.
Or even more likely, a combination of natural and human factors.
We don't have thousands and thousands of years of climate data, let alone multiple periods' worth.
We don't have thousands of years of weather data. We do have thousands of years of climate data, thanks to fossils and ice cores.
Weather data is specific, as in "67 degrees F and rained 1/4 of an inch".
Climate data is more general, such as "averages 50-70 degrees in winter, raining 10 inches".
We don't need to have collected weather data in order to get climate data, it just makes the climate data more accurate. But we can use the ice cores/fossils to say that, within a reasonable margin of error, the average tempature rose by 3 degrees over a particular 10,000 year period.
I think the reason that your post was modded so highly is because you posted the conclusion that so many people want to hear, which is, essentially, "Chrichton is sloppy at best, mendacious at worst for daring question the Truth about global warming." But, as with so many things, the devil's in the details.
... As we in this line of research are fond of pointing out to students in our introductory classes, 'Climate is what you expect; Weather is what you get'. Crichton would have been well served if he had read this tutorial on the distinction between the two...."
You labeled RealClimate.org's critique as a "detailed examination." But was it really that detailed? I read it, and it seems to me that they are only able to raise three objections, which I will detail here (easy, since there are only three):
1. Chricton claims, "No longer are models judged by how well they reproduce data from the real world-increasingly, models provide the data. As if they were themselves a reality."
- RealClimate.org responds with, "Crichton should know that this assertion is false. He cites in the 'bibliography' at the end of his book, the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But he appears unaware, for example..." and then gives examples of models which, in their opinion, do, in fact, model data from the real world.
* Even if what they write is true, it's not enough to disprove Chrichton's claim. Read what he wrote: "increasingly, models provide the data." In order for them to show falsehood, they would have to show that the phenomenon he bemoans is actually decreasing in frequency or, at best, happening at the same rate. Merely providing examples in the way they did is not sufficient to make Chrichton's claim false. Strike one.
2. Chricton claims, "Nobody believes a weather prediction twelve hours ahead. Now we're asked to believe a prediction that goes out 100 years into the future?"
- RealClimate.org droops to mockery and replies, "Crichton then goes on to make the classic error of confusing 'weather' and 'climate'
* RealClimate.org's analysis is as stupid as it is condescending. Again, read what Chrichton wrote! "Nobody believes a weather prediction twelve hours ahead." If "climate," by RealClimate.org's own admission is "what you expect," then that definition is functionally equivalent to a weather prediction. If there be any confusion here, it appears to be coming from RealClimate.org. Strike two.
3. Chrichton claims, "Certainly the increased use of computer models, such as GCMs, cries out for the separation of those who make the models from those who verify them."
- RealClimate.org looks down their nose again and claims, "Again, if Crichton has read the IPCC report, he should be aware of the fact that largely (though admittedly, not completely) independent communities of scientists are involved with..."
* hold on just a minute! If, by RealClimate.org's admission, the communities of science are not completely independent, then how is RealClimate.org so sure that such a phenomenon is not precisely the complaint that Chrichton has? The counterexamples RealClimate.org provides fall outside of that complaint and are, by nature, irrelevent. Strike three.
Is this the best that the "scientists" at RealClimate.org can come up with? Should I expect their writings on the Truth(TM) of Global Warming to be of the same caliber? Anyone who fails to communicate their thoughts without resorting to snotty invective loses huge amounts of credibility with me.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
" All you have to do is get a few well known and respected scientists on board and all the other lemmings will fall in line."
It's hard enough to get a group of five scientists to agree to be in the same damn room at the same time much less this "lemmings" nonsense.
Thats how men died in mars... and the methane explains it! Refried beans, the destroyer of worlds!
Cheers,
Adolfo
This is silly. A significant majority of anthropogenic climate forcing is due to CO2 produced directly by burning fossil fuels.
Indirect contributions to CO2, such as deforestation is very small in comparison. This can be seen by observing that during the 18th and 19th centuries, deforesting large areas of North America caused a measurable, but very small increase in atmospheric CO2. Burning fossil fuels in the 20th century caused a large increase in CO2 levels. There are several ways to tell where the carbon is coming from: isotope analysis shows that most of the additional carbon is old on the scale of the carbon 13 lifetime, so it has not come from organic material formed in the last couple of hundred thousand years. Second, the timing and magnitude of the increase coincides directly with the growth of fossil fuel use and not with any other anthropogenic or natural phenomenon.
Methane gets a lot of press, but it only lives for a decade in the atmosphere before it's oxidized, whereas carbon dioxide has a much longer lifetime (around a century) so it poses a much greater threat.
Even if we consider methane, cow farts are only a small fraction of total anthropogenic methane emissions.
The most important changes in land use affecting the U.S. share of the carbon budget are those that increase or reduce forest land. Each year, a very large amount of carbon dioxide, on the order of 100 billion metric tons, is removed from the atmosphere and sequestered into biomass and soil worldwide.
So biomass and soil accounts for 100 billion metric tons of carbon per year worldwide.
At the same time, carbon is released to the atmosphere from vegetative respiration, combustion of wood in natural or purposely set forest fires or as fuel, degradation of manufactured wood products, and the natural decay of rotting vegetative detritus.
But the same biomass is also responsible for the release of carbon.
The net numerical difference, or flux, between carbon sequestration and carbon release due to natural factors can be viewed as a measure of the relative contribution of biomass to the carbon cycle.
So by 'flux' they mean the net difference between sequestration and release, due to biomass.
Annual world carbon flux is difficult to measure but is thought to be close to zero; in other words, sequestration and respiration are roughly in balance worldwide.
So, across the whole planet, carbon flux from biomass is approximately zero (as one would expect for a steady state). Note that nowhere yet has emissions from any other source been considered!
In the United States, however, the live components of forests and the wood products produced from them (including paper and wood-based construction materials) sequestered a net of approximately 111 million metric tons of carbon (407 million metric tons of carbon dioxide) in 1992, including 12 million metric tons of carbon sequestered in wood products and 15 million metric tons of carbon sequestered in landfilled wood product waste.(112) A further 127 million metric tons of carbon were believed to be sequestered in forest soils and the forest floor in 1992. For purposes of comparison, this estimated amount of sequestered carbon offset approximately 17 percent of the 1,381 million metric tons of carbon (or 5,068 million metric tons of carbon dioxide) emitted in the United States in 1992 from the burning of fossil fuels (see Chapter 2).
This contains the real information. The US forests have a positive flux of carbon. ie, the amount of carbon stored in the forest per year is larger than the amount of carbon released by the forest per year.
BUT, this is only 17% of the carbon emitted by burning fossil fuels! So the USA is most definitely NOT a net sink of carbon!
CO2 lives in the atmosphere for a very long time. This is well-known. The more CO2, the longer the lifetime. Currently the lifetime of atmospheric CO2 is about 100 years.
Oceans warm up very slowly (on a timescale of 1000 years, which is determined by deepwater recycling times that can be measured very well.
Putting these two terms together implies that if global warming leads to unacceptable consequences, then by the time we have a clear and unambiguous observation of those consequences (remember that we're rejecting computer models that extrapolate from present trends) we will have set the earth on a course where those consequences will persist for another few centuries.
We don't have unambiguous proof today that human emissions of greenhouse gases will cause unacceptable damage to the environment. We can't predict future climates well enough to know with any certainty whether global warming is benign, catastrophic, or somewhere in between. We will not know this until we observe what the climate actually does.
Once we observe how the climate does change, it will be too late to alter its trajectory for a century or so, so deciding to wait until there is unambiguous proof is actually another way of deciding to do nothing. We should recognize that choosing to do nothing, choosing to take extreme action, or choosing some intermediate course of action will be done in a state of ignorance and uncertainty.
It may be that choosing to do nothing is the best course of action, but we should be honest that what we're doing is choosing to accept whatever climate change occurs in the next two centuries and not to sell it as though we would have the option of doing something about catastrophic climate change should we observe it 50 years from now.
As to nuclear power, I completely support you on this. Nuclear power is the only technology that has a hope of reducing CO2 emissions significantly in the next 30 years, so we should expand nuclear power as quickly as we can reasonably do.
But I don't see how Kyoto holds back the US at the expense of everyone else. Europe and Japan are committed under Kyoto to cut CO2 emissions more quickly than the US would be if we ratified the treaty.
Telling China that it would have to keep CO2 levels near its 1990 levels sounds good on paper, but even today, China emits only one sixth the amount of CO2 per person as the US does. Do you really think it would be a fair allocation of resources to freeze per-capita CO2 emissions with the US at about 6.5 tons per person per year, Europe at around 2.9 tons per person per year, and China at 1.2 tons per person per year?
People really are suffering from information overload. They live busy lives, and it's all they can do to keep up with their own lives, and that that of their families. It also does not help that 'The Academy' has become so heavily populated with folks with very left-wing social, and political agendas. Large sections of Americans do not trust institutions that they view as hot beds of neo-marxist pointy-headed, ivory tower bound granolas. Most of all they don't trust the chicken-little, 'doom is at hand' rhetoric that so many advocates (those who advance the theory of) of anhtropogenic warming. They have seen this pose before, and it's has become a pose that they very deeply distrust. You think scare-mongering no longer works, or that it's solely a tool of the "academic left"? Can you say, "weapons of mass destruction"? It's best to just admit that most Americans don't believe in global warming because they don't want to. The solution would cost them either effort (walking, riding their bikes more) or comfort (selling the SUV and buying a small car, for example) than they're willing to lose. Furthermore, we've recently been exposed to a string of articles suggesting that global warming would have little effect on North America, while it would be a much larger problem for the less-industrialized world. I'm certainly not an expert, and am not qualified to comment on the existence/nonexistence of global warming. Nonetheless, is it a good idea to perform the kind of vast chemistry experiment on our world that we currently are engaged in? Are we sure there won't be any consequences? Those might not be scientific questions, but since science is failing to provide definitive answers, maybe we need to turn to other sources of knowledge.
No, that's not what he said. He said they were susceptible to the same logical fallacies as everybody else. Read the article. They took a number of models of climate and compared to real data. The greenhouse models matched pretty close and the other models didn't. As a result, the report and/or scientists claim:
This is similar reasoning as some religious arguments. "Science can't explain X but our model of God can, therefore we got it right." Has it not occured to anyone that perhaps their models aren't accurate. For instance, it could all be due to solar activity and their model of how solar activity affects climate is wrong. That could be true of any of their models. They could even have the greenhouse model completely wrong and it gives the right answers because building the models in the first place was based off of calibrating it against real data.
This is partially from my own experience. I've developed calibrations for complicated systems and I know that the calibration algorithms do their best to fit the model to the data, even if the model is wrong.
That being said, our best guess is that humans are affecting the climate. I tend to agree with that, but there is hardly indisputable evidence of that. None of the above claims are reasonable for the given conditions of the testing and model validation.
To expand on the concept of replying for other posters, I'll take the AC side:
c -ncc020905.php which was from those wacky Europeans that everyone here says all are in agreement with the current global warming theories.
Actually there isn't much to retort in this article, as it is nothing but a bunch of claims and name calling, without any suporting data.
The AC asked the parent poster for a detailed analysis of the study, not the Times article. And there is reference to a reasonable amount of data in the study. Prior to its peer review and journal publication, neither of us can assess the methodology, so it's nonsensical to dismiss it (or OTOH to canonize it.) The press on the study was interesting to me, and in general terms it sounds like a solid effort.
Well that statement is certainly true. But that is because it only goes back 40 years to the low point in a global cooling trend. If you go back 65 years you see no net warming, so who cares.
The observed temperatures may indeed be within normal cyclic ranges, but that's doesn't mean the observed rate of change is "normal" too. And it isn't.
Can we see the data?
I'm sure eventually it'll be published somewhere, as that's academia's bread & butter.
Becuase, if true, it would cettainly be a revelation, as this has not been true ever before.
All you can say, based on evidence, is that these observations have never been made, or that this type of analysis was never done. You can NOT scientifically argue that the conclusions were not true prior to this study.
Which is why this article was released, it is basically just a retort from this article http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-02/sr
This is a dismissable ad hominem argument. The motives of the scientists involved in the study have no bearing whatsoever on the validity of their conclusions. If the study followed solid scientific methods, they could be the leftiest lefty leftist tree-huggin' enviro-whacko business-hatin' agenda-pushin' hippies ever, but their conclusions would be right. If their science is flawed, they could be the same leftiest lefty leftist tree-huggin' enviro-whacko business-hatin' agenda-pushin' hippies ever, but their conclusions would very likely be wrong.
Appeal to motive is a logical fallacy that holds no weight with me.
Hardly. Tweaked models are still tweaked models. They are still designed to show certain effects, no matter what data they get fed.
But the point is that despite their tweaking they correctly predicted current weather phenomenon, while the other models didn't.
That is the fundamental test of a scientific theory: Does the theory predict the measured data?
Maybe you're missing what they did: They took the models, and used them to predict climate changes. They compared these predictions to measured data. The model using greenhouse gasses as a driver of climate changed matched the data closely, the other models did not. There is only one conclusion you can make, political machinations of the model designers being irrelevent: the greenhouse gas model was accurate, the other models were not.
So yes, it does blow away your criticism of politically motivated "tweaking" invalidating the models. They can tweak the model, they can't tweak the real-world data that their model was used to predict. Maybe Newton "tweaked" his theory because he wasn't sure of it. It still perfectly predicts planetary motion.
It's clear you want to dismiss these results. If you want to, a better way to do it would be to say that the paper has not yet been submitted to a peer-reviewed journal. That's my main criticism -- they've ran to the press before their results were analyzed, and even if the paper stands up this can still be damaging.
And don't forget that this "greenhouse warming" causes cloud formation -- and the albedo of clouds is significantly less than that of the ground.
You're assuming the delta in light reflected would be greater than the delta in heat retained. I won't say with assurance that it's either, but I'll note that the coldest days of January in Michigan are the few without clouds.
If we weren't here, we couldn't have caused it, and if it happened before when we didn't cause it, there is no reason to believe we are causing it now.
That's fallacious reasoning. Fires existed before man, therefore man has started no fires?
The reason to suspect man is not because climate change is unique, because it isn't. The reason to suspect man is because the massive release of greenhouse gasses caused by industrialization is unique.
Plenty of fires have been caused by lightning. When you see a field with a charred box of fireworks in the middle, suspecting human interaction instead of assuming lightning is prudent.
The enemies of Democracy are
In some insane idea of "balance", people in the US seem to believe that there are "two sides" to every debate, in perpetuity. Wake up, guys: there are no "two sides" to this story anymore. The question has been settled scientifically. It's been settled for years actually, but this makes it even more clear: Human activity is a significant cause of global warming.
Furthermore, even if there were debate on that point still possible, just the fact that human activity may contribute to global warming is enough to make significant policy changes: when you are facing the possibility of widespread death, you can't afford to act only when you are completely certain about the causes, you eliminate all reasonably likely causes and factors that you can control.
Americans are like a chain smoking, obese man who has been diagnosed with heart disease and told to exercise and go on a diet, and who keeps saying "but there is still a possibility my heart disease is all caused some obscure disease and completely unrelated to smoking and diet".
These analyses are based on detailed models of the atmosphere, and those most certainly take into account the different contributions of CO2, methane, and other greenhouse gases. So, scientists can very much distinguish which gases are primarily responsible for causing global warming.
If cow farts were responsible for global warming, Kyoto would be a treaty on cow farts. Furthermore, methane has a short half life in the atmosphere, that would be really swell. Likewise, if deforestation were responsible for global warming, all the more reason to stop deforestation.
Unfortunatly for everybody concerned, it's easy to tell that cow farts are not the primary cause of global warming, CO2 is. CO2 has a long atmospheric half life, which means that we will have to live with the consequences of our stupidity for centuries.
In fact, what climate models really show is that other human activity (e.g., particulate emissions) has so far probably masked the full extent of global warming, so that things may actually already be further advanced than they appear based on our actual climate measurements. (And, in case you are wondering, we can't continue activities contributing to this masking effect because it has been killing huge numbers of people already.)
pretending we can bail out the Titanic with a teaspoon is simply typical human arrogance.
So is pretending that that the Titanic is unsinkable.
While I do consider myself an environmentalist, I am cautious about using the phrase "Carbon Dioxide increases cause global warming." In fact, so cautious that I instead use the phrase "Carbon Dioxide is correlated to global warming."
While there is a model in which carbon dioxide can lead to global warming, there are also several models in which global warming leads to increases in carbon dioxide levels.
1) Permafrosts thaw, allowing the built up organic matter (of which there is quite a lot of under tundra) to decay rapidly, releasing CO2 and CH4.
2) Increasing the temperature of water will decrease the solubility of gasses in that water, therefore increasing the temperature of the oceans will decrease the solubility of carbon dioxide in them, releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
While this sounds like I am saying not to worry about CO2 emissions, it does bring about a third possibility: Both models are right. 1)Greenhouse gasses released into the atmosphere by humans causes global warming. 2)Global warming releases greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, leading to... more global warming. Uh oh... we found a potential positive feedback loop in which crossing a certain threshold of greenhouse gas emissions will push us past the point of no return.
Then I like to go along with the idea that messing with something you don't know about ends up with that thing broken. What happens if that thing is essential to your life???
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
I doubt it would be the end of the world. Reducing green house gas over the course of 50 years would involve many technological innovations. You can't just look at technology today and say we can't do it. Currently we don't have enough incentives to do the research and clean up the problem. By creating an economic incentive for people to reduce green house gas, the technology will be developed. Just as Malthus was wrong about over population, technology can help us lower green house gases. (Think nuclear power, algae based oils...) Otherwise we can continue destroying the commons until we create a real economic disaster that will be much harder to reverse.
Personally from what I've read and heard (which is limited) I think the expected damage from ignoring green house gas emissions is much greater than putting together a solid program of incentives to reduce emissions. Of course, this would shake up the world economy and some vested interests would lose money, but so be it. This only gives me further reason to doubt the do nothing policy. Various rich people don't want to lose their empires and will spin things by spending money to keep things the same.
Chris Mesterharm
Why are you SO angry? If what I believe is irrational, unintelligent, and foolishness, then my worldview should be irrelevant. Why can't you merely dismiss what I believe in the same way you (and I) dismiss meduims and psychics?
The facts are that evolution remains unproven, but is the best materialistic explanation that naturalists propose. This is the case with all of science. Hypothesis gives way to testing, and if the phenomenon are observable and repeatable, it gives credence to the hypothesis.
This is rational and reasonable. Unless I'm mistaken, I believe based on your last post that we are in violent agreement on this issue.
An ordered universe presents itself in a way that ordered examination prevails in exposing and describing natural phenomena. It makes sense to me that everything that exists had a creator, and that a designer is a good explanation for the order and precision in the universe.
Also, naturalism as a world view fails when it comes to describing anything nonmaterial. What is the purpose of life? What gives life meaning? If materialism is true, then why shouldn't you kill anyone who opposes you? If genetic mutation is the pathway to improvements in the progression of living things, why not bombard all living things with radiation in an effort to speed evolution along?
What about those things that are not naturally explainable or describable? For example, love, duty, honor, passion, fear, and self-sacrifice are experiences common to all people, and yet completely nonmaterial. How does one with a naturalistic worldview fit those components together?
Again I ask, what if Christianity is true?
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?