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Global Warming Debunked?
limbicsystem writes, "I'm a scientist. I like Al Gore. I donate to the Sierra club, I bicycle everywhere and I eat granola. And I just read a very convincing article in the UK Telegraph that makes me think that the 'scientific consensus' on global warming is more than a little shaky. Now IANACS (I am not a climate scientist). And the Telegraph is notoriously reactionary. Can anyone out there go through this piece and tell me why it might be wrong? Because it seems to be solid, well researched, and somewhat damning of a host of authorities (the UN, the editors of Nature, the Canadian Government) who seem to have picked a side in the global warming debate without looking at the evidence." The author of the Telegraph piece is Christopher Monckton, a retired journalist and former policy advisor to Margaret Thatcher.
"Can anyone out there go through this piece and tell me why it might be wrong?"
/. buddy, what you'll get is a bunch of reasons why its right or wrong from people that didn't read the article.
This is
From the blurb: Can anyone out there go through this piece and tell me why it might be wrong?
I'm sure we got a couple thousand people here who will tell you why it's wrong... the question is; are they right?
I'm afraid that you're probably going to get a lot of shoddy answers to a legitimate question here.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
I would like to point out TFA says nothing about Linux or Microsoft and I am confused.
Also, the graphs would be a lot sweeter if they were replaced with pictures of robots... or lasers.
I think the biggest problem with the whole climate change debate, is that the common man can't easily do all the research to come to their own good conclusion. So they have to believe whoever in the media has the best song and dance show. This is the case with a lot of things though so there you go.
The answer to global warming is *very* simple, and *very* well known. We just need to plant massive amounts of biomass to soak up all the excess carbon. We just need to turn the United States into a temperate rain forest- with enough variety to ensure tree survival and food production from the rain forest itself. Lock up that carbon in wood- and then use the wood to build houses- locking up the carbon for decades, maybe centuries...
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
...but I don't look to newspapers for serious scientific research, I look to peer-reviewed scientific journals. But, that aside, the accusations in the article all seem to be things (relative role of solar forcing, the "medieval warm period", etc.) that have been discussed and dealt-with repeatedly in the literature, both as to their accuracy and their impact, there doesn't seem to be anything, on the first impression, new here.
Give me any conclusion on a topic involving a really complex process, and I'll find a way to poke a bunch of holes in it. I'll examine the process of investigation and nit-pick it to death, because no process is complete or fault-free. If necessary, I'll just go to the core assumptions and attack their validity. Easy enough.
Since none of the conclusions can be "proven", all we can do is go with our "best guess". In this case, the general concensus among scientists in the field is our best guess.
Granted I haven't had a chance to read the entire article yet, but it sounds like it's in line with what the climate scientists at my University have been saying for a while. Two things actually.
The first is that funding shapes science whether you want it to or not. If the general consensus is that global warming is happening, you're much more likely to get funded if you decide to do research on "why global warming is going on" or "what are the major contributors to global warming" etc. However, if you were to submit a proposal along the lines of "what if any effect has global warming had on climate change", good luck.
Therefore there's going to be a lot of science out there saying "Yes, global warming is happening and is the reason for climate change!", since that's what pays the bills, gets you published, and gets you invited to all sorts of posh international conventions on global warming. No one wants to invite the guy/gal that says "yes it's happening but it's not the cause, or certainly not the only cause behind global climate change".
Just my two cents. Keep and open mind, even when reading "science". At the end of the day scientists are human beings too, they have to pay the bills, report to a boss, have a reputation among their peers. Science is rarely about pure facts. The facts usually need to be teased out of the agenda, aggrandizing and ego of those doing the work.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! *snort*
Oh, I kill me. I really do.
And now, a PSA from David Lynch.
This is the very first paragraph:
" Last week, Gordon Brown and his chief economist both said global warming was the worst "market failure" ever. That loaded soundbite suggests that the "climate-change" scare is less about saving the planet than, in Jacques Chirac's chilling phrase, "creating world government". This week and next, I'll reveal how politicians, scientists and bureaucrats contrived a threat of Biblical floods, droughts, plagues, and extinctions worthier of St John the Divine than of science." [Emphasis mine]
OK, so not only is the American right-wing co-opting Evangelical Christians and 'values voters' to take away our civil liberties and conduct mass surveillance on the American public, but now hippies, greenies, and environmental scientists are also going to take away our freedoms by reducing greenhouse emissions, raising vehicle fuel efficiency, and sequestering carbon!?
Man, things are getting really weird when people on both sides of the aisle are starting to agree with Alex Jones.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Any fool can ask a profound question that takes a wise man decades to answer. [This chinese proverb is distributed to you under GPL V2.0]
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
whether global warming is happening. We know it is. We're recording it as it happens.
What is the issue is is this a natural process, a man-made process or a combination?
While we have evidence that warming and cooling cycles have happened in the past, this is the first time (that we know of) that the cycle has been recorded by man. If nothing else, it behooves us to study this phenomenon as critically as possible and determine if we are influencing things by our activities.
So no, global warming is not debunked. It is real and it is happening. The real question is why.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
If you're a scientist, why not give them the raw data & your conclusions?
Good point. What I'd like to see is a place where I can download the state-of-the-art models. That is, I want to be able to review their code, all assumptions going into the model, all justifications for the assumptions, and all historical evidence so I can replicate the predictions myself.
Since this is science, that information *should* be publicly available somewhere.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
The article referenced goes through several studies and papers and points out poor methodologies and statistical analysis that is likely fraudulent. From this you can conclude, these studies are possibly flawed. So where does that leave you? Can you logically conclude from this that global warming is not occurring or even not occurring faster than any time in the past? Of course not. Discrediting a study does not prove the opposite of that study is true. It simply provides you a reason to place more weight on other, more credible, studies.
From my reading I have little doubt that global warming is occurring. Just look in peer reviewed journals and other credible sources. It may not be as dramatic as some would like, and the dramatic, but ill-concieved, doomsday scenarios painted by the popular media are entertainment, not fact. The truth is, there are very real indications of climactic problems, which will probably be gradual, but may be practically irreversible by the time they are apparent to skeptics.
Just be careful of your sources and pay attention. Both industrial concerns and people working for government grant dollars have incentive to obtain particular results. Look for peer reviewed results from experiments and observations that have been repeated by numerous scientific studies. Be cautious of interpretations of this data by the popular media, who are more interested in selling ads than presenting the truth.
Just from observing here in Tennessee, when I was young (30 years ago) I remember getting 4-5 good snows every winter. Now you're lucky if you see 1 good snow every other winter.
Tennessee is right on the border between "gets a ton of snow" and "no snow at all". So small differences in temperature are exaggerated.
The question is, is global warming man-made, or some sort of natural cycle, ala El Nino or something else we don't know about. I'd lean toward the latter.
Dear Submitter,
The reason the article seems correct and insightful is because of the limited scope. It doesn't take issue with the scientific consensus on global climate change, just with the recent report issued by the UN.
Oddly, though, instead of just pointing out why this report is wrong, it concludes that since the report is poorly written, then that proves there is no climate catastrophe.
I've actually come across other criticisms of the "hockey stick" graph that used it as a starting point for a discussion on good science vs. bureaucracy and the disadvantages of pegging all your arguments on a single "visual". (the biggest disadvantage? disprove the "visual" and that disproves your whole argument). Unfortunately that's not what we've got in this UK Telegraph article.
Without reading TFA:
It doesn't matter whether man-made warming is real. It does get warmer, and the other riders of the apocalypse, namely storm, water and drought, are riding in in its wake. And oh, will they ever bring along the biblical set. With this in mind, it is our (as in mankind's) responsibility as a whole, to at least minimise our part in it, however small it may be. It is a fact that the enormous quantities of pollutants we release need to go somewhere, and that they do something, wherever they go. Those effects pose an incalculable risk to life on the planet.
So, no matter what lobbyists from either side of the fence may say, ignoring the problem (which is pretty real) is, as always, not the way to go. Governments and individuals are denying the greenhouse effect on various pretenses, which may even be valid in some ways. But when looking at The Big Picture, everyone who has not taken the short bus with the leaky exhaust, will clearly see a not so pleasant future that we may avoid by doing something, but that will definitely make life a lot less pleasant in the forseeable future if ignored.
I, personally, just hope that I will have a gun handy the day it gets too bad.
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
I'm hoping that was a joke, because I thought it was fairly common knowledge (amongst those interested in this kind of thing, anyway) that JunkScience is maintained by someone in the employ of ExxonMobil and Philip Morris, a Mr. Steven Milloy, who also works for Fox News. Hardly a neutral point of view, or an authoritative source.
There are plenty more reputable sources to find your debunkings, most of them far preferable than "JunkScience".
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
If you think about it the whole premise of any prediction is gouing to be wrong: "If we carry on as we're going now..." is not possible. China is industrialising. The price of oil will react to its scarcity. The percieved importance of rainforest is increasing as it becomes scarcer. Regional climatic shifts like what started the 1997 Indonesian smog will become more (or maybe less) common as ocean currents shift.
We can (and probably will) argue ad nauseum about the relative importance of the historical CO2 and temperature records, sunspots, methane from the tundra, oceanic absorption etc. but the basic fact is that we're releasing huge amounts of pollutants into the atmosphere whilst destroying the ecosphere's long-established buffers. Whether the system is stable unstable, metastable or whatever is probably impossible to predict with certainty. I would rather err on the side of caution. Those with a vested interest with us carrying on as we are would rather we ignore the doomsayers until it's too late^W^Wscientifically proven.
Every year the evidence for global warming gets more convincing.
The scientific evidence just builds and builds.
And when youve just gone through a summer in northern europe
when the tempreture never went below 30c for 8 weeks who needs
scientists.
The really scary bit is this:
The classic argument against global warming is that the climate
has always varied wildly -- sometimes it gets warmer sometimes
it gets colder, shit happens.
However historians have been patiently examining all the cool
spells and they all correlate to drop offs in human activity.
The last really big dip in temperature happened just after the
Black Death when approx. one third of humanity died.
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
I am a global warming believer. I personally have been concerened about the possibility of global warming since the 80's. A good site on the subject is http://gristmill.grist.org/skeptics It contains a complete listing of the articles in "How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic," a series by Coby Beck containing responses to the most common skeptical arguments on global warming. There are four separate taxonomies; arguments are divided by: * Stages of Denial, * Scientific Topics, * Types of Argument, and * Levels of Sophistication.
San Francisco Photographers
Comment removed based on user account deletion
in anything." - G.K. Chesterton.
There ya go. From his preface. People believe in climate change because they have lost their faith.
If that's not his argument...why is this one of the first things he says?
Also, he cites the concept that all climate scientists are saying there's a problem so they'll keep their jobs...before he gets to any actual numbers.
Then he says this...This is not true.
Then he says.Which is a classic mistake of mistaking weather for climate..and local for global.
Then he says it's not greenhouse gases...but the sun that is getting hotter.So, uh, it's not even that it's "global warming" that has been debunked...it's that the U.N. is wrong about what is causing it.
(yes, the headline is wrong).
Then he goes into the calculations...none of which is data he personally gathered (because if he did, that would be he is a climate scientist...which would mean he couldn't be trusted...as he would then be being paid to study the climate).
So...yea..that's why it's wrong.
+&x
..which is generally pretty levelheaded:
"Sir Nicholas may well err on the gloomy side. And it is certainly impossible to predict precisely what effect climate change will have had on the world economy in a century's time. But neither point invalidates Sir Nicholas's central perception -- that governments should act not on the basis of the likeliest outcome from climate change but on the risk of something really catastrophic..."
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
make a choice: ... OOPS TOO LATE. ... not much happens, nobody knows whether a chance would have occurred
1/ we wait until we see whether the earth warms up and take action
2/ we take the prudent side and try to cut emissions
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
Community Climate System Model. Enjoy.
Re: 3) Really? I haven't seen that show yet, but I've seen this scence your talking about. I'd find it hard to believe nobody has addressed this yet -unless your "glacier changing sizes seasonally" thing isn't correct which I'm too lazy to look up. Anyway- I don't pay much attention to global warming stuff, and I assume I'm talking out of my behind here... but I don't hear anything at all about the rotation of the earth. I know it's tens of thousands of years to effect major climate change involving the "wobble" of the earth, but it's always seemed so fragile to me that the tilt of the earth is enough to cause our seasons, so a slight variation in the wobble would cause those seasons to be extended/shortened etc. I guess that stuff is measurable though and someone would have noticed by now if we're in the "warm phase" of that wobble.
If there wasn't such a huge incentive for industry to fund research that "debunks" the theory of global warming, I might be a little more willing to listen. But the fact is, you've got researchers on one side, and believe me, there's absolutely no upside to telling Americans that dumping tons of pollutants into the atmosphere is going to have a bad effect, so researchers on one side who are going where the data takes them and researchers on the other who are paid handsomely to find out that there's absolutely no problem with spewing ever-growing quantities of hydrocarbons into the atmosphere.
Who you gonna believe?
You are welcome on my lawn.
My question exactly as well.
I consider myself environmentally conscious and have a reputation around the office as being the token enviro-nazi. But I will never understand why environmentalists in general are so violently opposed to nuclear power. It has the smallest environmental footprint. It is the most efficient way to produce power for an ever growing population.
Sure it has its nasty side (the waste - safety isn't nearly the concern it once was) but every means of producing energy does. I've always seen nuclear power as being the lesser of the available evils. Sure I'd love to see all power generated come from purely renewable sources but that is more dream than reality. If we built a nuclear plant and shut down the equivalent capacity in coal or natural gas we'd be MUCH better off.
Innovation makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old regime... -- Machiavelli
Yes, but where did the UN actually say that CO2 ended the ice ages? How is the author reading their minds? Such a view would certainly be contrary to must of mainstream science, of course, so where's the evidence that the author isn't setting up a strawman?
The Co2 graphs show the reliability of ice core CO2 data as a proxy for finding out historical temperature levels, and also the potential for positive feedback effects if temperatures rise. They give an idea as to the sensitivity of the situation to perturbations.
So how does the author know, then?
This is pure and simply a lie. It's a lie, because all of these critics have ever show is the tendency for hockey sticks in PV01. But PV01 is a certain statistical consequence that is not the same as the actual reconstruction. Studies searching for the hockey stick tendency in the full reconstruction have come up with nothing, because there are other components in the full reconstruction that cancel out the first term.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/graphics/2006/11/
This graph is comparing apples to oranges. The top graph is a global temperature anomaly graph. The bottom is the temperature of a relatively small continent, dominated by a warm ocean current. One is a average data over the world, and the other is strongly affected by local effects - such as the medieval warm period. The top graph is what global warming is talking about. The bottom graph is not relevant to the debate at all.
From wikipedia:
Stefan Boltzmann applies to a perfect blackbody. The Earth is not a perfect blackbody. In fact, not alot of things are. Doesn't it seem wrong to say that energy exposure always raises temperature to the same degree regardless of the object?
And so on and so forth.
The Sun's temperature is not constant
The ocean holds CO2 (when it rains, it get mixed into the ocean.. think soda)
When the Sun's temperature increases, the ocean releases CO2
Hence people think higher CO2 means higher temperatures, when the reverse is actually true.
I've read the article. The same old debunked myths: Medieval Warm Period? Debunked.
Variations in the output of the Sun? Debunked.
It's all a left wing myth perpetrated by the UN to set up a World Government? - Left as a exercise for the reader.
So they have to believe whoever in the media has the best song and dance show.
The media nowadays will publish whatever sells more advertising. That means: whatever sounds most sensational. Forecasting climate catastrophe sounds pretty sensational. It attracts more readers, generates more controversy, and (most important!) sells more advertising. So the media will go for it.
You not only don't have to "believe whoever in the media has the best song and dance show"; you're an idiot if you do.
You can look at the prediction track record of the people who are quoted. And understanding Monckton's criticisms is not rocket science. He says the graphs produced by the global-warming doomsayers in 2001 suppress the medieval warm period. By golly, he's right. The graph makes it look as though the current warming is exceptional, but it isn't. Fluctuations happen. The warming between 1000 and about 1400 AD was more than the current warming, and it's mentioned in many historical sources (e.g. Wikipedia) and has been confirmed by many studies. You don't need calculus to understand stuff like this.
It is prudent to be alert to risks of changing the climate. Modest measures to reduce our gross waste of fossil fuels would be sensible. For example, if the US raised its gasoline taxes to European levels, Americans might be less inclined to buy SUVs. But extreme and costly measures seem foolish.
Obviously. Anything nuclear is evil. That's why I've proposed legislation to ban anything with a nucleus to end this threat to the American way of life once and for all.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Point #1 makes about as much sense as saying "the camera was invented in the 1800's so I don't believe in dinosaurs. The global temperature data over time comes from a multitude of different proxies of temperature that have been preserved in geologic records just like ancient critters have been preserved as fossils.
I haven't seen much (actually I haven't seen any) argument that the historical temperature records are unreliable.
The real issues are the extent to which humans are responsible for climate change, the likely effects of such change, and whether climate change is a self-limiting/correcting or unstable-runaway process.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
"Galileo invented the thermometer in 1593.
I don't trust any temperature data for dates prior to 1593."
really? So you completely disavow any conclusions about tempratures from ice cores then.
"Isn't global warming better than another ice age?"
To the earth it's neutral. Just another season in the flow of time. To the humans just as bad if not worse.
"You know Al Gore's movie, where they show the glacier photos, before and after?
Are the before and after both from the same season?"
Al Gore is a liberal commie, pinko, fag, granola, green nazi. He wants to destroy the western world and wants to institute a one world govt (TM). Don't believe anything he says. Also don't listen to the scientists, they are all liars (except the ones that say there is no global warming of course).
evil is as evil does
I posted this in the "Snowball Earth" thread, but it applies here too.
At the moment the question seems to be "Are humans having a serious negative impact on the global climate?" This is used to reinforce the status quo, right? It's not our fault, what we're doing isn't the problem, so why bother changing what we're doing?
Shouldn't the questions be:
"Is the climate changing?"
"Is it changing in a way that will benefit humanity?"
"If not, how do we manufacture the change we desire?"
These questions should be framed with the idea that the climate is changing and will eventually wipe life as we know it off the face of the Earth. Eventually, something will replace all that biodiversity. But mankind won't be around to see it, so it behooves us as a species to guarantee our own survival by making sure the climate changes in a manner that allows us to continue to thrive.
All of the topics you mention seem to be areas where the unnecessary complexity was eventually discarded, to reveal a simple core truth. E=MC*2 is wonderfully, beautifully simple - that's its elegance.
Climatology is fundamentally different. It's a field, affected by huge numbers of variables. It's unlikely that you will be able to condense the problem down to a fundamental conclusion like "global warming IS manmade". Even if it becomes a devastating fact of life, and it wipes most of the life off of the planet, we still won't be able to definitively state that we caused it.
Of your original list, the 'Evolutionary Process" conclusion on "Origin and Differentiation of Biological Life" seems the most appropriate. Despite what we know of the process, we cannot definitively state the "Origin" of biological life.
Why is it that "Faith in religion is BAAAADDD!!!" but "Faith in science is GOOOOODDD!!!" around here?
And for the record, real faith is *not* blind belief in *spite* of evidence. It is belief in something that has not *yet* been proven, but most everything *else* related to that subject *has* been proven. Hebrews 11:1.
Linux IT Consulting and Domino Development in Michigan
When GW skeptics argue that scientists are deliberately producing results which indicate GW is happening and that they have an agenda I always ask myself "why?". The main argument brought forward is usually that you need to argue pro GW to receive funding. Now let's take a closer look at this argument. The biggest funding sources are usually government grants. Which government would provide the biggest research funding in the world, probably the US government. Now last time I looked the US government was, to put it mildly skeptical about GW. So why should they be trying to push a GW agenda? Then let's look at funding from outside the government. Who has the resources to fund large amount of fundamental research? Big cooperations, Now that is a group with a reputation of pushing environmental issues! . The argument of biased results because of the funding sources just does not stand up to a serious investigation.
The policy changed because the party that took power gets most of its wealth from its Alberta base. This province's economy is entirely driven by resource extraction, especially oil revenues. The leading strategists of the Conservative party come straight from the US neo-con fold. The influence of Straussian thought is remarkably strong, because their lead strategist (who cut his teeth contesting indigenous land rights) actually studied under Levi Strauss at the University of Chicago, then took a professor-ship there for years. The right-wing, corporate industrialist agenda is to debunk climate change data in order to block moves that would affect their hegemony. It's perfectly understandable, but don't for a minute believe that it has anything to do with science, or even common sense.
If you meant to imply that there is consensus in Canada concerning this policy turn-around, perhaps you could explain why the New Democratic Party threatened to topple the minority government unless the Clean Air Act was sent back to committee for readjustment.
The recent policy change has nothing to do with science, and everything to do with the political imperatives driving the Conservative party. And that is exactly what the submitter should be considering, too: when it comes to debunking Climate Change, qui bono? Who benefits from this kind of attack?
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
The actions by the new government in Canada don't speak anything about climate change. They do speak a lot about the backing of the Conservative Party of Canada: Alberta and the oil companies. Think they want to promote the Kyoto Protocol and/or reductions in energy usage? Then there's the kow-towing to the auto industry in Ontario *sigh* That's s not even talking about how excessive and wasteful Canadians are with energy consumption (far more per capita than even Americans) - nice graph in fact about this in today's or Saturday's Globe and Mail in an article about California and their energy policies.
There's also some discussion of it on a recent thread at RealClimate.
Monckton's rant is just the usual background noise. It's not hard to make up a story by selecting evidence carefully. The hard job is finding a story that is consistent with all the evidence. While we eagerly await the fourth IPCC assessment, the third IPCC assessment, the consensus of leading scientists in the relevant fields from 2001, is the best big picture we've got.
What some gadfly has to say should always be given due consideration, not less, but certainly not more. In the present case, not much.
mt
There are vast amounts of data available from the NOAA, from tree rings, to coral, to pollen, to ice cores, complete with search engines and mapping systems to help you locate the dataset you want. All of it is freely available for download and analysis. As for modelling - a quick search pulled up this page which provides R code for the MBH graph. Feel free to grab that, check their assumptions, and redo whatever you wish.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Unfortunately your personal experience does not add meaningful data to the debate, though that's a very, very common misconception. In fact, I hear scientists use anecdotal evidence to support global warming theory on a regular basis.
Two reasons:
1) Global warming is about the average temperature of the entire planet from year to year. There's so much normal variation and so many local weather cycles that observations from a single location are statistically insignificant. Your statement that Tennessee is right between two different climate patterns actually harms the applicability of your observations to a world-wide scale.
2) If global warming *is* happening then it's generally agreed that the rate of warming is about 0.1 degrees per decade across the planet, or a 0.3 degree increase over the 30 years you describe.
I'm not trying to tear you down here at all, and I don't claim to have any insight whatsoever into the validity or lack thereof of global warming, but it's easy to find individual situations to support either side, which is part of the reason why the debate is so choked with bad data.
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
global warming was still a theory...
I for one do not believe it yet. How can I believe people that are using data that goes back 150 some years when the earth has been around for 4+ billion years. I still believe its the natural cycles of the earth mixed with the 11 year cycles of the sun and other various natural causes.
There have even been warmer and colder times ON RECORD long before cars and coal power was around, pre 1900's. Someone want to explain what caused these? Did global warming exists back then?
*puts up his flame shield*
The majority has always been right, hasn't it? Am I right or am I right?
Let's take a vote and find out!
How can a post be modded "overrated" or "underrated" when it hasn't been rated yet?
Are you on crack?
First Falcon-1 to orbit, then Falcon-9. Then I can die a happy man.
Poking valid holes in good science shouldn't be very easy. If your theories can have holes poked in them with little things like "facts" and "statistics", then maybe you should go back to the drawing board.
Poking holes is perfectly fine. It's part of the scientific process.
The basics of Newtonian physics are far less complex and much more testable than are the basics of climatology. Therein is the problem. I said I can poke tons of holes in the methodologies involved in making conclusions about complex systems. That doesn't mean I'll prove it wrong. I'll just seem to make the results seem untrustworthy, even if they are completely correct.
When somebody claims to be debunking global warming, it bothers me a bit just because there has been such a vast amount of work done in the field. The author will generally do what I said - cherry-pick some items to call into question, and ignore lots of other research examples that reached similar conclusions. They can have a point with respect to the cases they mention, and still be completely wrong overall.
... can somebody "debunk" the results from the EPICA ice cores? You know, the ones that record CO2 levels for at least the past 650 kYears, and conclude that current CO2 levels are nearly 2 times higher than they have ever been over the last 8 ice ages?
And then there was another set of results that showed how CO2 levels and global temperature are very closely related.
Before I'm willing to believe that global warming is bunk, somebody is going to have to convincingly refute the above evidence to the contrary.
http://outcampaign.org/
You started well, so I'll just stick to what I know.
* Monckton mentions that there is a direct correlation between number of sunspots and grain prices falling, attributing it to the fact that more sunspots mean that the sun is hotter. Actually, that's wrong. Sunspots are cooler regions on the surface of the sun (3800 K vs 5400K on the rest of the surface), which means that the sun is actually radiating *less* energy in the visible and infrared spectrum. So his entire point completely falls apart with this basic item of astrophysics.
* Monckton categorically states that the temperature of the oceans has decreased, without using sources. From what I know though, temperatures have increased. Can't find a bullet proof link for it (was looking for NOAA timelines, but no luck), but you can use coral-reef die-offs as a good proxy. There was also a lot of hubbub when people tried to tie the increase in surface temperature of the Gulf of Mexico to the increased strength and number of Hurricanes that hit the US coast.
These are the two things that I categorically to be false. As for the rest of his arguments, they lack the data support I would expect from a debunking report. For example, why exactly did the ICCP remove the old temperature graph that showed in extreme fashion the warm and cold periods of the middle-ages? Besides, the temperature differences are still there - they are just not as blatant as before. There are also his 10 points which he thinks needs to be proven for Global Climate Change to be true, and what he thinks of them. Point 1 is a nice straw man, as someone pointed out already. Point 3 is another one, as people aren't arguing that the sun doesn't influence temperatures. They are arguing that the sun is less important than greenhouse gases. For the other points, I can give him the benefit of the doubt, even though all have significant problems with their wordings and his assessment of them.
In short, he might not be a shill - but there are enough problems in his "debunkation" to make me doubt the sincerity of his approach and his intentions. This might still be ok, if there weren't some massive errors in some of his arguments, which completely invalidate the points he is trying to make. As a result, I'm filing this under "waiting without bated breath to be properly ripped apart by people who know more".
Quite frankly, one reason I'm confident that we are in the beginning of Global Climate Change is that the only counter-arguments I see are poorly thought out, rife with personal attacks, lack data and make lots of statements without supporting data. If a group arguing for a position sounds like a bunch of idiots, I tend to take the opposite view.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Sure!
They are breaking off the Antartic ice shelf, as this thins and melts...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
On to the second comment
Interesting that you would call me a cancer on slashdot - you are the one that started a conversation thread based on bad science (can't trust the temperature since it was before thermometers), bad logic (false dichotomy/strawman), and FUD (misleading statements about a movie you haven't even seen). What I consider a true cancer on slashdot is misinformed readers posting bullsh** on slashdot when they should know better and then getting kharma for it. I consider it an even bigger cancer to be unable or unwilling to back up you bullsh**, and instead resort to puerile insults and calls to suicide. Pathetic.
Now I know you think I don't have a life, but I actually need to get back to mine (although I have a warm fuzzy in my heart knowing that I will probably start the day tomorrow with a dumbass comment from you to make me laugh). So, unless you want to try and address some of the valid points I made in my initial post (even if they were on the harsh side), I don't think there is much point in continuing to point out the errors in your ways. You could always get that feedback from a critical thinking course.
P.S. The "I mean it" about me committing suicide was a nice touch - showed a certain level of sincerity, even if a bit juvenile.
First Falcon-1 to orbit, then Falcon-9. Then I can die a happy man.
One site to check is http://www.junkscience.com/ . I read a long time ago that if you run the climate predicting models backward they should predict the past (time's arrow being irrelevant here) but they don't. I also remember that one of the beginnings of chaos theory was based on finding that a weather model produced dramatically different results simply because of a very small change in one datum. "The butterfly flaps its wings . . ." etc. [see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect%5D. When economists can predict interest rates accurately, I may start believing that weather models are useful beyond a short period.
I'm a scientist. If you want the straight dope on climate science, just visit realclimate.org. It's a site maintained by real climate scientists, expert in the science behind global warming. Global warming denialism is only interesting from a psychological viewpoint to me.
- warming-is-just-hoax.html) have all issued statements that a) global warming is real, and b) humans are the cause. Maybe one journalist knows something that has slipped by tens of thousands of scientists, but I seriously doubt it. Slashdot might be able to generate ad revenue by visiting this topic, but it won't advance the state of human knowledge.
I can't visit the linked article, the telegraph website appears slashdotted. I will point out that NOAA, NASA, the American Institute of Physics, the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society, the Royal Society of the UK, as well as many other scientific societies (http://illconsidered.blogspot.com/2006/02/global
"Mit der Dummheit kaempfen Goetter selbst vergebens." - Schiller
WHERE are the peer reviewed articles that debunk global warming.
Here: http://friendsofscience.org/
Especially here: http://friendsofscience.org/index.php?ide=7
Anyone who is really conserned about CO2 emissions can do something about it simply by stuffing R50 insulation into the walls of their house. This is about 1 foot thick. The time to do it is during new construction (best) and during any renovation and failing that doing it room by room when painting for instance needs to be done.
Cost of the insulation is about $1 bux per square foot. Labour is extra but a do-it-yourselfer can eliminate most of these costs.
This will already pay for itself from the cost of energy alone.
If
The Danish statistician who a few years ago did an analysis of the 'evidence' and it came up bust. He started the project to provide statistical proof of Global Warming. The response in the 'popular' scientific circles was to call him names and ignore his evidence.
Sadly, that is how both sides of this debate act. It isn't science, it's funding maneuvers.
A great many of the organizations investigating the 'warming' were the same organizations that 20 years ago were 'conclusively proving' Global Cooling. (We were to be well into the next Ice Age by now, according to the green press in the 70's. Often the same person who as a new researcher in the '70's used climate evidence to prove Global Cooling is now using the same evidence to prove Global Cooling. This time he/she is a 'senior scientist'.
It's clear that something is going on. Polar caps on both Earth and Mars are shrinking, by roughly the same percentage. In spite of all the doom sayers, sea level is not rising measurably. (Unchanged in the last 200 years, to within the margin of error.)
You should remember that a lot of the organizations on both sides of this 'debate' have an agenda. If you don't know the agenda, you won't know the 'researcher' bias. Most of the conclusions that get reported in the popular press are unrealistic. Take the headline here on Slashdot a day or two ago that in 30 years there won't be anything living in the oceans. They got there by combining a few worrisome statistics in unrealistic ways, then pontificating on how we should all adopt their politics to avoid the 'problem'. They didn't have any real solutions to the real problems of pollution and overfishing (which are very real, and not something to worry about in 30 years. They happened over 30 years ago.)
To solve these very real problems, we need real data, and then engineering analysis to create systems and policies that address the real root causes. I don't see that happening from either side of the debate.
The best solution at present seems to be more study and analysis. We don't seem to know enough yet to really fix the problem. (We aren't really sure what the problem is.) We need to make changes, but those changes have to take into account real peoples needs. If we don't, the result will be like Kyoto. Lots of camera ops, a few minor efforts, a few major hold outs, and total world wide failure.
I'm beginning to think that the real problem is politics. From all sides.
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
Forest Fires account about 30% to CO2 emissions... Has anyone seen any of the scientists involved in global warming fire-fighting? Are there proposals for reducing forest fires? Nop. That's the whole lie... If forest fires could be reduced to half, it would do much more improvement than Kyoto!
Since we are all stating credentials here, I am a mathematician.
The problem with the calculations above is that is is based on the measurements of the Earth's albedo as a whole. It is somewhat plausible, then, that the calculation gives a somewhat reasonable result for some sort of whole-earth lambda, including some certain adjustments for the change in pressure as we increase altitude.
However, this value is not relevant to GW study, because in GW we are not interested in an averaged temperature over all of the volume of the atmosphere, but an averaged temperature at sea level over the surface of the Earth - for example, a consequence of GW is that air temperature at certain levels in the atmosphere actually cools, and so a large factor in this is the movement of high temperature from high levels to low levels in the atmosphere, something that is cancelled out in your calculations. Stefan Boltzmann, which uses idealised surfaces, does not capture this effect.
In fact, it is impossible to capture this effect without detailed measurements and modelling of how the atmosphere is structured. In this, the UN is fully correct in adjusting its estimates as measurements change and become more detailed, and Monckton incorrect in dismissing the details needed in this calculation.
Let's see, on one hand we have an article that is full of utter nonsense. (Right, you expect me to believe - without any references - that the Chinese sailed the Arctic in 1421 and didn't find any ice?) On the other hand, we have NASA. I hope you'll forgive me if I choose to believe NASA over a bunch of loons who like to invent their own facts.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Hi,
I browsed through the article. A couple of things I would like to see better backed up by scientific references.
ISSUE 1: Viking farms
Article: "There were Viking farms in Greenland: now they're under permafrost. "
"Reference" linked from article: "Greenland in the Middle Ages: Eric the Red had named Greenland "Greenland" to encourage Danish
settlers, because in his time south-western Greenland was indeed green. It was ice-free, and was extensively cultivated until c.1425 AD, when the farms were suddenly overrun by permafrost. The Viking agricultural settlements remain under permafrost to this day - a powerful indication that the Middle Ages were warmer than the present, and that there is little cause for alarm at the current melting of Greenland glaciers because they are very likely to have melted to more than their present extent during the mediaeval warm period."
Permafrost or not, it seems that some vegetation does thrive in Greenland summer: http://www.narsaq.dk/green-00.html
A related article I found on the web: http://www.expressnews.ualberta.ca/article.cfm?id= 776
According to this, the farms are indeed under permafrost. However, it seems the reason for failure of the farms was not frost, but sand blown over the farms. Which is naturally caused by runaway erosion, which I had understood the Vikings had caused themselves by chopping down everything resembling trees (as happened with Iceland). If there were forests before, losing them would also mean changing the local microclimates, exposing the farms to chilly winds, and thus triggering the local freezing?
So to me it is not certain that global temperature change caused the freezing or non-freezing of the farmed areas. Somebody got harder facts?
ISSUE 2: Polar bears and iceless Arctic
Article: "There was little ice at the North Pole: a Chinese naval squadron sailed right round the Arctic in 1421 and found none."
Reference linked from article: "In 1421 a Chinese Imperial Navy squadron sailed right round the Arctic and found no ice anywhere. It is possible that at that time there was less of an icecap at the North Pole than there is now, particularly in summer. Yet the polar bears survived. Though there has been much discussion of the supposed threat posed by the warmer Arctic, the polar bears are thriving in the current warm period. Eleven of the thirteen principal known families are prospering as never before."
What does it mean "thriving as never before?" The Polar Bear Specialist Group has a table of the population status of 20 polar bear populations (http://pbsg.npolar.no/status-table.htm). Two populations are decreasing in numbers, and *additionally* "thinner bears, lower female reproductive rates, and reduced juvenile survival in the Western Hudson Bay polar bear population in Canada, which is at the southern edge of the species' range and the first to suffer impacts from global warming."
Most of the populations are tagged "W - evidence global warming effects on sea ice or populations"
The populations do not change in a few years time. "Polar bears rely almost entirely on the marine sea ice environment for their survival so that large scale changes in their habitat will impact the population (Derocher et al. 2004). Global climate change posses a substantial threat to the habitat of polar bears. Recent modeling of the trends for sea ice extent, thickness and timing of coverage predicts dramatic reductions in sea ice coverage over the next 50-100 years (Hassol 2004)." http://www.iucnredlist.org/search/details.php/2282 3/all
I would be extremely surprised about the adaptivity of polar bears had they survived without polar sea ice during hundreds of years during the assumed iceless period, and then within hundreds of years fully retaken
I am surprised more people aren't aware of Global Dimming which after recent long term research has been fully supported. The basic problem is that both Global Warming and Global Cooling are going on at the same time. As we all know Global Warming is caused by greenhouse gases. Global Dimming is caused by particulate pollution (soot, etc).
In a nutshell they have found that in heavily polluted (particulates not CO2) areas, especially China and India, that particulates in the air downwind of these areas cause clouds to reflect 10 to 30 percent more sunlight back out into space than unpolluted clouds. This huge difference in reflectivity easily shows up in both satellite images and ground solar radiation measurements. 10 to 30 percent is a HUGE difference in solar radiation heating the earth and would have enormous consequences except that most of the earth isn't polluted to that extent (particulate wise) and a lot of areas at any given time have no clouds over them at all so no loss of sunlight is happening then.
The particulate pollution causes clouds to be more reflective by causing larger water vapor droplets to form because they are larger than the dust and pollen these droplets normally form around. For some reason, larger water vapor droplets causes greater reflection of sunlight back into space.
The increase in particulate pollution from growing third world countries far exceeds the decreases of the same in the US and Europe. As a result this global dimming has reduced the global temperature by about 1.3 degrees Celsius over 20 years. Of course Global Warming has increased the temperature even more than this over the same period of time, BUT, if Global Dimming weren't cooling the earth, Global Warming would have caused 1.3 degrees even more warming than it has and there wouldn't BE a debate about Global Warming.
In the future as we clean up particulate pollution in these third world countries the cooling effect will disappear rapidly and global warming will seem to have accelerated dramatically. In actuality, we will just have lost one of our counterbalancing effects to Global Warming.
Scientists have tended to ignore Global Dimming in the past because it was obvious the Earth was warming up not cooling down, but now extensive studies in the Indian Ocean have made it clear that it is happening, but it is not as strong as Global Warming. This only makes it clear that Global Warming is worse than we thought because it has to overcome this temporary global cooling effect of heavy particulate emissions (until we clean them up).
"So to the scare. First, the UN implies that carbon dioxide ended the last four ice ages. It displays two 450,000-year graphs: a sawtooth curve of temperature and a sawtooth of airborne CO2 that's scaled to look similar. Usually, similar curves are superimposed for comparison. The UN didn't do that. If it had, the truth would have shown: the changes in temperature preceded the changes in CO2 levels."
A "sawtooth" implies multiple rises and falls. That gives us a chicken and egg problem. Whether CO2 increases preceded temperature increases or the reverse is determined by which one rises first on the chart. The one to rise first is obviously determined by when the timeline starts. Until we can make the chart go back to the day God said "Let there be CO2", we can't really know which came first just from a chart.
Personally I like the way that he criticizes the UN for not superimposing one graph over another while we fails to do the same.