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Sun May Be Warming Both Earth and Mars
MCraigW writes "Simultaneous warming on Earth and Mars suggests that our planet's recent climate changes might have a natural — and not a human-induced — cause. Mars, it appears, has also been experiencing milder temperatures in recent years. In 2005 data from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey missions revealed that the carbon dioxide 'ice caps' near Mars's south pole had been diminishing for three summers in a row. Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of the St. Petersburg's Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, says the Mars data is evidence that the current global warming on Earth is being caused by changes in the sun."
Take THAT hippie environmentalist tree huggers! I'm gonna go set a pile of styrofoam on fire in celebration.
I am more worried about carcinogenic crap in the ground, in the water and in the air than global warming. .. the global cancer rate is going to go up.
Under the guise of "global warming isn't real"
Thanks a lot.
We need clean nuclear power ASAP charging our electric cars, not driving around cancer fumers.
We must destroy the sun!
SpyDock: Scientific Python in a Docker container
So you mean only source of heat and energy for the planet is responisble for it's weather and tempreture? Wow. I bet these guys went to post-graduate school to figure that one out.
Well, that's clearly a gross oversimplification. For starters, the Earth has its own geothermal heat, and without greenhouse gases, the sun's heat would be reflected back out into space, leaving the planet quite cold. The presence of CO2 in the atmosphere clearly does warm the Earth. Nobody seriously debates that. The Earth has also been getting warmer in recent years. Nobody really debates that either. The only question still open for debate is whether humans are the primary cause of the increase in temperature.
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
Let's suppose that the orbit alteration is not the case. Wouldn't it still make sense to prepare for the worst? Why not stop CO2 emissions, we're better off slowing CO2 output and being wrong about global warming than we are heating up the planet with CO2 and being wrong about not having a human global climate impact.
Global warming is such a politicized issue from both sides, and a lot of money from both environmentalists and big oil is going into 'proving' it, that it's really quite difficult to know what is happening at all. This is in addition to the natural difficulties of the subject, who can say for sure what is happening in such a big place as the earth? Sure we have the satellites measuring temperature, but we know they had errors once, how do we know they are not in error still? Anyone who says they 'know' global warming is/isn't reality ought to be treated with suspicion.
That said, taking care of the environment in general is a good thing. So either way we ought to research renewable energy, keep recycling, etc.
Qxe4
crackpot:
"His views are completely at odds with the mainstream scientific opinion," said Colin Wilson, a planetary physicist at England's Oxford University.
"And they contradict the extensive evidence presented in the most recent IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report."....
Perhaps the biggest stumbling block in Abdussamatov's theory is his dismissal of the greenhouse effect, in which atmospheric gases such as carbon dioxide help keep heat trapped near the planet's surface.
He claims that carbon dioxide has only a small influence on Earth's climate and virtually no influence on Mars.
But "without the greenhouse effect there would be very little, if any, life on Earth, since our planet would pretty much be a big ball of ice," said Evan, of the University of Wisconsin.
It is common knowledge that the sun goes through cycles in which its output is increased thereby increasing the the solar radiation that strikes its planets. However we are still putting greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere which act to trap the solar radiation on the Earth. No reputable scientist will claim that every fraction of a degree in temperature increase is due to human influence on our atmosphere but they do know that the methane and carbon dioxide that we put continually pump into the atmosphere acts as a solar trap and can't help but raise the overall temperature of the planet.
If you don't know why, you can't fix it. Duh.....
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Pluto - http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/pluto_warmin g_021009.html
t a_trunc_sys.shtml
j r.html
Triton - http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/19980526052143da
Jupiter - http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/060504_red_
Prof. Farnsworth - "Oh a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-My-Own-Grandpa!"
When the temperature hits 200 F in a couple of years, we will be glad to know we didn't cause it.
Either way, no way I'm giving back my Oscar! -Al
Ya but what changes? Can we measure said changes?
Yeah, I'm pretty sure there are solar physicists around the world observing every measurable characteristic of the sun (that we can measure from here) all the time. Seems a bit silly to infer what's going on with the sun by looking at Mars instead of the sun itself. Unless some solar observations back this up, this'll probably be the last we hear of it.
True, although this could actually be built-up heat that has resulted from the continuous process in which the sun cooks our planet.
Could be, but it's more likely that it's heat caused by the extreme pressure at the Earth's core caused by gravity...
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
Because if we try to change what's going on without understanding the situation we might easily decide on a cure that's totally ineffective. If C02 emissions aren't a major factor (And I'm not saying they aren't.) then lowering them won't help much, if at all. It's better to spend a little money learning what's really going on before we spend a huge amount of money on possibly useless countermeasures.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Sir it's always good to see another of the same persuasion and I fully endorse your article and I would
ask you to do the same for my reply to this heresy. Here is what I told these man-made global warming
denial morons just a few minutes ago countering their childish theories with sound science-inspired deep
thinking on the matter:
As far as your latest apologist whacko theory is concerned, it is more than obvious that vast amounts of
CO2 and Methane are carried away from Earth's atmosphere by solar wind into space where it is deposited on
the other planets of the solar system. That's why we're losing the martian polar caps! It's YOUR IMMENSE
CARBON FOOTPRINT that's causing it so WE REALLY NEED THAT CARBON TAX YESTERDAY!
I can't wait for the day we can take them to court for their hate crimes and then lock them away for good.
There are two questions still open for debate --
Are humans a significant cause of the increase in temperature?
Are steps to mitigate the human effect on temperature worth taking?
I believe the answers are yes and yes, but we don't have to be the primary cause to make it worthwhile to reduce our carbon emissions.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Without knowing why it's happening you don't know what to fix or if you even can fix it. Say for instance it's the sun and it's only the sun causing global warming. What in the hell are you going to do about the sun? I'll tell you what you're going to do about the sun. You're going to sit there and put on your sunblock and shut the fuck up. The sun owns our ass like George Takei owns.... somebodies ass. What if it is "Intelligent Warming because God is chilly"? What are we going to do about it?
The part where we try and figure out the cause is the most important part there is. Otherwise we stand a good chance of wasting resources we don't have or screwing something up that isn't broken to begin with.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
It must be those SUVs NASA is operating on Mars that is the cause of the temperature rise...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
As usual, some useful discussion of these issues can be found on RealClimate.org. The following two articles are worth a look, though neither is especially recent:
The punchline from the latter article is, "There is a slight irony in people rushing to claim that the glacier changes on Mars are a sure sign of global warming, while not being swayed by the much more persuasive analogous phenomena here on Earth..."
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
News at 11, the ocean is wet.
God spoke to me.
Not at its age. Far too young.
I thought the Sun was middle aged...isnt that when you usually expand?
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
Unfortunately, I just lost my mod points by replying to a previous comment in this thread. But this is not a troll; there are plenty of scientists observing the sun directly, whereas we know bugger all about the weather patterns on mars. If there were significant changes happening to the sun, we would already know about it. Anyway, does the source of global warming actually matter much?
The bottom line is the correlation between greenhouse gases and temperature is well known (you can reproduce it in a simple lab experiment), so does it actually matter, in the end, what the source of warming is, if we aleady know how to prevent it? That is, even if the recent increases in temperature are due to some other cause, we know for sure we could reduce the effect by reducing human output of greenhouse gases (exactly how much we can reduce it by, is another question...).
It's sad when contributors pick and choose only the parts of an article that support their own viewpoint and hope that readers are unwilling to read the whole article. Anyone who has RTFA can see that fully half of the article is a repudiation of this man's hypothesis by most of the scientific community:
Choice quotes
"His views are completely at odds with the mainstream scientific opinion," said Colin Wilson, a planetary physicist at England's Oxford University. "And they contradict the extensive evidence presented in the most recent IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report."
Amato Evan, a climate scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, added that "the idea just isn't supported by the theory or by the observations."
Perhaps the biggest stumbling block in Abdussamatov's theory is his dismissal of the greenhouse effect, in which atmospheric gases such as carbon dioxide help keep heat trapped near the planet's surface.
To add to this, I'd like to point out that global warming deniers are quick to dismiss 650,000 years of data about earth's temperature as not being representative of the facts, but they jump on 3 years of data (and data confined to a local area and not the whole planet) as evidence against global warming, solely because they think it supports their opinion. If they were serious about science, they would apply the same rigour to the arguments they agree with as to the arguments they disagree with.
I came here for a good argument
Searching through for his previous works he has never published anything on climatology. This would be make his speculations well outside his field of study. Now, being a physicist myself I know that knowing physics gives you better understanding many other things. But, his one article doesn't get precedence over the mounds and mounds of other published work by people in the fields of climatology, environmental sciences, atmospheric sciences, etc. who are considered experts and are well published. If anything he might just be mentioning global warming to get money, as some /.'ers assumed about the deep sea temperature oddities article a while ago. Both sides can do it you know :).
Patrik
----------
Just your ordinary BOFH
http://killertux.org
Scientists *have* noticed a slight expanding at the sun's equator. I hear they recommended solar situps.
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
"Why do we have to waste time arguing about the cause? If a guy comes into an ER, and passes out, they don't stand around arguing about why he passed out before they help the guy."
You've never watched "House" have you...
Geting back on topic, moving to more efficient vehicles has other advantages than just reduced CO2 emmissions, oil will eventually run out.
It doesn't even go that far. Err it does exactly as your saying.
See how those sentences sound totaly different but convey the meaning I want to have? I will let you in on this secrete of mine in case your wondering what the hell I'm doing.
Like you said, The IPCC when making this statment about humans likley to be causing global warming, were looking for a rock and found a rock. They didn't pay attention to the dirt, the bugs or worms in the soil, they were lookin for a rock and found a rock. And now they are saying that area over there is full of rocks. But when you look at it, You see rich farm land teaming with life and nutrience and a couple of rocks. The IPCC didn't go on a quest to find out what was causing the earth to warm, the went on a quest to find if it was warming and if humans could be the cause. And they found that. Yes, humans could be causing the earth to be warming. But they statment shouldn't be taken as more then that.
I have also looked at all these reports that the vast majority of the science comunity belives humans are causing global warming. And all these reports revolve around a few peer review articles were a sample of scientist were asked it the papers were flawed and to make sure tey used good science. The people who said they didn't see any flaws or that good science was used were counted as people supporting the outcome of the papers. The minor few who had an objection with them for some reason, were counted as disagreeing with them. The endresult was the vast majority of scientist agree with global warming and that humans are the cause. But the questioning had nothing to do with this. It is a play with words and misinterpretations of wording used for a specific purpose.
The relevence here is that it is possible to create a model, perform experiments, be completly and scientificly acurate and still get it wrong. This is the nature of science and why people check others work. And this is why science finds new discoveries that change the way we think about things.
So you are right. Their job was to find evidence of global warming and that humans were the cause. They did exactly this. But the GP is very wrong in making the asertion that this rules other explainations out. It doesn't touch the validity of other explainations. What he doesn't seem to know is that the truth doesn't change with popular opinion. The truth always is and we change how we understand it. This change in understanding changes popular opinion. He has stopped trying to understand the truth and just wants to regurgitate popular opinion. Even when it is wrong.
Now the line about truth not changing came from someone else. I wish I could quote him on it but I forget his name and what context it was said in.
So, your recommendation would be to cause oh lets just say a 10-15% decline in global GDP because it *MIGHT* help... Here are the FACTS:
1) The Earth has been warmer than it is now before! We are not seeing temperatures outside the spectrum of nature, and even assuming worst case according to the IPCC we won't be outside normal for more than 500 years.
2) CO2 levels are not high now. There was an article in Scientific American which documented this, CO2 over the last 2 million years has fluctuated between ~200ppm and ~1400ppm. Right now we are at about 300ppm.
3) The Sun and the Orbit of the Earth both fluctuate and are beyond our control and both influence the climate much more than anything we could possibly do.
4) The Earth has been through many cycles of ice age and temperate age all before we were here.
5) The last temperate age melted almost all of the polar ice and caused sea levels to rise 4-6 meters this was 125k years ago. It is safe to assume it will happen again (with our without us)
6) We are still coming out of the last ice age, and we haven't seen temperatures comparable to the last temperate age yet, so we can easily assume temperatures still need to go up before the cycle starts again.
These things are completely beyond our control, if we spend billions (and I'd argue it would cost many trillions) to "fight" global warming, well if you want to fight against the solar system, go ahead but I'm not giving you my tax dollars to do it.
Stars move up and to the left in the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:H-R_diagram.png during their main sequence lifetime which means they
get cooler but more luminous. It it the luminosity that is most important for the temperatures of planets. Watch the evolution here http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/phys230/lectures/star _age/evol_hr.swf and you'll see that a factor of 2 in a billion years is about what
the evolution looks like. That is less that a part in 100 million per year. So, main sequence evolution is not the sort of thing we can
measure right now. There are changes in solar brightness at a larger level and on shorter timescales though recent changes do not account for
the measured warming. See a rough calculation here http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/02/executive-summ ary.html.
s -selling-solar.html
--
Solar: It's steady. http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
Probably just that correlation doesn't imply causation. There's a strong (negative) correlation between the number of pirates plying the seas and global warming, too, but that doesn't mean the solution to global warming is to increase piracy on the high seas.
You can only measure the changes with Habibullo Abdussamatov's patented
Space Solar Limbograph
I am not making this up.
He has a point. In this case, the lab work shows causation and not merely correlation. The correlations are between atmospheric CO2 and temperature. People hesitate to call the relationship there causation because there is inadequate time resolution. You don't know for sure that the increase in CO2 came before the increase in temperature or the other way around. However, we stand on the brink of a brave new world: I urge skeptics everywhere to take the experimental approch and reduce the CO2 concentration to the pre-industrial level.
This is the only sound science approach. If we're not sure about global warming, we need to check on this. Let's track temperature changes as we remove carbon from the air just as quickly as we've put it in. It is the only way to settle the debate.
More jobs, arr!
I do.
Right, which is exactly why it's important to understand whether or not the global climate change is anthropogenic. We want to know why it's happening rather than jumping to conclusions or just doing something drastic for the sake of doing something. Furthermore, there is quite a bit of evidence that the global climate has varied within 5 degrees within the time period which humans have existed. I think that humans will survive this, but I don't think that's the point. It's not about human extinction, but it's OK if you want to believe that (or continue overstating your case to make others jump on the bandwagon).
Most current research tends to show that human Co2 has some affect on the climate, but nobody is really sure how. There may be a number of other factors at play. The problem is that nobody really knows, any many people aren't willing to make major sacrifices regarding something that we need more information about. I don't think that we should panic and make irrational changes which will have severe and immediate economic effects on a global scale. Perhaps it would be wiser to make an evolutionary shift in technology and lifestyles, which the global economy can afford...and maybe do it in a manner consistent with our understanding of the phenomena that we're just beginning to understand.
So you suggest a new blind path to avoid a death warrant that you can't prove exists? You're overstating your case, my friend (or really believe everything that you read). Doing something for the sake of doing something is equally unjustifiable, especially when all sides of the issue are confounded with politically charged BS.
I'm not saying that this is or isn't being caused by humans, but you're taking on a position that I consider irrational. If global climate change is based around cyclical patterns that we can't change, there is little point in making drastic, sweeping changes. In that case, we'd better start thinking of ways to deal with our dynamic and always changing world. Just because a few extremists are predicting the end of the world (remember, most scientists aren't writing about the end of the world, or even human existence) doesn't mean that I'm going to jump on the bandwagon. If you believe every prediction of doom that you hear, why not accept 90% of the religions in the world? They all predict your doom if you don't believe, and there's only one way to be safe...start praying.
-Turkey
No offense, dude, but go take a physics class. That goes for whoever modded _that_ "informative" too.
1. Heat flows from the sun to the earth, and from both to the vast expanses of open space anyway. It's not the outside space that's heating the Earth, but the Sun.
2. The laws of thermodynamics have to do with atom/mollecule movement, and transfer of heat between bodies in contact. The only (ok, vast majority of) energy flowing in or out here has _nothing_ to do with thermodynamics as such, since there are no two bodies in contact exchanging heat (i.e., exchanging mollecule movement by impact.) What is happening there light being absorbed and radiated, and yes that can happen in the opposite direction just as well. There are relevant laws there, e.g., Stefan-Boltzman, but the second law of thermodynamics isn't it.
E.g., you can cut sheet metal with a focused laser beam even though the heated point is basically a hell of a lot hotter than the laser. It will absorb the light anyway. E.g., to address your "inside" and "outside" concerns, you can fry an ant with a magnifying glass even though the ant ends up hotter than the surrounding air. That's because the energy comes from the sun, not from the outside air.
So, sorry, the GP post was right, you are wrong.
But to get back on topic, what's happening is that the earth receives some radiation energy from the sun, and it radiates some back into space. The equilibrium temperature is when the energy radiated equals the incoming energy. Basically if energy E is incoming, then the equilibrium temperature T is when surface times emissivity times Stefan-Boltzmann constant times T to the 4'th power equals E. That's all.
The "insulation" and its non-uniformity across wavelengths messes things a little, but as long as the temperature variations are relatively small, the wavelength don't shift horribly much, so basically the proportionality stays. And a global warming of 1 Celsius (which at least at one point was all the heating Earth had experienced) isn't enough to throw it off the hook. If the Earth's temperature is, say, approximately 300 Kelvin (for the sake of a nice round number), we're talking a third of a percent increase. Since the rest is constants T1^4/T2^4=E1/E2, so it only takes an increase of (1.00333)^4=1.0134, or 1.34 percent increase in incoming energy to fully explain it. Better yet, since Stefan-Boltzman applies to the Sun too, to fully cause it, the Sun would have to experience the same heating the Earth does. A third of a percent heating of the sun creates the extra energy to heat up the Earth by a third of a percent.
So that's basically all the debate here: did our "insulation" change over time, or is it simply that the Sun got slightly hotter? The former wouldn't explain why Mars is heating up too, while the latter fully does.
Funny the things one can learn by paying attention in physics class, really.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
So, your recommendation would be to cause oh lets just say a 10-15% decline in global GDP because it *MIGHT* help...
The Stern report, authored by the former World Bank chief economist, says more like 1% of global GDP to prevent a 10-20% drop due to warming.
The Earth has been warmer than it is now before!
I suppose if a huge asteroid were on course to hit Earth, your argument would be "the Earth has been barren and molten rock before! let's not do anything!"?
CO2 levels are not high now.
CO2 levels in the last 720,000 years never went over 300 as we know from the EPICA ice cores. We're over 375 right now.
I love that you're smarter than thousands of climate scientists, essentially every relevant scientific organisation, and the 154 nations who had to unanimously sign off on the IPCC's conclusion that there's a 90% certainty that human activity is causing warming at least in part. When's the Nobel being awarded?
...read page two of that article. Abdussamatov is a nutcase, and neither recent overall warming of Mars nor any attribution to increased solar output are serious scientifc propositions.
Stephan
Abdussamatov is a nutcase,
Why do you say that? Does he hurl vitriolic condemnations at people who disagree with him? Does he try to shout them down, or demand that their funding be cut off?
BTW, you fulfilled my expectation that there would be an ad-hominem directed at the researcher in question within the first ten replies.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The worst case scenario according to IPCC is only a 1 inch sea level rise in 100 years, how is that going to cause a 20% drop in GDP?
t y&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:off icial&client=firefox-a
? type=worldNews&storyID=2007-02-02T212335Z_01_NOOTR _RTRJONC_0_India-286068-7.xml
No, it's not. They're predicting 4-30, and they've been widely criticised for being too conservative on the issue - ignoring unusually fast melting in Antarctica and Greenland, for one thing.
Sure if sea levels rise 6m it will displace quite a few people, but I still don't think it would cause that much upheaval.
10% of Bangladesh would be under water with a 1 meter sea rise. That's about 15 million refugees in one nation alone, and you can be sure Bangladesh can't afford to pay 10% of their population's land just to let it get eaten up by the ocean.
A 6 metre sea rise would also destroy Miami and a number of other major cities on the East Coast of the US. We're talking about pretty huge repercussions with that big of a sea rise.
The Stern report isn't just pulling numbers out of their asses.
As far as the asteroid is concerned what would your recommendation be?
You're missing my point. The OP stated that the Earth had seen much higher CO2 in the distant past. My point is that just because it has happened previously doesn't mean it'd be fine if it happened again - after all, the Earth started up molten and airless, but that wouldn't be conducive to human survival today.
That is what you environmentalists don't get, you never factor in risk/reward
Again, read the Stern report. For a 1% cost of GDP we protect 10-20% of GDP. How is that not factoring in risk and reward?
On the CO2 front I guess Scientific American got it wrong then I'm just quoting their article verbatim... So either they are lying, or you are, but whatever.
If you have the article in front of you to quote from, surely you can provide a citation?
I'm reasonably sure I'm not lying, and so is NOAA: Vostok's 420,000 years of data and EPICA's 650,000 years of data, for your perusal
The IPCC did not state anywhere any sort of statistical probability as you state.
http://www.google.com/search?q=IPCC+90%25+certain
" The scientists said it was "very likely" -- or more than 90 percent probable -- that human activities led by burning fossil fuels explained most of the warming in the past 50 years.
That is a toughening from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) last report in 2001, which judged a link as "likely", or 66 percent probable." - http://in.today.reuters.com/News/newsArticle.aspx
How does that not support my statement, quoted as follows: "there's a 90% certainty that human activity is causing warming at least in part"?
I don't see #1 - the 60% chance figure - in the 2006 IPCC report. Sure you're not looking at the 2001 report?
Sorry, I got cut off before I could add:
g as.html
http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/Hazards/What/VolGas/vol
>snipComparison of CO2 emissions from volcanoes vs. human activities.
Scientists have calculated that volcanoes emit between about 130-230 million tonnes (145-255 million tons) of CO2 into the atmosphere every year (Gerlach, 1999, 1992). This estimate includes both subaerial and submarine volcanoes, about in equal amounts. Emissions of CO2 by human activities, including fossil fuel burning, cement production, and gas flaring, amount to about 22 billion tonnes per year (24 billion tons) [ ( Marland, et al., 1998) - The reference gives the amount of released carbon (C), rather than CO2.]. Human activities release more than 150 times the amount of CO2 emitted by volcanoes--the equivalent of nearly 17,000 additional volcanoes like Kilauea (Kilauea emits about 13.2 million tonnes/year)!
The IPCC has released radiative forcing data for the various greenhouse components, and CO2 is by far the largest component.
You're making the mistake of conflating ozone depletion with global warming, too.
The Mars data is often misunderstood.
"The shrinkage of the Martian South Polar Cap is almost certainly a regional climate change, and is not any indication of global warming trends in the Martian atmosphere. Colaprete et al in Nature 2005 (subscription required) showed, using the Mars GCM, that the south polar climate is unstable due to the peculiar topography near the pole, and the current configuration is on the instability border; we therefore expect to see rapid changes in ice cover as the regional climate transits between the unstable states.
Thus inferring global warming from a 3 Martian year regional trend is unwarranted."
Funny how three years is good enough to prove Martian global warming to the same people who tell us 150 years of data (and 720,000 from ice cores) just isn't enough to base a conclusion off.
I'd be surprised if Pluto weren't warming, given it is just past perihelion and it has some quirky orbital parameters. Funny how when things get closer to the sun they warm up a bit. I'd also point out neither article mentions anything to do with the sun getting hotter, and both have quite plausible explanations for the observed trends on both bodies. These articles in no way supports your "OMG it's a conspiracy!" distortion field, unless you believe the astronomers are in on it with the climatologists and geologists.
Also, if you bother to check your history, James Hansen didn't pull this out of his ass and a bunch of climatologists suddenly said "Brilliant! We can finally crush ExxonMobile/Shell/BP/Chevron!!!". There was quite a bit of review and discussion early on, it's just that the theory that best explained the observations survived, which is how good science works.
PS: I did climate modeling in grad school. If you think it's so bloody simple and we're all just idiots, let's see you build a model than predicts anything useful.
Stephan
Relative to GDP per capita, the US, being the world's shining example of capitalism at work, has the highest rate of homelessness and citizens living in poverty in the world
Way to misquote... In the wikipedia article you linked to:
"The poverty rate in the United States is one of the highest among the post-industrialized developed world. It is, however, important to note that America's poor most commonly have adequate food, clothing and shelter. For example, of those beneath the federal poverty line, 46% own their own home, with an average of three bedrooms."
In the US, many people are unhappy if they can't afford everything that Madison Avenue is trying to shove down their throats. They are unhappy because not everyone in the freakin world can afford a 60" flat panel HDTV and a BMW or Mercedes. There is nothing more frustrating than seeing people like my sister-in-law who has been working the system forever (she doesn't have a job because the government pays her more not to work), goes out and buys that 60" flat panel TV on taxpayer dollars so she can sit on her fat ass and watch TV all day while I work 70 hours a week and pay about $100K in taxes each year, supporting lazy fat slob's like her. Oh yeah, she and her entire family of 6 kids and worthless husband get WAY better medical care than I do, with no deductibles - totally free medical and dental. So don't whine around me how bad "people in poverty" have it in the US, cause it's BULLSHIT.
Wow, another Slashdotter getting modded up for pointing out that correlation != causation.
You know, repating "correlation does not equal causation" is not an excuse to ignore any line of statistical evidence you choose. Correlation doesn't prove causation, but often it is damn suggestive. Most of the evidence linking lung cancer to smoking is "merely" correlation too.
Beside that, experiments do not show merely a "correlation" between CO2 and warming. It is known and very obvious adsorption physics that greater absorption in the IR spectrum than in the visible causes greenhouse warming, when the gas is subjected to visible light and coupled to a heat sink ("the Earth"). The heat sink re-radiates in infrared, and a gas which absorbs more re-radiated heat than incoming visible radiation will inevitably lead to overall warming. As noted by the grandparent, this is easily demonstrated by laboratory experiment.
This is, in fact, the reason why the entire planet is not a frozen iceball: if you leave the greenhouse effect out of the energy balance equations (incoming radiation = outgoing radiation), you'll find that the the temperature of the Earth should be much lower than it actually is. Something is trapping heat, we know for sure. The greenhouse effect is a proven mechanism, and lo, the amount of warming you should get from it is equal to the missing component of the energy balance.
People still debate about global warming, but I can't believe that people are still skeptical of the very existence of the greenhouse effect.
The uncertainty is not about whether CO2 in the real atmosphere causes warming. It's about the warming and cooling contributions from other sources — how much of the total warming can be attributed to each source. (The direct contribution from CO2 can be calculated directly from adsorption physics, but there is uncertainty about how feedback effects amplify its contribution, as well as the contribution of other sources.)
There is not now enough remaining uncertainty to attribute global warming to non-CO2 sources; see the IPCC estimates in Figure SPM-2 of their latest publication.
Christ, man. This is not POLITICS or ETHICS or anything where OPINIONS is all that counts. This is SCIENCE.
I'll call a man crazy if he disagrees that the Earth orbits the sun, and it is not just because he disagrees with my "opinion".
heretics like him should be burned at the stake, the world would be much better of without the vile contrarian rants of the likes of Copernicus, Galileo and Newton!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
That's the thing about science; it's not about `truth', it's about progressively more accurate approximations of reality. For a lot of cases, a fairly coarse approximation is all that is required; Newtonian mechanics is valid for all of the situations 99% of people will find themselves in. If you are on the leading edge of science, however, then relying on superseded approximations is a mistake.
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Got any data to back that up? We are talking both accuracy and precision. I want to see the manufacturer specs on the actual equipment that has been used at the hundreds of temperature measurings stations around the world for the past 100 years or even 30 years. Go ahead and try to find that data. Or are you claiming that it is not relevant to the discussion? I want to see numbers. After all numbers, quantitative data, is what we are talking about here. If it is so obvious then show me. If you can't do that at least talk about the temperature measurement tech we are dealing with here. Do the temperature measurement stations use infrared tech? At least cite which type or types of thermometer have been used around the world to measure these obvious changes.
The simple fact is that temperature measuring technology that is actually used to measure the air within a useable temperature range is highly imprecise and highly inaccurate. Most will only be able to measure temperature to within +/- 2C! And that assumes calibration that needs to be performed on a periodic basis. And digitals generally fare even worse than analogs at least if you ignore miniscus parallax issues (which of course you should not). It is interesting to me that everyone (on both sides) seems to dance around the very issue of where the rubber meets the road, the nature of the very equipment that seems to be predicting the end of our species, not in the distant future, not 10,000 years from now, but in less than a century. That would seem serious enough to at least warrant a discussion of such issues.
Francis Bacon, the great philosopher of science, cautioned against letting a theory stray too far from the data. This theory is so far from it that hardly anyone even bothers to talk about the uncertainties in that data. As if our methods of measurement, not just in the US in 2007, but in the Soviet Union in 1943, were perfect and absolutely without error. And what about human error, errors in recording the data? We seem to be assuming no human error whatsoever in the the recording of the temperature readings. Did they have automated computer temperature logging in the 1920s in Indonesia or Siberia? Do they even have it today? Such questions should at least be occuring to you. The fact that they are not makes me wonder about whether you really care about the truth.
I would sneer at the idea that it would mean the end of our species and openly laugh when you claim to have evidence that would prove it without the slightest doubt. So much so that any person to deny it is a crank. In fact, barring any unproven, unforeseen, effects, I would quite like an extra 5-10F increase at the lattitude where I currently live. Just means that there would be some migration away from equatorial regions. Some of us already regard them as inhospitable, especially at midday. Bad for some, good for others. On the whole, it sounds like a wash. Certainly not the end of all terrestrial life on our planet.
Actually all of them are. hehe. Okay. Sorry about that. Couldn't resist.
But in a positive way. Show me someplace, anyplace in the world where property on the coast is worth less than inland (discounting the costs within cities)? The owners of such property tend to be (comparitively at least) wealthy. It is true even in Indonesia (one of the poorest countries in Asia).
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
That is completely absurd. Even thermometers hundreds of years ago could accurately measure temperatures to better than 1 degree accuracy.
I work for one of the leading global suppliers of meteorological equipment. The issue isn't with how accurate the sensors can be, it's if they are being properly calibrated and maintained. In the US we do a fairly good job, although if a sensor is reporting off by a degree or two it is within accepted functional range and will pass any inspection.
It's a shame that this is posted AC, because I want to "friend" this poster.
Sure, CO2 is a cause of global climate change. I'll go with that, but it's just too early to start branding those who question the current theories as unscientific, crazy, or politicized. We did this to Galileo, Newton, Einstein...
We party on anthropogenic CO2 (a small faucet on a really big bathtub) because it's easy to fall into the trap of favoring the simplest solution to a problem (if reducing anthropogenic CO2 by 70% can be labeled "simplest"). Even after one of my friends warned me not to do it, I favored trying to pin my '85 Volvo's inability to start on the fuel-pump relay. I didn't do this because it was the most likely culprit. I did this because it was only $40, and it was easy to fix.
$300 later, the car runs, and it wasn't the fuel-pump relay that needed to be replaced.
Science is more about asking questions than knowing answers. If those who know the answers scoff at those who ask new questions, science isn't being done.