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New Research Forecasts Global 6C Increase By End of Century
jamie writes with this snippet from the UK's Independent:
"The world is now firmly on course for the worst-case scenario in terms of climate change, with average global temperatures rising by up to 6C by the end of the century, leading scientists said yesterday. ... [The study] found that there has been a 29 per cent increase in global CO2 emissions from fossil fuel between 2000 and 2008, the last year for which figures are available. On average, the researchers found, there was an annual increase in emissions of just over 3 per cent during the period, compared with an annual increase of 1 per cent between 1990 and 2000. Almost all of the increase this decade occurred after 2000 and resulted from the boom in the Chinese economy. The researchers predict a small decrease this year due to the recession, but further increases from 2010."
I sort of believe in climate change, but at this point in time, a day after we all got to learn that the top-institute for climate-change knowingly and willingly changed the numbers, lied... I can not take this serious. First I want to know how much has been fabricated and lied. After that, I might support this type of research again, but only after all the liars are banned from 'research'.
IF the forecast temperature rise is 6C per century, then it is .6C per decade
Nonsense. This is only true if it's a linear relationship. Given that the greenhouse effect involves a complex feedback cycle, that is not a valid assumption.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Response from the RealClimate website, here (http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack/#more-1853):
This will indeed cause certain people to "wonder". Especially people who do not have the faculties to properly understand the idiomatic uses of the English language, and people who are willing to take words and phrases of out of context, as well as people who are willing to formulate their opinions without considering the actual analysis and instead relying on secondhand hysteria generated by others who are also not willing to consider the actual analysis.
So it goes.
-Laxitive
Yes, they can measure the concentration of the isotope carbon-14. But even if we couldn't do so, what else do you think would make the concentration of carbon dioxide increase from about 285 ppm to about 385 ppm in just over 100 years?
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
I think they are basing the CO2 increases on fossil fuel use increases. I don't find the methodology in the article, but by looking at the number of new power plants going on line, and the number of existing ones, it should be pretty easy to get a fairly accurate number.
Regardless, it's a pretty depressing article. And it doesn't mention the methane hydrates that are starting to thaw and bubble up in the northern latitudes. That has the potential to push warming even higher and what is being forecast is already going to be disastrous to every living thing on the planet.
People around now are going to have things bad enough after the next few decades. After that, well, I hope you like Mel Gibson Road Warrior movies...
Not that suspicious in itself - I've often used the word "trick" to refer to a clever shortcut with no deception whatsoever. A quick search of my email shows several uses of it in this way.
I don't know enough about this to say whether there's anything dubious or not, but that quote by itself doesn't say much.
'Climate models predict disaster' is not news. Climate model always predict disaster.
'1999 climate model validated by 10 years of actual data'. *That* would be news.
The politicization of climate data will prove to be a disaster in the long run. Everyone has an axe to grind.
Here's a link to some NASA data about temperature:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2008/
Do we believe NASA when they say 2008 was the coolest since 2000? Is that just a tooth in the saw? Which trend to you believe? The one that shows temperatures generally increasing since 1880? Are the relatively flat temperatures between 1950 and 1980 an anomaly? Is it really correct to even assume the overall trend is anthropogenic? Or do we need to do some fancy footwork to make the data fit the hypothesis?
What we don't have is good, healthy debate.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
What we don't have is good, healthy debate.
If anything, that's the real black eye that the recent data swipe reveals. The emails between AGW scientists specifically mention bullying publications into not accepting/publishing papers that don't support AGW, and subsequently use the lack of published, peer-reviewed articles against those scientists whose conclusions differ from their own.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
>>Nonsense. This is only true if it's a linear relationship. Given that the greenhouse effect involves a complex feedback cycle, that is not a valid assumption.
Yes, as we all know from Al Gore's memorable definition of what a "non-linear system" is: "It's a fancy way they have of saying that the changes are not all just gradual. Some of them come suddenly in big jumps."
I used to work doing modeling of both ocean seawater and other things (like heart cells or full cardiac cycles) which attempted to accurately simulate whatever ODE or whatever it was we were simulating. These models were incredibly sensitive to the various constants used, and what the starting assumptions were. They'd fly off into incoherent-land if these values were not very precise, or if the constants didn't match each other. The only way we could calibrate or test our simulation was by, say, pulling out a rabbit's heart, wiring it up, flooding it with some solution, and having the severed heart beat for us when driven by impulses at different frequencies and amplitude. Testing and experimentation is the only way to truly know something, as Feynman said. If we just relied on the models without doing followup experimentation with them, we'd have gotten wildly inaccurate results.
Climatology, on the other hand, is "science-y", but not really science. It wants to be science, it really does - and goes through the window dressings of having peer reviewed journals and conferences and all of that - but ultimately it is not science. There is no experimentation involved (or if you will, there is one large experiment running all the time), and there is no control for the experiment. Forgive me if I do not allow your models to substitute for actual experimentation, for the reasons listed above.
As one of my professors once said, never listen to anyone who claims to be really accurate over the sample data set. It's real easy to be accurate on a sample data set. Hell, you can always just spit back out the original numbers if you want - for my neural net spam filter, we could have just returned the classifications of each email and claimed 100% accuracy, for example. If you don't think that climate researchers actually make bullshit claims like this, check out the wikipedia page on global climate modeling, and look at, say, this graph: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GCM_temp_anomalies_3_2000.jpg There's charts like that everywhere on wikipedia, showing how accurate the climate models are, even back in 1930, decades before the models were created.
What is important is the accuracy going forward into new data, and as they do, they've found numerous glaring problems with the predictive ability of climate models (such as rainfall changes being 25% of what is expected). (For some fun laughs, read predictions of what life would be like in 2010 written 10, 20 or 30 years ago.)
The simple fact of the matter is, I don't believe any (self-described) scientist who claims he knows how much temperature will move in the next 100 years, unless he says it will range somewhere between absolute zero and the temperature of the sun.
And if it sounds like I'm picking on climate "scientists", well, I am, but I had a number of friends who worked in the field at SIO, and they're generally smart and nice guys, and think there's a serious problem. Their problem lies in claiming more knowledge than they actually know. (Again, this is not how actual science works.) And it's not like other fields have looked enviously at the tremendous success of real scientific fields, like physics, over the last hundred years. Psychology, sociology, hell even scientology and philosophy have tried to co-opt the patina of science for themselves. (Nearly every modern philosopher since Wittgenstein calls themselves an analytic philosopher, which was a movement to directly make philosophy more "scientific" and less heads-in-the-cloudsy.)
In experimental science, this is not uncommon. Using different methods of analyzing the same subject is, in other words, using (relatively) independent methods to analyze that subject. Using multiple independent methods and combining their results is a good thing, because it avoids experimental error and potential systemic biases that exist in every observational setup.
That said, I don't want to get into an actual discussion about the actual paper in question because I have not read the relevant hacked personal e-mails with their full context and interpreted their significance (and I likely won't have time in the near future given the pressures of day to day life). I am not particularly inclined to start implying conclusions and accusations based off of an incomplete and shoddy reading of a few out-of-context paragraphs. I am neither willing to vouch for or defend, or attack a particular piece of research until I am reasonably well informed about how that research was conducted.
There seem to be many people, however, who are willing to do exactly that.
-Laxitive
How come the world temprature has dropped half a degree since 2000?
Could be lots of reasons. For instance, we've witnessed accelerating melting of the Antarctic ice sheet. Melting ice absorbs a lot of heat. More heat being used to melt large ice sheets means the temperature increase may stall until the ice sheets are fully melted. Also, 10 years worth of stalled heating isn't necessarily indicative of anything. It could just be natural climate fluctuations superimposed on a large slow rise in temperature. The five-year average shows little to buck the warming trend.
Even the Climate Change Congress now acknowledges this (quote: "temperature has plateaud"). Why?
Because its main motivation is to understand exactly what's going on with the climate. It doesn't have a political agenda. The best data right now suggests that the climate is getting warmer and that a probable reason for that is anthropogenic CO2. If new data comes in that suggests this is not the case, the IPCC and other climate change panels will have to acknowledge it.
And how are world leaders likely to respond if the temperature drops during the 2010s?
You say that as if they've responded thus far. As far as I can tell, the developing world is completely exempt from any decision on climate change, and various other efforts to get world leaders to acknowledge and act on climate change have garnered meager changes in policy at best. Face it: if the world is in danger and we're looking to our leaders to save the day, we're screwed. The best bet on climate change is to alter the individual consumer's behavior.
That is BS. If you bothered to read the refutations, the divergences are themselves a subject of many publications, and this has been out in the open forever.
I do agree that access to the raw data could be better, and even that some of the statistical methods etc have been applied poorly (or even incorrectly). You might even find, somewhere in the stack of tens of thousands of climate science publications, some that misrepresent the data, perhaps even deliberately. Not all scientists are as expert as they should be in statistics, and scientists are human and have human frailties (although that doesn't excuse anything). But this does not appear to be one of those cases. You are reading far too much into one email, and you clearly are not aware of the context.
If all of the science of global climate change depended on a single set of proxy data, then you would have a point. But it doesn't, and you don't.
And no greedy people in the fossil fuel industry? There's boatloads more money there, so that's where any thinking greedy person would go.
The one I find convincing is the melting of the ice. It's a crude kind of measure, lacking in detail, but any explanation that doesn't account for that is obviously unacceptable.
The North-West passage is currently open to ice-breakers, and it is projected to be open to normal passenger liners soon. This doesn't give me many data points, but the ones it give are irrefutable.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
What are you basing your statements on? Can you cite some research which isn't based on CRU's Hockey Stick graph which has been debunked and which clearly indicates that global warming is happening and it is not due to any natural geological cycle?
I am asking for research which indicates clearly that global warming is occurring due to humans and this research must not be based on CRU's data.
No, I am not quoting some idiot paid by oil companies to distort science, I think it is perfectly reasonable to cite researchers who have:
a) Placed their data online
b) Placed the source of the programs they have written to arrive at the results
c) Placed their detailed findings online
http://forkbomb.org/~ml/cmail/mail/1254751382.txt
If you would rather believe a bunch of "scientists" who claim to have lost their raw data but who seem to have retained all the results data, then please go ahead.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/13/cru_missing/
Just a few questions for you:
1. Do you think that it is even remotely possible that all of CRU's data was stored on a single storage medium and that ALL scientists who ever worked on the data, worked on this single storage - that too on the only master storage of data without ever taking any copies of this data?
2. Do you think that it is even remotely possible that all of CRU's data was lost despite the fact that the email log released yesterday includes emails even from the mid 1990s. Why is that email was backed up while the rest of the data was lost?
3. Why is that even reputed magazines such as Nature and Science who have policies on data retention for all articles published in them didn't either a) Get the data from CRU or b) Retain this data - despite it being their own policy?
4. Why isn't CRU releasing the raw data even now - despite all the controversy and wide-spread feeling that the research is flawed?
Also, I would be interested in hearing a response from CRU on the email sent to CRU by Fred Pearce from New Scientist as early as 1996.
http://forkbomb.org/~ml/cmail/mail/0845217169.txt
The only problem is that the results of their studies support their bottom line. Profit.
So do the studies on the other side, with the difference that the profit is taken from the taxpayers. If that's your criterion for dismissing research, then you have to dismiss both sides.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
If an African nation is permitted emission levels of ~zero (because they aren't emitting anything right now) while a Western nation is permitted to emit say 20% less than what they emitted in 1990, which one will win in the global economy? If the rich Western countries can't afford to use green technology, how can a poor African nation afford them?
Africa doesn't get to industrialize while polluting like mad bastards would be much better. Ditto for China.
China isn't polluting, compared to Europe or USA. Its per capita emissions are 1/4 of those of the US. When the US has cut its emissions in half it can start talks with the rest of the world.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
When heat enters a system temperature will not change until the phase change is complete. Once our icecaps have melted, temperature will start rising more dramatically.
One convenient locations...in Africa.