Slashdot Mirror
Global Warming 'Undeniable,' Report Says
BergZ writes "Scientists from around the world are providing even more evidence of global warming. 'A comprehensive review of key climate indicators confirms the world is warming and the past decade was the warmest on record,' the annual State of the Climate report declares. Compiled by more than 300 scientists from 48 countries, including Canada, the report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said its analysis of 10 indicators that are 'clearly and directly related to surface temperatures, all tell the same story: Global warming is undeniable.'"
So far, it's been a scorcher for folks all around the world. So it might come as no surprise that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has released a report revealing 2010 having the record for warmest June, warmest April to June and warmest year to date. The announcement said 'Each of the 10 warmest average global temperatures recorded since 1880 have occurred in the last fifteen years. The warmest year-to-date on record, through June, was 1998, and 2010 is warmer so far.' So far we are even surpassing 1998's records which held the warmest year (despite directly contradicting reports). It certainly seems the scads of winter precipitation we enjoyed were no indication of how we would swelter through our summer this year. Will 2010 turn it around or are we set to break more records?
Aside from that, I'm not really interested in making comments on this anymore because I'm so sick and tired of the armchair idiocy that follows (and somehow gets moderated up). Prediction: Not even 300 scientists from 48 countries and NOAA are going to convince everyone that global warming is real. At this point, I think it's just going to get worse.
My work here is dung.
Not so much.
If Canada is included, I'm sold.
I love the asshats that cite the winters around PA being cold as evidence that global warming is a myth.
I thought they were using the less specific term 'climate change' these days.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
It's been pretty cold recently.
"The planet is fine...the people are fucked."
Living With a Nerd
Unless you're a Republican or a corporate shill, that is.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Why do I get that sick feeling that the heat from this discussion will only make the global warming problem worse?
I need trepanation like I need a hole in the head.
got a front row seat and my bag of popcorn...
The people who decided some time ago that they dislike global warming for whatever reason will always find a way to rationalize their denial of it. They are not about to let some pesky "facts" from "experts" cloud their judgment.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I thought the issue wasn't whether climate change was happening, but whether it was artificial or natural.
All sorts of facts are denied by those who refuse to change their positions. See cognitive dissonance
It sure has been getting warmer since the end of the last ice age.
It's often speculated that the warming of the end, and the subsequent end of the last ice age, it was a major factor in the rise and spread of the human population.
Of course, it was the humans, ten thousand years ago, that were driving their SUVs that caused the last ice age to end.
The data as presented indicates a recent warming trend, but does not say anything about whether this is man-made or not; a 0.5deg rise in 50 years is extremely small in the scheme of things, and drawing the usual alarmist conclusions from this is quite unfounded.
There are (at least) two camps in the global warming skeptics camp--those who deny it is happening, and those like me who know it's happening but don't think it's worth changing our entire civilization to try and stop something that is, well, already happening anyway.
I dont think that the majority of deniers dont believe that the world is warming, I think the majority just believe that its not mans fault, that it is in fact natural. I mean who are we to think we have that much power over the entire planet?
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Most of the earth was buried under glaciers as little as 100,000 years ago. Of course there is global warming. Only crackpots would deny it.
The cause, on the other hand...
I'm still not convinced it's us.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Cue the people who deny it anyway.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
So.. the scientists keep trying to convince people who either refuse to accept logic and reason or are too stupid for it, by using more clear science.
This will change the minds of zero people.
This is not news. There is no debate about whether global warming is real. All available sources show a warming trend when averaged over the past thirty years.
I don't know why these people bother, except perhaps as a red herring to distract people from the real controversy, which is about causation.
Wake me when as strong a statement can be made about Human caused global warming.
Superiority of Ananymous Cowards is undeniable due to quantity of posts. News at 11
It's undeniable. Great. That clears it up. Where is the report that offers "undeniable" proof of God, and the "undeniable" inevitable end of crude oil deposits in the Earth? I am going to file these with my "undeniable" reports on Sky being blue, Sun being warm, and water being wet.
And the people who've already decided what their opposition is arguing will continue to mock them for it no matter how plainly we restate our position over and over.
The report that the article refers to is the 2009 State of the Climate report. More information about it is available at the NOAA website: http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2010/20100728_stateoftheclimate.html
Warning: This sig is not thread safe. For more information see Slashdot's sig policy.
Anyone else get a kick out of the doctored photo in the Telegraph article. Those poor polar bears have been stuck up on that iceberg for weeks while it melted underneath them and now they can't go anywhere. Damn that global warming!!!
P.S. Is there any difference between using a doctored photo to sell global warming and using doctored data to sell global warming (and literally make trillions of dollars off the backs of the rubes in the process)?
The fact that the climate changes has always been an indisputable fact. There are piles of historical evidence of this which reach higher than your head. Unfortunately, many (most?) people hear the phrase "Global Warming" and think it means "It's all our fault."
The only real questions is: How much influence are humans having on the natural process of climate change?
Fuck it. We are already in a warming trend that will eventually result in a cooling trend heading for the next ice age. Lets just get it over with and warm this puppy up! Then we can enjoy the cool slide down to freezing!
Then what will happen? It'll start all over again.
The only point worth arguing about is whether we warm the planet enough to make a real difference in our species survival. If we can weather the hottest the hot trend can dole out as well as the coldest the cold trend will give us, what does it really matter?
Obviously pollution sucks, but beyond that? I mean seriously, whether or not we succeed in stopping _human_ attributed warming or not doesn't stop the natural trend, it will merely slow it.
Again, I'm not advocating we throw caution to the wind and utterly destroy our planet though mass pollution, but stopping a recurring trend is futile. My point is to question whether or not there is any point to slowing a trend that will eventually peak and fall off to another ice age all on its own. Specifically, mathematically, when is the next ice age due on a non-human involved timeline and when are we apt to see it due to our being?
What does this say then about all the measures taken so far to quell the onset of global warming? If it has just gotten warmer with all the emissions controls, then is it just egotistical to think that what we change has any effect (at least in the US)?
someone cue Mandy Patinkin
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
Ok, I can live with that, global warming is undeniable. The important question is, are we CAUSING global warming?
this new proclamation does not have a cause listed. This allows them to to avoid some of the debate. It also allows the to solidify their side as well. Global Warming supporters all have "proofs" for their chosen cause. They just don't like to agree and some are pretty vehement in their disagreement. However they can support "Global Warming is increasing".
Still it does come down to two questions.
1) Should we be doing something to change the planet's climate?
2) Can we change the climate should we choose?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
So which is it, Global Warming or Climate Change?
Depends. Do you call it "Christmas" or "Holidays"? The only reason "global warming" was changed to "climate change" was an attempt to take out the "warming" part so that they wouldn't get jumped on every time the odd year ended up colder than expected (which is completely normal - natural phenomena don't follow graphs exactly). However the change neither adds value or information to the name. It's a political thing, it's lame, and I refuse to be forced to change by people in a country that doesn't even adopt the metric system.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The real question is whether human activities and human activities which humans are WILLING to curtail are the source of a significant part of the warming?
After all, the Earth has been warming globally for over WELL OVER 10,000 years during the time the last Ice Age receeded until the present.
Framing arguments with an improper word to skew things is NOT good science.
Am I the only one who thinks news of an impending rise in sea level is brought to us by a group called "NOAA?"
Currently hooked on AMP
The study does not address the cause of the warming.
We know no we have caused acid rain and the ozone hole by releasing different materials into the air.
We know that when we mess around with our environment whether it be with lead, pcbs, dioxins or really another chemical it causes problems.
Why do people find it so hard to believe that the incredible increase in atmospheric CO2 is not a problem?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeling_Curve
People deny evolution. People deny global warming...
People are incredibly good at denying that reality exists, especially when its reality they don't want to comprehend.
Test your net with Netalyzr
Opps, I meant "thinks it's funny that news.." not "thinks news" Sorry for the hasty post
Currently hooked on AMP
That is a fine job you just did of stating your position while not saying a damned thing about why you hold that position. If you have data that counters this research, then share it. Making fun of the other side and reaching for a "holier-than-thou" position for yourself does not in any way detract from actual data.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
As we can now see that Global Warming supporters have turned it into a religion ("undeniable" is a typical way to say that you won't accept new facts, eg: "God's existence is undeniable"), perhaps they can qualify for tax free status and I can deny their religion because I'm an atheist?
It's still global warming. They just started calling it "climate change" to shut up the assholes who were saying "It's not getting warmer, this winter was a little colder than the last one!"
Aside: What's their response now that 2010 is shaping up to be one of the hottest years on record, I wonder?
Caused by humans? Of course not.
The word used in TFA is 'unmistakable'. Still, all things can be denied/mistaken by hardcore deniers...
--Irrational response squad is a go!--
Rising indicators
1. Air temperature over land
Denial: Measurements are wrong - and the sun did it (despite the solar minimum).
2. Sea-surface temperature
Denial: Measurements are wrong - whales did it, we need to allow more hunting.
3. Marine air temperature
Denial: Measurements are wrong - underwater volcanoes must have done it.
4. Sea-level
Denial: Measurements are wrong - land must be getting lower, or else human sin is causing a new flood.
5. Ocean heat
Denial: Measurements are wrong - sonar must be messing with the equipment.
6. Humidity
Denial: Measurements are wrong - and this is a self-correcting, perfectly natural thing.
7. Tropospheric temperature in the 'active-weather' layer of the atmosphere closest to the Earth's surface
Denial: Measurements are wrong - and heat rises, duh!
Declining indicators
1. Arctic sea-ice
Something must be eating the ice! Must be all those hungry polar bears - caused their own problems!
2. Glaciers
Something must be weighing them down - they're just going underwater! Perhaps all those polar bears crowding on them.
3. Spring snow cover in the northern hemisphere
Ha! Is it too much snow, or too little now - confused scientists don't know nuthin'!
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a congressional subcommittee to advise.
--/Irrational response--
It's easy to find a 'reason' to deny something, when you don't have a burden/benefit of evidence or peer review. And when all you're doing is stalling for the status quo, denial is all you need.
Ryan Fenton
I had an eye-opening experience the other day over at the Oil Drum, a blog run by folks associated with the industry. Not people you'd exactly think of as being against the consumption of fossil fuels. But the gist of this posting (which had nothing to do with climate change, and received a lot of favorable commentary) was that we're deeply, deeply fucked if we think we're going to continue burning fossil fuels into our old age. The argument was specifically related to the increasing cost of extraction. (In a nutshell, there's a reason we're now getting our oil from wells a mile underwater).
Now, the conclusion of that poster was pretty depressing, though I don't think he covered all of the options. But what struck me is that if you believe his arguments, it doesn't really matter whether you believe that humans are causing global warming. The actions we need to take now to ensure a reasonable standard of living in 40 years are exactly the same actions we need to take in order to deal with the global warming problem. Above all, to place a tax on fossil fuel consumption (and CO2 taxes do this pretty well) as a means to encourage the market to do something reasonable about the problem. The fact that we couldn't even pass the tiny little tax proposed in the recently defeated Waxman-Markey bill tells us something deeply frightening about our chances.
What kills me about the anti-global-warming argument is that its opponents think that it really matters whether AGW exists. It doesn't matter. For either reason we need to dramatically reduce our fossil fuel consumption and develop alternative sources (efficient, cost-effective nuclear, wind, solar, etc._ just to ensure that we and our children have a chance at living a decent life in the future. There's nothing in the universe that guarantees we won't face terrible consequences for our bad decisions, just because we've had a pretty good run for the past few decades.
I can easily disprove the claims of these so called "scientists." They claim that global warming is undeniable, and yet we see people denying it right here in the comments. Ha HA!
Now, if they had said something along the lines of "At this point, the proof is so overwhelming that only mentally deficient conservative hippie-hating anti-environmentalist shills for big business will attempt to deny it," well, that is just self evidently true.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The new report, the 20th in a series, focuses only on global warming and does not specify a cause.
Just stating that it's getting warmer isn't enough. The problem isn't that the planet is getting hotter (on a geologic scale, the planet heats up and cools down periodically for completely natural reasons). What we really need to do is identify the causes - undeniably.
And faster than stink on shit.
What people don't realize is that the earth will get warmer with machinery,cars, power plants, etc.
You've never heard of something called conservation of energy, then? Tell me, sir, where is all the energy coming from that produces all that heat? Magic? Or is it the river that was slowed down by the dam and made to turn a turbine (in exchange for extracting some of its total energy). Is it the uranium that was mined and refined and made to give up its heat and neutrons quickly - in exchange for removing billions of year's worth of slowly releasing that energy into the environment? Do you SERIOUSLY think that an air conditioner produces more heat than the total energy that goes into it? What about all the cold air coming out the other end?
In fact the ONLY net energy input into our system is fossil fuel burning. But even that was produced by energy over millions of years. When it's all gone, that extra source of heat will be gone.
Do the words "closed system" mean anything to you? Sheesh, it's like the people who claim that the earth will "run out of resources". There may not be enough copper to go around if we keep growing our population like we are, but the copper isn't going anywhere. It's still here. But now you have to share it among 7+ billion people instead of the 4 billion we were 30 years ago. Everyone gets less, but we won't ever "run out" until we start putting it on rockets and shooting it out of the solar system.
I dunno, some people just don't think. Well no, many philosophers argue MOST people don't think.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
And that the Earth's flatness was also "undeniable". Fact of the matter is there exists NO credible evidence that C02 has anything at all to do with warming, and any climate study that includes ZERO research on solar output data (after all, ALL heat comes from the Sun) could not possibly be "undeniable" as it is at best incomplete.
Furthermore, archaeological evidence proves that our planet has been both much warmer AND much cooler than it is now. How could man be the cause of that when they didn't have SUV's in Roman times?
Corporatism != Free Market
Meh. As much as people will post about "OMG, those stupid deniers won't care!" I'll just remind folks that very few people deny that there IS some sort of climate change going on. Of course there is - point to any time in history when climate wasn't changing in some way.
It's a giant step, however, to assert that this is ipso facto the result of something humans did/are doing AND that whatever is happening is neither cyclical and/or beyond the bounds of what the system can rebound from.
Two 'warming' fallacies:
It was 75 degrees two hours ago, 82 one hour ago, and nearly 90 now. By that measure, by tomorrow it's going to be boiling hot outside!
It was cool this morning. Then THREE of my neighbors started up their lawnmowers, and now it's starting to get freaking warm. I'm going to have to tell them to stop mowing their lawns because it's clearly causing it to get hot outside.
(...and while you might want to point to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Satellite_Temperatures.png (30 year data) and even http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png (2000-year data) to illustrate that there really IS warming; I'd point to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:All_palaeotemps.png as a record going back 500 MILLION years illustrating that our current temps are actually fairly COOL compared to history, and that both the recent and archaic records point to radical climate changes over short periods REPEATEDLY in global climate history.)
It's warming. Yep, I agree.
This will result in a rough ride weather wise both for summers and winters.
Good thing we're the most adaptable creature on the planet. Too bad the polar bears may just turn back into bears tho, they look cool white.
Still think Al Gore's a self-promoting dick, tho.
-Styopa
I suppose it depends on what record one looks at. Back in the Cretaeus era Antarctica was covered with forests, and trended up towards being semi-tropical. Is this decade really warmer?
Everything is deniable. Look at all the anti-vacination, intelligent design, 9/11 conspiracists. In each case they have had copious incontrovertible evidence shoved in their faces and they still parrot the same idiotic nonsense as they always did. So it is with the anti-global warming crowd. Some people will not budge from a viewpoint no matter how obviously wrong or idiotic it is demonstrated to be.
And mankind had as much to do with that as we do with global warming. The time period during which we've been collecting data is insignificant compared to the age of the earth. You know what the most prevalent "greenhouse gas" is? Water. Yeah H2O. Whoever figures out how to sell capping and trading H2O will be even richer than Al Gore.
If it's nonanthropogenic, it just means we might not be able to stop it by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. However, there are lots of other options. I seem to remember someone suggesting that it would be relatively cheap to just blast large amounts of titanium dioxide particles into the upper atmosphere in order to increase the albedo of the earth and reflect some of the incoming solar radiation, thus reducing temperatures on earth. The scary part of this is that it's supposedly cheap enough that a single country could decide to do it unilaterally.
That's just one possible option, there are others.
"Global Warming is a hoax!" See? It's not undeniable. I just denied it. Stop lying!
Just how long have we been keeping records?
Notice that the second answer has quite a few more zeros in it than the first number even has total digits?
We don't know squat.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Jesus. For like half my life I've continuously heard about "Global Warming," and for a decade there's been a lot of "Proof" coming out. As in, they're constantly trying to PROVE IT EXISTS. The big news is always "GLOBAL WARMING IS REAL, SEE?!"
When you have to continuously find reasons to believe in something, and continuously tout that you've just proven (for the 600th time) that it's real, you've invented one of two things: Politics or Religion.
Give me something real: Impact assessments that aren't "ZOMG ZEE APOCALYPSE!"; correlated facts that aren't "CARS AND CIGARETTES MAKE THE EARTH A BOILING DEATH SPHERE!!"; suggestions about what we should do about it that aren't entirely focused on stopping/reversing the changes. Until then, I'm just looking at stupid political bullshit.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
For those super intelligent folks who are on the AGW bandwagon and believe whoeheartedly in the science of it I have a question: do you believe that life begins at conception - that a separate and distinct human being has thus been created? Yeah, yeah I know it seems quite off topic...
Fortunately there are some facts to back up your argument...
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
... would be if Bill Clinton came forward and said either that he created it (while getting a BJ from a staffer) or that he doesn't believe in it. Even then, Ronald Reagan would have to rise up from the dead and state his full unwavering support of the matter before everyone on the right would start believing.
Until that point, conservatives who choose to keep their fingers squarely in their ears over any data related to global warming will continue to do so, fueled in part by their undying hatred of all things Clinton.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Why is it so important to stress out that the 48 countries include Canada, again?
Here's the only place I'd like to get to: agreeing that 1) climate is warming to a point of unnatural irreversible damage and 2) man made factors are contributing to it.
I think you might succeed on point #2. But point #1 sets an impossibly high bar. Natural CO2 levels have been much higher in the geologic past and thriving ecosystems existed when there was no ice anywhere on the planet.
No dude you're just falling for the AGW propaganda. Do you really believe we're sitting in some "magical temperature sweet spot"? Does it strike you as odd that the only apparent consequences of a warming trend seem to be bad, if not fatal?
lets see if i can use your analogy a bit more.
you think it's flooding from the tap being left on. when it's the river you built your house next to that has a long history of flooding that's causing you grief. just because you're inconvenienced by the current water level doesn't mean that i have to stop what i'm doing and forfeit my time and money because you think it's something as simple as turning off the tap. if you build next to a river, you're basement is going to get flooded from time to time. its the natural coarse of things. it will auto correct and stop flooding at some point. stop telling me to go turn off your tap when it won't do any good.
Evidence?
"Compiled by more than 300 scientists from 48 countries, including Canada ..."
Hmm. I can't tell if the inclusion of Canadian scientists in the 300 is supposed to make me more or less skeptical.
The only reason "global warming" was changed to "climate change" was an attempt to take out the "warming" part so that they wouldn't get jumped on every time the odd year ended up colder than expected (which is completely normal - natural phenomena don't follow graphs exactly).
When our summers grow longer, and winters won't snow...
My summers are hotter and my winters are colder. I'm getting no snow, but I'm not getting RAIN during the winter; the humidity is just so fucking low...
Support my political activism on Patreon.
There is decreasing amounts of doubt that the world is warming up
May be true in across this planet in general, it is sadly not true in the USA. In the USA there is still a very substantial number of people who deny global warming outright for various reasons (often nothing more than political - just wait for this story to be tagged "manbearpig" on the front page).
(especially in the United States) liberals are ONLY concerned with the man-made "portion" of the effect
It is almost impossible to be concerned "only" with that portion - assuming it to be significant. That would be like being concerned about second hand smoke but not lung cancer in smokers, the two are directly connected matters. Whether global warming is caused by activities of humans doesn't change the fact that global warming is having dramatic affects on all life around the world.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I don't think it makes sense to claim that global warming will lead to water shortages, since it will mean increased precipitation. As long as people build the appropriate dams to capture the extra water, it should lead to an increase in water supply.
Also, I don't think the adverse effects to coastal cities will be as profound as people say. It would take a major increase in sea-level to really cause any problems, but the change to date has been modest.
The actions we need to take now to ensure a reasonable standard of living in 40 years are exactly the same actions we need to take in order to deal with the global warming problem.
Not exactly.
You could also make sure that other people's consumption decreased faster than the resource.
HTH
Deleted
the discussion about who is at fault for global warming, or even if it exists, is completely besides the point
in fact, make believe, for the sake of argument, that there is no global warming at all
ok: well, mankind's stewardship over this planet is still undeniable. correct? does anyone disagree with the idea that we are responsible for this planet?
therefore, simply for the sake of self-interest, mankind should be monitoring and maintaining the climate according to specifications that suit his purposes. and his purposes are to maintain the status quo. even if rising sea levels were completely natural, no one wants to turn all of our coastal cities into venice. or lose all our crop lands we have invested in to desert, even if, again, that were perfectly natural. therefore, we should do something to counteract whatever is causing difficulties for our status quo
what i am talking about is completely shortcircuiting pointless discussions about who is to blame and pointless discussions about whether or not the climate is changing
if we observe higher heat and smaller crops, we fix that problem. if we don't, we still maintain things as they are, as we are invested in the climate status quo
if we observe rising sea levels, we fix the problem. if we don't observe rising sea levels, we keep watching the sea level. beginning and end of discussion. everything else is pointless hot air, pun intended
in other words, shut the ideologues and politicians up, bring the scientists and engineers in the room:
1. observe
2. if any problems are seen, solve the problems
3. go to 1
every other discussion is methane-rich bullshit. only the problem solvers matter. is there a job to do? then get it done. any else to talk about? NO!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I wish the scientists and skeptics alike would get beyond any political agendas and simply state it like it is. Yes, global climate change is real and there is evidence to support a warming trend. Yes, man's activities have an impact on the climate but climate change is a given regardless.
Once they get that out of the way we can start talking about ways to respond to the climate change in a rational manner (without the knee-jerk reactions to seeing one's political position being attacked).
I don't see any good coming from denying global climate change OR from claiming that we can control the climate by eliminating pollution.
So far, it's been a scorcher for folks all around the world.
released a report revealing 2010 having the record for warmest June, warmest April to June and warmest year to date
I thought weather is not climate.
I remember hearing that a lot in 2009. Don't hear it so much this year, for some reason.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
I still haven't see any evidence that proves this change in climate isn't some sort of natural cycle that happens every few thousand or tens of thousands of years. I think that this might be happening regardless of any impact we are having on the planet, considering that cows produce more methane than all the cars in the world and that volcanoes spew out way more pollution than all the humans combined.
Yep, probably the warmest decade in last 800 or so. But it is likely the medieval warm period was warmer, and the Roman warm period, and most of the early Holocene. Planet and people somehow managed to survive those cataclysms.
As for warmest year... No. 1998, a big El Nino was warmer (according to most global temperature composites, and crucially the satellite records that are less susceptible to errors UHI biases etc). 2009-2010 was another big el nino, so no surprise temps were hot even if not as high as 1998.
2 important issues to me are:
1/ There has been no statistically significant warming since the mid 90's
2/ Temp records show overwhelming dominance of the pacific decadal oscillation in global temp record, basically a 60 year cycle in temp which topped out 10 years ago. We have a 0.6C per century rise with a 0.2C sinusoid superimposed. Expect several more decades of little change.
I would expect that by time we hit the next rise in several decades hydrocarbon fuel use will be in decline owing to solar power and electric vehicles quickly becoming economic even as we speak
And the people who've already decided what their opposition is arguing will continue to mock them for it no matter how plainly we restate our position over and over.
Well, I've yet to see one of you state it plainly the first time 'round. Come on, no obfuscation, no conflating things which are actually separate, just straight-up logic. What's your position? I'm waiting.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
At all. More BS from the Glow Ball Warming peeps.
In my almost 40 years on this planet, living in a country who's "summer time" was 2 weeks at best, now lasting 4-6, I can see my habitat changing.
So I believe in global warming.
What I do not currently believe is the Cambridge backed "hockey stick" projection, the underlying data and methods for which has yet to be properly vetted.
Do we need to do something ?
Undeniably YES.
Does it need to be as harsh, sudden and costly a change as we are led to believe - probably not.
I remain to be convinced.
Does this make me a "denier" or a "believer" ?
ask the people in the southern part of the world, or of the US, that are suffering through the worst cold spell in 100+ years if they are experiencing Global warming. Reasonable people can and do disagree not only with the conclusion of human caused Global warming, but with the whole concept that global wide climate change is in truth significant. Last year in Michigan, we had the coolest summer in over 50 years. This year the summer is warmer, but not extreme. Also I like to point out that the people that are making the conclusion that there is a global warming trend may or may not be the same people that are making a living off of the fear mongering of Human caused Global warming. Many of these people are not trust worthy. As for the earth warming, in general the temps on the earth have increased since the last ice age ended some 50,000+ years ago. in places, and at times the temps have dropped greatly, look at the "little ice age" in the recent past. Recent in relationship to how long ago the last ice age was. So is the earth warming, in someplace it is this year, in others not. Is it man made, not a chance, it is the height of human arrogance to think we can modify the climate. Is this report relevant? Most likely not. Anytime a report says something is undeniable, beware, it is probably trying to prove a point.
Global Warming 'Undeniable,' Report Says
Sorry brother but I think you were reading from the 9th Edition when you wrote the headline. In the new 10th Edition we call it "Climate Change". It is still double plus non good though.
Often, people speak of global warming, or ozone depletion, and point to mundane, everyday things that are easy to see and visualize. Nuclear testing put more chlorine and nox into the atmosphere than any other combined events in human history.
http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq5.html 5.2.2.1
http://www.mitosyfraudes.org/Ingles/OzoneTheory.html
It was a convenient cover-up to blame CFC's from refrigeration systems and aerosol cans (both of which are heavier than air and sink when exposed to atmosphere) rather than blame all the nuclear bomb detonations around the world since the 40's. The Montreal Protocol actually came into effect at a great time for Dupont (maker of Freon or R-12, the CFC used in most refrigeration systems (and cars) as well as aerosol cans), just as their patent on the material was about to expire. Since then, we have been forced to swap between "less dangerous" chemicals to do the same job but the effects are not going away.
http://multinationalmonitor.org/hyper/issues/1991/10/doyle.html
On average, there has been a nuclear detonation every 12 days since the 1940's.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon
Our governments lead us by the nose, and make us think this is OUR fault, and that WE need to act quickly to save ourselves. The information is out there, go see for yourself.
The data as presented indicates a recent warming trend, but does not say anything about whether this is man-made or not
That is because the report focuses ONLY on the evidence of existence of the global warming AND SPECIFICALLY does not deal with the cause:
From TFA: The new report, the 20th in a series, focuses only on global warming and does not specify a cause.
0.5deg rise in 50 years is extremely small in the scheme of things
Sure! Tell it to people losing their livelihood in floods, farmers losing entire crops or to ANYONE without an air-conditioned home this summer.
More from TFA: "But," it adds, "the temperature increase of about one degree Fahrenheit experienced during the past 50 years has already altered the planet.
Glaciers and sea ice are melting, heavy rainfall is intensifying and heat waves are becoming more common and more intense."
And let us not even start with half of Asia being fed from those glaciers (which power their major rivers).
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I get tired of the constant "Two Minutes' Hate" from the left towards "corporations." Guess what: if you plan on doing business in any developed nation, then you would be wise from a tax/litigation standpoint to incorporate, even if you are a company of one. Furthermore, it is undeniable that without corporations the standard of living that we currently enjoy would not be possible. When you get your paycheck, you need to multiply it by 2 if you work in the US because that's what it costs your employer to employ you after you account for payroll taxes, benefits, etc. Now try going out on your own and earning a replacement income (your current salary x 2). Not very many people can do that.
So what about everyone who works in the oil, gas, and coal industries? Their rational is that if we do something, they lose their job. Which is a very legitimate argument. What do we with everyone that is now unemployed? How will they make their livelihood? Will they have to move? People's financial stability are at stake when you talk about legislating changes that would mitigate global warming, so of course they're going to oppose it.
A good example of this is the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The people that live there have had their beaches and fishing grounds devastated. But when Obama proposed a moratorium on deep sea drilling, those same coastal states that were devastated opposed it more than inland states. Why? Because that's how regular folks make their money there.
Until you address the social issues that would arise from all these changes, and address them utterly completely, you will have people who will oppose (and yet not necessarily deny) global warming. The UN's Brundtland Commission established that sustainable development is defined as development that "meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." Until we show that we have firm plans for meeting that, well, we're fucked.
Ok. Maybe the Earth has warmed slightly in the past 50 years. After all, it has been a while since the last major ice age. However, what has happened in the past 50 years (where they have fairly good data) is a small blip in the time period since the last ice age. Calling it the hottest year on record (maybe it is the hottest in the past 50 years) and saying the data is irrefutable is just irresponsible.
What I want to know is if the people writing the report are still trying to blame CO2 for this temperature increase (even though some of the largest solar maxima occured during the same 50 years studied).
Well, I am waiting for the report to finish downloading (I wanted the high-res version).
Else it isnt the scientific method. It could be taken to the bring of certainty, but there is always that tiny possibility it could be wrong.
Just the other week there was a paper postulating gravity as an entropic state (high likelihood) state of the universe rather than a force. I dont understand it. But physicist denying gravity as an intrinsic force.
Making something undeniable just makes the deniers deny harder.
Why do they do it? Because they're paid to.
That's why money isn't speech.
Ok. These scientists keep saying GW is happening. OK. The earth is warming up. We get it.
So why are they wasting so much time trying to prove this? Are they just burning through grant money?
IF GW is caused by humans what do they suggest we do? No one is proposing a viable solution to the problem. People are not going to give up their cars. Al Gore will not give up his privet jet and mansion. China will not cut its coal use and carbon output. I can't ride a windmill to work.
Passing tons of laws in the EU and the USA will do nothing. It just pushes the problem to china and India.
Shutting down a EPA regulated widget factory in Pennsylvania doesn't help the Earth because that widget will just be made in China with zero regulation. The end resolt will just be more hardship for us and the earth being worse off.
Until someone comes up with a better energy source then oil that is cheaper and easier this will never get solved. GW will just continue to be a political football for the Republicrats and Demopublicans to further their agendas.
Get back to us when you have a SOLUTION to the problem. Re-defining the problem and pointing fingers isnt going to fix shit.
I have to return some videotapes...
"Denial: Measurements are wrong - and the sun did it (despite the solar minimum)."
Yeah you have to love this one. I encountered it today from an ignorant Denier, claiming it was the sun because we were at a Solar Maximum.
Which was the line from paid deniers(liars) several years ago. This guy must have been a clueless parrot that was just regurgitating old nonsense he didn't understand.
Currently we are in the deepest solar minimum in Decades. The more up to date shills (liars) are now proclaiming the great solar minimum will counter GW.:rolleyes:
...and they tell us the planet's climate changes.
How many millions did we tax-payers pay this time for that report brimming with previously unknown information?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
The Earth is trying to restore balance. Let it happen. There are too many humans on the planet. We are displacing other animals, we are causing extinctions at an accelerated rate, we are fishing the oceans bare, we are pumping oil out, and strip-mining everything.
The Earth and most of it's creatures will continue on without us. We will not be wiped out, but our numbers will be pared down. We're at what, almost 7 billion now? Cut that number at least in half to restore some balance to the planet.
When the cities flood, when the droughts come, when the food burns up in the fields and starvation is rampant, when we are resorting to canibalism, there will still be some who deny.
The bible tells the story of Noah, and how he tried to warn others of what was coming. Ironic that most of those that deny what's happening are bible thumpers. Apparently, they've never learned the stories and wouldn't recognize God if he came down and bitch slapped them.
Well mankind, your bitchslapping is coming. You can chose to prepare, or deny. It might take 100 more years, but our numbers will start dropping. We've gone from 3 Billion to 7 Billion in about 40 or 50 years, it'll probably take about 100 years to bring us back to 3 Billion.
But the planet is working on it. Remember how this year started, Earthquake after earthquake, followed by volcano. In two months we'll be discussing a new virulent strain of the flu, and then there will be more shaking, and more violent weather. Maybe we'll even get a nice rock from space. And the oil will run out.
Sure it'll take time, but it's all going to happen.
We're not here forever and we're on our way down from here.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
ClimateGate.
'nuff said.
It may be that the majority of Man Made global warming deniers don't deny warming at all. But that strawman is hardly non-existent. Last winter every time it got cold or snowed Faux news idiot Sean Hannity would use the event as a demonstration of the non-existence of global warming.
Oh man, until I heard Canada was onboard, I wasn't sure if I could trust this!
Seriously, what the hell kind of editorializing was that? I have no issue with Canada, just seems like a really random thing to emphasize since Canada isn't known as some kind of groundbreaker in the field of climate research (or am I wrong there?).
Even if temperature did increase and global warming exists... that does not mean that greenhouse gases are the cause. Correlation is not causation... if it was then everyone would accept that temperature variation is a result of cyclical solar activity. Those who push man-made global warming need you to beleive you can make a difference... otherwise why would you buy their overpriced crap? The truth is that the sun controls temperatures on earth... as solar activity increases so does temperature... if solar activity decreases then temperatures will go down even if greenhouse gases increase. Those pushing greenhouse gases as a cause rather than solar cycles are either unwilling to look at the evidence OR trying to make a buck off the yuppies.
more like undeniablegate IMHO lol...
Why the hell is this never discussed as a serious option?
If humans are capable of destroying the planet accidentally, surely they are capable of saving it deliberately. It's a worthy goal, and it has the wonderful side effect of being applicable to climate manipulation of other planets, so we can go there and live comfortably.
My biggest gripe about this whole debate is the willingness of participants to think small. Forget about whether your SUV is too big or you are not "green" enough. Let's just fix things properly by manipulating our environment deliberately and move on to growing in our abilities as we should be.
The time period during which we've been collecting data is insignificant compared to the age of the earth
How exactly is that relevant for the current issue ?
It's like saying that it's okay if New Orleans gets flooded, because, after all, millions of years ago, that place was under water anyway.
And yes, everybody in the field knows that H2O is a powerful greenhouse gas. We also know that CO2 is the second largest greenhouse gas, and that we've added about 35% since the industrial age. We have not a similar influence on water vapour, except that increases in sea temperature due to CO2 greenhouse effect causes higher evaporation rates, and increased atmospheric water vapour.
...can the ship be righted?
Personally I think arguing over global climate change is a red herring. Do we really need an excuse to advocate "green" technologies?
Shouldn't the fact that we would have cleaner air (eg. less smog), and cleaner water (eg. less spills) be enough?
The fact that industry is willing to pollute the air, water, and land to save a buck and use the threat of job losses to keep the populace from demanding stricter environmental regulations should be a huge clue on why we are even having this global climate change debate. It keeps us busy, and as long as we are busy trying to define what global climate change is, we are distracted from the real meat of the argument which is why are we living in this pollution now?
I'm not a registered tree hugger, but even I question why our energy and environmental policies hasn't evolved with the rest of our technological achievements. It becomes more evident by the day that we are keeping a very old and harmful power, industrial, and transportation system just to keep the current revenue generators fat and happy.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
[We have NO] agreement on a model for generating a single figure of merit for "earth temperature" it is absurd to discuss changes in fractions of a degree. There are too many parameters in the definition, and it's easy to get any result you want by playing with the definition of "temperature." There are no continuous measures from 1880 to 2000; all have to have "adjustments" and the adjustments are often larger than the error margins.
[other post}
You can prove anything if you can make up your data, and just about anything if you can select your data. But it isn't science. - Jerry Pournelle
Also, how can we trust computer models when the models can't and don't account for Medieval Warm and the Little Ice Age, we have little data from the Southern Hemisphere prior to the Voyages of Discovery. If the hypothesis cant even be corroborated with the historical data we DO have with the tools used, how dependable are they for prediction?
AGW is not a theory, it is a hypothesis at best, and we lack sufficient data to even falsify it, let alone promote it as a forgone conclusion.
How about something with a more climatic timespan:
http://www.longrangeweather.com/global_temperatures.htm If the data are correct, it looks like:
A) consecutive cold periods and warm periods appear to be getting closer together.
B) cold cycles look to be trending cooler.
C) warm cycles also appear to trend slightly cooler and terminating more abruptly.
See also previous discussion on the absurdity of their claims: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1629458&cid=31961726
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
And the only conceivable policy response is to empower yet another massive bureaucracy to add even more regulations over every aspect of the world economy.
I think the reason is because some people see global warming as a liberal issue. If you are predetermined to appose anything that you see as liberal, and you see global warming as liberal, you are going to deny it regardless of whether it is true or not.
The response is what you see on this thread. Lots of people saying "Of course the world is warming. There's no debate about that, the only debate is whether humans are the cause."
Of course if next year is colder than this year, they'll be back to "Global warming isn't real."
eponymous howard here,
question: Assuming global warming is occuring, is this bad and why? What is the ideal temperature for our planet, is there some consensus on this?
In fact the ONLY net energy input into our system is fossil fuel burning. But even that was produced by energy over millions of years. When it's all gone, that extra source of heat will be gone.
Do the words "closed system" mean anything to you?
Uhm, yeah... Take a look in the sky. See that great big ball of flame? *shrug* Fossil fuel burning is the controlled use of energy that originated from the sun.
OK, I really wouldn't care about the controversy about causation here (personally I'm agnostic about that), if only it would drive investment into developing technology which humanity is going to need eventually anyway.
Trying to solve the problem with a space sunshade would hopefully improve our ability to engineer large structures in space and improve the chances we might be able to survive there and eventually migrate to other parts of the solar system or even other solar systems. Better not to have all one's eggs in the same basket, eh?
Trying to attain a new relatively clean power source (some kind of fusion, preferably aneutronic) would probably improve our ability to survive in general, also, even if the greenhouse gases aren't the problem. Assuming it wouldn't make it trivial for Joe Normal to build extremely powerful and destructive weapons, of course.
and you did such a great job in your post.
Undeniable.
Because,
I deny!
That's right- I'm a denier!
And, I can say whatever I like with no fear of repercussions, because no one will read it anyway!
Ahahahahahahaha!
Stupid modders.
Let's assume for a moment that the world is 1/5 of a degree warmer than it was a few decades ago, and that this is causing glacial melt. Here's my question to you all:
So what?
Climate is not a constant. Never has been, never will be, and the variation has been a whole lot more than 1/5 of a degree. CO2 levels and global average temperatures have been higher and lower at many points in history, and we didn't magically turn into Venus or Mars. There have been times when the icecaps disappeared, and life somehow went on. Sea levels have varied by hundreds of feet, without Americans to blame for, well, everything. There have also been ice ages, and somehow the world didn't end.
So what?
There will be winners as well as losers. Canadians and Russians should be happy, as this will result in much longer growing seasons and more arable lands for them. They will be the breadbaskets of the world. And if this doesn't happen, if we decide that the current climate is decreed to never be allowed to change again, will there be a demand for subsidies for what "might have been"? Lack-of-CO2 credits?
So here's a question. If civilization had arisen 10,000 years earlier, and someone observed how quickly the ice sheets were retreating, would there be a clamor to protect the glaciers that blanketed pretty much everything north of 50 degrees latitude? Would THAT climate change be seen as the Armageddon that the proposed climate change is being presented as? Would rising sea levels lead to a frothing panic about the loss of the Bering land bridge?
So once again, I ask: If the climate is changing, so what? Climate is not a constant, things aren't automatically evil just because it's a human doing it, and I fail to see how this is any different from any other climate change in the four billion year history of everything on Earth.
Mod this down because I don't agree with you. It's the Slashdot definition of "fair". I just hope none of you are ever on a jury with the opportunity to destroy someone's life if you don't like their politics or religion or hairstyle or something.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
Is the solution to dump bazillions of barrels of oil and chemicals into the oceans? Could have fooled me...
I have no problems with the whole 'global warming' as it actually applies to the world, but I don't buy for a second that our govt(s) give a flying shit about it. Actually that's wrong, they do care in so far as they can milk it for cash and power like anything else.
Who pollutes more? All the little people with no power or money, or all the big corporations and big Govt? Yea...when the solution comes from someone other than those last 2, then I may give a shit.
Yikes, start packing for doomsday for the soothsayers are out and about using The Force to intensify propaganda after their self inflicted Climate Gate revelations of their Alarmist Scientist Core Cult members improprieties. Pack light though, it's going to be a scorcher, allegedly. Hawaii at the North Pole. I really am beginning to wonder if all these alarmist scientists are just rapture christians firing things up for the coming end times? Nostradamus still beats any climate scientist with soothsaying doomsday predictions. Hands down, and he's been dead a long time. Now how can that be? Let's explore the science that prevents predictions of complex systems.
It's not possible to predict the future with crummy or even excellent computer models. Do you really think that a chaotic system such as the weather is going to follow your computer model? Nature followers her own rules and it's the height of arrogance to think that we can model what is going to happen a 100 years from now. Besides Wolfram proved mathematically that simple systems (which weather and climate systems are) generate their own internal randomness that is impossible to predict, you must watch them unfold on the universal computer known as the objective reality of Nature where we actually exist. Wolfram shows in A New Kind of Science that these systems are highly complex, as complex as any complex system, and that in order to know what they will do next you have to observe them unfold in real time. No two ways around it.
Wolfram also shows that Natural systems are more like cellular automata than linear equations. Any climate scientists that fail to consider these and other facts is simply deluding himself and conning others with his belief stricken delusion that their climate models can be predictive.
At each decision point with a climate model all paths must be taken rather than just one. This leads to a combinatorial explosion of possible futures that are still an infinitesimal subset of all the actually possible futures that Nature could do. Oh, and many members of that infinitesimal subset are not actually possible in Nature since Nature doesn't follow the binary decisions of a climate scientists computer program. It's possible that this infinitesimal subset of simulated posisble futures generated by climate computer models actually contains zero elements that are actually possible in the objective reality of Nature.
Oh, and it's an extraordinary claim that computer climate models can accurately predict the future. It's up to the authors of these alleged climate models to provide hard evidence, extraordinary evidence, that their computer models in fact can predict anything accurately at all.
There's about 130 years of climate temperature data. Input the first 100 into any of the climate models and have them predict the next thirty years up to the present. If any of these climate models even come close to producing the same temperature patterns as recorded in the manipulated observed data then they might have a leg to stand on. Having talked with climate modelers directly they refuse to perform this test to validate their alleged climate models. It's no wonder why, you try to accurately predict the future of the weather and the climate 30 years out. Good luck with that.
As for the rest of it, the bad statistical correlation between CO2 and Temperature is just that, a bad statistical correlation. The Natural Null Hypothesis correlates much better ( http://tinyurl.com/NaturalNullHypothesis-pdf ), and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) correlates even slightly better.
So while there is a slight upward warming trend with a 60 year sin wave oscillation in the temperature records from 130 years ago to the present coming out of the The Little Ice Age there hasn't been any change due to the small increase in atmospheric CO2 levels since WWII ~65 years ago. The Natural Null Hypothesis shows no deviation due to CO2 as would have been expected if CO2 impacts
the cows are guilty
As shown by this guy, weather stations are positioned next to asphalt parking lots and air conditioner units which produce an unnaturally high reading. So until these monitors are placed elsewhere we will be getting reading that can be several degrees higher than the actual temperature, which will skew the results upwards.
So there may actually be man made global warming, but the man made part is the data...
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Seriously, Uneducated people aren't going to see it and educated people will see the agenda in the way the graphs are displayed.
Remember, most people don't question Global Warming, they question AGW Theory.
If the idea is to sell AGW Theory, then the graphs should show how we are deviating from the trend of warming since the last Ice Age.
When I look at the graphs (because of the focus on absolute increase) it appears to give ammo to AGW Deniers.
"Compiled by more than 300 scientists from 48 countries, including Canada"
I like that since Canada says so, it is so. Canada the Oprah of nations!
Visit my Forums?
Recording weather and temperatures has only been done for the last 150 years at most. We don't know what the weather was like 1000 years ago. We have computers that can calculate and model the climate but it can't be held as truth. We speculate that the Earth's climate goes in circles. It warms and cools. We even have proof of ice ages. The average temperature deviation across the globe is +2.8 degrees. That doesn't prove anything. The Earth is warming up slightly. Don't get your Al Gore panties in an uproar.
Next I offer you the population of the Earth. Of the 30% of the planet that is land mass only 10 to 15% of it has been industrialized. The other 85% of it has never see industrial pollutants or the effects of them. While certain cities like LA, New York, Chicago show signs of badly polluted environments I'm pretty sure there is nothing that is irreversible. You Hippies underestimate the ability of complexed environments to heal themselves. Sure LA is bad but if you forced everyone out for 10 years I promise you that you'd see huge environmental changes. Now I realize convincing people to leave LA isn't going to happen but that is the beauty of having less then 15% of the land mass industrialized. This world isn't as bad as what people want you to think it is yet. Even at the pace we are on, it won't be close to bad even after I great-grand children are dead.
I'm not saying we shouldn't continue to do things in a more green way but I am tired of hearing the doomsday message from people who have no clue what they are talking about.
hey that was great!
in return, I'd like to recommend another little webcomic that I think you may like that has a somewhat different take on the subject.
Global Warming is undeniable? In a world with Faux News and Rush Limbaugh, that is a big statement, and I think they'll take it as a challenge they can win.
We've removed carbon sequestered in the ground and burned it into the atmosphere, increasing atmospheric CO2 by 36% over 1832 levels. How's that for power over the entire planet?
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
It's "faith".
Just 6 months ago or so, there was a bunch of "we're in a short-term cooling trend which will last about 10-15 years."
Fine, put me in the Denier camp. This sounds an awful lot like doubling-down on scariness when the climate scientists have almost lost public opinion.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
So far all I've seen is anecdotal evidence, fabricated evidence, and manipulated evidence. Oh, an conspiracy to suppress contradictory evidence. Now we have "even more" evidence. I wonder which of the above categories it'll fall into?
I'm willing to entertain the notion that we might be directly influencing global temperatures in a way the planet can't deal with. But I'm getting tired of the newest "Flat Earth" philosophy of the Global Warming alarmists. It's "undeniable", list like the Earth being flat was. Why? Because there's no funding for "Global Normal" research.
Anyone with any reasonable intelligence is going to question the computer models moving forward, and ask you "how is this any different than global cooling in the 70s?"
Anyone with reading comprehension, the ability to use Google, and some cognitive skills that enable them to avoid certain intellectual event horizons is going to already be familiar with and likely satisfied by a number of available answers to "how is this any different than global cooling in the 70s?"
Tweet, tweet.
And even those gotchas only apply if you assume it's even possible to predict the climate.
The sad thing is, about the past, the IPCC is right : the climate *did* warm (mostly) because of co2 increases. Heh, guess I don't even disagree that "global warming is undeniable". But the IPCC is also absurdly wrong, relying instead on a known wrong intuition : this does not mean that a further rise in athmospheric co2 will increase warming. In fact any change could have any effect, so every policy, from let's pollute because we can to killing of the entire human species has exactly the same chances of influencing the climate. Quite frankly, anyone who's had a theoretical mathematics class at any university should know this, but of course ... there's politics. Blacks and whites have to be the same, even when we're talking about melanine levels, all religions and ethnicities have to be the same, even when talking about page count of important documents, science can answer *any* question 100% correctly to infinite levels of accuracy and anyone who believes otherwise is a racist. (get that ? you're a racist if you point out that the bible, as compared to other religions, is a very long book indeed. Or the fact that more people die from medical mistakes than that have their lives saved by medical intervention. What you are when you point out obvious flaws in the foundation of "climate theory" is simpler : unemployed and unemployable. And God forbid any publication on the "deniers" list should publish a quote from you that could, twisted appropriately, indicate you do not agree to doctrine)
So just putting it here, getting it off my chest : why is predictability an assumption ? Because, mathematically, some things are what is called "chaotic". Which means 2 things :
1) it is perfectly possible to predict the past, and to explain it. Down to the last tinyest little detail you can explain every variation in the graphs
2) said fabulous, genius, nobel-prize-winning theories (or other theories), will fail 5 minutes into the future. Whoops.
Climate is ... chaotic. Meaning it has the two properties above.
And despite seemingly credible sources claiming the opposite (hello "newscientist", "nature" ?), chaotic systems persistently refuse to bow to statistics (if they didn't that would be a contradiction of chaos). There are weaker forms of "chaotic behavior" that can be predicted by statistics. However, they've been tested and ... well the weather and climate are really fully chaotic.
Seemingly absurdly simple questions turn out to be chaotic (the coast of Britain to name a famous paper). How long is the coast of Britain ? Depends on your measurement device. Measure with a ruler 1000 km long and it will be seriously shorter than the English claim. Measure with a ruler of 1 cm and it will be seriously longer than the English claim. By varying the ruler's length you can make the coast of Britain any length, but it is impossible to predict what difference a change in ruler length will do to the length of the coast. The motion of the planets (the famous "three body problem"), another chaotic problem.
The consequences of this chaos conept are vehemently dismissed as total crap, even when it's pretty old and well known mathematical theory. The moon could fly away from the earth tomorrow (and while it probably won't happen tomorrow, the chances that it will eventually happen are very good indeed). That's a trivial consequence of the three body problem. Worse : we can't predict when this event will happen (just like we can't predict the motions of comets and meteorites accurate enough to decide if they'll hit earth until they're right on top of us). At best we can hope for a few days' warning. Despite the seeming absurdity one day the papers will announce "the moon left us, tidal currents slowing to a halt", and this will just happen some day, nobody seeing it coming (or at least nobody correctly predicting when it'll happen).
East Houston stinks because of the Brown Paper Company. Papermaking is very stinky because they boil wood in Sulfuric Acid to break it down into pulp more quickly. Hydrogen sulfide is released in the process and that stinks.
Ron White was sued when he pointed this out, and now he does a good 5 minutes of material about it. "When the wind is right, 2 million people can smell the [Houston] mill. I'm just saying, if someone were playing music that 2 million people could hear, they'd tell 'em to turn it the fuck off!"
The extremely annoying part is that the acid is not strictly required to make paper--it can be boiled in plain old water. But that would take longer and therefore cost more. So it's better to just render an entire city horrible than spend an extra buck for a ream at Staples.
Standard reporting technique to point out the reporting nation's involvement in an international effort.
Thought thinks itself.
Is it wrong to say I don't care much about whether it is warming up or not? The world is over-populated and humans are basically a virus infecting the planet through various ways. My wife and I aren't having kids so we only need to get another 50 years or so out of this planet.
I can see why people who may have a vested interest in the planet would want to preserve it....and to them I say "Good luck with that!"
All the king's horses and all the King's shills, can't put this piece of grifting together again. That's about that needs to be said. /END THREAD
1. CO2 is a greenhouse gas
2. Atmospheric CO2 has increased by 36% since 1832
3. US oil production peaked almost 40 years ago
4. India and China are adding millions of new cars on their roads every year, increasing worldwide demand for oil. China recently surpassed the US as the world biggest automobile market, and they still have plenty of potential to expand
5. Spending our dollars to import oil is hurting our economy
6. When the oil industry swore less than a year ago that offshore drilling was completely safe, they were lying
7. Alternatives to burning carbon for energy exist and grow cheaper and more efficient each year
8. Mining coal is dangerous (collapsed mines) and incredibly destructive(mountain top removal)
Given all the above, I can't see any logical argument against reducing our carbon usage, even if you don't believe in AGW.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
I am in the "We must FIX this" camp. Not because I have anything against higher temperatures... but because I am afraid of giant lizards. If the average temperature goes up, cold-blooded animals can become larger. And I really don't want giant alligators and snakes around me.
Wait a minute -- I'll be dead. Never mind.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
So they are calling it "global warming" again? I was just getting used to them changing from "global warming" to "climate change." Because the masses were not buying it. And man made? Its ego, plain and simple. The elites of this planet cannot contemplate being out of control. Or heaven forbid the masses being out of their control. And the rules and regulations from "controlling climate change" will keep the little people in line.
Including Canada makes all the difference!
Clearly, we must use the traditional description, and say that they have "huge tracts of land". That should avoid any dirty connotations, if you know what I mean.
No one's ever denied that it's getting warmer. The debate is over what's causing it.
Since the glaciers receded from North America and Europe 20000 years ago and have never stopped receding (which I learned in elementary school), my money is on the natural cycle theory.
See it's simple actually. No PhD scientists necessary. There's no way the glaciers, in what became the USA and Europe, melted because of anyone's v8 powered SUV (or even millions of them). FYI France used to be under several kilometers of ice. So did New York State.
Put that in your AGW pipe and smoke it. You'd have to be an idiot to believe that man is causing this. It is a cycle that was going on long before we came, and will still be going on after we're extinct. Incidentally, NASA has recorded warming trends on every planet in the solar system. I'm sure man caused that too. /sarcasm off
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
Fossil fuel burning is the controlled use of energy that originated from the sun.
No it's the difference between burning a candle 24/7 for a year, or setting off one stick of dynamite. Our current use of fossil fuel is the stick of dynamite. We're burning up millions of year's worth of stored energy in a few hundred years. Sure, you don't want to be around the stick of dynamite when it goes off - but it's not something that lasts forever. And fossil fuels won't last forever either. I'm not really worried, but the sheep love end of the world fantasies.
We don't disagree.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I suspect that this will be the sequence of events with the attendant burden of proof required before serious action is taken:
1. Global warming trend is happening.
2. The warming trend is anthropogenic, ie. human-caused, and specifically caused by factors A, B, C, etc.
3. The warming is actually disastrous, and will lead to loss of life and/or livelihood.
4. Addressing the symptoms of the warming after the fact will cost more and be less effective than attempting to curb the warming in the first place.
At this point, #1 is definitely irrefutable. There are some hold outs for #2, but I think the evidence is sufficient to conclude we're causing warming. #3 is pure speculation, but based on reasonable arguments; still, far from a given. #4 is almost beyond our ability to speculate, though there are some proposals to reverse some of the expected warming effects.
I think there are plenty of other good reasons to change the way we regulate environmental impact, eg. poor air quality has been killing thousands of people a year for decades. But anything less than the irrefutable evidence on all 4 of the above points will fail to convince someone. I suspect at least the first 3 will be required to galvanize enough people to make definitive political moves to addressing these issues.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
http://www.physorg.com/news199005915.html
Reduce the CO2 level to pre-industrial levels in 10 years via solar energy, create insane amounts of very pure carbon that can be used in the manufacture of liquid fuels and to generate electricity the traditional, coal-fired way, but without the mercury, radioactives, etc. Just need some lithium and some time to construct it. Should produced about $15 trillion worth of high-quality (zero sulphur) carbon fuel... pay for itself, too.
One of the frustrating things I found when I was a political activist was that I would talk to someone, explain my position, and the person I was talking to would lean in, and say, "Sure, you and I understand this, but most people just don't get it."
And the next person I would talk to would say the same thing. And the next. And the next. And so on.
The list of "apathetic" responses you gave? Lots of people are trying to reduce their impact on the environment, in similar ways. In fact, you probably picked up a lot of what you're doing from the people around you.
The political system is messed up, the economy is messed up. Most people know this. There's disagreement about the details.
There are also idiots and paid operatives who post crap in threads like these. They represent a much smaller proportion of humanity than they make themselves appear.
It's undeniable if you are sane. If you are not sane, then ...
What I really have trouble grasping is that over the last three months, we've watched one (1) oil well in the Gulf of Mexico cause widespread devastation. Few people would deny the ecological effects of this one well.
Now replace that one well with TEN THOUSAND, and replace those ninety days with ninety YEARS, and take all of that oil and burn it in the atmosphere. Add to that another two centuries worth of coal burning, and you start to grasp the amount of carbon we've placed into the atmosphere. What amazes me is not that the atmospheric levels of CO2 have risen, but that our planet has absorbed enough of that pollution that we can still breath.
Given the inertia and resistance to CO2 mitigation, I think our only real hope is that the oil runs out sooner, rather than later, because we seem to be unredeemably addicted to burning it.
--- Generation X: The first generation to have SIG lines inferior to their parents... ---
Well, the good news is the Earth has lived through 4.5 billion years of "climate change". I'm sure it will be around for a lot more changes. It really is a blip on the radar for old "Mother Earth"........
Real men don't need signitures!!!
As far as they're concerned.
Imagine if the /. crowd believed the climate scientists on the issue of global warming, because, well, they are the *experts* in their field.
And further imagine that the /. crowd believed the Catholic Church on the existence of God, because, well, they are the *experts* in their field.
Ha! I jest. But you realize that the moment you get the general population to accept science without question, you also pave the way to acceptance of other beliefs without question.
I have downloaded the datasets the IPCC used in their report. And I do see the downward trend in the past ten years, when taking into account the 11 year solar cycle.
I know someone out there will certainly tell me I'm wrong; but it would be far more helpful to post the code used to arrive at your conclusion. I really haven't done much with the data except some very elementary statistics in C. In a world where everyone seems to be an expert on global warming, at least one of you could post code, which, when run with the IPCC dataset would produce the global warming trend everyone seems to believe is happening.
Then, I think we can have a fruitful discussion.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Is this irony? I am not sure. I am from the US, and up until now I always thought it was just a British myth that we didnt get irony. I am confused, so maybe the Brits are right.
Ok, if you're really curious as to why people doubt AGW, take a moment to realize exactly what its proponents are saying. "Undeniable" implies that the science has proven something. Science doesn't do that. While I'd normally overlook that error by a layman, it's a pretty good indicator that they don't understand the science, and thus they have no idea whether or not the science supports their opinion. Having a climatologist explain it is a little better, but scientists (of any sort) always have opinions about nature that data doesn't support, hence why they gather the data to support or refute those hypotheses (most are wrong). There's also the fact that randomized, blinded trials should be taken with a grain of salt, so climatology as a science is fairly weak. They're making lots of progress, but I wouldn't make important decisions based on their findings at this point. (Keyword: "I", you are free to make your own choices, but I'd prefer if my cooperation isn't forced.)
Second, there's a massive logical non-sequitur between the assessment and plan. If you wake me up to tell me my house is on fire, then suggest I use a squirt gun against it, then I'll assume you're crazy and go back to bed. If post-industrial CO2 levels are causing climate change, then we need to return them to pre-industrial levels. Every year we increase the CO2 level, and cap-and-trade will still allow this. What we'd need to do is cut our emissions even lower than pre-industrial levels so the CO2 level will actually be reduced. (I also like to be optimistic, but not delusional. The only way we'd do this is if it were already too late, so it's kinda pointless IMO.)
Of course, that's ignoring the positive feedback loops that have been triggered (e.g. albedo), and I find the belief that we can control the climate (i.e. stabilize an ever-changing system at the temperature we want) to be optimistic at best. There's also the fact that massive economic hardship will cause a lot more human suffering and death than a change in climate. Sure, it'll cause a mass extinction, but that's not even close to an apocalypse, and humans have proven their adaptability. OTOH, I have a tough time accepting that the lives of a large number of poor people in the developing world are worth more than our precious biodiversity. Rather than wade through the exaggeration and outright lies by both sides, and then grapple with that decision, I've just become jaded about the whole thing.
So when I break it down, the global warming argument is one of many steps, which are not all the same evidence wise:
1) The world is getting warmer over all.
This one seems pretty solid, though I have to say I find a disturbing number of gaps, problems, and corrections in the record. Regardless, I think the evidence is pretty good here.
2) Humans are the primary cause for this warming.
This is shakier. I understand the basic theory, but it doesn't hold up so well given other evidence. For example CO2 only absorbs 3 bands of IR, not a wide range and so on. I'll file this one as a "Maybe, but the theory needs some work."
3) This warming will have catastrophic results. Even a small amount will be catastrophic.
Sorry, but I do not see the evidence for this. I'm not saying people haven't linked things that make these claims, I am saying I find the basis of their arguments to be unconvincing. This is speculative at best in my opinion.
4) Humans have the ability to stop this warming, without creating greater harm.
Here I have to call bullshit. Even many people who are proponents of the first three points say that some cutbacks ala Kyoto won't do shit except delay things for a bit maybe. They say a full deindustralization would be needed. Well we know the consequences in terms of loss of life and so on from a pre industrial society, having had one for many centuries, I don't believe that is acceptable.
5) That stopping this is the right answer, rather than focusing on surviving. Implied in this is that the world was effectively steady state before humans came around.
This is complete BS. As best we can tell the Earth has been much hotter and cooler in the past, and the climate always varies, cycles within cycles. That being the case, if a small amount of temperature change is catastrophic our efforts should not be spent on learning why this is happening, but on how to survive the change. Even were this one man made and preventable, the next one might not be. So, better to spend resources becoming resilient so that a change doesn't kill us.
That is a problem I've always had. The GW argument is often presented as a simple thing, and you are expected to accept all the premises and all the conclusions or you are a "denialist". There's no acknowledgment that it is a multi-level argument, and no allowance that someone should be able to have a different point of view as to what should be done.
It becomes a religious argument. You accept everything, as a given, with no argument or you are shouted down and cast out. You aren't allowed to agree with somethings and reject others. You are with us, or you are a denalist kind of thing. That shit is what you see in church, not in science.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Of course plenty of people deny evolution, too, so whatever.
Just wondering.
What makes Canada special among these 48 countries?
http://www.stolk.org/tlctc
Beleive us, we didn't fake the data *this* time.
I think you mean "Oops."
This seems to be a key point that is obfuscated or ignored by deniers. That there are gigantic sinks of fossil carbon, in addition to the fossil fuels we bring up, that have been sequestered safely under the conditions prevelant during all of human civilization. Many of these are predicted to, or have already begun being released, as global temperatures rise. Positive feedback means the more it happens, the more it will happen, until the system spirals wildly out of control.
Example of this are the permafrost areas at the edge of the Northern polar region, the Methane Clathrates, reversal of the Amazon rain forest from a carbon sink to a source, and the greater absorption of heat from sunlight as melting ice and snow changes Earth's albedo.
And here is what is meant by irreversible--that these feedback loops will accelerate and cause massive disruption in time scales directly relevant to human civilization--i.e. the next few centuries, at least. Deniers like to bring up crap about there having been massive changes in temp all throughout the billions of years of the fossil record, so we should all relax. That is true, but in each case, these changes caused massive dislocation or extinction of the dominant plant and animal species of that time.
We're talking about what happens to this particular race of animals that is here spending its time reading and writing Slashdot postings. It is disingenuous for deniers to claim some lofty halo of wisdom that transcends mere human-centric concerns, especially when, for the most vociferous of them (such as the paid lackeys of Exxon-Mobile), they are more concerned with making a buck in the next fiscal quarter than they are about the concerns of even the humans alive today, much less those not yet born.
48 countries including Canada? Why did they say that? Has Canada been demoted in countryship? Is that like 9 planets, including Pluto? Or maybe Canadian research is suspect as there are too many polar bears, or they stand to gain a lot of banana plantation business with global warming...
Your Mom is "undeniable"
She's hot too!
Here is the yearly climate chart for my region.
As is easily seen, it's been colder than normal for the last six months, we're ahead on precipitation, February was unusually cold in a very consistent streak, snow continued into late May, quite late as compared to normal, and here, in late July, the temperatures continue to reach below normal ranges consistently, with only occasional excursions above.
One region does not by any means a global climate make, but I'm afraid I still have to take issue with "it's been a scorcher for folks all around the world." Not in this part of the world, it hasn't.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
LOL, yep. Sigh, not my morning, typographically.
Currently hooked on AMP
1) Though it is a massive percentile increase, it still accounts for a minor part of the total gases in the air. When you add up the gasses in dry air it is 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, 1% argon. You'll notice that is 100%, since the amount of other gasses are so small you have to increase precision for them to even show. In the case of CO2, it is about 0.04%. In actual air, this is even less since it contains water vapour to the tune of around 1%.
2) CO2 is not a broad band IR absorber. It only strongly absorbs on two frequencies, and a small amount on two more (http://webbook.nist.gov/cgi/cbook.cgi?ID=C124389&Units=SI&Type=IR-SPEC&Index=1#IR-SPEC if you are wondering). As such the amount of energy it can absorb is questionable. This is especially true as opposed to water vapour, which absorbs a whole lot more IR.
3) Looking at the long terms historical record, which admittedly is some guess work, CO2 seems to lag temperature, not lead it. If CO2 is a major cause of warming, you'd expect it to lead warming (CO2 goes up, warming follows). As it stands the data is confusing.
4) The theories seem to leave a major factor unaccounted for, that being the sun. As the sun is the source of basically all of our surface heat, its output would have a heavy effect on the over all temperature. Thus any theory for warming would need to measure and account for solar output.
I'm not saying this "proves global warming is wrong" or any crap like that, I'm saying that these are reasons why people find it hard to believe it is such a problem. Saying "CO2 absorbs IR and is increasing thus must be causing warming," isn't well developed enough. It's a complex system, you need to account for everything. That there is an increase in CO2 and warming for sure merits investigation. When there's a correlation, causation is often found. However there are other things that need to be accounted for.
Idiots on slashdot all believe it.
...Compiled by more than 300 scientists from 48 countries, including Canada...
Are we supposed to be impressed by the Canada part? Ooh, they brought in Canadian scientists, this must be serious!
I guess they better tell all of the false scientists who deny it. Have some perspective... http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/ice_ages.html
I don't believe in karma, I just call it like I see it.
Please explain how a species that survives everywhere from the equator to the north pole is threatened by a 1 degree climate change over a century.
And if there's no way to stop it, we can end the conversation and go back to burning more organics? ;^)
It's funny, but in a way, the non-anthropogenic argument is a bit like someone saying "STFU." From a climate activist's viewpoint, it must seem almost nihilistic.
I'm neither a denier nor an activist. I believe a lot of people are upset with the fact that a minority group of scientists (relative to non-scientist humanity, not within the field) who are just laying groundwork in the study of global climate systems are proposing massive global solutions that will require suffering, perhaps wars, and possibly won't work.
People are frightened and they want to be very sure that it is as bad as the activists say it is, and those activists can't provide anything more than tree rings and ice cores to back up their claims beyond the past few hundred years of climate data collection from the modern scientific era.
The "hockey stick" is unconvincing, because while we're warming, there's no correlative temperature hockey stick proportional to the carbon. Never mind that the presumption is baloney, it's what people see.
The concern is emotional. It's is hard to get people to move in such drastic unity over a collection of data. They look around and say, "Nothing has changed. Why should I?"
Plus, there's a basic logical failure in a position of "activism," that precedes facts and cause. You have to be able to act, and that action has to be effective. If we (the Western world) stop burning fossils, is China going to? Will India? How about any country in Africa? If not, are we willing to invade and shut down any country that refuses to do so?
What are the tanks going to burn? ;^)
We are a proto-global society, built on oil. We simply don't have the political apparatus to extract from that, regardless of the validity of the research. Activists who ask for global change on climate are politically clueless.
While a global climate exists, a global government does not.
We will be well beyond peak oil before we can pull it together. The oil will be burned, because if we don't, it makes it cheaper for someone else, and they will consume it. The developing world wants our lifestyle. It's all going to burn, at the same rate, no matter how we shoot ourselves in the foot.
That's not nihilism, it's a political analysis of the situation. The best way to slow the process is to invent technologies that get more work with less carbon production. Capping carbon will not help, because someone else in the developing world will gladly use the "bad technologies" that produce more carbon and fill in the gaps with the cheaper fuels. It destabilizes the oil market, and drives up consumption in developing countries.
My alternative: Invent and refine better engines and ramp up alternatives. Fast. Put the money into research. Don't try to draw it from carbon caps, though. That's destabilizing. Here in America? Give it to the NSF and industry spend it. It's a good idea whether we're a cause of warming or not. Plus, if we succeed, we get rich, we get new industries, and we all get to live in peace (hopefully).
--
Toro
I thought weather is not climate.
I remember hearing that a lot in 2009. Don't hear it so much this year, for some reason.
Well the reason you heard it then was because many people's subjective experience of the weather was different than the climate. People in the northern hemisphere were getting cold weather and lots of snow, and saying "Ha! Global Warming my ass!" in which case it's important to note that weather and climate are not the same, and increasing global temperatures aren't necessarily going to mean that there will be higher temperatures in a particular region. 2009 was nevertheless one of the hottest years on record.
But then again, sometimes they do coincide. So far, it's been a very hot summer for us in the Northern Hemisphere, and hey, the global temperatures are also higher than ever before. So real reason to point it out; local weather and global climate happen to have coincided for the people who are having the conversation (mostly US and Europe here on /.).
Weather still doesn't prove climate change, if that was your point. Global warming is indicated by record high global temperature, not our hot summer. Notice that the global average is a record high, even though half the planet is in the cold part of their year.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was an Argentinian blog where the "Global warming my ass, look outside!" conversation was happening right now.
But it's the globe as a whole that matters.
The enemies of Democracy are
Governments can only do two things, tax or not-tax, offer a credit. They both are examples of social engineering, but one is a lot more palatable to people than the other, because it really is the carrot-reward, or stick-punish system. that's it.
A hypothetical then to achieve this goal of cleaner renewable energy sources, by reducing demand and use of the dirtier sources.
Say you are joe blow, make fifty grand a year, and after all other deductions and whatnot, the government still walks off with five grand every year. On top of that, you buy stuff, stuff that uses energy to get made, including a lot of nasty coal that stinks up the air and has a negative effect on climate and so on, all in all, we agree it is bad news in mass quantities..
A carbon tax increases what you have to pay, this is the main point of it, increase the costs to discourage use. These companies are in no manner going to eat any new tax, they just will pass it on to the end user. Nature of the beast. OK, that is the stick method. You are still out five grand taxes, plus now a lot of your stuff costs more, so you went negative after this new carbon tax gets put in. And all the coal is still being burnt.
Now, the carrot method. The government offers a five grand tax credit for *you* to use for personal alternative energy stuff, or perhaps for retrofitting a lot more insulation or what not. So now you have a choice, let the government take that five grand, or you get to spend it, and directly improve your economic and comfort bottom line, whilst also doing your personal fair share of improving the environment.
Which would you pick then? I know I'd take the tax credit over the carbon tax and the rising cost of goods. I think most people would, and it would probably result in much faster uptake and use of the alternative cleaner and more long term carbon neutral methods.
Now say the same five grand credit was pro rated, and you could use it for five to ten years. Now you are talking some serious loot, at ten years, that's a *fifty grand* solar system (random example there)for your house you could get that would rock, this directly would eliminate all that amount of coal burning that your previous demand was responsible for, it would add to the demand in general for panels and increase competition and economies of scale (with millions of people taking advantage of that credit), and keep reducing that coal demand for the life of the system, currently 25-30 years and still then at 80% (most new panels today). In other words, a lot. Buhzillions of solar panels would be going up all over, tons of new factories to make them, hundreds of thousands of productive jobs for the factory workers and installers, etc, and the demand for the coal juice would drop exactly as much as the solar production went up, watt hour for watt hour.
To me, I would much prefer the multi year pro rated tax credit, both for individuals and for corporations doing commercial scale (whatever that might be, make it some millions of bucks, 1-5 maybe, the same pro rated for initial deployment), over just slapping a new tax burden on stuff. Both methods are social engineering, this is undebatable, so which suits human nature better and which would be more likely to be adopted at huge scales, and quite willingly and enthusiastically?
We've already seen just partial credits help a lot, these 10-30% credits that exist now, so imagine full 100% multi year pro-rated credits!
I really think it would work a lot better, individuals and companies would just go to the cleaner, more sustainable solutions, given the two choices. With the carbon tax, they are five grand a year, plus rising costs for just about everything, out of pocket..nothing left to invest in cleaner solutions then, they get tapped out, just have to pay more for everything, and all that nasty coal will still get burnt, it just costs more now, but people still need the power, so they will cut someplace else. With the tax, you go broker faster and nothing much happens to the positive for the environment, with the credit, tens of millions go solar (or whatever works for them at their x-y the best).
To prove it they fired every single person who did not agree with them.
The real issue is not global warming. The real issue is population. No matter what you do to control "global warming," it's pointless without measures to control population, and if history is any indication, if we don't control it ourselves, mother nature will gladly step in to take a hand.
I am so sick of this. The debate is not as to the possibility of it warming or not, but to what degree humans are influencing it. 1%? 99%? All we really know is its not 0 and not 100. ANY person who say differently is lying or has an agenda. Ask a geologist for once.
I am actually for global warming. The ice age seem to hit earth every 100k years. At the peak, earth was 2C warmer than today, and trough was 4~8 degrees cooler than today. Glacier covered half of North America. At the end of Younger Dryas period, temperature was increasing 7C in just a few years (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas) Do we really need to care about a +.5C variation?
If we go into another ice age. The world's arable land will dramatically decrease and cause famine and havoc. I am counting the lucky star that our temperature is holding relatively stable. +-.5 C is just noise. Remember the big global cooling scare in the 1970's? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling) Scaring ourselves seem to be a human passion.
While global warming - or at least some kind of significant climate change - is certainly "undeniable" what remains questionable is where exactly is this change coming from?
What is clearly needed is something that says "Every mile driven in an SUV kills a child in Asia." or something like that. With that information, we can start destroying the SUVs and save some children. Without that information or something like it, as we have seen it is very difficult to stir up the SUV-destroying mobs that are waiting on the sidelines.
Similarly, once it is clear there is a causal link between airline flights and climate change maybe the government will step in and cease all passenger air travel. You know, it really isn't necessary - but if it isn't doing any harm why not let it continue? Do we have some numbers of people that will drown because of sea level changes per airline mile flown?
One thing that might help is some sacrificial folks seeking climate martyrdom. Blow up some airliners (on the ground), start burning cars on a large scale. Sure, you might get arrested but the trial could be good PR. As it is today you can expect some of the "climate scientists" to be driving SUVs and flying in airplanes. Heck, Al Gore even has his very own plane. Talk about lack of committment!
Obviously, coal-fired power plants are putting out a lot of CO2 and it would be nice to just turn them off. However, this would be a serious inconvenience for a lot of people. Crushing every SUV and eliminating passenger air travel wouldn't really be that much of an inconvenience, at least compared to turning off some large percentage of the electricity in the US. We aren't going to have any other sources of electricity for a long time - decades, probably. So doing anything about the coal power plants is probably off the table.
I feel certain that until the people convinced of AGW (especially the "A" part of it) start actually walking the talk, the talking part just isn't going to make much of an impact. So far, I haven't heard anyone destroying anything that is destroying the environment in the name of preserving the planet. Let's see some action. Then maybe people will start to take things seriously.
Then again, if the mission is just to push the standard of living back to around 1870 or so (pre-electric), then maybe nobody is really all that committed. In which case, you can expect nothing to get done.
The question was never: is there really global warming. It was instead what is the cause? Is this a bad thing? Can we change it?
" A warmer planet is a better planet for life, period."
Yes, for "life", in general, a warmer planet is "better". On a geological timescale.
Myself, I'm less concerned whether or not something is good for "life" or not, and whether or not it's good for "humans". And some consequences of warming are crop failures. A 2 degree mean global increase in temperature means that, in july and august, in the non-coastal areas of North America, a six degree rise in daytime temperature high.
So it takes very little to have massive, massive crop failures.
And that's if nothing happens to water supplies. OK, some areas, depending on your latitude, might end up with more rainfall. But there's a lot of people, and a lot of farming, in the regions where expanding Hadley cells means more deserts.
Sea level rise - personally, I think the effects of this on coastal cities has been much overblown. The dutch figured out how to build dikes a long time back. However, if you think about the big river deltas of the Yellow or the Yangzee, you have millions of people living within 1 meter of sea level. Oh, and, those millions are frequently farmers who feed billions. Anyway. How much of a sea level rise do you need to destroy an awful lot of rice paddies?
So yeah, in a sense, a warmer planet is "better for life". However, on the much-shorter-timescale of a human lifetime, it's going to be very unpleasant for a few lifetimes.
Oh, and, your argument about "telling a family in Africa that they have to watch their children die of malnourishment", um, that really only makes sense if your budget for combating climate change comes out of your foreign aid budget. Maybe that's how it works in the Free Republic of Ayn Rand-ia, but I don't know of any _real_ countries where it works like that.
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
if we wait for the government to fix global warming we're all doomed. It will be just like the war on drugs and the war on terrorism. There was a war on poverty be we gave up on that 50 years ago.
Hmmm... Anybody keeping track of the checklist of climate-change denier bingo here?
First, we get the "the earth isn't warming. And if it is, it isn't anything humans did. And if it is, it isn't a problem" progression.
Now the AC above me gives us the (so thoroughly debunked I'm not gonna bother searching for links) "in the 70s climate scientists told us the earth was going to cool so it's all a big hoax!" argument.
I have a theory that, the reason a lot of people get so upset about this issue because, when you're trying to have a logical, reasonable discussion with someone, and you realize, they aren't having a discussion at all, they're doing something between deliberate disinformation and a political speech, you realize that your opponent has been entirely deceptive and mendacious.
That tends to make people angry. Especially if the former in this example is a scientist or a researcher, and they're used to dealing in something like objectivity, and don't have much in the way of "political skills" or "media literacy", and you realize you just got ambushed by somebody with a hidden agenda.
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
It still baffles me that there are people out there who discount the body of work created by scientists from across the world even though they themselves have absolutely no grasp of the science behind the statements being made. I'm no rocket scientist, nor a nuclear physicist, but if I ever talked to one, I'd assume they knew what they were talking about. If I came across a group of them, who all made the same statements regarding their field, I'd trust them even more. But when it comes to climate science, people don't trust the statements made even though the basics are quite easy to understand. Al Gore did a brilliant job of explaining in layman terms what this is all about. Now, whatever one may think about Al Gore, he was not stating things that he had invented himself, the consensus of climate scientists from all over the world supported him. A year or so back, tired from all the voices claiming that global warming was a lie and that many climate scientists disagreed, I decided not just to trust the media, but do a bit of research on my own. I selected two scientific journals, did a search for "global warming", read the summaries of a selection of them and convinced myself that each and everyone of them confirmed that global warming was real and that they were only arguing amongst themselves about the [i]degree[/i] of human involvement, the mechanisms involved and similar questions.
I can only imagine how frustrating this must be for scientists actually working in the field. Imagine being a computer scientists and explaining to a layman how a computer program is executed by a computer and some voice out of the crowd says: "Hogwash! Everyone knows computers work by magic." Now imagine your horror as people in the crowd actually agree with this statement which you know to be patently false! Now imagine that you had been explaining that this was a program used by a nuclear power plant and that you had been explaining it had an inherent flaw that could lead to a meltdown! Imagine no action being taken because not enough people were convinced that something needed to be done!
Personally, I'm a historian and I find it annoying when people make claims about history which are not based in fact but completely biased. But in my line of work, there aren't any lives on the line. Nevertheless, I'd like to see a little more faith in science. It has gotten us so far, why not stick with it?
So to those that are sceptics, I say: do a little research of your own, maybe something along the same lines as what I did. You might learn something.
As for the people who are at least in agreement that global warming is real, but who doubt that it can have any dangerous consequences, I say:
Never in history have there ever been so many people as there are now. We live in a time of plenty and food distribution problems are more responsible for hunger than a lack of food. But what will happen when too much land becomes unusable because it floods, dries out or burns off? How many thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions will die? It is unimaginable. Yes, life as a whole has survived much worse. But humans are, despite all their achievements, still vulnerable. What will be the cost of inaction? Time will tell and historians will be there to write the narrative. Hopefully they will be able to be say some positive things about us.
You wouldn't be paying for my things, the things you are saying are "bad", I'd be paying for an improvement in energy production, which means I am *not* paying for the thing you are against, because I would then *not be using that product*, I'd be using the new better product, in this case, the switch from coal burning, and all the costs you mention, to solar, which has little of the downside coal has.. Both sides win under a tax credit, I win, you win, plus the environment gets cleaner.
I'll turn it around, why do you not want me to switch to solar, when with a pro rated ten year tax credit, this could be possible? You want me to stay stuck on coal brand electricity, just pay a lot more for it, because of the externalities which I admit exist readily, or to actually switch completely off coal? That's my point, what is the *real* goal? Just pay more to keep using coal, or like I suggest, take that money and go directly to solar, and do it quite willingly, and wind up owning the means of production, rather than renting my grid infrastructure forever, where the costs just go up, and you never get to own anything?
Me, I'd rather dump the coal, and go to solar, given the two choices. Your method keeps me stuck on coal, just costs more than, because there's no extra loot for doing anything else then. If you make the coal just way more expensive, I won't have the money to go to solar, because I'll be stuck in an endless loop of paying for the more expensive now coal, which is still being burnt.
You are talking to one of *the* biggest alternative energy enthusiasts and proponents on this board, and I tell you, the carbon tax is the worst way to achieve the goal of getting away from burning nasty stuff. Offering full tax credits for the alternatives is by far and away the fastest, easiest and cheapest way to slide away from the fossil fuel economy to a renewable and cleaner energy economy.
We just have two differing philosophies headed towards the same goal, you want to punish the bad, I prefer to route around/bypass/shun the bad and reward the good, and do that directly and as soon as possible. We can recognize that what we did in the past wasn't all that swift, and we need to do something better in the future, but the money has to come from somewhere, ultimately, the tax payer and energy buyer. Spend the effort and all the money in punishing, there isn't as much left to reward. It's really simple. If my x-amount of money is going to go someplace, I would much rather it go directly to the solution, not just to punish the problem. The problem will be solved once the solution is implemented. Punishing the problem will not pay for any solution, it will just delay it and make it cost way way more than it needs to be.
Ask roles in Ice Ages
Global warming may be true, but it might still in the hand of mother nature. If we force the weather stay in current stage, then we certainly break the balance.
Killing yourself and kill all life on Earth by stupid.
By manipulating others to acquire power is of-cause nature in political game. But it shouldn't make all human and animals die.
One individual is not threatened--he could just move when his ecosystem gets unworkable, although he would have a hell of a time selling his old assets(who would buy them?) and buying new ones somewhere else.
The problem is, when this happens to hundreds of millions or billions of people all at the same time, where do they all go? Into your cozy niche?
Not to mention the problem of losing many of the investments of thousands of years of civilization, when cities are made unusable due to rising coastal waters and tidal estuaries, failing water supplies or the repeated damage of extreme weather events. What is the economic hit of losing Manhattan or London, or Tokyo?
Sure, some people will be OK, but do you really think we can maintain our economic growth, our just-in-time global industrial systems, our political stability and the rule of law under such stresses?
Maybe, but why would anyone think so, when tiny little fluctuations in the economies of single countries (like the runs on currencies in Mexico, Thailand, Russia, etc.) end up causing huge global disruptions. Don't you think a systemic change in the physical viability of large areas of the planet might knock a point or two off the old DOW?
It isn't happening all at once - it's spread out over a century.
Contrary to common belief, science is not the process of gathering a large number of scientists into a room and having them vote on what the truth is. What makes a scientific argument compelling is the strength of the evidence presented, not the number of experts convinced by it. Which is why stories like this always bug me; little time is spent discussing the evidence presented in the report which would actually useful information. Instead we're presented with a laundry list of people talking about how great the report is and how no one could possibly question it, expecting us to be swayed by appeal to authority alone.
One thing to remember in this debate is charging more money (i.e. taxing the &^%R out of oil), does absolutely nothing to combat rising temperatures. If global warming is happening, which is heavily debatable, the solution is to stop using fossil fuels and outlaw the internal combustion engine. Something that will never be proposed by those who only want to steal money in the name of environmentalism.
I suggest you read what you have written and then think about it. The stuff about the sensors is paticularly similar to looking at the contents of death row in a prison and concluding that all 600 million Americans are murderers.
Go visit China and see it.
I'm curious, where did you get this stupid misconception that SOx and NOx would not turn into acid? A power company I used to work for had to pay a fortune to get a lot of cars repainted when they messed up, put out a lot of NOx and the wind was blowing over the town, so definitly real enough to touch.
Who is it that is feeding you such stuff and creating a generation that is poorly equipt to function in an increasingly technological world?
Just a few thoughts. I don’t claim to be smarter or know anything more then anyone. I don’t know if the globe is warming or not. I think that anyone wanting to be honest would be able to tell is this fact (I don’t think that putting monitoring stations in some of the places I have heard them placed is being Honest then again maybe what I was told was dishonest). My main hang up is in what we are to DO? 1. Change all my light bulbs to CFC. OK if it was my choice (some places make it the Law, so no choice). I’m not sure if I think it better to have something containing Hg around all over the place, tends to make me question the Better for the environment. I was told that they are more energy efficient because the make less heat(being in a place that about half the year you have a heater on the heat is welcome) 2. I need to drive a hybrid car. So I need a car that has two motors (gas and electric), a gas tank, and a set of batteries. Not sure how that is better. Also most of the batteries contain things that are not good for the environment. 3. Use renewable energy sources. Like hydro electric (can’t do that they hurt the fish, cause erosion, and flood a bunch of land), Geo thermo (cause earthquakes), and windmills (I bet you are thinking that I’m going to ask about the birds but lets talk about the wind itself. Our global weather is move on the winds, when we take energy out of the wind we are slowing it down and affecting the weather over the globe) 4. Stop using fossil fuels because they are putting CO2 in the air. Here is a question for you, where do fossil fuels come from? Answer “Fossils” Plants and animals from long ago. Where did the Plants and the animals get the Carbon from? The way I understand it, the animals get it from eating the plants, and the plants get it from the Air (CO2). Wait a second I thought it was bad in the air. I don’t think that everyone is being honest here. I think they fall into different camps of people. Some people want to make $$$ selling things that we say are new and Green even if they are just as bad or worst for the environment. People that are doing research on the issue and if it is a BIG world changing issue then they are better off ($$$ or fame). People that truly want to fix the issue that they are seeing. People that don’t want the world to change (the global temp should be this year exactly what it was last year. Or what ever year they really wish it was) and there will be no animals extinctions (I don’t like to see it happen esp. if it was caused by something I did, but I also think that some are good ie Dinosaurs) what ever part of the world they take up is ok and others will pay to make it happen. People that don’t really know what is going on and are pushed around. People that don’t care, maybe they have other worries in their lives. I also think that you have people that want to see the world destroyed for there own gain (well some people think there are people like this and who am I to say no). Thank you for your time.
Am I the only one who thinks news of an impending rise in sea level is brought to us by a group called "NOAA?"
On a scale from 1-5, you, my friend, deserve an 11.
The Great Pinis will have its fill.
Bow to the Pinis .... and spread.
Brits love Pinis ... all children scream for Pinis.
The people who decided some time ago that they dislike global warming for whatever reason will always find a way to rationalize their denial of it. They are not about to let some pesky "facts" from "experts" cloud their judgment.
How can people be this dumb, is beyond comprehension.
People are not denying that there is a climate change. You can feel it yourself.
What people are arguing is whether it is 'induced' by humans or it's a part of some natural cycle.
Slashdot has gotten to the point where you can't even refer to the people that devote their lives to the study of climatology across the world without being called a Troll. And the real awesome thing is that I see people who haven't even read the report in question being moderated up up up up.
You are being far too negative about slashdot. In fact slashdot has a readership/moderatorship with a far higher level of science and technical education than most online fora. No really!
So here's a little experiment for you. Wait for 24 hrs while the moderation does a global timezone sweep, then come back and browse at a threshold of 4. You may be pleasantly surprised. The Dunning-Kruger filter works pretty well actually. Even the posts opposing scientific orthodoxy tend to be of the more considered sceptical variety as opposed to the outright denialist ones. And when considering truly sceptical arguments, let's not forget this isn't "settled science". Well OK some if it is. [in which AGW "sceptic" and intelligent designer Roy Spencer's intellectual chickens come home to roost.]
You are not wasting your time.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
Don't trust those f'ing liarz! Watch Fox News, they will tell you the truth.
God beless the USA and none else!
It's kind of funny - in a tragic way - that the old repeated-enough-to-become-true meme still works.
There wouldn't be all these arguments if we could *prove* that global warming exists and that it's man made. Note that there are two separate statements here that needs to be proven for the full monty.
Now, the first is all about historical data combined with modern data and interpretation of these. You can use them to plot graphs that show everything from "ice age approaching", over "no change" to "global warming". You can even mess with the data to make "a more obvious warming" as we've seen it done. As there's still a lot of arguments in this department it is obvious that there's no standard way, nor some carved-in-stone way, to work with these data.
The second statement assumes that the first exists, and seeks to explain why. It tends to focus on CO2 for some reason, despite the two obvious problems: The exact role of CO2 in the atmospheric greenhouse balance is unknown but it is assumed that it acts as a reflected energy blocker in the mix just as it does alone. Nobody knows for sure. The second problem is that much worse greenhouse gasses are also released in increasing amounts, methane in particular. So, working on reducing CO2 might not do anything except waste time and money.
Finally - Occams Razor. There was no human activity during past massive climate changes so what caused them and might that factor still be a work today? - The obvious culprit is the Sun. A change in output will affect the climate. I've even heard some respected climate scientists say "the Sun has no significant influence on Earth's climate" which is utter lunacy of course. Without the Sun the Earth would be a ball of ice, barely warmer than the surrounding space (warmer only due to radioactive materials and tidal forces), so of course the Sun has a huge influence. But minor changes, both in radiated heat and in high energy particles that interact with the Earths atmosphere in various ways, what does that do to the climate? - We don't know, but we know that something, most likely the Sun, caused the ice ages and the warming in between. It is by far the simplest explanation of any climate change we may or may not be observing today.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
It's not popular, and nobody here will listen, but as a scientist, this report is still not evidential not proof.
First, it's just about impossible to reconcile all of these temperatures and assume that they were taken the same way, and have no conversion errors, etc. Do you measure at the hottest and coldest points of a day? At a fixed time? Does it vary based upon the season?
Second: Do you really believe that a thermometer (basically a pressure column with some lines beside it) was accurately calibrated enough 50 years ago to be scientifically relevant? How about 100 years ago?
Third: The Malinkovitch cycle has us in a warming period; the earth may be warming, but greenhouse gases could at most account for .05 percent of this; the majority of greenhouse gas is water vapor.
Fourth: The erroneous handling of the data to date, and the lack of any sort of clarification of what has been done to correct issues with data means that this report cannot be considered as the "shiny holy grail" to convert all to belief.
Sorry, the science just isn't there yet...see also Jerry Pournelle, Freeman Dyson, I could go on forever...
Yes, it's UNDENIABLE ... except for the thousands of scientists that deny it, of course. Don't worry, as long as we continue to hand billions of dollars per year over to these unbiased researchers, they'll save us... don't worry about the faked or misinterpreted data, it was all for a good cause.
New religions are so fun to watch.
its official 2010 the warmest ever recorded.now if 2011 is the coolest ever recorded is there still global warming? was'nt there record lows this winter in europe and other places?they have allways been our enemy,they have allways been our friends.
No one denies that the earth is getting warmer, but there are people that deny the cause of it (natural vs. human). "Global Warming" describes the ideology that humans are the cause of the earth getting warmer.
Government funding isn't the only game in town. There are many, many wealthy businesses that stand to lose big bucks from the cost of controlling CO2 emissions. They've already spent huge amounts on lobbying. Funding some scientists to do climate studies is small change by comparison. And most scientists aren't picky about who gives them money; they just care about doing the research. I imagine that a climate scientist with real credentials and a contrarian view of CO2 would do quite well in terms of financial support for their research.
Unless, of course, it simply isn't possible to find any credible academic climate scientists whose research challenges the consensus regarding the role of CO2 in climate change. After all, nobody in academia gets rich off of doing research. The university thinks the grant money that you bring in belongs to them, not you. They keep a close eye to make sure that your aren't lining your pockets with your research funds, but are spending them on actual research. Your salary is constrained by the institution's salary scale, and academic salaries aren't that high. So academics generally really have to believe in the value of their research, because the only real reward for research success in academia is getting to do more of it.
This is an urban myth. To investigate allegations the CRU was hiding (or worse, altering) data and computer models, the Muir-Russell report actually went so far as to independently reproduce CRU's analysis. Here were their conclusions
This is JULY its summer time, and we are now going into August and September our HOTTEST months of the year so YES right NOW the planet in the northern hemisphere IS WARMING -- THAT IS UNDENIABLE !!!!!!
But it has been quite coOol here is California, record cOoOlness soo I am skeptical of the concept that THIS summer is warmer then ever, especially in light of our recent very cold winter.
Also your scientist politicians will NOT receive anymore funding for research via my vote until they begin to act more like scientists and less like politicians.
The 5 easy steps to being green and adverting the worst effects of climate change and peak oil. And these strategies create stable and local job growth which is the best economic sense: 1) Stop SprawL!!! 2) R.R.Recycle! 3) ReForest/FoodForest!/VirginForest!! 4) Wind!/GeoThermal!!/Solar! 5) Electric&OpenSource Trains!!/Cars/Media! http://www.nrdc.org/globalWarming/solutions/ http://www.usgbc.org/DisplayPage.aspx?CMSPageID=1989
Or at least, you haven't bothered to look it up
More record temperatures and bigger snowstorms are expected consequences of global warming (weather is not climate, but climate does influence weather). They are not strong evidence of global warming (which is already well established by a huge mass of data, anyway), but they are examples of the consequences that we can expect, and that are likely to become increasingly common.
Very likely. If over a thousands of years, people had adapted to living on the ice sheets, agricultural methods had been developed that depended upon growing plants specifically adapted to cold climates, and huge numbers of people were living on the edges of the ice sheets--and suddenly, there were the prospect of the ice sheets vanishing over a couple of hundred years, faster than any known climate change in the past, it would be an immense disaster with enormous costs, both financial and in terms of humans suffering.
So of course people would be clamoring for a way to protect the ice sheets.
Did you have a point?
The majority of oxygen is generated at sea.
Compared to the biggest driver of global warming... Water Vapor. Look it up.
Those are still carrots or the stick examples. "Investing" in research by the government is done with tax money, it's a tax, the stick. Writing a law against something is the stick, BAM, you can't do that. Allowing some research to go forward, by encouraging it with a tax credit, that's a carrot. It's just variations on social engineering, and there are still only two basic ways they can do that, bribe or punish, tax or not-tax.
Well, the prediction is more like 2 degrees C (3.6F) by 2100. But that's a global average. At the poles, particularly the North Pole and surrounding areas it will be more like 4 or 6 degrees. Maybe that doesn't sound like much to you but ask some biologist about it.
Predictably enough, Anthony Watts is at it again ([1] [2]). Haven't looked too deeply into his claims, and I'm really not too tempted to do so either. So has anyone else looked at it? Any comments?
Clever signature text goes here.
I like, how with how old of the earth is, and how we actually have so little data of what it does, that we can say anything.
Man don't know shit.
Be seeing you...
Yes, people are indeed denying that there is climate change, and that the climate is warming. Sometimes they'll change their position and accept that the climate might be warming, but it is certainly not because of humans! Those are dogmatic positions based on political ideology. The scientific facts clearly show warming, and that the warming is man-made.
Clever signature text goes here.