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Global Warming 'Confirmed' By Independent Study
chrb writes "The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project — an independent study of Earth's historical temperature record partly funded by climate skeptics, including the Koch brothers — has released preliminary results that show the same warming trend as previous research. Project leader and physics professor Richard Muller, of the University of California, has stated that he was 'surprised' at the close agreement, and it 'confirms that these studies were done carefully.' The study also found that warming in the temperature record was not caused by poor quality weather monitoring stations — thus rejecting a frequent claim of skeptics. Climate skeptic Stephen McIntyre has previously said 'anything that [Muller] does will be well done.'"
Because that's the real issue that most skeptics have been questioning of late. Anyone who isn't an idiot knows that the earth's climate is ALWAYS changing (and always has been). The real issue that people are talking about when they say "global warming" is the question of how much influence human activities have had on the normal warming/cooling cycles, if this is a negative influence, and, if so, what can humans do within reason to mitigate any negative influences. And *those* questions are a helluva lot harder to answer than "Has there been a general warming trend over the last 100 years?".
I'm not sure pure science is up to answering those questions. And it doesn't help that the issue has become hopelessly politicized--to the point where I've grown very skeptical of BOTH sides and their respective penchants for self-serving hyperbole and increasingly shrill fear-mongering.
Of course, there is also the question of DEGREE of warming, an issue where it's getting harder and harder to distinguish between mainstream science and Chicken Little fear-mongering. IIRC, initial models were showing a 1-2 degree increase over the next 100 years, something that clearly needs to be addressed but not something that's GOING TO KILL US ALL TOMORROW!!!!!. Somewhere along the way this kept getting more and more ramped-up to the point now where I hear advocates claiming that the entire east coast of the U.S. is going to be underwater by 2050. I can no longer tell where the truth begins and the humbug ends.
Of course, I'm going to be criticized here for even daring to question the accepted narrative.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
There is no amount or type of evidence, even in principle, which would answer climate change sceptics. They will disavow the fundimental principles of science if that is what is necessary to protect their beliefs.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Does Muller stand by this statement on Principle Component Analysis from 2004?
In PCA and similar techniques, each of the (in this case, typically 70) different data sets have their averages subtracted (so they have a mean of zero), and then are multiplied by a number to make their average variation around that mean to be equal to one; in technical jargon, we say that each data set is normalized to zero mean and unit variance. In standard PCA, each data set is normalized over its complete data period; for key climate data sets that Mann used to create his hockey stick graph, this was the interval 1400-1980. But the computer program Mann used did not do that. Instead, it forced each data set to have zero mean for the time period 1902-1980, and to match the historical records for this interval. This is the time when the historical temperature is well known, so this procedure does guarantee the most accurate temperature scale. But it completely screws up PCA. PCA is mostly concerned with the data sets that have high variance, and the Mann normalization procedure tends to give very high variance to any data set with a hockey stick shape. (Such data sets have zero mean only over the 1902-1980 period, not over the longer 1400-1980 period.)
My work here is dung.
No one disagrees that the earth's climate has warmed and cooled repeatedly over the last 100,000 years and beyond. Many disagree, however, about the extent of man's involvement in climate change. This sort of study is as if police were to report 'Yes a crime has occurred' when what people really want to know is 'who dunnit?'
... about sums it up.
Exactly! That is what people always forget! The planet may be warming, but is it really because of us? Are we humans responsible for the rise in temperature? To put it another way - if it were not for us, would the planet still be getting hotter? Had we not invented the industrial revolution, would the planet be as warm as it is now? Perhaps if humans did not exist, the planet would be cooler? Or maybe if we existed but no-one had invented the industrial revolution, the world would be more temperate and the temperature would not have changed? These are all facts that should be considererd, and have been glossed over in the research.
Things look different when not done by agenda-driven "climatologist". warmest year was 13 years ago, let's all have some retroactive panic
But see also:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/20/the-berkeley-earth-surface-temperature-project-puts-pr-before-peer-review/
A real important thing to note was that this was paid for privately- with a large chunk of that capital coming from Climate-change-deniers who wanted to prove that climate change wasn't happening.
Climate-change-deniers often say that government paid studies are fake because governments are encouraging the scientists to come back with fake positives to promote various policies... ... they can't say that anymore.
The debate of man's involvement will still go on- but STOP DENYING THE PROBLEM! Let's put that to bed now.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Very well I am convinced but I am still not going to sacrifice because of all the shit others have put me through. If no one was willing to help when I was being bullied nearly to killing myself, if no one was willing to help facilitate my social acceptance then I am absolutely not willing to help others in that regard.
Go ahead and reply with something to demonize me. Just like what Fox News would do, right?
The problem is that there are so many political careers that hinge on Global Warming. Because of this there is also incredible amount of research funding that is allocated to prove Global Warming and if disproved the research funding will stop. What this all adds up to is a situation where neither side of the political isle will believe the results of the research produced by the other side.
I looked at the graph in figure 1 of the article's pdf
This was a pr campaign by the warmest. Smoke and mirrors...
Please God NO... it's bad enough seeing so-called news sites like the BBC peppered with scare quotes in headlines. Please don't start doing it here.
These papers are not out of peer review yet, and /. wants to promote their preliminary results?
remind me again, which side has an agenda, exactly?
I swear they give me mod points to shut me up.
"But for Richard Muller, this free circulation also marks a return to how science should be done."
I've long been sceptical of 'man made global warming' because of the science involved. It didn't help that people would say, "Only university-trained scientists can understand the data", either. (Obviously an idiotic claim. Anyone with a brain can learn, and Universities are not a requirement for learning.)
But this is the moment I've been waiting for. Someone finally did the science openly and put all their cards on the table. They aren't hiding anything, including their funding sources. They even used new data that wasn't tainted and made sure to watch for the things sceptics have been critical of.
So, as a long-time AGW sceptic, I'm saying: Thank you for finally proving it.
Now if we can only find ways to counter or offset it that don't hurt the environment even more than we already are, we'll be in good shape.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Notice that it abruptly cooled and the leveled out for about 30 years starting in the 40s and resumed the previous trend again the the 70s. Also note that if not for that little dip, there is pretty much a straight line from about the average in the 1800s to now.
So the temps have been going up a overall steady rate since 1800.
Why is it so hard to accept that human actions can have consequences ?
.......... why, really ?
A planetary biosphere which has evolved without homo sapiens sapiens' mega-scale industry and the innumerable effects it produces worldwide, is supposed to just take whatever you can dish out at it with your pollution, smokes, emissions, radiation, precisely because
it comes to me as if the people who are into this denial are moving with a centuries old understanding that thinks world is a biiig, biiig place. so that nothing can happen if 2-3 factories smoke here, a few people dump stuff in the sea somewhere. hey - guess what - people are doing it EVERYWHERE. and this planet actually is a small planet on the 3 orbit around a small sun in the outer rim of a galaxy called milky way. if you endlessly shit on it, it will get affected.
Read radical news here
Reporting on an event consisting of the release of preliminary results for a much-anticipated study that are clearly identified as preliminary results hardly needs to be agenda-driven. It's a news-worthy event. Just like the peer-review results of the study will be a news-worthy event.
Put your big, ugly bias back under your big, ugly hat. k?
-SS "Teach the ignorant, care for the dumb, and punish the stupid."
When did data analysis become science? Science is about testing hypothesis with controlled experiments. Where's the control?
http://motls.blogspot.com/2011/10/berkeley-earth-recalculates-global-mean.html
"It is not true that the Berkeley group has found relevant evidence for the core questions in the AGW debate
Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature led by Richard Muller – a top Berkeley physics teacher and the PhD adviser of the fresh physics Nobel prize winner Saul Perlmutter, among others – has recalculated the evolution of the global mean temperature in the most recent two centuries or so, qualitatively confirmed the previous graphs, and got dishonestly reported in the media.
Some people including Marc Morano of Climate Depot were predicting that this outcome was the very point of the project. They were worried about the positive treatment that Richard Muller received at various places including this blog and they were proved right. Today, it really does look like all the people in the "BEST" project were just puppets used in a bigger, pre-planned propaganda game."
The Berkeley study got $150,000 from the Koch brothers precisely because those who started it came largely from outside climate science, having established their considerable credentials in other sciences, and announced at the outset their skepticism about the standards of climate scientists. They expected they well might find - and the Koch brothers clearly hoped they would find - that the interpretations of the temperature records accepted by over 97% of current climate scientists were exaggerated and sloppy.
The Berkeley study leaders are now openly surprised that their conclusions - using more advanced statistical methods than have been employed previously - are within 2% of the mainstream climate science analyses. I'll bet good money they get no further funding from the Koch brothers going forward. The Kochs have many billions, and have been generous in funding the economics department at Florida State University, with strings attached to assure that department will support economic theories the Kochs agree with ("Austrian school" economics). Universities keenly court large donors. Had the Berkeley climate study likewise come to conclusions agreeing with the brothers' prejudices, that cash-strapped university could have anticipated generous funding to support a climatology institute going forward.
So which side of the bread is buttered? Were the genius scientists too stupid to see they just dropped the bread butter-side down? Why have they followed the science even when it drives away their funding?
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
I'm sorry, calling for a proper scientific procedure, where papers are reviewed by experts before their conclusions are sent to the masses, is an "ugly" bias? I guess I didn't realize humanity had fallen so far. Perhaps I'll someday accept recently written white-papers as conclusive human knowledge someday, but it will be at the point of a gun by an oppressive government, I can tell you that. In the mean time, perhaps you can put your troll-gun away, accept that I have a point here, and acknowledge that research should go through all manner of due-diligence before being touted as "oh we've now confirmed something" in the media.
I swear they give me mod points to shut me up.
here is a picture of the CRU data they released recently. http://www.io-solutions.com/WorldTemps1700-2011wAnoAveCount.jpg
ALL OF IT. That red line in the middle is the GISS temperature anomaly. The Orange dots are the simple average of each months data. All of the gray dots are dots experienced somewhere on the planet.
My analysis.
1. GISS temps seem to match CRU temps.
2. The warming visible if you just look at the Anomaly is almost invisible if you look at the range of temperatures.
Basically you have a bunch of people examining the leaves of a tree in a forest and forgetting to keep track of the forest.
The forest does matter.
God: "I don't leave footprints!"
Um... yeah.... so, to be clear, the Skeptical community rejects the climate deniers as ideologues. They are not skeptics; they are deniers. Skeptics accept things that are clearly demonstrated by evidence, which these people do not do. We skeptics insist that our good name not be sullied by these folks. You are entitled to your (wrong) opinion, but you are not entitled to use a word which means the opposite of what you say.
Regardless of who causes global warming, humans, spagetti monsters, natural fluctuation- it is important to acknoweldge that it is real.
Why? Because- if it continues we are in for some problems.
Sea-levels rising, weather patterns changing, extinctions, crop growing suitability changing, disease from mosquitos species spreading north.
Stopping global warming (if caused by man) is only one side of the coin- the other side is WE NEED TO PREPARE because there is no reason for anyone to believe it is going to stop anytime soon.
So, we need to start thinking about- how to we stop coastal cities from flooding costing us billions every year. We need to think about how changing economies in local regions will change. If Nebraska is no longer capable of growing maize- how will that affect the economy there?
Lots of cities are already seeing increased flooding because they can't handle the increased rainfall they get as weather patterns change.
Chicago is smart- they're upgrading their sewers with an increase in heavy storms expected so they won't retroactively be dealing with floods.
I don't care if you think man is not responsible- if you're republican or democrat- spreading denial of climate change is dangerous. We need our elected officials to take the threat seriously and prepare for the changes BEFORE they happen.
I don't want to sensationalise or be a scare-monger... we don't need to run into the streets screaming- but we do need to calmly, on a local by local basis sit down and analyse- what will climate change mean for my community and what needs to be done about it. Do we need to build flood walls, prepare the economy for a new agriculture (or loss of it)?
We can adapt to a changing climate- but we need to take it seriously and act now- rather than wait until it is too late.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2011/10/arguing-with-your-crazy-uncle-about.html
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
that this was rigged even though it was done by their top idiots.
That doesn't settle any of the debates:
1. How bad is it?
2. Are humans causing it?
3. Will it continue?
Personally, if it's happening and it's going to affect the world I live in, I think we should stop arguing about whose fault it is and just find ways to correct it. If it's natural -- for example more cloud cover, ash, etc. in the atmosphere = more retained heat -- then maybe we should be looking for ways to control nature. If it's man-made, maybe we should be looking at the ways we've caused it -- carbon emissions? Water consumption? Deforestation? -- and correct those. Likely, it's a combination of both natural and unnatural causes, and we'll need a bit of both to fix it.
In my mind, the one thing that's NOT an option is to continue life as usual without attempting to address the problem. I don't care how many jobs it creates, IF deregulating leads to the degradation of the planet we live on it's not worth it. I'd rather have a planet to live on than a job, if I had to choose between the two.
I still don't understand why this wasn't more broadly reported, but CO2's role may not be the cause... http://news.yahoo.com/nasa-data-blow-gaping-hold-global-warming-alarmism-192334971.html
There is no Hockey Stick when you look at the chart from 1800 to present.
The only way you can see a hockey stick is to assume that the temps in the 40s-70s were "normal". But looking at the chart, they represent an abrupt decrease and 30 year plateau in the trend from 1800 to the 40s.
Just looking at the chart you can pretty much put a ruler to it and draw a straight line from 1800 to now. One long, consistent trend.
Seem more indicative to me of a natural process.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/20/the-berkeley-earth-surface-temperature-project-puts-pr-before-peer-review/#more-49601
Regardless of who is visiting us, other-humans, spagetti monsters, little-green-men it is important to acknoweldge that it is real.
Why? Because- if it continues we are in for some problems.
Possible interplanetary war, damage to Earth, extinctions, famines, possible new viruses from alien contact.
Stopping alien visitation (if caused by man) is only one side of the coin- the other side is WE NEED TO PREPARE because there is no reason for anyone to believe it is going to stop anytime soon.
So, we need to start thinking about- how to we stop coastal cities from being abducted, depriving us of our families. We need to think about how alien activities in local regions will change our way of life. If Nebraska is no longer capable of growing maize because of alien attacks- how will that affect the economy there?
Lots of cities are already seeing increased fear because they can't handle the increasing encounters they get as the aliens get aggressive.
Chicago is smart- they're upgrading their anti-aircraft with an increase in alien attention so they won't retroactively be dealing with lost population.
I don't care if you think man is not responsible- if you're republican or democrat- spreading denial of alien visitation is dangerous. We need our elected officials to take the threat seriously and prepare for the changes BEFORE they happen.
I don't want to sensationalise or be a scare-monger... we don't need to run into the streets screaming- but we do need to calmly, on a local by local basis sit down and analyse- what will alien war mean for my community and what needs to be done about it. Do we need to build large lasers, prepare the economy for a new agriculture (or loss of it)?
We can adapt to a war with the green men but we need to take it seriously and act now- rather than wait until it is too late.
I swear they give me mod points to shut me up.
They show a nice picture of a weather station at an airport. How many do they have in cornfields in the middle of Kansas? Airports tend to be in urban areas with large growth, and we already know cities create bubbles of higher temperature around them. Any station in such an area is simply documenting population growth and not saying much about global change.
Question #1: Is the Earth appreciably warmer lately? Answer: Yes. There seems to have been some skepticism over this question but this appears to be where the nutjobs on the 'denier' side fell (we'll get to the nutjobs on the other side in a minute). To some extent we 'already knew this,' but the point of this study appears to have been that we need to start from this point -- that if we can't even agree whether the Earth is warmer, we certainly aren't going to agree on why or what to do about it.
Question #2: Is it our fault, i.e. is it anthropogenic global warming (AGW)? Answer: This study doesn't have anything to say about that, but as others have pointed out, it is 'consistent with AGW models.' This seems to be the most difficult question because there are so many variables. The earth is warmer, sure; but it's been warmer before without our having done anything to it and the crucial piece of information that would easily answer this question -- what would temperatures be if we hadn't been mucking about doing things for the last 200 years -- would require a control planet. I've been trying to educate myself about global warming for a while but it's been very difficult filtering through the noise and vitriol. It doesn't seem possible to me that can conclusively answer this question, and to some people, that's a reason to forget the whole thing -- but the realization that we can't prove it doesn't excuse us from having to make a decision. It just means that we have to make a decision with imperfect information.
(Question #2A would be 'if the Earth has been warmer before, is it necessarily a bad thing that it's warm again -- is that just a natural cycle? This is an interesting question but let's set it aside for the moment. Even if we assume that there is a natural cycle, let's still also assume that what we're concerned with here is the extent to which humans are changing that natural cycle, not whether 1 degree celsius is going to cause an apocalypse.)
Question #3: To what extent should we handicap our own consumption of natural resources or industrial production to alleviate AGW? If we aren't entirely certain about our answer to #2, it's difficult, but by no means impossible to make a quantitative analysis of the 'value' of reducing carbon emissions by, say, one ton a year. But this question is so political that it'd be tough to have a reasonable conversation about it even if it didn't depend on equally, but differently perplexing questions like #2, because it allows for a scenario where an elected leader has to make a judgment call that is going to favor the environment over his or her constituents' jobs. We don't like to think about it in those terms -- we prefer to just imagine that everyone will buy a Prius or bicycle to work -- but it's important to realize how far-reaching these decisions are. It's also quite naive to imagine that industrial interests only exist on one side of this equation. The green industry has just as many crooks in it as the oil industry does, as any industry does, because it is composed of homo sapiens. Throwing money at solar and wind is well and good, but it's a luxury that a rich country ('rich' being relative these days) like the United States can afford; it's a joke to imagine that India or Indonesia or China are going to handicap their economies when they've only just lately (to varying degrees) got round to having economies in the first place. That's not to say that they won't invest in wind and solar (China certainly has) but this is merely diversifying their own energy portfolio -- reducing their dependency on oil -- which is related to but not the same as pursuing green energy for its own sake.
Speaking as an American business owner for a moment, it's tough for me to accept that the solution here is to make it even more expensive to conduct business via something like cap-and-trade, though not because it will affect my own business (it won't, much). This is clearly a problem that requires huge expenditures of capital to solve, and a
Good grief, I thought we were past this already. Science has already establish the earth is indeed heating up. Any idiot who's been alive for more than 10 years & who goes outside (no offense /.) can plainly see the earth is heating up.
If you still doubt, try this simple exercise:
Step #1: Look at old pictures of glaciers from all over the world.
Step #2: Compare pictures of those places to current pictures of the same places from any point in the year.
----- OR -----
Step #1: Go outside.
Step #2: Hike in the high country for multiple years.
Step #3: Take pictures of the same areas of the high country each year, including glaciers in your photos (assuming you can find large glaciers in your neck of the woods).
We've had glaciers recede by MILES. We've had chunks of ice the size of Rhode Island break off the Antarctic and melt. What causes ice to melt? Hmmmmm, could it be.... heat? In long-standing ices case (e.g. glaciers, the Antarctic) could it be heat that wasn't there before? DUH! Figure it out for yourself people... it's not that hard.
The only debatable questions are:
1. What is causing the earth to heat up?
2. How fast is the earth heating up?
3. What will the ramifications be as the earth heats up?
4. What, if anything, can we do to counteract the trend?
5. Should we counteract the trend?
However, considering that deniers still exist (mainly due to vested interests), how highly politicized an issue this has become (again due to vested interests), how polarized most countries have become, and as a result of all of the above, how long it has taken to answer this most basic of questions... we are all hopelessly lost, at least until wars begin over fresh water, and the front page of every major newspaper hits deniers in the face with undeniable truth. Unfortunately, that's making the MAJOR assumption that people will put the pieces together, and that they won't be more worried about their bank accounts than drinking water.
As long as people will agree that the earth is warming up - will a long discussion about whether man caused it really serve any useful purpose?
Here's how I see it:
Picture yourself as a passenger of the Quantas A380 plane whose engine exploded mid-flight. The moment the engine exploded, what would you look at first:
a) trying to figure out what CAN be done?
b) trying to figure out whether it was caused by humans or not (terrorists or material faults vs. meteor or lightning strikes)?
Think that you will have to decide what to focus on, while the plane is having trouble staying in the air.
My guess is, that getting to land safely ANYWHERE was the top priority... But - it's just my guess...
Maybe you want to fund a study into the event asking everyone on board to see what they did first...
_OR_ we might try and focus on how to get the situation under control as safely as possible - by reducing the number of maneuvers that could contribute or increase the problem, and thinking about counter-maneuvers.
I bet you, even if the wing of that A380 would have gone, and even if chances of the pilot making ANY difference AT ALL - I bet you, they would have tried EVERYTHING to even minimally increase the chances of ANYONE surviving.
A friend of mine proposed a very interesting argument against climate change, especially human-influenced climate change. "If God created the earth, why would he have created it in such a way that we would be allowed to pollute so badly that it ruins the atmosphere?" It's pretty difficult to argue with that statement. Unless you are a non-believer, of course.
Name one thing that we have dumped tons of into the local environment that has been good for us long term?
Just one.
Biowaste? Even the romans had sewers.
Fertilzer? Not good for the water systems
Sulpher in fuel? Acid rain.
Flurocarbons ? Ozone Hole
DDT ?
Industrial Waste ?
Think CO2 is that one magic thing that will not have consequences ?
Their donations are everywhere, especially at PBS and MIT, graduating a few years before I did. Some of my MIT friends were worried about working in a group funded by them, but there has been no overt censorship so far. Ditto PBS. They are more libertarians than conservatives. They mainly want to drastically shrink government, but not tell people how to live their lives.
It is inappropriate to draw any conclusions from this research because it has not yet been peer reviewed. Watts of wattsupwiththat.com fame was shown a draft, and found some problems with the study, specifically with the selection of weather siting data. No doubt there will be other issues that need to be corrected, that's the whole point of having peer reviews. Everybody wants to skip to the end, but we need to let the process work.
You'd think that the /. crowd would be a little more sophisticated about this kind of thing than the average MSM reader, but apparently not in this case, given the comments I've read thus far.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
wouldn't it be laughed out of the college, not printed anywhere and get moderated as a troll/flamebait like this post probably is going to be?
OK so now we have proof that there has been a recent warming trend. Where is the proof that it was caused by human activity?
Besides, there is nothing wrong with the planet. Nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine. The PEOPLE are fucked. Difference. Difference! The planet is fine. Compared to the people, the planet is doing great. Been here four and a half billion years. Did you ever think about the arithmetic? The planet has been here four and a half billion years. We've been here, what? A hundred thousand? Maybe two hundred thousand? And we've only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over two hundred years. Two hundred years versus four and a half billion. And we have the CONCEIT to think that somehow we're a threat? That somehow we're gonna put in jeopardy this beautiful little blue-green ball that's just a-floatin' around the sun?
The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles; hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors; worlwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages... And we think some plastic bags, and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet... the planet... the planet isn't going anywhere. WE ARE!
We're going away. Pack your shit, folks. We're going away. And we won't leave much of a trace, either. Thank God for that. Maybe a little styrofoam. Maybe. A little styrofoam. The planet will be here and we'll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet will shake us off like a bad case of fleas. A surface nuisance.
The question isn't "Is global warming real?". The questions (among others) are
Those "cards" were laid on President Johnson's desk some time back. It wasn't contraversial back then. The "debate" happened when people who don't like the idea of any sort of change heard of it and started giving money to a PR company called the Heartland Institute to stir up what turned into a circus. Once Al Gore stood up to try to counter a circus with another cirus it divided neatly on political party lines instead of being left to the experts as it had been with a few earlier Republican and Democrats administrations.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Think CO2 is that one magic thing that will not have consequences ?
The extent to which CO2 has consequences or not has surely got nothing to do with the facile suggestion that, because some by-products are harmful, we should cease ... what? Existing? Every industrial process has by-products. I don't think anyone suggests that these are 'good' things. The point is to mitigate the level of bad things, and to do that, we have to know which ones are bad, and how bad they are.
I haven't taken the position that CO2 has no effect on the environment, but reasoning like this is why debates on AGW go into the toilet. You aren't trying to analyze the effect of CO2 on the environment, you're just taking the tired, far-left position that having ANY impact on the planet whatever is terrible. You're also retroactively making the assumption that, every time we come up with a new technology, we know right away what its effects on the environment will be. Sometimes we do, and sometimes greedy people don't care and employ it anyway. But this kind of 'humans are ruining the earth with their technology' fearmongering doesn't bring us any closer a mechanism through which we might actually try and determine what the impact of anything we use in our daily lives is on the environment.
even if the energy coming from the sun was multiples of that, the biosphere would still have evolved according to the energy coming from the sun. and any undue disturbance introduced into the system would upset the balance. thats what BALANCE means.
Read radical news here
Isn't the correct procedure to wait until something is peer reviewed before comment - remember Cold Fusion? According to Anthony Watts, a well-known climate skeptic, there are several errors in the paper mainly to do with comparison of different data timelines and siting of temperature record stations.
Most climate skeptics agree that the world is undergoing "climate change" the larger question is whether humans should do anything about it.
Berkeley might be the most liberal 10 sq mile location in the United States. I'm not saying that their findings aren't sound, but if they were truly after a non-biased opinion that will stand up to scrutiny, couldn't they have picked a different company or location to do the research?
To answer your questions, the warming we see is consistent with anthropogenic climate change models, it is going at a rate which requires remedial action within a century, and I have yet to see anyone outside of the lunatic internet fringe claim that climate change is going to kill us all off, Roland Emmerich style.
It seems fairly clear that the only ones who stand to gain and are adamant on attacking the scientists are corporations selling oil, cars, and their lobbyists. Anyone else has basically been misled by the same corporate PR/propaganda lobby. PR, lobby and advertising nonsense does work very well on all of us - if it didn't there just wouldn't be much of it. Anyone would do well to question exactly where do ideas originally come from and exactly who stands to gain the most from whatever stance...
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
I wasn't aware of any research centers which don't have a very large vested interest in the global climate?
If anyone has ever bothered to look, the "manmade global warming" claims began with the left, continues to be pushed by the left, and villifies the right.
If anyone bothered to read history, one would find out that San Francisco area (Bay area) is a hotbed of extreem left thinking, and Berkeley is the cornerstone of left wing University thinking....
Try COLA or IGES or CREWas an independant source (whoops they would never agree with the pre-destined conclusion they are scientists without an agenda, some of whom have been experts in Climatology for decades longer then the manmade global warming Popes and Cardinals)
Remember the problem with these studies, is they are started with an agenda, funded with a pre-defined conclusion, and carefully ignores generally accepted scientific method, and denies that there is ALWAYS contention among scientists, and scientists speaking research do not come up with broad all incomassing conclusions, and NEVER claim that thier findings close the book on the topic.
now if someone went to see some "independant" research...here is a study of PEOPLES VIEWPOINT
http://www.climatechangecommunication.org/images/files/ClimateBeliefsMay2011.pdf
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No, this study did not confirm that the warming is caused by man. There is an alternative hypothesis:
1. Although it has been known for a century that CO2 can produce warming, and although the degree of modern warming is in agreement with that predicted as a result of increased atmospheric CO2, there is some other unknown mechanism (something to do with clouds, maybe?) that limits CO2 warming.
2. Although none of the known mechanisms that have been identified as responsible for earlier warming episodes in earth's history, such as changes in the earth's orbit or the sun's output, have been found to be present today, there is some other unknown (but natural!) mechanism that is producing the modern warming, which only coincidentally matches the warming predicted from CO2.
3. And whatever the cause of this natural warming might be, it is temporary, and is just about to give way to natural cooling (in fact, I think it's a bit cooler today than yesterday, so doubtless it has already begun!)
According to some studies, wars and social unrest are more common in cooler climates.
Actually it makes sense, after all warmth is beneficial for plant growth.
As of this post, Al Gore was only mentioned twice! Okay, three times now with my post ;)
As soon as I read the summary I was sure Gore would be the center of much of the discussion.
The cake is a lie.
Unlike the Slashdot Editors, I actually RTFA.
The study does not "confirm" global warming, and certainly not man-made global warming. It confirms that the analysis from various temperature stations over the last 100 years has been fairly accurate. This indicates a light global average increase in temperature over this period. This tells us nothing about whether the planet is truly warming, or if we are in some sort of long term earth cycle. It also tells us nothing about man-made warming, if it exists. Finally their analysis still can't fully account for the so-called "fudge factor" which has to be applied when you consider the positive effect of concrete cities on temperature readings. All they can prove is that previous samplings of the data were adequate, and that our somewhat inherently faulty data shows a positive temperature trend over the last 100ish years. They also reconfirmed the El Nino impact.
Finally, I think it's important to note that if this study had come to the opposite conclusion, it would have been derided as quack science and laughed off of Slashdot. Furthermore, the fact that the Koch brothers funded an apparently legitimate scientific study is unlikely to challenge the conception of most on this forum that they are a bunch of purely evil monsters, but it should.
the earth has had an ice age (not covered with ice, just cooler periods) every 40,000 years. our last one was about 20,000 years ago. we should be warming and it should reach it's peak soon (+/- 2000 years). if we have increased the peak temp of warming by 1-5 degrees, so what? it will thin our numbers and our impact will decrease. if you really want to decrease man's impact on nature, kill some people. everything else is wasted money, time, resources, etc.
The study does not address causation, but that will not stop alarmists from pushing overzealous political policies that usurp individual rights.
Since the last ice age.
Influenced by man? Maybe, if so it is too late to make a difference.
Changes made on this continent will only be offset by shifting the bad things to another continent.
We need to adapt, move underground maybe....
Rick B.
The debate should not be about the existence of global warming -- that debate is pretty much closed. The question should be, "What should be done?"
Nothing. Absolutely nothing should be done to mitigate global warming and here is why
1. It will be economically cheaper to relocate those people who live by the coasts. Most of the people who have beach front property in the US don't need assistance anyways.
2. The cost to freedom of giving the government powers to regulate carbon emissions is too great. Everything from the number of pets you own, to the food you eat, to the number of children cause carbon emissions. Giving the government power to regulate carbon emissions gives the government power to regulate everything.
3. Models show that increased carbon in the atmosphere will contribute to increased plant growth and after a brief adjustment period biomes will adjust to the changes.
Global warming is about control and power. If you want to do something about it: plant a tree.
how many subsidies have been paid to solar and wind power industries in the past three years?
Let the sceptics provide proof it is not caused by man. The primeval forests grew for about 100 million years before the first herbivores evolved on land, capturing atmospheric carbon and burying it under their own canopies, with the young trees growing in the debris of their dead ancestors. The atmospheric CO2 levels fell dramatically during this period, and the earth cooled considerably as a result. Forests are very efficient at capturing sunlight and using it to capture atmospheric carbon, and atmospheric CO2 is very good at keeping heat at the plant's surface. We are well on our way to burning through 100 million years of captured sunlight, and releasing the stored energy back into the atmosphere as free CO2. If someone has a good hypothesis as to how this would not change the climate, they are free to try to prove it.
Korma: Good
This is how science works.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Global warming is one thing...but MAN MADE global warming is BS, and always has been.
All apples are fruit but not all fruit are apples.
In other words even if there is a global warming trend, and in spite of current beliefs that is not a fact, it may or may not be related to industrialization.
"In so doing, we find that the global land mean temperature has increased by 0.911 ±
0.042 C since the 1950s (95% confidence for statistical and spatial uncertainties). This change is
consistent with global land-surface warming results previously reported, but with reduced
uncertainty."
The study defines a global trend of a less than 1 degree C increase over 60 years. This could just as easily be the result of cyclical global climate trends going back millions of years. To determine if current data is consistent with cyclical processes we would need millions of years worth of data. We do not and will not have that kind of data until scientists have time travel and invisible satellites that would not interfere with any primitive cultural beliefs.
Posting a story about a news event doesn't deny the proper scientific procedure.
Complaining that posting said story about a news event somehow undermines the proper scientific procedure when, in fact, it doesn't smacks of bias.
Any more questions?
-SS "Teach the ignorant, care for the dumb, and punish the stupid."
I have no doubt there is climate change of our planet because there is climate change of all other planets in our solar system also. However right there is where most of my agreement with the global warmers stop.
1. I don't believe global warming is man made or if it is there is such a small fractions that it just doesn't matter.
2. I believe that is just another way to regulate and control all of us though use of other peoples agendas.
3. Any idiot can see that there are weather cycles on the earth and that the earth is not in a perfect circular pattern around the sun. So if you smart enough to realize that then you should be smart enough to know that there are times where the earth will be closer to the sun for longer times and then farther away from the sun at other times. This is nothing new but its being packaged that way like we are all idiots that just found out the earth is round.
"Human Caused Warming" is what some political groups want to imply.
Global warming cooling changes of large magnitude seem entirely due to the Sun & Earth orbit.
Every scientist knowing the record of the last 2 dozen great ice ages over the last 2.5 million years knows that global cooling and warming alternate and that it is such a massive change that humans will not have any effect on the magnitude of those large changes.
We are in a cooling period some solar scientists have speculated may last a decade or more.
I don't buy studies financed by dollars from governments given to the people doing the studies. That is very much like raises to teachers who then vote for more legislators who promise more raises and higher pensions, tenure and earlier retirement. Hello Greece.
For all those that will start screaming I am a climate change skeptic/denier/whatever, I will burst your bubble now and openly acknowledge the climate is changing.
The question relates to the cause and significance of the change.
The data set referenced in the summary goes back to 1800 and shows a trend of increasing temperature. Should we all panic about global doomsday? Perhaps, but perhaps not.
What about the data set? We know there have been climate changes well beyond man's record keeping. The ice age is a fine example, and you can't blame driving SUVs on that. Think of it this way. If I use the winter months as my historical data, spring starts to look damn scary and by summer we will be convinced the temperature will keep rising until the earth bursts into flames.
Looking at this data set, concluding it proves man-made global warming beyond a doubt, and claiming causation can be established with it is simply foolish.
That was nicely done, particularly the summary video http://berkeleyearth.org/movies.php. I'm glad we can consider the question on 'warming' settled.
Oh wait, that was only a peripheral question. Most 'deniers' I know conceded that in fact the globe probably WAS warming - although this well-done study pretty much removes any question.
Of course, it's a big step from "this is happening" to "this is WHY this is happening", and an ever-larger conceptual step to "this is what we all agree should be done about it".
-Styopa
Where we disagree is what caused the warming. Past temperature data for holocene"current interglacial period" shows that earth has been going through similar warming cycles many times over the last thousands of years. The current so called global warming period is not even one of the warmer ones.
The problem with this scientists is that they look only at a short timespan, when natural climate cycles dont work on such short timescales.
If you start the data from lets say 1800s, then of course there will be warming as that was a unusually cold period.
This current global warming period also coincidence with the highest solar activity in 8000 years.
So, if I'm hearing you correctly, proper scientific procedure consists of two-sentence soundbites and article headlines about assured conclusions by scientists? I mean, you just said:
So I'm forced to conclude that, according to you, when people posted news stories about cold fusion and cures for cancer, they were performing the proper due-diligence with regards to scientific process.
I swear they give me mod points to shut me up.
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Nope. No critisizing here. I fear the same things you fear - the insane rush to legislate what we THINK we MIGHT see happening. I am still angry about the rush to legislate during the great CFC "crisis". No one ever explained how those large, heavy CFC molecules made it up into the upper atmosphere, and stayed there. Nope! Let's rush to outlaw traditional CFCs, and make sure people have to pay more more AC and refrigeration.
So - the temperature data dates from the year 1800. We have a little over 200 years of data to characterize the earth's temperate behaviour. I do not believe it is representative of the earth. We still need more data.
All the evidence, majority of scientists, repeated research, tons of data proving that global warming is a fact means nothing.
One semi-scientist, who hijacks scientific publication procedure to publish his research (using a magazine not specializing in his field of research), in which hi actually does not disapprove anything, just claims that global warming models are largely exaggerated is enough for the public to exclaim "Global Warming a Hoax".
Majority of people do not follow logic and reason, but emotions, people in general believe, what they want to believe, and it is not a criticism - I start to think it is just an evolutionary adjustment. Very few have the courage to face the reality.
You're right. Libertarians don't want the government to tell people how to live their lives; they want corporations to tell people how to live their lives.
Me? I prefer to have a vote in who tells me how to live my life. And I mean a real vote, not a fake vote-by-dollar, which isn't a vote at all. Even when I spend zero dollars at a store, that store still tells me that I have to drive past its billboards on the way to work. If I want a billboard-free drive, the only way to get that is by having government "tell billboard makers how to live their lives". Alas...
I just noticed these people at Berkeley are SCIENTISTS! They're just like the the other scientists at NASA and elsewhere who are obviously faking their data to get those lucrative NSF grant funds! Really, people, how can scientists be trusted at all. What we need are a panel of non-scientists, like, say, the GOP candidates for president, to carefully evaluate the data until this elaborate hoax of Al Gore's can finally be forgotten.
What a load of total cobblers
You know, the whole question of coastal cities has always been unconvincing to me. If sea levels rise by nine feet, then humans will... uh... move nine feet up the hill. Yes, that means that some coastal properties will be destroyed, and new coastal properties will be created. Yes, there might be some expense in that. But nobody is going to die with a one-millimeter-per-year sea level rise. I don't know -- that always seemed like a losing argument of the environmentalists to me.
The sad fact is that there is a large group of people, primarily conservative America, who will still disregard or dispute even this most basic aspect of the global warming/climate change discussion. The right-wing has made such a strong effort to attack anything which liberals even mildly support that it's become ingrained into the culture for them to simply conclude that it's fake left-wing propaganda. They'll likely only watch one news source, or only conservative sources, and therefore get no outside information on the subject to even begin to use their own brains for comprehending the situation.
While I think corporations played a hand in wanting to avoid emissions legislation that would cost them money, I don't think that's the entire problem, particularly since it mostly only affects this one particular issue. I think their culture has become what it has primarily because the Republican party in power has become so afraid of losing that power that they're building up this impenetrable partisan wall between their followers and everyone else, so that not only do their followers disagree with the opposing viewpoints and candidates, but they despise them. It's to the point where even when they need their followers to believe something different, they themselves have a hard time putting that new message through. Kind of like the select few respectable Republicans who kept trying to lay to rest the rumors about Obama being Muslim, or the birth certificate debacle, and how they were generally ignored since that wasn't the party consensus. Look how long it took for that to settle after the evidence was repeatedly provided and even after the original naysayers accepted it, trying to make the issue disappear due to growing negative public sentiment towards it by that point. Yet you'll still find many in the party who believe it regardless, since it was held onto for so long by so many prominent figures.
Global warming will be the same. Even if they come out with irrefutable evidence that it is also man made, it's become so accepted as liberal propaganda that we're going to have a very hard time passing any sort of legislation to help prevent further damage. That, and you'll have people who are so disgruntled at their long accepted viewpoint being wrong that they won't care enough to show any support. The Republican party and media are going to have to collectively work hard to rewrite this narrative they've created if we ever intend to get anything done.
How sad it will be for future generations to read about the history of this situation. Where not only will humans possibly have caused the climate change, but humans were too stubborn to accept responsibility for it and debated even its existence until it was severely impacting their environment. How stupid we may look. And we'll all be judged for letting it happen, not just one vocal group, because in the end republicans and democrats don't really matter. As should be the case right now.
What if the country is flat, and moving nine feet up means moving 100 km sideways ? What if millions of people live and work in the affected area ?
Will the cost of relocation be shared by the rest of the world ?
Yeah. Then those people would move. They would all be affected, yes; they would have to build new homes, yes; but its hardly cataclysm. They would have a century to slowly migrate 100 kilometers? Yeah, I see the problem, and the problem I see is small. Why pays for relocation is a political question; my prognostication is that, no, the rest of the world would shed them a tear then tell them to move themselves uphill.
Also, yes, grain yields will decrease (maybe, if we don't engineer different grain) in traditional growing areas (USA) and will increase in other growing areas (Canada, Russia). Yes, there will be winners and losers. Yes, I see the problem, and the problem I see is small.
But hey, I'm just a guy. I've never studied this stuff. I'm open to being convinced that these are bigger problems than I imagine, or that there are bigger problems than these. Still, I haven't yet been convinced that a slightly deeper ocean is a big problem.
I agree!!, but i feel that previous ./ posts have been more balanced than I was expecting. It is way too early to draw conclusions.
but still I am going to limit myself to just one.
1) The change is small -- there is no horrible feedback loop (hockey stick). Whew!!!!!!
You can't slowly migrate.
But you're right of course. If the problems don't affect you, it's not really a problem.
Where else would anyone want to measure temperatures?
I'm the real Vorokrytin P. Winterbuttocks.
7) Let's kill some more brown people, as they are usually to blame.
From the headline above
"it 'confirms that these studies were done carefully.' The study also found that warming in the temperature record was not caused by poor quality weather monitoring stations — thus rejecting a frequent claim of skeptics."
From page 2 of the report.
No adjustments or corrections were made for systematic effects such as urban heat island warming or change of instrumentation.
So they did nothing to check the quality of the monitoring stations. They accepted the readings. This does nothing to reject the effect of these claims.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
1 give me money to study a problem.
answer: yes it is a problem -- it requries more money for study
see 1.
This is a bigger factor than " if you can prove us wrong, we will give you a PRIZE "
I don't understand what you mean. Of course you can slowly migrate. Humans slowly migrated over the whole world. In fact my understanding of the world migrate requires slowness. A fast migration is called exodus or flight or evacuation or something.
It's true. I don't live anywhere near a coast today, so if I live here until I die then sea level rise won't cause me to move at all. But I've lived most of my life on coasts, like most people. And if I had to, I'd move uphill.
Daniel Schechtman won a Nobel for proving wrong what 99.9% of scientists held to be true.
Science is about skepticism. Climate science has become a religion.
Some countries such as Bangladesh are set to lose MOST of their agricultural land.
Some island nations could be completely underwater under the worst-case scenarios.
Some countries such as the Netherlands have large portions of their territory already below sea-level. Would be disasterous for those countries.
For lands that are already below sea-level there is increased risk of flooding- especially in areas that are not accustomed to flooding.
It would be impractical to move a city like New York- so some sort of storm surge protection like Holland uses will need to be implented.
It's not so much people are going to drown from sea-level rises (except during the increased storms that will occur)- it's the financial cost.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
From this very study:
Goto http://berkeleyearth.org/Resources/Berkeley_Earth_UHI
Scroll down to page 10.
Look at that map, it clearly shows that the dataset they're pulling from isn't even meaningfully above the noise level. They say ~33% of the stations they surveyed had negative temperature trends (over 70 years... two stations within the same city have completely opposing trends over seventy. goddamn. years.)
This study and those like it will have zero credibility until someone can explain WHY stations right next to each other have such large discrepancies, and can ACCURATELY model those discrepancies.
Once someone can give me sensible and reproducible information on the data these studies are based on, I will start giving the conclusions drawn from it some weight. There simply is no conclusion to be made until the data is sound.
I believe the most relevant questions to ask regarding global warming are:
#1 and #2. Is there global warming? If so, what will the impact be?
While many people like to ask if this is caused by mankind, I think that this question may never be answered adequately, and in the end it doesn't really matter what the answer is if we will need to take the same course of action. Knowing who smashed your windshield does not change the fact that you need to replace it.
I believe the answers are: Yes, there is global warming and the impact will harm our current way of life at least mildly and possibly severely depending where you live.
#3. Are the consequences of the current global warming serious enough to take action against?
I don't think that we have any kind of consensus on this point. The consequences are too minor from one year to the next for most people to see a large problem. For the sake of discussion, I like to assume that the answer is yes. The dangers are serious enough to warrant a response.
#4. What action can we take that will have an appreciable impact?
This is my largest problem with most global warming fanatics. It seems like everyone has the same solution in mind... to cut our CO2 emissions drastically. Even if everyone across the globe was able to cut CO2 emissions by 40% (an impossible task), it would not stop global warming... it would only slow it down a bit. Therefore, if the solution requires something that is impossible to implement and it won't solve the problem, then it isn't a solution that should be considered. It is like having everyone pay thousands of dollars extra in taxes to have someone mow 1/10 of everyone's lawn. It is way too expensive for too little benefit.
I am not saying that we shouldn't seek 'greener' technologies. Coal fired power plants and internal combustion engines spew a lot more stuff into our atmosphere than just CO2 and switching to greener technologies will make our cities cleaner and nicer to live in, but they aren't going to solve THIS problem. We need more people to research possible solutions that have a chance of working.
The best solution is rarely to reverse the actions that cause the problem. If my kids track sand and dirt into the house, I could ask them to find and pick up each peace and take it out, but the consequences of the solution would be worse than simply living in a dirty house. A better solution is to use a vacuum and a mop even though the vacuum and mop were not used to create the initial problem. There are other ways to reduce global warming
It's indeed time to stop stagnating the debate, repeatedly stuck on what causes temperature increases or simply denying it by any and all means, and focus on what matters - what to do to about it. Especially now as it has become abundantly clear governments and corporations are completely immobilized on the issue and have apparently given up. In spite of the massive increase in sales and marketing of stuff that slaps the label "eco-whatever" on it, it appears that all of this is mere sales, and has no real effect of long term environmental consequence. It's the same consequence selling "diet-everything" has on a population of fat people, after being taught that drinking sugared water all day will make them special - now the still-fat people buy "diet" stuff for more money. Converting 0,0001% of the combustion engines per year to electric engines will take about a million years to have any effect. Especially when much electric power is still generated by coal. I live in a city where any eye, nose, and throat doctor tells every patient every day the cause for their health problems is the air quality - and the only thing to really do it is move to another city. There are simply too many cars here, and not enough wind or water to take away that smog. On any weekday of dry weather, the air gets thick and gray, hovering above town like a pillow smothering everyone's breathing. Meanwhile, the government is giving tax incentives to sell more cars, because of the economic benefits. Make your choice - health, or short-term economic and political gain. Ah, just take the money, and later we'll deal with the dead.
The Koch Brothers? Independent?
After all, you identify yourself with the group: deniers by using the word "we". Fine. Then at least admit to yourself that you believe truth is subject to political dogma, and move on.
Paranoia is a Survival Trait!
Did anyone else notice that the authors clearly state on page 3 that there was a lack of warming between 1950 and 1975. After that the temperatures clearly got warmer. Doesn't that suggest the culprit is the clean water act of 1972?
Yes many papers were published, but not the raw underlying data. FOIA requests for the data were improperly denied or ignored. This study is publishing its raw data that included more sources, so that will be a big improvement over previous practice. Note this paper DOES NOT definitively say that Global Warming is caused by man made CO2 emissions.
If god created humans, why would god have made us so prone to violence and war when his 1st commandment is thou shall not kill? or further, why create us to be prone to breaking his commandments yet still give us commandments to fail and create hell to punish us from acting in the way in which we were created?
Since when is anything coming out of Berkeley independent? really.
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N2
Water
Helium Gas
O2
Now that we have someone else with credible standings, can we lay this to rest and just agree to recycle more, and use the bus more, etc...
Also pushed by Academia.
There was never a hole and it was caused by our magnetic poles.
We banned a CFC and the thinning gets larger!
You should try science sometime, you might learn something. If you learned something you might not be such a dumbass
I sincerely hope this will be the start of proper science in climate research, with all the politician and corrupt "scientists" from both sides getting out of it. Studying this field is very important for the future of mankind, we need results quickly, and the only thing that can provide it is unbiased research true to the scientific method.
I like the way you have broken down the issue.
#1: GW is happening. Most agree.
#2: Is it because of humans? Scientists are working on it -- but they need to come up with an accurate model before it is convincing. For e.g., predict average temp a few years ahead of time. It will also be great if the same model can say how much reducing CO2 today will impact the temperatures tomorrow. Chances are certain parts of the world (Coastal Florida, Maldives) might have to be written off no matter what the answer to this is.
#3: "To what extent should we handicap our own consumption of natural resources or industrial production to alleviate AGW?"
If the answer to #2 is "a little bit", then #3 doesn't matter. Take the money from CO2 programs and spend it on adjusting to a hotter world.
If the answer to #2 is "a whole lot", it gets interesting. The tree-huggers will tell you to stop all CO2 emissions, but that's an overreaction. Everything that humans do has an impact on the environment. The right question is not
- Can we avoid impacting the environment? No we can't. The Greeks and Romans ran out of firewood before Jesus was born. There are 6 billion of us now.
The right question to ask is:
- Is it more expensive to reduce CO2 than it is to deal with a hotter world?
To be precise, the question is
- How much CO2 can we reduce so that the cost of reduction and the cost to deal with a hotter world is minimum?
With a model from #2, there are bean-counters among us that can tell you the answer. Although I think they'll take 10-20 years to come to agreement, just like the scientists.
The parameters of the analysis are simple:
- Timeframe = 60 years: Why? Firstly, we don't care about the problems to be faced by the still-to-be-born. That's our kids problem to solve. Secondly, once we get past 60, problems like GW are diminished by worries of a personal nature such as retirement funds and biological phenomena.
- Region = Developed world + China: Basically regions with money. If the Somalis run out of water, well... we don't care about that today.
We can make the countries that are affected pay proportionately to the countries that reduce CO2, and problem solved. This is of course assuming a rational leadership. Which brings me to the last point.
The kick in the ass. Common folks need to panic before they get behind any change in the behavior... Panzer tanks, Nuclear leaks, that type of thing. My thought is that 1 million white people dying in a short timespan will be enough of a kick in the ass to get the ball rolling.
That's a very nice strawman you've constructed there, did it take you long to make?
/. read the whole article before pooping your pants... I don't care what side you are on. The real lesson here is to try to be more like Muller and team. I lifted this off of page 2 for the trolls who failed to read that far:
Muller also cautions that observers should not to take the BEST results and use them to prove something that they can't. When we asked him if it were possible to extrapolate from his team's results and predict whether the temperature increase will continue, he told us: "I don't think that is possible. The key issue is what fraction of the observed change is anthropomorphic. We don't shed much light on that."
I never understood why people care about what causes changes to the environment? If you got skin cancer would you really give a flying rats ass if it came from a naturally occuring ozone hole vs one produced by CFCs?
I guess it would be helpful to correlate atmospheric carbon with an observed effect on climate as input to judge the benefit of removing carbon from the air.
However in the grand scheme of things it does not matter. 1/3rd of the carbon in the atmosphere is unquestionably man made. The extra carbon is unquestionably the direct cause of carbon loading of the oceans increasing acidity. It is simply not necessary to go on with an expidition to prove human cause for global warming when we already know too much carbon is doing bad things to the world even if global warming did not exist.
If you decide global warming is bad and want to drop the global temperatures it is as geoengineering projects go cakewalk. You just dump sulfates into the atmosphere reflecting more energy from the sun into space and your little planet gets cooler. MUCH easier than getting everyone to stop spewing their carbon into the atmosphere.
If you are more concerned about the direct effects of carbon screwing with the ph of our oceans then enumerate the potential problems this causes when mainge that the political case for change. Global Warming from a practical perspective is a red herring where it really matters.
Going an added step further than the parent, I'll use the analogy of warfare. The costs to avoid open combat can be budgeted and weighed. The costs to fight a war are unknown at the beginning, the scope of future battle being impossible to accurately forecast, although the costs can be inferred to be high.
For instance, the direct cost to maintain no-fly zones over and embargo shipping around Iraq rose above $1b/year only twice over of the course of ten years. The direct cost to invade and fight a counter-insurgency in Iraq ran over $100b/year, every year.
So it will go with climate change. The costs to maintain something like our current environment are fairly well known. The total potential scope of unbridled climate change is unknown, as are the potential costs to mitigate it. However, those costs can reasonably inferred to be very high, being as the last millennium of human civilization was built within the limited climate zone variation over that time.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Studies have been repeated, and verified, and (in this case) repeated again. Sending something back to committee for more study is a transparent tactic. I don't doubt that the likes of the Koch brothers will pony up for more... naturally, since the margins from their current business model depend on dumping crap into the public commons.
Luke, help me take this mask off
The environment (physical, social, economic) within which you manage your business is going to go through considerable change. Unless you're in the last 15 - twenty years of life, you are going to experience it personally. Your assumptions as to what it takes to avoid massive climate change is based on small-c conservative thinking, starting with a fossil fuel-centric focus. However, to create the status quo you're accustomed to required massive, pervasive governmental intervention to encourage the millions of economic decisions that once would have gone another way, to instead go this way. Not central planning on the scale of the USSR, obviously, but planning and action nevertheless.
And, so it will need to go this time, so that you can meet change on a scale that you can manage and anticipate, rather than one that hits you like a hurricane. A good market-oriented solution, using the same sort of successful governmental guidance we'd had in the past, will involve a cap on carbon emissions which the market can self-organize and innovate within.
You'd like climate mitigation that doesn't require much of anything from you, and that's not going to be possible, whichever way it goes.
Luke, help me take this mask off
I think it's funny that after we had the whole Climategate thing and they even admitted they weren't even doing peer-review anymore (At that point, it's just mysticism honestly) and people STILL think that AGW-deniers are the crazies. It's not like they got caught red-handed lying, falsifying data and admitted they weren't even doing the most basic steps right.
That's not to say this can't be correct! In fact, I hope it is because I would like the actual truth, but until it is peer-reviewed (and at the time of writing, it is not) it doesn't matter WHAT they say it says.
Everyone should cool it and wait until some actual scientists look at the data and make some conclusions.
Have you actually read the IPCC assessment reports and the studies they refer to ?
The IPCC takes 50 models, all using similar, but quite different methods. And all of them predicting different things (some are monte carlo simulations, which give different results on each run, and as you would expect, monte carlo simulations of a chaotic system don't actually converge over a large number of runs).
So you are asked to give the average value of a non-convergent non-predictable element. Think of it as giving the average of a sinus. Think about this real careful. The average of the values of the sinus function in [0,x] will be displaced slightly. And when you raise x, it will get closer to a certain value (but it won't ever actually arrive there). And then closer, and closer. This is called a convergent series. What if you were asked the average of the function 2x*sin(x) ... every value in existence has equal rights to the title of "average of 2x*sinx" (because for every desired average a and every minimum interval size b you can give an interval c where |c| > |b| and avg(f(c)) = a) ... And this is merely an edge-case of a divergent series. It can get worse. Given a function that does a random walk, how would you calculate the average ?
So there's the problem. Suppose someone were to ask you to give the "average value" of all the digits of pi (assuming that actually is chaotic - which is only a near-certainty, as far as I know it's not actually proven). There is no answer here. No matter what answer is valid for the first 1000 digits, taking in another 1000 digits gives a different answer. The next 1000 digits change the answer again, and no matter how far you go, the average refuses to settle on any particular value.
This will happen to any model of any chaotic function. Of course, that means that nature, which can be seen as another model (though is 100% certain to differ from all the considered models, no matter how many you consider or how accurate they are) ... will behave in a manner that is ... not mathematically related to any of the models ...
So how did the IPCC solve this problem ? Mathematically, the problem is fundamentally unsolvable, so how did a panel of scientists do it ? Well, when faced with unsolvable problems, simply pretend they don't exist.
They took every model they could find, assigned a "believability" value, which is averaged from a panel of scientists, weighted by the length of their beards ("seniority" would be the polite term). Then simply make a weighted average from the models that - due to the chaos property - bear no relation to reality. This is the "consensus".
Why is this acceptable ? Because we know no better way of working.
You might think this is strange, but it's how science has worked for a long time. Take for example physics, and the standard model's equations. You might think we know how to calculate their results in concrete situations ... we don't. But no worries ! We can calculate a few terms (the first and the third) of the infinitely long formula, and we assume the rest is not important (because if we don't do that, we can't derive quantum mechanics). Of course, chances are that the other terms are in fact important, at least in a few situations.
Sadly, you might think this sort of thing is rare in exact sciences. And while there's at least the consolation that ignoring inconvenient data is much less common in exact sciences as compared to, say the humanities (to say nothing of really politically inconvenient data, like the much observed fact that muslims are dumber than hindus even with near-exact matching ethnicity observed in India). However ignoring data is not just a political problem, or a "dumb social scientists !" problem, it is not nearly as nonexistent in exact sciences as I'd like it to be.
The sad fact is, even math itself (specifically number theory) has a little bit of inconvenient data. The v
Does no one else here notice that the study was funded solely by the Koch Brothers. The billionaire libertarians that astroturfed the Tea Party. They are ultra conservatives. Not nice people (they do business with Iran etc).
Anyways, I am stunned even they have admitted to climate change. Its like Fox News actually being Fair & Balanced. Something you never though you would see happen.
I found this relevant: http://0.static.funpic.hu/files/pics/00029/00029517.jpg
is this something like the creationists vs. darwin or what ?
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
The question is not is the earth warming, but is it warming due to man's actions. The article doesn't add much and "pre-releasing" it just continues the politics/religion not science aspect. Oh well.
Did you guys know the project leader attended and spoke at the Bohemian Grove? Just saying... It was also partly funded by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a government entity that is allll about the geo engineering. This whole "Independent Study" is surrounded by suspicious characters and entities. Bill Gates and Charles Koch also funded this study.... Extremely interesting. So we are to trust and believe that the people who paid for this didn't have any influence of the research even though they stand to make BIG BUCKS from the global warming lie. Yeah, ok. Furthermore, I haven't seen one thing in this study that hasn't been easily demolished by scientists that aren't funded by the Elite of the world that are trying to cash in on this scam.
Rich Muller has been a self-important [you fill in the rest] IMHO since I first espied him in the late '70s. No one ever said he wasn't smart, or a fine experimentalist, but what did he bring to the table that wasn't already there? Did he have a real argument here, or did he want to be a denier? Is Climate Change "just a theory" until Freeman Dyson capitulates too?
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Go and READ what they have written!!!!DONT let a website TELL you!!!!!!
Here's a FACT for you to check The Skeptics have agreed that "the earth has warmed by 0.9 degrees Celsius in the last 200 years"
0.9 degrees in 200 years.
Not even 1 whole degree in 200 years. Bet the eco-nazi's didn't tell you that.
Look at Figure 1 and observe how the 2009-2011 results have broken the lower level of confidence. This is an indicator of the reversal of trend. Yes, we were in a 35-year warming cycle. Now we are in a cooling cycle. This debunks AGW conclusively.
Since they damn well did the calculations to show what the warming trend WAS. Shit, you really WILL deny any damn thing to pretend there's not a problem, won't you...
You sick fuck.