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Little Ice Age: It Was Not the Sun
vikingpower writes "The Little Ice Age, lasting from the end of the Middle Age into the 17th century, may very likely have been caused by the combined effects of four major volcanic eruptions and increased sunlight reflection by increasing sea ice, the so-called Albedo effect. ... The University of Boulder has a press release with maps and photographs. Bette Otto-Bliesner, one of the scientists behind the 'volcano + sea ice' thesis, fields an earnest warning against drawing conclusions too quickly from this research: 'I think people might look at the Little Ice Age and think that all we need to save us from rising temperatures are some volcanic eruptions or the geo-engineering equivalent [...] But when you see what happened when global temperatures dropped by just one degree and you look at current predictions of six or seven degree increases for the future, you realize how precarious things are for life as we know it.'"
Not the University of Colorado at Boulder?
After 5 billion years, the sun is basically in steady state. I would not expect to see fluctuations over the type of timescales that human beings exist on. Yes, the sun is slowly getting hotter, but that's a long term trend.
No doubt this item will produce reasoned, well mannered discourse in droves! Pop some popcorn, enjoy the highbrow debate!
... and we don't really understand how they work now.
The sun's output did matter in the Little Ice Age. Sol doesn't put out constant energy, perhaps it was coincidentally at a low during that period and that contributed to cooling.
This climate system of ours is more complex and dynamic than the AGW devotees are willing to admit.
we really need another chicken little story? i sure wish we could get the politics out of science and vice versa. the fact of the matter is they just don't know. they can put on their pointy little hats and point to their diplomas from their philosophically skewed homogenous little universities and the fact of the matter is they are full of crap. starting with a premise and then pursing facts that make the nonsense seem a little less ridiculous is for attorneys not scientists. we aren't trying to exonerate O.J. here. im just so tired of the lies and bull...
Canwedo it with beer and make it lowbrow?
Just bought a new quantum computer, but I'm uncertain how it works.
Canwedo it with beer and make it lowbrow?
You betcha.
make it Löwenbräu.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
Keep inventing stories. I have never heard of a sinle po-global warming person denying the existence o the little ice age.
The trouble is, most questioning of the science related to global warming is politically motivated.
The REAL trouble is, even when the questions are not politically motivated, the "Global Warming" fanbois will label the people with questions as "Anti-changers".
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I fail to see how a 1 degree average change can make any significant difference (In Phoenix, if one day the temperature ranges from 80-110 degrees F, and the next day it's 81-111 degrees F, you won't notice).
That said, one thing that's consistently missing is how much the standard deviation of the temperature changes. You might not notice a 1 degree standard deviation shift, but you will notice a 5 or 10 degree standard deviation shift.
Why is this data never present in global warming arguments? Any climatologists care to explain?
After 5 billion years, the sun is basically in steady state. I would not expect to see fluctuations over the type of timescales that human beings exist on....
the sun is pretty steady, a middle-aged star, but there are still some small variations in solar intensity. The hypothesis was that the Little Ice Age was correlated with the solar "Maunder Minimum," a 75-year period during which the sun had no sunspots (and hence presumably was about 0.07% lower in brightness).
What this work did was put a good date to the start of the Little Ice Age; using radiocarbon dating to determine when the plants killed by the advancing glaciers died... and the dating shows the Little Ice Age began well before the Maunder minimum. The Maunder minimum didn't cause it, very definitely.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Same with anti vaccination loonies, and creationists, they all use the same tactics of internet circle jerk where one denialist site quotes another as a reference. The facts whilst interesting are considered irrelevant.
I have got to the point where i dont even bother to challenge them anymore, as their objections are based in their self interest allowing them to ignore relevant facts and use nit picking irrelevancies to support their case.
For some reason what seem to be otherwise intelligent people here on Slashdot show a remarkable degree of stupidity on this issue. Then again a lot of them propound libertarian claptrap too, so I guess I shouldnt be too shoucked.
I have never seen a case where they ask questions, their minds are made up already and no ammount of evidence/answers will change it. After all they might have to drive their SUV overcompensationveichles a bit less or something, and we cant have that!
A much bigger problem is that western economies, having their medium exchange controlled privately, rely on perpetual (and infinite) economic growth to avoid deflation.
The second more important issue is that the west is continually building their economy to rely on an infinite (and cheap) supply of oil when it's quite clearly a finite commodity.
Fix these two world collapsing issues first.. and then worry about whether the planet's getting a little bit warmer or not.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
...something catholic church would disapprove of.
Amazing how you manage to make yourself seem a victim of the moneygrubbing AGW scammers.
There was actually some non-politically motivated criticism, and a group of scientists lead by a renowned physicist set out to double-check the work of AGW science (who had doubts regarding AGW) and sponsored by AGW doubters. What happened? Do you even remember or did you filter that out...
There was some questions on the issue of bias due to the sponsorship, yet most in the AGW community seemed to welcome the effort to independently verify claims of global warming. And what was the result? AGW was confirmed as happening.
... and the dating shows the Little Ice Age began well before the Maunder minimum. The Maunder minimum didn't cause it, very definitely.
The only logical conclusion is that cold temperatures on earth somehow prevent sunspots. Which means, obviously, that global warming will blot out the sun due to a proliferation of sunspots caused by warmer temperatures here.
We're doomed!
Our economy is in the tank anyway because we've stopped manufacturing things. So if your big concern at the moment is money (which it is for a lot of people because of the poor economy), you might want to make yourself aware of the growth opportunities in the field... Most people who are into green tech want better tech, not less tech. My wife and I are building a house that we expect will use about 1/8th the energy a normal house uses for heating in the winter (we live in Vermont). The house will be a lot more comfortable to live in than a regular house, because we won't be heating the air as much, and the air will be fresher, because with a heat recovery ventilator we're actually getting more air exchanges than a leaky house, but using less energy. So it's just the opposite of wearing a hair shirt—we'll be more comfortable using less energy.
I'm sure someone can help me on this; wasn't science settled on numerous things before? Like ulcers, smallpox, the earth was the center of Universe, D=RT (distance = rate times Time), Bird Flu will kill us all( new one every year). All these things were proved true and many more beliefs, and it was needed to be proven untrue- I know an oxymoron. Prove GW and quit with the name calling, to me, right now, it's just a religion.
I'll just leave this here for you.
You are trying to use logic and reason, supported with a reasonable link to a source, when discussing an issue with an audience that is universally unwilling to accept that they are wrong. :P :(
Its like trying to deal with Creationists. Its not going to work, period. The other side has their opinion and is going to stick to it.
Now, to be fair they have that right. Everyone has a right to their own faith. I just wish people wouldn't try to use that as a basis for logical discussion. If I believe Wombats secretly control the world's politicians with their psychic abilities (arguably no less believable than Creationism since neither is based on a whit of scientific evidence), I can share my discussions with other Wombatists, but its pointless to try to explain my position to those who have not "seen the light"
The Anti-GW crowd will still be posting their denials when the first 100 million people have died from flooding, when major coastal cities are under water, when the poles are completely melted, and when most of the equatorial region has been in a drought for 20 years.
Sadly in the US they will probably be in the majority position in Government as well
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Wait is this the same radiocarbon dating that has wild variances that can be wildly thrown off by the smallest of mistakes? Especially when using proxies that don't correlate to what you think they should?
Yes, yes it was. Thank you, AC, you have caused boffins everywhere to tear up their doctorates in shame over the obvious flaws in their decades of careful work.
The original article is about the Little Ice Age primarily, and the only tie-in is the comment warning against relying on volcanoes to save us from warming / geoengineering man-made "volcanoes" to fix warming.
But, ok, you want to ask the question "is it actually warming?" I'm a climate scientist-ish, I'll throw in a line. I recommend skepticalscience.com for it's superb evidentiary support for the theory of anthropogenic global warming (a.k.a. climate change).
Yes - we have ample data demonstrating that it is warming, not only in the air but in the surface waters of the ocean (water absorbs some of the heat, it turns out - if only it would absorb more of it!). We have really really obvious evidence (seriously, just look at the satellite pictures) of dramatic summer sea ice loss. The troposphere (where we live - where our weather happens) has warmed about 1.3 degrees F over the last 100 years. This might not sound like a lot, but just integrate 1.3 degrees over the whole planet, and you're talking about a significant amount of energy.
The stratosphere has cooled up to 6 degrees Celsius (yeah, that's right, mixing up the units) in some places, and higher atmospheric layers have cooled even more. Now, you might ask, why the cooling - this is supposed to be global WARMING, right? The mechanism behind stratospheric cooling is a bit complex, but think about it this way: Greenhouse gases (GHG's) trap more heat (absorbed and re-radiated long-wave energy) in the Troposphere (the lowest layer, where weather happens) than we would otherwise have. If that extra heat weren't trapped in the lower atmosphere, it would have to go somewhere else, right? So where would it go? It turns out, it would go back into space or, more importantly, into the upper layers of the atmosphere (stratosphere, mesosphere, ionosphere). Essentially, the GHG's play favorites with the atmosphere - they give the lowest layer more heat while depriving the higher layers of their ordinary allowance.
Incidentally, this phenomenon allows us to distinguish GHG-driven heating from sun-driven heating. If global warming were caused by the sun alone, the temperature would increase in all layers of the atmosphere - the sun doesn't play favorites.
But wait, how do we know it's people? Physics tells us CO2 absorbs long-wave radiation (and then re-radiates that energy in all directions). Simple energy balance calculations tell us that without CO2 and other greenhouse gases (but mostly the CO2, as it is slower to enter/leave the atmosphere than H2O) the earth would be too cold to support most life forms. Over and over again in Earth's long history, higher concentrations of CO2 are associated with higher temperatures (the very early Earth was very warm, despite a weaker sun - this is known as the Faint Young Sun paradox - but greenhouse gases were more abundant). We're pumping this gas into the atmosphere with careless abandon, and we can measure and observe that much of it stays there (removing CO2 from the atmosphere permanently by natural processes takes a loooong time). Even if we didn't measure warming and we couldn't measure CO2 (did I mention we can measure warming and CO2? We do it all the time) the laws of physics and the principles of chemistry allow no other possible conclusion than a future of warming (for most of us) and cooling (for anyone unfortunate enough to be stuck in the upper atmosphere).
Sorry for the long post. Also, don't think for a minute someone does serious climate science without asking the questions "are we sure we know what we know?" or "are the computer models any good, like, at all?" about 3 times before breakfast. Seriously, people, we're pretty smart apes, this isn't "too complicated" or "too difficult" for us humans to figure out.
Terms like "denier" or "believer" have no place in this debate.
What convenient one-word label should we use for the anti-science side of this debate? Bearing in mind that using 'sceptic' for deniers is completely unacceptable to sceptics such as myself?
Both imply an unwillingness to consider what is known and what isn't.
A denier is simply someone who denies what is known is in fact known (inasmuch as anything can be "known"). If people are out there simply denying what is known why is it wrong with to call them 'deniers?'
Am I allowed to call Syrian President Bashar al-Assad a 'dictator?' Or is that forbidden too?
Why can't we simply accept it was the will of god and leave it at that? The amounts of money spent on all this science hasn't done the church one bit of good and it has to stop now. We need more people donating more money and come to church more often, but they have no time or money if they spend it all on science.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
It always astonishes me that on a geeky site like Slashdot with an audience that in theory puts such a high value on science, you get so many global warming denialists.
For some reason, everyone, both liberal and conservative, seems to take it as an obvious given that if a human influenced on the climate is happening, something should be done to stop this. This means that people who like our current way of life have no choice but to deny a human influence on the climate.
In my opinion, this is the wrong way of looking at it. Whether human activity influences the climate is a scientific question, best answered by scientists who have actually done the work to study the matter. It should not be a political question any more than research into the cause of cancer or earthquakes.
The political question should be: given that evidence shows that human activity influences the climate, what should be done with this data. A very valid answer could be: nothing can realistically be done about it, so stop talking about it.
The economic and social cost of reversing our effect on the climate would be staggering, and vast amounts of political and military force would have to be used to make sure every country cooperates (because any unrestricted outlier will soon start to dominate the world economy). People would have to get used to living in a state we would now consider poverty. No personal cars, very few gadgets, no airco, definitely no air travel. A huge sacrifice, and all just to keep the climate very slightly colder, which doesn't necessarily benefit everyone equally. Many parts of the world will become more pleasant and productive with a slightly warmer climate...
I have never seen a case where they ask questions, their minds are made up already and no ammount of evidence/answers will change it. After all they might have to drive their SUV overcompensationveichles a bit less or something, and we cant have that!
This. This is the problem I have.
There are a lot of reasons to not drive an SUV in cities, so don't get me wrong I'm all for things that make people behave less stupidly.
But you're using a cudgel to attempt to beat sense into their heads instead of educating them as to why their behaviour is harming everyone around them. So it's not surprising they're taking it as an attack and stubbornly resisting every step.
Let's just follow the chain of logic you're using:
- Global Warming is caused by human CO2 emissions
- Cars emit CO2, and bigger cars emit more CO2
- Therefore people should stop driving cars, or drive smaller cars if they must drive cars
It's perfectly logical, but completely wrong.
If we assume the first step as true, then cars are not the only thing that emit CO2, and in fact they're not even in the top 10. There are lots of other things that will make more difference to the climate if we cut them than cars.
But if we assume that the second step is true, then we just need to switch fuels to something that doesn't emit CO2, or clean the CO2 from the exhaust fumes, and we're still good to drive massive overcompensating cars again.
Trying to drive people to more ethical sensible behaviour by screaming at them 'the world will burn unless you do this' is just going to backfire sooo badly.
Business/App ideas are like arseholes: everyone's got one, they're mostly shit, but very rarely they contain a diamond
The famous hockey stick graph had no Little Ice Age or Medieval Warm Period.
Of course gravity is a theory. All scientific generalizations are theory. The facts or the observation. "I dropped this ball and it fell to the floor" may be a factual observation. "Balls fall when dropped" or "there is a force that attracts masses together" are theories--they can never be proved, because they are generalizations: you can never test every ball, or every pair of masses.
If I believe Wombats secretly control the world's politicians with their psychic abilities (arguably no less believable than Creationism since neither is based on a whit of scientific evidence), I can share my discussions with other Wombatists, but its pointless to try to explain my position to those who have not "seen the light" :P
I may not believe you, but I'd certainly subscribe to your newsletter!
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
From the post:
I think people might look at the Little Ice Age and think that all we need to save us from rising temperatures are some volcanic eruptions or the geo-engineering equivalent [...] But when you see what happened when global temperatures dropped by just one degree and you look at current predictions of six or seven degree increases for the future, you realize how precarious things are for life as we know it.
That's an important point. If you consider the disruption that occurred with one degree of temperature drop in the Little Ice Age can you expect the same level of disruption with a one degree rise in temperature? How about two degrees or the 6-7 degrees mentioned?
Nobody's ever denied the Little Ice Age. It was obvious from the historical records. What they are saying is that the Maunder Minimum made what was already a cooler era for other reasons that much worse.
No, the periods just didn't stand out the way you want them to. Here is a graph of a number of temperature reconstructions for the past 1000 years including Mann's hockey stick graph (the dark blue line). They pretty much all agree that it was warmer 1000 years ago than it was 400 years ago.
I love that straw man you set up there.
What "responsible" party has been predicting 6 or 7 degrees within 100 years? Nobody I know, including the IPCC.
The most extreme predictions I have seen from reputable sources have been 2 to 3 degrees within 100 years.
I have never seen a case where they ask questions, their minds are made up already
If you haven't seen it, let me suggest you go stand in front of a mirror, and stare in it
When you accuse the other side of having their minds made up, your mind too are already made up
Pot, kettle, black
The weird thing being that a lot of the policy options are things we'd want to do anyway: increasing energy efficiency, building more nuclear power plants, and reforestation are examples.
"Intelligent debate"? What kind of nonsense is that?! Everybody worth listening to knows full well that Slashdot posts aren't written, they're generated from a QRNG in CmdrTaco's basement, and comment scores reflect natural selection.
Sadly this post is a bit of a joke. This sort of paper comes out at least once a month. People just really, really want to believe this it seems. They are slowly getting more convincing, but as you can see in the paper, the timing doesn't exactly match very well. Some of the changes occur rather a long time after the earliest eruption, which throws their whole thesis in serious doubt. If the plant disasters they claim indeed occurred at the dates claimed, why isn't that massive sudden cooling in the history books along with a few revolutions occurring at those dates ? Why did the cooling last so much longer than similar volcanic eruptions ? At the very least they're missing something, at worst, they're just wrong.
They're also invoking feedback effects. That's cute, but feedback effects obviously never cause anything, it's a cop-out. This sort of claim gets weaker and weaker once you realize that they claim a tiny, tiny effect (slight albedo reduction, a sort of (tiny) "nuclear winter" caused by volcanoes) and everything else followed by necessity (it cooled further because it was cooling. Great ! If so, why did it stop ? No answer).
What this paper claims is that the little ice age occurs in simulations of their events, after tweaking the values a few times. Which values ? They need to rather greatly prolong the expected cooling a volcanic eruption causes. Great. But the Mauder minimum just happens to coincide really really well with the little ice age. And the timing matches a lot better than their volcanoes. Is that just a coincidence ? Nobody really thinks so, and this will be one of the many papers that fails to convince people of that fact.
If this paper is true, that little ice age should probably be classified as a "false start" of a real one. It tried to start and sure enough, temperatures started dropping (enough to cause the extinction of several countries), but for some reason that this paper doesn't go into, it didn't happen (and the modern world wouldn't have happened if it did, we'd be back in the stone age if not extinct instead of on the moon). The feedback loop cooling the planet got triggered, ran for a while, and then just ... died. Why ? It doesn't seem to have had any false starts the previous times. In fact this feedback system has proven extremely unstoppable in the past, including a few times with a massive co2 increase, which failed to halt temperature drops (at least in the long term it failed, in the short term we're guessing). They could at least have said something akin to that the sun may not have started the little ice age, but it looks like it ended it (at least the Sun may have sufficient power to do so).
That's another bit of an elephant in the room. It is "about time" (give or take 5000 years) for another huge ice age to start. Was the little ice age a "false start" ? If it is, that seems a rather unique event. We don't yet know what causes ice ages (and no, it's not an iceberg blocking the gulf stream as half of the internet seems to believe, that would suck for Europe, as last years' UK snow disasters would become yearly events, and rock for Canada (unless Canadians like skiing), but it doesn't really change temperatures). We just know that ice ages happen with alarming regularity in the past, and that their alarm clock is about to go off.
Regardless, this paper is one of many with this claim, and it's not exactly better than most. They have some new, real-world data which is rather unique, but otherwise ...
There's another problem I'd like to point out about these simulations. They show us the real nature of causality. No one cause "causes" something else. In this paper the "cause" of global cooling during the middle ages is "a number" of volcanic eruptions, which activated a number of physical effects due to their location and their distribution, which were followed after a century and a half by another 3 volcanic eruptions, and the warming between the two caused a change in ocean salinity in one or t
I'm finding the list of beers most stimulating.
"What Are They Gonna Do When Were All Using Freenet"
http://backstreetboysfan.com/ http://leonardowilhelmdicaprio.com/
Sorry, economics and climate science suffer from not having repeatable experiments. Both are not science. Real provable science.
They pretty much all agree that it was warmer 1000 years ago than it was 400 years ago.
1000 years ago Earth was far less populated and hence less deforestated (had much lower albedo) then 400 years ago.
...offering why those large volcanoes in particular had this effect.
According to http://www.volcano.si.edu/faq/index.cfm?faq=06 (which admittedly doesn't go back that far) it seems that volcanic activity has been relatively flat over time.
As presented in the blog summary (which may or may represent their actual paper accurately) it looks very much like a case of observer bias - they had a cooling period, and they looked just before it to see if anything happened, which seemed to be these 4 big eruptions. That (alone) can't be the basis for a compelling theory.
Without comparing the larger frequency of eruptions over time, this data is meaningless. If these 4 eruptions were an outlier, then indeed this is interesting. If they weren't (ie if either a) this was a typical frequency of vulcanism over time, and/or b) there were periods of comparable or heavier vulcanism without such observed climate effect) then this theory loses a lot of its traction.
Looking at volcanic megaevents - the HUGE collection of eruptions about 132 million years ago, and again about 30 mya - doesn't seem to present ongoing climatological effects, but then the Little Ice Age phase is so short (centuries) it wouldn't really even be a blip on a paleoclimatological chart.
-Styopa
Leaving out all tree rings doesn't change the result.
But despite throwing out good data because of one subset, still it's pretended that the historical reconstruction of the last 10000 years of climate temperatures are wrong because of them.
If we assume the first step as true, then cars are not the only thing that emit CO2, and in fact they're not even in the top 10. There are lots of other things that will make more difference to the climate if we cut them than cars.
Have you ever actually looked at the amount of CO2 and other pollutants released by automobiles. I have. I tallied the numbers back in 2008.
34,254,000 Tons of Hydrocarbons, 260,462,000 Tons of Carbon Monoxide, 30,707,400 Tons of Oxides of Nitrogen and 5,086,605,000 Tons of Carbon Dioxide. These numbers are from just one year and only from automobiles and light trucks. It doesn't include trains, ships, airplanes or factories.
http://deesuniverse.blogspot.com/2011/10/what-our-vehicles-leave-behind.html
We put out more carbon dioixide in three-five days than the entirely of volcanoes do in a year. http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=2827
Would you like to rethink your statement.
what about my retarded unibrow cousin?
Gen 8:22 While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.
So the Headline is "...NOT the sun!". Then the post and the article go to length caveating the heck out it with "may" and "probably". That kind of mismatch immediately let's you know the post isn't about the science, it's about the politics.
Hmm. In your (insightful? Really?) response, I see a lot of opinion and ranting, but I don't see a single cogent statement that refutes any of the claims in the paper. They explain the lags, the feedbacks, and the modeling they used in their paper. Real climate even has a more layman's description of the mechanism: http://www.realclimate.org/ .
Of course, you're probably counting on the fact that people rarely RTFA and fewer would RTFP. But basically your entire premise is incorrect and refuted in the paper itself.
~X~
>"Gravity" is not a theory.
If gravity had a political program attached like a Siamese twin to it, I think you'd probably start seeing a lot of "gravity deniers".
Let's work out some analogues:
1) theory: masses attract.
2) conjecture: some asteroid might swerve into the path of the Earth
3) political program: spending billions, even trillions of dollars on asteroid-avoidance
If scientists were solemnly intoning that we have to spend trillions of dollars on X because "the science says so", you'd see a of people denying X.
Actually, though, they'd be denying the attached political program, not the underlying basic science.
Similarly, no one denies that CO2 acts to warm things up in a closed glass box. That's the real basic science. They're denying the conjectures (we'll be X degrees in Y years) and the political program.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
"But the Mauder minimum just happens to coincide really really well with the little ice age."
No it didn't, according to the University of Boulder paper the little ice age (LIA) began ~1275-1300 (Mann says is covered 1400 to 1700) and the Mauder minimum only spanned 1645 to 1715.
But I think you're right that the LIA was a false start of a new ice age, indeed the current Milankovitch cycle should be causing global cooling (not warming). Indeed, under such circumstances the climate might be especially sensitive to negative forcings such as volcanic eruptions. Recall, the Milankovitch cycle involves decreased melting of spring-summer ice i.e. it is an albedo feed back that enhances high latitude cooling that causes the ice ages. Volcanically forced increase in polar ice coverage could result in an albedo feed back during this current current
"We don't yet know what causes ice ages"
Milankovitch cycle causes ice ages, Oh, dear.
Mann, M.E., Zhang, Z., Rutherford, S., Bradley, R.S., Hughes, M.K., Shindell, D., Ammann, C., Faluvegi, G. & Ni, F. 2009. Global Signatures and Dynamical Origins of the Little Ice Age and Medieval Climate Anomaly. Science 326(5957), 1256 -1260
Hays, J.D., Imbrie, J. & Shackleton, N.J. 1976. Variations in the Earth’s Orbit: Pacemaker of the Ice Ages. Science 194(4270), 1121 -1132.
The entire point behind a "liberal arts" education was that free men were supposed to be educated to enough of a degree in many different subjects so they could intelligently discharge the duties of citizenship.
Ideally, that would mean
-people have enough of a grounding in computer science/applications to know about encryption and privacy issues
-people have enough knowledge about DNA testing to know when it useful and when it's not
-people have enough knowledge about science to ask useful questions of climate and other scientists
If we're just going to leave things to a priesthood, we don't need to question prosecution attorneys, judges, the police when they ask for more powers, the government when it makes certain claims, car companies, Goldman Sachs, etc.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
I could stop reading after "feedback effects obviously never cause anything" - insightful? you have got to be kidding me
With all due respect Oligonicella, you are outrageously misinformed. Almost all the data is freely and publicly available, and at least for GISS even the source code is available. You can run it at home.
A shady secret conspiracy? Seems like someone has been playing you for a sucker.
Extra apropos: Eisbock. More alcohol, less water!
Shouldn't all science be questioned?
Yes, all science is questioned. The process is named "peer review". Do you know what the word "peer" means? It means someone who has a similar standing.
The work of scientists should be questioned by people who have gone to the trouble of studying and understanding what the subject is about. Not by trolls who repeat the bullshit spewed by corporations whose interests are hurt by the facts that scientists present.
So increasing population and deforestation was the reason the temperature dropped from the Medieval Warm Period 1000 years ago to the Little Ice Age 400 years ago? Why hasn't that trend continued?
How much does solar irradiance vary at wavelengths below 400nm and what are the physical and chemical effects of this variance on the atmosphere and global climate? Do the variance in solar magnetic index and the interaction of the solar and terrestrial magnetic fields have any direct or indirect effects on global climate?
The problem is if we test it and it turns out to be true, we just screwed ourselves...
Shouldn't all science be questioned?
Yes, but the problems with the deniers is that they don't listen to the answers.
Terms like "denier" or "believer" have no place in this debate. Both imply an unwillingness to consider what is known and what isn't.
Let me propose some terminology. The people opposing the anthropogenic theory of global warming can be divided into three distinct categories:
*skeptics
*policy critics
*deniers
Skeptics are asking legitimate questions about the science. Policy critics deny the proposed responses to global warming, for economic or political reasons (I have no problem with this-- there should be more debate on policy.) Deniers deny anthropogenic global warming, period, end of discussion.
Skeptics and deniers are actually complete opposites. The key feature of deniers is that they are not skeptical, in fact, they are completely credulous of any argument, no matter how ridiculous, that opposes global warming.
I have a quick heuristic to distinguish deniers from skeptics: ask if they've actually read the IPCC report from Working-Group 1, "The Physical Science Basis of Climate Change" http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_and_data_reports.shtml
Not "well, no, but I read a critique of it on website-X and I know what's wrong with it, the problem is -xxx--." Actually read it. Not the summary, not the analysis on some page, the actual report.
If you haven't read it, but still want to tell me your opinion on why the science is wrong-- well, your opinion is based on ignorance. You're a denier.
If you have read it-- well, congratulations. You're the one percent. It's a pity that the relentless and highly-amplified shouting of the 99% who don't actually know anything about the science is completely drowning out what you have to say.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
you global warming nuts need a life and no political power. You need a padded cell and some electroshock. Stop being a fucking communist!!!
It's become far too easy to get modded "insightful." All you have to do is type up a long-ass post of nonsense that nobody will actually bother to read.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, re Voltaire
While as you say everyone has the right to believe as they like, that does not make their belief correct. Relativism has run too far with the idea that everyones opinion is as good as anyone else. Science is about verifying opinion with experimentation and observation. If you want to be a Wombatist I don't care but you should be open to the idea that given contradictory evidence maybe you should reevaluate your personal beliefs, but it seems as if no one is willing to do this anymore because everyone's a unique little snowflake, who's opinions are just as good as everyone else.
They're also invoking feedback effects. That's cute, but feedback effects obviously never cause anything, it's a cop-out.
You know the big feedback loop that's going to be bad bad news? It also comes from one of your denier friends...
Water Vapor. It accounts for a vastly higher amount of the atmosphere than CO2 and is a very effective green house gas.
It's level of concentration is always tied directly to the temperature since it's presence comes from evaporation. (simplified obviously)
So now you have increases in CO2 that cause measurable effects to warm the climate. Not massive on their own, but they do make it warmer.
That temperature increase causes more water vapor to form thus further increasing the green house effect. Which causes more water vapor to be created. Rinse repeat and sweat a lot...
The mods forgot their meds apparently today as you're an idiot.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Well I don't get the official position on feedback loops ... first of all, my personal opinion is that yes, they exist, and yes, they're big ones. But ignoring ones particular beliefs about the feedback loops, there are 2 options. (to summarize, "feedback loops" here means global warming is caused by only one factor : a tiny amount of warming about 170 years ago, and the ship has sailed : no amount of co2 reduction or anything short of diverting more energy than global warming has already amassed can stop warming running it's course. Needless to say, diverting energy streams like that is a pipe dream. )
But as I said, reality is simple : either they exist, or they don't.
In case they don't, then global warming will add the direct influence of co2 and proceed to stop. Which will result in a net warming of ~0.1 degree Celsius, let's say worst possible case and call it 0.5 degrees. It's insignificant. 0.5 degrees and everything else is the normal cycle. In this case we should obviously do nothing, as there is no reason to do anything.
If they do, then the battle is lost. Expanding every last resource available to the entire human race to the point everybody dies will not make the tiniest dent in the warming effect. Again, co2 reductions are ridiculous, unless they can be implemented 200 years ago. Anything later than that is beyond ridiculous.
So can anyone please explain to me how the hell you justify co2 reductions ? They don't even work in the most optimistic cases (ie. we drop co2 production tomorrow and let everyone north of North Carolina freeze to death), and in the scenario where China does ... well the only possible option available to them (burn all their coal in the next 50-100 years or faster) ... forget about it.
I think what he was referring to is not that cars release CO2, but that the CO2 they release is several orders of magnitude less than say coal fired power plants.
Dude. We don't link to "RealClimate" any more since we know it's produced by a PR company. Not scientists.
Current temperatures are always natural in that they occur as a result of all of different factors that combine to produce them. What is not natural (in the sense that humans produced the effect) is the dramatic increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, particularly CO2. There is no known event in the past where they have increased so drastically on such a short time scale. Of course the further back you go the more difficult it is to discern anything on such a short time scale so it's kind of fuzzy but still it doesn't appear to be normal.
Because:
Science of the future will find better ways of dealing with it than bankrupting ourselves trying to remove carbon from all we do.
Science of the present already has cheap ways of dealing with the warming itself.
The MODELS used to predict the disaster are just that: MODELS. Since there's no reason to suspect they're any better than current weather models that cannot much predict thing more than 4 days in advance, then there is no reason to believe that they can accurately predict the calamities that they do.
These MODELS have not successfully predicted past behavior, and have no explanation for the fact that there has been no warming since 1997.
The trend in transportation, one of the bigger CO2 injectors, is toward electric cars which will cure much of the problem. The final solution is battery operated cars and trucks where batteries are ultimately charged with solar-thermally generated electricity that can run all night and for several days on molten salt, and work without PV panels that "wear out" over time and require scarce rare earth materials that may not be available into the future.
All we have to do is give this problem time, and the solution will happen because it is a good economic idea, not because we need to bankrupt society to stop mining coal NOW, stop burning anything NOW, stop using internal combustion automobiles NOW.
If they do, then the battle is lost.
I see what you did there.
So it's either that we don't really understand the climate and so the alarms being raised are false. Or - it's so bad we can't possibly understand and fix it and should just accept our fate.
We do understand quite a bit. Feedback loops are quite clear and already evident. Warmer temps means less snow cover which means more heat absorbed instead of reflected which means warmer temperatures which means less snow...etc.
Are there perhaps feedback loops we don't know about yet? I'm quite sure there are, but since we're seeing measurements moving at paces not seen previously at any time in history, it's fairly safe to say that retardant feedback loops aren't currently helping much if they exist at all.
I already gave you the CO2/H20 vapor loop. It's real, it's testable, it exists.
That alone is reason to reduce CO2. The earth is a very malleable planet, we've changed it before, we can change it again in ways that benefit us rather than hurt us. Scientists have said that if the Canadian tar sands are brought online for production it may very well be game over as far as stopping a runaway greenhouse effect but those us who actually care aren't going to let people like you stop us from trying to save both us and you.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
How much does solar irradiance vary at wavelengths below 400nm
Quite a bit! The UV component of the sun varies far more than the average luminosity with solar activity.
and what are the physical and chemical effects of this variance on the atmosphere and global climate?
That is a subject of research; a lot of people would like to know! For the most part, the UV doesn't make it to the troposphere, so it doesn't have a direct effect, but it's still an unresolved question as to what indirect effects it may have.
The best study I know of looking at the correlation of solar activity with global temperature shows only a plus or minus 0.1 degree variation from solar max to solar min, though, so it doesn't seem to be a major player in temperature (the reference is Camp and Tung, http://depts.washington.edu/amath/research/articles/Tung/journals/GRL-solar-07.pdf ) The Working-Group 1 report links to more references on the subject; you might look at some of them: http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_and_data_reports.shtm
Do the variance in solar magnetic index and the interaction of the solar and terrestrial magnetic fields have any direct or indirect effects on global climate?
I don't know of any confirmed effects there, other than aurorae.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Citation? When I look at the EPA's GHG inventory for the US, on page 5 I see that Electricity Generation leads with 2.2Pg (Pg = petagram = 10e15 grams). Next is Transportation at 1.7Pg. After that Industrial at .7Pg. All of CH4 (as CO2 equivalent) is .7Pg, all of N2O is .3Pg. Volcanos worldwide are .2Pg.
And, page 9: "Transportation End-Use Sector. Transportation activities (excluding international bunker fuels) accounted for 33 percent of CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion in 2009. Virtually all of the energy consumed in this end-use sector came from petroleum products. Nearly 65 percent of the emissions resulted from gasoline consumption for personal vehicle use." .65 times 1.7Pg = 1.1Pg, or 20% of our total CO2 (not CO2-equivalent) emissions. In the US, cars are number two, after electricity generation. What are these "lots of other things" that would be better for us to cut, and how much are their yearly emissions?
World emissions are at about 30 Pg, so US automobiles alone account for about 3.7%, ignoring cars in all other countries. World-wide, "road transport" produces 5Pg of CO2 (p. 10), or 1/6 of the total, with no breakdown into personal and not. It is possible that US personal car use alone is not in the top ten of world-wide sources of CO2, but I'd like to see a reference for that or an explanation. World wide, 41% is "electricity and heat". The next big category is "transport" at 23%, then "industry" at 20%, "other" at 10%, and "residential" at 6%. Obviously, there's some category shuffling going on here (transport includes ships and airplanes, too), but if you carved out the world-wide top two (ignoring our contribution to "transport"), our 3.7% for personal autos looms decently large against the remaining 40%. It's bigger than ships, world-wide, it's bigger than airplanes, world-wide.
This might have something to do with why people who worry about global warming don't much like big, wasteful automobiles. They have the secondary problem of making the road a scarier place for people who might like to drive smaller cars or take a motorcycle, scooter, or bicycle. And in theory, yes, we could switch to a GHG-free fuel for our cars and then people could choose them just as huge as SUVs today. But here on Planet Earth, for the next ten years or so, that is not much of an option. An E-vehicle can be more efficient, but right now a whole lot of "E" comes from coal-fired power plants, so it's best to keep them small, and use them where they win biggest (start/stop driving so they can use regenerative braking).
But it's not, certainly not in the US. US personal auto emissions are 1.1Pg of CO2. Total US fossil fuel CO2 emissions is 2.2Pg. Unless an "order of magnitude" is the third-root of 2 (1.26), that's not several.
you are right I took his 34.2M as the CO2 number incorrectly
The belief that "if you don't have replicates of some subject to use as a control group, you can't know if a theory will make good predictions about this subject" is false.
We only have one universe , with no control group, but scientists have been able to accurately predict things about our universe.
Solomonoff's inductive inference is a mathematical formalization of how to make a good prediction in a unique universe. It is a mathematical Occam's razor: shorter theories give better predictions, provided that they perfectly describe previous observations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Inductive_inference&oldid=471899642
>But I think you're right that the LIA was a false start of a new ice age
We are in an Ice Age, and have been for millions of years. You probably mean "Glaciation Period", which are things that happen during Ice Ages.
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
It was not the sun that caused the Ice Age. Here is a good explanation. Although it may have been a ice comet. The problem is that people don't accept what the Bible says. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKO-vTwYCo8
Realclimate is known to push propaganda over science. Don't trust it. Especially when you can read the actual paper itself, which actually means something.
i believe we all know now how to quell AGW... VOLCANOS
Realclimate is known to push propaganda over science. Don't trust it. Especially when you can read the actual paper itself, which actually means something.
Known, eh.
Is the RC summary contradicted by the paper?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Are there perhaps feedback loops we don't know about yet? I'm quite sure there are, but since we're seeing measurements moving at paces not seen previously at any time in history
This is quite a claim. Since we have no data of any real resolution once you go back 200 years you should change this claim. Before that measurement intervals are at best 10 years apart (as in we can't tell what happens during 10 years in history, only "average change over 10 years, assuming x y z, which we know corrupted at least some datapoints"). Once you go anywhere near the last ice age, which would be the interesting area for this, resolution is down to several centuries. So we have no idea if the rate of change is really unprecendented. It's unprecedented in the last 200 years, but that's not exactly a surprise to anyone. Before that it's a game of chance.
There have certainly been more massive co2 releases into the athmosphere than all human production combined in history. And much faster ones too. They did not kill the planet.
I already gave you the CO2/H20 vapor loop. It's real, it's testable, it exists.
It's "real" only for specific cases (it has requirements such as being at very near the end of an interglacial period). It's most definitely not testable (nothing in climate science is testable, since we have no spare climates to fool around with. And please don't start with how simulations are the same as tests, or I will compare the data of the IPCC AR1 simulations with reality and let's see you explain that). However I agree the data seems to indicate this feedback loop does exist (statistical inference is what's used here, not "reality", not experiments, not empiricist science (in fact according to empiricist science you'd be pretty fucking justified in claiming it doesn't exist), it just statistically seems to be what's happening "on average").
Incidentally, what you neglected to mention is that it also releases massive amounts of co2 into the atmosphere, and by now far more than the human production. In fact, it's far past the point where human co2 emissions became insignificant. Let's call this existence of this feedback loop "fact A".
That alone is reason to reduce CO2. The earth is a very malleable planet
Great let's call this "claim B".
Can you elaborate on A -> B. You take this as a given. Needless to say I don't agree. This step is beyond unclear to me. If feedback loops exist the only reason for warming (in the last century and a half) is warming slightly before that (which may - may have been caused by anthropogenic co2 in the beginning of the 19th century aided by a few larger than life volcanic eruptions). Human emissions after that probably did not help matters, but they had but a tiny effect. So can you please explain to me what effect 1% (at best) reduction in CO2 levels in the athmosphere is going to have ? (most co2 additions to the athmosphere in the last century were the result of feedback loops adding more co2, they were not human emissions. And yes, the pace of h2o and co2 release into the athmosphere is accelerating much faster than our production is)
When saying "co2 emissions caused by humans caused global warming" that is only correct if you mean the deforestation that occured in the early 19th century in Europe and a bit in Asia, with perhaps a dash of coal burning, but not much. It is absolutely incorrect to claim it has anything to do with burning oil, or burning coal in the 20th century. Same for 21st century.
So I really, really, really don't understand. Limiting emissions does nothing about global warming (if it's real - but we both seem to agree it is).
Oil and gas started in earnest at the beginning of the 1900s.
Both quite nicely coincide with large increases in CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. Do you disagree with these widely accept and studied facts?
When saying "co2 emissions caused by humans caused global warming" that is only correct if you mean the deforestation that occured in the early 19th century in Europe and a bit in Asia, with perhaps a dash of coal burning, but not much.
Seriously...you think deforestation is producing more CO2 that coal or oil? "In 2008, 8.67 gigatonnes of carbon (31.8 gigatonnes of CO2) were released from fossil fuels worldwide" compared with "land use change contributed 1.20 gigatonnes in 2008, compared to 1.64 gigatonnes in 1990." linky with refs
Did the large deforestation during the industrial revolution contribute? Sure, but that's a one time change and releases carbon that was only recently taken out of the atmosphere so it's less harmful. And once it's added the CO2 levels would stay steady and/or go down as other plants start growing. What we've seen instead is an ever increasing CO2 level, something else is continuing to add CO2. That is coal and oil.
If you can't understand that you need to go back to school, chemistry in particular. We burn LOTS of coal and LOTS of oil, a major byproduct of that is CO2. Millions of years worth of CO2 that has not been in the atmosphere for millions of years.
When you add that into the atmosphere in just under 200 years it's going to cause an effect. That effect is warming since it is scientifically proven that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Funny enough, we've seen this exact effect through studies of global temperature and observations of the vast majority of glaciers melting at record paces. Glacier National Park won't have *any* glaciers in just 20 years.
We have added/are adding lots of CO2 to the atmosphere which is causing warming. Reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will make it less able to keep heat in and thus will reduce temperatures.
How's that for A -> B? If you don't believe CO2 is contributing to global warming, well you are in the very small majority.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
The problem of course is that those increases coincide with much larger increases in co2 ... They accelerated the situation, but the situation will "deteriorate" almost as fast without them.
Have you read the IPCC reports ? They pretty directly state this.