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Climate Change To Drive Weather Disasters, Say UN Experts
mdsolar writes "Climate change is amplifying risks from drought, floods, storms and rising seas, threatening all countries, but small island states, poor nations and arid regions in particular, UN experts warned on Tuesday. In its first-ever report on the question, the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said man-made global-warming gases are already affecting some types of extreme weather. And, despite gaps in knowledge, weather events once deemed a freak are likely to become more frequent or more vicious, inflicting a potentially high toll in deaths, economic damage and misery, it said."
Or you could get your head out of your ass and learn something.
Nice start AC. Let the food fight begin!!! ;-P
woot.
There is 7 BILLION people on this planet, and nearly 1/3 of the forest has been cut down in the last century. With all the polution humans cause, and millions roads that we built, how can anyone dispute our involvement in climate change?
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
You can find studies that show more hurricanes, less hurricanes, more sever hurricanes all due to global warming. It's getting old attributing every possible outcome to Advance Global Warming. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/07/070730-hurricane-warming.html http://www.science20.com/news/global_warming_may_mean_fewer_hurricanes http://www.sciencedaily.com/videos/2009/0109-global_warming_causes_severe_storms.htm
It all starts at 0
You read 596 pages already?
You only have to feel guilty if you're a *white* Homo sapiens sapiens. Everyone else can be proud!
more regulations, taxes
Think of the billionaires' children!
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I am socially and fiscally conservative. I believe in states' rights. The data about what exactly is happening to our climate is muddy. The outcomes are unknown. There is a lot of politics behind it.
But what we are doing to the environment cannot be good. We need to do something about it. Add a $5/gal tax to gasoline and use the money to develop public transporation and bicycling infrastructure. Bar new fossil fuel plants. Build offshore wind farms, the Kennedys be damed. Add tarrifs to good from countries that are not cutting emissions. Invest in next-generation nuclear reactor development. Ban cars from city centers. Stop giving tax rebates to people buying hybrids - give tax rebates to people buying bicycles, train tickets, and bus tickets. Stop building cities around cars.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
Too late. They pounced while your weren't looking, and got FP to boot. Idiots... They're the first one to dismiss "global warming" when it snows hard in their town, while totally missing the real story - it's snowing harder because of global warming. Extremes in weather are the predictable outcome of more energy in the environment. To be sure, one storm, does not a trend make, but the observed events are pretty much following the model. "Damn those scientists! Let's just cover our eyes and ears and mutter to ourselves..."
Seriously though I predict 500+ comments despite no one reading the thing they are talking about. That is just today. The number of comments by people who have not read the report will number in the billions a couple years from now.
Predictions with little to no ability to falsify them don't exactly qualify as "science." "In a system with a lot of variability to begin with, CO2 is going to increase the risk of variability."
Ok, maybe at one level it's science. Pointing out that the prediction doesn't have much predictive value isn't "railing against science."
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
I wonder how the worlds scientists who are all in consensus about the fact that climate change exists and it's causing weather patterns to be unpredictable would respond to your comment. It was fact long before it became political fodder to be poked and prodded and written off as pseudo-science...
On the face of it this makes sense, but what are you basing that on? I mean is it that there is more energy, or just a changing amount of energy?
Perhaps.
The undeniable fact is that it's wars, dictators, poverty, tribalism, illiteracy and low education that is amplifying the impact of weather extremes.
Somehow, we are trying to fix that with a fight against a carbon dioxide chimera.
It's almost like it's a symbolic sacrifice - a token of our will, but it will not stop people from dying in countries far away.
We can't use up our natural reserves in this way, but the acute problem is to stop people from dying today.
The long term solution is to fight for democracy, fight for education, and fight against (christian and islamic) fundamentalism.
This will keep our children from dying.
Then, in 20 years, we can start thinking about solar panels, etc...
It also predicts larger economic damages due to weather. Well, no duh. We're building more and more expensive stuff. The weather could stay the same and this will be true.
Not just more stuff, but in more places. It is a lot harder for the storm to rip through empty fields now as we are filling them with homes.
Not all good scientific theories and models are falsifiable.
Take high-energy physics: the Standard Model predicts the existence of the Higgs boson. However, 'proof' is statistical. When we can only ever say that something exists with statistical certainty (e.g. 6.5 sigmas), then it's going to be tough, if not impossible to falsify.
Doesn't mean that that theory is useless in describing the world. What makes a theory good, is its ability (or lack thereof), to explain observations about the real world.
FWIW, conservatives who say things like "evolution is only a theory", all need a good hard punch in the head. Because it displays an obscene lack of understanding of how the world works.
That's like an obese person who eats junk food all day, and says his diabetes has nothing to do with his diet!
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
Is there consensus on that second part? What is your source? Because that is not what is said on the first page of the report the IPCC just released.
This country cares for the planet like their diet. They deny any bad doing till it's too late, and then look for other excuses as to why it happend.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
Don't waste any effort having a conversation with AC and his/her ilk. They won't believe anything that is in conflict with their world view. Their motto must be ignorance is bliss!
You are playing fast-and-loose with the words "all" and "fact", which seems to be the standard mode of operation for left-wing nutjobs. The facts are: 1. We have a lot of evidence suggesting that climate change is happening. 2. We have some evidence that human pollution has caused some of the symptoms of climate change. 3. We also know for a fact that the overall climate of the earth has changed and fluctuated to extremes without the help of humans, in FACT, before humans even existed.
You got any karma man? I really neeed it. Just a little hit! Come on!
On paper, yes. In reality that was the rest of the world expressing relief that the US hadn't elected another Republican president.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
They've been perpetuating disasters since 1945!
it's a theory
You keep using that word. It doesn't mean what you think^W suppose it means.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
Uhhh, yeah, they are. If a theory is non-falsifiable, it isn't science. Evolution is highly falsifiable. AGW isn't. Sorry, but that's the way it is. The change is so small that it falls within the noise of natural variability of both weather (fluctuations in water vapor content have hundreds of times as much effect on atmospheric heat retention as all the CO2 ever produced by man), and climate (we don't really understand long term climate, or what caused past climate changes). We don't even have a single control (whereas we have practiaclly unlimited controls and unlimited samples to show that evolution happens, and the ability to read paste changes in the genetic code, which are predictive, etc etc).
Also, ad hominem is a logical fallacy. If you want to find the actual truth, rather than descending into political squabbling, you would do well to avoid it.
I just hate how they take the conclusion "the same number of hurricanes, or less" and yet still spin it into a scary prediction, by leading it with a "the wind might blow harder".
Use your common sense. Hurricanes are routine events. We have them every single year, and the majority don't cause much damage. It's the most extreme hurricanes that cause damage, so it's the frequency of those extreme hurricanes that matters.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Wow. You really got screwed over by your school system. This isn't pseudoscience, this is the real deal. And just because you seem to not understand the words the scientific community uses to describe the validity of a hypothesis and the evidence supporting it doesn't make it any less real.
Right, but (assuming proper experiments and analysis is performed) what level of "statistical certainty" should be required before science is used to inform public policy? The answer lies somewhere between 0 and 6.5 sigma. In a nutshell, this is what the argument is about.
more regulations, taxes
Think of the billionaires' children!
Don't you worry! Those kids will be just fine. I fear, however, for the children of those that work for the billionaires.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Open your mind, and learn the difference between climate and weather. Note that it isn't the IPWC. It's the IPCC. Big difference.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
You can find studies that show more hurricanes, less hurricanes, more sever hurricanes all due to global warming. It's getting old attributing every possible outcome to Advance Global Warming. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/07/070730-hurricane-warming.html http://www.science20.com/news/global_warming_may_mean_fewer_hurricanes http://www.sciencedaily.com/videos/2009/0109-global_warming_causes_severe_storms.htm
You do realize that a hurricane and a "severe storm" are rather different things, right? Your last Science Daily citation is about severe storms, not hurricanes. It never even uses the word "hurricane" nor does it indicate that it's talking about storms that only affect coastlines. A thunderstorm and a hurricane are two very different events. Are you going to complain that global warming reports are in direct conflict over precipitation figures and then link to stories about increased monsoon seasons and decreased snow fall?
That's like an obese person who eats junk food all day, and says his diabetes has nothing to do with his diet!
But you can't prove that it's the diet that is causing the diabetes. Might as well be lack of excercise, or too much wanking, or whatever. Correlation != causation and so on.
That said, if I was fat and started to develop a type 2 diabetes, I would fix my diet, just in case.
2. We have some evidence that human pollution has caused some of the symptoms of climate change
We have controvertible proof, and there was consensus on that in the 1979 NAS report. Fixed that for you.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
I'm pretty sure no one thinks the idea of pumping shit-tons of excess carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is a GOOD thing. It's not a question of whether we should do something about this, it's a question of how to most rationally balance our economic interests and our long-term environmental interests. The problem is that reason has become a scarce commodity in both sides of the debate at this point. The increasingly shrill alarmism of the left and the head-in-the-sand denialism of the right are making for the kind of emotionally-charged debate that's making it damn near impossible to chart a clear path that's going to keep the planet from warming too much while also not creating an economic disaster worse than the environmental one.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
There is now consensus that it sucks to be poor, to live on small island states and arid regions.
Some change should become take place when richer countries start getting hit more regularly.
Care to share the secret where you want to go once this planet became inhabitable? I wanna come with... no scratch that, I don't want to share a planet with someone like you.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Huh, IPWC.... I'm looking at the IPCC report this slashdot article is about, right now. It does not sound anything like "consensus". It sounds like properly nuanced presentation of their analysis. This is not what you will read in the news:
There is evidence that some extremes have changed as a result of anthropogenic influences, including
increases in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. It is likely that anthropogenic influences have led
to warming of extreme daily minimum and maximum temperatures at the global scale. There is medium confidence
that anthropogenic influences have contributed to intensification of extreme precipitation at the global scale. It is
likely that there has been an anthropogenic influence on increasing extreme coastal high water due to an increase in
mean sea level. The uncertainties in the historical tropical cyclone records, the incomplete understanding of the physical
mechanisms linking tropical cyclone metrics to climate change, and the degree of tropical cyclone variability provide
only low confidence for the attribution of any detectable changes in tropical cyclone activity to anthropogenic
influences. Attribution of single extreme events to anthropogenic climate change is challenging.
Because the call to action is called after the Scientist makes an Hypothesis not when they make the conclusion.
How many laws are put on the table before these is strong evidence. Banning chemicals in plastic without conclusive evidence that it is causing health problems. Cellphone regulations because someone who is a Scientist says that Cell phones may cause cancer.
The problem isn't as much the Scientist but the Psuto-Scientist who did OK in their High School science class. Who take everything from a Scientist as fact, vs. Asking for their data, and checking it out. And wants to be the guy who said I told you so, if something was actually harmful.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Don't waste any effort having a conversation with AC and his/her ilk. They won't believe anything that is in conflict with their world view. Their motto must be ignorance is bliss!
I'm having trouble telling you two apart.
~Loyal
I aim to misbehave.
Erm... how much more than a summary would you expect in a single post on slashdot?
I have no real opinion on it all, but was there some part of what he said that you actually disagreed with?
If and when the next natural disaster happens, how will we know if it is spawned by climate change, or if it is something that would have happened anyway? How do meteorologists make that determination? I seriously would like to know.
it’s a theory at best.
So is relativity, but your GPS wouldn't work if it didn't compensate for relativistic effects.
(Not that I am in any way defending or condemning AGW. I just hate seeing misuse of terms.)
Disclaimer: I am a libertarian.
Global warming has been studied so carefully, scientifically and so thoroughly by so many, that I don't think that it can be denied. At least in the geological short term. The amount and speed of warming can still be debated.
However, the response to this warming insight seems to be based entirely on emotional, non-scientific and non-economic grounds. The "cure" seems to be mostly based on reversing greenhouse gas emissions, whereas alternatives or simply adapting to changed conditions are dismissed.
The King Canute's should see this as an opportunity, not a threat. Let's see the same intellectual engagement in the response to global warming as there has been to climate change itself.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
Or, in plain english: "Climate is changing, we screwed it up, now we're going to get more flooding. Not sure about the cyclones though."
Genius, the true cause of climate change: "Too much wanking". That's something the republican party could get behind.
But who are we going to sue once we get the bill for our idiocy?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'm curious. The proponents of (formerly global warming) climate change all say that disasters (drought, floods, storms, rising seas) are on the horizon if temperatures change. But that implies the recent temperature average is a minimum for disasters. If we'll have more disasters if the temperature increases or decreases, what an amazing coincidence that right now all of history, even pre-history, we should be at the disaster minimum.
Climate has changed before - those with the brains to adapt survive, those dinosaurs who can't will die off. Climate change drives evolution.
I, for one, welcome our new carboniferous age.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Do you know what "likely" refers to when used by the IPCC? What about "medium confidence", etc? If not, are you qualified to interpret their statements? Please at least skim the report that millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours have produced for you. First, go to page 21.
The folks behind some enormous word-wide climate rallies, 350.org, just launched a campaign to connect the dots between weather anomalies and climate: http://www.climatedots.org/
If the temperature is going up, on average, there would be more energy by definition. Heat is energy. If the average temperature weren't going up, it wouldn't be global warming.
I listen to it, for the sole reason that I do not have an exit plan for when this planet becomes uninhabitable. I cannot shrug, say "oh well, looks like it failed" and head over for my other Earth and start over there.
In risk management, we'd handle it as a high risk, regardless of the probability. The impact is devastating, the probability nonzero, resulting in a risk you have to take serious and handle.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Too late. They pounced while your weren't looking, and got FP to boot. Idiots... They're the first one to dismiss "global warming" when it snows hard in their town, while totally missing the real story - it's snowing harder because of global warming. Extremes in weather are the predictable outcome of more energy in the environment. To be sure, one storm, does not a trend make, but the observed events are pretty much following the model. "Damn those scientists! Let's just cover our eyes and ears and mutter to ourselves..."
So if it gets hotter, it's global warming. If it get's colder, it's global warming. If there are weather extremes, it's global warming. If weather is mild, it's global warming.
And my all time favorite...
If the climate changes, it's global warming.
Tell me; What would the weather be like if it were not for global warming?
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Then again, do we really need so many more?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
No one respectable is saying climate change will ruin the earth, or even wipe out humanity... Please stop with this falsehood. When you set cost to EXTREME MAXIMUM it makes cost-benefit analysis impossible for you to perform.
Are you willing to tell all of the people below the poverty line that they can no longer afford to drive to work, pay for the food and afford to heat their house?
And bicycles? trains? That might be fine for whatever city you're living in, but there are many places in this country where such means of transportation are absolutely not available. Think seriously about the economic consequences of what you're proposing. Wind is not a viable alternative energy source yet, and won't be for some time, if ever.
Yes... I was talking about the conclusion it would lead to "extreme weather". I mean the statement is faulty to begin with since there are obviously many types of "extreme weather" that need to be looked at separately.
But even ignoring that, I don't think increased energy in system -> more kurtosis risk can be assumed to be true. The system is complex with many feedback loops. That is why I asked what the evidence was.
In case I am wrong about what exactly?
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
Uhm... "more" would be a "changing amount". Jeezuz...
Who is saying the planet will become uninhabitable (even with very low odds)? It is not the IPCC, where does this idea come from?
Even the scenario of highest temperature change at the highest rate will still be slower and of lower magnitude than what has happened in the past (if you trust the proxy data).
The Standard Model is falsifiable. Some parts are hypotheses that have not been proven yet as technology may not exist (ie existence of Higgs boson). See the solar neutrino problem which changed a fundamental aspect of the Standard model. It led to a Nobel Prize as neutrinos are now considered to have mass.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Is it anymore painfully simple than "our current climate change is caused by human causes?"
If there is no God then free will is an illusion.
"Changing amount" includes both "less" and "more"... If you don't understand such a basic concept, I take it you were talking out of your ass and there is no way you will be able to answer my question.
It's how they operate. I don't know if AGW is happening or not. I think it's very likely that we influence our environment. What gets my panties in a bunch is that the AGW crowd ONLY states the negatives. As if there could be no possible benefit from a warmer planet. Living in the midwest, I've rather enjoyed the 70+ degree weather in March. Yes, yes, that's weather. But I'd rather the trend go warmer than colder. Give me the negatives, but give me the positives too so society can weigh them against each other to determine if we might be better off with global warming.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
Still it makes great press. It gives people who an agenda leverage. Most important it allows some groups to extort money from others while ignoring those groups who would tell them to bugger off.
It's a 594 page report with 220 authors from 62 nations leaving 18,611 review comments published by the United Nations. And that's what your professional assessment of this effort? Great press? Extortion?
Yes there is climate change. Is that bad? Depends on where you are and what change you experience. We do know it has been hotter before.
So I have two things here, I have a six hundred page report with many many many citations from peer reviewed journals. And I have your two or three sentences of cheap rhetoric -- you don't live on the coasts so you say "depends on where you are and what change you experience." And we should just all turtle inwards and say "fuck commerce and 90% of the world population"? You say that we know it's been hotter than before yet you don't explain how the temperature slowly got to that point, slower than a hundred years, slow enough for it not to totally destroy a key link in the food chain. Nobody's depending on polar bears, but what happens when the fisheries in the ocean start coming up drastically short or we get another dust bowl? This report, it's not worried about Earth, animals, plants, etc. It's worried about humans. We depend on those other things but the reason to worry is not FUD and your idiotic assertions aren't doing anything to calm anybody. So please shut the hell up until you have something meaningful to contribute.
My work here is dung.
Attacking the source when the comment is not liked (but mostly accurate) has been a staple of man for eons.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Whats on page 21? Is it a picture?
and it's causing weather patterns to be unpredictable
It occurs that weather patterns on earth have not been that predictable, ever.... prediction of weather is inherently hard. Scientists have done a good job explaining away weather phenomena in the past, such as ice ages. But the state of the art has never been any good at predicting changes in weather patterns like that.
You have no argument, so you resort to ad hominem. What does that say about your position?
I'm surprised that there isn't more discussion of this from a risk management position.
The naysayers basically seem to be stating that the science must be absolutely ironclad before we settle on any course of action, other than what we're doing today.
If they're wrong, and if climate change is real, then we're all in a whole big pile of hurt. I won't say that the Earth will become uninhabitable, because I don't believe that. What I do believe is that the Earth won't sustain the current population or society. It'll be more than bad enough.
If they're right, and climage change isn't happening, then they're out some profitability.
The question is how much remediation we do, how much we cut back, how much we push conservation, and how much we push alternative energy. For the first measure, to fail to push conservation in many forms is absolutely criminal, because it's good, no matter what. Better-insulated houses are just plain better, and will require less fuel, of whatever form. Same thing for higher-mileage cars, obviously balancing for safety. Sometimes I think in America the use of fossil fuel is considered a right, almost a duty - when if it were more properly considered an expense we'd be taking different actions.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
This. Adding a $5/gal tax to gasoline would send thrills up lots of liberals legs, but it would hurt poor people the most. It would adversely affect the cost of basically everything, not just transportation.
Extreme weather goes in cycles, usually a rough multiple of solar cycle. this was taught in universities decades ago because it is true. what we have is urban sprawl and overdevelopment putting more real estate and people in harms way from weather (and earthquakes too). As for these "island natives threatened by rising seas", the sea has been rising since the last ice age, these lands that are essentially at sea level or an inch above are doomed anyway, whether now or in the next couple hundred years, they might as well move now because their population will only grow with modern benefits. Those half a century old and older see the patterns, while the young think they are living in some new era.
Tough luck; politicians in the largest superpower, which is neither a small island, poor nor arid, have determined through extensive consulting of industry lobbyists and religious leaders that global warming does not exist.
Likely has a specific definition in the report. It is then a risk-management decision to evaluate how important this is. Agreed? Well, it doesn't matter, because your insurance company has already agreed, and they'll be setting your premiums.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
By the year 2005, young children won't even know what snow is. (It's funny how all these dire warnings from the UN and other nation-level climate bureaus never seem to come true. - ed.) BTW the rate-of-rise of sealevel on these island nations is only two-thousandths of an inch per year. Hardly a great tragedy.
LINK Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/snowfalls-are-now-just-a-thing-of-the-past-724017.html
LINK # 2 http://www.uncommondescent.com/science/no-more-snow-in-england-say-global-warmists/
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
I'm still pretty skeptical about AGW (though not global warming itself, the temperature records unquestionably and unsurprisingly show a warming trend).
But here's the thing: it doesn't fucking matter.
We are spewing toxins into the atmosphere at an alarming rate. Air advisories are more common by the year and I can barely stand being in big cities for an hour before the saturated odor of pollution gets to me (no not physically, I'm not a whiner about such things... it just... gets to me... I want away from it).
So why the fuck are we even discussing this in light of what might possibly happen if the data isn't as bogus as it seems at times and the models that have never been right might possibly be right this time?
All of the same things that allegedly contribute to AGW are polluting the air and water in real, tangible, short term ways. How about we focus on that right now and keep an eye on the still unanswered question of exactly what it means to the climate.
Haha, there is a picture. The point was that is where they explain the "Treatment of Uncertainty".
There are even worse examples than that. "Silent Spring" caused huge reduction in the use of DDT as a pesticide, as it reported environmental consequences along with some studies linking it to cancer. Of those studies, one had design errors and the others people haven't been able to reproduce. Meanwhile, the reduced use of DDT in Africa and South America caused a huge increase in deaths from malaria, projected to be in the tens of thousands. Countries where malaria is a problem are now starting to use DDT again, and are seing malaria infection rates drop dramatically. Meanwhile, Americans are happy because the population of their national bird has increased.
for i in `facebook friends "=bday" 2>/dev/null | cut -d " " -f 3-`; do facebook wallpost $i "Happy birthday!"; done
Uhhh, yeah, they are. If a theory is non-falsifiable, it isn't science. Evolution is highly falsifiable. AGW isn't. Sorry, but that's the way it is. The change is so small that it falls within the noise of natural variability of both weather (fluctuations in water vapor content have hundreds of times as much effect on atmospheric heat retention as all the CO2 ever produced by man), and climate (we don't really understand long term climate, or what caused past climate changes). We don't even have a single control (whereas we have practiaclly unlimited controls and unlimited samples to show that evolution happens, and the ability to read paste changes in the genetic code, which are predictive, etc etc).
Ways anthropogenic global warming can be falsified:
1) Extended period of stable or declining temperatures, while atmospheric CO2 concentrations continue to increase. (And no that doesn't mean you can disprove global warming by comparing a downward fluctuating year and an upward fluctuating year in the past.)
2) Average daytime temperatures increasing more than nighttime temperatures. (One of the signatures of the greenhouse effect versus solar driven temperature change is that nighttime temperatures increase more than daytime)
3) Equatorial temperatures increasing more than polar temperatures. (One of the signatures of the greenhouse effect versus solar driven temperature change is that temperatures in the polar regions increase faster than the equator)
4) Upper atmosphere temperatures increasing instead of decreasing. (Yes, another way to differentiate between the greenhouse effect and solar temperature driven changes.)
I'll leave out the highly improbable ones (like a declining level of CO2 in the atmosphere with an continuing to increase temperature or the disproof of most of modern physics which would be required to actually call the underlying physical model into question.)
it’s a theory at best.
I'm going to go out on a limb and bet that you use the same argument against evolution.
Your idea sounds good. Any ideas on what you're going to do about the massive unemployment, starvation, and misery that will result from your changes?
If that's true, there needs to be more competition in the insurance industry. What is stopping them from raising premiums for any reason whatsoever?
Do you just keep pulling these numbers out of your ass?
Surface area, water: 361,132,000 km2[0]
Surface area, water, in acres: 89,000,000,000[1]
People on earth: ~7,000,000,000
Surface area (water, acres) divided by people: 89,000,000,000 / 7,000,000,000 ~= 13.
13. Thirteen. Not 1285. You're off by a factor of 100 this time!
Btw, not saying that "water surface area" has any relevance whatsoever in this case (it may or may not, I would have guessed volume mattered more than area, but I don't know) - but please, for the love of FSM, stop making numbers up just to use them in your arguments.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth
[1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=361%2C132%2C000+km2+in+acres
May we live long and die out
They are the 99%
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
The scientific community also suppressed evidence of Lamarckian-looking evolution because it didn't fit the consensus view that Darwinian theories were the answer. And now what do we find? OOPS! Consensus was wrong, for something like 150 years, and there is plenty of evidence showing that Lamarck was on to something. He didn't understand the mechanism, but he was right - ACQUIRED TRAITS CAN BE INHERITED. The scientific community can be wrong, and shouting down dissenting views isn't good science. There's a lot more to the world than "scientific consensus" can understand.
Well, then I guess you better pay a visit to your friendly neighborhood cobbler.
Could be the volcano-load of fossil CO2 that human civilization is spewing into the atmosphere every 3 days or so. Just an idea.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Great post.
Both sides should take some time for serious reflection and ask if their proposes solutions or resistance to solutions is more derived from their political desires or from their actual concerns.
If the answer is: we need to do everything I believe in politically to resolve this, you should not be surprised to see resistance.
No one except you thinks the planet will become uninhabitable. Please stop repeating this.
The positives and negatives are relative and complicated.
Some places which are currently good for crops will become bad; some which are bad will become good. The type of crops which will grow will change. I think that overall, slightly warmer weather and more CO2 will make it a bit easier to grow crops, but that likely won't be a major difference.
In the US, we have (comparatively) rich and educated farmers. We can move farms and change crops. Any change in farmland will produce some short-term problems for us, but overall our agriculture will be fine and possibly a bit better.
In parts of the world with poor farmers who barely survive now, changes in farmland will drop the farmers and possibly whole countries below starvation levels. Since the farmers have no education and no resources, it will be hard for them to change crops or move farmland. Their agriculture will be much worse off.
Does that help? There are lots of similar effects: a rise in sea level will create some new seafront property which is fine if you aren't one of the billions of people who now live on underwater land; some species will do quite well as their ecological rivals go extinct. Most of these changes would have happened anyways over thousands+ of years and would have caused minor effects; the same changes occurring in less than a hundred years will be far more damaging and will give people and ecologies little time to adapt.
So, you get warmer weather in March (and more blizzards in March some years). And poor farmers in Africa starve. Is that a net positive or a net negative for you? And for the world?
Either we tell them now and help them deal with it, or we give our great-grandchildren a messed up planet.
I know. That is what we need to fix. But it is available for a huge number of people.
No, but wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear together is viable.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
If that's true, there needs to be more competition in the insurance industry. What is stopping them from raising premiums for any reason whatsoever?
I knew that the denial crowd would leap for this. Everything has to be interpreted as a conspiracy, or people lying, or being dishonest, or evil, or stupid. Anything but accept that intelligent people are trying to tell you something.
/counter-evidence/, like a good skeptic actually would.
Well, the actuaries in the insurance industry have done the math, and worked out that they need to raise premiums to deal with the already measurable risk. You can dismiss this out of hand if you like, but you'll still have to pay. Instead, you could, of course, extend yourself by learning something about he issue. And that means you should stop reading partisan blogs, and find
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Who? When? Please provide a source.
There are well established statistical methods of extracting long-term trend from short-term noise such as fluctuations in water vapor. As these fluctuations ride "on top of" the long-term trend, it is plausible that the rising trend could lead to more extreme weather events, although how much that is happening at the present time remains a challenging statistical question.
There have already been numerous tests of modern climate theory, which could have potentially have falsified the theory. For some of the tested predictions of climate science, see here. Indeed, every time a volcano erupts, it is another test of climate theory.
um... First of all, so far I'm the one in this thread actually referencing the IPCC report the discussion is supposedly about.
Insurance companies have a financial incentive to overestimate risk. This is obvious. The disincentive is supposed to be that if they do it too much they will lose business. What conspiracy are you talking about?
No, no, no. We'd immediately implement an exemption for people making less than 800% of the poverty level and pass an income tax credit for almost all of the rest. Thankfully the tax prep industry is tightly coupled with Washington, so you know the next version of TaxCut or TurboTax will take this into consideration.
We'll need to implement a National ID you will be required to present at the gas station so it can link to a central database to approve each purchase. We'll contract that out to private industry who will, of course, need to take just a small percentage of the transaction to cover their expenses. No point in having state issued ID's anymore so we'll just ban them.
Naturally we'll need a lot of new laws and regulations to implement this new tax. Because $5/gal tax is going to inspire a bunch of black market activity we'll have to establish a new Department of Energy Security (DES) . The DES will have to have extreme police powers to conduct their newly established war on un-taxed gas smugglers which will include para-military forces making no-knock raids on private residences. For the children; y'know.
In the end, we'll have a massive new Federal bureaucracy with a well established constituency of special interests. They'll, of course, be hiring a lot of lobbyists and every time the budget comes up for renewal we'll have a parade of our 'elected' officials telling us we can't possibly cut funding (read: give smaller increases) to the new bureaucracy or some unspecified "THEY" will win.
Since we're excluding almost everyone from the tax and we've got a new bureaucracy to pay for, it turns out we're not getting quite as much revenue as we'd like and the only option at that point will be to nationalize the entire petrochemical industry. Don't worry though, we'll pay for it all by raising the gas tax and cutting waste and fraud.
Resource availability changes. Lifestyles have to adjust.
Looking around my city, it would hurt the upper middle class the most. The poor live in small houses or apartments in the city. They can already get to work by bus, and many of them do. Traffic is slow (30mph limits) and bicycling is easy. They can walk to a grocery store or two in under twenty minutes. They will have to buy more sweaters and keep the heat down in the winter; some of the fuel tax could go towards expanding programs like HEAP (Home Energy Assistance Program).
The upper middle class live in large houses in sprawling suburbs. Their heating bills will be astronomical. Buses do not run out there. Roads in the developments meander to nowhere useful and then dump out onto busy highways where walking and cycling is frightening. They have to travel 5+ miles to get to anything other than houses. And they're already underwater with their mortgages. When the housing prices in more efficient areas go up and theirs plumet, they will be bankrupt.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
If you live in the US, you are already benefiting from redistribution of wealth toward drivers. Current gas taxes do not come anywhere close to covering road costs. You are being subsidized by people like me who pay income and property taxes to support the roads but then bike to work. I am proposing letting you pay out of your own wages.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
You seem to be against my idea. Any ideas on what we're going to do about the massive unemployment, starvation, and misery that will result from not making changes?
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
Insurance companies have a financial incentive to overestimate risk. This is obvious. The disincentive is supposed to be that if they do it too much they will lose business. What conspiracy are you talking about?
Well, obviously the insurance industry thinks they need to make this assessment, and that those who do not are at risk of going out of business.
btw, kudos on actually referencing the IPCC report. Most deniers haven't even cracked it open.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
>>>where you want to go once this planet became uninhabitable
And global warmers wonder why we laugh at them. The planet will not become uninhabitable, but will merely revert to a state that existed before the current ice age. (No ice on the poles; tropical jungle as far north as the Great Lakes.) In fact the planet will be MORE pleasant to live upon, as the flora and fauna will florish in the warm snowfree climate.
Jeez. At least make SOME attempt to educate yourself, while espousing your global warming theories.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Most people haven't ever cracked any IPCC report open, yet there is an endless stream of arguments between those who hold strongly held beliefs about climate change. I am probably in 99th percentile just because I have spent some time reading them.
Also, you really don't understand the point I was making about insurance companies, do you?
For fucks sake... It's "Man Made ACCELERATION of Global Climate Change" and NOT "Man Made Global Climate Change"
if people understood the difference then maybe it'll be more acceptable. The deniers ALWAYS misinterpret this either deliberately or through lack of comprehension
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
The claim that Silent Spring killed untold millions is one of those falsehood that people love to slander environmentalists with. That way, we can all feel great about ignoring them!
Hey mate, spare a sig?
I thought he was talking about his pet fish...
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
"Arguing with climate deniers is like arguing with Christians. Pesky facts don't matter to people KNOW they're right." - i agree with that but add TeaParty'ers and Republican Politicians to that list as they fall into both camps.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
If you believe that nowadays, you're just a denialist. At least try to keep up, most other denialists have moved onto "global warming's not bad" or "you're totally right but I refuse to participate in a solution, I'd rather live in a biodome."
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Well, I don't know about suppressed. As far as I know, the evidence for lamarckian inheritance wasn't strong enough for most researchers to accept it without a plausible mechanism. Correct me if I'm wrong.
if Lamarckian-looking evolution was real, we'd ALL be war mongers, slave traders, homophobes, still living in the trees etc etc. if there was real evidence they use it. Its a hypothesis with no falsifiable evidence by the Lamarckian believers.
where do you get the idea of "suppressed evidence"?
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
>>>Current gas taxes do not come anywhere close to covering road costs.
Yes actually they do. The gas taxes collected exceed the amount of money spent by the U.S. DOT for road maintenance. And in my state there's so much excess gas tax collected, they transfer it to the Baltimore train lines. (A few years ago I sat in a legislative session and witnessed them transfer money from the gas tax to build a whole new rail line!)
So NO I am not being subsidized as a driver. It is the opposite. I am paying MORE than what is spent on road maintenance, and it is being used to subsidize other projects by the U.S. and Maryland.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
And at what point did you accept AGW? How much evidence did it take to convince you?
Given all the money sloshing around in recent years that drove demand for silly stuff like CDOs, etc, there's ample opportunity for someone with a more-accurate assessment of the risks to undercut anyone charging too much and make a killing. Hurricane-related insurance costs in Florida spiked a few years ago -- my parents eventually dropped that part of their coverage, and spent money on storm-proof shutters for their windows instead.
So, does the invisible hand not work so well after all, or are the insurance companies pricing risk close enough to what it really is?
The earth will eventually become uninhabitable by humans - the sun will get hotter and make this planet so hot nothing will grow or live on the surface. Mind you, you still have a billion or so years before this happens
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Well the global warming theory has been solid from day one, the anthropogenic part I'd say was pretty well-established by the early/mid 2000s. I've been somewhat keeping up with new developments since the late '90s.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Hmm, so what is the global equivalent of the Lap-Band (tm)?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I believe that most if not all the insurance companies are organized as mutual companies which means the company is owned by the policy holders and excess profits are returned to them. State Farm for example is a mutual insurance company and they've sent me checks twice in the past 20 years returning excess profits due to fewer claims than predicted. They are also allowed to raise rates when claims are higher than predicted.
So there is not really any financial incentive for insurance companies to skew their risk models.
"Even the most religious farmers understand that evolution is a fact." - i doubt that. they will still believe god makes the babies, its all "Gods Way"
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
This sums it up nicely. No need to read any further comments, it just becomes a pissing match.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
He's talking about inheriting epigenetic patterns... which occurs alongside normal genetic inheritance.
I am unfamiliar with the idea this was suppressed though.
Actually, it is falsifiable. If global average temperatures don't continue to rise, despite increasing CO2 concentrations, then the theory is disproven.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
No -- if the price of fuel goes up, poor people will have to pay more for things like milk and bread. Has that clicked in your mind yet? Rich people will arguably be affected less than poor people, because rich people don't care if a gallon of milk costs $12.
The state of the art has been pretty good at predicting rates and ranges of maximum and minimum temperatures. We don't know for sure what the temperature will be, but we can state with pretty good confidence that it will be between a lower and upper limit. For example, it is a good bet that on any given day, the temperature that day will stay between the maximum and minimum temperatures observed that day in the last 100 years. And it should be a safe bet (in general) that it's equally likely that we would exceed the minimum or the maximum temperature.
However, recent trends have made these two bets not so safe; it is more than normally likely that we will set a record, and the distribution is skewed warm -- we tend to break high records, not low records.
> I thought I was supposed to be underwater by now?
;)
I suppose it depends on when you bought your house
Bark less. Wag more.
[quote]threatening all countries, but small island states, poor nations and arid regions[/quote] So what, has mother nature turned greedy? "Mommy only loves you if your GDP is soooooo big".
However, people saying that the storm cares if the GDP is so much just gives these guys [Climate Change Deniers] more credit...
WTF Slashdot, why do I have to login 50 times to post?
What pieces of evidence though?
Pics or it didn't happen.
And no, the three boobed prostitute in 'Total Recall' does not count.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Any ideas on what we're going to do about the massive unemployment, starvation, and misery that will result from not making changes?
The general idea is that with economic growth, we will be more able to handle those problems in the future than we are now, and this is especially true of developing economies, many of which are currently experiencing rapid growth.
The alternative, assuming we want to go back to the 'safe' level of 350ppm CO2, means we need to cut CO2 emissions so much that we are actually reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. This means switching to nuclear, everyone giving up their cars and going electric, and planting lots trees. We don't have much time to do this.
Now, ignoring the capital outlays required to switch from coal to nuclear immediately, can you imagine the economic impact of requiring everyone to switch to electric cars? Even in the US, most people aren't going to afford that. A $27,000 car is more than a lot of people make. And if you consider the world median income, $27k is as much as they will make in 10 years.
Given all the difficulty, it's not surprising that politicians make no more than token efforts at reducing CO2, for example, the Kyoto agreement.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You're expecting all of those folks in the slow lane to understand 'acceleration'?
A quick trip down any four lane highway in the US should give you some idea of what we're up against.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I don't really follow your last question.
Not so fast. There's a low-but-larger-than-happy-making probability of the oceans going anoxic, and that would make the planet uninhabitable. Latest I've read (don't have a citation handy, sorry) says that things would have to go pretty far out of spec to make this happen, but there's error bars on both good and bad news.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian–Triassic_extinction_event
Do I think this will certainly happen? No, not today, but I'd like to be a good deal more certain that it won't. In my opinion you overstate the certainty that it won't happen. The risk is affected both by the range of warming and the rate of warming -- slow warming releases frozen methane slowly (it has a relatively short residence time in the atmosphere compared to CO2), rapid warming might deliver it all in one geologically quick burp.
Resource availability changes. Lifestyles have to adjust.
My lifestyle can't adjust, much. If fuel prices continue to rise, I won't be able to afford to buy any. That means I won't be able to do any work.
That, in turn, means that you won't have food in the shops, and that's sure as hell going to affect rich and poor alike.
And all of those untold billions of people who live in the current equatorial belt whose ability to obtain food and water and shelter drop to near zero are just going to sit there and calmly give up as their local environments are rendered markedly less habitable?
You should look up the idea of a 'resource war'.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Interesting, thanks. How are "excess profits" determined?
"The best match for current changes was the Palaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum of 55 million years ago, when vast amounts of methane were released into the atmosphere causing rapid global warming, ocean acidification, and mass extinction. But even then, it took at least 3000 years for ocean pH to drop by 0.5. "That is an order of magnitude slower than today," Hönisch says.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21534-oceans-acidifying-at-unprecedented-speed.html
A key point (indirectly pointed to in the article) is that the *rate of change* of acidity is what's critical. We've got the accelerator floored and we're close to the cliff.
"a theory at best".... A theory is something testable that has withstood the tests subjected to it (contrast that with a hypothesis, which may not be yet tested). The word you and other "let's legitimize the scientific method" people are looking for is a "hunch". Global warming is not a "hunch".
The change is so small that it falls within the noise of natural variability
It doesn't. Short-term variability averages out well by computing longer-term trends. Long-term variability is about an order of magnitude slower than the current trend.
I didn't overstate anything. I said no one thinks this is going to happen. I was unaware there was work predicting an anoxic event due to CO2 emissions.
Your idea sounds good. Any ideas on what you're going to do about the massive unemployment, starvation, and misery that will result from your changes?
Petrol in the UK costs about GBP 1.5 per litre. That's roughly $9 per gallon.
Mass starvation has somehow failed to occur.
To restate -- it does take money to form an insurance company, so if there is not money out there looking for investment, it's not too likely someone would invest in the insurance business. The existence of a healthy (urk) market for CDOs and similar investment gadgets, pre-bust, indicated that there was money out there looking for profitable investments. If an insurance market is overpriced (and my parents certainly believed that it was, relative to buying storm shutters), then an investment in entering that market and charging lower-but-still-risk-profitable rates should be profitable.
And if the invisible hand (of the market) works, those profitable investments will occur, especially since no innovation is required, just fair and accurate pricing. People are always looking for a way to make a buck.
So maybe the invisible hand doesn't work, or maybe insurance is priced close enough to actual risk that the investment in forming a new insurance company would not be profitable. But insurance rates have definitely gone up in recent years. Hurricane-statistically, the year Katrina occurred was damn creepy; I believe that year half of the top-6-most-intense storms for the Atlantic were replaced (Katrina, Rita, Wilma).
Ok, and who has said that an anoxic event is likely to occur? I'm not being snarky, it is an honest question.
The work exists, some people are studying the problem (I know references would be helpful, but so would lunch, and Google works for this). I am sure that there are *some* people who think this is going to happen, but I am not sure that any of them are (at this point) climate scientists. The Wikipedia article alone ought to be enough to inspire some small percentage of them.
Well, before talking about any invisible hands you need to address the degree of regulation. Often this factor adds substantially to the barrier to entry (e.g., only so many insurance companies can be licensed per region, etc). I am unfamiliar with insurance regulation.
We would have to look at the history of insurance rates for various regions, adjust for inflation, the definition of "excess profits", etc to draw any further conclusions. Interesting info though, thanks.
Gradients. Really, look at the big picture thermodynamics of a heating planet. Especially if you're increasing heat rapidly, you will increase gradients. Bigger winds, bigger storms.
Physics can be a world class bitch at times.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I believe many of the "deniers/right-winger/etc" are actualy noticing how a belief an ACG creates a "give me your money we promise to do something to convince you to give us more money" effect. If actual solutions where put in place then questioning the science may not be the most effective tool to keep what we earned and not have it confiscated/taxed by Big Al, IPCC, USA, UN, etc to make them richer with no actual real world change to the problem.
Europe lost maybe 20 million people or more to the effects of a multi-decade cooling due to lack of sunspots starting in the time of Galileo who discovered the spots.
See! If the Catholic Church had taken care of Galileo properly they would not had this population loss.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
So what your suggesting is that we take away the natural process of nature removing the organisms that are unable to migrate or adapt to their environment?
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
I will try to look into it. For what it's worth there is no mention of "anoxic event" or "anoxic" in this IPCC report. I assume it would be mentioned if thought possible since the report is entitled:
MANAGING THE RISKS OF EXTREME
EVENTS AND DISASTERS TO ADVANCE
CLIMATE CHANGE ADAPTATION
It could be under a different name though. All I did search for the terms.
That is different. Who is saying their ability to obtain food, water, and shelter will drop to near zero? Is it in this report? I haven't really looked through it yet but I assume they have a better estimate than "near zero".
So the idea is that the energy is being sequestered unequally throughout the system, leading to larger heat gradients. Makes sense. Would still be nice to look at some data.
Natural processes cause people to die and cities to fall into decay. All people die, all cities are eventually emptied.
Dropping lots of bombs also does this. Is leveling a city and killing all of the inhabitants a natural process of nature?
More specifically, a city gradually being abandoned because the people migrate (over generations) to a better area is one thing. A city being abandoned because the water topped the dikes for the third year in a row is not really the same thing. Both are natural processes, but they do not cause the same amount of (economic, social, physical) problems and hardships.
The IPCC are notoriously conservative in their worst-case scenarios.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Are they? So much so that a possible extreme event is not even mentioned in a 596 page report? How is degree of conservatism assessed?
The US DOT does not do all of the road maintenance.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
Please look at the UK and the US on a map and then tell me which one is generally impacted more by increasing fuel prices.....
US gas prices are roughly $4 per gallon, imposing a tax to double those prices would be disasterous.
The solutions that work in population dense European counties do not necessarily work in the much much less population dense US.
Ironically, I wouldn't have been so sarcastic in my response if the original poster had said: Mandate that every US state build at least ONE new nuclear power plant in the next 5 years.
Don't tell me you're going to double the price of gas and encourage everyone to get an electric car if you don't have a plan to get rid of the coal power plants!!
To be more precise, malaria control is the main indication that DDT is indeed still allowed for. Where the hell did the crowd of DDT liars pop up from? I noticed their bullshit coming up with increased frequency since about two years. Wonder who set that meme in motion.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
IPCC is hardly the last word; they're quite conservative in their predictions, and this is (I think) generally regarded as a low-probability event even by the people studying it. But note, asteroid strikes are also low-probability, and we study those.
Here's an example: http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/36/3/231.abstract (from searches for "global warming anoxia")
yea, sorry... my bad...
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Fixed that for you.
With controvertible proof? You don't own a dictionary. Do you?
Mods, please increase the parent with +1 Funny. It's hilarious.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
I think the GP and GGGP posts are arguing, and justifiably so, that "likely" does not convert to scientific law. It is theory. And not evolutionary theory, but a lower level theory.
Remember, we are talking science. Not democracy. The majority doesn't win the day. Statistics don't win the day. Proof wins the day.
what's causing it? climate change. The climate has been changing forever too. The whole summary was like...so?
You are correct however one can look at past years dates to determine patterns and apply a deviation to that model (that's what meteorologists do sometimes). If the standard deviation grows year after year it's a suspicious factor which is what climatologists look for. It's no secret that these climatologists (of whom I reference in my post as "world scientists", should have said "world climatologists" instead) look at this data as well as past temperature/precipitation/drought/and wind patterns to effectively predict next decades worth of climate "patterns" and the patterns are getting more and more wild because the standard deviation is growing. Thus the reference to "weather patterns to be unpredictable" cause more often then not, if the deviation is greater than your standard, your predicate model is not accurate enough to predict real world outcomes. The only scientists who disagree about this "theory" are most likely those who either are without the model "knowns" or are not specialized climatologists to begin with. Though I don't know their personal backgrounds to be sure but it seems that way. 99% of the worlds climatologists have agreed that there is climate change and that it will alter our weather patterns as well as ecosystems and biological makeup of the planet.
Most people haven't ever cracked any IPCC report open, yet there is an endless stream of arguments between those who hold strongly held beliefs about climate change.
This is completely true. However, the arguments that /scientists/ make are never answered by "skeptics", who are operating on intellectually vacuous territory. In fact, "skeptics" will say anything that sounds good, and just ignore what scientists have to say on the issue, which is why it is called by its true name: denial.
Your complete valid point not-with-standing, I am interested in the scientific debate on the issue -- as so are the actuaries at insurance companies, it would seem.
Also, you really don't understand the point I was making about insurance companies, do you?
Yeah I got it. This could be a price-fixing scam of insurance companies. i.e.: a conspiracy theory -- although a believable one. So it is possible; however, the actuaries are working off actual science. So I think the burden of proof is to show that this is actually a scam.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
What kind of alarmism are you referring to, specifically? Got an example?
Clever signature text goes here.
I was going to say " what about the IRA?" but then I saw I missed your 50 year disclaimer.
Star Trek, there maybe hope.
You seem to be conflating studying anoxic events with thinking they will occur due to AGW. Yes, this should obviously be studied. That particular paper says nothing about AGW other than barely hinting at it in the final sentence:
The integration of the Mo isotope system with other proxy indicators of environmental change is able to increase our understanding of the evolution of the oceans and atmosphere over Earthâ(TM)s history and has the potential to indicate how the ocean-atmosphere system might evolve in the future.
I'm sorry, but who cares? It doesn't matter if you are Einstein himself if you deny simple and basic scientific facts, such as the observed warming and the human impact.
Being a scientist in one field does not make you an expert in another.
Clever signature text goes here.
"Funny how the Right love science when it produces weapons to bomb brown people, or enriches multinational corporations. But go NUTS if it means that their rich friends endure more regulation."
Funny how many people mistake Libertarians for right-wing.
Your statement shows just how little you know about their actual politics.
Got an example?
The post directly above yours where the poster asserts that global warming will cause the extinction of all humanity pops to mind.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Just look as the Vostock ice core data. "Stable climate" is nonsense historcially - whether simply changes over time. Humanity gained technology during a 10000 year anomoly where whether patterns were somewhat stable, but that's otherwise unseen in the past million or so years. We should expect climate change; it's normal. We're in an ice age, and either we'll return to normal glaciation quite soon (in geological terms) wth most of europe, Russia, and Canada wiped off the map, or by some quite unlikely coincidence we happen to be around for the transition between an ice age and a warm Earth (which happenes every few hundred million years).
A warm Earth, BTW, supports far more land (and likely sea) life than the current ice age, as most of the warming happens at the poles. And if humanity with all our technology can't survive a few storms, we don't deserve to.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
More arable land results in a "resource war"? And global warmers wonder why we laugh at them.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Does anyone think that maybe the fact that there are 7 times as many people in the world today than there was only 200 years ago could be a contributor to global warming? 7 billion people breathing out carbon dioxide...
AGW is indeed falsifiable. Either you are dishonest and pretending that it isn't, or you are ignorant and don't know how.
Another lie. Or lack of knowledge.
Clever signature text goes here.
The actuaries have the same data available to us... honestly I have no idea why actuaries are suddenly an authority on climate science but whatever.
There is no scam necessary. If the insurance company can make more money by justifying higher premiums (for any reason), they should be expected to do so up to the point it loses them business.
Really, this is a very convoluted argument with regards to AGW. It unnecessarily adds all sorts of business, regulatory, and social factors. It makes much more sense to simply look at what the IPCC has said and discuss that.
"However, 'proof' is statistical. When we can only ever say that something exists with statistical certainty (e.g. 6.5 sigmas), then it's going to be tough, if not impossible to falsify."
I don't know of a more diplomatic way to say this: That is simply wrong.
Scientific proof is impossible, and always has been. Science cannot be proved, only disproved. Your example is of something that is difficult to verify, not something that's difficult to falsify. Those are two very different things.
6.5 sigmas is good "proof" indeed, as such things go. But that's far from "unfalsiable". On the contrary: it takes only ONE counterexample to falsify. The fact that there currently is no such counterexample is part of the evidence in favor. But "proof"? Not on your life.
I think the GP and GGGP posts are arguing, and justifiably so, that "likely" does not convert to scientific law. It is theory. And not evolutionary theory, but a lower level theory.
If you actually look at the very start of the IPCC, you will see statistically precise definitions of terms like "likely".
Almost all science relies on statistical proofs and there is always uncertainty.
It is a question of risk-management -- like what insurance companies do, and business managers. An insurance company doesn't need proof that your house will burn down at a certain date in order to sell you insurance. They just need the expected risk and costs.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Also, how is the degree of conservatism assessed? Have they underestimated some aspect of climate change in the past? People keep saying this but I never find out where the idea is coming from.
The funny thing is that global warming deniers who have problems accepting conclusions from scientific studies have no problems believing crackpot theories about "overpopulation" or "islamification".
While it's true there is limited public infrastructure in less densely populated areas, it has not always been the case. Consider the interurban in central IL. It was an electric passenger train that linked all the little towns. I know people whose grandparents rode it to college, went home on weekends to work on the farm. No reason it could not be re-implemented, only takes political will.
There is no scam necessary. If the insurance company can make more money by justifying higher premiums (for any reason), they should be expected to do so up to the point it loses them business.
Except for the realities of a free market dictates the opposite. Are you saying the the insurance industry needs to be regulated?
Really, this is a very convoluted argument with regards to AGW.
It's a straight-forward real-world example of the consequences of AGW and risk-management. The argument for the evidence of the expected costs of AGW is a different matter. Read the IPCC and follow the references; I don't need to hold your hand.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Yes it is. It has far lower emissions per person than a regular car. One train or bus can replace countless cars.
Clever signature text goes here.
I couldn't point to any handful that made a big difference, it's mostly been gradual confirmation of the basic theory and disproof of alternates. The recent studies on the CO2 output of volcanoes were a pretty big deal, that was a guesstimated factor for a long time and a major "skeptic" talking point. The BEST study was also a pretty big deal in terms of additional confirmation.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
No, I am not conflating, that is just the first paper (as opposed to panicky science-light article, which are plentiful) that a search turned up. And that was the abstract, not the article.
He seems to be talking about humans having "infested" the planet and needing to be exterminated.
Clever signature text goes here.
The studies you mention were only reported on in the last few years, and were necessary in my opinion. The "skeptics" are just forcing the research to proceed as it should.
I wonder how life has survived on for so long on this planet? For a majority of the Earth's history, the temperature has been warmer than it is now and there have been no polar ice caps.
A phenomenon like the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum must have had a very detrimental effect on life on this planet, but the geologic record doesn't show that. It shows there was an explosion of diversification of species during that time, particularly with mammals.
I'm sorry, but who cares? It doesn't matter if you are Einstein himself if you deny simple and basic scientific facts, such as the observed warming and the human impact.
Being a scientist in one field does not make you an expert in another.
Why do you assume that scientist that disagree must necessarily be in a different field? A little bit of a superiority complex maybe?
Here is a list of scientists that are skeptics AND possessing the required pedigrees
Syun-Ichi Akasofu, retired professor of geophysics and Founding Director of the International Arctic Research Center of the University of Alaska Fairbanks said in a 2007 blog post:"[T]he method of study adopted by the International Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) is fundamentally flawed, resulting in a baseless conclusion: Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations. Contrary to this statement ..., there is so far no definitive evidence that 'most' of the present warming is due to the greenhouse effect. ... [The IPCC] should have recognized that the range of observed natural changes should not be ignored, and thus their conclusion should be very tentative. The term 'most' in their conclusion is baseless."[43] ... At this moment in time we know only that: (1) Global surface temperatures have risen in recent decades. (2) Mid-tropospheric temperatures have warmed little over the same period. (3) This difference is not consistent with predictions from numerical climate models."[45] ... The global warming hypothesis states that there are positive feedback processes leading to gains g that are larger than 1, perhaps as large as 3 or 4. However, recent studies suggest that the values of g is much smaller."[46] Also in a 2009 opinion piece: "...I see neither the developing catastrophe nor the smoking gun proving that human activity is to blame for most of the warming we see. Rather, I see a reliance on climate models (useful but never "proof") and the coincidence that changes in carbon dioxide and global temperatures have loose similarity over time."[47]
Claude Allègre, geochemist, Institute of Geophysics (Paris) said in a 2006 newspaper article:"The increase in the CO2 content of the atmosphere is an observed fact and mankind is most certainly responsible. In the long term, this increase will without doubt become harmful, but its exact role in the climate is less clear. Various parameters appear more important than CO2. Consider the water cycle and formation of various types of clouds, and the complex effects of industrial or agricultural dust. Or fluctuations of the intensity of the solar radiation on annual and century scale, which seem better correlated with heating effects than the variations of CO2 content."[44]
Robert C. Balling, Jr., a professor of geography at Arizona State University said in a 2003 essay for the George C. Marshall Institute:"[I]t is very likely that the recent upward trend [in global surface temperature] is very real and that the upward signal is greater than any noise introduced from uncertainties in the record. However, the general error is most likely to be in the warming direction, with a maximum possible (though unlikely) value of 0.3 C.
John Christy, professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, contributor to several IPCC said in a 2009 Energy and Environment paper with David Douglass: "...the data show a small underlying positive trend that is consistent with CO2 climate forcing with no-feedback.
Petr Chylek, Space and Remote Sensing Sciences researcher, Los Alamos National Laboratory said in a 2002 magazine article: "Carbon dioxide should not be conside
If there is no God then free will is an illusion.
I read the article. They mention future climate in the abstract but it is irrelevant to the paper. They compare total organic carbon (TOC) from a sample of sediment layer from millions of years ago (I am no expert in this) to estimated ocean redox state based on Mo sequestration. I don't know how to convert TOC to atmopheric CO2, but in this case TOC rose a max of 15%.
I also realize it was basically a random artical you came up with. My main point is that anoxic events clearly aren't considered to be likely to result from AGW (you appear to agree with this), so the poster who keeps talking about the earth becoming inhabitable should shut up about it.
If the problem is my unawareness, the solution is for you to provide sources of info about it (which you did half way). Can you provide references to Muller or Trenberth postulating on the earth becoming uninhabitable? There is too much noise in the google searches.
Also, the consensus is that even if the most extreme scenario comes true, warming will stop on its own after about 6C over the course of 100-200 years.
They've been wrong EVERY YEAR on the prediction of extreme hurricanes. EVERY FUCKING YEAR they have been wrong. Then, they use the scapegoat "Oh, we study climate, not weather" -- WELL WHY THE FLYING FUCK WERE YOU PREDICTING THE WEATHER, THEN, ASSHOLE?
I am a database administrator. When my boss asks me to work on the network, I tell him I'm not a network admin, and that if he wants the network broken beyond repair, he should keep asking me to fix it, otherwise, he needs to talk to our network admin. If he wants a database, he needs to come to me. For the company's sake, I stick to what I do best and let the other guy do what he does best.
If I get a shitty meal at a fine restaurant and complain, asking for my money back, and then the waiter comes out saying "I'm sorry but we can't refund your money because our chef didn't prepare your food. The farmer who raised the cow did. He's in the kitchen, now, grilling up some lamb if you want to take it up with him." then how should I feel about the restaurant? The chef? The farmer? It tells me that none of them don't know what the fuck they're doing.
I am saying that they are probably already regulated (although I know little about this). If this is the case (which I am 99% sure is true) it is not a free market... and we should not expect insurance companies to act as if it was.
The actions of insurance companies are not a good way to assess the legitimacy of climate change research. Although I see where you are coming from, using this as a metric only adds confounding variables.
I was not asking you to hold my hand, it should be clear to you that I am already familiar with the IPCC reports. You claimed to wish discussing the science, but so far all we have seen from you is ad homs and arguments from authority.
Sure. Blogwhoring, but here: http://dr2chase.wordpress.com/2011/02/15/this-looks-bad/
And it's that ice cap melting that I think is the subject of a lot of current head and chin-scratching -- is it changing the weather, and if so, how? Apparently some models say yes, some say no, hard to tell. But it would be surprising if it did nothing. Medium-term, a whole lot depends on that ice cap -- the more open water, the lower the albedo, the more heat accumulates in the summer, the more chance of releasing methane when the water warms.
The 2007 report also explicitly ignores sea level chance from Greenland/Antarctic ice sheet melting, largely because they did not feel that they had good models for this yet (I think they say this), and the geological record shows it occurring slowly (they say or imply this), and the actual energy required to melt the ice sheets in place is quite enormous (as opposed to sliding them off into the ocean and melting them there, where ample heat is available -- math here: http://dr2chase.wordpress.com/2012/02/04/numbers-that-were-larger-than-i-had-imagined/ )
That's what I mean by conservative -- they didn't make predictions, unless they had a bunch of models and data to back up the prediction.
Are you implying that those who bike to work don't need roads? Do you ride nature trails?
Forget going back and forth to work--how do you think all the stuff in your home got to the stores you bought it from? How do you think all the public utilities and services get around?
The entire economy is built around the road system. It's shortsighted, ignorant, and foolish to suggest that roads only benefit those who drive cars, and that therefore only car drivers should pay for them.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
You have no argument, so you resort to ad hominem. What does that say about your understanding of your position?
That was sounding a lot like an ad hominem itself, close one.
My webcomic
From the article:
This isn't a 7 day weather forecast. The quote from the article is talking about predicting the rate of record breaking temperatures through the end of the century. That's longer than an 85 year period. They have extrapolated, but there's no way of knowing how accurate these long term climate predictions are. We should think long and hard about making any political decisions based on long term predictions like these.
I don't understand then. Is being conservative a good thing or bad thing? Conservative sounds normal, while the alternative sounds like sensationalism and jumping to conclusions. In other words, people who accept the non-conservative approach are not basing their "beliefs" on science.
we don't really understand long term climate, or what caused past climate changes
Another lie. Or lack of knowledge.
We may think we know, but without a time machine, we can't really know for certain. These extrapolations are on a scale often beyond human history, and certainly beyond the history of science.
Science is proving hypotheses by experimentation. We can't prove any of these hypotheses because we can't experiment, nor can we go back to when the supposed data was supposedly "recorded" into tree trunks or glaciers.
It's guessing. It may be educated guessing, but it's still guessing, because it's logically and factually unprovable. At the very least, you must admit that correlation does not necessarily equal causation.
If you dispute that, that is a lie or ignorance.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
Really? It shocks you when people associate snow with cold?
AC: "You think more snow means it is colder? My goodness, well then!"
.I was not asking you to hold my hand, it should be clear to you that I am already familiar with the IPCC reports.
This is just a plain fabrication. You might know where they are, how long they are, and what you might expect to find in them, but you are not familiar with them. These are extraordinary long and detailed documents. It would take the work of a graduate student to become familiar with them. Be honest with yourself.
Furthermore, you think I'm talking about science, but I'm talking about risk-management, which is the basis upon which policy should be discussed. There are no certainties in science, and none in risk-management. It seems that only "skeptics" and a bunch of anti-science-green-freaks are certain about climate science. The scientific debate is wholly apart from that morass. The political debate is only just beginning. The propaganda war has been in full force since the 90s.
If you are interested in the science, then go for it. The IPCC reports are full of references to all points of view on the discussed topics -- including Lindzen, McIntyre, and other contrarians. If you are interested in policy, then it is much harder to find good sources, but they do exist. There is a long essay (short book) on the topic "Quarterly Essay 44: Choosing Between Progress and Planet", by Andrew Carlton. If you are interested in the politic discourse around the topic, as chilling as it is, then I would recommend Naomi Oreskes' "Merchants of Doubt".
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Wow, good comeback.
A little googling and you could educate yourself.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
CO2 is currently under 0.04% of the atmosphere and according to the historic record is the effect, not the cause, of warming (Temperature has always increased before CO2 levels).
I assume you're talking about the ice age CO2/heat lag? In those cases the warming cycles weren't initiated by CO2 but that doesn't mean CO2 can't initiate or be directly responsible for warming:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-lags-temperature-intermediate.htm
Now I understand that it has been shown that CO2 can help increase temperature ... but by what amount? Where is the equation that shows that X increase in CO2 increases temperature by Y? If we doubled the CO2 amount from 0.04% to 0.08%, which may not even be possible if we wanted too, how much would that warm the planet?
The equation's pretty complicated and always being refined, that's basically the main purpose of a climate simulator.
If humans are in the vast minority of the forces that create climate change then you are going to have a really hard time explaining why everyone needs to live beneath their means so we can get our hand in a wrestling match between titans.
We're responsible for the vast majority of fossil CO2 release and a very meaningful chunk of the warming overall. Now who said anything about living beneath their means? Your car will go weeng instead of vroom and your electricity will come from different sources that probably won't cost any more, what's the big deal?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
If you read economics reports such as the Stern review, you would see that doing nothing is more expensive than reducing emissions. And that's the whole point about it.
Is it cheaper for some persons to do nothing? Yes. But as a whole, the global quality of life of the human specie will be a lot better if we lower emissions than if we don't.
Very interesting if true. I doubt this data is publicly accessible. Although if the pricing is government enforced it may be.
Ok, "more familiar than 99% of people." I agree that risk management is what we should be discussing.
Confirmed Reptilian right there.
Bikes do far less damage and require far less infrastructure than cars do.
If the products and services I buy are are delivered by roads and road use taxes go up, so will the prices I pay. If we reduce general taxes accordingly, it is a wash for me.
That is what we need to fix.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
No doubt it's from one of Rupert Murdoch's properties.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
It is amusing to me how a simple statement of easily verifiable fact can get modded "troll" on Slashdot.
We've moved the start of tornado season to January.
Enjoy, red states!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
You are being subsidized by people like me who pay income and property taxes to support the roads but then bike to work.
Hm. Those roads make civilization more efficient than not having roads at all. You participate in that civilization and benefit greatly from the lifestyle that it affords you. Sure, the driver probably puts more miles and abuse on the roads than you... but really, trying to escape your tax burden entirely is not very sporting of you.
(captcha is "ominous". weird.)
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
You don't make political decisions based on the long term predictions, you make them based on the cost-benefit analysis. Almost all of the economists who have studied the matter, predict that taking action to reduce CO2 emissions now will save a few trillion dollars in expenses for the U.S. I'm not sure what the world wide savings would be.
However, the basic truth that if the average temperature increases we'll see more hot days should only be doubted by the insane. The exact increase in frequency might be different, but it's probably reasonable accurate. It's based on an analysis of temperature distribution and projected onto the warming trend caused by AGW. If the warming trend continues, there would have to be a fundamental change in the amount of variability in weather patterns to make the prediction wrong.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Ok, so which emissions, and how? These are not choices to be made on a whim.
OTOH, there are alternatives to emissions reduction. These issues must be resolved before potentially squandering money for little return.
The Stern review has its problems, but at least it's a start. Much more scientific and economic work must be done. I am just concerned that we are rushing to "solutions" by creating a false sense of urgency.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
Consensus seems to be the new science. The world is the way you think it ought to be, not the way it is. And so on...
http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2012/03/handy-bullshit-button-on-disasters-and.html
"A few quotable quotes from the report (from Chapter 4):
"There is medium evidence and high agreement that long-term trends in normalized losses have not been attributed to natural or anthropogenic climate change"
"The statement about the absence of trends in impacts attributable to natural or anthropogenic climate change holds for tropical and extratropical storms and tornados"
"The absence of an attributable climate change signal in losses also holds for flood losses"
The report even takes care of tying up a loose end that has allowed some commentators to avoid the scientific literature:
"Some authors suggest that a (natural or anthropogenic) climate change signal can be found in the records of disaster losses (e.g., Mills, 2005; Höppe and Grimm, 2009), but their work is in the nature of reviews and commentary rather than empirical research.""
How do we get from "their work is in the nature of reviews and commentary rather than empirical research" to "climate change to drive weather disasters"?
Really?
Shame on you! True warmistas know that it isn't enough to just assert AGW, because the evidence suggests that the anthropogenic component of the observed global warming since the Little Ice Age (which was, incidentally, the coldest period the Earth experienced in the entire Holocene and hence neither it nor the Dalton minimum that occurred around the time thermometers came to be relatively commonplace and accurate are the best points to use as a baseline, unless that baseline was created by Michael Mann) could be as little as 0.3 K, once one accounts for the considerable natural variability of the climate and the grand solar maximum of the 20th century. Therefore they append the word Catastrophic . Mere AGW isn't scary enough, it has to be Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming. AGW leading to the melting of the polar icecaps (which are currently within a standard deviation of their long term average, so the polar bears are safe, don't worry). AGW leading to rising seas that flood the coastlines (in spite of the fact that there is damn-all evidence of any such thing as catastrophically rising seas). AGW leading to droughts, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, in spite of no evidence of increases in any of them. Terrifying AGW. AGW that will convince people that it is worth paying any price in higher taxes, carbon taxes, higher energy prices, reduced productivity and so on to avoid it because the consequences that are described are more horrific than the substantial human suffering caused by the misdirected wealth in the meantime.
Everybody sensible that at least some anthropogenic global warming has occurred, and will continue to occur as CO_2 doubles, although (as noted) even tiny increases in bond albedo more than cancels it all out, especially since a lot of the late 20th century increase in temperature was due to a minimum in bond albedo, not CO_2. However, there is no evidence that the warming observed or reasonable projections of the warming for the rest of the century will exceed perhaps a degree C. There has been no warming observed, for example, for roughly the last 13 years, and the 33 year baseline UAH lower troposphere anomaly for both January and February were negative, -0.1 C. This is by far the most reliable measure of global average temperature, being the result of unbiased sampling of the entire globe and not subject to the kind of tweaking that is constantly being applied to e.g. HADCRUT or GISS and that has the effect, strangely enough, of always making past temperatures cooler as they adjust them to exaggerate the relative warmth of the present. Hard to do that with satellite data, easy to do with ground thermometry when nobody really knows what you are doing to adjust it anyway and besides, you control the adjustments and your entire professional career and reputation depend on it getting warmer.
Which, currently, it is not. It's getting to be a real embarrassment for the warmist crowd, so they have to point at how warm the eastern US has been this spring while quietly ignoring the fact that the entire pacific, the pacific northwest, and most of north asia was anomalously cold (and has a hell of a lot more area). We're currently out there at very close to 2 standard deviations underneath the most conservative (lowest) of the IPCC projections, global temperature wise, with no real sign of the resumption of warming in sight.
This isn't really surprising to anyone that looks over the physical theory underlying all of this. Warmists claim "alarming" amounts of positive feedback that multiply expected warming from CO_2 by as much as 3 to 5. The evidence has already positively rejected the more extreme of these claims, and the centroid of current claims is steadily moving down as the climate continues to stubbornly refuse to get warmer. The current solar cycle is the lowest in roughly 130 years, and the next one is expected by my solar physics friends to be even lower, quite possibly Maunde
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Church of Global Warming mods are apparently on the loose - simply question how one would exclude natural climate change as the reason for our modern observations, and it's a troll? Really?
Imagine, for a moment, that all observed climate change is simply natural variability. We'll call this the null hypothesis. Now how would you exclude our observations from natural variability?
Here's a quick quiz:
http://climate-skeptic.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/08/26/periodb.gif
http://climate-skeptic.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/08/26/perioda_3.gif
Which 50 year period is "natural" (since humans weren't pumping out vast amounts of CO2 then), and which 50 year period is "unnatural"?
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1998/to:2012/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1998/to:2012/trend/plot/esrl-co2/from:1998/to:2012/normalise
Are you ready to accept your theory has been falsified, now that you've been presented with the falsification you asked for?
Because the precautionary principle mistakenly assumes that their precautionary action has no risk. Ancel Keys did this to us with low-fat diets, moving forward with the vilification of dietary fat despite the lack of evidence - he wanted to save people from the risk he knew was there but couldn't prove. Instead, we got 40 years of low-fat/high-carb living, with more obesity, cancer, diabetes and other chronic diseases than ever.
Lowering CO2 emissions is dangerous, and quite reasonably one can assert that it is much more dangerous than any possible climate impact it might have. In fact, since we *know* so many *absolutely certain* problems with lowering CO2 emissions (increasing mortality as poverty increases, inability to cope with natural disasters as standard of living falls), it's the most fanciful thing to think that we'd be doing the *safe* thing by destroying our economy.
Won't bet the farm against that.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
According to wikipedia the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum was a 6 degree rise over 20,000 years. That's a lot of time to adapt. Compare that to the rate of change happening now. See the difference?
Switching one risk management problem for another one isn't quite what I'd consider a solution.
Though, admittedly, a nuclear meltdown risk is much more local and hence preferable.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So your argument is that if we can't stink up the place and dump our waste wherever we want we cannot be competitive? Newsflash: We ALREADY cannot due to wages. If anything, globally enforced "green"production could actually get some jobs back to the US and the rest of the "West". Because we can certainly more easily meet eco-production standards than, say, China. We are already halfway there, while they'd have to start pretty much from zero.
Of course, this isn't wanted by those in power, since they're also the one who profit the most from cheap (and dirty) production in places like China. But getting jobs back that were smuggled offshore would actually be much easier with global eco standards that we can match much more easily than any of the places that we cannot compete with due to labor laws and salary.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I bet it was "fiscally". He read up to there then made the post.
Really, placing "conservative" after "fiscally" is redundant. Nobody calls themselves "fiscally liberal".
You should stop being socially conservative though, imo.
Current political "conservatives" are mislabeled in my opinion. In the scientific sense, "conservative" predictions are those that are supported by as much proof/data/modeling as possible.
In the case of the IPCC, to me, their conservativism says that we should (all) expect AT LEAST the change that they are predicting, and that is precisely what political conservatives are NOT doing. The closest they get to recognizing the work of the IPCC is when they cite it as either (a) an upper limit on what could happen ("and that's not so bad, is it?") or (b) misinterpret it in bogus games of "gotcha" (Monckton apparently did this, conflating equilibrium temperature projections at particular CO2 levels, with the temperature observed when the CO2 level first reached those levels -- it takes decades-to-centuries to hit equilibrium.)
There's a third sense of conservatism, which suggests that we should not only avoid high risks, but that we should also keep an eye out for low-likelihood high-cost events. A bird flu epidemic; that would be bad. An asteroid strike, that would be bad. Some of the we-haven't-ruled-this-out-completely climate projections would also be bad -- on the emissions path we're on, how sure are we that the anoxic oceans won't happen? There have been well-researched possible-predictions of a sudden onset of rapid sea-level rise (5cm/year, for a century or two). At the higher limits of projected temperature rise, some parts of the world are supposed to become uninhabitable -- sometimes so hot and humid that a person could not avoid fatally overheating in the course of a few hours. And all these things, when they appear in the press, are OMG-we're-all-gonna-die!, which is ridiculous, but that doesn't mean that the risk is anywhere near zero, and the cost-weighted risk is pretty high because the outcome is potentially very costly. The fear-mongers are not exactly helpful to anyone.
This is my main problem with current political "conservatives", because in these two traditional senses of the word, they're not. They don't respect sober, conservative science, and they don't take a conservative approach to low-probability-high-cost risks -- excepting terrorism, in which case, the one percent doctrine applies.
Well, I would like to be able to say that christian fundamentalism is not part of the problem when fighting poverty.
Unfortunately, some Christians - the pope for instance- are against birth control, which is an important weapon against poverty and illiteracy, in all sort of ways.
Regardless of that - lets fight the warlords, tribal leaders and theocratic elites that are earning power and money from the fact that the people is illiterate and uneducated, like in Afghanistan or east Africa. If it's possible to suppress the warlords, and if you also can put the kids in school, make sure that the parents know how to farm efficiently and have access to contraceptives - then you can build a strong society - in a generation or two, that will be able to handle climate changes, anthropogenic or not.
A weather event that would be catastrophic in east Africa, would most probably be just an economic problem for insurance companies in most parts of US and Europe. I'm saying most parts, since there are pockets of poverty, where natural catastrophes will hit - and have hit - more severely.
There is of course reasons to worry about our carbon footprint, but it's more of a 100-year problem, and there are plenty of problems in the world, many of them interconnected, to worry about first... This is not to say that we should do nothing, but I fail to see the urgency.
The source of the "meme" is the World Health Organization, the USA and other organizations that are working to save peoples lives and it started around 6 years ago.
And to correct your false thinking on theses "DDT liars" whatever that means, DDT was almost stopped everywhere where malaria was the largest killer of people. While it was not banned in a lot of countries its used dropped to almost none because the industrialized countries placed funding restrictions that if you used DDT you would not get any funding.
While some countries did have banes those started going away around a decade or so ago and then some of the restrictions on funding and DDT starting being removed. Some people start working more about eradicating malaria verse the false science of was common knowledge, and DDT use started to spread
I never said there was a global ban, just a sharp reduction in use. Wikipedia supports this, and adds that malaria infections were reduced by 60% in Ecuador when the country started increasing DDT usage again. Also, I said tens of thousands, not millions. As the WHO points out in its 2008 report, there are 800 000 deaths yearly from malaria, so a 5-10% increase is hardly unlikely.
Look, I'm not some anti-global-warming-nut, I'm just pointing out an unintended negative consequence of environmentalism.
for i in `facebook friends "=bday" 2>/dev/null | cut -d " " -f 3-`; do facebook wallpost $i "Happy birthday!"; done
I didn't overstate anything. I said no one thinks this is going to happen. I was unaware there was work predicting an anoxic event due to CO2 emissions.
I also don't expect the planet to become uninhabitable. *However*, we may be dealing with a non-linear system that will undergo a catastrophic state change if pushed far enough from it's current stable state. AIUI, some scientists speculate that's what turned Mars into a desert world.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
But note, asteroid strikes are also low-probability, and we study those.
And we fairly often hear serious calls to do something about the risk.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Sure. Blogwhoring, but here: http://dr2chase.wordpress.com/2011/02/15/this-looks-bad/
I only follow it casually, but it looks to me like they've consistently underestimated the rate of melt-down at both poles.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Ok, so which emissions, and how?
Let the market decide. Either cap carbon emission or implement a cap and trade mechanism. Both would be effective (as long as the tax is high enough or the cap is low enough).
There is no false sense of urgency here. Acting now is cheaper than acting in 50 years. We can't stress this enough.
I don't understand then. Is being conservative a good thing or bad thing? Conservative sounds normal, while the alternative sounds like sensationalism and jumping to conclusions. In other words, people who accept the non-conservative approach are not basing their "beliefs" on science.
Science tends to be conservative. Come out with a weird new idea like continental drift, expanding universe, mobile genes, etc., and people want to see some evidence. (Sometimes, ISTM, *too* conservative.)
OPERA apparently played it straight with the scientific method on the FTL neutrino thingy, but even so the director feels like he needs to resign now that it turned out to be wrong.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I understood you meant conservative in what you describe as the "expect AT LEAST the change that they are predicting" sense... Although I highly disagree with your characterization of conservative science here.
A conservative approach to science simply means being as un-speculative as practically possible. Wait until you have strong results before drawing any conclusions. This is the way research with such huge societal implications should be reported. When the media is looking to sensationalize anything and everything you say, this is the only ethical way to report your results. Even then they will still be dumbed down and sensationalized, but it is the responsibility of the researcher to minimize this as much as possible. It is unethical to do otherwise.
Read the stories on the PI of the group that reported FTL neutrinos, he was forced to resign even though he was quite conservative in his statements compared to many climate change researchers. Why? Because an uproar like this over a false positive seeds public distrust in science, it is bad for everyone. These things need to be communicated to the public very carefully and some climatologists do not appear to have been doing so.
This is why many scientists from other fields get disgusted with the few big mouths in climate science, and then the entire field for not taking care of their own.
You can witness the results of this non-conservative scientific reporting for yourself, half the public does not trust them and the other half know almost nothing about climate change but believe whatever the media feeds them, appearing as drones to former.
More arable land results in a "resource war"? And global warmers wonder why we laugh at them.
The problem is, some countries are going to end up with a better environment for agriculture than they have now, and others are going to end up with worse.
The have-nots will undoubtedly be happy to become haves, but the haves aren't going to be very happy to become have-nots.
Look at the long history of the Western Powers manipulating the Middle East to ensure their oil supply, tough shit if you happen to live there. Then imagine what's going to happen if those same Powers find themselves needing to ensure a food supply.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The funny thing is that global warming deniers who have problems accepting conclusions from scientific studies have no problems believing crackpot theories about "overpopulation" or "islamification".
I think the people with their panties in a bunch over islamification are just theocrats who don't want the competition.
Not sure what you're talking about on the overpopulation thing, but the basic cluster (f) of denialism and paranoia is just a correlation that comes out of the socio-political organization of the USA. In particular, the rich (who don't like the fact of global warming, because doing something about it would cost them money) have gotten in bed with the religious right (who imagine all manner of terrors and fantasies), because the rich have to deal with those troublesome elections in order keep running the country.
So you get social conservatives believing that global warming is a plot by liberal scientists, and plutocrats happy to ignore or even fan the flames of *phobia.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
2. We have some evidence that human pollution has caused some of the symptoms of climate change.
Do you dispute the science of greenhouse gasses?
Do you dispute the fact that we've spent over a century spewing huge amounts of greenhouse gasses into our atmosphere?
Are you clutching at straws?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
For example, it is a good bet that on any given day, the temperature that day will stay between the maximum and minimum temperatures observed that day in the last 100 years.
Well, first of all, there's no reason to believe that the last 100 years are representative. Human civilization has existed for over 20,000 years, and here you would be sampling 100 years, less than 0.5% of that and less than 0.000001% of the time life existed on earth.
Going with last 100 year's data is essentially guessing that last year's minimum/maximum temperature won't be exceeded since a very small amount of time has passed, and things probably don't usually change a whole lot year to year -- things plateau, and depend on recent temperatures around earth, and most of the temperature variation is attributed to the earth's rotation and orbits and small random variations.
Just because that worked on year 101 though, is not necessarily a reliable basis for expecting the same will work for every day on year 102.
"Good bet" is very tenuous in this case. It's like looking outside and recording daylight for the past 20000 seconds from 10 am to 4 pm, and assuming based on this recorded information, that the intensity of light visible every millisecond will fall within the minimum and the maximum seen in the last 20000 seconds.
The data for the past 100 years can't account for "falling off the cliff"; e.g. weather events where the conditions for a significant abberation to happen build up over many thousand years, and then suddenly, on one day, when a threshold has been reached, a series of cascading changes will invalidate any assumptions based on previous recent observations.
For example, the sun falls below the horizon, and then suddenly in less than 600 seconds, at some moment, the amount of visible light is way below the minimum seen over the last 20000 seconds; a remarkable and drastic change one could not really have anticipated, except having observed that longer term cycle.
Now if the average human life was 60 seconds, it might be many thousands of generations before this cycle was seen.
To go from "day/night" to "weather patterns" convert "seconds" to "decades"
The IPCC report is unspeculative, as much as one can be when talking about future outcomes. I think we are in violent agreement on what constitutes conservative science, we merely disagree whether the IPCC is an example of that. The basic science behind global warming is old, simple, and well-understood. The devil is in the details -- the feedback loops, the delays, and the buffers.
"huge societal implications should be reported"
I assume that you're talking about recommended changes in how we produce energy as having huge societal implications. It might not hurt to have models and evidence to justify that. Big industry in this country has a long track record of crying "wolf" about the economy-destroying implications of various regulations (and conservative have a pretty good track record of mispredicting economic outcomes). We could, for example, add a carbon tax, but reduce some other tax (e.g., social security) in a revenue-neutral way. Small taxes (I've heard $40/CO2-ton initially, roughly $.40/gallon for gasoline) would get people's attention, yet not destroy the economy -- anyone who really wanted to drive somewhere, would have extra money in their pocket to spend on gasoline. We also have quite a few existence proofs for countries full of happy healthy people who pay far more for gasoline than we do. So when you say "huge societal implications", suddenly *I'm* going to be a tad skeptical :-). I just don't buy it -- we've actually had other countries run the experiment, and it seems to work okay for them. Why are we so different?
I wonder how life has survived on for so long on this planet? For a majority of the Earth's history, the temperature has been warmer than it is now and there have been no polar ice caps.
A phenomenon like the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum must have had a very detrimental effect on life on this planet, but the geologic record doesn't show that. It shows there was an explosion of diversification of species during that time, particularly with mammals.
During the Paleocene-Eocene we didn't have to feed and water 7,000,000,000 people, of whom a large fraction live in coastal areas near the sea level.
Sure, we can let the climate go wild and ourselves go back to a species of about a million hunters-gatherers. Is that what you want?
If not, pointing out that this planet has been very hot before is utterly irrelevant to the discussion.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The scientific community also suppressed evidence of Lamarckian-looking evolution because it didn't fit the consensus view that Darwinian theories were the answer. And now what do we find? OOPS! Consensus was wrong, for something like 150 years, and there is plenty of evidence showing that Lamarck was on to something. He didn't understand the mechanism, but he was right - ACQUIRED TRAITS CAN BE INHERITED. The scientific community can be wrong, and shouting down dissenting views isn't good science. There's a lot more to the world than "scientific consensus" can understand.
Suppressed?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
On the face of it this makes sense, but what are you basing that on? I mean is it that there is more energy, or just a changing amount of energy?
Global warming = (approximately) more thermal energy in the atmosphere and seas.
I would expect more and/or stronger storms of all types.
Also, from further up-thread:
They're the first one to dismiss "global warming" when it snows hard in their town
They conveniently ignore the fact that a huge snow in winter or spring may not imply colder weather at all, just more water in the air.
They also use an evidence gate: if a cold spell logically disproved global warming, then a warm spell would logically prove it. But they only shout about the cold spells, because that "supports" their beliefs.
Truth is, we're going to keep having both cold spells *and* warm spells -- perhaps more often and/or more extreme -- unless the planet warms up a *lot*.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
But who are we going to sue once we get the bill for our idiocy?
Basically we're going to privatize profits and socialize risks.
When it comes time to relocate our coastal cities to higher ground, you can bet the oil execs aren't going to pay for it in proportion to what they gained by obstructing preventative measures.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
we don't really understand long term climate, or what caused past climate changes
Another lie. Or lack of knowledge.
We may think we know, but without a time machine, we can't really know for certain. These extrapolations are on a scale often beyond human history, and certainly beyond the history of science.
Science is proving hypotheses by experimentation.
No, science is understanding things as best we can with the evidence we can find or generate. Sometimes we can't generate it -- e.g., galaxy collisions -- so we have to do with what we can find.
People never have a problem with this until they feel a need to deny something that scientists have discovered, and then it's suddenly "if you can't do it in a lab, it ain't science".
Sorry, but science is about drawing inferences from evidence - period.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
It's how they operate. I don't know if AGW is happening or not. I think it's very likely that we influence our environment. What gets my panties in a bunch is that the AGW crowd ONLY states the negatives. As if there could be no possible benefit from a warmer planet. Living in the midwest, I've rather enjoyed the 70+ degree weather in March. Yes, yes, that's weather. But I'd rather the trend go warmer than colder. Give me the negatives, but give me the positives too so society can weigh them against each other to determine if we might be better off with global warming.
You can expect a mix of good and bad. But whatever the balance, it's going to upset the status quo, and a lot of people aren't going to be happy with that.
You get a nice spring; Las Vegas becomes a ghost town because there's not enough water.
Some of the good will be very good: places that aren't any good for agriculture now will be good for it in the future. But also vice versa, and countries that export food now aren't going to like importing food in the future.
Ultimately, IMO, the issue is this: we've spent thousands of years evolving a civilization to fit a world as it has been, and on a relatively short time scale that world is going to change, and our civilization is not going to fit so well. Then what happens? Are billions of people going to say, "Oh, well, that's the breaks."? Or are they going to fight over the redistributed resources, spend vast sums trying to make current arrangements continue to work as the world changes, and then spend vast sums again when the current arrangements cannot be stretched any further and new arrangements have to be tried.
Here's a prediction (based on my belief that we will not get serious about addressing GW until it has already caused very serious problems): over time, more and more coastal cities will spend more and more money trying to keep the sea out, until they reach a point where it just isn't technically or economically feasible anymore, and then the cities will be relocated or abandoned.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
So what your suggesting is that we take away the natural process of nature removing the organisms that are unable to migrate or adapt to their environment?
I don't know... should we take away the natural process of bleeding to death when we hurt ourselves real bad?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The King Canute's should see this as an opportunity, not a threat. Let's see the same intellectual engagement in the response to global warming as there has been to climate change itself.
Good suggestion. But that's not going to happen so long as so many powerful people insist on denying it.
Frankly, I suspect that if we decided to get serious about reducing our carbon emissions it would put millions of people to work and provide lots of entrepreneurs / venture capitalists to rake in huge piles of money. Should make liberals *and* libertarians happy. But too many vested interests don't want to let go of the sweet arrangements they have right now.
In 100 years, they'll be seen as buggy-whip makers opposing the Industrial Revolution. Only for real.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I quite like extreme weather. Mild weather is boring. I just hope we actually get to see some during my lifetime instead of 10,000 years from now.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Liberals don't like to be reminded that there are lunatics on the left. But there are. Read about the Democratic Socialists of America, and what they stand for. Read about the DSA's New Party, that had a lot of stuff going on in Chicago in the 1990's. Read about a young State Senate candidate in Illinois who was a member of that organization, a fact which is now so embarrassing that these organizations have attempted to scrub it from the internet (unsuccessfully, as most internet scrub attempts go). The lunaticy is closer to home than most people think.
Am I trolling? I wasn't aware of it.
"lunaticy"... hmmm.
Frankly, I suspect that if we decided to get serious about reducing our carbon emissions it would put millions of people to work and provide lots of entrepreneurs / venture capitalists to rake in huge piles of money.
See! You're not getting it either! Where is the peer-reviewed, worldwide scientific consensus that reducing carbon emissions is the best strategy?? There is none, just a knee-jerk statist reaction. Sheesh.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
You are getting it all wrong.
It's getting hotter globally. The last decade was the warmest on record.
However, there are local variations.
It seems that you are merely a victim of your own ignorance and inability to educate yourself on the matter.
Nope. You are getting it wrong again. Why is it that you can't be bothered to educate yourself before commenting on this?
The sad part is that you are either extremely ignorant or extremely dishonest, because just about everything you just wrote is complete and utter nonsense.
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>I'm pretty sure no one thinks the idea of pumping shit-tons of excess carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is a GOOD thing.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute produced ads, now available on Youtube, closing with "CO2: they call it pollution, we call it Life!"
Conservatives have argued that if there's even a one percent chance of a nation attacking us, we should start a war.
The conservative approach to climate change would be to proceed on the basis that if there's even a one percent chance that the people who spend their lives studying climate know what they're talking about, then we should reforest, build more nuclear power plants, and generally do things that are good ideas anyway.
"Either we tell them now and help them deal with it, or we give our great-grandchildren a messed up planet."
Cool. You get to have great grandchildren while poor folk get to die from the many miseries that electricity spares us. Like dying of cold, heat, unpreserved or uncooked food, burning to death when their cooking fires get out of control or just getting sick because their immune system is compromised by not getting enough food. Just what we need: a bunch of sanctimonious assholes with a cause important enough in their eyes to justify doing whatever the hell they want to do.
I thought that was the Republican parties job. Turns out they're not nearly as good at it as you lot.
"Cursed is he who rises early in the morning..." Isiah 5:11
Yes it is. It has far lower emissions per person than a regular car. One train or bus can replace countless cars.
A train or a bus with one passenger (the driver/engineer) is definitely not as clean as a 25 mpg car with one driver, and absolutely more inconvenient.
A train or a bus filled to the gills with passengers is definitely cleaner than a 25 mpg car with one driver (and probably 3 passengers, to boot), though likely with only a modest improvement in the average convenience level.
At some point, there is a breakeven point looking only at emissions (and not price per passenger mile, etc). What percentage of time is it true in each case because a reasonable exercise to work out, if emissions are your only concern. In China (pick almost any city), the percentage of time a bus or train is over that limit is very common. In Dallas... not so much (small, in all likelihood, except for special events- I consider 4 hours out of an 18 hour transit day to be "small"). Of course, in China they achieve this by putting disincentives in place which cause a car to cost a consumer 2x what it would cost that consumer in the USA (and 2-3x for gas).
The economic and political ramifications are left as an exercise for the reader.
Yeah, being this cold and uncaring is their job. Who the hell do you think you are, being this much better at it than they are?
"Cursed is he who rises early in the morning..." Isiah 5:11
Why HADCRUT3?
Why 1998?
Why do you claim this is a falsification when you know it isnt?
Oh, because you are a troll. I forgot.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
You don't know what ad hominem means.
If he said we should ignore your argument because you're a wanker that would be ad hominem.
Saying we should ignore your argument because you don't know what the fuck you're talking about is not ad hominem.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
So add a 40 cent tax on gas and AGW will go away? What are you basing this on? I really don't understand where you are coming from.
What is an evidence gate?
And.. unregulated futures markets would take care of this.
That's a start -- that's the initially (several years ago) recommended carbon tax. It's enough to change behavior and create markets for products that support further future change. If we tried to go from our current habits to zero (or rather, low) carbon in one year, that would probably be unpleasant, and would in fact be bad for the economy. Start small, change gradually, not so bad.
The longer we put this off, the faster we'll need to change to get the same (lack of) effect on the climate, and the larger the actual societal implications. From my POV, someone who advocates delay in order to avoid drastic and unpleasant economic change is setting us up for exactly that just a few years (decades?) down the road when AGW has progressed to a more-obvious state.
Farmers...Wow.
And what will the additional tax revenues be spent on?
Almost all the economists...
Reducing other taxes, preferably mostly on the poor, because gas taxes are regressive and we'd like to stay not just overall revenue-neutral, but per-class revenue neutral.
What is an evidence gate?
Kinda like Maxwell's Demon.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Warmer temperatures mean more water in the air and that means more precipitation. If the starting average temperature is sufficiently cold that means more snow, not less. There is a point where the increase in snow will be outweighed by the conversion of snow to rain, but not every place will hit that point or hit it at the same time. And even those places that have decreased their average snowfall will be more likely to having record snowfall events when it does snow due to the increased moisture in the air.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Both can be true. Records snowfalls are more likely because of increased temperatures that are still below freezing. This years record low snowfall is at least partially because of ice loss in the arctic. We got much warmer temperatures than normal because the warmer water disrupted wind patterns of the arctic that normally would blow warm air over the North Eastern part of North America towards Western Europe.
Further study is necessary to determine how frequently we can expect to see similar conditions.
This isn't proof of global warming, it's the effects of global warming. The proof is in the global temperature records. Even the skeptical scientists hired by the Koch brothers have affirmed that global warming is real and occurring. Global warming is well established theory with a lot of supporting evidence that makes it hard to falsify. There are plenty of falsifiable parts. For example if you could prove that carbon dioxide did not have an insulating effect you could disprove global warming. Of course, you won't be able to do that because there are easily reproducible experiments that show that it does.
Resorting to personal attacks like "it's religion" just makes you look bitter and foolish. Especially since many of the people who deny global warming do so for religious reasons. Like the congressman who claimed Global Warming couldn't be real because God promised not to flood the world again.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
I didn't even have to read that it was an IPCC report -- I just needed to see "UN experts" in the headline.
International Perpetrators of a Criminal Conspiracy. "Oil for Food" was reasonably profitable, but their goal is to steal trillions with the climate scam.
"The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don't know anything about." -- Wayne Dyer.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
I am not very tolerant of bullshit, and you are spreading bullshit. Your link is about Anthony Watts once again misrepresenting scientific research, and that makes me even less tolerant of you.
Of course you had to mention the "hide the decline" lie. You think it means something it doesn't. Just like the research you think supports your superstition because Watts said so.
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Wow, an argument from ignorance. That's... novel.
So what? That doesn't make the facts any less factual.
No, politicians do decide on the results of the actual research. You are extremely confused, it seems. The science is right there, in actual scientific journals.
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There are few positive to rapid climate change. Nature likes equilibrium and well adapted species. Shake everything up and you tend to get massive die offs. Take for example the last retreat of the glaciers, it killed off most of the megafauna in North America leaving us with deer and bison. The lack of domesticatable land mammals is part of the reason that Native American civilization was destroyed by Europeans.
Most of the world is fed by crops that evolved in the fertile crescent (an area in the middle east). If we change the climate sufficiently so that those few crops no longer thrive the world faces famine on a scale we've never seen. The world produce around 700 million tons of wheat, 700 million tons of rice and about 800 million tons of corn. Those three crops provide the majority of the world's calories. In contrast the world produces about 200 million tons of meat and 100 million tons of fish. Everything else is pretty much irrelevant. On a human time scale there are no real advantages to climate change. Fewer people might freeze, but more people are killed by heat stroke so that's a net negative. Some frozen land becomes poor quality arable land, however more good quality arable land becomes unusably drought stricken, that a net negative. Maybe a few centuries from now the total arable land area might go up, but in the short term we're trading good land for bad.
When the scientists evaluate the changes, they are are all short term negative and debatable on the extremely long term. It seem clear that slowing the rate of change is a net benefit regardless of the eventual outcome. If we slow the changes everyone has more time to adapt, and that's clearly a good thing.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Or perhaps they just disagree with your proposed solution. It's entirely possible for someone to be more concerned with the risks of nuclear than the risks of climate change whether or not that's rational. Whenever I see someone say that "nuclear has to be part of the answer", the message to me is that it's more about political ideology than solutions. I looks to me like you are trying to shoehorn your opinions on nuclear nuclear as a precondition on participating in the discussion.
Nuclear is quite likely going to have to be part of the solution, but when you push too hard people don't want to listen.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
We can disagree on what qualifies as true science--that's fine.
But I do stand by my point that these conclusions drawn from mathematical models based upon extrapolations of physical data that's millions of years old cannot be proven, because the models and extrapolations cannot possibly be verified to be accurate.
If one were studying only recent phenomenon and were using such data to extrapolate from, one could cross-reference it with independent records to see if correlation actually was causation--but since no one was keeping such records millions of years ago, all we have are guesses, inferences that seem right but are by definition unprovable.
Since they are, by definition, unprovable, it is foolish to advocate radical changes based upon them. The short history of science has demonstrated that what seems impossible one day may become commonplace the next, or that what seems to be the only possible answer one day turns out to be completely wrong the next.
We need to consider the bigger picture, and that includes looking outside our own perspective and humbly recognizing our limitations. Science and arrogance do not mix.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
There will always be climate change, but right now it's changing extraordinarily rapidly due to human emissions, which means that it's changing faster than we can adapt.
Then you complain about the way scientists phrase things. You are obviously only used to reading political demagoguery where absolute certainty is always present. Science isn't like that. So I can understand why you think science sounds all weird and honest and all.
The UN requires scrutiny, but the IPCC is backed by every single respected scientific institution on the planet.
Take your FUD to your political forums instead of spewing your political propaganda here, please.
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> If the products and services I buy are are delivered by roads and road use taxes go up, so will the prices I pay. If we reduce general taxes accordingly, it is a wash for me.
In theory, that might work. In practice, I don't think it would be so simple.
Hey, it'd be cool if the economy wasn't built around the road system. But what is the alternative? Going back in time a few hundred years and not even having a national economy? Not being free to move about the country independently, depending on planes and trains? Or do we need ubiquitous aircars? Or teleportation?
Besides, your assertion that the economy should not be built around the road system is unfounded. Why is that necessarily a bad thing? What if that's just the way it is? I think that makes about as much sense as saying that our diets should not be built around water-based foods, because then we wouldn't be dependent on water. Hey, roads are the lifeblood of the modern world, just like veins and arteries are necessary in our bodies.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
Right, I'm just wondering if raising the quality of life of "the poor" may require increased carbon emissions.
Having a road system is fine. Using the roads for distributing supplies in trucks is fine. Building your cities around people burning fossil fuels to drive a 4000lb vehicle that takes up a 10 foot by 20 foot space 10 miles to buy 30 pounds of groceries is a disaster.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
Well, you might have a point, but even your "disaster" assertion is unfounded. You need to elaborate.
What was it like beforehand? Is what we have today better? Surely it is in some ways--whether it's a net gain is the question. Can people eat better today for less money? (Not "do they".) Is the food supply more stable? Is there more variety throughout the year? Is food safer? (Let's not go down the HFCS/fat-Americans route--that's a question of discretion, not possibility.)
What about things besides groceries? Is living in a city necessarily better than a suburb or rural area? Which has better quality of life? What about the freedom to choose--how does that affect quality of life? Some people would hate living in a cramped city; they'd rather own a little bit of land and a house, maybe in a nice neighborhood.
Bottom line: I think you are oversimplifying.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
According to this guy, yes:
http://darwins-god.blogspot.com/2011/09/transgenerational-epigenetic.html
I was originally made to be suspicious of this in high school, when my biology teacher, who was really quite excellent, strangely told us a story not in the textbook about how mice were observed to develop webbed feet in one generation when a swamp was flooded. The he got a puzzled look on his face, and explained that it couldn't possibly happen, because evolution and mutation were not single-generational, fully-developed mutation mechanisms. He was great to acknowledge the anecdote (I could never find a citation), but had no explanation.
Interesting read here:
http://darwins-god.blogspot.com/2011/09/transgenerational-epigenetic.html
See my other post down a few on my high school bio teacher. Really got me curious.
That link is wierd. What does any of this have to do with religion? Epigenetic inheritance is just much less obvious than genetic inheritance.
It is a little weird. You can find other references to this phenomenon, though. I think what he's saying is that "scientific consensus" can be a lot like religion; it can go from a general agreement on reasonably vetted attempts to understand the natural world into a faith-based, group-membership based mindset, and it's hard to tell sometimes when that happens. It's about scientists being human and social creatures, and the risks that go with it. Scientists are supposed to be above that, and often are, but sometimes are not. They're people.
For your deaths facts: http://www.thenewamerican.com/tech-mainmenu-30/environment/621
As for your arable land excuse, the vast majority of land on earth today is too cold to grow crops. A very small percentage is too hot. Most of Alaska is wetlands, imagine how good those soils would be for farming if it were warmer. I suspect most of Canada, Greenland, and Russia are similar.
And finally, how long will it take us to adapt? How many major cities were in the US 100 years ago? 200 years ago? Is AGW really happening THAT fast?
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
Hey, if someone is going to make the blanket claim that "if global average temperatures continue to rise, despite increasing CO2 concentrations, then the theory is disproven", I'll take whatever time period I like, and whatever data set I like.
Would you like to be more specific? Perhaps state a required starting year? Perhaps a required length of time? GISS, or RSS instead of Hadcrut3?
Or are you yet another troll without a falsifiable hypothesis :)
No, my argument is that you cannot blindly try to fix a hypothetical problem with an incredible waste of resources without hurting the poorest of the poor. "Green" jobs, funded by government subsidies, waste resources and cause measurable harm to humanity, and even by the most optimistic of appraisals, will do *nothing* significant to combat future climate change.
Energy is life, and if you make it more expensive because you imagine that one day, bad things will happen because of a gas measured in parts per million, used by plants to grow, is going to kill us all, what you'll end up doing is harming more people, and of course harming those that are the most vulnerable.
All the whys aside, global temperatures are rising. Higher temperatures directly correlate with increased evaporation rates. Increased evaporation rates result in increased volumes of water vapor in the atmosphere. The latent heat energy in the water vapor means more available energy in the atmosphere. Why would anyone be surprised by larger releases of this energy in weather events, its not like it is going to be destroyed you know. wabi-sabi matthew
I agree on that. Argument from consensus should be recognized for what it is: A useful heuristic but logical fallacy.
I never claimed that it was. Buses rarely drive around with just one person. Their purpose is to move lots of people around.
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Wow, that is a lot of text. Sadly for you I'm not going to read all that. From what I can tell you are just parroting old denialist canards. The fact is that it's still warming, CO2 is still increasing, and the science is getting more and more complete with every passing day.
Please educate yourself.
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Yes, I did some googling, and it turns out that CAGW is another denialist invention. It seems to be an attempt at setting up straw man because denialists are unable to argue against the actual scientific theory, AGW.
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Because actual scientists in a field are doing actual research on the topic, and they have been through all the debates and reviews and all that.
Of course, that still doesn't mean that some scientists in a field can't be dishonest scumbags who consciously spread falsehoods about their field because of their political or religious beliefs. There are biologists who deny Evolution, for example.
Case in point. Notice how you are referring to things like speeches and blog posts rather than actual scientific papers?
And as I pointed out above, there are always some scientists within a field who sadly let their ideology cloud their minds. However, what matters is what they can show through their research.
Akasofu, for example, makes claims that are demonstrably false, and he is basing them on misinformation.
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Yes, we can. There are numerous ways to look at the climate in the past.
And yes, one can indeed do exepriments in climate research. That you think one can't just shows your ignorance.
And you don't prove anything in science. You deal with evidence, not proof.
You keep making all these weird claims and comments, and it seems that it's all based on your amazing lack of knowledge. You seem to be clueless about the scientific process in general, and also climate science in particular.
Climate science does not claim that correlation equals causation, for example. So this just proves that you are clueless.
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Oh dear. Your ignorance is on display again. You really do think this is all they have, don't you?
I'm sorry, but you are the one ignoring the bigger picture, and instead doing cherry-picking and arrogantly declaring that the science is false because you don't understand it.
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Actually, I suspect if Alaska were warmer most of the land would still be terrible for growing crops. That's not considering other factors such as shorter growing seasons and weaker sunlight. I'm roughly familiar with Northern Canada's geography, and I think it would make especially poor crop land, I think it's mostly rocky with at best a poor, thin, top soil. It could, in theory, be turned into prime agricultural soil but it would like be at immense cost and years if not decades of work, it would likely end up being funded by government because it seems doubtful that any private interest would engage in a project of that expense and duration that has such an uncertain payoff.
It's not just areas that too hot to grow crops, it's too hot and too dry, and with unstable weather patterns. Texas just had the worst drought in it's history, as temperatures continue to increase Texas may shift to a similar pattern to the one Australia seems to see: some years they get massive flooding, other years they get virtually no rain. There are areas around the world where they get either drought or flood, and little in between those two extremes. The U.S. midwest is one of the most productive food growing regions in the world, do you really think it's wise to risk that productivity on the chance that other lands might eventually be as good?
You need to think carefully about the question: "How long will it take us to adapt?" As long as we continue to terraform the planet we're adapting to a moving target. That target isn't likely to settle down until decades after we run out of usable fossil fuels*. It can take decades for the temperature to reach it's new equilibrium point after CO2 emissions are released.
* At least at prices where they can remain an option for the general public.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Climategate was not an op ed in the WSJ, but a manufactured controversy where fake and out of context quotes from stolen emails were used to deceived people into thinking that scientists were doing bad things.
The op ed you are referring to in the WSJ was littered with errors and lies, and those "prominent scientists" were mostly politicians trying to make a buck.
And Fritz Vahrenholt is not and never was a scientist. He is a politician, and has made a living selling his services to the energy industry. His claims are blatant lies.
There is consensus, and a liar like Vahrenholt will not change that.
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"Home-schooled" "armchair" + no counterargument=failure.
If you want to say that I don't know what I am talking about, you'd best tell me what you think you know and why you think you know it. Failure to do so indicates that you just have no idea, and instead are functioning on the level of an unthinking zealot.
You would do well to read about the "halo effect". Understanding your biases makes you much less of an abrasive asshole.
Typical troll, doesn't reply to the comment.
Like said, you don't know what ad hominem means. It does not mean "waah, they're being mean to me".
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Because actual scientists in a field are doing actual research on the topic, and they have been through all the debates and reviews and all that.
Of course, that still doesn't mean that some scientists in a field can't be dishonest scumbags who consciously spread falsehoods about their field because of their political or religious beliefs.
Case in point. Notice how you are referring to things like speeches and blog posts rather than actual scientific papers?
And as I pointed out above, there are always some scientists within a field who sadly let their ideology cloud their minds.
Your statements here belie an arrogance that is inappropriate. You over simply a complex issue by essentially stating that all skeptics do not have any peer reviewed work, or are intentionally misleading people. Here is a website full of scientists with the correct qualifications that disagree with the AGW establishment with peer reviewed papers. http://www.populartechnology.net/2009/10/peer-reviewed-papers-supporting.html
If there is no God then free will is an illusion.
Further on your analogy...
Not everyone that eats junk food is fat. Not everyone that is fat gets diabetes. Some people have a genetic disposition to it. There are many causes. Being fat, or obese is a significant indicator, but I wouldn't say it is the "cause" of it.
You could say the same thing about climate change. Human CO2 emissions I am sure are not helping matters much, however to trivialize such a complex system to say FACT: Human CO2 Emissions are causing climate change, might be a bit much.
Or not. I'm inclined to believe we should be trying to reduce our pollution regardless one way or another.
Anyway I wish more people would think critically with a healthy dose of skepticism rather than blindly accepting whatever is shoveled at them as "truth" or "gospal". Not that I am saying that is what is happening in this instance, only that many just seem to be parroting rhetoric (on both sides of the argument).
No, it is you who are oversimplifying, and even linking to a page which presents papers as something they aren't. For example, it lists a bunch of papers from denialist publication "Energy & Environment" which shows that the list is just a huge lie. The rest of the papers are mostly misrepresentations of their conclusions, as they do not support what that blog says they support.
The fact that you even link to that blog is proof that you are a denier who has no clue what the science actually says, and you blindly parrot that page because you hope it's right. Unfortunately for you, the list is bogus.
And skeptics like Lindzen do have peer reviewed work. The problem is that his research does not support his personal opinions. His research supports AGW, or doesn't address it directly.
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Just looking at a list and calling the 900 plus scientific papers "lies" because you don't like a few of the sources is a logical "straw man" fallacy. My statement never has been that the science is conclusive about AGW. I am a skeptic. My assertion is that there are well respected scientist doing peer reviewed research that do not agree with or state there isn't enough research to make a decision about AGW.
If there is no God then free will is an illusion.
in fact here is a link to a great opinion piece that best describes my opinion:
http://solberg.snr.missouri.edu/gcc/LupoMOMed.pdf
If there is no God then free will is an illusion.
I didn't say it did. If you read my WHOLE post, you'll see I refer to MDOT (Maryland DOT) doing road maintenance.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
>>>- it's snowing harder because of global warming.
Always trying to have it both ways. When it snows hard (record snowfalls last winter) they claim it's because of global warming. And when it barely snows (this winter) they claim it's because of global warming.
You can't have it both ways.
You can't claim both less & more snow == proof.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
I'm not calling 900 plus scientific papers lies. I'm pointing out that the list is not what it claims to be. It consists of fake papers, that is, papers that are not actual scientific papers published in reputable scientific journals. It also consists of papers that do not support the denialist agenda.
You are a denier, not a skeptic. A skeptic would not fall for the BS seen on that page, and would have done a minimum of research instead of mindlessly parroting denialist propaganda.
All peer reviwed research supports AGW. Including that of skeptical scientists like Lindzen, although they tend to ignore their own and other people's research when they get paid to speak on the matter by the oil industry and right-wing think tanks.
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Anthony Lupo is a liar and a hack. He is part of the anti-scientific NIPCC, and gets paid by the Heartland Institute to spread propaganda. He is making numerous claims that are demonstrably false. He is parroting denialist lies and talking points like "the vikings colonized Greenland" and "there was a wine industry in England in medieval times," and so on.
Seriously, are you only able to dig out "sources" that are 100% owned and operated by right-wing propaganda organizations that have been repeatedly caught lying on the matter?
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To reverse it back on you, please enlighten me as to how "fight against Christian fundamentalism" equates to "fight against Christianity" unless you're positing that all Christians are fundamentalists.
Virg