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Koch Bros Study Finds Global Warming Is Real And Man-Made
bledri writes "The results of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature are in and Richard Muller, the study's director (formerly an AGW skeptic) declares, 'Call me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I'm now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.'
The study was funded by the Folger Fund, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research (created by Bill Gates), the Bowes Foundation, the Koch Foundation, and the Getty Foundation."
...is global warming good or bad.
For some it will be good. For some bad. The diversity of life has historically increased with warming. Coastal cities won't like a sea level rise though.
AFAIK The Koch Foundation isn't the same as the Koch Brothers (the folks who donate to conservative political candidates.)
Bark less. Wag more.
The Koch Brothers were among several funders, some of whom actually had decent motives. For example, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab are not partisan conservatives. And FICER (the Gates-funded organization) actively depends on global warming existing, because their whole raison d'etre is pushing geoengineering as a solution, which would obviously be unnecessary if there were no problem for geoengineering to solve.
In fact that's probably why the outcome was actually scientifically legit: it was a study by actual scientists with a fairly broad set of backers, done at a university rather than in the private sector.
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TFS obviously tries to throw the results of this study back in the Koch Foundation's face, by singling them out when the study was funded by numerous other groups. It's just another insufferable "I told you so", which we can all relate to as making people cling ever more tightly to their beliefs or just refuse to change their ways for spite.
So wouldn't it make more sense first to sit back and see if the Koch brothers become converted skeptics like Muller? Imagine having their billions behind efforts to advance alternative energy.
(Bjorn Lomborg) as two prominent if not THE most prominent AGW skeptics to change their minds. (I've heard of these guys and if I've heard of them, since I'm not a specialist, I figure they must be prominent).
So what's it going to take? Convincing every last person that this isn't real? That's going to be pretty damned impossible because as Upton Sinclair wrote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.". Substitute the word "salary" with "lifestyle" (or even "SUV") and you'll see how the average American thinks.
I've read that a ten percentage increase in electrical costs would be enough to sequester all the CO2 we're currently emitting. So the fact that a ten percentage increase in something that is not a big item in the average American budget is keeping us from potentially preventing great harm to our ecology, biosphere and a great number of species on this planet (including us!) makes me realize that we will deserve the hell on earth we get.
Anyhoo - the more people on _both_ sides of the argument who actually look at the data rather than just attack the conclusions, the better for everybody concerned.
Please remain calm, there is no reason to pani... wait, where are you all going?
I was confused. I am prepared to believe the Koch Foundation on this because I think Global Warming exists and we are the primary cause of it. We would be the solution but I don't think we can ever organize ourselves enough to solve the problem - politicians think too shortterm and only want to be reelected. Pushing policies that will be unpopular with their constituents and their supporters (Corporations) will not result in reelection.
I think that people who believe the Koch Brothers on anything are being suckered - i.e. they are "Koch Suckers" :)
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Not necessarily. It depends very much on the specific city, of course, but assuming that the harbour can manage any rise in sealevels through increasing quay heights, construction of berms, etc. then a sealevel rise could actually be beneficial to operations. Higher water levels would reduce the need for dredging and also reduce the impact of low tides on deeper hulled vessels' ability to come and go.
Of course, if you are actually on the beach, as it were, and can't simply retreat up the shoreline, then your options are going to be a good deal more limited. There are large areas are Bangladesh in particular that are going to be essentially rendered uninhabitable by any significant sealevel rises.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Soon we will engage in apocalyptic greed, panic and defensiveness. Stock up on canned and dry foods... and ammo.
Step one was to deny it was real. Now we are on step two: admit it is real but that it is too expensive for us to fight it. Step three is to build another mansion on higher ground and put in larger A/C units.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Thanks for that. One thing, though -- some massive melting we are seeing goes WAY beyond typical cycles and goes into melting ice formed long before the first animals walked the earth.
I don't care about the cause. I care more about the solution. We're looking at a global extinction event and I'd like man to be able to survive it.
Global warming will also destroy crop yields - just look at the corn yield THIS YEAR.
which will affect beef production/
Global Warming will also affect fisheries. Between GW and over fishing around the World, we're going to see some real devastation there - and fisheries around the World are already in trouble. That's why you keep seeing new and different species of fish behind the counter - the other ones have been almost wiped out. (Farmed fish is an environmental and nutritional joke. But that's for another time.)
See, that's the thing that annoys me. Just about all of the "debate" in the popular media about global warming is about "lifestyle", taxes, nationalism, ... everything but food supply except when it comes to ethanol. (The corn lobby needs to be destroyed. Farm subsidies mostly enrich Cargil, Monsano, Tyson, and other huge corporate food processors. It lowers input their costs.)
So, while the general public is being distracted my non-issues about GW like losing control of our government to the UN, higher taxes and other non-sense, the folks who are profiting dearly from our current policies are getting away scott free.
And the above is just ONE facet of the true forces behind the issue.
You are aware that the earths spin is not centred on the magnetic poles. Our biggest heat source (the sun) is most effective above equatorial regions. These are defined by the earths rotation which has not moved that much in the entirety of human existence.
If some places have got hotter and others cooler because of climate change, that is in keeping with what has been expected. I just don't recall being told which areas will get hotter and which cooler - except by Hollywood...
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
And how are global temperatures influenced by the location of the magnetic pole? The sun rays aren't influenced by the earth magnetic field.
Our increase of CO2 is still far below any volcano ...
Not surprised you cower behind anonymity when spouting utterly wrong claptrap like that. Hint: try actually finding things out before demonstrating your ignorance in public.
According to the USGS, man-made CO2 emissions are 35 billion tons per year, total volcanic output (from land and under the seas) ranges from 0.13 to 0.44 billion tons per year. Even in a year of abnormally great volcanic activity, volcanic output is tiny in comparison to that of human activity. There are only a few Mount St. Helens scale eruptions per year, but it would take 3500 of them every year to equal current man-made CO2 emissions.
From the same USGS page, in 1900, the annual anthropogenic CO2 output was about 18 times that of volcanism. In 2010 it had increased to about 135 times the annual volcanic output. These ratios are based on the maximum estimate of volcanic CO2 output. So the increase in annual anthropogenic CO2 output dwarfs the annual volcanic CO2 output.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Sequestering carbon is dang expensive, not well understood, and we're decades from it scaling up to the 100s of GW of capacity necessary given our current generation infrastructure.
We could shut down lots of coal for a 10% increase in electricity rates, replacing it with natural gas, wind, and energy efficiency. That might reduce our carbon footprint from electrical by 10%. For another 10% increase in electricity rates, we could probably roll out GWs more storage [hydro or compressed air], roll out more wind and some solar and more energy efficiency, and cut another 10% from our electrical carbon footprint. Wind and solar prices continue to fall. The "easy" answer is to stop building coal plants, invest in energy efficiency and co-generation, improve building codes, and complement new wind and solar with storage and fast-ramping combustion turbines [which are inexpensive to build, but more expensive to operate], and useful for dealing with the intermittency of some renewables. It need not be done all at once, and some parts of the country can be done economically faster than others, but that's the way to do it at a cost which would be manageable.
Now, before I elicit the nuclear fanboys, I'll make two points: (1) nuclear power is more expensive than solar PV per kWh at a levalized cost without any subsidies for either, and (2) just as the sun doesn't shine at night, the nuclear power plants don't turn off at night. Nuclear is already more expensive than PV -- if you've got to build storage too to shift some of that unusable nighttime production to daytime, you might as well build storage and shift some of that extra PV to nighttime. Want to encourage small, identical reactors to lower cost? Sure -- but you're looking at 10-15 years before the first one is online. In the meantime, we've got to cut CO2 now, and it's far easier, cheaper, and politically possible to do it at point sources like electrical generation than it is at distributed sources like tailpipes and home furnaces.
Firstly, let us be clear on what we're talking about: current temperature appears as a statistical blip in the historical record.
Secondly, Richard Muller is not and never was a skeptic. Way back in 2003 he was saying things like, "Let me be clear. My own reading of the literature and study of paleoclimate suggests strongly that carbon dioxide from burning of fossil fuels will prove to be the greatest pollutant of human history. It is likely to have severe and detrimental effects on global climate." and even more incredibly, "If Al Gore reaches more people and convinces the world that global warming is real, even if he does it through exaggeration and distortion - which he does, but he’s very effective at it - then let him fly any plane he wants."(2008).
Thirdly, even William Connolley, the guy banned from editing Wikipedia for 6 months due to his attempts to rubbish skeptics, thinks Muller is a wazzock for making the claims he has. So, slashdot, the excitement you are experiencing here is really quite misplaced.
"nobody seems to be able to find anything he's ever said that put him in the "skeptic" camp..."
Especially if they don't have 5 seconds with which to perform a google search.
Here's the latest. Scientific American has now published an interview with Richard Muller, in which Muller repeats the most popular climate denial talking points related to Mike Mann's famous and endlessly replicated hockey stick temperature graph, and throws in unsupportable slurs against Al Gore, the IPCC, and climate science in general. The magazine's editors did not see fit to fact check any of the statements.
Source
In addition, the warming could have a cascade effect with the permafrost on the ocen floor releasing Methane in greater amounts as well, which would also add to the heating cycle.
Although methane currently accounts for only 15% of warming (a far distant second to CO2's 75% contribution to warming), it is also a concern if you factor in the amounts they believe may be locked in the permafrost under the ocean floor.
It's hard to believe there are still people stupid enough to spout these two talking points, a good decade or more after they've been debunked, soundly and repeatedly.
Clearly there are though, and they're proud of their extreme ignorance.
What a misleading summary. What Muller claims to have shown is:
1. Warming is happening; criticisms of statistical methods can either be worked around or are shown to not be valid.
2. Solar activity and/or other proposed non-CO2 warming drivers are not responsible for the observed increase.
3. Atmospheric CO2 is by far the best correlate with global surface temperatures.
However, he then adds, "These facts don’t prove causality and they shouldn’t end skepticism," and goes on to reject a number of "alarmist" (his word) consequences of warming (more frequent hurricanes, the U.S. drought, polar bears dying, etc.)
He himself uses that term, in the quote that's right here in the Slashdot summary! It's not some kind of external appellation. He says:
The 3-years-ago part I believe is referring to "Climategate", which Muller was very critical of. In addition, he's criticized the methodology of studies over the years, which has caused him to be viewed as something of a skeptic. In 2004, he wrote a now-famous editorial attacking the "hockey stick graph" for being "poor mathematics".
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by the time it gets to the point of really doing anything to require relocation, those yahoos in Congress denying it will be long gone from those positions and living on easy street someplace. And we will likely have to pay to have THEM moved before anyone on the coast gets a dime for relocation.
And nothing about rising seas means the coastal trade stopping. We will still have coastlines there will just be less land between the coasts. Look at the bright side, transporting goods from the coasts will require less distance to travel so less fuel will be needed.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
How about Muller's own words in the Times Op-Ed: "Call me a converted skeptic."
but the USGS didn't factor in the Methane releases and Methane is a more effective Green House Gas then CO2 ever was. Right now, the biggest contributors of Methane are all the damn cows being fed antibiotics in those massive dairy and feed lots so people can have beef on the Barbie. All you have to do is check out the various orbital colony scenarios and you soon realize that beef isn't that efficient in generating protein for consumption. Goats, sheep, chicken, rabbits and fish are far better at converting feed into protien and the reason I didn't include pork is they're number 2 in methane production.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
How definite is the attribution to humans? The carbon dioxide curve gives a better match than anything else we’ve tried. Its magnitude is consistent with the calculated greenhouse effect — extra warming from trapped heat radiation. These facts don’t prove causality and they shouldn’t end skepticism, but they raise the bar: to be considered seriously, an alternative explanation must match the data at least as well as carbon dioxide does.
I believe you're referring to methane hydrate and it's not under the ocean floor but ON it.
I'm a Democrat, and I love nuclear! (And I conditionally love fracking gas, though I think it needs better - though not onerous - regulations. I certainly love it more than coal, even in its present badly-regulated state.) The leader of my party, President Obama, defends exactly these policies, as far as I can tell. I really don't think that Democrats are the problem. I think that giant energy companies like Exxon-Mobil (the funding arm of the Republican party) are the problem. I think the (Republican) coal lobby is a problem. NIMBYism (which cuts across party lines) is a problem. And science denialism is a problem (on which Republicans have a near monopoly). In all this, it's weird to blame the Democrats.
There will still be coasts. We'll just have to build new cities a little higher. It will only cost a few dozen trillion dollars.
We are the primary cause of global warming, we are the primary cause of accelerating it
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
They did exactly that.
It's not posted yet, but last week I attended a lecture at the Aspen Center for Physics about this very subject:
http://www.aspenphys.org/50th/events/july25.html
It will be available sometime soon here:
http://vod.grassrootstv.org/cablecast/public/Search.aspx?ChannelID=1&SimpleSearch=physics
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
That global temperature have risen during the past 100-150 years is a fact, and that greenhouse gas emissions are at least partly responsible for it was also likely. The real question is the rate of it. A 0.1C warming is harmles, a 10C warming is apocalyptic. In the past 150 years we have burned about 10% of the fossil fuels in the ground, which amounts to about 50% of the reserves we can actually extract. This resulted in a 40% increase in CO2 concentration and about 1C of warming. So if we burn the second half, it won't even rise the temperature with another degree. On the other hand, if technological advances will allow us to exploit more than that, it would result in a bigger warming, which could melt the permafrost releasing all the methane stored there in the athmosphere resulting in an unstoppable warming. Now these numbers are horribly imprecise, and to be able to plan ahead climate research should focus on getting much more accurate data.
This is all just liberal propaganda paid for by... ...oh wait...
What Obama says in public, and what his administration does in reality, are two different, and usually diametrically opposed things. Giant energy companies don't care what they sell, as long as they make a profit doing it. The coal lobby is bipartisan. It's not just red states which are dependent on coal for electric generation capacity. And science denialism is bipartisan too. There is more to science than just CAGW and the Democrats are very, very, good at denying reality when it suits them. It's not at all weird to blame the party in power for what is happening on their watch.
Yeah. We've been telling that to New Orleans for over 150 years and see how well they listened.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Time Cube Guy?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
at a rising rate of less than 2 mm a year (and the rising happening since the last ice age), no you are not. Get a grip.
I don't recall seeing this claim debunked. I have only seen people claim that this claim has been debunked, mixed in with ad hominem.
Perhaps the parent hasn't seen it either? Maybe you should post a link rather than being an abusive twat.
Though the methane numbers do help to attribute climate change more to the West than the rest of the world.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
If you didn't think the argument involved multiple parts, then you weren't paying attention. I find this to be one of the biggest problems with many self-proclaimed proponents of AGW is that they think if they prove something, then the argument is done, over, everything else follows logically and there can be no question. No, not at all. There are multiple stages to the argument.
The first is the claims of fact: That average surface temperature is increasing and that CO2 levels in the atmosphere are increasing. These are claims of facts about the world, things to be observed or measured. CO2 is pretty easy given the nature of gasses diffusing to uniform, temperature is quite a bit harder. However, it looks pretty solid that yes, temperature has been increasing. So that's step one, verify the facts behind the theory.
The next step is the central theory: That the primary or exclusive cause of the observed warming is the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere due to human emissions. Like all theories, it attempts to explain the connection between facts, how things relate. So that the facts are true does not automatically imply the theory is correct. That is the point of this (and other) studies. See if there are facts that would falsify this theory, or are there other theories that would fit the available facts better. So far, it does not seem so which means that this theory is probably correct.
This is not the end of the argument though. All you've done is shown why something is happening. That doesn't mean anything in and of itself. The next part of the argument is where things get more specious: The claim that this will be a bad thing for humanity as a whole. That's not a scientific theory, that's an over-arching claim, a judgement call. It is based on a number of theories and hypothesis out there. However to be accurate it needs to be backed up by theories with evidence that indicate that things will change in negative ways. Also you have to weigh just how positive and negative all the predicted changes will be. Anyone who pretends something is all positive or all negative is pushing an agenda and/or ignoring reality. Everything has a downside, a cost. The question is how does it weigh overall?
This is a discussion that doesn't seem to happen much. The "It will be a bad thing," seem to be parroted as dogma. You accept or you get shouted down. Any hypothesis that says something bad will happen is accepted as true, any hypothesis that says something good will happen is said to be false. Sorry, but it doesn't work that way.
Then, after you've shown it is a net negative overall, that it is something that would be better if it didn't happen, you get down to the policy of what to do about it. This is not science at all, there is no one right answer. It is a matter of deciding what we wish to do based off of costs, likelihood of success, other downsides and so on. "Just stop burning fossil fuels," isn't the "correct" answer. It is a possible course of action, but not the only one. Geoengineering solutions would be others. Still others would be not to try and change what is happening, but rather to change ourselves and prepare to deal with the changes since though this change may be human caused it is likely at some point another will happen that isn't and thus we may not be able to affect.
So if you are hoping for the magic moment of "All debate ends and everyone agrees with me," well sorry you aren't going to see it. As I alluded to, the big thing at this point would be to show that this change is going to be a net negative for humanity. That's complex, so no surprise it is hard. Even once that is in the bag, the question remains as to what to do. To that there will never be a final "correct" answer, only possibilities that eventually will need to be weighed and chosen from (including the possibility of doing nothing).
I'd be careful about being so trivial about a 10% increase in electricity prices. It might be trivial for you, it's a fairly non-elastic good in most of the states, and increases in it, much like fuel prices, tend to hit the poor the hardest.
You could double my electricity bill and while I'd wince, I wouldn't need to substantially change my budget. Increase the bill of my grandparents on social security even 50% and they'd be cutting into the grocery money. Maybe even at 10%, but I don't know their finances that well.
Then you get into businesses and manufacturing and it's one more reason to leave the area. Civilization depends on cheap energy, the cheaper the better.
This brings up another argument - sure, global warming is happening. There will be both positives and negatives. Coastal cities might need to adjust their infrastructure in major ways; but at the same time a few degrees warmer average temperatures can add weeks to the growing season of major areas of North America, Siberia, and other regions. The studies I've seen predict warmer temperatures to increase potential farmland, not decrease it. So the question becomes: Is the economic cost of preventing global warming worth it, and by how much? I'll note that I'm in the camp of global warming is happening, and that we should do stuff about it, but the question becomes one of 'how much?'. There are easy fixes out there, and I think we should be doing more of them. But some of the proposals are crazy.
Finally - We don't ever want to become dependent upon one source of electricity. My 'ideal' carbon-neutral electrical mix is 40% nuclear, 20% solar(~20% of electricity is spent on cooling anyways, and demand is something like 50% higher during the day, so when you figure that solar only works during the day, it pretty much works out*), 20% wind, and 20% other(such as hydro, geothermal, biomass, etc...).
Another point is that if we massively go towards electrical vehicles(to get rid of that carbon), my estimates are for an average increase in electricity usage for househoulds of 50%. I figure that 'most' households, especially areas with more expensive electricity, have taken the easy fixes already - saving more juice will take things like replacing windows and putting more insulation in. Reducing a household's electrical usage by 50% to keep usage even after switching to EVs - that takes stuff like getting rid of electric heat, including the water heater(If they're on gas or oil, carbon could be avoided by switching to a heat pump, but again, that would increase electrical usage). This can be done, but isn't an 'easy fix' in most areas.
*Night usage: 1, Day usage: 1.5. Total: 2.5. 20% of 2.5 = .5, or the increase during the day.
I don't read AC A human right
Do you actually know how much the sea level rise is predicted to be, and over what timeframe? Right now we're estimating about 200 cm by 2100 . That's not really enough to warrant mass relocation of most first-world coastal cities, I'd imagine, and there's plenty of time to make modifications to existing harbors and such in the meantime.
Yes, there are some areas that may be seriously screwed (like Bangladesh, IIRC), but honestly it'll mostly be business as usual in the USA.
I do not really care much about Global Warming or Climate Change, which seems to be the preferred term nowadays. I care even less about hippies and tree huggers telling me that I should go back to a hut in the middle of a forest.
We have to look at this from an economic perspective. The reality is that, places like China will continue to pollute a lot for as long as they possibly can. It is cheap for them to forego how this will impact their future generations. It is cheap for us to buy crap made in China when they do not have to worry about environmental standards and labor law. We cannot compete with them unless we sink to the same level, which we most definitely do not want to do. Hence I would say it is time for us to divide the World in two again (just like the good old soviet times). I believe we should creat a "Green Wall". On our side of the Green Wall, only countries that are democratic and comply with certain environmental standards can be admitted. We will only trade with them and they are only allowed to trade with us. If they trade with anyone else over the Wall, we will cut them off. Countries on the other side of the wall, could apply to join us on this side of the wall. In their case, the trade barriers would be dropped slowly until they finally become full democracies and comply to all of our standards.
The markets are here in West. Countries like China, cannot survive without access to them. Let's make this World a better place by forcing them to change if they want to continue to have access to our markets.
Green protectionism has also another advantage. Chances are that these countries would only be able to meet our envrionmental standards if they bougth technology from us. That would in essence create a huge demand for some of our exports.
BTW: I am sick and tired of stories that talk about some Western company that helped China crack down on their dissidents by selling them sniffing technology yadda... yadda...yadda. What the heck do you want our companies to do? They do not have the luxury of ignoring a market such as China if access to it as not closed to their competition. If they ignore it, the competition moves in. By allowing our country to trade with countries such as China and Equatorial Guinea, we leave our companies with little choice. If we care that we fill our tanks with oil that came from Equatorial Guinea (one of the most brutal, corrupt, and repressive regimes in the history of mankind), why not completely cut them off from access to our markets? If Europe, Japan, and North America did so, the World would be a much better place.
No, the Kochs are the same billionaires. They must have either figured out a way to monetize global warming, perhaps through an environment-monitoring division, or figured out that most people would rather have oil than a stable atmosphere.
Or maybe their foundation accidentally backed the wrong science. Even billionaires can hire people who make mistakes.
John
The Martian atmosphere is thin compared to Earth's but it's 95% CO2 vs only 1/2 a percent here on Terra. So there's significant heat-trapping potential complicated by the significant amount of dust in the Martian sky.
Comparing Mars, Earth and the Moon is problematic as only 1 has extensive and deep oceans, which store a huge amount of heat.
Mars also get cold enough that as much as a quarter of it's CO2 freezes out of the air at the poles during the winter.
I hear a lot of talk about warming in the solar system, mostly from denialist sycophants enamored of that bug-eyed Englishman. But they also claim that we've been in a solar lull for several years and this is one of the weakest cycles in a long while.
So what's warming the solar system?
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
After the storm of 1900, the entire Island of Galveston was raised by 10 or 20 feet. If they could do it back then with limited technology and resources while dealing with thousands of dead bodies and 50 ft tall piles of debris, I think we can deal with a centimeter per decade rise.
Gates, Koch, Getty and Bowes. That's a pretty diverse group. Either you don't trust anyone or that's about as close as you are going to get to a fair determination.
Thats what they said when the report that the earth was round came out.
That is a lesser evil than half of Africa starving to death because of increased food prices caused by carbon taxes on farmers in the US and elsewhere.
Of course, we COULD just abandon our idiotic de facto ban on nuclear research and build LFTRs everywhere, both halting the growth of CO2 emissions (among other more potent greenhouse gases) and making energy cheaper for everyone, improving everyone's standard of living.
I am thinking Bill Gates this time, he doesn't have one yet - in fact Nobel Prizes for everyone !
There are lots of corporations that might be very happy with the massive infrastructure improvements needed to move to a more energy efficient economy. The coal industry is going to be against it, but even the oil industry getting excited about the potential of natural gas.
We're looking at a global extinction event and I'd like man to be able to survive it
I don't know about all that. Most people think low lying coastal areas and much of Florida are screwed, but we should have plenty of advance warning that the coastlines are receding, so I doubt many people will die due to that. The southern US won't be as productive as it has been, and the California agriculture miracle will dry up, but there is going to be plenty of land opened up too. Canada will benefit, along with the northern prairie in the US. Russia will see longer growing seasons and may become a major food exporter in the next 30-50 years. The tropics will be less inhabitable, possibly becoming more desert-like than today.
Oh, it will be wet. more heat means more water vapor and bigger rain events. That's happening now. If we're smart we will build more fresh water reservoirs and water pipelines. But I'm sure we won't do anything but complain.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
At some point, you might as well be abusive. Moon vs Earth temperatures is a good an example as any he could give. The difference between the two? Greenhouse effect. More Greenhouse leads to yet higher average temperatures.
The whole debate is not about who is right and who is wrong. It is about people fighting for their right to deny reality in exchange for clinging to their religious beliefs or a fat pay-cheque. There is no merit in that. No moral principle. The debate consists entirely on one side bringing up irrelevant and minor points and demanding that they be refuted in detail. This gives them time to come up with the next batch of irrelevant details
In some sense, the fact that this study was conducted was a huge gimmick: the outcome was obvious, and any scientist (yes even a physicist) who thinks he'll get better results than the guys from a field he's not from has a clearly overinflated ego.
It's not as if the Koch brothers are in the carbon emission credit trade... oh wait
Since this is the second time that line is misread that particular way, I'll offer an explanation, even though it should be obvious. California's government happens to go bankrupt from time to time. That doesn't make the state poor, because there are also people and companies in the state who own and produce assets that are valuable. Interesting that you would think that only the government can create or maintain value ;-)
As for why the state of California regularly goes bankrupt: having the populace vote on every tax increase is a surefire way of never getting taxes increased. If at the same time people vote pro-spending, government becomes unsustainable. Not that hard to figure out, definitely a construction failure, and fairly unrelated to the question of regulations.
(BTW slashdot sitll doesn't allow unicode? Why can't I put something as innocous as the not equal sign into the subject? It's 2012, not 1992)
nobody seems to be able to find anything he's ever said that put him in the "skeptic" camp...
And yet the people who are pro-AGW have heard of him, and have felt the need to create a rebuttal page listing what he has said and where he went wrong. Here is an article written by Muller about the hockey stick graph.
The problem is that he is not an extremist, and when he finds evidence that does support the climate change then he accepts it. However, he does have problems with some of the claims from the scientific community and he calls them out on it. He is a true skeptic, unlike the people who keep insisting that they are called skeptics who turn nasty on anyone who actually has their mind changed by scientific data. Those so-called skeptics are really just deniers.
That isn't how physics works. Magnetic fields effect charged particles, not photons.
politicians think too shortterm
...but a proffesional public service doesn't, the long term energy plan for most industrial nations is to spend the next couple of centuries burning every last ounce of coal they can find.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
"...Skewed for the interests of one set of billionaires.
"I have now been flipped, and am rewarded for serving the competing interest of an entirely opposed set of different billionaires.
"Everything you read is true. Especially if it is funded by large foundations."
FNORD
Precisely. Including the Illuminatus! reference.
There was a fellow who said the same thing like a year ago, and all the pro-AGW people were singing in the streets, trumpeting their final victory.
Then it turned out that the guy had actually been pro-AGW from the start, and simply signed on to the Koch funded study under false pretenses, pretending to be a skeptic, so he could strike them a killing PR blow. That is not science.
However, from a review of the article, Muller appears to be rational and acceptably skeptical. He does not subscribe to ideological warfare, or feel the need to defend ideas that support AGW, but are weak or flat out untrue, instead blasting them, and those who do. This is the correct approach, and adds tremendously to his credibility in my book. I haven't read his study yet, but I hope he maintains his neutral, truth seeking position there as well.
The carbon dioxide curve gives a better match than anything else weâ(TM)ve tried.
If only we could stop the politicians from exhaling...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I think you will find most scientists shy away from attributing any particular weather system like Katrina with AGW. Statistically, it's just about impossible to pick out one weather event and say "See that one was caused by climate change!"
It's a statistical science, like radioactive decay. You can't predict when a particular alpha particle will be emitted, you can only predict at what points you should see rough percentages emitted. The same goes for AGW. You can't predict an individual storm, but what you can do is predict that storm systems will become more frequent and more powerful over time. There will still be years with fewer hurricanes and years with more hurricanes. What counts is the mean.
The problem here is that a good deal of attention is paid to be non-experts; Al Gore, journalists, populizers, who tend to make extreme or absurd claims. The actual scientists seem to rarely be the voice that is heard. It's all filtered, either by exuberant supporters or hostile critics.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The next big hurricane might finish it.
Of course global warming is real. And a good thing too, the average temps of a body without CO2 at 1 AU (like, I don't know, the moon?) is -10F. But it the increase is man-made, then the increased temps on Mars must be from the emissions from all those NASA rovers there, eh? Hello! The sun is a mildly variable star.
Exactly!
The human input into the global climate equation is, barring pretty much anything short of humans triggering a Krakatoa-sized volcanic eruption, fairly laughably insignificant.
The solar input into the global climate equation, however...
So, the obvious answer is to pass legislation to regulate the Sun's output.
It’s a scientist’s duty to be properly skeptical. I still find that much, if not most, of what is attributed to climate change is speculative, exaggerated or just plain wrong.
In other words, he has serious doubts that hurricanes and other disasters will be the result of AGW.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
That funny given Obama received $2.4 million in donations form big oil in 2008 compared to the $900k that McCain got in the same time period. So yeah big oils the funding arm of the republican party. In reality Big Oil puts its money on who it thinks will win based on the theory giving them money will influence them in there favor and it seems to of worked since the Democrats controlled majorities in the House, Senate and Presidency until the 2010 mid-terms elections and did jack shit.
Sell stocks in insurance companies and buy construction companies.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
http://www.populartechnology.net/2012/06/truth-about-richard-muller.html Richard Muller has never been a skeptic, at best he had a moment of intellectual honesty towards skeptics when he acknowledged Steve McIntyre's debunking of Mann's Hockey Stick, only to later dismiss this as irrelevant to the global warming debate, "This result should not affect any of our thinking on global warming". Hardly surprising, as Muller considers the carbon dioxide produced from burning fossil fuels to be, "the greatest pollutant in human history" and likely to have, "severe and detrimental effects on global climate". The future outlook for global warming according to Muller is that, "it’s going to get much, much worse" and thus advocates that the United States immediately pay China and India hundreds of billions of dollars to cut back their carbon emissions or, "it'll be too late". No wonder he endorsed "The Earth is the Great Ship Titanic", Steven Chu as "perfect" for U.S. Energy Secretary and Al Gore's hypocritical alarmism...
Well, if you want to get really technical, most methane hydrate is under the ocean floor, but very close to the surface. It is excluded from great depths beneath the sea floor because the temperature starts rising, and that melts it. There are a few places where you can see methane hydrate directly exposed to sea water on the sea floor, but they aren't commonplace. It tends to be a bit more stable if some sediment is on the top.
Anthropogenic sources of greenhouse gases (0.28%) are a drop in the bucket compared to natural sources(99.72%).
Volcanoes are only a small part of nature's contribution to greenhouse gases. Forests and decaying vegetation are far more significant contributors.
So, cheaper than bailing out the investment banks then?
" The diversity of life has historically increased with warming".
Sure, but the same can be said of asteroid impacts; new studies have indicated that after as short as 10 million years, the biosphere has recovered and maybe even opened up a few new ecological niches by dislodging the old dominant species (bye bye dinosaurs!).
The problem is the word "short". On any human timescale, ten million years is a long time. In a few centuries which really is the blink of an eye in a geological sense, we'll be altering the climate substantially. For many species (millions?) it will be too fast for them to evolve.
So they'll die.
Global warming will NOT extinguish life on earth (well not unless we manage to cause a runaway greenhouse effect like Venus). It does have the potential of creating a less diverse world filled with crabgrass, cockroaches and rats and other generalist species (like us) that will take over. Our descendants for TENS OF THOUSANDS of generations may curse their selfish, short-sighted ancestors of the 21st century.
And Americans in particular.
BTW slashdot sitll doesn't allow unicode? Why can't I put something as innocous as the not equal sign into the subject? It's 2012, not 1992
Do I have to explain the 2002 bidirectional override incident again?
DOD, and the US Navy in particular, have considered climate change to be a major national security issue for several years. There is no question that "climate change" is occurring. As usual, what is in question is:
— Precisely what part human activity plays in concert with natural global climate cycles, and
— Even if human activity is the exclusive cause, exactly how much the US and other First World nations should dramatically alter their economies and energy strategies while developing economies and other major economies (such as China and India) do comparatively nothing, absurdly sacrificing the ends to the means.
China is set to emit 50% more greenhouse gases than the US by 2015.
It doesn't matter that China has more people in the context of the climate change argument! If you identify some level x of greenhouse emissions as being a "bad" thing, then China emitting far more than the US is an extremely bad thing in terms of the effects that it would cause. One can argue that the US may be in a position to make the most impact, but with China set to significantly outpace the US in emissions and oil consumption, I think we need to take a look at what value the US taking a disproportionate hit in emissions control — and the dramatic impact that would have on our economy — would actually do for climate change that would be positive.
If the issue requires a global response — whatever the cause — then it necessarily must be a global response, not just First World nations sacrificing their entire economic and energy base, thus removing any influence they may have over the issue.
Put it another way: does anyone think that the evidence supports that China (or India, or any other developing economies) would be a better steward of this responsibility?
Nice work dissing all those other hard-working blue-collar folks who don't haul their tools around (because they're in a factory etc). But SUVs make total sense for everyone because of your fringe case. I bet you drive OVER 9000 miles a day too so electric cars are universally stupid right?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
You are comparing one tiny island to the entire Atlantic seaboard? It is generally wise to have a sense of proportion.
Mitigation strategies become more expensive as "we" delay efforts to develop and apply those strategies.
There is now a huge separation of interests between those control access to concentrated capital from those whose lives are most directly affected by environmental conditions.
The "capitalists" have a strong interest in preserving their existing revenue streams. The interests of the rest of society are irrelevant. The truly poor in other countries, many of whom live in low lying areas and depend on water supplies that are already turning brackish due to the current rise of only a few inches. Such people have almost negative value to high-concentration capital operators, usually being in the way when one investment or another involves their displacement.
The Koch brothers and their friends the major fossil fuel industries have a strong interest in their current business model, and will fuck the rest of the world if necessary to prevent losses in their investments.
The delays that the Heartland Institute, and other thinktanks advocate WILL cause mitigation strategies to become prohibitively expensive and count on it coming out of our asses. The longer we wait, the more painful the movement will be.
To those who are skeptical of government intervention, I hesitantly agree, for two reasons: 1) It's been bought off by highly concentrated capitalists expressing their "free speech rights" drowning out all others in the public square, 2) Too many people have a problem with learned helplessness and are unwilling or unable to see the effects of the endless talk of "freedom", failing to see that "freedom" usually means "free to fuck over those that do not have the countervailing power to prevent it".
The place where I flat out disagree with that logic is that the people who pull the strings of highly concentrated capital are *far* worse. My preference for "government" intervention is precisely because in a society that has not entirely lost its capacity for small-D democratic action, government is weakened by the constant re-election of legislators & "leaders". Throw away that feedback loop by *endlessly* whining about "government" with the effect of ceding control to the few lever-pullers, and you will have something way more interesting.
P.S. I am a white guy in my mid-fifties who has been working in corporate environments large and small for 35+ years. I have seen the effects of narrow interests screwing over the others for most of those years. When authority is not balanced by strong accountability WITH TEETH, that authority is misused one hundred-point-zero percent of the time. Those with insufficiently accountable authority have an absolutely perfect record of misusing it.
Most of the money in the TARP has already been repaid. They were loans, not free money. So far, the total cost to the taxpayer has been $32 billion. It helps to read and understand the news instead of merely believing what you wish were true.
The things that are leading to pollution of such extents (selfishness and greed, ultimately), would fuck us over, and corner us like this stuff will (and by "us" I don't mean all humans, if you think all men are created equal under current circumstances you're a fucking lunatic), even if they didn't also result in pollution. So why not adapt by, you know, cutting the crap? I know that's mighty easy to say, but still, if we're not at least THINKING, much less TALKING about actual causes, wtf can we hope to achieve?
Also, this is about more than water levels rising. FFS! You upset the eco system you live in, you're sawing off the branch you're sitting on. Yes, stuff changes, and life adapts. That's a given. But so is that people are greedy because and then die with a shirt that has no pockets. At best they gain nothing, at worst they go to hell. So yeah, let's adapt. We have our side of the equation under control. Sure, nature might still burp some day, and we'd end up with even worse catastrophes -- so? That's the part of life we cannot and never will control, the sheer mortality of it. That's someone elses responsibility, or nobodies -- but no excuse for the shit we do.
"people are greedy because and then die"
I have no idea what I was trying to say there. People are greedy because.. they're people? What? Sometimes I confuse myself.
CFLs are cheaper to operate than incandescents. Attic insulation usually pays for itself in less than two years.
Geeks and businesses understand "cheaper to operate" and "pays for itself". A lot of the general public does not, seeing only the initial sticker price. That's how anything with a razor and blades business model gets bought.
A small turbo-diesel car is far cheaper than a gasoline powered SUV.
What automaker headquartered in the United States makes turbo-diesel cars for sale in the United States? A lot of nationalistic people won't buy a "foreign" car: a Toyota made in a neighboring state is more "foreign" than a Ford made in Mexico because "the money goes back to Japan". In addition, what a lot of families need is an efficient station wagon, but a CAFE loophole has forced automakers to make SUVs instead of station wagons.
My 2010 TDI "Sportwagen" gets 35+ under constant in-town acceleration/deceleration during rush hour, gets 40+ in off-hour in-town driving, and 52+ on disciplined long trips.
Plenty of room for a custom bicycle (I am 6' 4", and the bike's frame is enlarged to accommodate exceptionally long legs). Or alternatively room for 4 people and all their luggage for a long weekend at a family wedding.
Being a slashdot poster, you should know about "refactoring". Doesn't happen enough in the software world, and it for sure doesn't happen often enough in the legislative world. But the answer is not "deregulating": which merely cedes the power to those who really want to socialize their responsibilities while privatizing their profits.
There has never been a free market. The only question to be answered is "who controls the market"? It could be, and usually is, the group who have the concentrated market power, or an entity that should be responsible to the society at large, whose capacity to design and implement the regulations is admittedly imperfect, but without that imperfect process, we're all fucked.
There are complex systems wherein small changes to X trigger large changes to Y. Why is that so hard to understand?
Uh... someone's reading a bit too much into that article.
If you read it correctly you'll see that his main conclusion is not that it's man-made at all.
It's that it exists(duh to those denying that) and that it's best correlated to CO2, and that CO2 is mostly man-made.
This is not causality though. And if you read well page2 you find out he's not going alarmist screaming like a headless chicken.
Good job slashdot on posting flamboyant titles to get attention.
The earth has been known as roughly spherical - since 1500-1200 BC or thereabouts.
Ptolomaic astronomy, from the 2nd century AD, while geocentric, assumed a spherical earth, at the center of concentric heavenly spheres. Each of these had there own spherical planets embedded in their arc.
It is true that there were doctrines espoused by the Byzantine Church, which promoted a "Christian Cartography" that used Biblical references to mandate a flat-earth. These were always widely contested with the complete awareness of Ptolomaic models - solely on the basis of "Pagan" versus "Christian". These views were held by a minority of relatively unimportant European barbarians.
Using the idea that a "flat earth" was a commonly held belief in the middle ages does not illustrate the folly of an opposing argument. Rather, it demonstrates how fully history and "common knowledge" are propagandized folly.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
There was a fellow who said the same thing like a year ago, and all the pro-AGW people were singing in the streets, trumpeting their final victory.
Oh yeah! Now what was his name again? That's right, it was Professor Richard Muller. Yes, it is the same guy.
And no, he was not later found to have joined the study under false pretenses. That was just the anti-AGW crowd's attempt to belittle the study by attacking the author, in the same way that the great-grandparent did with the claim of not being able to find any skeptical statement by Muller.
A "tiny" island with a city that was larger and more important than Houston. And they had to raise it by tens of feet. The Atlantic seaboard is unlikely to need more than a foot for the next century. You don't even have to make a concerted effort of it. Just make it known that sea levels are rising, and people will do it on their own. Those properties that are not worth saving, won't be, and you get the double benefit of having new marshland for wildlife.
Seattle managed it.
> So what's warming the solar system?
Furious wanking.
I have nothing to lose but my bindings.
That's probably as accurate as any of the denialist tripe
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
After the storm of 1900, the entire Island of Galveston was raised by 10 or 20 feet. If they could do it back then with limited technology and resources while dealing with thousands of dead bodies and 50 ft tall piles of debris, I think we can deal with a centimeter per decade rise.
The economic focus of southeast Texas also left Galveston for Houston, never to return.
Galveston had been Texas' primary seaport. Now it's little more than a cute tourist trap. (Which still needs to be totally evacuated every few years.)
The economic costs to Galveston for being too close to sea level have been utterly devastating to that city.
You will be moderated "troll" for saying anything against the paradigm here cirby.
Blasphemy! You can't say such things because they are against the economic religion of the times; you must be a communist! If you are not with us 100% you are a blaspheming communist!
Tariffs are evil protectionism, the almighty holy market is the decider and how dare you contradict it's wishes!
The all mighty market and its prophets (PACs) run the government and control the ignorant populace; it is so rigged you can't introduce reasonable tariffs anymore.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Rather, it demonstrates how fully history and "common knowledge" are propagandized folly.
I know... that is why I said it...
ahh religion, making humanity dumber since 1200 BC
Thanks man.
If a few more people were interested in actually presenting facts, there might not be controversy in the first place.
Honestly I've been very reluctant to accept AGW. There are plenty of people of people I respect who are sure that it is exaggerated or completely false. I hear them recount their points over and over and each article or soundbite in favor of their perspective gets discussed with enthusiasm.
I've done my own research and found that most people who write in favor of AGW do so without actually checking the science. They tend to be an abusive and dismissive group. That doesn't actually persuade me that AGW is bogus, I'm willing to accept that truth can be supported by assholes, but it does make it hard to find information. It is a lot easier to find deniers using facts and referencing studies. Again, that doesn't convince me since plenty of whackjobs think they have reliable sources.
I've heard the Mars talking point plenty of times and recall some doubt after looking it up myself, but it would have been nice to see a link to information rather than abuse.
I believe you are mistaken. From my reading of the article, the start date for the study has no impact on the results.
What they did was to take the global temperature record and various subsets of it (e.g. discarding urban measurements, adjusting for poor-quality measurement stations and so) and compare it to the record for various factors, such as volcanic eruptions, solar activity, and CO2 emissions, that could potentially affect temperature. Basically, they compared curves. They found a clear signal corresponding to volcanic eruptions, nothing measurable from solar cycles, and the best match by far was with CO2
Keep in mind that scientists do not measure global temperature: as different measurement stations go on- and offline and large areas of the Earth lack monitoring, that would be virtually impossible. This is why you never see claims that the global temperature used to be X, now it is Y. Instead, they measure changes in temperature. So if a given station measured Z degrees last year and Z' degrees this year, delta T = Z' - Z. That change can be compared with changes in measurements at other stations to get an overall fluctuation for a given time interval.
I am rather surprised you got modded down. I don't see any reason why you should have been. You are clear about your interpretation and the reasons for it.
Sorry, but there are "sides". Specifically, they are "truth" and "belief". You are harbouring the misconception that belief is altered by argument. It isn't. Real, deeply held beliefs are who you are, and they exist mostly as markers of the place you hold in society. I find it wonderful that you believe that you can convince people to stop being who they are in favour of reason.
In reality, there is no one who in good faith believes that they know better than the absurdly overwhelming majority of scientists in a field unless they either have not really thought about it, also believe that the scientific process is bunk, or that some crazy conspiracy is going on. Only in the first case can you convince people, but these are easily spotted: they don't ask stupid and/or made-up crazy shit.
Finally, scientific thinking is not about questioning everything and repeating all experiments in a fit of paranoia. Instead, it is about looking at the theory used to explain the experiments, figure out what else this theory predicts, and running _these_ experiments to attempt to either disprove or refine the theory. A blanket "you guys don't know stats, therefore your calculations must be wrong" to hundred of thousands of people in climate science was ridiculous, and indeed, he did find exactly the results which were the field consensus. Duh.
The diversity of life has historically increased with warming.
Huh? That contradicts everything I know about climate change, or any other kind of environmental change. When habitats change rapidly, many species find that their adaptations no longer apply, and go extinct. Google "warming diversity" and you'll see a lot of scientific studies with results along the lines of what I've just said.
I guess the logic of your argument is: evolution is life's way of adapting to change, therefore more change means more species. In the long run, that's actually true, but the process takes millions of years. In the short term, like the next few thousand years. we're looking at a planet with drastically reduced biodiversity. And guess what: that makes it a lot harder for humans to get by.
Which suggests that ultimately that nature will solve global warming for us, though not in a way that we'll be around to appreciate.
Has he found evidence of CO2 levels rising? Actual numbers?
1. How do you decide who you respect as far as statements about climatology? What standards do you apply?
2. Who is it that you're studying so far as arguments for AGW? Again, what standards do you apply?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Man made CO2 emissions can be calculated. For instance burning a ton of coal that is about 70% carbon produces about 2.5 tons of CO2. You can do similar calculations for other fossil fuels. We have pretty good numbers on how much fossil fuels are being used.
Is it really so hard to identify the characters that cause problems and outlaw them?
Yes, because a future version of Unicode may introduce more such characters. Google blacklist vs whitelist for the security principle involved.
The corn yield this year is due to the "largest drought in 50 years". http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-07-27/news/sns-rt-us-usa-grains-tourbre86q1hf-20120727_1_crop-tour-soy-crops-corn Our records on droughts in the continental US only go back about 110. The climate models predict continental centers drying out - a cycle of drought does not disprove or counter this.
Please help metamoderate.
I won't believe it until we've watched most of the world's crops wither away causing widespread famine. And even then I won't believe it. It would have happened anyway. Nope nope nope. Science is a sham.
I don't think you get what happens when the global climate changes. Sure things get hotter or colder, but also, water distribution changes drastically as well. This is partly why we find marine life fossils in deserts. So it's not just that water levels change, but rain and weather patterns (which is really just a fancy way of expressing rain) change, temperature changes and all that. With this, wild plant life will suffer as will the lower animals which depend on those plants... and neither will migrate on their own so easily.
Man will, no doubt, be able to keep up with some elements of the changes in eco systems, but we're not particularly good at it as we still make really stupid mistakes on a frequent basis... you know, like putting frogs where they don't belong or creating GM foods which, in theory, kill insects but which actually end up breeding super-resistant insects that are even harder to kill than before. (Harder to kill and quick to reproduce means potential plagues of biblical proportions)
People are NOT looking forward enough and not seeing the whole of the world.
Mars actually has 15 times the partial pressure of CO2 compared to Earth,
Mars 0.9532 CO2 * 0.636 kPa = 0.6062352 kPa CO2, (210 K mean temp; 590.589 (W/m2 above atmosphere))
Earth 0.00038 CO2 * 101.325 kPa = 0.039010125 kPa CO2, (287.2 K mean temp; 1,366 (W/m2 above atmosphere))
0.606 / 0.039 = 15.54
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Coastal cities are so popular because they can have harbors. Being a trade hub allowed those cities to grow so much. Even if the water levels rise the harbor still has to be at the water.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
The Mars idea claims that increased solar irradiance is the cause for warming on both Earth and Mars, hence warming is unrelated to human activity. However we've had SoHo measuring the Sun from outside the Earth's atmosphere and it does not show increased irradiance. In fact when I looked at the data we seem to be close to a minimum.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1003.4524&ei=7IMVUOWhJqTg0QGDoIGACQ&usg=AFQjCNH4sheVAbaAZfcaDDY6LVKdg-MM8A&sig2=4CmVW9NY1BXtoGQrHnyG4w
well, technically 0AD should be the point when that started happening. his reference to 1200BC was a matter of when a round earth was first postulated. somewhere around 200BC was the first time the circumference had been accurately calculated. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes ....
prior to 0AD there was even a popular "religion" that believed and sought proof of atoms and particles - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomism . oh where we would be today if it weren't for 0AD
That may be Muller's own opinion, but that is NOT what the Berkeley study says.
The only thing Berkeley has done so far is to gather their own statistics about land surface temperatures. That data does -- roughly -- tend to support other climate scientists statistics about PAST surface temperatures. But that's ALL it does. So far they have not even compiled ocean temperatures yet... much less come to any conclusions about CAUSE.
This article is nothing but more propaganda. The Berkeley study ONLY tends to confirm PAST, LAND, temperatures. That's all it does. They do not even have the data yet to even TRY to make conclusions about causes.
Um, did you notice anything about food prices this year?
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Most Unicode characters are more useful for making what used to be called ASCII art than for conveying thoughts in English. The letter in Oriya script representing long î (U+0B08) looks more like the head of a Smurf than anything else. And Slashdot used to have serious problems with vandals posting ASCII art of obscene gestures.
Anthony Watts just posted some new information regarding errors in the BEST data. Perhaps Richard Muller will need to re-evaluate his "skepticism." http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/29/press-release-2/
The IPCC has purposely engineered a massive scientific fraud.
Whoops! I think you mean the seawall is raised, not the entire island. For a performance review of how impregnable the seawall in Galveston is...see "Hurricane Ike"
Milutin Milankovic found this out (published in 1930?), however (according to the Wikipedia page; I'm not an expert) these "orbital forcings" produce temperature oscillations on the timescale of tens of thousands of years! The quickest of the three cycles described says, that the orbital forcing by axial tilt produced a maximum warming effect at 8 700 B.C. (think: before Jerusalem and before Babylon, in the time of Jericho when there were still woolly mammoths and agriculture was invented etc.) and is now slowly "cooling down" (predicting a DOWNWARD temperature trend) until the minimum at the year 11 800 (think: the Plutonium in Yucca Mountain nuclear waste has decayed to 75% of its current strength).
Therefore, orbital forcing can not be used to predict or explain a temperature change that occurs in the time period of only 200 years.
Your timescale is wrong.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
Man, what have you been smoking?
The Earth's axis of rotation has not shifted significantly. As tmosely noted magnetic fields don't affect photons which are 99.999% of the energy we receive from the Sun. The magnetic pole's position does not affect the amount of sunlight that shines on any place on the Earth.
Depends on how you define "ocean floor". It's in the sediment.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Do you care about the kind of lives your children and grandchildren will have? Oh, right, this is /.
Scientists knew that CO2 levels in the atmosphere affected temperature long before they matched the curve of CO2 levels and temperatures. Arrhenius was the first to explicitly state that in 1896.
if the quantity of carbonic acid increases in geometric progression, the augmentation of the temperature will increase nearly in arithmetic progression.
Interesting hypothesis (not!). Now find the causal link between weather and the magnetic pole (as opposed to the rotational pole) moving.
That is a lesser evil than half of Africa starving to death because of increased food prices caused by carbon taxes on farmers in the US and elsewhere.
How do you figure?
I agree that if I were to see nothing but that graph and then those two predictions, I'd say that the more conservative one seems more likely. However, the fact that most of the scientific community doesn't agree with me sounds like pretty convincing indication that there is something more complicated going on and that I - having no expertise in this subject - shouldn't give much weight to my own guesses over the predictions of those who study the subject for living.
So... do you happen to have any actual expertise in this field, so that it would make sense for me to care about your thoughts here?
Talking about the number of hurricanes hitting the US is silly. Whether they hit the us hard or not is a matter of chance. You need to look at hurricanes over the whole area they occur in. For instance 2010 and 2011 are tied for the third most active Atlantic hurricane season ever recorded and 2012 has been the most active before July ever recorded. (See the notes column in this list.)
You do realize that the official estimates were obtained by a process of averaging studies that included rejecting the more extreme claims for rising sea level, while accepting those that predicted little or no rise don't you? This was documented in the official reports.
Also Greenland, e.g., is melting a lot faster than any of the included studies predicted. I'm not sure how significant this is, but I wouldn't put any vast amount of trust that the sea-level won't rise a lot faster than the official projections.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Then there are the Pythagorians which killed someone because they discovered irrational numbers. They also had a thing about people eating beans...
The reference point in a graph of temperature anomalies is arbitrary. It doesn't matter where zero is because they all show about the same amount of change when you subtract the low from the high.
Yes, there are some areas that may be seriously screwed (like Bangladesh, IIRC), but honestly it'll mostly be business as usual in the USA.
2m will not be business as usual. Some areas will have to be abandoned. But sea level doesn't rise evenly (because of gravity -- look it up). The east cost of the USA will be worst affected by the distribution of sea-level rise, and it could be 5-7m. In 100 years, we may be relocating half of New York City.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
But Bush-the-Elder's friends? Now that carries some weight!
That would sound reasonable, but alas, that is not how the cognitive bubble works. It will be more like this:
Yes, indeed, expect Muller's BEST to have no practical effect on the cognitive bubble. That is why it is called denial.
If history has any lessons, it is that we will literally have to wait until the deniers die of old age before their "discourse" disappears into history.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Now, wake me up when the AGW loons decide that nuclear is better than coal, and I'll start taking them seriously.
Since you already have the solutions, you may have missed the fact that wind-power is just about to become cheaper than coal. And that's when we /don't/ factor in coal subsidies, which /includes/ treating the atmosphere as a free garbage dump.
It'll only be 5 years or so.
Would that make a difference to your fantasy-land? Or do you believe that we should let coal pollute for free, get additional government subsidies, and then only be replaced by nuclear, because only liberals like wind. Well??
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
But the cheap and dirty solution is always going to be cheaper than the economically responsible and affordable solution.
That would be depressing if it were true. But coal will become more expensive than wind in about 5 years. And we have every reason to expect that it will soon be more expensive than solar, but that will take longer.
Sure we need base-load power as well; however, there are many possible solutions in the works for that too.
I believe that conservatives are rightly suspicious of environmental paranoia; however, the suspicion goes too far. AGW is a real and present danger to our civilization, as the science clearly demonstrates. Also, the economics of addressing climate change really aren't that bad. Germany has been doing it, and they managed to grow their economy 3% p.a., during a global recession. Cap-and-trade has been shown to have a negligible (if any) impact on the economy, and it does reduce emissions. In short, conservatives are guilty of economic alarmism.
But I also believe that we would have been ill-served by rolling out massive wind/solar installations in the 80s/90s. (We had consensus in the scientific community in 1979, according to a NAS report from that year.) The technology was too immature. The system of grants and subsidies has helped move these technologies along tremendously, and they are almost ready for prime-time. We are less then a decade from a major shift in energy policy.
With the benefit of hindsight, I believe that we would have been best served by a carbon tax that went directly into technology R&D project, small-scale installations, and subsidies for quality energy efficient housing. It is difficult to know if this would have sped the development of technology, since society has already invested heavily in such projects. However, it would have prevented the misallocation of resources by those who -- for ideological reasons -- believe that the fossil-fuel party will last forever.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Richard Muller is a lot of things (a fairly good scientist for one), and the press keeps insisting he's a "former skeptic," but nobody seems to be able to find anything he's ever said that put him in the "skeptic" camp
He was skeptical about the historical temperature record (which is why he launched this project in the first place). Does that not make him a "skeptic"?
2. Anonymously leak memos that show "scientists" you funded were making up data
3. Have FoxNews report "Scientists make up data, Global Warming a Fraud!" without reporting who paid the scientists.
4. Completely discredit all global warming research by association.
5. Profit!!
6. ??????
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
but the USGS didn't factor in the Methane releases and Methane is a more effective Green House Gas then CO2 ever was.
This is true, and the amount of methane in permafrost and on the ocean floor is stupendous; however, CO2 lasts in the atmosphere for 1000s of years. Methane is more like 2-5 years.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Yes, inflation does the same thing, which is why we also need to stop the genocidal maniacs in charge of Western economies. A given effect can have more than one cause.
I thought that was a self-explanatory line of reasoning. Developed economies that export food are as a rule reliant on fossil fuels to put out crops. Fuel price goes up, food price goes up. This happened in 2008 and caused worldwide riots (confined to the third world). IIRC, this was a major part of the impetus to the Arab Spring. I may be misremembering that, though. I do remember food riots in Cairo in 2008, though.
Further, much of the population of Africa is dependent on food aid through charities with limited budgets which are only likely to get tighter. This means that many more people will be one harvest away from famine and death.
But it's very easy to register a warming when compared to a cool period.
On this very day, two years ago, the Koch bothers both scoffed at the news: http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/07/29/167253/global-warming-undeniable-report-says?sbsrc=thisday
No sig for you! Come back one year!
Thanks for the link. You will notice from reading through the comments that I felt the same then as I do now. However, at some point I heard the allegations about the man not actually being a climate skeptic, with statements going back decades that global warming was definitely real, and it was caused by man. I don't remember where those came from or whether they were vetted or not. That said, the article makes a lot of sense, and strikes me as being very even handed and neutral, which makes me tend to trust it on a subconscious level.
Further, since the study only claims that the highest correlation they have found has been between warming and CO2, it is not exactly conclusive, though it does narrow the probability space, and lowers the likelihood of a lot of arguments used by skeptics and "deniers", an effect that is independent of his intentions.
Well, that's well and good, but are the other planets warming or not? This is an important empirical question. We can speculate as to the cause or lack thereof AFTER determining if the initial assertion is true.
Beautifully put. In a bitterly beautiful way
I didn't say "subsidize them", I said "don't tax them". The two are separate issues, and balancing subsidies with taxes is a TERRIBLE idea that does nothing but waste time and capital.
I do agree that farm subsidies should be taken off the books immediately.
I presume you have never been to Galveston. The entire island was raised, including the buildings that survived, and is even with the seawall where the two connect, sloping slightly back towards the bay, I think.
I was not commenting on it's "impregnability", I was talking about the engineering of the project, which was much more difficult than would be the case for most of the East Coast, who only needs an extra foot or so to remain at their current elevation for the next hundred-odd years.
Yes, the bulk of shipping traffic did leave, but only because everyone was dead and much of the city destroyed. Everyone doesn't die from global warming or a few cm/year of sea level rise.
But even under those circumstances, they were able to raise the island by that much. The cities on the East Coast can't manage a foot? With modern technology and a mostly not-dead population?
Well, those own words are a lie.
I'm not a coward by any name.
Google "total solar irradiance". We've had direct satellite measurements of solar flux since 1978.
Imagine the climate is a glass of water, and the water level is temperature.
I was going to briefly post somewhere under this story to mention that measured temperature changes were accidentally doubled
But then I saw your post and realized that real science is totally lost upon the race of fear-inducing mouth breathers that are the core that remains of the AGW Warmists. I'll read no more Warming Cult stuff on Slashdot, you all are beyond hope.
I mean, can you even dress yourself? "Climate is like a glass of water, we are adding more water"....
HOLY CRAP SLASHDOT is 4CHAN.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
How are you going to sequester the C02 coming out of your tailpipe
Electric cars displace emissions to the power plant.
and going up your furnace flue?
Heat pump (air conditioner run in reverse) and/or geothermal heating, at least for those months when outdoor temperatures aren't literally freezing.
One of the distinguishing features of self-styled "skeptics" of climate science is that their skepticism is amazingly one sided; they seem to become utterly credulous regarding any argument, no matter how blatantly lame, that seems to cast doubt on the reality of global warming. The "It's warming on Mars!" claim (accepted by many "skeptics" as unquestioned truth) is an excellent example. Of course, a genuine skeptic would immediately think, "Wait a minute. There can't be a lot of thermometers on Mars, and they can't have been there very long. I wonder how you measure a multi-decadal temperature trend on Mars? Just how good is the evidence for a warming trend on Mars, anyway?" Not very good, as it turns out.
Similarly, any genuine skeptic, hearing the claim that warming is due to the sun being a "mildly variable star" would immediately think, "Wait a minute. Thus sun is clearly visible up there in the sky. It can't be that hard to measure solar radiance. Is it really plausible that scientists haven't thought to check that?" They have. It's not the sun.
Seriously, where was this guy 20 years ago? The basic idea of global warming is not that hard to understand, and we've had decades to work it all out, now. Frankly, this guy's rejection of the "large, complex global climate models, the huge computer programs" in favor of shape fitting (one of my former profs joked that he could fit a curve to the New York skyline with only 3 free variables) has all the hallmarks of a student laboriously working out for himself the implications of the reading he chose not to do; it works, and maybe he himself has a better appreciation of some of the finer points of the gross theory, but otherwise it was nothing but a waste of time and money. I am frankly convinced that it is too late to stop the worst consequences and that we need to start preparing to deal with the it. Personally, I won't miss Florida... As for what we could have done, my not-so-humble opinion is that subsidizing energy lead to profligate use and that people would drive smaller cars less often if gas cost $15/gal.
Why stop there? Maybe the whole galaxy is heating up. Demand the exoplanet termperatures.
They are monetizing it thrum carbon credits. The carbon credits industry is going to be huge.,
Calling the scientific consensus "truth" is begging the question. The scientific method is akin to credit for work shown rather than credit for correct answers (i.e. faith), so the honest argument is already over when "truth" starts getting thrown around. But based on the rest of your post, I suppose I'm preaching to the choir.
You may be correct about the whole "global weirding" thing ... but where's the evidence that us spending billions on "drastically reducing our consumption of carbon" would provide benefits in a reasonable time-frame??
That's the "sticking point" I see that's not adequately studied or addressed. It's too easy to spread fear around, and motivate people to "Start acting now!" (which usually equates to convincing government to fork over big subsidies to specific industries who claim to sell some of the solutions).
Let's not forget, for example, that this is GLOBAL warming we're talking about (even if it's popular now to call it "climate change" instead). It's not USA warming. With nations like China having far larger populations than the U.S. does, I fail to see how even a drastic reduction on the part of the U.S. would necessarily turn the problem around before it can cause the negative impact people are trying to prevent? You'd have to get the entire world on-board with these drastic changes, and I don't imagine some of the biggest contributors will show much interest.
On top of that, it seems to me like cleaner alternative forms of energy are going to come about as a natural progression of things, regardless of trying to "force" them to come about with legislation. We're fairly certain we're not going to see the price of oil dropping significantly in the future. Long before we actually use it all up, we'll hit the point where extracting it is simply a costly enough process that other alternatives start making more economic sense. Many places already want to move away from burning coal, simply because it creates pollution in the vicinity of where it's burnt (AND because cleaner burning natural gas is currently cheaper and more plentiful). This would hold true even if the climate change theory never even existed.
I'm not one of the "deniers", but I *do* know from history that government often rushes to provide solutions without realizing all of the ramifications of implementing those new changes and laws. I'd say that in most cases, it turns out we were better off without the artificial interference. (Remember the "oxygenated gasoline" mandate not that long ago, that demanded people use the alternate mix of fuel because it didn't cause as much air pollution? Not long after it was put into law, they discovered the oxygenated mix had an increased tendency to leech into ground-water and cause pollution that way, AND it gave cars less miles-per-gallon than the traditional mixture, meaning people burnt more of it. So essentially, we were better off not mandating the change at all.)
I strongly believe our plant is pretty capable of balancing things out in the long run. We only have so many natural resources of a given type to utilize, and the basics laws of physics make certain guarantees too (such as us being unable to create or destroy matter ... the finite amount we have is simply converted from one substance to another). I think I'd rather trust that than making drastic lifestyle changes that could horribly impact the quality of our lives. Scientists just decided in the last decade or less that humans created this scenario over 200-some years that we THINK we can MAYBE reverse in short order by giving up our primary forms of energy. THAT sounds less that convincing.
People who "switched to SUVs" almost always did so because they found a larger vehicle useful, and the trend was to move away from such options as full-size conversion vans or full-size station wagons.
It's ridiculous to pretend that before the SUV, everyone only drove small, economic vehicles.
What's actually happening now is we're seeing the fuel economy improve on such vehicles, since high sales volume leads to justification to invest more R&D in improving them. My Jeep Patriot 4x4 with an automatic (technically CVT) transmission got an average of 26-27MPG. That's really not too horrible for a box-shaped 4 wheel drive SUV.
The fact that modern economy cars give more leg room or more comfortable back seats than in the past isn't that relevant. What about pet owners, for example? A lot of SUV drivers I know have 1 or 2 large dogs they need to transport around regularly, and they want that enclosed space in the back of an SUV, vs. dogs laying across back seats intended for humans.
It is more than evidence, but "truth" was ill advised as a choice of word. "Search for truth" would've been better.
From the point of view of science, the goal is to establish theories, and this is done through trying (and failing) to find evidence to disprove them. To me theories are truth -- but truth until they get superseded. People frequently say "but science has been wrong so many times in the past", but this is not true: each time theories were demoted to "models" (sometimes still useful, like Newton's gravitation, sometimes not, like the epicycles describing the movement of planets).
The Earth is flat: if you map a walk taking into account the curvature of the planet, you are a crazy person! The Earth is round: if you consider it flat when piloting an intercontinental flight, you are a crazy person! The Earth is a weird-shaped blob: if you consider it to be a perfect sphere when programming your GPS satellite, you are a crazy person!
Evidence only has meaning when illuminated by a theory, otherwise, it is noise. So "search for truth" it is :)
we have a Ford Focus hatchback - easily seats 5 with a fair amount of cargo space, maybe 6 if the people in the back seat are small. Gas mileage is something in the mid-20s.
Also, you could fold down one or two of the back seats for a lot more cargo space, especially if you need the extra cargo space only occasionally.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Watts squirming?
That ain't half of it. The tag wattsupwiththat.com/tag/berkeley-earth-surface-temperature/ should point to BEST but currently directs to Watts' OWN new paper.
The guy just went over 9000.
...doesn't exist. The Kochs donate to a lot of things beneficial to society...actually more than they donate to politicians. I can boldly say this, because, yes...I worked for a Koch funded organization. Hardly anything "conspiratorial" about it. I don't agree with some of their political donations, (though their political views are actually quite different that the GOP candidates they donate to; since they are very Libertarian, pro-gay marriage, legalization of drugs, etc.) but they do a lot of good things...that you will NEVER hear in the press. I'll even say this without being anonymous, because why should I? They've done a lot more good than they've done bad. Soros probably has too.
Some of us are working on that.
The investment banks were under a lot more water. Should have left them there.
Just retreat into your own little world making up new words to talk to your fellow reality refugees, words like warmists.
Your religion of greed and denial and suppressed guilt is so strong it has overthrown your reason, and you mumble nonsense in your fever.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Dude, seriously, don't post links from the "wattsupwiththat" site. Its almost as bad as posting links from creation science ministries or a homeopathy site.
Bad cranky un-science from a noted pseudoscience peddler.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
They could build most devices to last a solid decade now, yet the majority of our items are designed for the dump, why?
Because most people shop based on price and will take the $80 food processor over the $130 food processor? Even if the latter lasts many more years?
They produce what people will want to buy. As long as people are willing to buy cheap crap, they will produce cheap crap.
Our descendants for TENS OF THOUSANDS of generations may curse their selfish, short-sighted ancestors of the 21st century.
And Americans in particular.
This imply the assumption the human race survives GW.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
yeah, i have been to galveston, and like i said earlier, it's only the seawall that is raised. you may get the impression that it is the whole island, since the wall is at places 50-100 feet wide...but it is a very small part of the island that is raised.
I could feel a shift in the weather patterns in my bones from mid 70s into the 80s. Things changed, the Winters had changed, and they haven't been the same since. I used to talk about this back then, and people thought it was paranoid bullshit. If you paid attention to environmental issues, it wasn't surprising.
I've been giving this all some thought over the decades as we shift into twilight, and here are my thoughts on it all. Hydrocarbons, we are goofy when it comes to burning them for fuel. Our footprint is too big, and we don't have enough deep green foliage to do deep photosynthesis. We need to reside under the canopy of deep green if we can. If not, we build under what foliage we can find. Our thermal/heat sink footprint is too high. It's our structures and a lot of it is concrete.
We set by and watched Brazil trash the Amazon rain forest. We have patches of trash in our ocean the size of Texas. Forests of smoke stacks puke God only knows what into the sky. We burn the fuck out of hydrocarbons in about everything. Start adding it all up and it's insanity.
Too big to fail. Does that work with ecosystems?
Take the Red Pill.
Oh lemme see....now.
The global banking system has been looted, and is in collapse and guess what? A bunch of bankers decide they need a carbon credits trading system to tax all living things on the planet and just can't figure out how to do it?
Oh I know, lets just make a study up and tell everyone no no, Man made climate change is real and everyone has to pay us a carbon tax so that we can save the planet. You know....only BANKERS can save the planet.
What a BUNCH OF CRAP.
-Hackus
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
It depends on the quality of that beef. If you have really good-quality beef, that's hard to beat. But poor-quality? That's not worth eating. Give me any of the others any day.
There are lots of corporations that might be very happy with the massive infrastructure improvements needed to move to a more energy efficient economy. The coal industry is going to be against it, but even the oil industry getting excited about the potential of natural gas.
Any time there is change you can predict, corporations want in. Actually, most investors will want in. Everyone wants to be an early investor in something that will pay off.
The debate consists entirely on one side bringing up irrelevant and minor points and demanding that they be refuted in detail. This gives them time to come up with the next batch of irrelevant details
Which is pretty much the principle that pseudo-scientists, scammers, religious and other people are following as well.
The thing is that the human mind does not work rationally or scientifically, but it does defend what it has decided upon as truth - sometimes to the death.
The real issue here is neither meteorological nor political, it is psychological. And I claim that if we find a cure to religion, we've also found our solution to climate-change denial and Bushism.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Except that now the $130 food processor does NOT "last a few more years" it just has a better brand name and/or a few more features but dies just as quickly. Hell between the crap soldier and the making every damned thing out of plastic that $1000 laptop doesn't last a damned bit longer than the $450 as the fans are just as crappy, the heatsinks just as thin, again they complete on brand or feature NOT on durability.
You see it as "people buy on price therefor crap" but frankly I see just the opposite "everything crap therefor buy on price" because everyone I know that bought the more expensive TV, laptop, stereo, cell phone, etc? Frankly it didn't last a damned bit longer than the cheap crap sitting next to it, so why pay more?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
You need to watch more news.
http://money.cnn.com/2012/07/25/investing/corn-food-prices/index.htm
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Hehe... Here's a couple of great quotes:
"Don't pray in my school, and I won't think in your church"
-- Unknown --
"'Faith' means not wanting to know what is true."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche --
"Science gave us planes, religion gave us 9/11."
-- Daniel Schultz --
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
not unless we manage to cause a runaway greenhouse effect like Venus
Even then, life will go on. It may not be very complex life (then again, who knows?), but something will survive.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
First, neither the National Review nor Mother Jones seem to think TARP has actually been paid back.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/242731/did-tarp-money-really-get-paid-back-kevin-d-williamson
http://www.motherjones.com/bailout/2009/06/big-bank-bamboozle
Second, TARP itself was only a part of the bailout, estimates on total money given to the banks by the Federal Reserve run as high as $29 trillion.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/45674390/The_Size_of_the_Bank_Bailout_29_Trillion
So, yes, it does help to "read and understand the news instead of merely believing what you wish were true". You should try it sometime.
The cities on the East Coast can't manage a foot? With modern technology and a mostly not-dead population?
Why are you referring to just the east coast? Many of the Gulf Coast states would have flooding or be under water including Florida, Texas and Louisiana. What about west coast cities? Sorry, you can't compare a tiny island from 112 years ago to abrupt rises in sea-level and the impact that would have on every coastal city today. Also, I'm assuming a larger rise than a foot.
Exactly!
Nobody has explained the historical climate changes and apart from the relatively limited effects of the occasional meteor impact and exploding super-volcanoes, all changes must be the result of variations in solar input into the system. Remember, the atmosphere's ability to retain heat comes to absolutely nothing if the input from the Sun goes away.
So any significant changes in the solar input will affect the global climate, but for obvious reasons we don't know what changes caused what in the past, so we cannot say that one or more of these are in effect now. Thus, it is impossible to say conclusively what caused any change we might see today. Note, that it is equally impossible to say if we see any change today beyond the natural variations.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
That's why numbers are reported as C02e, not C02.
See, for example, http://www.mckinsey.com/client_service/sustainability/latest_thinking/costcurves, where the reports talk about GHG emissions in terms of GtC02e.
Why would this work differently from any other field of scientific endeavour? Say, virology, or fluid dynamics, or pharmacology, etc? In every field, people who've studied it forever are going to be the first port-of-call vs people who've studied some other branch of science.
No true scientist can be a "converted skeptic", i.e., a "believer".
Except that the public opinion IS changing.
http://www.people-press.org/2011/11/03/the-generation-gap-and-the-2012-election-3/11-3-11-101/
http://www.people-press.org/2011/11/03/the-generation-gap-and-the-2012-election-3/11-3-11-104/
http://www.people-press.org/2011/11/03/the-generation-gap-and-the-2012-election-3/11-3-11-105/
Also, the price of solar power is falling fast, and wind price is going down too. It is predicted that half the world will reach residential solar grid parity as early as *2015*; wind will reach grid parity by 2025. And there are even other options such as next-generation nuclear.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity
So even though AGW is probably real, rest assured that free market is moving in the right direction. Also, public opinion is becoming ever more willing to have the government interfere and accelerate the process.
See http://www.people-press.org/2011/11/03/the-generation-gap-and-the-2012-election-3/11-3-11-102/
If you are serious, I'd suggest starting with Skeptical Science. They don't allow abusive comments either for or against AGW and there's a ton of information there. Start with the Big Picture link and they'll lay out a very convincing science based case for AGW.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Of course we are causing global warming, and so what? It is the natural result of nature's experiment with high intelligence. And nature is finding out that high intelligence is pathological in a species and always results in its self destruction. Peabrained dinosaurs lived for hundreds of millions of years because they conformed to their environment and were killed by it when it wanted them dead. Not so humans. We alter the environment to suit our own survival and increase. We exploit its resources to that end. We spend our lives creating order out of chaos and beltching entropy out the tailpipe. Our behavior is natural, unavoidable, and inevitably fatal. Shrug.
E Proelio Veritas.
Global warming by itself might not end life on this planet. But human beings using conventional and/or/eventually nuclear weapons to persuade other human beings to surrender their arable land and/or water...that's a different - but consequential - extinction event altogether.
It would be difficult to assert that humans would not make war for survival given that they have demonstrated a willingness to make war for oil - oil that is more of an enabler of human leisure activities, in reality, than a survival prerequisite like food and water.
(Although - to continue the emphasis on reality - oil wars are more about enabling or continuing the harvesting of the effectively imaginary wealth that is generated by the trade in oil.)
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Have you tried getting them to stop inhaling first? Unless some of the AGW skeptics on here want to argue on the cause-and-effect relationship between inhaling and exhaling, I'm pretty sure you have to stop one to get the other to stop.
NOAA overstates warming: study
What was once true, is no longer so
There could be a good reason why Charles Koch's foundation might give money to support the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) study.
But let us separate that from 1) Muller's use of the temperature data, and 2) Muller's claim that he's a "recently converted skeptic", which is a flat-out lie as he has always been a warmist.
Even other warmists are ridiculing Muller's article, including scientists who used to co-author papers with him.
That's the real problem with deniers- they're essentially throwing in their lot with likes of the Young Earth believers and evolution deniers. For all these groups the sheer number and the basic nature of things that would have to be fundamentally misunderstood and actually different from what they are, yet somehow all conspire to give the same results as if the scientists were correct is impossible.
For Young Earthers, you can't deny carbon dating, for instance, because the follow on consequences of it being wrong in completely different fields would imply even MORE basic things were wrong and in need of a new set of explanations which coincidentally give us the same results. The fan out from carbon dating being an error essentially leaves only magic as a possible explanation for all of science.
So also with human caused global warming. The burden of having to account for the observed events and findings as the pieces start to lock together into a coherent whole, the odds that you'll be able to do that and still be doing what we call science are effectively nil.
Even Einstein was wrong about quantum mechanics and God playing dice. At some point, the mountain of evidence is not just too high, but too casually interlinked to supporting lines of evidence and in fact to facts which are not even related to the field in question that any future explanation is only an elaboration of the theory, not a refutation of the theory.
Blaming America for this is strange. Other countries have contributed a lot more (overall and per GDP) CO2.
On the other hand, if you compare today's $200 full-page scanner with the $3000 scanner of the late 1990s -- the latter was built like a tank, considerably more so than even the $3000 scanner of today.
Complaining about how things that used to be built to last are being built to be cheap today doesn't mean that expensive things today are built with the durability of expensive things of yesteryear.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You're confusing the funders with the people doing the research.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
No, I'm responding to a claim that the funders would create bias in the researchers but pointing out the funders are diverse. If you don't believe funders have an influence on the results of research your issue is with the GP.
If I find a body in the middle of the road, with many broken bones, severe internal bleeding, and skid marks nearby, I better throw up my hands and declare it's impossible to guess how the person died as I can't know until I've proven how every person ever died...
One can never honestly claim to have 100% certainty, but if I have a very good explanation for what I'm seeing, and I can't find anything else that fits, I can reasonably assume I am on the right track until someone can put together a stronger theory.
The thing with AGW is, increased CO2 will cause the earth to heat up (we know this from chemestry and thermodynamics, no computer models needed). So in order to explain away AGW, you not only have to come up with something that explains the warming better than the CO2 increase we are seeing, but also explain what is counteracting the warming from the CO2 (so you somehow have something causing cooling in one way but warming in another). Going back to the analogy, this is like you have both the body and the car, and can see how the injuries line up very well with how the car would have hit the person.
My webcomic
I wish I could be treated by them, but I want properly evaluated evidence that their claims are true. Without regulation, who know what that treatment could do to what's left of my knees?
Thanks for agreeing with me, but the poster I was responding to say the reason things WERE CRAP was because people only buy the cheapest crap and therefor only crap gets made. You point is exactly what i was talking about, that $3000 scanner today is just as flimsy, made with crappy thin boards and lousy parts, no different than the $200 scanner. Today they instead focus on adding more features or a better branding but NOT on quality.
I know plenty of people that will buy the more expensive unit, be it laptops or TVs or office gear or whatever, in the belief that like the old days the more expensive units will last longer, only to see first hand as they end up with the same results I told them they'd get. They get a little more speed, or more features, or a fancier label but they don't get a single day longer life out of those units they paid out the ass for.
Frankly for most electronics it doesn't matter how much you pay, its all "designed for the dump" cheapo Chinese crap.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I'm not clear on the implications of that. Please explain, thanks.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Muller's claim that he's a "recently converted skeptic", which is a flat-out lie as he has always been a warmist.
Prove it please. This article from 2004: Global Warming Bombshell shows his earlier skeptic bonifides. True, even in this article he is concerned that global warming may be real, but he is skeptical of the research and was repeatedly so (see Quotes by Richard Muller. Remember that he did get support from the Koch Brothers who are not ones who would knowingly fund a "warmist". The main difference between him and most other skeptics was that he did not reject AGW out of hand and had a degree of open mindedness and honestly that lead him to do primary independent research which lead him to change his mind, thus proving that honest global warming skeptic doesn't always have to be a oxymoron.
Our descendants for TENS OF THOUSANDS of generations may curse their selfish, short-sighted ancestors of the 21st century. And Americans in particular.
Then fuck them. We are to squander our opportunities now (Which I might had has the potential to improve those lives far beyond mere biodiversity) because of TENS OF THOUSANDS of incompetent generations? If they want biodiversity, then they can make it.
As I see it, if we curb our civilization we can make one world with a huge diversity of life. If we don't hold back, we potentially can make millions of such worlds.
The warming that's occurred in the last 250 years is there whether you start your graph then or 65 million years ago.
Heh. Killed for discovering irrational numbers. Imagine that obituary...
But the beans thing does have some science - its due to a condition called 'favism' (G6PD deficiency in modern parlance), where eating fava beans can cause haemolytic anaemia, which can have some significant negative consequences. The condition does protect against malaria somewhat, so it has an interesting population distribution, being more common in regions where malaria has been endemic for a long time.
Since Mars has 15 times as much CO2 in it's atmosphere, it's reasonable to assume that even with half the insolation, its temperatures would be more Earth-like, if CO2 were the main driver of planetary heat retention; yet that's not the case.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Except that now the $130 food processor does NOT "last a few more years" it just has a better brand name and/or a few more features but dies just as quickly. Hell between the crap soldier and the making every damned thing out of plastic that $1000 laptop doesn't last a damned bit longer than the $450 as the fans are just as crappy, the heatsinks just as thin, again they complete on brand or feature NOT on durability.
Yup. This. Sure, sometimes the pricier thing is better quality. But plenty of times it's just not. It's the same cheap shit with a fancier faceplate and c ouple more useless LEDs. there's just hardly any way for a consumer to know what's quality anymore. The only way is online reviews which have their own set of problems like rampant shilling.
You see it as "people buy on price therefor crap" but frankly I see just the opposite "everything crap therefor buy on price" because everyone I know that bought the more expensive TV, laptop, stereo, cell phone, etc? Frankly it didn't last a damned bit longer than the cheap crap sitting next to it, so why pay more?
Unfortunately, this is the rational response. Since you really have no way of knowing which higher-priced stuff is actually better quality, it's rational to assume it's all cheap crap and save money by always buying the chepest thing and assuming it will break.
Digging further into the details of Martian climate, I see we may be both oversimplifying it.
The very high percentage of CO2 notwithstanding, Mars thermal inertia is very low, in its very thin atmosphere, its soil and lack of liquid water.
I imagine its eccentric orbit doesn't help.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Other planets in the solar system warming is irrelevant? You and I disagree on the definition of that particular word, apparently.
Sorry, guy, you are totally wrong on this: http://www.gthcenter.org/exhibits/graderaising/index.html
You are assuming a situation that seems unlikely. Give me numbers that say that sea levels rise by more than that, and in what kind of time period. I haven't seen a precedent in human history, and before that, only when the ice dams in North America gave did we see sudden large changes in sea level.
Also, note that pretty much everyone can raise their grade, if they know that a deluge is coming. Those that can't will move vital operations to higher ground, and we get more marshland, which prevents further flooding.
shadowstats.com
That inflation.
I always watch the news. I developed that habit when I was the current events champion in my high school years ago. You need to apply modifiers to your belief system in regards to propaganda organizations. American media, including CNN, has gotten so bad that I automatically discount all of their analysis, and only pay attention to the factual accounts which they report (ie "there is a civil war in Syria"--they are utterly complicit in pushing the US government's desired public view on that conflict, same with Libya, same with Iraq, same with Afghanistan, same with a half dozen other "low level" conflicts).
So? They did it self funded. Any other city could do that now, if they really wanted to. They have both more money and more advanced technology today.
OK. Factual statement: "There is an unusual drought which is decimating this year's crops."
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Nonsense. High food prices help the very poor because the poorest people in the world are primary producers.
Yes, that is correct. Think back to the days of the Soviet Union. There was always some drought, or flood, or some "natural" disaster to which they assigned the blame for their inability to keep food available to their people.
If we would allow new technology to come into being/use in the nuclear space, we could use power from the resulting LFTRs to desalinate seawater or water from brackish aquifers and drought wouldn't matter one whit.
Much simpler than Earth, we're still debating whether clouds are a positive, negative or both feedback; but the science is settled.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
I don't think I'm twisting logic at all here....
First of all, most of the researchers studying climate, I'd say, are primarily motivated to report all of the details they come up with of negative implications of the situation (from doing extensive computer modeling, making charts with predictions based on previously gathered data put in a sequence, etc.). Understandable, but that can be a "can't see the forest for the trees" situation. Does anyone know for CERTAIN what the eventual outcome will be? No... but throughout history, scientists have been making predictive models and been largely incorrect.
For example, back in WWII, the military consulted with scientists when developing the atomic bomb, and were warned that detonating a nuclear bomb in the air could cause the upper layers of the atmosphere to catch on fire and literally burn away, pretty much ending life as we know it. The military obviously decided to ignore that advice and continued testing their nuclear weapons anyway -- and it turns out that no, those scientists predicted incorrectly. On a more mundane, daily basis, I get weather forecasts that are almost invariably wrong. Expect rain on Thursday? Nope... it's bright and sunny all day! Highs in the low 90's? Nope, 104! Despite all the research going into weather prediction, I can give a guess that's as good as anything they come up with for the next day's forecast, and beyond that -- nobody seems to provide anything much better than random guesses.
Where you and I disagree seems pretty simple. You feel it's got to be worthwhile to "do something" vs. "sitting back and doing nothing". I, on the other hand, feel that most of us think a little bit too highly of ourselves and our ability to "save the planet" or "save us from ourselves" in various situations. I'm not denying the fact that our collective choices for generating energy appear to be resulting in some climate changes. But I'm questioning how rational it is to believe that when we can't even come up with an accurate weather forecast a WEEK out from a given day, we somehow have the ability to reverse these temperature increases in time to prevent the proposed catastrophes we predicted MIGHT happen otherwise.
Trying to do something would be a simple "no brainer" if the stakes weren't so high. The proposed solutions involve HUGE expenditures, an assumption that the rest of the civilized world will agree to implement similar plans at correspondingly HUGE expenditures, and in some cases (such as dumping chemicals in the oceans to encourage more algae growth?), questionable side-effects that aren't being taken into account. (What would such a change do to the aquatic life, for example?) A demand to a near immediate halt to energy production done with oil and coal puts many people out of work, causes costs to skyrocket to build alternatives in a short time-frame, and could basically destabilize an entire economy. Would it even work though? Probably not if other countries just say, "Cool! Cheaper oil and coal for us to use now that the USA doesn't want it anymore!")
Pino, how about taking part in the argument instead of sniping at people you disagree with? Yes, it's more work, but your sourceless counterclaims and nitpicks don't change anybody's opinion, so why bother?
It's not that simple. The African continent has more than enough arable land to feed its population. The problem is that their traditional small-scale farming methods economically cannot compete with imported food from emerging nations with more efficient farming methods, and food from developed nations that is, in addition, heavily subsidized (directly as well as indirectly by keeping oil prices artificially low). So starting from the 1960s, Africa's farming output has been lagging behind its population growth, and yes, if international food prices suddenly jerk up, this causes famine in Africa in the short term. However, if international food prices would stay high for a prolonged period of time, market forces dictate that Africa would ramp up its own food production and would probably be better off in the long run.
/. would be gullible enough to swallow that.
It should be added that we, the developed countries, have played a very cynical role in creating the situation as it is now. On the one hand, we have been pushing aggressively for these African countries to open their markets and decrease government interference such as subsidies, but on the other hand, we're not playing the game by our own rules, taxing and bureaucratically encumbering food imports, and heavily subsidizing our own food production, thereby undercutting African farmers' prices and driving them out of business. If we would play it fair, we would lose, becoming hopelessly dependent on foreign food and creating a runaway trade deficit against which the current situation pales. We have to either continue subsidizing or close our markets. The utopian unencumbered (and unsubsidized) international trade we have so long been advocating is simply not in our best interests. In that respect, rising international shipping costs as a consequence of rising fuel prices might actually help us as well as those African farmers. Not to mention that it will economically favor less fuel-intensive farming methods...
Either way, don't give me the utter BS that we're keeping our fuel prices low out of altruism with those poor African countries; I find it hard to believe that anyone here on
Recommended reading: http://www.redorbit.com/news/international/1823226/what_is_crippling_food_production_in_africa/ and the original PNAS publication as well as other studies by the same authors.
Thanks for agreeing with me, but the poster I was responding to say the reason things WERE CRAP was because people only buy the cheapest crap and therefor only crap gets made. You point is exactly what i was talking about, that $3000 scanner today is just as flimsy, made with crappy thin boards and lousy parts, no different than the $200 scanner. Today they instead focus on adding more features or a better branding but NOT on quality.
I suppose I disagree entirely with the premise that pricier quality items just don't exist, and that the $80 food processor and the $130 are somehow equivalent.
Sure, price does not automatically mean quality, and every brand will be different. You usually have to do a little bit of research to figure out which one is just marketing and gimmickry, and which one is the higher-quality product.
You seem to be implying that the difference between a cheaper product and a more expensive one is the name and the label, but I think that's way too broad a brush to use.
I have done elsewhere. Look, he's be down-modded troll for pointing out the obvious.
In this case "Troll" means "dumb". Of course Muller is a climate skeptic. He calls himself a climate skeptic. Read his damn op ed piece.
So, how is he a skeptic? The only notable thing he did was question Michael Mann's graph! Well, who the hell hasn't don't that?
Your cherry picking is amazing. Did you miss the part where he used to be a critic of that famous IPCC report? What could be more climate-skeptical than that?
But then he goes and does the scientific thing, and tries to gather data that justifies his climate skepticism. And then he applies scientific logic to the data and discovers he was wrong. And then he does the grownup thing and admits he was wrong.
Of course, that doesn't fit into your paradigm of climate change being a scam. So you retroactively kick him out of the skeptical community. Very Mitt Romney of you.
So your argument would be, CO2 causes the earth to be warmer than it would otherwise, but more CO2 doesn't. Would that be because the atmosphere is already at 100% CO2, or because all IR is currently absorbed by the atmosphere and none escapes? Because there can't be any other reasons why it wouldn't.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Presumably the reason the earth and Mars are both warming is supposed to be that " The sun is a mildly variable star." (Unless that's just something the OP interjects randomly into conversations). In which case, you'd kind of see it in more than 2 planets in this booming community of objects we call a solar system, wouldn't you? (This is where they name Pluto and/or maybe some random moon of Jupiter or Saturn or something) You need more than 50% of the objects in the solar system to be warming to be a statistically significant indicator of some common factor, such as the sun. In particular, the complete absence of any warming on the moon, the cosmic equivalent of the doghouse in our back yard, bathed in the same dosage of sun and very easy to see and measure, would be a screaming indicator that the sun isn't doing any heating on objects in our vicinity without an atmosphere.
Doesn't take a PhD in climatology to figure that out, BTW.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Hah! You're one of those sky-is-falling chicken liberals who probably believes the tiny amount of heat in a match could cause a whole house to catch fire. It's completely impossible! In fact, just the amount of heat a house receives in a day from the sun dwarfs the tiny amount of heat in a match. Liberals just want to restrict your freedom to set your own draperies on fire, and to tear down our economy by attacking the match-making industry, without which we'd still be in the caves unable to create fire.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
His criticism of the report isn't `Climate Skeptical'. He criticised the report. So did lots of "warmists". At no stage did he doubt AGW. That is the point. And STFU about Mitt Romney. I couldn't give a **** about US politics. I'm not even a right-winger. I just care about the destruction of public trust in science that the AGW "scientists" are currently engaged in delivering.
If attacking the evidence for climate change doesn't make you a skeptic, what does?
Well, the thing is, if you read the comments he made from 2003 onwards that I've shown (there are quite a few more), I think even with the mental contortions you are doing it's very hard to describe him as a skeptic.
Less name-calling, more facts. Point me at something he said that casts doubt on his skeptichood.I don';t mean the recent stuff you quoted previously.
So what you're saying is, "apart from the pro-AGW statements he's made in the past, please show me some pro-AGW statements he's made in the past"? Listen, I posted a quote from 2003 and some quotes from 2008. I'm not inclined to do a literature search for you. It's enough for me that his "skeptic" credentials are pretty tenuous. I mean if attacking Mann's hockey stick is skeptical, pretty much everyone except the most die-hard environmentalist is a skeptic!
The statements you quoted were made last week.
So, as this is dated 2003 (that's TWO THOUSAND AND THREE), it's highly unlikely it's a quote from last week, unless amongst his other talents is time travel.
OK, you're right. This article proves that he always had an open mind. That definitively disqualifies him as a skeptic.;
I think questioning Michael Mann's work doesn't qualify you as a skeptic first and foremost, it simply means you're not a complete cretin.