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Study Rules Out Global Warming Being a Natural Fluctuation With 99% Certainty
An anonymous reader writes "A study out of McGill University sought to examine historical temperature data going back 500 years in order to determine the likelihood that global warming was caused by natural fluctuations in the earth's climate. The study concluded there was less than a 1% chance the warming could be attributed to simple fluctuations. 'The climate reconstructions take into account a variety of gauges found in nature, such as tree rings, ice cores, and lake sediments. And the fluctuation-analysis techniques make it possible to understand the temperature variations over wide ranges of time scales. For the industrial era, Lovejoy's analysis uses carbon-dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels as a proxy for all man-made climate influences – a simplification justified by the tight relationship between global economic activity and the emission of greenhouse gases and particulate pollution, he says. ... His study [also] predicts, with 95% confidence, that a doubling of carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere would cause the climate to warm by between 2.5 and 4.2 degrees Celsius. That range is more precise than – but in line with — the IPCC's prediction that temperatures would rise by 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius if CO2 concentrations double.'"
Splendid. Where have you published this remarkable result?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Not only that, 500 years? Are they thinking the world started 7000 years ago and so 500 years to now represents a significant chunk of time to have merit?
So what do we have to give up to have a zero change in the global temperature
Only one thing: having so many offspring.
The problem isn't that we have an excessive lifestyle. The problem is that there are TOO MANY of us having an excessive lifestyle. Get the population down to a billion or so and we can all have diesels, coal-fired power stations and as much beef as we could ever desire.
It's just that all 7 billion of us can't all do that at once.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
And yet the climate change deniers will CLING to that 1% and continue to stick their ignorant heads in the sand and pretend that we aren't messing up our climate.
I suppose you can't ascertain whether the universe was created 5 seconds ago either. Fortunately the laws of physics, chemistry, thermodynamics, biology, etc. allow science to make Predictions not only about the future outcome of an event, but also about the probability of circumstances which caused observable outcomes.
If you leave your sandwich near me and come back to find a bite taken out of it, would you accept the argument, "You cannot ascertain the intake of past consumption with enough precision to absolutely blame me for eating your sandwich", or would you say I'm full of shit?
You're full of shit.
The confidence levels in the data are 99%, not in the conclusion.
PS - I believe in man driven global warming, I just hate sensationalized headlines.
I don't get it, after reading the comments here, why is there so much resistance accept that man is causing climate change? Just thinking logically, it makes sense. We're taking carbon that's been buried for millions of years, and then burning it, on a huge scale. How can this not affect the climate? I actually hope that the climate skeptics are right.
The poster you are referring to made a legitimate argument. Your strategy was a silly ad hominem.
I don't know what the right answer is, but between your two comments I can easily say who the winner is.
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It's become a political litmus test. Just look at the names attributed to anyone who doesn't agree with you: denier, alarmist.
There's no room for real science.
But who is dismissing what? There has never in the history of the world been climate-stability. The causality of *all* prior changes appears to have been dismissed.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
People who actually work in the field and spend decades of their life in this dedicated study have a vested interest in reaching a positive conclusion. If they found that there was no man-made global warming, they'd be out of jobs.
And yet SETI aren't reporting any alien contacts.
You're full of shit. There is MORE money available for any scientist that publishes papers that say there is no global warming. Oil companies are rich, and there are few qualified scientists willing to take their preferred side of the argument. And the reason they aren't taking this easy money? Because the science to say global warming isn't happening isn't there. It's easy to write blogs or newspaper articles denying it. It's impossible to write proper scientific papers that do so.
A baker will always claim his bread is the best.
And yet no bakers say yeast doesn't make CO2 to make the bread rise.
The poster you are referring to made a legitimate argument.
He's not made any argument at all. He's simply repeated his opinion, contrary to the scientists paper, with nothing to back it up.
It's classic denial, no more.
Hopefully in a journal that is reviewed by skeptics rather than Ideologues.
All scientific journals are reviewed by skeptics.
That's because all scientists are skeptics.
Wacky global warming deniers are not skeptics, they are credulous fools.
Skeptics look at the evidence before making their minds up, and change their minds if new evidence comes to light.
Deniers deny. Disprove one nutty theory and the continue denying with another, often incompatible nutty theory. This sometimes goes around in circles 'till they come back to the first, already disproven, theory.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Isn't this the Bill Nye v. Creation Guy debate?
Bill Nye made the point repeatedly that no, of course we can not observe directly with our biological sensing apparatuses the world of 1000 years ago, but we can create a fairly educated surmise of the reality based on what we observe today, combining bench studies with field observations, etc. Ken Ham's argument, repeatedly, was "We weren't there, so we can't know to any useful degree (degree, get it?) what it was like."
Science may be wrong about the anthropogenic nature of global warming, but science is quite clear and confident in its conclusion. Given Science's track record so far, I'm going to bet on it.
If you can afford a Tesla, I'm not surprised you didn't notice the increase in your bill. Don't forget to thank the rest of us for the tax subsidy on your Tesla.
Anthropogenic warming isn't dangerous to the planet, it's dangerous to us. The timeline of the planet is irrelevant.
Yes, for an analogous meaning of "predict" as applies to the AGW scenario, ie. not predict precise emotions and behaviour at any given instant, but predict general trends with a certain probability distribution. What do you think psychology is all about? They conduct surveys and studies of small a percentage of the population to find correlations and establish general trends about humanity, like what makes people happy, angry, sad, how they respond to trauma, etc.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
We sacrificed other things so we could buy what was for us a swing for the fences dream car. Thank you everyone for the tax subsidy. And you are welcome for our support of the Tesla strategy to get the cost of electric cars low enough so that gas cars don't make sense.
Greed is the root of all evil.
How dare you let facts get in the way of left-wing "science.
There is no such thing as "left wing science", only science.
Your belief that science and politics are somehow the same thing amkes my thing you're probably a loopy wingnut who doen't let facts get in the way of a good political position.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
People have made up their minds unfortunately. Changes in climate can easily be brushed off as natural variation. A few days of locally cold weather is enough to re-enforce a denier's belief that global warming is a farce.
Over time the consequences will become increasingly hard to ignore and people will suffer. As is typical, the poor will suffer the worse. Ironically, many otherwise conservative organizations such as insurance companies will be willing accept global warming as fact because it gives them an excuse to raise their rates in coastal areas.
No, the original statement is a fabrication so the conclusion is a non-sequitur.
The original statement from rubycodez was as follows:
we cannot ascertain the temperatures of past centuries with enough precision to make any such study nor claims
That's not a fabrication. That's just wrong. Calling it a fabrication bestows too much grace on it.
Sadly, the anti-science (and particularly anti-AGW) crowd has no shortage of wrong statements, because unlike scientists, they are not tethered to facts.
We may not have direct records but that's not what the paper presents. Science is not always able to have first-hand accounts, but only indirect data sources, and yet we rely on it for a shocking amount of findings. Will you start dismissing those as well because they don't suit your agenda? Because an agenda it must be, for you to make such unreasonable demands and yet draw unrelated conclusions from them, while trusting other science based on similar methods.
This. Claiming that indirect evidence does not count is a desperate, sophomoric attempt by the anti-science crowd.
Recall the recent debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham on the theory of evolution. One of Ken Ham's favourite strategies was an attempt to make a distiction between "observational" science and "historical" science, with the latter being invalid in his opinion. How often did we hear him say "you don't know, you weren't there" in response to indirect evidence?
What if, after the debate, Ken Ham had walked to the parking lot of his museum and discovered that the driver-side front fender of his car was damaged, with debris from his front driver-side headlight strewn on the ground? He would no doubt conclude that someone hit his car while he was parked there. But not so fast, Mr. Ham. Let's apply your own standards of evidence: You don't know. You weren't there.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Much warmer in the past, with no anthropogenic CO2 influence.
And? Are you trying to prove that cyanide won't kill you because vacuum does? An increase in temperature can be caused by many things, and neither of them disproves that the others don't. Also, Greenland is just one place. When climate scientists talk about global warming, they're referring mostly to global accumulated heat rather than to local temperatures. Local temperatures in individual places can have the same peaks or valleys of equal magnitude. Or, they can have peaks and valleys of lesser or greater magnitudes. Or, in some places, they can even go in completely different directions.
Certainly no catastrophic AGW, humans do well in warm times. Cold is cop failures, starvation, and freezing to death.
Hey, if you want to go down the "let's make anecdotal evidence out of isolated data points" road, two can play this game. Look how your Greenland data have temperature spikes where Egyptian First and Second Intermediate Periods and European Bronze Age Collapse lie.
Ezekiel 23:20