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Scientists Warn of Rising Oceans As Antarctic Ice Melts
mdsolar (1045926) writes "The collapse of large parts of the ice sheet in West Antarctica appears to have begun and is almost certainly unstoppable, with global warming accelerating the pace of the disintegration, two groups of scientists reported Monday. The finding, which had been feared by some scientists for decades, means that a rise in global sea level of at least 10 feet may now be inevitable. The rise may continue to be relatively slow for at least the next century or so, the scientists said, but sometime after that it will probably speed up so sharply as to become a crisis."
it can be somebody else's problem!
(I stole the baby boomers generation playbook)
Fuck all this Prius hippie shit. I'm buying a Hummer.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Chicken Little because it isn't going to happen in your lifetime?
I don't get it. This is happening.
Just kidding... the Antarctic ice has been melting for decades. More precisely, the mass of the old, thick land ice is decreasing due to rising temperatures, but the surface area of the short-lived, thin sea ice has been increasing, partly due to decreased salinity in the Southern Ocean because the land ice is melting. Overall, the Antarctic has been losing ice at an accelerating rate as temperatures have continued to increase.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
I'm a bit puzzled. If it will truly become a crisis, does it not suggest that the ice was frozen for all time and has never in history been running water?
Wouldn't that mean that eons ago, we had a crisis to solve and managed to create the worlds biggest ice-box in the process... who cares if it made some dino-ice cubes?
The world is constantly changing, for better or worse, and people always seem genuinely surprised when it changes.
Just remember, short term comfort ALWAYS trumps long term viability. We live in a world dominated by the next few fiscal quarters. It's a breeding ground for sociopaths and the mentally deficient dupes who follow them.
Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we shall day is literally the motto for so many people.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Nothing a good meteor impact can't fix. Apparently, we get buzzed all the time by large rocks (reference to some other article recently here.)
When it hits, we'll have of few months of darkness to fix the problem.
Well, let's find out if that's actually true. Here's a math problem: The salinity of the ocean is 3.5%, and the ocean has an average depth of 3700 meters. If enough fresh water is added to the ocean to increase its depth by 3 meters, what is the new salinity of the ocean?
(Answer: 3.5%, i.e. not significantly different from before.)
NYC, the new Venice!
California should build MASSIVE quantities of desalanization plants along the coast. So that we can keep the oceans properly salined. While extract massive amounts of water to turn the entire southwest into a lush green sub-tropic region, and keep sea levels in check. Start now!!!
99.9%+ of the people alive today will not live to see the crisis, or even live long enough to know whether or not the crisis will actually occur.
So what do you want to do about it? We live in the real world, most of us in elective democracies where any politician that purposes a reduction in the standard of living will quickly find himself out of a job. Green energy doesn't scale and nuclear is a bad word, so where do you propose we get the gigajoules needed to both run Western civilization and bring the third world out of poverty?
The climate change crowd never has a good answer for this question. Thankfully we're an adaptable species, arguably the most adaptable ever to live on the blue marble. I think we'll manage just fine.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Two things associated with global warming are a water shortage and rising sea levels.
Seems like if we really wanted to we could use one to help the other.
For instance pumping sea water to death valley and filling it full of water would
create a ton more waterfront property. We have oil pipelines much longer than this.
You could do the same thing by digging a big hole in the sahara desert or any other
desert relatively close to the ocean. Heck, we could even solve the other potential
problem of human overpopulation by creating more farmable land in the process.
There are plenty of solutions to this problem. If this ever really becomes a problem
you would think places like florida, etc.. could easily get together and finance
a "water sequestering" plan that could possibly even make the world a better place.
Reading the wiki on both desalinization via boiling and reverse osmosis indicates the vast majority of the energy in both methods (ether boiling the water under a vacuum or pumping at a high pressure) seem to be independent of how much salt it has to remove; so reducing the salt content by a few percent won't reduce the energy consumption (but will flood most existing plants and require more energy to have them rebuilt).
Pfft. Math. Science. That stuff is for weaklings.
unless Svensgaard vetoes it...
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
... so where do you propose we get the gigajoules needed to both run Western civilization and bring the third world out of poverty?
Nuclear and solar, duh. Throw some geothermal and tidal power in there too and we're good.
Only one report claimed an ice age, and they didn't have anything to back them up. I know you are desperate to avoid accepting responsibility for your actions and the need to clean things up, but insulting everyone else's intelligence with your usual BS is not going to accomplish anything.
Time to start buying real estate in the southwest.
"The rise may continue to be relatively slow for at least the next century or so..."
Oh. Okay. I'll be dead by then, and I didn't have any kids.
You young'uns're screwed! Heeheehee!
If short term comfort was all that mattered to people nobody would ever take out mortgages, so, er, yeah.
This article says is that even if we and all of our works vanished tomorrow, it still wouldn't make a difference. Despite which most if not all developed nations have goals to reach in terms of renewable energy generation, and many of them are reaching or exeeding their goals. In a hundred years I'd be surprised if fossil fuels are in use at all to be honest.
The world is changing. I for one am rather glad of past changes as I'd have some difficulty typing under several kilometers of ice. The problem which will arise due to sea level changes are more due to a global assumption that the state of affairs which exists today is somehow "normal" or "in balance". It's not and it never has been, there is no natural balance, and the sooner we adjust our societies to work with rather than try to withstand enormous generational adjustments, the better.
One thing it's not however is the end of the world, far from it.
I have a better idea: eat them instead!
Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we shall day is literally the motto for so many people.
So....carpe diem cras?
No, you're very confused here. It's correct that the rock beneath the West Antarctic ice sheet is below sea level, but the ice sheet is not floating and sea level will certainly rise if the thing melts.
Think of it this way. If you have an ice cube floating in your drink, it is 90% under water and 10% above water. If such an ice cube melts, the level of your drink doesn't change.
Now imagine that instead of a free-floating, 90%-submerged ice cube, you have an ice cube that is suspended by a string so that it is 50% above water and 50% below water. This ice cube "wants" to settle lower in your drink so that it is 90% below water, and if it is allowed to do so, the level of your drink will rise. So if the ice cube is allowed to melt, the level of the drink will also rise, to exactly the same level it would reach if you cut the string.
The WAIS is like a 50% submerged ice cube that wants to be 90% submerged.
You're probably trolling, but here goes:
Any continent will rise if the mass on top is reduced, because the mantle acts as a liquid on geological time scales (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-glacial_rebound)
However, it's not the loss of mass or height of the antartcic that is causing sea levels to rise, but the movement of water from "long term storage" on top of the antarctic continent into the ocean. What the container does after the contents have been released is immaterial.
(for the arctic ice it is different because it is all floating, so melting it won't do anything to sea levels (it will to salinity and hence ocean currents) - and greenland has a lot of land ice, of course)
This is happening.
No, it's not. It's always GOING to happen *at some point*.
The same way that nuclear fusion is always GOING to be happening at some point.
The same way that the world is always GOING to be ending soon in every cult.
The same way that Jesus is always GOING to be coming someday.
The same way they by the time these predictions come due, everyone is GOING to have long forgotten them and moved on to the next environmental-disaster-thats-going-to-kill-us-all-this-time.
Chicken....Little.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
"Unbelievers" -- the movie, the real thing --> TPB.
NOW.
Marine based ice sheets do not affect sea level.
Whhoooah there. Let's not jump to conclusions here...
The melting of these three glaciers alone is contributing an estimated 0.24 millimetres per year to the rise in the worldwide sea level.
Okay, close enough for all practical purposes. :-)
Indeed. They have all been too moderate.
Glad to assist.
Ice is melting from warm currents in the sea, not global warming. They only said warmer winds from global warming MAY hasten the melting a little.
Global warming itself was only going to raise sea levels about a foot over 100 years... hardly something to get worked up over.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Watch the Insurance Agencies. They'll tell fools like you what
to believe in no time.
While buoyancy works exactly as you state (and I am pretty sure climate scientists understand this too). I do recall from past reading is that scientists are concerned that breakup of the marine sheets leads to accelerated melting of the land sheets.
With intact marine sheets, the land sheets do not flow easily into the ocean (not enough force to displace the marine ice). But if the marine ice is gone, the land ice can flow more freely into the water. In the large, Ice is quite plastic and will flow downhill due to gravity at significant rate.
It's not "waterfront property" that anybody is worried about. It's the fact that a very large number of the world's current cities happen to be located near the water for historical reasons (major trading hubs built around ports for oceangoing ships.) The utter annihilation of those cities is a huge economic problem.
And flooding Death Valley with seawater doesn't create a single acre of arable land. You can't farm jack $hit out of soil contaminated with salt. The shores of the Persian gulf (nor, for that matter the shores of southern CA) don't support much in the way of farms, despite the large body of water next door.
That's the surface area of ice, not the amount of ice, which is measured by volume or mass. If you look at the mass of ice in the Antarctic, you can see it's been melting for decades at an accelerating rate. Funny how the real facts get in the way of a good misinformation campaign.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
West Antarctica appears to have begun and is almost certainly unstoppable,
The "unstoppable" part is gratuitous and meant to create a sense of urgency. The melting is supposed to take place over hundreds of years, so if by some miracle of science we could reduce C02 production by 50% in 30 years, likely the melting process would stop. If only we had a clean source(s) of energy growing exponentially that could replace fossil fuels. I don't know something powered by either nuclear fusion on Earth or fission high above in outer space where it is safe to store a massive fission reactor from which we could collect energy in the form of radiation.
You can't carry it around in a jerrycan, basically.
Do some reading about base load power, then contemplate the fact that the United States consumed 3,866,000,000,000 kilowatt hours (that's 13,917,600,000,000,000,000 joules, if you were wondering) of electricity in 2012. Since nuclear fission is politically explosive, explain how you propose to generate a sizable fraction of that energy (never mind all of it) without relying on carbon based sources. Limit yourself to technologies that are actually here, not distant fantasies like nuclear fusion.
After you do that, you can further depress yourself with the realization that I'm only talking about electricity. The actual energy budget of the United States is far higher when you account for the transportation sector and other non-electrical needs. And we're only talking about the United States here, one country out of ~190, with 4.5% of the global population. The rest of the World aspires to our standard of living, and they're not going to abandon that goal because of a distant and hard to quantify threat.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Not trolling....My logic is that if the continent rises, then the volume of water it displaces would in-effect decrease, thereby countering the effect of the water rise. The real idea i was putting forth was that they could measure the volume displacement countered to see what the offset really is. 15mm/yr rise doesn't sound significant, but if you consider the area affected, 15mm could make a huge difference in offsetting the purported rise in sea level.
Actually, the models have been too conservative. Things are significantly worse than predicted.
But you're clearly not a "facts oriented" kind of person.
Why on Earth would anyone want a 3-cylinder "truck"??!!!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
comments like these.
Well yes, that's how it works. Flamebait gets modded as flamebait. If you find that all the posts like this one are being modded similarly, it just means that the modding isn't some statistical outlier and that the masses have a consensus for what they consider "flamebait".
Which article? The OSS article says the data confirms three factors, the first of which is "Antarctica is warming". That makes sense, if the globe is warming then that will cause Antarctica to warm.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Ah, nothing like quoting an anti-AGW blog as if it were the equivalent of a published article.
Tell me, do you get your biology information from Answers in Genesis as well?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Well im glad that we have nothing to do with this..
I think we'll manage just fine.
Yes, I am truly grateful that the people who built the first skyscraper had such foresight, Even better that they built it 600 feet above sea level.
Maybe, if we pick up on our desalination efforts, we can drain the oceans as fast as they rise. (take caution with that one :-))
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Why do you presume to know more than the scientists that study this? A skeptical mind might suppose that the scientists are considering something that you are failing to see. Perhaps the WAIS acts as a buttress that supports inland ice? Remove the buttress and the inland ice will flow? Just a guess, but probably more accurate than assuming that the experts overlooked something obvious.
Exactly. Employ large scale desalinization plants near the coast of western Africa and just keep pumping that water into the Sahara. Africa would have to be recolonized to make it happen in time though.
From TFA: "The basic problem is that much of the West Antarctic ice sheet sits below sea level in a kind of bowl-shaped depression the earth. As Dr. Mercer outlined in 1978, once the part of the ice sheet sitting on the rim of the bowl melts and the ice retreats into deeper water, it becomes unstable and highly vulnerable to further melting."
So, if the ice is currently sitting in a bowl BELOW sea level, and water uses more volume as ice than as a liquid, when the ice melts, it will fill less of the bowl than it did before. Making a not too farfetched assumption, at some point the ice melt will open a channel from the open sea into the bowl below sea level, which will then fill with sea water. Since water uses more volume as ice than as a liquid, the amount of liquid held in the bowl, should be more than the amount of ice it previously had, before melting.
Seems to me that the net result of this should be lower global sea level...
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
No, Denver is full, stay in California!
the melting has nothing to do with global warming, but from warmer currents about which we can do nothing.
Well, obviously . . . we need to declare a "War on Warm!"
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Ocean levels haven't been constant for the miniscule amount of time humanity has been around, never mind on a geologic scale. For that matter, the climate hasn't been static either, not even for our short amount of time on this rock.
If predictions are true, it's going to suck, it's going to be painful, but we'll survive it. Asking people to forgo the benefits of civilization just isn't going to happen, and even if the killer app of energy is discovered tomorrow (fusion?) we're still going to have to adapt to the changes already under way.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
We live in a western capitalistic world dominated by the next few fiscal quarters. It's a breeding ground for sociopaths and the mentally deficient dupes who follow them.
FTFY
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
I know, right?! The fact that the melting of floating ice would have no effect on sea levels must have completely escaped those silly career scientists AND the editors of the journals who are going to publish their research.
Yeah AC, you've got more expertise than Wagner, Joughin, Alley, and (importantly) Mercer when it comes to this sort of thing...prolly more than all of them combined! Thanks for posting.
And thanks for the perceptive moderator who marked parent Insightful. It's another helluva day for science here on slashdot!
We do expect and demand that the public change their lifestyles quite a bit. First we need less babies. Then we need to make certain that energy demands decrease for each individual. But we have large businesses that are corrupt and pay off politicians in order to deny global warming. Wyoming is the latest example. They don't want global warming taught in the schools. Frankly these issues bite deeper than politics and things could get really nasty. Not only are we going to be harmed by the nay sayers but they are putting our children and grandchildren in harms way. At some point this issue could cause violence to break out within our nation and many nations are likely to go to war as their suffering increases.
Somehow, I imagine you sitting at home chain-smoking cigarettes and complaining about all those "chicken little" idiots who believe smoking causes cancer.
That's a great quote btw. I was going to suggest a similar issue with the so-called sea level rise from melting ice (if the ice is floating and melts then it doesn't raise the level since ice has more spacial volume than water per)...however there is also suggestion (from the global warming/science community) that some of the ice melt from Antarctica is from ice that is over land and not currently floating or below the sea level, which would, all other variables excluded, raise the sea level.
How hard can it be when the summary has but a single link:
"Scientists said the ice sheet was not melting because of warmer air temperatures, but rather because of the relatively warm water"
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
the part where you have to use it for base load. (nuclear withstanding, because apparently that's not 'green enough')
Clearly no one watches Vice.
http://www.hbo.com/vice/episod...
We do expect and demand that the public change their lifestyles quite a bit.
Which won't change a damned thing, because the third world is not going to meekly sit back and accept their current level of development. The United States could literally cease to exist tomorrow and the freed energy wouldn't be enough to bring the billions in the third world out of poverty. You can't even convince Westerners to waste less, but you think you're going to convince those in the third world to meekly accept their current lot in life?
First we need less babies.
Capping family sizes is antithetical to western notions of freedom. That's literally the most personal decision you can make, it's not something that can be imposed from the top down in our societies. A civilization without our reverence for individual liberty tried it and arguably failed, or at the very least created all manner of unintended consequences with deleterious outcomes that still haven't been fully quantified.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
So many are blaming the far right and rich ppl. Yet, I would have to say that it is the far right AND THE FAR LEFT. The left deserves a lot of blame for things. For example, they fight using symbolic gestures, rather than items that will make a difference. Take the case of keystone pipeline. Will it stop CO2 emissions or pollution? Nope. Canada currently transports via train all over north America. Will building the pipeline increase the emissions? Nope (might actually lower it slightly since pipelines are far more efficient than the train). What drives the tar oil is money. The fact is, that Canada will continuing mining it as long as it is economically feasible. And that will continue while oil is about 70/bl.
Instead, the far left should be pushing for a COMPROMISE in which keystone is built, BUT,trade for changes that will lower the demand for oil. Best way is to temporarily subsidize NEW NAT. GAS COMMERCIAL VEHICLES, along with stations for CNG and LNG. In addition, modify the subsidies on electric vehicles. Basically, hybrids should not be included, or should have minimal subsidies.
Then we have the far left screaming about America's emissions, while ignoring the fact that China, India, South Africa, Germany, Japan, other nations are building new coal plants. America accounts for less than 15% of emissions, and ours is dropping (both in % as well as in totals). In addition, America will be shutting down a number of coal plants over the next 3 years, and our emissions will likely be 13% or less.
OTOH, China is building loads of new coal plants and accounts for more than 33% of CO2 emissions. In fact, they open up a new one EACH WEEK. And NONE OF THESE WILL BE CLOSED OVER THE NEXT 50 years. And yet, the far left screams that the west, esp. America, is to blame for all of this.
Yet, if America were to stop ALL CO2 emissions, within 10 years, CHina's new additions would equal what America stopped. Yes, they are INCREASING BY an America's worth of CO2 EACH DECADE. That is just insane.
Then add to this the fact that Europe is increasing their emissions as well. They are no longer dropping esp. since Poland and Germany are growing their coal plants.
There are problems, but the real issue is NOT JUST THE WELL KNOWN FAR RIGHT.
It is national leaders that want to cheat and the far left that will allow them to do so.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Politicians can't sell the solution because people keep obfuscating the fact there's a real problem.
Tell someone they have cancer and need to undergo months of nasty chemo or they're likely going to die and they're gonna do it.
Tell someone it might not be cancer, and even if it is it won't cause much harm, and even if it does cause harm they can delay treatment until it does start causing problems without any real consequence. Well it's going to be real tough to sell that person on chemo right off the bat.
The fixes aren't actually that drastic, they will slow economic growth, but the technology is there, and compared to the consequences of not acting it's not a tough decision.
I stole this Sig
Get a house TODAY you don't need to save up your money! Mortgages let you have immediate comfort now.
The cost of a house forces a long term payment plan but you can STILL have short term thinking. Short term thinking is central to the mortgage crisis we are still recovering from. bad planning / rates .... adjustable rates. That'll solve itself somehow you'll probably make more money long term...
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
I read a reference that said that a 108-mile square of the US Southwest could, if completely covered with solar panels, supply all the US's power needs.
That's barely big enough to show as a dot on a map of the US.
Now, of course, there are certain... realities... we need to face. For instance, we can't pack the panels in without roads and access spaces, and we'd need to store power (how?) for the night time. And so on, etc. But, it is an interesting hypothetical that shows that alternate, 'green', energy is certainly possible. I mean it's not like we'd need more surface area to power the US than the US has, or anything impossible like that.
Once again, everyone uses their own biased sources. You're both wrong. The only ice that matters is the ice that was ON LAND before and is now IN THE OCEAN and bellow the water line. Does melting ice in a glass of water raise the level of water in the glass? No. Put a new ice cube in, does the water level raise equivalent to the volume of ice? No. It raises equivalent to the volume of ice bellow the water line.
What volume of ice was their on the land 100 years ago? No one knows. There's no way to find out. Probably more than there is now. The truth is probably more on the side of people concerned about climate change and less on the side of the people who deny it. That said, things aren't nearly as bad as the alarmists would have you think. This is something we should address, but stupid knee jerk reactions based on made up science are what alienates people and gives the deniers an excuse to stall and do nothing. Lets have real facts, and common sense so we can address a growing problem that will hurt our great grandchildren.
You logic may be faulty. An increase in height of a continental shelf relative to the center of mass of the earth should cause decrease in the depth of the nearby ocean basins, and so a localized decrease in the size of the ocean basin surrounding that continental shelf, which would effectively increase the water displacement of the continent.
Disclaimer: I am not a geologist, so my logic may also have faults.
Do you think that Antarctica is a continent floating on top of water?
That's not what that link says; it says it has been losing mass "since at least 2002". While it is obviously losing mass now, it has most probably not "been melting for decades". We don't have any serious data on that before 2002, when GRACE was launched. Funny how the real facts get in the way of a good misinformation campaign.
0x or or snor perron?!
I have never even seen Antarctica, and I don't recall anyone talking about it twenty years ago. If 97% of geographers say Antarctica exists, I'd just like to point out that I've driven 50 miles in every direction but up and haven't seen no sign at all. And I'm pretty sure that my brother's boss once heard that geographers are telling us about this mythical Antarctica to take money from people like me and give it to themselves.
No continent I've ever seen is going to make me worry about sea-level rise, so keep yer commeenistic plots off of Slashdot.
Come ON! Everyone who watches Fox News KNOWS that this is nothing more than a conspiracy by the guvment to increase regulation and hurt job creators!
What the hell are you talking about? Mass != surface area. It's not a dodge, it's basic understanding.
I thought fracking blasted away a lot of that peak oil crap... Remember that as cost goes up, demand goes down. And, other technologies to retrieve that energy become more viable. At some point, even things like solar become feasible, so you should like that part.
"Ah, nothing like quoting an anti-AGW blog as if it were the equivalent of a published article"
Ah nothing like quoting Skeptical Science or Real Climate or DeSmogBlog or HughPickensDOTcom, because those are outlets of pure unvarnished truth that no sane man may object to.
In fact the WUWT article points to an article in "The Australian" and quotes the NSIDC.
I assume you get your answers from Genesis because you like things handed down as Holy Writ, probably because its easier than thinking. Climate alarmism is deeply religious and very much creationism without all of the messy stuff about Cain and Abel.
Like "The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is 50 below zero, so how is it melting?"
But that's for people who understand science and critical thinking, something you're not capable of.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
You clearly don't understand that a global warming skeptic can spot problems in five minutes that an actual scientist wouldn't see in years.
Rumour has it that the theory of gravity wasn't discovered by Issac Newton, but an enlightened fisherman. This fisherman, driven by the profit motive to fully understand the forces that caused the tides, was walking by Newton one day and yelled out:
"I beseech thee Dumbass philosopher! Can thou not see that any two bodies in the universe attract each other with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them?! Tis clearly a conspiracy by the clergy and lords to keep the populace in line. Now I give you an apple as a gift, perhaps one day myself or one of my entrepreneurial ancestors will bother explain to one of your intellectual ancestors the limitations of the speed of light when we see you're finally worthy of the knowledge!"
I stole this Sig
Except the ice sheet is not at float eqilibrium.
If the ice was at float equilibrium its melting would then take up less space. But because the ice sheet is stacked so high above sea level the floor of the glacier is grounded there is much more ice there than the float equilibrium point. There is a lot more ice there than the water it displaces. Your argument does not cover that point.
Insightful and disturbing.
If Humanity finds itself severely curtailed by the results of AGW because we collectively refuse to believe anything is wrong, we will get everything we deserve. Time will tell how much we've really contributed to the problem.
Far more upsetting to me is the accompanying loss of diversity in the planet's flora and fauna. A criminal act perhaps significant enough for our hidden alien overlords to step in to straighten things out? A nice fantasy.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
So...Antarctica wasn't at the south pole, and had no ice...THEREFORE...there must not have been ice at the south pole! Small problem with your logic, bub.
The only way that ice can be below sea level is if it's pushed down by something. In this case, the ice below sea level is pushed down by ice on top of it. (Which is why an iceberg is 90% below water and 10% above water.)
> "Since water uses more volume as ice than as a liquid, the amount of liquid held in the bowl, should be more than the amount of ice it previously had, before melting."
I think the mistake that you're making is that you think there are icebergs which are below the surface of the water, but they are less dense than the water. Of course, this can't happen. It's like having a helium-filled balloon that falls to the floor, even though helium is less dense than the surrounding atmosphere.
You have to take into account the fact that 10% is above water to begin with. As it turns out, those two things cancel out - i.e. the volume used up by ice which is below sea-level is exactly the volume of water that the a melted iceberg will use-up (after it's melted). This is the same principle used in ship-building: the weight of water which is displaced by a ship is equal to the weight of a ship. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D... ) Similarly, the weight of water which is displaced by an iceberg is equal to the weight of an iceberg.
You can test this easily enough with a glass of water. Fill the glass with ice. Now, fill the glass to the brim with water. Some ice will stick out above the top of the glass (because ice is slightly lighter than water, so part of it will float above the surface of the water). Wait for it to melt. The water level will remain constant (it won't go down and it won't overflow).
> "Seems to me that the net result of this should be lower global sea level..."
No. That would only be true if you ignore the fact that some of the ice is located above sea-level. When you calculate all of it together, you'll find that ice in the water won't cause a sea-level change when it melts. (And the sea-level change that global warming people worry about is caused by ice melting which is currently located on top of land.)
Why stop with electricity? After all we want to replace all other fuel consumption as well, right? If I'm reading it right, wikipedia says primary energy use (before transmission and generating losses) in the US circa 2012 was 25,484TWh (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States), or 25e15Wh
In most places decent solar panels average something like ~200W/m^2 for 5 hours a day, or 365kWh/year
So that means going purely solar we'd need at least
25e15Wh/yr / 365e3Wh/m/yr = 68.5e9 m^2 of solar panels to provide 100% of all energy
which is only 68,500 km^2
or the equivalent of 23% of the surface of Arizona, to provide for 100% of the US energy usage.
Face it - renewables are more than sufficient to completely supply all the energy we need, all we're lacking is decent energy storage technology.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I read a reference that said that a 108-mile square of the US Southwest could
That's certainly in the right ballpark. The solar constant is about 1300 W/m**2 (at the top of the atmosphere) so call it 8000 W/m**2 at the surface, cut it by half for night-time and multiply by 0.1 for solar panel efficiency and other losses and you get about 40 W/m**2 or 40 MW/km**2. The GP's big numbers come out to about 400,000 GW, so this comes out to 400,000/40 = 10,000 km**2, which is a square just 100 km on a side (a 108 mile square is about 170 kilometres on a side.)
Now mind you, storing that power and distributing that power are non-trivial, and Greenpeace, the Bulletin of the Atomic Liars, and god knows who else would be mounting protests to "Save Our Desert!" if anyone actually dared build anything anywhere, but the raw numbers aren't at all insane given the scale and success of past human engineering projects.
Unfortunately, with the new "Can't Do!" attitude of the modern US it's very unlikely that this will happen.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Storing and transporting that energy are the distant fantasies in your "hypothetical". I'm not sure how that shows that solar providing base load is possible.
Yeah? And every morning I see the weatherman talking...guess what? RECORD rainfall in Western Washington this year. Flooding, snow, tornadoes all through the central US. RECORD drought in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. Yeah, it's all unrelated, right?
Well, we could start with education, and help nuclear not be a bad word. We could start by helping green energy "scale" as best we can, and by doing what we can to help it (i.e. by allowing electricity suppliers to change the price of power on a timescale of minutes and communicate this to consumers, allowing them or their thermostats, etc., to throttle consumption up and down to match the fluctuating supplies of wind and solar).
We could start by seeing just how much of a reduction in the standard of living it would entail if it were done by less disruptive economically sensible means (a carbon tax with the tax rate tuned to create whatever desired reduction you'd like). I imagine it would be less than you'd think.
So your assertion, that decrease in mass means increase in extent, means that eventually, when most of the mass of the ice is melted, the entire world will be covered in ice?
Huh? No one asserted anything remotely similar to that. If you're going to go all reductio ad absurdum on him at least reduce to something relevant.
Furthermore, wouldn't the melting of ice mass (without affecting albedo), prove to be a negative feedback, since the ice melt is an endothermic reaction that mitigates heat from any source, natural or otherwise?
Who was talking about the endothermic nature of the reaction? Maybe that's relevant, maybe not, I don't know the energy levels involved (it's actually better for your argument if it's not).
Your original comment was a claim that directly contradicted the central claim of the article, he showed your claim was false, and now you're talking about something unrelated?
Funny how your dodge doesn't really address the issue :)
Except for the part where he directly addressed the issue and you responded with a complete dodge.
I stole this Sig
The same way that nuclear fusion is always GOING to be happening at some point.
Yes, about 2017 for demonstrable fusion power production and 2027 for full-scale commercial fusion plant operation. Chicken Little indeed.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
Nuclear fission is only politically explosive because people are ignorant. We could perhaps work on fixing that.
or the equivalent of 23% of the surface of Arizona, to provide for 100% of the US energy usage.
You live in a country that can't even build a wind farm or a pipeline without decades of environmental studies and political bickering from all sides.... You think you're going to cover 23% of Arizona in solar panels, completely re-engineer the power distribution grid, and do this quickly enough to make a damned bit of difference if humanity's CO2 emissions really are the tipping point?
I'm sorry, but I'm a realist, and the best course of action for us at this point is to start planning for the changes rather than try to prevent them from happening.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I get my information from climatologists, and not from weathermen with an ax to grind.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Storing power is well understood. There are many ways for grid storage, such as molten metal batteries or if building a moltan salt solar plant all that heat can continue to be used at night when the load is typically a lot lower.
Hell, the battery in my car could easily power numerous houses overnight (85KWh) in my area. The problem is that the government has not made any significant investment into green energy or for that matter any new energy generation methods. Other green methods are geothermal and wind, where there are large parts of the US that could supply a significant amount of power and things like gothermal are great for baseline and there are areas of the US that have very steady wind supplies.
We could be building thorium reactors using that U238 they want to bury. We could be investing a lot more in fusion research. The big complaint comes from what about all those jobs for the coal minors and crap like that.
The stupid politicians so in bed with the fossile fuel industry it isn't funny. They'll believe whatever their contributors want them to believe, voters be damned. Look how much the coal and oil industry contribute to campaigns.
As for needing a reference, it takes typing "108 square mile solar" into google to get multiple references.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
By honest, you mean "does not intrude on my ideology".
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Far more upsetting to me is the accompanying loss of diversity in the planet's flora and fauna.
We're not the first species on Planet Earth to outcompete other species and we won't be the last....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Politicians won't sell a solution because their contributors don't want them to. (i.e. coal, natural gas and petroleum industries). Politicians answer to their campaign contributors, not the voters. There, fixed it for you.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Do you think that Antarctica is a continent not floating on top of a liquid mantle?
Do you think?
Get a house TODAY you don't need to save up your money! Mortgages let you have immediate comfort now.
So does renting, without decades of debt slavery and possible depreciation of the asset if you ever want to sell it on. In fact mortgages reduce your immediate comfort more than renting if the cost of the interest is greater than the rent.
Well, we could start with education, and help nuclear not be a bad word.
That would be an awesome start, but most of the resistance to nuclear power comes from the same people who believe humanity driven climate change is a pressing problem. Nobody else cares, in fact fossil fuels are cheaper, so it's an apparent win as far as most people are concerned.
i.e. by allowing electricity suppliers to change the price of power on a timescale of minutes
This is a stupid idea. Never mind the disruption to people's household finances by asking them to absorb that much pricing uncertainty.... electricity is a commodity and there will always be futures contracts that allow people to lock in a price. Which is as it should be. More to the point, you think people in the United States are going to accept a situation where regular black/brownouts become the norm, after generations of largely having electricity around the clock? I know such occurrences are "normal" in a lot of countries, but not here.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
We're not the first species on Planet Earth to outcompete other species and we won't be the last....
I quite agree, however with all the potential for floods, droughts, disease, earthquakes, volcanoes and the ever-present Damocles sword of a meteor strike that comes with life on Earth I'd really rather we weren't responsible for another disaster resulting in the extinction of those lifeforms that had survived until now.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
So, we're supposed to believe that in a warming world, ice sheets melt, but then sea ice will extend to cover the entire planet? :)
Funny how warming produces more ice and less ice at the same time :)
No, I ask for a necessary and falsifiable hypothesis statement before accepting something as science - neither Genesis nor CAGW manage to provide one, so I don't reflexively believe them :)
I keep telling deniers: If you really believe it's BS, then you can currently buy south-eastern* beachfront property at a discount, because half the buyers believe it doomed. If climate change turns out to be BS in a decade or two, you'll be very wealthy. That's gets some of them researching it more because money is involved.
* S.E. US beaches are deemed especially vulnerable due to the patterns of sea currents.
Table-ized A.I.
Of course mass != surface area - but by what miracle do you assert that surface temperature warming will affect only *mass* but not *surface area*?
If the assertion is that surface area increases as mass decreases, the logical extension is that as mass further decreases, the entire planet will cover in surface ice.
It simply doesn't follow.
The assertion that temperature must *not* be stable in order for ice to melt is refutable with the simplest countertop experiment - put ice in water. Let temperature stabilize. Watch the ice continue to melt without changing water temperature. Q.E.D.
FTFA: "The collapse of large parts of the ice sheet in West Antarctica appears to have begun and is almost certainly unstoppable, with global warming accelerating the pace of the disintegration, two groups of scientists reported Monday."
Out of curiosity, what do you suppose 'Layzej' means? I'm curious how that could be 'not unironic'...
No. It happen in every civilization. Happening in capitalistic, Communistic, theolistic, communes, and so on.
It's intuitive nature that we need to move beyond.
The only form that has a chance to minimize or stop that type of thinking is democratic socialism..
OMG, he said socialism!!!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
A solar furnace farm, 100 miles to a side, could supply all that energy.
I'm sorry, I think you were saying " blah blah blah WONT WORK!!! blah blah blah."
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I'd really rather we weren't responsible for another disaster resulting in the extinction of those lifeforms that had survived until now.
Too late.
If it makes you feel any better we're just fulfilling our biological imperative. The most adaptable species have thrown their lot in with us and are tagging along for the ride. Species that aren't as adaptable? Well, nature is a bitch like that.
On a macro scale civilization is always going to displace other species that get in the way. On an individual level people are always going to choose survival. My favorite example of the latter? The Wake Island Rail, hunted to extinction by a starving Japanese garrison during WW2.
Would you voluntarily starve yourself to death to save another species? If the answer is "Yes" you've either never experienced true hunger in your life, or you're the most altruistic person I've ever met.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
You have a serious issue with time frames. In one case you are referring to plate tectonics which move over periods of millions of years. On the other you are referring to our causing changes in the next 100 years that are equivalent. Then you say since they change would have happened anyway in the next million years or so, why is everyone upset at it happening in the next hundred years or so...
The assertion that temperature must *not* be stable in order for ice to melt is refutable with the simplest countertop experiment - put ice in water. Let temperature stabilize. Watch the ice continue to melt without changing water temperature. Q.E.D.
Huh? That's not what endothermic means.
Endothermic means that the process absorbs energy, it takes energy to transform ice into water.
If you did do an experiment with ice, water, and no other energy transfer, the average temperature of the final system would be less than the initial system because energy was used turning the ice into water.
That still doesn't explain why you were talking about it in the first place. It's a complete non-sequitur.
I stole this Sig
Why would they use solar panels, they would use solar furnaces so they have 24/7 electricity and a baseload supply.
and it would be 100 miles to a side.
"I'm sorry, but I'm a realist, and the best course of action for us at this point is to start planning for the changes rather than try to prevent them from happening."
I'm going to explain to you why that's wrong, and why you are NOT being a realist. Ready?
Planning is great, and need to be done but we have to prevent the end game from happening.
People like you say "eh, it will rise 10 feet' we will just plan for it", but you never seem to realize it wont' stop there. This isn't stop in now, or we end up with a high sea level. It's start fixing it now, or the green house effect will removal habitability for humans, i the long run
What, you think it will stop at 500ppm? 600 ppm? You think the rising and warming of the sea level isn't going to impact food? Impact the ocean ability to change co2 to O?
The sooner we can to prevent and remove CO2 emission, the cheaper, and 'easier' it will be.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Great response, I hope it catches the eye of someone with modpoints.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
A good rule of thumb is to assume that the dominant 'society/civilization' on earth at any given movement is an unsustainable one driven by greed and control, or else it wouldn't be in control... unless proven to be 'true' and we are quite a far ways from that.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
According to this wikipedia article on impervious surfaces, there's approximately 36.6k km**2 of urban rooftop surface area in the contiguous 48 states, so it seems we could just put panels on everyone's roof and accomplish the same thing with fewer transmission losses.
Of course, this doesn't take into account any added maintenance costs, since I imagine it'd be easier to maintain one giant field of panels at ground level than it would to climb up on everyone's roof every couple of years...
" but we'll survive it. "
based on..what? what happens at 500 ppm? 600 ppm? 1000 ppm?
What happen when the sea temperature is too warm to support the lowest part of the food chain?
250 - 350 ppm – background (normal) outdoor air level - OOPS past that
350- 1,000 ppm - typical level found in occupied spaces with good air exchange.
1,000 – 2,000 ppm - level associated with complaints of drowsiness and poor air.
2,000 – 5,000 ppm – level associated with headaches, sleepiness, and stagnant, stale, stuffy air. Poor concentration, loss of attention, increased heart rate and slight nausea may also be present.
Yeah, we kind of need an 'aggressive' plan to deal with this now.
We need to be build large solar furnace, re-engineering the electrical grid, get coastal cities on board with moving inward with time, we need thorium reactors, we need to put tough regulation and taxes on vehicles.
We need to get some sort of solar system on every house. Panels, some sort of shingle what ever. All this take time, so we need to start now. The longer we wait, the more we pay.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The rest of the World aspires to our standard of living...
Or at least this is what Americans keep telling themselves, right?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
since western civilization(specifically one with a liberal education fro everyone, and where women control there own reproduction cycle) the population is declining.
"A civilization without our reverence for individual liberty tried it and arguably failed,"
why do you think ares is not
" or at the very least created all manner of unintended consequences with deleterious outcomes that still haven't been fully quantified."
Which applies to our civilization as well.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
:) This needs to be modded up :)
I've read about some scientific theories that postulate a trigger for planetary ice-ages is, in fact, a continent drifting across one of the poles... creating a run-away effect of increasing the albedo of the planet. One possible consequence of these theories is that we are currently smack in the middle of one of these ice-age phases - and that the "normal" state of the globe is, in fact, very little or NO ice... anywhere on the entire planet... with possibly a few seasonal exceptions in extreme locations.
The point is, the Earth will do what the Earth will do - and there is nothing we can do to stop it or change it. As any kind of Earth-science should teach us - change is the only constant in this world... Look at the fossil record! How many thousands of species lived and passed away? I live a thousand miles from the nearest ocean - yet there are fossils of sea-creatures here! Things change. And the factors that govern our climate are HUGELY more complex than than our politicians and their useful idiots are prepared to accept. Yes, we humans could wipe ourselves out someday - but its not going to happen by using the natural resources given unto us by mother nature herself to survive.
Yes, politician can. If the Rep. said 'well, with this latest evidence, it turns only AGW is real'.
The vast majority of current denier would change. Most of them are deniers becasue their politician say it isn't happening and continues to pander to a belief, instead of facts..
Once that is done, then we can have discussion on a plan to move forward.
But Obama could have the perfect solution tomorrow, one that includes free energy and blow jobs for all and Pub would still vote against because its from Obama.
Just to be clear: He doesn't, not possible, and sorry ladies.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It IS happening. Just like the vast majority is science prediction are accurate. I'ts cute that you think a few cherry picked and non scientific things did happen.
Grow up.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The idea that the oceans may rise any civilization-threatening amount in the next century is laughable. If they had said 10,000 years... I might have been interested enough to look into it. Consider the surface temperature in Antarctica year-round and compare that to the melting point of H2O... The temps are going to have to raise a HECKOFALOT to get anywhere close to -32 F.
Capping family sizes is antithetical to western notions of freedom.
And yet families in Western countries are dramatically smaller than than they were a century ago--which some would see as the result of acquiring reproductive freedom, including the freedom *not* to have more kids than you want to or think you can afford, etc.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
And the short sighted continue to not change becasue they need to be led like sheep. How does it feel to be a sheep? Staring blankly at some screen, shoveling food in your mouth. Here is a translation into you native tongue:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
You think there might be some complex reason on why the president needs to make person appearance?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
An acceleration of something already happening does not make it the cause, or even a problem.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Do you think the crust under the ocean is not floating on the the SAME liquid mantle?
As a real scientist, I disagree.
A subject matter expert as are the ones quoted? As in you've done nothing but study glaciers your whole career?
Yeah right.
You do not consider the oceans part of the globe?
The currents in play are, as stated, not caused by global warming so in that sense no.
You need to think more about what is being said instead of living so much in your own head.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I haven't actually met most people so I can't really say what they consider, although well done on finding the time to post here what with your busy schedule meeting them by the way. From those I've spoken to they generally seem to feel that inflation will eat away at the last decades of their mortgages, which is probably true to an extent. Short term pain, long term gain.
Planning is great, and need to be done but we have to prevent the end game from happening.
There is no "end game". That's what I think the climate change crowd doesn't realize. They've based their whole notion of "normal" off an incredibly insignificant slice of Earth's history. It's not even a significant slice of homo saipans history, never mind the history of life on Earth. When has the climate on planet Earth been static? Great Britain used to be in the wine belt. Washington crossed an ice filled Delaware river. The climate changed long before humans started digging carbon out of the ground and it will continue to change long after we're gone.
Climate change is not going to doom human civilization. It will have an impact, a very harsh impact for some (and a benefit for others, which is one of the dirty little secrets nobody will acknowledge...) but we will survive and adapt. Pull up pre industrial age life expectancy charts and tell me we're really not better off. Then tell the third world that they're not allowed to develop any further, and the first world that we have to voluntarily lower our standard of living.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
You can also look at it from a positive side and already stat with what IS possible. e.g. 30% of Denmarks electrical power comes from windpower.
Also the USofA has 4,5% of the population, but we are talking energy here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
So please don't look at what is not possible, look at what is possible and then trow some money towards finding out how to do the rest. The USofA military is basicaly fighting to get cheap oil. Use some of that money in R&D on alternative energy.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I don't get it. This is happening.
Unless it isn't happening. There's always another choice to such scenarios. It's easy to concoct a disaster scenario today on flismy or no evidence.
While if it really happens, then a 10 foot rise in sea level is a bit hard to deny or hide. So I'm willing to wait to see what happens, especially given that this is claimed to be inevitable.
The trope goes like this:
1) CO2 increases surface temperatures through the greenhouse effect;
2) this increased surface temperature magically *increases* surface ice, but *melts* subsurface ice
If you accept that melting is an endothermic reaction, then it's simple physics that melting ice (and a very little melt, in all actuality) will more than absorb any surface temperature heat - water has a significantly greater specific heat than air.
I'm still interested in hearing what kind of magical heat jump can pass through surface ice, and get to all that ice underneath to melt it :)
I suspect the volume of the entire world's damable valleys is pretty darn low in relation to the Antarctic and Icelandic ice caps. And the number of sub-sea-level valleys is even lower.
Here you go:
https://twitter.com/Revkin/sta...
Awful misuse of "Collapse" in headlines on centuries-long ice loss in W. Antarctica. See rates in papers. Same as '09
So you've chosen authority figures without bothering to ask them for necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statements :)
Sounds just like people picking a pope :)
Virtually all of the people who have visited "Antarctica" are SCIENTISTS. And the rest are GOVERNMENT WORKERS.
Can we really believe people who have a vested interest in grant money to accurately report on this place?
Pretty soon now we'll find the set in Alaska where "South pole research station" news segments are filmed.
On the endothermic front you're making a huge assumption that the magnitude of energy absorbed by melting ice is large enough to make a significant difference to the global temperature, and even if it were so what?
As for your talk about magical heat you're obscuring the basic fact that whatever the mechanism decreasing volume and increasing surface area is actually happening. If I make up a stupid theory about magical bunnies driving the moon around the earth that doesn't actually stop the moon in its tracks.
If you're actually interested bunratty posted a relatively short and understandable explanation but I have no interest in debating your magical heat theories.
I stole this Sig
Chicken Little because it isn't going to happen in your lifetime?
I don't get it. This is happening.
If you really thought it was happening - in some crisis-like way, anyway - you'd do something more substantive about it than handwringing and put downs.
I know; have the first lady hold up a hand-lettered sign saying #BringBackOurShore. That seems to be how people "take action" these days.
So, where's the big campaign to switch to nuclear? What's that, no?
Funny. That's how they taught me about tides.
In the meantime, I'm sitting 100 meters above sea level, waiting for my waterfront property.
Have gnu, will travel.
Fracking is about 100 years old. The greenies just noticed it recently.
Good thing they didn't notice it when they were doing explosive fracking. The sky would definitely have fallen...than.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
WTF? Bullshit!
Idealists need to be fed their own self righteous bullshit until they become pragmatic.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
In a place where the temperature is always well below freezing, "global warming" is not going to melt all the ice. That doesn't mean it isn't a problem elsewhere. Even if there were no net ice loss on earth, if we're losing ice in places we need it (such as mountain ranges that supply people with drinking water), and accumulate it in places that have no humans at all (Antarctica), that's an enormous problem.
But hey, let's confuse land ice and sea ice and create doubt about the actual science by cherry picking data, spreading half-truths and general misinformation.
Some privacy policy Slashdot.
Ohh I love math. The atmosphere has a mass of about 5.15×10^18 kg. Of that 0.039% is CO2. If we burn all the hydrocarbons in known reserves of the top 17 oil producing countries (1.3x10^12 bbl) assuming 443 kg of CO2 per bbl of oil (found online) and let's assume that all the H2O released falls as rain (making the water problem easier too!). Also, let's neglect the loss of oxygen from all that combustion since we have plenty of excess... So we have:
2x10^15 KG current mass of CO2
5.8x10^14 KG additional mass of CO2
So now with all that burned oil we are at 0.05% CO2 an increase of 0.01%. But you just said tiny percent changes aren't significant...
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
Again with the claim of big $$.
Do you have any idea how moronic that looks when the "let it burn" crowd is the oil and coal industry?
---- Sig. gone.
Mortgages are long term thinking in relation to renting. Sure it would be nice to save all your money and buy a house with cash, but unless your alternative to a mortgage is squatting, I don't see how mortgages count as short term thinking.
You can live in a way nicer house by renting than by paying a mortgage, the downside is that after 30 years of renting, you don't have anything to show for it.
Energy is energy. Maybe it's not efficient to use solar power to synthesize hydrocarbons like octane, but you can put liquid hydrogen in a container.
There's very few areas where the cost of renting is lower than interest unless there's some form of rent control.
---- Sig. gone.
You're comparing solids (silt) to dissolved minerals (salt) and liquids (fresh water), dumbass
But, it is an interesting hypothetical that shows that alternate, 'green', energy is certainly possible.
No it shows that it is theoretically possible, just like it's theoretically possible to get nuclear fusion to work. Taken beyond the hypothetical you'll find a lot of very uncomfortable truths that would make it "certainly" impossible:
1. Energy storage on this scale doesn't economically exist.
2. The power source is still variable, not baseload and (see 1.)
3. It would be an interesting economic exercise to source 108 sq miles of solar panels. What would the sudden spike in demand followed buy the massive crash look like? Do we even have the raw materials to manufacture them? How quickly could the world's capacity actually supply them, and what on earth would the resulting cost be in a scenario of world wide solar panel shortage?
Sure, but asserting the heat *bypasses* the surface ice on its way to the deeper ice is ludicrous, don't you agree?
Which is a completely different thing from aerosol-based cooling that was the flash point for the very visible media pieces.
We didn't have a nuclear winter (yet) because we've not set off lots of nuclear bombs in a war (yet).
Your only reliable source of confusion is that Steve Schneider wrote papers about each of them. He retracted the botched calculations of the aerosols.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Not an assumption - pretty simple math when it comes to understanding the mass of water vs. the mass of atmosphere and their specific heats.
As for "so what", if *water* is driving *atmosphere*, wouldn't it be silly to look at *atmosphere* as the driver of the *water*? Causality starts somewhere specific :)
Help me out here. In my ignorance, I imagine Antarctica as a disk with a pole near its center. How do I find the Western part? Or the Eastern part? Uh, the Northern part??
...omphaloskepsis often...
Not an assumption - pretty simple math when it comes to understanding the mass of water vs. the mass of atmosphere and their specific heats.
As for "so what", if *water* is driving *atmosphere*, wouldn't it be silly to look at *atmosphere* as the driver of the *water*? Causality starts somewhere specific :)
Unless you think the ocean is somehow causes winter I'm not sure what your point is. Yeah the ocean has a lot of stored energy (and that was one theory for the recent subdued warming), that doesn't mean that's where energy is entering the system.
Question: are you claiming your entire point since your original post was a claim that the decreasing volume as opposed to extent is evidence that warming is coming from the ocean or ground and not CO2?
I stole this Sig
Winter, of course, is caused by the axial tilt of the planet - and it's regional to boot :)
Global temperature changes, on the other hand, can certainly be driven by ocean temperature fluctuations, as shown by things such as AMO and PDO.
The original claim was that expanding sea ice extent, and decreasing sea ice mass, is somehow a logical result of atmospheric global warming due to CO2. Obviously, it doesn't follow.
At best, decreasing sea ice mass, driven by temperature flows and fluctuations in the ocean, is driven by ocean dynamics, not atmospheric dynamics. From that POV, continued expansion of sea ice extent is *obviously* driven by lower atmospheric temperatures, which are generally precluded by a hypothesis that posits higher atmospheric temperatures.
Now, ask yourself the question - what moderates the transfer of energy from the sun to the oceans? Heat in the atmosphere, or changes in cloud albedo moderating the amount of sunlight that hits the oceans?
I live on the U.S. gulf coast, right on the coast. I can throw a rock from my house into the gulf. If the water goes up, I'll know. Al's been saying how much the Arctic has melted, but nothing is happening at my end. So I wouldn't worry. You know what they say, follow the money. And "Che Benefici - Who Benefits?" Don't be bamboozed, all this is coming from scientists who want grant money, they'll say whatever they have to keep it coming. The bottom line is (and that's all that matters), the water is not rising. Also, anyone else in this country who lives on the coast (which are millions of people) can see nothing is happening. I guess their task is to make us afraid of what IS GOING to happen. I'd be more concerned with nuclear war, it's much more likely to happen before man can change the climate globally. If and when the nukes start flying, I don't think anyone will care what Al Gore has to say.
So it takes you 6 posts to reach the point you claim you were talking about at the start.
And it doesn't even fit the facts. Warmer air temperatures at the poles isn't a theory, it's a well documented fact.
I stole this Sig
"Scientists at the British Antarctic Survey say that the melting of the Pine Island Glacier ice shelf in Antarctica has suddenly slowed right down in the last few years, confirming earlier research which suggested that the shelf's melt does not result from human-driven global warming." Read more here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2... Here's the story of the ship stuck in Antarctic ice which had to be rescued, then the rescue ship got stuck. This article is dated Jan 3, 2014. In the southern hemisphere, IT WAS SUMMER. July 3 is the northern hemisphere equivalent of that date. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...
And I take it you've got a theory to go with that well documented fact that makes the warmer air temperatures *skip* melting the surface ice, and instead melt the ice beneath :)
Seriously, given warmer air temperatures in antarctica, how do you explain *more* surface ice extent? Is there some magic freeze ray in your theory? :)
I'm sorry, did you have something to say about personal freedoms and reproductive choice? Doesn't seem much like it.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
The heat flux from the earth's core into the oceans is 100mW/m^2. Heat flux from the sun is 1kW/m^2. As far as global climate is concerned, we can safely ignore geothermal effects.
As a matter of fact I do have a theory! This is a bit clearer.
Basically you were right about the heat capacity of the water being important. It sounds like the slightly warmer air and upper ocean means the new sea ice is a lot saltier (cold drives the salt out). Normally salt gets squeezed out by the cold, it makes the water underneath extra salty, that cold salty water sinks and it replaced by new warmer water. This new warmer water accelerates the melting process.
When the air is slightly warmer the salt stays in the ice and the changeover doesn't occur to the same degree. Instead of warmer water to melt the ice all you have is warmer air.
I stole this Sig
"You barge into discussions with your off-topic hosts file nonsense" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Friday April 11, 2014 @09:51PM (#46731153) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Show us a post where I put up material on hosts where it doesn't apply.
Why should anyone bother, when you keep doing such a wonderful job of proving it yourself, just like you do here?
Oh! I almost forgot---How did you like the postcard?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Yeah, damned Stanford hippies.
The thing is: it isn't clear at all. There is no consensus. Here's the abstract from an article in the NASA archives that shows Antarctic ice mass increasing during the same period. Somehow the alarmists don't cite this one...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
The thing is: it isn't clear at all. There is no consensus, only a lot of media hype. It may not be a conspiracy, but it is certainly not PC to doubt - what's the latest term? - "climate disruption.
Here's the abstract from an article in the NASA archives that shows Antarctic ice mass increasing during the same period. Somehow the alarmists don't cite this one...
Which view is correct? Hard to say - I'm no climate expert - but I certainly do have the feeling that coverage of the issue in the mainstream media is driven more by politics than by science.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
This is all FUD! Climate change is faaaaaaalse and cannot be demonstrated scientifically because... LALALALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU
How much wood would a woodchopper chop if a woodchopper would chop wood?
Actually, qualified scientists who are expert on this topic are telling us right now what their predictions are of what will happen.
But yes, continue putting your hands to your ears and shouting yaddayaddayadda.... all future is uncertain so just fuck it all. You can go eat at McDonalds every day and stuff yourself full of cheeseburgers. Predictions are you will get fat and possibly die from the causes at some point. But you don't care about that, right? Because we have no idea what might happen.
1. Deep energy retrofits on can reduce energy on buildings by 50%, most of this will payback and the building sector uses as much energy as the transportation sector .22 $/kWh you get storage and ~ 40 kWh of transportation.
2. New buildings can be designed for 60-70% less energy consumption, often at lower initial cost or else certainly at quick payback
3. Educated and sensible use of electricity can trim residential and commercial plug loads by 50-80%
4. A grid dominated by natural gas, solar, and wind, could reduce ghg from the utility sector by 90% at less than 10 cents a kWh. For ~
All in all, its relatively trivial to reduce the energy footprint of an American by 60-70%. There are lots of Americans who do this. I would wager in fact, that energy conscious consumers do so while maintaining a higher quality of life than average. There are many examples where our "standard of living" is achieved, actually exceeded, in harsher climates (on average), using less energy. The idea that we need 9 GW scale nuclear reactors in the U.S. to run DVRs when similar and cheaper devices exist at 1% of that power consumption doesn't really put the American standard of living in the best light. Similarly the poorly constructed built environment in the US also ends up costing more through unnecessary energy expenditures. The amount of energy and time and money wasted on gross and often deliberate inefficiency greatly exceeds any and all of the transition costs to a more sustainable environment. That you could replace a DVR with a cell phone, make modest home efficiency improvements at 50%+ ROI and save more than the additional cost of solar energy is embarrassing.
When predictions over decades fail, then the obvious solution is to make predictions over centuries. They are absolutely safe to make.
It is hard to believe that we left the dark ages for this bulshit.
Having just read the summary for policy makers from the IPCC's fifth assesment report http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/... and their estimates for sea-level rise by 2081-2100 were at worst less than a meter including allowances for the antarctic ice sheet going kablewy. Now I'm now expert but I'm fairly certain 10 feet is a long way off a meter and I'm more ready to believe the actual published scientific data than the crap in the new york times has carefully regurgitated in order to sell more copies.
Never gonna happen. But do me a favor. I want you to print out your post, put it in an envelope marked "Open in 2027." And when 2027 rolls around and nuclear fusion is still "Just 30 years away now" (as it always has been), I want you to open said envelope and realize how wrong you were in 2014.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
NO IT'S NOT. Do you see any fucking seaports flooded?? Is Charleston, San Francisco, or New York under fucking water? Has a single harbor even had to close or relocate because of these supposed rising sea levels in the last 100 years? They're saying it's GOING TO HAPPEN, just like any futurist can say X, Y, and Z are going to happen.
Look around you. REAL SCIENCE is about actual empirical observations, not just polling your colleagues to see what *they* think. Go down to the beach that has been there for decades and tell me if you see a bunch of houses under water. If it's happening, we should have already seen a rise of a least a few inches in the last 100 years, right? So where is the physical evidence?
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Well, let's find out if that's actually true. Here's a math problem: The salinity of the ocean is 3.5%, and the ocean has an average depth of 3700 meters. If enough fresh water is added to the ocean to increase its depth by 3 meters, what is the new salinity of the ocean?
(Answer: 3.5%, i.e. not significantly different from before.)
This isn't a math problem. It's an oceanography problem. Oceans are not well mixed entities. If you add a bunch of freshwater to the ocean it does not become instantly mixed. Reducing salinity in the top 3 meters of the ocean would have significant climatological impacts.
~X~
So now with all that burned oil we are at 0.05% CO2 an increase of 0.01%. But you just said tiny percent changes aren't significant...
emphasis mine...
His example: Salinity of 3.5% changes to 3.497% with an increase in ocean levels of 3 meters. This is a relative change of -0.08%. As he said, not significantly different from before.
Your example: 0.039% CO2 changes to 0.05% CO2 after burning the majority of our fossil fuel reserves. This is a relative change of 28.20%. Unlike you imply, this is pretty significant.
Ohh I love math.
There was a reason for Disraeli 's comment about lies, damn lies, and statistics and I suspect he was thinking about someone just like you when he said it.
You're nothing but a troll, for whom the word "logic" represents a foreign language.
Fracking is about 60 years old, but even though it was invented awhile ago, it wasnt used regularly for extraction until recently. It also didnt involve the use of toxic chemicals originally; that's a recent "refinement" that allows higher pressures that pure water would allow for.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/05/12/the-guardians-suzanne-goldenberg-jumps-the-shark-again-gets-called-out-by-nyt/ Check out the link. A lot of things could happen in a thousand years. We could get hit by an asteroid... We could get wiped out by an epidemic...
More global warming alarmism.
In a related story, antarctic ice is a a record high level sinc3e satellite observations began. http://wattsupwiththat.com/201...
So your argument against fighting climate change is that we might already be all dead before it matters?
That wouldn't be scale, that would be portability. Pretty obviously practical EVs are carrying electricity around in their batteries. Range is lower for now, but the technology is improving (scaling).
But you're not the OP that said scaling, so you can;t explain what he meant by it. I think it might have been generation, but it wasn't clear, which is why I asked.
No, of course that's not the assertion. What the hell kind of assertion would that be?
If you spill a glass of water on the counter, the surface area of that water increases greatly but the mass stays the same. In fact, it evaporates faster that way so while the surface area stays much larger than it was, the mass actually reduces much faster as a result. What is likely happening here is very similar, except with ice instead of liquid water
I feel like I'd have better luck explaining this to a three year old.
I don't need to read up, I only needed to confirm what you intended by the comment before answering.
First of all, you saying nuclear fission is politically explosive doesn't take it off the menu. There's nothing technological to stop nuclear plants being built. And when you say a technology isn't scalable we do mean the technology.
Additionally America hasn't yet touched the surface of what it can do with existing green tech. The existing wind and solar generation is small beer. There's vast deserts for solar, unused farmland for wind, great mountain ranges that could have hydro dams.
And all of those fade into insignificance compared with the energy available from the sea. Wave technology hasn't been very good, but tidal, but from barrages of the countless bays, to tidal turbines could certainly supply all of America's needs.
What's lacking is the will, not the technology. And the will is lacking because the oil industry are such big lobbyists and donors (what would be called corruption in other countries).
But as a country and a world we have to get past that, because fossil fuels are finite.
Other countries are already on course to having 100% of their electricity produced by green tech. America can too.
Great Britain used to be in the wine belt.
Great Britain used to be able to produce wine, and it still does produce wine. We know the current wine is good enough for modern commercial sale, but we know nothing of the quality wine the Romans made.
We do know that while there aren't vast numbers of vineyards now there's no evidence of there ever being more at any time in the past.
So what's your point? Just repeating a stupid denier myth?
You simply have to provide enough infrastructure to supply the base load you need. There's no reason it can't be green tech.
You use a mixture of green sources, in a variety of geographical locations, such that variability of cloud cover, wind and tides doesn't ever leave you without other forms of power that are still generating.
And you smooth it out to meet the varying demand with hydro and nuclear.
Yup, about twenty years later than the estimates I heard twenty years ago, and those were twenty years later than the estimates I heard forty years ago. The 2017/2027 estimates might be reasonably accurate this time, and I hope so, but after all these years I'm pretty cynical about it.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
So, this article says ten feet, and on the same day, The Register claims it's four feet. Was there something in the actual study pointing to one or the other? While neither is good, having reports that vary by 2.5 times isn't good, and likely leads to more people claiming that nobody really knows WTF they're talking about.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
Just another day in Paradise
So for the last several years "scientists" have been howling that the Arctic ice caps were melting, a new permanent Northwest passage would open, and it's all due to global warming. It's proof they said, absolute proof.
Well the Arctic ice cap is bigger than EVER! WTF happened there? Well, they were wrong - duh. So now the Antarctic ice cap is melting? And this is a horrible, terrible, OMG crisis?
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. And yet... as always... it matters not one bit to either side. The same old tired arguments that were shouted at each other YESTERDAY are once again shouted at each other TODAY, with many insults being hurled, and everybody calling everybody else a dumb ass. Can we please find something new to argue about? This has all gotten so ridiculously boring. The comment count = 508 on yesterday's climate click bait, 557 on today's - it's all the same people even....
Murphy was an optimist
Except that we can change what is going on on the planet, such as putting more CO2 into the atmosphere. It's risen from about 280ppm to about 400ppm in less than two centuries, and we did that. Also, plate tectonics aren't going to modify the climate fast enough to worry about, unlike global warming. It's mostly the rate of change that is the problem.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
So now you're saying that surface ice is *sublimating* to reduce mass as it increases in extent?
By what magic is this happening?
So with salt, you get freezing point depression and boiling point elevation - which means that if, as you posit, the new sea ice is saltier, it requires a *colder* atmosphere in order to form ice...which contraindicates your "slightly warmer air" assertion.
If, as you assert, warmer air means *more* ice extent at the poles, why do the antarctic and arctic behave differently in this respect?
I believe, if you're honest with yourself, you'll note that the melting and extent of ice at the poles has much less to do with any sort of atmospheric temperature effects, and much more to do with storm effects, and ocean effects, neither of which is particularly well modeled by any GCM.
The problem here is that someone is trying to take an observation, and force a world view on it, rather than accepting the true complexity at hand. It's like insisting that you rolled a 7 or 11 on craps because you blew on the dice.
that's hand-waving away some really pretty difficult technical hurdles. Namely the generation capabilities near cities.
The areas with ample sun,wind,wave,geo or whatever are not always near the population centers that need the electricity. For cities like Phoenix or Las Vegas, yeah solar/solar thermal is a slam dunk.
Nuclear, with reprocessing spent fuel seems like the most sane solution -- but sadly to many people that's not 'green'. So we're stuck with coal or natural gas. Or the fringe environmental groups who seem to think the real solution is a drastic reduction in consumption (not going to happen.)
Didn't we just have an episode where we had to send rescue vessels to the Antarctic to rescue vessels that had gotten trapped in too much ice? Oh, was that on the other side of Antarctica? So, the ice on one side is getting thicker and the ice on the other side is getting thinner? Sounds like a wash to me. We aren't the least bit worried about how our children and grandchildren will deal with the economy we are leaving to them. When did we get to be so arrogant? Even if the findings are correct. What can we (The US Public) do about it? Nothing. We do represent enough of a percentage of the world's population to have more than a minor effect on anything to do with the Climate or atmosphere. Our 10% cannot trump the other 90%. Are we really thinking that we need to do something about this just to set an example? Great example. No outcome, or benefit. OH! Let's go sink Billions into that fix! Or, let's just let everyone in the US pay a "Save the Planet tax" that will satisfy our Administration, briefly. It takes a lot to be this arrogant! (And stupid at the same time)!
You think there's any comparison at all between the way a for-profit military contractor develops technology and the appalling, childish debacle that is ITER?
Were ITER the only feasible direction then yeah, I'd be right with you.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
Don't blame you for a second, especially as we all know the funding has been messed with several times.
Fortunately LM have a track record a great deal more encouraging than the ITER boondoggle.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
It doesn't require a colder temperature to form the ice, if anything the forming temperature would be warmer.
In both conditions the initial ice is the same salinity as the water, but in the colder years the temperature then drives salt out of the ice causing the changeover). If the changeover doesn't occur the upper water might actually have less salinity making ice formation easier.
I don't claim for a second that this effect sounds bizarre and counterintuitive and I'm sure there's other factors at work. I'm honestly not sure how well established the understanding of this particular phenomena is.
Of course whatever the mechanism we know the air temperature is increasing, the ice surface area is growing on the sea, but the total volume is decreasing on land (and in the multiyear regions of the sea). The decreasing volume of on land and the multiyear sea ice is the part that really breaks your theory of water being the driver. It's also the thing to worry about with sea levels. The sea ice extant is an interesting phenomena but doesn't really affect much directly. The multiyear ice is responding as anticipated and that's a problem.
I stole this Sig
Are you now really arguing that there is no such thing as freezing point depression and boiling point elevation when making water saltier? :)
Really?
Air temperature increasing, ice extent increasing, ice mass decreasing does not lead to "it's the air temperature that dunnit". It speaks to a multitude of drivers, moving in opposite directions, and directly contradicts the idea of a single primary driver.
You're trying to justify a false premise, forcing contradictory observations into a box that won't contain them. The problem isn't that your proposed effect is bizarre - it's that your proposed effect *isn't really what's going on*. The complexity of contradictory observations is obviously coming from multiple drivers, not a single surface air temperature driver.
Are you now really arguing that there is no such thing as freezing point depression and boiling point elevation when making water saltier? :)
No. You misunderstood entirely.
In either scenario the salt water freezes. But when it gets colder later on the cold drives the salt out of the ice making the water underneath saltier.
I stole this Sig
Let's review:
Now, checking with physics, ice is formed at 0C. Checking with chemistry, adding salt to water causes both boiling point elevation, and freezing point depression, making ice form at 0C.
In what world can you have a *warmer* temperature form more ice?
No quotes required on green house gas. Water vapor is one, just like carbon dioxide.
While the system itself may be vastly complex, ultimately, it's massive black body encased on a thermally non-conductive substrate. Its only real way to cool down is via radiation emission. Swing it however you like, throwing infrared favoring radiation absorbing agents into the outbound radiation path is going to alter the radiative flux of the system, and it's going to do it by way of increased energy of the system. That is, decreased outward emission. Fundamental physics and thermodynamics require this. Certainly you're correct that we are using some pretty complicated guesses to figure out how the system will react to the increased energy, and how and where it will find new equilibriums, but the overall model used in the experiments is completely correct for showing the Earth's dynamic energy flux.
and freezing point depression, making ice form at 0C
I assume this was a typo as salt water freezes well below 0.
In what world can you have a *warmer* temperature form more ice?
If the warmer temperatures led to the water having lower salinity that could cause more ice. Also if warmer temperatures or other factors cause higher winds the wind pushes existing ice packs from very cold areas into less cold areas which increases total ice production.
This article seems to make the most sense of what I've seen.
I stole this Sig
Ocean levels haven't been constant for the miniscule amount of time humanity has been around, never mind on a geologic scale. For that matter, the climate hasn't been static either, not even for our short amount of time on this rock.
For the past 6,000 years, basically the whole of the time it took to develop our modern civilization both sea level and the climate in general have been remarkably stable. I'm not worried about the human species surviving but it's an open question if this complex modern civilization we live in is resilient enough to survive. If the civilization collapses then a lot of people are going to die.
The biggest problem for nuclear power is economics. The amount of financing it takes to build the plant, how long it is before any return on your investment and the cost of the power produced are all things that stand in the way of nuclear power far more than anti-nuke activists.
No, the surface area increases somewhat but not enormously. Oceans already cover more than 70% of the Earth's surface.
pure water freezes at 0C
salt water freezes If the warmer temperatures led to the water having lower salinity that could cause more ice.
So warmer temperatures will magically cause more ice? :) Really?
http://nov79.com/gbwm/icemelt....
"An increase in air temperature does not heat oceans or melt ice which floats. Anyone who studies science should know this; yet carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is said to be heating the oceans and melting Arctic ice.
First, air has such a low heat capacity that it doesn't hold enough heat to influence water or the ice within it significantly. Secondly, heat moves upward, not downward, which prevents it from moving from air to water or ice on water.
Why would the tropics be warmer, when air does not absorb much sunshine? The atmosphere is nearly the same in the tropics. It's because the water and land absorb the sunlight and transfer the heat to the atmosphere, not the other way around.
The numbers show the absurdities. Here are calculations for heating Arctic ice and the amount of globally warmed air required to melt it. These simple numbers are found in numerous places on the internet.
The amount of Arctic ice is said to be 12x106 km2 (square kilometers). In the winter of 2010 it is said to be two meters thick, though in some areas it would be thicker. So we will calculate the amount of heat required to melt that much ice when two meters thick.
Converting to meters results in one million square meters per square kilometer; and two meters thick results in 24x1012 m3. The density of ice is slightly less than water, or 917 kg/m3. Multiplying these two numbers yields 22x1015 kg of ice.
The heat required to melt the ice is called heat of fusion. It is 334 kj/kg. That's kilojoules per kilogram. Multiplying this times the number of kilograms yields 7.4x1018 kj.
So how much air would have to be heated 0.6C (the supposed global warming caused by humans, lately sliding up to 0.7C, even though global cooling has been occurring) to provide this amount of heat? The heat capacity of air is about one fourth that of water on a gram basis, which is 1 kj/kg-K for air. That's one kilojoule per kilogram per degree Kelvin or centigrade. For 0.6C, it's 0.6 kj/kg.
To get 7.4x1018 kj would require that many kilograms for one degree and 0.6 times as much for 0.6C, which is 4.4x1018 kg of air.
The density of the atmosphere is 1.2 kg/m3 for the first kilometer of height. So we divide the 4.4x1018 kg by 1.2 kg/m3 to get the number of cubic meters, which is 3.7x1018 m3 of air. There are a billion cubic meters per cubic kilometer, so this number is reduced to 3.7x109 km3.
This is the amount of square surface area of atmosphere, one kilometer thick, which will hold the necessary amount of heat to melt all Arctic ice when two meters thick. It's 3.7 billion square kilometers of atmosphere. That's 61,000 kilometers on each side of a square. The total area of the earth's surface is only 510x106 km2, which is 23,000 kilometers on a side. The required amount of air is 7.25 times the total amount on the earth.
Notice that the surface area of the ice was 12x106 km2, while the surface area of the air for melting it was 3.7x109 km2. The surface area is 308 times as much for the air as for the ice. This means that even if the ice is not all melted, whatever portion is melted requires 308 times as much air per surface area as ice. If one square kilometer of ice is melted, 308 square kilometers of air must be moved over it with all 0.6C of AGW heat removed.
There are an infinite number of complexities stemming from the fact that no one can describe exactly what is happening or produce a consistent theory for what is supposed to happen. For example, where is the heat supposed to be located? The 0.6C is supposed to be near the earth's surface. How much heating is there supposed to be in the higher atmosphere? None can be detected, yet it is supposed to be back-radiatin
You could take your fire boat down there and start spraying the front of the glaciers with water. That will speed up the rate of melt.
pure water freezes at 0C
salt water freezes If the warmer temperatures led to the water having lower salinity that could cause more ice.
So warmer temperatures will magically cause more ice? :) Really?
I posted a mechanism and an article that gave a credible explanation and your response is to ignore it and post a snide remark.
As for the article you posted
First, air has such a low heat capacity that it doesn't hold enough heat to influence water or the ice within it significantly. Secondly, heat moves upward, not downward, which prevents it from moving from air to water or ice on water.
CO2 traps energy in the atmosphere heating up the air, the warmer the air is the less energy is transferred from the water or ground into the air
There are an infinite number of complexities stemming from the fact that no one can describe exactly what is happening or produce a consistent theory for what is supposed to happen. For example, where is the heat supposed to be located? The 0.6C is supposed to be near the earth's surface. How much heating is there supposed to be in the higher atmosphere? None can be detected, yet it is supposed to be back-radiating to heat the surface.
My fuzzy recollection is that the upper atmosphere is cooler or at least not warmed because the heat hasn't radiated up there because of CO2. But that's kind of irrelevant to the topic at hand. That the author sees fit to rant about it anyways is telling.
Not all of the Arctic ice has been melted, but alarmists claim that it will. If all of the atmospheric heat caused by humans were circulated to the Arctic and melted ice, there would have to be 7.25 times as much heat, which is 0.6 x 7.25, which is 4.35C. But much of the ice is thicker than two meters, which would require more heat to melt it.
First no one claims the Arctic ice is simply going to melt in place, the ice sheets are going to break up and float into areas where they can melt. But the thing to worry about is the land ice sheets which he ignores. Without the thick sea ice surrounding them the land sheets will flow into the oceans and raise sea levels.
The rest of article is a bunch of calculations based on strawman assumptions. I might as well write an article about how guns can't kill people because the kinetic energy in a bullet is nothing compared to the mass of a human.
I stole this Sig
Melting antartic wont affect the sea levels nearly as much as simple thermal expansion will, as water warms it expands, a few degrees increase in ocean tempratures from climate change will cause ocean levels to rise much more than melting ice will.
And according to your hypothesis, this warmer air causes more ice to form because salinity is reduced. So, warm air makes ice.
Over a period of hundreds, if not thousands of years :) The changes in sea ice and land ice are driven by forces other than atmospheric temperature.
So now you're saying that the heat from the atmosphere magically concentrates and targets a very small portion of the ice to melt it down, the way a bullet transfers its kinetic energy to just one small spot on a human's body? :)
Can you at least admit that the article over hyped the issue?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/201...
And according to your hypothesis, this warmer air causes more ice to form because salinity is reduced. So, warm air makes ice.
Let me get this. You're trying to get me to agree to a ridiculous sounding oversimplification of my position so you can then turn around and say that sounds ridiculous?
Over a period of hundreds, if not thousands of years :) The changes in sea ice and land ice are driven by forces other than atmospheric temperature.
Like gravity, without the sea ice to hold it in place it starts flowing towards the ocean.
So now you're saying that the heat from the atmosphere magically concentrates and targets a very small portion of the ice to melt it down, the way a bullet transfers its kinetic energy to just one small spot on a human's body? :)
No, I'm saying that comparing numbers from two different things is irrelevant without understanding how those things interact.
Can you at least admit that the article over hyped the issue?
No. They said it's going to be fairly slow for the next century or so and didn't hide the fact. How is that hype?
I stole this Sig
So. .... If I buy a house now, you're telling me my mortgage won't end up underwater?
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Two principles apply: when you want to climb out of a hole, stop digging; and a long journey begins with a single step. Alternately, we could just sit here and do nothing.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
We do expect and demand that the public change their lifestyles quite a bit.
Which won't change a damned thing, because the third world is not going to meekly sit back and accept their current level of development. The United States could literally cease to exist tomorrow and the freed energy wouldn't be enough to bring the billions in the third world out of poverty. You can't even convince Westerners to waste less, but you think you're going to convince those in the third world to meekly accept their current lot in life?
First we need less babies.
Capping family sizes is antithetical to western notions of freedom. That's literally the most personal decision you can make, it's not something that can be imposed from the top down in our societies. A civilization without our reverence for individual liberty tried it and arguably failed, or at the very least created all manner of unintended consequences with deleterious outcomes that still haven't been fully quantified.
That's the spirit! Why should we refrain from our current contribution of 25% of civilization's possible demise, when all those not currently contributing might decide to do so in the future? How dare they! Don't they know the gravity of what they're doing, in our imagination? Serves them right! I'm going to go out right now and burn some coal for no reason, just to show them.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
I ain't died yet in the past, so obviously the logical conclusion is that I won't die in the future.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
You seem to invoke the word 'falsifiable", but appear to have no idea how it applies to science. It is you that is simply repeating mindless mantras.
Complaining about authorities on a subject and not even offering an actual critique suggests you are incapable of doing so.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The original paper points out this particular melt is occurring on the scale of centuries. The point is not that this is going to drown New Orleans or New York before we. can cope. The point is that, for all this debate about a tripping point, and is there one, and when do we hit it, the fact odds that there lots of smaller tripping points like this one, and we're passing them all the time, and even if we do get it together at some point to turn off the auxiliary heating element, things aren't going to get back to "normal", ever. And every day we delay means something else changes irreversibly.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Of course I understand how "falsifiable" applies to science:
1) a set of observations, which if observed, would cause us to abandon our hypothesis;
2) a logical argument that the lack of those observations leads *only* to our hypothesis.
The fact that you can't understand that doesn't mean that it's a mindless mantra - it means you're incapable of groking some pretty basic features of the scientific method :)
And this is an *actual* critique - you, and your fellow travelers, have *never* been able to come up with a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement of CAGW or AGW - and the lack of that makes what you preach *not* science :)
No, that's *literally* your position as stated.
"If the warmer temperatures led to the water having lower salinity that could cause more ice."
You are *literally* asserting that warmer temperatures decrease salinity, and therefore cause a mitigation of the typical freezing point depression, and therefore cause more ice.
I'll quote the article I cited:
"As seems to always be the case the climate fear propaganda news media have completely mislead the public once again regarding climate related issues this time by alleging claims of 4 meter high future sea level rise increases supposedly addressed in two recent studies which performed analysis of glacier melt behavior of six large glaciers in West Antarctica.
One study was published in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL) and titled “Sustained increase in ice discharge from the Amundsen Sea Embayment, West Antarctica, from 1973 to 2013“. This study is available here:
http://www.ess.uci.edu/researc...
The second study was published in Science and titled “Marine Ice Sheet Collapse Potentially Under Way for the Thwaites Glacier Basin, West Antarctica“. This study is available here:
http://sciences.blogs.liberati...
Both studies evaluate the relatively recent melt rate history of these glaciers with one focusing on the use observed satellite data to estimate melt rate behavior while the other uses computer models to estimate melt rate behavior.
Amazingly enough and considering how the press manufactured headlines about sea level rise increases being determined from these studies neither of the studies addresses or make any claims about the impact of their research results on specific future sea level rise projections.
In fact GLC study mentions nothing specific about future sea level rise projections while the Science study clearly notes that their research models “are not coupled to a global climate model to provide forcing nor do they include an ice-shelf cavity-circulation model to derive melt rates. Few if any such fully coupled models presently exist (13). As such, our simulations do not constitute a projection of future sea level in response to projected climate forcing.”
Also unreported by the same climate alarmist propaganda focused media were the significant qualifications, limitations and cautions noted in these studies concerning their glacier melt research findings.
The GRL published study noted for example the following qualifiers regarding its analysis:
“These observations are a possible sign of the progressive collapse of this sector in response to the high melting of its buttressing ice shelves by the ocean.”
“Until numerical ice sheet models coupled with realistic oceanic forcing are able to replicate these observations, projections of the evolution of this sector of West Antarctica should be interpreted with caution.”
The Science published study contained the following similarly related qualifiers regarding its analysis:
“Although our simple melt parameterization suggests that a full-scale collapse of this sector may be inevitable, it leaves large uncertainty in the timing. Thus, ice-sheet models fully coupled to ocean/climate models are required to reduce the uncertainty in the chronology of a collapse.”
Why aren’t these significant research finding qualifiers regarding the preliminary nature of these studies results addressed by the main stream media?
The main stream media manufactured numbers alleging sea level rise projections not addre
The TFA isn't talking about next year or even next decade.
This year alone we've heard global warming is accelerating and decelerating. I suppose it depends on the time frame.
The climate continually surprises us because we _do not_ understand it completely, yet we are asked to consider letting someone actually try to _alter_ the climate with no thought given to the repercussions.
All the while we are told that this warming is the cause of the apparently 'extreme' weather events we are apparently observing because it is a 'complex system'.
And yet, complexity apparently tells us that the flapping of butterfly wings in China can cause a thunderstorm in New York.
ALL THIS TELLS ME: all climate predictions are pretty much low quality guesses and assume _nothing_ about possible unforeseen events that could completely change the outcome. The climate will do what it will do, and the best we can do is adapt, and that's what we do best.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Suburban houses can generate most or all of their own electricity with solar panels. Indeed UK householders that already have solar panels manage to generate power for their EVs and still feed power back into the grid. And the UK has cloud cover most of the time.
The average householder won't do that well, because part of the trick is minimising electricity use. But still, most of their power can come that way.
All of the cities that are near the seaboard could use tidal for much of their power.
And how many cities are there without surrounding rural areas, for either wind or solar or both?
Well I don't have to answer for the opinions of others. Plenty of leading green thinkers accept nuclear is part of the answer for controlling carbon emissions. And so do I.
If the green infrastructure isn't built up it'll certainly happen. If only because people can't afford the amount of energy they used to use. Again, fossil fuels are finite. As more of the easy sources are used up, the price will continue to go up. There's only so many wars you can fight to ensure the continuation of cheap energy. When you're facing finite fossil fuels, and a global population that's going to rise to about 9 billion, with extreme poverty being rarer, something's got to give.
Continuing as things are now is not an option. It never was.
No sane scientist is even remotely claiming these levels will ever be reached. Hell i doubt there is enough fossil fuels in existence for those kind of level to ever be reached. Most of the predictions are based on 800pm being reached which is assumed to be somewhat possible, but well beyond peak oil.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Over longer time scales rebound is very significant [expected] contributor to sea level rise. For both Antarctica and Greenland.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
there's hundreds of years of coal and natural gas. those will get burned before consumption decreases. particularly in the developing world. Politically, telling the developing world to curb their energy usage is akin to kicking the ladder out from under them -- and is a non starter.
i'd love to see statistics or some kind of citation about solar panels in the UK providing anything remotely approaching self sufficiency. Powering a tiny euro-EV is one thing, but reducing the need for base load generation is totally another.
What you're describing is honestly green-washed fantasy. Any solution needs to minimize distribution losses, must be available 24/7, and must be able to scale, and most importantly cannot try to coerce people to give up their standard of living. (realpolitik and such... a technical solution is not always politically viable in reality.)
If you want consumption of fossil fuels to decrease, carpeting the world in solar farms and windmills isn't going to suffice.
I was hoping to find one of Robert Llewellyn's videos to link for you, but I can't find it as he's done so many, and you can't search in videos!
But here's a recent article about some best in class green homes. One is not only self sufficient but sell half it's electricity to the power companies. The other is quoted as earning the houseowner 3500 UKP per year from selling electricity back to the grid. Which much be far more than half, considering bills for even inefficient houses. Yes, these are exceptions, but ones that show the limit is not just self-sufficiency but you can go far beyond that.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/pro...
What you're describing is honestly green-washed fantasy. Any solution needs to minimize distribution losses, must be available 24/7, and must be able to scale, and most importantly cannot try to coerce people to give up their standard of living.
Again, if you followed Robert Llewellyn's video blog Fully Charged, you wouldn't have that belief. In and amongst the EV reviews he visits universities, power stations and people with green homes, all who know far more than you or I on the topic. And all of them know this is coming.
One thing we haven't yet mentioned here: The smart grid: Rather than simply generating according to demand, devices which are non-time critical communicate with the grid and switch of and on to help regulate the demand to closer match the supply. Current items like fridges, freezers and AC are obvious candidates. But also EV charging falls into this category. Indeed the power companies talk of EVs as helping them match demand, because they can be charged overnight when demand from everything else is at a minimum. There's even talk of them being used for power smoothing - when you finish with your car for the day, the remaining power in the batteries can be fed into the grid, when electricity is expensive, and then the battery charged up fully when electricity is cheap overnight, ready for the next day.
If you want consumption of fossil fuels to decrease, carpeting the world in solar farms and windmills isn't going to suffice.
OK, you're starting to get annoying. I don't mind discussing this stuff, if we're going to keep it real. But I've already mentioned tidal, hydro and nuclear. Empty assertions which ignore more than have the sources I've already mentioned is not constructive.
And at no stage have I talked about giving up a standard of living. For sure reduction of usage is part of the answer, but things like insulation and more efficient technology does not lower the standard of living it enhances it.
The green movement is not a step back into history, it's progress into the future. It's fossil fuels that are the backward looking technology.
your attacks contain no logic, or actual economic theory.
actually your entire long rant containt no facts whatsoever.
you doth say too much, whilst saying nothing.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
I'm convinced you are being deliberately dense.
The fact that your explanations are logically flawed, and even fanciful, doesn't make the listener of those explanations dense :)
You tried to make an analogy between evaporating water (evaporating from the top) as surface area increases, and magically melting ice (melting from the bottom) as surface area increases, somehow driven by the air *above* the ice. It simply doesn't follow.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/201...
Sea ice you moron.
It's not the same piece of ice, you buffoon.
No, it's actually very hard. The disaster scenario market is highly competitive. Your scenario has to compete with other disaster scenarios for people's attention (read: money)
Well, those other disaster scenarios would have to account for the presence of an additional ten feet of sea level rise. I somehow doubt, no doubt due to my incorrigible nature, that a BitCoin disaster would have that aspect.
lmfao!
So, somehow, the loss in ice mass is on some *different* ice that doesn't actually have a connection to surface ice?
Can you draw a picture showing the path of heat from the atmosphere, bypassing the surface ice, and going to the other "piece of ice" underneath?
purposes a reduction in the standard of living
Green energy doesn't scale
Those are assumptions. To date, there is no nation or state that has hit a barrier where they cannot install anymore green energy. To date, no state/nation in the world that is pursuing green energy has required their population to reduce their standard of living.
We haven't really tried to "go green" in the US. We have devoted tiny amounts of resources to it. Theoretically we have enough green energy (sun/wind/tidal/geo) to power the country if we are willing to capture it. The only real decisions are how fast to do it, how subsidized does it need to be, etc.. If we start now with a goal of say, 50-75 years, it will be very painless. Of course, if set a date 5 years from now, it would be a disaster.
Another fool that thinks power lines are lossless.
Yes, everyone must put $20000+ worth of solar panels on their roofs. Totally feasible at all let alone in the next decade.
You are *literally* asserting that warmer temperatures decrease salinity, and therefore cause a mitigation of the typical freezing point depression, and therefore cause more ice.
That's correct (there were other factors too). What I objected to was your insistence on me agreeing to the phrasing "So, warm air makes ice". To me that sounds like you're trying to get to agree to a ridiculous sounding simplification just for the purpose of making me sound ridiculous.
As for the media I'll acknowledge that there was some inappropriate hyping in the fact that the reports underplayed the timeline and overplayed the certainty. The expected rise in the next century timeframe should have been much better communicated, and the fact is that every new paper is reported as fact and uncertainties are overridden.
But that doesn't mean the consistent message given by climate scientists is just hype. They're working in the literature, not the media, the media conversation is fairly irrelevant to their research.
And I'll still come back to the original assertion you made, about the increasing extent, is itself misleading compared to the decreasing volume.
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Sorry, but to be honest, it was ridiculous before the simplification - and you come pretty close to admitting it, acknowledging the spin and overplayed certainty. And *this* is what poisons the well - you're quoting people who are positing a convoluted explanation for observations inconsistent with their original predictions in order to preserve their dubious central conceit, and when you get past the song and dance, the reduction of their position is clearly contradictory.
Any "consistent message" is a political one, and you know it. There is broad disagreement on climate sensitivity, impacts, drivers, and the role of natural variation. Science isn't about *messages* - it's about necessary and falsifiable hypothesis statements, and the earnest attempt to find those falsifications.
Okay, so check this: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...
"For the latter, the issue is reconciling the observed expansion of Antarctic sea-ice extent during the satellite era with robust modelling evidence that the ice should melt as a result of stratospheric ozone depletion (and increases in GHGs)."
So to be clear, the "robust modeling evidence" was what predicted increased antarctic ice extent - but the nature of a non-falsifiable hypothesis, such as AGW, means that even when observations are *opposite* of predictions, ad hoc special pleadings are made. In this case, the ad hoc special pleading "we didn't really mean ice extent, what counts is ice mass".
So, if measuring extent is misleading, let's at least admit that this bad path was the very one mapped out by GCMs :)
Sorry, but to be honest, it was ridiculous before the simplification - and you come pretty close to admitting it, acknowledging the spin and overplayed certainty. And *this* is what poisons the well - you're quoting people who are positing a convoluted explanation for observations inconsistent with their original predictions in order to preserve their dubious central conceit, and when you get past the song and dance, the reduction of their position is clearly contradictory.
I'll admit the salt layering explanation sounds convoluted, the less salty ice one marginally less so, that doesn't mean either is false, it's actually not an issue I've got a ton of experience with. I do know that part of the ocean is apparently lower salinity than usual, whether that's related to (or the right scale of) the explanation that was posted I don't know. And the wind explanation actually does sound more logical to me.
At the end of the day there's warmer air temperatures, larger ice extents, and lower ice volumes. Whatever the mechanism it's clearly possible to have that combination of factors. And even if your alternative model of water driving the larger extents was accurate why would that help? The effect is clearly not maintaining the ice volume which is the critical factor.
Any "consistent message" is a political one, and you know it. There is broad disagreement on climate sensitivity, impacts, drivers, and the role of natural variation. Science isn't about *messages* - it's about necessary and falsifiable hypothesis statements, and the earnest attempt to find those falsifications.
The fact they're trying to coordinate their message doesn't mean the coordinated message is wrong. Even with all the individual disagreements they can agree on the main story. It's a mild form of the game creationists use when they frame every controversy in biology as evidence that evolution is falling apart.
"For the latter, the issue is reconciling the observed expansion of Antarctic sea-ice extent during the satellite era with robust modelling evidence that the ice should melt as a result of stratospheric ozone depletion (and increases in GHGs)."
So to be clear, the "robust modeling evidence" was what predicted increased antarctic ice extent - but the nature of a non-falsifiable hypothesis, such as AGW, means that even when observations are *opposite* of predictions, ad hoc special pleadings are made. In this case, the ad hoc special pleading "we didn't really mean ice extent, what counts is ice mass".
So, if measuring extent is misleading, let's at least admit that this bad path was the very one mapped out by GCMs :)
There's four main possibilities to the increasing ice extent:
1) Scientists largely expected it and weren't really surprised.
2) Scientists were uncertain but were well able to understand when it happened
3) Scientists were uncertain are don't quite understand why
4) Scientists were surprised and still don't understand why
It's probable something from 2-4. Some stuff I saw suggested 2-3, this paper suggests 3-4.
But what you've shown doesn't suggest any goalpost moving from volume to extent, in fact I can remember years back they were always concerned about the ice caps entering the ocean and causing sea level rise, and to a lesser extend the Greenland ice cap changing the jet stream to Europe. Even if the ice extent is a surprising result it's not changing the thing they were worried about.
I stole this Sig
Sure - here's the IPCC AR5 Chapter 10:
"Overall we conclude that there is low confidence in the scientific understanding of the observed increase in Antarctic sea ice extent since 1979, due the larger differences between sea-ice simulations from CMIP5 models and to the incomplete and competing scientific explanations for the causes of change and low confidence in estimates of internal variability."
It's clearly possible that the air temperature has little or nothing to do with larger ice extents and lower ice volumes - they simply *don't understand*.
Yes, it does. The purpose of science isn't to put forth a "coordinated message" -> that's *politicks*. The purpose of science is to draw closer to the truth through the application of the scientific method, through the rigorous application of skepticism to ones' own preferred hypotheses. The moment you've decided to coordinate a message, rather than seek the truth, you've exited the realm of science.
But the fact that it contradicts their predictions means that their central conceit is wrong...except they won't admit it, and ignore the observations in contrast to their models.
The fact of the matter is this - the earth changes, always has always will. Attributing catastrophe to our sins is a religious impulse, not a scientific one.
Yes, it does. The purpose of science isn't to put forth a "coordinated message" -> that's *politicks*. The purpose of science is to draw closer to the truth through the application of the scientific method, through the rigorous application of skepticism to ones' own preferred hypotheses. The moment you've decided to coordinate a message, rather than seek the truth, you've exited the realm of science.
But the coordinated message is just how they're communicating it to the public, internally they're just as rigorous as before. And even then they're only coordinating the message about things they already agree with. The fact that all physicists describe relativity in relatively the same way doesn't mean they're not aggressively questioning other matters.
But the fact that it contradicts their predictions means that their central conceit is wrong...except they won't admit it, and ignore the observations in contrast to their models.
If you're claiming they don't have a complete understanding of every aspect of the climate no one will disagree. But you've failed to explain why this particular gap in knowledge is critical. Temperatures are warmer, that much is certain. Lots of ice is melting, that is expected. More yearly ice is forming on open sea water, that is unexpected but not particularly meaningful.
I stole this Sig
So, are you saying with a straight face that they don't pressure people who don't adhere to the "message"?
http://www.thegwpf.org/matt-ri...
Here's the thing - say you're coordinating a message about things you "already agree with". What happens to the first guy who re-evaluates the information, and changes his mind? What happens to the guy who goes "off message"?
If physicists had a "coordinated message" about string theory, and blackballed the first guy who thought of loop quantum gravity, would you see a problem?
Here's the point - your retort is applicable for *any* prediction thus made by AGW supporters. Like astrologists, you throw a bunch of stuff against the wall, ignore the failures, and then focus on whatever "hits" you get.
Put another way - what predictions have to be wrong in order for AGW to be wrong? Flat temperatures and continually rising CO2 for over 20 years? What gaps in knowledge *would* be meaningful?
And be honest, if sea ice *extent* had been decreasing, but ice *mass* had been increasing, would you be making the same argument just with different failed predictions?
The problem isn't that we don't know everything about climate - the problem is that we can't tell *when* we don't know something about climate, and people keep insisting that we *do* know something about the climate when and where we don't.
So, are you saying with a straight face that they don't pressure people who don't adhere to the "message"?
http://www.thegwpf.org/matt-ri...
Here's the thing - say you're coordinating a message about things you "already agree with". What happens to the first guy who re-evaluates the information, and changes his mind? What happens to the guy who goes "off message"?
Of course they do, they're human. The difference is they aren't just brainstorming. If someone can justify why he's going off message with good evidence he gets a publication out of it.
Here's the point - your retort is applicable for *any* prediction thus made by AGW supporters. Like astrologists, you throw a bunch of stuff against the wall, ignore the failures, and then focus on whatever "hits" you get.
Put another way - what predictions have to be wrong in order for AGW to be wrong? Flat temperatures and continually rising CO2 for over 20 years? What gaps in knowledge *would* be meaningful?
This is about a predicted consequence of AGW, not a prediction of AGW. If this prediction is wrong is carries consequences for the sea level rise, it doesn't mean the earth isn't getting hotter.
We always say weather != climate, but consider weather as an example. We have science that can predict the weather with surprising accuracy, but we can still be wrong. When the weather network predicted sun and you instead got rain does that mean all their models are completely wrong, or does it mean they just got something wrong.
Multiyear ice is receding all over the planet. There's a few subsystems that don't perform exactly as we expect, single year sea ice extent is one of them, that doesn't mean we're completely wrong, just that we're not completely right.
I stole this Sig
So you're adding the additional "you need to justify going off message" criteria to the scientific method? Who decides if the going off message is "justified"? The "pal-review" guys from climategate? :)
I don't understand the semantics you're trying to assert here - a "consequence" prediction and a "non-consequence" prediction is a distinction without a difference in the scientific method. If your hypothesis predicts that you cannot find a modern rabbit fossil in the precambrian (for evolution), how do we decide if that is a "consequence" or not?
Further, isn't it possible to have *some* predictions of say, astrology be right, and others be wrong...would astrology become science if we simply said that all wrong predictions weren't "consequential"?
Here's the real problem - without a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement, you've got no way to tell if some of the "hits" you get with your prediction are just coincidence, or actual support for your hypothesis.
Astrology isn't "completely right" - are we to consider it a science now?
Here's a great article on "going off message":
http://www.rationaloptimist.co...
"Professor Bengtsson’s resignation shows that the alleged “consensus” on dangerous global warming involves suppressing dissent by academic bullying. He emphasises that there is no consensus about how fast and how far greenhouse warming will go, let alone what can be done in response.
Evidence of such bullying emerged in the “Climategate” scandal of 2009, where some climate scientists’ emails revealed them to be ready to threaten and blackball colleagues, reporters and editors who expressed sceptical views. I talk frequently to scientists who are unconvinced that climate change is even close to being the world’s most pressing environmental problem, but who will not put their heads above the parapet for fear of what it would do to their careers."
There was just another story about that very scientist. Turns out his paper was rejected because it sucked, all he did was point out inconsistency in some data that wasn't expected to be consistent, presumably so he could imply the data sets were junk.
Bengtsson also later said "I do not believe there is any systematic 'cover-up' of scientific evidence on climate change or that academics' work is being 'deliberately suppressed', as the Times front page suggests. I am worried by a wider trend that science is gradually being influenced by political views".
The narrative I take from this is Bengtsson got the rejection, which he wrongly interpreted as political rather than scientific. He then joined a denialist group, to which some scientists were definitely opposed. It's wrong if some tried to pressure him, but the fact that a minority tried to pressure him doesn't mean that AGW is wrong. Also note a bunch also supported him after the story came out, and his feelings of pressure were likely heightened by the misinterpretation of the paper rejection.
I stole this Sig
And there's the rub. Whether or not the pressure is systematic and preconceived (which, given the climategate emails, there is *some* evidence of that), the pressure is there and it *stops* science in its tracks.
Science is not about "the message" - that's clearly a political issue. To get back to science, it needs to be about the necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement, and the earnest attempt to falsify even one's own pet theories - being "on message" is a corruption of the scientific method, period.
And there's the rub. Whether or not the pressure is systematic and preconceived (which, given the climategate emails, there is *some* evidence of that), the pressure is there and it *stops* science in its tracks.
Science is not about "the message" - that's clearly a political issue. To get back to science, it needs to be about the necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement, and the earnest attempt to falsify even one's own pet theories - being "on message" is a corruption of the scientific method, period.
The pressure to conform is a bad thing but it's something you'd expect regardless of the truth of AGW. They're still doing good science, they could do better science, but you can't politically charge an issue, attack the scientists, and then blame them when they start considering political messaging.
I stole this Sig
Most AGW proponents are doing shoddy science at best, failing to do even basic things like version control data. Some of the best work is done by skeptic scientists, like Curry, or Lindzen - and it makes sense since they need to be completely above board before getting through the gauntlet of "pal-review" that gives a pass to anyone who plays to the party line.
Remember, the political charge on this came *first*, with the insistence that "we must act" and that "it's worse than we thought" - the fact that their predictions have contradicted observations has only caused them to circle the wagons more fervently, and that *increase* in political style messaging, rather than some well deserved humility that would be the proper response, is only exacerbating the issue.
If you want to show me someone doing good science here, find me *any* necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement of AGW from *any* paper at *any* time in history. Just one.
AGW represents science being subservient to politics, and the problem with politics is that you can never admit error (we've got a similar problem with fat and carbohydrates and the past 40 years of 'low-fat' advice from the government).
Most AGW proponents are doing shoddy science at best, failing to do even basic things like version control data. Some of the best work is done by skeptic scientists, like Curry, or Lindzen - and it makes sense since they need to be completely above board before getting through the gauntlet of "pal-review" that gives a pass to anyone who plays to the party line.
This is contradicted by almost every external scientist who starts to investigate the literature.
Remember, the political charge on this came *first*, with the insistence that "we must act" and that "it's worse than we thought" - the fact that their predictions have contradicted observations has only caused them to circle the wagons more fervently, and that *increase* in political style messaging, rather than some well deserved humility that would be the proper response, is only exacerbating the issue.
The insistence that we must act came because the science suggests we might act. What would you prefer, "our study shows that you're driving straight towards a brick wall, but we have no recommendation on whether you should stop or change direction"?
As for the politicization of the message to the public this is justified by the eagerness with which you yourself jump on the different proposed mechanisms for the increasing ice extent. You insist on any sign of inconsistency as proof there's no scientific consensus, then when they try to form a consistent message you indict them for that as well.
If you want to show me someone doing good science here, find me *any* necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement of AGW from *any* paper at *any* time in history. Just one.
AGW represents science being subservient to politics, and the problem with politics is that you can never admit error (we've got a similar problem with fat and carbohydrates and the past 40 years of 'low-fat' advice from the government).
Look at the Republican party and tell me the opposition is more politically motivated than the scientists.
As for your 'falsifiable hypothesis' nonsense, almost *every* AGW paper is going to be making falsifiable hypothesis, what the hell do you think they're publishing if they don't have a hypothesis? Hell, that's one of the reasons why Bengtsson got rejected, because he had no hypothesis and was just pointing at numbers.
You're not asking for a falsifiable hypothesis, you're asking them to predict the unpredictable, to give a precise multiyear forecast of a complex system.
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Find me a single "external scientist" who investigated the literature, and found a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement of AGW. Just one.
This happened once before with another corrupt scientist - Ancel Keys. His notorious "7 countries study" asserted a link between dietary fat intake and heart disease. As it turned out, his results were only caused by deleting data to "hide the decline" as it were. His ruthless pursuit of power led him to positions at the heart of government that led eventually to our dietary advice for lower-fat, and higher carbohydrate intake. He demanded that we act because the "science suggested" that there was a link between heart disease and dietary fat intake. In fact, he was wrong, and sent our country on an over 40 year path of increasing obesity, diabetes, cancer, heart disease and other chronic diseases.
Science does not suggest action - it leads us to truth. We have not been led to the truth by people pursing the AGW message.
*EXACTLY THIS*. We've proven there is no such thing as "scientific consensus" on AGW (nor is science driven by consensus). So *of course* we're going to indict them when they try to form a "consistent message" when the *FACTS* contradict that message!
Quote a *SINGLE* one. Find me a single AGW paper that says "if we observe this, that, or the other, AGW is false, and if we *fail* to observe this, that, or the other, we must logically conclude AGW is true".
Just for fun, you'll note that I made my hypotheses falsifiable - "there is no AGW paper with a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement of AGW" is falsified by a *single* observation of an AGW paper with a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement of AGW. Find just *one*, and I'll admit I'm wrong :) Of course, since this is a simple hypothesis, you can logically see how if you can't even find *one*, then it's very likely that my hypothesis is true - the logical case for AGW would of course have to be more complex in order to show that the lacking observations couldn't also happen with natural climate change.
Find me a single "external scientist" who investigated the literature, and found a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement of AGW. Just one.
fine
This happened once before with another corrupt scientist - Ancel Keys. His notorious "7 countries study" asserted a link between dietary fat intake and heart disease. As it turned out, his results were only caused by deleting data to "hide the decline" as it were. His ruthless pursuit of power led him to positions at the heart of government that led eventually to our dietary advice for lower-fat, and higher carbohydrate intake. He demanded that we act because the "science suggested" that there was a link between heart disease and dietary fat intake. In fact, he was wrong, and sent our country on an over 40 year path of increasing obesity, diabetes, cancer, heart disease and other chronic diseases.
Are you the one of the Taubes followers? It seems that crackpot science follows the same rules as conspiracy theories. (yes, fat was probably overblown, but the science self-corrected)
*EXACTLY THIS*. We've proven there is no such thing as "scientific consensus" on AGW (nor is science driven by consensus). So *of course* we're going to indict them when they try to form a "consistent message" when the *FACTS* contradict that message!
So 97% of climate scientists agreeing isn't consensus, though just in case someone doesn't buy that you'll say science isn't driven by consensus, presumably because that would provide a falsifiable hypothesis you would fail.
Quote a *SINGLE* one. Find me a single AGW paper that says "if we observe this, that, or the other, AGW is false, and if we *fail* to observe this, that, or the other, we must logically conclude AGW is true".
Just for fun, you'll note that I made my hypotheses falsifiable - "there is no AGW paper with a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement of AGW" is falsified by a *single* observation of an AGW paper with a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement of AGW. Find just *one*, and I'll admit I'm wrong :) Of course, since this is a simple hypothesis, you can logically see how if you can't even find *one*, then it's very likely that my hypothesis is true - the logical case for AGW would of course have to be more complex in order to show that the lacking observations couldn't also happen with natural climate change.
Here's a bunch. In specific "Satellite measurements of outgoing longwave radiation". CO2 trapping more heat in the atmosphere means that there will be less radiation emitted from the atmosphere in the related wavelength. That's a falsifiable hypothesis and it's a hypothesis they tested by looking at the thermal radiation.
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Your first cite shows someone changing their mind - it doesn't have a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement :)
Heck, people convert to Christianity all the time, but that doesn't make Christianity science :)
The insulin hypothesis is backed up by observations - the fat-heart hypothesis is not. Taubes is just reporting the science, he's not making it.
The fact of the matter is that even if we are "correcting", it's taken us over 40 years - by that measure, we'll finally realize the error of AGW in about 20 more years :)
That's a political number, not a factual one.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/201...
But I again remind you, consensus isn't science :)
That certainly may be *necessary* for AGW to be true, but it's clearly not *sufficient*. Heck, it doesn't even begin to touch on the origins of CO2, or the lack of any sort of relation between human CO2 emissions and measured CO2 levels (CO2 emissions vary widely both seasonally and yearly, but global CO2 levels have been monotonically increasing, as if governed by completely different drivers than simply human input).
Futhermore, the outgoing longwave radiation hypothesis is, in fact, subject to significant question:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...
"We further examine the impact of cloud overlapping assumptions on the results of linear regression of spectral differences with respect to predefined spectral fingerprints. Cloud-relevant regression coefficients are affected more by different cloud overlapping assumptions than regression coefficients of other geophysical variables. These findings highlight the challenges in constructing realistic longwave spectral fingerprints and in detecting climate change using all-sky observations."
So there's a question as to whether or not anyone has constructed a "realistic longwave spectral fingerprint".
But here's the real problem - your SS cite throws a bunch of stuff at the wall, but does not actually specify falsification observations. And if you're honest, you'll admit that when there *are* observations of falsifications, the AGW trope is protected by ad hoc special pleadings asserting that they aren't "consequential" :) It's a very typical astrology trick :)
Your first cite shows someone changing their mind - it doesn't have a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement :)
Heck, people convert to Christianity all the time, but that doesn't make Christianity science :)
He thought the science was of good quality. I'm not going to bother looking for a quote from an external scientist who says "I found a sufficient falsifiable hypothesis" anymore than I'd look for a quote from a philosopher who said "I found an atheist who wasn't a criminal". It's a fact so obvious and innocuous that no one bothers to comment on it.
The insulin hypothesis is backed up by observations - the fat-heart hypothesis is not. Taubes is just reporting the science, he's not making it.
The fact of the matter is that even if we are "correcting", it's taken us over 40 years - by that measure, we'll finally realize the error of AGW in about 20 more years :)
The problem is you take up the contrary revolutionary position on every scientific question, that's a very reliable method for being wrong.
That certainly may be *necessary* for AGW to be true, but it's clearly not *sufficient*. Heck, it doesn't even begin to touch on the origins of CO2, or the lack of any sort of relation between human CO2 emissions and measured CO2 levels (CO2 emissions vary widely both seasonally and yearly, but global CO2 levels have been monotonically increasing, as if governed by completely different drivers than simply human input).
So a general hypothesis that the earth will warm in several decades isn't valid because it's not falsifiable for several decades.
And any other hypothesis is insufficient because the only actual thing that will actually prove significant warming in several decades is waiting several decades for significant warming.
What's the point if you've created an impossible standard for a hypothesis or evidence?
But here's the real problem - your SS cite throws a bunch of stuff at the wall, but does not actually specify falsification observations. And if you're honest, you'll admit that when there *are* observations of falsifications, the AGW trope is protected by ad hoc special pleadings asserting that they aren't "consequential" :) It's a very typical astrology trick :)
When an observation clashes with theory you go back and figure out why. Is the observation wrong? Is the theory wrong? Is it wrong in general or is there a special case responsible for this observation. That's not special pleading, that's science. With your model when astronomers found the planetary orbits didn't work out they would have thrown out gravity instead of positing Pluto.
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When I was a kid, early 1970's our government was making plans to cover the ice caps with soot to help alleviate the coming ice age. We are after all, at the end of an inter-glacial warming period. Unfortunately, carbon dioxide constitutes 0.04% of our atmosphere. IF there is a CO2 warming link, we'd have to get the CO2 up to 4% of the atmosphere to stave off the next ice age.
google "Next Ice Age". Man typically does better in a warm climate than a cold climate. Women look better in bikinis than parkas. Choose wisely.
Now that's an ingenious defense of a failure to produce evidence :) "Oh, your honor, we don't have the murder weapon, but it's obvious since there was a murder, there was a weapon, so let's just not comment on it!" :)
I'm sure theists believe that God's existence is so obvious and innocuous that nobody should question it either :)
Really? It seems more obvious that contrary revolutionary positions is what has driven science forward :) Germs? What germs? Evolution? What evolution? Relativity? What relativity? :)
Here's the deal - where science has gone wrong has been when falsifiability has been compromised, and a "consistent message" has been the rule for the day, rather than the required skepticism of dogma that every scientist should practice :)
No, it's not valid because it is not *sufficient*. Yes, a warming earth is *necessary* for AGW to be true, but you cannot simply assert that observed warming is not *natural*. That's a horse of a different color.
It's not an impossible standard - there must be a set of observations excluded by the hypothesis, and a logical argument why the lack of those observations must lead *only* to the conclusion of the hypothesis. AGW has neither.
AGW is filled with nothing but special pleadings. A theory with nothing but special pleadings isn't science, it's cargo-cult science:
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
"There is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. ... It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty — a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid — not only what you think is right about it; other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked — to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.
Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can — if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong — to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.
In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.
Now that's an ingenious defense of a failure to produce evidence :) "Oh, your honor, we don't have the murder weapon, but it's obvious since there was a murder, there was a weapon, so let's just not comment on it!" :)
I'm sure theists believe that God's existence is so obvious and innocuous that nobody should question it either :)
So I assume you were talking about a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement for their research, not the entirety of AGW at once.
So no, no one has achieved your impossible standard.
Really? It seems more obvious that contrary revolutionary positions is what has driven science forward :) Germs? What germs? Evolution? What evolution? Relativity? What relativity? :)
How did relativity go?
Einstein proposed it, people looked it over, proposed alternatives, proposed experiments, and eventually all came around to agreeing.
Same with germs, evolution, gravity, etc.
What you're proposing is something quite different. You're saying relativity got proposed, generally accepted, and then decades later everyone threw it away and went back to square one.
That's a completely different scenario, it's possible, and happens to slight degrees in fields like nutrition and psychology, but what you're proposing with AGW is fairly unprecedented in science.
It's not an impossible standard - there must be a set of observations excluded by the hypothesis, and a logical argument why the lack of those observations must lead *only* to the conclusion of the hypothesis. AGW has neither.
Except climate isn't a simple enough process for a standard like that to be possible. There's feedbacks, oceans, clouds, multiple layers of atmosphere, ice, people doing unpredictable things to the whole system, etc. There's a fundamental complexity you can't ignore, that's why you need thousands of papers studying every detail and then things like the IPCC report to collect it into a whole.
AGW is filled with nothing but special pleadings. A theory with nothing but special pleadings isn't science, it's cargo-cult science
I know what cargo-cult science is, I've read denialist blogs :P
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Aha! An admission at last!
Yes, an astrologist making the claim that Cancers get along with Leos may have a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement for their research, but of course, even if they're proven wrong, that doesn't prove astrology wrong, correct? :)
This is *exactly* not science. Asserting that AGW is supported by all these lesser hypotheses, and that it survives no matter how many of these lesser hypotheses are disproven, is the textbook definition of unfalsifiable :)
And just what part of that required that physicists maintain a consistent message? :)
No, I'm saying newtonian physics got proposed, was generally accepted, and then decades later everyone threw it away and accepted relativity :)
But surely you're not asserting that climate science is anywhere near as useful, reliable, or scientific as relativity, are you? :)
Very good point. Seems impossible to rule out natural climate change, doesn't it, given those uncertainties :)
That's cargo cult science :) Thousands of papers. All of them "consistent with". None of them "consequential" if they're disproven.
Take the ten million people who read their astrological chart today. Take the fundamental complexity of people. Say even a small fraction, just several thousand, had astrological charts that matched *perfectly* with reality.
Is this science? :)
Aha! An admission at last!
Yes, an astrologist making the claim that Cancers get along with Leos may have a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement for their research, but of course, even if they're proven wrong, that doesn't prove astrology wrong, correct? :)
Correct, that does not prove astrology wrong.
Astrology isn't a single hypothesis but a general model for human interaction. It's a poor model as virtually every astrology related hypothesis is shown to be wrong. Then again your month of birth has a definite and quantifiable influence on your chances of making the NHL. It's the totality of evidence that shows that the model is wrong.
This is *exactly* not science. Asserting that AGW is supported by all these lesser hypotheses, and that it survives no matter how many of these lesser hypotheses are disproven, is the textbook definition of unfalsifiable :)
The lesser hypothesis aren't disproven, they're refined. AGW related theories predicted the ice caps would melt, they are. The ice extent increased which requires refinement, but to say the hypothesis was disproven is imprecise.
And just what part of that required that physicists maintain a consistent message? :)
So do you see biologists trying to create a consistent message as evidence that evolution is faulty science?
No, I'm saying newtonian physics got proposed, was generally accepted, and then decades later everyone threw it away and accepted relativity :)
But surely you're not asserting that climate science is anywhere near as useful, reliable, or scientific as relativity, are you? :)
Someone should have my physics 114 prof that Newtonian physics was thrown away because he spent a lot of the course teaching us Newtonian physics.
I suggest a little Asimov on the relativity of wrong.
Very good point. Seems impossible to rule out natural climate change, doesn't it, given those uncertainties :)
Natural climate change is certainly quite possible. That's why the IPCC estimates its probability.
That's cargo cult science :) Thousands of papers. All of them "consistent with". None of them "consequential" if they're disproven.
Take the ten million people who read their astrological chart today. Take the fundamental complexity of people. Say even a small fraction, just several thousand, had astrological charts that matched *perfectly* with reality.
Is this science? :)
That's what you are but what am I?
That's the essence of your argument. A handful of bloggers and scientists are doing real science while a major scientific field has gone cargo-cult.
But you don't even have a consistent model of what you're complaining about. In one instance its cargo cult because they won't allow any contrary information to be published, in the next instance its cargo cult because they're constantly disproving all their theories.
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So, what you're saying is AGW isn't a single hypothesis but a general model for weather and climate.
And, even though these models fail, we still believe in AGW :)
Any natural warming would also predict the ice caps would melt.
Your theory requires more than just refinement, it requires a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis :)
Certainly not at relativistic speeds, right? :)
The problem is the probability of their probability estimate :) With no necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis, they have no way to validate their estimates at all :)
Both are certainly true - pal review lets specious papers into the published record, keeps out contradictory ones, and whenever a pal reviewed paper is debunked, it's simply derided as "inconsequential" to the larger hypothesis.
My argument, which you've conceded to, is that there is no necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement of AGW. Once you've admitted that, how can you insist that AGW is scientific, without opening up the way for accepting astrology and other cargo cult science?
Any natural warming would also predict the ice caps would melt.
Your theory requires more than just refinement, it requires a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis :)
Which brings us back to the fact the only hypothesis you'd accept is impossible to falsify until it happens.
Someone should have my physics 114 prof that Newtonian physics was thrown away because he spent a lot of the course teaching us Newtonian physics.
Certainly not at relativistic speeds, right? :)
Did you miss the point of the Asimov essay? I'd seriously suggest you read it, he's a hell of a writer and it would clear up some misconceptions you're repeating.
Both are certainly true - pal review lets specious papers into the published record, keeps out contradictory ones, and whenever a pal reviewed paper is debunked, it's simply derided as "inconsequential" to the larger hypothesis.
My argument, which you've conceded to, is that there is no necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement of AGW. Once you've admitted that, how can you insist that AGW is scientific, without opening up the way for accepting astrology and other cargo cult science?
I can insist AGW is scientific because a single "necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement of AGW" is not feasible.
You ever wonder why you don't really see a simple, precise, all-encompassing definition of the scientific method? Because there is none. The scientific method is basically a system of critical evidence based reasoning. The specific methods depends on the problem at hand. Sometimes its a double-blind experiment, sometimes a mathematical proof, sometimes an observational study, it depends what you're trying to do.
The basic concept of AGW is simple, more CO2 in the atmosphere means more trapped heat, at a certain point this causes secondary factors to kick in and trap even more heat, this will make the climate as a whole warmer. I think this actually fits the definition of a "necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement of AGW". The problem is that you can't falsify it unless you wait 50 years, at which point we're experiencing the bad thing we would have like to avoid.
Instead we test it using secondary means. Does CO2 do what we'd expect? Yes. Does the atmosphere emit radiation the way we'd expect? Yes. Is the atmosphere warming as we expect? Yes. Is it warming at the precise rate we expect? Not quite. Is the ice melting as we expect? Mostly. etc
Instead your line of reasoning seems to be. We can't easily test it, therefore all the science is junk, therefore it isn't happening!
I'm sorry, that's a bad line of reasoning.
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Not at all. In fact "it happens" (in terms of the globe warming over any given period of time), could very well be 100% natural, so the trick with a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis is that you need to *exclude* the natural explanation (not simply wish it away).
Sadly, though Asimov was a great writer, he wasn't much of a scientist :) Arguably, he was a luddite, but I still love his prose.
The fact that such a grand hypothesis is infeasible is a clue that like the grand hypothesis of astrology, it isn't scientific :)
And the first step of science, its very cornerstone, that which it cannot do without, is falsifiability.
Without falsifiability, no amount of critical reasoning can work - the lack of falsifiability *precludes* the discovery of truth, because observations have no meaning - when *any* observation can be "explained" by a hypothesis, it ceases to be science.
Popper, again for your reference: http://www.stephenjaygould.org...
And exactly what observations would show that in fact, CO2 doesn't drive secondary factors, or that CO2 drivers are overwhelmed by natural variations?
Furthermore, logically explain how the *lack* of those observations leaves us *only* with human CO2 as the culprit.
You've already admitted the complexity and uncertainty of the climate system - the fact that you would believe such a simple formulation is contradictory to the points you've already conceded to.
I refer you to Feynman again - it isn't about *expectations*. The fact that CO2, and atmospheric emissions of radiation, and warming, and rates of warming, and ice melting could all *also* be due to natural variation means we haven't yet covered our foundational responsibility of the scientific method, falsifiability. Lots of things are "consistent with" or "expected" by astrology - that doesn't make it science.
No, my line of reasoning is this - we can't tell through observation whether or not our hypothesis is true or not (because *all* observations are "consistent with" our hypothesis), therefore, the hypothesis isn't scientific.
The tests don't have to be *easy* - they could be horribly complex, requiring all kinds of satellite technology, or radiocarbon dating, or intense data collection. However, the *must* exist.
You'll respond, "well, i've got lots of little tests!", but then make the clever, but unconvincing, claim that any little test that fails isn't enough to invalidate your central conceit. Much like an astrologist making 365 predictions in a year, and claiming that *all 365* must be wrong for his central conceit to be wrong.
Science is science, and it requires falsifiability, regardless of how difficult that bar is. Hunches, gu
Not at all. In fact "it happens" (in terms of the globe warming over any given period of time), could very well be 100% natural, so the trick with a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis is that you need to *exclude* the natural explanation (not simply wish it away).
So you're basically stating it's impossible for science to determine whether pumping CO2 into the atmosphere will make the earth warmer.
Sadly, though Asimov was a great writer, he wasn't much of a scientist :) Arguably, he was a luddite, but I still love his prose.
Funny how instead of addressing the argument you use an ad hominem against Issac Asimov.
And the first step of science, its very cornerstone, that which it cannot do without, is falsifiability.
Without falsifiability, no amount of critical reasoning can work - the lack of falsifiability *precludes* the discovery of truth, because observations have no meaning - when *any* observation can be "explained" by a hypothesis, it ceases to be science.
Popper, again for your reference: http://www.stephenjaygould.org...
Ok.
Explain to me why evolution is science and AGW isn't.
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Actually, I'm making a more nuanced statement - it's impossible for science to determine whether pumping CO2 into the atmosphere will make the earth *significantly* or *detectably* warmer.
It's like saying, "it's impossible for science to determine whether watching G.I. joe as a child will make someone more likely to murder" - theoretically, with a robust enough measuring network, and enough understanding about they myriad factors that makes someone a murderer, you could tease apart these inputs. We know that, in general, violence on TV correlates with murderous behavior, but separating that from other causal factors is surely beyond any practical scientific measure.
So should we ban violence on TV, and censor the airwaves everywhere, just in case? :)
Well, let's follow his argument - once upon a time scientists thought humans were causing global cooling. They were wrong. Today, some scientists believe we are causing global warming. They're still wrong, but certainly not as wrong as the scientists who claimed an ice age was upon us. Some day in the future, scientists will isolate other factors that cause climate change, and in some way they'll be wrong too, but certainly not as wrong as those who claimed that our activity would create an ice age, or that our activity would create a runaway greenhouse.
Now here's a challenge to you - by what measure would you decide that someone was wrong on their central conceit, so that you could compare wrongness by some metric?
Evolution is falsifiable. Find a modern rabbit in the precambrian, and it's back to the drawing board. At that point, you either need to assert time travel exists, or that the rabbit fossil was placed there by aliens, or some other equivalent to god.
It's like saying, "it's impossible for science to determine whether watching G.I. joe as a child will make someone more likely to murder" - theoretically, with a robust enough measuring network, and enough understanding about they myriad factors that makes someone a murderer, you could tease apart these inputs. We know that, in general, violence on TV correlates with murderous behavior, but separating that from other causal factors is surely beyond any practical scientific measure.
So should we ban violence on TV, and censor the airwaves everywhere, just in case? :)
There's no scientific consensus about the effects of violence on TV.
Well, let's follow his argument - once upon a time scientists thought humans were causing global cooling. They were wrong. Today, some scientists believe we are causing global warming. They're still wrong, but certainly not as wrong as the scientists who claimed an ice age was upon us. Some day in the future, scientists will isolate other factors that cause climate change, and in some way they'll be wrong too, but certainly not as wrong as those who claimed that our activity would create an ice age, or that our activity would create a runaway greenhouse.
Now here's a challenge to you - by what measure would you decide that someone was wrong on their central conceit, so that you could compare wrongness by some metric?
Almost no one believe in global cooling, certainly nothing close to the scientific consensus. To add it to the narrative is simply dishonest.
However, even if it had been the consensus for a short period that still works with Asimov's essay. They thought CO2 plus could cover plus a bunch of other anthropogenic factors would affect the planet making it cooler, they were wrong. They improved this to get a basic picture of global warming, they were still wrong. They improved to get a much more complex picture of global warming, they are still wrong, but much closer to the truth. That's how science works.
As for someone being centrally wrong I judge the people and evidence involved. The climate scientists don't strike me as the people to be and spectacularly wrong as you suggest.
Evolution is falsifiable. Find a modern rabbit in the precambrian, and it's back to the drawing board. At that point, you either need to assert time travel exists, or that the rabbit fossil was placed there by aliens, or some other equivalent to god.
Show that CO2 doesn't trap heat in the atmosphere, and it's back to the drawing board. But how do you prove evolution over millions of years? Look at fossils? What about all the gaps? Modern experiments? Well that's just micro-evolution but it doesn't scale up.
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There's as much consensus with violence on TV as there is with AGW :)
That's awfully optimistic of you :) I've got a lot of respect for Judith Curry (a lukewarm), but not so much for Michael Mann. :)
That's part of it, but not all of it - if CO2 levels are actually moderated by ocean temperatures, rather than the other way around say, then it's also back to the drawing board. And there are certainly others - you've got to add much more :)
Let's be precise on what we mean by "evolution" - we're really talking about natural selection moving from simplicity to complexity and other adaptations. Evolution is not the precise claim of a chain of steps from prokaryotes to humans, or any other arbitrary life form, but a specification of how such chains can happen.
In terms of AGW, meteorology to explain why it rained last tuesday in Padova is a specific assertion of an evolutionary chain; the whole of "AGW" therefore is the parallel to the whole of evolution by natural selection.
I'm certain you're not suggesting that in order to make AGW falsifiable you have to have a falsifiable hypothesis for every moment of weather in all history :)
Bottom line is this - the argument isn't that AGW can't possibly be true, the argument is that AGW is thus far lacking the very first step of the scientific method - the necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement.
Not that I agree with everything this guy says, but here's an interesting recent article on hard and soft sciences that touches on this: http://wattsupwiththat.com/201...
That's part of it, but not all of it - if CO2 levels are actually moderated by ocean temperatures, rather than the other way around say, then it's also back to the drawing board. And there are certainly others - you've got to add much more :)
Congrats, you've demonstrated that climate is complex, which means you can't really give a one or two line hypothesis, which according to you means climate science doesn't exist.
Let's be precise on what we mean by "evolution" - we're really talking about natural selection moving from simplicity to complexity and other adaptations. Evolution is not the precise claim of a chain of steps from prokaryotes to humans, or any other arbitrary life form, but a specification of how such chains can happen.
So your definition of evolution seems to be moving further from a testable hypothesis.
I'm certain you're not suggesting that in order to make AGW falsifiable you have to have a falsifiable hypothesis for every moment of weather in all history :)
No, just like a surprising adaption showing up in some beetle, or a version of eyes popping up earlier than we'd expect in the fossil record, doesn't mean evolution isn't science.
Not that I agree with everything this guy says, but here's an interesting recent article on hard and soft sciences that touches on this: http://wattsupwiththat.com/201...
Climate science is a hard science, it's just that the important questions also happen to be very hard.
The question we're discussing is whether they're right on one of the biggest questions, is AGW happening and is it significant.
Btw, here's another necessary and mostly sufficient falsifiable hypothesis. The majority of the warming in the past 100 years can be attributed to human CO2 emissions.
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No, I'm happy to have a multiple line hypothesis. Heck, take a few paragraphs if you need to. Pages even! But the hypothesis shall be falsifiable, contain specific observations that would falsify the hypothesis, and a logical argument that the *lack* of those observations can only lead us to conclude the hypothesis is true.
It's absolutely testable - finding an anachronistic fossil in the precambrian, such as that of a modern rabbit, would falsify it.
You seem to think that "test" means "lab experiment" - they really aren't the same thing. You can test a hypothesis by making a falsifiable prediction, and looking for observations that match - astrophysics is filled with stuff like that, since obviously we can't just setup experiments of solar systems and galaxies.
But you need the falsifiable prediction. No fair going, "if I see more droughts here, or if I see more floods here, AGW is right!" or "if Cancers are sometimes honest, but other times dishonest, astrology is right!"
What observations would falsify that hypothesis? You're simply making a blanket assertion, providing no observations which would show that the vast majority of warming in the past 100 years was *not* attributed to human CO2 emissions!
Now, here's one that would be better - given the vast majority of human CO2 emissions happened after 1950, we shall exclude any warming rates *before* 1950 greater or equal to those *after* 1950. If we see any such warming rates before 1950, we shall conclude that human CO2 emissions are not the primary cause of warming since 1950.
Futhermore, the amount of warming from 1914 - 1950 shall be attributed to natural causes, and if it represents a majority of the warming of the past 100 years, our hypothesis shall also fail.
Of course, the problem is, we've already observed the failure of this particular hypothesis - rates of warming pre-1950 and post-1950 are largely similar. The other problem is that even this *better* hypothesis statement doesn't exclude natural warming changing in the same predicted manner (after all, it's perfectly possible for the world naturally to warm in one mode from 1914-1950, and in another mode from 1950-2014, through natural processes we haven't cataloged or been able to model).
Falsifiability is hard, but it is *key*. Your hypothesis statement needs more work - and arguably, more work just might help! But my estimation is, after years of looking at all the experts in the field, none of which has ever put forth a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement for AGW, is that despite billions upon billions of dollars spent, it just isn't possible. If it was, the IPCC would already have it in their documentation.
No, I'm happy to have a multiple line hypothesis. Heck, take a few paragraphs if you need to. Pages even! But the hypothesis shall be falsifiable, contain specific observations that would falsify the hypothesis, and a logical argument that the *lack* of those observations can only lead us to conclude the hypothesis is true.
Yeah, I'm not that motivated.
It's absolutely testable - finding an anachronistic fossil in the precambrian, such as that of a modern rabbit, would falsify it.
You seem to think that "test" means "lab experiment" - they really aren't the same thing. You can test a hypothesis by making a falsifiable prediction, and looking for observations that match - astrophysics is filled with stuff like that, since obviously we can't just setup experiments of solar systems and galaxies.
But you need the falsifiable prediction. No fair going, "if I see more droughts here, or if I see more floods here, AGW is right!" or "if Cancers are sometimes honest, but other times dishonest, astrology is right!"
How about a list of ten things that could prove AGW false?
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And you know what, that's okay! But I would've expected *someone* to have been this motivated already. Given the billions of dollars of research done in climate science, you would've thought *someone* would've done it already if it was possible.
My bet here is that two things happened:
1) latecomers just assumed it was there;
2) the early proponents were more politically motivated, and glossed over the politically inconvenient fact that their hypothesis wasn't falsifiable.
We've already seen that in the ice core record. Certainly nobody claims they have any sort of climate model that accurately hind casts ice ages.
Same as #1.
Same as #1.
Argument from ignorance. Just because we can't enumerate all natural causes of climate change doesn't mean that we must find them to disprove the pet theory that human CO2 emissions overwhelm all natural factors.
No reason this cannot happen naturally.
Again, no reason why measured outgoing long wave radiation cannot be a natural phenomenon.
Same as #5 and 6, but more importantly, this is one of the grand failures of GCMs that assume a feedback effect from CO2 to water vapor. The predicted humidity increases haven't happened.
Another argument from ignorance.
Necessary, but certainly not sufficient. You could claim that if the speed of light is wrong, then astrology is debunked, but the speed of light itself, or any other physical constant, does not imply a complex theory must be true.
Same as #9
VERY good cite though! They're thinking in the right direction, but haven't made a convincing argument yet. They've certainly hit some *necessary* components (like the spectral constants of CO2), but they cannot reverse the burden of proof and insist we must enumerate all other climate influences before giving up on the central conceit that CO2 from humans drives climate.
And you know what, that's okay! But I would've expected *someone* to have been this motivated already. Given the billions of dollars of research done in climate science, you would've thought *someone* would've done it already if it was possible.
My bet here is that two things happened:
1) latecomers just assumed it was there;
2) the early proponents were more politically motivated, and glossed over the politically inconvenient fact that their hypothesis wasn't falsifiable.
When the IPCC says there's a 95-100% chance that human influence was the dominant cause of global warming between 1951-2010 isn't that a falsifiable hypothesis?
I don't think that counts for events where we don't have sufficient data.
That sounds a lot like the god of the gaps, we can't account for every minor natural forcing so we can't make conclusions about the major forcings.
And every observation with evolution is consistent with ID. AGW is the only good theory that explains all those observations.
They're not reversing the burden of proof. They're saying here's a theory backed by a ton of observations and has imperfectly predicted warming for decades. And no one has been able to offer an alternate theory for what's happening.
I stole this Sig
No. You haven't mentioned any observations that would falsify it. It's an assertion.
You doubt the ice core record and the changes of ice ages?
You've got it the other way around - the god of the gaps is "unless you account for every minor and major natural forcing, you must believe that it was my god of CO2 that did it". Much like creationists say "unless you account for every step of evolution for every organism, you must believe that it was my god that did it".
Every observation of evolution is consistent with ID because ID has no falsifications - it explains *everything*.
Every observation of global temperature and CO2 is consistent with AGW because AGW has no falsifications - it explains *everything*.
Astrology has tons of observations too - what it doesn't have is falsifiability :)
As for the alternate theory, again, you're arguing the god of the gaps - if we can't enumerate all the details, we must believe it's your God :)
Let's not forget the null hypothesis, which to date, has not been excluded - natural climate change.