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Geothermal Heat Contributing To West Antarctic Ice Sheet Melting
bricko sends this news from The University of Texas at Austin:
Thwaites Glacier, the large, rapidly changing outlet of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, is not only being eroded by the ocean, it's being melted from below by geothermal heat, researchers at the Institute for Geophysics at The University of Texas at Austin (UTIG) report in the current edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The findings significantly change the understanding of conditions beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, where accurate information has previously been unobtainable. The Thwaites Glacier has been the focus of considerable attention in recent weeks as other groups of researchers found the glacier is on the way to collapse, but more data and computer modeling are needed to determine when the collapse will begin in earnest and at what rate the sea level will increase as it proceeds. The new observations by UTIG will greatly inform these ice sheet modeling efforts.
The Thwaites Glacier is melting because of Geothermal heat rather than AGW? I must admit that I'm astonished. Not by the cause of the melting, but by the fact that the discovery is being announced without any attempt to spin this as proof of AGW.
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It was so much nicer when we could just attribute disasters to the Gods, sacrifice one or two goats and all be happy about it.
I am siding with those that the climate changes. In my opinion it does. If CO2 curbing means more direct taxes on me, then I am against it.
of whether humans are the cause of global warming, we should stop pollution for it's own sake! Even if we are 0% responsible, we should still cut the amount of stuff we put into the air and water.
And queue the alarmists that will take every little thing and blow so moronically out of proportion that it bears no resemblance to the data or science.
Both sides are enemies of reason and science. If you have a vested emotional interest in a given conclusion and are inclined to ignore evidence that contradicts that position or inclined to exaggerate/fabricate evidence that supports your position then you're an enemy of reason and science.
And BOTH sides of this issue have lots of those people.
There is a moderate middle that just wants to hear the science and deal with this in a reasonable fashion. But they're shouted down by the fanatics on either side that scream "YOU"RE WITH US OR AGAINST US" while foaming at the mouth like diseased animals.
That is what needs to stop. This issue have been hijacked by political interests... left and right when really it should supersede the factional struggles in our political system.
Global warming is not an issue to be used to profit the political ambitions of democrats or republicans. Socialists or capitalists... or any other label you'd prefer.
Global warming must be an issue that is dealt with in a respectful, bipartisan, and transparent fashion.
Anything short of that and any claim to scientific purity is GONE. Utterly irrelevant. It becomes nothing more then a political struggle with the issue of truth being irrelevant to the process. Power politics against power politics. One screaming stupid face against another screaming stupid face... the winner being decided by who can shout louder and longer.
Choose.
Do you want this to be about science or do you want this to be about who can yell louder? Because if you want it to be about science, the politics need to be put away.
And for that, you're going to have to stop trying to twist people's arms and ACTUALLY convince them. Which will mean compromises and respect for contradiction. It will mean going through a long drawn out process where there is no roughshodding, steamrolling, or other terms for the attempt to push things through without going through due process.
Will this take awhile? How fast is the currently process going? What we have no is sort of like stop and go traffic. Everything rushes forward for a moment and the alarmists think they've suddenly broken through. Only to have the whole thing either stop or outright reverse itself taking away most of those gains. Graph the progress over time and its not going fast if its going at all.
So why not try something else? It can't be slower then what you already have and you might find it more pleasant to actually talk respectfully with people rather then try to undermine their very right to participate in the process at all.
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First of all reducing the AGW debate to "both sides" with a neutral "middle ground" is disingenuous - in the count of number of people the balance is very strongly in favor of accepting AGW to degrees ( e.g. this recent set of studies arriving at between 91-97% consensus ). The denialists get disproportionate attention, which is actually a known type of political manipulation (e.g. argument to moderation) and this type of attention has been shown to disproportionately affect people who aren't specialized in the subject matter to moderate their position when no such moderation is required (more on this subject, though I can't find the scientific paper about it right now.
Second, appeal to "scientific purity" is overshooting. Science is constantly advancing, improving models, replacing wrong assumptions with less wrong assumptions. There is nothing "pure" about it, and in no way does it need to be to advance the cause and be useful to our lives. Words such as "purity" are much too loaded to be used, exactly because of the scientific approach. There's no need to deny - the scientific world does not have all the T's crossed and the I's dotted on AGW, just as it doesn't on gravity, physics and quantum theory, but we still happily cross bridges every day. The degree of certainty has long reached sufficient levels to warrant seriously looking at how to realistically (not politically, stupid carbon credits) mitigate instead of discussing a black and white position on AGW's existence.
And thirdly the AGW debate is much bigger than the USA. I understand that you have bipartisan issues across the board (not just AGW, and to be clear: I think both parties are in the wrong) but that doesn't extend to the rest of the world and this is a global issue.
So I think that while I don't entirely agree with your argumentation, I agree with your position. AGW is a science thing - and science has agreed that it exists though not to which degree. The challenge is to find solutions, and that's also with science.
Finally, I find the actual article very intriguing and somewhat challenging to my own views on AGW, as evidenced by my first thoughts on this: could it be that the geology of the antarctic is becoming destabilized because of the lessening of the weight of the ice sheet, in turn causing more geological activity? But that's a conjecture from an explanation that wouldn't challenge AGW, and real science must of course also look for other hypotheses.
Usually (Yellowstone, Iceland, ...) geothermal sources are present tens of thousands, if not tens of millions, of years before present. Unless this is a newly-formed hot spot, the ice sheet has survived millions of years of it. Only the OTHER (read: us) source of heat is now exposing the ice sheet to more heat than it can withstand.
Bring on the geothermal heat "deniers"
You're just trying to justify the ongoing politicization of the issue.
Which is fine. The price of that is that the science is irrelevant and that the issue becomes one purely of politics.
That is the price. And that is not a decision I can make for you. You must make that decision yourself for yourself. But I do think its important that you understand that this choice has a cost.
You are calculating that it is more expedient to attain your goals by applying political pressure rather then go through the tedious process of actually gathering consent.
However, in doing that you force opposing forces to likewise employ political pressure. And when political pressure meets political pressure - logic is irrelevant.
I find it to be rather puzzling that people that think they have the stronger scientific argument have done more then any other to make the science irrelevant to the discussion. You've dramatically undermined your position by doing this and none of the science will be relevant in the discussion until the nature of the discussion changes.
You're going to bring up poor little villagers in the pacific that have lost their village or something due to encroaching tides due to AGW... and the opposition is going to talk about rust belt cities turned into urban wastelands due to punitive ecological controls.
You are not winning the political argument. The international coalition is toothless and if anything more against you then for you. And that is made all the stronger by the poor economy.
In short you have two options.
1. You can have the humility to have the discussion the way you should have in the first place without dismissing people or calling the science settled.
2. You can make this political, render the science irrelevant, and lose to entrenched economic forces.
Choose. You can moderate your position and actually get somewhere while enlightening everyone to the risks and problems of the issue. Or get downed out in a political screaming match and lose.
I know you don't like your choices but those are your choices. Pick one.
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To be clear, the researchers did not find an increase in geothermal activity under the west Antarctic ice sheet, they just mapped sources of geothermal activity and found that there were significant sources. If the models do not take these into account they may greatly underestimate the rate of collapse.
The science is settled.
I don't know what that can possibly mean. Science, last time I checked, does not work that way.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Is that a typical example of your logic, or are you trolling, or just hoping to fool stupid people? On a continent that's 5.4 million square miles, with 11,000 miles of coastline, you pick the stats for the far inland south pole station -- probably one of the coldest places on Earth at that altitude -- and conclude that since no melting can occur there, it can't occur anywhere on the whole continent?
Here's a little hint for you: you know that 11,000 miles of icy coastline I just mentioned? Guess what's rubbing up next to the ice? Liquid water. Get where the warmest temperatures are? Near that big mass of liquid water: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
For God's sake, educate yourself. Because Fox News and El Rushbo aren't doing the job.
The science is settled.
I don't know what that can possibly mean. Science, last time I checked, does not work that way.
Yes, it does. It's the only way for practical research to ever happen. You can't go around questioning fundamental assumptions at every turn. This doesn't mean that those fundamental assumptions are "settled" for all time, but from a practical standpoint, science must treat some core assumptions as effectively "settled" in order to get on with any detailed research.
Example: I accept that in normal everyday life, that light obeys the "Law of Reflection." That is SETTLED science. When I'm driving my car, I don't wonder: "Gee, maybe I should do another experiment with the rearview mirror just to be sure," nor do I worry, "Oh, maybe the Law of Reflection won't work today, so I should be careful and not rely on my mirrors to tell me where things are."
More importantly, if something goes wrong with my mirrors in the real world, my first thought is definitely NOT "Oh, the Law of Reflection is probably wrong." Instead, I assume the mirrors are damaged or poorly designed or something else. At this point, that's the ONLY reasonable conclusion to come to -- as a scientist.
The science is settled.
That's what we mean by "settled" in everyday life. When we say a disagreement is "settled," for example, we don't mean that we are denying the possibilityof ever disagreeing again. We mean that we've reached a practical stability point, and it's not worth continuing the discussion further at this time.
From a scientific standpoint, it's necessary to establish these core assumptions within a research paradigm so that we can work on actually refining our work without running around questioning fundamental assumptions all the time. If you think Thomas Kuhn's notions of paradigms and scientific "revolutions" is too extreme, a very reasonable alternative is Imre Lakatos's notion of research programs , which was developed in response to Kuhn. From the Wikipedia article:
A Lakatosian research programme is based on a hard core of theoretical assumptions that cannot be abandoned or altered without abandoning the programme altogether. More modest and specific theories that are formulated in order to explain evidence that threatens the 'hard core' are termed auxiliary hypotheses. Auxiliary hypotheses are considered expendable by the adherents of the research programme - they may be altered or abandoned as empirical discoveries require in order to 'protect' the 'hard core'. Whereas Popper was generally read as hostile toward such ad hoc theoretical amendments, Lakatos argued that they can be progressive, i.e. productive, when they enhance the programme's explanatory and/or predictive power, and that they are at least permissible until some better system of theories is devised and the research programme is replaced entirely.
For the majority of climate scientists today, the assumption of global warming has become part of a "hard core" in their research programs. They believe that it's now more productive to treat this assumption as "settled" and focus on investigating other aspects of climate problems, rather than worrying about continuing to debate this fundamental question.
I suppose there are a few scientists who would continue to debate this issue specifically about global warming. But you simply cannot deny that actual scientific research in general necessarily has to accept "core assumptions" as "settled" in order to make any progress.
All scientists rely on funding. And if I were looking to get rich, I'd be producing results favorable to the denialists. There's a lot more money there, and a lot less competition.
Kythe
just saying its not political, doesnt make it true. This is a topic that has been abused by politicians in the same way immigration and drug reform have been. Both sides like to pay lip service but they only talk about it because they know it divides, We have real pressing issues that are affecting us *TODAY* that politicians dont talk about in any real substance because they would rather have americans bickering about abortion, something that is a blip on the radar in reality, or the death penalty, where we have had an avg of 2 executions a year since 76, in other words a non issue.
meanwhile they fundraise on global warming and these other issues while our bridges rot away, our people are living paycheck to paycheck more and more, and no one wants to talk about those issues seriously
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
I will believe the science is settled when the journals that carry articles about climate stop rejecting articles that are not "in line" with the alleged settled science, especially those articles that are brought forward by scientists who don't put the word "climate" in front of "scientist" or "researcher" when they describe themselves.
"Science" is about exploring boundaries and ideas, and a "memory hole" has no place at all in science. "Science" is about evaluating the data and resulting theories, not the person bringing the data and theories forward. "Science" is about recognizing new facts and incorporating them into existing theories...or throwing out the old theories when the new facts require those theories to be stretched all out of shape to shoehorn in the new facts, much like politicians gerrymander the boundaries of voting districts to achieve a desired result.
Why have the various predictions been so drastically wrong? That says the science is not settled. If it were, the results would better match the predictions. Especially the doomsday predictions. Not to mention the flip-flops between "global warming" and "global cooling" -- how does the settled science square with those changes in view? I'm reminded of the boy crying "Wolf!"...
I agree that there are trends in temperature change that needs to be watched closely, but I disagree that there is one "magic" solution. Indeed, I look at reduced industrial CO2 emissions as only one of many things we should look to do. For example, have you considered growing grass on the roof of your house, and on the body of your car? How about roofing over car parks, and growing plants on them? Have you looked into dense, CO2-consuming flora on the top of your office building? How many trees have you planted on your property, especially large-leaf ones?
"Climate change" is not a "Someone else's problem" -- it's YOUR problem, too. Why do I see lots of talk but little personal action? Show us how to solve the problem, don't just say "you do it."
Which means you're justifying not negociating but imposing your will. Which means you're going for the political option.
Which means the science under your policy will be irrelevant as to whether you succeed or fail to impose your will. It will come down literally to whether your faction is more politically powerful then your opposition.
The right or wrong of it will be irrelevant.
Do the logical math. Watch Variable1 interact with Variable2 through EquationX.
Check your premises and think the issue through.
What you are saying is "I think I'm right so everyone should do what I say"... that's great but you have to convince people not only that you're right but that your solutions to the problem are right.
If you refuse to go through that process then what you have to do is overwhelm/strong arm people into bending to your will. And that means whether you are right or wrong won't matter. You can strong arm people into saying the sun is made of puppies that way. Look at what is going on in the Islamic world for a good example of what I'm talking about. Do you think things work that way over there because someone convinced everyone that was the best way to run a society? No. They just threatened to kill anyone that disagreed with them. They've fought literally hundreds of wars over that over the last 400 years. You have no idea the bloodshed. But they got what they wanted.
And being right or wrong doesn't matter if you're forcing people. You're just forcing them. End of story.
I'd like to think my society is better then that. That we can arrive at common action through a less coercive policy. But that will require patience and flexibility on everyone's part to arrive at action that a plurality feels acceptable.
Any such policy is not going to make radicals on either side happy. The radicals on the right and radicals on the left will not like it because they both want the reciprocal extreme options.
What shall it be? Are you willing to try to go through a rational dialog on the issue or do you want to use power politics to compel people?
Because the choices you make there will have consequences as how things are run and maintained.
If you maintain your authority at gun point you can get people to comply. But the instant the gun wavers.. is dropped... things can shift very quickly and possibly violently.
This is an appeal for moderation, patience, and civility.
The environmental movement has damaged itself by allowing itself to be hijacked by political factions that seek to use it for their own selfish political gain. That said, if those same political forces dominate they will probably give you everything you want.
So that's a calculation you'll have to make. Of course, if you lose politically... you'll find no cooperation in the political organizations that struggled to shut it down. They'll oppose you reflexively.
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It's worth pointing out that the increased geothermal heat estimate only contributes a few per cent to the melting of the Thwaites glacier. It's predominately AGW and natural calving. I'm not saying this paper isn't important (we all know about the straw that broke the camel's back), just pointing out that it doesn't provide an alternate explanation to AGW for the melting of the Thwaite glacier.
It doesn't mean, "the science is complete".
It does mean that the results so far show with confidence that humans are responsible for the majority of global warming. This conclusion is deemed strong enough to act on.
There is still much more work to be done on nailing down mechanisms, reducing error bars etc, but none of this is likely to change the above conclusion. That would require both strong new evidence and a counter-explanation for all the results so far.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
I will accept that the science is settled when the scientists and politicians who claim that the science is settled stop jetting around the world to meetings to discuss how they can get other people to stop jetting around the world to meetings.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
> There was an article here in /. just a week or two ago saying that the Antarctic Sheet is perplexing to climatologists because it is _increasing_, not decreasing.
Increasing in surface area but decrease in volume. This isn't complicated, but if you won't look stuff up then it is easy to say that all exaggeration is equal. Kind of like -1 and +10 are both numbers so they are really just the same thing.
Well, if you're precisely at the South Pole, any direction is north. Fortunately, all of Antarctica is not precisely at the pole. Western Antarctica is the part of the continent that is in the western hemisphere. There, that wasn't so hard, was it?
As I made clear, your two options here are as follows:
1. Make this about science and abandon the politics. Discuss things with people. Be patient. Do not attempt to compel people to comply. Accept that there will be differences of opinions. Work for mutually agreeable solutions.
2. Make this about politics and render the science irrelevant. Try to force people with law. Do no argue. Do not negotiate. Test your political will against their political will. Shout them down. Shut them down. Take no prisoners and offer no mercy.
Those are your two options. And as much as you've said the science is settled, you've apparently chosen option 2 which means the science doesn't matter. Its all politics if you go down that road. The winner there will not be whomever has science on their side but whomever has a stronger political coalition.
And I should note... you're losing the political fight.
I strongly suggest that if you want to have a chance to win... you choose option 1. Option 2 is leading to a pathetic defeat.
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meanwhile they fundraise on global warming and these other issues while our bridges rot away, our people are living paycheck to paycheck more and more, and no one wants to talk about those issues seriously
The future and the present are both relevant. They're talking about global warming not because it's not a real problem, since it is, but because they can make a buck pretending to do something about it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If you make this a political struggle then your arguments are ultimately political ones.
What will matter is who supports you, how many of them there are, and how much political will and force you can bring on the issue.
You will also need to sustain that effort because you will have only attained your goal by overwhelming other factions that will likely come back for reprisals later if they feel you slighted them.
Which is what you have happening now. Look at all the reversals the AGW lobby has faced lately. Seriously. Look at the countries that have reversed course... that accepted your policy and then repudiated it.
You've gone in most cases one step forward and two steps back.
What is going on in Australia is a good example. We're also seeing rejection in Canada, most of Asia, France, and we're even seeing wobbling in Germany which is just about the strongest supporter the AGW has at this point.
Look... You have no more control over the wider battle taking place then I do. I'm just pointing out that these choices have consequences and that the results are predictable if you understand the rules.
By making this a political battle what you've done is make the environmental issue itself irrelevant. The politicians you rely upon to push your issue don't even really care about your issue. To them, its a weapon. They see it as a means to power. A talking point. Something they can say to embarrass rivals and increase poll numbers. Which means they don't care if you ever actually accomplish anything.
What they care about is if they look good from one moment to the next. Grasp that they can do this for another million years without accomplishing anything and so long as they keep getting elected they won't care.
That's politics.
If you want to actually accomplish something you have to take it away as a weapon and rather make it an issue that supersedes political rivalry. You have to make it clear it isn't sufficient to argue or try to do something. Rather you have to actually accomplish something. And if nothing is accomplished you can't reward them simply for trying.
This is one of the reasons the money in politics is so incidious because so often what is actually going on is that politicians will suggest they might do something just to get the campaign donations flowing. Its sort of like a protection racket. Would be terrible of taxes went up on your lobster fisheries... maybe you should lobby congress to make sure that doesn't happen. Imagine that but with every industry and every coalition. Then add the dollars up.
This is one of the reasons the tech issues are getting rattled right now. Washington sees all this money in Silicon valley and not enough of it is getting spent on lobbyists and campaign donations. So they fuck with the tech sector until the money starts flowing.
The various issues like AGW are no different in many cases.
They're revenue streams.
You go the political route... and its quite likely you'll pay and pay and pay... and never get anything. They'll bleed you white... of money... of will... they'll leave you disappointed, depressed, and without hope.
It takes awhile to see how it works. You watch the pattern... you see how they do things... and this is the result. Sorry to say.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
We don't have much more than a few data points on Martian temperatures, so it is not really possible to know whether there are any long term warming or cooling trends. Mars has no oceans and only a very thin atmosphere, which means there is very little thermal inertia. This makes Mars more susceptible to large swings in temperature. Orbital eccentricity contributes far greater changes to Martian climate than to that of the Earth because variations in Mars' orbit are five times greater than the Earth. Massive dust storms may also play a big role in changing the energy balance.
The only papers I can find on Venus indicate that it is likely cooling, but again, data points are sparse so it is inconclusive.
One thing is for certain. If they are warming, it is not because of a warming sun. We know this for sure because the sun has been cooling over the last 40 years.
The research shows you are wrong, and yet you still post. That's why your remarks deserve nothing more than "childish" attacks as you are trying to debunk an entire field of science by writing a few childish lines of pseudologic in a slashdot post, and acting as if you are some sort of amazing free-thinker. You're not. You are wrong, and the worst thing is this: you have the tools to easily educate yourself on just how wrong you are, yet refuse to do so. You are part of the problem.
I agree, we should stick to the science. Here you go:
If you dispute this science, then I recommend publishing your own peer-reviewed papers, your own models, and your own alternative hypotheses in the scientific journals. I see a lot of skeptics nit-picking the science, but not many actually taking the effort to publish in the scientific forums.
I eagerly await one of the skeptics out there to please post an equally substantive list of references to "balance" my citations, so everyone can review and compare them.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
All the raw data is available. Everything is available. Just because you want to think it isn't, and don't look for it, and ignore its very existence doesn't mean it doesn't exist. You sound like an absolute fool parroting these nonsensical claims.
i worded that wrongly. What I was intending to say was some of the measures some of these politicians are taking seem to be based on fear mongering rather than logic.
I would wager no scientist in their right mind would say that we need to raise taxes on oil and oil based products 100% or 50% even in the short term. I would think that most scientists would be more reasonable in the approach. We do need to get off fossil fuels, even if you dont believe in global warming but because eventually they will run out, probably not in our lifetimes but it will happen.
the rational answer is to continue funding R+D, while at the same time making the oil refining process more environmentally friendly.
it seems that some politicians want to save the world, at the expense of the people, especially the poor. just 10 years ago I could get 300 miles on 10 bucks, now that same 300 miles costs me 64 bucks. to top that off the costs of goods have gone up due to this as well and the poor keep getting poorer and the rich keep getting richer but i dont believe its because of greedy people as much as i believe its due to inept politicians trying to play god. its a mixture of both of course, but we have more oil flowing now than anytime in the past, there is no excuse for it to cost as much as it does
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
"People on the coast can move or build sea walls or something.
It's not that big a deal. There is plenty of uninhabited non-coastal land."
Sea level rise is not the biggest problem of climate change/global warming.
In recorded and pre-recorded history, the weather/climate phenomenon thst has killed the most people is drought.
While there may be some regions in the north that are able to grow more crops due to the warmer weather, most of it won't be suitable for farming.
The world won't be able to support N billion people if we let it warm by 5 degrees
Yes, it does. It's the only way for practical research to ever happen. You can't go around questioning fundamental assumptions at every turn. This doesn't mean that those fundamental assumptions are "settled" for all time, but from a practical standpoint, science must treat some core assumptions as effectively "settled" in order to get on with any detailed research.
The level of ignorance is astounding. "questioning fundamental assumptions" is exactly what science is all about. Nothing is ever settle in science. Major breakthroughs occur when you successfully challenge fundamental assumptions. And this gets modded up. It's no wonder the current climate debate is so off kilter.
Who is John Galt?
I would wager no scientist in their right mind would say that we need to raise taxes on oil and oil based products 100% or 50% even in the short term.
I imagine you meant the long term? Or for the short term?
it seems that some politicians want to save the world, at the expense of the people, especially the poor.
We all breathe. Reducing pollution actually means more jobs. Doing things right is harder.
just 10 years ago I could get 300 miles on 10 bucks, now that same 300 miles costs me 64 bucks.
Driving on petrofuel is unsustainable. You haven't done anything to change your habits on your own, so now you're being forced.
but we have more oil flowing now than anytime in the past, there is no excuse for it to cost as much as it does
Yes there is, and the excuse is that you have to be some kind of sociopath to think it's a good idea to be burning oil as fuel. It's too valuable to burn, and the secondary effects are harmful to our very existence. We have no need to burn it. For example have the technology (and have at least since the 1980s) to replace one hundred percent of our transportation fuel consumption with biofuels in a way which is carbon-neutral or even carbon-negative. As ever, I refer you to this DoE report and information on AIWPS, as well as on Butanol.
I'm tired of your the dichotomy between economic development and ending the wasteful, harmful, and completely unnecessary refining and subsequent combustion of oil. By all means, make plastic out of it. It saves an enormous amount of energy as compared to making plastics from other sources, and the plastics can be recycled. You're repeating this logical fallacy solely to avoid taking responsibility for your own actions, and you're only impressing others suffering from the same brand of cognitive dissonance. In fact, it is wholly possible to reduce and perhaps even eliminate harmful emissions, or at least account for them (e.g. by carbon-fixing schemes) such that there is effectively zero negative impact to human health and biosphere persistence, the latter currently being an absolutely irreplaceable requirement for the former. We have numerous (one might even be tempted to say innumerable) solutions which we are not putting into place for political-economic reasons which boil down to protection of profit for a privileged class of self-entitled robber barons.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It wasn't stating that AGW is real that generated the controversy but rather the proposed solutions to it.
If you told the world "AGW is real but no one has to do anything about it" then you wouldn't be getting the blow back you're seeing now. The various factions you are dealing with are mostly undermining the validity of AGW as a proxy to attack the proposed fixes for AGW which is really what they have a problem with in the first place.
Once you understand that, you can grasp that what you really have here is a negociation between different groups. Some factions offered solutions... many of those ideas were rejected. They tried to push them anyway after they were rejected... which meant the political factions that rejected it had to prove why getting their acceptance was important or they'd have no legitimacy in that issue or other issues.
These factions you must appreciate would have no value if they were unable to get their will enforced. Who cares about republicans or democrats? who cares about labor or conservatives or liberal democrats or greens or whatever?
Well... they make you care. They must or they have no value. No reason for anyone to waste any time with them at all.
So... Lets understand that the issue of AGW itself is not really an issue of contention. Its the proposed solutions.
Are you willing to negotiate on those and arrive at win win options that are acceptable to a plurality of factions? You won't make literally everyone happy but if you can make 75 percent happy then we'll be in good standing.
If you can't do that... then you you're unfortunately going to have to struggle against their political power to get what you want. And in doing that the environmental issue will get wound up with the thousand other things those political factions are trying to do all the time and in the end your issue won't matter. It will be just one of a thousand things they bounce between while trying to get reelected. A talking point... a means to generate funding or get out the vote. Little more.
I obviously think that's a big mistake. But maybe I'm wrong and you'll overwhelm all political rivals, your politicians will be honorable, everyone will maintain political will against entrenched financial interests, and the world will be saved by your enlightened will.
I obviously don't find that very likely... but that's just my opinion.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
It means there is a large and growing body of research that has collected diverse and disparate lines of evidence that support the major governing theory on the topic. In particular, it's enough that we can say with a high degree of confidence that the fundamental aspects of the theory of global warming are well founded and reasonably accurate.
The biggest problem with this argument is that our level of understanding of the "climate" system on this planet is miniscule when compared to the complexity of the system. This discovery is just another example. The other problem is that anything that challenges the theory of global warming seems to be either twisted to fit the current theory or ignored. The theory is supposed to be changed to fit the evidence.
That's what some pendants would like you to think. They want you to ignore the fact that science is both a process and the body of knowledge collected (and verified) through that process.
You seem to ignore the fact that science is all about challenging the "verified" body of knowledge collected. That's actually the primary point of science: doing experiments to test current theories and looking for evidence that doesn't fit current theories.
Who is John Galt?
Renewables are only profitable if they are subsidized.
Oil is only profitable if it is subsidized. Besides all the usual subsidies to oil companies, there's also being permitted to ignore externalities. For example, the EU requires companies to deal with their waste, which most of them are handling by making it highly recyclable. If the refineries were required to deal with the inherent waste of selling their product, it would cost vastly more than it does today.
What's really pathetic is that I don't even advocate doing anything other than charging the cost of externalities. Instead of permitting the petrochemical companies to push them off onto everyone alive, I propose that they should have to pay them. For example, when you buy fuel, the cost should include the cost of fixing the carbon. If the fuel was produced carbon-neutrally, then there won't be any cost for that. This is a way in which a tariff can be applied equally to all fuels and yet drive people towards carbon-neutral fuels.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Let me phrase it in science-fiction-y terms for you: We must maintain our life support system at all costs. If we don't do something significant and positive about CO2 (or looked at another way, negative about carbon, ho ho) and other major climate-changing activities like deforestation, then the economic impact will be the very last thing on your mind, or on anyone else's. Oddly enough fixing one problem will help fix the other problem, but nobody important seems to give a shit.
Hey, I could be wrong, this could all be a lot of shit, but when the physics of decades ago and the physics of today agree that these concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere will cause harmful effects, and we are actually seeing effects of the kind long since predicted, I take that as a sign that the concerns are probably real and we should do something about them. Complaints about minor variances in models of a chaotic system are just wankery. The credible models only disagree, and then only to slight extents, on how fucked we are and when we will be completely fucked.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I think you're confusing Antarctic sea ice with the Antarctic ice sheet. The maximum sea ice extent has grown somewhat recently but the ice sheet has been losing ice.