Genetic Rescue Efforts Could Help Coral Shrug Off Warmer Oceans

The Washington Post reports that research published last week in the journal Science indicates that coral reefs may be less vulnerable to ocean temperature changes than has been widely believed, especially given human intervention. A slice: Some corals already have the genes needed to adapt to higher ocean temperatures, and researchers expect those genes will naturally migrate and mix with corals under stress over time ... And that process could potentially be sped up artificially. ... Giving coral evolution a boost isn't an entirely new concept. Some scientists have already suggested genetically modifying corals through artificial breeding, or doing the same for the tiny microbes that live inside corals and are essential to reef growth.

Comments

Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

You know those islands made out dead coral? Yeah... how did those get there? The thing is that coral is really really sensitive and dies really really easily. But its a species with a survival strategy more like bacteria then barn owls.

Yes, they die... they die easily and they die in huge numbers. But there are huge numbers of them to die. And while some die, some also survive. And this means that coral actually evolves very quickly. Any adaptation tends to not make it less death prone but the new strain of coral is happy in the new ocean conditions.

Change the temperate of the water? Coral dies.
Touch the coral? The coral dies.
Change the ocean chemistry in anyway? The coral dies.

Its super sensitive. But that's okay. Because while some coral dies some lives. And the coral that survives won't die to whatever killed their sires.

This is Tuesday for coral. Nothing new.

Does that mean we should f' up the coral and not care about damage we do the environment? Of course not... that's f'ing stupid. However, we also need to be less ignorant in the way we respond to issues.

I'm seeing people freak out about tress being cut down to make paper for example and the morons complaining about this tend to not realize that the trees being cut down were literally planted like we plant corn to produce paper/lumber trees.

Paper is as renewable a resource as cucumbers. We're not running out of either.

And the coral situation is analogous in that people are not grasping that the resiliency of coral is not in that it doesn't die but that it dies and adapts.

We have this big wide open beautiful world and it is full of many diverse species that all have different survival strategies. The strategies of ground squirrels are not going to be the same as the strategies of honey bees or the strategies of pine trees or the strategies of coral.

Its the 21st century, chaps. Stop freaking out like a bunch of fucking peasants.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

The jury is more out on those matters than the progressive activists would like to have people believe.

The 98 percent consensus for example arrived at that number by collecting a big sample of published papers and citing any paper that referenced climate change as the author supporting the most extreme predictions of climate change.

This included papers that argued against climate change.

The issue with climate change is that its too political to be scientific at this point. People aren't being rational on the issue. People get angry and get invested in their tribal entanglements. And because of that they can't with integrity claim to be forming opinions based on science... especially when a great many of the supporters have made zero effort to actually research the issue. Most of them didn't get past those little cartoons with the squiggly sun rays. And then they enter discussions can claim "science"... because of the squiggly sun ray cartoon they saw.

It goes back to something Richard Feynman said:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

So much of it is cargo cult science. Remember that polar bear article we saw about how they are eating dolphins now... evidence? One researcher saw one dolphin getting eaten by a polar bear... the dophin in question appears to have just died and then been scavanged by the polar bear. Which is something polar bears have been eating since always. If a dead human washed up on the ice the polar bears would eat that too. Its free calories.

But these things are in the news without irony all the time. And because of that the reports have to be read with great skepticism because there is clearly a political agenda on the issue.

My opinions on climate change? I don't know. I know only that the people telling me to trust them have a track record of being wrong and don't seem to have the requisite scientific humility and integrity to be able to self correct their own errors. And for me at least, that would suggest that they're not very good scientists in the first place regardless of the issue.

I'd really prefer if a different crop of people were working on this... not people that ascribed whatever my ideology happens to be but rather people that examined the issue indifferent to the political advantage of any of the factions.

Until that happens, any report on this subject has to be taken with a grain of salt. Price of making Al Gore and Bill Nye the spokespeople of the thing.

Re:Coral dies all the time

[Iamthecheese]

You're right! Some coral will survive, and its progeny will be able to better survive.

But I don't care about that, because that's going to take thousands of years. What I'm worried about NOW is whether the ecosystem in 20 years will be able to support another 500 million people. You didn't address that at all. And stop thinking your opinions make you better than others. It's arrogant and creates ignorance.

Re:Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

No, it doesn't take thousands of years. As I said, they have a survival strategy more akin to bacteria or algae. They die easily but they adapt very quickly.

You've seen the bacteria become resistant to anti bionics. it is a similar situation.

You kill 98 percent of the bacteria... and what remains is resistant. Eventually if you keep dosing the same bacteria with the same anti biotics... it will become immune.

Which doesn't mean you can't kill 98 percent of it again with something else. And of course, if you stop hitting it with those anti biotics, it will actually lose the resistance.

  Point being... it dies easily and adapts quickly.

Re:Coral dies all the time

[dunkelfalke]

Maybe if you would just started thinking before you write something, just for once.

Yes, corals die easily, and some survive and adapt. But only if the change is small enough to allow the survival of some. If the change is strong enough or happens too quickly, there won't be any survivals.

And as for trees, sure the trees were planted. But they were planted where the trees used to grow and were cut in first place.

It is the same in every post you write. You accuse others of being stupid but you yourself are unable to look beyond superficial, unable to see interrelationships, too dense to understand positive feedback loops and unintended consequences.

Re:Coral dies all the time

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'd be curious to know how well they deal with pH changes. We already know, from observing coral bleaching during short term warm periods, that they are touchy and somewhat feeble; but the survivors are capable of recolonizing, or building atop depending on the details, the skeletons of their fallen.

If those structures come under attack, or if wringing calcium ions out of the water becomes more difficult and energy intensive, they may have larger problems. As might, unfortunately, a surprisingly large number of other ecologically important aquatic organisms. That could really be a downer.

Re:Coral dies all the time

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Saving the corals might actually be the easy part: It wouldn't be a fun job, unless you are a real saltwater aquarium masochist; but taking 'cuttings' and propagating them in captivity is reasonably well understood, at least for the ones that have historically merited the attention. Even if you can't modify them to make them more durable, there is lots of ocean currently too cold for a given coral ecosystem that, if warmed, will become a viable location for transplants from the areas that are becoming too warm(the current cold-water reefs, which do exist; but don't get the attention of the tropical ones, may be pretty screwed, Rost reef, in the frigid waters off Norway, will be pining for the fjords).

However, much of the charm of coral reefs is the amount of ecosystem that they support. All sorts of weird stuff, the stuff that eats it, and so on to the top of the food chain. Transporting that, or convincing it to swim in the right direction, will be a much greater challenge. Plus, unlike the fecund swarms of tiny organisms, where 'genetic diversity' fits in a medium fish tank, and could probably re-mutate from a monoclonal strain in a matter of decades; larger organisms lose genetic diversity much more easily as individuals die, and don't recover nearly as easily. Some of the larger fish, say, will be will be a pretty inbred and sorry lot(exquisitely vulnerable to disease, as monocultures always are), if most of them die and a new population is seeded from a few transplants.

If there were some sort of payoff in it, we could probably have 'coral farms' up and running in short order; but they'd have roughly the same resemblance to natural reefs that tree farms producing papermill feedstock do to mature forests, or alfalfa fields do to prairies.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Attila Dimedici]

You really need to learn a bit more about how the real world works, because greenhouses do not use CO2 to capture heat. They use CO2 to stimulate plant growth. A greenhouse works because the translucent walls (whether glass, plastic, or some other material) allows light to pass through. When that light strikes an opaque surface some of it becomes heat. The walls do not readily allow that heat to escape.

As a matter of fact, CO2 does not work to capture heat in a greenhouse, there is just not enough room for CO2 to pay a significant role in capturing heat on the scale to which a greenhouse is built.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

If I were some paid shill, wouldn't I be posting as an AC like you? After all, your account type is perfect for sock puppeting and trolling.

Where as I actually logged in.

AC's have no grounds to criticize the posting history or conduct of people that ACTUALLY log in.

If you have something to say about the issue. Fine. But you don't get to talk about me or anyone else that logs in. For all anyone knows you're advocating pedophilia in other threads. No one would know because you're too chicken shit scared to post under even a fake name. And with this you still presume to judge me?

Fuck off, shit stain.

Re:Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

... Sigh. Size is relative to the number of actors responding is it not?

If you knock a big building down and there's only one person there to rebuild it then it will take a long time to rebuild it. If there are lots of people then the building could be rebuilt rapidly.

So yes, the reef is large but the amount of coral that will survive will also be proportionally huge. What will likely happen is a certain layer of the coral will get trashed. Certain depths are going to have more or less favorable conditions and depths outside of those ranges are going to get hit first and harder. While the coral that is relatively shielded which will be all along the reef... will be less effected or not effected at all. And the uneffected coral along with coral that survives in the damaged areas will recolonize the reef.

This is a natural part of the life cycle of coral.

Complaining about this is like complaining that a pine forest burns down. Pine cones... the seed pods dropped by pine trees, only open after a fire. The heat causes the cones to open. What is more, the forests basically encourage fire at intervals. The fires are thus part of the natural life cycle of pine forests. They grow, they kill off all other plant species under them by making the soil acidic with their needles, and then they dry out, burn, and reseed the forest with only their own species. The pine trees get a head start in populating the forest... and by the time any other species starts to invade the pine needles are already getting spread on the soil both blanketing the earth so that saplings can't get sunlight and making the soil acidic. Rinse and repeat.

This is just nature.

The point of a coral reef is not for you to take pictures of it and go "oh pretty"... its a natural dynamic system and it has dealt with far worse than anything that is happening to it today.

It is important to remember that coral is a very old species. It is older than crocodiles and other similar highly adaptive species that have survived through some very rough times.

How does coral survive these things despite dying so easily? Because it adapts rapidly. It is easily killed. But it adapts quickly as well.

Re:Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

Oh this should be good... *gets more popcorn and lube*

No, coral has adapted to extreme changes in the past. Coral is killed very easily by almost any tiny change. A small change in temperature kills coral. Introducing almost any chemical that it isn't familiar with will kill it. Any kind of abrasion by anything but water will often kill it.... Really it just goes on and on.

And yet it is one of the most ancient species on this planet. Why don't you actually think about that for a change? How has such an ancient species survived so long despite being killed by nearly anything?

Because dying like that is part of its survival strategy. It isn't a barn owl or a ferret or a dolphin. Its survival strategies are very very different. The islands of the Caribbean are BUILT out of dead coral. A fair amount of the sand is pulverized coral.

The oceans are fucking teeming with the leavings of dead coral. And we're talking about dead coral from way back when. This isn't new.

As to paper mill trees taking up space that used to host a native forest... you could say the same thing about the field we planted wheat in or the field we planted soy beans in or the place we put your house on.

Yet I don't see you morons saying we shouldn't eat food because all the farm land should be returned to prairie land. Why is that? Why are you bitching about the tree farms which are relatively more in harmony with nature but you don't complain about wheat fields?

There is a tendency amongst people like you to respond with childish feelings rather than cold rationality. And it doesn't serve you well when it comes to discussions about ecology.

Nature doesn't give a flying fuck what you feel about anything. Mother nature is a cold blooded cunt. Yeah, I used the C word. She's utterly heartless. She deals in survival. You either adapt or you die. And she sheds not a fucking tear for anything that doesn't make the cut. What you're cute and cuddlingly and make cute cooing noises when your belly is rubbed? Her only question is "did you survive?" No? Then enjoy oblivion.

If you have a rational ecological point, I'd love to hear it.

But note this, the trees we harvest are not immortal in the first case. You do know trees die right? They're not highlander trees. And on top of that, if you just let them all fall on top of each other in the forest... in most cases that means the forest is going to burn.

Which is further funny because people like you don't like forests to burn. Never mind that the native americans burned the forests and the fields all the time. It was something they actively did to control their environment. Whenever the undergrowth started to get thick, the native americans burned it.

And I cite them not because I think they're better ecologists than us, but because people like you tend to think of them as pure unreprochable guardians of the earth. So perhaps pointing out they intentionally burned the forests with some regularity might cause you to pull your head out of your ass for a moment.

As to what I'm able to look beyond... your perceptions are so limited and scripted that you can't even be credited with having real opinions. Everything you believe is what someone else told you to believe. You're more a puppet than a man. And you presume to judge me?

Prove to me you're not just a robot. Break with the script for a moment. Show me that you're able to have an original thought. Something YOU came up with on your own.

You might not like what I have to say... but at least what I say came out of my own mind which is more than you can claim.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[fyngyrz]

"Adds heat" is a woefully inadequate simplification of whether or not it's an issue to be concerned with. When temperature goes up, other things change as a result of the relevant phsyics. For instance, the evap/precip cycle accelerates, carrying more warm air and moisture up, and more cool air and moisture down. CO2 in the upper atmosphere reduces radiation by a factor, but more heat up there, more often, increases radiation. More CO2 almost universally implies conditions better for plants. More and healthier plants means more of all sorts of things and less of others.

Dire predictions: Warming moves the zone(s) within which plants and animals flourish north. There's plenty of room to go, a great deal of northern area is frozen wasteland at this point. More CO2 is good for plants. People might have to move. They do that all the tiime. Coastlines may change and infrastructure may need to maintained, adapted, moved or replaced. That happens all the time. Currently estimated timescale for sea level changes: inches per year. Totally yawn-worthy.

In short, the issue is complex beyond any possible "on noes, warming" assessment -- hysteria is entirely uncalled for.

Science is a method. When facing something new, it involves formulating a hypothesis, testing that to validate or disprove it, and then drawing conclusions. We have not seen and do not know what happens when CO2 increases by large amounts due to our production of it. In the historical record, CO2 increases trail warming, not lead it -- which is another way of saying that historically speaking, CO2 increases herald cooling, so that is not any kind of adequate confirmation of the idea that human-caused CO2 increases will lead to significant climactic warming. Doesn't mean it won't -- it just means that this is a new thing and that drawing conclusions either requires flawless modeling that takes everything significant to the process into account (which we don't have... not only in re natural processes, but in re unanticipated technology), or actually seeing what happens. Without one of those - which again, we don't have -- it's not settled science. It is unvalidated hypothesis.

o Yes, we should be trying to figure this out.
o No, we have not figured it out.

When will we know when we have figured this out? When we have a model that accurately predicts climate change as known to have occurred in the historical record.

PS: coral does not "die when you touch it." I have multiple coral reef tanks. I touch my corals (hard ones and soft ones) all the time to move them around, frag (subdivide and transplant) them, brush them when I'm reaching for something else. I cut colonies of soft corals with a razor in order to divide them into more than one instance and place them in multiple places and/or share them with other coral reef owners. Certainly doesn't kill them (doesn't even seem to hurt them.) For hard corals, you break them into separate instances (frag them) with tools that are basically smallish hammers and chisels. You even do this out of the water. Again, doesn't kill them. They don't die because they were bothered or touched. I've never, ever seen that happen. Some of them don't react at all or very much, but the most I've ever seen them do is pull away or retract, dependably to return to their original extension and condition within minutes of the disturbance that caused it ending. Fish touch them all the time as well. Doesn't hurt a thing.

The things that I have seen be directly and immediately detrimental to corals are Ph changes, temperature changes, salinity changes, very large and sudden changes in lighting, and the actions they engage WRT each other (chemical warfare among corals has to be seen to be believed. They are nasty to each other at times.)

Climate change panic bores me. Climate change dismissal bores me. But, like a lot of other induced hysteria, it's a major component of pop culture and the media's slavish devotion to fanning same, so I have to actually work to avoid both. :)

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

The atmospheric studies used to make this argument are based on the planet Venus where CO2 is not a trace gas but is actually one of the dominant gases in the Venusian atmosphere. On earth, CO2 is a trace gas.

Its impact on climate heat trapping is unlikely to be relevant beyond its relative atmospheric concentrations which are tiny.

As to CO2 being a green house gas... Every gas is a green house gas in that every gas absorbs certain spectrums of light.

CO2's distinct absorption specturm is also very small. Nearly all of the spectrum that CO2 absorbs is already absorbed by water vapor and there is far more water vapor in the air than there is CO2.

Thus you're talking about a trace gas with a sliver of the EM spectrum.

The argument that a relatively small change in the percentage of the atmosphere that is made up of CO2 will lead to run away global warming is asinine.

And to further back up my position, the climate models that keep being heralded as proving the theory keep failing to predict anything accurately requiring them to be retroactively altered and past mistakes white washed.

Listening to the climate change lobby reminds me of listening to the old Soviet Politburo in that "the future is always the same... it is the past that keeps changing". That is a bit of dark humor from the Cold War. That is, the future prediction always remains the same... but you have to keep changing what you said in the past and white washing out of the bogus predictions.

Behold the bright communist future... never mind that we said we'd already be living in paradise by now 30 years ago. Keep working comrades for the brave new world.

And your point is "beware climate change, the world is going to go through these changes... never mind that we said New York City would already be under water by 2015."

This whole AGW argument has been going on long enough that your far out predictions are catching up with present time. And without exception they're all wrong.

I mean... you've been wrong about EVERYTHING. And yet you presume to claim you can predict a future you've thus far utterly failed to predict with any accuracy... even in gross terms. I'm not asking you to predict what temperature it will be on any given day. But you can't even get your graphs straight.

A little humility would go a long way from you people. You don't have the track record to justify this arrogance.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[hey!]

Oh, well you have a feeling. I guess the scientists can pack up and move on to some other topic then.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

And yet it happened:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ja...

Also this notion that peer review catches all frauds is laughable:
http://www.nature.com/news/pub...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

http://articles.mercola.com/si...

http://arstechnica.com/science...

http://www.the-scientist.com/?...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04...

As to your point about reading the abstracts. That's not enough. You need to actually have the study itself vetted. And peer review does not do that.

These studies are getting busted all the time for making things up or using really sloppy methodology that could be "interpreted" to mean anything... often transparently the author had a conclusion they wanted before even starting the study.

That isn't real science. That's what creationists do. You have to do your study with an open mind and accept whatever the study might say. No forming your theory before the data comes in and no shaping the data to fit your theory. It is FINE to have a hypothesis before you start the study. But it can't go beyond that until you've actually got the data in... and then you base the theory on the data... you do not shape the data to equal your hypothesis.

And that is frequently what is going on.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

Coral is one of the oldest life forms in the world. It has seen worse than a minor temperature change.

The reefs survived the ice ages.

The coral is is only fragile in the sense that one of your skin cells is fragile while you as a larger organism are not as fragile. The coral can survive having large amounts of it killed by environmental changes... and that sort of thing is part of its normal life cycle. Coral goes through this all the time.

Your notion that all the coral will die or too much of it will die is not supported by any sound understanding of what is going on. The speed with which the coral dies and recolonizes means that it does adapt very quickly to changes. Part of this adaptation is dying. But it adapts in the process.

Re:Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

Its nothing new. The "bleaching" people talk about is something coral just does when conditions fall out of the very narrow specs that permit it to live.

What is not understood by many is that these specs can and are adjusted. So yes... specs change and the coral dies. Possibly a lot of it. But that just means it has to change its specs to whatever the new standard is... and it does that... and new coral grows on top of the dead coral... which is how those islands in the Caribbean were formed.

This has been going on for millions of years. It isn't anything new.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[SpankiMonki]

And yet it happened:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ja...

You either didn't read the Forbes article you linked to, or you didn't comprehend it.

The article's author, James Taylor, claims that the survey conducted by the paper's researchers didn't ask the right question:

As is the case with other ‘surveys’ alleging an overwhelming scientific consensus on global warming, the question surveyed had absolutely nothing to do with the issues of contention between global warming alarmists and global warming skeptics.

Taylor does also claim that the papers composing the data of phase I of the study were misclassified - but he relies solely on the analysis of "investigative journalists" at the crank site Popular Technology to support his position. Further, both Taylor and Popular Technology conveniently ignore the fact that phase II of the study had the authors of the papers self-classify.

As an aside, pointing to an opinion piece on Forbes written by James Taylor, a lawyer at the Heartland Institute, hardly lends weight to ANY argument. Mr. Taylor claims to be a "scientist by training" because "I successfully completed Ivy League atmospheric science courses". His employer, Heartland Institute, has likened climate scientists to Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, murderer Charles Manson and Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.

Also this notion that peer review catches all frauds is laughable:

snip

NOBODY said the peer review process is perfect. But as GP correctly states, it's the best we've got. You seem to think that just because some academic fraud exists, that it's therefore having a substantial impact on climate science. That's a pretty extraordinary claim...got anything to back it up?

As to your point about reading the abstracts. That's not enough. You need to actually have the study itself vetted. And peer review does not do that.

That's not what GP was saying. Jesus. Namarrgon is saying that before YOU or some other guy on the internet starts pontificating about this or that scientific research, YOU should at least read the abstract of said research. But since you're happy to rely on opinion pieces and pop science articles that are chock full of hyperbole and distortion, I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that Namarrgon's wise advice is falling on deaf ears. At least in your case.

And that is frequently what is going on.

According to who? You? On what credible data do you base that extraordinary claim? Another James Taylor opinion piece in Forbes?

Re:Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

Oh look, its a snarky AC who rather than having an intelligent comment decides to front baseless insults and sarcasm as a position.

There is a reason people like you post AC... its because you're stupid... and you know it.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

You cited no link to this phase 1 versus phase 2.

The forbes article said nothing about it and neither did your subsequent citations.

Cite your source please.

Absent this information your argument boils down to ad hominem.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[SpankiMonki]

You cited no link to this phase 1 versus phase 2.

I'm so very glad you pointed this out, because it perfectly illustrates why you should be reading, at a minimum, the paper's abstract:

"We analyze the evolution of the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, examining 11944 climate abstracts from 1991–2011 matching the topics 'global climate change' or 'global warming'. We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming. Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. In a second phase of this study, we invited authors to rate their own papers. Compared to abstract ratings, a smaller percentage of self-rated papers expressed no position on AGW (35.5%). Among self-rated papers expressing a position on AGW, 97.2% endorsed the consensus. For both abstract ratings and authors' self-ratings, the percentage of endorsements among papers expressing a position on AGW marginally increased over time. Our analysis indicates that the number of papers rejecting the consensus on AGW is a vanishingly small proportion of the published research."

The forbes article said nothing about it and neither did your subsequent citations.

Thereby demonstrating the folly of relying on opinion pieces written by lawyers masquerading as scientists to support your arguments.

Cite your source please.

See above.

Absent this information your argument boils down to ad hominem.

It comes as no surprise that you don't know what constitutes an ad hominem attack.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

I see, so you troll as AC because you're afraid of other AC trolls?

I don't troll people, idiot. Did I post in response to your comment? Who is the original poster of this thread? Oh that's right... I am.

Which means YOU engaged me not the other way around.

And just FYI, I get trolled by at least one fucktard AC all the time. I call him Bingo... Bingo the clowno.

And he can be relied upon to respond to every thread I create with something along the lines of "you're stupid" or "you're a bad person"... he uses harsher language than that but that is the general message. He never offers any reason for what he says.

I picked him up when I criticized a post about psychology and said that it wasn't really a true science and we had to take conclusions from it with a grain of salt.

Since then, I've had bingo... he's been following me for months.

So for you to sit there and presume superiority over me when I have to deal with bingo and you don't have to deal with shit... is a little stupid. What is more, you don't get to comment on my record because you've gone out of your way not to have one.

Your entire position is hypocritical.

Kindly do not presume to comment on people that actually log in. Log in and THEN call me an ass if you like. But you don't get to sit there in the AC shadows and throw shit at the people that actually log in.

If you do anything other than stop being a fucking hypocrite OR log in... Then you can go fuck yourself with a rake sideways.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

http://link.springer.com/artic...

And your phase 2 point only got to that number by citing any credence to the notion of AGW even marginally as being evidence of 100 percent approval of the IPCC position.

Never mind that only about .3 percent actually held that actual view.

All the other positions were more nuanced. And by that definition most 'deniers' are supporters of your position because most "deniers"... a sad attempt to equate people that question your premise with holocaust deniers... but the thing is that most of the "deniers" believe in some amount of AGW... they just don't think it is as big a deal. But using Cook's methodology, they'd all be AGW supporters.

Your paper is bullshit.

And not only was it bullshit but Cook TRIED to publish another paper after this one to correct mistakes in the first one... and because people were actually paying attention... his paper didn't even pass peer review. That's how full of shit it was.

So no. Try harder. You don't impress me.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Namarrgon]

All those links, and not one published paper among them. Seems like you completely missed my point.

Your Forbes link illustrates precisely what I'm talking about. It is not a peer-reviewed analysis, it is not subject to any stringent scientific standards, it is merely one layman's opinion, and judging from the language it's a highly biased opinion at that. *Exactly* the sort of reporting that only muddies the waters. What makes you believe he didn't "form his theory before the data came in" - or that the scientists in question did?

And nobody is claiming the peer-review is perfect - but it is *far* better than no peer review at all! It can't guarantee perfection of course, but the review process weeds out the vast majority of mistakes, obvious and subtle, and expert review does this better than any layman could. Inevitably there are crap publications that merely pretend to review, just like there are equally useless blogs and editorials, but reputable publications are still looked to as reliable sources by all in the field. There is a reason why, in every scientific discipline, peer-reviewed papers continue to be our highest standard of information quality.

You make vague accusations of bias, yet no offer explanation why so many researchers around the world in this one specific field would be risking their all-important reputation by apparently submitting (and passing) sloppy, biased work - only your claim that all their politics are different to your own. Plus of course, you fail to say why your preferred, non-scientific source is any better, particularly as it hasn't even had the benefit of an expert review.

Re:Coral dies all the time

[rtb61]

Coral cores prove, coral reefs are destroyed by changes in sea level. The last big change being a few hundred metres up. So they likley will suffer this time round to. Not really the biggest problem. All that stuff on land going through a rising surf zone will wash huge quantities of debris and pollutants into the sea, now that is the real problem.

Want change, easy, target people's greed. Start running around tagging builds with "UNDERWATER FRONT - PROPERTY VALUE ZERO" stickers and signs, all for sales signs in at risk locations. Bring the real message home, to their rapidly devaluing home and they will start clamouring for real solutions to the problem and not empty treatment of the symptoms of the problem. When they start feeling the pain of falling property values they will start screaming for change to current policies.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

Oh you want peer reviewed rebuttals?

Done:
http://link.springer.com/artic...

Your man actually tried to publisher another paper that corrected some of his errors while reasserting the same position... his paper didn't even make it past peer review this time because unlike before... people were paying attention.

His methodology was shit and his entire process was more akin to what you see out of creationists.

This is why this field of science has gotten a bad reputation. Its been polluted with political interests and corrupt cronies seeking cash and status.

Its sophistry and cargo cult science.

And because I know the truth is just a word to you... let me hit you where you live... you're losing the political argument as well.

I know that's all you really care about and like all sophists you have made the cardinal error that you can win by trying to win above all else.

Where as the philosophies that gave birth to the discipline of science itself don't try to win. They instead try to be right. And in being right... they ultimately win.

Your victories thus far are transitory and will be remembered with scorn. Eventually people will smurky openly at everything you're saying the same way we do at the ice age predictions from the 1970s.

What you people don't understand because you have the memories of goldfish is that this argument has been going on long enough for your predictions of the future to catch up with the present.

For example, New York was supposed to be under water by 2015.

Well... that didn't happen did it?

Like the joke about the old Soviet Politburo, "The future is always the same... it is the past that keeps changing"...

You have to keep retroactively altering your own history to white wash your unbroken series of failed predictions.

The models are updated at least once a year to bring them in line with what ACTUALLY happened and what the same models predicted a year ago is conveniently memory holed... again and again and again.

And then when anyone contradicts you, you pull out this argument from authority or popularity that "well, we have most of the scientists with us"...

Only you don't. At best you have half of them. That's not conclusive of anything but a controversy.

And given how you demonize anyone that contradicts you, a fair number of people either don't want to get involved and keep their opinions a secret or pretend to support you out of fear for their jobs.

And it is in this environment that you proclaim your consensus.

You're a shit merchant. And the more people try your wares, the fewer buyers you're going to have.

Time is on my side... Every year you get weaker and look more foolish... and every year people like me appear more credible. The only way to reverse your decline in credibility is to stop trying to win and instead try to be RIGHT. Actually right. F' the politics. Try to ACTUALLY be right. No shaping your data to fit your desired theory. Just take the data in and form a theory tabula rasa from the data. Try it.

And then you might actually start to get some credibility back. The price will be you're going to have to change your argument. Because your argument isn't right. It just is what the politicians find the most convenient. And it isn't going to win in the end.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

What's this? An anonymous coward commenting on the posting history of someone that actually logs in?

Do tell us, sir... what is your posting history?

Because if that isn't exposed to everyone on the site like mine is... then you're a fucking hypocrite.

The question is of course rhetorical... I point that out because on top of being a hypocrite you're also stupid.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[SpankiMonki]

Your paper is bullshit.

Is this supposed to be a reply to my post? I'm not defending any paper, I've not called anyone a "denier", and I don't care about someone's paper that wasn't accepted.

What I am doing is calling into question the claims of the author of the Forbes piece you cited.

I'm also challenging your apparent contempt for peer review. If there's a better way to get good science, you haven't identified it.

I'm also calling you out on your insinuation that scientific misconduct/fraud/sloppiness/whatever is rampant in climate science.

Finally, I'm supporting poster Namarrgon's advise on citing source documents whenever possible - instead of citing sources that have such a low signal to noise ratio, it's difficult to get to the underlying science.

What your incoherent ramblings above have to do with anything I've said is beyond me. Maybe you should take a break for a while.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

you're defending cook's paper... so... yes.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[SpankiMonki]

you're defending cook's paper

LOL, please quote what I said in support of Cook's paper.

so...yes.

so...yes..you're taking a break? That's probably a good idea.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

""I'm so very glad you pointed this out, because it perfectly illustrates why you should be reading, at a minimum, the paper's abstract: [iop.org] ""

quote from you. You're arguing his paper is not full of shit.

Re:Coral dies all the time

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

That's why I expressed curiosity about pH, rather than temperature. We know that some amount of temperature variation leads to survivable bleach/recolonize cycles; but a shift in the direction of making calcium-based structures more expensive to build and maintain under water could be quite different in impact.

Re:Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

Specifically to your question then, ocean pH has fluctuated over time... in some cases quite dramatically.

There was an expedition not long ago that was pulling up core samples to get a history of it... the cores went back something like 53 million years. And yeah... the pH moves about quite a bit.

Again, coral is a very ancient species. You don't get species that old unless they're tough sons of bitches.

We're talking about a species that survived vast changes in the earth's biosphere. We're talking about a species that has been preyed upon by an endless procession of species and the coral outlived them all. We're talking about a species that survived the meteor that killed the dinosaurs. We're talking about a species that has lived through many ice ages largely unchanged.

Coral as a collective is extremely tough. As individuals they die to anything. Think bad thoughts about coral and it dies. Say you don't believe in coral without clapping your hands afterwards and that kills fairies and... and coral. Bad breath probably kills coral.

The thing is yes... it is absurdly sensitive to any change in its environment and tends to respond to just about anything by bleaching. However not all the coral dies in any of these situations and the survivors recolonize the reef.

Here is something you can see:

http://coralreef.noaa.gov/abou...

This is talking about how oil spills effected coral reefs in South America and the middle east.

The results were bad when the oil was all over the place. But when the oil was finally digested by the ecosystem... oil is edible to some kinds of bacteria... once the oil was gone... the reefs were fine.

A point on oil specifically... its actually 100 percent fucking natural. Petroleum bubbles up around the world in various places and always has. That is not to say oil spills are fine or we shouldn't care about the poor pelicans that get coated in oil. that's tragic and the oil companies should be penalized for being sloppy with that stuff.

BUUUUT... the ecosystem actually can deal with it. Yes... it will kill birds and fish and fuck up all sorts of things. But the real engine of the planet's biosphere... the bacteria and algae... they don't mind it so much. The bacteria literally can eat it. When we had that big BP spill most of the fish were getting killed due to oxygen deprivation because the bacteria were so active eating the oil that they were using up all the oxygen in the water. IT wasn't the oil killing most of those fish. It was the biosphere digesting the oil that was killing the fish.

Anyway, coral is more similar to the bacteria and the algae than it is similar to the fish. Just like the bacteria or the algae, coral is very easy to kill. You can kill the majority of bacteria in any situation VERY easily. However... killing ALL of it is nearly fucking impossible. And any small amount that survives... will rapidly multiply until whatever numbers were lost are entirely replaced and possibly then some... plus an increasing resistance to whatever you did to kill past generations.

It adapts very quickly.

It is being increasingly pointed out by coral experts that the Maldives for example will not be submerged. Because the coral is responding to the various things going on with the land and water in the area... and ultimately breeding to stay near the surface and trying to create as many reefs around the islands as possible because it suits their biological needs.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[SpankiMonki]

""I'm so very glad you pointed this out, because it perfectly illustrates why you should be reading, at a minimum, the paper's abstract: [iop.org] ""

quote from you. You're arguing his paper is not full of shit.

Sigh.

First, I was simply providing an example in support of Namarrgon's admonition to review source documents rather than strictly relying on popular media sources.

Second, I used the Cook abstract because it contained a citation YOU ASKED FOR.

Third, how anyone can claim with a straight face that this sentence: "I'm so very glad you pointed this out, because it perfectly illustrates why you should be reading, at a minimum, the paper's abstract:" represents an endorsement of the paper's conclusions is beyond me.

Perhaps your little break from this discussion wasn't long enough, because you're still not thinking very clearly.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

Very well... keep in mind that I'm arguing with like 20 people in this thread and you're apparently literally the only one that hasn't taken a side one way or the other.

So my crime if you can call it that was assuming that you were taking a side since everyone else was... if I am in error there and you have no opinion and do not wish your statements to be taken in any way as an endorsement of either side then so be it and I apologize for assuming otherwise.

So... I accept your statement that you're not taking sides... and simply will conclude that I have taken sides obviously and it is my position that the paper how many ever phases it has... is bullshit.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[SpankiMonki]

Very well... keep in mind that I'm arguing with like 20 people in this thread and you're apparently literally the only one that hasn't taken a side one way or the other.

I do try to avoid politically charged discussions, although I am sucked into them every once in a while. : )

and it is my position that the paper how many ever phases it has... is bullshit.

I certainly won't disagree with you on that point.

Cheers!

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Namarrgon]

That's quite a rant there - assumptions, ad hominems, sweeping declarations, invective, ironic projection, the lot. In fact, pretty much everything except data.

Oh you want peer reviewed rebuttals? Done:

Science & Education, really? Remember what I said earlier about crap publications that would publish anything? Yeah. It's not exactly Nature, is it? Where is its peer-review policy anyway?

Shame the article is paywalled so we can't examine it, but these guys did. And if it's the article I think it is, applying Monckton's own peculiar standards for handwaving-away any papers that aren't explicit enough for him, only makes the numbers for rejection of AGW look even tinier, at a mere 9 out of 11,944 papers reviewed. And nowhere is there anything to back your claim that the consensus figures "included papers that argued against climate change".

And of course, Cook's paper isn't the only one that arrived at ~97% consensus - from Oreskes to Powell, they all give similar results. Plus, of course, the long list of scientific institutions that have confirmed the findings of AGW, and none dissenting.

[vague accusations & unsourced claims of bias & corruption omitted]

ice age predictions from the 1970s [...] New York was supposed to be under water by 2015

Ah, specifics. Cite the papers that predicted these, please. Or are you getting misled by bad reporting again?

Every year you get weaker and look more foolish

Every year, the surface temperatures rise, ocean temperatures keep going up, sea levels rise some more, global ice mass keeps decreasing - the ongoing trend is obvious everywhere to anyone who opens their eyes, and comes from climate scientists around the globe who couldn't care less about all that Republicans vs Democrats nonsense. The argument about what to do about global warming is certainly political - but the data aren't, and wild, unsourced claims of massive political bias in the field only make the accusers look like the foolish ones.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

The only thing you said in there that was relevant was your assertion at the end that the temps are going up.

Lets look at that.

First, the surface temperature is based on increasingly smaller numbers of stations. By the own rating system of various people that compile these into ONE global temperature number they're mostly not very accurate. And even when they are, the majority of the cited warming occurs in places there are no stations or very very few. Nearly all the warming for example is supposed to be at the poles. But there are almost no stations in the poles.

The majority of the world's surface temp data... and down to a fraction of a degree no less is abstracted from a shrinking number of stations with everything in between being a guess. A guess with math... but still a guess.

To make matters more complicated the sat data is adjusted to match the surface data. When the stats were launched they were believed to be quite accurate. Since then they have their readings INCREASED every year basically to harmonize them with the surface stations.

The current "correction" is about .4 C... or nearly exactly the amount of warming that your crowd says we've had since then.

Which is itself very convenient. Why would the sats have a calibration error that is from what I can see.. precisely what warming you're citing? Doesn't that seem more than a little coincidental?

The calibration error should be more or less than that. And yet... bang on the same figure you're citing the world warmed.

In regards to the ocean, the depths of the ocean are not warming. All this warming is happening at the surface and much of that is a result of climate cycles that are well understood. We went through a warming cycle from 1860 to 1940 I believe. There are papers on file citing that and then it cooled. But the point is that the temperature is not sinked in the depths. It rarely goes below 100 meters much less 200 meters. I can cite the NASA findings on that point if you doubt me.

As to sea level rise, we're talking about what amounts to very small changes in sea level and there is no way to know how much of that is the result of a climate change and how much is climate cycle.

We get these changes during la nina and el ninos amongst other cycles. So saying that this is a long time trend would require long time data that went outside the scope of your information. You're thus overstating your knowledge.

As to Ice mass, that appears to be an oversimplification. There are regions that are losing ice and regions that are gaining ice and there are regions that are stable. From what I've been able to tell, the places that are losing ice typically have lots of reasons for the ice declining besides global climate change. There are quite a few geothermal vents for example.

What is more it is relevant that you're citing ice mass and not ice extent. Because ice mass is difficult to estimate and ice extent is very easy to estimate. And ice extent doesn't show a decline.

There are low years and sometimes that will persist for awhile but it springs back. The alarmists were citing ice extent for awhile but then the data shifted on them and they started talking about ice mass which is relatively very hard to estimate with any accuracy.

What is more, if the ice packs were melting over all to any significant degree you'd see a great deal more sea level rise than we have seen thus far. The fact that we're not suggests that the ice being lost in one place is either not that much or is being compensated for somewhere else.

Just stop for a moment. How much ice are you saying has melted in the last 100 years or... pick your time period. By volume or weight... just give me your rough estimate.

I've seen numbers ranging from around 60~100 Ã-- 10^6 square kilometers... most of that in the Antarctic.

So how much of that do you say has melted. Because here it becomes very easy to see if it actually happened. We can look at the volume of water in

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

to clarify, the sea ice number I cited was the estimated volume of sea ice not the loss or gain there of.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

I don't stalk anyone, you complete fucking retard.

Look at my posting history. I basically never post in response to someone else's posts.

What i do is make my own post to a topic and then people post in response to that and then I respond to them.

That means people come to ME. I don't stalk anyone. Go through my posting history. I don't even read other people's comments outside of my own threads. I see an article I want to comment on... and I comment on.

People only get responses from me when they respond TO ME.

So saying I stalk people when really you're the AC dipshit that joined MY thread to harass ME... is frankly beyond the fucking pale. If you were a cartoon you'd be strike by lightening for being a hypocrite.

And an idiot.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

what does profanity have to do with anything, fucktard?

I never claimed I didn't use profanity and using or not using it doesn't make someone right or wrong.

As to bingo, he admits it. I've talked to him about it a few times. He's been following me for months.

His posts are really distinctive... I don't think i've ever miss addressed him... he's that obvious. And as I said, I've talked to him about it. He has reasons... bordom apparently that compel him to troll someone and I got picked.

If it were just him I wouldn't have such a low opinion of ACs... my real issue is that practically all the really stupid posts are from ACs. I don't know why that is... possibly the additional anonymity causes ACs to think even less about what they post? Its hard to say.

But they're almost entirely without value in the community. Whatever the intention, the AC login system basically just enables sock puppeting and trolling. I grant that you could use it for a good purpose but I haven't seen it used that way to any significant extent.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

Your link equated the concentrations of CO2 with that of a poison.

That stupid.

First, lets go over the only spectrum that CO2 even absorbs... now overlay that with the spectrums of other compounds in the atmosphere like water vapor and you're left with a tiny sliver of UNIQUE spectrum that it blocks.

The painted window analogy is also stupid because CO2 isn't analogous to opaque paint. Its if you like analogous to basically transparent paint. And a thin layer of it at that.

The climate models that that started this whole thing were based on studies of Venus... which is dominated by CO2.

And another point, Venus actually isn't made hot because of CO2. Its made hot instead because it is closer to the sun and its atmosphere is a lot denser. Compare the temperature of venus to the temperature of earth AT one atmpsohere which is earth sea level and you'll find that venus's temps aren't that much higher than the earth's. The issue is that you can keep going down in Venus's atmosphere and it gets hotter as you do.

The same thing can be found on every planet with an atmosphere. Descend into Jupitor and stop at about 1 atmosphere and you'll find the temperature is again not that different from earth. Jupitor is obviously colder at one atmosphere and Venus is hotter. But they're all at different distances from the sun.

The composition of the atmosphere is less relevant than its density. So even the initial premise is dubious.

Now why is that sliver of spectrum that is unique to CO2 special? It isn't. The sun doesn't emit appreciably more energy on it and that spectrum plays no special part keeping the earth warm or cool. The relevant factor is the density of the entire atmosphere. And nothing we've done has changed that.

And then you have to take into consideration that the amount any gas is going to block something in the air is going to be relative to its concentrations.

The concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere are low. Plants have to actually work very hard to get CO2 which is why green house growers will often pump CO2 into the green house to accelerate plant growth.

Now if you actually want to talk about this... then we can do that. If instead like most of the progressive fucktards your only interest is in censoring and silencing the opposition then you can fuck yourself sideways with a rake.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Namarrgon]

Well, you took the time to write all that out, so I'll do you the courtesy of a response, but I will point out that none of it is worth saying without citations (which was the entire point of this thread).

You call it "common knowledge", but when it contradicts the published, peer-reviewed results from any number of studies, which are compiled, published and endorsed by organisations like NOAA, CRU, CSIRO, and the IPCC in numerous countries, then your "common knowledge" doesn't seem to be all that common at all. I provided linked citations of reputable sources for my claims, so you'll need data at least as reputable (please, no blogs or news articles). I've heard claims just like yours countless times, and nobody has yet provided any reliable data to back them up.

"[surface temperature stations] are mostly not very accurate" - a vague claim, but in aggregate they can still give a very accurate picture of the temperature trend.

"[satellites] have their readings INCREASED every year...The current "correction" is about .4 C" - citation certainly needed for this one, for both claims.

"the depths of the ocean are not warming... It rarely goes below 100 meters much less 200 meters." - the data shows that ocean heat content has been rising steadily down to 2,000m. Below that, NASA finds no significant change. But there's a huge amount of energy going into that top 2km of the world's oceans.

"there is no way to know how much [sea level rise] is the result of a climate change and how much is climate cycle." - well, we know that sea level rise accelerated significantly in the last 150 years. We know that it's consistent with predictions based on thermal expansion and measured ice loss. If it's part of a long-term cycle, there needs to be a cause, and there's no credible evidence of any cyclic cause at that timescale.

"There are regions that are losing ice and regions that are gaining ice... How much ice are you saying has melted... just give me your rough estimate." - Shepherd et al 2012 finds a net ice mass loss of over 200 gigatonnes/year for the last couple of decades, using multiple lines of evidence.

"ice extent is very easy to estimate. And ice extent doesn't show a decline." I cite ice mass because it's what matters, for rising heat content and for sea levels. Ice extent is a fairly inaccurate indicator of overall ice melt. That said, ice extent has been declining in the Arctic and Greenland while increasing in the Antarctic (despite overall ice mass decreasing there by around 70 Gt/y).

"if the ice packs were melting over all to any significant degree you'd see a great deal more sea level rise than we have seen thus far... We can look at the volume of water in the oceans and compare the change to your ice loss figures." - Yes, and it matches well with what we've observed, including accounting for thermal expansion (which, if you're tacitly admitting exists, requires significant ocean warming).

Citations - yes please. At this stage, if you have any further claims to make, I want to see only links to reputable published data and peer-reviewed studies, not talk of "common knowledge" or speculation from laymen or reporters.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

Actually it is common knowledge to people familiar with the subject. That you are unaware of it undermines your claims to actually being familiar in the first place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Some of the corrections in there look like they're putting upwards of a .6 C temp bias on the sat data.

Again, this is common knowledge. There is your citation. Don't be stubborn or proud. It will undermine your intellectual credibility. This is common knowledge. Admit that and move on.

As to the oceans, I have a big problem with the units you're using in that graph... Zeta Joules? Why aren't you citing this as temperature? That's very odd. I don't know if I can even convert that back into temperature without more information. Do I have to literally take an estimate of the total planetary ocean volume and then figure out how many zeta joules it would take it to change the temperature? The use of that unit is very strange. I'd like that in temperature before I accept the finding please. For example, we'd need to see a significant temperature change or its just too likely to be a normal climate cycle. We have el nino and la nina and that is actually one of the shorter cycles. There are climate cycles that span centuries.

As to sea level rise, if you view the rise in geological time scales, you'll see that the modern changes are actually relatively placid. Do you want me to show you graphs with sea level changes over the last 20,000 years? The reality is that if you expand those graphs beyond the industrial revolution you'll see that the trend line actually extends well beyond our use of the evil fossil fuels. The seas have been rising since the end of the last ice age. It increases and decreases... contrary to what you think, we're actually in a plateau where it isn't changing much relative to before. I can cite the graphs if you're only familiar with sea level data cherry picked from the start of the industrial revolution. FYI, people that do that are attempting to bias the data by making it look like the trend line starts there. It doesn't.

BEWARE... back of napkin calculations coming.

As to ice melt... okay lets look at that: 200 gigatons is 200 billion tons ice is ~ 200 billion tons of sea water.

200,000,000,000 tons per year
convert tons of sea water into cubic meters
195,698,545,959 cubic meters of water
convert to cubic kilometers
195,698,546 cubic kilometers of water
x 20 years

3,913,970,919 cubic kilometers of water

The surface of the world's oceans is
~ 361,740,000 square kilometers (aka 71 percent of the earth's total surface)

This is my own calculation and I must have made a serious error in there some where. Can you find where I did it? Because... if my math is right... and it can't be... then the seas should have risen miles above our heads. My figures don't make sense by magnitudes.

Now the annual sea level rise is about 2.6mm per year.

Taking the global ocean square surface area and multiplying it by 2.6mm
So that is 2.6e-6 kilometers... or 0.0000026
x
~ 361,740,000 square kilometers (aka 71 percent of the earth's total surface)

~ 941 cubic kilometers of sea water.
Convert to meters
941,000 cubic meters of sea water...
convert cubic meters to metric tons
961,683 metric tons of ice.

Again... show me the error I made here.

The math isn't making any sense and I am quite comfortable with accepting I made a mistake in here somewhere and take no shame in that since I don't do these calculations often and it would be very easy to make a silly mistake.

But please... you can see from these rough calculations that either my math is massively wrong or the predictions make zero sense.

I must have made some big mistakes in there. But I think this line of investigation would be illuminating. I'd like to compare estimated ocean rise with water volume

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

I'd also like to point out that I really enjoy these types of discussion. Please don't take my aggressiveness as something emotional.

I am challenging you.

If my aggressiveness puts you off then know that isn't intentional. I don't want to silence you or censor you or shut you up or shut you down.

I want to engage you in an intellectual investigation where we both pool our knowledge of an issue and try try to enlighten each other through this sharing.

Even if I don't agree with you about a lot of things, I learn a lot when I have these discussions because you're forcing me to think through certain things. The sea ice vs sea rise calculation was not something I had done before. And even if I f'ed that up horribly it is precisely the sort of calculation that I think brings clarity to the matter because so many of these things are very difficult to measure. The zeta joules of the ocean for example... I have no idea how you'd even begin to audit that. Or the bazillion temperature stations across the planet that go through some sort of blackbox algorithm to output a faction of a degree warming... on stations that are typically barely accurate to the degree? Auditing this stuff is genuinely hard because the data sets are so large and often proprietary.

So I'm very interested in finding ball park estimates that are easily audited. And if the cilmate people are pushing numbers that are very different then... I'll have a very hard time believing those figures without understanding the problems with the ball park calculation.

One thing that I can think of off the top of my head that might screw up my sea ice versus sea rise calculation might be deep sea geological changes. If the crust bends in as water is added in... then the volume of the seas would increase more than the observable surface sea level.

As to my calculations... I really don't know what happened in there and I am genuinely hopeful you can set me straight on it. One thing I'm not sure of is what unit the gigatonnes were in... metric or imperial... I don't think that would matter in the context of how far off the numbers look. I mean... sure... that could bring the numbers closer to sense... but they're so far off anything that is possible that i'd have had to make other even bigger errors in there.

I don't know... looking forward to your response and please don't get upset with me. My point is not to piss you off but to get to the bottom of what appears to be a difference of perception between us.

I would like to believe I'm able to accept correction. I hope I'm not closed minded. I do try.

I would of course ask you to do the same thing... with no intention of implying an insult... just be patient with me and I'll be patient with you. :)

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Namarrgon]

https://en.wikipedia.org/

Some of the corrections in there look like they're putting upwards of a .6 C temp bias on the sat data.

Sorry, you'll have to explain to me where in that link you're seeing hard figures for satellite corrections. You're not assuming "Global Temperature Anomaly" is a correction factor, are you? (it's the difference in temperature results from a mean value). All I see is that graph of those results, and some figures for trends. I followed some of the source links, but the methods they use are complex, and some of them only have abstracts available.

I have a big problem with the units you're using in that graph... Zeta Joules? Why aren't you citing this as temperature?

It's NOAA's graph, not mine, and they use joules because it's a measure of total energy change. This is helpful for discovering how much solar energy is being trapped by greenhouse gases and subsequently absorbed by oceans. Temperature is a less useful figure because it's dependant on the volume of water and thermal mass, but will show the same ongoing trend.

It's true that El Nino and La Nina cycles directly affect ocean heat, but these are relatively short cycles and can easily be smoothed out by averaging data over decades; similarly for solar cycles. There are also geologic cycles as you say, but those have a much slower effect, and can be accounted for by measuring the change in their causes (e.g. orbital changes). While we can't discount the effect of an undiscovered long-term climate cycle on what we're seeing now, nobody has yet found a natural cause that would result in such a relatively rapid change - but the effects we're observing match quite closely with the calculated effects of the rise in atmospheric CO2, so that's a sufficient and far more likely cause than postulating an unknown factor.

Similarly for sea level rises. Of course it has changed much more drastically in the past, and sometimes very rapidly too, but nonetheless the level of rise we're seeing helps confirm our hypotheses, and is still of concern to our many coastal communities.

show me the error I made here

Yeah, you're off by a factor of 1 million - 195,698,545,959 cubic meters of water is actually 195.7 cubic kilometres of water (there are 1000x1000x1000 cubic metres in a cubic kilometre). Though because the ice is freshwater, 200 Gt of ice would be closer to 200 km^3 when melted, or about 0.55mm when spread out evenly. There are of course other sources of meltwater than just Greenland + Antarctic, and thermal expansion is about 25% of the total rise too.

Where in there do they show any calculations?

The last link was to the IPCC AR5 paper; they don't do the calculations there, they summarise the conclusions of the papers that do, and cite those papers. (The link I gave you was actually a draft and was missing diagrams, so here's the relevant section of the final report).

If you look at section 13.3.6, that discusses the contributing factors to the total sea level rise, and cites a number of papers for their sources, including Shepherd et al 2012 (better link than earlier) and Church et al 2011a.

Hope that helps.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Namarrgon]

Thanks, it's a refreshing change to have an actual rational discussion :-)

Luckily the sea ice calc was easy to debug, and does get you into the ballpark. Most of the climate papers are much harder to work through (kinda why you need to have all that study and experience under your belt); while many of the principles can be grasped by laymen like ourselves, it quickly becomes clear from reading the papers that there can be a lot of subtleties and counter-intuitive effects that we just don't realise, and I'm happy to admit I get lost in the depths of many of them.

For auditing papers, the peer reviewers read the described methodology in data collection, and work through the calculations to check them, while looking for factors the paper may not have dealt with adequately. But the raw data has to be taken on faith, and errors can still slip through.

Luckily, papers examining different lines of evidence can often come up with similar figures, so cross-correlation is possible, where multiple different sets of observations and methods can confirm each other, and this is the basis for much of our confidence in the climate research to date.

I'd like to think I'm quite open to correction too, particularly on specifics (easy to get those wrong), but I have fairly high standards of proof required these days. There's so many different lines of confirming evidence for the observed warming that to change my views on that I'd need to see a peer-reviewed paper from a reputable climatologist, ideally that has also been publicly checked and confirmed by other reputable climatologists. Disputing global warming has reached the threshold of an extraordinary claim, given the sheer weight of studies, climate scientists, and scientific institutions that have confirmed it, so extraordinary evidence is now required to question it.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

As to debugging the sea ice... you didn't correct my math though. I'd like to actually see that corrected so I can see where I messed up. I don't learn anything if I don't see the correction.

As to peer review doing X or Y... I can cite a lot of things that made it through peer review where none of those things happened.

I mean... there was that guy that had gotten over 150 papers through peer review that were apparently all bogus.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

As to the link, I think I cited the wrong link...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

As to zeta joules, I can't process that information. The issue is that we're trying to audit each other's information and you're citing something that can't be audited because the units are odd and there is nothing I can compare this against. That means I can't audit it. And I don't like evidence that can't be audited.

As to the corrections on my math, thank you. I think this back of the napkin calculation actually does a better job of finding consensus than a lot of the other things we could do.

I'd throw this out then:
200 cubic kilometers of water
x 20 years

4000 cubic kilometers of water

So this is the amount of water that they say was added.

Lets compare that against sea level rise

The surface of the world's oceans is
~ 361,740,000 square kilometers

2.6mm x 20 years = 52mm

52mm = 0.000052km

0.000052km x ~ 361,740,000 square kilometers

18810.48 cubic km of water

Did I make another error here? Because these numbers are still no where near what they're talking about. That shows nearly five times the melting of that estimate. That's not even close.

Can they account for 18810 cubic kilometers of water in ice loss? If not... then where the hell did the water come from?

If we understand what is going on, then these numbers should be close. I could accept figures that were ~20% give or take. But these are off now by about 4.7 times.

As to your citation, it appears to start either in the 90s or around 1965. To blame this on the industrial revolution and our burning of fossil fuels, you're going to have to show a graph that predates the heavy emission of fossil fuels.

If the graph when you expand beyond that shows a similar trend line before fossil fuel burning then associating the trend line with fossil fuel burning is likely specious. If instead there is a change in the trend line roughly around where we start burning a lot of fossil fuels that will support your position.

Any trend that starts in the 90s or 60s will not be useful if we're talking about AGW.

As to shepard, apparently there was a problem with the system used to measure the ice:
http://www.gps.gov/governance/...

JPL admits the issue there and suggests a better satellite.

As to church,
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/c...

That shows a much lower rate of rise... I think they're saying inches per century.

Re:Coral dies all the time

[RockDoctor]

But its a species

Anyone who can refer to "coral" as a species clearly has such a strong grasp on biology as to not be worth paying attention to.

I'm not a biologist in any significant form, but I didn't spend a large chunk of a year learning to identify different classes and genera of coral as fossils (for dating the rocks in which their fossils are found) without getting the message that there have been many, many different species of coral. And I didn't get horrible sunburn the first time I snorkelled on a coral reef without realising that "coral" covers a LARGE amount of diversity. And so far we're only talking about morpho-species, which for-sure are a much coarser division of sessile framework forming Cnidarians than they use themselves. (Corals, if they think, probably don't differentiate much betweens any temporarily-marine vertebrates.)

Re:Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

... that's more than a little pedantic. I use the term species instead of class and so you get to discount the rest of my position regardless of whether it was valid or not?

That type of rhetoric is interested not in honest evaluation but in political domination and censorship.

Your attitude has no credibility in a scientific discussion.

Adjust your stance to one that is not designed for politics and we can continue. If you refuse to alter your tack then you're simply admitting a lack of intellectual curiosity which undermines your position more than mine was using the wrong term.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Namarrgon]

We know exactly how much effect CO2 has on incoming and outgoing radiation, because we can measure it in the lab, and via satellite. We know beyond doubt that it allows broad-spectrum energy in, but blocks much of the Earth's black-body radiation from escaping again.

We have measured precisely how much CO2 is in the atmosphere, and we can calculate accurately how much effect it should have. That's how we know that CO2 is such a significant problem; see this page for empirical measurements, a discussion of the maths, and a graph of the Earth's radiative forcings (all with fully cited sources of course, which I recommend you follow up).

The effect of CO2 is unquestioned. What is still being debated is only how much does this affect us? At what rate will surface temperatures change as a result? This is complicated by the myriad feedback cycles involved in the climate system. Current scientific opinion varies between "this could be a real problem" to "if we don't do something ASAP we're in for a very unhappy time".

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Namarrgon]

Sorry, I thought the error was clear - you converted cubic metres to cubic kilometres incorrectly. I'll spell it out:

200 gigatons is 200 billion tons ice is ~ 200 billion tons of sea water.

200,000,000,000 tons per year
convert tons of sea water into cubic meters
195,698,545,959 cubic meters of water
convert to cubic kilometers
195,698,546 cubic kilometers of water

It should be 195.699 cubic kilometres of water, because there are 1000x1000x1000 cubic metres to a cubic kilometre, not 1000.

Thus, over 20 years this would be 3,913.97 cubic kilometers of water, and as the surface of the world's oceans is ~361,740,000 square kilometers, you would see a rise of 0.0000108198 km, or 10.81 mm.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

CO2 is not unique in its ability to absorb energy or radiate that energy.

You can do comparisons to every other planet in the solar system and what you'll find is that the chemistry of the atmosphere makes almost no difference.

what makes a difference is distance from the sun and density.

Do you want me to cite the temperature of Venus by pressure? We have graphs. I can do the same for Jupiter and mars... I'm not sure about Uranus but I can probably find good figures for that.

Tell me if you want those graphs cited. They're not hard to find. If you match pressures you'll find that the temps become much more similar across all the worlds. With worlds being closer to the Sun being hotter and worlds farther away being cooler.

The mistake with the Venus study was in discounting pressure as being relevant. I believe I was first twigged to this observation by a mathematician that took a casual interest in the issue.

As to the skeptical scientist, I should point out that that is an advocate's site... It isn't impartial. If you expect to cite that, then I expect to be able to cite the opposing equivalent... "Watt's up with that" or Judith Curry's blog. Can I do that or do you want to reconsider your citation?

As to the effect of CO2 being unquestioned, that is simply not true. You've just redefined "question" to only apply to people that don't disagree. By that method anything can be unquestioned. There is clearly a controversy so claiming there is no question is not logically supportable. Are the questions of it valid? Perhaps not... but you can't say they don't exist.

And that puts you in the position of showing why any given challenge is or is not valid. You can't simply dismiss them all. That is not how science works. That's your politics intruding into the issue. You can do that if you want... but your surrender scientific and intellectual credibility in the process and become purely a political animal at that point.

If you choose to do that, then I'll likewise shift into that argument and simply point out that you're losing the political argument. The trend line for polling of the general population in the US and UK shows a trend to skepticism. You're spending billions of dollars... often of US tax money to argue your case... and you're losing. Is this the discussion you wish to have? Or would you like to go back to science? Because I am quite happy to have either a battle of power politics or detached scientific evaluation. Its up to you. I'm an amphibian like that. Comfortable in either setting. I'm a seasoned campaigner, chum... we can have any kind of conversation you please but don't expect me to be surprised or unprepared for anything. I've seen it all.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Namarrgon]

As to the link, I think I cited the wrong link...

The new link does show corrections to a single satellite dataset - but there's nothing there even faintly close to the 0.6 degrees/year you were claiming. There are both positive and negative corrections that are a fraction of that, as they discover and account for factors like orbital decay.

There is your citation. Don't be stubborn or proud. It will undermine your intellectual credibility. Admit that and move on ;-)

As to zeta joules, I can't process that information... That means I can't audit it. And I don't like evidence that can't be audited.

Perhaps you should engage in further study, then - and until then, you'll have to accept that this evidence has been audited by expert reviewers, both before and after publication; by people who have enough experience in the field to understand what heat content is. This is how science works in every field.

That said, I don't understand your confusion. How would a temperature figure help here? Do you just want to see an overall degrees/year amount so you can decide subjectively if it's "significant" or not? It's rather more complicated than that.

18810.48 cubic km of water

Did I make another error here? Because these numbers are still no where near what they're talking about. That shows nearly five times the melting of that estimate. That's not even close.

That's because you're calculating from incomplete data. The 200 Gt/year ice loss figure I quoted was an estimate from a single paper that dealt only with the major ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica. To get a more accurate figure for all the sea level rise inputs, you also have to factor in the melting glaciers everywhere else in the world. This is further complicated by the fact that ice melt in different areas can contribute quite differently to sea level rise (e.g. if it's floating, or if shrinking ice extent decreases albedo, resulting in warmer water and thus more moisture uptake in the atmosphere, to name a couple of factors). Then on top of this you have to include the effects of thermal expansion, which is around 25% of the total rise.

For a more detailed discussion, you could start with Meier et al 2007, which for example estimates that 60% of sea level rise actually comes from glacier melting, not including the two ice sheets in Greenland and the Antarctic.

you're going to have to show a graph that predates the heavy emission of fossil fuels.

Take a look at Figures 5 through 7 in Church et al 2011, that I already linked to earlier.

Obviously satellite data doesn't go back that far, which is what Shepherd was looking at, but we have fairly good logs of tidal data going back hundreds of years. These are confirmed by sedimentary cores going back to 1300.

That shows a much lower rate of rise... I think they're saying inches per century

This is only looking at ice melt in some specific areas. A direct quote:

we quantify mass-change trends in 19 continental areas that exhibit a dominant signal... the net effect was + (1.1 ± 0.6) mm/year.

This is consistent with our calculations above, as it includes areas beyond Greenland and the Antarctic. But it does not include all global sources of sea level rise; besides, we can measure that directly.

What's more, the rate of sea level rise has itself been increasing. Prior to 1900 it was close to 1mm/year, but in the las

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Namarrgon]

CO2 is not unique in its ability to absorb energy or radiate that energy.

Of course; there are other greenhouse gases too.

You can do comparisons to every other planet in the solar system and what you'll find is that the chemistry of the atmosphere makes almost no difference.

Citation most definitely needed for that claim.

what makes a difference is distance from the sun and density.

Obviously, but distance from the sun only affects the level of incoming energy, not outgoing radiated energy. And it's also obvious that pressure affects temperature. This goes back to the 1700s. But this doesn't trap heat.

Where greenhouse gases make a difference is because they allow most of the incoming radiation to pass (which from our sun is primarily in the optical spectrum, and CO2 is invisible to optical light), but they block a significant amount of the outgoing radiation, much which has been absorbed then re-radiated at black-body temperatures, i.e. in the infra-red range.

If you don't like the Skeptical Science site, don't read it - just read the cited sources (that's what I've been telling you to do all along, if you recall). I merely provided the page as it has a good list of relevant papers, but if you can't even bear to go near it, I'm happy to list them here for you.

As to the effect of CO2 being unquestioned, that is simply not true.

Show many any reputable atmospheric scientist who is questioning the basic science of the greenhouse effect. I'll concede that there are still ignorant people in the world who aren't up to speed on this, but if you want to include any old uninformed opinion, then there are still people who question whether the earth is round.. Let's not muddy the discussion by being over-literal, yes? Context matters. This is centuries-old science, dating back to the 1820s.

There is clearly a controversy so claiming there is no question is not logically supportable.

Now I think you're being disingenuous. When I said there was no question about the effect of CO2, I was clearly referring specifically to the well-established greenhouse effect, and there is pretty much no controversy about that in scientific circles (I'm largely ignoring uninformed opinion outside that, as I don't see that as relevant to the science). And as I said, there is still debate about how much this effect translates into increased temperatures on the surface.

You can't simply dismiss them all. That is not how science works.

Now you're going all straw-man on me. I'm not "simply dismissing" anything. I've provided citations to peer-reviewed papers for every single claim I've made - which is far more than you've been doing, I might add - and the few links you've provided have not challenged anything I've said, or even backed your own claims.

Let's start seeing some actual citations for your claims, because this conversation is ending up as one-sided as all the others. I've spent enough time providing you with verified evidence, and all you've done so far is change the subject.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

Jesus... fine.

Earth's temperature by pressure:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I can probably find a better graph but lets go with that for now.

Venus:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

There is this table in that wiki:

I assume X Earth means the unit is atmospheres.
Height(km) Temp.(ÂC) Atmospheric pressure (x Earth)

0 462 92.10
5 424 66.65
10 385 47.39
15 348 33.04
20 306 22.52
25 264 14.93
30 222 9.851
35 180 5.917
40 143 3.501
45 110 1.979
50 75 1.066
55 27 0.5314
60 â'10 0.2357
65 â'30 0.09765
70 â'43 0.03690
80 â'76 0.004760
90 â'104 0.0003736
100 â'112 0.00002660

As you can see there, at around 1 atmosphere or about 50km above the surface you're looking at around 75C. Keep in mind, Venus is a lot closer to the Sun.

Jupiter:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

About -98C at 1 atmosphere.

Mars:
Couldn't find a graph or table. Surface pressure is 600-1000 pascals with a temp of around -65 C... on Earth, the temp at 600-1000 pascals (about 30km above the earth's surface) is about -35 C.

What is more, on more, on the hotter worlds you can very easily get a lower temp by going up a tiny bit in the atmosphere and on the colder worlds going down a bit... typically you can equalize these with the Earth by moving the needle 10 or 20 percent at most up or down in the the relevant atmosphere.

This is the basis of the discussions about setting up a habitat on Venus for example... which would be some sort of lighter than air habitat that could choose the desired external temperature by rising or descending into the atmosphere.

As I said, this observation was not my own. I got it from a mathematician that played with the numbers and posted it on a blog as a "by the way" sort of thing. As a one off, I think its interesting. A different way of looking at things. Rather than simply comparing everything at the surface temperature of all these worlds which is quite arbitrary... comparing at equal pressures gives more of an apples to apples comparison. Since you can clearly see how radically the temperatures fluctuate based on pressure.

As to trapping heat... CO2 is hardly unique in this feature nor do I see why it plays a special role in the Earth atmosphere. The painted window analogy suggests that CO2 is like an opaque paint. But the reality is that once you've subtracted from its spectrum all the other overlapping spectrums you're left with only TINY sliver of spectrum that is actually unique to CO2. That is the ONLY portion of its spectrum that you can claim as being relevant. Water vapor for example overlaps over nearly all of CO2's spectrum all by itself... and goes well beyond CO2.

Water vapor is a MUCH more powerful green house "gas".

These lab tests you allude to... did they involve pumping a chamber up to 70~80 percent relative humility and then introducing CO2 in small amounts to see if the CO2 actually made any difference once the dominant green house gases were already accounted for?

I have no doubt that introducing CO2 into some test chamber is going to effect light absorption. The question is whether it does so significantly when the more common green house gases are already doing the same thing.

I've looked at these test cases in the labs and they don't appear to do that. They appear to have low humidity... or possibly even no humidity in the chamber when that happens. That's not reasonable.

You have to make as close an approximation to the earth's atmospheric composition at various altitudes... Then get a base line of

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

As to the citation, that is fair. I'll accept that but I do remember something else. I think my primary problem is that I can't find the source.

Even from that data though you're seeing an overall divergence of about 0.132 C in total. Which is still pretty big. If you're saying the temps went up .4... the sats are effectively showing 0.268 C... that's still a problem. What is more, the stats are not showing the high polar warming that the ground data is ASSUMING. Keep in mind, the ground stations have almost no actual data on the poles. I saw a map with all the areas not actually captured grayed out compared to the map we're typically presented with and all the areas with red had no stations in them. The stations all kissed the edges of the red areas but were not actually in them. If you look at the ground data they show big red spots at the poles. But the sats don't show it. And the ground data has a couple stations in greenland and a few in Alaska and northern canada. And it is on the basis of that that the entire pole is painted red. You're literally talking about maybe four or five stations... and if they're across the artcic circle at all... then only just barely.

The sat data shows a very different picture and I don't know if it makes sense to calibrate the sat data to the surface data because maybe it makes sense to do it the other way around... or at the very least try to harmonize the two. it seems like that doesn't happen though. The stat data is just slaved to the surface data even when the surface data is extrapolated.

As to your claim that the Zeta joule thing was audited, I've seen no evidence of that. I've actually seen several other scientists express frustration at the units because they don't know how to audit them.

As to church figures 5-7... if we assume 1860 predated any relevant human involvement then your citation actually undermines your position because the tend line doesn't significantly change with the burning of fossil fuels. Thus your citation of sea level rise while valid would not be valid supporting evidence for AGW. GW? Perhaps... but anthropogenic?... no.

As to your claim that it is accelerating, your cited figured from Church contradicts that. Examine figure 6... You're claiming the rate has jumped by three times... the trend line shows no break out with rates increasing by 3 times. I'm frankly puzzled by your Church citation because it seems to validate my positions more than your own and yet you keep citing it as evidence against me. You are confusing me.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Namarrgon]

comparing at equal pressures gives more of an apples to apples comparison. Since you can clearly see how radically the temperatures fluctuate based on pressure.

Um, well yeah. The temperatures on different planets are very different, even at the same pressure - as you'd expect, given all the other differences, like distance from the Sun, cloud cover, chemical composition and who knows what else. I'm really not sure where you're going with all this. It certainly doesn't show that "the chemistry of the atmosphere makes almost no difference." It just shows that there are a lot of factors that determine temperature. The pressure may be "apples to apples" but nothing else is.

And of course the temperature goes up & down with the pressure at different altitudes; that's the Pressure-Temperature law I linked to earlier. Perhaps I'm missing something, but I don't see what any of this has to do with the Greenhouse Gas effect.

As to trapping heat... CO2 is hardly unique in this feature nor do I see why it plays a special role in the Earth atmosphere.

What's different about CO2 compared to the other, stronger greenhouse gases like water vapour and methane is that it accumulates over a long time.

Water vapour is a stable quantity in the atmosphere (for a given temperature). Any excess simply precipitates out as rain. It doesn't increase, at least not until you start warming the air up.

Methane does accumulate, for a while - but it is broken down by UV light over a period of years, so it has only a short term effect as well. It can still be a problem (e.g. if melting permafrost like the Siberian Traps releases significant methane into the atmosphere, which is a real concern and could trigger other warming feedbacks), but it doesn't build up over a long time, so any direct effects of a methane pulse are short-lived.

CO2 takes centuries to be removed from the atmosphere. This is done by vegetation, to a small extent, but the vast majority of CO2 uptake is done by the ocean. Even so, this is a slow process. CO2 has been building up rapidly in our atmosphere, and even if we stopped emitting ALL anthropogenic CO2 tomorrow, it would still take centuries to return to pre-industrial levels. Worse, much of that CO2 being absorbed by the oceans is being converted to carbonic acid, which is resulting in ocean acidification - a decreasing pH that we've been observing for some time, and is already having measurable results on sensitive ocean ecosystems.

I had a hard time finding a graph for CO2 ironically... maybe you can help me out there.

I did find this which should serve: https://commons.wikimedia.org/...

Yep, that looks like a useful graph. It's certainly clear that water vapour has a bigger effect - but the primary point here is that CO2 also blocks outgoing energy. It's in addition to the effect of water vapour. Water doesn't "black out" the effect of CO2, it adds to it, trapping more energy.

While the water vapour effect is bigger, the CO2 effect is added to this - and that is steadily increasing, as the CO2 in our atmosphere increases. This is enough extra trapped energy to change the temperature equilibrium of our planet; we've done the maths. See e.g. Myhre '98 for how this is forcing value is derived, while Puckrin '04 compares our radiative flux models for a variety of greenhouse gas mixes with atmospheric observations, and finds them to agree well.

Have a look here for a comparison of the radiative forcing values of the significant greenhouse gases, particularly the Greenhouse Gases section and

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

The CO2 climate models were based on Venus... that is the relevance.

Everything blocks outgoing energy. Water vapor, CO2, Nitrogen, Oxygen... everything.

You're saying that that little sliver of spectrum that is unique to CO2 is the only frequency that energy is radiated away from earth on? That's nonsense.

As to CO2, its taken up by plants as well. It might take longer but we are seeing plants respond to the increase in CO2. Will the plants sink the carbon in the ground the way it was when it was oil... eventually... that will of course take a very long time. But even then it might not matter because the plants are sucking a lot of that carbon up. And even if they let it go when they die, the total amount of plant biomass wouldn't have to expand by much to take all that extra carbon out of the air.

Will that ultimately happen? I don't know. But there are many indications that the plants are trying to do just that.

As to Myhre 98
http://meetingorganizer.copern...

The primary issue is that Myhre appears to use "radiative heat transfer" as his primary means of heat transfer in the atmosphere which only makes sense over distances if you're talking about a vacuum... which our atmosphere is not. Therefore, radiative heat transfer is not how heat flows through our atmosphere. It isn't possible. The citation above discusses that and tries to address the problem.

The conclusion it comes to by the way is that the warming effect of CO2 is less than a 3rd of what the IPCC is estimating simply from that one correction. In the paper he modeled a doubling of the CO2... and broke up the atmosphere in layers and lateral zones then modeled the way energy would be transferred between them.

As to puckrin 04, did you look at figures 3 and 4? They overlap completely. Not in intensity but in range and my understanding is that the water is so much more prevalent that the intensity figures may not be relevant... with anything the water vapor touches probably being blacked out by the amount of water vapor. The percentage of the atmosphere that is water vapor is... roughly 2 percent would you say? And CO2 is 0.04%. I'm just saying that if a low peak of the water spectrum touches something the CO2 might have a high peak on it... will the CO2 even matter? Even if the water is MOSTLY transparent to a given spectrum there is so much more of it. We're talking about a difference in concentration of 50 to 1. Even very clear glass is entirely opaque if its thick enough. And as I said... water is NOT opaque to most of CO2's spectrum.

The only situation where I can think the CO2 would be relevant is at high altitude. At low altitude, I can see no way CO2 can do anything unless its concentrations start to rival that of H2O which is not a credible worry. From what I can tell, CO2 concentrates in low altitudes... which means it is hanging out with the water... which means since it is 1/50th the concentration and nearly its entire spectrum is redundant with water vapor... I just don't see how it could matter.

50 to 1 is a massive difference. And look at the overlaps in the spectrums.

Is it that I don't know how to read these charts? That's possible. I consider myself a clever guy... an educated guy... a reasonable guy. But I don't know anything and I am certainly an amateur in all this... so I'm going to make amateur errors. I have the humility to accept that.

Explain why my reading of the spectrum charts is wrong. i don't see it. The portion of CO2 that is not absorbed by water is a TINY silver of the total... and the CO2 is 1/50th of the water... and we're talking about that 1/50th like it is going to wage the dog? The CO2 in comparison to the total atmosphere 1/2500th of the atmosphere. Is this real life?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Is this going to be forever? :D

I genuinely do not understand.

As to

Re:Coral dies all the time

[RockDoctor]

Using the wrong word for the wrong concept is a tactic that Humpty Dumpty discussed in 1870-odd. It's reputation hasn't improved.

... that's more than a little pedantic.

If you want a scientific discussion, then get used to pedantry, and saying precisely what you mean using precisely the technical terminology of the field, unless you want people to think that you mean what you say, instead of what you mean.

For example, you say Change the temperate of the water? Coral dies. / Touch the coral? The coral dies. / Change the ocean chemistry in anyway? The coral dies. I suspect that you mean "Change the temperature of the water too much and too fast and the coral dies" (and appropriate other changes). Because if that isn't what you meant, then you are implying that every single day then every coral on the planet dies as the thermonuclear radiation of the rising Sun sears the water. (The deep water corals would die on a less predictable time scale. I see about 0.16 centigrade variation on the well I'm just writing reports on, though that's isolated from the global deep water circulation. But that's an easily measurable change, which you imply is fatal. If only the seabed wasn't lethal, so that there could be corals to die.)

You seem to be thinking that all species of corals are interchangeable. Which I find incredible, having to spend some parts of my working life writing reports on corals at the bottom of the North Atlantic (well, 2km below surface ; below the photic zone by over a km, and in water temperatures of 1-2 centigrade) and other parts of my life monitoring for contamination of coral reefs in the intertidal zone and 25-30 centigrade water. Somehow, I don't think that one of those species is going to be able to colonise an empty niche left by the other.

Rate of change is very important. The global temperature rise in the Lower Cretaceous didn't lead to a significant extinction event. That temperature change took place over several millions of years. A similar magnitude of temperature change in the Late Eocene (the PETM "blast in the past" as we call it at work, using it as a geosteering datum) took place over about 6000 years and led to one of the largest mass extinctions outside the "big five".

The effect of humans on the seas is significant, important, and growing. But personally, I'm slightly more concerned about the pH changes than the temperature changes. Not because I think corals are robust to temperature changes, but because the symbiont algae are probably more amenable to rapid evolution (human directed, if necessary) and experimental recharge of the corals. Which is work-in-progress. But that won't be by the sort of mechanisms that you seem to think will happen.

Re:Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

You're really having a hard time processing general statements as general statements.

I could be specific, use all the scientifically accurate terms, and go through the various processes... but that is contextually unnecessary because I was making a GENERAL point.

Simply sitting there and being pedantic is not a refutation of my point. It is at best a personal confession on your part as to the context of the discussion... the first point being that this is an internet chat forum and a certain amount of latitude is expected in this context. That you either were unaware of that or think you can use the fact that I'm treating the thread in this way as a way to de-legitimize my position is silly.

On point... if you're able.

Coral dies very easily. It is very sensitive to many things and dies or "bleaches" all the time for any of a tediously long list of reasons. It is however resilient as a "class" of life in that while it does die easily, it also adapts quickly and recolonizes quickly.

One can see this in the experiences of the salt water aquarium world at the very least.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

You can see lots of people talking about how they grow coral in tanks. The relevance of that is that they're very aware of SPECIFICALLY what the coral needs... a tediously long list of things that seem like a pain in the ass to maintain artificially. But the point is that if those conditions are in place the coral grows quickly.

The notion being spread around by chuckle heads like you is that when the coral bleaches the reef can't bounce back. It can and does so long as the prevailing conditions support coral.

Might the species mix of coral shift around a bit? Sure... that's nature. But will the coral go away entirely in those reefs? Fuck no.

And again, I'm not saying anywhere in here that we should casually destroy their habitat or not care about things that can hurt coral. I am instead arguing against alarmism that suggests that the coral is dying out.

It is not. various things will kill it or cause it to die back... and then it comes back. As a CLASS of life it is incredibly hardy. It isn't going anywhere.

Re:Coral dies all the time

[RockDoctor]

. the first point being that this is an internet chat forum and a certain amount of latitude is expected in this context

Wrong.

read what the site's sub-title is : News for Nerds.

I don't see any reason to lower the expectations I've placed on other users for the last 17 or so years (I've forgotten when I signed up. I know I was still on dial-up ; Slashdot was one of the things that persuaded me to get an automatic dial up account instead of manually dialling up). If you're a nerd (which you self-identify as, because you're here) then you should be able to handle a level of technical discussion far higher than the jock in the stadium.

Nonetheless you do seem to have some severely distant-from-reality ideas about the biology of corals. That's a general point. Perhaps you'd like to explain how long it takes a coral to die due to increasing water temperatures, and then reflect on what windows that leaves for remedial work? In general of course. The impression you give (obtained by, uh, reading your words ; I may be under the misapprehension that you chose your words with more consideration than a "normal" person. Because you're, like, generally here, man.) is that you think that it is an instantaneous reaction, for all corals in an area in a very short period of time?

In general, how long do you think it would take a new coral growth to spread from a thermally resistant survivor to at least partly replace the corals lost in a bleaching event? It's quite an important question because, in general, it affects things like shore line stability for considerable areas, and so affects how much expenditure will be needed for protecting harbours, approach channels etc for shipping?

Just to put things into context - the last time that the planet had this level of ocean acidification and greenhouse gas dumping, it was done over a period of about (+/- 50%) 6 thousand years (compared to the couple of hundred years that we've done it), and it took about 120 thousand years (compared to the 10 thousand years we've had agriculture) for the effects to be absorbed back to something approaching normality. That's one of the reasons that it's geological marks are a useful signpost. The question is less one of whether or not corals will survive, but more of whether human civilisation will survive to ask the question of the corals.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Namarrgon]

You're saying that that little sliver of spectrum that is unique to CO2 is the only frequency that energy is radiated away from earth on? That's nonsense.

Of course I'm not saying that. Please re-read what I did say. Water vapour blocks much of the outgoing energy, and CO2 blocks some of what's left. Their effect is added.

we are seeing plants respond to the increase in CO2.

Sure, and the ocean has increased its CO2 uptake too (hence the acidification). But it's not nearly enough, hence our CO2 levels are still rising. Plant uptake would have to increase enormously to make a substantial difference, especially as it's a relatively small fraction of the total.

Therefore, radiative heat transfer is not how heat flows through our atmosphere. It isn't possible.

Heat moves through our atmosphere with both radiative and convective transfer (and probably a little conduction too). Heat cannot leave our atmosphere by convective transfer, as we're surrounded by a vacuum. Therefore, radiative transfer is the only way heat can actually leave our planet. That's why it's important.

Your citation is only an abstract, but models both convective transfer of heat to upper atmosphere layers, and radiative transfer as a Planck black-body radiator. It agrees that CO2 has a warming effect, though the amount calculated is much lower than more recent research (the exact figure is still being determined).

Explain why my reading of the spectrum charts is wrong.

It's not so much wrong, as not really the point. Yes, there's a lot of overlap between CO2 and water. But even if atmospheric water blocked 100% of the radiation covered by its absorption spectrum (it doesn't), CO2 would still have an additional effect. And any overlapped frequencies that aren't blocked completely by water, CO2 will also have an additional effect.

The point is, degree of overlap is not the issue. Amount of outgoing energy blocked by CO2 is the issue. And the figure to look for there is radiative forcing, calculated as 3.7 W/m^2 (this article shows how to derive CO2 forcing from first principles, and compares it to satellite measurements). This is the raw effect that increasing CO2 has on our atmosphere (which is then complicated by numerous positive & negative feedback effects).

I just don't see how it could matter.

You haven't done the maths. Your gut feeling is not reliable here. Look at the science, not your preconceptions.

In regards to not listening to the progressives but listening to the scientists... the problem is that the the one will misrepresent themselves as the other.

What evidence do you have that any scientific papers have misrepresented anything?

I can't just trust anyone. The only defense I have is to use what intelligence I have and go through the argument and logically evaluate it brick by brick.

Unfortunately, without years of study and experience, that's simply not enough.

Your choices are: a) get enough experience in the field to be considered an expert, run your own evaluation on the massive amounts of data acquired in the last 30 years, then make an expert judgement of your own, or; b) listen to the many experts who have done exactly that.

Unfortunately, too many people choose c) none of the above, and make snap judgements on limited understanding of the field, and even more limited evidence. This is all but guaranteed to run afoul of preconceptions, political and otherwise. The Dunning-Kruger effect prevents most of these people from even realising how far off base they usually are.

Given your difficulty in even dealing with ocean heat c

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Namarrgon]

For polar temperature measurements - don't forget we have satellites too. We're not relying solely on a handful of ground stations, but their measurements help confirm our satellite results.

I can't believe you're still confused about "the zeta joules". Earth has an energy budget, right? A near-constant amount of energy from the sun comes in (about 700 terawatts from memory), and a variable amount goes out. The difference in energy remains on the earth - in the atmosphere, but mostly in the oceans. Energy units are measured in joules, where a joule is one watt for one second. If we're measuring the ocean heat content in "zeta joules", that's clearly a lot of energy that is being stored. I have no idea why you find this so baffling, let alone "several other scientists".

Regarding sea level rise, look at Vermeer 2009 for example, specifically Fig 3.

You can see that not only has the sea level been rising, but the rate of change in the sea level has also been rising - and has more than tripled in recent years, due to faster ice melting.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

Yeah but the sats are calibrated with ground data. You don't take raw sat data and say "the reading from the sats is X". The sats have their information calibrated by the ground stations. And there has been the adjustments to the sat data is all an increase in temperature. The raw data from the sats shows a much lower temperature... I think they were actually showing global cooling. Every year their numbers are adjusted up...

I find that to be problematic because the output from the sats is then only as good as the calibration and the calibration is based on the ground stations which means we're still dealing with the ground stations as our only real source.

When everything references back to the same source that is a problem.

As to Zeta joules... don't be silly... I've explained that one, the issue is that the number can't be audited it. I can't cross reference that information with any other source to find confirmation or conflict.

What is more it doesn't tell us what we really care about which is how much the oceans have warmed. From what I can tell, their warming isn't outside of normal climate cycles. Can you show me evidence to the contrary? I don't want to talk about the zeta joules anymore... its not usable. Talk about temperature.

As to Vermeer, that contradicts what was in the Church paper that you cited yourself. I cited the figures that show a consistent trend line with no apparent acceleration.

You need to address that. I cited it in the previous post. Figures 5-7 which you actually cited yourself when I asked for historical figures but... you citation shows no acceleration in the trend.

Here is another thing, how long do you think CO2 remains in the atmosphere? That is how long do you think it takes before CO2 is absorbed by the biosphere in some manner?

Because I've seen citations of as low as 5-10 years. And that something like 90 percent of all CO2 in our atmosphere has been emitted in the last 20 years or so.

If true this implies the CO2 from our sources is being emitted at a lower rate than the biosphere's absorption ability.

I'll look as well, but one thing which I'd be interested to know is how long it takes for a volcanic emission of CO2 to disappear from the graph.

That is... a big volcanic emission is large enough that it can individually effect the global CO2 levels. And that means its showing on the graphs. How long does it take after it shows up on the graphs before the emission can no longer be detected? That is how long before the graph returns to a previous trend line or base line figure?

I don't think that takes centuries. I'll look as well, but I'd ask you look also because you seem like you're very good at finding some of these reports.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

More of my shoddy back of napkin math:

7823Mt coal year
7,823,000,000 tonnes of coal per year
  2.86 tonnes of co2 per ton of coal
22,373,780,000 tonnes of CO2 per year from coal
22,373,780,000,000 kg of CO2 per year from coal

87,310,923 barrels per day
31,868,486,895 per year
433 kg co2 per barrel
13,799,054,825,535 kg co2 from crude per year

~36,200,000,000,000 kg co2 from oil and coal per year

total mass of atmospheric carbon is supposed to be around
2.996 x 10^12 tonnes
2,996,000,000,000,000 kg Total atmospheric carbon
----36,200,000,000,000 kg Yearly human emissions of CO2 from human sourced fossil fuels excluding natural gas which probably isn't important for this anyway.

anyway, that works out to about 1.2% of global CO2 per year.

Did I cock this math up as well? Are my variables wrong?

I got the coal and gas numbers from futures investment companies and then cross referenced that with some stuff I saw on wikipedia. The information was very similar.

The CO2 per tonne/barrel was obtained from a few people going through the molar equations on blogs and stuff. I don't know how valid that is... I was too lazy to do those calculations myself.

Anyway... It is looking like at our emissions rates it will take us 100 years... roughly to double atmospheric carbon... assuming carbon was not taken up by the biosphere at all which... it obviously does. So... that could mean the real doubling rate could be somewhere between never assuming the uptake rate is faster than our emission rate... or possibly hundreds or thousands of years.

Okay, looking at other data, it seems our CO2 has gone up by 18 percent since 1958. What I find the most interesting about those graphs is that the trend line is pretty constant while of course our emissions were not. I mean, we were emitting a lot less in 1958 then we are today. So... why hasn't the trend line accelerated? I'm looking at data from the NOAA. The CO2 from 1958 to 1970 shows a change in the trend line. But from 1970 to 2015 the trend line is linear while of course our emissions have increased consistently over that entire period.

I should see correlation between our emissions increases and the increase in atmospheric carbon. Our emissions haven't just gone up but they've gone up at an accelerating rate. That should be evident in the CO2 figures but it isn't.

That implies that the biosphere has to be eating it... and pretty quickly too.

But assuming current rates... we're looking at a doubling of atmospheric CO2 from 1958 in another 228 years.... not 100 years. And I don't know how much of the actual increase is due to human or natural factors. And the actual consequences of that kind of increase appear to be... somewhere between confused and controversial. I saw something say it would happen in 100 years but they were saying that implied accelerating CO2 rates and... the graphs I saw from the NOAA shows linear growth. I'm seeing some people say its another .4 C with the doubling which I appreciate could mean disproportionate things for ice caps. But I'm having a hard time seeing the apocalypse here.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

As to the added effect of CO2, you'll still talking about a very thin spectrum of the EM band and I've found nothing to suggest that that band is special in anyway.

Also, I've found some indication that this notion of heat trapping assumes a vacuum between the lower atmosphere and the upper atmosphere. Because after all, heat can move freely through the atmosphere simply by one gas touching another.

Lets say I had something that was hot... and I put that hot thing in a transparent bubble of CO2... are you suggesting that the hot thing would cool off or lose its heat more slowly than if the bubble were filled with nitrogen or oxygen or helium? Because I don't think that matters.

I mean, what we're really talking about here is light captured from the sun rays reflecting off the earth and being turned into heat before they can be make it out of the atmosphere. Right?

How much of the Earth's reflectivity is even in that spectrum in the first place? Because we're not talking about sunlight at that point. We're talking about Earth light.... like moonlight... just whatever the earth emits when the sun shines on it.

So we're looking at very narrow spectrum... how much of the earth's reflected light is even in that band? how much energy are we talking about?

And if some significant amount of energy is turned into heat by CO2... it would seem that the heat could just work its way through the atmosphere to emit into space. I saw several people complaining about the way this issue is discussed talking about how the treatment of this heat trapping effect assumes a vacuum between the lower atmosphere and the upper atmosphere. I think I cited the scientific term for the effect in play before. I can do it again.

As to Ocean acidification, I'm not sure about that as well. Apparently only records since 1988 are considered valid and if you look at record that go back an additional 60 years you don't see the same trend line. The data before that is not counted apparently because it isn't considered accurate. But absent a longer trend line I don't know if you can claim what is and is not the ocean's baseline.

Would you mind citing an ocean acidification graph that goes back more than 20 years? Ideally as far back as possible.

Here is one thing I found that is sort of interesting to me anyway:
http://www.abeqas.com/wp-conte...

I'm actually downloading the data he's citing from the NOAA. There is a site I didn't know about where any jerk can query data from an automated system. It apparently takes hours for the data to be pulled. So I'll wait for the email and then I'll have a download link for some giant excel files.

This is a thing I see a lot... cherry picking the beginning of trend. So if you back out you'll see some graph that shoots up and down and up and down all over the place. But the graph as cited in many contexts will start at some arbitrary year that perfectly allows them to show a clean linear trend line that would be unsupportable if you showed a slightly longer time scale and noticed that before going up or down it was going down or up by some equal measure.

I feel more comfortable with longer trend lines.

As to how heat leaves our atmosphere, the CO2 isn't in the upper atmosphere pretty much at all. So... I don't know why you're saying the CO2 is relevant up there. If the heat is transferred to the upper atmosphere then its going to emit it the same way it always did. The CO2 isn't even up there. Just like the water vapor, the CO2 is mostly concentrated in the lower atmosphere.

As to this energy budget thing... this is interesting:
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/jou...

Examine figure 1... .6 watts per square meter is the imbalance... with a margin of error of 17 watts.

I mean... when your margin of error exceed your value... you bas

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Namarrgon]

the sats are calibrated with ground data... Every year their numbers are adjusted up...

No, they're not. The measurements are going up, not the adjustments. The citations you yourself provided show only tiny adjustments to the trend, every few years, going both up and down - while the measured temperature trend is ever upwards.

The calibration is not re-done from scratch every year. That would be meaningless, as you say. The satellite data obviously must be kept comparable, both to itself and to ground measurements, so that any trends can be determined. Give these people some credit, would you? not to mention the expert reviewers who checked their methods.

I can't cross reference that information with any other source

Similar data is in the HadCRU and NASA datasets, not just NOAA. They're all cross-checked with each other and with related evidence. Perhaps you should look harder.

As to Vermeer, that contradicts what was in the Church paper that you cited yourself.

No, it doesn't. Church's Fig 5 and Vermeer's Fig 3 Lower are the same graph, though Vermeer has a blue trend line drawn over the red measurement line. You can see clearly they have the same values at the same decades. Fig 3 Upper is the derivative of that trend line, showing rate of change.

how long do you think CO2 remains in the atmosphere?

Individual molecules of carbon are being re-absorbed - and re-emitted - all the time, by plants and by the ocean, in large quantities (around 200Gt/year). This is normally in equilibrium, with a slow growth from geologic weathering and occasional volcanism. The rates of natural emission and uptake aren't fixed however, due to numerous feedbacks, so the best we can say is between 30 and 95 years for much of it, with perhaps 20% persisting a lot longer (thousands of years). It depends a lot on the atmospheric concentration, and how much we keep releasing. This page discusses the issue and provides lifetime graphs.

If true this implies the CO2 from our sources is being emitted at a lower rate than the biosphere's absorption ability.

Obviously that's not the case, because atmospheric levels have gone up sharply for 150 years See this ice-core data and more recent Mauna Loa data, showing a definite acceleration even in the last 50 years.
Regarding CO2 spectrum absorption, your questions were already answered by the citations I've given. Broad-spectrum sunlight is not only reflected, but also absorbed and re-radiated in infra-red (look up black-body radiation), which is then partially blocked by various greenhouse gases. This is well-understood science going back to the 1800s. and I'm not going to go over it all yet again. I've already cited papers that quantify the measured radiative forcing of CO2. There's no serious debate about this aspect, only about the feedbacks and resulting temperature rise.

Regarding ocean acidification, Turley et al 2006 is cited by many. Can't find a link to the paper, but here is a related presentation by Turley - see page 4.

Sorry, but I no longer have the time to spend with long explanations. It's taking too much time from my work. If the many peer-reviewed papers I've already provided haven't convinced you of anything, then providing more won't help. Either you're unable to follow the studies I've cited, or you're unwilling to to accept them as valid evidence, despite peer review and cross-correlation with other evidence. You claim that the broad agreement

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Namarrgon]

I've found nothing to suggest that that band is special in anyway.

It's only "special" because we're pumping gigatonnes of CO2 into the air every year. That makes its effects relevant to us.

Regarding the earth's energy fluxes (in and out), we can measure those accurately with satellites (not just the less-accurate surface measurements you cite further down). See this picture for figures, and details, particularly Fig 2 - the energy imbalance is +0.58±0.15 W/m^2, even during a solar minimum (and you'll note the error levels are perfectly reasonable).

just because you publish something and it gets peer reviewed, it doesn't mean anything in the paper is valid or that the underlying conclusions of the paper are beyond criticism.

It's not an absolute guarantee of truth (there's no such thing) - but it's the closest we've been able to get. Individual papers can be wrong (though far more often they're simply incomplete), but you can't dismiss all peer-reviewed papers because of that, particularly when similar conclusions are reached from independent evidence, all across the field, for decades.

As to whether my own intelligence is enough... you're missing the point. It has to be enough. If it isn't then I have no choice but to simply assume something is valid or disbelieve everything by default.

Or, you could accept that certain other people are better equipped (by means of study, experience and access to data, if not intelligence) to make judgements about the evidence, than yourself, and defer to their conclusions. You can't hope to make an informed conclusion yourself about any field you know so little about, any more than myself or any layman. To assume your own meagre knowledge is sufficient to contradict the findings of experts is pure Dunning-Kruger effect.

As to your question about whether a scientific paper has ever misrepresented itself... this is a very odd statement you're making. You're suggesting that no scientist has ever lied?

I did not say that. I said there's such broad agreement among climatologists and institutions - are they all misrepresenting the truth? Every one of them?

To dismiss consensus as "political" is to accuse every scientist and institution that endorses the consensus opinion, of falsifying their conclusions for political reasons, which would be career suicide. All those scientists are doing their jobs by evaluating the decades of evidence and reaching conclusions - are you really claiming they're all lying to us?

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

As to how much CO2 we put out... I think I did a rough calculation of that. Roughly 1 percent of the CO2 in the atmosphere currently is emitted each year by humans. So... if there 100 units of CO2 in the air... the humans are emitting 1 unit in a given year... as of 2015. By the calculations I did the actual rate of increase in CO2 shows that about 2/3rds of that is absorbed by the biosphere at least because the rate of change in the atmosphere has been less than 1/3rd our emissions.

I find that to be interesting. That implies a very rapid uptake. And again, I'd like to know how quickly the CO2 from a large volcanic eruption lasts in the atmosphere. I think that's a good test. One of those goes off and the CO2 ppm of the whole world changes noticeably. The question is how many years before it returns to baselines? Because that will tell you how long it took for that CO2 to get eaten.

As to Hansen... So this covers 5 years during a solar minimum.... and the imbalance figure is significantly lower than previously thought.

In addition, he says we need to reduce CO2 concentrations to 350 ppm to restore balance... we're nearing 400 ppm.

An imbalance I would point out does not prove causation... I would also point out that warming the seas... especially the upper seas is going to do all sorts of unpredictable stuff to humidity, clouds, etc. I think there are a few long term deserts that have started to turn green after thousands of years of being bone dry because they're getting water again. So... whether or not any of this is actually bad is debatable.

As to dismissing peer reviewed papers, I'm not doing that. Please don't start strawmanning me... it makes it hard to have this discussion. My point is that I can't just trust that what it says is valid because it went through that process. The process is not infallible. So it is not immune from audit, scrutney,, or skepticism. Just because something goes through that process doesn't mean it can't be questioned.

Dunning-Kruger effect, this citation has become trite and becomes little more than an appeal to authority or ad verecundiam at this point. You want to call me stupid? Then just do that. I can think of a similarly dismissive insult for you and that will be the end of any discussion. Is this what you want? I have no insecurities about my own intelligence. I know I'm smart. Saying otherwise would be false modesty on my part. I've a life time of validation to fall back on in this regard. If you don't want to have a discussion, then I don't know why you've even presuming to have gone this far. If you wanted me to drop to my knees and just accept whatever you say... then you were always going to be disappointed there. Choose please. Do you want a discussion or do you want to trade insults? I assure you... insulting people on the internet is one of my better honed talents at this point. So I'll probably if anything become more formidable. Moving on.

As to political arguments, I'm not repeating myself. If you want to have a political discussion, we can do that. But the nature of the discussion will shift dramatically to one of power, influence, and money. Choose. Do you want science or politics? I'm not interested in attempts to conflate the two.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

The records were showing a cooling trend until they were recalibrate.

Some of the recalibration were obviously valid. Others are not as clear cut. For example, the orbital decay correction was entirely valid.

Regardless, even the corrected datasheets don't show warming if you look from 1998 to today
http://data.remss.com/msu/mont...

The whole "pause" thing which is argued started in 1998 and what caused people to start looking for where the heat went. You're saying into the ocean... because it isn't in the air.

70.0 - 82.5 is the global table. The other columns address different regions.

As to sea level... from church:
http://static-content.springer...
From the EPA
http://www.epa.gov/climatechan...
the actual graph:
http://www.epa.gov/climatechan...

Do you see the problem?

The sea rise is linear. Our rate of emissions have not been exponential. Explain how the CO2 even correlates with that when the trend lines don't match?

The rate of change in emissions should be reflected in the rate of change in the environment assuming these systems respond quickly to these changes.

What we're seeing is LINEAR changes to exponential inputs. That implies the two variables don't even correlate much less one being caused by the other.

Also sort of interesting is this data on on the CO2 concentrations:
http://co2now.org/images/stori...

I find it interesting that basically was flat from 58-64... as you can see it ramps up going faster and faster towards the present.

Anyway, I'd like to see if we can get a single point emission of CO2... something large enough to be detectable globally for some period of time. I think a large volcanic erruption might create such a rise... and then I'd like to see how long it takes for the trend line to return to normal.

Your IPCC citation assumes 120 years. I don't understand how that is possible. We're emitting 1 percent of total atmospheric carbon every year and the rate of actual change in our environment is about 1/3rd of our emissions.

That implies that 2/3rds of our emissions are being taken out of the atmosphere and not re-emitted ANNUALLY. If 2/3rds of our emissions are being removed and not re-emitted annually... then what does that do to the life expectancy of emitted CO2?

The IPCC figure you're citing is 120 years... that seems obviously impossible. And your other figures you were cited were ranging from 100-30 years... which means we have range of 30 to 120 years just from your citations.

We're talking about the 6 foot tall man give or take 30 feet again. As to serious debate, you're in one right now to the extent that any such thing can happen on the internet. I'm not interested in your political references. Stop making them. I'm utterly indifferent to how many people agree with you.

As to your data on increases in carbon... I didn't say carbon wasn't increasing. I said that the rate of increase in the carbon doesn't match the increase in our emissions. If the time it stays in the atmosphere is 120 years as the IPCC says or around the 100 year range that wikipedia says... then we should see a closer match between emissions and atmospheric concentration. The discrepancy can only be explained by the biosphere sinking the carbon... possibly in the oceans if you like but still out of the air. And even the 30 year figure seems dubious to turn an exponential curve into a linear one.

As to Turley et al 2006, you're skipping over my request for a longer trend line on pH valu

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Namarrgon]

The records were showing a cooling trend until they were recalibrate

Please cite data that shows that.

even the corrected datasheets don't show warming if you look from 1998 to today

What was that you were saying about cherry-picking trends?

In any case, surface temperatures are only one symptom of climate change - and we know they're quite variable over decadal periods. Others, like ocean heat content, ice melt, and sea level rise, are still rising. And that table you cited looks to me like mostly negative anomalies in the 70s, and mostly positive anomalies in the current time - how is that not a warming trend? Perhaps a graph would make it clearer?

The sea rise is linear.

No, it isn't. The difference in trend from the first couple of decades to the last couple looks clearly visible to me, and Vermeer's graph of the derivative rate of change makes the accelerating sea rise crystal clear.

I think a large volcanic erruption might create such a rise...

The Mount Pinatubo eruption emitted 42 million tonnes of CO2. Human emissions in 1991 were 23 billion tonnes of CO2. Don't expect to see much of a blip.

The IPCC figure you're citing is 120 years... that seems obviously impossible

Why do you assume they're wrong, instead of assuming you're missing something?

As I said (and my citations tried to explain), it's not as simple as a fixed number. CO2 uptake depends on numerous processes, some of which are feedback loops. Some CO2 is re-absorbed quickly, some slowly, and some of it takes centuries to be removed from the atmosphere. That's why I mentioned the CO2 lifetime graphs - it's not a linear process.

But you only have to look at the rising atmospheric CO2 levels to see that, clearly, our CO2 emissions are currently exceeding the uptake.

I'm utterly indifferent to how many people agree with you.

It's got nothing to do with how many people agree with me. It's got everything to do with how many experts agree with each other.

you're skipping over my request for a longer trend line on pH values in the ocean.

Did you look at the graph page 4 of the presentation link I gave? Is 25 million years not long enough?

If you can find other data from 1900, please do feel free to cite it.

don't like having to validate your positions

Still waiting for you to validate yours. You've made a lot of claims, but cited very little data - and the data you've cited so far has contradicted your claims, not backed them.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Namarrgon]

By the calculations I did the actual rate of increase in CO2 shows that about 2/3rds of that is absorbed by the biosphere at least because the rate of change in the atmosphere has been less than 1/3rd our emissions.

Humans emit around 26 Gt/year of CO2. Annual atmospheric CO2 increase is currently about 2.1ppm, which works out to about 15 Gt. The difference is being absorbed, primarily by oceans (causing acidification), but clearly it's not enough.

Volcano eruptions are a tiny blip on this process, as I pointed out in the other post.

So this covers 5 years during a solar minimum.... and the imbalance figure is significantly lower than previously thought.

Is it? It's still a significant imbalance - and the overall imbalance figure is of course higher, when the sun is not at a minimum.

An imbalance I would point out does not prove causation

A measurable net influx of energy is precisely what's causing global warming.

What's causing most of this net influx of energy? CO2 has a well-established mechanism, and the calculated effect correlates surprisingly well with our observations. Unless and until someone proposes a new cause that better fits the data, we'd be foolish not to act on what is by far the most likely cause.

whether or not any of this is actually bad is debatable.

It's been studied extensively. The conclusions remain clear - it's bad for our food and water security, it's bad for our health, it's bad for our weather, and it's bad for our coastal communities. There are some upsides (more in the long term), but they are greatly outweighed by the negatives - which will be particularly harsh for the world's poor, who cannot pay the cost of adapting.

The [peer review] process is not infallible.

Nor is it meaningless.

Just because something goes through that process doesn't mean it can't be questioned.

Of course it is questioned - before, during & after peer review - by experts. But when numerous experts have questioned it, and found no cause for doubt, what makes you think a layman is likely to find something they missed?

If you, or me or any layman, thinks we've discovered a mistake in a peer-reviewed paper for any complex scientific field - it's far more likely that it's us that has made the mistake, than the paper's authors AND all the experts who reviewed it, including after publication. Wouldn't you agree?

Dunning-Kruger effect...appeal to authority... You want to call me stupid?

No, not stupid, never said that. Ignorant of the field, yes - just like me. We are both profoundly ignorant of climate science, at least compared to any practicing climatologist. Dunning-Kruger is the assumption that one already knows all one needs to know about a field to make a valid judgement, and says nothing about intelligence. Why do you assume that it's an insult? It's an unconscious bias that we all need to strive to avoid.

I'm deferring to expertise, not appealing to authority. If someone thinks expertise is meaningless, that would be Dunning-Kruger.

Do you want science or politics? I'm not interested in attempts to conflate the two.

Seems to me you're the one conflating scientific consensus with politics.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

As to the corrections... this is common knowledge:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

As to graphs... did you look at the spread sheet I sent you? There are two datasets for sat temperatures. The RSS and the UAH

Anyway... the point of my cherry picking was to point out the pause is in the data.

And while you accuse me of cherry picking that hasn't stopped you from doing it. I mean... is that what we're just going to do to each other?

Find the portion of any graph that agrees with our premise and then cite it out of context? Because your pH reference did that and so did your sea level graph.

I cited your own Church graph back at you and you're not admitting that it shows no change in the trend despite massive increases in human CO2 release.

The Trend line BEFORE that was the same as it is afterwards. Come on.

As to Vermeer, I don't know why you're taking about him instead of defending the church graph. You're switching data sets whenever your last citation causes you a problem. And the Vermeer graph didn't go back as far as the church graph. Its like my 1998 citation. We can play that game if you like... I just want you to understand the rules you're setting down here.

As to why I assume something is wrong... I laid out the math. I don't see how they could be right.

If you look at our emissions and look at the change in global CO2 mass... you can see that there is less CO2 in the environment than there would be if it weren't getting absorbed.

Then you can look at how fast it is being absorbed.

What you can see from the data is that ANNUALLY about 2/3rds of our emissions are being absorbed and the rate of absorption is increasing as fast as our rate of emission because the graph of increase in CO2 in the atmosphere is linear and the graph of our emissions is exponential. That means that the difference between the two is being absorbed.

If you think I've made a mistake then tell me where. I'm entirely open to correction if you have a correction besides simply assuming that there must be one because you're assuming everything is right.

I'm neither assuming things are right or wrong. I'm simply auditing it and finding issues.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

first, did you look at my calculations? I'm seeing something closer to 35 G/t.

What are your calculations based on? Mine are admittedly a worst case. I counted all oil as being burned effectively even though a certain amount is turned into plastic or lubricants or something.

I did not count natural gas emissions though... so frankly I think my numbers are not far off.

As to the increase... around 30 G/t is about 1 percent of the total in the atmosphere at this point.

Regardless the increase is linear. You can see the graph from Hawaii that I posted to see the graph of increase is linear. And then you can look at the emissions graph from the EPA to see the emissions are exponential.

I really think that point is important because it reveals something about the systems involved. if they're increasing linearly from exponential inputs. Think about that.

As to peer review being one thing or another... my only point was that simply citing its peer review status isn't sufficient to silence debate which was the context you attempted to use it in. I do value things more if they've been peer reviewed. But they're not above criticism.

As to the notion that only experts can have valid opinions... you have two problems with that position. First, there are experts with all the right diplomas that are making the same sorts of arguments I'm making. To arbitrarily say they're invalid but some other people are not... It doesn't work that way. If the question is one of "show me your diploma" then I can show you people saying the things I'm saying with all the credentials.

Here you'll say but "a poll of people with those credentials have said"... political argument. Science isn't a democracy. One scientist or even no scientists can say a given thing and the majority can be wrong. Citing a majority opinion doesn't make it true. It just makes it the popular view. I'm really quite tired of that entire line of logic. I have very little patience for it.

As to conflating science and politics... no... I just know one from the other.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

You might find this interesting:
http://www.dcscience.net/Giger...

""
The application of statistics to science is not a neutral act. Statistical tools have shaped and
were also shaped by its objects. In the social sciences, statistical methods fundamentally
changed research practice, making statistical inference its centerpiece. At the same time, textbook writers in the social sciences have transformed rivaling statistical systems into an apparently monolithic method that could be used mechanically. The idol of a universal method for
scientific inference has been worshiped since the âoeinference revolutionâ of the 1950s. Because
no such method has ever been found, surrogates have been created, most notably the quest for
significant p values. This form of surrogate science fosters delusions and borderline cheating
and has done much harm, creating, for one, a flood of irreproducible results. Proponents of the
âoeBayesian revolutionâ should be wary of chasing yet another chimera: an apparently universal
inference procedure. A better path would be to promote both an understanding of the various
devices in the âoestatistical toolboxâ and informed judgment to select among these.
""

I can cite many big names in science and many of the major journals that are all worried about a growing trend towards pseudo science.

A lot of it has to do with data driven science where in a data set is taken in and the whole study is just the analysis of the data. A core aspect of science is that at some point in the study there is supposed to be a "reality check". And many studies don't have any such thing in them... this worrying trend of not being able to reproduce results of published studies or various models when push comes to shove not being able to actually predict or model anything outside of the set piece of the study's data.

I'm no where near stupid. I won't defer to people that I see as increasingly compromised and who have a very poor track record of actually being able to predict or verify anything.

If that makes me a bad person or a fool... Then I wear that badge with pride with the proper attributions cited.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

http://www.clim-past.net/8/765...

More things of interest... that's showing about 1000 years ago we had similar temps in Greenland. It also shows that the current temperature trend we're on predated the heavy burning of fossil fuels by most of the world's population. It looks like the warming trend started around 1800.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Namarrgon]

That's Northern Hemisphere data, not global. Cherry picking? or honest mistake?

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Namarrgon]

I won't defer to people that I see as increasingly compromised

Right, there's my answer. You've found reasons to distrust the experts (though strangely not the few who are saying what you want to hear), so you've decided your own conclusions are more valid, despite your total lack of expertise.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Namarrgon]

As to the corrections... this is common knowledge:

Yes, you gave that link already, and I responded. This conversation is going around in circles.

did you look at the spread sheet I sent you?

Yes, and responded with a link to a graph of it.

while you accuse me of cherry picking that hasn't stopped you from doing it

If you can find datasets that are more complete than the ones I've cited, please do link to them. I gave you all the data I could find, including pH & sea level, and I even found different proxy data for you that went back further. Your turn.

As to Vermeer, I don't know why you're taking about him instead of defending the church graph.

It's the same graph! Same dataset, same values, same time period (1870-2010) = same graph.

If you still think it doesn't show an accelerating trend, draw a straight line on it and see how well that fits.

the graph of increase in CO2 in the atmosphere is linear

No, it isn't. Here is the full Mauna Loa CO2 record. And yes, it's accelerating - look at the graph directly below it, which shows atmospheric CO2 growth rate. See how it's now around double what it was in the 60s?

Your "issues" seem to be based around wondering why the results aren't quite what you think they should be. Perhaps it's all just not as simple as that?

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Namarrgon]

I just know

Say no more.

Thanks, it's been fun & all, but I can see this is going nowhere. If you feel peer-review results can be challenged, then you better come up with even more solid data - not your own inexpert "reality check". If you think a consensus of experts is meaningless (or merely "political") without stopping to consider why the majority might be in agreement, then I can't see how me citing more data will help you.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

The people I personally listen to are batting a thousand from what I've seen. Many of the corrections to the IPCC's reports have come from criticism from just these people.

Regardless... this is a political argument.

I am not kidding. You want a political argument... I will transform into a political animal... I'll go into politician mode.

If that's what you want...just say so. Otherwise... drop the consensus argument. Its lazy and invalid.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

Nice... so you want your final comment to be you taking me out of context? Nice.

What I was saying is that I know the difference between a political argument and a scientific argument. You should as well. Its pretty obvious.

Saying "I have X people that have voted Y" is a political argument anyway you slice it.

If you can't handle a discussion that isn't about confirmation bias and presuming intellectual superiority on the basis of blindly believing your presumed experts... then you are right... this will go no where.

I am sorry we could not part of mutually respectful terms. That was your choice.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

Cherry picking obviously... I thought you were okay with that since you've been arguing that it is entirely valid to do that.

So... if you're okay with it... I was just going to start cherry picking like crazy.

Your ocean pH study was one such that you've as yet not provided a longer term trend line for...

I mean... is ocean pH unusually acidic? Your study showed a 5 year tend line. Am I mixing that up with another study you had? Regardless... I'd like something that went back a good deal farther than that.

I cited something myself that went back more than a hundred years and it showed that the pH of the ocean over the time scale of even centuries goes up and down.

Re: Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

As to circles... then you have to admit that the sat data was adjusted.

Confirmed. If you don't want to go in circles then stop going back on past admissions.

As to the graph from Church:
http://s18.postimg.org/oschmgb...

I know how to read a graph like this from my analysis of futures markets. The graph is the reverse of what you see in those charts because the past is increasingly uncertain where as in a financial chart they know exactly what the price was but what the price will be is less certain.

Note the red line and the two green lines I made that are parallel to it. The line is quite linear. It dips down below the range for a time but then goes into the middle of it. When you describe a data set from NATURE or a market as being linear you don't mean the line is LITERALLY straight. You mean it is essentially straight within a margin of uncertainty or random variability.

As to my issue being that results are not what I think they should be... and what then is your scramble to find a reason for the "pause"? The pause is only a problem if you don't expect it and its existence is a problem for your theories which you're very married to at this point.

There is a lot of projection in these little insults you've started throwing at me. Why you'd think the insults would matter to me is sort of baffling to me. If there's anything you should have gathered already it is that I am inherently antisocial.

As such... peer pressure... of which your various judgements basically fall into... they just don't mean anything to me. You're using dog arguments on a cat. You're presuming to use herd mentality and pack mentality on someone that just doesn't think in those terms. I don't respond to personal judgments like that. They just don't mean anything to me.

Re:Coral dies all the time

[RockDoctor]

First, eat every last dick. All of them.

Projecting your daydreams, eh? Whatever - that's your your hearts desire.

I went over and talked to the reef aquarium people and I asked them how fast coral grew in their tanks.

You need to go and get some experience in dealing with the complexities and variabilities of the natural world, not the sterile and extraordinarily delicate artificial systems that live in human-friendly environments.

Re:Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

Why don't you talk to someone? I found out how fast coral can grow. It can double every month.

Now its your move.

Re:Coral dies all the time

[RockDoctor]

I work out in the real world and have spent about 8 months overall living and working on a coral reef, out observing every couple of days. That's probably more time than your collection of aquarium shop staff added together. I note that you don't claim to bring any field experience to the discussion.

As we say at work, in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. And then we go and show the theoreticians that their theories are incomplete representations of reality.

Re:Coral dies all the time

[Karmashock]

You rebuttal is to chest thump... like a fucking ape? Really?

You could have come back with information about how fast you've observed coral grow in the environment given your experiences you're claiming. You could have talked about reefs that died and haven't recovered. You could have talked about the various conditions that reefs need and why they're fragile. Any of a nearly endless list of constructive and informative things that would validate your personal knowledge and challenge my argument.

You did none of these things. You hooted at me like a fucking primate... chest thumped... and then presumed intellectual superiority.

Really? Are you fucking serious?

I don't believe you're an expert. I think you're lying because you've demonstrated that you don't understand basic rhetoric through you ridiculous response or basic philosophy for that matter. You can't possibly be educated.

It would be like if someone claimed to be an expert in physics but didn't understand math.

If you're a scientist... which appears to be your claim here... then you either have to know better or you diploma came out of a crackerjack box.

The Reef tank experts have practical empirical knowledge of how fast coral grows under what are ultimately laboratory conditions. That serves as a reasonable maximum rate for coral to grow under ideal circumstances.

According to them, if the variables are not ideal then the coral either grows more slowly or just gets sick and dies. Tell me I'm wrong.

Re:Humans die all the time.

[Anonymous Coward]

>>See those graveyards? Full of dead people. So I can make you join them right now, right?

I know you Global Warming nutjobs hate humanity and want people to die, but usually you aren't so direct about it.

Re:Will it let them work in the dark?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Deeper seas means exciting new shallow-ocean areas replacing such formerly dessicated locations as 'Florida' and 'The Netherlands, except that they actually believe in civil engineering over there, so maybe not'. This presents its own problems, of course; but the geometry of the earth's land area simply doesn't allow you to deepen-out the existing shallow areas without opening up new shallow areas; unless you have wrath-of-an-old-testament-god-in-a-genocidal-mood amounts of water available.

Re: Of course

[Namarrgon]

It seems unlikely that all the coral will go completely extinct, yes. Some small percentage will doubtless adapt and survive. But sudden drastic changes to the environment will certainly result in massive diebacks, of the coral and the ecosystems that depend on them.

It'd also suck for the local tourism & fishing trades, and the many livelihoods that depend on them, not to mention losing at least one of the natural wonders of the world, but hey, at least the coral won't be completely extinct.

Re:Is there a -10 complete bollocks mod?

[Karmashock]

http://www.populartechnology.n...

Wrong. The consensus myth is based on fallacious statistical studies of published papers.

Many of the scientists cited as being in support of AGW by such papers have openly objected.

The objections range from saying they are opposed to it, to saying their support is over stated because they think there needs to be additional qualifications, to saying that their paper actually made no relevant reference to AGW and they don't understand how the paper was used to arrive at that conclusion.

Further analysis of the methodology of the statistical studies show that they had a graduate student review roughly 800 papers a day. Given that that is entirely impossible unless the kid is super human or he's just doing a word search... we can conclude that he was just doing a word search. And that being the case, they can't actually say the papers were in support of anything but rather that a given paper used some collection of words taken to be associated with climate change.

That cannot be used to determine support or opposition. Thus the statistical study is bogus on the count that the people cited as supporting it are often objecting and that the methodology itself is unsupportably sloppy.

Don't worry. Be happy.

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

None of this matters. Bag it and tag it's DNA. In 100 years or 200, none of this will matter.

We are like people in 1900 arguing about how to best shoe a horse to not grind up horse poop into dust the best way possible, so as to give those people in 2015 nice air to breath.

Except the difference in tech will be even worse 100 years from now.

Re:Humans die all the time.

[Karmashock]

I think I'll have to channel my inner Leonidas and say:
"Try me."

Re:For gods sake, poptart????

[Karmashock]

link?

Re:I for one...

[thegreatbob]

Wish I had mod points at the moment, as I had come to say something very similar.

Re:For gods sake, poptart????

[Karmashock]

Nice try... I was not talking about papers that said X was skeptical.

I was instead talking about a paper that said X was pro the UN climate change position.

And just as you were able to find scientists that said they were not in fact skeptical, a lot of the scientists cited in the 97% figure were equally baffled.

If you look at the data, what you find is that the scientific community is actually SPLIT. You have no grand consensus and I don't have to prove that there is a consensus for my opinion to refute your position. My position is not that there is a consensus for my position. But rather that there is not one for yours.

Critical Thinking FAIL

[SMTB1963]

http://www.populartechnology.n...

You're linking to a site that doesn't list the names of it's publisher, editors, writers, or contributors. The listed editor of the site, one "Andrew K" is a "Computer Analyst" sporting a Gmail address - and he appears to have written ALL of the content on the site. I could not find one single article written by anyone other than "Andrew" on populartechnology.com. But I suppose these things don't represent red flags for you.

Many of the scientists cited as being in support of AGW by such papers have openly objected.

The objections range from saying they are opposed to it, to saying their support is over stated because they think there needs to be additional qualifications, to saying that their paper actually made no relevant reference to AGW and they don't understand how the paper was used to arrive at that conclusion.

Popular Technology lists seven scientists who have objected to the classification of their papers. Seven authors, seven papers. Out of almost 12,000 papers and hundreds of authors in the scope of the study. "Andrew" claims to have "emailed a sample of scientists whose papers were used in the study and asked them if the categorization by Cook et al. (2013) is an accurate representation of their paper." "Andrew" gives no indication of how many researchers he contacted, or of the nature of their responses. "Andrew" provides no methodology or supporting data of his supposed survey. "Andrew" simply lists SEVEN of the scientists, and surprise, ALL of them objected. Surprise 2 electric boogaloo: ALL of the scientists mentioned in "Andrew's" analysis are climate skeptics, one of whom is a crackpot who claims to have paranormal abilities and can find water by dowsing.

But, apparently, you see nothing problematic here either.

Further analysis of the methodology of the statistical studies show that they had a graduate student review roughly 800 papers a day.

LOL, did you just pull that out of thin air? Making things up and stating them as fact doesn't help your credibility.

So many of your "sources" are easily debunked when subjected to the slightest bit of scrutiny. Maybe you should challenge yourself and your sources just a tiny little bit harder before offer up these supposed "sources" in support of your claims.

Re:Critical Thinking FAIL

[Karmashock]

You keep attacking the source as if there was only one source that verified the problem.

Since you're addicted to ad hominem, I'll shift sources and we'll see if you're able to form a coherent thought without resorting to fallacious logic again:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/201...

That cites a peer reviewed audit of the study that showed Cook's methodology and conclusions to be in error.

Also noted in that article is that Cook submitted another paper along the same lines and this time his paper did not even pass peer review.

*gets out lube*

Bend over. I'm jamming your pretensions right back up the slimy hole they came out of... :-)

Re:Critical Thinking FAIL

[SMTB1963]

You keep attacking the source as if there was only one source that verified the problem.

If there was another source challenging the validity of the Cook et al paper, you didn't provide one. If you did provide one, I would've taken a hard look at the source and made a judgement as to it's trustworthiness. But since the only source you provided was populartechnology.com, I took a hard look at the quality of the information there and found it lacking.

BTW, I've made no claims about the validity of the Cook et al paper. To be honest, I've always been highly skeptical that there could be anything close to a 100% consensus on the subject. Be that as it may, the only thing I'm attacking here is your contention that citing a sketchy site like populartechnology.com provides authoritative support for ANY argument.

Since you're addicted to ad hominem...

Popular Technology puts itself up as a publication with editors and writers. Pointing out that there is but a single author for all their articles, pointing out the complete lack of methodology/data regarding "Andrew's" survey (which on the face of it is blatant cherry-picking) certainly speaks to their credibility or lack thereof. Sorry, providing facts about Popular Technology in order to support my contention that the site isn't trustworthy doesn't qualify as an ad hominem attack.

I'll shift sources and we'll see if you're able to form a coherent thought without resorting to fallacious logic again: http://wattsupwiththat.com/201...

That cites a peer reviewed audit of the study that showed Cook's methodology and conclusions to be in error.

Other than your little "fallacious logic" falsehood, you may actually have something here. It would've been a helluva lot better for you to cite the paper directly, instead of wrapping it in the rampant hyperbole of wattsupwiththat.com. Do you have a link to the full papery?

*gets out lube*

Bend over. I'm jamming your pretensions right back up the slimy hole they came out of... :-)

You're not helping yourself. Juvenile comments like that don't speak very well about your level of maturity.

Re:Critical Thinking FAIL

[Karmashock]

link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11191-013-9647-9

There you go, peer reviewed paper refuting cook's paper.

What you didn't understand because you were so biased against the source was that there was actually a valid argument being made.

The argument has been made by multiple sources in and out of academia.

You cannot simply dismiss all criticism this way. You need to address the argument. If you can't do that, then you are not competent to have a discussion of this nature. It is a prerequisite that you have to have some intellectual curiosity and integrity in matters such as these. Simply being mulish and tribalistically political is not acceptable.

If you want to be scientific then you need to put all that baggage down for a moment and just address the issue tabula rasa.

Re:Critical Thinking FAIL

[SMTB1963]

link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11191-013-9647-9

There you go, peer reviewed paper refuting cook's paper.

Yeah, I was able to find the abstract on my own. What I asked you for was a link to the full paper.

What you didn't understand because you were so biased against the source was that there was actually a valid argument being made.

Hardly. Like I said, my problem is with you citing opinion pieces in financial magazines as having some kind of scientific authority.

The argument has been made by multiple sources in and out of academia.

...yet it's taken you so very very long to find ONE legitimate rebuttal of the Cook paper. Christ, the thing was published in 2013. Yet you, a self-proclaimed authority on the subject, only became aware of the rebuttal within the last few hours.

You cannot simply dismiss all criticism this way.

I don't dismiss all criticism. I do however dismiss poorly supported claims by cranks with obvious agendas. Critical thinking demands being skeptical of "sources" in popular media, and when your source is an opinion piece penned by a non scientist citing dubious websites, well... you're just not doing a convincing job of supporting your arguments.

It is a prerequisite that you have to have some intellectual curiosity and integrity in matters such as these. Simply being mulish and tribalistically political is not acceptable.

WOW! Your complete lack of self awareness is truly impressive.

If you want to be scientific then you need to put all that baggage down for a moment and just address the issue tabula rasa.

The only baggage I'm carrying is a requirement for critical thinking when it comes to accepting claims - especially ones that aren't supported by legitimate scientific authority. The little turd of a Forbes article you cited doesn't even come close to be convincing anyone with a critical mind. The fact that you kept trying to feed that turd to people in this discussion isn't a sign of strong critical thinking skills.

Be that as it may, you did (finally) manage to provide a cite with some legitimacy, so congratulations - perhaps you are beginning to be competent enough to have a discussion of this nature.

Re:Critical Thinking FAIL

[SMTB1963]

I didn't just cite one source, half wit.

I cited a lot of things. And mostly recently I cited a peer reviewed paper.

Choke on it.

Did you say check on it? OK! Here's a complete list (as of this writing) of your citations in this thread in chronological order:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvfAtIJbatg (no mention of the Cook paper)
http://www.populartechnology.n... (Site is a one man operation that doesn't identify the operator or his alleged "staff". Attempts to debunk Cook paper by cherry-picking results from a nebulous survey.)
http://www.nature.com/news/pub... (no mention of the Cook paper)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/... (no mention of the Cook paper)
http://articles.mercola.com/si... (no mention of the Cook paper)
http://arstechnica.com/science... (no mention of the Cook paper)
http://www.the-scientist.com/?... (no mention of the Cook paper)
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04... (no mention of the Cook paper)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ja... (opinion piece written by a lawyer (who doesn't appear to have ever practiced law) who claims to be a "trained scientist". The article relies exclusively on research done by unnamed "investigative journalists" at populartechnology.com - a blog that by all appearances is operated by a single unidentified individual.)
http://wattsupwiththat.com/201... (first mention of a legitimate source rebutting the Cook paper)
http://link.springer.com/artic... (legitimate source debunking Cook)

So what have we got here...looks like a bunch of citations that have nothing to do with the Cook paper, one citation from a clearly bogus website, One citation written by a hack lawyer relying exclusively on the aforementioned bogus website, one citation from a pop-sci website alluding to an authoritative source, and (finally) a citation pointing to a legitimate source. And guess what? I've recognized your final source's potential legitimacy multiple times. You should probably take that as a win and call it a day.

In any event, don't you think you could've saved yourself a lot of time, effort, aggravation and ridicule if you'd have just kept your mouth shut until you actually come across a legitimate source? Instead, your process (if you can call it that) of supporting your arguments is to link to sources that you haven't subjected to any scrutiny whatsoever. It's a textbook example of a lack of critical thinking skills.

As to your claim that there is only one peer reviewed paper refuting your peer reviewed paper...

You're making things up again. I made no such claim. And for the last time, Cook's paper isn't MY paper. The only time I addressed it's validity I expressed skepticism of it's conclusions. Since you're having trouble remembering, here, let me help you:

"To be honest, I

Re:Critical Thinking FAIL

[SMTB1963]

So... more ad hominem?

Ugh. I'm not in an argument with "Andrew" of Popular Technology. I'm in an argument with YOU, and I'm claiming that your citation of such an untrustworthy source demonstrates a lack of critical thinking on your part. I've bolstered my contention that Popular Technology is untrustworthy by stating FACTS about the nature of the site, and FACTS about the weaknesses of "Andrew's" supposed debunking of the Cook et al paper. You are deluding yourself if you think I've made any ad hominem attacks in this discussion.

Anyone who spends ten minutes looking at populartechnology.com with any degree of skepticism will see what it is - a crank site run by ONE guy who won't identify himself. Anyone who cites populartechnology.com in support of their positions needs to take a hard look at the quality of their critical thinking skills.

Respond to the peer reviewed paper...

I have responded to the peer reviewed paper:

"Other than your little "fallacious logic" falsehood, you may actually have something here."
"Be that as it may, you did (finally) manage to provide a cite with some legitimacy"
"I've recognized your final source's potential legitimacy multiple times."

How many more responses do you need?

I have no patience or respect for this notion that a valid point can be dismissed on the grounds that you don't respect the person making it. It is a textbook logical fallacy.

You're still stuck with the notion that I'm making an argument I'm not. The only thing I'm arguing is that your citation of populartechnology.com represents a lack of critical thinking on your part. Christ, I even put my position in the title of my post. Apparently you didn't notice that.

If you can't... then you have nothing constructive to offer this discussion and I'll kindly ask you to stop wasting my time.

LOL, since I'm not forcing you to respond to my posts, no one's wasting your time but you. Given the number of your responses to ACs, I can only surmise that you *enjoy* wasting time.

Re:Critical Thinking FAIL

[Karmashock]

Nothing of value... oh well.

Re:Critical Thinking FAIL

[SMTB1963]

Yeah, I think it's best you get back to your fine work with all those AC trolls to you're trying to win over. That will be better than wasting your time here on an argument you can't win.

Re:Critical Thinking FAIL

[SMTB1963]

quote where I said I was trying to win over AC trolls?

Doesn't matter whether you said it or not. The amount of time and effort you've spent on ACs in this thread speaks for itself.

Kill yourself. Slowly and painfully.

My my, aren't we testy today. Oh wait, judging by the frequency of insults, profanity and homoerotic imagery in your posts, you're testy *every* day. Maybe you should consider working with a therapist.

Re:Critical Thinking FAIL

[SMTB1963]

LOL! Which position of yours do you think I've misrepresented?

Since you don't know what constitutes an ad hominen attack, it comes as no surprise that you don't know what forms a strawman argument. So let's add "false accusations of logical fallacies" to the list of your testy behaviors.

Keep posting. I look forward to another public demonstration of your ignorance.

Re:Critical Thinking FAIL

[Karmashock]

... so you're illiterate?

What is your first language? If it isn't English this will be more understandable. I'll help you out here with all due humility and patience if English is not your first language.

If it is your first language... then you have no excuse.

Re:Critical Thinking FAIL

[SMTB1963]

I understand English just fine. I'm also familiar with logical fallacies, and it's clear that you are not - at least when it comes to the ad hominem/strawman types.

So let's take a look at a definition of strawman attack:

"A straw man is a common form of argument and is an informal fallacy based on giving the impression of refuting an opponent's argument, while actually refuting an argument which was not advanced by that opponent.

The so-called typical "attacking a straw man" argument creates the illusion of having completely refuted or defeated an opponent's proposition by covertly replacing it with a different proposition (i.e., "stand up a straw man") and then to refute or defeat that false argument ("knock down a straw man") instead of the original proposition."

For me to have created a strawman, YOU have to first advance a position.

So I ask you again, which one of your arguments/propositions/positions have I used as the basis to create a strawman?

Take all the time you need to respond. I have plenty of patience when it comes to you embarrassing yourself. Again.

Re:For gods sake, poptart????

[Karmashock]

So you have no response to the peer reviewed paper that showed your 97% paper was bullshit?

So... I predicted that you actually have no legitimate position and you're only capable of making the same sad ad hominems over and over again?

How could I have called you so perfectly like that. I mean, I clearly wasn't even trying and I still pegged you.

Could it be that you're that fucking transparent? Seems so.

Better luck next time, cupcake. Your cargo cult science is going down.

Look at the trends. I know you don't actually care about science so instead look at the prospects of your little cause... it grows weaker by the day while politically the opposition gets stronger.

True... mostly in the US and UK... but that's where this crap is coming from in the first place.

You're losing. And the reason you're losing is because all you care about is winning in an argument where being RIGHT is more important the typical identity politics bullshit you morons use in all contexts.

If you cared more about being right than winning... you'd have won. But that would mean modifying your position to suit the data rather than changing the data to suit your position. I know... you don't want to do that. And it doesn't matter anymore.

Your position is so tanished with transparently bogus political power plays and fallacious straw men and endless ad hominems that you're just not that credible anymore.

And what is funnier still is that you've been so degenerate about it that scientists are starting to pick apart your bullshit. The various peer review boards are all talking about people like you and how they can deal with you.

You've been so crazy that you've caused the normally non-confrontational and conservative science community to start working rather seriously on taking you apart.

And the fact that you ignored the peer reviewed paper I sent you and just went right back to your ad hominems just shows you're another of these alarmist robots that has no ability to think for himself.

You're a joke. And more people are realizing it every day.

Re:For gods sake, poptart????

[Karmashock]

Its difficult to keep all the anon cowards straight... which is probably why you fucks don't log in.

Anyway:
http://link.springer.com/artic...

Boom shaka laka.

Re:Bollocks.

[Karmashock]

Your attempt to strawman my entire position as being based on a single source that I frankly picked out of a fucking hat when asked to back up my position is not valid.

Even if for the sake of argument I entirely surrender that source which would rob you of any further ability to use that link ad hominem against my position in any way... EVEN if I did that... I have so many other independent sources saying the same thing that it doesn't matter.

You're attacking one head of a hydra. You want to take that head? Go for it. I don't think your claim against it is enough to actually invalidate the entire source. But for the sake of argument... lets say it does... what did you fucking accomplish with that?

Jack or shit?

Because there are so many other fucking sources saying the same thing with varying degrees of evidence going all the way up to peer reviewed studies of the study... that your fixation on that one source is utterly meaningless.

Meaningless.

As in... without meaning. You're attacking something that doesn't matter.

To be substantive on this issue you're going to have to defend the position rather than simply playing ad hominem whack-o-mole with dozens of sources.

Re:OK Leonidas. What's your name and address?

[Karmashock]

Find out.

Re:Bollocks.

[Karmashock]

If striking down one data source meant someone was a liar then everyone in science would be liars.

You're an idiot.

Re:i have: it's a fake out.

[Karmashock]

Says the AC?

Your name is literally anonymous coward. You're literally too chicken shit to even use a fake name. And you presume to judge me?

You're garbage. Another AC waste of oxygen.

Please lets not forget...

[martinfb]

The Earth has already seen a number of extinction events, some due to climate change. It is widely believed this current climate issue is the fastest climate change we are aware-of. Coral may well not be capable of evolving fast enough to survive; even with our "help". So, let's be careful to not let what appears to be a "whew!" moment fool us into thinking we don't need to act on climate change ASAP.