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Study: Man-Made Global Warming First Became Evident In the Mid 20th Century
TapeCutter writes: In 1958 the US National Academies of Science (NAS) warned the US government that they had detected a robust Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) signal, they have not changed their mind on that claim for 57 years. Like the modern day Al Gore, Frank Capra publicized the possible effects in a popular documentary (video). Today we have news of a study from Melbourne University claiming the effects of AGW first became evident in the mid 20th century. In other words, the NAS could not have picked up the signal much earlier than they actually did. The fact that the last serious scientific objection to AGW (as a theory) was overcome in the mid 20th century by improving spectrometers in heat seeking missile was a remarkable coincidence, NAS took full advantage of that opportunity.
"The last serious ... objection was overcome"
While saying there is no agw is presumptuous you make a very good point.
One of THE key tests of a scientific theorem is that it can predict.. And yet these 'state of the art' models have so far had a dismal record of prediction.
And yet their 'findings' are treated as science.
Global climate change is obvious, inevitable, and continuous as it always has been of course. There is no static climate.
However AGW is a very different proposition.. And there is a wide continuum of possibilities within in from minor self adjusting changes to serious positive feedback.
However so far no model has shown any actual predictive capability.. Therefore all we can say is no model is useful yet.
That's the problem with complex iterative models.. They need to be close to perfect or their output is complete junk as the errors compound.
THIS is the big issue always swept under the carpet.. If we are going to believe the models they need to demonstrate predictions.. Not in daily weather but in ongoing climate. As yet they cannot.
Until they can anything based on them is politics. In either direction.
If and when they can let's hope people can turn their energy to a true solution.. The obvious ones of course being nuclear power in its more modern versions.. And cut through the red tape and bs that a generation scared stiff by iron curtain nuclear Armageddon propaganda hammered in to their children.
Oh course most are all far to addicted to rampant consumerism to actually change.. So that is pretty much the only solution if there really is a problem.
People like you are why the world is doomed.
If the "externalized costs" were incorporated into the prices you use to make your decisions, then you would decide more wisely.
The cost of a pack of cigarettes isn't just the cost to grow, process and deliver the tobacco to you, it is also the cost of treating lung cancer - not to mention the social cost of pissing off everyone who doesn't want to die prematurely.
The cost of continuing to pump greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere isn't just the cost of extracting the fossil fuels and using them, it's the cost of relocating our cities to higher ground, and other very expensive consequences. We may pass this cost off to future generations and get away (dead) without paying for it, but it is a price that will be paid.
I love how the AGW stories always bring the lunatics typing from their mom's basements out of the woodwork.
You know nothing about science. Really, nothing.
> One of THE key tests of a scientific theorem is that it can predict
What is a 'scientific theorem'? Oh maybe you mean a scientific theory? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... And yet these 'state of the art' models have so far had a dismal record of prediction.
Wrong. The reputable models from the 80's and 90's (those that had a good level of peer-review and were based on sound assumptions) quite accurately predicted our current warming rate. The reason you don't know this is because you probably derive most of your 'information' from sources that actually don't deal in science.
> The obvious ones of course being nuclear power in its more modern versions
I knew you'd segue into nuclear power at the end, and you didn't disappoint! Somehow anti-AGW lunacy seems to be highly correlated with nuclear lunacy.
Nuclear energy is not going to solve our problems. It is obscenely expensive - far more expensive than wind or solar. This is true both for construction costs, maintenance costs, total lifetime costs, and also costs per final delivered kWh. Nuclear is only feasible for a very specific set of scenarios - scenarios where you have a large population or industry center located in an area that is poor in renewable energy sources. And even then, only as an augmentative power source to renewable energy, not as a sole source of power.
Nuclear is also non-renewable and reprocessing (to make it renewable) adds even more expense to the point that it could never hope to be commercially competitive. You guys believe in the free market right? That the market always knows best? Well the market decided on nuclear, and it decided that nuclear sucks. It also decided that nuclear reprocessing sucks even harder.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
You mean like the IPCC? Perhaps you could explain why the objective, full-coverage satellite data shows no warming for nearly 20 years while the CO2 level has continued to rise exponentially. This suggests that the CO2 sensitivity used by the alarmists in their failed predictions is way too high, at the least. Also, the issue is not "AGW"; it's Catastrophic AGW caused specifically and exclusively by CO2 concentrations. (As doomed-to-fail plans to limit CO2 emissions is the only thing the alarmists are even talking about, rather than feasible, cheap plans like geo-engineering.) Every time someone takes a step, they cause a small earthquake. Does that mean they should sit very still and starve to death? Similarly, if a small amount of AGW isn't seriously dangerous, does that mean we should kill hundreds of millions of people through energy poverty to fail to solve something that really isn't that much of a problem? What will you do if the global temperature starts falling in the next five years while CO2 concentrations continue to rise exponentially? Will you admit you were wrong?
Pick another topic then, Crime, Disease.
We know a lot about both topic, we can definitely say both exist, and I am sure you have been the victim of one or both.
Now like temperature, we can't predict who will be the next victim.
And neither can we with any certainty predict their future patterns, will crime increase/decrease, how much by, will this be by state/country/globally.Flu season, they estimate possibly which strains may be prevalent next flu season and make vaccines, and yet they get that wrong a lot too.
Climate is significantly more complex.
each square mile of land impacts the climate of the one surrounding it, as do the clouds, dust, water vapour, pollution, solar output, position of the moon, tides, etc etc etc, there are billions of variables. However we KNOW CO2 and other pollutants trap heat, thats a simple experiment to perform and prove, we know water vapour traps heat, again simple provable , we know the polar caps reflect light back out into space, we know a LOT of things that impact how much heat our atmosphere holds and in general how this impacts the climate. Based on this, we are making models, crude models but testing them and improving them.
Generally what it shows is that we ARE having an impact.
However we are where the cigarette industry was 50-60 years ago, their industry had a strong vested interest in science denial, people had smoked them for years, hell there were people in their 90's who had smoked them for 70 plus years and they weren't dead. However as we now know smoking is bad for your health.
In another 50-60 years, we will look back and wonder how people could be so ignorant about climate change.
We it will come back to the same problem , people judge it based on how much it impacts their lives. If its going to increase the cost of petrol, it does not exist, if it means they may have to use public transport and loose their car, it will not exist, same with being forced to pay for recycling, global warming will not exist because without it there is no need for higher costs.
On the flip side an increase in extreme weather, well their house being blown away or burned to the ground will be "gods will".
The way I see it is
If we acts as though global warming is real, and we take steps, guess what we will have more efficient cars, computers, lighting, etc etc and a cleaner environment , there is no down side where at all..
If we do nothing and we are wrong , the problem is global and will be too big for us to just stop.
Think of it as putting your breakables high enough up so the grandkids can't reach them, prevention, versus trying to glue back that vase that belonged to your great grandmother, once it becomes obvious it is destined to break, there is nothing you can do to stop it.
For chrissake, step out of the basement and READ. I beg you. I deplore of you. Every single point you're making has been debunked to death for years. There is no such thing as 'global warming hiatus'. Only bad data, measurement inaccuracies over the oceans, and a regional pause in warming over North America and Europe, which has been more than compensated for by an incredible degree of warming at the poles. http://www.bbc.com/news/scienc...
> Every time someone takes a step, they cause a small earthquake. Does that mean they should sit very still and starve to death? Similarly, if a small amount of AGW isn't seriously dangerous, does that mean we should kill hundreds of millions of people through energy poverty to fail to solve something that really isn't that much of a problem?
Actually climate change is a very serious problem and by far the cheapest way of dealing with it is to deal with it right now. It is projected - based on optimistic predictions! - that the economic damage caused by climate change would dwarf the expense of dealing with it. And if you do it in a smart way, it doesn't even need to be that expensive to deal with. Solar and wind are already pretty cheap and could create lots of jobs. The price of oil is going to continue to rise; the sooner we reduce our oil consumption the less we have to pay in the long run. Any way you look at it, it's beneficial economically and environmentally to deal with climate change as soon as possible. Except, of course, if you're a coal magnate, which anti-agw people either are or are useful idiots for. Sorry to say this but it's true.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
Perhaps you could explain why the objective, full-coverage satellite data shows no warming for nearly 20 years while the CO2 level has continued to rise exponentially.
Why do you think there's been no warming? Are you still looking only at surface temperatures? Have you not seen the accelerating rates of rising ocean heat content, ice loss, and sea levels? Surface temperatures will climb faster when we move into an El Nino phase, if that's what you're looking for.
And why do you bring up the straw man of "energy poverty"? We don't have to slash our energy usage (though efficiencies of course help), we just have to produce it without burning carbon fuels. There's many ways to do that.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
At this rate, I don't see anything suggesting that we're really seriously taking the steps needed to get off of fossil fuels before it gets ugly.
Maybe you should try researching what's going on before posting then.
Follow the money.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.