How Two Scientists Accurately Predicted Global Warming in 1967 (medium.com)

Slashdot reader Layzej shares an article from this spring marking the 50th anniversary of the first accurate climate model: Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel looks at a climate model (MW67) published in 1967 and finds "50 years after their groundbreaking 1967 paper, the science can be robustly evaluated, and they got almost everything exactly right."

An analysis on the "Climate Graphs" blog shows exactly how close the prediction has proven to be: "The slope of the CO2-vs-temperature regression line in the 50 years of actual observations is 2.57, only slightly higher than MW67's prediction of 2.36" They also note that "This is even more impressive when one considers that at the time MW67 was published, there had been no detectable warming in over two decades. Their predicted warming appeared to mark a radical change with the recent past:"

Comments

Now we just need one more thing

[elrous0]

A way to distinguish the one prediction that's going to be right from the millions that aren't.

Re:Now we just need one more thing

[ColdWetDog]

Fruit flies like a banana.

Time flies like an arrow.

Re:Now we just need one more thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention that they did not have anything close to an accurate average global temperature to begin with in 1967.

Re:Now we just need one more thing

[I'm New Around Here]

Depends on how you throw the banana.

Re:Now we just need one more thing

[Type44Q]

Velocity vs acceleration; understand the difference? Didn't think so.

Re:Now we just need one more thing

[Anonymous Coward]

How's the "Jump To Conclusions" mat coming along?

Re:Now we just need one more thing

[ClickOnThis]

A way to distinguish the one prediction that's going to be right from the millions that aren't.

We have that. It's called science.

And while we're on the subject, science does get things wrong despite its best efforts. But the most important thing about science is that it is in a constant state of trying to correct and improve itself.

Re:Now we just need one more thing

[Grand Facade]

Something about monkeys and typewriters comes to mind....

Re:Now we just need one more thing

[whyyisthissohard]

Okay and what about all the climate models that are "called science" that were very wrong? His point is that there are many competing models and almost none of them were correct. We only know this one was correct in hindsight.

Re:Now we just need one more thing

[mnemotronic]

A way to distinguish the one prediction that's going to be right from the millions that aren't.

I disagree with that assumption. I think the spectrum of predictions is graduated; not binary. I believe that more than a few prognosticators will be absolutely correct; many will be partially correct but incomplete; some partially right/partially wrong, others mostly wrong and about 50% fully worng. My reason for that number is that I think that life on earth is far more complicated, interconnected and inter-dependent that we yet realize. Once the links are broken or disturbed, some life will evolve, adapt and survive in surprising ways. Other life will cease to exist. Those adaptions and failures will, in turn, induce further changes. This goes on all the time. IMHO, rapid, intrusive climate change just pokes at the gradual evolutionary processes with a pointed stick.

We have that. It's called science.

And while we're on the subject, science does get things wrong despite its best efforts. But the most important thing about science is that it is in a constant state of trying to correct and improve itself.

Is it that science is wrong, or that people are wrong? Science is science. People have foibles, flaws, misinterpretations, lack of imagination and hidden agendas.

Re:Now we just need one more thing

[whit3]

...they did not have anything close to an accurate average global temperature to begin with in 1967.

Completely irrelevant, of course. This planet has a molten nickel-iron core, and frigid upper atmosphere; it doesn't have thermal equilibrium, nor an 'accurate temperature'. We make various averages and selections of temperature according to a variety of needs.

There was nothing wrong with any or all of those temperatures in 1967, nor is there now.

Re:Now we just need one more thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course there is a way to pick the best model for any given situation...........
Wait for the events, measure the results, then pick the winner.

the power of DUH!

Re:Now we just need one more thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Velocity vs acceleration; understand the difference? Didn't think so.

So you are saying an unknown average measure in 1967 is somehow better than a slightly better known temperature in 2007. And now you are claiming you can calculate either velocity or acceleration from only one somewhat fuzzy observation. Amazing!

Toss some more random words around to show you think you know what you are doing.

Re:Now we just need one more thing

[whit3]

A way to distinguish the one prediction that's going to be right from the millions that aren't.

A danger warning about safe crossing of the street doesn't have to identify the one car of millions that is gonna run you down.

It's OK to dodge ALL the cars, and you get to the other side without getting flattened.

The proposed 'need' is nonsense.

The real need, is enough knowledge and understanding (i.e. science) to proceed with a degree of safety.

Re:Now we just need one more thing

[Uberbah]

Okay and what about all the climate models that are "called science" that were very wrong?

Okay and which ones would those be. The climate cooling myth doesn't count for obvious reasons.

https://skepticalscience.com/i...

His point is that there are many competing models and almost none of them were correct.

His point is an uncited tautology.

We only know this one was correct in hindsight.

"Scientists pull random theories out of their butts and decades later pick and choose the ones that were correct" isn't how science actually works.

Re:Now we just need one more thing

[MrL0G1C]

Start with the fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and we know precisely how much of it is emitted when fossil fuels are burnt. We've known that CO2 is a greenhouse gas for a lot longer than 50 years.

http://www.climatechangenews.c...

1856, we've known CO2 is a greenhouse gas for over 160 years now!

Re:Now we just need one more thing

[dryeo]

Is it that science is wrong, or that people are wrong? Science is science. People have foibles, flaws, misinterpretations, lack of imagination and hidden agendas.

Science is a process that depends on amongst other things, correct data.
A famous example is the ether theory. Made perfect sense as light obviously had the properties of waves and in the experience of people, waves need a medium to travel in.
Eventually the measurements got better and showed that light traveled at the same speed no matter what, which was unlike anything people had experienced. After checking and rechecking their measurements, the theory of ether was thrown out.
The science was limited by the data the tools gathered and the limitations of people. The important thing was that the science improved, though it took a genius to think far enough out of the box to come up with relativity.
People are limited and our tools are limited.
Now climate science is much simpler in some ways, trap more energy in a system, temperatures, on average will raise and the arguments are more like arguing about the shape of the Earth. The flat Earthers are wrong, and so are the round Earthers, but one of them is much less wrong then the other.

Re:Now we just need one more thing

[haruchai]

Now, thin fruit flies like thunderstorms
And thin farm boys like farm girls narrow;
And tax firm men like fat tax forms –
But time flies like an arrow.
When tax forms tax all firm men's souls,
While farm girls slim their boyfriends' flanks;
That's when the murd'rous thunder rolls –
And thins the fruit flies ranks.
Like tossed bananas in the skies,
The thin fruit flies like common yarrow;
Then's the time to time the time flies –
Like the time flies like an arrow.

Re:Now we just need one more thing

[whyyisthissohard]

isn't how science actually works

seems to be how Science actually works

Re:Now we just need one more thing

[Anonymous Coward]

I feel the same way about tarot card readers which is why I continue to have my fortune read despite being wrong so many times.

Re:Now we just need one more thing

[KeensMustard]

DId any of the models that assumed "it's not CO2 causing the warming" get it right?

No?

Then that's a start, right?

Re:Now we just need one more thing

[KeensMustard]

A way to distinguish the one prediction that's going to be right from the millions that aren't.

You mean predictions like:

"It's not warming"

"It's warming but it's the sun/moon/jupiter"

"It's a something something natural cycle! Natural!"

"It's warming but it's good somehow (mumble mumble)"

Predictions like those?

Re:Now we just need one more thing

[Layzej]

I believe that more than a few prognosticators will be absolutely correct;

Probably not. They say "Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful". This is the nature of models regardless of the field. Though even the wronger ones can be useful insofar as you can attempt to understand why it deviated from reality.

In this case "The big advance of Manabe and Wetherald’s work was to model not just the feedbacks but the interrelationships between the different components that contribute to the Earth’s temperature. As the atmospheric contents change, so do both the absolute and relative humidity, which impacts cloud cover, water vapor content and cycling/convection of the atmosphere. What they found is that if you start with a stable initial state—roughly what Earth experienced for thousands of years prior to the start of the industrial revolution—you can tinker with one component (like CO2) and model how everything else evolves."

Even in this case where the projected answer is indistinguishable from observations, it is wrong to assume that they got it exactly right. Their projection is that a doubling of CO2 will cause 2.36C of warming - all else being equal. In reality all else was not equal. Solar output has been waning since the study was published. Aerosols have likely been increased. Etc. Still, it's useful to understand what worked and why.

Re:Now we just need one more thing

[david_thornley]

The exact temperature in 1967 or 2017 is not really important. What's important is the change, and that we can determine pretty accurately.

Re:Now we just need one more thing

[david_thornley]

How wrong were they? No model of anything is completely accurate. Many are close enough to be useful. As we get more data, we can make better models. Models that are close to accurate are more likely to be largely correct, and are good things to study.

There's also a whole lot of odd claims in the media. They often have nothing to do with science.

Re:Now we just need one more thing

[Magius_AR]

Okay and which ones would those be.

Umm, many? "All models are wrong" is a very common thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The biggest one I remember is when the models overlooked the ocean as a gigantic heatsink, leading to a massive gap in "missing heat": http://www.sciencemag.org/news...

Most recently, the most recent models have been shown to vastly overstate the warming case: http://reason.com/blog/2017/09...

Just one quote: "Here's where it gets interesting. The average global temperature now stands at about 0.9 C above the pre-industrial baseline, which implies that global temperature would have to increase by 0.6 C between now and 2021 if the IPCC carbon budget calculations were right. This is highly implausible since such an increase would be about 10 times faster than than what has actually heretofore been observed"

"Scientists pull random theories out of their butts and decades later pick and choose the ones that were correct" isn't how science actually works.

And yet that appears to be almost exactly what they're doing...you basically shotgun a bunch of models based on "best understanding" of a very complex ecosystem. After observing end results (hindcasting), the ones that best fit you keep, the others you throw out. Which is a perfectly fine method of science long-term, with the exception that you aren't allowed to make a bunch of claims of certainty of the end of humanity when you're far from having it figured out. You know all those people that claims 90+% scientific consensus that we're on a path to global catastrophe? Right down to exact "tipping point" climate timelines which were pretty much used to craft the guidelines in the Paris accord.

Re:Now we just need one more thing

[Uberbah]

Umm, many? "All models are wrong" is a very common thing

Only if we're counting every thesis and hypothesis as a peer-reviewed theory, which is of course nonsense.

Most recently, the most recent models have been shown to vastly overstate the warming case: http://reason/

Reason??? I'm happy to read their pieces on why drug prohibition/civil forfeiture/NSA spying should be ended, but on the subject of climate change they should be taken as seriously as a Young Earth Creationist telling you that carbon dating is crap.

Because for a libertarian to admit that AGW is real is to admit that libertarianism could never stop it, and the only things that would are things that libertarians despise: massive government regulation and massive government spending. Regulation and spending we have not seen the likes of since WWII. Which is why libertarians deny climate change like young earth creationists deny the carbon dating of dinosaur bones. To paraphrase that old line about paychecks:

It's hard to get a Libertarian to understand something when his ideology is dependent on his not understanding it.

Actual science

[jandrese]

This paper is arguably the origin of the modern disinformation campaign against carbon pollution. This is the point where politically powerful interests realized that their core business model was in danger and that they needed to do something to stop it. Now we have an entire political party who's official position is to ignore the blatantly obvious and to be actively hostile to the kind of research that produced this paper.

Re:Actual science

[OffTheLip]

Agreed. The opposition we good at mobilizing their financial resources at the expense of natural resources.

Re:Actual science

[Q-Hack!]

Now that I have actually read the paper, I notice that there is no prediction of doom and gloom. Remembering back to the days of Al Gore... he made it political. I suspect he introduced us to the carbon tax idea so that he could get in on the ground floor and make millions. Most of us who have been labeled "Deniers" are really more just skeptical of outlandish claims. The science seems legit; the predictions of the end of the world do not.

Re:Actual science

[microbox]

I've lived in houses for 42 years, and have yet to have one burn down on me. As a rough approximation, we could say that the probability of my house burning down next year is less than 1 in 42, or less than 2.4%. Yet I have fire insurance, because it is worth it.

Same thing with climate change. The chances of catastrophe are small, but the best estimates put it about 2.4%. And real world experience has shown that the cost of doing something is, net, almost nothing. Sure there are winners and losers, and the losers are big carbon companies, who are behaving exactly like tobacco companies when faced with the same calculus.

Re:Actual science

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

I've lived in houses for 42 years, and have yet to have one burn down on me. As a rough approximation, we could say that the probability of my house burning down next year is less than 1 in 42, or less than 2.4%. Yet I have fire insurance, because it is worth it.

Must be liberal arts grad. Your neighbor too lived for 40 or 50 years without burning down a house. Now suddenly your upper bound drops to 1%. And then add more and more people and you will find a few who lost houses to fire. Your sample might eventually include Betram Wooster who burnt down two houses, (or was it three?). Pretty soon you can get a very good estimate of actual likelyhood of you losing a home to fire in the next one year. The insurance company has this actuarial statistic and priced you insurance premium accordingly.

The actuarial science actually dates back to 1700s when the mortality of the priests in England was calculated with surprising accuracy.

Re: Actual science

[Anonymous Coward]

Pascal's wager much ?

Re:Actual science

[Oceanplexian]

I'm a trader and read a lot into statistics. It's quite interesting how most people quickly jump to conclusions based on bad data.

Just because you can predict something, does not mean you can repeatedly predict it, or that your prediction implies a pattern. Investors tend to lose their shirt on a regular basis thinking they can time the market, even with rock solid data. Even predictions that can be replayed on historical data, frequently fail when applied on new, future data. I can virtually guarantee if you tried to apply the same model to an expanded data set it would be a hell of a lot less conclusive. Unfortunately the blogger that posted this has neglected to apply the model to the last 1,000, or 10,000 years, and has instead decided to come to conclusions based on 0.0001% of the actual data we should be looking at. This, too, is a common tactic, intended to obfuscate the facts and imply that carbon pollution is a much more serious threat than it actually is.

Re:Actual science

[plopez]

The difference here is that there is a mechanistic explanation, the physical properties of CO2, while in trading you just have people twiddling knobs getting functions to fit or AI to converge. That is what makes climate research science and trading voodoo.

Re:Actual science

[riverat1]

Climate models don't use data like you think they do. Temperature data is never an input to climate models except maybe as a starting point. Instead they run climate models in reverse to see how well they compare to the temperature data from the past and they do pretty well at it.

Re:Actual science

[Aighearach]

Everybody with a 4 year degree who didn't attend a "trade school" has a Liberal Arts Degree. That includes all those BS degrees!

"The more you know!"

Liberal Arts means you had to learn how to read in addition to learning math.

Re:Actual science

[iMadeGhostzilla]

Anytime we think there is a mechanistic explanation for events in a complex system -- such as the Earth and its biosphere is -- we're probably wrong. As for me, I'd rather trust a trader's ability to observe patterns than the climate researcher's because the shirt on back of the former literally depends on that ability. In the case of the climate researcher his prediction may or may not eventually match reality but whatever happens a century from now will affect neither his paycheck nor his reputation. In other words he has no skin in the game.

Re:Actual science

[Ungrounded Lightning]

This paper is arguably the origin of the modern disinformation campaign against carbon pollution. This is the point where politically powerful interests realized that their core business model was in danger and that they needed to do something to stop it.

It also looks just like the hockey stick the "corrections" to later data warp the readings to match.

Now that the issue has been politicized, any actual science is no longer relevant to the debate.

  * One side has caught researchers fudging (or using data pre-fuged by others) and doesn't trust further papers predicting gloom and doom, as possibly defective, pushed and often funded by the powerful institutional interests seeking more power and/or engaging in multi-billion dollar rent-seeking operations (such as carbon credit exchanges).

  * The other rejects papers that don't predict gloom and doom as being fake research, possibly funded by fossil-fuel interests.

It's really a pity. If there really IS a problem it would be nice to have some trustworthy advance warning on which to make plans.

Meanwhile, it would be interesting to see how this one compares to the UNcorrected climate data.

Re:Actual science

[Uberbah]

That's not even quarter-assed denialism. Smoked many cigarettes rolled in asbestos papers lately to stick it to those librul scientists?

Re:Actual science

[Uberbah]

Anytime we think there is a mechanistic explanation for events in a complex system -- such as the Earth and its biosphere is -- we're probably wrong.

Definitely denialist handwaving. When even Exxon-funded scientists admit that climate change is being driven by humans, why insult your own intelligence with the "gosh this is toooo hard to understand!" shtick.

As for me, I'd rather trust a trader's ability to observe patterns than the climate researcher's because the shirt on back of the former literally depends on that ability.

Traders who make money on fees whether the market goes up or down. A market driven by human psychology, something climate DGAF about.

Re: Actual science

[Anonymous Coward]

If we use thermodynamics instead of stastics, it's clear that Venus (oft cited example of runaway greenhouse effect) high surface temperature is caused by the high atmospheric pressures (90atm) adiabatic compression of the atmosphere. If we release enough of any gas and increase the mass of gas our atmosmosphere the temperature will increase due to adiabatic compression. This same effect causes the air temperature in deep underground mines to increase so much the mining conpanies need to air condition.

In australia our climate scientist undergrads don't study thermodynamics, don't believe me, have a look at university course profiles.

Thermodynamics texts are written using practical application examples, not climate.

Re:Actual science

[Uberbah]

Remembering back to the days of Al Gore... he made it political.

So was giving women the right to vote and keeping companies like DuPont from dumping toxic waste into your drinking supply. WYP.

I suspect he introduced us to the carbon tax idea so that he could get in on the ground floor and make millions.

Yes, a conservative, market-based approach to mitigating climate change. Yet conservatives who believe in market solutions for everything despise Al Gore, for some reason.

Re:Actual science

[MrL0G1C]

Climate denial is a faith, it doesn't matter what the science says, denialists will listen to whatever BS the high priests of climate denial come out with.I haven't heard a good explanation yet from a global warming denier as to why CO2 isn't a greenhouse gas - something that was discovered over 160 years ago. They also need to explain why the north pole sea ice is melting.

Re:Actual science

[Anonymous Coward]

No need to mock people.

Your example doesn't make perfect sense. You're neglecting that the "two side by side houses not burning scenario" is highly auto-correlated. The probabilities are highly dependent on each other. This is why insurance companies won't sell fire insurance to entire blocks of houses.

Re:Actual science

[riverat1]

Anytime we think there is a mechanistic explanation for events in a complex system -- such as the Earth and its biosphere is -- we're probably wrong.

The Earth's climate doesn't change for magical reasons or as in the case for economic models for human psychological reasons. It changes for actual physical reasons, IOW mechanistic reasons. The complexity may make it difficult to determine those reasons but they definitely exist.

Also, a scientists reputation depends on the quality of the science they do and I think most scientists care quite a bit about their reputations. If they cared more about money they're smart enough to go into another field that pays more.

Re: Actual science

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a story that might help you understand:

Remember the perpetual motion engine? It was an engine that required no energy input to run. Unfortunately every time an energy conversion or heat transfer occurrs there a efficiency losses. The perpetual motion engine was a fraud.

Greenhouse gas is the perpetual motion engine of our time.

Heat radiated from the earths surface is absorbed by CO2 and part is radiated back, further heating the surface, leading to an increase in surface temperature. This is nonsense as the surface would heat indefinitely generating more and more energy out of thin air.

CO2 is not a blanket or insulation that prevents convection.

It's all just nonsense, lies damn lies and statistics, to fool the ignorant, educate yourselves properly, so they can't pull the wool over your eyes.

Re:Actual science

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

The term "liberal arts" is distinguished from "technical arts" by who studies it, not by what is studied.

Liberal arts are meant for people with independent means of income and wealth who do not need the education to earn a living. Liberal comes from liberty and freedom. Such people would learn useless things that takes to their fancy without worrying about whether it would lead to paying jobs.

Re:Actual science

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a mechanical system, and you're not talking about some sand getting into the gearbox grease and staying there. For example, CO2 is processed by plants, it doesn't just sit there.

Re: Actual science

[Anonymous Coward]

Where do these people come from and why do they read 'news for nerds'?
It kind of implies you have at least the most basic understanding of science or at least the intellectual curiosity to learn about something you don't know about from reputable sources rather than a moronic conspiracy theory/climate change denial website, pretty sad but keep on embarrassing yourselves for our entertainment.

Re:Actual science

[Anonymous Coward]

And being a member of the Church of Climate Change is also a faith. The problem we have here is the continued use of the term "greenhouse gas" as if that is supposed to be some derogatory poisonous substance where in fact it is an absolute necessity for life on Earth as it is plant food. CO2 is regularly pumped directly into greenhouses specifically to make the plants grow faster and larger and increased CO2 in Earth's atmosphere is doing the same thing on a global scale.

So why all the hyperventilation regarding increased CO2 and temperatures continuing to rise as they have been since the end of the last ice age and will continue to do so until the beginning of the next? Temperatures may or may not reach levels that come close to historical maximums that have been observed. Who is to say what it should our shouldn't actually be, who is the omnipotent one to decide what is correct or not? Nothing we see today in the climate the Earth hasn't witnessed before.

Whether we're moving it a bit faster due to industrialization than it normally would have is irrelevant. How do we know that the presence of the massive dinosaurs emitting tons of methane in the atmosphere didn't have a similar effect on the climate back then? Considering methane is a much more potent "greenhouse gas" than CO2 and that there was much more plant life and animal life, it is likely more CO2 was absorbed while more methane from creatures and decay was more prevalent and geologic evidence shows temperatures in those periods were higher than now, and yet the world survived and here we are.

So the whole debate is political and economic. The concern is not for the welfare of the Earth, humans need to be stop being so arrogant as to think they could actually destroy the planet. We don't have the capability of a real DeathStar. We could seriously mess it up and make it uninhabitable for us but it will recover and some other life forms will become dominate.

No this entire argument is about maintaining the status quo of economic distribution. The current industrialized nations don't want to risk weather patterns shifting (as they inevitably do) resulting in them now not able to be the bread basket of the world and instead having to rely on food imports. Many of the wealthy jet-setting acolytes of the CCC live along the coast lines of their respective countries (look how liberal both the East & West coast of the US are as an example) and they believe the hype that this will cause massive increases in sea level and that will have a negative impact on their holdings. So they all fly their private jets and drive around in their large motorcades to these waste of time conferences and decry what the rest of us are doing.

This is not about the welfare of people or the planet, it is about maintaining power bases.

Consider if the temperature rose sufficiently to thaw the Arctic, something that was true prior to the last ice age. Then suddenly two of the largest nations on the planet by land mass - Canada and Russia (maybe even Greenland) - have access to much more arable farm land. Now the US is no longer the breadbasket of the world and can't use food sanctions as a weapon.

Say rain patterns shift and now Saharan and Sub-Saharan Africa gets regular rainfalls like it must have had back when the Sahara was a lush green area, enough rain to end the drought and famines in Ethopia or Sudan or those other countries? Those same rain patterns move and the monsoons stop devastating the Bangladesh and India regions. What happens to the geo-political power base now when poor 3rd world nations are able to feed their own people but richer industrialized nations need to import food?

That is the true basis of the climate change hysteria but isn't they one the priests of the CCC are willing to disclose because to do that would show their true agenda.

So we're called "deniers" and are treated like heretics of this new church in a typical attempt by these same people to stifle the debate before it star

Re:Actual science

[Mark of the North]

Why do you keep talking about prediction? Is it because it's the only place you can cultivate uncertainty? If you want certainty, look backward. The climate has warmed: https://climate.nasa.gov/vital... A smart rock could see the trend. A dumb slug would be worried that the recent trend of acceleration of historically rapid warming. It takes a whole bunch of motivated reasoning to ignore the obvious.

Re:Actual science

[ceoyoyo]

Apparently they dropped debate, argument and formal logic at his though: the GP's point, while valid, strengthen's the OPs actual argument considerably.

Re:Actual science

[Anonymous Coward]

Scottish priests.

Re:Actual science

[danbert8]

I'm all for fighting climate change if it is a reasonable cost. There is no way of knowing the cost of future climate change and if the premium we are being asked to pay to slow it down is worth the decreased risk.

Re:Actual science

[danbert8]

You must not listen much. Global warming deniers for the most part don't doubt CO2 is a greenhouse gas, they doubt the man made catastrophe predictions of AGW zealots. You just can't come up with real evidence for a looming disaster so you set up the straw man CO2 argument to shut down debate.

Re:Actual science

[MrL0G1C]

Real evidence is historical evidence of what happened in the past when CO2 levels where high, there have been very large scale extinction events before. We're on course for 3centrigrade or more of heat rises, then there's the knock on effect of the methane from melting permafrosts which hasn't been added to the models and there's a substantial risk from ocean methane clathrates also releasing, also not factored in to the models. The permafrosts are already melting much like the north pole sea ice has already mostly melted at the warmest part of the year. Global warming is uneven, the north pole seems to be getting 10 to 20 degree rises already.

There is very clear scientific evidence that more CO2 = higher temperature and higher sea levels.

The oceans are already substantially more acidic because of mankind burning fossil fuels. Warming oceans is already killing coral reefs which are home to large amounts of ocean life. CO2 + water = carbonic acid and that's literally what's happening in the oceans right now, CO2 is turning into carbonic acid and acidifying the oceans. The last time the oceans became too acidic, most ocean life died, it rotted, that in turn released enough toxic gases to kill nearly all animal land life. Climate and sea level is the least of our worries, we should be far more concerned about ocean acidification - that's the real killer.

So you can ignore the predictions, you can also look up the road and ignore a Juggernaut heading towards you. Both are a bad idea. Heat = energy and more energy = more severe weather systems, pretty obvious really.

What have "Global warming deniers" got? Rhetoric by scientists who's main field of science usually isn't climate and they're typically backed by fossil fuel corporations. And whacky conspiracy theories that don't hold water under inspection.

Re:Actual science

[danbert8]

Global warming deniers have technology. Which is sort of a game changer when it comes to survivability... It's safe to ignore the Juggernaut ahead of you on the road if you've had the hover conversion done on your car and can glide right over it.

Technology can allow us to build more hardened structures, control water resources better, and even manipulate the atmosphere. But instead of focusing resources on those efforts which would benefit humanity regardless of climate, the cult of AGW has insisted we tax and reduce the expansion of technology to poor people which will never really have a measurable effect. CO2 reduction efforts are like government cash bailouts. If things improve, it was obviously successful. If things don't improve, we obviously didn't do enough. There is no way it is a wasted effort...

Re:Actual science

[MrL0G1C]

You want to live on a planet with air too toxic to breathe!!!

"It's safe to ignore the Juggernaut ahead of you on the road if you've had the hover conversion done on your car and can glide right over it."

Yeah, fantasy like the rest of the denialists ideas.

" the cult of AGW has insisted we tax and reduce the expansion of technology to poor people"

Such as? Coal Power stations? But of course coal is not technology, coal is a fossil fuel, one of which when you include the external costs is one of the most expensive forms of energy. Or should poor people just shut up and suffer from the nasty diseases and death that poor air quality brings.

Re:Actual science

[Aighearach]

The term "liberal arts" is distinguished from "technical arts" by who studies it, not by what is studied.

So, your point is that you disagree with the basic concept of identity ? That's a hard row to hoe, for sure. Good luck with that, I know I'm unlikely to even consider your absurdity.

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

Re:Actual science

[iMadeGhostzilla]

Precisely because the scientists care is why I trust those scientists whose reputation will be hurt if they are proven wrong. The problem with climate scientists as I see it is that it is difficult to prove them right or wrong in their lifetime.

I have no doubt that perhaps the vast majority of them are honest people doing their best and it is a difficult field, but they need to understand that an average Joe like myself needs to see several reasonably accurate predictions from their model come to pass, in a reasonable time frame, in order to make major changes in his life based on their model. To my best knowledge that hasn't happened yet. Most other scientific theories with far reaching consequences have been put to such test, and where they haven't, we have often paid the price.

Re:Actual science

[riverat1]

Warming has continued, ice continues to melt, sea level continues to rise. What more do you need? The problem with making projections about the future is that there's no event in Earth's past that is analogous to what is happening now* so it's difficult to say with certainty how it's all going to evolve.

*The PETM is the closest thing we know of but the increase in greenhouse gases and warming took place over thousands of years instead of hundreds of year as it currently happening.

Re:Actual science

[danbert8]

No, I want to live on a planet with the technology to clean the air. Also, CO2 is not toxic at any of the concentrations projected in any model.

Yes, I expect the technology 50 years from now to be what we would today consider fantasy. That's how technological advancement works. Ask Arthur C. Clarke.

Poor people do suffer from nasty things that poor air quality brings, but it beats suffering from hunger, exposure, and all of the other things they deal with in 3rd world countries. It's easy for you to forego coal power when you can buy solar panels shipped to your house on Amazon. It's harder to ask dirt poor people to pay more for what little electricity they can afford. You are talking about people so poor when a gasoline tanker overturns, they all come out with pots and pans to steal less than a gallon of fuel at the risk of their lives.

Re:Actual science

[MrL0G1C]

You need to consider the energy required to 'clean air' and the energy expended whilst outputting CO2. Since the 2 parts oxygen of CO2 are coming from the atmosphere, burning 1 ton of coal results in over 2 tons of CO2 in the atmosphere. How much energy does it take to remove 2 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere best case scenario?

I didn't say CO2 is toxic at any point.

The problem with your 3rd statement is that renewables are now cheaper than coal without subsidies in many places and the cost of renewables is still plummeting. Coal is dead, it costs too much, there is no point in continuing to burn it. Building a coal power station right now is a very risky thing to do which is why it's simply not happening much.

You can pretend the external costs don't matter, but that's simply not true those external costs are very real financial costs and they do matter. Do you expect developing countries to stop developing, do you not expect poor people to not receive medical treatment both now and in the future?

What's so great about electricity that it's worth getting ill and dying for? Would it not be better to simply pay for renewable energy and not get ill?

Re:Except of course not

[Megol]

1. Not really.

2. CO2 (It's carbon dioxide not cobalt gas) increases after warming from several sources, yes. But adding CO2 by burning fossil fuels also increases warming.
Not really worth arguing but correlation is often an indication of causation. That is one can't just use this phrase to disprove causation unlike some idiots think.

3. Ice age argument again? Really. Learn to troll noob.

Re:Except of course not

[Sique]

ad 1st: 2.36 and 2.56 are better than 0.1. For a simulation of the last 50 years, that's impressive. (And much better thant any denier would give credit to any climate model).

ad 2nd: CO2 did raise far before the warming. The numbers were 270 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere in 1899 (Anatole Leduc, Nouvelles Recherches sur les Gaz, 1899), 330 ppm in the 1970ies, and are 400 ppm now. Warming took of in the 1970ies, when half of the CO2 increase until now had happened already.

ad 3rd: The global temperature level of the Eem Interglacial (the last warm period before the last Ice Age) is already reached.

Fake news!

[UnknowingFool]

[sarcasm]Clearly there is no way that scientists came up this research with decades ago and that they debated it for decades before consensus. No this was all invented by China recently to cover up their involvement with the Kennedy assassination and the Lindberg kidnapping.[/sarcasm]

Re:Fake news!

[Aighearach]

Make Pancakes Tennis Again!!!!1@

not as heroic as it sounds...

[Anonymous Coward]

How Two Scientists Accurately Predicted the End of The Ice Age in 1967.

Re:not as heroic as it sounds...

[Anonymous Coward]

The last ice age ended nearly 12,000 years ago, when the earth started warming again. That warming period peaked about 8,000 years ago - and since then, it's been slowly getting cooler.

Up until 150 years ago, that is, when temperatures suddenly spiked back up again. They passed the previous peak about 20 years ago, and are now at their hottest point in the last 110,000 years.

Looking backwards is no way to predict the future

[petes_PoV]

If you collect every predictive scientific paper published this year and fast-forward 50 years, a proportion of them will turn out to be correct, simply due to sheer dumb luck.

However, there is no way of knowing now, in 2017, which ones will be correct. Or which ones will be right for the wrong reasons. Neither can we say today which ones look plausible but have missed an important point, could not possibly have foreseen something unimaginable that hasn't happened of just happen to have lucked out and pick the few truly significant causes / relationships / equations out of the mass of conflicting opinions circulating at present.

Re:Looking backwards is no way to predict the futu

[Anonymous Coward]

So you're saying that we should just sit back and do nothing at all except gaze at our navels?

Re:Except of course not

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the most convincing arguments for rising CO2 concentrations I can think of is seeing the concentration every single day when I look at my thermostat. Most people don't have these and for them they have to believe what scientists are saying.

Did you know that at high (> 900 ppm) concentrations you are less able to concentrate? In badly ventilated office environments these are already common. Lower air quality is already costing productivity *today*. When you want to feel miserable, try to program in an environment with >1200ppm [1]. The highest acceptable ppm tolerated in regulations for non-office work is much higher. I wonder how many people die in industrial accidents, because of a lack of paying attention (caused by bad air).

However, despite raising CO2 concentrations, it's not an impossible problem. There just needs to be the political will to solve it, since net negative CO2 systems already exist and these could be powered by solar. Playing around with systems that have evolved on a geological scale without advanced planet terraforming technology (which we do not have) is irresponsible policy.

The underlying problem of that is that most people are stupid. What do you do when 1% of the population has a somewhat accurate idea of what is going on and only 0.001% is an expert typically funded by a party who is not trusted by the general public? I.e., governments on one side and Big Oil on the other. There is no cure for stupidity and there is no way to move to another planet.

[1] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2220218/Why-office-sending-sleep.html

Re:I remember cooling was forecasted in the 70s.

[microbox]

Yeah, there was a few exploratory papers (no consensus), and then one was popularized in the media, and caught the public imagination. It seems that scientists are pinged for asking the hard questions (will dust cause net cooling), and then pinged again because the news media knew how to sell a good story.

Question

[Anonymous Coward]

So is this magical paper perfectly accurate before modern scientists "revised" the data or after? Because they sure love proving warming by lowering old temps.

Re:Question

[riverat1]

Actually "unrevised" raw data shows a steeper warming slope than the adjusted data. That's because the methods they used to measure sea surface temperatures back then had a cool bias. When you haul a bucket of water out of the sea it cools by evaporation before it gets on deck and you can plop a thermometer in it.

Re:The coming Ice Age

[WindBourne]

As a schoolkid in the 60s and 70s I remember every science class telling us if we didn't fix our ways there would be another ice age.

It is obvious that you either did not pay attention and likely are just a business or liberal arts idiot, OR you have no memory of any kind.

Re:Except of course not

[LynnwoodRooster]

NASA wants to set max CO2 levels in the ISS at ~13X what it is on Earth right now. I think they have a bit of an interest in keeping astronauts clear-and-level headed, and apparently levels around 5000ppm are acceptable. Given most navies allow up to 8000ppm long-term in their submarines, it's probably a safe level for critical thinking,

Re:I remember cooling was forecasted in the 70s.

[Barsteward]

Perhaps you should have taken note of the scientists instead of the media regarding the "cooling" - here is a good place to start https://skepticalscience.com/i...
A lot of times where things do not happened as predicted are due to the predictions being addressed with possible solutions.

Re:The coming Ice Age

[Anonymous Coward]

club of rome, and even some of most famous climate is warming... guys did tout about global cooling. dr schneider is one of them..

Re:The coming Ice Age

[LynnwoodRooster]

Interesting article from National Geographic in the 1970s about the potential for a coming ice age. And how the law that kicked of the US Federal Government research into climate change was specifically about global warming - not climate change (meaning - the conclusion is foregone, how do we research it).

Re:The coming Ice Age

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember it also, they were predicting another ice age 50 years ago. They were wrong of course, but still it did happen.

You don't need to be insulting - clearly your memory suffers or you weren't alive then.

Re:The coming Ice Age

[hey!]

Yes. Because science doesn't dabble in truth, it deals with evidence, and likelihoods. Truth may be unchanging, but the most probable scenario has to change as you obtain more evidence.

From the 1940s to around 1980, the globe actually cooled because of industrial aerosol emissions, which reflect solar energy back out into space. From around 1910 to around 1960, CO2 mediated warming was believed to be impossible because (a) atmospheric CO2 was mistakenly believed to be in a stable equilibrium with ocean dissolved CO2 and (b) CO2's emission spectrum was mistakenly believed to overlap that of water vapor, which is much, much more common.

In the 1950s both those beliefs were disproven, by Roger Revelle's study of ocean CO2 chemistry and by more precise spectrographic instrumentation. This meant CO2-mediated warming was physically possible, however in the 1960s cooling was still the consensus because at that time scientists thought aerosol cooling would outpace CO2 warming. That was easy to believe, because the Earth was cooling before our very eyes.

In the 1970s measurements of increasing CO2 along with newly available computer modeling techniques tipped the balance of scientific consensus toward warming in the upcoming decades even though we were still in a aerosol-mediated cooling phase.

This is about as robust as a scientific result gets: an accurate prediction of a reversal of current trends. Were the predictions being made perfectly precisely correct? Of course not. But on the whole the prediction of a reversal of current temperature trends was correct. There was still significant dissent about the direction of future climate in the 80s, but by 1990 it was clear to virtually everyone in the climate research field that CO2 warming was overwhelming aerosol cooling.

Again, that's how science works. It's about reasonable extrapolations from evidence, not eternal and unassailable truths.

Re:Except of course not

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I would think that even a slight decrease of productivity of hundreds of millions of people would be more expensive for the society as a whole than a more severe decrease of productivity of a few dozen or a few hundred people.

Re:The coming Ice Age

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Yes, because high school science teachers are such vanguards of scientific knowledge...

So this global warming thing...

[eminencja]

So this global warming thing is not a scam?

Re:So this global warming thing...

[Anonymous Coward]

For the sake of the argument lets take the position that global warming is real and the consequences are also real. Now that we have acknowledged the problem what are we prepared to do to reverse or at least slow down the global warming? We can champion the growing use of renewable energy sources and the creation of vehicles that do not burn fossil fuels. Has anyone bothered modeling the growing use of renewable energy and comparing the model with the climate model to determine if any efforts being done today will delay the coming global warming? The problem with fighting global warming is that nobody is willing to admit that the real problem is
unrestricted global population growth.

Suggestion: RTFA

[Kludge]

The medium.com article is very good by the way. Read it!

Re:Suggestion: RTFA

[thegarbz]

The medium.com article is very good by the way. Read it!

I've fallen for that one before. Friends don't let friends read medium.com

Re: Looking backwards is no way to predict the fut

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. Better do nothing than something stupid.

Enough typewriters

[Anonymous Coward]

And monkeys and you'll eventually get Shakespeare

Re:Except of course not

[LynnwoodRooster]

Maybe... it is around $500 million to send a person into space, and about $30,000 per pound of supplies they need. So whilst it may be a few dozen at the ISS, the cost per person is easily in the hundreds of millions of dollars per year per person.

Re:The coming Ice Age

[Miles_O'Toole]

I don't think you actually remember that at all. Just about all the papers published then predicted warming, with only a few outliers saying we were headed for an ice aga.

Re:The coming Ice Age

[bjdevil66]

Or he did hear that being taught, just like I did in the late 70s and heard the exact same thing being taught - even in the Weekly Reader (those under 40 or so probably have no clue what that even is). The last theory I heard before the "next Ice Age" theories died out was that cooling was going to be caused particulate pollution in the atmosphere keeping sunlight from hitting the ground. Looking back it doesn't make a lot of sense, IMO, but that was the theory.

Weak trolling attempt, dude...

Throw enough studies against the wall...

[kenh]

Wow, in 1967 scientists predicted global warming, with a study that half a century later has proven to be largely accurate...

BUT, did that 1967 take into account all the dramatic changes that have been under-taken since 1967 to shrink the world's carbon footprint? Probably not, they got lucky.

Also, in 1974 scientists reversed course and predicted an impending ice age - which points out that climatologists are guessing and publishing all kinds of studies putting forth all manner of possibilities, hoping there will come a time when their particular findings will be proven true, before the unpredictable climate changes again, earning them their 15 minutes of climate prediction fame.

Re:Throw enough studies against the wall...

[hyades1]

You're either very badly mistaken or flat-out dishonest. Most of the studies in the 1970's predicted warming. The few that didn't have been discredited or retracted.

Read and learn:

https://skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s-intermediate.htm

Re:Throw enough studies against the wall...

[religionofpeas]

BUT, did that 1967 take into account all the dramatic changes that have been under-taken since 1967 to shrink the world's carbon footprint?

Yes, they took into account all zero of the dramatic changes.

Re:Throw enough studies against the wall...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nonsense. I lived thru that time, and remember the global cooling new ice age hysteria clearly.

Re:Throw enough studies against the wall...

[Uberbah]

I lived thru that time, and remember the global cooling new ice age hysteria clearly.

You mean you remember reading articles in news magazines, not scientific studies. We'll be charitable and go with "badly mistaken". But as many times as this canard has been debunked it's probably "flatly dishonest".

Re:Throw enough studies against the wall...

[david_thornley]

He was paying attention to the wrong things. There was a "new ice age" idea going through the media, based on some speculation from some scientists. At that time, it was harder to find out what actual scientists were saying about things.

Re: Except of course not

[mean pun]

Well yes, some of us do trigger on insinuation, especially if there is zero proof. I consider this a good thing.

Re:Except of course not

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope ... no effect actually as the uncertainty relations for clear progressive thought forbid:

dP*dT > j*maxtask
dD*dT = - laxtask
dP*dD == -j*delt( maxtask - laxtask )

Re:Looking backwards is no way to predict the futu

[Anonymous Coward]

No. You do not do nothing. You adapt. Rather than accept the hubris that says the entire energy distribution of the planet is under complete human control, and even if it were there is no way you can control enough humans to a fine enough degree to steer it, you accept that change for whatever reason is happening and adapt. If you cannot adapt, you die. Now there's a fine old idea with only a few radical right wing non-thinkers disputing it. Adapt or die.

(although there were some ads on buses in our city with the catch phrase "Adaptation is not the answer." in regards to climate change/global warming/whatever we call it this week. :-)

It's not a climate model

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a model for global warming; in particular the effects of CO_2 on global warming. It makes NO other predictions, in particular it makes NO predictions about CLIMATE. The controversy about "climate change" among rational people has to do with predictions about CLIMATE, not warming, such as the predicted frequencies of severe storms.

Re:The coming Ice Age

[Anonymous Coward]

Better than Fox News, Breitbart, WattsUp, and the other paid off troll organizers.

Re: Global warming might be GOOD (more food, etc)

[Anonymous Coward]

_<O__
_(_\_
__X__
8===D

Really?

[Grand Facade]

https://science.slashdot.org/s...

Re:Really?

[religionofpeas]

Yes, really. What has a mantle plume under Antarctica have to do with global warming ? You're only exposing your ignorance here.

Re:Global warming might be GOOD (more food, etc)

[Anonymous Coward]

Your death could be good. You might be a mass murderer or you might snap and become one. We don't therefore decide because it MIGHT be a good idea that we can't undo if we turn out to have been wrong, that we might as well give it a go, eh?

So, no, the models for agricutlure changes needed show it will NOT be a good thing and we ARE acting like it's going to be a good thing (by continuing), so it IS happening, no need to guess there, it IS our fault, no need to guess there either, and it WON'T be good. So lets STOP ACTIVELY MAKING IT WORSE, OK?

Re:The coming Ice Age

[Anonymous Coward]

Except nobody was taught that in school. Not one link to that except one person linking to WTFUWT who are not reliable.

And not a school.

Re:Except of course not

[ClickOnThis]

2. CO2 (It's carbon dioxide not cobalt gas) increases after warming from several sources, yes. But adding CO2 by burning fossil fuels also increases warming. Not really worth arguing but correlation is often an indication of causation. That is one can't just use this phrase to disprove causation unlike some idiots think.

Actually the causation part is well-known. CO2 is a greenhouse gas. You can demonstrate that easily in any high-school science class.

Re: The coming Ice Age

[Anonymous Coward]

This should help you, son.

http://www.populartechnology.net/2013/02/the-1970s-global-cooling-alarmism.html?m=1

Re:Global warming might be GOOD (more food, etc)

[fustakrakich]

Global warming may or may not be bad, but some of us would like to see clear skies every now and then. The contamination is unnecessary. We don't have to be such slobs.

Re:Except of course not

[religionofpeas]

Here's a nice demonstration how the greenhouse effect of CO2 works:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re: Global warming might be GOOD (more food, etc)

[Anonymous Coward]

Bird hit by truck.
__________________ %¥_\\ ^o_x___

Re:The coming Ice Age

[WindBourne]

They hysteria about it lasted less than a month, and then other scientists had come forward saying that it was the opposite.
IOW, it was not during the 60s and 70s, but about 1 month in the 70s and then it disappeared, and instead, scientists were saying we do not know, but it looks more like a major warming.

Re:The coming Ice Age

[WindBourne]

You heard for less than a month about possible ice age and then after that, all of the scientists were saying that it would likely be a warming.
IOW, those that make 'ice age' as though it was a HUGE deal, either was not alive or simply is a total idiot.
And yes, I do remember since I am 58 and it occurred before 10 years ago.

Re:Except of course not

[Aighearach]

3rd. coming out of an ice age it is a safe bet to predict increasing temperature

Golly, if only we had some sort of geologic record to compare! Oh, wait...

Re: Except of course not

[Aighearach]

What is Digg? Is that going to be the new slashdot?

Re: Global warming might be GOOD (more food, etc)

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong.

Do you think we should institute precrime detection like Minority Report and start arresting and executing people based on probability models?

Models are frequently wrong. This is the epistemological problem in modeling.

Re:Except of course not

[Aighearach]

If you're sending the same number of people either way, and the number of people being sent is not set up to automatically scale to their productivity, then the difference in cost is $0.

Whereas most of the people on the ground work at jobs where if they got less work done, it would translate into more total hours of work their employer would have to pay for.

Easy, easy calculation! X > 0 T/F

Re: Global warming might be GOOD (more food, etc)

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, no one wants to breathe toxic air. The solution, then, is to institute civil liability for actual contamination of the person or property of someone else. If Exxon poisons you, Exxon is liable. If Monsanto destroys your farm, Monsanto is liable.

The crony problem is big business in bed with big government. Remove the protective wall around big business to make it fully liable to civil action for damaging person or property, and polluters will be held in check by the profit motive.

For some introductory reading to this line of thinking, see https://mises.org/blog/are-libertarians-too-anti-pollution

Infinite monkeys

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey! Someone who we'll now qualify as a SCIENTIST said something nebulous about global warming decades ago.
However, because it fits The Narrative (All Hail The Narrative, Long Live The Narrative), we'll call it an accurate prediction!

Re:The coming Ice Age

[Aighearach]

"Liberal Arts" means they tried to teach you to read, in addition to teaching you a trade.

I take it you're very proud of your trade school degree, and consider it to be more valuable than a science degree from a Liberal Arts institution, right? Right? You're not just an idiot who couldn't learn the words??!

Re: Except of course not

[Anonymous Coward]

Except no, the 70s weren't. The USA is only 2% of the globe, retard. You don't claim hypothermia because your elbow is cold.

One big problem here

[whyyisthissohard]

How did they predict CO2 output? They had an accompanying industrial growth model?

Seems like they just got lucky.

Re:One big problem here

[MrL0G1C]

They looked at the past and extrapolated.
https://www.google.co.uk/imgre...

Anonymous Cowards might be GOOD (but I doubt it)

[XXongo]

These arguments always tend to revolve around whether global warming is real or not. That is not the right question.

Let us assume that global warming is real. The fallacy is when people assume that global warming is BAD.

Yes, but that is a different question.

The relentless assault on climate science and on climate scientists-- using words like "hoax" "scam" and "fraud" in referring both to the science and the scientists-- is still continuing. But now the attack has forked, with attacks on the scientists continuing, but now another branch of the attack saying "well, but maybe warming is good."

I'd pay more attention to them if they weren't pretty much the same people (and funded by the same oil companies) who were saying "climate science is a hoax and climate scientists should be put in jail."

I notice you don't sign your name, Mr. Anonymous Coward. So, to be clear: do you accept the evidence that global warming is real, and anthropogenic greenhouse gasses are the major contributor? Or are you just doing a new attack on a new front?

Re:The coming Ice Age

[LynnwoodRooster]

Source? The NatGeo article was certainly built on science and papers that were generated and submitted over more than 1 month time...

Re:Except of course not

[Anonymous Coward]

That’s not a planet. It’s a space station.

Not how science is done

[XXongo]

If you collect every predictive scientific paper published this year and fast-forward 50 years, a proportion of them will turn out to be correct, simply due to sheer dumb luck.

This just happens to be the first one, and the one in all of the textbooks (even the textbooks not about global warming-- textbooks about atmospheric light scattering, for example), and the one that all the climate scientists acknowledge as the beginning of accurate climate models.

This is not a paper that was picked up in retrospect, because it happened to be right-- this is the paper the started the field.

However, there is no way of knowing now, in 2017, which ones will be correct.

Bullshit. That's not how science is done. Scientists show their work and lay out their calculations and the reasons, and other scientists replicate their work (well, physical scientists do. I don't know about social scientists). "Scientists make random predictions and some of them are right" is not how science is done

Re:Except of course not

[Anonymous Coward]

That is not really relevant to a planetary scale biosphere and atmosphere.
A space station or submarine is a tiny environment, climate controlled, temperature controlled, no forests, oceans, agriculture, icepacks, weather etc.

They can set the CO2, O2, N, temperature etclevels to whatever is appropriate for their highly specialised mission. For example, I believe in both environments O2 is kept abnormally low to reduce risk of fires.

Scientific Studies Don't Matter

[zifn4b]

I hate to break this to you liberal climate change alarmists, the problem isn't climate change deniers. The problem is you present a problem but you don't present a way to fix the problem. Essentially, you're just complaining about something "wah wah wah, someone should do something about it!" The combustion engine is the backbone of the entire global economic system that we have. We can't just simply said "Oh man, climate change. Ok everyone no one can drive a car anymore!" You need a solution to the problem and you need a transition plan. I've never seen such a thing and until such time that someone comes up with that, it's going to continue to be a problem and if you guys are right it will be a fatal one. But that outcome won't be the result of people not acknowledging the problem, it will be the result of not finding a solution to the problem.

Re:Scientific Studies Don't Matter

[Uberbah]

The problem is you present a problem but you don't present a way to fix the problem.

Do you also think that doctors talk about the danger posed by measles without ever saying what can be done about it?

Re:Scientific Studies Don't Matter

[MrL0G1C]

Complete bollocks, environmentalists know exactly how to fix the problem, you just haven't been listening to anything they say. Solutions exist right across the board. No-one's saying it would be easy or that we could do this for free or without some small sacrifices in lifestyle methods, but if we don't address global warming we could wipe ourselves out. Personally I think that Trump winning the election is an example of so much stupidity that I don't think the human race is collectively intelligent enough not to wipe itself out.

Re:Scientific Studies Don't Matter

[zifn4b]

Complete bollocks, environmentalists know exactly how to fix the problem, you just haven't been listening to anything they say. Solutions exist right across the board. No-one's saying it would be easy or that we could do this for free or without some small sacrifices in lifestyle methods, but if we don't address global warming we could wipe ourselves out. Personally I think that Trump winning the election is an example of so much stupidity that I don't think the human race is collectively intelligent enough not to wipe itself out.

Present the plan then. You can claim it exists but if you don't present it, all you have is words.

Re:Scientific Studies Don't Matter

[zifn4b]

The problem is you present a problem but you don't present a way to fix the problem.

Do you also think that doctors talk about the danger posed by measles without ever saying what can be done about it?

Posing another question doesn't help anything. Again, you didn't present anything constructive. You're passing the buck.

Re:Scientific Studies Don't Matter

[MrL0G1C]

You think it'd fit here? The plan would be the size of an encyclopedia. 100% Renewables, investment in multiple types of energy storage, changes to the way concrete and steel are made, changes to aeroplane fuel types. Efficiency increases. Incentives and fines. Massive car charging networks. Fossil fuel nothing, electric everything. 100% recycling of literally everything, if it can be recycled then don't make products with it. Just some of the stuff that needs doing, doing all of this would create jobs and industries and so would mostly be zero-sum cost to the economy.

Re:Scientific Studies Don't Matter

[zifn4b]

You think it'd fit here? The plan would be the size of an encyclopedia.

Excuses. Show me evidence there is such a plan and that it's been peer reviewed to have been deemed viable by experts. That'll fit in a comment.

Re:Scientific Studies Don't Matter

[MrL0G1C]

Evidence of a plan? There has to be some magical fucking scheme, get lost, there's all the solutions needed to reduce CO2 output, we don't need some fancy stupid master plan, that's fallacious.

Re:Scientific Studies Don't Matter

[zifn4b]

Evidence of a plan? There has to be some magical fucking scheme, get lost, there's all the solutions needed to reduce CO2 output, we don't need some fancy stupid master plan, that's fallacious.

Wow, you wouldn't know the first thing about Logic, MrL0G1C. If you actually knew what logic was you'd realize how much you just embarrassed yourself. You just made a half a dozen appeals to irrational emotion. And guess what? Ironically, that's why the issue isn't resolved because people like you approach it irrationally. You're your own worst enemy. :)

Re:Scientific Studies Don't Matter

[MrL0G1C]

And that's all bollocks, this thread is a waste of time, I really don't care, what you;re saying has nothing to do with global warming and I don't think you're at all interested in solutions to global warming you just want to be an annoying git. There's no reason why I have to provide some 'plan' that isn't necessary, there doesn't need to be some incredible plan, just individual solutions to individual problems.

Re:Scientific Studies Don't Matter

[zifn4b]

And that's all bollocks, this thread is a waste of time, I really don't care, what you;re saying has nothing to do with global warming and I don't think you're at all interested in solutions to global warming you just want to be an annoying git

Awwww all little baby could do is whine and complain and sit on their behind and not lift a finger besides to rant on the internet to solve a problem they supposedly care about. Wah wah wah. Do you need a diaper change?

Re:Scientific Studies Don't Matter

[MrL0G1C]

Like I said, nothing to do with the subject what so ever. Do you have any evidence that we can't deal with global warming. How about YOU actually try and construct some kind of meaningful argument, something which you haven't actually done yet, you've said nothing meaningful what-so-ever. Just went with some weird straw man argument.

Re:Scientific Studies Don't Matter

[zifn4b]

Like I said, nothing to do with the subject what so ever. Do you have any evidence that we can't deal with global warming

I asked you to present compelling evidence for your claim and you presented nothing. You're the one who made the claim not me. I never claimed we can't deal with global warming. Go ahead look back and see if I made that claim. If you think I did, you either can't read or you're delusional.

Re:Scientific Studies Don't Matter

[MrL0G1C]

No, you did not ask for compelling evidence you asked for "a plan", a wholly singular thing that would require a herculean effort by one party. The solutions to global warming are not 'the plan' it's not a valid argument to say that solutions to global warming don't exist because you don't know what they are. Global warming is an extremely multifaceted problem, not a singular problem, it is caused by construction, by farming, by transport, by the energy industry etc. There is no one solution, there are hundreds of solutions it's absurd to ask anyone to list them all. Solutions to transport, energy production.

Re:Scientific Studies Don't Matter

[zifn4b]

No, you did not ask for compelling evidence you asked for "a plan"

Now you're claiming a detailed plan wouldn't be compelling evidence. Are you sure you're logical? Most plans, in case you weren't aware, not only contain a strategy but also projected results to justify the plan. That would be compelling. Governments do this all the time.

a wholly singular thing that would require a herculean effort by one party.

No one said things worth doing would be easy. You sir have now achieved the status of a bonafide moron. But keep the rosy glasses on if it helps you sleep at night.

Re:Scientific Studies Don't Matter

[MrL0G1C]

"Now you're claiming a detailed plan wouldn't be compelling evidence."

No, I'm not.

Re:Scientific Studies Don't Matter

[zifn4b]

"Now you're claiming a detailed plan wouldn't be compelling evidence."

No, I'm not.

Last word achievement unlocked. Congratulations. Cheers!

Re:Scientific Studies Don't Matter

[david_thornley]

Start with revenue-neutral CO2 taxes (i.e., reduce other taxes so it's revenue-neutral). That will push the market to seek solutions that don't put as much CO2 into the air. Eventually, we want to cut almost all CO2 emissions, but that's not currently practical.

In practice, this is not going to be as simple as it sounds, but it's a good step forward.

Re:Scientific Studies Don't Matter

[Uberbah]

Do you also think that doctors talk about the danger posed by measles without ever saying what can be done about it?

Posing another question doesn't help anything. Again, you didn't present anything constructive.

Sure I did: I pointed out in a sarcastic fashion that you were being willfully obtuse. The easy answer to your is-water-wet question is that of course, those warming of climate change have always had solutions proposed to deal with it. You know, like moving away from fossil fuels.

That you've worked hard at ignoring proposed solutions doesn't mean they don't exist.

Re: Except of course not

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly the simple experiment is wrong. Carbon Dioxide has a lower specific heat capacity than air, for the same energy input, it will reach a higher temperature than the same mass of air. Also the glass case filters infrared light and prevents convection.

In other words this model is not representative of the earths atmosphere.

I've got my four years of thermodynamics university study and computer modelling of a power station to thank for that. My generations lecturers were a class above my childrens today.

Global cooling was not forecasted in the 70s.

[XXongo]

Yeah, that never happened.

"Yeah, that never happened" is correct! Anonymous Coward says something accurate for a change.

There was no scientific consensus nor prediction by scientists that the Earth was "entering a global cooling phase."

Citations: http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/2008BAMS2370.1
http://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.5.8199/full/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-global-cooling-story-came-to-be/
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/the-global-cooling-myth/"
http://www.factcheck.org/2015/03/cruz-on-the-global-cooling-myth-and-galileo/

Re: Global cooling was not forecasted in the 70s.

[Anonymous Coward]

Concensus is politics, not science.

Re: Global cooling was not forecasted in the 70s.

[david_thornley]

Scientific consensus means that a large number of smart people who know a lot about what they're saying and are prone to argument and disagreement believe something. That means that there's some pretty darn good evidence for it.

comparison

[XXongo]

Wow, in 1967 scientists predicted global warming, with a study that half a century later has proven to be largely accurate...

BUT, did that 1967 take into account all the dramatic changes that have been under-taken since 1967 to shrink the world's carbon footprint?

No. If you'd read the article, not just the summary, you'd see that the paper did not try to predict how much carbon dioxide would be produced. It predicted if this much carbon dioxide is produced, then this much warming would occur.

The comparison of prediction to experiment-- if you'd read the article you'd know this-- was to look at how much carbon dioxide actually was put in the atmosphere, and compare the warming to the amount predicted for that amount of carbon dioxide.

The theory turns out to be a remarkably good match to the data. Good work, Manabe and Wetherald.

The paper that started modern climate modelling

[XXongo]

If you read any of the literature, you'd know that this is the reference-- the Manabe and Wetherald paper was the first to fully model the co-effect of carbon dioxide and humidity in a convective atmosphere, and is the one pretty much everybody references.

Here https://www.carbonbrief.org/pr... for example, or here https://www.skepticalscience.c...

Manabe was the grandfather of global circulation models-- pretty much all the models that exist today can be traced back to his work. This wasn't a "random" paper-- this was the paper.

Re: Except of course not

[mnemotronic]

...We need real mods not these fake ass mods...

said the AC

Re:The coming Ice Age

[bluegutang]

So, if entirely by accident we produced enough aerosol emissions in order to neutralize global warming for decades, shouldn't it be easy right now to intentionally release aerosols which will neutralize global warming? Wouldn't this be cheaper, quicker, and less disruptive than reworking our entire economy to avoid carbon emissions?

Goblal warming will be bad (less food)

[AutodidactLabrat]

... The fallacy is when people assume that global warming is BAD.

The point is: think about the ECONOMICS. Global warming may be real, but the fallacy is assuming that it is bad. It may be a great thing.

Never play games with reality, you get burned
The only fallacy is assuming that more deserts = more food

Re: The coming Ice Age

[Uberbah]

This will help you more, sophist.

https://skepticalscience.com/i...

Re:The coming Ice Age

[Uberbah]

Or he did hear that being taught, just like I did in the late 70s and heard the exact same thing being taught - even in the Weekly Reader (those under 40 or so probably have no clue what that even is).

You weren't taught any such thing unless your teacher was a quack making shit up.

https://skepticalscience.com/i...

Re:The coming Ice Age

[Uberbah]

And Popular Mechanics had articles on how everyone would have their own personal airplanes. Whoop de fucking do.

https://skepticalscience.com/i...

Re: Anonymous Cowards might be GOOD (but I doubt i

[Anonymous Coward]

First off, calling yourself by a moniker on a website is no better than posting anonymously.

Second, facts are facts, regardless of who presents them. If you really believe in science and reason, then you need to apply that standard to the economics and the epistemology; instead, you are skewing the argument to conspiratorial thinking about who is claiming what. How is that any better than the people you are critiquing?

Check out this talk by David Friedman on the economics of global warming. Friedman affirms that global warming is probably real, but that the economics of what it will actually do are vague.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-yJ3K9fNos

Re:The coming Ice Age

[hey!]

What you are talking about is called geoengineering, and yes, people have examined the possibility of stratospheric aerosol injection.

There are some drawbacks to the procedure. CO2 has a half-life of 100 years, and CO2 levels are continuing to rise; you'd have to put a lot of aerosols into the stratosphere and continue doing so indefinitely on an increasing basis as CO2 rises. So one question is whether this is cheaper in the long run than simply curbing carbon emissions. Aerosol injection will also cause drastic local climate changes in many places, and effect crop yields globally.

Re: The coming Ice Age

[Anonymous Coward]

Soylent green is made of people!

Re:Looking backwards is no way to predict the futu

[Uberbah]

No. You do not do nothing. You adapt. Rather than accept the hubris that says the entire energy distribution of the planet is under complete human control, and even if it were there is no way you can control enough humans to a fine enough degree to steer it, you accept that change for whatever reason is happening and adapt.

Like how you just adapted yourself into a straw man!

If you cannot adapt, you die. Now there's a fine old idea with only a few radical right wing non-thinkers disputing it. Adapt or die.

Give us an update if its your ass that's dying for reasons outside your control, due to the actions of self-centered denialists.

Re:Global warming might be GOOD (more food, etc)

[Uberbah]

It should be obvious by now that humans are notoriously bad at predicting large, systemic shifts and trends.

Boilerplate denialist handwaiving.

Let us assume that global warming is real. The fallacy is when people assume that global warming is BAD.

Every extinction event in history (before man started hunting species to extinction) arose from the climate changing too fast for life to adapt to it. You may have dreams of planting wheat in Antarctica and bananas in Siberia, which would be cool if that climate change took place over a few million years. Change the climate that fast over a thousand years, and you're going to have mass die-offs of plants and animals. Animals that will include a few hundred million humans, at least.

Re: The coming Ice Age

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually a lot of power stations, vehicles and industries were cleaned up. Particulate is a thing!

Re:The coming Ice Age

[Anonymous Coward]

In their June 24, 1974 issue, Time presented an article titled "Another Ice Age?" that noted "the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades" but noted that "Some scientists... think that the cooling trend may be only temporary."

On January 11, 1970, the Washington Post reported that "Colder Winters Held Dawn of New Ice Age".

Seems those editors are even slower than here.
Or Your memory is less accurate than you think.

It was old news then

[Anonymous Coward]

Svante Arrhenius predicted it during the late 19th century.

Re: Global warming might be GOOD (more food, etc)

[Anonymous Coward]

A few more ppm or even hundreds more ppm of CO2 will not cloudmyour skies, make you cough and do anything else to you.

CO2 is not a pollutant. Every time I see someone post that it is a pollutant I know I'm reading the words and thoughts of some ignorant person who has been brainwashed into thinking a trivial amount of a harmless trace element will kill us all. Simply not true.

Re:The coming Ice Age

[Anonymous Coward]

Another way that science (apparently) works: offer no real good scientific justification on downwardly adjusting older land-based temperatures readings.

Re:The coming Ice Age

[Baron_Yam]

Nope. Same here, it was all, "We're all gonna freeze!" in the late 70s, maybe into the early 80s. Then we got distracted by cocaine, gun violence, and AIDS for a while.

Keep in mind, we're talking about what was being told to kids in school, and usually at the elementary and high school level you're lucky if you're getting anything published in the last 20 years. And teachers who actually know and understand such things well enough to teach them generally aren't doing so in elementary or junior high environments.

Re:Global warming might be GOOD (more food, etc)

[Anonymous Coward]

but the fallacy is assuming that it is bad. It may be a great thing.

As the Conservative voice on Slashdot I can tell you that change of any kind is bad.

Re: Except of course not

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly the simple experiment is wrong. Carbon Dioxide has a lower specific heat capacity than air, for the same energy input, it will reach a higher temperature than the same mass of air.

Thanks. You just made the point that CO2 is a greenhouse gas.

Also the glass case filters infrared light and prevents convection.

Then why did the infrared camera show an image of the candle before CO2 was fed into the chamber? And convection is a red herring.

I've got my four years of thermodynamics university study and computer modelling of a power station to thank for that. My generations lecturers were a class above my childrens today.

Ask for your money back.

Re:The coming Ice Age

[Anonymous Coward]

Imbecility all the way around.

Water outguns Co2 by 10,000 fold in terms of effects. CO2 simply cannot have the effects ascribed to it.

Coin flip

[Anonymous Coward]

Now we just have to pick the correct prediction before it happens.

Re:Except of course not

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems my first post was censored.

So here we go again:

The experiment is not representative of CO2's role in our atmosphere for the following reasons:
1. Carbon Dioxide has a smaller specific heat capacity than air, given the same energy input the CO2 will attain a higher temperature than air.
2. Glass cases filter out infrared light.
3. The class case prevents convection.

I have noticed that credible arguments against greenhouse gas theory have been censored / removed.

Venus - the runaway greenhouse effect

[Anonymous Coward]

Facts:

* Venus has an atmospheric pressure 90 times that of earth, the gasses at the planets surface are adiabatically compressed by effect of gravity on the gasses above.
* A diesel engine with a compression ratio of 16:1 is hot enough to ignite diesel (this is adiabatic compression, a constant entropy process).
* Venus' upper atmosphere is colder at the poles than anywhere on Earth: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2016/04/20/a-frigid-surprise-at-venus-poles/
* If we added large amounts of any gas that resulted in 90 atmospheres of pressure, it will result in high temperatures similar to Venus' surface (influenced by the specific heat capacity of gasses).

 

Drivel

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the kind of "scientific" drivel that Slashdot finds suitable to support Anthropic global warming.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

[Anonymous Coward]

Since the mid-60s many people have predicted almost every possible future climate scenario. Let's not forget the little ice age predicted around 1970, for example. It's not surprising that one of these guys came close.

So, we're safe!

[rogerz]

The only quantitative _predictive_ statement in the Medium article is that a doubling of CO2 concentration will cause a 2degreesC increase is temperature (at fixed relative humidity). This is a strictly log-linear prediction. Let's submit it to a real _prospective_ experiment:

We are currently at ~400 ppm CO2. According to the IPCC, the prediction of CO2 concentration in 2100 is about 600 ppm. So, according to the cited model, we will have about another 1degreeC in global mean temperature by 2100. (This, by the way, is well below the 2-5degreesC range predicted in the last IPCC assessment report (AR5). At the very high end of the CO2 predictions above, we have 800 ppm, meaning 2degreesC warming according to the model.

So, they're predicting 1-2degreesC increase with business as usual! I can live with that. Let's see if it's right.

Re:So, we're safe!

[david_thornley]

First, you have no idea what you're talking about what you can live with. It isn't that things will be a touch warmer, it's all the knock-on effects.

Second, the statement almost certainly refers to equilibrium temperature, and we're not an an equilibrium. If we were somehow able to cut all fossil CO2 emissions, we'd continue warming for some time.

Re:So, we're safe!

[rogerz]

Duh - I was submitting the OP to its own test. If we're not at equilibrium, then how can the OP claim the "model" in the cited paper accurately predicted the temperature? The experiment isn't over yet, by that standard.

As for the "knock-on" affects, well those are completely speculative. Some could be good, some could be bad. We have plenty of time to adapt, if we leave people alone to innovate. Oh, and being rich and having lots of reliable energy will help a great deal with innovation. For that, we have lots of supporting data.

Re:Except of course not

[ebvwfbw]

We're still not there yet. When the Romans took over England, they were growing grapes and the sea was at least 30' higher than it is today.

Strange

[Neuronwelder]

In Geography class (1967) we had it written in our books that the deserts were getting bigger. Hmm.. Let's connect the dots. And if you are one of those "climate deniers" what did you loose if we implement cleaner devices and laws? Cleaner air, water, land, sea?? Gee. Sounds like a big loss (Sarcasm). Oh, I get it! $$$ Its the money $$$

Not worried in the slightest

[rhyous]

Can someone explain the problem?

I live in Utah. It looks like the temperature will go up 1 or 2 degrees by 2100. So my kids will be dead before this is a concern.

But that doesn't take into account the fact that we are already switching to solar and electric cars. One discovery could change all this. Heck, a large astral body could pass between us an the sun and shade us for two days, which would nearly freeze the world and then maybe global warming is a good thing.

So what is the problem? Are we going to die? No. Are we going to starve? No. Are we facing the end of the species? No. We are looking at a rise of 1 to 2 degrees by 2100.

The rising oceans isn't really a problem. It actually means that the seas will go inland further, the air will have more moisture, there will be more precipitation.

No to mention, the oceans rising a few feet over about 80 years is not nearly as dramatic as the ocean rising a few feet in one day. Will there be homes and business affected? Yes. But they will have time to move or be torn down, except in hurricane areas.

I dislike pollution. That is a problem. It causes asthma in kids. It causes could. Inversions actually hurt lungs, kill old people. So I am all for cleaner air.

But Global Warming beyond 1 or 2 degrees is only a possibility. Solar panel roofs and roads and electric cars and so many other changes will happen by 2100. What if we run out of warming CO2 and start cooling?

So I am not denying global warming. I asking, what is the problem?

Global Warming deniers are funny. Global Warming doomsdayer's are just as funny. Both seem to be fanatics.

I agree that global warming exists, but I deny that global warming is a problem now or that it will be much of a problem in the future.

I also deny that we have to take active part in global warming prevention. The market will take care of itself. We will get electric cars. Continued efficiencies in light bulbs. We will discover more energy sources. We will begin to desalinate the ocean at a very rapid rate. We haven't even really begun that. What if we start pumping water to Utah's Great Salt Lake from California, which makes sense, because water pumped to Utah flows back to California, so everyone benefits. We fill up the Great Salt Lake, which causes increased precipitation in the Rockie Mountains, rebuilds the snow packs, etc.

By 2100, if scorching of the earth looks likely I feel it will be solvable. What if we build a paper thin shield and deploy it to space and shade portions of the earth to prevent it from scorching? What would be the effect of shading 1 square mile of earth from the sun? What if that becomes an industries and we start shading thousands of square miles of earth from the sun? What if the cost to do that is nothing by 2100, as we have a new thriving community on Mars by then?
Or what if we put a large asteroid between the earth and the sun?
What if we start mining asteroids and bring air back to earth?
What if we just pump desalinzed water into the Sahara or Ghobi deserts and turn it back into a tropical forest and the increased plants absorb our extra C02?

Don't spend billions solving a problem that first, is not even for sure a problem, and second is likely to solve itself, and third we are likely to have way better technology to solve well before it actually becomes a problem.

Why don't we just stick cleaning up pollution. That is for sure a problem. That also would possibly result in hindering global warming.

Pollution is a problem, "Global Warming" or going up a degree or two or the next century is not.

Re:Not worried in the slightest

[david_thornley]

It isn't just things getting a bit warmer and that's it. It's about lots of things happening because of that.

There will be more heat energy in the atmosphere. Some plants and animals are sensitive to fairly small temperature changes. There will be fairly large local changes. Global warming already appears to be affecting agriculture in some areas, and when people can't eat they get unruly.

You're discussing sea level rising in developed parts of the world. There are less developed parts of the world where moving inland is not trivial. There's also the possibility of rapid sea level rise from Greenland or Antarctica land ice falling off. If the Gulf Stream goes away, Europe turns into a freezer.

Your ideas about astronomy seem to lack a sense of scale. There are no large astral bodies that can block the entire sun for two days. If a large asteroid got close enough to the Sun to block the Sun on that scale, it would be moving so fast the effect would be temporary. This is true whether we move it deliberately or it happens by itself. We have transits of the Sun from Mercury, Venus, and the Moon already, and Venus is large, about the size of the Earth. The atmosphere is something over five quadrillion tons, and asteroids don't have noticeably atmospheres. We aren't shipping anything useful back to Earth in quantities large enough to be useful.

People are looking at geoengineering schemes to block out sunlight. However, blocking enough sunlight to cool us down will have other effects that we can't currently predict. It may or may not be a good idea. Some proposals for removing CO2 from the atmosphere don't look promising.

Solar panels and electric cars are part of the solution, but if we have no individual reason to cut down on CO2 emissions we'll still do a lot of fossil fuel-burning things. Producing electricity is only one thing we do with fossil fuels.

I care about the planet my descendants will have to live in, and I care about what happens after 2100 also.

Re:The coming Ice Age

[Miles_O'Toole]

I can't argue that my science teachers in public school were anything special, but the ones I had for math and sciences in high school were pretty good.

Maybe I was just lucky.

Re: Global warming might be GOOD (more food, etc)

[dave420]

It increases the temperature which increases the amount of water vapour the air can hold, which in turn increases the amount of clouds when the air cools.

Re:Except of course not

[Layzej]

1st. 2.36 and 2.56 are wayyy off.

2.36 is well inside the 95% confidence interval of the observations (2.29-2.84), so it's not accurate to say that this is way off from observations. Indistinguishable would be a closer word. As far as policy implications go they are also indistinguishable. Both are about 1/2 an Ice Age Unit (IAU) for a doubling of CO2. We're on track to much more than double by the end of the century.

This was actually predicted almost 200 years ago

[WillAffleckUW]

Actually, the literal discovery of various gasses included the discovery that C02 was created by burning materials, reducing O2, and the predictions then indicated that the use of coal and other fossil fuels would have this impact.

We've known the lifespans of various gasses such as the NOx SOx COx variants for a long time. We even figured out how long they remained in the atmosphere. Which is why climate change is settled science.

Try reading a basic chemistry book sometime.

Re:The coming Ice Age

[bjdevil66]

I'm genuinely surprised that most of the replies here are just denials, minimizations, etc. I'm telling you - I WAS taught about the IDEA of a possible Ice Age in the very near future - at a public school, by an everyday school teacher. And we read about it in a Weekly Reader.

And it wasn't some quack teacher, either. Remember - we didn't have the same level of standardization in school curriculums at the federal level 40 years ago, Teachers had more latitude - as long as they got good grades and generally stuck to their more lax version of the "common core" at the state level.

The idea was even reported on at the national news level for a brief time. Maybe people don't remember it as well because it wasn't being sold with the same fearmongering, ratings-driven fashion that climate change is reported on today (on both sides)?

Pop-Sci from teh 1950's through 1970's

[Anonymous Coward]

Some counter points:

Climate Change 1958: The Bell Telephone Science Hour https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-AXBbuDxRY

And "Soylent Green" from the 1970s is about global warming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xo7yZ9kG9A

Re:Except of course not

[david_thornley]

I have noticed that credible arguments against greenhouse gas theory have been censored / removed.

Nope. The reason you don't see them is that there aren't any.

Re:Except of course not

[david_thornley]

Do you have a point? Should I bring up toilet training incidents concerning my son? My experience in poker games?

Re:I remember cooling was forecasted in the 70s.

[david_thornley]

IIRC, the global cooling speculation was about increasing amounts of particulates in the air. Then, I believe, we started putting fewer particulates into the air.

Anthropogenic climate change is dependent on what the anthros do. It's sort of like the ozone hole: we created it, and changed what we're doing so it started closing again.

Re:The coming Ice Age

[david_thornley]

I remember it. The question is who was predicting it, and it was generally not scientists. Don't trust the media to report science accurately.

Re:The coming Ice Age

[david_thornley]

Look, teachers get things wrong. When I was in elementary school, I got punished for knowing more than the teacher did about the Gregorian calendar and insisting on it.

And, yeah, I remember speculation on global cooling. Some scientists started speculating, and the media turned it into a circus for a while. These things happen. However, there's a very large difference in credibility between what almost all climate scientists say about the climate and what some journalists say about the climate.

Re:Except of course not

[Sique]

There are grapes growing in England right now. And the reason that in the Middle Age grapes were grown so far in the north was to have wine for the Eucharist, as transportation of wine from the South was cumbersome, and the wine often became vinegar in the process. It was never enough to be actually used as a regular drink, and it wasn't good enough for that too. When better sealing of kegs and bottles and better roads to transport them were available in the Early Modern times, vineyards so far in the north were rendered obsolete and given up.