Slashdot Mirror
Extreme CO2 Levels Could Trigger Clouds 'Tipping Point' and 8C of Global Warming (carbonbrief.org)
If atmospheric CO2 levels exceed 1,200 parts per million (ppm), it could push the Earth's climate over a "tipping point", finds a new study. This would see clouds that shade large part of the oceans start to break up. From a report: According to the new paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience, this could trigger a massive 8C rise in global average temperatures -- in addition to the warming from increased CO2. The only similar example of rapid warming at this magnitude in the Earth's recent history is the Paleo-Eocene Thermal Maximum 55m years ago, when global temperatures increased by 5-8C and drove widespread extinction of species on both the oceans and land.
However, scientists not involved in the research caution that the results are still speculative and that other complicating factors could influence if or when a tipping point is reached. The threshold identified by the researchers -- a 1,200ppm concentration of atmospheric CO2 -- is three times current CO2 concentrations. If fossil fuel use continues to rapidly expand over the remainder of the century, it is possible levels could get that high. The Representative Concentration Pathways 8.5 scenario (RCP8.5), a very high emissions scenario examined by climate scientists, has the Earth's atmosphere reaching around 1,100ppm by the year 2100. But this would require the world to massively expand coal use and eschew any climate mitigation over the rest of this century. Further reading: A state-of-the-art supercomputer simulation indicates that a feedback loop between global warming and cloud loss can push Earth's climate past a disastrous tipping point in as little as a century.
However, scientists not involved in the research caution that the results are still speculative and that other complicating factors could influence if or when a tipping point is reached. The threshold identified by the researchers -- a 1,200ppm concentration of atmospheric CO2 -- is three times current CO2 concentrations. If fossil fuel use continues to rapidly expand over the remainder of the century, it is possible levels could get that high. The Representative Concentration Pathways 8.5 scenario (RCP8.5), a very high emissions scenario examined by climate scientists, has the Earth's atmosphere reaching around 1,100ppm by the year 2100. But this would require the world to massively expand coal use and eschew any climate mitigation over the rest of this century. Further reading: A state-of-the-art supercomputer simulation indicates that a feedback loop between global warming and cloud loss can push Earth's climate past a disastrous tipping point in as little as a century.
USA could be 100% clean and it won't matter if China and India keep polluting. So this is all fucking pointless.
There is an abundance of scientists, but no names; so who the 'f are they?
Is pollution bad?
Yes.
Is global warming/climate change bad?
Yes.
Is human activity making climate worse?
Yes.
Is all the over-the-top scaremongering making it ridiculous?
Yes.
IT'S NOT GOING TO BE THE END OF THE FUCKING WORLD
CO2 levels over geologic time spans are usually much, much higher on Earth than the current 400 ppm. Levels in the thousands PPM are more normal.
For fuck's sake, the scaremongering just plays into denialist hands: "World will end in 12 years!" is straight from a religious nutter. It's just missing the "Repent!"
If global CO2 levels get to 1200ppm, we are going to have even more problems than that. At 1000+ ppm indoor concentrations people start to feel drowsy. Some people will begin to have headaches and experience symptoms of "sick building syndrome". At that concentration CO2 actually becomes an acute hazard.
Climate change is real, but you need to read any single study or model with a bit of a "let's see if this gets confirmed by other groups" before believing it.
This is the flip side of that "scientific consensus" thing that the deniers keep not understanding. Science is about replication, and the real science comes when other scientists look at a result and say "yes, that makes sense, we can confirm it with our own modeling and measurements."
This is one group, with one model. Too early to call it doomsday yet.
Massive system that dwarfs the scale of the organisms modifying it, mostly only changes dramatically on timescales longer than a single organism's lifespan. Shocking!
Meanwhile, we're pretty much seeing most of the relatively minor initial changes forecast 50 years ago.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The publisher made it freely available -- a pleasant rarity.
Note that the focus of the paper appears to be a possible explanation for extreme temperature changes in the past, not that there's a credible chance of this happening any time in the near future.
I was thinking of those folks that disagreed being listed would be important also.
What is the average age of /.'ers these days? 8???
About 65, I think.
Millennials and younger don't do computers, they're all about their phones. /. is a relic left over from the stone age.
They are scared of clouds over oceans vanishing? If I u derstood that correctly, doesn't the also mean more water evaporates? And if more evaporates, doesn't that cool thi gs too?
Not to mention that the water has to go somewhere. Seems to me the climate in Europe is getting dryer. Perhaps that would be impacted as well?
The whole thing seems a tad too simplified. We're talking about global climate here.
Just read the summary. But from what I understand, they're going to ruin the clouds! Where will we host our servers and upload cat videos to?
This is one group, with one model.
The worst part is they don't have any estimate for how accurate or inaccurate their model might be.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
From the abstract it looks like a doomsday prediction. Predicting an 8 K increase (+265c) in global temperature is an extraordinary claim and would require extraordinary evidence.
It's not even an extraordinary claim; it's an extraordinary hypothesis.
Past the doomsday headline, the story says :
"The paper emphasises that large uncertainties remain and the results they find are very much preliminary. Because they are using a high-resolution large-eddy simulation their model lacks many other factors contained in global climate models that operate over larger geographic scales.
"Specifically, climate models suggest that large-scale subsidence in the atmosphere – colder air becoming denser and moving towards the ground – weakens as the world warms. This has the effect of lifting up and cooling cloud tops, which counteracts possible stratocumulus breakup. While the paper tries to account for this, the weakening of subsidence that occurs is uncertain and varies across climate models."
Really, I'm not sure why this is even a story making the news. "Here's some scientists trying to figure out feedback loops in a greenhouse regime that is far from where we currently are, and here's an possible result that is interesting but has yet to be rigorously modelled, much less tested."
If all of you will think way back to where we first were supposed to be alarmed about global warming, it was exactly because too much CO2 was supposed to lead to runaway warming.
Well obviously that never happened, and this new paper is admission that fundamental concern was misplaced In fact now we see we need to get to a very high CO2 level we probably cannot even reach, to MAYBE risk a CO2 rise because of cloud interaction (the idea is only theoretical). It's quite apparent at this point that interaction of CO2 with a real world atmosphere is quite a lot more complex than any climate scientist is willing to admit.
Further proof that what we were told to worry about, should never have been a concern to start with. We seriously need to stop our focus on CO2 and start re-examining real sources of pollution again and focus on those.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I think scientists should get credit for their work. Whether it's right or wrong.
They do, however, link to the actual paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-019-0310-1
(Which is actually worth reading, since it is much more restrained than the doomsday headline. It's mostly about modelling past climate, not future climate.)
They name two scientist, both of whose names are immediately followed by the phrase "who was not involved in the study" (Prof Andrew Dessler at Texas A&M University, and Dr Kate Marvel at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Science)
The problem here is that studies like this are based on *simulations* not observations of repeatable experiments.
True. It's a math model and should be treated as such. Simulations can be very useful but it's important to know the limits and assumptions that go into the model.
What we have here is a set of theories, which really cannot be proven beyond doubt.
Not true. Presuming the model is accurate it should be making testable predictions about what will happen as the climate chances in the coming years. If the model predictions fits the data we gather well then we have reasonable confidence that it is accurately modeling the real world. Problem is that because the consequences of letting climate change run unchecked are potentially so severe (presuming the model is accurate) we cannot risk actually testing it fully so at some point we'll have to extrapolate and take actions. But we're going to find out at least the early predictions whether we want to or not because some changes are already too late to stop.
If we are being honest here, climate change science is, at best, an educated guessing game, not a proven beyond a doubt set of scientific laws, and specifically I mean "man made climate change."
No it really is not just a guess unless you think every hypothesis is "just a guess". A lot of the science in the field is simply documenting changes that absolutely ARE occurring, many of which were predicted by those same models that you are calling guesswork. The model makes predictions which absolutely can be checked.
The critics of this science have some valid points. Past high profile predictions of our demise from climate change have been wildly over blown, there seems to be a bias towards "making news" in order to get research grants, and little attention is paid to the views of those who disagree with the consensus.
Most of the critics do not actually make or hold valid counter points. They mostly simply are seeking to reinforce their confirmation bias for various reasons. If they were serious about disputing the science the way to do that is present their own alternative testable hypothesis and back it up with data. The scientists are doing this and the critics by and large are not. Since the critics cannot be bothered to actually do the science their opinions (rightly) get ignored.
Simulations have serious limits.
Yes they do. That doesn't mean they are useless. I used to do simulations for a living in a previous job. There is a famous saying that "all models are wrong but some models are useful". If you insist on perfection in the climate models despite them giving you good and actionable data, you are completely missing the point. Newtonian physics isn't the most perfect model we have but it's still extremely useful and gives reasonably accurate testable predictions. A lot of the climate science is throwing off a lot of very useful data and we ignore it at our peril.
This is actually several dozens of groups coming up with similar modeling and conclusions over the last few years, though yes they differ a small bit they are all saying the same thing. It's not one single study saying this. False characterization.
Not merely dozens of groups, there are hundreds of groups running climate models (possibly thousands: the main models are open source.).
They are all saying the same thing, if by that you mean "human generated greenhouse gasses, primarily carbon dioxide, are increasing the Earth's greenhouse effect, and having a warming effect on the climate."
Yes, that part is a clear scientific consensus, well understood, and replicated by many groups.
It is this new result (this paper), suggesting a new feedback mechanism only operating at much higher carbon dioxide levels, of which I am saying "a single study".
And not merely one study: it is one study of which the authors of the study themselves emphasize how preliminary the results are.
Guess who benefits probably the most from oil and natural gas. Its not the executives. Its the billions of dollars that pension funds own in those industries. The pension funds supply teachers, firefighters, police officers with their retirement income. BTW there would be no internet to post your foul mouth messages on if it wasn't for oil, and natural gas industries. Just another fool who doesn't understand history.
Triassic: 1750 ppm CO2. Temp 3 C above modern level.
Jurassic: 1950 ppm CO2. Temp 3 C above modern level.
Cretaceous: 1700 ppm CO2. Temp 4 C above modern level.
Paleogene: 500 ppm CO2. Temp 4 C above modern level.
Neogene: 280 ppm CO2. Temp 0 C above modern level.
Quaternary Period: 250 ppm CO2. Temp 0 C above modern level.
Then you get to the Modern Period. Frankly we are still living in an Ice Age.
If anyone's interested, Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) is running a Climate change debate on his blog, where he invites believers and skeptics to post their best arguments with evidence, and he (as an intelligent person with no background) sorts through the bullshit for us.
One outcome of that debate is that claims of sea levels rising are bullshit. That's a concrete point, one where "the debate is settled" can now be applied. Sea levels have not risen to any appreciable degree, and that point cannot be made to show that climate change is real.
(They may rise in the future, but that is not the same as using *current* sea level changes as an argument for climate change.)
I look forward to Scott examining - one by one - all scientific claims of the climate change debate. Perhaps eventually we will arrive at a position everyone can agree on.
But wait! If higher CO2 eliminates clouds, why does Venus (which has an extremely CO2-rich atmosphere) also have about 100 percent cloud cover?!?
When did the world's glaciers START melting I wonder? Oh wait... 2.6 million years ago.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
It's always a doomsday scenario, yet EVERY single climate model has not been a little wrong, but horribly wrong. If you listened to the predictions in the 90's we'd all be dead now and out of oil. I love how every single type of weather is attributed to climate change. Conveniently, there's not one type of weather that can be pointed to as not being climate change, warmer = climate change, colder = climate change, dryer = climate change, wetter = climate change, hurricanes up or down = climate change. When you have a dogmatic system it fails to be science anymore, instead becoming a religion. Especially when none of the science stands on its own and always has to be modified toward an outcome. IPCC is very clear that they are not objective in studying climate phenomenon, rather they are set up specifically to find science that proves global warming/climate change. What other area of study determines the outcome beforehand and then conducts "science" to support it. And don't stay that's what testing for a hypothesis is, because a hypothesis is a guess, not a conclusion, and the predicated outcome often is different from the actual outcome. They've been caught over 100 times modifying and cherrypicking evidence towards a conclusion when not convenient, each day adding to the list. http://notrickszone.com/climate-scandals/
I would like there to be serious consequences for these prediction not panning out. So far very, very few models have shown any predictive power, and they're all on the "less dramatic", non-doomsday side of the spectrum. So I'd like to see real consequences for alarmism. I.e. we record the prediction, and then 20 years later if it's within less than, say 20% accurate, and it was used to influence public policy, you get to pay 1% of the cost of the measures taken or something like that. I'm open to suggestions. Right now the situation is absurd: I can whip up a computer program which would justify spending trillions of dollars on shit that's not going to work, and the mainstream press will take it at face value and spread my "research" with near-religious zeal. That's not science.
When did the world's glaciers START melting I wonder? Oh wait... 2.6 million years ago.
And the rate of melting has been constant over that time, or has it fluctuated ? And if it has fluctuated, what was the cause of these ? And when was the most recent fluctuation ? And the cause of that ?
CO2 is also being taken from the atmosphere by the Earth's ecosystem. It's still a net gain but the trend of overall CO2 emission reduction is very clear, there's no way we will reach the level described even if we did nothing but carried on with existing adoption of solar/nuclear power, and electric vehicles.
Can you point out any models that show CO2 levels even close to 1200ppm? Even the worst case I can find is 1000ppm by 2100 (still a long, long ways off and more than enough time to fully integrate renewable energy across most of the world).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I think you are gravely overestimating the accuracy of the simulation models as they move into the future. I think you also are making assumptions about what I actually think.
My personal opinion (and I'm not a climate scientist, nor did I stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night so I make no claim to any authority) I think the climate IS changing, things are getting warmer. This is partially due to CO2 emissions, and party just the natural cycling of the planet's climate. We can argue the proportions of what's causing warming, but to me it's a pointless debate. What IS important though is the discussions about what, if anything, we should DO about this.
At this point, we likely part company. I think the climate change lobby are NUTS in a full blown religious sort of way. We may be heading towards a different climate, by our own hands, but some of the proposed solutions I've heard proposed, even in the main stream, are absolute lunacy, both practically, environmentally and economically. There is absolutely no way we can justify the near total destruction of our economy and the violence, death and pestilence which would come to the world's people, yet that's what is being suggested and pushed as the responsible "greed" way. I think we'd be better off foregoing the self inflicted pain and deal with whatever climate change decides to dish out, because up to this point, the dire predictions of the past have been proven wildly wrong.
Past performance doesn't guarantee future performance, but it can give you a pretty good idea what is possible. In this case, the global warming/climate change alarmist bent is alive and well. I strongly suspect they are being as ridiculously dire as they always have, if not more, and I'm unwilling to agree to basically commit "Harry Carry" on the alter of climate change.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Modeling is not evidence.
The problem here is that studies like this are based on *simulations* not observations of repeatable experiments.
You are talking about two different things here, and I think it's worth clearly disentangling the two.
One is the specific paper being discussed here, which proposes a new feedback mechanism that operates only at high carbon dioxide concentrations, much higher than those in the present era. This one is indeed a simulation, and the authors themselves emphasize that it is speculative and needs to be studied further. In particular, this feedback mechanism may have applicability to understanding paleoclimate events.
but you seem to go on to be to take a pot-shot at climate science, and climate models in general.
What we have here is a set of theories, which really cannot be proven beyond doubt.
Science doesn't, and can't, "prove things beyond doubt."
What science really does is make models (what the general populace calls "theories"), and then test the models against measurements. The models that explain the measurements better are kept, and the ones that don't are discarded. A scientific theory is never "proven beyond doubt"; in real science, every model is subject to being discarded when a better model comes along, or when new measurements are made that the old model can't explain.
Science is really a process of progressive iteration: the models get better and better as we understand more.
If we are being honest here, climate change science is, at best, an educated guessing game, not a proven beyond a doubt set of scientific laws, and specifically I mean "man made climate change."
Here is where you switch from discussing the paper in question, and go on to take pot shots at climate science.
Unless you mean "all science is at best an educated guessing game", no. The basic points of climate science, and specifically "man made climate change," are well understood, and well supported by evidence. The basic physics has been known for over a century, the basic model is over fifty years old now and well supported by evidence. The detailed models are working at accounting for details at progressively finer scales, but the basics are well understood.
The critics of this science have some valid points.
The main (or at least the loudest) "critics" of the science in the past have consisted almost entirely of people whose "science" is driven by ideology and funded by fossil-fuel companies, and they have proven to be wrong so many times over and over that their main problem is nobody takes them seriously. If they have "some valid points", those points have been so overwhelmed by the tidal wave of ideologically-driven garbage that they are entirely invisible.
Past high profile predictions of our demise from climate change have been wildly over blown,
When you talk about "high profile" predictions, I think you're now moving into yet a different rant, which is a critique of media coverage of the science. Ignoring what the media considers "high profile", the actual predictions done by real science have, so far, mostly been accurate.
there seems to be a bias towards "making news" in order to get research grants,
You are confusing the science with the media attention. The paper in question is a good case in point. Notice how the headline on the article is "Extreme CO2 levels could trigger clouds ‘tipping point’ and 8C of global warming"-- that's "making news". And then read the actual paper, which has a single sentence talking about the possibility of this happeni
This is a modification of a previous post. It's all well and good for researchers to think about climate change. To me, it's pretty clear that climate science has the general picture right, even if individual models are all imperfect.
However, I doubt anything serious will be done until it becomes a *real* and *immediate* problem that's undeniable to *most* of the planet. In the past, humanity was able to do things proactively, like agree to limit fluorocarbons to fix the hole we punched in our ozone layer. Unfortunately, forward-thinking and cooperation is mostly dead, at least for the time being. Humanity is currently engaged in a full-blown session of head-up-ass (on multiple issues, not just climate change) and the bar for action in this area is very, very high.
A slight rise in temperature isn't real enough.
A slight increase in storm severity isn't enough.
The loss of one or two major breadbasket regions isn't enough. Food production will just shift around.
Anything that happens in a poor country isn't enough, including starvation. Poor people simply don't count enough to those with power and wealth.
Any effect that is limited to the coasts isn't enough. People will just move.
Any extinctions short of country-scale ecological collapse isn't enough. Most people don't care about plants and critters beyond eating them.
Anything that is limited to the arctic isn't enough. Nobody lives there.
Mass migrations from poor countries won't be enough. Rich countries will just put up barriers and allow populations to die.
Actually, humanity is starting to de-carbonize, but incrementally and not for ecological reasons. Renewables are slowly becoming more economically competitive than carbon-based energy. Will it happen before we change the planet in ways that impede our progress as a species? The jury is still out on that one.
As far as I can see, here are the only things that will force humanity to deal with the problem at a faster pace:
Environmental-related destruction that renders entire cities in the rich world uninhabitable. That level of economic damage won't be deniable.
Loss of enough major food-producing regions to affect the dinner tables of people in the rich world. When steak becomes unavailable, it'll be serious.
Beyond that, it's business as usual. Let's hope that geo-engineering is a viable option, because I suspect that we're going to need it.
Yeah its seriously got to be 50+ given the greybeards and the fox news political opinions tossed around here.
just the natural cycling of the planet's climate
How does that work ? What is actually causing the up- and downturns in these cycles ?
Global avg surface temp is 15 deg C (14.9) that gives us a water vapor pressure of 12.8 torr
According to http://www.wiredchemist.com/ch... ..if we increase temps by 8C that raises that to 21 torr.
I rather expect that increasing the vapor pressure of water by 64% will increase cloud formation substantially?
-Styopa
Where is the control Earth without humans against which to verify these models?
But in this case he has a point, if not a good one. To claim that this would be the result (which they don't do, but which the headline suggests) is unreasonable. But what they claim is that this is analogous to what happened in a prior time. This appears true, but analogies are notoriously tricky, and it's not clear that this one would hold. Which is what they say in their paper.
The problem here is people reacting against headlines as if they were claims of solid evidence. And those who write the headlines to this on purpose and with the intent to mislead.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The reason forest fire frequency and severity is increasing is because people like you moved to the "Wet Coast". Humans cause most forest fires and when you move into a forested area that is going to cause problems. Drought is partially caused by people taking all the water in the "Wet Coast". So basically YOU are part of the problem.
If you want to say global warming is essentially a consensus, I'll agree. But this study is still an outlier. 8C warming is considerably higher than most projections. They say that it's because they included a factor that other models didn't include, but that's going to need considerable confirmation.
That said, don't trust the models when the warming projected gets over 2C warming, as they are then operating beyond the range within which they have been validated. And expect that there are feedback loops, both positive and negative, that will become important in that range which haven't been needed up until now. So saying that it will be considerably worse than the current projections isn't unreasonable. Certainly when not when you include an additional feedback loop. But there are likely to be others that will act as dampers. Their argument against it is that "last time this is what happened", but "last time" isn't a close match against current conditions, so there may be other effects.
All that said, the conservative approach would be to consider that they might be right.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
FWIW, there are two (or more) important caveats.
1) The current climate models don't make accurate predictions. This is so true that what is used is an ensemble prediction, where several different models are run, and their points of agreement is what is used as the working prediction. This gives fairly good results, but clearly shows that the process isn't understood. Either that or it's so sensitive to initial conditions that only the attractors can be reasonably predicted.
2) This is a prediction of a single model far beyond the range of variation within which the current models have been validated. Whoops! Take this as a warning, not as a serious claim.
P.S.: IIUC, the original paper didn't make a serious claim to be more than "This is analogous to what happened in this prior time, so watch out!", which *is* a true claim, though points of analogy are always of dubious validity. (But CO2 levels are a reasonable thing to tie your model to.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
If they can sell them to people in the United States for more than consumers in China would pay, why wouldn't they export them?
Because they could make more and sell them to both consumers in the United States and in China.
That's the beauty of economy of scale.
And yet some of them that resisted that melting for hundreds of thousands of years completely disappeared in my lifetime. It's almost as if the process accelerated....
I'm with you. I think resources would be better spent investing in technologies to allow us to adapt to climate change rather than dumping that money into CO2 reductions that may only be responsible for a fraction of actual warming. Efficiency improvements, insulation, transportation, and genetic modification of crops are better solutions to climate change than manufacturing endless solar and wind farms that aren't displacing base load generation. Natural gas from fracking has done more for CO2 reductions than all the renewables development.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
Climate change is real
So is continental drift. Earthquakes kill thousands of people every decade. I propose a new tax to prevent continental drift and deal with all these earthquakes.
Wow, I think that's the silliest example of whataboutism I've ever seen.
What is such a problem?
No problem. I'm actually more optimistic than you. I firmly believe that as solar panel prices continue to drop, the retail installations will swamp what the power companies are doing. I WILL have a panel installation in my home and an electric car before I retire, because it will be retirement that stands against any stock market bust. Then my kids will use the same panels for many years after I'm gone.
Just let it happen. AOC is NOT the boss, no matter how many wacky ideas she comes up with. Sustainability is not the future. SELF sustainability is.
Want to save the world from global warming? Start convincing people to look out for themselves.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
You found that shit fest slightly entertaining. The only thing stupider than the "science" in that movie was the actors.
Hint: If you're stuck in a library and need a fire to keep warm, DON'T burn books, even if burning law books does make a leftist statement. Brake up one of the oak chairs from the row up on row of oak chairs. Books require constant turning to burn well, and the hardwoods burn much hotter.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
If you want to say global warming is essentially a consensus, I'll agree. But this study is still an outlier. 8C warming is considerably higher than most projections.
Well, it is higher than most projections because this is an effect that kicks in only at CO2 levels way beyond the CO2 levels that most predictive models look at.
Again: this headline is about one sentence in their paper, which was immediately followed by a statement of uncertainties.
But, if your comment is to the effect of "let's wait and see what other scientists think, and whether they,can confirm these results, before we take them seriously.... yes, exactly. Never credit a single study.
How does that work ? What is actually causing the up- and downturns in these cycles ?
If it is an external force, it would have to be huge; something on the order of magnitude of the sun.
Yep. And we measure the output of the sun from satellites, and it's not changing . So we rule that out.
No, that's the good thing about hundreds of independent research groups on six continents making measurements and running models: they don't all use the same set of assumptions and the same data.
Volcanic CO2 is chump change compared to what a certain species of primate does.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I know a lot of atmospheric scientists, and I don't believe I've ever heard one suggest that the current increases in CO2 levels were going to lead to "runaway warming"
Maybe check Google before you post?
Results include such notables as Steven Hawkins:
""We are close to the tipping point, where global warming becomes irreversible. Trump's action could push the Earth over the brink, to become like Venus," - SH
MIT Technology review chimes in with another climatologist saying it could happen.
How dare you try to whitewash the shameful history of climate alarmism by acclaimed scientists and celebrities.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You need to be able to calculate the error bars for your predictions.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
That could do it - except that our measurements show no sufficient long-term increases in solar output.
The measurements do show sufficient long-term increases in gases that trap more of that solar output, though
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Well, entertaining in kind of a slipping on a banana sort of way. Entertaining to the observer, not so much for the one stepping on the banana.
This is an argument for the climate change situation being difficult -- more so than many of us realize, in terms of how widespread the potential economic pain is -- but it's not an argument against it being true.
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
They do suffer from confirmation bias, however. If my model says there will be no warming, and everyone else's model says there is warming, I "fix" my model until it agrees with everyone else.
Less than you think.
What you are ignoring is that scientists get famous by proving the existing theories wrong.
A group that found a flaw in the current understanding of the greenhouse effect would instantly become the most famous atmospheric scientists in history... and every single one of them knows it.
The trick, however, is you have to find a flaw, and prove it's real. Asserting "oh, I think it's wrong, I can't say why" doesn't work. Finding the flaw turns out not to be easy-- a thousand people have been looking for one for fifty years now, and so far the understanding has withstood all attacks.
See this issue in action while Millikan et al calculates the electron's charge: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...
Feynmann likes amusing anecdotes. The actual history of electron charge measurements maybe sort of shows a progression like that, but not nearly the neat progression like Feynmann suggests, in fact, the very next measurement published, Backlin 1929, was within the error bars of the correct measurement. Graph here: https://i.stack.imgur.com/WtmU...
This is the internet at its worst. Extreme result study not replicated with a mild disclaimer embedded in it. But that is not the story that will get out. All that will be remembered and parroted over and over is the extreme claim that will be taken as fact: "Oh yeah, well a study proved that ..." It's just disheartening but hopefully it won't be fatal.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
The only testable fact we have is that CO2 does act as a greenhouse gas
AND billions of tons of CO2 produced. try it for yourself : lock yourself up in your garage with a CO2 meter and start your cars engine.
Yes that's why it's called reductio ad absurdum
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
When your error bar is bigger than what you're actually predicting, maybe it's not a model problem.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Well, what kind of problem is it then?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Whataboutism is replying to a comment or argument with "but, what about [something completely different]."
Just because what you said was a non sequitur and absurd does not make it reducto ad absurdum..