Not only are you being ridiculous, you appear to have very little idea of what the IPCC is, what it's for, or what it does.
The IPCC is charged with investigating the extent to which humans may be influencing the climate. That does not mean that they are ordered to ignore natural climate change or any other such paranoid absurdity. "No human influence" is a possible answer within the scope of their mission; it just happens not to be supported by the data.
As I said, the IPCC assessment report has extensive discussion of natural climate change, both present and past. In attribution studies, in order to quantify the extent to which humans are or are not influencing the climate, you have to start by studying the natural climate, so that you can say whether current change is different from ordinary natural change. That is in fact what is done in the research summarized by the IPCC, using a combination of observational data and physical modeling.
As far as "making up numbers" or "someone else giving them numbers" on the amount of natural/human climate change is concerned, the IPCC's job is to summarize the various published scientific research in the field. For example, the figure I mentioned is based in part on Stott et al., J. Clim. 19, 2763 (2006).
My point being that global warming "deniers" don't get as much funding as global warming "believers"
What numbers support this claim?
because if there is no global warming, then there's nothing to study and it's business as usual.
Government funding agencies like the National Science Foundation don't give a rat's ass whether you're a "believer" or a "denier". You don't submit a grant proposal which says "I'm going to prove/disprove anthropogenic global warming". You write something like "I'm going to estimate the total feedback strength of the climate system", or "I'm going to investigate the correlation between solar irradiance trends and global temperatures". If you do what you said you'd do, publish a paper on it, and it advances our scientific understanding of whatever it is you said you were going to investigate, the NSF is happy.
This "they're only in it for the gold" crap is just a cognitive blinder to give you an excuse to ignore arbitrarily many scientific findings. It doesn't matter what or how much is published; you can just dismiss it as "biased" and ignore it in favor of whatever your preconceptions are.
The IPCCC was only looking at human causes of Global warming
The IPCC report discusses both human and natural causes of warming, and their relative contributions. They even have a figure where they estimate how much of the last century's climate is due to natural vs. human causes.
If you're right then it boils down to "trust us" which, to me, is not science but rather philosophy.
It is science. You can test it. It just takes a long time before the test can be carried out. The problem is not that the science is untestable, but that we have to make a decision earlier than that. Even 20 years ago, with much cruder models, there were predictions that have been at least approximately borne out (e.g. here). But "unquestionable accuracy" is hard to come by. The fact that science is uncertain doesn't mean that it's not science.
As a strategy for encouraging change the GW debate is fatally flawed.
There isn't any other way to carry out that debate. The fact is that climate change is a slow and largely invisible process. Yes, other kinds of air pollution are visible and immediate. We can act to reduce those kinds of pollution. But that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the serious problem of climate change. Yes, it would be nice to have the luxury of only needing to act on immediate, visible dangers. But some problems simply aren't that easy. With climate change, our decisions now need not cause serious damage for a century. We can't avoid the reality that those decisions, nevertheless, need to weigh the risk of future impacts. Climate change has the potential to significantly alter the Earth system for millennia to come.
My understanding is that Global Warming is now predicted to be irreversible at our current technology level.
Short of geoengineering schemes, it is irreversible at our current technology level, over the next couple centuries. Reversing global warming has never been the goal. I've never seen a proposed climate change policy which was aimed at returning the planet to a pre-industrial climate within the next few centuries. The goal is to reduce it and slow it down.
I have heard no discussions about mitigation other than "use less", with no discussion of whether or how much that would actually help.
You're not trying very hard. There is, as I said, a huge literature on this subject developed over the past 20 years. You can start by looking up some of the economists I mentioned. Nordhaus has a new book on the subject, A Question of Balance.
Frankly, I'm not seeing a lot of rational discussion about real issues.
How many economic or scientific analyses have you read, as opposed to media headlines?
If I saw more of "Canada will be the new breadbasket of the world", and "we will need dikes around New York at a cost of X", I would be a lot more convinced.
I'm sure the Canadian government has commissioned reports on the agricultural impacts of climate change, although I can't cite one off the top of my head. I've read papers on New York City sea level impacts, and somewhere I saw a detailed engineering study of flood risks, but I don't know if they've yet developed an adaptation plan for the next century.
I am totally uninterested in economists comparing "the do everything to combat Global Warming" case to the "do nothing to combat Global Warming" case
I have not referred you to any such economists. The economists I cited look at optimal mitigation pathways, which means estimating how much mitigation is required at what cost to achieve what level of benefit, in the presence of uncertainty about climate, damages, and costs.
As it is, there is no difference between Global Warming and belief in Zuul.
Maybe if you weren't so intentionally ignorant of climate policy research you'd understand the difference between the two. Sheesh. It doesn't really take that much effort to Google some of the work that has been done in this area.
Think I'm wrong? Then explain to me the difference in cost of waiting 20 years when it is obvious that we need dikes (and we hopefully by then know how high to make them), and starting now.
The cost in waiting to build dikes is not that high; we can wait until sea level rises to build them. The cost in waiting to abate CO2 emissions is high, because that greatly influences the amount of change which needs to be adapted to.
There is evidence of a rapid carbon spike at the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. Unsurprisingly enough, this is used as evidence of CO2's influence on climate, because the PETM was followed by a large amount of global warming. It was also preceded by a smaller amount of more gradual warming, which leads to a feedback theory: slow warming eventually triggered a threshold response, such as destabilizing methane clathrates in the ocean, which were abruptly released to the atmosphere and caused additional very rapid warming (due to methane's greenhouse effect as well as CO2, because methane degrades to CO2 in the atmosphere).
What I'd like to see is for them to use their models to make a near-term prediction that is so accurate that no one could question that they have it right.
That's basically impossible, from a mathematical standpoint. Weather is unpredictable past about two weeks. The background climate state that weather fluctuates around is controlled by less chaotic processes on the long term (the Earth's radiative imbalance), but when you put all the chaotic weather noise on top of it, it takes decades for the underlying climate signal to show up. That's why it took so long before climate scientists were willing to definitively attribute climate change to humans.
Unfortunately, the reality of climate science is that predictions take a long time and a lot of work to verify, and even then there is still residual uncertainty. A strong case has already been made, but it simply isn't easy.
I disagree on what economists say - I have only seen one or two even address the issue, and they have said widely diverging things.
"One or two"? There is by now a rather enormous literature on this topic. Notable names in this area include Nordhaus, Tol, Yohe, Stern, Pizer, Weitzman, etc. And there is fairly widespread agreement that some amount of mitigation is economically justifiable to insure against the more dangerous possible outcomes.
We do not know our technology limitations 100 years from now well enough to predict how much it will cost.
We know our technology limitations NOW, and in the near future. If we wait 100 years before spending money on the problem, it's going to be far harder to deal with, particularly since we will already have experienced many of the impacts mitigation was supposed to avert.
If technological miracles occur, great: we can decrease spending on future mitigation efforts. In the meantime, mitigation is still worthwhile even at current projected costs.
The one prediction that is always safe: It will be cheaper (in time and resources - not dollars) to deal with a static problem in the future rather than in the present.
That is not at all a "safe" prediction. The problem GROWS with time. The longer you wait to mitigate, the more mitigation you have to do. Plus you have the usual problems of assuming unlimited exponential economic growth.
Like many of sumdumass's claims, it never happened. There's another of Inhofe's "protest petitions" going around. But it didn't take the form of 600 scientists (or any scientists) "walking out of a meeting".
Because any climate scientist who isn't in agreement suddenly finds he has no govt funding, and loses credibility in his field.
The problem with this claim is that pretty much all of the notorious skeptical scientists (Lindzen, Spencer, Christy, Schwartz, Chylek, etc.) continue to be both funded and published.
It also doesn't explain how new scientific theories come into existence. (Hint: it's not usually through destroying the careers of those who propose them.)
But hey, don't let me get in the way of your conceptual blinders. Want to ignore arbitrarily large amounts of evidence? Simply accuse anyone you disagree with of bias and use that as an excuse to dismiss any evidence without considering it.
I'd personally like to see an IPCCC-like document outlining proposed best practices, which currently available scientific evidence suggests would, if followed, have some desirable outcome or prevent some undesirable outcome.
Within this current ice age, we're currently in an interglacial (a small warm patch). Do you know what that means? Yay, things are melting! Whoopeedo! It would be a jolly funny interglacial if they weren't. And within this interglacial, all the curves are bouncing around wildly, as they have always done.
The concern is not over the current The manmade CO2 influx of the last century seems quite large at first glance, but it isn't significantly more than natural processes inject quite regularly.
The manmade CO2 flux is indeed quite large relative to the normal imbalance between natural sources and sinks, which is why CO2 levels haven't been as high as they are now in millions of years.
The CO2 curves over millions of years are some of the most erratic processes known to science.
They don't jump up 100 ppm in a hundred years.
Yet no GCM currently models our destruction of the carbon transport mechanism. I guess it's not sexy for the media and won't bring in research funds.
It certainly would bring in research funds, and it would probably also be sexy for the media ("we're even more screwed"). The problem is that nobody yet has a good handle on what humans are going to do to those ecosystems. There is some research, but nothing that's yet made its way into the GCMs (which are only now acquiring interactive carbon cycle modules in the first place).
We were in the 200 ppm's of CO2 interval before the industrial age, and now we're in the 300 ppm's... but we were at 1000 ppm just 100 million years ago, and temperature has not correlated with CO2 at all since then over long time scales.
Temperature has correlated with CO2 over many long time scales; see Royer's climate sensitivity estimate, for example. It doesn't always correlate, but you don't expect it to, because CO2 isn't the only thing that influences climate. The fact is, you have to get down to details in each geological period to understand what's going on at that particular time.
Temperature correlates with CO2 over geologically short time spans of 100ky periodicity as shown in the Vostok cores, but which is cause and which is effect (if either) is far less certain.
It's pretty well certain that CO2 has an effect on temperature, or else you can't explain the magnitude of the ice age cycle.
The paleoclimate record shows that CO2 levels are not in the slightest a primary determinant of average planetary temperature.
Nonsense. The paleoclimate record strongly supports the influence of CO2 on climate over many periods in the Earth's history.
At the end of the Ordovician Period some 400 or so million years ago, the Earth had CO2 levels of 4000 to 5000 ppm, well over 10 times our present value, yet guess what the mean temperature was? We were in the deepest ice age that the planet has ever experienced.
That doesn't mean that CO2 doesn't have any influence on the climate. Absolute CO2 levels aren't that informative, because the baseline climate is modulated by lots of other things, such as the positions of the continents and their effect on the atmospheric-ocean circulation, or the intensity of the Sun (which was weaker in the distant past). More relevant is changes in CO2 levels (although they are also not wholly predictive, because you have to consider what other drivers may be counterbalancing them). Indeed, although the Late Ordovician glaciation is not yet understood, there have been a number of papers which attribute it partially to a drop in CO2 levels. Some relevant papers are by Herrmann, Poussart, and Saltzman; search under "Ordovician".
But the Earth is not a test tube. It doesn't behave as one at all because it has numerous extremely powerful feedbacks that mitigate the effect of CO2 change.
Personally, I don't care that much who causes global warming - because the benefits of reversing global warming do not currently outweigh the costs.
No one is talking about reversing global warming (short of a few geoengineering proponents). They're talking about slowing it down. And economists who have studied the issue are in pretty widespread agreement that the risk-weighted benefits of doing that outweigh the costs. See Nordhaus's latest book for a pretty mainstream economic overview.
I do not take the liberal media to be a reliable source of information.
The above post is a survey of the scientific literature, not the "liberal media". If you want to read the modern scientific literature, browse through the latest issues of Nature Geoscience, Journal of Climate, Journal of Geophysical Research, Geophysical Research Letters, Climatic Change, etc. You will notice a conspicuous dearth of articles claiming "it's all natural".
I need to read from someone who has nothing to gain by saying its so.
And yet, when confronted with scientific research, I'm sure you will claim that "they're only saying that to get grant money". Which conveniently excludes virtually all the actual scientific experts on the planet.
We are not on mars or the other planets, yet they are warming at a rate proportional to ours.
This is false. And if it were true, it would DISPROVE your claim, because different planets warming from a common cause should warm at different rates, given the differences in their atmospheric heat capacities, lack of oceans, distance from the Sun, etc.
So and sane minded person ought to be able to look at this and think, "hmm, I see a pattern here, and humans are not in this equation".
That's one of the most ridiculous of all skeptic arguments. Not all planets are warming, and not all planets are warming globally. When you actually get down to looking at what's going on at each planet, they have nothing to do with each other. Mars had a shift in dust storms which altered the amount of sunlight reaching the southern hemisphere. Jupiter's equator is warming and its poles are cooling, due to shifts in convection patterns. Pluto is experiencing summer. And so on.
There is a sun which has increased sun spot activity and an increased number of solar flares and cosmic dust. All of which attribute to the increased temperature.
Not particularly. Solar irradiance and cosmic ray trends have been pretty unchanged for 30-50 years, right when the modern global warming took off.
It has definitely cooled this winter with record low temperatures.
Global warming doesn't predict that every year is warmer than the year before. While this winter has been cool relative to some recent winters, due partially to La Nina, even the coldest month of winter is (globally speaking) still warmer than anything on record until at least the mid-1990s.
Spread out over 16 blocks, I found all twelve monkeys, the whole ten yards (or is that "the whole nine yards"?) detected using a "sixth sense" device made from the fifth element built in four rooms while telling three stories about Joan committing the first deadly sin
If you count the lines in this story, they add up to my lucky number, slevin
The orbit is very highly eccentric, which means the usual theory of tidal locking doesn't apply. The research uses a theory of spin pseudo-synchronization (Eq. 18 of this paper) to derive the planet's rotation rate in relation to its orbit. They do note there is an alternate theory of spin synchronization that, for simplicity, they didn't consider in this paper.
And I'm pointing out that you intentionally ignore the laws of physics, the instrumental data, and the paleo evidence which support the influence of greenhouse gases on climate.
Of course, if you want to see any such influence in the data, you have to look when the forcing is strong, such as in the 20th century, in the glacial-interglacial cycle, or in even larger carbon excursions such as the PETM. In particular, as I noted, late Holocene climate when CO2 variations were slight (usually less than +/- 5 ppm, and generally not more than ~10 ppm over the considered time period) does not indicate anything useful about the influence of CO2 on climate, as there was virtually no CO2 forcing whose response can be quantified. You can't constrain the sensitivity of the climate to changing CO2 levels from data when CO2 levels aren't appreciably changing.
In other words, contrary to your claim, the study you link to is irrelevant to the question of whether there is a causal relationship between CO2 and climate. It's sad that you appear unable to comprehend this obvious fact, and indeed claim that it's "not supported by science". It's really rather ridiculous how you persistently parrot anything you read on a skeptic website without even the most basic understanding of what it even means. I wonder why "disproving global warming" is so important to you that you keep clinging to refuted pseudoscience.
If you ever do happen to run across any evidence which indicates there is no causal relationship between CO2 and climate, you're free to try again.
It means exactly as I said, they didn't call it Climate change until after global warming deniers gained traction.
And I proved you wrong repeatedly, so we're back to your original lie.
Whatever, that's how it happened, it's a political organization and it's 80%of the ammo supporting Global warming
Nonsense. The IPCC Working Group 1 summary of the physical science is a summary written by scientists and agrees with the vast body of the scientific literature on the subject.
That continues to be a libelous and wrong claim, and one that you repeatedly avoid supporting with facts.
Perhaps you need to look up the definition of libel. You keep using that word and I don't think you know what it means.
It's a malicious and false accusation.
Which in turn, does not negate the utility of an emission cap.
Lol... I didn't say a word about an emissions cap.
You were talking constantly about the EU's emissions cap.
We both were talking about the artificial increase of energy prices hurting the economy. If you can get an emissions cap that doesn't do that,
Any emissions cap will slow economic growth. I'm sorry you're incapable of accepting that economic growth incurs economic damages to the environment.
The change in the amount of Co2 and water effect the absolute amounts.
You're still not getting it. The point is, AGAIN, that whether CO2 is a large or small part of the atmosphere is irrelevant. What is relevant is how much radiative forcing is due to the amount of CO2 we've emitted, and how easy/hard it is to reduce emissions relative to what we've already emitted.
The entire premise is that the absolute amounts are causing heat to build up and therefore damage to the environment that you have arbitrarily decided needs to stay the same as you know it.
Measured by the publicized prophecies of the al mighty science community and reported in the press.
You didn't answer the question. What is "80 or 90 pecent"? What is the skill measure and what is the quantity being measured?
Actually, no. It is very relevant.
Sigh. An atmosphere which has 500 gigatons of carbon in it and no molecular nitrogen has the same greenhouse effect as an atmosphere with 500 gigatons of carbon in it and lots of molecular nitrogen, because N2 isn't a greenhouse gas. (Ignore NOx for the sake of argument here.) In the second case, CO2 is a much larger fraction of the atmosphere than the former. Don't you get it YET?
Especially when you have reports like this.
The following sentence is utterly false: "According to Compo and Sardeshmukh's study, all the greenhouse gases humans have dumped in the atmosphere over the last 46 years - the primary factor most climate change proponents cite to blame humans for global warming - haven't affected land temperatures at all."
They find that land temperatures are driven strongly by ocean temperatures, which is already well known. The oceans are enormous heat sinks. It doesn't change any of the evidence that both land and ocean are warming from the greenhouse effect.
I don't think I need to.
Yeah, why not. I can make up wrong claims unjustified by any facts too.
Well, it appears that the models are so flawed that they can show the exact same warming trends as being blamed on Co2 without even raising Co2 levels.
That's not a flaw in the models. Compo and Sardeshmukh used EXACTLY THE SAME models that predict CO2-based warming trends. If you think the models are flawed, you shouldn't believe their results either.
Didn't we discuss the sun and water vapor a while back? Are you still going to deny they play a large role in this scam of global warming?
Yes, I'm going to deny the Sun plays a large role in modern global warming. Water vapor does play a large role, but water vapor is not a cause of warming, it is an amplification o
If you gear the models to accurately track past weather then they don't predict any significant warming now. Likewise, if you gear the models to show warming now, they no longer make sense of past weather.
Climate models don't track weather. If you calibrate them against past climate, they do predict current warming. And models which are not calibrated against climatic time series, but are initialized to a pre-industrial climate state, do agree with the subsequent climate.
You may be getting confused about the Keenlyside Nature paper, which predicts little warming for a few years based on initializing a model with recent ocean state data instead of a spun-up pre-industrial state. (i.e., the model knows that the PDO is in the cool phase, whereas models spun up to pre-industrial climates know about the PDO but not its phase.) This does not actually alter any model parameter (i.e., any of the model physics), or the model's climate sensitivity to CO2, or the model's hindcasts for past climates, or the model's forecasts for long-term climate.
Hell, it was just thirty years ago we are being told a global ice age was on the way...and they were giving the same type of dire predictions, the same hand wringing, and the same "we're absolutely sure we're right" speeches from all the noted scientists
I don't know how many times this needs to be debunked, but here goes again.
Last I heard, mathematics was still considered science.
As a scientist, I don't consider mathematics to be science. It doesn't have the necessary empirical connection.
Please be assured that in real science, things can indeed be proven.
This is wrong. No scientific theory can ever be proven, in the mathematical sense. You can support it with increasingly large amounts of evidence, but no amount of evidence can prove it true the way you can prove a theorem.
It's when they started titling their positions with it when I'm concerned with.
What does that have to do with the use of the term "climate change" vs. "global warming"? Nobody ever titled themselves "global warming".
Members of the UN were ready to install sweeping actions and call for treaties and such. It was the so called denier who forced the IPCC to be implemented,
Uh, no, that doesn't have anything to do with how the IPCC was created.
it got hijacked and turned into a political organization.
The IPCC was always intended to be a political organization. That's what the "Intergovernmental" is for. It's also a scientific organization. That's what the "Climate Change" is for.
Nope, it was originally supposed to investigate if there was even a problem, by the time it was actually put in play, it had one purpose, to prove anthropological global warming.
That continues to be a libelous and wrong claim, and one that you repeatedly avoid supporting with facts.
Yea, I had some excuses to why it isn't working either. It still doesn't negate that they tried and are loosing.
Which in turn, does not negate the utility of an emission cap.
Sure it is. When an increase of 1 percent in water vapor can have 10 times the effect, it makes a big difference.
Again, what matters is not the absolute amount of CO2 vs. the absolute amount of water vapor. What matters is the CHANGE in CO2 vs. the change in other radiative forcing agents.
It seems that it isn't because we still can't predict into the future with any acceptable degree of accuracy. And yes, I'm not expecting 100% accuracy but we cannot even hit 80 or 90 percent.
More made-up numbers. 80 or 90 percent of what, measured by what?
The absolute amount compared to other gases in the atmosphere is irrelevant to how hard or easy it is to reduce the emissions rate of any particular gas.
Sure it's relevent. It shows that we can't effect even a small percentage without major problems in the economies and life styles of people.
Again, this is wrong. It's not relevant whether CO2 is a small or large fraction of the total atmosphere. What is relevant is how hard or easy it is to alter CO2 emissions relative to the fraction by which we've increased CO2 concentrations.
It drives costs up more then the savings which drive costs of products up.
Feel free to justify this with actual numbers.
Yep, and if CA would just build a natural gas or coal power station, or even a nuclear power station instead of spending the extra money on wind and solar that aren't reliable, they could end the rolling blackouts.
They don't need to ramp up full-time gas/coal, they just need gas turbines that can be spun up on peak days.
They can be a lot more perfect then they are now.
So can any model.
The real problem is that their claimed accuracy isn't what the reported values of their predictions are.
That's not really true either; in the major climatic indicators, the model predictions, with their error bars, encompass the observations, with their error bars.
You know what I mean, altering the Co2 levels don't produce accurate results in predictions.
It's pretty much impossible to address a claim with such weasel words, since you can define "accurate" to mean anything you want.
If increasing Co2 by a factor of 1 meant a temp increase of a factor of 1, the models don't follow in reality.
The models, forced by CO2 and other radiative forcing agents, do agree with observed temperatures within their error bars.
Oh, so there's no dissent? No credible scientist or organization is speaking out saying there's a lack of consensus?
I said that they are not present in equal numbers. Nor, for that matter, are they supported by equally credible arguments and lines of evidence.
You want to look at what has changed, do you? How nice that the only thing that mother nature has changed in the last few millenia is the CO2 level!
If you spent half the time reading about science as you do making retarded sarcastic quips, you might learn something.
I have not said that CO2 is the only thing which has ever changed in the last few millennia. I said that CO2 is not a relatively unimportant gas compared to water vapor, when you look at what has changed.
Are these other factors big contributors or little ones? You don't know.
Wrong. Quite a lot is known about those other factors, both from a modeling and a data perspective. In particular, we have quite a bit of data on solar output, ocean circulation, etc. during the modern warming period.
I left the door open hoping you'd fall into this trap.
It's not a trap, because you're too unintelligent to appreciate what's acutally going on.
So, if we burn all of it now or later, what's the difference?
The difference is in both rate and final temperature. I'm not talking about "two decades from now". I'm talking about tens of thousands of years from now, if we actually do enter an ice age. That's not going to happen in two decades. Raising planetary temperatures 5 degrees above the modern climate is entirely different than raising it 5 degrees above a glacial climate. And the rate is entirely different too: a descent into an ice age takes tens of thousands of years. If we wanted to use greenhouse gases to counteract that, we could do so correspondingly slowly. That's far less disruptive than altering planetary temperatures by a similar amount within a century or two.
I figured you'd be smart enough to spot that, but you weren't.
It's always amusing to watch idiots criticize the intelligence of others.
And while nuclear plants are pretty safe, there are real safety, proliferation, and storage issues â" especially if you're talking about this being a worldwide solution, and not just for a few developed nations and their allies.
Let me be clear: I am only concerned with my developed nation and its allies. Other countries lift not a finger to help us in any way; quite the opposite, actually. So I find it difficult to muster much concern over whether someone else might find hardship in this plan.
Oh, gee, I thought you were interested in a plan that would, I don't know, work. A "solution" which requires everyone else in the world to become bestest friends with your country, and to have total and perfect control over their citizens and their nuclear security, is even more useless than the international agreements you criticize. That's how the world works.
Slashdot Mirror
But can it emulate Tennis for Two? (These guys did it...)
Not only are you being ridiculous, you appear to have very little idea of what the IPCC is, what it's for, or what it does.
The IPCC is charged with investigating the extent to which humans may be influencing the climate. That does not mean that they are ordered to ignore natural climate change or any other such paranoid absurdity. "No human influence" is a possible answer within the scope of their mission; it just happens not to be supported by the data.
As I said, the IPCC assessment report has extensive discussion of natural climate change, both present and past. In attribution studies, in order to quantify the extent to which humans are or are not influencing the climate, you have to start by studying the natural climate, so that you can say whether current change is different from ordinary natural change. That is in fact what is done in the research summarized by the IPCC, using a combination of observational data and physical modeling.
As far as "making up numbers" or "someone else giving them numbers" on the amount of natural/human climate change is concerned, the IPCC's job is to summarize the various published scientific research in the field. For example, the figure I mentioned is based in part on Stott et al., J. Clim. 19, 2763 (2006).
My point being that global warming "deniers" don't get as much funding as global warming "believers"
What numbers support this claim?
because if there is no global warming, then there's nothing to study and it's business as usual.
Government funding agencies like the National Science Foundation don't give a rat's ass whether you're a "believer" or a "denier". You don't submit a grant proposal which says "I'm going to prove/disprove anthropogenic global warming". You write something like "I'm going to estimate the total feedback strength of the climate system", or "I'm going to investigate the correlation between solar irradiance trends and global temperatures". If you do what you said you'd do, publish a paper on it, and it advances our scientific understanding of whatever it is you said you were going to investigate, the NSF is happy.
This "they're only in it for the gold" crap is just a cognitive blinder to give you an excuse to ignore arbitrarily many scientific findings. It doesn't matter what or how much is published; you can just dismiss it as "biased" and ignore it in favor of whatever your preconceptions are.
The IPCCC was only looking at human causes of Global warming
The IPCC report discusses both human and natural causes of warming, and their relative contributions. They even have a figure where they estimate how much of the last century's climate is due to natural vs. human causes.
If you're right then it boils down to "trust us" which, to me, is not science but rather philosophy.
It is science. You can test it. It just takes a long time before the test can be carried out. The problem is not that the science is untestable, but that we have to make a decision earlier than that. Even 20 years ago, with much cruder models, there were predictions that have been at least approximately borne out (e.g. here). But "unquestionable accuracy" is hard to come by. The fact that science is uncertain doesn't mean that it's not science.
As a strategy for encouraging change the GW debate is fatally flawed.
There isn't any other way to carry out that debate. The fact is that climate change is a slow and largely invisible process. Yes, other kinds of air pollution are visible and immediate. We can act to reduce those kinds of pollution. But that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the serious problem of climate change. Yes, it would be nice to have the luxury of only needing to act on immediate, visible dangers. But some problems simply aren't that easy. With climate change, our decisions now need not cause serious damage for a century. We can't avoid the reality that those decisions, nevertheless, need to weigh the risk of future impacts. Climate change has the potential to significantly alter the Earth system for millennia to come.
My understanding is that Global Warming is now predicted to be irreversible at our current technology level.
Short of geoengineering schemes, it is irreversible at our current technology level, over the next couple centuries. Reversing global warming has never been the goal. I've never seen a proposed climate change policy which was aimed at returning the planet to a pre-industrial climate within the next few centuries. The goal is to reduce it and slow it down.
I have heard no discussions about mitigation other than "use less", with no discussion of whether or how much that would actually help.
You're not trying very hard. There is, as I said, a huge literature on this subject developed over the past 20 years. You can start by looking up some of the economists I mentioned. Nordhaus has a new book on the subject, A Question of Balance.
Frankly, I'm not seeing a lot of rational discussion about real issues.
How many economic or scientific analyses have you read, as opposed to media headlines?
If I saw more of "Canada will be the new breadbasket of the world", and "we will need dikes around New York at a cost of X", I would be a lot more convinced.
I'm sure the Canadian government has commissioned reports on the agricultural impacts of climate change, although I can't cite one off the top of my head. I've read papers on New York City sea level impacts, and somewhere I saw a detailed engineering study of flood risks, but I don't know if they've yet developed an adaptation plan for the next century.
I am totally uninterested in economists comparing "the do everything to combat Global Warming" case to the "do nothing to combat Global Warming" case
I have not referred you to any such economists. The economists I cited look at optimal mitigation pathways, which means estimating how much mitigation is required at what cost to achieve what level of benefit, in the presence of uncertainty about climate, damages, and costs.
As it is, there is no difference between Global Warming and belief in Zuul.
Maybe if you weren't so intentionally ignorant of climate policy research you'd understand the difference between the two. Sheesh. It doesn't really take that much effort to Google some of the work that has been done in this area.
Think I'm wrong? Then explain to me the difference in cost of waiting 20 years when it is obvious that we need dikes (and we hopefully by then know how high to make them), and starting now.
The cost in waiting to build dikes is not that high; we can wait until sea level rises to build them. The cost in waiting to abate CO2 emissions is high, because that greatly influences the amount of change which needs to be adapted to.
There is evidence of a rapid carbon spike at the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. Unsurprisingly enough, this is used as evidence of CO2's influence on climate, because the PETM was followed by a large amount of global warming. It was also preceded by a smaller amount of more gradual warming, which leads to a feedback theory: slow warming eventually triggered a threshold response, such as destabilizing methane clathrates in the ocean, which were abruptly released to the atmosphere and caused additional very rapid warming (due to methane's greenhouse effect as well as CO2, because methane degrades to CO2 in the atmosphere).
What I'd like to see is for them to use their models to make a near-term prediction that is so accurate that no one could question that they have it right.
That's basically impossible, from a mathematical standpoint. Weather is unpredictable past about two weeks. The background climate state that weather fluctuates around is controlled by less chaotic processes on the long term (the Earth's radiative imbalance), but when you put all the chaotic weather noise on top of it, it takes decades for the underlying climate signal to show up. That's why it took so long before climate scientists were willing to definitively attribute climate change to humans.
Unfortunately, the reality of climate science is that predictions take a long time and a lot of work to verify, and even then there is still residual uncertainty. A strong case has already been made, but it simply isn't easy.
I disagree on what economists say - I have only seen one or two even address the issue, and they have said widely diverging things.
"One or two"? There is by now a rather enormous literature on this topic. Notable names in this area include Nordhaus, Tol, Yohe, Stern, Pizer, Weitzman, etc. And there is fairly widespread agreement that some amount of mitigation is economically justifiable to insure against the more dangerous possible outcomes.
We do not know our technology limitations 100 years from now well enough to predict how much it will cost.
We know our technology limitations NOW, and in the near future. If we wait 100 years before spending money on the problem, it's going to be far harder to deal with, particularly since we will already have experienced many of the impacts mitigation was supposed to avert.
If technological miracles occur, great: we can decrease spending on future mitigation efforts. In the meantime, mitigation is still worthwhile even at current projected costs.
The one prediction that is always safe: It will be cheaper (in time and resources - not dollars) to deal with a static problem in the future rather than in the present.
That is not at all a "safe" prediction. The problem GROWS with time. The longer you wait to mitigate, the more mitigation you have to do. Plus you have the usual problems of assuming unlimited exponential economic growth.
Like many of sumdumass's claims, it never happened. There's another of Inhofe's "protest petitions" going around. But it didn't take the form of 600 scientists (or any scientists) "walking out of a meeting".
Because any climate scientist who isn't in agreement suddenly finds he has no govt funding, and loses credibility in his field.
The problem with this claim is that pretty much all of the notorious skeptical scientists (Lindzen, Spencer, Christy, Schwartz, Chylek, etc.) continue to be both funded and published.
It also doesn't explain how new scientific theories come into existence. (Hint: it's not usually through destroying the careers of those who propose them.)
But hey, don't let me get in the way of your conceptual blinders. Want to ignore arbitrarily large amounts of evidence? Simply accuse anyone you disagree with of bias and use that as an excuse to dismiss any evidence without considering it.
I'd personally like to see an IPCCC-like document outlining proposed best practices, which currently available scientific evidence suggests would, if followed, have some desirable outcome or prevent some undesirable outcome.
You could start with the IPCC Working Group 3 assessment report.
Within this current ice age, we're currently in an interglacial (a small warm patch). Do you know what that means? Yay, things are melting! Whoopeedo! It would be a jolly funny interglacial if they weren't. And within this interglacial, all the curves are bouncing around wildly, as they have always done.
The concern is not over the current The manmade CO2 influx of the last century seems quite large at first glance, but it isn't significantly more than natural processes inject quite regularly.
The manmade CO2 flux is indeed quite large relative to the normal imbalance between natural sources and sinks, which is why CO2 levels haven't been as high as they are now in millions of years.
The CO2 curves over millions of years are some of the most erratic processes known to science.
They don't jump up 100 ppm in a hundred years.
Yet no GCM currently models our destruction of the carbon transport mechanism. I guess it's not sexy for the media and won't bring in research funds.
It certainly would bring in research funds, and it would probably also be sexy for the media ("we're even more screwed"). The problem is that nobody yet has a good handle on what humans are going to do to those ecosystems. There is some research, but nothing that's yet made its way into the GCMs (which are only now acquiring interactive carbon cycle modules in the first place).
We were in the 200 ppm's of CO2 interval before the industrial age, and now we're in the 300 ppm's ... but we were at 1000 ppm just 100 million years ago, and temperature has not correlated with CO2 at all since then over long time scales.
Temperature has correlated with CO2 over many long time scales; see Royer's climate sensitivity estimate, for example. It doesn't always correlate, but you don't expect it to, because CO2 isn't the only thing that influences climate. The fact is, you have to get down to details in each geological period to understand what's going on at that particular time.
Temperature correlates with CO2 over geologically short time spans of 100ky periodicity as shown in the Vostok cores, but which is cause and which is effect (if either) is far less certain.
It's pretty well certain that CO2 has an effect on temperature, or else you can't explain the magnitude of the ice age cycle.
The paleoclimate record shows that CO2 levels are not in the slightest a primary determinant of average planetary temperature.
Nonsense. The paleoclimate record strongly supports the influence of CO2 on climate over many periods in the Earth's history.
At the end of the Ordovician Period some 400 or so million years ago, the Earth had CO2 levels of 4000 to 5000 ppm, well over 10 times our present value, yet guess what the mean temperature was? We were in the deepest ice age that the planet has ever experienced.
That doesn't mean that CO2 doesn't have any influence on the climate. Absolute CO2 levels aren't that informative, because the baseline climate is modulated by lots of other things, such as the positions of the continents and their effect on the atmospheric-ocean circulation, or the intensity of the Sun (which was weaker in the distant past). More relevant is changes in CO2 levels (although they are also not wholly predictive, because you have to consider what other drivers may be counterbalancing them). Indeed, although the Late Ordovician glaciation is not yet understood, there have been a number of papers which attribute it partially to a drop in CO2 levels. Some relevant papers are by Herrmann, Poussart, and Saltzman; search under "Ordovician".
But the Earth is not a test tube. It doesn't behave as one at all because it has numerous extremely powerful feedbacks that mitigate the effect of CO2 change.
It also has numerous powerful
Personally, I don't care that much who causes global warming - because the benefits of reversing global warming do not currently outweigh the costs.
No one is talking about reversing global warming (short of a few geoengineering proponents). They're talking about slowing it down. And economists who have studied the issue are in pretty widespread agreement that the risk-weighted benefits of doing that outweigh the costs. See Nordhaus's latest book for a pretty mainstream economic overview.
I do not take the liberal media to be a reliable source of information.
The above post is a survey of the scientific literature, not the "liberal media". If you want to read the modern scientific literature, browse through the latest issues of Nature Geoscience, Journal of Climate, Journal of Geophysical Research, Geophysical Research Letters, Climatic Change, etc. You will notice a conspicuous dearth of articles claiming "it's all natural".
I need to read from someone who has nothing to gain by saying its so.
And yet, when confronted with scientific research, I'm sure you will claim that "they're only saying that to get grant money". Which conveniently excludes virtually all the actual scientific experts on the planet.
We are not on mars or the other planets, yet they are warming at a rate proportional to ours.
This is false. And if it were true, it would DISPROVE your claim, because different planets warming from a common cause should warm at different rates, given the differences in their atmospheric heat capacities, lack of oceans, distance from the Sun, etc.
So and sane minded person ought to be able to look at this and think, "hmm, I see a pattern here, and humans are not in this equation".
That's one of the most ridiculous of all skeptic arguments. Not all planets are warming, and not all planets are warming globally. When you actually get down to looking at what's going on at each planet, they have nothing to do with each other. Mars had a shift in dust storms which altered the amount of sunlight reaching the southern hemisphere. Jupiter's equator is warming and its poles are cooling, due to shifts in convection patterns. Pluto is experiencing summer. And so on.
There is a sun which has increased sun spot activity and an increased number of solar flares and cosmic dust. All of which attribute to the increased temperature.
Not particularly. Solar irradiance and cosmic ray trends have been pretty unchanged for 30-50 years, right when the modern global warming took off.
It has definitely cooled this winter with record low temperatures.
Global warming doesn't predict that every year is warmer than the year before. While this winter has been cool relative to some recent winters, due partially to La Nina, even the coldest month of winter is (globally speaking) still warmer than anything on record until at least the mid-1990s.
Spread out over 16 blocks, I found
all twelve monkeys, the whole ten yards (or is that "the whole nine yards"?)
detected using a "sixth sense" device
made from the fifth element
built in four rooms
while telling three stories about Joan
committing the first deadly sin
If you count the lines in this story, they add up to my lucky number, slevin
The orbit is very highly eccentric, which means the usual theory of tidal locking doesn't apply. The research uses a theory of spin pseudo-synchronization (Eq. 18 of this paper) to derive the planet's rotation rate in relation to its orbit. They do note there is an alternate theory of spin synchronization that, for simplicity, they didn't consider in this paper.
while that may be well and good for knowledge and proficiency what does it do to learning about social coexistence?
Aren't you presupposing that MIT students currently learn about social coexistence?
oh well, i guess they could take a class for that too.
Potsdam University is already on it.
And I'm pointing out that you intentionally ignore the laws of physics, the instrumental data, and the paleo evidence which support the influence of greenhouse gases on climate.
Of course, if you want to see any such influence in the data, you have to look when the forcing is strong, such as in the 20th century, in the glacial-interglacial cycle, or in even larger carbon excursions such as the PETM. In particular, as I noted, late Holocene climate when CO2 variations were slight (usually less than +/- 5 ppm, and generally not more than ~10 ppm over the considered time period) does not indicate anything useful about the influence of CO2 on climate, as there was virtually no CO2 forcing whose response can be quantified. You can't constrain the sensitivity of the climate to changing CO2 levels from data when CO2 levels aren't appreciably changing.
In other words, contrary to your claim, the study you link to is irrelevant to the question of whether there is a causal relationship between CO2 and climate. It's sad that you appear unable to comprehend this obvious fact, and indeed claim that it's "not supported by science". It's really rather ridiculous how you persistently parrot anything you read on a skeptic website without even the most basic understanding of what it even means. I wonder why "disproving global warming" is so important to you that you keep clinging to refuted pseudoscience.
If you ever do happen to run across any evidence which indicates there is no causal relationship between CO2 and climate, you're free to try again.
It means exactly as I said, they didn't call it Climate change until after global warming deniers gained traction.
And I proved you wrong repeatedly, so we're back to your original lie.
Whatever, that's how it happened, it's a political organization and it's 80%of the ammo supporting Global warming
Nonsense. The IPCC Working Group 1 summary of the physical science is a summary written by scientists and agrees with the vast body of the scientific literature on the subject.
That continues to be a libelous and wrong claim, and one that you repeatedly avoid supporting with facts.
Perhaps you need to look up the definition of libel. You keep using that word and I don't think you know what it means.
It's a malicious and false accusation.
Which in turn, does not negate the utility of an emission cap.
Lol... I didn't say a word about an emissions cap.
You were talking constantly about the EU's emissions cap.
We both were talking about the artificial increase of energy prices hurting the economy. If you can get an emissions cap that doesn't do that,
Any emissions cap will slow economic growth. I'm sorry you're incapable of accepting that economic growth incurs economic damages to the environment.
The change in the amount of Co2 and water effect the absolute amounts.
You're still not getting it. The point is, AGAIN, that whether CO2 is a large or small part of the atmosphere is irrelevant. What is relevant is how much radiative forcing is due to the amount of CO2 we've emitted, and how easy/hard it is to reduce emissions relative to what we've already emitted.
The entire premise is that the absolute amounts are causing heat to build up and therefore damage to the environment that you have arbitrarily decided needs to stay the same as you know it.
Measured by the publicized prophecies of the al mighty science community and reported in the press.
You didn't answer the question. What is "80 or 90 pecent"? What is the skill measure and what is the quantity being measured?
Actually, no. It is very relevant.
Sigh. An atmosphere which has 500 gigatons of carbon in it and no molecular nitrogen has the same greenhouse effect as an atmosphere with 500 gigatons of carbon in it and lots of molecular nitrogen, because N2 isn't a greenhouse gas. (Ignore NOx for the sake of argument here.) In the second case, CO2 is a much larger fraction of the atmosphere than the former. Don't you get it YET?
Especially when you have reports like this.
The following sentence is utterly false: "According to Compo and Sardeshmukh's study, all the greenhouse gases humans have dumped in the atmosphere over the last 46 years - the primary factor most climate change proponents cite to blame humans for global warming - haven't affected land temperatures at all."
They find that land temperatures are driven strongly by ocean temperatures, which is already well known. The oceans are enormous heat sinks. It doesn't change any of the evidence that both land and ocean are warming from the greenhouse effect.
I don't think I need to.
Yeah, why not. I can make up wrong claims unjustified by any facts too.
Well, it appears that the models are so flawed that they can show the exact same warming trends as being blamed on Co2 without even raising Co2 levels.
That's not a flaw in the models. Compo and Sardeshmukh used EXACTLY THE SAME models that predict CO2-based warming trends. If you think the models are flawed, you shouldn't believe their results either.
Didn't we discuss the sun and water vapor a while back? Are you still going to deny they play a large role in this scam of global warming?
Yes, I'm going to deny the Sun plays a large role in modern global warming. Water vapor does play a large role, but water vapor is not a cause of warming, it is an amplification o
Wow, another content-free wrong post by Troed. Way to rebut there.
If you gear the models to accurately track past weather then they don't predict any significant warming now. Likewise, if you gear the models to show warming now, they no longer make sense of past weather.
Climate models don't track weather. If you calibrate them against past climate, they do predict current warming. And models which are not calibrated against climatic time series, but are initialized to a pre-industrial climate state, do agree with the subsequent climate.
You may be getting confused about the Keenlyside Nature paper, which predicts little warming for a few years based on initializing a model with recent ocean state data instead of a spun-up pre-industrial state. (i.e., the model knows that the PDO is in the cool phase, whereas models spun up to pre-industrial climates know about the PDO but not its phase.) This does not actually alter any model parameter (i.e., any of the model physics), or the model's climate sensitivity to CO2, or the model's hindcasts for past climates, or the model's forecasts for long-term climate.
Hell, it was just thirty years ago we are being told a global ice age was on the way...and they were giving the same type of dire predictions, the same hand wringing, and the same "we're absolutely sure we're right" speeches from all the noted scientists
I don't know how many times this needs to be debunked, but here goes again.
Last I heard, mathematics was still considered science.
As a scientist, I don't consider mathematics to be science. It doesn't have the necessary empirical connection.
Please be assured that in real science, things can indeed be proven.
This is wrong. No scientific theory can ever be proven, in the mathematical sense. You can support it with increasingly large amounts of evidence, but no amount of evidence can prove it true the way you can prove a theorem.
It's when they started titling their positions with it when I'm concerned with.
What does that have to do with the use of the term "climate change" vs. "global warming"? Nobody ever titled themselves "global warming".
Members of the UN were ready to install sweeping actions and call for treaties and such. It was the so called denier who forced the IPCC to be implemented,
Uh, no, that doesn't have anything to do with how the IPCC was created.
it got hijacked and turned into a political organization.
The IPCC was always intended to be a political organization. That's what the "Intergovernmental" is for. It's also a scientific organization. That's what the "Climate Change" is for.
Nope, it was originally supposed to investigate if there was even a problem, by the time it was actually put in play, it had one purpose, to prove anthropological global warming.
That continues to be a libelous and wrong claim, and one that you repeatedly avoid supporting with facts.
Yea, I had some excuses to why it isn't working either. It still doesn't negate that they tried and are loosing.
Which in turn, does not negate the utility of an emission cap.
Sure it is. When an increase of 1 percent in water vapor can have 10 times the effect, it makes a big difference.
Again, what matters is not the absolute amount of CO2 vs. the absolute amount of water vapor. What matters is the CHANGE in CO2 vs. the change in other radiative forcing agents.
It seems that it isn't because we still can't predict into the future with any acceptable degree of accuracy. And yes, I'm not expecting 100% accuracy but we cannot even hit 80 or 90 percent.
More made-up numbers. 80 or 90 percent of what, measured by what?
The absolute amount compared to other gases in the atmosphere is irrelevant to how hard or easy it is to reduce the emissions rate of any particular gas.
Sure it's relevent. It shows that we can't effect even a small percentage without major problems in the economies and life styles of people.
Again, this is wrong. It's not relevant whether CO2 is a small or large fraction of the total atmosphere. What is relevant is how hard or easy it is to alter CO2 emissions relative to the fraction by which we've increased CO2 concentrations.
It drives costs up more then the savings which drive costs of products up.
Feel free to justify this with actual numbers.
Yep, and if CA would just build a natural gas or coal power station, or even a nuclear power station instead of spending the extra money on wind and solar that aren't reliable, they could end the rolling blackouts.
They don't need to ramp up full-time gas/coal, they just need gas turbines that can be spun up on peak days.
They can be a lot more perfect then they are now.
So can any model.
The real problem is that their claimed accuracy isn't what the reported values of their predictions are.
That's not really true either; in the major climatic indicators, the model predictions, with their error bars, encompass the observations, with their error bars.
You know what I mean, altering the Co2 levels don't produce accurate results in predictions.
It's pretty much impossible to address a claim with such weasel words, since you can define "accurate" to mean anything you want.
If increasing Co2 by a factor of 1 meant a temp increase of a factor of 1, the models don't follow in reality.
The models, forced by CO2 and other radiative forcing agents, do agree with observed temperatures within their error bars.
Hansen co authored a paper while at nasa
Oh, so there's no dissent? No credible scientist or organization is speaking out saying there's a lack of consensus?
I said that they are not present in equal numbers. Nor, for that matter, are they supported by equally credible arguments and lines of evidence.
You want to look at what has changed, do you? How nice that the only thing that mother nature has changed in the last few millenia is the CO2 level!
If you spent half the time reading about science as you do making retarded sarcastic quips, you might learn something.
I have not said that CO2 is the only thing which has ever changed in the last few millennia. I said that CO2 is not a relatively unimportant gas compared to water vapor, when you look at what has changed.
Are these other factors big contributors or little ones? You don't know.
Wrong. Quite a lot is known about those other factors, both from a modeling and a data perspective. In particular, we have quite a bit of data on solar output, ocean circulation, etc. during the modern warming period.
I left the door open hoping you'd fall into this trap.
It's not a trap, because you're too unintelligent to appreciate what's acutally going on.
So, if we burn all of it now or later, what's the difference?
The difference is in both rate and final temperature. I'm not talking about "two decades from now". I'm talking about tens of thousands of years from now, if we actually do enter an ice age. That's not going to happen in two decades. Raising planetary temperatures 5 degrees above the modern climate is entirely different than raising it 5 degrees above a glacial climate. And the rate is entirely different too: a descent into an ice age takes tens of thousands of years. If we wanted to use greenhouse gases to counteract that, we could do so correspondingly slowly. That's far less disruptive than altering planetary temperatures by a similar amount within a century or two.
I figured you'd be smart enough to spot that, but you weren't.
It's always amusing to watch idiots criticize the intelligence of others.
And while nuclear plants are pretty safe, there are real safety, proliferation, and storage issues â" especially if you're talking about this being a worldwide solution, and not just for a few developed nations and their allies.
Let me be clear: I am only concerned with my developed nation and its allies. Other countries lift not a finger to help us in any way; quite the opposite, actually. So I find it difficult to muster much concern over whether someone else might find hardship in this plan.
Oh, gee, I thought you were interested in a plan that would, I don't know, work. A "solution" which requires everyone else in the world to become bestest friends with your country, and to have total and perfect control over their citizens and their nuclear security, is even more useless than the international agreements you criticize. That's how the world works.