That's possible. On the other hand, maybe they'll build dykes around it, or build a dome over it.
That would likely be even more expensive than what they're currently proposing, or else they'd be proposing something else.
We know that the adaptation to an energy system which uses no coal or oil will be very expensive using current technology. You can't just postulate that technology will render negligible the cost of changing to energy systems of this type. Is that what you meant?
Mitigating climate change certainly has costs. They're likely less than the worst-case climate outcomes that mitigation is intended to hedge against.
Economics would indicate that in the coming centuries, as the supplies of oil and coal dwindle, the cost of those resources will rise. Eventually windmills and solar panels might be cheaper than coal and oil.
Climate economists already take into account the limited supply of fossil fuels. Eventually those resources become expensive enough that no additional carbon price is needed, but that is well in the future, and doesn't really help to avert potential extreme outcomes.
What we really need is a cost/benefit analysis comparison of various mixes of energy use.
You're a decade or two behind the times. This has been a field of environmental and energy economics for at least the last 15 years.
I was arguing in the context of the other poster's scenario in which you start wiping out coastal cities, which assumes a rather large sea level rise. Such a large SLR is possible, particularly if we cross the Greenland ice sheet disintegration threshold, but likely not this century. Venice has been studying strategies to cope with SLR until 2100, with a controversially expensive plan. If SLR continues past that, it could get to the point where Italy judges the city too costly to maintain. Which was my main point: some adaptations are expensive, and you can't postulate that technology will inevitably render them negligible.
I was primarily addressing the claim that there has been no large, sustained change in ozone depletion: there has been. The original poster was implying that the ozone hole has always been there and has been relatively unchanged over time.
Attribution is another issue. I think a compelling case has been made that the long-term trend is, indeed, due to CFCs. (The large change in trend visible around the time the Montreal Protocol was implemented in the early 1990s is suggestive to me.) But as far as I know, Rex's work has not been shown to be wrong. A citation search suggests that he hasn't published it, although some of his coauthors published something related. I don't see any followup studies out yet which check (either supporting or refuting) this result. I'm not an atmospheric chemist, so I can't say what the implications are for the CFC/ozone hole link if it is true. I read something which indicates that chlorofluorocarbons are still implicated because of correlations with observed (not theoretical) changes in chlorine levels, which in turn are heavily tied to CFCs. However, I don't get the impression that anyone yet knows what to make of these results.
"Faking data" is a libelous claim. GISTEMP has made and corrected data errors before, as have the UAH satellite people (including famous skeptics Spencer and Christy), the Argos ocean temperature floats, and so on. That's far different from intentionally creating data known to be false. The difference between the first case and the others is that the skeptics apparently decided that using Al Gore as a punching bag was getting old and they decided Hansen would be a good boogeyman.
Lol. Did you know that prefixing every sentence with 'lol' makes you look like a retard? Lol.
The term climate change as in changes in the climate was used but it was never the name of a cause or principle push by scientists until people were rejecting global warming.
The fact is that "climate change" is not a new term being used by scientists to cover up their failed predictions. It's a term they've been using all along. And it's a more appropriately general term to begin with, since the effects of CO2 on the Earth system go beyond temperature rise.
Th IPCC was created by the UN to see if what was being claimed was even possible.
The IPCC was created by the UN to, as I said, summarize the current state of knowledge, which is the logical and necessary first course of action independent of the existence of any "deniers".
During it's creation and organization, it was hijacked.
That's continues to be a libelous and wrong claim.
And that has nothing to do with the costs that I mentioned.
Of course it does: the analyses include costs to the economy of CO2 abatement.
Mitigation isn't removal, it's dealing with it.
No, that's adaptation. Mitigation is reducing the change.
I'm sorry, I thought you were familiar with the Kyoto accords
I'm not talking about Kyoto. That's why there's that funny little "s" thingy on the end of "proposals", which in the English langauge means "plural".
In fact, from 2001 to 2004, Western Europe actually saw an increase of 100,000 million metric tons of Co2 emissions.
Europe has not had a real cap in place. Their experimental market grossly overallocated emissions credits at the outset, giving no economic incentive to reduce emissions: the market price of carbon cratered.
It shows how much of an attribute is being given to such a small amount
The absolute amount compared to other gases in the atmosphere is irrelevant to its radiative forcing efficacy.
and it also shows that current efforts still aren't even able to reduce that little amount.
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.
Yes, China has to expand their industry rapidly in order to meet Europe's increased demands seeing how Most of Europe artificially limited their industry capabilities.
Europe didn't artificially limit their industrial capabilities.
I find it interesting that you cite California. They have the largest unemployment rate in the US currently, the government is suffering the largest budget deficit, they have rolling blackouts
If you want to explain how the more efficient use of energy leads to, say, unemployment in California, feel free. Otherwise, you've got nothing but guilt-by-association.
As for rolling blackouts, efficiency HELPS rolling blackouts by reducing demand below what it otherwise would be. California has a capacity and distribution problem, not an efficiency problem.
Reasonable does not mean accurate.
If so, then it looks like what you're asking for is unreasonable accuracy.
the models are still not accurate.
Models are not, and cannot be, perfect. GCMs are accurate within their stated uncertainties, and they're accurate enough to usefully inform policy. The real problem is if the models are less accurate than their claimed accuracy.
We simply cannot predict the future by using Co2 data alone.
It's a good thing we don't use CO2 data alone, then.
And no, it is not irrational to suspect the work and motivations of someone who was claiming global coo
Lol.. NO, that is from when they were claiming global cooling.
No, it's not. You can find the term used in reference to anthropogenic global warming, global cooling, and neither. Just do the damn Google search. You're an unstoppable fountain of uneducated misinformation.
The IPCC was started in 1988 at the request by deniers.
Deniers didn't create the IPCC. The IPCC was created to summarize the state of scientific research in the field. Which is still does, despite your insinuations about its politicization.
And non of them has been able to accurately measure that costs per damage to the economy and stability of the governments.
Even basic order-of-magnitude estimates show the need for mitigation policies.
Less industrialized nations are exempt from limits in GHG productions in all resulting so called fixes
No, not in all of the proposals.
The entire idea behind the fixes purposed so far is to limit the economic progress of wealthier countries while enabling it in poorer countries.
More idiotic conspiracy theories. Economists are not generally in favor of crippling their own economies. The idea is to reduce CO2 emissions, at an expected cost less than the expected unmitigated climate damages.
The amount of Co2 and green house gasses that are supposed to be a problem is less then 1% of total gasses in the atmosphere.
That's totally irrelevant.
Even with Carbon caps capped at 1990 levels for the industrialized countries, we wouldn't be producing less of those gasses that are the problem.
We would be producing less CO2 than we otherwise would be, and CO2 is the primary problem as far as climate change over the next century or two is concerned.
Surprisingly, I have seen some numbers (Can't find a post-able link right now) that suggests most of China and India's recent grow in GHG emissions can be attributed to Europe's increase in import for those areas since 2003.
It's due to their industrialization, which is certainly linked to their economic exports, but it also due to, e.g., the Chinese government's choice to industrialize in the fastest (and dirtiest) manner possible.
Anyways, we can't reduce our emissions at a rate that will have a positive effect on any damage that is claimed to be present.
Pretty much all the leading economists who have studied this problem, some of which I have cited, disagree. Hell, if the U.S. just improved their energy efficiency to Californian standards, that would have a significant impact. Even allowing emissions to increase, but at a slower rate than business-as-usual and stabilizing by the end of the century, has significant economic value in terms of risk management. Mitigating emissions doesn't mean "cutting them to zero", it means slowing them.
What I mean about that is the projections looking forward never seem to fit, but after adjustments to make the data fit, going back can always seem to work correctly in the models.
I'm sorry, but the data has not been substantially revised to fit models. As for projections going forward, there have been few of them made long enough ago to have been verified, since it takes 20-30 years to see a definitive trend. But Hansen's projections (you know, the guy you irrationally revile) from 1988 did a pretty reasonable job.
Then there are the Ice sheets at the poles that are melting because of global warming and the air temp or Ocean temp never gets above freezing in the area.
It might be three times of Texas now, but after a few hundred years of procreating, it'd be the whole globe...
A lot of demographic geographers are projecting that world population growth will stabilize in the mid- to late 21st century.
Well, unless you manage to solve the population growth problem,
It's not clear that it needs external "solving". Birth rates drop as economies and life expectancies grow, cultures shift away from agriculture, urbanization takes place, education increases, birth control becomes more prevalent, etc. There are trends towards most of those things in most countries.
manage to overcome the tautology of natural selection: those that have most offspring have most offspring, who will also have the genetic traits that helped their parents to have the most offspring....
Natural selection does not predict that maximizing the fitness of one's offspring means maximizing the number of offspring. Besides which, social factors are at least as important in birth rates, or else we'd all still be having 15 children.
I think it was in the last century or so, that scientists had the world in an uproar by declaring 'Global Cooling'...that they world was getting colder and heading towards a new ice age.
You see, there's absolutely no causal relationship between "those gasses" and the what the "planet was like".
There certainly is, established by the laws of physics, modern instrumental data, and paleo data. Paleo data from a time period when variations in CO2 were small does not support your contention, as it's unable to quantify temperature change as a result of CO2 forcing. You don't EXPECT to see CO2 having a big influence on climate when it's not changing much.
That has now been disproven - scientifically
Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if the MWP was global, but a handful of proxies from one location don't really prove it. If they can amass a decent number of South American and African proxies, they might start to build a case.
You're right, we would not roll back to the exact same climate state. But we're far more likely to approach a known state that way than by implementing geoengineering schemes which use a completely different mechanism than the original forcing.
Ah, the sign of an insincere pseudo-skeptic: they bring up Al Gore in the first sentence, as if he matters.
and pretends to act as if he's unsure about GlobalWarming(TM). But there's a reason they're 20 feet apart: if they were overlaid, it'd be CLEAR that CO2 rises 800 years AFTER the heat comes.
That wouldn't be clear; it's not even visible to the naked eye on that scale, in the noise.
This isn't biblical history; this is fossil-record-fact. CO2 cools, not warms the atmosphere.
That's not a "fact". CO2 warms the atmosphere, amplifying deglacial warming when it rises due to temperature, and vice versa for glacial cooling.
However, there's another proven fact: tell a scientist he won't get any money unless GlobalWarming(TM) isn't in the study, and you purchase scientists.
Gee, let's see the proof of this "fact". I hope it's better than the proof of your last "fact".
Clue: the NSF and other funding agencies don't give out money for "proving global warming is due to humans". They give out money for things like "estimating the climate sensitivity to CO2". You get the money BEFORE you do the research, and you can find either a low or a high number. (Published estimates range between 1 and 5 C.)
The term climate change was used original by detractors of global warming to signify that the climate changes but it wasn't because of the political accusations being made.
Hardly. As I said, SCIENTISTS widely used the term "climate change" long before anthropogenic global warming was ever a political issue. A trivial Google Scholar search turns up tons of references going back at least to the 1960s.
After some of the loudest predictions of gloom and doom failed to come true, the science community started using Climate change in an effort to capitalize on the anti global warming crowds momentum.
Your fairy tale does not agree with actual facts. And, as you yourself note, the IPCC itself used the term from the very beginning.
We can't do the changes in Co2 production fast enough without causing too much damage to the economy and stabilization of governments.
The actual economists who study this disagree with you. Look at Nordhaus, Tol, Yohe, etc. None of them advocate cutting emissions to nothing. But they all find that a reduction in emissions passes a cost-benefit test in terms of climate risk management.
We can't really replace our carbon emissions fast enough to not have the damage they claim the emissions are going to cause to geoengineering should be part of the solution is symptoms actually exist.
I think that's the most incomprehensible sentence I've seen out of you yet, and I've seen a lot. I can't even begin to parse it.
But say things do go haywire, sure, drop some sort of fix into the enviroment as long as it's effects are short terms and know well enough to control (IE, it doesn't survive more then a short time past our efforts).
Depends on who you ask. For every noted, accredited, respected supporter of GW you can find a similarly noted, accredited, and respected opposer of GW.
Not even remotely. There is an enormous difference between the two; glancing at any climate journal will show you that.
Even those in support of GW cannot agree on whether it's anthropogenic.
There is rather widespread agreement on that, too.
CO2/temp graphs are not terribly convincing when you consider (a) the data models have been unable to accurately model past and current weather trends when supplied with "accurate" data
They've been able to model trends on multidecadal time scales. They're not good for sub-decadal prediction, although maybe they eventually will be with advances in state initialization from 4D data assimilation.
(b) CO2 is a relatively unimportant climate gas compared to other factors such as water vapor.
CO2 is not a relatively unimportant climate gas compared to water vapor, when you look at what has CHANGED. Water vapor provides much of the 30 C baseline greenhouse effect which is preventing the Earth from being a frozen iceball. The global warming we're talking about from CO2 is due to an increase in GHGs over that baseline, which may end up amounting to a few more degrees.
This is a rather silly response since you assume a zero sum game.
I'm not assuming any such thing. Fossil fuels are by far the cheapest way to put in place a very long term planetary warming effect, should anyone want to do so. Almost anything else (e.g., modulation of insolation, surface albedo, etc.) is more expensive and requires constant maintenance. Nuclear power alone isn't going to stave off an ice age, if that's what you were suggesting below. It might keep (some of) us warmer during one. I suspect most people would vote to stave it off.
If the public were to ever get over its idiotic aversion to nuclear power, all of the above arguing would become moot. We have enough nuclear fuel for centuries, and perhaps thousands of centuries if we can ever get this whole fusion thing worked out.
I think we need to be doing a lot more nuclear, but even if we started full-speed on building nuke plants today, that's still not going to put a huge dent in CO2 emissions for a long time. We're talking about ramping up nuclear use by two orders of magnitude worldwide (more in places that don't have any), and in the meantime, existing coal plants are going to be running for the next 50 years just because the cheapest plant is the one that's already built. And while nuclear plants are pretty safe, there are real safety, proliferation, and storage issues — especially if you're talking about this being a worldwide solution, and not just for a few developed nations and their allies.
There's a difference in one raw subnetwork, BEFORE any corrections are applied. (Funny how they complain about "adjusting" the raw data for biases, and then complain that the raw data can have biases...) And as long as you're citing Climate Audit, this (and John V's comments below, e.g. #88) is what I was referring to.
I know it was in the press. I'm saying that it wasn't something that SCIENTISTS, as a whole, were strongly pushing.
There was no 'Climate Science community' then
That's not true. Climatology existed well before before the 1970s. Climate scientists often worked out of meteorology, oceanography, etc. departments instead of "climatology departments", but the same is true today: there's no such thing as a "climatology" department in any university as far as I know.
Scientists only worked out of universities, not Government Institutions,
That's also not true; there are a number of FFRDC's that existed before then, although not as many in climate-related fields. NCAR was founded in 1960. NOAA was founded in 1970. But what does that have to do with the fact that scientists weren't widely predicting global cooling?
The press took the story up strongly, and the government put a fair amount of money into research.
I know the government researched it, as they should have. It was an uncertain risk. That's quite different from anybody predicting it was likely to happen, or more likely to happen than warming. The scientific research from that time definitively favored warming over cooling, despite the media.
I didn't mean to say that I was a climate scientist. The original poster said that "we" thought we were heading toward an ice age. I was trying to say that if by "we" the OP meant "climate scientists", then "we" didn't think that.
That being said, I am a scientist (physics), so maybe I can give you some vague advice. I don't know what your science background is, but the usual route would be to get a Ph.D. in some geoscience field. Right now geonengineering doesn't exist as a field of engineering (and it may never do so), so you'd probably have to start out in science. (There are some engineering departments which look at carbon capture and sequestration, if you're into that.) If you're more interested in aerosol or cloud geoengineering, you want to look at meteorology, atmospheric chemistry, etc. If you're more into geoengineering the carbon cycle, you want to look at terrestrial or ocean ecology, or geology and geochemistry if you want to do geological sequestration. If you have existing scientific/engineering training, your route might be different.
The post I was responding to claimed the choices are survival or extinction, then qualified to all or most lives on the planet. My point is that that isn't the choice at all. The fact is, the climate is going to change. Humanity have no capability to stop it.
We have substantial ability to reduce the change that we are causing.
The choice is try and control it and completely destroy the quality of life of everyone,
This is the conservative boogeyman version of "global warming will wipe out all life on Earth". Mitigating CO2 emissions does not require "completely destroying the quality of life of everyone".
or to adapt and make accommodations for the people who are currently living in areas where health won't be sustainable.
We are going to adapt, but it's easier to adapt when you have a smaller problem to adapt to.
It's not my job to inform you, but you might start with "second atmosphere."
So I'm right: it's never happened since life has existed. So basically your point is totally irrelevant to anything.
Huh? You want people to "give it a rest" that Hansen fabricated much of the data used to prove global warming?
Hansen didn't fabricate any data, retarded handwringing about "adjustments" aside.
You think we should all base our planning on the predictions of people who have been 100% wrong in every model they've ever presented?
What nonsense. Climate models are not 100% wrong, and in fact do a good job of reproducing long-term temperature trends, stratospheric cooling, the major ocean circulation patterns, the oceanic heat uptake, the top-of-atmosphere radiation flux, and so on.
Sorry, but at least 30% of the warming in Hansen's numbers is completely fabricated (some people believe that number is 100%.)
Uh, yeah, that's not an actual fact, that's a made up number.
Note also that the GISTEMP trend agrees rather closely with the HADCRUT, RSS, and UAH trends.
It has everything to do with the Goddard numbers for historical temperatures being repeatedly adjusted to demonstrate progressively greater warming (pre-1970 temperatures lowered and post-1970 temperatures raised.)
Goddard numbers SHOULD be adjusted. ALL raw instrumental data have to be adjusted for bias-correction, and that includes both the non-GISS surface data and the satellite data. I'm sorry you're emotionally incapable of accepting the fact that the bias correction might lead to a conclusion you don't like. The thing that skeptics cry about is that GISS does the adjustment to individual stations, and then averages spatially. Statistically, the more fundamental adjustment is to leave the stations alone, and correct the average; that's what the Hadley people do. You end up with pretty much the same number either way, but in the GISS case, you end up with station data which is homogeneity adjusted to the region, but no longer represents the actual station.
We need the best science not uninformed, blind activism and rhetoric.
You're not contributing to the signal-to-noise ratio here.
Um.. no. He's talking about the fact that world temperatures started to come down in 2002, and the rate of CO2 rise has just started to slacken.
Um, no, he's talking about the hundreds of years (can't you read) lag between temperature and CO2 (e.g., here).
Yes, there is. The only way to avoid admitting that is to claim that anyone who doubts the fraudulent science is a denier, and not a climate scientist..
No, it's trivial to support: just look at the number of papers which were published on solar effects on modern warming 20 years ago, and the far fewer such papers published today.
We're not adding very much as a percentage, but we ARE increasing our output.
We've added 35% to the atmosphere since pre-industrial times, and are looking to easily double, triple, or even quadruple it.
And the temperature has been going down since 1998.
Cherry picking a giant El Nino year doesn't help your cause. And no, there isn't any statistically significant decadal-scale cooling.
Incidentally, you know what the response of true believers is to those figures is? If the temperature goes up, it's Global Warming. If it goes down, it's a weather anomaly...
Anything trend deviation over less than 10 years is almost certainly weather noise regardless of which way it goes.
And yes, temperatures have been trending downward since '98.
Not if you use any other year except for your enormously cherry picked 1998.
And they have been trending downward very steeply since 2006.
Two years is even more meaningless than 10 years, especially when you throw a La Nina in the mix.
How many years do we need before it's no longer a 'monthly fluctuation'?
The standard duration for a climatological average is about 30 years, which is why it took so many years before climatologists were able to definitively attribute the trend. After about 20 you start to see a real signal.
Yes there is. See almost any dendrochronology site.
Sadly for your link, neither solar nor thermohaline circulation trends agree with the modern warming. Also, their reconstruction in Fig. 3b predicts strong cooling post-1950, which didn't actually happen in Finland. Maybe it happened at some particular lake where they took cores, but then its utility as a proxy for regional temperature, let alone global temperature, is questionable.
That doesn't make any sense. By that logic, no theory can become well established by evidence.
Nothing about Global Warming is well established,
The greenhouse effect is well established as are its effects on the climate. You may consult the last 50+ years of climate research on this matter. The IPCC AR4 WG1 report has indexes into this literature.
it can't be
Now who's being unscientific?
Personally I am not sure that we are the cause for global warming or if it is yet just another natural event (ice ages came and went without the help of man so it is not a theory that we can rule out just because the media says so).
The media doesn't have anything to do with it. Natural causes for the recent warming are not supported by the DATA.
You're way too emotional and hostile to be taken seriously
I'm sorry you can't deal with rational arguments. If you want me to source something I've said, feel free to ask. I find that nobody ever bothers to consult anything I cite, dismissing it as biased without reading it, so it's often not worthwhile unless someone has a specific question.
You seem knowledgeable on this topic, but seem to suffer the same mental illness as many scientists who utterly fail to realize the implications of their suggestions.
I am quite aware of the implications, thank you.
Secondly, who exactly is going to 'authorize' this? One country? If any single entity had the audacity to implement such a scheme on their own I would read it as a declaration of war and act appropriately. The UN? A couple hundred political appointments deciding to act on behalf of everyone on earth?
The same is true of any international agreement to, say, reduce CO2 emissions. Abatement efforts without international agreement are unlikely to succeed. Pure adaptation without mitigation doesn't accomplish enough.
The idea of geoengineering the planet earth on behalf of all life to *try* save us from the folly of man may be the only offensive idea I have ever heard. Especially when the real solution is so obvious.
Geoengineering is a backup plan to use if we fail at "the real solution".
Global warming is established the same way a geocentric universe was established, anyone who disagrees with it is considered a heretic.
Wow, another clueless pseudoskeptic who can't tell the difference between science and religion.
several other planets are experiencing global warming at the same time as us.
And several of them aren't, and none of them are experiencing warming for any reasons related to what's going on here. (Mars has large changes in dust storms, Jupiter's convection patterns shifted, Pluto is experiencing summer, etc.)
also who ever established that a warmer earth is necessarily a bad thing.
It's not necessarily a bad thing. Too much change, too fast, is usually a bad thing.
the earth has been getting warmer since the last ice age and no one complained.
The Earth's climate has been unusually stable since the last ice age.
Here are a few thoughts for you: 1) 99% of all life that has ever lived on this planet is extinct.
So? That doesn't mean that we would prefer to increase extinction rates.
2) During times when it was much hotter than it is now the earth was teeming with life.
So? You might want to live in a Cretaceous jungle climate, but I don't.
3) There were times when the atmosphere of the Earth was 80% CO2.
When? I don't know that it's ever been above 10,000 ppmv while multicellular life has existed. (And even if true: so? See above.)
4) James Hansen (NASA big wig involved in climate study and the keeper of the US climate data) has adjusted the numbers to make previous years cooler and more recent years hotter.
Give it a rest already. GISTEMP doesn't disagree with either NCDC, HADCRUT, RSS, or UAH.
Slashdot Mirror
That's possible. On the other hand, maybe they'll build dykes around it, or build a dome over it.
That would likely be even more expensive than what they're currently proposing, or else they'd be proposing something else.
We know that the adaptation to an energy system which uses no coal or oil will be very expensive using current technology. You can't just postulate that technology will render negligible the cost of changing to energy systems of this type. Is that what you meant?
Mitigating climate change certainly has costs. They're likely less than the worst-case climate outcomes that mitigation is intended to hedge against.
Economics would indicate that in the coming centuries, as the supplies of oil and coal dwindle, the cost of those resources will rise. Eventually windmills and solar panels might be cheaper than coal and oil.
Climate economists already take into account the limited supply of fossil fuels. Eventually those resources become expensive enough that no additional carbon price is needed, but that is well in the future, and doesn't really help to avert potential extreme outcomes.
What we really need is a cost/benefit analysis comparison of various mixes of energy use.
You're a decade or two behind the times. This has been a field of environmental and energy economics for at least the last 15 years.
I was arguing in the context of the other poster's scenario in which you start wiping out coastal cities, which assumes a rather large sea level rise. Such a large SLR is possible, particularly if we cross the Greenland ice sheet disintegration threshold, but likely not this century. Venice has been studying strategies to cope with SLR until 2100, with a controversially expensive plan. If SLR continues past that, it could get to the point where Italy judges the city too costly to maintain. Which was my main point: some adaptations are expensive, and you can't postulate that technology will inevitably render them negligible.
I was primarily addressing the claim that there has been no large, sustained change in ozone depletion: there has been. The original poster was implying that the ozone hole has always been there and has been relatively unchanged over time.
Attribution is another issue. I think a compelling case has been made that the long-term trend is, indeed, due to CFCs. (The large change in trend visible around the time the Montreal Protocol was implemented in the early 1990s is suggestive to me.) But as far as I know, Rex's work has not been shown to be wrong. A citation search suggests that he hasn't published it, although some of his coauthors published something related. I don't see any followup studies out yet which check (either supporting or refuting) this result. I'm not an atmospheric chemist, so I can't say what the implications are for the CFC/ozone hole link if it is true. I read something which indicates that chlorofluorocarbons are still implicated because of correlations with observed (not theoretical) changes in chlorine levels, which in turn are heavily tied to CFCs. However, I don't get the impression that anyone yet knows what to make of these results.
The excuse for faking data?
"Faking data" is a libelous claim. GISTEMP has made and corrected data errors before, as have the UAH satellite people (including famous skeptics Spencer and Christy), the Argos ocean temperature floats, and so on. That's far different from intentionally creating data known to be false. The difference between the first case and the others is that the skeptics apparently decided that using Al Gore as a punching bag was getting old and they decided Hansen would be a good boogeyman.
Lol. Did you know that prefixing every sentence with 'lol' makes you look like a retard? Lol.
The term climate change as in changes in the climate was used but it was never the name of a cause or principle push by scientists until people were rejecting global warming.
The fact is that "climate change" is not a new term being used by scientists to cover up their failed predictions. It's a term they've been using all along. And it's a more appropriately general term to begin with, since the effects of CO2 on the Earth system go beyond temperature rise.
Th IPCC was created by the UN to see if what was being claimed was even possible.
The IPCC was created by the UN to, as I said, summarize the current state of knowledge, which is the logical and necessary first course of action independent of the existence of any "deniers".
During it's creation and organization, it was hijacked.
That's continues to be a libelous and wrong claim.
And that has nothing to do with the costs that I mentioned.
Of course it does: the analyses include costs to the economy of CO2 abatement.
Mitigation isn't removal, it's dealing with it.
No, that's adaptation. Mitigation is reducing the change.
I'm sorry, I thought you were familiar with the Kyoto accords
I'm not talking about Kyoto. That's why there's that funny little "s" thingy on the end of "proposals", which in the English langauge means "plural".
In fact, from 2001 to 2004, Western Europe actually saw an increase of 100,000 million metric tons of Co2 emissions.
Europe has not had a real cap in place. Their experimental market grossly overallocated emissions credits at the outset, giving no economic incentive to reduce emissions: the market price of carbon cratered.
It shows how much of an attribute is being given to such a small amount
The absolute amount compared to other gases in the atmosphere is irrelevant to its radiative forcing efficacy.
and it also shows that current efforts still aren't even able to reduce that little amount.
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.
Yes, China has to expand their industry rapidly in order to meet Europe's increased demands seeing how Most of Europe artificially limited their industry capabilities.
Europe didn't artificially limit their industrial capabilities.
I find it interesting that you cite California. They have the largest unemployment rate in the US currently, the government is suffering the largest budget deficit, they have rolling blackouts
If you want to explain how the more efficient use of energy leads to, say, unemployment in California, feel free. Otherwise, you've got nothing but guilt-by-association.
As for rolling blackouts, efficiency HELPS rolling blackouts by reducing demand below what it otherwise would be. California has a capacity and distribution problem, not an efficiency problem.
Reasonable does not mean accurate.
If so, then it looks like what you're asking for is unreasonable accuracy.
the models are still not accurate.
Models are not, and cannot be, perfect. GCMs are accurate within their stated uncertainties, and they're accurate enough to usefully inform policy. The real problem is if the models are less accurate than their claimed accuracy.
We simply cannot predict the future by using Co2 data alone.
It's a good thing we don't use CO2 data alone, then.
And no, it is not irrational to suspect the work and motivations of someone who was claiming global coo
Lol.. NO, that is from when they were claiming global cooling.
No, it's not. You can find the term used in reference to anthropogenic global warming, global cooling, and neither. Just do the damn Google search. You're an unstoppable fountain of uneducated misinformation.
The IPCC was started in 1988 at the request by deniers.
Deniers didn't create the IPCC. The IPCC was created to summarize the state of scientific research in the field. Which is still does, despite your insinuations about its politicization.
And non of them has been able to accurately measure that costs per damage to the economy and stability of the governments.
Even basic order-of-magnitude estimates show the need for mitigation policies.
Less industrialized nations are exempt from limits in GHG productions in all resulting so called fixes
No, not in all of the proposals.
The entire idea behind the fixes purposed so far is to limit the economic progress of wealthier countries while enabling it in poorer countries.
More idiotic conspiracy theories. Economists are not generally in favor of crippling their own economies. The idea is to reduce CO2 emissions, at an expected cost less than the expected unmitigated climate damages.
The amount of Co2 and green house gasses that are supposed to be a problem is less then 1% of total gasses in the atmosphere.
That's totally irrelevant.
Even with Carbon caps capped at 1990 levels for the industrialized countries, we wouldn't be producing less of those gasses that are the problem.
We would be producing less CO2 than we otherwise would be, and CO2 is the primary problem as far as climate change over the next century or two is concerned.
Surprisingly, I have seen some numbers (Can't find a post-able link right now) that suggests most of China and India's recent grow in GHG emissions can be attributed to Europe's increase in import for those areas since 2003.
It's due to their industrialization, which is certainly linked to their economic exports, but it also due to, e.g., the Chinese government's choice to industrialize in the fastest (and dirtiest) manner possible.
Anyways, we can't reduce our emissions at a rate that will have a positive effect on any damage that is claimed to be present.
Pretty much all the leading economists who have studied this problem, some of which I have cited, disagree. Hell, if the U.S. just improved their energy efficiency to Californian standards, that would have a significant impact. Even allowing emissions to increase, but at a slower rate than business-as-usual and stabilizing by the end of the century, has significant economic value in terms of risk management. Mitigating emissions doesn't mean "cutting them to zero", it means slowing them.
What I mean about that is the projections looking forward never seem to fit, but after adjustments to make the data fit, going back can always seem to work correctly in the models.
I'm sorry, but the data has not been substantially revised to fit models. As for projections going forward, there have been few of them made long enough ago to have been verified, since it takes 20-30 years to see a definitive trend. But Hansen's projections (you know, the guy you irrationally revile) from 1988 did a pretty reasonable job.
Then there are the Ice sheets at the poles that are melting because of global warming and the air temp or Ocean temp never gets above freezing in the area.
Now what are you talking about?
It might be three times of Texas now, but after a few hundred years of procreating, it'd be the whole globe...
A lot of demographic geographers are projecting that world population growth will stabilize in the mid- to late 21st century.
Well, unless you manage to solve the population growth problem,
It's not clear that it needs external "solving". Birth rates drop as economies and life expectancies grow, cultures shift away from agriculture, urbanization takes place, education increases, birth control becomes more prevalent, etc. There are trends towards most of those things in most countries.
manage to overcome the tautology of natural selection: those that have most offspring have most offspring, who will also have the genetic traits that helped their parents to have the most offspring....
Natural selection does not predict that maximizing the fitness of one's offspring means maximizing the number of offspring. Besides which, social factors are at least as important in birth rates, or else we'd all still be having 15 children.
I think it was in the last century or so, that scientists had the world in an uproar by declaring 'Global Cooling'...that they world was getting colder and heading towards a new ice age.
Not really.
You see, there's absolutely no causal relationship between "those gasses" and the what the "planet was like".
There certainly is, established by the laws of physics, modern instrumental data, and paleo data. Paleo data from a time period when variations in CO2 were small does not support your contention, as it's unable to quantify temperature change as a result of CO2 forcing. You don't EXPECT to see CO2 having a big influence on climate when it's not changing much.
That has now been disproven - scientifically
Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if the MWP was global, but a handful of proxies from one location don't really prove it. If they can amass a decent number of South American and African proxies, they might start to build a case.
You're right, we would not roll back to the exact same climate state. But we're far more likely to approach a known state that way than by implementing geoengineering schemes which use a completely different mechanism than the original forcing.
There are two charts Al Gore holds up
Ah, the sign of an insincere pseudo-skeptic: they bring up Al Gore in the first sentence, as if he matters.
and pretends to act as if he's unsure about GlobalWarming(TM). But there's a reason they're 20 feet apart: if they were overlaid, it'd be CLEAR that CO2 rises 800 years AFTER the heat comes.
That wouldn't be clear; it's not even visible to the naked eye on that scale, in the noise.
This isn't biblical history; this is fossil-record-fact. CO2 cools, not warms the atmosphere.
That's not a "fact". CO2 warms the atmosphere, amplifying deglacial warming when it rises due to temperature, and vice versa for glacial cooling.
However, there's another proven fact: tell a scientist he won't get any money unless GlobalWarming(TM) isn't in the study, and you purchase scientists.
Gee, let's see the proof of this "fact". I hope it's better than the proof of your last "fact".
Clue: the NSF and other funding agencies don't give out money for "proving global warming is due to humans". They give out money for things like "estimating the climate sensitivity to CO2". You get the money BEFORE you do the research, and you can find either a low or a high number. (Published estimates range between 1 and 5 C.)
The term climate change was used original by detractors of global warming to signify that the climate changes but it wasn't because of the political accusations being made.
Hardly. As I said, SCIENTISTS widely used the term "climate change" long before anthropogenic global warming was ever a political issue. A trivial Google Scholar search turns up tons of references going back at least to the 1960s.
After some of the loudest predictions of gloom and doom failed to come true, the science community started using Climate change in an effort to capitalize on the anti global warming crowds momentum.
Your fairy tale does not agree with actual facts. And, as you yourself note, the IPCC itself used the term from the very beginning.
We can't do the changes in Co2 production fast enough without causing too much damage to the economy and stabilization of governments.
The actual economists who study this disagree with you. Look at Nordhaus, Tol, Yohe, etc. None of them advocate cutting emissions to nothing. But they all find that a reduction in emissions passes a cost-benefit test in terms of climate risk management.
We can't really replace our carbon emissions fast enough to not have the damage they claim the emissions are going to cause to geoengineering should be part of the solution is symptoms actually exist.
I think that's the most incomprehensible sentence I've seen out of you yet, and I've seen a lot. I can't even begin to parse it.
But say things do go haywire, sure, drop some sort of fix into the enviroment as long as it's effects are short terms and know well enough to control (IE, it doesn't survive more then a short time past our efforts).
Well, we at least agree there.
Depends on who you ask. For every noted, accredited, respected supporter of GW you can find a similarly noted, accredited, and respected opposer of GW.
Not even remotely. There is an enormous difference between the two; glancing at any climate journal will show you that.
Even those in support of GW cannot agree on whether it's anthropogenic.
There is rather widespread agreement on that, too.
CO2/temp graphs are not terribly convincing when you consider (a) the data models have been unable to accurately model past and current weather trends when supplied with "accurate" data
They've been able to model trends on multidecadal time scales. They're not good for sub-decadal prediction, although maybe they eventually will be with advances in state initialization from 4D data assimilation.
(b) CO2 is a relatively unimportant climate gas compared to other factors such as water vapor.
CO2 is not a relatively unimportant climate gas compared to water vapor, when you look at what has CHANGED. Water vapor provides much of the 30 C baseline greenhouse effect which is preventing the Earth from being a frozen iceball. The global warming we're talking about from CO2 is due to an increase in GHGs over that baseline, which may end up amounting to a few more degrees.
This is a rather silly response since you assume a zero sum game.
I'm not assuming any such thing. Fossil fuels are by far the cheapest way to put in place a very long term planetary warming effect, should anyone want to do so. Almost anything else (e.g., modulation of insolation, surface albedo, etc.) is more expensive and requires constant maintenance. Nuclear power alone isn't going to stave off an ice age, if that's what you were suggesting below. It might keep (some of) us warmer during one. I suspect most people would vote to stave it off.
If the public were to ever get over its idiotic aversion to nuclear power, all of the above arguing would become moot. We have enough nuclear fuel for centuries, and perhaps thousands of centuries if we can ever get this whole fusion thing worked out.
I think we need to be doing a lot more nuclear, but even if we started full-speed on building nuke plants today, that's still not going to put a huge dent in CO2 emissions for a long time. We're talking about ramping up nuclear use by two orders of magnitude worldwide (more in places that don't have any), and in the meantime, existing coal plants are going to be running for the next 50 years just because the cheapest plant is the one that's already built. And while nuclear plants are pretty safe, there are real safety, proliferation, and storage issues — especially if you're talking about this being a worldwide solution, and not just for a few developed nations and their allies.
There's a difference in one raw subnetwork, BEFORE any corrections are applied. (Funny how they complain about "adjusting" the raw data for biases, and then complain that the raw data can have biases...) And as long as you're citing Climate Audit, this (and John V's comments below, e.g. #88) is what I was referring to.
I was alive then, and looking at the press.
I know it was in the press. I'm saying that it wasn't something that SCIENTISTS, as a whole, were strongly pushing.
There was no 'Climate Science community' then
That's not true. Climatology existed well before before the 1970s. Climate scientists often worked out of meteorology, oceanography, etc. departments instead of "climatology departments", but the same is true today: there's no such thing as a "climatology" department in any university as far as I know.
Scientists only worked out of universities, not Government Institutions,
That's also not true; there are a number of FFRDC's that existed before then, although not as many in climate-related fields. NCAR was founded in 1960. NOAA was founded in 1970. But what does that have to do with the fact that scientists weren't widely predicting global cooling?
The press took the story up strongly, and the government put a fair amount of money into research.
I know the government researched it, as they should have. It was an uncertain risk. That's quite different from anybody predicting it was likely to happen, or more likely to happen than warming. The scientific research from that time definitively favored warming over cooling, despite the media.
I didn't mean to say that I was a climate scientist. The original poster said that "we" thought we were heading toward an ice age. I was trying to say that if by "we" the OP meant "climate scientists", then "we" didn't think that.
That being said, I am a scientist (physics), so maybe I can give you some vague advice. I don't know what your science background is, but the usual route would be to get a Ph.D. in some geoscience field. Right now geonengineering doesn't exist as a field of engineering (and it may never do so), so you'd probably have to start out in science. (There are some engineering departments which look at carbon capture and sequestration, if you're into that.) If you're more interested in aerosol or cloud geoengineering, you want to look at meteorology, atmospheric chemistry, etc. If you're more into geoengineering the carbon cycle, you want to look at terrestrial or ocean ecology, or geology and geochemistry if you want to do geological sequestration. If you have existing scientific/engineering training, your route might be different.
The post I was responding to claimed the choices are survival or extinction, then qualified to all or most lives on the planet. My point is that that isn't the choice at all. The fact is, the climate is going to change. Humanity have no capability to stop it.
We have substantial ability to reduce the change that we are causing.
The choice is try and control it and completely destroy the quality of life of everyone,
This is the conservative boogeyman version of "global warming will wipe out all life on Earth". Mitigating CO2 emissions does not require "completely destroying the quality of life of everyone".
or to adapt and make accommodations for the people who are currently living in areas where health won't be sustainable.
We are going to adapt, but it's easier to adapt when you have a smaller problem to adapt to.
It's not my job to inform you, but you might start with "second atmosphere."
So I'm right: it's never happened since life has existed. So basically your point is totally irrelevant to anything.
Huh? You want people to "give it a rest" that Hansen fabricated much of the data used to prove global warming?
Hansen didn't fabricate any data, retarded handwringing about "adjustments" aside.
You think we should all base our planning on the predictions of people who have been 100% wrong in every model they've ever presented?
What nonsense. Climate models are not 100% wrong, and in fact do a good job of reproducing long-term temperature trends, stratospheric cooling, the major ocean circulation patterns, the oceanic heat uptake, the top-of-atmosphere radiation flux, and so on.
Sorry, but at least 30% of the warming in Hansen's numbers is completely fabricated (some people believe that number is 100%.)
Uh, yeah, that's not an actual fact, that's a made up number.
Note also that the GISTEMP trend agrees rather closely with the HADCRUT, RSS, and UAH trends.
It has everything to do with the Goddard numbers for historical temperatures being repeatedly adjusted to demonstrate progressively greater warming (pre-1970 temperatures lowered and post-1970 temperatures raised.)
Goddard numbers SHOULD be adjusted. ALL raw instrumental data have to be adjusted for bias-correction, and that includes both the non-GISS surface data and the satellite data. I'm sorry you're emotionally incapable of accepting the fact that the bias correction might lead to a conclusion you don't like. The thing that skeptics cry about is that GISS does the adjustment to individual stations, and then averages spatially. Statistically, the more fundamental adjustment is to leave the stations alone, and correct the average; that's what the Hadley people do. You end up with pretty much the same number either way, but in the GISS case, you end up with station data which is homogeneity adjusted to the region, but no longer represents the actual station.
We need the best science not uninformed, blind activism and rhetoric.
You're not contributing to the signal-to-noise ratio here.
Um.. no. He's talking about the fact that world temperatures started to come down in 2002, and the rate of CO2 rise has just started to slacken.
Um, no, he's talking about the hundreds of years (can't you read) lag between temperature and CO2 (e.g., here).
Yes, there is. The only way to avoid admitting that is to claim that anyone who doubts the fraudulent science is a denier, and not a climate scientist..
No, it's trivial to support: just look at the number of papers which were published on solar effects on modern warming 20 years ago, and the far fewer such papers published today.
We're not adding very much as a percentage, but we ARE increasing our output.
We've added 35% to the atmosphere since pre-industrial times, and are looking to easily double, triple, or even quadruple it.
And the temperature has been going down since 1998.
Cherry picking a giant El Nino year doesn't help your cause. And no, there isn't any statistically significant decadal-scale cooling.
Incidentally, you know what the response of true believers is to those figures is? If the temperature goes up, it's Global Warming. If it goes down, it's a weather anomaly...
Anything trend deviation over less than 10 years is almost certainly weather noise regardless of which way it goes.
And yes, temperatures have been trending downward since '98.
Not if you use any other year except for your enormously cherry picked 1998.
And they have been trending downward very steeply since 2006.
Two years is even more meaningless than 10 years, especially when you throw a La Nina in the mix.
How many years do we need before it's no longer a 'monthly fluctuation'?
The standard duration for a climatological average is about 30 years, which is why it took so many years before climatologists were able to definitively attribute the trend. After about 20 you start to see a real signal.
Yes there is. See almost any dendrochronology site.
Sadly for your link, neither solar nor thermohaline circulation trends agree with the modern warming. Also, their reconstruction in Fig. 3b predicts strong cooling post-1950, which didn't actually happen in Finland. Maybe it happened at some particular lake where they took cores, but then its utility as a proxy for regional temperature, let alone global temperature, is questionable.
Actually, even the ancient Greeks knew that the Earth was round, well before Galileo.
It is an hypothisis until disproven.
That doesn't make any sense. By that logic, no theory can become well established by evidence.
Nothing about Global Warming is well established,
The greenhouse effect is well established as are its effects on the climate. You may consult the last 50+ years of climate research on this matter. The IPCC AR4 WG1 report has indexes into this literature.
it can't be
Now who's being unscientific?
Personally I am not sure that we are the cause for global warming or if it is yet just another natural event (ice ages came and went without the help of man so it is not a theory that we can rule out just because the media says so).
The media doesn't have anything to do with it. Natural causes for the recent warming are not supported by the DATA.
You're way too emotional and hostile to be taken seriously
I'm sorry you can't deal with rational arguments. If you want me to source something I've said, feel free to ask. I find that nobody ever bothers to consult anything I cite, dismissing it as biased without reading it, so it's often not worthwhile unless someone has a specific question.
You seem knowledgeable on this topic, but seem to suffer the same mental illness as many scientists who utterly fail to realize the implications of their suggestions.
I am quite aware of the implications, thank you.
Secondly, who exactly is going to 'authorize' this? One country? If any single entity had the audacity to implement such a scheme on their own I would read it as a declaration of war and act appropriately. The UN? A couple hundred political appointments deciding to act on behalf of everyone on earth?
The same is true of any international agreement to, say, reduce CO2 emissions. Abatement efforts without international agreement are unlikely to succeed. Pure adaptation without mitigation doesn't accomplish enough.
The idea of geoengineering the planet earth on behalf of all life to *try* save us from the folly of man may be the only offensive idea I have ever heard. Especially when the real solution is so obvious.
Geoengineering is a backup plan to use if we fail at "the real solution".
Global warming is established the same way a geocentric universe was established, anyone who disagrees with it is considered a heretic.
Wow, another clueless pseudoskeptic who can't tell the difference between science and religion.
several other planets are experiencing global warming at the same time as us.
And several of them aren't, and none of them are experiencing warming for any reasons related to what's going on here. (Mars has large changes in dust storms, Jupiter's convection patterns shifted, Pluto is experiencing summer, etc.)
also who ever established that a warmer earth is necessarily a bad thing.
It's not necessarily a bad thing. Too much change, too fast, is usually a bad thing.
the earth has been getting warmer since the last ice age and no one complained.
The Earth's climate has been unusually stable since the last ice age.
Here are a few thoughts for you: 1) 99% of all life that has ever lived on this planet is extinct.
So? That doesn't mean that we would prefer to increase extinction rates.
2) During times when it was much hotter than it is now the earth was teeming with life.
So? You might want to live in a Cretaceous jungle climate, but I don't.
3) There were times when the atmosphere of the Earth was 80% CO2.
When? I don't know that it's ever been above 10,000 ppmv while multicellular life has existed. (And even if true: so? See above.)
4) James Hansen (NASA big wig involved in climate study and the keeper of the US climate data) has adjusted the numbers to make previous years cooler and more recent years hotter.
Give it a rest already. GISTEMP doesn't disagree with either NCDC, HADCRUT, RSS, or UAH.
Nobody is proposing to remove all the CO2 from the air. Sheesh.