The best scientific introduction is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 4th Assessment Report, Working Group 1 (physical science). It attempts to be a comprehensive literature review of the mainstream science. It is all available online here. If you'd like to know more specifically about any particular issue, and are having trouble locating it in the IPCC report (e.g., if you don't know what keywords to look for), let me know and I might be able to provide more specific references.
The IPCC report is kind of dense and is a survey of the modern state of the art. If you're looking for more of a textbook sort of introduction to climate science, I'd recommend David Archer's book Understanding the Forecast. It's aimed at undergraduate freshmen, so it might be below the level you're looking for, but it's still pretty good at laying out a lot of the important issues.
I'm not worried about future global temperatures. If they don't change due to anthropogenic stress they will change naturally and thats all there is to it.
No, that's not all there is to it. The rate, magnitude, and sign of anthropogenic climate change is likely very different than natural change. The amount of anthropogenic change likely over the next few centuries is almost certainly much greater and faster than the likely natural change over a similar period.
I'm more worried about things like drinking water and acceptable aquatic habitats not inhabitable by most species on this planet except for northern marine and terrestrial mammals as well as marine fish which are quite likely to adopt and move southward when the ice is "all gone". Issues that are real and facing today's ecosystem rather than talking about something that might impact the ecosystem drastically in a few 100-1000s of years.
It's not an either/or issue. Climate change and ecosystem stress are problems, and the former exacerbates the latter.
I'm sure there will be a major catastrophic event such as an asteroid before then.
What major catastrophic event happened in the last 1000 years? It may happen, but we can't count on it, and even if we can, why add to it?
Ice acts a deflector deflecting the sun's rays back into space. When this massive deflector is gone we will see oceans absorbing these rays and warming exponentially.
Ice albedo feedback is real, although the process is not exponential.
Condensation builds up. Then we see storms, massive storms. I don't believe the most "recent" period will demonstrate what I said previously but rather look back to pre-historic vertebrates that survived these periods and look at their fossil records. The sheer amount of condensation will block the sun.
Not according to any climate models of the relationship between temperature and evaporation-precipitation and cloud cover. Nor according to any geological evidence I'm aware of. I think we will see more storms, but I don't think there is any theoretical or experimental evidence that this actually leads to large cloud-induced cooling.
During the Pleistocene period we have seen a relative period of stability but I disagree with your suggestion that we should try to conserve CO2 for when we really need it.
Why?
Himalayas likely contributed to the cooling but what about volcanic ash blocking the sun? Would a continental collision not suggest a very active volcanic periods as well?
It's possible, but from my recollection of the Cenozoic cooling literature, there isn't enough volcanic ash in the geologic record to create that much cooling. Volcanoes are one of the standard cooling hypotheses in paleoclimate, and if the mainstream hypothesis is not volcanoes (which it isn't), there must be some evidence against them or at least lacking.
I agree that non-experts can judge for themselves. But very few people "study all the evidence", and "cover the available research". Almost all self-styled "climate skeptics" rely on a rather biased set of sources, and most of the "climate alarmists" do too. I've met very few people of any position who have actually sat down and read, say, the IPCC report — even the summary. If all you're going by is, say, what you find on skeptic websites, then you're not really in a position to judge the science. Climate change is a subtle issue and there is unquestionably large uncertainty.
To draw valid conclusions, a person needs to study the science for some time, and that has to start with reading some of the science, published by mainstream scientists. It took me several months of heavy reading before I had a real handle on where the legitimate areas of debate are. Not many people are willing/able to invest that much time. I submit that for those who are not, it makes sense to rely on experts. Even Steve McIntyre, one of the few skeptics I respect, acknowledges that he doesn't have that level of expertise, and if he was a government policymaker he'd be guided by what's in the IPCC report.
All of the IPCC scientists are leading world experts on the parts of the report they authored. The ecologists work on the ecology part of the report, and so on. The scientists who contributed to the attribution parts of the report are the leading experts on climate change attribution, and they DO have the expertise to judge the matter. The scientists who didn't contribute to the attribution studies don't have opinions on the matter which are included in the report.
You should get more acquainted with the informed and enlightened skeptics to climate change
Steve McIntyre is an informed skeptic. Anthony Watts promotes all kinds of nonsense on his blog.
Extensive in-the-field evidence of poor data gathering and management, especially terrestrial temperature monitoring equipment.
Every data product has flaws, but there is nothing wrong with it that is going to drastically change any of the global time series or conclusions about AGW. I'm sorry, but skeptic masturbatory fantasies about how global warming is going to turn out to be a data artifact are just that: fantasies. The urban heat island effect doesn't appreciably contaminate the record, the surface stations agree with the satellites, you get almost identical results if you only rely on the best stations, and so on.
Of course the great irony is that Plimer plays the other side in the evolution-creation "debate"
You're right, I forgot about that. He does. Kind of amusing that he doesn't see the parallels between climate skeptics and creationists. He probably draws the opposite comparison: creationists and climate change "alarmists" are both "religious zealots".
Most people don't realize this but we are actually still in an ice age. The planet goes through natural cycles of cold and hot. Our cold climate is warming, perhaps from anthropogenic disturbances but also perhaps from natural climate change.
Before industrial fossil fuel CO2 emissions, the Holocene has been in a very stable period, neither warming nor cooling, which is actually kind of unusual. Normally it would have been cooled slightly by now.
Sure the globe might be warming faster from CO2 but it will warm regardless we just might have accelerated things a bit.
Why should it warm regardless? As I said, if you go by past interglacials it should probably be cooling. If you go by this interglacial's earlier history, it shouldn't be warming or cooling much. Unless you're proposing that the whole ice age cycle was due to end this time around anyway. What evidence do you have for that? I've never seen that in any of the geological literature.
When all of the ice is "gone" the planet will effectively reboot and start the process all over again. Once the oceans warm up to the point condensation will kick in, extreme storms, and then a massive cooling period.
Again, what is the basis for that? The last time we left an extended greenhouse for an extended ice age (~50 million years ago?), it wasn't because the oceans were too warm or all the ice was gone. (It had been warm with no ice for millions of years before that.) It was more likely due to weathering from the Himalayas drawing CO2 out of the atmosphere when the Indian subcontinent collided with Asia.
The 'naturalists' will be stuck inside their box right up until their extinction occurs.
If you're really so worried about future global cooling, you should be arguing for us to save our greenhouse gases for later when we need them, rather than use them all up now when we don't.
So you have irrefutable evidence that global warming is due to fossil fuel combustion products and not, say, the output of the sun?
Yes, pretty much. Hardly anything is totally "irrefutable", but there is plenty of evidence which supports the link between warming and CO2, including the paleoclimate record, the observed timing, rate, and magnitude of the warming compared to the CO2 forcing (when other forcings are included too, of course), the stratospheric cooling fingerprint, the observed changes in the diurnal cycle, etc. All of those directly disagree with solar irradiance trends. The solar trend disagrees in rate, timing, and magnitude with the warming since the mid-20th century, although it explains a fair bit of the warming before then. So does the cosmic ray trend, for that matter. Solar warming doesn't lead to stratospheric cooling, it doesn't lead to the same changes in the day-night cycle as globally distributed greenhouse gases do, and so on. See Foukal et al., Lockwood and Frohlich, etc. Of course, your article doesn't bother to mention any of those inconvenient facts.
The whole "other planets are warming" is among the dumbest of all skeptic arguments. The climate of other planets has about jack squat to do with the Earth's climate. Some of them hardly have any atmosphere, none have water oceans, and so on. When you actually look at what causes warming on various planets, it's not even the Sun; Martian warming is attributed to a change in global dust storms, Jupiter warming isn't even global, Pluto warming is due to it being summer there, and so on. I don't know why people ignore the large amount of data we have on Earth climate and what causes it, in favor of much sparser data from planetary climates dramatically unlike our own.
The fact is that most of the global warming theories are based on poor evidence and conjecture.
Oh, that's a "fact" is it? What establishes this fact?
we shouldn't have irrational, knee-jerk reactions to the use of fossil fuels.
It's not an irrational, knee-jerk reaction, it's one based on over 40 years of scientific and economic study. The IPCC AR4 WG1 report summarizes the state of the science. Nordhaus's A Question of Balance is a good introduction to the policy side of the issue.
If you think climate scientists don't relish debate, you obviously haven't been to a scientific conference.
What they relish, however, is honest debate by an informed opponent. As opposed to 95% of the so-called "skeptics" out there — like Plimer — who do little but repeat long-discredited misleading or wrong arguments. It's pretty much the same as the evolution-creation "debate". Evolutionary biologists argue all the time about evolutionary theory — witness the whole gradualism vs. punctuated equilibrium debate. But that doesn't mean they relish correcting creationist wackaloons, again and again, every time they drag out the same bad arguments. Bypassing the whole scientific debate in the first place by going straight to the media. The reason why creationists don't engage in real scientific debate is because their arguments are so poor they can't get published. Of course, they then cry that the orthodox gatekeepers are "silencing" them. Pretty much like most of the climate skeptics. There is legitimate scientific debate about, say, whether the equilibrium climate sensitivity to CO2 is closer to the lower or the upper end of the IPCC range. But you hardly ever see any of the real debate. Instead, you see the ridiculously wrong claims like "the geologic record proves that temperature is unrelated to CO2" or "all the global warming is an artifact of urban heat island contamination". It's a shame.
I agree that no one should be jumping to attribute this particular event to climate change. Climate change is generally slow, and something that abruptly shows up in a particular year probably isn't climate related. If the acorns have been gradually disappearing over the past few decades, that would be another matter.
That being said, most of what Plimer says about climate change is misleading at best, and dishonest nonsense at worst. (But it sure does sell books, doesn't it?) Climate change is real and is being substantially influenced by humans. You can start by reading last year's IPCC AR4 report.
For example, Plimer says:
"Climates always change," he said. Our climate has changed in cycles over millions of years, as the orbit of the planet wobbles and our distance from the sun changes, for instance, or as the sun itself produces variable amounts of radiation.
Total non sequitur. We know climate has changed over millions of years. That doesn't mean that we ought to be changing it further in ways that are to our detriment, or with consequences we can't fully predict.
And the current climate change is not due to orbital wobbles (that takes place over tens of thousands of years) nor variance in solar radiation (whose measured history in the 20th century does not agree with the actual changes we've observed).
"All of this affects climate. It is impossible to stop climate change.
No one is seriously claiming we can stop all climate change, forever. We can't even stop the current change we've caused. We can, however, slow it down to a more manageable rate.
Plimer said one of the charts, which plots atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature over 500 million years, with seemingly little correlation, demonstrates one of the "lessons from history" to which geologists are privy: "There is no relationship between CO2 and temperature."
That's an absolutely ridiculous statement, and even more ridiculous to claim that this is some well known fact among geologists. See, for example, Royer et al.'s Phanerozoic climate sensitivity estimate, or the vast amount of work on the effect of CO2 on the glacial-interglacial cycle, or the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) event (although it's still debated whether that was CO2 or methane).
Sure, you can draw a graph of CO2 vs. temperature (or rather, some paleotemperature proxy) over 500 million years, and no, they're not always going to agree with each other. That doesn't mean that CO2 is unrelated to climate. It means CO2 is not the only thing which affects climate, as Plimer himself acknowledges. Hundreds of millions of years ago, the continents were in totally different locations, the atmospheric and ocean circulation patterns were likewise altered, ice sheets were in different places or absent altogether, the distribution of vegetation was different, the sun itself was slightly weaker, and so on.
All those things affect climate. But it's very difficult to infer all the factors which were contributing that long ago. To isolate the effect of CO2, the best we can do is look at certain intervals when there were large changes, like the PETM, where the climate signal is very strong. Or we can start going closer to the present, where we have more data; we can dig ice cores back a million years and reconstruct a lot of the past climate drivers more directly then we can if we have to rely on much older ocean sediment cores. That covers many of the glacial-interglacial cycles. And we do see direct relations between temperature and CO2.
In short, it's completely dishonest to claim that you can disprove the link between CO2 and temperature using nothing but the correlation between the two. This goes the same for people who claim that you can prove the link using the glacial-interglacial correlation between the two. The link is vastly more subtle than that. Plimer would know that if talked to any of his geolog
The problem with your vision of prediction is that *many* climate scientist search for such basardized "predictions" as you call them. This is data-mining 101. They are equation mining for methods, given existing data set A, which can fill in values of data set B.
Lying about their methods does not support your position. I described to you how GCMs are calibrated. If you refuse to pay attention, this is not an indictment of their methods.
Your utopian view of what is occuring is false.
Considering I actually know some climate modelers, and I doubt you do, I'm afraid this is not a compelling argument.
Dude, when all you've got is conspiracy theory, you've lost the argument. It's just an excuse for you to dismiss arbitrarily large amounts of evidence. No matter how much study or data there is, you can simply wave it all away as biased, without any actual scientific evidence to support your conclusion.
It is because you cannot tell the difference between fitted methods and predictive methods until real predictions are made.
"The Sentinel" was the inspiration for some of the early movie/novel, where they discover the monolith on the moon. Everything after (and some before, as with the apes) is new material.
2001 wasn't really a Hollywood adaptation. Clarke and Kubrick worked on the plot of both film and novel together, and the novel came out after the movie. You might as well say that a core part of the novel's plot was ADDED to the novel, rather than lost in the film.
There are perfectly good examples of scientific orthodoxy trying to shut up inconvenient facts. Einstein himself tried to destroy quantum theory, when he'd helped create it with his work on the Photoelectric effect.
That's one of the worst examples you could have picked.
Einstein never tried to destroy quantum theory, and he never tried to "shut up inconvenient facts". Einstein liked quantum theory. He just didn't like the non-deterministic Copenhagen interpretation. And he wasn't just irrationally denying facts. He had damn good arguments and thought experiments to support his view, which although ultimately proven wrong, ended up advancing our understanding of quantum theory (such as the EPR paradox). Bohr was his famous opponent, who spent much of his life thinking about arguments and how Einstein would react to them, because Einstein was so good at holding his own. If he couldn't support his position, Bohr wouldn't have wasted his time.
Einstein never used his status in "the scientific orthodoxy" to attack and "shut up" support for the "unorthodox" quantum theory. Exactly the opposite. Quantum theory was the mainstream by then. Einstein drifted out of the mainstream because of his views on quantum mechanics. Not because anyone was shunning him, but because his work didn't address the experimental realities (such as a non-deterministic theory of electromagnetism, QED).
It would take a number of decades and great expense to develop and deploy a national hydrogen infrastructure. For the same amount of money and in considerably less time we can promote more efficient building codes and other energy-efficiency initiatives, carbon capture and sequestration, non-fossil energy (hydrogen is an energy storage mechanism, not an energy source), plug-in hybrid or electric vehicles (where low carbon power plants are available), etc. Read Joe Romm's book. A hydrogen transportation infrastructure takes too long and costs too much, relative to the alternatives, to be useful in reducing fossil fuel use.
Yes. We're able to measure the CMBR, but it's electromagnetic radiation. If dark energy primarily or solely interacts gravitationally, that's a world of difference. The electromagnetic and gravitational interactions have very different strengths. We can't detect the gravitational effects of the CMBR at all, since it's about 100,000 times less energetic than dark energy. Dark energy has only recently been detectable at all through its gravity. That's (one reason) why it's so hard to directly detect dark matter, too.
This will kill my karma, but I just have to ask: isn't all this "something we can't see that's messing up our physics" putting us off the possibility that our physics models may just be flat out wrong?
Yes, and that's why various dark energy theories introduce new physics (such as new types of particles or modifications to gravity).
I mean, would we have a relativity theory if Einstein had stuck to Newtonian physics and stated that the errors measured were caused bay some misterious force/matter/energy that we couldn't see?
Would we have discovered Neptune if we had tried to invent new physics instead of postulating that some unseen body was perturbing the orbit of Uranus?
Anyway, Einstein's solution was to modify Newton's theory of gravity. The leading solution is to modify Einstein's theory of gravity by adding a cosmological constant. (Actually, it's really just restoring Einstein's theory to its first published form, which originally had dark energy in it.)
If you want to reconstruct the expansion history of the universe, you need to know where various objects were located in the past.
By looking at the redshifted light from a distant star, you can tell by what factor the universe has expanded. (It's equal to the factor by which the wavelength of light is stretched.) By the Hubble distance-redshift relation, you can tell how far away the star is: in an expanding universe, faster moving and more redshifted stars are farther away. That relation only works if the universe's expansion isn't accelerating, though.
You can also tell how far away a star is if you know how bright it is. If it looks really dim compared to its true brightness, then it's far away. This method of measuring distance only works if you know how bright the star really is. There is a special kind of supernova (Type 1A) which always has the same brightness. (Or rather, there is a known relationship between its brightness and the rate at which it fades out after the nova.) If you look at those stars, you can measure their distance just from their apparent luminosity.
The problem is, the two methods don't agree with each other: some supernovae are much dimmer than the redshift Hubble relation implies. That implies that something made them accelerate away, since the Hubble relation assumes no acceleration. By comparing the two measures of distance (redshift-inferred and brightness-inferred), you can work the amount of excess acceleration. This is dark energy.
The JDEM mission is supposed to measure supernova redshift and brightness, and thus measure the strength of dark energy.
See here for more information. This article is on SNAP, the predecessor to JDEM.
Dark matter doesn't have anti-gravity effects. The whole reason why it was postulated in the first place was because of its positive gravity effects: to explain the "missing mass" contributing to galactic rotation curves.
It doesn't exactly have "anti-" light effects. The main working theory is just that it doesn't interact with light (electromagnetic radiation), because it's not electrically charged.
There's nothing wrong with epicycles as a theory. It's just Fourier analysis. The real problem with epicycles is not that they're wrong, but they're not predictive. (There's no theory to say what the Fourier coefficients ought to be.)
Dark matter is not like epicycles. You can put in assumptions about dark matter inferred from one set of observations (e.g., galaxy scale physics), and make predictions about different observations (e.g., the cosmic background radiation), and you find that the predictions work.
My problem with both theories is that they seem to be band-aids applied to current physics to tweak the result to something that matches our observations.
That's how science works. If you see something anomalous, you start by applying the most minimal possible tweak to explain the anomaly. If that doesn't work, you expand your hypotheses to be more radical until you hit upon something that works.
As it happens, the most vanilla, boring possible modification — a cosmological constant — seeems to explain our observations, agreeing with both supernova luminosity-redshift relations and the cosmic background radiation angular power spectrum. That disappoints a lot of theorists who want to come up with new dark energy theories. In fact, it's not even really a modification of existing theory. A cosmological constant has been present in Einstein's theory from the very beginning, in 1915. Einstein later took it out of his theory because he didn't see a need for it. Now we do, because we can make more sensitive measurements.
I was always a skeptic when it came to Dark Matter(I am not an astronomer, so this all technically an uniformed opinion). But now I know that it really is all a load of idle speculation coupled with incomplete investigation, and an excessive dose of hype. It only took a few minutes of googling to come up with this paper.
Oh yeah. A few minutes of Googling turns up an unpublished manuscript which overturns 80 years of research and thousands of papers. A manscript written by a guy who runs a mail-order crystal business and a former Xerox employee who studies fluid droplets. (I bet I'm going to hear "but Einstein was a patent clerk" real soon now...) Which cites Electric Universe theory papers. That's totally credible.
It is only evidence of the need for more applied mathematics courses in astronomy undergraduate degrees.
Yeah, everyone who has worked on dark matter flunked basic undergraduate astronomy. That's probably it. I bet they can't implement Newton's law of gravity in an N-body simulation either.
I don't really feel like working through their manuscript, but it seems rather reminiscent of the Cooperstock and Tieu paper which tried to do away with dark matter by introducing a thin disk of regular matter (e.g., here). It was also reported on Slashdot, and debunked within a month. (I suspect the only reason anyone bothered to write up a rebuttal is that Cooperstock has a reputation in gravity and people were worried someone might buy it. Most of these flawed papers just get ignored.)
Space can have a gravitational effect: in general relativity, gravity gravitates. A black hole is a vacuum solution of the Einstein field equations. And if you object to it being vacuum because you can't say what's at the singularity, there are non-singular vacuum solutions too, like gravitational geons. However, they're not stable, so attempts to describe matter as pure space have failed. (Another attempt which also largely failed is to describe particles as wormhole mouths.)
Matter = space is an intriguing idea, but people have worked on it for over 50 years and haven't made it work. Maybe with a full theory of quantum gravity they could, but I really doubt that would lend any new insight into dark matter or energy, any more than it would suddenly revolutionize our understanding of electrons — the relevant physics would have to be Planck scale and mostly irrelevant except maybe at the Big Bang.
Once scientists understand that space and matter is the same thing (something you should be able to test and prove here on earth) they should understand that dark matter is just space.
Although attempts have been made to unify matter and space (see Wheeler's geon idea), they've all failed. Matter and space appear to be different. But even if they were unified, so what? What's the practical difference between "matter which is secretly some aspect of space" and "matter"? I mean, I can say that an electron is really just "space", but that doesn't prevent it from acting like matter.
it's really interesting that they aren't doing it with a clear understanding about what they're measuring or why.
They have quite concrete ideas of what they're measuring. They just don't happen to agree with your pet ideas of what they're "really" measuring.
Slashdot Mirror
The best scientific introduction is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 4th Assessment Report, Working Group 1 (physical science). It attempts to be a comprehensive literature review of the mainstream science. It is all available online here. If you'd like to know more specifically about any particular issue, and are having trouble locating it in the IPCC report (e.g., if you don't know what keywords to look for), let me know and I might be able to provide more specific references.
The IPCC report is kind of dense and is a survey of the modern state of the art. If you're looking for more of a textbook sort of introduction to climate science, I'd recommend David Archer's book Understanding the Forecast. It's aimed at undergraduate freshmen, so it might be below the level you're looking for, but it's still pretty good at laying out a lot of the important issues.
I'm not worried about future global temperatures. If they don't change due to anthropogenic stress they will change naturally and thats all there is to it.
No, that's not all there is to it. The rate, magnitude, and sign of anthropogenic climate change is likely very different than natural change. The amount of anthropogenic change likely over the next few centuries is almost certainly much greater and faster than the likely natural change over a similar period.
I'm more worried about things like drinking water and acceptable aquatic habitats not inhabitable by most species on this planet except for northern marine and terrestrial mammals as well as marine fish which are quite likely to adopt and move southward when the ice is "all gone". Issues that are real and facing today's ecosystem rather than talking about something that might impact the ecosystem drastically in a few 100-1000s of years.
It's not an either/or issue. Climate change and ecosystem stress are problems, and the former exacerbates the latter.
I'm sure there will be a major catastrophic event such as an asteroid before then.
What major catastrophic event happened in the last 1000 years? It may happen, but we can't count on it, and even if we can, why add to it?
Ice acts a deflector deflecting the sun's rays back into space. When this massive deflector is gone we will see oceans absorbing these rays and warming exponentially.
Ice albedo feedback is real, although the process is not exponential.
Condensation builds up. Then we see storms, massive storms. I don't believe the most "recent" period will demonstrate what I said previously but rather look back to pre-historic vertebrates that survived these periods and look at their fossil records. The sheer amount of condensation will block the sun.
Not according to any climate models of the relationship between temperature and evaporation-precipitation and cloud cover. Nor according to any geological evidence I'm aware of. I think we will see more storms, but I don't think there is any theoretical or experimental evidence that this actually leads to large cloud-induced cooling.
During the Pleistocene period we have seen a relative period of stability but I disagree with your suggestion that we should try to conserve CO2 for when we really need it.
Why?
Himalayas likely contributed to the cooling but what about volcanic ash blocking the sun? Would a continental collision not suggest a very active volcanic periods as well?
It's possible, but from my recollection of the Cenozoic cooling literature, there isn't enough volcanic ash in the geologic record to create that much cooling. Volcanoes are one of the standard cooling hypotheses in paleoclimate, and if the mainstream hypothesis is not volcanoes (which it isn't), there must be some evidence against them or at least lacking.
I agree that non-experts can judge for themselves. But very few people "study all the evidence", and "cover the available research". Almost all self-styled "climate skeptics" rely on a rather biased set of sources, and most of the "climate alarmists" do too. I've met very few people of any position who have actually sat down and read, say, the IPCC report — even the summary. If all you're going by is, say, what you find on skeptic websites, then you're not really in a position to judge the science. Climate change is a subtle issue and there is unquestionably large uncertainty.
To draw valid conclusions, a person needs to study the science for some time, and that has to start with reading some of the science, published by mainstream scientists. It took me several months of heavy reading before I had a real handle on where the legitimate areas of debate are. Not many people are willing/able to invest that much time. I submit that for those who are not, it makes sense to rely on experts. Even Steve McIntyre, one of the few skeptics I respect, acknowledges that he doesn't have that level of expertise, and if he was a government policymaker he'd be guided by what's in the IPCC report.
All of the IPCC scientists are leading world experts on the parts of the report they authored. The ecologists work on the ecology part of the report, and so on. The scientists who contributed to the attribution parts of the report are the leading experts on climate change attribution, and they DO have the expertise to judge the matter. The scientists who didn't contribute to the attribution studies don't have opinions on the matter which are included in the report.
You should get more acquainted with the informed and enlightened skeptics to climate change
Steve McIntyre is an informed skeptic. Anthony Watts promotes all kinds of nonsense on his blog.
Extensive in-the-field evidence of poor data gathering and management, especially terrestrial temperature monitoring equipment.
Every data product has flaws, but there is nothing wrong with it that is going to drastically change any of the global time series or conclusions about AGW. I'm sorry, but skeptic masturbatory fantasies about how global warming is going to turn out to be a data artifact are just that: fantasies. The urban heat island effect doesn't appreciably contaminate the record, the surface stations agree with the satellites, you get almost identical results if you only rely on the best stations, and so on.
Of course the great irony is that Plimer plays the other side in the evolution-creation "debate"
You're right, I forgot about that. He does. Kind of amusing that he doesn't see the parallels between climate skeptics and creationists. He probably draws the opposite comparison: creationists and climate change "alarmists" are both "religious zealots".
Most people don't realize this but we are actually still in an ice age. The planet goes through natural cycles of cold and hot. Our cold climate is warming, perhaps from anthropogenic disturbances but also perhaps from natural climate change.
Before industrial fossil fuel CO2 emissions, the Holocene has been in a very stable period, neither warming nor cooling, which is actually kind of unusual. Normally it would have been cooled slightly by now.
Sure the globe might be warming faster from CO2 but it will warm regardless we just might have accelerated things a bit.
Why should it warm regardless? As I said, if you go by past interglacials it should probably be cooling. If you go by this interglacial's earlier history, it shouldn't be warming or cooling much. Unless you're proposing that the whole ice age cycle was due to end this time around anyway. What evidence do you have for that? I've never seen that in any of the geological literature.
When all of the ice is "gone" the planet will effectively reboot and start the process all over again. Once the oceans warm up to the point condensation will kick in, extreme storms, and then a massive cooling period.
Again, what is the basis for that? The last time we left an extended greenhouse for an extended ice age (~50 million years ago?), it wasn't because the oceans were too warm or all the ice was gone. (It had been warm with no ice for millions of years before that.) It was more likely due to weathering from the Himalayas drawing CO2 out of the atmosphere when the Indian subcontinent collided with Asia.
The 'naturalists' will be stuck inside their box right up until their extinction occurs.
If you're really so worried about future global cooling, you should be arguing for us to save our greenhouse gases for later when we need them, rather than use them all up now when we don't.
So you have irrefutable evidence that global warming is due to fossil fuel combustion products and not, say, the output of the sun?
Yes, pretty much. Hardly anything is totally "irrefutable", but there is plenty of evidence which supports the link between warming and CO2, including the paleoclimate record, the observed timing, rate, and magnitude of the warming compared to the CO2 forcing (when other forcings are included too, of course), the stratospheric cooling fingerprint, the observed changes in the diurnal cycle, etc. All of those directly disagree with solar irradiance trends. The solar trend disagrees in rate, timing, and magnitude with the warming since the mid-20th century, although it explains a fair bit of the warming before then. So does the cosmic ray trend, for that matter. Solar warming doesn't lead to stratospheric cooling, it doesn't lead to the same changes in the day-night cycle as globally distributed greenhouse gases do, and so on. See Foukal et al., Lockwood and Frohlich, etc. Of course, your article doesn't bother to mention any of those inconvenient facts.
The whole "other planets are warming" is among the dumbest of all skeptic arguments. The climate of other planets has about jack squat to do with the Earth's climate. Some of them hardly have any atmosphere, none have water oceans, and so on. When you actually look at what causes warming on various planets, it's not even the Sun; Martian warming is attributed to a change in global dust storms, Jupiter warming isn't even global, Pluto warming is due to it being summer there, and so on. I don't know why people ignore the large amount of data we have on Earth climate and what causes it, in favor of much sparser data from planetary climates dramatically unlike our own.
The fact is that most of the global warming theories are based on poor evidence and conjecture.
Oh, that's a "fact" is it? What establishes this fact?
we shouldn't have irrational, knee-jerk reactions to the use of fossil fuels.
It's not an irrational, knee-jerk reaction, it's one based on over 40 years of scientific and economic study. The IPCC AR4 WG1 report summarizes the state of the science. Nordhaus's A Question of Balance is a good introduction to the policy side of the issue.
If you think climate scientists don't relish debate, you obviously haven't been to a scientific conference.
What they relish, however, is honest debate by an informed opponent. As opposed to 95% of the so-called "skeptics" out there — like Plimer — who do little but repeat long-discredited misleading or wrong arguments. It's pretty much the same as the evolution-creation "debate". Evolutionary biologists argue all the time about evolutionary theory — witness the whole gradualism vs. punctuated equilibrium debate. But that doesn't mean they relish correcting creationist wackaloons, again and again, every time they drag out the same bad arguments. Bypassing the whole scientific debate in the first place by going straight to the media. The reason why creationists don't engage in real scientific debate is because their arguments are so poor they can't get published. Of course, they then cry that the orthodox gatekeepers are "silencing" them. Pretty much like most of the climate skeptics. There is legitimate scientific debate about, say, whether the equilibrium climate sensitivity to CO2 is closer to the lower or the upper end of the IPCC range. But you hardly ever see any of the real debate. Instead, you see the ridiculously wrong claims like "the geologic record proves that temperature is unrelated to CO2" or "all the global warming is an artifact of urban heat island contamination". It's a shame.
I agree that no one should be jumping to attribute this particular event to climate change. Climate change is generally slow, and something that abruptly shows up in a particular year probably isn't climate related. If the acorns have been gradually disappearing over the past few decades, that would be another matter.
That being said, most of what Plimer says about climate change is misleading at best, and dishonest nonsense at worst. (But it sure does sell books, doesn't it?) Climate change is real and is being substantially influenced by humans. You can start by reading last year's IPCC AR4 report.
For example, Plimer says:
"Climates always change," he said. Our climate has changed in cycles over millions of years, as the orbit of the planet wobbles and our distance from the sun changes, for instance, or as the sun itself produces variable amounts of radiation.
Total non sequitur. We know climate has changed over millions of years. That doesn't mean that we ought to be changing it further in ways that are to our detriment, or with consequences we can't fully predict.
And the current climate change is not due to orbital wobbles (that takes place over tens of thousands of years) nor variance in solar radiation (whose measured history in the 20th century does not agree with the actual changes we've observed).
"All of this affects climate. It is impossible to stop climate change.
No one is seriously claiming we can stop all climate change, forever. We can't even stop the current change we've caused. We can, however, slow it down to a more manageable rate.
Plimer said one of the charts, which plots atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature over 500 million years, with seemingly little correlation, demonstrates one of the "lessons from history" to which geologists are privy: "There is no relationship between CO2 and temperature."
That's an absolutely ridiculous statement, and even more ridiculous to claim that this is some well known fact among geologists. See, for example, Royer et al.'s Phanerozoic climate sensitivity estimate, or the vast amount of work on the effect of CO2 on the glacial-interglacial cycle, or the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) event (although it's still debated whether that was CO2 or methane).
Sure, you can draw a graph of CO2 vs. temperature (or rather, some paleotemperature proxy) over 500 million years, and no, they're not always going to agree with each other. That doesn't mean that CO2 is unrelated to climate. It means CO2 is not the only thing which affects climate, as Plimer himself acknowledges. Hundreds of millions of years ago, the continents were in totally different locations, the atmospheric and ocean circulation patterns were likewise altered, ice sheets were in different places or absent altogether, the distribution of vegetation was different, the sun itself was slightly weaker, and so on.
All those things affect climate. But it's very difficult to infer all the factors which were contributing that long ago. To isolate the effect of CO2, the best we can do is look at certain intervals when there were large changes, like the PETM, where the climate signal is very strong. Or we can start going closer to the present, where we have more data; we can dig ice cores back a million years and reconstruct a lot of the past climate drivers more directly then we can if we have to rely on much older ocean sediment cores. That covers many of the glacial-interglacial cycles. And we do see direct relations between temperature and CO2.
In short, it's completely dishonest to claim that you can disprove the link between CO2 and temperature using nothing but the correlation between the two. This goes the same for people who claim that you can prove the link using the glacial-interglacial correlation between the two. The link is vastly more subtle than that. Plimer would know that if talked to any of his geolog
The problem with your vision of prediction is that *many* climate scientist search for such basardized "predictions" as you call them. This is data-mining 101. They are equation mining for methods, given existing data set A, which can fill in values of data set B.
Lying about their methods does not support your position. I described to you how GCMs are calibrated. If you refuse to pay attention, this is not an indictment of their methods.
Your utopian view of what is occuring is false.
Considering I actually know some climate modelers, and I doubt you do, I'm afraid this is not a compelling argument.
Dude, when all you've got is conspiracy theory, you've lost the argument. It's just an excuse for you to dismiss arbitrarily large amounts of evidence. No matter how much study or data there is, you can simply wave it all away as biased, without any actual scientific evidence to support your conclusion.
It is because you cannot tell the difference between fitted methods and predictive methods until real predictions are made.
This is manifestly false, as I already explained.
"The Sentinel" was the inspiration for some of the early movie/novel, where they discover the monolith on the moon. Everything after (and some before, as with the apes) is new material.
I'm not mixing the two up. The original poster made a statement about dark matter. If they meant dark energy, then they mixed it up.
2001 wasn't really a Hollywood adaptation. Clarke and Kubrick worked on the plot of both film and novel together, and the novel came out after the movie. You might as well say that a core part of the novel's plot was ADDED to the novel, rather than lost in the film.
There are perfectly good examples of scientific orthodoxy trying to shut up inconvenient facts. Einstein himself tried to destroy quantum theory, when he'd helped create it with his work on the Photoelectric effect.
That's one of the worst examples you could have picked.
Einstein never tried to destroy quantum theory, and he never tried to "shut up inconvenient facts". Einstein liked quantum theory. He just didn't like the non-deterministic Copenhagen interpretation. And he wasn't just irrationally denying facts. He had damn good arguments and thought experiments to support his view, which although ultimately proven wrong, ended up advancing our understanding of quantum theory (such as the EPR paradox). Bohr was his famous opponent, who spent much of his life thinking about arguments and how Einstein would react to them, because Einstein was so good at holding his own. If he couldn't support his position, Bohr wouldn't have wasted his time.
Einstein never used his status in "the scientific orthodoxy" to attack and "shut up" support for the "unorthodox" quantum theory. Exactly the opposite. Quantum theory was the mainstream by then. Einstein drifted out of the mainstream because of his views on quantum mechanics. Not because anyone was shunning him, but because his work didn't address the experimental realities (such as a non-deterministic theory of electromagnetism, QED).
It would take a number of decades and great expense to develop and deploy a national hydrogen infrastructure. For the same amount of money and in considerably less time we can promote more efficient building codes and other energy-efficiency initiatives, carbon capture and sequestration, non-fossil energy (hydrogen is an energy storage mechanism, not an energy source), plug-in hybrid or electric vehicles (where low carbon power plants are available), etc. Read Joe Romm's book. A hydrogen transportation infrastructure takes too long and costs too much, relative to the alternatives, to be useful in reducing fossil fuel use.
Yes. We're able to measure the CMBR, but it's electromagnetic radiation. If dark energy primarily or solely interacts gravitationally, that's a world of difference. The electromagnetic and gravitational interactions have very different strengths. We can't detect the gravitational effects of the CMBR at all, since it's about 100,000 times less energetic than dark energy. Dark energy has only recently been detectable at all through its gravity. That's (one reason) why it's so hard to directly detect dark matter, too.
This will kill my karma, but I just have to ask: isn't all this "something we can't see that's messing up our physics" putting us off the possibility that our physics models may just be flat out wrong?
Yes, and that's why various dark energy theories introduce new physics (such as new types of particles or modifications to gravity).
I mean, would we have a relativity theory if Einstein had stuck to Newtonian physics and stated that the errors measured were caused bay some misterious force/matter/energy that we couldn't see?
Would we have discovered Neptune if we had tried to invent new physics instead of postulating that some unseen body was perturbing the orbit of Uranus?
Anyway, Einstein's solution was to modify Newton's theory of gravity. The leading solution is to modify Einstein's theory of gravity by adding a cosmological constant. (Actually, it's really just restoring Einstein's theory to its first published form, which originally had dark energy in it.)
If you want to reconstruct the expansion history of the universe, you need to know where various objects were located in the past.
By looking at the redshifted light from a distant star, you can tell by what factor the universe has expanded. (It's equal to the factor by which the wavelength of light is stretched.) By the Hubble distance-redshift relation, you can tell how far away the star is: in an expanding universe, faster moving and more redshifted stars are farther away. That relation only works if the universe's expansion isn't accelerating, though.
You can also tell how far away a star is if you know how bright it is. If it looks really dim compared to its true brightness, then it's far away. This method of measuring distance only works if you know how bright the star really is. There is a special kind of supernova (Type 1A) which always has the same brightness. (Or rather, there is a known relationship between its brightness and the rate at which it fades out after the nova.) If you look at those stars, you can measure their distance just from their apparent luminosity.
The problem is, the two methods don't agree with each other: some supernovae are much dimmer than the redshift Hubble relation implies. That implies that something made them accelerate away, since the Hubble relation assumes no acceleration. By comparing the two measures of distance (redshift-inferred and brightness-inferred), you can work the amount of excess acceleration. This is dark energy.
The JDEM mission is supposed to measure supernova redshift and brightness, and thus measure the strength of dark energy.
See here for more information. This article is on SNAP, the predecessor to JDEM.
Dark matter doesn't have anti-gravity effects. The whole reason why it was postulated in the first place was because of its positive gravity effects: to explain the "missing mass" contributing to galactic rotation curves.
It doesn't exactly have "anti-" light effects. The main working theory is just that it doesn't interact with light (electromagnetic radiation), because it's not electrically charged.
There's nothing wrong with epicycles as a theory. It's just Fourier analysis. The real problem with epicycles is not that they're wrong, but they're not predictive. (There's no theory to say what the Fourier coefficients ought to be.)
Dark matter is not like epicycles. You can put in assumptions about dark matter inferred from one set of observations (e.g., galaxy scale physics), and make predictions about different observations (e.g., the cosmic background radiation), and you find that the predictions work.
My problem with both theories is that they seem to be band-aids applied to current physics to tweak the result to something that matches our observations.
That's how science works. If you see something anomalous, you start by applying the most minimal possible tweak to explain the anomaly. If that doesn't work, you expand your hypotheses to be more radical until you hit upon something that works.
As it happens, the most vanilla, boring possible modification — a cosmological constant — seeems to explain our observations, agreeing with both supernova luminosity-redshift relations and the cosmic background radiation angular power spectrum. That disappoints a lot of theorists who want to come up with new dark energy theories. In fact, it's not even really a modification of existing theory. A cosmological constant has been present in Einstein's theory from the very beginning, in 1915. Einstein later took it out of his theory because he didn't see a need for it. Now we do, because we can make more sensitive measurements.
I was always a skeptic when it came to Dark Matter(I am not an astronomer, so this all technically an uniformed opinion). But now I know that it really is all a load of idle speculation coupled with incomplete investigation, and an excessive dose of hype. It only took a few minutes of googling to come up with this paper.
Oh yeah. A few minutes of Googling turns up an unpublished manuscript which overturns 80 years of research and thousands of papers. A manscript written by a guy who runs a mail-order crystal business and a former Xerox employee who studies fluid droplets. (I bet I'm going to hear "but Einstein was a patent clerk" real soon now ...) Which cites Electric Universe theory papers. That's totally credible.
It is only evidence of the need for more applied mathematics courses in astronomy undergraduate degrees.
Yeah, everyone who has worked on dark matter flunked basic undergraduate astronomy. That's probably it. I bet they can't implement Newton's law of gravity in an N-body simulation either.
I don't really feel like working through their manuscript, but it seems rather reminiscent of the Cooperstock and Tieu paper which tried to do away with dark matter by introducing a thin disk of regular matter (e.g., here). It was also reported on Slashdot, and debunked within a month. (I suspect the only reason anyone bothered to write up a rebuttal is that Cooperstock has a reputation in gravity and people were worried someone might buy it. Most of these flawed papers just get ignored.)
Space can have a gravitational effect: in general relativity, gravity gravitates. A black hole is a vacuum solution of the Einstein field equations. And if you object to it being vacuum because you can't say what's at the singularity, there are non-singular vacuum solutions too, like gravitational geons. However, they're not stable, so attempts to describe matter as pure space have failed. (Another attempt which also largely failed is to describe particles as wormhole mouths.)
Some people think that dark energy is the gravitational effect of space. See the vacuum energy interpretation of the cosmological constant. That is also different, however, from dark energy being matter, or matter being space.
Matter = space is an intriguing idea, but people have worked on it for over 50 years and haven't made it work. Maybe with a full theory of quantum gravity they could, but I really doubt that would lend any new insight into dark matter or energy, any more than it would suddenly revolutionize our understanding of electrons — the relevant physics would have to be Planck scale and mostly irrelevant except maybe at the Big Bang.
Once scientists understand that space and matter is the same thing (something you should be able to test and prove here on earth) they should understand that dark matter is just space.
Although attempts have been made to unify matter and space (see Wheeler's geon idea), they've all failed. Matter and space appear to be different. But even if they were unified, so what? What's the practical difference between "matter which is secretly some aspect of space" and "matter"? I mean, I can say that an electron is really just "space", but that doesn't prevent it from acting like matter.
it's really interesting that they aren't doing it with a clear understanding about what they're measuring or why.
They have quite concrete ideas of what they're measuring. They just don't happen to agree with your pet ideas of what they're "really" measuring.