According to all the assumptions that he built into the model but failed to include knobs for. It wouldn't replicate anything, it would 'examine similar situations with'.
Uh, yeah. You cannot actually put another Earth in a box and reproduce it. I don't think you understand the point of computer models.
Presumably, the point is that "If you'd like to replicate this experiment in a NASA climate simulation yourself", as the original poster said, you'd tweak the air pollution knob and see how that affects the climate.
What I worry about, is that in this rush to "counteract global warming" (conveniently forgetting that a few decades ago, the paranoia was about "global cooling"!)
That wasn't really a fear among the scientific community; unlike global warming, global cooling was something that you saw in the media but didn't really see in the literature. This is a nice historical review.
we'll both disrupt and accelerate the normal cycles
Merely reducing CO2 levels back to pre-industrial levels is not likely to worsen the natural cycles compared to letting them increase without constraint. Unmitigated CO2 potentially could disrupt the ice age cycle.
Geoengineering efforts like the pollution being discussed here could make things worse, but given its short residence time in the atmosphere, probably doesn't matter on long time scales. But it could cause problems on a sub-annual time scale just as you fear. If you stop doing it, the air clears up all you get hit by a whole bunch of global warming all at once.
Considering how little we understand long-term weather and climate, I'd say it's smarter to keep our hands off the controls, lest we crash the planet BY our efforts at course corrections.
Emitting CO2 at increasing rates is keeping hands ON the controls. Reducing them back to more natural levels isn't going to hurt. CO2 levels don't respond quickly in the atmosphere given the speed of the carbon cycles.
Our unintentional contributions to the atmosphere haven't caused any huge changes on a millennial scale.
Even if we stopped emitting CO2 today, a lot of that CO2 will indeed be around on millennial scale, and that's only going to get worse.
Global warming is the y2k of this decade. It's about creating a problem/minor panic and a cause that can generate new markets and flow megabucks for things that just aren't worth it.
Pretty much all the world's leading climate economists find that CO2 mitigation passes a cost benefit test. Look at Nordhaus, Weitzman, Yohe, Tol, Stern, and so on.
If you've got a scientific or economic argument for why global warming isn't a problem, let's hear it.
The other really is a lie propagated by people wanting to take down capitalism.
Oh for fark's sake. You are way out in tinfoil country. Your political paranoia has nothing to do with the scientific evidence. If you've got a scientific argument to make, let's hear it.
How much would melting all the world's ice raise ocean levels? I've seen figures as low as a few INCHES.
Melting the world's sea ice would do little, but that's not what people worry about. It's the land ice. Melting all that would raise ocean levels a couple hundred meters. Of course, that's not going to happen, but the point is that sea ice is not what matters to sea level.
How much would be offset by the fact that when it's warmer, more water evaporates? That's going to come down as rain somewhere, and some of it in areas where it won't become immediate runoff.
Right, there would be an overall net increase in precipitation. Unfortunately, that's just the net, and some already-arid areas are likely to get screwed. Worse, we can't predict regional precipitation very well, so we don't know who gets screwed, although we can make some educated guesses. In the presence of uncertainty, it's better to keep things from changing too much, if you don't know if they're going to change for better or worse. The status quo is the safest choice. Also, net is not the whole story, you also care about variance. Even in places that get more total precipitation over the course of a year, they (somewhat paradoxically) are often predicted to get longer droughts as well as heavier floods, because the precipitation becomes more variable too.
Most who call themselves environmentalists today are extremist whackjobs.
No, they're just the ones who get all the attention.
Real, science based environmentalism has been sidelined for the last 20 years in favour of the politicized variety.
You're not even paying attention.
Climate change is a real, recurring, natural phenomenon.
It's also a manmade phenomenon.
Human induced global warming is greatly exaggerated.
And your revised scientific estimate of climate sensitivity to CO2 is derived how and published where?
IPCC still won't explain the fudge factors they had to include to make their models work.
What are you talking about? You can download the source code for many of these models yourself. There are plenty of papers documenting their design. You don't even need a fancy model to predict global average temperature; a simple two equation model does pretty well, when you calibrate it against observations.
No, you've got a whole mix of arguments, which don't distinguish between paleo, historical, and instrumental records.
Namely that over millions of years (for you old earth people) the levels of CO2 fluctuated separately from temperature and was much higher then we have now.
We have plenty of examples of very close correlation between CO2 and temperature, not just limited to the glacial-interglacial cycle. Long term paleoclimate estimates get pretty close to modern estimates of climate sensitivity; e.g., see Royer's paper on the Phanerozoic. CO2 and temperature don't always correlate, though, because there are lots of other influences on climate. On long timescales volcanism becomes much more important, you have to pay attention to geology as erosion changes the orography and tectonics move the continents and ocean circulations around, which has a pretty drastic effect on climate. You can't conclude something about CO2 and temperature unless you know what all the other forcings and geological changes were. For relatively recent history (the Pleistocene) we can reconstruct a lot of these things from core samples, but that's really hard further back.
In addition what we have now is not even recently historic as data from 1812 taken from air samples is thrown out by the IPCC.
Beck is one of the idiots I was talking about. The whole reason why Keeling became famous in the 1950-60s was because he conclusively showed that the CO2 measurement techniques that Beck relies upon are completely bogus. Go back and read Keeling's original papers for some oblique criticism of all the things other people were doing wrong. (Not testing samples against a standard for calibration, contaminating their own air samples, taking samples in the middle of high-CO2 cities, and so on.) That data wasn't just thrown out by the IPCC; it was shown to be wrong 30 years before the IPCC even existed. Not only are the methods wrong, but if you take the data at face value, it implies CO2 fluxes which are so absurdly high that you'd have to be wiping out and replanting most of the vegetation on earth within the span of a decade. Such a flux would change the isotopic composition of the atmosphere dramatically, which is not seen. It disagrees with the ice cores as well as the instruments. His estimates of temperature forcing of CO2 are totally inconsistent with each other from decade to decade. It is gibberish.
Now tell me, why do you ignore 60 years of scientific research and place your faith in a paper written by a high school teacher which wasn't published in any respected scientific journal?
Get with the times. Beck isn't even taken seriously by other skeptics. The real debate is not about what CO2 levels are or whether CO2 induces a measurable greenhouse effect. The debate is about how strong the climate feedbacks are, that is, the extent to which the greenhouse effect may be amplified by other factors.
Believe me, I've read all the idiotic denialist arguments a dozen times each. They don't get any better upon re-reading, and you're not even citing the smart skeptics. If you'd like to pick one argument out and discuss it, feel free.
Yeah, that's why people talk about things like a progressive graded tax, tax shifting, or tax-and-dividend. (I don't know what the cap-and-trade equivalents of those strategies are.)
If global climate change were false, we wouldn't find out about for 50-100 years after due to the entire industries and politics that are structured around it.
Give me a break. It's not that hard to look at temperature observations and compare them to predictions. You have to wait about 30 years before the signal comes unequivocably out of the noise, not 50-100.
The global warming as defined; feel free to pick your definition it seems the experts love to change it up a lot too;
It's defined as an increase in global average temperature, which is the same definition it's always had, although there are plenty of other effects other than that.
is not a hoax but a carefully planned wealth and power transfer.
In other words, it's a hoax.
Did you ever wonder why the interest in it spiked even with proof we haven't warmed in years but actually may have cooled?
We haven't cooled. The trend is current below average, but that's the point of averages: sometimes you're below, and sometimes you're above. The decade before this, we were above average.
If you want to present any other scientific reasons why anthropogenic global warming is wrong, feel free.
I know we can influence it but when I see the results that show one Pacific volcano was measurable beyond doubt
What are you talking about?
Yes, volcanos have a measurable, temporary effect on climate. This is well known and included in all climate models. What's your point?
yet its passed over like how all the planets warmed too.
That's got to be the worst argument against AGW ever. You pass over all the vast amounts of information we have about Earth's climate which support AGW, and try to conclude things from the sparse data regarding other poorly understood planetary climates.
It's not even true that "all the planets have warmed". Some have, and you hear about that from the skeptics, but you never hear about the rest. Wonder why? And then the whole thing falls apart when you look at causes. The only factor that all the planets have in common is the Sun, but the Sun fails to explain recent climate change both here and on other planets; it disagrees in magnitude, rate, and timing. Mars has experienced some short term warming, which when you get down to it is probably due to their dust storms, and definitely isn't due to the Sun. Jupiter is warming in some places and cooling in others, due to a change in its circulation pattern. Pluto warmed because it's summer there.
Go figure, the fact is that the whackjobs lost their credibility when they kept moving the line. They then fell back on total scare tactics, TWENTY YEARS TILL DOOM, EIGHTEEN YEARS, TWELVE, hell some even go as low as TEN YEARS AND WERE DOOMED!
I hate to break it to you, but the predictions of the first IPCC report are not that different from the predictions today. See here for one comparison to predictions made 20 years ago.
The goal of AiT wasn't to present a detailed cost-benefit analysis, but to make the point that there are hidden costs associated with CO2 emission that are currently ignored when people try to maximize profits.
I don't think Gore himself really advocates "all or nothing". Until recently he's been pretty mainstream on mitigation policy: you have to do some of it, but you don't do 100% since that's too expensive.
Gore has come out with that "decarbonize in 10 years" plan recently, but I honestly don't think he believes that's the best policy; I think it's an attempt to shift the Overton window.
True, CO2 mitigation would have high costs, but so would climate change. The benefits of mitigation outweigh the costs, but mitigation isn't very effective unless all the major players are on board. That's the real problem.
and points the way to a solution that nobody wants to consider
Lots of people have considered it. There was a big workshop at Harvard last year.
we need to pollute the air MORE to cool the planet... and yes, we need to reduce greenhouse gases as well, but blocking out the sun is an important part of global cooling efforts.
No, this "aerosol geoengineering" is a bad idea, for at least four different reasons; see this post. You'd only want to do it as a last resort, if you were in danger of crossing a very dangerous or irreversible climate threshold.
The trouble I see with the argument of "Soot helps!", is that soot is temporary, eventually washing out of the air. CO2 is not. CO2 is rapidly saturating it's sinks and is steadily increasing in the atmosphere. So even if we tried to use lots of particulate matter to dim things, eventually the ever accumulating CO2 would swamp things out.
Exactly right. Even worse, if we ever wanted to stop emitting particulate matter like soot, we can't: we have to keep doing it to counteract the CO2. And if we stopped suddenly, we'd get all that greenhouse effect at once, which would be even worse than spreading it out over time.
The other bit of warning from the Nova episode is that this cooling is localized to the downstream of the polluters. So by creating localized cooling you can really screw up historic weather patterns.
Right. The problem is that you're trying to exactly cancel out one effect with another effect, and the two effects don't behave in the same physical way. So it's really hard to keep in balance at all places and at all times. Sometimes you're going to get gaps where they don't exactly cancel, and people still get screwed. Maybe even worse if there are big spatial gradients in the cancellations.
Plus, if you're shooting stuff into the atmosphere you have to worry about the usual chemical effects like acid rain, ozone depletion, and other atmospheric chemistry. Also, the oceans still acidify as CO2 accumulates even if the climate doesn't change.
Exactly! We need to reduce particulate matter and harmful gases from the environment but CO2 is a natural part of the environment
Many things are part of the natural environment but grow dangerous if there's too much (or too little) of them.
and we are in a time of low CO2 levels historically
We are already at higher CO2 levels than any time during which the human species has existed. (If I recall correctly. It's true at least for the last 800,000 years, and I think for the whole Pleistocene.)
CO2 levels were higher in the Cretaceous, but that doesn't mean that humans want to live in that climate.
and more CO2 just helps the plants out.
And what happens to plants when climate zones shift substantially in a single century?
CO2 helps out the C3 photosynthesizers, but doesn't do much to the C4 plants. Even for C3 plants, carbon fertilization isn't usually a huge boost, and eventually it gets overwhelmed by other rate-limiting factors like water and nitrogen availability. CO2-fertilized crops can actually grow bigger but have smaller nutritious content.
Even if you ignore climate change, increased CO2 levels are bad news for many ocean species, as they upset the pH balance.
Not that we should go overboard or anything but this sequestering CO2 crap is the dumbest move ever.
Except that "fighting global warming" isn't about cleaner air.
That depends on what you mean by "cleaner air" I suppose, but note that one way to get cleaner air is to burn less fossil fuel, which also reduces CO2. (Of course there are other ways to reduce pollution which leave CO2 emissions the same.)
It is about reducing "greenhouse gases", primarily CO2, which is an essential part of the atmosphere.
No one is talking about sucking all the CO2 out of the atmosphere so all the plants die. They're talking about reducing it back towards pre-industrial levels. (Note I say "towards"; it's not feasible to reduce it all the way down to 280 ppm this century.)
So, it does matter if "global warming" is true, because people like Al Gore are asking us to cripple our economies to reduce CO2 emissions,
Reducing CO2 emissions won't "cripple the economy". That's just the conservative version of "global warming alarmism".
I'd recommend reading William Nordhaus's new book, "A Question of Balance". Nordhaus is an economist at Yale and one of the leading experts on climate economics. A free draft manuscript is here. His recommendations are more conservative than the Stern Report someone else cited. But he still concludes that from a cost-benefit perspective, we should be implementing substantially more CO2 reductions than we currently are. That's also the conclusion of pretty much every other climate economist who works on the problem, although they disagree to various extents about the exact reductions needed and the best way to get there. Note that economists are not generally in favor of crippling the economy.
Which is a question that I rarely seen discussed. If Global Warming is true, is it really a problem?
You can start by reading the Nordhaus book I cited, and also the IPCC Working Group 2 report. (Also the Working Group 3 report for what should be done about it.)
Since MOND does revert to GR in high Gravity situations so it will support frame dragging.
Don't confuse MOND and TeVeS. MOND is MOdified Newtonian Dynamics. It doesn't revert to GR or any relativistic theory in high gravity situations; in fact, it grows more different from those theories in strong gravity. TeVeS is a relativistic theory which has MOND as a particular limit (and Newtonian dynamics as another). It probably approaches GR in some other limit (decoupling of the scalar and vector fields?), but whether it agrees with all observations in strong gravity situations is, as you say, unknown. It doesn't automatically agree with GR, so unless someone has performed the frame dragging calculation specifically, we can't say how much frame dragging it may predict.
Well Bullet Cluster or any other cluster is a problem for MOND. But the Bullet Cluster is also a problem for Dark Matter. The velocity of the Cluster is much faster than GR can provide, which MOND can easily handle.
(GR doesn't have anything to do with it per se; Newtonian gravity predicts the same thing as GR on galactic scales.)
The Bullet Cluster is a much more severe problem for MOND than dark matter; you can't even qualitatively explain the divergence between the galaxy and the lensing with MOND. The Brownstein and Moffat paper you're alluding do doesn't even attempt to address that elephant in the room, which is the problem with MOND and the Bullet Cluster by far. I've also read comments on Cosmic Variance that they assume some coincidental alignments of the galaxies and the result barely reaches statistical significance, but I'm no expert.
Then again, there are the other problems with getting MOND to hold on a number of other scales, which myself and others have discussed elsewhere in these comments.
I actually liken MOND to Keplers laws. It shows how the matter moves. If GR cannot reproduce it, then there is a need for a new theory.
Er, no. MOND doesn't show anything about how matter moves. We observe how matter moves and theorize explanations of it (dark matter, MOND, etc.) There is more than one way to explain observations. And I don't see this as even remotely a thorn in the side of GR, or even much so for dark matter. Galaxies are messy. In the case of the Bullet Cluster, it happens to have a geometry which is a smoking gun against MOND (or at least MOND with no dark matter), but it's much less conclusive about dark matter.
The other problem is that GR and QM don't work well.
That almost certainly doesn't have anything to do with MOND, given the scales at which quantum gravity is relevant (which is not astrophysical!). It certainly doesn't imply something like MOND should be true.
It could be that both MOND and DM are correct.
That would be the most scientifically interesting outcome. But I don't think it's very likely. Even if GR needed to be modified on astrophysical scales, I highly doubt anything like MOND would be it.
DM may exist in significant quantities in Clusters while MOND is sufficient at the Galactic levels.
It's really hard to construct a hybrid theory like that, because if you reduce the amount of dark matter in galaxies by introducing MOND, you completely screw up early universe structure formation. Then you have to explain why all that dark matter in clusters didn't clump in galaxies. You can turn back to hot dark matter, but I think that's going to screw up cosmology. The reason why dark matter has become the dominant theory is because it consistently explains a lot of otherwise unrelated phenomena. It's hard to change one part of it without making things worse.
Nevertheless, it is rarely reported that a lot of the forcings introduced are guesswork to fit the past climate data and that there is more than one forcing profile that can fit that data. Because this is skipped it's really easy to make the results look dodgy.
It's not skipped.
It's usually not feasible to run models with every possible combination of forcing, but people use several different forcing reconstructions as a proxy for this uncertainty, and still arrive at the same conclusions. And sometimes it is possible, for the simpler models, which are adequate if all you care about is global or hemispheric annual temperature.
In particular, to see a pretty comprehensive error analysis for both natural and anthropogenic forcings, see last years J. Climate article on climate sensitivity by Tomassini et al. This is even including very wide (factor of 2) uncertainties in some of the forcing profiles, like the indirect effect of sulfate aerosols. This is for the instrumental records where we've had good measurements of most of these since the 1950s or so, and still have pretty decent reconstructions earlier in the century.
When I read it, that disclaimer did NOT note that it was not the policy of APS to publish without peer review of some sort.
It's just a forum newsletter, not an academic journal. I've never heard of a peer reviewed newsletter.
It's another weakness of the global warming side that any arguments against them tend to be ridiculed rather than rationally refuted.
Ha. You should see the river of ridicule that runs freely on the skeptic blogs.
To the non-expert, on casual reading, the paper looks convincing. Rather than say "Oh, but he's a journalist" a more detailed response might be appropriate.
A detailed response helps, and I linked to responses. However, "Oh, but he's a journalist" alone should be a sufficient warning sign that it's not something you should be supporting, unless you yourself are an expert and know all the pros and cons. I know everyone on Slashdot likes to be egalitarian and root for scientific rebels, but in reality random people just don't overturn decades of research with a casual analysis, at least not anything that's been really intensively studied. People forget that while Einstein was a "rebel", he was also deeply trained in physics...
Slashdot Mirror
According to all the assumptions that he built into the model but failed to include knobs for. It wouldn't replicate anything, it would 'examine similar situations with'.
Uh, yeah. You cannot actually put another Earth in a box and reproduce it. I don't think you understand the point of computer models.
Presumably, the point is that "If you'd like to replicate this experiment in a NASA climate simulation yourself", as the original poster said, you'd tweak the air pollution knob and see how that affects the climate.
What I worry about, is that in this rush to "counteract global warming" (conveniently forgetting that a few decades ago, the paranoia was about "global cooling"!)
That wasn't really a fear among the scientific community; unlike global warming, global cooling was something that you saw in the media but didn't really see in the literature. This is a nice historical review.
we'll both disrupt and accelerate the normal cycles
Merely reducing CO2 levels back to pre-industrial levels is not likely to worsen the natural cycles compared to letting them increase without constraint. Unmitigated CO2 potentially could disrupt the ice age cycle.
Geoengineering efforts like the pollution being discussed here could make things worse, but given its short residence time in the atmosphere, probably doesn't matter on long time scales. But it could cause problems on a sub-annual time scale just as you fear. If you stop doing it, the air clears up all you get hit by a whole bunch of global warming all at once.
Considering how little we understand long-term weather and climate, I'd say it's smarter to keep our hands off the controls, lest we crash the planet BY our efforts at course corrections.
Emitting CO2 at increasing rates is keeping hands ON the controls. Reducing them back to more natural levels isn't going to hurt. CO2 levels don't respond quickly in the atmosphere given the speed of the carbon cycles.
Our unintentional contributions to the atmosphere haven't caused any huge changes on a millennial scale.
Even if we stopped emitting CO2 today, a lot of that CO2 will indeed be around on millennial scale, and that's only going to get worse.
The knobs are, by definition, the assumptions that are exposed.
If you're complaining that it doesn't have all the knobs you want, just say that.
The purpose of turning the knobs is to see what effect various assumptions have.
There are assumptions built into every model. That's what makes it a model.
Global warming is the y2k of this decade. It's about creating a problem/minor panic and a cause that can generate new markets and flow megabucks for things that just aren't worth it.
Pretty much all the world's leading climate economists find that CO2 mitigation passes a cost benefit test. Look at Nordhaus, Weitzman, Yohe, Tol, Stern, and so on.
If you've got a scientific or economic argument for why global warming isn't a problem, let's hear it.
The other really is a lie propagated by people wanting to take down capitalism.
Oh for fark's sake. You are way out in tinfoil country. Your political paranoia has nothing to do with the scientific evidence. If you've got a scientific argument to make, let's hear it.
How much would melting all the world's ice raise ocean levels? I've seen figures as low as a few INCHES.
Melting the world's sea ice would do little, but that's not what people worry about. It's the land ice. Melting all that would raise ocean levels a couple hundred meters. Of course, that's not going to happen, but the point is that sea ice is not what matters to sea level.
How much would be offset by the fact that when it's warmer, more water evaporates? That's going to come down as rain somewhere, and some of it in areas where it won't become immediate runoff.
Right, there would be an overall net increase in precipitation. Unfortunately, that's just the net, and some already-arid areas are likely to get screwed. Worse, we can't predict regional precipitation very well, so we don't know who gets screwed, although we can make some educated guesses. In the presence of uncertainty, it's better to keep things from changing too much, if you don't know if they're going to change for better or worse. The status quo is the safest choice. Also, net is not the whole story, you also care about variance. Even in places that get more total precipitation over the course of a year, they (somewhat paradoxically) are often predicted to get longer droughts as well as heavier floods, because the precipitation becomes more variable too.
Do you mean the years immediately after WW2, or all the years after up to today? WW2 CO2 levels were about 310 ppm compared to about 380 today.
Most who call themselves environmentalists today are extremist whackjobs.
No, they're just the ones who get all the attention.
Real, science based environmentalism has been sidelined for the last 20 years in favour of the politicized variety.
You're not even paying attention.
Climate change is a real, recurring, natural phenomenon.
It's also a manmade phenomenon.
Human induced global warming is greatly exaggerated.
And your revised scientific estimate of climate sensitivity to CO2 is derived how and published where?
IPCC still won't explain the fudge factors they had to include to make their models work.
What are you talking about? You can download the source code for many of these models yourself. There are plenty of papers documenting their design. You don't even need a fancy model to predict global average temperature; a simple two equation model does pretty well, when you calibrate it against observations.
All the arguments I'm talking about are the same.
No, you've got a whole mix of arguments, which don't distinguish between paleo, historical, and instrumental records.
Namely that over millions of years (for you old earth people) the levels of CO2 fluctuated separately from temperature and was much higher then we have now.
We have plenty of examples of very close correlation between CO2 and temperature, not just limited to the glacial-interglacial cycle. Long term paleoclimate estimates get pretty close to modern estimates of climate sensitivity; e.g., see Royer's paper on the Phanerozoic. CO2 and temperature don't always correlate, though, because there are lots of other influences on climate. On long timescales volcanism becomes much more important, you have to pay attention to geology as erosion changes the orography and tectonics move the continents and ocean circulations around, which has a pretty drastic effect on climate. You can't conclude something about CO2 and temperature unless you know what all the other forcings and geological changes were. For relatively recent history (the Pleistocene) we can reconstruct a lot of these things from core samples, but that's really hard further back.
In addition what we have now is not even recently historic as data from 1812 taken from air samples is thrown out by the IPCC.
Beck is one of the idiots I was talking about. The whole reason why Keeling became famous in the 1950-60s was because he conclusively showed that the CO2 measurement techniques that Beck relies upon are completely bogus. Go back and read Keeling's original papers for some oblique criticism of all the things other people were doing wrong. (Not testing samples against a standard for calibration, contaminating their own air samples, taking samples in the middle of high-CO2 cities, and so on.) That data wasn't just thrown out by the IPCC; it was shown to be wrong 30 years before the IPCC even existed. Not only are the methods wrong, but if you take the data at face value, it implies CO2 fluxes which are so absurdly high that you'd have to be wiping out and replanting most of the vegetation on earth within the span of a decade. Such a flux would change the isotopic composition of the atmosphere dramatically, which is not seen. It disagrees with the ice cores as well as the instruments. His estimates of temperature forcing of CO2 are totally inconsistent with each other from decade to decade. It is gibberish.
Now tell me, why do you ignore 60 years of scientific research and place your faith in a paper written by a high school teacher which wasn't published in any respected scientific journal?
Get with the times. Beck isn't even taken seriously by other skeptics. The real debate is not about what CO2 levels are or whether CO2 induces a measurable greenhouse effect. The debate is about how strong the climate feedbacks are, that is, the extent to which the greenhouse effect may be amplified by other factors.
Believe me, I've read all the idiotic denialist arguments a dozen times each. They don't get any better upon re-reading, and you're not even citing the smart skeptics. If you'd like to pick one argument out and discuss it, feel free.
Yeah, that's why people talk about things like a progressive graded tax, tax shifting, or tax-and-dividend. (I don't know what the cap-and-trade equivalents of those strategies are.)
If global climate change were false, we wouldn't find out about for 50-100 years after due to the entire industries and politics that are structured around it.
Give me a break. It's not that hard to look at temperature observations and compare them to predictions. You have to wait about 30 years before the signal comes unequivocably out of the noise, not 50-100.
The global warming as defined; feel free to pick your definition it seems the experts love to change it up a lot too;
It's defined as an increase in global average temperature, which is the same definition it's always had, although there are plenty of other effects other than that.
is not a hoax but a carefully planned wealth and power transfer.
In other words, it's a hoax.
Did you ever wonder why the interest in it spiked even with proof we haven't warmed in years but actually may have cooled?
We haven't cooled. The trend is current below average, but that's the point of averages: sometimes you're below, and sometimes you're above. The decade before this, we were above average.
If you want to present any other scientific reasons why anthropogenic global warming is wrong, feel free.
I know we can influence it but when I see the results that show one Pacific volcano was measurable beyond doubt
What are you talking about?
Yes, volcanos have a measurable, temporary effect on climate. This is well known and included in all climate models. What's your point?
yet its passed over like how all the planets warmed too.
That's got to be the worst argument against AGW ever. You pass over all the vast amounts of information we have about Earth's climate which support AGW, and try to conclude things from the sparse data regarding other poorly understood planetary climates.
It's not even true that "all the planets have warmed". Some have, and you hear about that from the skeptics, but you never hear about the rest. Wonder why? And then the whole thing falls apart when you look at causes. The only factor that all the planets have in common is the Sun, but the Sun fails to explain recent climate change both here and on other planets; it disagrees in magnitude, rate, and timing. Mars has experienced some short term warming, which when you get down to it is probably due to their dust storms, and definitely isn't due to the Sun. Jupiter is warming in some places and cooling in others, due to a change in its circulation pattern. Pluto warmed because it's summer there.
Go figure, the fact is that the whackjobs lost their credibility when they kept moving the line. They then fell back on total scare tactics, TWENTY YEARS TILL DOOM, EIGHTEEN YEARS, TWELVE, hell some even go as low as TEN YEARS AND WERE DOOMED!
I hate to break it to you, but the predictions of the first IPCC report are not that different from the predictions today. See here for one comparison to predictions made 20 years ago.
The goal of AiT wasn't to present a detailed cost-benefit analysis, but to make the point that there are hidden costs associated with CO2 emission that are currently ignored when people try to maximize profits.
I don't think Gore himself really advocates "all or nothing". Until recently he's been pretty mainstream on mitigation policy: you have to do some of it, but you don't do 100% since that's too expensive.
Gore has come out with that "decarbonize in 10 years" plan recently, but I honestly don't think he believes that's the best policy; I think it's an attempt to shift the Overton window.
True, CO2 mitigation would have high costs, but so would climate change. The benefits of mitigation outweigh the costs, but mitigation isn't very effective unless all the major players are on board. That's the real problem.
and points the way to a solution that nobody wants to consider
Lots of people have considered it. There was a big workshop at Harvard last year.
we need to pollute the air MORE to cool the planet... and yes, we need to reduce greenhouse gases as well, but blocking out the sun is an important part of global cooling efforts.
No, this "aerosol geoengineering" is a bad idea, for at least four different reasons; see this post. You'd only want to do it as a last resort, if you were in danger of crossing a very dangerous or irreversible climate threshold.
The trouble I see with the argument of "Soot helps!", is that soot is temporary, eventually washing out of the air. CO2 is not. CO2 is rapidly saturating it's sinks and is steadily increasing in the atmosphere. So even if we tried to use lots of particulate matter to dim things, eventually the ever accumulating CO2 would swamp things out.
Exactly right. Even worse, if we ever wanted to stop emitting particulate matter like soot, we can't: we have to keep doing it to counteract the CO2. And if we stopped suddenly, we'd get all that greenhouse effect at once, which would be even worse than spreading it out over time.
The other bit of warning from the Nova episode is that this cooling is localized to the downstream of the polluters. So by creating localized cooling you can really screw up historic weather patterns.
Right. The problem is that you're trying to exactly cancel out one effect with another effect, and the two effects don't behave in the same physical way. So it's really hard to keep in balance at all places and at all times. Sometimes you're going to get gaps where they don't exactly cancel, and people still get screwed. Maybe even worse if there are big spatial gradients in the cancellations.
Plus, if you're shooting stuff into the atmosphere you have to worry about the usual chemical effects like acid rain, ozone depletion, and other atmospheric chemistry. Also, the oceans still acidify as CO2 accumulates even if the climate doesn't change.
Exactly! We need to reduce particulate matter and harmful gases from the environment but CO2 is a natural part of the environment
Many things are part of the natural environment but grow dangerous if there's too much (or too little) of them.
and we are in a time of low CO2 levels historically
We are already at higher CO2 levels than any time during which the human species has existed. (If I recall correctly. It's true at least for the last 800,000 years, and I think for the whole Pleistocene.)
CO2 levels were higher in the Cretaceous, but that doesn't mean that humans want to live in that climate.
and more CO2 just helps the plants out.
And what happens to plants when climate zones shift substantially in a single century?
CO2 helps out the C3 photosynthesizers, but doesn't do much to the C4 plants. Even for C3 plants, carbon fertilization isn't usually a huge boost, and eventually it gets overwhelmed by other rate-limiting factors like water and nitrogen availability. CO2-fertilized crops can actually grow bigger but have smaller nutritious content.
Even if you ignore climate change, increased CO2 levels are bad news for many ocean species, as they upset the pH balance.
Not that we should go overboard or anything but this sequestering CO2 crap is the dumbest move ever.
You haven't exactly made a compelling case here.
Except that "fighting global warming" isn't about cleaner air.
That depends on what you mean by "cleaner air" I suppose, but note that one way to get cleaner air is to burn less fossil fuel, which also reduces CO2. (Of course there are other ways to reduce pollution which leave CO2 emissions the same.)
It is about reducing "greenhouse gases", primarily CO2, which is an essential part of the atmosphere.
No one is talking about sucking all the CO2 out of the atmosphere so all the plants die. They're talking about reducing it back towards pre-industrial levels. (Note I say "towards"; it's not feasible to reduce it all the way down to 280 ppm this century.)
So, it does matter if "global warming" is true, because people like Al Gore are asking us to cripple our economies to reduce CO2 emissions,
Reducing CO2 emissions won't "cripple the economy". That's just the conservative version of "global warming alarmism".
I'd recommend reading William Nordhaus's new book, "A Question of Balance". Nordhaus is an economist at Yale and one of the leading experts on climate economics. A free draft manuscript is here. His recommendations are more conservative than the Stern Report someone else cited. But he still concludes that from a cost-benefit perspective, we should be implementing substantially more CO2 reductions than we currently are. That's also the conclusion of pretty much every other climate economist who works on the problem, although they disagree to various extents about the exact reductions needed and the best way to get there. Note that economists are not generally in favor of crippling the economy.
Which is a question that I rarely seen discussed. If Global Warming is true, is it really a problem?
You can start by reading the Nordhaus book I cited, and also the IPCC Working Group 2 report. (Also the Working Group 3 report for what should be done about it.)
Since MOND does revert to GR in high Gravity situations so it will support frame dragging.
Don't confuse MOND and TeVeS. MOND is MOdified Newtonian Dynamics. It doesn't revert to GR or any relativistic theory in high gravity situations; in fact, it grows more different from those theories in strong gravity. TeVeS is a relativistic theory which has MOND as a particular limit (and Newtonian dynamics as another). It probably approaches GR in some other limit (decoupling of the scalar and vector fields?), but whether it agrees with all observations in strong gravity situations is, as you say, unknown. It doesn't automatically agree with GR, so unless someone has performed the frame dragging calculation specifically, we can't say how much frame dragging it may predict.
Well Bullet Cluster or any other cluster is a problem for MOND. But the Bullet Cluster is also a problem for Dark Matter. The velocity of the Cluster is much faster than GR can provide, which MOND can easily handle.
(GR doesn't have anything to do with it per se; Newtonian gravity predicts the same thing as GR on galactic scales.)
The Bullet Cluster is a much more severe problem for MOND than dark matter; you can't even qualitatively explain the divergence between the galaxy and the lensing with MOND. The Brownstein and Moffat paper you're alluding do doesn't even attempt to address that elephant in the room, which is the problem with MOND and the Bullet Cluster by far. I've also read comments on Cosmic Variance that they assume some coincidental alignments of the galaxies and the result barely reaches statistical significance, but I'm no expert.
Then again, there are the other problems with getting MOND to hold on a number of other scales, which myself and others have discussed elsewhere in these comments.
I actually liken MOND to Keplers laws. It shows how the matter moves. If GR cannot reproduce it, then there is a need for a new theory.
Er, no. MOND doesn't show anything about how matter moves. We observe how matter moves and theorize explanations of it (dark matter, MOND, etc.) There is more than one way to explain observations. And I don't see this as even remotely a thorn in the side of GR, or even much so for dark matter. Galaxies are messy. In the case of the Bullet Cluster, it happens to have a geometry which is a smoking gun against MOND (or at least MOND with no dark matter), but it's much less conclusive about dark matter.
The other problem is that GR and QM don't work well.
That almost certainly doesn't have anything to do with MOND, given the scales at which quantum gravity is relevant (which is not astrophysical!). It certainly doesn't imply something like MOND should be true.
It could be that both MOND and DM are correct.
That would be the most scientifically interesting outcome. But I don't think it's very likely. Even if GR needed to be modified on astrophysical scales, I highly doubt anything like MOND would be it.
DM may exist in significant quantities in Clusters while MOND is sufficient at the Galactic levels.
It's really hard to construct a hybrid theory like that, because if you reduce the amount of dark matter in galaxies by introducing MOND, you completely screw up early universe structure formation. Then you have to explain why all that dark matter in clusters didn't clump in galaxies. You can turn back to hot dark matter, but I think that's going to screw up cosmology. The reason why dark matter has become the dominant theory is because it consistently explains a lot of otherwise unrelated phenomena. It's hard to change one part of it without making things worse.
Nevertheless, it is rarely reported that a lot of the forcings introduced are guesswork to fit the past climate data and that there is more than one forcing profile that can fit that data. Because this is skipped it's really easy to make the results look dodgy.
It's not skipped.
It's usually not feasible to run models with every possible combination of forcing, but people use several different forcing reconstructions as a proxy for this uncertainty, and still arrive at the same conclusions. And sometimes it is possible, for the simpler models, which are adequate if all you care about is global or hemispheric annual temperature.
In particular, to see a pretty comprehensive error analysis for both natural and anthropogenic forcings, see last years J. Climate article on climate sensitivity by Tomassini et al. This is even including very wide (factor of 2) uncertainties in some of the forcing profiles, like the indirect effect of sulfate aerosols. This is for the instrumental records where we've had good measurements of most of these since the 1950s or so, and still have pretty decent reconstructions earlier in the century.
When I read it, that disclaimer did NOT note that it was not the policy of APS to publish without peer review of some sort.
It's just a forum newsletter, not an academic journal. I've never heard of a peer reviewed newsletter.
It's another weakness of the global warming side that any arguments against them tend to be ridiculed rather than rationally refuted.
Ha. You should see the river of ridicule that runs freely on the skeptic blogs.
To the non-expert, on casual reading, the paper looks convincing. Rather than say "Oh, but he's a journalist" a more detailed response might be appropriate.
A detailed response helps, and I linked to responses. However, "Oh, but he's a journalist" alone should be a sufficient warning sign that it's not something you should be supporting, unless you yourself are an expert and know all the pros and cons. I know everyone on Slashdot likes to be egalitarian and root for scientific rebels, but in reality random people just don't overturn decades of research with a casual analysis, at least not anything that's been really intensively studied. People forget that while Einstein was a "rebel", he was also deeply trained in physics...