Competition speeds up technology development. If the technology isn't there then it does you no good to regulate. If there's no monetary incentive to develop technology, it does no good to compete.
Simply telling companies to not pollute (or taxing them) is easy, coming up with solutions is the hard part. That's nice, but it is not an argument about the relative merits of the free market vs. regulation.
If the government has been regulating all this time, why are these companies not completely clean?
Another specious argument. The issue is what results in cleaner companies.
We need to work towards deregulation and free markets and ending all emissions into public spaces that do not have proven counterbalances. I know you believe that, but you haven't actually made a case for deregulation and free markets solving the global warming problem.
I don't see an emergency like you do though. There isn't an "emergency"; we're not all going to die. We will, however, suffer consequences for unabated emissions.
What new inventions or technology has France come up with in the last 30 years? Again, irrelevant to the fact that France has superior emissions standards. I am sure you want to insist that the price for having cleaner emissions is technological and economic failure, but you haven't made that case either.
Pollution regulation is different than sector regulation. The government basically controlled the Utility companies. Little progress was made because the companies did not have to compete for customers. Thus they used old technology (because it wasn't advancing) that was more likely to pollute. The government was the cause and is to blame. Competition for customers was not their incentive for reducing pollution; regulation was. Both the energy sector and industry today have even less incentive to voluntarily reduce emissions, since the costs are all long-term and they're largely concerned with the short-term bottom line. Some of the oil companies like BP and Shell have started taking action about global warming; Exxon-Mobil is a notable holdout. Guess which one is the US-owned company?
So this blame or tax America more stuff is just ridiculous. No, it isn't. America has done good things and bad things, and it's ridiculous to ignore the bad things just because there have also been good things.
If the US wants to, say, cut foreign aid, that is its right, but that does not obviate its responsibility regarding AGW.
Only because of Nuclear Power, which I mentioned. Not just because of nuclear power, but also fuel economy (which I mentioned) and other reasons.
Are you for Nuclear Power? Yes.
If France ever has a melt down or two, their pollution could surpass ours in deadliness. Hardly. Western reactors have never been constructed as poorly as Chernobyl, and modern reactors are self-damping.
What are they doing with the waste? This.
Mother nature has dealt with worse nonanthropogenic sources, even during the time humans have existed from what I know, correct?
That depends on what you mean by "dealt with". The Earth has been a tropical jungle and a frozen iceball. It's not going to freeze to absolute zero or vaporize anytime soon, but that's not really the point. The point is, what kind of world do we ourselves want to live in? Nature isn't magically going to stick to a climate that is preferable or convenient for our society. Over hundreds of thousands of years the climate will vary, but we don't need to be helping it along at a rate and in a direction that isn't beneficial for our current civilization.
There were ice ages in history where there was more CO2 in the atmosphere than at the present time. The CO2 probably wasn't the cause of the cooling, right?
Actually, a drop in CO2 has been implicated in the cooling of at least one of those ice ages (the Ordovician). The absolute value of CO2 matters, but what also matters is the magnitude of changes in CO2. Even if there is a lot of CO2 producing a large greenhouse effect, a drop in CO2 can set off positive feedbacks that end up with major cooling.
I assume at a certain point the earth would turn to being as hot as venus.
That's possible, but isn't likely to happen. (Well, in billions of years the Sun is predicted to get significantly hotter, which will set off another positive feedback and may well lead to a runaway greenhouse effect like Venus.)
Although scientists are humans and do worry about their children and the environment, they should leave the activism to activists and just present the facts.
In the scientific literature, they do present the facts. In their own free time, they can do whatever they want. (And do you also object to climate skeptics making a fuss in the media about their views, or should they confine that to the journals as well?)
They don't need to adopt politically correct leftist psycho-socio babble orwellianisms.
Don't hold back now. Tell us how you really feel about global warming activists.
It is and always has been heavily regulated. Even oil companies are at the mercy of OPEC. This is partly why the energy sector is so antiquated and still pollutes like it does.
Wow, talk about Orwellian doublespeak. The energy sector pollutes so much because it is so heavily regulated. Amusing. Also funny how the industrial sector cut way back on pollution after regulation was put in place.
Also, there really have not been any good solutions to the CO2 problem offered up, at least not ones that make good economic sense. It is easy to impose the full force of the government on someone and make them pay a tax, it isn't as easy to come up with good solutions to the problem.
Government taxation always sounds like a heavy-handed and crude way of dealing with economic and social problems. But in this case, a tax is in many ways the least heavy-handed way to proceed: it doesn't tell anybody how to go about fixing the problem; it doesn't explicitly single out any technologies, businesses, economic sectors, or governments; it doesn't legally require anybody to take any specific kind of action. It just imposes a cost on emissions which depends on only the amount of emissions and not on who the emitter is, and lets the global economy sort it out in any way the involved parties see fit (abatement/sequestration, arbitrage, etc.). Politically, it's something you can get a lot of nations behind, because in a sense it's optimally fair: the up-front cost to a nation is directly proportional to that nation's contribution to the problem. A lot of economists — including in the US — support a carbon tax for just those reasons, and they are not known for being the most socialist bunch.
I am not going to argue that a carbon tax is necessarily the best possible option, but
The earth will cool due to natural cycles. Mother nature has a way of balancing itself out over time. Mother Nature hasn't had to deal with a bunch of anthropogenic sources. Ever.
While climate feedbacks will eventually limit the warming, it doesn't mean that we are going to return to pre-industrial climate anytime within the next few hundred years.
When it does, the scientific community will blame it on the sun (which doesn't factor in when the earth is warming, only when it is cooling), or having "over" too much CO2 in the atmosphere, thus having the opposite effect. I find myself frequently responding to you: what the hell are you talking about? Putting imaginary claims into the mouths of scientists does not help your argument. ("Too much CO2 produces cooling"??)
What is the climate comunity? Some leftist group? No, it is the community of climate scientists.
I am part of the community, and I care about what I breathe. Scientists should not be political, so surely you are not talking about them. I am talking about them. When climatologists use the phrase "business as usual", they refer to scenarios in which no effort is made to reduce emissions (referring to the fact that, as is "usual" so far, no effort has yet been made). Reduction of emissions is "business not as usual" (although this is referred to in the climate community as "abatement").
Where have you been? Cars don't pollute as much as they did in the 50s. Factories don't either. Where have you been? There was a hell of a lot of government regulating going on with that "free market". Apparently, when the government regulates pollution, it's a good thing; when it regulates greenhouse gas emissions, it's a dirty socialist plot. Not to mention the fact that the "free market" so far has been almost wholly ignoring the CO2 emission issue despite the scientific warnings.
Right, which was my point to begin with. Scientists might produce a study 5-10 years from now (or the weather might get really cold) and AGW would be debunked completely. Not even remotely. The evidence for AGW has only been getting stronger, and the predictions are getting more accurate. They're not suddenly going to jump to the opposite conclusion. The evidence in favor of AGW is conclusive.
Why would one reward the government by allowing them to steal money from consumers So you're against all taxation, then. Even most libertarians have more sense than that.
If the government does not want these companies to operate, they should not give them permits to operate. The government wants them to operate. It also wants them to reduce their carbon footprint.
We should tax countries that are not democracies and should also tax countries that are socialist or have government affiliated businesses, because they slow free market capitalist progress and make us less safe, etc. Not only is that nonsense, it ignores the majority contribution of the US to AGW.
I am not against international agreements per se, but we must be careful about them. I agree with that.
Business-as-usual is the BEST "alternative." It's the worst alternative as far as climate is concerned: it is a technical term in the climate community referring to the scenario in which no effort is made to reduce emissions. "Business as usual" is what got us into the problem in the first place. We need business "not as usual" to solve it.
If we want it bad enough, we will use business-as-usual market forces and human endeavor to solve the problems we have. Yeah, we can see how well the free market has solved that problem so far.
Apparently, this guy: That link does not contain any discussion of AGW proponents suing heretics to get them to stop teaching. In fact, it describes the opposite: denialist Tim Ball threatening to sue AGW proponents. (He has in fact sued Dan Johnson; see here.)
I am still waiting for evidence of brave global warming skeptics being sued to force them from teaching their heresy. All I see is them suing other people, as in this case and in the other two cases I mentioned earlier.
IPPC has had to change it's predictions since the last "study." Duh. Every new scientific study in every field ever has changed its predictions from previous studies. That's what happens when science improves.
This new summary does not have predictions. You obviously did not read it. Try again. Look at pages 10-21.
They are going to wait until policy is in place and everyone buys into their hype, then they will release the predictions that won't come true. What the hell are you talking about? They've already released the most important predictions, like temperature change. More detailed predictions will follow in a few months. None of these predictions are new; they are just a summary of the range of predictions that already exist in the literature.
Name the papers that had predictions that were made 10 years ago that have come true? Rahmstorf et al.'s survey in the latest issue of Science is a good place to start.
I am not against a market approach for dealing with all major emissions (even if they aren't considered pollution). This is common sense. What I am against is a larger government, more taxes, a negative effect on our great Capitalistic economy, etc. A carbon tax may be the best solution, actually. However, there is room for reasonable people to disagree on economic policy. As for the effect on our economy, there will most likely be a negative short term impact on it no matter which solution is used, but that should be weighed against the longer term damages that may accrue under the business-as-usual alternative.
I am definitely against the socialist and dictator jokers at the UN deciding these things. In fact, we should show that it is possible and pain free first, then help other countries do it by using our example rather than some treaty. There is nothing wrong with solutions being proposed by people outside of the US (and the US certainly plays a role in any UN decision-making, for that matter). It is up to the US, of course, to decide whether those solutions are proper or not.
I think it is interesting that you apparently feel there is no political or economic advantage in binding international agreements. Although perhaps you were criticizing some specific treaty (e.g., the Kyoto Protocol), not the idea of treaties in general.
Isn't it convenient that they release the summary for policy makers first? Why not release the whole document at once? They could have waited until the end of the year to release the whole thing. They thought it would be more useful to get the high-level summary out first. The scientific details already exist in the published literature; the supplementary chapters are just literature surveys, not new science. Everything in the AR4 that "skeptics" can dispute is published material that they already have disputed. AR4 does not contain any yet-to-be-published science.
From RealClimate,
"Finally, a few people have asked why the SPM is being released now while the main report is not due to be published for a couple of months. There are a number of reasons — firstly, the Paris meeting has been such a public affair that holding back the SPM until the main report is ready is probably pointless. For the main report itself, it had not yet been proof-read, and there has not yet been enough time to include observational data up until the end of 2006. One final point is that improvements in the clarity of the language from the SPM should be propagated back to the individual chapters in order to remove any superficial ambiguity. The science content will not change."
IPCC AR4, rather (see here). The summary for policymakers is here (PDF). (Most of the emphasis is on the evidence for AGW, but the last part talks about future consequences.) Later this year the supporting chapters with detailed scientific predictions and their justifications will be released.
First of all, there should not really be any such thing as "consensus" when it comes to science, particularly when it comes to relatively new findings. Scientists should always be trying to disprove their work. Scientists themselves should be their own worst "skeptics". Scientists are their own worst skeptics. The evidence just isn't there anymore to claim that AGW isn't happening. It's like a scientist still trying to push phlogiston or the steady-state universe. Scientific consensus doesn't happen because everybody gets together behind closed doors and decides what the official orthodoxy is going to be; it happens when alternatives becomes less and less supportable and you can't credibly support them any more.
What happens is that they get accused of working for the evil Exxon and being a "Global Warming denier." Frankly, that's frequently the case. Anyway, so what? Academia is contentious, and this is in no way limited to "skeptics of the orthodoxy". If suggesting conflicts of interests or use of terminology that you don't like is your worst accusation, it's nothing compared to how, say, speakers of any position in any field get cross-examined in seminars every day.
They are afraid of controversy, so they don't speak up. Controversy is what science is about. In fact, in order to make it big in science, you have to be controversial. You also have to be right.
They get letters threatening to sue if they don't stop teaching heresy, etc. Really? Who has gotten legal threats to "stop teaching heresy"?
(I have heard of the opposite; global warming denier Pat Michaels threatened to sue Peter Gleick after Gleick compared Michaels to a flat-earther; Fred Singer sued Justin Lancaster for libel.)
If scientists are so sure about this, then they should make predictions and test their hypothesis. What are the predictions for the next so many years? Say 10-30 years? Isn't that how it works? Tell me what the predictions are. ... what?? Have you missed the, um, thousands of papers published about global warming over the next century? You could start by reading the climate study (IPPC AR4) which this Slashdot story is about.
Remember that Greenland used to be green and England was once known for its wine. Even countries which stand to benefit from global warming don't stand to benefit if it warms too fast, as their societies and economies are optimized for a particular climate. Not to mention the fact that the predicted warming over the next century alone may well exceed anything that human civilization has seen so far, nor the fact that plenty of other countries are definitely not going to be helped by global warming.
While I am all for cutting down on all pollution, I am not for UN imposed socialism or an anti-US laden guilt trip. Expecting the US to do its fair share in reducing emissions, given its contribution to them, is neither socialism nor a guilt trip.
When it comes to attributing global warming to climate change, there is no longer room for reasonable doubt, only unreasonable doubt. That should have read, "when it comes to attributing global warming to human activity,..." The scientific debate has moved on from that question; there was still some room for debate 15 or maybe even 10 years ago, but the evidence is now far in favor of anthropogenic global warming.
I want to reemphasize that there is still a lot of uncertainty about the future, and that there is scaremongering in the media about that. However, I also want to say that the existence of uncertainty isn't an excuse to do nothing, either; in any other aspect of life with uncertainty and potential negative consequences, people hedge their bets, buy insurance, etc. Given the most likely scenarios and their possible consequences, as well as the existence of unlikely but extremely damaging scenarios, mitigating the effects of global warming is worth a very close look.
If we listened to "scientists" during the 1970s, we would have been painting tar on the artic ice to melt it. The scare at that time was global cooling. That's not really the case either. There were two very high profile articles in the media, in Newsweek and I think Time. However, that didn't reflect what the majority of climatologists thought at the time. If you go through the literature from the 1970s — and I can point you to references if you like — you'll find that the general view was that the Earth was undergoing natural cooling, but there wasn't yet enough data to make a call on how much anthropogenic influences would ultimately offset that cooling. So at that time, most scientists (and why do you keep putting scare quotes around that word) were saying that they didn't know enough and needed more data.
Indeed, if you look at temperature anomalies, melt rates, and many other indicators, they really started ramping up around 1970, and it took about 10-20 years before climatologists were confident that anthropogenic warming would continue to outweigh natural cooling.
We now have 35 more years of data than in the 1970s, as well as much better models, and correspondingly greater certainty: it can now be said with confidence that there is a warming trend due to anthropogenic forcings which will continue.
However, there is still a lot of uncertainty as to how much warming there will be in the future, so there is still a lot of room for policy debate.
They now label sceptics "global warming deniers" to give it the same sound as "holocaust deniers". At this point, "skeptic" is no longer a good word; it implies reasonable doubt. When it comes to attributing global warming to climate change, there is no longer room for reasonable doubt, only unreasonable doubt. The place for reasonable doubt is, as I said, in projections for the future, and in the efficacy of different policies.
Universities are not areas of freedom of discussion and debate like you think. In fact, they are. There is nobody watching over a professor's shoulder reporting him to the climate nazis if he says the wrong thing to a colleague.
Richard Willson, a Columbia University researcher also affiliated with NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies has stated that "the Sun's possible influence has been largely ignored because it is so difficult to quantify over long periods." This is false, and I have referred you to a number of papers at this point which study that very issue in detail.
One volcano can put more CO2 (and other greenhouse gases) in the atmosphere than we would be able to do in 10-50 years. That's also wrong — quite absurdly so, in fact. The entire GHG output of all of the volcanoes in the world put together, in one year, is only about 1-3% of what humans put out in one year.
You may be thinking of aerosol emissions; a really large volcano, like Pinatubo, can put out a very significant amount of aerosols. These lead to temporary cooling — not warming — over the span of a few years. Some, like Tom Wigley, have proposed artificially producing high amounts of aerosols to combat global warming (which is a whole different can of worms).
Assuming that all the data collection methods are correct and have very small error (which I doubt), and assuming that you've accounted for all the carbon sinks with very small error (which I doubt), and assuming that record lows in Hawaii recently means nothing, and assuming that there is not some unkown heat source that you have not accounted for (which I doubt), even then you have to rely on some "tipping point" theory because the amount of CO2 that man has put into the atmosphere is very small compared to natural sources. 1. Anthropogenic CO2 emission rates are known to about 5% accuracy. 2. Carbon sinks, record lows in Hawaii, and "unknown heat sources" are irrelevant to the issue of how much anthropogenic CO2 there is and how much warming it produces. Proposing "unknown heat sources" to explain global warming runs into the "unknown cooling source" problem I just mentioned (not to mention being beyond credibility that there is an unknown heat source large enough to be responsible for global warming). 3. No "tipping point theory" is needed. The amount of CO2 put into the atmosphere by man in recent times is larger than the amount of CO2 put into the atmosphere by natural sources over the same span of time.
Even if mankind is _completely_ responsible for global warming (which I doubt), our response to the problem is going to be HIGHLY political. So you cannot leave politics out of the debate. You can, and should, leave politics out of the debate when talking about science. It is a necessary component of the debate when talking about policy.
Anthropogenic global warming is not a liberal conspiracy, it is a conclusion based on the weight of scientific evidence. Your objections to it are not scientific, they are political.
Your rebuttal is by Gavin Schmidt (a well known AGW activist) Clue: pretty much every scientist in the climatology community acknowledges the fact that global warming is anthropogenic. There's no point in picking on Schmidt.
But if you have some personal grudge against Schmidt, there are plenty of other studies which conclude that solar variations are responsible for little of the global warming, such as Foukal et al.'s 2006 review in Nature, and Stott et al.'s 2003 analysis in J. Climat. Solar variations as the majority cause of global warming has been falsified in the literature. The scientific arguments are now over whether it's responsible for, say, 15% vs. 25% of the warming, not over whether it is responsible for more warming than anthropogenic sources.
and a bunch of "scientists" who happen to live in socialist countries Oh for god's sake. If you're going to dismiss the findings of any scientist who happens to live in a country you don't like, you are well outside the bounds of rational debate. (Incidentally, five of the eleven authors work at US institutions. I was unaware that the US was socialist.)
As for the attribution of CO2 to anthropogenic sources, it is not just the difference between two uncertain numbers. There are independent ways of checking it. One is from an economic analysis of industrial emissions over the last 150 years. Another, and the best, way is isotopic analysis: we know directly how much CO2 in the atmosphere is due to our burning of fossil fuels, because it has a unique isotopic signature. (Your accusations of "biased sampling" ignore this fact.) All three independent estimates agree with each other.
Bottom line: we know how much CO2 there is in the atmosphere, we know how much of it we have put there, and we know how much heat it retains. We know that the Sun hasn't generated enough extra heat to be responsible for the recent warming trend; its contribution is comparatively even less relevant to the accelerating warming over the last 30 years. Even if you wanted to invoke an alternative source of warming, you'd have to invoke an even bigger source of cooling to counter all the extra CO2. Not only is there no evidence for an alternative source of warming that is large enough to explain more than a minority of the global warming, there is no evidence for this new cooling source that would also be needed.
You are not arguing on the basis of facts here, but political prejudice, as is very obvious from your remarks.
It's sort of true: what's being referred to is the phenomenon of polar amplification. It means that cold places, on average, increase in temperature more than warm places. However, that is merely an average, and greater or less warming than average can take place in different regions. Also, it doesn't mean that warm places don't get hot, just that cold places tend to see more temperature increase.
What they need to do is gain credibility the old fashioned way- stick a stake in the ground and say "10 years from this date, given these things continue, the conditions will be X" You mean, like this? (Brief conclusion: the models since 1990 appear to have somewhat underestimated the climate response to global warming that actually took place.)
As I said before, I believe the solar radiation and volcanism are the two primary climate regulators, with the Biosphere comming in 3rd. The rest, if there is any influence, such as man, is shall we say, "debris influence" and doesn't add up too much.
That flies in the fact of those pesky things called "facts".
Volcanoes affect climate primarily through their greenhouse gas and aerosol emissions.
The GHG emissions of volcanos are smaller than man's GHG emissions by a factor of ONE HUNDRED. You keep pounding the "we know little" platform, but we do not know so little that we just simply missed 99% of the volcanic gas emissions. Even undersea volcano emissions are measurable, and even if we could not measure volcanic emissions at all, or even any other source of GHG emissions, we still know that man's GHG emissions are the largest source of GHG gas increase. That's because isotopic analysis tells us that the majority of CO2 in the atmosphere was put their by burning fossil fuels, regardless of where the minority came from. We can also measure the increase of other GHG gases and, while important, manmade CO2 has the largest effect.
Aerosol emissions from volcanoes act to cool the planet, and so cannot be responsible for global warming. They definitely can cause global cooling for a few years when a major volcano goes off; Pinatubo is an example. But they are not the main driver of climate at the present, given the overall warming trend (and they rarely are the main driver of climate given how little GHGs they emit, how quickly their aerosols fall out of the air, and how infrequently really major volcanoes erupt).
Solar radiation has an effect on the climate. It is not responsible for global warming, as you say.
We can measure the global temperatures fluctuate during the 11-year solar cycle and we see the temperatures increase and decrease in synch with the Sun: that temperature change, however, is small compared to greater trends such as global warming. We know how much the Sun's output is changing, and we know that it is by a small amount.
In the past, the Sun's output has varied more, and may have been partially responsible for the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age.
There is no paleological evidence for really large climate changes being due to solar variation.
There is evidence that orbital variations can drive major climate change such as the Milankovitch ice age cycles. I stated that early in the thread and attribute it to the Earth's motion, not to the Sun directly, although the effect of the orbital variations is to increase or decrease the amount of power received from the Sun, and to change the timing and location of maximum insolation.
If the primary argument is solar, then it makes sense that other planets in the solar system should be warming as well, not just the earth.
Once again, global warming here on Earth is not due to the Sun. You appeared to acknowledge that yourself (that the Sun is "no match" for our current activity), but then you turn around and claim that since the Earth is warming, other planets should warm as well. Since you appear to agree that the primary argument is not solar, then whether other planets in the solar system are warming or cooling is irrelevant. (In fact, it's largely irrelevant even if the warming was solar in origin, given the vast differences in climates between the Earth and the other planets.)
In case you are unclear on this: the solar output of the Sun has not increased enough to be responsible for global warming. Even if you wanted to postulate a mechanism by which the Sun's output can inexplicably cause more warming than is believed, you would also have to postulate large new cooling mechanisms to explain why the warming isn't even greater than is observed due to the greenhouse effect: since we know from simple adsorption physics how much heat our CO2 emissions are retaining, yo
Shaviv's conclusions disagree with most other work on solar variations and global warming. The cosmic ray connection is particularly tenuous. Foukal et al.'s 2006 paper in Nature gives a good review of the work in the field; for a specific critique of Shaviv's work, see this rebuttal by eleven climatologists as well their more detailed analysis; there have been other criticisms in the literature, but that is a fairly good summary.
Of course the numbers are made up. I can't tell you those things because no good models exist. They are all crude, and don't predict squat.
Not only is that false, it's not terribly relevant to the fact that CO2 takes centuries to be removed from the atmosphere. That's mostly basic atmospheric physics, not requiring sophisticated climate models, and we do know the order of magnitude of the effect. Climate models just let us nail it down more precisely: e.g., is it 80 years or 120?
You believe we know everything there is to know about CO2, without question.
We don't know everything about the carbon cycle, but we do know that CO2's residence time in the atmosphere is not days, months, years, or even a few decades.
anyone out there that has questions about CO2 are politely showed the door in University Departments around the United States, or pushed under the rug along with a whole MOUNTAIN OF QUESTIONS that need to be answered about CO2 recycling
I'm sure you can provide concrete examples of that having happened with proof, and your failure to do so was mere oversight.
I am not suggesting methane release is a common scenario. I also was talking about temperature increase. I didn't say I did not care about CO2 emissions. You are making the assumption that just because I pointed out that methane is a possible scenario, I do not care about CO2 and we shouldn't worry about it.
You said that we shouldn't care about a mere 5 degree temperature increase when methane might poison us all. That to me implies that you don't care about CO2 emissions, or in fact very much about the current global warming at all. You have also stated that CO2 emissions have comparatively little influence on the climate.
If you are indeed concerned about the influence of CO2 emissions on the climate, I stand corrected.
I am not talking about "poisonous" amounts of methane. [...] The research is crude, but it warrants more time spent at the real possibility there would be a lot less oxygen to breathe, not that we would be poisoned by methane.
To me, an amount of methane that makes it difficult to breathe, regardless of whether that effect is directly or indirectly attributed to methane, is "poisonous".
I think it is dubious at best to make such a statement, that atmospheric changes in composition has not played some part in all biospehere diversity events.
I think atmospheric changes in composition certainly play a role in biodiversity. (For an extreme example, see what happened to the existing anaerobes when oxygen first appeared in the atmosphere.) On a more contemporary note, atmospheric CO2 concentrations influence the rate of plant growth as well as the health of plants. There is evidence of atmospheric concentrations being linked to widespread species extinctions, but no such evidence within millions of years except that which can be attributed indirectly to atmospheric gases through their influence on the climate (as opposed to your suffocation scenario).
Poor understanding of CO2, poor understanding CO2 recycling in the oceans, poor understanding of CO2 on land, poor understanding of CO2 recycling in the atmosphere.
We have already beat this issue to death: you are confusing your own poor understanding with the understanding of climate researchers. The scientific community simply is nowhere near as ignorant about the carbon cycle as you believe.
But, I have read enough papers to realize most of them are on the Democratic or some some sort of political/money trail in the energy sector or just opportunists looking to make good on tenure.
Wow, funny how you can read all that in a scientific paper in Nature or J. Climate or GGR or whatnot. You must be really good at reading what you want to see, er, I mean, reading between the lines.
I do not see human activity radically changing climate on this plan
I'll grant you that at some level that's true, but I'm not sure why you say "source or sink", when it seems pretty clear that it's all sink. I was being pedantic. It's not all sink: there are both oceanic sources and sinks, although the net effect is to sink. (And as you point out, further warming will continue to degrade the ocean's ability to sink GHGs.)
Secondly, your argument about the solar output not having had a measurable impact on past climates might not be right. I didn't say that. I said that over the last 150 years, it hasn't been the majority contributor, and over periods longer than that (here I was thinking on the scale of the glacial cycles), solar variations have not been the main driver of climate change. (At least, not to my knowledge; other factors such as orbital variations, GHGs, albedo, etc. have been more significant.) They do however have a measurable impact on past climates; they have a measurable impact on the current climate, even though that impact is relatively small. They have also been significant drivers of climate change on "short" terms (comparable to the ~150 year span being discussed in relation to AGW); for instance, solar variations are likely at least partially, and perhaps mostly, responsible for the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age.
Perhaps I wasn't sufficiently clear. When addressing a lot of points I don't always have time to carefully think through the wording of each response.
I didn't throw those numbers out as an exact number. I was being....GENEROUS in pointing out though that with such crude computer models of CO2 and atmospheric knowledge as we have right now, we need more direct observational data be it 50 or a 100 such platforms. We need more AND a longer observational time. In fact, they are totally made up. We don't need any more direct observational data or longer observation time to know what the current CO2 removal rate is. If you think we need more, show the calculation of how much more we "need".
If it serves your purpose, I mean to say we just need more data to figure out where the CO2 is comming from, how the oceans absorb volcanic activity and better space weather platforms. We know that the majority of the increase in CO2 over the last 150 years is due to fossil fuel burning, for reasons I have already explained. Determining how much of the remainder is due to each natural source is useful, and has already been done to a great extent, but it is a simple fact that most of it is due to human activity.
Likewise, it's interesting to know how the oceans absorb volcanic activity, but the total warming produced from all the GHGs emitted by volcanoes, even if they were not absorbed and all went straight into the atmosphere, is still only a tiny fraction of warming produced by anthropogenic GHG sources.
Likewise, better space weather platforms are definitely useful in predicting future climate change, but we already have enough data to attribute past climate change, and we have more than enough data to know that the residence time of atmospheric CO2 is on the order of centuries.
Since we know so little about what is underneath the oceans in volcanic activity, what do you think would happen if a 50 mile wide outpouring of molten Lava anywhere in the vicinity of a Methane ice trap would do? That could be bad.
Quite frankly I could give a rats ass about a 5 degree temperature increase world wide. Who the hell cares about the temperature increase when you can't breathe. Your logic is broken. Just because worst-case scenario Y is worse than worst-case scenario X doesn't mean that we shouldn't worry about X.
Incidentally, the lack of mass extinctions over the last tens of millions of years suggests that "releasing poisonous amounts of methane into the atmosphere" is not a common scenario. Releasing enough to produce climate change is a different matter (and what makes you think we don't know anything about how methane is absorbed by the ocean?).
Nobody that I know of talks about these sorts of things because methane isn't a money maker. Do you know any climatologists? See, e.g., here.
There is a lot of literature on paleological climate change due to undersea methane hydrate destabilization, and at least some literature on the risks associated with contemporary destabilization (e.g. here). I'm not aware of papers specifically discussing contemporary destabilization from vulcanism, but it's not like I've performed an extensive literature search.
Would you believe we have better sensors on the MARS express probe to detect methance on mars than we do on any Earth based sat platform right now, excluding the ISS?
Why do you think that is? Probably because all sensing platforms related to global warming and Earth observation in general are getting cut across the board (e.g. here and here).
By the way, I agree completely that methane destabilization is a possibility that should be — and is — studied. But that is an issue completely separate from the fact that anthropogenic CO2 is the major contributor to recent global warming, and will remain a major contributor to the climate in the future.
What I doubt is that man is the cause of global warming. Much of this 'conclusive' evidence relies on error prone computer models You can't just dismiss the laws of physics as "error prone computer models". Our understanding of the climate isn't perfect, but it's not so poor that we don't know anything about the climate either. If you want to propose an alternative explanation for warming, you have to not only come up with an alternative warming source large enough to be responsible for the warming, but you also have to introduce new cooling mechanisms to explain why the CO2 isn't causing even more warming than your alternative warming source. There just are not any plausible mechanisms remaining at this point.
and a disproved hockey stick study Ok, (a) the hockey stick has not been disproved, (b) there are plenty of other temperature reconstructions performed by different, independent methods that agree with Mann et al.'s hockey stick, and (c) the evidence for anthropogenic global warming does not rest on paleoclimate reconstructions.
OK, first of all, the report explicitly says that the model is not working when predicting Texas, particularly for precipitation. So let's be honest and remember that this data is still being worked on.
Let's be honest and admit that models aren't predicting that all the warming takes place in the north.
"It can be seen from Fig. 5 that over UMRB: (1) increase in Tmin/Tmax is consistently 2-3K,". Since 1K=1C, I think that the report pretty much backs me up.
As plainly stated in the paper, the UMRB does not include most of the southern United States (it contains nothing south of 37N.)
I will merely point out that there are two models in the study, neither of which worked for the testable part of Texas' weather (which is admitted in the study) - and these models gave opposite predictions for Texas.
They didn't give opposite predictions as far as Tmax is concerned; in fact, both of them predicted that peak warming would occur in the northwest and near western Texas.
The summer change is less than 2 degrees C - and this is an average across the whole nation with most of the warming happening up north where it is cold
Most of the warming is not happening up north; in fact, there is more warming taking place in the southern half of the U.S. than the northern, as is also plainly obvious from Fig. 4.
Recall too that we were not talking about the average U.S. change, but the change in hotter regions of the U.S. like Arizona and Texas. And that an X degree increase in temperatures is more of a problem in hotter regions than cooler ones. Or have you forgotten what this thread was about?
and of course, no to mention that this is one century from now, when we will have weather control rays operated by our mutant mental powers
What the hell are you talking about?
Well, I'm not the one requiring a lifestyle change at gunpoint, am I?
First, no one is requiring a lifestyle change at gunpoint, and second, yes, you are requiring a lifestyle change for people in hotter climates, if you advocate doing nothing to mitigate global warming.
Are you saying that their right to existing weather patterns is more important than my right to live the way I want?
In other words, "fuck everyone else in the world, I want it warmer where I live".
Why is preserving the status quo (a pointless excersize, in my opinion) more important than my persuit of happiness?
Yeah, why not? I'm sure the Eskimos would like it even warmer, let's accelerate global warming even more.
Your pursuit of happiness doesn't have to come at the expense of other people's lives.
Don't scaremonger about costs. How much did it cost to relocate New Orleans? It was noticeable, but not major unless you lived there.
Ok, one, you are fucking crazy. Not even the most conservative people think that the cost of New Orleans was nothing and it's just fine economically for the U.S. to have more disasters like that in the future. Two, your callous self-centeredness is showing with your causally off-hand "unless you lived there", as if the costs to anyone other than you are unimportant. Three, New Orleans had like 1.5 million people. To use your examples, Florida has far more, and Bangladesh has 150 MILLION. Are you really so eager to pay for that kind of relocation personally? Not to mention the fact that you can't actually pay for that: taxpayers have to, and not all of them agree with you on how their money ought to be spent. Fourth, there are social costs of relocation in addition to economic costs; look at what's happening in France, Germany, etc. with their large immigration fluxes, not to mention the unrest in United States itself.
Well, this gets onto another topic altogether, but I happen to like immigration.
Yeah, great, do you also happen to like 150 million Bangladeshi immigrants? If not, would y
If you read the report, it says 2-3C change, not 5C. The northern parts of the country get the most additional heat, like I said. That's not well supported by the report, assuming we are still talking about summer extreme temperatures. Did you read it? The RegCM2 model predicts up to 5C warming in both the Pacific northwest and near western Texas. The HIRHAM model predicts up to 3-4C warming in the southwest, and almost as much in the northwest. See Fig. 4.
If you even make a cursury glance at the seasonal data, you will see that the winters are far warmer than the summers - almost double. So the cold winters in the cold parts of the world get warmer, and the hot summers in the hot parts of the world are relatively unchanged. "Relatively unchanged" is only relative to the winter change. The summer change is still nothing to sneer at, especially in climates that are already very hot.
I would gladly pay to relocate all the people in Bangladesh or Florida is it means that 75% of the country becomes a nicer place to live! That's very generous of you. I wonder how the people who live there feel about it. I'm sure they won't mind leaving their homes or nations as long as somebody is willing to pay for it.
I suspect also that you would be less willing to pay for relocation if you realized what the costs would actually be. I hope you also don't mind the greater influx of immigrants both legal and illegal into more northern nations.
What you are saying is that we don't have enough data on these other factors, therefore it must be the CO2? No, I'm saying that we have a lot of data on these other factors, and if you consider them only (without appealing to human-emitted CO2), we can't explain much of the observed warming. If we include both these factors and the anthropogenic CO2, we can explain all of the observed warming. (There is a nice summary figure here, although the justifications that went into making it would require more discussion.)
I've read that Mars just so happens to be getting warmer too. That's not really correct (see here): there is only evidence for regional warming on Mars, not global warming. Also, the only climate factor Earth and Mars share in common is the Sun's output, but that is demonstrably not responsible for the warming on Mars (since the Sun's output decreased over the period that the recent warming has taken place).
Also, assuming that the rise in CO2 coincides with the rise in population, how do we know that it isn't just a coincidence? I assume there was also a rise in farm animals, cows, etc., too. All giving off methane, btw. We know that animals give off CO2 and methane, but the amount they give off isn't sufficient to account for the observed warming. We also know directly that most of the CO2 increase is due to fossil fuel consumption, because that leaves a unique isotopic signature which is distinguishable from all other sources of CO2.
Slashdot Mirror
Another specious argument. The issue is what results in cleaner companies. We need to work towards deregulation and free markets and ending all emissions into public spaces that do not have proven counterbalances. I know you believe that, but you haven't actually made a case for deregulation and free markets solving the global warming problem. I don't see an emergency like you do though. There isn't an "emergency"; we're not all going to die. We will, however, suffer consequences for unabated emissions. What new inventions or technology has France come up with in the last 30 years? Again, irrelevant to the fact that France has superior emissions standards. I am sure you want to insist that the price for having cleaner emissions is technological and economic failure, but you haven't made that case either.
If the US wants to, say, cut foreign aid, that is its right, but that does not obviate its responsibility regarding AGW. Only because of Nuclear Power, which I mentioned. Not just because of nuclear power, but also fuel economy (which I mentioned) and other reasons. Are you for Nuclear Power? Yes. If France ever has a melt down or two, their pollution could surpass ours in deadliness. Hardly. Western reactors have never been constructed as poorly as Chernobyl, and modern reactors are self-damping. What are they doing with the waste? This.
Wow, can you get patents for turning anything upside down? Dibs on the upside-down ping pong ball!
Mother nature has dealt with worse nonanthropogenic sources, even during the time humans have existed from what I know, correct?
That depends on what you mean by "dealt with". The Earth has been a tropical jungle and a frozen iceball. It's not going to freeze to absolute zero or vaporize anytime soon, but that's not really the point. The point is, what kind of world do we ourselves want to live in? Nature isn't magically going to stick to a climate that is preferable or convenient for our society. Over hundreds of thousands of years the climate will vary, but we don't need to be helping it along at a rate and in a direction that isn't beneficial for our current civilization.
There were ice ages in history where there was more CO2 in the atmosphere than at the present time. The CO2 probably wasn't the cause of the cooling, right?
Actually, a drop in CO2 has been implicated in the cooling of at least one of those ice ages (the Ordovician). The absolute value of CO2 matters, but what also matters is the magnitude of changes in CO2. Even if there is a lot of CO2 producing a large greenhouse effect, a drop in CO2 can set off positive feedbacks that end up with major cooling.
I assume at a certain point the earth would turn to being as hot as venus.
That's possible, but isn't likely to happen. (Well, in billions of years the Sun is predicted to get significantly hotter, which will set off another positive feedback and may well lead to a runaway greenhouse effect like Venus.)
Although scientists are humans and do worry about their children and the environment, they should leave the activism to activists and just present the facts.
In the scientific literature, they do present the facts. In their own free time, they can do whatever they want. (And do you also object to climate skeptics making a fuss in the media about their views, or should they confine that to the journals as well?)
They don't need to adopt politically correct leftist psycho-socio babble orwellianisms.
Don't hold back now. Tell us how you really feel about global warming activists.
It is and always has been heavily regulated. Even oil companies are at the mercy of OPEC. This is partly why the energy sector is so antiquated and still pollutes like it does.
Wow, talk about Orwellian doublespeak. The energy sector pollutes so much because it is so heavily regulated. Amusing. Also funny how the industrial sector cut way back on pollution after regulation was put in place.
Also, there really have not been any good solutions to the CO2 problem offered up, at least not ones that make good economic sense. It is easy to impose the full force of the government on someone and make them pay a tax, it isn't as easy to come up with good solutions to the problem.
Government taxation always sounds like a heavy-handed and crude way of dealing with economic and social problems. But in this case, a tax is in many ways the least heavy-handed way to proceed: it doesn't tell anybody how to go about fixing the problem; it doesn't explicitly single out any technologies, businesses, economic sectors, or governments; it doesn't legally require anybody to take any specific kind of action. It just imposes a cost on emissions which depends on only the amount of emissions and not on who the emitter is, and lets the global economy sort it out in any way the involved parties see fit (abatement/sequestration, arbitrage, etc.). Politically, it's something you can get a lot of nations behind, because in a sense it's optimally fair: the up-front cost to a nation is directly proportional to that nation's contribution to the problem. A lot of economists — including in the US — support a carbon tax for just those reasons, and they are not known for being the most socialist bunch.
I am not going to argue that a carbon tax is necessarily the best possible option, but
While climate feedbacks will eventually limit the warming, it doesn't mean that we are going to return to pre-industrial climate anytime within the next few hundred years. When it does, the scientific community will blame it on the sun (which doesn't factor in when the earth is warming, only when it is cooling), or having "over" too much CO2 in the atmosphere, thus having the opposite effect. I find myself frequently responding to you: what the hell are you talking about? Putting imaginary claims into the mouths of scientists does not help your argument. ("Too much CO2 produces cooling"??) What is the climate comunity? Some leftist group? No, it is the community of climate scientists. I am part of the community, and I care about what I breathe. Scientists should not be political, so surely you are not talking about them. I am talking about them. When climatologists use the phrase "business as usual", they refer to scenarios in which no effort is made to reduce emissions (referring to the fact that, as is "usual" so far, no effort has yet been made). Reduction of emissions is "business not as usual" (although this is referred to in the climate community as "abatement"). Where have you been? Cars don't pollute as much as they did in the 50s. Factories don't either. Where have you been? There was a hell of a lot of government regulating going on with that "free market". Apparently, when the government regulates pollution, it's a good thing; when it regulates greenhouse gas emissions, it's a dirty socialist plot. Not to mention the fact that the "free market" so far has been almost wholly ignoring the CO2 emission issue despite the scientific warnings.
I am still waiting for evidence of brave global warming skeptics being sued to force them from teaching their heresy. All I see is them suing other people, as in this case and in the other two cases I mentioned earlier. IPPC has had to change it's predictions since the last "study." Duh. Every new scientific study in every field ever has changed its predictions from previous studies. That's what happens when science improves. This new summary does not have predictions. You obviously did not read it. Try again. Look at pages 10-21. They are going to wait until policy is in place and everyone buys into their hype, then they will release the predictions that won't come true. What the hell are you talking about? They've already released the most important predictions, like temperature change. More detailed predictions will follow in a few months. None of these predictions are new; they are just a summary of the range of predictions that already exist in the literature. Name the papers that had predictions that were made 10 years ago that have come true? Rahmstorf et al.'s survey in the latest issue of Science is a good place to start. I am not against a market approach for dealing with all major emissions (even if they aren't considered pollution). This is common sense. What I am against is a larger government, more taxes, a negative effect on our great Capitalistic economy, etc. A carbon tax may be the best solution, actually. However, there is room for reasonable people to disagree on economic policy. As for the effect on our economy, there will most likely be a negative short term impact on it no matter which solution is used, but that should be weighed against the longer term damages that may accrue under the business-as-usual alternative. I am definitely against the socialist and dictator jokers at the UN deciding these things. In fact, we should show that it is possible and pain free first, then help other countries do it by using our example rather than some treaty. There is nothing wrong with solutions being proposed by people outside of the US (and the US certainly plays a role in any UN decision-making, for that matter). It is up to the US, of course, to decide whether those solutions are proper or not.
I think it is interesting that you apparently feel there is no political or economic advantage in binding international agreements. Although perhaps you were criticizing some specific treaty (e.g., the Kyoto Protocol), not the idea of treaties in general.
From RealClimate,
"Finally, a few people have asked why the SPM is being released now while the main report is not due to be published for a couple of months. There are a number of reasons — firstly, the Paris meeting has been such a public affair that holding back the SPM until the main report is ready is probably pointless. For the main report itself, it had not yet been proof-read, and there has not yet been enough time to include observational data up until the end of 2006. One final point is that improvements in the clarity of the language from the SPM should be propagated back to the individual chapters in order to remove any superficial ambiguity. The science content will not change."
IPCC AR4, rather (see here). The summary for policymakers is here (PDF). (Most of the emphasis is on the evidence for AGW, but the last part talks about future consequences.) Later this year the supporting chapters with detailed scientific predictions and their justifications will be released.
(I have heard of the opposite; global warming denier Pat Michaels threatened to sue Peter Gleick after Gleick compared Michaels to a flat-earther; Fred Singer sued Justin Lancaster for libel.) If scientists are so sure about this, then they should make predictions and test their hypothesis. What are the predictions for the next so many years? Say 10-30 years? Isn't that how it works? Tell me what the predictions are. ... what?? Have you missed the, um, thousands of papers published about global warming over the next century? You could start by reading the climate study (IPPC AR4) which this Slashdot story is about. Remember that Greenland used to be green and England was once known for its wine. Even countries which stand to benefit from global warming don't stand to benefit if it warms too fast, as their societies and economies are optimized for a particular climate. Not to mention the fact that the predicted warming over the next century alone may well exceed anything that human civilization has seen so far, nor the fact that plenty of other countries are definitely not going to be helped by global warming. While I am all for cutting down on all pollution, I am not for UN imposed socialism or an anti-US laden guilt trip. Expecting the US to do its fair share in reducing emissions, given its contribution to them, is neither socialism nor a guilt trip.
I want to reemphasize that there is still a lot of uncertainty about the future, and that there is scaremongering in the media about that. However, I also want to say that the existence of uncertainty isn't an excuse to do nothing, either; in any other aspect of life with uncertainty and potential negative consequences, people hedge their bets, buy insurance, etc. Given the most likely scenarios and their possible consequences, as well as the existence of unlikely but extremely damaging scenarios, mitigating the effects of global warming is worth a very close look.
Indeed, if you look at temperature anomalies, melt rates, and many other indicators, they really started ramping up around 1970, and it took about 10-20 years before climatologists were confident that anthropogenic warming would continue to outweigh natural cooling.
We now have 35 more years of data than in the 1970s, as well as much better models, and correspondingly greater certainty: it can now be said with confidence that there is a warming trend due to anthropogenic forcings which will continue.
However, there is still a lot of uncertainty as to how much warming there will be in the future, so there is still a lot of room for policy debate. They now label sceptics "global warming deniers" to give it the same sound as "holocaust deniers". At this point, "skeptic" is no longer a good word; it implies reasonable doubt. When it comes to attributing global warming to climate change, there is no longer room for reasonable doubt, only unreasonable doubt. The place for reasonable doubt is, as I said, in projections for the future, and in the efficacy of different policies. Universities are not areas of freedom of discussion and debate like you think. In fact, they are. There is nobody watching over a professor's shoulder reporting him to the climate nazis if he says the wrong thing to a colleague. Richard Willson, a Columbia University researcher also affiliated with NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies has stated that "the Sun's possible influence has been largely ignored because it is so difficult to quantify over long periods." This is false, and I have referred you to a number of papers at this point which study that very issue in detail. One volcano can put more CO2 (and other greenhouse gases) in the atmosphere than we would be able to do in 10-50 years. That's also wrong — quite absurdly so, in fact. The entire GHG output of all of the volcanoes in the world put together, in one year, is only about 1-3% of what humans put out in one year.
You may be thinking of aerosol emissions; a really large volcano, like Pinatubo, can put out a very significant amount of aerosols. These lead to temporary cooling — not warming — over the span of a few years. Some, like Tom Wigley, have proposed artificially producing high amounts of aerosols to combat global warming (which is a whole different can of worms).
2. Carbon sinks, record lows in Hawaii, and "unknown heat sources" are irrelevant to the issue of how much anthropogenic CO2 there is and how much warming it produces. Proposing "unknown heat sources" to explain global warming runs into the "unknown cooling source" problem I just mentioned (not to mention being beyond credibility that there is an unknown heat source large enough to be responsible for global warming).
3. No "tipping point theory" is needed. The amount of CO2 put into the atmosphere by man in recent times is larger than the amount of CO2 put into the atmosphere by natural sources over the same span of time. Even if mankind is _completely_ responsible for global warming (which I doubt), our response to the problem is going to be HIGHLY political. So you cannot leave politics out of the debate. You can, and should, leave politics out of the debate when talking about science. It is a necessary component of the debate when talking about policy.
Anthropogenic global warming is not a liberal conspiracy, it is a conclusion based on the weight of scientific evidence. Your objections to it are not scientific, they are political.
But if you have some personal grudge against Schmidt, there are plenty of other studies which conclude that solar variations are responsible for little of the global warming, such as Foukal et al.'s 2006 review in Nature, and Stott et al.'s 2003 analysis in J. Climat. Solar variations as the majority cause of global warming has been falsified in the literature. The scientific arguments are now over whether it's responsible for, say, 15% vs. 25% of the warming, not over whether it is responsible for more warming than anthropogenic sources. and a bunch of "scientists" who happen to live in socialist countries Oh for god's sake. If you're going to dismiss the findings of any scientist who happens to live in a country you don't like, you are well outside the bounds of rational debate. (Incidentally, five of the eleven authors work at US institutions. I was unaware that the US was socialist.)
As for the attribution of CO2 to anthropogenic sources, it is not just the difference between two uncertain numbers. There are independent ways of checking it. One is from an economic analysis of industrial emissions over the last 150 years. Another, and the best, way is isotopic analysis: we know directly how much CO2 in the atmosphere is due to our burning of fossil fuels, because it has a unique isotopic signature. (Your accusations of "biased sampling" ignore this fact.) All three independent estimates agree with each other.
Bottom line: we know how much CO2 there is in the atmosphere, we know how much of it we have put there, and we know how much heat it retains. We know that the Sun hasn't generated enough extra heat to be responsible for the recent warming trend; its contribution is comparatively even less relevant to the accelerating warming over the last 30 years. Even if you wanted to invoke an alternative source of warming, you'd have to invoke an even bigger source of cooling to counter all the extra CO2. Not only is there no evidence for an alternative source of warming that is large enough to explain more than a minority of the global warming, there is no evidence for this new cooling source that would also be needed.
You are not arguing on the basis of facts here, but political prejudice, as is very obvious from your remarks.
It's sort of true: what's being referred to is the phenomenon of polar amplification. It means that cold places, on average, increase in temperature more than warm places. However, that is merely an average, and greater or less warming than average can take place in different regions. Also, it doesn't mean that warm places don't get hot, just that cold places tend to see more temperature increase.
As I said before, I believe the solar radiation and volcanism are the two primary climate regulators, with the Biosphere comming in 3rd. The rest, if there is any influence, such as man, is shall we say, "debris influence" and doesn't add up too much.
That flies in the fact of those pesky things called "facts".
Volcanoes affect climate primarily through their greenhouse gas and aerosol emissions.
The GHG emissions of volcanos are smaller than man's GHG emissions by a factor of ONE HUNDRED. You keep pounding the "we know little" platform, but we do not know so little that we just simply missed 99% of the volcanic gas emissions. Even undersea volcano emissions are measurable, and even if we could not measure volcanic emissions at all, or even any other source of GHG emissions, we still know that man's GHG emissions are the largest source of GHG gas increase. That's because isotopic analysis tells us that the majority of CO2 in the atmosphere was put their by burning fossil fuels, regardless of where the minority came from. We can also measure the increase of other GHG gases and, while important, manmade CO2 has the largest effect.
Aerosol emissions from volcanoes act to cool the planet, and so cannot be responsible for global warming. They definitely can cause global cooling for a few years when a major volcano goes off; Pinatubo is an example. But they are not the main driver of climate at the present, given the overall warming trend (and they rarely are the main driver of climate given how little GHGs they emit, how quickly their aerosols fall out of the air, and how infrequently really major volcanoes erupt).
Solar radiation has an effect on the climate. It is not responsible for global warming, as you say.
We can measure the global temperatures fluctuate during the 11-year solar cycle and we see the temperatures increase and decrease in synch with the Sun: that temperature change, however, is small compared to greater trends such as global warming. We know how much the Sun's output is changing, and we know that it is by a small amount.
In the past, the Sun's output has varied more, and may have been partially responsible for the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age.
There is no paleological evidence for really large climate changes being due to solar variation.
There is evidence that orbital variations can drive major climate change such as the Milankovitch ice age cycles. I stated that early in the thread and attribute it to the Earth's motion, not to the Sun directly, although the effect of the orbital variations is to increase or decrease the amount of power received from the Sun, and to change the timing and location of maximum insolation.
If the primary argument is solar, then it makes sense that other planets in the solar system should be warming as well, not just the earth.
Once again, global warming here on Earth is not due to the Sun. You appeared to acknowledge that yourself (that the Sun is "no match" for our current activity), but then you turn around and claim that since the Earth is warming, other planets should warm as well. Since you appear to agree that the primary argument is not solar, then whether other planets in the solar system are warming or cooling is irrelevant. (In fact, it's largely irrelevant even if the warming was solar in origin, given the vast differences in climates between the Earth and the other planets.)
In case you are unclear on this: the solar output of the Sun has not increased enough to be responsible for global warming. Even if you wanted to postulate a mechanism by which the Sun's output can inexplicably cause more warming than is believed, you would also have to postulate large new cooling mechanisms to explain why the warming isn't even greater than is observed due to the greenhouse effect: since we know from simple adsorption physics how much heat our CO2 emissions are retaining, yo
Shaviv's conclusions disagree with most other work on solar variations and global warming. The cosmic ray connection is particularly tenuous. Foukal et al.'s 2006 paper in Nature gives a good review of the work in the field; for a specific critique of Shaviv's work, see this rebuttal by eleven climatologists as well their more detailed analysis; there have been other criticisms in the literature, but that is a fairly good summary.
Of course the numbers are made up. I can't tell you those things because no good models exist. They are all crude, and don't predict squat.
Not only is that false, it's not terribly relevant to the fact that CO2 takes centuries to be removed from the atmosphere. That's mostly basic atmospheric physics, not requiring sophisticated climate models, and we do know the order of magnitude of the effect. Climate models just let us nail it down more precisely: e.g., is it 80 years or 120?
You believe we know everything there is to know about CO2, without question.
We don't know everything about the carbon cycle, but we do know that CO2's residence time in the atmosphere is not days, months, years, or even a few decades.
anyone out there that has questions about CO2 are politely showed the door in University Departments around the United States, or pushed under the rug along with a whole MOUNTAIN OF QUESTIONS that need to be answered about CO2 recycling
I'm sure you can provide concrete examples of that having happened with proof, and your failure to do so was mere oversight.
I am not suggesting methane release is a common scenario. I also was talking about temperature increase. I didn't say I did not care about CO2 emissions. You are making the assumption that just because I pointed out that methane is a possible scenario, I do not care about CO2 and we shouldn't worry about it.
You said that we shouldn't care about a mere 5 degree temperature increase when methane might poison us all. That to me implies that you don't care about CO2 emissions, or in fact very much about the current global warming at all. You have also stated that CO2 emissions have comparatively little influence on the climate.
If you are indeed concerned about the influence of CO2 emissions on the climate, I stand corrected.
I am not talking about "poisonous" amounts of methane. [...] The research is crude, but it warrants more time spent at the real possibility there would be a lot less oxygen to breathe, not that we would be poisoned by methane.
To me, an amount of methane that makes it difficult to breathe, regardless of whether that effect is directly or indirectly attributed to methane, is "poisonous".
I think it is dubious at best to make such a statement, that atmospheric changes in composition has not played some part in all biospehere diversity events.
I think atmospheric changes in composition certainly play a role in biodiversity. (For an extreme example, see what happened to the existing anaerobes when oxygen first appeared in the atmosphere.) On a more contemporary note, atmospheric CO2 concentrations influence the rate of plant growth as well as the health of plants. There is evidence of atmospheric concentrations being linked to widespread species extinctions, but no such evidence within millions of years except that which can be attributed indirectly to atmospheric gases through their influence on the climate (as opposed to your suffocation scenario).
Poor understanding of CO2, poor understanding CO2 recycling in the oceans, poor understanding of CO2 on land, poor understanding of CO2 recycling in the atmosphere.
We have already beat this issue to death: you are confusing your own poor understanding with the understanding of climate researchers. The scientific community simply is nowhere near as ignorant about the carbon cycle as you believe.
But, I have read enough papers to realize most of them are on the Democratic or some some sort of political/money trail in the energy sector or just opportunists looking to make good on tenure.
Wow, funny how you can read all that in a scientific paper in Nature or J. Climate or GGR or whatnot. You must be really good at reading what you want to see, er, I mean, reading between the lines.
I do not see human activity radically changing climate on this plan
Perhaps I wasn't sufficiently clear. When addressing a lot of points I don't always have time to carefully think through the wording of each response.
Likewise, it's interesting to know how the oceans absorb volcanic activity, but the total warming produced from all the GHGs emitted by volcanoes, even if they were not absorbed and all went straight into the atmosphere, is still only a tiny fraction of warming produced by anthropogenic GHG sources.
Likewise, better space weather platforms are definitely useful in predicting future climate change, but we already have enough data to attribute past climate change, and we have more than enough data to know that the residence time of atmospheric CO2 is on the order of centuries. Since we know so little about what is underneath the oceans in volcanic activity, what do you think would happen if a 50 mile wide outpouring of molten Lava anywhere in the vicinity of a Methane ice trap would do? That could be bad. Quite frankly I could give a rats ass about a 5 degree temperature increase world wide. Who the hell cares about the temperature increase when you can't breathe. Your logic is broken. Just because worst-case scenario Y is worse than worst-case scenario X doesn't mean that we shouldn't worry about X.
Incidentally, the lack of mass extinctions over the last tens of millions of years suggests that "releasing poisonous amounts of methane into the atmosphere" is not a common scenario. Releasing enough to produce climate change is a different matter (and what makes you think we don't know anything about how methane is absorbed by the ocean?). Nobody that I know of talks about these sorts of things because methane isn't a money maker. Do you know any climatologists? See, e.g., here.
There is a lot of literature on paleological climate change due to undersea methane hydrate destabilization, and at least some literature on the risks associated with contemporary destabilization (e.g. here). I'm not aware of papers specifically discussing contemporary destabilization from vulcanism, but it's not like I've performed an extensive literature search. Would you believe we have better sensors on the MARS express probe to detect methance on mars than we do on any Earth based sat platform right now, excluding the ISS?
Why do you think that is? Probably because all sensing platforms related to global warming and Earth observation in general are getting cut across the board (e.g. here and here).
By the way, I agree completely that methane destabilization is a possibility that should be — and is — studied. But that is an issue completely separate from the fact that anthropogenic CO2 is the major contributor to recent global warming, and will remain a major contributor to the climate in the future.
OK, first of all, the report explicitly says that the model is not working when predicting Texas, particularly for precipitation. So let's be honest and remember that this data is still being worked on.
Let's be honest and admit that models aren't predicting that all the warming takes place in the north.
"It can be seen from Fig. 5 that over UMRB: (1) increase in Tmin/Tmax is consistently 2-3K,". Since 1K=1C, I think that the report pretty much backs me up.
As plainly stated in the paper, the UMRB does not include most of the southern United States (it contains nothing south of 37N.)
I will merely point out that there are two models in the study, neither of which worked for the testable part of Texas' weather (which is admitted in the study) - and these models gave opposite predictions for Texas.
They didn't give opposite predictions as far as Tmax is concerned; in fact, both of them predicted that peak warming would occur in the northwest and near western Texas.
The summer change is less than 2 degrees C - and this is an average across the whole nation with most of the warming happening up north where it is cold
Most of the warming is not happening up north; in fact, there is more warming taking place in the southern half of the U.S. than the northern, as is also plainly obvious from Fig. 4.
Recall too that we were not talking about the average U.S. change, but the change in hotter regions of the U.S. like Arizona and Texas. And that an X degree increase in temperatures is more of a problem in hotter regions than cooler ones. Or have you forgotten what this thread was about?
and of course, no to mention that this is one century from now, when we will have weather control rays operated by our mutant mental powers
What the hell are you talking about?
Well, I'm not the one requiring a lifestyle change at gunpoint, am I?
First, no one is requiring a lifestyle change at gunpoint, and second, yes, you are requiring a lifestyle change for people in hotter climates, if you advocate doing nothing to mitigate global warming.
Are you saying that their right to existing weather patterns is more important than my right to live the way I want?
In other words, "fuck everyone else in the world, I want it warmer where I live".
Why is preserving the status quo (a pointless excersize, in my opinion) more important than my persuit of happiness?
Yeah, why not? I'm sure the Eskimos would like it even warmer, let's accelerate global warming even more.
Your pursuit of happiness doesn't have to come at the expense of other people's lives.
Don't scaremonger about costs. How much did it cost to relocate New Orleans? It was noticeable, but not major unless you lived there.
Ok, one, you are fucking crazy. Not even the most conservative people think that the cost of New Orleans was nothing and it's just fine economically for the U.S. to have more disasters like that in the future. Two, your callous self-centeredness is showing with your causally off-hand "unless you lived there", as if the costs to anyone other than you are unimportant. Three, New Orleans had like 1.5 million people. To use your examples, Florida has far more, and Bangladesh has 150 MILLION. Are you really so eager to pay for that kind of relocation personally? Not to mention the fact that you can't actually pay for that: taxpayers have to, and not all of them agree with you on how their money ought to be spent. Fourth, there are social costs of relocation in addition to economic costs; look at what's happening in France, Germany, etc. with their large immigration fluxes, not to mention the unrest in United States itself.
Well, this gets onto another topic altogether, but I happen to like immigration.
Yeah, great, do you also happen to like 150 million Bangladeshi immigrants? If not, would y
I suspect also that you would be less willing to pay for relocation if you realized what the costs would actually be. I hope you also don't mind the greater influx of immigrants both legal and illegal into more northern nations.