They don't work accurately if you push them far enough into the past, and they don't work the other way either. They are SHORT TERM models only, based on a very small, local history model of weather behavior. They don't work over the long scale because Earth's weather (even within the last 1000 years!) has varied widely from our recent weather pattern. That's why they don't use them to predict over the long scale.
P.S. You're confusing climate and weather.
The Global Warming crowd always fails to mention this. They use data from the last hundred years to try and predict global weather patterns that cycle on 1000-2000 year schedules. Nonsense. They use data from much longer periods of time, and they only predict over 100+ year time spans.
I can pull these links ALL DAY, but I've got work to do and a life to live. And we can rebut them all day, but ditto, so don't go around claiming victory.
If you'd like to stick to one issue at a time, post a scientific claim and discuss it.
The point is, the more evidence we gather, the more we realize that IF the world is warming (and it's a BIG if) then it's part of a natural cycle that has been taking place on our planet for Millenia, and there isn't a damn thing we can do to cause or stop it. Wrong, wrong, and wrong. It is not just "a natural cycle". There are natural forces at work, but our CO2 emissions have caused most of the recent warming, and reducing those emissions will slow that warming (although not stop it, given the timescales it takes to remove CO2 from the atmosphere); increasing other kinds of emissions (like aerosols) can also reduce the warming, although not necessarily in a desirable way.
Claiming that human beings are unable to influence the climate is an even more pathetic state of denial than merely claiming that global warming is not due to humans. It's tantamount to saying that the laws of physics are wrong. Fact: greenhouse gases do trap heat. Fact: atmospheric aerosols do reflect light away from the Earth. Fact: these alter the climate. Fact: humans emit substantial quantities of both. Even if you really believed that humans are not responsible for the recent warming, it is ludicrous to claim that we cannot, by our actions, either accelerate or decelerate that warming. The real question is about whether it is economically and socially desirable to do so.
Look, you have to explain more clearly because it's not easy to understand your point. You can point at correlations all you want, but if you actually calculate how much the Earth's temperature changes as a result of the Sun's output changing, the number you get is much smaller than the observed warming. The Sun's output has increased, but it hasn't increased enough to be responsible for the warming we see: we aren't getting enough extra heat.
I don't see what is so hard for you to understand here.
For argument's sake, let's say sunspots are twice as numerous as they've been in a millennium. The stock market's at an all time high too, does that mean it's because of sunspots? Hardly likely, because there's no connection we're aware of between stock prices and sunspots. That's exactly my point. There is no connection between the Sun and warming that explains the amount of warming we measure on the basis of the amount of solar activity we measure.
Ah, but global temps are also shooting up at a very fast rate, in fact the rate of increase strongly resembles the rate of increase in sunspots. Coincidence? Possibly. It resembles the rate of CO2 emissions even more so, and just as important: if you calculate how much warming is produced by increased CO2 concentrations, you get the right answer, and if you calculate how much warming is produced by increased solar output, you get the wrong answer. (Or rather, both give warming, but the first gives significantly more warming than the second, and the second gives significantly less warming than is observed.)
You cannot draw a causal link from solar variations to global warming unless you can proposed a physical mechanism by which solar variations can produce global warming. The only known mechanisms do not produce enough warming to be responsible for the majority of the observed warming.
I'm not turning ""sunspot number" curves into "temperature anomaly" curves" Yes, that's your problem. You have to do that, because when you do, you find out that the solar output isn't actually changing enough to account for the observed temperature changes. Your analysis is only semi-numerate; you cannot ignore the actual quantity of solar output.
Oops, that's horribly wrong. It should be, if Greenland and the Antarctic both go. If just Greenland and the West Antarctic both go, it's more like 50 feet. But it's still very unlikely. The most likely "disaster" scenario is that Greenland goes, which is still about 20 feet. More likely, we will get some melting of both, and a few feet of sea rise over the next century (but it will keep going up).
Since the North Pole is not land, it is just floating ice and since unlike most materials, water is actually bigger as a solid than as a liquid (hence freezing waterbottles causes them to burst), it is hard to imagine the oceans rising. What people are worried about with sea level rise is (a) melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, and (b) warming causing thermal expansion of water.
Even when you count the Greenland glacier [...] and the South Pole [...] it is hard to see mass flooding. It may be hard for you to see, but it's true. If Greenland and the West Antarctic ice sheets both go, we're talking potential sea level rises of over 250 feet. Fortunately, it's very unlikely that both will melt completely, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't worry about the much smaller melting that is more likely to happen.
In other words, do the models that people use to project the climate accurately map what we know to have occurred in the past? The answer so far is no. Actually, AOGCMs show reasonable skill at hindcasting the climate. They don't work if you push them thousands of years in the past, but they're not claiming that level of accuracy.
Did you look at the curves or not? Yes. Did you read my response or not? Your argument breaks down when you try to turn "sunspot number" curves into "temperature anomaly" curves. Solar variations do produce changes in climate, but the recent global warming is not largely attributable to them.
Wikipedia. See in particular, Foukal et al. (2006) and Stott et al. (2003).
Heh, I knew someone would mention terrorism. Slashdot is so predictable sometimes (all the time). You say that as if you're somehow scoring rhetorical points. The fact is, terrorism is a notable counterargument to your claim.
Anyway, terrorists have actually killed us, yet these alarmist claims haven't really occurred yet. Note that the terrorist alarmism started after September 11. You can only count it as vindication if terrorists killed us after the alarmist claims. The alarmist claims about terrorism post-9/11 haven't really occurred yet either.
But I dissent from the alarmism on the right too... it's similar to eco-nut alarmism. I never claimed that alarmism didn't exist on the left, I just disputed that it is somehow more prevalent there.
Maybe because Democrats are more prone to hysteria? Funny, I don't see them as much on the TERRORISTS ARE GOING TO KILL US fearmongering campaign. In the past, substitute "communists" and any number of other bogeymen. Your assertion only holds weight if you limit alarmist claims to environmental issues.
If you want to assume that, then you can't conclude anything about the Sun's influence on the climate, either way. If someone wants to propose a new physical mechanism by which the Sun produces much more warming than is currently believed, and support that mechanism with evidence, they can do so. But until then, it's not a plausible hypothesis.
Responsible scientists don't use excel, powerpoint, and bullhorns as their 'evidence.' Yeah, they use actual scientific evidence as their evidence. Read any climate journals lately?
Take a look at this graph. [...] The major problem with solar forcing enthusiasts is that they ignore the fact that the variations in solar output simply aren't large enough in magnitude to account for the observed recent warming trend.
We are on the up-swing (interglacial) from the last ice age that ended only about 10,000 years ago. Actually, the paleoclimate record over the last 10,000 years doesn't support much warming; if anything, there has been more cooling (e.g., Vostok).
There are a number of factors (sun cycles/solar activity, atmospheric content and even the magnetic field) that cause temperatures to rise, but even if every power plant and factory were closed and all use of fossil fuels was ceased, temperatures would still rise. More recent reconstructions also support cooling (pre-industrial) more than warming (here).
While it may be a temporary downswing geologically speaking, and there will be future warming, that warming will be much more gradual than what is going on right now. The current warming is also largely due to our own activities, and we can do something about it, if we decide that the costs of not doing anything are higher.
You point out above higher CO2 levels in prehistory times when hominids existed 440,000 years ago, and that poses a problem for people and some scientists and certainly politicians obsessively focused on CO2 (what about other gases like dihydrogen oxide & methane) Other greenhouse gases contribute, but the change in temperature due to changes in those GHG concentrations is not as large as the change in temperature due to CO2 concentrations.
Dust-soot may present a far larger "problem" as it obviously affects sunlight reaching the earth...yet no one seems to be talking about that much, as it is You certainly see talk about aerosols in the climatological literature. In fact, reduction of pollutant emissions, for example, has accelerated global warming to some extent. More pollution can be "good", as far as global warming is concerned. It may be, however, a case of the cure being worse than the disease, and pollution still isn't enough to offset CO2 warming.
Volcanoes are the largest Dust-soot-gas belchers of all in the earth, and about one eruption every 10 years, but many dozens of active volcanoes spewing things but not classified as errupting (Indonesia has 100 active volcanoes EVERY YEAR). How does this affect the Earth and how does that COMPARE to Humans? Volcanoes put out a tiny amount of CO2 (like a few percent of total emissions), and so do not contribute much to warming. Really big eruptions, like Pinatubo in 1991, can put out a lot of aerosols that lead to temporary cooling (on the order of a year). But they don't occur often enough to cancel out global warming as a whole.
On a side note, some (like Tom Wigley of NCAR) have proposed "geoengineering", intentionally pumping lots of aerosols into the atmosphere to mitigate global warming. That proposal is problematic. It's like overeating and going on a crash diet instead of eating more reasonably. You could do it if there is no other recourse, but it's not the most sensible option. Even ignoring the effects of additional pollutants in the atmosphere, aerosols get cleansed out quickly (as I mentioned). So you have to keep putting them in there. If you stop or cut back even for a few years, you're back to where you'd be without them. Suppose CO2 levels ramp up for a century and would ordinarily produce a lot of warming, but you cancel them with additional aerosols. If at the end of a century you fail to keep up your aerosol production, bam, all of a sudden you have a century's worth of global warming taking place in the span of a few years as the aerosols go away — even worse than ordinary global warming.
GP is simply asking for a bit more than speculation before making trillion dollar policy decisions. There is more than "speculation" on the matter, but there are still deep uncertainties regarding the extent and impact of future warming. The existence of current warming, and man's contribution to it, is not however in doubt.
Yet, CO2 was an order of magnitude higher 450 million years ago and temperatures were roughly the same as they are today. Climate isn't correlated with absolute concentrations of CO2, because of all of the other climate factors in effect. Changes in climate are correlated with changes in CO2, however. In fact, the Ordovician temperatures and CO2 concentrations to which you refer support our picture of the influence of CO2 on the climate, rather than contradicting it. The evidence suggests that a drop in CO2 precipitated the ice age, and a rise in CO2 may have ended it.
CO2 concentrations are about 20% higher today than they have been any time in the last 400,000 years yet drastic temperature increases have not followed suit. They're not drastic on the scale of "an ending ice age", but they have produced an unusually rapid temperature change, temperature increases are related nonlinearly to CO2 concentration, and we are still in for a lot of CO2 increase over the next century, which is the real worry.
In the mid 90's, Dr. Patrick Michaels called bullshit in front of Congress when predictions of higher temperatures made by computer models did not materialize. Micahels' analysis was, shall we say, dodgy at best.
"climate scientists" once again were eating humble pie when computer models that generated gloom and doom "hockey stick" graphs were shown to spit out hockey sticks with random input by people who were not climate scientists McKitrick & McIntyre's analysis is also not without its flaws (here and here).
What has to be shown, with confidence, is that man is causing a deviation from the natural rhythm and cycle of climate variation. It has been shown beyond doubt that man is causing climate deviations. It has also been shown that man is more likely than not the cause of most of the deviation over the last 50 years.
Frankly, it appalls me that everyone assumes that scientists are unmotivated agents. They are just as susceptible to greed, avarice, deception, groupthink, and "doin's a' transpirin'" as anyone. The history of science indicates that while the process of science is not perfect, the mechanisms in place to keep things on the "straight and narrow" do, for the most part, work. Scientists are rewarded for finding errors in other scientists' work. And while not all scientists are honest, most are: it's not all hard to find papers in which scientists report findings that go against their own expectations.
These same scientists, with huge help from the popular media, try to muzzle the other scientists who's research contradicts the human cause theor.y Really? Then how come those other "muzzled" scientists still get to publish their work? Sure, it gets ripped apart in rebuttal papers, but it still gets published. That's a far cry from the government telling scientists what not to say.
Fact is we dont live long enough to recognise any of the Earth's long term cycles. We know even less about non-terrestrial facts which directly effect our planet. We also tend to forget that our system orbits the galactic center of our galaxy. Our system most likely enters and exits energized (radioactive) clouds off and on. How does this effect life here on earth? We forget how little we know and in our arrogance we think we know it all. We don't "know it all", but we do know a lot about what is happening on Earth right now, which is really what is relevant.
The guy who predicted the worst hurricane on record for 2006 is a perfect example of the selective science behind the whole movement. When the stats don't support their theory, they conveniently leave them out. It's worth noting that an El Nino wasn't predicted to develop when it did; ENSO events are rather unpredictable. When they show up, they highly suppress hurricane formation in the Atlantic. Predicting a hurricane season for a particular year on the basis of climate alone necessarily leaves out the ENSO contribution because it can't be predicted.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't get proof in science. If you're not allowed to use the laws of physics to calculate things, you can't attribute anything to anything.
Maybe you should pay less attention to "moonbats" and more to scientists.
P.S. You're confusing climate and weather. The Global Warming crowd always fails to mention this. They use data from the last hundred years to try and predict global weather patterns that cycle on 1000-2000 year schedules. Nonsense. They use data from much longer periods of time, and they only predict over 100+ year time spans.
If you'd like to stick to one issue at a time, post a scientific claim and discuss it. The point is, the more evidence we gather, the more we realize that IF the world is warming (and it's a BIG if) then it's part of a natural cycle that has been taking place on our planet for Millenia, and there isn't a damn thing we can do to cause or stop it. Wrong, wrong, and wrong. It is not just "a natural cycle". There are natural forces at work, but our CO2 emissions have caused most of the recent warming, and reducing those emissions will slow that warming (although not stop it, given the timescales it takes to remove CO2 from the atmosphere); increasing other kinds of emissions (like aerosols) can also reduce the warming, although not necessarily in a desirable way.
Claiming that human beings are unable to influence the climate is an even more pathetic state of denial than merely claiming that global warming is not due to humans. It's tantamount to saying that the laws of physics are wrong. Fact: greenhouse gases do trap heat. Fact: atmospheric aerosols do reflect light away from the Earth. Fact: these alter the climate. Fact: humans emit substantial quantities of both. Even if you really believed that humans are not responsible for the recent warming, it is ludicrous to claim that we cannot, by our actions, either accelerate or decelerate that warming. The real question is about whether it is economically and socially desirable to do so.
I don't see what is so hard for you to understand here. For argument's sake, let's say sunspots are twice as numerous as they've been in a millennium. The stock market's at an all time high too, does that mean it's because of sunspots? Hardly likely, because there's no connection we're aware of between stock prices and sunspots. That's exactly my point. There is no connection between the Sun and warming that explains the amount of warming we measure on the basis of the amount of solar activity we measure. Ah, but global temps are also shooting up at a very fast rate, in fact the rate of increase strongly resembles the rate of increase in sunspots. Coincidence? Possibly. It resembles the rate of CO2 emissions even more so, and just as important: if you calculate how much warming is produced by increased CO2 concentrations, you get the right answer, and if you calculate how much warming is produced by increased solar output, you get the wrong answer. (Or rather, both give warming, but the first gives significantly more warming than the second, and the second gives significantly less warming than is observed.)
You cannot draw a causal link from solar variations to global warming unless you can proposed a physical mechanism by which solar variations can produce global warming. The only known mechanisms do not produce enough warming to be responsible for the majority of the observed warming.
I suggest you read the two papers I referenced.
Oops, that's horribly wrong. It should be, if Greenland and the Antarctic both go. If just Greenland and the West Antarctic both go, it's more like 50 feet. But it's still very unlikely. The most likely "disaster" scenario is that Greenland goes, which is still about 20 feet. More likely, we will get some melting of both, and a few feet of sea rise over the next century (but it will keep going up).
Wikipedia. See in particular, Foukal et al. (2006) and Stott et al. (2003).
If you want to assume that, then you can't conclude anything about the Sun's influence on the climate, either way. If someone wants to propose a new physical mechanism by which the Sun produces much more warming than is currently believed, and support that mechanism with evidence, they can do so. But until then, it's not a plausible hypothesis.
While it may be a temporary downswing geologically speaking, and there will be future warming, that warming will be much more gradual than what is going on right now. The current warming is also largely due to our own activities, and we can do something about it, if we decide that the costs of not doing anything are higher.
That doesn't answer the question, which was about why Republicans are far more likely to be GW skeptics than are Democrats.
On a side note, some (like Tom Wigley of NCAR) have proposed "geoengineering", intentionally pumping lots of aerosols into the atmosphere to mitigate global warming. That proposal is problematic. It's like overeating and going on a crash diet instead of eating more reasonably. You could do it if there is no other recourse, but it's not the most sensible option. Even ignoring the effects of additional pollutants in the atmosphere, aerosols get cleansed out quickly (as I mentioned). So you have to keep putting them in there. If you stop or cut back even for a few years, you're back to where you'd be without them. Suppose CO2 levels ramp up for a century and would ordinarily produce a lot of warming, but you cancel them with additional aerosols. If at the end of a century you fail to keep up your aerosol production, bam, all of a sudden you have a century's worth of global warming taking place in the span of a few years as the aerosols go away — even worse than ordinary global warming.
Yet, CO2 was an order of magnitude higher 450 million years ago and temperatures were roughly the same as they are today. Climate isn't correlated with absolute concentrations of CO2, because of all of the other climate factors in effect. Changes in climate are correlated with changes in CO2, however. In fact, the Ordovician temperatures and CO2 concentrations to which you refer support our picture of the influence of CO2 on the climate, rather than contradicting it. The evidence suggests that a drop in CO2 precipitated the ice age, and a rise in CO2 may have ended it. CO2 concentrations are about 20% higher today than they have been any time in the last 400,000 years yet drastic temperature increases have not followed suit. They're not drastic on the scale of "an ending ice age", but they have produced an unusually rapid temperature change, temperature increases are related nonlinearly to CO2 concentration, and we are still in for a lot of CO2 increase over the next century, which is the real worry. In the mid 90's, Dr. Patrick Michaels called bullshit in front of Congress when predictions of higher temperatures made by computer models did not materialize. Micahels' analysis was, shall we say, dodgy at best. "climate scientists" once again were eating humble pie when computer models that generated gloom and doom "hockey stick" graphs were shown to spit out hockey sticks with random input by people who were not climate scientists McKitrick & McIntyre's analysis is also not without its flaws (here and here).
If glacier changes on Earth were our only evidence of global warming, or were demonstrably unrelated to external forcing, you would have a point.
Good thing they're making climate predictions and not weather predictions, then.
... therefore, oil will last forever, with no end in sight. Good thing it's an unlimited supply!