I watched Al Gore's video expecting to see GW stuff. I found lots of ice melting, which I couldn't careless about. Good thing you don't live on a coast. (Note that ice melting is "GW stuff".)
Climatologists fishing for more grants is the most/easiest to believe. Yes, it's always easiest to believe in global conspiracies. Scientists can just make up whatever claims they want and no other scientists will ever call them on it, because they all want more grant money.
Suppose climatologists are fishing for grants. What exactly are you suggesting her? That they simply are lying about their findings? They ran a study, found out there was no global warming, and changed all the negative numbers to positive ones? All of them?
Um, I'd have to see some local/national changes rather than the most inhabitable places on earth having their ice melt. Temperatures are still going up, even nationally. As for adverse effects, it will be a lot harder to attribute those to global warming, even if that is indeed the cause. If we get more droughts, floods, hurricanes, etc., it's going to be further decades before we can say that global warming is responsible for them.
Um, this is an issue, but its also an issue that our climate scientist can't predict our climates either. Climate scientists can predict global climate with some skill. Regional climates are harder.
but if they can't predict it and prove that they've actually predicted it You can't prove that you've predicted anything until after it happens. You're missing the point of "prediction". You never know if your predictions are right. That's a different question from how much confidence one should place in a prediction.
Um, I'd say we influence the environment, but we don't know enough at this time to use them to make any decision off of. Decisions about the future are hard. However, political and social institutions adapt poorly to rapid change. It's probably worth mitigating our effect on the climate to some extent even if we can't predict the extent of the costs of climate change, as a matter of insurance. You buy insurance to hedge against low probability and uncertain, but high impact, events.
Based on ALL THE DATA available (not just the cherry pickings), there is compelling evidence that the earth has a cool/warm cycle with a period of roughly 100,000 years. The data identifies we're in the midst of a warming period of the 100,000 year cycle. Actually, the data indicates that we've been in a period of slight cooling for most of the last 5000+ years. The warming may well continue over the next several tens of thousands of years, but natural trends cannot account for the very rapid recent warming.
As there were no human-induced C02 contributions during the previous warming cylces, I am hard pressed in understanding how "scientist" can identify which part of our current warming is human-induced and which part is due to the natural cool/warm cycle. The natural interglacial warming trend is much more gradual than the recent global warming. Furthermore, climatologists (why the scare-quotes around "scientist"?) can measure the contributions of the various climate effects as well as model their influence on the global temperature, and the natural portions of the trends are not sufficient to account for the majority of the warming.
I'm just saying the data presented to date is not sufficient to establish humans as the main cause. That turns out not to be the case; it is sufficient to establish humans as the main cause beyond reasonable doubt. Even 10 years ago that wasn't the case — it was merely "likely" — but the science has progressed.
And furthermore, given the level to which the conclusions have been tainted politically, the results have severe credibility problems in my mind. You are welcome to ignore the political debate and read the published studies themselves.
The earth adjusts, recovers, and continues on. Yes, but the issue is whether climate change is good for us. The Earth will survive global warming. Humans will too. It's just a question of what the costs to us will be.
I love that these scientists and their cult followers in the "climate-change" group (amazing how quickly they're getting away from the "global-warming" tag given the weather recently) can't answer the logic that if we can't STOP it, how did we ever START it? What's "it"? Global warming? We started it with CO2 emissions. We could stop it if we could get rid of all the CO2. We can't do that, but we can reduce the CO2, and thus reduce the warming.
The earth has its coping mechanisms, all of which work. Yes, there are feedback mechanisms, and the Earth won't continue warming forever. But it will continue warming for a while, and that may not be good for us.
I forget the exact statistics, but I recall reading that if the earth's orbit around the sun was disturbed ~1% plus or minus its current distance, earth would be UNINHABITABLE Even if true, what's your point?
And after everything the earth has gone through, we are here still, and that's the proof that I need to believe that there is nothing that man can do to cause or "FIX" global warming/climate change. Your logic is broken. Think about your claim: "We have survived climate change, which proves that we cannot change the climate". How does that make sense?
The fact is, the climate changes naturally. Human activities also change the climate. The changes for which we are responsible may not be desirable to us. We cannot make the climate whatever we want, but our actions can alter the course of the climate, for good or for bad. The questions are about the costs of taking action, vs. the costs of doing nothing.
Couple that with the fear-mongering I grew up in the 70s about running out of oil (no end in sight) "No end in sight"? Even big oil companies like BP are expecting oil production to peak in a few decades; Exxon has admitted that at least non-OPEC oil will peak on similar timescales.
and acid rain destroying all of humanity, it becomes much easier to blow off the global warming problem. You know, one of the reasons why acid rain didn't become a bigger problem is because governments actually did something about it and put emissions controls in place.
You can't ignore the scientist who have come out and said that and then say, "Show me the scientist, I see no scientists." Actually, it's fairly easy for me to ignore them, because they're not climatologists, and furthermore, they're wrong (as you would find out if you read the links I gave).
There are plenty of scientists that are saying there are solar, geologic, and other causes. Well, duh. All of those effects exist: you can't explain the climate trend without them. They're just known to be smaller than the anthropogenic contribution.
I don't deny man has an impact, but its the degree. I don't deny that nature has an impact, but it's the degree: smaller than man's impact. (In fact, if you read the Stott reference, you would find that the Sun's influence something like 15-30% of the warming, with the median likely closer to 15 than 30.)
But to deny that there is impact from sources outside of man's control is just wrong. Where did I do that?
The hysteria crowd like to twist things so someone arguing about the cause of global climate change looks like he is arguing that there is no climate change: Acutally, the article is primarily about controversy surrounding his statements regarding the future effects of climate change, not so the existence of past change or its cause.
I think people are afraid to admit that its that pesky Sun, on a warming cycle, and volcanic action, there's been a lot, and just plain cycles. It's not the Sun: there hasn't been a big enough increase in solar output.
It's not volcanic action: volcanoes make only a tiny contribution to greenhouse gases; their only large contribution is from aerosols, whose effect doesn't last much longer than a year, and which produces cooling, not warming.
It's not "just plain cycles": climate cycles occur, but the paleo record does not indicate that we were "due" for the kind of warming that we are experiencing (if anything, the opposite). Furthermore, climate cycles are based on physical mechanisms of forcings and feedbacks (such as the solar variations, orbital variations, and so on), so you're really just sweeping the question under the rug. You can't just say "it's just plain cycles", you have to give a mechanism. What is the physical mechanism currently underway that's responsible for the global warming, and what is the evidence for that claim?
No one diputes the fact that the Earth is warming. People still do. There is a full spectrum of global warming deniers.
However, there is not scientific consensus that it is caused, or substantially increased, by humans. Among the community of climate scientists, there is now very broad consensus on that issue. If you extend your statement to include scientists who do not specialize in the climate, your claim may be true. Note that the climate skeptics tend to be people like economists, physicists, petroleum geologists, meteorologists, etc., not people who study the climate for a living.
The inconvenient truth that Gore fails to mention is that about 10,000 years ago, the Earth was so warm that citrus fruits were growing in what is now northern Germany. Yeah, and 100 million years ago most of the planet was tropical. The Earth has been warmer before. So what? The problem is that the Earth is now warming at an unusually high rate, due to our influence.
When the ice age ended, the Earth began warming, and has been warming ever since. Actually, the evidence is that the Earth has been slightly cooling for the last 5000+ years or so, until recently (with a little blip around the Medieval Warm period). See here and here.
It will continue to warm, until another ice age occurs. That's a bold claim. What science supports it?
The culprit is not the Earth's habitants; it is the sun, which we sometimes see in the Pacific Northwest. That happens to be false, for reasons given in another post.
"I do not know of a single TV meteorologist who buys into the man-made global warming hype." (from James Spann) That rather proves the point: TV meteorologists are out of touch with the findings of climate science, in which they receive little to no training.
I wonder where are the studies published in scientific journals by climatologists which support these claims.
While solar variations certainly have influenced the climate in the past, including recently, they simply have not been large enough to explain the majority of warming the Earth has experienced in recent decades. (See Stott et al. (2003), among others.) In what must be an incredible coincidence, atmospheric CO2 concentrations have increased with timing, rate, and magnitude that do agree with the observed warming. (Some commentary by climatologists on Singer and Avery's claims here.)
As for cosmic rays, their effect on cloud formation is still not well understood, but regardless of their effect, cosmic ray flux is not well correlated with climate change (see, e.g., here), so it does not seem reasonable to attribute the recent rapid warming to cosmic rays to any large extent. (Especially, again, given the amount of greenhouse gases now in the atmosphere; anyone who wants to postulate an alternative mechanism for warming has to also introduce a lot of of extra cooling mechanisms to explain why the GHGs aren't warming the planet as much as thermodynamics predicts.)
Re:Storytelling Ability Is the Primary Requirement
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Telling a good story is done by game designers and dialogue writers. I should perhaps amend that to, "telling a story is done by game designers and dialogue writers". Telling a good story in a game is done by no one (usually).
Re:Storytelling Ability Is the Primary Requirement
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Although developers spend most of their time learning how to make cool graphics, they should learn how to tell a good story. In most games nowadays, except for small development shops, the two tasks are done by different people. Cool graphics are made by developers (engine coders) and artists. Telling a good story is done by game designers and dialogue writers.
Re:For great justice...
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Game Writing
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Perhaps the point of specializing in game writing is to raise standards and introduce literary skills into a field that lacks them.
Before Stonehenge, there was Woodhenge and Strawhenge, but a big bad wolf came and blew them down, and three little piggies were relocated to the projects.
Seriously, the only way to get respect as a journalist is to uncover something important. Ain't gonna happen in video games. Unless they start following the example of Naked News...
I've heard some of the craziest suggestions to stop Global Warming. From a giant mirror in space to actually releasing agents into the atmosphere that will reduce the greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. That has always struck me as extremely arrogant thinking. I can agree with that. However, there are more conservative ways of mitigating climate change, such as reducing greenhouse gas concentrations back towards "natural" levels.
Especially with all the evidence that it can fix itself. Higher temperatures due to the proximity of the sun. Water vapor being the primary greenhouse gas. This suggests that it can fix itself. We just need to prepare to wait it out. That's not sensible. Feedback cycles do exist, but things can get bad for us before sufficient feedback kicks in, and feedbacks don't always return the climate to its original state.
Waiting it out may be what we do if we have to, but we can take a more active role in ensuring a climate that we'd prefer.
The fact that we believe we can avert something like this when we can't even avert a hurricane is staggeringly arrogant. That's a specious comparison. If we can cause climate change in the first place, we can also alter its course — at least, unless until so much change takes place that an irreversible threshold is crossed. That's possible, but it probably hasn't happened yet. The question is not whether we can affect the climate, it is what is the cost of altering the climate vs. the cost of doing nothing.
I can agree with media distortion regarding the situation. However, I think you're still missing the point. Water vapor's influence on global warming is not what, for instance, the second link implies. It fails to differentiate between the greenhouse effect and global warming. Without a greenhouse effect, the Earth's mean temperature would be about 0 F. Instead, it's more like 60 F, mostly due to water vapor. But that's irrelevant to the issue of global warming: "global warming" is about why the mean temperature has risen from 60 to 62 F over the past 150 years. (Those numbers aren't exactly right, they're just for illustrative purposes.) And the reason for that 2 F warming is largely increases in CO2 and their concomitant effects.
The picture of global warming as something that is primarily due to humans' CO2 emissions is correct. Water vapor has an influence on global warming (as opposed to the baseline planetary temperature due to the greenhouse effect) mostly only insofar as the CO2-induced warming liberates more water vapor. Citing water vapor as a key driver of global warming is misleading at best.
These are only some of the links you get when you google water vapor and global warming. You might want to read them. As I said, water vapor is not the primary driver of global warming. Water vapor is the most significant greenhouse gas, but that merely explains baseline temperatures, not the increase in warming, which is far out of proportion with changes in water vapor concentration. Increased water vapor does explain some of the warming, but the reason why the increased water vapor is there in the first place is because of the much larger warming due to CO2 causing greater water evaporation.
As an aside, I think Ambitwistor (here on slashdot) is in the Oxford University group that did the monte carlo analysis program. I think you have me confused with someone else.
The only way we are going to be able to have the control of carbon dioxide emission that we need is if we institute strict state run birth control. I am sure that is an informed opinion based on an analysis of the economic and technological situation.
I love how "skeptics" automatically go from "global warming isn't happening" to "global warming may be happening but it's impossible to do anything about". Either way is an excuse to ignore the issue.
And even if that were done it still wouldn't do anything to stop Global Warming. Global warming can't be stopped in the near term, but it can be slowed.
The main green house gas is water vapor and that is something that we really cannot control. That water vapor is the main greenhouse gas is irrelevant. Water vapor is the reason why the Earth has not always been a frozen iceball. Carbon dioxide is the reason why the Earth has warmed rapidly since pre-industrial times.
Carbon dioxide emissions really aren't what the media is making it out to be. That's incorrect. CO2 emissions are responsible for most of the global warming, by which I mean "the change in global mean temperature since pre-industrial times".
Global Warming may be real but we are no closer to finding out what is causing it than we are to sending a man to alpha centauri or some such planet. That is also incorrect. See above. The greenhouse effect is a real and inevitable consequence of atomic adsorption physics, and the amount of warming it predicts agrees in timing, rate, and magnitude with the warming that has been observed.
Scientists are supposed to be open-minded. Yeah, go ahead, try to hide shoddy science behind the "open minded" defense.
AiG and TJ do have some credibility. No, they don't. Not even a little. There's a reason why creationists were crowing when Stephen Meyer managed to get a paper accepted by a real journal. It's because creationist journals have zero scientific credibility. Hell, AiG's Statement of Faith flat out states, "No apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the Scriptural record." Let's talk about open-minded science.
And there are plenty of creationists with credentials, if that's what you want. They merely lack credentials in the fields they're writing about. Humphreys, for instance, wrote a book on astrophysics but has no actual astrophysics background nor astrophysics publications in real scientific journals. In fact, Starlight and Time, Humphreys' self-published manifesto, was so laughably incorrect that even fellow creationists like Hugh Ross attacked it. (Hugh Ross himself is another example: he accepts mainstream science in his own field, astronomy, but disagrees with the mainstream in fields he's not trained in, like biology.)
Try looking for rebuttals of evolution written by creationists who have degrees in evolutionary biology, or criticisms of ice core dating by creationists who are trained in paleoclimatology. Suddenly true creationist "experts" are much harder to find. Usually you find things like evolution being criticized by mathematicians or biochemists, geology being criticized by engineers or plasma physicists, and whatnot.
That's like saying we need to put out all campfires because they might be fires in the future. No, it's more like taking precautionary measures, like limiting campfires to only times when the forest isn't too dry.
Global Warming as Caused by Man is a theory that is unfounded and can be disproven. All theories can be disproven in principle, but anthropogenic global warming is a theory that has not been disproven, and is in fact now well founded by both observation and theory.
While I don't doubt that there is Climate Shifts it is most likely a combination of factors that are greater than the sum of their parts. That's surely true, but it is also surely true that the human factor is a major contributor.
Just because of a seemingly overwhelming majority of the scientific community supports Global Warming Theory. They have divisions within themselves too. Right now, the divisions are mostly between the "it's going to warm a little in the future" vs. the "it's going to warm a lot in the future" people. The debate has moved past "whether it's happening" (it is), and now centers on "how big of a problem is it going to be".
Also, the public as always been a century or two behind current scientific theory. Nowadays its about 50 years behind current scientific theory. Theories like right brain/left brain have been disproven yet it is still seen as common scientific knowledge by the public. Global warming is still accepted within mainstream science today; in fact, the evidence for it is now stronger than it ever has been. You can easily verify this for yourself by picking up the latest issue of any climate-related scientific journal and perusing the abstracts.
It seems like the big problem with string theory is more that it's too far out ahead of experimntal physics. By contrast, when the standard model surged ahead of experimental physics, it provided clear avenues for new experiments to make up the gap. String theory is too far ahead for those experiments to be apparent. It's like we need some model that fits in-between, providing a program of experiments and testable predictions that will allow improved models, new instruments, and more new experiments. That's right. That's why string phenomenology has been getting more attention again. See, e.g., the Randall-Sundrum braneworld proposal to solve the hierarchy problem, the AdS/QCD program, and so on. But in general, string theory has difficulty in motivating models originate from experimentally motivated problems (as opposed to models motivated purely by their testability).
It's not a terribly strong test of string theory. I think the authors wrote it mainly in response to claims that string theory is compatible with all conceivable experiments and therefore untestable even in principle.
As far as experimental tests of string theory go, knowing the full, non-perturbative theory is not so relevant; perturbative string theory is enough to handle anything we can ever hope to reasonably test, other than possible relics of the Big Bang.
Slashdot Mirror
Suppose climatologists are fishing for grants. What exactly are you suggesting her? That they simply are lying about their findings? They ran a study, found out there was no global warming, and changed all the negative numbers to positive ones? All of them? Um, I'd have to see some local/national changes rather than the most inhabitable places on earth having their ice melt. Temperatures are still going up, even nationally. As for adverse effects, it will be a lot harder to attribute those to global warming, even if that is indeed the cause. If we get more droughts, floods, hurricanes, etc., it's going to be further decades before we can say that global warming is responsible for them. Um, this is an issue, but its also an issue that our climate scientist can't predict our climates either. Climate scientists can predict global climate with some skill. Regional climates are harder. but if they can't predict it and prove that they've actually predicted it You can't prove that you've predicted anything until after it happens. You're missing the point of "prediction". You never know if your predictions are right. That's a different question from how much confidence one should place in a prediction. Um, I'd say we influence the environment, but we don't know enough at this time to use them to make any decision off of. Decisions about the future are hard. However, political and social institutions adapt poorly to rapid change. It's probably worth mitigating our effect on the climate to some extent even if we can't predict the extent of the costs of climate change, as a matter of insurance. You buy insurance to hedge against low probability and uncertain, but high impact, events.
The fact is, the climate changes naturally. Human activities also change the climate. The changes for which we are responsible may not be desirable to us. We cannot make the climate whatever we want, but our actions can alter the course of the climate, for good or for bad. The questions are about the costs of taking action, vs. the costs of doing nothing.
It's not volcanic action: volcanoes make only a tiny contribution to greenhouse gases; their only large contribution is from aerosols, whose effect doesn't last much longer than a year, and which produces cooling, not warming.
It's not "just plain cycles": climate cycles occur, but the paleo record does not indicate that we were "due" for the kind of warming that we are experiencing (if anything, the opposite). Furthermore, climate cycles are based on physical mechanisms of forcings and feedbacks (such as the solar variations, orbital variations, and so on), so you're really just sweeping the question under the rug. You can't just say "it's just plain cycles", you have to give a mechanism. What is the physical mechanism currently underway that's responsible for the global warming, and what is the evidence for that claim?
I wonder where are the studies published in scientific journals by climatologists which support these claims.
While solar variations certainly have influenced the climate in the past, including recently, they simply have not been large enough to explain the majority of warming the Earth has experienced in recent decades. (See Stott et al. (2003), among others.) In what must be an incredible coincidence, atmospheric CO2 concentrations have increased with timing, rate, and magnitude that do agree with the observed warming. (Some commentary by climatologists on Singer and Avery's claims here.)
As for cosmic rays, their effect on cloud formation is still not well understood, but regardless of their effect, cosmic ray flux is not well correlated with climate change (see, e.g., here), so it does not seem reasonable to attribute the recent rapid warming to cosmic rays to any large extent. (Especially, again, given the amount of greenhouse gases now in the atmosphere; anyone who wants to postulate an alternative mechanism for warming has to also introduce a lot of of extra cooling mechanisms to explain why the GHGs aren't warming the planet as much as thermodynamics predicts.)
Perhaps the point of specializing in game writing is to raise standards and introduce literary skills into a field that lacks them.
Before Stonehenge, there was Woodhenge and Strawhenge, but a big bad wolf came and blew them down, and three little piggies were relocated to the projects.
The Coast Guard didn't recognize his distress signal, because he sent it in Gray code instead of Morse.
(Yes, I know they're different people.)
Waiting it out may be what we do if we have to, but we can take a more active role in ensuring a climate that we'd prefer. The fact that we believe we can avert something like this when we can't even avert a hurricane is staggeringly arrogant. That's a specious comparison. If we can cause climate change in the first place, we can also alter its course — at least, unless until so much change takes place that an irreversible threshold is crossed. That's possible, but it probably hasn't happened yet. The question is not whether we can affect the climate, it is what is the cost of altering the climate vs. the cost of doing nothing.
I can agree with media distortion regarding the situation. However, I think you're still missing the point. Water vapor's influence on global warming is not what, for instance, the second link implies. It fails to differentiate between the greenhouse effect and global warming. Without a greenhouse effect, the Earth's mean temperature would be about 0 F. Instead, it's more like 60 F, mostly due to water vapor. But that's irrelevant to the issue of global warming: "global warming" is about why the mean temperature has risen from 60 to 62 F over the past 150 years. (Those numbers aren't exactly right, they're just for illustrative purposes.) And the reason for that 2 F warming is largely increases in CO2 and their concomitant effects.
The picture of global warming as something that is primarily due to humans' CO2 emissions is correct. Water vapor has an influence on global warming (as opposed to the baseline planetary temperature due to the greenhouse effect) mostly only insofar as the CO2-induced warming liberates more water vapor. Citing water vapor as a key driver of global warming is misleading at best.
These are only some of the links you get when you google water vapor and global warming. You might want to read them. As I said, water vapor is not the primary driver of global warming. Water vapor is the most significant greenhouse gas, but that merely explains baseline temperatures, not the increase in warming, which is far out of proportion with changes in water vapor concentration. Increased water vapor does explain some of the warming, but the reason why the increased water vapor is there in the first place is because of the much larger warming due to CO2 causing greater water evaporation.
I love how "skeptics" automatically go from "global warming isn't happening" to "global warming may be happening but it's impossible to do anything about". Either way is an excuse to ignore the issue. And even if that were done it still wouldn't do anything to stop Global Warming. Global warming can't be stopped in the near term, but it can be slowed. The main green house gas is water vapor and that is something that we really cannot control. That water vapor is the main greenhouse gas is irrelevant. Water vapor is the reason why the Earth has not always been a frozen iceball. Carbon dioxide is the reason why the Earth has warmed rapidly since pre-industrial times. Carbon dioxide emissions really aren't what the media is making it out to be. That's incorrect. CO2 emissions are responsible for most of the global warming, by which I mean "the change in global mean temperature since pre-industrial times". Global Warming may be real but we are no closer to finding out what is causing it than we are to sending a man to alpha centauri or some such planet. That is also incorrect. See above. The greenhouse effect is a real and inevitable consequence of atomic adsorption physics, and the amount of warming it predicts agrees in timing, rate, and magnitude with the warming that has been observed.
Try looking for rebuttals of evolution written by creationists who have degrees in evolutionary biology, or criticisms of ice core dating by creationists who are trained in paleoclimatology. Suddenly true creationist "experts" are much harder to find. Usually you find things like evolution being criticized by mathematicians or biochemists, geology being criticized by engineers or plasma physicists, and whatnot.
It's not a terribly strong test of string theory. I think the authors wrote it mainly in response to claims that string theory is compatible with all conceivable experiments and therefore untestable even in principle.
As far as experimental tests of string theory go, knowing the full, non-perturbative theory is not so relevant; perturbative string theory is enough to handle anything we can ever hope to reasonably test, other than possible relics of the Big Bang.