The East Anglia climate email leak shows that a lot of climate scientists weren't acting in good faith.
That's a weird interpretation of the absolving outcomes of multiple commitees' investigatons.
You're wrong. The investigations showed that the science they were doing wasn't outright malfeasance (although the statistics could use some help). The investigations weren't checking to see if the scientists were acting in good faith. You should have known that.
I'm curious what you mean by saying the scientists weren't acting in good faith. Scientists know that if they don't present the results of their research honestly that other scientists will quickly call them on that. They know that their scientific reputations depend on them doing good science. It's insane to believe that there is some sort of worldwide conspiracy among tens of thousands of climate scientists to misrepresent their findings that has lasted for well over 30 years. The first warnings about the potential of CO2 to cause global warming started out in 1896 with Svante Arrhenius and started getting serious in the 1950s. In all that time if there were some fundamental flaw in the reasoning I find it hard to believe that someone wouldn't have found it by now.
Also one of the big reasons we've been getting so many of these stories lately is that the American Geophysical Union's fall meeting, the biggest Earth and space science meeting in the world is coming up on Dec. 11-15 in New Orleans. There will be about 24,000 attendees. Scientists typically release a lot of studies in the period prior to the AGU's meeting so they can present their findings there. So things should settle down a bit after that is over but you can expect stories about 2017 being the 2nd warmest year in the record despite it being a La Nina year long about February so prepare yourself for that.
Not sure when it was published but the Antarctic graph animation shows ice loss up to June of 2014 so it's not that old. The one in the OP was dated October 2015. The problem with the study showing net gain in ice is that it was trying to measure it by changes in surface elevation of the ice sheet by measuring it with radar altimeters from satellites which has issues with things like the density of the snow it is measuring which needs to be confirmed by ground studies which are difficult in most of East Antarctica. Here is a story from Scientific American published July 6, 2017 about it: What to believe in Antarctica's great ice debate
I would be very surprised if you actually find any direct quote from Gore that says that. What you will find is stories claiming he said something like that without any cites to actual quotes from him.
... That massive iceberg (4x the size of Manhattan) that broke off earlier this year was estimated at 1 trillion tons. While that's a huge amount to lose all at once, it's less than half the amount Antarctica needs to lose every year to maintain equilibrium. The press likes to hype up outlier events like that because it appears to confirm the belief that Antarctica's ice is melting. But outliers are just that - outliers, and not necessarily representative of what's actually happening. The last scientific net gain/loss study I saw actually concluded that Antarctica is gaining ice. Not losing it. Enough to lower sea levels by 0.23 mm per year.
The GRACE satellites disagree with that study that shows a net gain of ice on Antarctica. By measuring changes in gravity the GRACE satellites find that Antarctica is actually losing ice overall, about 118 gigatonnes/year mostly in West Antarctica. GRACE Ice Sheets and Glaciers
No, when the underlying bedrock is full of holes already like the limestone much of Florida sits on you might have to make the foundation your seawall sits on a thousand feet deep in order for it to be effective.
Fill the glass to the top with water so the ice sticks out the top. Watch what happens when the ice melts. Science. Thanks for playing, morons.
Fill the glass to the top with water then make a platform with toothpicks that will hold the ice above the water. Watch what happens when the ice melts. That's the equivalent of glaciers sitting above sea level on the land melting.
That TFA of this submission we're discussing goes straight to AGW as the only possible cause to explain the evidence cited is disturbing. Perhaps they should have gotten together with the scientists from the Slashhdot story I linked below and compared notes first before publishing.
"NASA Discovers Mantle Plume That's Melting Antarctica From Below"
Just because they recently discovered the mantle plume under Antarctica doesn't mean it's something new. Given what we know about mantle plumes chances are it's been there for millions of years and it's unlikely that the amount of melting it is doing has changed significantly in the recent pass. But I'm open to evidence for that if you can find it.
A few glaciers have been growing, most have been shrinking. As an example the glacier in the crater of Mount St. Helens has been growing but it didn't even exist after the 1980 eruption.
This story about Al Gore buying oceanfront property is getting tiresome. I looked up the address on Google Maps once and the property he bought is right around the 400 foot contour line, well above any possible sea level rise. (If all the ice on Greenland and Antarctica melted sea level would rise around 215 feet.)
Please cite where Gore said the glaciers would be gone by 2017. It could be that they're already as good as gone but it takes time for large blocks of ice to melt so they won't fully disappear for decades or even centuries. Of the estimated 150 glaciers in Glacier National Park that existed in the mid 1800s only 25 remain today and at the current rate they could be essentially gone by the 2030s.
Technically that is true. The sun is responsible for over 99% of the energy on the Earth's surface. But since the sun's output hasn't changed enough to account for the actual warming we've seen there must be other factors that help hold the sun's energy on the Earth such as an increase in greenhouse gases. AC was implying it was because the sun was at a high level of output.
Warming has continued, ice continues to melt, sea level continues to rise. What more do you need? The problem with making projections about the future is that there's no event in Earth's past that is analogous to what is happening now* so it's difficult to say with certainty how it's all going to evolve.
*The PETM is the closest thing we know of but the increase in greenhouse gases and warming took place over thousands of years instead of hundreds of year as it currently happening.
Sheesh! The story from a few days ago was based on actual research published in 1967. I've been aware of the 1967 paper from Manabe and Wetherald for close to two decades. Nothing popsci about it.
I figured someone might come back to me with the so called "pause". The problem with that is while the rise in atmospheric temperatures may have slowed down to a statistically insignificant degree the oceans where over 90 percent of the warming occurs continued to warm during that time. There was no real pause, just a small change in the distribution of heat in the system.
The real problem many have with global warming is that the models really aren't any good. The specific predictions made are repeatedly proven wrong while the general predictions have such huge uncertainty bars that a coin toss is nearly as robust.
Did you see the post a couple of days ago about how two scientists accurately predicted global warming in 1967? I would suggest that you don't really understand what climate models are capable of and your criteria for judging them are wrong. They're not meant to predict temperatures on short time scales of a decade or so but rather the evolution of temperature over longer time time periods like 30 years or more. On shorter time scales the noise of natural variations like the aforementioned low solar output, volcanic effects and the timing of the ENSO cycles is enough to overwhelm the global warming signal.
I remember studying this during a return to college in 2010 when the leading scientists and models made claims that Micronesia would be underwater, vast desertification would cause futures markets to collapse and there would be 40 million climate change refugees by 2015. None of that happened. At a stretch we could say that 2 million refugees from the middle east and north African wars by 2017 were due to climate change, but that's really pushing it.
2010 is only 7 years ago. I'd be really surprised if you point to statements by leading scientists that Micronesia would be underwater or desertification would have proceeded so far in just 7 short years. You need to pay more attention to the time scales they put on such predictions.
Regarding refugees I believe the wording was "up to 40 million refugees". That's more like putting a cap on the total number of refugees expected. And the distinction of who is a climate change refugee can be subtle. For instance are the Inuit in Alaska who are forced to move their village a few miles inland climate refugees? Same thing on south Pacific islands where villages are being abandoned because of the encroaching seas.
Yes, climate science is a complex subject and scientists don't know everything. There will be surprises along the way like the melting of Arctic sea ice affecting the jet stream bringing causing it to meander more causing weather systems to stall over places causing longer heat waves and more precipitation. But as the 1967 predictions mentioned above show the scientists are basically on the right track and the information they provide is far better than any coin toss would provide.
Humans don't understand nearly as much as they think they do.
Except for AGW.
There, "the science is settled"....
The basic science of AGW hasn't changed much in over 50 years (you could perhaps say since Arrhenius in 1895). Of course like any science it's subject to revision pending new information. But over 50 years of the basic message remaining the same makes it settled enough for me.
That's the problem with people like the previous two AC's (dare I say climate science deniers). They don't have a unified coherent idea about what's going on. It's all scattershot like a shotgun. So one person says it's volcanic activity causing global warming, another says it's the sun and others say the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics proves the greenhouse effect is impossible but provide no reason for the warming, etc, etc. They throw out a bunch of thoughts with the hope that some of the shot will hit the target. They seldom do.
On the other hand climate scientists do have a unified coherent idea about what's going on. The message hasn't changed much in over 50 years, they've just filled in more and more details and improved their understanding of them.
Regarding the first AC they need to show that it's not something that's been going on for more than 10,000 years and that there's been a significant change in the volcanic activity in Antarctica in the last few hundred years. There is no evidence that is the case. Also not much evidence that isn't the case but if it had changed significantly in the past 50 years or so I think we would have noticed.
Regarding the second AC the sun since around 2006 has shown its lowest activity level in the past 100 years. Yet there is no indication of cooling as a result of it.
All the climate science deniers have to do is come up with some science that explains the observations as well as or better than the current climate science. But they don't do that. They just loudly proclaim that climate scientists are in it for the money or some global communistic plot. They claim climate scientists are manipulating the observations when the methods they use to make the adjustments are available for anyone to see and make scientific arguments against. They claim like you did that scientists predictions are bullshit without fully understanding what the predictions are or getting specific about what is wrong with the predictions. Climate science deniers should put up or shut up.
Anytime we think there is a mechanistic explanation for events in a complex system -- such as the Earth and its biosphere is -- we're probably wrong.
The Earth's climate doesn't change for magical reasons or as in the case for economic models for human psychological reasons. It changes for actual physical reasons, IOW mechanistic reasons. The complexity may make it difficult to determine those reasons but they definitely exist.
Also, a scientists reputation depends on the quality of the science they do and I think most scientists care quite a bit about their reputations. If they cared more about money they're smart enough to go into another field that pays more.
Actually "unrevised" raw data shows a steeper warming slope than the adjusted data. That's because the methods they used to measure sea surface temperatures back then had a cool bias. When you haul a bucket of water out of the sea it cools by evaporation before it gets on deck and you can plop a thermometer in it.
Climate models don't use data like you think they do. Temperature data is never an input to climate models except maybe as a starting point. Instead they run climate models in reverse to see how well they compare to the temperature data from the past and they do pretty well at it.
Slashdot Mirror
The East Anglia climate email leak shows that a lot of climate scientists weren't acting in good faith.
That's a weird interpretation of the absolving outcomes of multiple commitees' investigatons.
You're wrong. The investigations showed that the science they were doing wasn't outright malfeasance (although the statistics could use some help). The investigations weren't checking to see if the scientists were acting in good faith. You should have known that.
I'm curious what you mean by saying the scientists weren't acting in good faith. Scientists know that if they don't present the results of their research honestly that other scientists will quickly call them on that. They know that their scientific reputations depend on them doing good science. It's insane to believe that there is some sort of worldwide conspiracy among tens of thousands of climate scientists to misrepresent their findings that has lasted for well over 30 years. The first warnings about the potential of CO2 to cause global warming started out in 1896 with Svante Arrhenius and started getting serious in the 1950s. In all that time if there were some fundamental flaw in the reasoning I find it hard to believe that someone wouldn't have found it by now.
Also one of the big reasons we've been getting so many of these stories lately is that the American Geophysical Union's fall meeting, the biggest Earth and space science meeting in the world is coming up on Dec. 11-15 in New Orleans. There will be about 24,000 attendees. Scientists typically release a lot of studies in the period prior to the AGU's meeting so they can present their findings there. So things should settle down a bit after that is over but you can expect stories about 2017 being the 2nd warmest year in the record despite it being a La Nina year long about February so prepare yourself for that.
Not sure when it was published but the Antarctic graph animation shows ice loss up to June of 2014 so it's not that old. The one in the OP was dated October 2015. The problem with the study showing net gain in ice is that it was trying to measure it by changes in surface elevation of the ice sheet by measuring it with radar altimeters from satellites which has issues with things like the density of the snow it is measuring which needs to be confirmed by ground studies which are difficult in most of East Antarctica. Here is a story from Scientific American published July 6, 2017 about it: What to believe in Antarctica's great ice debate
I would be very surprised if you actually find any direct quote from Gore that says that. What you will find is stories claiming he said something like that without any cites to actual quotes from him.
It's endless. Every single day on this fucking website. 'Climatedot'. What a joke it has become.
Try the truth instead:
www.wattsupwiththat.com
www.climatedepot.com
Don't worry, it will never stop. You can't hide from reality forever.
That massive iceberg (4x the size of Manhattan) that broke off earlier this year was estimated at 1 trillion tons. While that's a huge amount to lose all at once, it's less than half the amount Antarctica needs to lose every year to maintain equilibrium. The press likes to hype up outlier events like that because it appears to confirm the belief that Antarctica's ice is melting. But outliers are just that - outliers, and not necessarily representative of what's actually happening. The last scientific net gain/loss study I saw actually concluded that Antarctica is gaining ice. Not losing it. Enough to lower sea levels by 0.23 mm per year.
The GRACE satellites disagree with that study that shows a net gain of ice on Antarctica. By measuring changes in gravity the GRACE satellites find that Antarctica is actually losing ice overall, about 118 gigatonnes/year mostly in West Antarctica. GRACE Ice Sheets and Glaciers
No, when the underlying bedrock is full of holes already like the limestone much of Florida sits on you might have to make the foundation your seawall sits on a thousand feet deep in order for it to be effective.
Fill the glass to the top with water so the ice sticks out the top. Watch what happens when the ice melts. Science. Thanks for playing, morons.
Fill the glass to the top with water then make a platform with toothpicks that will hold the ice above the water. Watch what happens when the ice melts. That's the equivalent of glaciers sitting above sea level on the land melting.
That TFA of this submission we're discussing goes straight to AGW as the only possible cause to explain the evidence cited is disturbing. Perhaps they should have gotten together with the scientists from the Slashhdot story I linked below and compared notes first before publishing.
"NASA Discovers Mantle Plume That's Melting Antarctica From Below"
https://science.slashdot.org/s...
And link to the original study from the above article published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...
Strat
Just because they recently discovered the mantle plume under Antarctica doesn't mean it's something new. Given what we know about mantle plumes chances are it's been there for millions of years and it's unlikely that the amount of melting it is doing has changed significantly in the recent pass. But I'm open to evidence for that if you can find it.
A few glaciers have been growing, most have been shrinking. As an example the glacier in the crater of Mount St. Helens has been growing but it didn't even exist after the 1980 eruption.
This story about Al Gore buying oceanfront property is getting tiresome. I looked up the address on Google Maps once and the property he bought is right around the 400 foot contour line, well above any possible sea level rise. (If all the ice on Greenland and Antarctica melted sea level would rise around 215 feet.)
Please cite where Gore said the glaciers would be gone by 2017. It could be that they're already as good as gone but it takes time for large blocks of ice to melt so they won't fully disappear for decades or even centuries. Of the estimated 150 glaciers in Glacier National Park that existed in the mid 1800s only 25 remain today and at the current rate they could be essentially gone by the 2030s.
There is plenty of water and other volatiles in the asteroid belt that is much easier to get at than trying to export it from Earth.
Technically that is true. The sun is responsible for over 99% of the energy on the Earth's surface. But since the sun's output hasn't changed enough to account for the actual warming we've seen there must be other factors that help hold the sun's energy on the Earth such as an increase in greenhouse gases. AC was implying it was because the sun was at a high level of output.
Warming has continued, ice continues to melt, sea level continues to rise. What more do you need? The problem with making projections about the future is that there's no event in Earth's past that is analogous to what is happening now* so it's difficult to say with certainty how it's all going to evolve.
*The PETM is the closest thing we know of but the increase in greenhouse gases and warming took place over thousands of years instead of hundreds of year as it currently happening.
I think the real hubris here is people who don't have the expertise to evaluate the scientists work judging them anyway.
Sheesh! The story from a few days ago was based on actual research published in 1967. I've been aware of the 1967 paper from Manabe and Wetherald for close to two decades. Nothing popsci about it.
I figured someone might come back to me with the so called "pause". The problem with that is while the rise in atmospheric temperatures may have slowed down to a statistically insignificant degree the oceans where over 90 percent of the warming occurs continued to warm during that time. There was no real pause, just a small change in the distribution of heat in the system.
The real problem many have with global warming is that the models really aren't any good. The specific predictions made are repeatedly proven wrong while the general predictions have such huge uncertainty bars that a coin toss is nearly as robust.
Did you see the post a couple of days ago about how two scientists accurately predicted global warming in 1967? I would suggest that you don't really understand what climate models are capable of and your criteria for judging them are wrong. They're not meant to predict temperatures on short time scales of a decade or so but rather the evolution of temperature over longer time time periods like 30 years or more. On shorter time scales the noise of natural variations like the aforementioned low solar output, volcanic effects and the timing of the ENSO cycles is enough to overwhelm the global warming signal.
I remember studying this during a return to college in 2010 when the leading scientists and models made claims that Micronesia would be underwater, vast desertification would cause futures markets to collapse and there would be 40 million climate change refugees by 2015. None of that happened. At a stretch we could say that 2 million refugees from the middle east and north African wars by 2017 were due to climate change, but that's really pushing it.
2010 is only 7 years ago. I'd be really surprised if you point to statements by leading scientists that Micronesia would be underwater or desertification would have proceeded so far in just 7 short years. You need to pay more attention to the time scales they put on such predictions.
Regarding refugees I believe the wording was "up to 40 million refugees". That's more like putting a cap on the total number of refugees expected. And the distinction of who is a climate change refugee can be subtle. For instance are the Inuit in Alaska who are forced to move their village a few miles inland climate refugees? Same thing on south Pacific islands where villages are being abandoned because of the encroaching seas.
Yes, climate science is a complex subject and scientists don't know everything. There will be surprises along the way like the melting of Arctic sea ice affecting the jet stream bringing causing it to meander more causing weather systems to stall over places causing longer heat waves and more precipitation. But as the 1967 predictions mentioned above show the scientists are basically on the right track and the information they provide is far better than any coin toss would provide.
Humans don't understand nearly as much as they think they do.
Except for AGW.
There, "the science is settled". ...
The basic science of AGW hasn't changed much in over 50 years (you could perhaps say since Arrhenius in 1895). Of course like any science it's subject to revision pending new information. But over 50 years of the basic message remaining the same makes it settled enough for me.
That's the problem with people like the previous two AC's (dare I say climate science deniers). They don't have a unified coherent idea about what's going on. It's all scattershot like a shotgun. So one person says it's volcanic activity causing global warming, another says it's the sun and others say the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics proves the greenhouse effect is impossible but provide no reason for the warming, etc, etc. They throw out a bunch of thoughts with the hope that some of the shot will hit the target. They seldom do.
On the other hand climate scientists do have a unified coherent idea about what's going on. The message hasn't changed much in over 50 years, they've just filled in more and more details and improved their understanding of them.
Regarding the first AC they need to show that it's not something that's been going on for more than 10,000 years and that there's been a significant change in the volcanic activity in Antarctica in the last few hundred years. There is no evidence that is the case. Also not much evidence that isn't the case but if it had changed significantly in the past 50 years or so I think we would have noticed.
Regarding the second AC the sun since around 2006 has shown its lowest activity level in the past 100 years. Yet there is no indication of cooling as a result of it.
All the climate science deniers have to do is come up with some science that explains the observations as well as or better than the current climate science. But they don't do that. They just loudly proclaim that climate scientists are in it for the money or some global communistic plot. They claim climate scientists are manipulating the observations when the methods they use to make the adjustments are available for anyone to see and make scientific arguments against. They claim like you did that scientists predictions are bullshit without fully understanding what the predictions are or getting specific about what is wrong with the predictions. Climate science deniers should put up or shut up.
Anytime we think there is a mechanistic explanation for events in a complex system -- such as the Earth and its biosphere is -- we're probably wrong.
The Earth's climate doesn't change for magical reasons or as in the case for economic models for human psychological reasons. It changes for actual physical reasons, IOW mechanistic reasons. The complexity may make it difficult to determine those reasons but they definitely exist.
Also, a scientists reputation depends on the quality of the science they do and I think most scientists care quite a bit about their reputations. If they cared more about money they're smart enough to go into another field that pays more.
As far as I know no one has yet built a thorium reactor that demonstrates economic viability. Once they do that we can talk.
Actually "unrevised" raw data shows a steeper warming slope than the adjusted data. That's because the methods they used to measure sea surface temperatures back then had a cool bias. When you haul a bucket of water out of the sea it cools by evaporation before it gets on deck and you can plop a thermometer in it.
Climate models don't use data like you think they do. Temperature data is never an input to climate models except maybe as a starting point. Instead they run climate models in reverse to see how well they compare to the temperature data from the past and they do pretty well at it.