While I didn't mention water vapor except generically in greenhouse gases I agree with what you said.
However if get the feeling you may be conflating clouds and water vapor. Sorry if I'm wrong. They certainly are related since a cloud's existence depends on water vapor but the greenhouse effects of clouds and water vapor are quite different.
I'm not aware of anything that's liquid at the right temperatures and pressures and likely to be available in a large enough quantity to substitute for water. The only possibility I can think of would be ammonia and it seems it would likely have somewhat different effects than water because of its reactive nature.
Of course as you moved the orbit out the Earth would be colder and the the evolved biosphere would likely be very different than it is now. The habitable zone doesn't mean it's necessarily habitable for humans, just life in general.
Clouds not only affect sunlight on the day side of the planet but also also radiative heat transfer from the surface on both the day and night sides. Ever notice how much warmer it can be on a cloudy night than on a clear night? Current research indicates that clouds overall probably have a slightly positive effect on global warming but much research still needs to be done.
So clouds have an effect but greenhouse gases still dominate the equations. That affects the accuracy of model he uses but it's likely not an order of magnitude off and so is useful as a starting point to further refine the science.
This binary thinking that something has to be 100% right or it's completely wrong is not how science works.
Changing the orbits of planets is probably not a simple as you think. There are resonances between the orbits of planets of the Solar System which would change because of the move. Who knows what that would do? The length of the year would increase and it would take biological systems time to adapt. I don't know that it would affect the length of a day but if we have the power to move the planet we certainly have the power to set the length of a day to anything we want within reason.
If we're worried about Earth not being in the habitable zone it's far easier to do something to change the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth* than to move the planet. Probably a lot cheaper too.
*My proposal would be an array of mirrors orbiting at the Earth-Sun L1 point.
A perfect mirror is a theoretical concept that doesn't exist in reality. My main point is that a mirror works by reflecting photons and any photons it absorbs reduces its efficiency as a mirror because they won't be re-emitted at the same frequency they came in at.
The land based part of the GPS system (called WAAS) does not do the same thing as the satellites. They correct the slight errors caused by minor deviations in the GPS satellite's position and clock. After all when you have to account for relativistic effects on the satellite it doesn't take much to cause a lot of error. The WAAS system sends the deviation correction signal to a geosynchronous satellite that broadcasts it back to Earth where properly equipped GPS receivers can use it to improve their accuracy.
So you think they build the results into the models but you don't really present any evidence other than saying humans are always biased. That may be true but how do we get any science done if it's not possible to overcome that? What makes you think climate scientists are worse than any other scientists? Maybe you have some confirmation bias of your own.
Yes, you can't predict things that have already happened but you can certainly start any model's run at any point in time and let it run then compare the results to the observations. The only thing you would need to feed them is the observed changes in CO2 and other greenhouse gases (except water vapor which is a feedback of temperature changes and built into the models), changes in solar radiation and major volcanic eruptions. The output would be mostly temperatures.
My point about the global cooling thing still stands, far more scientists were looking at global warming even back then.
I am a computer programmer/sys admin but I took through 200 level courses and some 300 level courses in college for physics, chemistry and biology. Science is something I've had a lifelong interest in and I think I know a thing or two about how to conduct it. Science is always subject to revision pending new results but someone has to come up with the new results first. If climate scientist are so biased that their results are wrong it shouldn't be that hard to come up with those new results but no one has so far.
Einstein overturned Newtonian physics but didn't prove them wrong, just a special case of the Einsteinian universe.
I read that other post and debated responding. I'll just say you bring up a lot of things like deforestation that scientist are not ignoring. It looks to me like you haven't read deeply enough in the literature to know what they've already covered on those subjects. One error you made is that the polarity of the Sun's magnetic field flips at the solar minimum, not the maximum. Also, sunspots, total solar irradiance and solar flares all track together fairly well. You seem to be saying that maximum luminosity occurs when the sunspot count is lowest. That doesn't give me confidence in the rest of what you say.
On the reflectivity of plants, that is easily measured with a spectroscope and it has been. Another thing that has not been ignored. In fact they measure the spectrum of the incoming solar radiation in orbit and at the surface and the outgoing radiation at the surface and from orbit. All of that constantly to see how it's changing.
I saw the article about cities downwind temperature effects but from what I've read so far it appears that it is at best a minor factor in the overall equation and is unlikely to overturn the larger picture.
I don't think I said you were unscientific specifically and apologize if you think I did. But as I have pointed out you've said a lot of things that don't fit well with what I know about the subject. I'll continue to believe what climate scientists say until someone comes up with a better explanation and I don't think they are ignoring things because they don't fit with their narrative. Time will certainly tell whether they are right or not but so far they've done pretty well.
Human heat sources are a rounding error compared to the energy Earth absorbs from the Sun every day. We get more energy from the Sun in 12 hours than the human race uses in a whole year.
Climate is by definition the average large-scale atmospheric conditions over the long term!
That is true but incomplete. Here is the World Meteorological Organization statement on what climate is:
Climate in a narrow sense is usually defined as the "average weather," or more rigorously, as the statistical description in terms of the mean and variability of relevant quantities over a period of time ranging from months to thousands or millions of years. The classical period is 30 years, as defined by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). These quantities are most often surface variables such as temperature, precipitation, and wind. Climate in a wider sense is the state, including a statistical description, of the climate system.
Just as important as the average weather is a description of the variability of weather.
Again, what does the age of anything have to do with it? What makes you think a 10 year old climate model is limited to 10 years of data? Climate models can be fed with data of any age and they'll calculate based on what you give them and run as long as you let them go. Typical climate model runs are for periods of 100 years or so (accomplished in about 1 month of model run time). And let's be clear, climate models are never fed temperature data except maybe as a starting point, that is part of their output. What they are fed is things like changes in insolation, CO2 levels, the occasional major volcanic eruption, ENSO data etc. I'm just confused that you think age has anything to do with it.
The "global cooling" myth needs to die. A search of the scientific literature from 1965 to 1979 found 44 papers on global warming and only 7 papers on global cooling. The cooling papers got a lot of publicity when Time and Newsweek used them as cover stories but they were never the mainstream view. At least a couple of the cooling papers were examining what could happen if humans continued increasing the level of aerosols and SO2 at the rate they were up to that time. Continuing increase would have caused more cooling. Of course we implemented pollution controls and pretty much stopped that problem although it's growing again because of the industrialization of SE Asia. I was in my 20's back then and I don't remember any televised debates. Maybe on PBS I suppose.
I'm happy to have a debate as long as it's done on a scientific basis. But to debate things scientists have already examined and come to conclusions on is pointless unless you have new information. You owe it to the person you're debating to be knowledgeable about subject you are debating including the current research in the field.
I'd rather have a warmer planet because we failed to do something than a cooling (iceball) planet because we mis-corrected.
There really is no danger of that happening unless the Sun does something it's never been know to do before. According to a study released a couple of years ago we've already upped the CO2 level enough to prevent the next glaciation from happening.
What does the age of a model have to do with anything? Why would you expect a model from the 1970's to have "realized concrete predictions" more than a newer model? They all can be run to cover any time period. Wouldn't you expect as time goes on that models would get better, more refined and we'd be able to throw more computing power at them?
All those other things you mention have been and are being studied by scientists. They are not being ignored by climate scientists but there has to be a plausible link for them to take it into account. Climate scientists certainly factor in changes in solar output and large volcanic eruptions already. They point to deforestation, particularly burning as a factor in CO2 levels. So scientists are incorporating those and other things into the theory as they become more known and so far none of them has been shown to be anything more than a vernier dial compared to the "Human caused emissions of CO2 are the major factor in global warming." dial. Debate is fine but it has to be scientifically based.
The proof that CO2 concentration affects temperatures is in the physics of its radiative absorption. You have to get around the fact that those physics say an increase in the concentration will lead to an increase in temperature. In the real world there are other factors that complicate the picture but I haven't seen anything yet that would completely negate the effects of CO2. Even such notable contrarians as Richard Lindzen and Roy Spencer admit added CO2 will cause warming. They just say it's not as powerful as other scientists say or that there are other factors that counter it more completely than is found in the main stream.
The process doesn't run away because each increment of CO2 causes less warming than the previous increment so the curve asymptotically approaches zero. If each increment caused the same or greater warming than the previous then it could run away.
As far as CO2 following temperature, where is the evidence that CO2 levels significantly changed because of periods like the Roman or Medieval warming periods? The evidence suggests that CO2 levels has remained near 280 ppm for the past 8,000+ years. Shouldn't there have been significant bumps from the RWP and MWP? Ice core evidence shows that CO2 levels have not been above about 300 ppm for at least the past 800,000 years. If CO2 rise is caused by temperature rise (and not possibly the other way around too) then where is the temperature rise that caused CO2 levels to rise to the current ~400 ppm, a level not seen for probably over 15 million years?
Global temperature increase data: Don't make the mistake of extrapolating the results of one study from Lapland to the whole globe. Unless you can present corroborating evidence from reasonably globally spread sites it's more about local conditions than global conditions.
Human induced warming: Of course there is nothing "supposed" about the warming. It has been measured. Where is your evidence that CO2 rise has to follow the rise in temperature? If that it true then where is the temperature rise that caused the current rise in CO2 to a level 40% greater than has been seen for at least 800,000 years (from ice cores) and probably greater than it has been for over 15 million years (from other CO2 proxies)? Are you confusing correlation with causation?
Global warming models: If you think global warming models are just based on curve fitting extrapolations of "short term trends" you really have no idea of what they do. They are fundamentally based on the physics of the climate system. Observational data such at temperature trends are only used to compare to model output. See the FAQs here and here for more information about how climate models work. Since the period of the eccentricity of the Earth's orbit is approximately a 100,000 year cycle it is not a significant effect on a scale of a few thousand years let along a couple hundred years. Other elements of the Milankovitch cycles have periods as short as around 25,000 years, still not particularly significant on century scales.
Vilification of scientists: Here you just start making political arguments that don't have much to do with science. Well known skeptical scientists such as Roy Spencer, John Christy, Richard Lindzen and Judith Curry have not lost their positions because of their views. Once you get outside of scientific circles there is vilification going on but it occurs on both sides of the argument. Examples on the "global warming side": Michael Mann, Phil Jones, James Hansen.
The reason CO2 followed temperature in past deglacitions is because CO2 is a feedback of warming. I believe the primary source of CO2 during these periods is outgasing from the oceans. Colder water holds more dissolved CO2 and as it warms up it will release it*. Another smaller factor could be CO2 trapped in the continental ice sheets that is released as they melt. None of this means that CO2 can't also force changes in temperature. In fact the temperatures reached during interglacial periods can't be fully explained without including the added warming from increased CO2 and methane.
* The reason oceans are still absorbing CO2 despite the fact that they are warming is because the dissolved CO2 in water is a function of both temperature and the partial pressure of CO2 in the atmosphere above it. We've added enough CO2 to the atmosphere that the oceans are still sinking it but that can't last forever.
Did Hatta say anything about government? The leadership in what he's referring to comes from the corporate/wealthy and some of their bought off government minions.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry but I have to say the word is habitable. Habital sounds like something I do as a result of a habit.
Maybe better comets from the Kuiper belt. More bang for the buck.
While I didn't mention water vapor except generically in greenhouse gases I agree with what you said.
However if get the feeling you may be conflating clouds and water vapor. Sorry if I'm wrong. They certainly are related since a cloud's existence depends on water vapor but the greenhouse effects of clouds and water vapor are quite different.
I'm not aware of anything that's liquid at the right temperatures and pressures and likely to be available in a large enough quantity to substitute for water. The only possibility I can think of would be ammonia and it seems it would likely have somewhat different effects than water because of its reactive nature.
Of course as you moved the orbit out the Earth would be colder and the the evolved biosphere would likely be very different than it is now. The habitable zone doesn't mean it's necessarily habitable for humans, just life in general.
Clouds not only affect sunlight on the day side of the planet but also also radiative heat transfer from the surface on both the day and night sides. Ever notice how much warmer it can be on a cloudy night than on a clear night? Current research indicates that clouds overall probably have a slightly positive effect on global warming but much research still needs to be done.
So clouds have an effect but greenhouse gases still dominate the equations. That affects the accuracy of model he uses but it's likely not an order of magnitude off and so is useful as a starting point to further refine the science.
This binary thinking that something has to be 100% right or it's completely wrong is not how science works.
Changing the orbits of planets is probably not a simple as you think. There are resonances between the orbits of planets of the Solar System which would change because of the move. Who knows what that would do? The length of the year would increase and it would take biological systems time to adapt. I don't know that it would affect the length of a day but if we have the power to move the planet we certainly have the power to set the length of a day to anything we want within reason.
If we're worried about Earth not being in the habitable zone it's far easier to do something to change the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth* than to move the planet. Probably a lot cheaper too.
*My proposal would be an array of mirrors orbiting at the Earth-Sun L1 point.
The string is called gravity.
An apology is not necessary. It was a good interchange. I pretty much agree with the rest of what you wrote.
A perfect mirror is a theoretical concept that doesn't exist in reality. My main point is that a mirror works by reflecting photons and any photons it absorbs reduces its efficiency as a mirror because they won't be re-emitted at the same frequency they came in at.
There's a difference between reflecting and absorbing and re-emitting photons. Perfect mirrors do not absorb photons.
The land based part of the GPS system (called WAAS) does not do the same thing as the satellites. They correct the slight errors caused by minor deviations in the GPS satellite's position and clock. After all when you have to account for relativistic effects on the satellite it doesn't take much to cause a lot of error. The WAAS system sends the deviation correction signal to a geosynchronous satellite that broadcasts it back to Earth where properly equipped GPS receivers can use it to improve their accuracy.
Or too stupid to know any better because of the lead in the gasoline.
So you think they build the results into the models but you don't really present any evidence other than saying humans are always biased. That may be true but how do we get any science done if it's not possible to overcome that? What makes you think climate scientists are worse than any other scientists? Maybe you have some confirmation bias of your own.
Most models do a decent job, better than any other method so far. Here is a comparison of model results to observations (the 2012 update will be out shortly). Here is a discussion of Hansen's 1981 results compared to observations. As you can see it actually underestimates what has been observed and what later models project.
Yes, you can't predict things that have already happened but you can certainly start any model's run at any point in time and let it run then compare the results to the observations. The only thing you would need to feed them is the observed changes in CO2 and other greenhouse gases (except water vapor which is a feedback of temperature changes and built into the models), changes in solar radiation and major volcanic eruptions. The output would be mostly temperatures.
My point about the global cooling thing still stands, far more scientists were looking at global warming even back then.
I am a computer programmer/sys admin but I took through 200 level courses and some 300 level courses in college for physics, chemistry and biology. Science is something I've had a lifelong interest in and I think I know a thing or two about how to conduct it. Science is always subject to revision pending new results but someone has to come up with the new results first. If climate scientist are so biased that their results are wrong it shouldn't be that hard to come up with those new results but no one has so far.
Einstein overturned Newtonian physics but didn't prove them wrong, just a special case of the Einsteinian universe.
I read that other post and debated responding. I'll just say you bring up a lot of things like deforestation that scientist are not ignoring. It looks to me like you haven't read deeply enough in the literature to know what they've already covered on those subjects. One error you made is that the polarity of the Sun's magnetic field flips at the solar minimum, not the maximum. Also, sunspots, total solar irradiance and solar flares all track together fairly well. You seem to be saying that maximum luminosity occurs when the sunspot count is lowest. That doesn't give me confidence in the rest of what you say.
On the reflectivity of plants, that is easily measured with a spectroscope and it has been. Another thing that has not been ignored. In fact they measure the spectrum of the incoming solar radiation in orbit and at the surface and the outgoing radiation at the surface and from orbit. All of that constantly to see how it's changing.
I saw the article about cities downwind temperature effects but from what I've read so far it appears that it is at best a minor factor in the overall equation and is unlikely to overturn the larger picture.
I don't think I said you were unscientific specifically and apologize if you think I did. But as I have pointed out you've said a lot of things that don't fit well with what I know about the subject. I'll continue to believe what climate scientists say until someone comes up with a better explanation and I don't think they are ignoring things because they don't fit with their narrative. Time will certainly tell whether they are right or not but so far they've done pretty well.
Human heat sources are a rounding error compared to the energy Earth absorbs from the Sun every day. We get more energy from the Sun in 12 hours than the human race uses in a whole year.
Climate is by definition the average large-scale atmospheric conditions over the long term!
That is true but incomplete. Here is the World Meteorological Organization statement on what climate is:
Climate in a narrow sense is usually defined as the "average weather," or more rigorously, as the statistical description in terms of the mean and variability of relevant quantities over a period of time ranging from months to thousands or millions of years. The classical period is 30 years, as defined by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). These quantities are most often surface variables such as temperature, precipitation, and wind. Climate in a wider sense is the state, including a statistical description, of the climate system.
Just as important as the average weather is a description of the variability of weather.
Again, what does the age of anything have to do with it? What makes you think a 10 year old climate model is limited to 10 years of data? Climate models can be fed with data of any age and they'll calculate based on what you give them and run as long as you let them go. Typical climate model runs are for periods of 100 years or so (accomplished in about 1 month of model run time). And let's be clear, climate models are never fed temperature data except maybe as a starting point, that is part of their output. What they are fed is things like changes in insolation, CO2 levels, the occasional major volcanic eruption, ENSO data etc. I'm just confused that you think age has anything to do with it.
The "global cooling" myth needs to die. A search of the scientific literature from 1965 to 1979 found 44 papers on global warming and only 7 papers on global cooling. The cooling papers got a lot of publicity when Time and Newsweek used them as cover stories but they were never the mainstream view. At least a couple of the cooling papers were examining what could happen if humans continued increasing the level of aerosols and SO2 at the rate they were up to that time. Continuing increase would have caused more cooling. Of course we implemented pollution controls and pretty much stopped that problem although it's growing again because of the industrialization of SE Asia. I was in my 20's back then and I don't remember any televised debates. Maybe on PBS I suppose.
I'm happy to have a debate as long as it's done on a scientific basis. But to debate things scientists have already examined and come to conclusions on is pointless unless you have new information. You owe it to the person you're debating to be knowledgeable about subject you are debating including the current research in the field.
I'd rather have a warmer planet because we failed to do something than a cooling (iceball) planet because we mis-corrected.
There really is no danger of that happening unless the Sun does something it's never been know to do before. According to a study released a couple of years ago we've already upped the CO2 level enough to prevent the next glaciation from happening.
What does the age of a model have to do with anything? Why would you expect a model from the 1970's to have "realized concrete predictions" more than a newer model? They all can be run to cover any time period. Wouldn't you expect as time goes on that models would get better, more refined and we'd be able to throw more computing power at them?
All those other things you mention have been and are being studied by scientists. They are not being ignored by climate scientists but there has to be a plausible link for them to take it into account. Climate scientists certainly factor in changes in solar output and large volcanic eruptions already. They point to deforestation, particularly burning as a factor in CO2 levels. So scientists are incorporating those and other things into the theory as they become more known and so far none of them has been shown to be anything more than a vernier dial compared to the "Human caused emissions of CO2 are the major factor in global warming." dial. Debate is fine but it has to be scientifically based.
The proof that CO2 concentration affects temperatures is in the physics of its radiative absorption. You have to get around the fact that those physics say an increase in the concentration will lead to an increase in temperature. In the real world there are other factors that complicate the picture but I haven't seen anything yet that would completely negate the effects of CO2. Even such notable contrarians as Richard Lindzen and Roy Spencer admit added CO2 will cause warming. They just say it's not as powerful as other scientists say or that there are other factors that counter it more completely than is found in the main stream.
The process doesn't run away because each increment of CO2 causes less warming than the previous increment so the curve asymptotically approaches zero. If each increment caused the same or greater warming than the previous then it could run away.
As far as CO2 following temperature, where is the evidence that CO2 levels significantly changed because of periods like the Roman or Medieval warming periods? The evidence suggests that CO2 levels has remained near 280 ppm for the past 8,000+ years. Shouldn't there have been significant bumps from the RWP and MWP? Ice core evidence shows that CO2 levels have not been above about 300 ppm for at least the past 800,000 years. If CO2 rise is caused by temperature rise (and not possibly the other way around too) then where is the temperature rise that caused CO2 levels to rise to the current ~400 ppm, a level not seen for probably over 15 million years?
Responding to your points:
Global temperature increase data: Don't make the mistake of extrapolating the results of one study from Lapland to the whole globe. Unless you can present corroborating evidence from reasonably globally spread sites it's more about local conditions than global conditions.
Human induced warming: Of course there is nothing "supposed" about the warming. It has been measured. Where is your evidence that CO2 rise has to follow the rise in temperature? If that it true then where is the temperature rise that caused the current rise in CO2 to a level 40% greater than has been seen for at least 800,000 years (from ice cores) and probably greater than it has been for over 15 million years (from other CO2 proxies)? Are you confusing correlation with causation?
Global warming models: If you think global warming models are just based on curve fitting extrapolations of "short term trends" you really have no idea of what they do. They are fundamentally based on the physics of the climate system. Observational data such at temperature trends are only used to compare to model output. See the FAQs here and here for more information about how climate models work. Since the period of the eccentricity of the Earth's orbit is approximately a 100,000 year cycle it is not a significant effect on a scale of a few thousand years let along a couple hundred years. Other elements of the Milankovitch cycles have periods as short as around 25,000 years, still not particularly significant on century scales.
Vilification of scientists: Here you just start making political arguments that don't have much to do with science. Well known skeptical scientists such as Roy Spencer, John Christy, Richard Lindzen and Judith Curry have not lost their positions because of their views. Once you get outside of scientific circles there is vilification going on but it occurs on both sides of the argument. Examples on the "global warming side": Michael Mann, Phil Jones, James Hansen.
The reason CO2 followed temperature in past deglacitions is because CO2 is a feedback of warming. I believe the primary source of CO2 during these periods is outgasing from the oceans. Colder water holds more dissolved CO2 and as it warms up it will release it*. Another smaller factor could be CO2 trapped in the continental ice sheets that is released as they melt. None of this means that CO2 can't also force changes in temperature. In fact the temperatures reached during interglacial periods can't be fully explained without including the added warming from increased CO2 and methane.
* The reason oceans are still absorbing CO2 despite the fact that they are warming is because the dissolved CO2 in water is a function of both temperature and the partial pressure of CO2 in the atmosphere above it. We've added enough CO2 to the atmosphere that the oceans are still sinking it but that can't last forever.
It got stuck in the sand and they didn't have AAA.
Tell her when she grows up she can go on the Mars mission and they can pick Curiosity up and bring it back to put in the museum.
Did Hatta say anything about government? The leadership in what he's referring to comes from the corporate/wealthy and some of their bought off government minions.