...also returned a Republican majority in the all important House of Representatives.
That was largely because of gerrymandering. There were 549,597 more votes cast for Democratic Representatives (50.26%) than Republican Representatives (49.74%) around the nation in the recent election out or 107,354,883 votes cast. If the house were apportioned by party vote it would essentially be split 50-50.
Yes but how many of those 46% are paying Social Security/Medicare taxes? How many of them also pay state and local sales and income taxes? What would be the point of forcing them to pay federal income tax if you just have to turn around and offer them federal assistance anyway?
If you had even read the/. post you would have noticed that they're talking about the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Department of Justice and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act being involved. Nothing about the FCC.
I used to read WattsUpWithThat some 4 or 5 years ago but found it was mostly a waste of my time. Lindzen and Choi have a history that's not particularly encouraging so I take what they say with a grain of salt. Here's a critique of their 2009 paper.
First of all using only the UAH temperature dataset to the exclusion of others such as the other satellite dataset, RSS, and the various surface temperature datasets is a bit of cherry picking to since it is the one that shows the lowest temperature trends. I'm not saying it's wrong, just that I know of no good reasons to use it to the exclusion of the others. Second, I don't really think any temperature trends based on less than around 20 years of data is particularly useful. Too much noise from natural variability. Climate scientists generally use 30 year trends.
Attaching "catastrophic" to AGW is rather subjective. I'm not surprised that climate scientists don't use the C word. If AGW is going to be catastrophic it's a slow motion catastrophe and the really bad stuff won't show up for several more decades and even then it's not like a switch is being thrown* but a gradual worsening until all of a sudden you realize how bad things are getting.
* That's not to discount the possibility of non-linear effects that do switch a natural system from one mode to another. But until they actually happen and can be documented scientifically they're just speculation.
I think the current data is pretty believable. The physics of CO2's absorption of infrared radiation as tested is the lab is unassailable. To expect it to behave completely differently in the atmosphere doesn't seem reasonable. The rise in CO2 is well documented. Multiple lines of evidence show that the rise is primarily due to human emissions of CO2 mostly from burning fossil fuels. There are of course some other greenhouse gases we are emitting but in quantities small enough that you can ignore them for a first order analysis (except maybe methane).
So then I guess you get to the question "How bad is it going to get?" That's difficult to answer because there are no good analogs in past to compare it to. The closest could be the PETM 55 millions years ago but that took around 20,000 years to raise the temperature 6C. At the rate we're going we could do that in 200 years (even at 1C a century it's only 600 years). One principle of disaster management is the less you know about something that could be bad the more you try to avoid it. I think that applies to climate change as well.
Some things I'm pretty sure of. Warming will continue as long as greenhouse gas levels continue to rise and because of the thermal inertia of the oceans for another 30 or so years after they stop rising. Glaciers around the world and the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets will take several centuries to reach a new equilibrium state which will contribute to continued sea level rise. Ocean acidification will cause some level of disruption of the ocean's food chains. All of the changes are likely to have some drastic effects on the world's natural systems and the production agriculture that we've built our civilization around.
I think if you look more closely you'll find that most of the soil in those "millions of acres of Northern Canada and Siberia" is thin and not particularly suited to modern production agriculture and it would take hundreds of years to make it suited. There's also the issue of day length and the fact that it's still going to be getting damned cold in the winter when there's less than 8 hours of daylight.
The Sun was also several percent cooler back then and the layout of land areas relative to sea areas was entirely different. Simplistic answers are often too simple.
Look as hard as you like, you won't find a reasonable explanation from the chicken-little crowd for CO2 lagging temp.
You didn't look very hard, did you? As the warming from changes in Milankovitch cycles take hold the oceans start warming up. That causes them to release CO2 because warmer water is less soluble to CO2. Because of the oceans thermal inertia it takes a while for the process to get going. CO2 trapped in the continental ice sheets may also be a bit of a factor as they melt. Without the added forcing from the additional CO2 the interglacial temperatures would not get nearly as high as they do.
Now you can explain why adding CO2 to the atmosphere by a process that doesn't depend on a natural change in the global temperature (that would be digging up and burning fossil fuels) won't cause warming despite all the physics that says it will.
The last time CO2 was higher than it is now was probably over 15 million years ago.
quote>Correct, but they also find that CO2 rises after temperature, not before, with a lag time of at least a couple of centuries.
Yes, rising CO2 is a well known feedback of warming, primarily because of out-gassing from warming oceans. But the ultimate warming that occurs in such a situation is warmer that it would be without the increased CO2. And that in no way means that CO2 increases independent of feedback from warming can't also drive temperatures up. It's not an either/or situation.
We have Medieval deep water ports in Scandinavia that are not deep water ports today...
The absolute Sea level hasn't changed that much since medieval times. What has changed is the level of the land has risen where those ports are located as the whole Scandinavian Peninsula is still undergoing post-glacial rebound after the last ice age.
I have to say I have a hard time taking anyone who cites WattsUpWithThat seriously.
The problem with saying scientists are manipulating and producing fake data is that it's impossible to get away with it forever and when it's discovered the manipulators scientific reputation is destroyed. Most scientists are far too smart to think they could get away with that for any length of time. Despite all sorts of accusations I'm not aware of any of that, just some of the sort of errors you can expect in any human enterprise that are corrected when discovered.
A lot of these problems can be solved merely with wealth.
I guess we know what's important to you and it's not the science. All the wealth in the world won't do you much good if the infrastructure behind our civilization can't be maintained.
As a result, I see no reason not to wait a few more years (or even a few more decades!) until we see what really happens.
The problem with that attitude is the many of the effects of global warming are not reversible on any human time scale. Once we see what happens we can't really fix it. On top of that even once we get to net zero CO2 emissions it will take 20-40 years for actual temperatures to catch up to the forcing and reach a new equilibrium. This is primarily because the oceans are a huge heat sink that absorb 90% of the excess energy coming in.
Even if human civilization were to collapse and 90% of the population dies off that only stops the increase in CO2. The level of CO2 would stop rising but the natural processes alone that remove CO2 would take 1,000's of years to bring the level down significantly. Only humans actively removing it from the atmosphere would make much of a dent on decadal or century time scales.
In order to even equal human emissions of CO2 volcanic emissions would have to be 2 orders of magnitude greater than the estimates. I find it highly unlikely that vulcanologists estimates are that far off.
To be specific the average you are talking about is the 20th century average (which your quote says). Every month since March of 1985 has been warmer than the 20th century average (1901-2000) for that month.
I love that the article includes the chart showing "Atmospheric CO2 at Mauna Loa Observatory".
Kinda like a thermometer hanging over a boiling pot of water to show it is warm.
And naturally you assume the scientists who set up the observatory didn't think of that too. Go back and read the published research from them and you will find that issue is addressed. Come back when you can scientifically criticize what they said about it.
And the Mauna Loa Observatory may be the first place to start continuous monitoring of CO2 but now there are hundreds of them scattered around the world that serve as a check against each other. They all show the same general trend.
No cherry picking involved. rgbatduke talked about Hansen's predictions over 35 years or so and that's the closest I could find. If you want a comparison of Hansen's 1988 model (which was much more sophisticated than the 1981 model) you can find it here along with data comparisons to other models. Scroll down to the "Hansen et al, 1988" heading. Hansen was still more right than wrong especially when you consider that he used a climate sensitivity of 4.2 rather than around 3 which is considered the best estimate today.
Hurricane or not the destruction that Sandy wrought is evident. In terms of sheer size it's the largest Atlantic storm ever seen, over 1000 miles across at one point. Chances are without the influence of climate change Sandy wouldn't have been quite as strong as it was.
Slashdot Mirror
That was largely because of gerrymandering. There were 549,597 more votes cast for Democratic Representatives (50.26%) than Republican Representatives (49.74%) around the nation in the recent election out or 107,354,883 votes cast. If the house were apportioned by party vote it would essentially be split 50-50.
Once you start means testing for Social Security it becomes a welfare program rather than an insurance program. That just makes it easier to attack.
Yes but how many of those 46% are paying Social Security/Medicare taxes? How many of them also pay state and local sales and income taxes? What would be the point of forcing them to pay federal income tax if you just have to turn around and offer them federal assistance anyway?
No, I think it must be 42.
If you had even read the /. post you would have noticed that they're talking about the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Department of Justice and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act being involved. Nothing about the FCC.
If you got a cube of frozen oxygen (54K) and dropped that in a vat of boiling oil I imagine the results would be pretty spectacular.
I used to read WattsUpWithThat some 4 or 5 years ago but found it was mostly a waste of my time. Lindzen and Choi have a history that's not particularly encouraging so I take what they say with a grain of salt. Here's a critique of their 2009 paper.
First of all using only the UAH temperature dataset to the exclusion of others such as the other satellite dataset, RSS, and the various surface temperature datasets is a bit of cherry picking to since it is the one that shows the lowest temperature trends. I'm not saying it's wrong, just that I know of no good reasons to use it to the exclusion of the others. Second, I don't really think any temperature trends based on less than around 20 years of data is particularly useful. Too much noise from natural variability. Climate scientists generally use 30 year trends.
Attaching "catastrophic" to AGW is rather subjective. I'm not surprised that climate scientists don't use the C word. If AGW is going to be catastrophic it's a slow motion catastrophe and the really bad stuff won't show up for several more decades and even then it's not like a switch is being thrown* but a gradual worsening until all of a sudden you realize how bad things are getting.
* That's not to discount the possibility of non-linear effects that do switch a natural system from one mode to another. But until they actually happen and can be documented scientifically they're just speculation.
I think the current data is pretty believable. The physics of CO2's absorption of infrared radiation as tested is the lab is unassailable. To expect it to behave completely differently in the atmosphere doesn't seem reasonable. The rise in CO2 is well documented. Multiple lines of evidence show that the rise is primarily due to human emissions of CO2 mostly from burning fossil fuels. There are of course some other greenhouse gases we are emitting but in quantities small enough that you can ignore them for a first order analysis (except maybe methane).
So then I guess you get to the question "How bad is it going to get?" That's difficult to answer because there are no good analogs in past to compare it to. The closest could be the PETM 55 millions years ago but that took around 20,000 years to raise the temperature 6C. At the rate we're going we could do that in 200 years (even at 1C a century it's only 600 years). One principle of disaster management is the less you know about something that could be bad the more you try to avoid it. I think that applies to climate change as well.
Some things I'm pretty sure of. Warming will continue as long as greenhouse gas levels continue to rise and because of the thermal inertia of the oceans for another 30 or so years after they stop rising. Glaciers around the world and the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets will take several centuries to reach a new equilibrium state which will contribute to continued sea level rise. Ocean acidification will cause some level of disruption of the ocean's food chains. All of the changes are likely to have some drastic effects on the world's natural systems and the production agriculture that we've built our civilization around.
I think if you look more closely you'll find that most of the soil in those "millions of acres of Northern Canada and Siberia" is thin and not particularly suited to modern production agriculture and it would take hundreds of years to make it suited. There's also the issue of day length and the fact that it's still going to be getting damned cold in the winter when there's less than 8 hours of daylight.
The Sun was also several percent cooler back then and the layout of land areas relative to sea areas was entirely different. Simplistic answers are often too simple.
Look as hard as you like, you won't find a reasonable explanation from the chicken-little crowd for CO2 lagging temp.
You didn't look very hard, did you? As the warming from changes in Milankovitch cycles take hold the oceans start warming up. That causes them to release CO2 because warmer water is less soluble to CO2. Because of the oceans thermal inertia it takes a while for the process to get going. CO2 trapped in the continental ice sheets may also be a bit of a factor as they melt. Without the added forcing from the additional CO2 the interglacial temperatures would not get nearly as high as they do.
Now you can explain why adding CO2 to the atmosphere by a process that doesn't depend on a natural change in the global temperature (that would be digging up and burning fossil fuels) won't cause warming despite all the physics that says it will.
The last time CO2 was higher than it is now was probably over 15 million years ago.
Then don't bother asking a climatologist because they don't really care. Ask your local weather service.
quote>Correct, but they also find that CO2 rises after temperature, not before, with a lag time of at least a couple of centuries.
Yes, rising CO2 is a well known feedback of warming, primarily because of out-gassing from warming oceans. But the ultimate warming that occurs in such a situation is warmer that it would be without the increased CO2. And that in no way means that CO2 increases independent of feedback from warming can't also drive temperatures up. It's not an either/or situation.
We have Medieval deep water ports in Scandinavia that are not deep water ports today ...
The absolute Sea level hasn't changed that much since medieval times. What has changed is the level of the land has risen where those ports are located as the whole Scandinavian Peninsula is still undergoing post-glacial rebound after the last ice age.
I have to say I have a hard time taking anyone who cites WattsUpWithThat seriously.
What's this 4 degrees C thing then and why is it suddenly relevant today?
Because if you want to avoid it it's far easier to get started on it now than 50 years from now.
The problem with saying scientists are manipulating and producing fake data is that it's impossible to get away with it forever and when it's discovered the manipulators scientific reputation is destroyed. Most scientists are far too smart to think they could get away with that for any length of time. Despite all sorts of accusations I'm not aware of any of that, just some of the sort of errors you can expect in any human enterprise that are corrected when discovered.
A lot of these problems can be solved merely with wealth.
I guess we know what's important to you and it's not the science. All the wealth in the world won't do you much good if the infrastructure behind our civilization can't be maintained.
As a result, I see no reason not to wait a few more years (or even a few more decades!) until we see what really happens.
The problem with that attitude is the many of the effects of global warming are not reversible on any human time scale. Once we see what happens we can't really fix it. On top of that even once we get to net zero CO2 emissions it will take 20-40 years for actual temperatures to catch up to the forcing and reach a new equilibrium. This is primarily because the oceans are a huge heat sink that absorb 90% of the excess energy coming in.
Even if human civilization were to collapse and 90% of the population dies off that only stops the increase in CO2. The level of CO2 would stop rising but the natural processes alone that remove CO2 would take 1,000's of years to bring the level down significantly. Only humans actively removing it from the atmosphere would make much of a dent on decadal or century time scales.
In order to even equal human emissions of CO2 volcanic emissions would have to be 2 orders of magnitude greater than the estimates. I find it highly unlikely that vulcanologists estimates are that far off.
To be specific the average you are talking about is the 20th century average (which your quote says). Every month since March of 1985 has been warmer than the 20th century average (1901-2000) for that month.
I love that the article includes the chart showing "Atmospheric CO2 at Mauna Loa Observatory".
Kinda like a thermometer hanging over a boiling pot of water to show it is warm.
And naturally you assume the scientists who set up the observatory didn't think of that too. Go back and read the published research from them and you will find that issue is addressed. Come back when you can scientifically criticize what they said about it.
And the Mauna Loa Observatory may be the first place to start continuous monitoring of CO2 but now there are hundreds of them scattered around the world that serve as a check against each other. They all show the same general trend.
No cherry picking involved. rgbatduke talked about Hansen's predictions over 35 years or so and that's the closest I could find. If you want a comparison of Hansen's 1988 model (which was much more sophisticated than the 1981 model) you can find it here along with data comparisons to other models. Scroll down to the "Hansen et al, 1988" heading. Hansen was still more right than wrong especially when you consider that he used a climate sensitivity of 4.2 rather than around 3 which is considered the best estimate today.
I don't know where you get your information about Hansen but even his simple model from 1981 isn't that far off.
Largest Atlantic Hurricanes
Hurricane or not the destruction that Sandy wrought is evident. In terms of sheer size it's the largest Atlantic storm ever seen, over 1000 miles across at one point. Chances are without the influence of climate change Sandy wouldn't have been quite as strong as it was.