Hey now, let's be fair. These same flappy heads were claiming that Manhattan Island and Florida would be under water by 2000(when I was a kid in the 1980's), and again by 2010, then 2012, and the latest ones screaming it'll be by 2025, and then there's the ones saying 2060 and then there's the others saying by 2100 too. You also can't forget the other alarmist stuff, like acid rain will destroy all the trees by 1995. The ozone hole will make it so you can't go outside except at night. The world will run out of oil by 1985. And my personal favorite? The world will starve by 1976.
Maybe some flappy heads were saying that but I doubt you could find a scientist who studies sea levels who said that. In fact the reality is that sea level rise has been faster than they predicted.
And regarding acid rain and the ozone hole we actually did something about those things to prevent them from getting out of control.
Sometime in the next 200-500 years there will be no way to protect coastal cities. The last time CO2 was over 400 ppm sea level was over 70 feet higher than it is now. It may just be a matter of how fast the polar ice caps melt. Are you going to build 100 foot high levees around the whole coast?
Producing CO2 is not inherently bad, sorry. Arguing about producing CO2 is quite frankly stupid. It is the other pollutants not discussed in AGW theory which are the problem. Want to fix CO2 issues? Grow plants!
Considering that we are burning thousands of years of plant accumulation daily thinking that growing plants will help the problem is like thinking that pissing on a 5 alarm fire will put it out.
NONE of the pseudoscience that would validate claims of AGW climate change is repeatable or reproducible, meaning some black box of information must exist to prove these claims but most likely does not.
Really? The basics of AGW are that some gases in the atmosphere are opaque to infrared radiation at certain frequencies, easily shown in a lab. And that the increase in greenhouse gases, primarily CO2, is due to anthropogenic sources or feedbacks from that (water vapor). Again, easily shown by the amount of fossil fuels we burn compared to the increase in atmospheric quantities and by the change in isotopic ratios of carbon in the atmosphere. Once you get beyond that your just getting into the details.
Science doesn't happen by consensus. It happens by rigorous proof and verifiable, repeatable testing of a (hopefully null) hypothesis.
But consensus does happen by science. Consensus in science is an organic thing that happens when most of the scientists in a field accept a concept and move on to arguing the details. The over 90% consensus in climate science that global warming is caused primarily by the increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and that the increase is mainly anthropogenic in origin is not based on models but on basic physics.
The Earth isn't going to "die" from global warming but it may well cause the collapse of our civilization and even if it doesn't it's going to be very expensive to adapt to it. Many civilizations in the past have died from lesser climate change than we see coming at us.
"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet." It doesn't matter what the child thinks as long as they use the correct white powdery stuff to make their cake.
I had a terrible manager a long time ago but fortunately he knew nothing about my job (systems and database administrator on a VAX system). He'd come over and talk to me and I'd just bury him with VAX specific jargon. As long as the VAX ran fine (and it always did) I was left alone. Others in the department weren't so lucky because he thought he knew something about PCs and the phone system and he was a micromanger. He lasted less than two years as head of IT but got moved to other departments and had similar problems (a manger can manage anything, right?). Eventually he got fired when he go caught trying to return an expensive camera system that he'd "borrowed" without approval. It was needed for some tests.
The one time he did get to me (and the others in the department) was when he insisted that all email go through him for approval. This was in the days before ubiquitous internet email so we had two systems, the local VAX email and the corporate system called sysm. That only lasted for about a week. We buried him in emails then complained when he wasn't able to keep up and deliver the messages in a timely manner. At the time I was changing usernames on the VAX to the new corporate standard so I was sending out 20 or 30 messages a day telling users about the new usernames they'd have the following morning. Users were complaining and I told them "Talk to Ted, he was supposed to forward the message on to you".
I don't see what's sad about the current paper. The possibility that declining Arctic sea ice and the warming Arctic may be having an effect on the jet stream was first hypothesized by Jennifer Francis about 5 years ago and it appears that support for it has increased over time.
Just like everyone else scientists have to prioritize their limited resources. In this case there doesn't appear to be that much value to figure that out given that it's not an obvious problem across a wide range of proxies.
I agree that it's not that clear why the tree rings diverged. I'm not sure how much effort scientists are willing to put into finding out at this point. It's not that important in a sea of other information that shows the divergence is an anomaly in one tree series, not a wide spread phenomenon.
The speculation is that in the tree rings that diverged (not all did) it had to do with pollution.
Mann is not a tree ring specialist. He used tree ring data from scientists who are. He followed the recommendation from the scientists who produced the data he used to not use the divergent data.
In any case there have been more than a dozen temperature reconstructions done since Mann's 1998 and 1999 hockey stick graphs and they all show the same thing as Mann. So even if you throw out all of Mann's work it doesn't change a thing.
I suggest you read the published papers of the scientists who study those sorts of things. They don't just use any old tree rings. The tree ring samples they use for temperature studies are carefully selected from places where temperature will be a major factor in their growth.
I'm not saying that CO2 is a trigger for the current interglacial. The trigger appears to be Milankovitch cycles. But once the planet started warming up feedback from increased water vapor and CO2 make it warmer than it would get from Milankovitch cycles alone.
CO2 is a trailing indicator, in other words CO2 starts rising after temperature rises. In fact, (excluding the last hundred years), every time CO2 levels were above 300ppm in the last 400,000 years we were in an ice age.
There is no time in the past 400,000 years that CO2 was above 300 ppm until around 1960.
Also CO2 is not an either/or situation. Just because it's a feedback of warming temperatures doesn't mean it can't also be a forcing when it increases for reasons other than warming temperatures.
Please point to your evidence that it was 2C or warmer globally in the MWP than it is now. Also Mann's original hockey stick graph started in 1400, well after the end of the MWP.
There may be unknown causes but to just assume that without evidence is magical thinking. If there was a significant unknown cause you would expect there to be holes in the current theory but I've seen no evidence of such holes.
I think you probably meant to say "it is moving toward being minutely more corrosive. It is true that the ocean is not acidic but the term acidification just means that the pH value is dropping, not that the pH is below 7.
You could make the same argument about the "climate scientists". Did their models accurately predict that there would be a leveling off of global temperatures throughout most of the '2000's? No. Did they admit that they were wrong? No, but they did have to revise their models in light of the fact that the observations did not match the predictions of their original models. Why should we take them seriously now in light of their failure?
You shouldn't "believe" ANYONE... alarmists or skeptics... when it comes to explanations and predictions about something as complicated as the climate.
Climate models make projections based on the expected progression of factors that affect climate. Most of those factors are not predictable in advance. Such factors as changes in solar insolation, the cycle of El Nino/La Nina, volcanic eruptions and some others. But most of them are fairly predictable over longer time periods. So climate models aren't necessarily supposed to be accurate for short term projections but should be more accurate on the longer term. A decade or 15 years is short term for climate models. 30 years or more is the longer term.
...some tree ring series started showing declines in temperatures that weren't matched in observations by actual thermometers...
Slow down there, cowboy!
Tree ring data is used to estimate temperature changes occurring during the past before there were thermometers (or humans for much of Earth's past history for which tree-ring data is used, for that matter).
Can't be comparisons between two data sets when one set does not exist!
There is an overlap in thermometer readings and tree rings since about the mid-1800s that can be used to calibrate the tree ring estimations. It isn't ideal but it does provide information.
Do you have any evidence that any glaciation (ice age) in the last several million years occurred when CO2 levels were above 300 ppm?
The current hypotheses on the cycle of glaciation and interglacial periods is that they are kicked off by Milankovitch cycle changes and then pushed along one way or the other by feedback changes in greenhouse gas concentrations. Do you have anything that fits the evidence better?
Slashdot Mirror
Hey now, let's be fair. These same flappy heads were claiming that Manhattan Island and Florida would be under water by 2000(when I was a kid in the 1980's), and again by 2010, then 2012, and the latest ones screaming it'll be by 2025, and then there's the ones saying 2060 and then there's the others saying by 2100 too. You also can't forget the other alarmist stuff, like acid rain will destroy all the trees by 1995. The ozone hole will make it so you can't go outside except at night. The world will run out of oil by 1985. And my personal favorite? The world will starve by 1976.
Maybe some flappy heads were saying that but I doubt you could find a scientist who studies sea levels who said that. In fact the reality is that sea level rise has been faster than they predicted.
And regarding acid rain and the ozone hole we actually did something about those things to prevent them from getting out of control.
Sometime in the next 200-500 years there will be no way to protect coastal cities. The last time CO2 was over 400 ppm sea level was over 70 feet higher than it is now. It may just be a matter of how fast the polar ice caps melt. Are you going to build 100 foot high levees around the whole coast?
As a species homo sapiens may well survive but that doesn't mean shit to a lot of individuals who won't survive.
Producing CO2 is not inherently bad, sorry. Arguing about producing CO2 is quite frankly stupid. It is the other pollutants not discussed in AGW theory which are the problem. Want to fix CO2 issues? Grow plants!
Considering that we are burning thousands of years of plant accumulation daily thinking that growing plants will help the problem is like thinking that pissing on a 5 alarm fire will put it out.
Which hockey stick graph are you talking about? Here is a list of over 40 hockey stick graphs. Are you saying they're all debunked or just Mann's original one?
You should break down what fields those were found in. There's a lot of BS in social sciences but not so much in physical sciences.
NONE of the pseudoscience that would validate claims of AGW climate change is repeatable or reproducible, meaning some black box of information must exist to prove these claims but most likely does not.
Really? The basics of AGW are that some gases in the atmosphere are opaque to infrared radiation at certain frequencies, easily shown in a lab. And that the increase in greenhouse gases, primarily CO2, is due to anthropogenic sources or feedbacks from that (water vapor). Again, easily shown by the amount of fossil fuels we burn compared to the increase in atmospheric quantities and by the change in isotopic ratios of carbon in the atmosphere. Once you get beyond that your just getting into the details.
My study indicates we'll be in another ice age by the end of the century.
Which one of us is right?
I call bullshit on your study. It's not thermodynamically possible to be in another ice age in only 83 years.
So what does Texas have to do with the whole Earth? The answer is 0.14% of the surface area.
Science doesn't happen by consensus. It happens by rigorous proof and verifiable, repeatable testing of a (hopefully null) hypothesis.
But consensus does happen by science. Consensus in science is an organic thing that happens when most of the scientists in a field accept a concept and move on to arguing the details. The over 90% consensus in climate science that global warming is caused primarily by the increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and that the increase is mainly anthropogenic in origin is not based on models but on basic physics.
The Earth isn't going to "die" from global warming but it may well cause the collapse of our civilization and even if it doesn't it's going to be very expensive to adapt to it. Many civilizations in the past have died from lesser climate change than we see coming at us.
"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet." It doesn't matter what the child thinks as long as they use the correct white powdery stuff to make their cake.
I had a terrible manager a long time ago but fortunately he knew nothing about my job (systems and database administrator on a VAX system). He'd come over and talk to me and I'd just bury him with VAX specific jargon. As long as the VAX ran fine (and it always did) I was left alone. Others in the department weren't so lucky because he thought he knew something about PCs and the phone system and he was a micromanger. He lasted less than two years as head of IT but got moved to other departments and had similar problems (a manger can manage anything, right?). Eventually he got fired when he go caught trying to return an expensive camera system that he'd "borrowed" without approval. It was needed for some tests.
The one time he did get to me (and the others in the department) was when he insisted that all email go through him for approval. This was in the days before ubiquitous internet email so we had two systems, the local VAX email and the corporate system called sysm. That only lasted for about a week. We buried him in emails then complained when he wasn't able to keep up and deliver the messages in a timely manner. At the time I was changing usernames on the VAX to the new corporate standard so I was sending out 20 or 30 messages a day telling users about the new usernames they'd have the following morning. Users were complaining and I told them "Talk to Ted, he was supposed to forward the message on to you".
I don't see what's sad about the current paper. The possibility that declining Arctic sea ice and the warming Arctic may be having an effect on the jet stream was first hypothesized by Jennifer Francis about 5 years ago and it appears that support for it has increased over time.
Just like everyone else scientists have to prioritize their limited resources. In this case there doesn't appear to be that much value to figure that out given that it's not an obvious problem across a wide range of proxies.
I agree that it's not that clear why the tree rings diverged. I'm not sure how much effort scientists are willing to put into finding out at this point. It's not that important in a sea of other information that shows the divergence is an anomaly in one tree series, not a wide spread phenomenon.
The speculation is that in the tree rings that diverged (not all did) it had to do with pollution.
Mann is not a tree ring specialist. He used tree ring data from scientists who are. He followed the recommendation from the scientists who produced the data he used to not use the divergent data.
In any case there have been more than a dozen temperature reconstructions done since Mann's 1998 and 1999 hockey stick graphs and they all show the same thing as Mann. So even if you throw out all of Mann's work it doesn't change a thing.
I suggest you read the published papers of the scientists who study those sorts of things. They don't just use any old tree rings. The tree ring samples they use for temperature studies are carefully selected from places where temperature will be a major factor in their growth.
I'm not saying that CO2 is a trigger for the current interglacial. The trigger appears to be Milankovitch cycles. But once the planet started warming up feedback from increased water vapor and CO2 make it warmer than it would get from Milankovitch cycles alone.
CO2 is a trailing indicator, in other words CO2 starts rising after temperature rises. In fact, (excluding the last hundred years), every time CO2 levels were above 300ppm in the last 400,000 years we were in an ice age.
There is no time in the past 400,000 years that CO2 was above 300 ppm until around 1960.
Also CO2 is not an either/or situation. Just because it's a feedback of warming temperatures doesn't mean it can't also be a forcing when it increases for reasons other than warming temperatures.
Please point to your evidence that it was 2C or warmer globally in the MWP than it is now. Also Mann's original hockey stick graph started in 1400, well after the end of the MWP.
There may be unknown causes but to just assume that without evidence is magical thinking. If there was a significant unknown cause you would expect there to be holes in the current theory but I've seen no evidence of such holes.
I think you probably meant to say "it is moving toward being minutely more corrosive. It is true that the ocean is not acidic but the term acidification just means that the pH value is dropping, not that the pH is below 7.
You could make the same argument about the "climate scientists". Did their models accurately predict that there would be a leveling off of global temperatures throughout most of the '2000's? No. Did they admit that they were wrong? No, but they did have to revise their models in light of the fact that the observations did not match the predictions of their original models. Why should we take them seriously now in light of their failure?
You shouldn't "believe" ANYONE ... alarmists or skeptics ... when it comes to explanations and predictions about something as complicated as the climate.
Climate models make projections based on the expected progression of factors that affect climate. Most of those factors are not predictable in advance. Such factors as changes in solar insolation, the cycle of El Nino/La Nina, volcanic eruptions and some others. But most of them are fairly predictable over longer time periods. So climate models aren't necessarily supposed to be accurate for short term projections but should be more accurate on the longer term. A decade or 15 years is short term for climate models. 30 years or more is the longer term.
...some tree ring series started showing declines in temperatures that weren't matched in observations by actual thermometers...
Slow down there, cowboy!
Tree ring data is used to estimate temperature changes occurring during the past before there were thermometers (or humans for much of Earth's past history for which tree-ring data is used, for that matter).
Can't be comparisons between two data sets when one set does not exist!
There is an overlap in thermometer readings and tree rings since about the mid-1800s that can be used to calibrate the tree ring estimations. It isn't ideal but it does provide information.
Do you have any evidence that any glaciation (ice age) in the last several million years occurred when CO2 levels were above 300 ppm?
The current hypotheses on the cycle of glaciation and interglacial periods is that they are kicked off by Milankovitch cycle changes and then pushed along one way or the other by feedback changes in greenhouse gas concentrations. Do you have anything that fits the evidence better?