Climate models are one way of testing climate related hypotheses by synthesizing what we currently think we know about climate into a coherent whole. In general they do better at projecting the future than simpler methods. There may be "trillions" of variables affecting climate but once you get past the 5 or 10 biggest factors the rest are just vernier adjustments. As for the rest of your post, heat (and visible light) reflected from clouds is measurable but it's difficult to do on a global scale, we know something about how solar activity affects the planet and are learning more all the time and the change in pH of the ocean is a direct measurement of carbon dioxide trapped by the ocean. To me it is an example of hubris that you think you know more than actual climate scientists.
Uncertainty in future warming is represented by range projections. For example, the uncertainty range for the warming averaged over the region’s land areas is from 1.7 to 7.5F. This is a 95% uncertainty range, so that there is a 19 out of 20 chance that the correct value lies in this range. The uncertainty is due to variation in the global models and the complex seasonal and topographical features of the L.A. regional climate. Even the lower bound is positive though, indicating extremely high confidence in the likelihood of warming by mid-century.
Climate models when run on a global scale typically use a grid size of 100x100 km (at the equator). In this case they ran them on a regional scale with a grid size of about 2.5 sq. miles which is about 2.4x2.4 km. That's where the increased precision comes from. It's easier to take in the vagaries of local geography into account at that scale.
That's because you don't go read the original papers which always contain information about the uncertainty. Instead you read journalist's accounts of the papers which usually leave the uncertainty out to avoid confusing readers. Mostly the journalist probably doesn't understand it well enough themselves to convey it accurately to their readers anyway.
The published study can be found here and it does contain uncertainty information. Here is a downloadable PDF of the summary of findings.
Here's one guys take on The future of oil prices. He basically expects the price of a barrel of oil to bounce between $85 and $125 for the next couple of years.
During the State of the Union address there is always at least one official fairly high in the line of succession who does not attend the speech and stays in an undisclosed location specifically because of this issue.
Most of the time it's not hard to figure out but occasionally the ball hits just barely above the home run line and bounces back on the field or it's difficult to tell if it was just inside the foul pole or not. That's where they use it, not for every home run, just ones that can be disputed.
Pitch count doesn't matter as much to a knuckleballer because they don't throw nearly as hard as a fast ball pitcher. They couldn't hold on to the ball reliably if they tried.
Actually there are a few things they do use instant replay for now in cases where the call is not clear such as determining if a hit ball is a home run or not.
Idealistically I agree with you but if we'd let all of those banks go bankrupt in 2008 we'd be in a full fledged worldwide depression now that might rival the 1930's and take more than a decade to recover from.
Are you kidding?! Those large corporations and rich people are job creators--they're what allow the other 99% to be able to eat and have a place to sleep!
I'm getting tired of that bullshit argument! Large corporations and rich people are not job creators! The job creators are the people who have enough money to spend that creates demand for products! Without demand why would corporations or rich people make the investments that require workers to fulfill that demand? You could be the richest person in the world but you're not going to create jobs unless you have enough people with enough disposable income to spend to make your investment profitable. How many jobs are created by entrepreneurs who go out on a limb and start their companies with money borrowed from their relatives or on a credit card? Calling large corporations and rich people "job creators" is just bullshit!
What models would those be that show sea level "should be meters higher on the way to [a] 60 meter increase"? I'd bet you couldn't cite even one specific model that predicts any such thing in less than centuries.
Of course as is often brought up here on/. correlation is not causation.
The question you have to ask yourself is "If the exhalation of CO2 by living things has some relation to the rise in CO2 in the atmosphere then where is that carbon coming from?" In other words what is a source of the carbon in the CO2 you exhale that didn't start as CO2 absorbed by the living things you eat?
It is true that deforestation and other changes to land and sea use can cause a significant rise in CO2 but compared to the amount of CO2 released by burning fossil fuels it's pretty small.
Fertilizer derived from fossil fuels does not use the carbon in those fuels. The carbon that plants use is exclusively derived from CO2 already in the atmosphere (or the water for aquatic plants) as far as I can tell.
If you want people to believe that the increase in CO2 is due to the increase in human population due to their eating and breathing you're going to have to come up with some actual scientific evidence for that, not a simple correlation between population and CO2 levels. Human population is a factor in the CO2 levels in the atmosphere but it's due mostly to increased burning fossil fuels, not breathing. We know fairly accurately how much CO2 is released by burning fossil fuels. It's an easy calculation based on the chemical formulas for that reaction. The increase in CO2 in the atmosphere from one year to the next amounts to about 45% of the CO2 released by burning fossil fuels and other human activities such as deforestation and cement manufacture. Most of the rest is absorbed in the oceans leading to ocean acidification.
(Sorry I didn't respond sooner but I was out whitewater rafting the past 3 days.)
So the corresponding rise of CO2 along with life on our planet has to do with our increased extraction of of carbon over the past couple of billion years?
Not at all. Both Venus and Mars have atmospheres that are about 95% CO2. I doubt life had much to do with that on either of them. Carbon is a relatively abundant element in the universe and it's not surprising to find it outside of the realm of living systems. If you want me to take your hypothesis seriously you have a lot of details to fill in.
LOL. The carbon in the CO2 that humans and other animals exhale came from CO2 absorbed by the plants you ate (and the plants the animals you eat ate). Animal exhalation doesn't change the level of CO2 in the atmosphere. Digging up carbon and burning carbon that's been sequestered for millions of years does add to the level of CO2 in the atmosphere.
I guess the point is that a single weather event or even a single unusual season in a particular location on the Earth doesn't have much effect on the global climate. Climatologists generally use a 30 year running mean to denote the global climate temperature.
The article says it was the most ice seen in the Bering Sea in the 32 years of satellite monitoring. However I doubt any scientist would unequivocally state that it is the longest it has ever been present. The ice in various areas of the Arctic Ocean and adjacent areas like the Bering Sea varies from year to year due to local conditions but my main point was that overall the ice area is a bit below the 1979-2000 average.
I think you have that a bit backwards. Around 500 million years ago when complex animal life was first developing the atmospheric level of CO2 appears to have been around 5000 ppm. Since then it has generally been on a downward trend reaching lows around 180-280 ppm in the past million years.
In the field of risk management the hazier the risks the more value there is in trying to avoid them. If you know well what the risks are you can plan for them effectively but if the risks are not clear but could potentially be bad then you invest more in trying to avoid them.
Slashdot Mirror
Title says "More Hot Weather For Southern California, Says UCLA Study". More hot weather events would be an expected result of global warming.
Climate models are one way of testing climate related hypotheses by synthesizing what we currently think we know about climate into a coherent whole. In general they do better at projecting the future than simpler methods. There may be "trillions" of variables affecting climate but once you get past the 5 or 10 biggest factors the rest are just vernier adjustments. As for the rest of your post, heat (and visible light) reflected from clouds is measurable but it's difficult to do on a global scale, we know something about how solar activity affects the planet and are learning more all the time and the change in pH of the ocean is a direct measurement of carbon dioxide trapped by the ocean. To me it is an example of hubris that you think you know more than actual climate scientists.
From the summary.
Uncertainty in future warming is represented by range projections. For example, the uncertainty range for the warming averaged over the region’s land areas is from 1.7 to 7.5F. This is a 95% uncertainty range, so that there is a 19 out of 20 chance that the correct value lies in this range. The uncertainty is due to variation in the global models and the complex seasonal and topographical features of the L.A. regional climate. Even the lower bound is positive though, indicating extremely high confidence in the likelihood of warming by mid-century.
Sounds reasonable to me.
You're talking about the coast. Inland in the Mohave Desert, Death Valley and the Central Valley it gets pretty damn hot.
Climate models when run on a global scale typically use a grid size of 100x100 km (at the equator). In this case they ran them on a regional scale with a grid size of about 2.5 sq. miles which is about 2.4x2.4 km. That's where the increased precision comes from. It's easier to take in the vagaries of local geography into account at that scale.
That's because you don't go read the original papers which always contain information about the uncertainty. Instead you read journalist's accounts of the papers which usually leave the uncertainty out to avoid confusing readers. Mostly the journalist probably doesn't understand it well enough themselves to convey it accurately to their readers anyway.
The published study can be found here and it does contain uncertainty information. Here is a downloadable PDF of the summary of findings.
Here's one guys take on The future of oil prices. He basically expects the price of a barrel of oil to bounce between $85 and $125 for the next couple of years.
During the State of the Union address there is always at least one official fairly high in the line of succession who does not attend the speech and stays in an undisclosed location specifically because of this issue.
Amen.
What happened to companies hiring a competent worker and training them for the specifics of the job?
Most of the time it's not hard to figure out but occasionally the ball hits just barely above the home run line and bounces back on the field or it's difficult to tell if it was just inside the foul pole or not. That's where they use it, not for every home run, just ones that can be disputed.
Pitch count doesn't matter as much to a knuckleballer because they don't throw nearly as hard as a fast ball pitcher. They couldn't hold on to the ball reliably if they tried.
Actually there are a few things they do use instant replay for now in cases where the call is not clear such as determining if a hit ball is a home run or not.
The EPA has saved this country far more money than it has cost it.
Idealistically I agree with you but if we'd let all of those banks go bankrupt in 2008 we'd be in a full fledged worldwide depression now that might rival the 1930's and take more than a decade to recover from.
Are you kidding?! Those large corporations and rich people are job creators--they're what allow the other 99% to be able to eat and have a place to sleep!
I'm getting tired of that bullshit argument! Large corporations and rich people are not job creators! The job creators are the people who have enough money to spend that creates demand for products! Without demand why would corporations or rich people make the investments that require workers to fulfill that demand? You could be the richest person in the world but you're not going to create jobs unless you have enough people with enough disposable income to spend to make your investment profitable. How many jobs are created by entrepreneurs who go out on a limb and start their companies with money borrowed from their relatives or on a credit card? Calling large corporations and rich people "job creators" is just bullshit!
What models would those be that show sea level "should be meters higher on the way to [a] 60 meter increase"? I'd bet you couldn't cite even one specific model that predicts any such thing in less than centuries.
Of course as is often brought up here on /. correlation is not causation.
The question you have to ask yourself is "If the exhalation of CO2 by living things has some relation to the rise in CO2 in the atmosphere then where is that carbon coming from?" In other words what is a source of the carbon in the CO2 you exhale that didn't start as CO2 absorbed by the living things you eat?
It is true that deforestation and other changes to land and sea use can cause a significant rise in CO2 but compared to the amount of CO2 released by burning fossil fuels it's pretty small.
Fertilizer derived from fossil fuels does not use the carbon in those fuels. The carbon that plants use is exclusively derived from CO2 already in the atmosphere (or the water for aquatic plants) as far as I can tell.
If you want people to believe that the increase in CO2 is due to the increase in human population due to their eating and breathing you're going to have to come up with some actual scientific evidence for that, not a simple correlation between population and CO2 levels. Human population is a factor in the CO2 levels in the atmosphere but it's due mostly to increased burning fossil fuels, not breathing. We know fairly accurately how much CO2 is released by burning fossil fuels. It's an easy calculation based on the chemical formulas for that reaction. The increase in CO2 in the atmosphere from one year to the next amounts to about 45% of the CO2 released by burning fossil fuels and other human activities such as deforestation and cement manufacture. Most of the rest is absorbed in the oceans leading to ocean acidification.
(Sorry I didn't respond sooner but I was out whitewater rafting the past 3 days.)
So the corresponding rise of CO2 along with life on our planet has to do with our increased extraction of of carbon over the past couple of billion years?
Not at all. Both Venus and Mars have atmospheres that are about 95% CO2. I doubt life had much to do with that on either of them. Carbon is a relatively abundant element in the universe and it's not surprising to find it outside of the realm of living systems. If you want me to take your hypothesis seriously you have a lot of details to fill in.
LOL. The carbon in the CO2 that humans and other animals exhale came from CO2 absorbed by the plants you ate (and the plants the animals you eat ate). Animal exhalation doesn't change the level of CO2 in the atmosphere. Digging up carbon and burning carbon that's been sequestered for millions of years does add to the level of CO2 in the atmosphere.
I guess the point is that a single weather event or even a single unusual season in a particular location on the Earth doesn't have much effect on the global climate. Climatologists generally use a 30 year running mean to denote the global climate temperature.
The article says it was the most ice seen in the Bering Sea in the 32 years of satellite monitoring. However I doubt any scientist would unequivocally state that it is the longest it has ever been present. The ice in various areas of the Arctic Ocean and adjacent areas like the Bering Sea varies from year to year due to local conditions but my main point was that overall the ice area is a bit below the 1979-2000 average.
I think you have that a bit backwards. Around 500 million years ago when complex animal life was first developing the atmospheric level of CO2 appears to have been around 5000 ppm. Since then it has generally been on a downward trend reaching lows around 180-280 ppm in the past million years.
In the field of risk management the hazier the risks the more value there is in trying to avoid them. If you know well what the risks are you can plan for them effectively but if the risks are not clear but could potentially be bad then you invest more in trying to avoid them.
Methane is actually the #1 greenhouse gas emission from people.
The level of methane in the atmosphere is about 1.75 ppm. CO2 is about 396 ppm. Since 1750 CO2 levels have increased by about 116 ppm while methane levels have increased by a little over 1 ppm. See here (note that the methane levels are noted in parts per billion, not parts per million). Methane is something to worry about but it's no where close to CO2 yet.