Models are about projecting climate outcomes given various scenarios. They can't predict because they don't know the future. The timing of things like solar cycles and ENSO or how much more CO2 we will add to the atmosphere and how fast or how much methane will be released from melting permafrost. Climatologists know the GCM's are not completely correct or complete but they are as good as they can make them with current resources and computing power. They will always be wrong, the question is are they in the ballpark? They are improved by understanding why they were wrong and correcting it.
You guys gotta give up on the "Global Cooling in the 1970s" bs. A study (PDF) found that from 1965 to 1979 there were 7 papers predicting global cooling and 42 papers predicting global warming. It got a lot of publicity from writeups in Newsweek and other publications but it was never the predominant theory in the field.
I wish people would give up on the "1970s ice age scare" meme. It's false. From 1965 to 1979 there were 7 peer reviewed papers predicting cooling that got a big writeup in Newsweek and other publications but there were 42 peer reviewed papers about global warming, many of them singling out CO2. Even back then global warming was predominant.
You see the problem is, climatologists can't even predict the "small stuff" to any degree of accuracy, yet will quite happily stand 100% by their conclusions on what will happen in 10 years fro now, declaring that they know better, and everyone else is either unqualified, or misguided, or a moron.
This just demonstrates your complete lack of understanding of the difference between climate and weather and of the importance of natural variation. Climatologists don't predict weather. Instead they project what climate will be in terms of different scenarios of possible inputs to the climate system.
Forget water vapour, forget methane, forget solar flares and the solar cycles, forget everything else, yes for sure it's those bloody humans and their CO2 !
Do you seriously think the scientists studying this stuff are so stupid that they ignore all of the factors that go into climate? Do you think they decided CO2 was going to be the bad guy and made their evidence fit that. I guess that's what you're saying. Don't you think it's possible that after examining all of the various factors that affect climate they determined that the major cause of the changes we're seeing is CO2?
Here are the global annual mean temperature anomalies for the 1930s, 1990s & 2000s in 0.01 degrees Celsius with 0 being the mean from 1951-1980 (you can divide the number by 100 and add 14 degrees C to them to get absolute temperatures):
Those numbers are from the GISS and are available here here. The records start in 1880 but you could make a case for extending the record back before 1850 based on the level of data collection. If you're going to dispute the numbers you have to make a cogent scientific argument about it, not some hand waving about insufficient records.
The only thing I'm aware of climate scientists accusing the Bush administration of is trying to silence them or distorting their reports on the subject. I don't have a problem with scientists discrediting poor science and boycotting journals that publish it. The paper the emails refer to is Soon & Baliunas 2003 published in Climate Research. The editor-in-chief and several other editors resigned over it being published and even the publisher eventually admitted it suffered from serious flaws. The only data that was deleted was their refined and normalized data, not the original data it was derived from which came from a bunch of sources. It could be recreated if there was a reason to.
What is the World Weather Bureau? I can't find anything about it. But Al Gore doesn't matter. He just disseminates the information that climate scientists give him. It's the scientists who matter.
If we would just let forests burn naturally the would thin themselves, after all they survived just fine for a long time before we showed up on the scene. But it's probably too late for that after a century of fire suppression. That's kind of peripheral to issue of climate change though so I'm not sure why you brought it up.
Water vapor is by far the most important greenhouse gas contributing 36%-72% of the total effect but it's not all of it. CO2 is 9%-26%. If CO2 only causes a 1% rise in retained heat that's equivalent to nearly 3 degrees Celsius in temperature.
Again, I'm not aware of any primary data that was thrown out and I don't have a problem with discrediting poor science. The Earth's climate has been scientifically studied for a long time. It's been pretty intensively studied since WWII. The possibilities of CO2 having an effect on climate have been known since the late 1800s. Lyndon Johnson had a briefing on the possibility of human releases of CO2 causing global warming in 1966 or so. There's a lot of science from thousands of scientists on the subject so what "real scientific study" are you asking for? I think you just want it explained in simple enough terms that even you can understand it but that's probably not possible because it isn't simple.
If you think the science on ozone was all a hoax because DuPont's patent on Freon was running out I don't know what to say to you. The ozone depletion of the stratosphere is a measured fact and there is a measurable increase in ultraviolet radiation on the surface of the earth because of it. The chlorine atoms in CFS have been shown to cause the breakdown of ozone. Freon wasn't the only CFC that was banned and I doubt all of their patents were running out at the same time. As people like to say here on/. correlation is not causation.
And people aren't getting rich off the current fossil fuel regime?! It's just the people you don't agree with that you don't want getting rich I guess. If we don't spend "trillions" now responding to climate change and it turns out we needed to it will cost us far more later and may cost us our civilization depending on how the biosphere responds. If we do spend "trillions" and it turns out we didn't need to we still have ren
Of course petroleum didn't come from dinosaurs. The conventional theory is that oil formed from the remains of algae and plankton in shallow seas. I guess abiogenic origin can't be ruled out but it's poorly supported in the petroleum geologist community and seems pretty far fetched to me. I'll continue to call them fossil fuels.
CO2 can be both a cause and a symptom. The basic facts are that CO2 is a greenhouse gas* that absorbs certain bands of infrared radiation. That is a fact. It can be measured in the laboratory. The situation in the atmosphere is more complex but show me some evidence that it doesn't absorb IR in a similar fashion to the way it does in a lab.
* An unfortunate name as it works entirely differently than a greenhouse that allows solar radiation in and traps the heat mostly by limiting convection. It has little to do with water vapor either in a real greenhouse.
Humans have caused most of the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere. That is a fact. When you burn a ton of coal that is 70% carbon over 2.5 tons of CO2 is released in the atmosphere. When you add up all of the coal, oil and gas that humans consume it's around twice as much as the yearly increase of CO2 in the atmosphere.
The 1930s were not the hottest decade on record globally, they may have been in the US. If you have a reference that disproves that I'll take a look at it. Now it's become clear that the hottest decade globally in the instrument record will be the 2000s.
If you threw out all of the climate change evidence related to the East Anglia U emails it wouldn't change the conclusions one bit as they are but a small part of total volume of evidence for global warming.
I guess I must be a member of the Church of Climatology. The high priests are the climate scientists and Al Gore is their acolyte. Funny way to run a cult though. They don't ask me for donations and don't tell me what to think. They just ask me to listen to what they say and make my own judgment. But if someone comes along with substantive evidence to refute what they say I'll switch to the new religion in an instant. I'm such a whore.
But I prefer to think of it as acknowledging that the recognized experts in the field are probably right and that's where I place my bets.
Whoa, I'm not sure what to say about that. If you seriously think that petroleum is self renewing over short (geologically speaking) time periods you need to educate yourself better. If you let old wells lie fallow for a while I imagine some of the oil that was stuck in between the cracks will eventually pool up some allowing you to recover more oil from the well.
"Fudging" or omitting data is not unscientific if there are valid scientific reasons for doing so as appears to be the case in this instance.
The science says that the warming that has been measured in the last 100+ years is largely due to the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere. It's pretty trivial to show that the increase in CO2 is mostly due to human extraction and use of fossil fuels. There's your blame and what we can do about it is to reduce the CO2 we're adding to the atmosphere year after year.
Of course Al Gore isn't a climate scientist but he does vet all of his statements on the subject with real climate scientists. He's just using his position as an elder statesman to help spread the science. As such he's become a lightning rod for people who don't accept climate science but it doesn't matter because the reality of global warming will overcome all the noise.
In the climate field, there are a number of issues which are no longer subject to fundamental debate in the community. The existence of the greenhouse effect, the increase in CO2 (and other GHGs) over the last hundred years and its human cause, and the fact the planet warmed significantly over the 20th Century are not much in doubt. IPCC described these factors as ‘virtually certain’ or ‘unequivocal’. The attribution of the warming over the last 50 years to human activity is also pretty well established – that is ‘highly likely’ and the anticipation that further warming will continue as CO2 levels continue to rise is a well supported conclusion. To the extent that anyone has said that the scientific debate is over, this is what they are referring to. In answer to colloquial questions like “Is anthropogenic warming real?”, the answer is yes with high confidence.
The basic premises of anthropogenic climate change are well established. It's the refinements that are being debated.
How does whether climate change is natural or not affect their jobs? It's still a subject worth studying so we have the information to mitigate the changes that occur.
Projecting climate is a much different thing than predicting weather. Climate is the envelope that weather and natural variability fit into. Climate models project various climate outcomes based on input variations.
Your breath is not pollution. It's a natural part of the carbon cycle that has existed for billions of years. Digging up fossil fuel carbon that has been out of the carbon cycle for 100s of millions of years and putting back in is pollution.
The code from the emails is totally unrelated to the code for General Circulation Models that Jim Hansen and GISS have worked on. The code for the GISS GCM's is available here.
... The ones that claim man is to blame for GW when in fact things have been warming up for clearly over 1000 years.
That's not a reasonable statement. In the past millennium the reconstructions and measurements clearly show temperatures cooling until around 1850, just about the time we started ramping up fossil fuel use.
The Little Ice Age ended after 1850. Industrial use of fossil fuels started in the late 1700's. There's been a measurable increase in atmospheric CO2 since at least 1830.
The "Hockey Stick" graph made no predictions. It is a reconstruction of temperatures for the past millennium. It was constructed in 1999. You're too impatient. You'll probably have to wait for the 2040's before sea level has risen a foot.
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Models are about projecting climate outcomes given various scenarios. They can't predict because they don't know the future. The timing of things like solar cycles and ENSO or how much more CO2 we will add to the atmosphere and how fast or how much methane will be released from melting permafrost. Climatologists know the GCM's are not completely correct or complete but they are as good as they can make them with current resources and computing power. They will always be wrong, the question is are they in the ballpark? They are improved by understanding why they were wrong and correcting it.
You guys gotta give up on the "Global Cooling in the 1970s" bs. A study (PDF) found that from 1965 to 1979 there were 7 papers predicting global cooling and 42 papers predicting global warming. It got a lot of publicity from writeups in Newsweek and other publications but it was never the predominant theory in the field.
The data and source code you're talking about were for climate reconstruction, not climate models.
What makes you think climatologists have tossed out natural cycles? The models wouldn't be realistic if they excluded them.
I wish people would give up on the "1970s ice age scare" meme. It's false. From 1965 to 1979 there were 7 peer reviewed papers predicting cooling that got a big writeup in Newsweek and other publications but there were 42 peer reviewed papers about global warming, many of them singling out CO2. Even back then global warming was predominant.
Data doesn't get "presented for peer review". The methods used to collect and process data may be peer reviewed if it's relevant.
If I could use my mod points you'd get an "Insightful" for that.
They are. Read the statement of the American Geophysical Union. That statement is also supported by the Geological Society of America [PDF].
This just demonstrates your complete lack of understanding of the difference between climate and weather and of the importance of natural variation. Climatologists don't predict weather. Instead they project what climate will be in terms of different scenarios of possible inputs to the climate system.
Do you seriously think the scientists studying this stuff are so stupid that they ignore all of the factors that go into climate? Do you think they decided CO2 was going to be the bad guy and made their evidence fit that. I guess that's what you're saying. Don't you think it's possible that after examining all of the various factors that affect climate they determined that the major cause of the changes we're seeing is CO2?
Here are the global annual mean temperature anomalies for the 1930s, 1990s & 2000s in 0.01 degrees Celsius with 0 being the mean from 1951-1980 (you can divide the number by 100 and add 14 degrees C to them to get absolute temperatures):
1930-1940: -4, 2, 3, -12, 2, 3, -12, 2, -9, 1, 11, 14, -2, 14
1990-2000: 48, 44, 15, 18, 32, 45, 36, 40, 70, 43, 40
2000-2008: 40, 56, 67, 65, 59, 77, 64, 72, 54
2009 looks like it will be around 71.
Those numbers are from the GISS and are available here here. The records start in 1880 but you could make a case for extending the record back before 1850 based on the level of data collection. If you're going to dispute the numbers you have to make a cogent scientific argument about it, not some hand waving about insufficient records.
The only thing I'm aware of climate scientists accusing the Bush administration of is trying to silence them or distorting their reports on the subject. I don't have a problem with scientists discrediting poor science and boycotting journals that publish it. The paper the emails refer to is Soon & Baliunas 2003 published in Climate Research. The editor-in-chief and several other editors resigned over it being published and even the publisher eventually admitted it suffered from serious flaws. The only data that was deleted was their refined and normalized data, not the original data it was derived from which came from a bunch of sources. It could be recreated if there was a reason to.
What is the World Weather Bureau? I can't find anything about it. But Al Gore doesn't matter. He just disseminates the information that climate scientists give him. It's the scientists who matter.
If we would just let forests burn naturally the would thin themselves, after all they survived just fine for a long time before we showed up on the scene. But it's probably too late for that after a century of fire suppression. That's kind of peripheral to issue of climate change though so I'm not sure why you brought it up.
Water vapor is by far the most important greenhouse gas contributing 36%-72% of the total effect but it's not all of it. CO2 is 9%-26%. If CO2 only causes a 1% rise in retained heat that's equivalent to nearly 3 degrees Celsius in temperature.
Again, I'm not aware of any primary data that was thrown out and I don't have a problem with discrediting poor science. The Earth's climate has been scientifically studied for a long time. It's been pretty intensively studied since WWII. The possibilities of CO2 having an effect on climate have been known since the late 1800s. Lyndon Johnson had a briefing on the possibility of human releases of CO2 causing global warming in 1966 or so. There's a lot of science from thousands of scientists on the subject so what "real scientific study" are you asking for? I think you just want it explained in simple enough terms that even you can understand it but that's probably not possible because it isn't simple.
If you think the science on ozone was all a hoax because DuPont's patent on Freon was running out I don't know what to say to you. The ozone depletion of the stratosphere is a measured fact and there is a measurable increase in ultraviolet radiation on the surface of the earth because of it. The chlorine atoms in CFS have been shown to cause the breakdown of ozone. Freon wasn't the only CFC that was banned and I doubt all of their patents were running out at the same time. As people like to say here on /. correlation is not causation.
And people aren't getting rich off the current fossil fuel regime?! It's just the people you don't agree with that you don't want getting rich I guess. If we don't spend "trillions" now responding to climate change and it turns out we needed to it will cost us far more later and may cost us our civilization depending on how the biosphere responds. If we do spend "trillions" and it turns out we didn't need to we still have ren
There are no chimps in RSA. It's probably baboons.
Of course petroleum didn't come from dinosaurs. The conventional theory is that oil formed from the remains of algae and plankton in shallow seas. I guess abiogenic origin can't be ruled out but it's poorly supported in the petroleum geologist community and seems pretty far fetched to me. I'll continue to call them fossil fuels.
CO2 can be both a cause and a symptom. The basic facts are that CO2 is a greenhouse gas* that absorbs certain bands of infrared radiation. That is a fact. It can be measured in the laboratory. The situation in the atmosphere is more complex but show me some evidence that it doesn't absorb IR in a similar fashion to the way it does in a lab.
* An unfortunate name as it works entirely differently than a greenhouse that allows solar radiation in and traps the heat mostly by limiting convection. It has little to do with water vapor either in a real greenhouse.
Humans have caused most of the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere. That is a fact. When you burn a ton of coal that is 70% carbon over 2.5 tons of CO2 is released in the atmosphere. When you add up all of the coal, oil and gas that humans consume it's around twice as much as the yearly increase of CO2 in the atmosphere.
The 1930s were not the hottest decade on record globally, they may have been in the US. If you have a reference that disproves that I'll take a look at it. Now it's become clear that the hottest decade globally in the instrument record will be the 2000s.
If you threw out all of the climate change evidence related to the East Anglia U emails it wouldn't change the conclusions one bit as they are but a small part of total volume of evidence for global warming.
I guess I must be a member of the Church of Climatology. The high priests are the climate scientists and Al Gore is their acolyte. Funny way to run a cult though. They don't ask me for donations and don't tell me what to think. They just ask me to listen to what they say and make my own judgment. But if someone comes along with substantive evidence to refute what they say I'll switch to the new religion in an instant. I'm such a whore.
But I prefer to think of it as acknowledging that the recognized experts in the field are probably right and that's where I place my bets.
Whoa, I'm not sure what to say about that. If you seriously think that petroleum is self renewing over short (geologically speaking) time periods you need to educate yourself better. If you let old wells lie fallow for a while I imagine some of the oil that was stuck in between the cracks will eventually pool up some allowing you to recover more oil from the well.
"Fudging" or omitting data is not unscientific if there are valid scientific reasons for doing so as appears to be the case in this instance.
The science says that the warming that has been measured in the last 100+ years is largely due to the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere. It's pretty trivial to show that the increase in CO2 is mostly due to human extraction and use of fossil fuels. There's your blame and what we can do about it is to reduce the CO2 we're adding to the atmosphere year after year.
Of course Al Gore isn't a climate scientist but he does vet all of his statements on the subject with real climate scientists. He's just using his position as an elder statesman to help spread the science. As such he's become a lightning rod for people who don't accept climate science but it doesn't matter because the reality of global warming will overcome all the noise.
Hard to tell the difference sometimes.
Did you read the post you linked to?
The basic premises of anthropogenic climate change are well established. It's the refinements that are being debated.
How does whether climate change is natural or not affect their jobs? It's still a subject worth studying so we have the information to mitigate the changes that occur.
Projecting climate is a much different thing than predicting weather. Climate is the envelope that weather and natural variability fit into. Climate models project various climate outcomes based on input variations.
Your breath is not pollution. It's a natural part of the carbon cycle that has existed for billions of years. Digging up fossil fuel carbon that has been out of the carbon cycle for 100s of millions of years and putting back in is pollution.
The code from the emails is totally unrelated to the code for General Circulation Models that Jim Hansen and GISS have worked on. The code for the GISS GCM's is available here.
That's not a reasonable statement. In the past millennium the reconstructions and measurements clearly show temperatures cooling until around 1850, just about the time we started ramping up fossil fuel use.
Another one of those dreaded correlations between rising temperatures and rising CO2.
The Little Ice Age ended after 1850. Industrial use of fossil fuels started in the late 1700's. There's been a measurable increase in atmospheric CO2 since at least 1830.
The "Hockey Stick" graph made no predictions. It is a reconstruction of temperatures for the past millennium. It was constructed in 1999. You're too impatient. You'll probably have to wait for the 2040's before sea level has risen a foot.
Nice one. If it could use my mod points I would.
Volcanic activity had nothing to do with the end of the last ice age. It probably mostly had to do with Milankovitch cycles.