The average lifetime of a particular CO2 molecule in the atmosphere may be only a few years but the effect of increased carbon in the carbon cycle and therefore increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is in the thousands of years. That is unless we do something to actively remove CO2 from the atmosphere we're stuck with the increased levels of CO2 for thousands of years.
It seems to me the hysterics reside on your side of the issue who always take the worst case scenario as an absolute prediction. The rate of sea level rise has consistently outpaced the IPCC predictions/projections since the first report in 1992.
Unfortunately for those on in the US living on the Western Atlantic, the effects of Greenland ice melt on sea level rise will be greatest there rather than immediately adjacent to Greenland...
Oddly enough the effect of Greenland's melting ice will actually be a relative reduction in sea level around Greenland because of the reduction in gravitational attraction from the ice sheet.
We were more concerned about storms and erosion than something that is so tiny scientists are still arguing if it is happening. Where I live just south of Charleson, SC, I have never heard of someone losing property to sea level rise, but I have probably seen over ten thousand homes within a couple of blocks of the ocean damaged by storms. The actuaries I worked with didn't give a damn about something that doesn't cost us money.
In most cases the first damage you see from sea level rise will be storm surges reaching places they've never reached before. But the inexorable rise of sea level means than in 100-150 years most of south Florida will be abandoned and the Everglades will be history.
LOL, Solyndra was one small piece of an over $40 billion program that was budgeted by Congress for an over 10% failure rate. Last I heard the failure rate of the program was still under 7%. Solyndra was just a trumped up excuse for Republicans to carp about the current administration with little meaning in the big picture.
... melting ice from continental blocks pours into the sea... I would imagine such water, having recently changed state from ice, is colder than the sea, not warmer than it, and so the net effect would be to reduce the temperature of the water it hits.
Not saying the seas aren't warming from other factors, but it seems counter-intuitive to assume that adding glacial / ice meltwater would be a factor for sea temperature increase.
Perhaps I'm missing something here.
One interesting artifact of ocean temperatures lately is a cold blob off the south of Greenland that is thought to be at least partially a result of meltwater from Greenland.
So how far back do you think this corruption of climate science goes? Back to the 1980s when the IPCC was formed? Back to the 1960s when President Lyndon Johnson was told of the potential for warming from increasing emissions of CO2? Back to the 1950s when Gilbert Plass wrote a paper titled "The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change"? There hasn't been much change in the basics of climate science since then, just a lot of refinement. Arrhenius's basic formula from 1896 is still valid at the basic level.
Models are not the primary evidence for anthropogenic climate change. That would be the infrared absorption characteristics of greenhouse gases, primarily CO2. There is lots of corroborating evidence such as ocean warming, ice melt and sea level rise. Sea level is natures thermometer. In many cases the observations are outpacing the predictions/projections of climate scientists (See the/. post about "Fastest Sea Level Rise In At Least 2800 Years).
You can allege the corruption of climate science but until someone comes up with something that overturns the current understanding you're just shooting blanks. I find it hard to believe that if there is some major problem with climate science that among the tens of thousands of scientists around the world who have/are studying climate over many decades that someone has not been able to point out that the emperor has no clothes. To just hope that something will be found ot overturn current climate science without any evidence of a major problem of it is just wishful thinking.
On short time scales the noise of natural variability overwhelms the global warming signal. It's only over long time periods (20 years or more) that the signal starts to rise above the noise.
Strangely while most people seem to know that there were glaciers Iowa, they don't seem to grasp that the reason that there are no glaciers in Iowa now is that it's been getting warmer for the last 15,000 years.
Actually the warming for the current interglacial reached a peak around 6,000-8,000 years ago and had been slowly cooling since then until the sharp spike upwards lately.
I'd like to see you cite anything in context anything said by James Hansen that supports your assertions. At most he may have said such things are not out of the realm of possibility.
The UNEP said we could have up to 50 million climate refugees by 2010. That's different than saying we "would" have. Depending on how you define refugee I would think the number of refugees where changing climate is a factor in their status numbers probably in the low millions right now.
Do you always take worst case scenarios as actual predictions?
Freeman Dyson doesn't believe human activity is causing global climate change, nor does he believe a changing climate is necessarily harmful. Historically, warmer times have been better times.
"Generally speaking, I'm much more of a conformist, but it happens I have strong views about climate because I think the majority is badly wrong, and you have to make sure if the majority is saying something that they're not talking nonsense." - Freeman Dyson.
If Freeman Dyson says your maths are rubbish -- They are.
If Freeman Dyson thinks the majority is badly wrong then he should actually put in some work to show them the error of their ways. Meanwhile a lot of talented scientists who study climate would say that Dyson doesn't know what he's talking about. This xkcd comes to mind.
What is 'Climate denial' I wonder. There is no such thing as climate! There is only weather!
The proper term as far as I'm concerned is "climate science denial". As far as climate is concerned, by definition it is the long term averages and variability of weather and the boundaries that constrain it. That is something you can look at ranging from a single location up to global scale.
Does this mean all research (most of which is government funded) is crap? No, only that our society and our modern mechanism for funding research is chock full of biases. There is no font of ivory-tower-pure money that permits properly indifferent scientists to pursue their hypotheses and publish what they find, even if what they find is "nothing interesting". Does it mean that the boldly stated "settled science" that is sold as climate science is wrong? Not at all. It is just a long ways from being proven right, especially when it is a long way from even being uniform in its conclusions and while there is substantial disagreement between many of its conclusions and observational reality. And it is beyond any doubt that all of the conditions for the corruption of science are present in the government funding of climate science -- it is sold as Pascal's Wager, so that there is no price that is too big to pay, no work that is too small to contribute to selling the political and economic aspects of the current story to a skeptical public (and a rather large number of skeptical scientists who know better than to trust even the most boldly stated of consensus-view truth).
The problem I have with this is that the natural world that science studies is incorruptible. It is what it is and there is nothing humans can do to change it. Any scientist worthy of being called a scientist knows that and while they may let their biases put some spin on something it just boggles the mind to think that they would purposely publish something they know to be wrong. The best way to make your name in science is to overturn some previous paradigm and advance the field in an unexpected way. It is certainly true that funding sources may put more emphasis on some areas of science than others and lead the science in directions that they prefer but in the end they have to conform to the reality they discover through science. So while it may happen sometimes in the short term, in the long term science is incorruptible.
So I went and looked at the report you cited. They split the expenditures into 5 categories:
1) Scientific research into climate change, about $2.5 billion. 2) Clean energy technologies, about $6 billion. 3) International assistance, about $0.9 billion. 4) Natural resource adaption, about $0.09 billion. 5) Energy tax provisions that may reduce GHG emissions and energy payments in lieu of tax provisions, about $10 billion.
So direct climate research is only about 11.6% of the total expenditures and by far the biggest chunk is tax provisions that aren't actually expenditures but just reduce the taxes collected.
Regarding the tax provisions and other breaks fossil fuel producers get plenty of that sort of support as well. For example coal mines that pay less than $5/ton for coal mined on government lands that they can sell to China for around $50/ton.
The old temperature measurement methods are not wrong, they are just different than current methods. You don't think scientists should be doing anything to reconcile the differences between different measurement techniques?
ExxonMobil also has a huge vested interest in refuting any false role that burning oil has in accelerating climate change.
The disagreement can only be on whether the premise, that fossil fuels are in fact accelerating climate change, is correct. If no, shame on the majority fo scientists that have been convinced in error.
... the company’s knowledge of climate change dates back to July 1977, when its senior scientist James Black delivered a sobering message on the topic. “In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels," Black told Exxon’s management committee. A year later he warned Exxon that doubling CO2 gases in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by two or three degrees—a number that is consistent with the scientific consensus today.
Since then the science has only strengthened and no one has come up with anything that explains the accelerated warming better than carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
go back and look, IPCC climate models have not panned out five years later. we can't model climate usefully
Of course 5 years (or even 15 years) is a ridiculously short period of time on which to judge climate models. Maybe it's your expectations of what climate models do that have not panned out.
There are at least 4 nuclear reactors currently being built in the US. The Vogtle Units 3 and 4, the
The problem nuclear power has is that it's expensive compared to other ways of generating power. Renewable energy and related technologies like batteries have been advancing steadily and becoming cheaper in the process. I think it's possible to foresee in the not too distant future that they will become the dominant power technologies.
The paper was about the effect of temperatures on the nesting success of zebra finches. As part of the study they looked at natural conditions but they also tested the effects of artificially raising the temperature. The paper barely mentions global warming.
And having looked at the dataset, I can conclude that it is incomplete (as shown) because there is no date ranges for each of the data points in the spread graph (fig 1). All it shows is that the heat band (grey box) is the danger zone. They haven't shown increasing temperatures as the cause for the datapoints in that range.
With an analysis of the graph like that I can see why I always think you don't have a clue what you're talking about. The x-axis of the graph is clearly labeled July through June (the equivalent seasonally of January through December in the Northern Hemisphere) and the caption to the graph says the points of the graph represent the daily maximum temperature from 2005 to 2013. On top of that the caption says the grey band is the ideal range for avian embryo development.
The paper wasn't trying to say anything about anthropogenic global warming, it was just looking at the effect of temperature on the nesting success of zebra finches.
Or you could go actually read the original paper to see if you could detect any confirmation bias. I did and it's not that hard to read if you have a little biology literacy.
I think it's probably to much to ask to get all of the different organizations around the world to use the same baseline. In the end it's a rather arbitrary choice what baseline to use. Converting between different baselines is just a simple matter of addition or subtraction.
I went and looked at your link and the baseline they were using is 1961-1990. The other difference between your link and the NASA data was that your link was for Australia only not the whole world. I suspect if you took the NASA data for Australia only and compared it to Australia BOM data the results would be pretty close to the same after adjusting the baseline.
So I Googled "volcanic emissions of carbon dioxide" and the scientific studies it finds all say that volcanic emissions of CO2 are about 1% of human emissions.
Slashdot Mirror
The average lifetime of a particular CO2 molecule in the atmosphere may be only a few years but the effect of increased carbon in the carbon cycle and therefore increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is in the thousands of years. That is unless we do something to actively remove CO2 from the atmosphere we're stuck with the increased levels of CO2 for thousands of years.
It seems to me the hysterics reside on your side of the issue who always take the worst case scenario as an absolute prediction. The rate of sea level rise has consistently outpaced the IPCC predictions/projections since the first report in 1992.
Unfortunately for those on in the US living on the Western Atlantic, the effects of Greenland ice melt on sea level rise will be greatest there rather than immediately adjacent to Greenland ...
Oddly enough the effect of Greenland's melting ice will actually be a relative reduction in sea level around Greenland because of the reduction in gravitational attraction from the ice sheet.
We were more concerned about storms and erosion than something that is so tiny scientists are still arguing if it is happening. Where I live just south of Charleson, SC, I have never heard of someone losing property to sea level rise, but I have probably seen over ten thousand homes within a couple of blocks of the ocean damaged by storms. The actuaries I worked with didn't give a damn about something that doesn't cost us money.
In most cases the first damage you see from sea level rise will be storm surges reaching places they've never reached before. But the inexorable rise of sea level means than in 100-150 years most of south Florida will be abandoned and the Everglades will be history.
LOL, Solyndra was one small piece of an over $40 billion program that was budgeted by Congress for an over 10% failure rate. Last I heard the failure rate of the program was still under 7%. Solyndra was just a trumped up excuse for Republicans to carp about the current administration with little meaning in the big picture.
From TFS:
Not saying the seas aren't warming from other factors, but it seems counter-intuitive to assume that adding glacial / ice meltwater would be a factor for sea temperature increase.
Perhaps I'm missing something here.
One interesting artifact of ocean temperatures lately is a cold blob off the south of Greenland that is thought to be at least partially a result of meltwater from Greenland.
So how far back do you think this corruption of climate science goes? Back to the 1980s when the IPCC was formed? Back to the 1960s when President Lyndon Johnson was told of the potential for warming from increasing emissions of CO2? Back to the 1950s when Gilbert Plass wrote a paper titled "The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change"? There hasn't been much change in the basics of climate science since then, just a lot of refinement. Arrhenius's basic formula from 1896 is still valid at the basic level.
Models are not the primary evidence for anthropogenic climate change. That would be the infrared absorption characteristics of greenhouse gases, primarily CO2. There is lots of corroborating evidence such as ocean warming, ice melt and sea level rise. Sea level is natures thermometer. In many cases the observations are outpacing the predictions/projections of climate scientists (See the /. post about "Fastest Sea Level Rise In At Least 2800 Years).
You can allege the corruption of climate science but until someone comes up with something that overturns the current understanding you're just shooting blanks. I find it hard to believe that if there is some major problem with climate science that among the tens of thousands of scientists around the world who have/are studying climate over many decades that someone has not been able to point out that the emperor has no clothes. To just hope that something will be found ot overturn current climate science without any evidence of a major problem of it is just wishful thinking.
Global cooling is nothing anyone has to worry about for thousands of years.
On short time scales the noise of natural variability overwhelms the global warming signal. It's only over long time periods (20 years or more) that the signal starts to rise above the noise.
Strangely while most people seem to know that there were glaciers Iowa, they don't seem to grasp that the reason that there are no glaciers in Iowa now is that it's been getting warmer for the last 15,000 years.
Actually the warming for the current interglacial reached a peak around 6,000-8,000 years ago and had been slowly cooling since then until the sharp spike upwards lately.
Ooh! I believe that AGW is a proven* theory. Does that mean can can still use my IC vehicle?
*As proven as evolution and general relativity. Of course anything in science is subject to revision pending new information.
I'd like to see you cite anything in context anything said by James Hansen that supports your assertions. At most he may have said such things are not out of the realm of possibility.
The UNEP said we could have up to 50 million climate refugees by 2010. That's different than saying we "would" have. Depending on how you define refugee I would think the number of refugees where changing climate is a factor in their status numbers probably in the low millions right now.
Do you always take worst case scenarios as actual predictions?
Freeman Dyson doesn't believe human activity is causing global climate change, nor does he believe a changing climate is necessarily harmful. Historically, warmer times have been better times.
"Generally speaking, I'm much more of a conformist, but it happens I have strong views about climate because I think the majority is badly wrong, and you have to make sure if the majority is saying something that they're not talking nonsense." - Freeman Dyson.
If Freeman Dyson says your maths are rubbish -- They are.
If Freeman Dyson thinks the majority is badly wrong then he should actually put in some work to show them the error of their ways. Meanwhile a lot of talented scientists who study climate would say that Dyson doesn't know what he's talking about. This xkcd comes to mind.
What is 'Climate denial' I wonder. There is no such thing as climate! There is only weather!
The proper term as far as I'm concerned is "climate science denial". As far as climate is concerned, by definition it is the long term averages and variability of weather and the boundaries that constrain it. That is something you can look at ranging from a single location up to global scale.
Does this mean all research (most of which is government funded) is crap? No, only that our society and our modern mechanism for funding research is chock full of biases. There is no font of ivory-tower-pure money that permits properly indifferent scientists to pursue their hypotheses and publish what they find, even if what they find is "nothing interesting". Does it mean that the boldly stated "settled science" that is sold as climate science is wrong? Not at all. It is just a long ways from being proven right, especially when it is a long way from even being uniform in its conclusions and while there is substantial disagreement between many of its conclusions and observational reality. And it is beyond any doubt that all of the conditions for the corruption of science are present in the government funding of climate science -- it is sold as Pascal's Wager, so that there is no price that is too big to pay, no work that is too small to contribute to selling the political and economic aspects of the current story to a skeptical public (and a rather large number of skeptical scientists who know better than to trust even the most boldly stated of consensus-view truth).
The problem I have with this is that the natural world that science studies is incorruptible. It is what it is and there is nothing humans can do to change it. Any scientist worthy of being called a scientist knows that and while they may let their biases put some spin on something it just boggles the mind to think that they would purposely publish something they know to be wrong. The best way to make your name in science is to overturn some previous paradigm and advance the field in an unexpected way. It is certainly true that funding sources may put more emphasis on some areas of science than others and lead the science in directions that they prefer but in the end they have to conform to the reality they discover through science. So while it may happen sometimes in the short term, in the long term science is incorruptible.
So I went and looked at the report you cited. They split the expenditures into 5 categories:
1) Scientific research into climate change, about $2.5 billion.
2) Clean energy technologies, about $6 billion.
3) International assistance, about $0.9 billion.
4) Natural resource adaption, about $0.09 billion.
5) Energy tax provisions that may reduce GHG emissions and energy payments in lieu of tax provisions, about $10 billion.
So direct climate research is only about 11.6% of the total expenditures and by far the biggest chunk is tax provisions that aren't actually expenditures but just reduce the taxes collected.
Regarding the tax provisions and other breaks fossil fuel producers get plenty of that sort of support as well. For example coal mines that pay less than $5/ton for coal mined on government lands that they can sell to China for around $50/ton.
The old temperature measurement methods are not wrong, they are just different than current methods. You don't think scientists should be doing anything to reconcile the differences between different measurement techniques?
ExxonMobil also has a huge vested interest in refuting any false role that burning oil has in accelerating climate change.
The disagreement can only be on whether the premise, that fossil fuels are in fact accelerating climate change, is correct. If no, shame on the majority fo scientists that have been convinced in error.
Exxon first heard about the issue from their own scientists nearly 40 years ago in 1977:
Since then the science has only strengthened and no one has come up with anything that explains the accelerated warming better than carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
go back and look, IPCC climate models have not panned out five years later. we can't model climate usefully
Of course 5 years (or even 15 years) is a ridiculously short period of time on which to judge climate models. Maybe it's your expectations of what climate models do that have not panned out.
There are at least 4 nuclear reactors currently being built in the US. The Vogtle Units 3 and 4, the
The problem nuclear power has is that it's expensive compared to other ways of generating power. Renewable energy and related technologies like batteries have been advancing steadily and becoming cheaper in the process. I think it's possible to foresee in the not too distant future that they will become the dominant power technologies.
The paper was about the effect of temperatures on the nesting success of zebra finches. As part of the study they looked at natural conditions but they also tested the effects of artificially raising the temperature. The paper barely mentions global warming.
And having looked at the dataset, I can conclude that it is incomplete (as shown) because there is no date ranges for each of the data points in the spread graph (fig 1). All it shows is that the heat band (grey box) is the danger zone. They haven't shown increasing temperatures as the cause for the datapoints in that range.
With an analysis of the graph like that I can see why I always think you don't have a clue what you're talking about. The x-axis of the graph is clearly labeled July through June (the equivalent seasonally of January through December in the Northern Hemisphere) and the caption to the graph says the points of the graph represent the daily maximum temperature from 2005 to 2013. On top of that the caption says the grey band is the ideal range for avian embryo development.
The paper wasn't trying to say anything about anthropogenic global warming, it was just looking at the effect of temperature on the nesting success of zebra finches.
Or you could go actually read the original paper to see if you could detect any confirmation bias. I did and it's not that hard to read if you have a little biology literacy.
I think it's probably to much to ask to get all of the different organizations around the world to use the same baseline. In the end it's a rather arbitrary choice what baseline to use. Converting between different baselines is just a simple matter of addition or subtraction.
I went and looked at your link and the baseline they were using is 1961-1990. The other difference between your link and the NASA data was that your link was for Australia only not the whole world. I suspect if you took the NASA data for Australia only and compared it to Australia BOM data the results would be pretty close to the same after adjusting the baseline.
So I Googled "volcanic emissions of carbon dioxide" and the scientific studies it finds all say that volcanic emissions of CO2 are about 1% of human emissions.