I personally don't rule out nuclear as a solution (heck, anything is better than coal). There are undeniably cases where nuclear is the best option. However, it's an not the cheapest and has some significant risk (low chance of failure, but expensive consequences), so there may well be better options in other cases. Any serious energy policy has to consider all the options on their merits - including renewables.
All a carbon tax will do is make people poorer and government bigger
Carbon taxes are not intended to reduce demand, they're intended to raise prices of carbon-intensive energy sources, making carbon-neutral sources like nuclear and renewables more competitive. Additionally, the revenue from the tax can be used to mitigate the health & social costs of emissions, invested in carbon-neutral energy development and infrastructure, and/or used to offset the short-term price rises for consumers. That's how it was implemented in Australia, and it was working (overall impact on CPI was tiny, fossil-fuel energy demand dropped, and carbon-neutral energy demand increased).
Wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, etc. are expensive, unreliable, and/or geography dependent.
These are geography-dependent, but between them they can cover a very wide range of geography (nuclear is an option for the remainder). They are reliable in the sense that they have well-defined capacity factors - lower than coal (which can still be as low as 45%), but this can be covered by widely-distributed generation as it is today, with some grid-level storage as a backup. Dealing with intermittency has been well studied.
As for expense, the (unsubsidised) levelised cost of onshore wind, hydro, solar PV, and geothermal, are all well below that of nuclear and coal, especially with carbon capture.
I took a look at your links and saw no mention of nuclear power.
Yeah, a lot of the focus (and all of IPCC WGI & WGII) is on getting people to recognise the problem first. Once we're past that, we can happily debate different solutions - nuclear, solar, lawyers on bicycles or whatever.
All too often I see the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming alarmists backing us into an impossible corner by denying the use of fossil fuels and nuclear power.
Please don't conflate the science establishing that AGW exists, with proposed solutions like whether or not we use fossil fuels or nuclear. The science only says, if we emit this much CO2, we can expect these estimated consequences. These findings are entirely independent of any solutions we choose, and sadly way too many people completely deny the science because they don't like a particular solution that someone suggested. We need to accept that the problem exists, then we can propose better solutions - which can certainly be nuclear, if you prefer.
If the idea of another nuclear power plant going on line every week makes you uncomfortable
A lot less uncomfortable than more coal plants, frankly. Though I would disagree that nuclear is our only alternative, based on the research I've done (see above links).
The wildest projections for global temperatures predict a max of 5C global temperature increase
The strongest RCP 8.5 scenario assumes continued and increasing (business-as-usual) emissions reaching 936ppm CO2 by 2100. This is likely to result in 3 to 5 degrees temperature increase by 2100 - but will certainly keep increasing well beyond that, even if we suddenly stopped all our emissions. So no, 5 is not the max. Also, that's an average, and thus specific areas can climb well beyond 5C (see Fig SPM 8 [a]).
never mind that these models have been wrong and every 10 years they have to turn them down to avoid losing all credibility
Citation needed. The first IPCC report in 1990 predicted a temperature increase between 1 and 2 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures (see Figure 8), with a rise rate of 0.1 to 0.2 degrees per decade. Right now we're about 1.2 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures, and rising at 1.7 degrees per decade.
the tropics aren't going to get much hotter due to the effects of evaporation, most of the rise will be seen at the poles and further latitudes
Again, citation needed, because Fig SPM 8 (a) shows pretty clearly that tropical land temperatures can expect 4C to 7C average rises (again under RCP 8.5).
The past is massively important to what we are currently seeing.
But solely for the purpose of identifying past forcings, so that we can evaluate them in the context of today's increases (obviously there is no direct effect). Past changes can (and did) have entirely different causes to current changes. Every natural and cyclical cause that we've identified from the paleontological record has been evaluated in the context of modern warming, and found to be insufficient to cause the observed changes.
If this global warming is due to increased solar flux/frequency shift
It definitely isn't (surely you knew that much?) See IPCC AR5 WGI Chapter 8, particularly section 8.5.
a myriad of other factors not directly or indirectly caused by man
I welcome any suggestions that climatologists may not have considered. But considering you seem to believe they didn't even check solar flux, I'm not hopeful you'll think of anything new.
that argument can be made easily looking at the global temperatures over the past 500k years; hint: palm trees used to grow on Antarctica)
Again I say: so? Why do you think that current climate changes must have the same cause as past changes? Is it not conceivable to you that we could be seeing an entirely different proximate cause? I remind you once again that we've accounted for all known natural forcings, and found them insufficient to cause current observations.
BTW, palm trees grew on Antarctica 52 million years ago (not 500k), and atmospheric CO2 was at least 600ppm. That doesn't bode well for the scope of changes we're likely to see.
all the resources we pour into fighting global warming are 100% wasted
Even if we assume (against all evidence) that current warming is unrelated to human activity, transitioning our energy infrastructure to renewable and/or carbon-neutral sources is hardly wasted. Simply getting off coal will save hundreds of billions in health costs every year, in the US alone. Removing oil-burni
I never understood why deniers keep bringing up conditions millions of years ago, as if they were relevant to us today. Yes, the planet was once a ball of lava - what's your point?
Nothing in the past affects any of the evidence of change we see today. All that's relevant are two things - that the climate is changing, rapidly and undeniably (and the sudden decrease in Arctic ice extent is just one of many indicators of this), and that those changes will require human societies to expend a lot of money and effort to adapt to (which much of the world cannot afford).
The active stuff, you mean. If it wasn't dissolved into insignificance it would be bad for you, not good. Hence those babies dying from the not-insignificant belladonna in their teething drops.
Normally locked to the HTC Vive (has an explicit check for the make/model of your headset). But Shockfire's wedge dll spoofs the headset ID strings and makes it work perfectly on the Oculus Rift (and it really is gorgeous).
Best used with motion controllers too - I use an old Hydra (works great), but pre-release Oculus Touch controllers, Playstation Move wands, even a Leap Motion will get you there. Keyboard controls are available too, in a pinch.
We compare the distribution of linear temperature trends for these sites to the distribution for a rural subset of 15,594 sites chosen to be distant from all MODIS-identified urban areas... the difference of these is consistent with no urban heating effect over the period 1950 to 2010, with a slope of -0.10 +/- 0.24/100yr (95% confidence).
You think the UN controls every major scientific organisation on the planet (all of which endorse the findings of AGW)? You think they also control every climate research organisation around the globe too? Is the UN paying for NASA's research? Do they have authority over NOAA or CRU or CSIRO, or the peer review structure of the many climate research journals as well?
What leads you to believe any political organisation has such an astonishingly far-reaching influence over the entire global science community?
Come to that, what the heck is a "climate change based tax regime"? The science has shown we're changing our climate, and that remains independently true regardless of any proposed political solutions. If you don't like a given tax regime, vote for a different solution - but don't confuse the solutions with the problem, because no amount of political criticism will make that go away.
Did you forget that plants also die, break down, and release virtually all their CO2 right back into the atmosphere again? Their net effect is almost zero, unlike the ocean.
My bet is it's close to negligible.
I'll take that bet. Unlike you, I've actually seen the data.
Why do you claim the models ignore clouds? Of course they'reincluded. The problem is their effect is difficult to predict precisely, as they trap heat as well as increase albedo, so the net contribution can vary significantly. There are a great many studies about their contribution though, and confidence is very high that the increasing humidity is a positive feedback even with the resulting extra clouds factored in.
I'm glad you agree that the climate is steadily warming. Obviously all record temperatures will be on El Niño years, just as La Niña contributes to the cooler periods between them (which some have mistakenly labelled a "pause"). The important part is that this El Niño year has been hotter than all the previous El Niño years - just like 2015, 2014, 2010, 2005 and 1998. Such a string of broken records can only be a sustained warming trend.
And may I suggest less complaining about others examples, and more looking for citations to back up your own claims.
Why are large multi-national corporations having any say in the US political process?
When have they not? Who do you think delivered the election news in the past? At least these days there's a much wider spread of multi-nationals involved with election information, so individual entities have less influence overall.
if Google reports an incorrect count people will believe it
Perhaps, same as with Facebook and Twitter and CNN and Fox News etc etc. But since no counts are reported until all polls are closed, it won't affect the result.
I agree, it's almost certainly just adding light, and unless their final product includes an LCD blocking layer then bright background objects will indeed show through. But while this would limit its use in daylight, I suspect it would still be perfectly usable in a lot of scenarios. Yeah, their marketing material isn't entirely representative, but then it can't show its biggest strengths either; the comfortable 3D and natural-ness of a lightfield display.
But then they're not selling it to consumers yet. Only to investors, who you can bet will get real demonstrations of what it's actually like - and they're certainly convinced. So I'm still content to wait and see. If it actually will be available inside 18 months, then all the better - we'll see how its field of view and usability hold up against Hololens.
If it's a scam, then it's an unusually clever one. Their demonstrations and patents convinced Google, Qualcomm & others to invest hundreds of millions in them (twice). Maybe soon we'll find out for sure.
Fair enough. I wouldn't say it was crazy, but I think unexpected. My main point was that I (and Mann, and many others more knowledgeable than myself) DO consider the instrumental record to be at least broadly comparable to the proxy reconstructions. Surely the whole point of doing reconstructions that overlap with known temperatures is to verify this, and to better calibrate them.
There are of course caveats, as you and Mann and others point out, and it's good to keep that in mind when making comparisons between the two records - but you can just as easily say that about the entire instrumental record too, which comes from a huge number and variety of different instruments, each with their own set of biases. All of those readings have to be cross-calibrated to form a coherent record, and proxy reconstructions are not all that different.
Yeah, it's clear this is going nowhere. My attempts to address your other points are waved away as "deflections", any relevant studies are dismissed while you continue to make flat declarations of fact about your own opinions as if you think that's convincing, and you only really seem interested in arguing about the effectiveness of government, which clearly isn't an opinion that's going to change regardless of rational discussion. And you claim I'm not listening because I'm not focusing solely on that point, yet you've missed or ignored almost everything I've said about it. So have fun with all that.
Every one of my links is well-sourced with numerous references to peer-reviewed research to support the argument that they (and I) are making. I'm not the one making completely unsupported assertions here.
the IPCC represents opinion, not fact
In your own opinion. In everyone else's, the IPCC's summaries and countless references to peer-reviewed research are a heck of a lot more reliable than some random web comment.
you are pointing to the 2007 report
Your point is? Would you like me to cite more cost-benefit research? There's plenty out there. Or perhaps you'd care to present actual evidence for a change?
That's an assumption you're making without any justification.
Well, only justified by the historical track record of successful government interventions in other emissions issues, as I stated further down. Where's the justification for your own assumptions?
you haven't cited any research
No, you've just dismissed and ignored it all.
putting solar cells on the roof and buying electricity from renewable sources
Good for you. Leaving aside all the people in rental properties, apartment buildings, shaded areas, multistory shopping malls, industrial factories, developing nations etc who can't meet their needs with solar cells, how many of them have any alternate options of renewable grid sources? What makes you so confident they will get an alternate option in any reasonable time-frame, if fossil-fuel companies are allowed to continue offloading their biggest costs?
The existence of externalities a century from now
Well, those and the hundreds of billions annually in health costs that I already mentioned.
even for RCP8.5, sea level rise by 2100 will likely stay below 3 ft, yet you conjure up disaster scenarios.
And you think 3 feet isn't a problem? The research I didn't conjure is concerned with rises beyond 2100 - if their model is valid, there could be far more drastic sea level rise over the next 500 years than was anticipated, to the point that almost every coastal city on the globe will be heavily flooded. I'd like to see that possible scenario avoided, and I don't share your faith that it'll automatically happen on its own.
making any other arguments irrelevant
And here you've lost me. Leaving aside the various otherstudies that disagree with you, your apparent insistence that all other human, social, and health costs, risks & uncertainties, etc are completely valueless in your cost-benefit analysis makes any further discussion fairly pointless. If discounted direct costs are your only metric for action then I don't see that we can agree on anything.
I'll leave you with this: most current power stations will EOL sometime in the next 30 years anyway, and will need to be replaced. So long as they are required to be replaced with low- or zero-carbon alternatives, be they wind, solar, nuclear, or whatever, then we will have eliminated a lot of our CO2 emissions at minimal additional cost, especially considering that renewables have low ongoing costs. Similarly, most vehicles will be up for replacement in much the same time frame, and mandating most replacements to low- or zero-carbon (EV, hydrogen, biodiesel, etc) would also have a relatively low impa
I can look at first hand experience because we have had 1C of warming over the last 150 years.
Leaving aside what you think "first hand" means, you're dismissing scientific studies in favour of the entirely unsupported belief that "what's always happened will continue to happen". Does that sound wise to you?
An actuarial cost-benefit analysis is not part of science and should be done by economists, not scientists
indeed for the last 12,000 years given it is an interglacial
Except that it's been slowly cooling for the last 8,000 years. The warming phase only lasted 4,000 years, and it's been all downhill since then - right up until the moment we got involved, when the trend suddenly changed dramatically.
The reconstructions you are left with show the temp since 1900AD rising, but still lower than 1400, 1000, 800 and close to 600 and 400.
Huh? The only proxy that gets above the 0 mark before modern times are the EIV reconstructions - and that cuts off at 1850! The others end around 1970 or 1990, so none of them can be compared directly with current-day temperatures, though even at those not-so-recent dates they all match or exceed the earlier times (EIV excluded).
So you have to look at the overlap with the instrumental record for 1850 onwards to get an idea of how much the proxies under- or over-estimate warming. Looking at the EIV line at 1850, it's about 0.2C under the instrumental temperature at that time, so one could assume it might under-estimate temperatures by 0.2C. But you can see that even if you compensate for that assumed bias by adding 0.2C to the entire reconstruction, at no point does it come close to post-2000 temperatures.
Fig.2 shows proxy reconstructions for 20th century temperatures, which allows us more overlap with the instrumental record and thus a better idea of proxy bias, but if anything Fig.2 C/D shows the EIV proxies over-estimating temperatures, so that doesn't help your case.
In Fig 3 the calibration will have been to the entire instrumental record.
If that's true (it's unclear to me) - if the Fig.3 results have been re-calibrated to the instrumental record - then none of the proxy temperatures gets even slightly close to recent temperatures. I don't see how you feel a maximum 0.2C anomaly in 960 is remotely comparable to the 0.85+C anomaly shown for 2000. As Mann explicitly says, "Peak multidecadal warmth centered at A.D. 960 in this case corresponds approximately to 1980 levels".
the reconstructions since 1900 ARE NOT higher
Only because they don't even try to represent current-day temperatures.
I am observing the fact that the reconstructions themselves as the represent the warming since 1900 do NOT show unrivalled temperatures, but instead reflect a current warming that was matched by the reconstructions multiple times earlier. It is only when including the instrumental record that the comparison becomes anomalous.
So if I am to understand you correctly, your sole point is that the Northern Hemisphere proxy reconstructions by themselves do not show any higher temperatures than those during medieval times (because they cut off early and don't even try to include current temperatures). You don't consider the instrumental record to be pertinent to this point.
Is that it? Because if that really is the point you were trying to make, I'm left wondering why you bothered. It's abundantly clear that temperatures in the last couple of decades have shot well past those medieval levels, which is surely more relevant to today's discussions.
All I see is you repeating what you said, over and over, waving away any the research that disagrees with you, and never citing any of your own - just more flat declarations that we're supposed to take on faith.
I understand what you're claiming quite well, but I disagree. I cited research that supports my opinion, whereas you dismiss it all as "a bunch of people with an agenda". How is this not pure denial?
Bangladesh is gaining sedimental land in some parts (which will take decades before it's useful farmland) - but it's still low-lying, and at the mercy of storm surges like this one. And that's still only one example. If you want to convince me that these analyses are flatly wrong, you'll have to do better than more unsourced declarations.
I said that it will do so independent of any policies we adopt.
I heard you the first time, and you still haven't provided any reason for me to believe you. Whereas adopting policies that restrict and phase out fossil fuels absolutely will greatly slow atmospheric CO2 level rises, since that is demonstrably the largest source.
the cost of dealing with climate change and the cost of avoiding it are about the same
That same report also says: * that the costs are very likely to be greatly underestimated, * that costs will scale up dramatically past 3-4 degrees of warming, * that unmitigated warming adds numerous risks and uncertainties that could potentially add greatly to the bill, * that there are numerous mitigation strategies with net-negative costs (i.e. they save more money than they cost), * and that the financial costs do not take into account the significant human and social costs, which can also be reduced by mitigation.
Your clear example of cherry-picking the one quote you want to hear just highlights your own agenda.
the incorrect assumption that without government intervention, people won't switch to renewables
And how do you think people can switch to renewables when they have no choice about their electricity source? How do you propose to convince the fossil fuel companies to abandon their campaign of discrediting renewables at every point, to compete fairly in the market (they're currently given a free pass for offloading their external emissions costs, which costs us hundreds of billions annually), and to not make full use of their existing infrastructure, vast scale, and trillions in assets to do their utmost to block renewables from displacing them completely from the energy market?
Government intervention would not be required if the market were actually free, but it will never be free as long as carbon emitters don't have to pay for the costs of their emissions. Governments around the world have already intervened in numerous similar cases (sulfur emissions, ozone emissions) with highly successful results, yet some people remain utterly convinced that in this case any possible action is somehow doomed to failure.
Rising sea levels are "easy" to adapt to for us - but not cheap. We have a lot of valuable property on low-lying coastal areas, and billion-dollar floods from storm surges will only get more common, until we either build massive levees (where possible) or start relocating vast amounts of city infrastructure. Who gets stuck with that bill, the taxpayers? Owners of private homes who can no longer insure them? And that's assuming it doesn't turn out to be a lot worse than we expected.
Rising sea levels are not so easy to adapt to for the hundreds of millions in less-developed countries, where e.g. tens of millions of people depend on river delta farmland that will get flooded with salt water. (BTW, claiming there's noevidence of that is simple denial).
As for food production, the research shows both positives and negatives up until about 3K warming - and then highly likely to be negative after 3 degrees. It also shows that again, developing countries are least able to adapt and will experience more of the negatives (in part due to lower latitudes).
it is going to happen no matter what policies we adopt
Citation certainly needed for that. Sure we're stuck at 400ppm and probably higher, but we can still avoid far larger increases by phasing out fossil carbon as soon as practical. We're locked in to significant warming and we'll have to deal with that, but it will certainly get far worse (and far more expensive) if we stick our heads in the sand. The business-as-usual case is likely to see 3.7 to 4.5 degrees this century - much higher than the 2.0-2.5 we're hoping we can keep it to.
Have you looked at the likely impacts with a mere 1K of warming? Because those are real problems and potentially very expensive - a long way from "meh", and particularly for the global poor who can least afford to adapt.
But there's absolutely no reason to assume the lowest outcome in that range - in fact, competent disaster planning would more likely work on the assumption of the worse case of 4.5K, even if we can hope for a lower result.
Nobody is claiming all the science is done and complete - the only thing that's completely "settled" is whether it's happening at all, though we've got a pretty good idea about how & why, and of the range of things that could happen. But if you think it should be better, then shouldn't you join the call for more focus and investment in climate research, rather than trying to undermine what's been done so far?
Yeah I read what you said the first time. I'm curious why you feel you can interpret his data better than he can, since he clearly disagrees with you. Are you assuming that he is ignoring this bias himself, despite him describing it clearly in his graphs and his results? Did you factor in any of his mentioned caveats, such as the "divergence problem" of recently-declining tree-ring sensitivity (accounted for in Fig.2 B)?
Yes, I too looked at the data, and unless you're just slapping an arbitrarily-large boost onto the proxy data, I don't see anywhere that it supports your own conclusion. E.g. the CPS Land proxy slightly overestimates the instrumental record (in the period of overlap of Fig.3), and comes nowhere close to modern levels (even if you add on a generous 0.4C bias from Fig.2 B). Moberg 2005, Esper 2002, and Mann & Jones 2003 are similarly in the same ballpark as the instruments. The EIV proxies barely overlap the instrumental record at all, but you could perhaps assume about a 0.2C underestimation where they do (though this is not well supported by Fig.2 C/D) - and adding that back to the peaks of the proxy around 1000AD still falls short of current temperatures by over 0.6C. As Mann said, "The EIV reconstructions suggest that temperatures were relatively warm (comparable with the mean over the 1961–1990 reference period but below the levels of the past decade) from A.D. 1000 through the early 15th century". So which part of his data are you referring to?
It seems to me that you're taking an out-of-context quote about finding a bias, making an unsupported assumption as to how big that bias must be, then reinterpreting his conclusion to suit yourself (assuming that Mann has entirely ignored this bias himself), and directly contradicting his own findings.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody caught me on this? Always check the sources, people.
I personally don't rule out nuclear as a solution (heck, anything is better than coal). There are undeniably cases where nuclear is the best option. However, it's an not the cheapest and has some significant risk (low chance of failure, but expensive consequences), so there may well be better options in other cases. Any serious energy policy has to consider all the options on their merits - including renewables.
All a carbon tax will do is make people poorer and government bigger
Carbon taxes are not intended to reduce demand, they're intended to raise prices of carbon-intensive energy sources, making carbon-neutral sources like nuclear and renewables more competitive. Additionally, the revenue from the tax can be used to mitigate the health & social costs of emissions, invested in carbon-neutral energy development and infrastructure, and/or used to offset the short-term price rises for consumers. That's how it was implemented in Australia, and it was working (overall impact on CPI was tiny, fossil-fuel energy demand dropped, and carbon-neutral energy demand increased).
Wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, etc. are expensive, unreliable, and/or geography dependent.
These are geography-dependent, but between them they can cover a very wide range of geography (nuclear is an option for the remainder). They are reliable in the sense that they have well-defined capacity factors - lower than coal (which can still be as low as 45%), but this can be covered by widely-distributed generation as it is today, with some grid-level storage as a backup. Dealing with intermittency has been well studied.
As for expense, the (unsubsidised) levelised cost of onshore wind, hydro, solar PV, and geothermal, are all well below that of nuclear and coal, especially with carbon capture.
I took a look at your links and saw no mention of nuclear power.
Yeah, a lot of the focus (and all of IPCC WGI & WGII) is on getting people to recognise the problem first. Once we're past that, we can happily debate different solutions - nuclear, solar, lawyers on bicycles or whatever.
All too often I see the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming alarmists backing us into an impossible corner by denying the use of fossil fuels and nuclear power.
Please don't conflate the science establishing that AGW exists, with proposed solutions like whether or not we use fossil fuels or nuclear. The science only says, if we emit this much CO2, we can expect these estimated consequences. These findings are entirely independent of any solutions we choose, and sadly way too many people completely deny the science because they don't like a particular solution that someone suggested. We need to accept that the problem exists, then we can propose better solutions - which can certainly be nuclear, if you prefer.
If the idea of another nuclear power plant going on line every week makes you uncomfortable
A lot less uncomfortable than more coal plants, frankly. Though I would disagree that nuclear is our only alternative, based on the research I've done (see above links).
Well, let's see now:
The wildest projections for global temperatures predict a max of 5C global temperature increase
The strongest RCP 8.5 scenario assumes continued and increasing (business-as-usual) emissions reaching 936ppm CO2 by 2100. This is likely to result in 3 to 5 degrees temperature increase by 2100 - but will certainly keep increasing well beyond that, even if we suddenly stopped all our emissions. So no, 5 is not the max. Also, that's an average, and thus specific areas can climb well beyond 5C (see Fig SPM 8 [a]).
never mind that these models have been wrong and every 10 years they have to turn them down to avoid losing all credibility
Citation needed. The first IPCC report in 1990 predicted a temperature increase between 1 and 2 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures (see Figure 8), with a rise rate of 0.1 to 0.2 degrees per decade. Right now we're about 1.2 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures, and rising at 1.7 degrees per decade.
the tropics aren't going to get much hotter due to the effects of evaporation, most of the rise will be seen at the poles and further latitudes
Again, citation needed, because Fig SPM 8 (a) shows pretty clearly that tropical land temperatures can expect 4C to 7C average rises (again under RCP 8.5).
The past is massively important to what we are currently seeing.
But solely for the purpose of identifying past forcings, so that we can evaluate them in the context of today's increases (obviously there is no direct effect). Past changes can (and did) have entirely different causes to current changes. Every natural and cyclical cause that we've identified from the paleontological record has been evaluated in the context of modern warming, and found to be insufficient to cause the observed changes.
If this global warming is due to increased solar flux/frequency shift
It definitely isn't (surely you knew that much?) See IPCC AR5 WGI Chapter 8, particularly section 8.5.
a myriad of other factors not directly or indirectly caused by man
I welcome any suggestions that climatologists may not have considered. But considering you seem to believe they didn't even check solar flux, I'm not hopeful you'll think of anything new.
that argument can be made easily looking at the global temperatures over the past 500k years; hint: palm trees used to grow on Antarctica)
Again I say: so? Why do you think that current climate changes must have the same cause as past changes? Is it not conceivable to you that we could be seeing an entirely different proximate cause? I remind you once again that we've accounted for all known natural forcings, and found them insufficient to cause current observations.
BTW, palm trees grew on Antarctica 52 million years ago (not 500k), and atmospheric CO2 was at least 600ppm. That doesn't bode well for the scope of changes we're likely to see.
all the resources we pour into fighting global warming are 100% wasted
Even if we assume (against all evidence) that current warming is unrelated to human activity, transitioning our energy infrastructure to renewable and/or carbon-neutral sources is hardly wasted. Simply getting off coal will save hundreds of billions in health costs every year, in the US alone. Removing oil-burni
I never understood why deniers keep bringing up conditions millions of years ago, as if they were relevant to us today. Yes, the planet was once a ball of lava - what's your point?
Nothing in the past affects any of the evidence of change we see today. All that's relevant are two things - that the climate is changing, rapidly and undeniably (and the sudden decrease in Arctic ice extent is just one of many indicators of this), and that those changes will require human societies to expend a lot of money and effort to adapt to (which much of the world cannot afford).
The active stuff, you mean. If it wasn't dissolved into insignificance it would be bad for you, not good. Hence those babies dying from the not-insignificant belladonna in their teething drops.
And worse than that, US taxpayers will (once again) have to foot the cleanup bill.
Normally locked to the HTC Vive (has an explicit check for the make/model of your headset). But Shockfire's wedge dll spoofs the headset ID strings and makes it work perfectly on the Oculus Rift (and it really is gorgeous).
Best used with motion controllers too - I use an old Hydra (works great), but pre-release Oculus Touch controllers, Playstation Move wands, even a Leap Motion will get you there. Keyboard controls are available too, in a pinch.
BEST already did that analysis:
We compare the distribution of linear temperature trends for these sites to the distribution for a rural subset of 15,594 sites chosen to be distant from all MODIS-identified urban areas... the difference of these is consistent with no urban heating effect over the period 1950 to 2010, with a slope of -0.10 +/- 0.24/100yr (95% confidence).
You think the UN controls every major scientific organisation on the planet (all of which endorse the findings of AGW)? You think they also control every climate research organisation around the globe too? Is the UN paying for NASA's research? Do they have authority over NOAA or CRU or CSIRO, or the peer review structure of the many climate research journals as well?
What leads you to believe any political organisation has such an astonishingly far-reaching influence over the entire global science community?
Come to that, what the heck is a "climate change based tax regime"? The science has shown we're changing our climate, and that remains independently true regardless of any proposed political solutions. If you don't like a given tax regime, vote for a different solution - but don't confuse the solutions with the problem, because no amount of political criticism will make that go away.
Did you forget that plants also die, break down, and release virtually all their CO2 right back into the atmosphere again? Their net effect is almost zero, unlike the ocean.
My bet is it's close to negligible.
I'll take that bet. Unlike you, I've actually seen the data.
Why do you claim the models ignore clouds? Of course they're included. The problem is their effect is difficult to predict precisely, as they trap heat as well as increase albedo, so the net contribution can vary significantly. There are a great many studies about their contribution though, and confidence is very high that the increasing humidity is a positive feedback even with the resulting extra clouds factored in.
I'm glad you agree that the climate is steadily warming. Obviously all record temperatures will be on El Niño years, just as La Niña contributes to the cooler periods between them (which some have mistakenly labelled a "pause"). The important part is that this El Niño year has been hotter than all the previous El Niño years - just like 2015, 2014, 2010, 2005 and 1998. Such a string of broken records can only be a sustained warming trend.
And may I suggest less complaining about others examples, and more looking for citations to back up your own claims.
The Eagleworks paper has already been accepted by the AIAA, which could fairly be described as "reputable". It will appear in the December 2016 issue.
Why are large multi-national corporations having any say in the US political process?
When have they not? Who do you think delivered the election news in the past? At least these days there's a much wider spread of multi-nationals involved with election information, so individual entities have less influence overall.
if Google reports an incorrect count people will believe it
Perhaps, same as with Facebook and Twitter and CNN and Fox News etc etc. But since no counts are reported until all polls are closed, it won't affect the result.
Er yeah, that got screwed up. I blame the thought influencer. Try this link instead.
I agree, it's almost certainly just adding light, and unless their final product includes an LCD blocking layer then bright background objects will indeed show through. But while this would limit its use in daylight, I suspect it would still be perfectly usable in a lot of scenarios. Yeah, their marketing material isn't entirely representative, but then it can't show its biggest strengths either; the comfortable 3D and natural-ness of a lightfield display.
But then they're not selling it to consumers yet. Only to investors, who you can bet will get real demonstrations of what it's actually like - and they're certainly convinced. So I'm still content to wait and see. If it actually will be available inside 18 months, then all the better - we'll see how its field of view and usability hold up against Hololens.
If it's a scam, then it's an unusually clever one. Their demonstrations and patents convinced Google, Qualcomm & others to invest hundreds of millions in them (twice). Maybe soon we'll find out for sure.
Fair enough. I wouldn't say it was crazy, but I think unexpected. My main point was that I (and Mann, and many others more knowledgeable than myself) DO consider the instrumental record to be at least broadly comparable to the proxy reconstructions. Surely the whole point of doing reconstructions that overlap with known temperatures is to verify this, and to better calibrate them.
There are of course caveats, as you and Mann and others point out, and it's good to keep that in mind when making comparisons between the two records - but you can just as easily say that about the entire instrumental record too, which comes from a huge number and variety of different instruments, each with their own set of biases. All of those readings have to be cross-calibrated to form a coherent record, and proxy reconstructions are not all that different.
Yeah, it's clear this is going nowhere. My attempts to address your other points are waved away as "deflections", any relevant studies are dismissed while you continue to make flat declarations of fact about your own opinions as if you think that's convincing, and you only really seem interested in arguing about the effectiveness of government, which clearly isn't an opinion that's going to change regardless of rational discussion. And you claim I'm not listening because I'm not focusing solely on that point, yet you've missed or ignored almost everything I've said about it. So have fun with all that.
You have cited no research at all.
Every one of my links is well-sourced with numerous references to peer-reviewed research to support the argument that they (and I) are making. I'm not the one making completely unsupported assertions here.
the IPCC represents opinion, not fact
In your own opinion. In everyone else's, the IPCC's summaries and countless references to peer-reviewed research are a heck of a lot more reliable than some random web comment.
you are pointing to the 2007 report
Your point is? Would you like me to cite more cost-benefit research? There's plenty out there. Or perhaps you'd care to present actual evidence for a change?
That's an assumption you're making without any justification.
Well, only justified by the historical track record of successful government interventions in other emissions issues, as I stated further down. Where's the justification for your own assumptions?
you haven't cited any research
No, you've just dismissed and ignored it all.
putting solar cells on the roof and buying electricity from renewable sources
Good for you. Leaving aside all the people in rental properties, apartment buildings, shaded areas, multistory shopping malls, industrial factories, developing nations etc who can't meet their needs with solar cells, how many of them have any alternate options of renewable grid sources? What makes you so confident they will get an alternate option in any reasonable time-frame, if fossil-fuel companies are allowed to continue offloading their biggest costs?
The existence of externalities a century from now
Well, those and the hundreds of billions annually in health costs that I already mentioned.
even for RCP8.5, sea level rise by 2100 will likely stay below 3 ft, yet you conjure up disaster scenarios.
And you think 3 feet isn't a problem? The research I didn't conjure is concerned with rises beyond 2100 - if their model is valid, there could be far more drastic sea level rise over the next 500 years than was anticipated, to the point that almost every coastal city on the globe will be heavily flooded. I'd like to see that possible scenario avoided, and I don't share your faith that it'll automatically happen on its own.
making any other arguments irrelevant
And here you've lost me. Leaving aside the various other studies that disagree with you, your apparent insistence that all other human, social, and health costs, risks & uncertainties, etc are completely valueless in your cost-benefit analysis makes any further discussion fairly pointless. If discounted direct costs are your only metric for action then I don't see that we can agree on anything.
I'll leave you with this: most current power stations will EOL sometime in the next 30 years anyway, and will need to be replaced. So long as they are required to be replaced with low- or zero-carbon alternatives, be they wind, solar, nuclear, or whatever, then we will have eliminated a lot of our CO2 emissions at minimal additional cost, especially considering that renewables have low ongoing costs. Similarly, most vehicles will be up for replacement in much the same time frame, and mandating most replacements to low- or zero-carbon (EV, hydrogen, biodiesel, etc) would also have a relatively low impa
I can look at first hand experience because we have had 1C of warming over the last 150 years.
Leaving aside what you think "first hand" means, you're dismissing scientific studies in favour of the entirely unsupported belief that "what's always happened will continue to happen". Does that sound wise to you?
An actuarial cost-benefit analysis is not part of science and should be done by economists, not scientists
Like this one, or this one?
indeed for the last 12,000 years given it is an interglacial
Except that it's been slowly cooling for the last 8,000 years. The warming phase only lasted 4,000 years, and it's been all downhill since then - right up until the moment we got involved, when the trend suddenly changed dramatically.
The lack of predictive ability belies that.
Indeed.
The reconstructions you are left with show the temp since 1900AD rising, but still lower than 1400, 1000, 800 and close to 600 and 400.
Huh? The only proxy that gets above the 0 mark before modern times are the EIV reconstructions - and that cuts off at 1850! The others end around 1970 or 1990, so none of them can be compared directly with current-day temperatures, though even at those not-so-recent dates they all match or exceed the earlier times (EIV excluded).
So you have to look at the overlap with the instrumental record for 1850 onwards to get an idea of how much the proxies under- or over-estimate warming. Looking at the EIV line at 1850, it's about 0.2C under the instrumental temperature at that time, so one could assume it might under-estimate temperatures by 0.2C. But you can see that even if you compensate for that assumed bias by adding 0.2C to the entire reconstruction, at no point does it come close to post-2000 temperatures.
Fig.2 shows proxy reconstructions for 20th century temperatures, which allows us more overlap with the instrumental record and thus a better idea of proxy bias, but if anything Fig.2 C/D shows the EIV proxies over-estimating temperatures, so that doesn't help your case.
In Fig 3 the calibration will have been to the entire instrumental record.
If that's true (it's unclear to me) - if the Fig.3 results have been re-calibrated to the instrumental record - then none of the proxy temperatures gets even slightly close to recent temperatures. I don't see how you feel a maximum 0.2C anomaly in 960 is remotely comparable to the 0.85+C anomaly shown for 2000. As Mann explicitly says, "Peak multidecadal warmth centered at A.D. 960 in this case corresponds approximately to 1980 levels".
the reconstructions since 1900 ARE NOT higher
Only because they don't even try to represent current-day temperatures.
I am observing the fact that the reconstructions themselves as the represent the warming since 1900 do NOT show unrivalled temperatures, but instead reflect a current warming that was matched by the reconstructions multiple times earlier. It is only when including the instrumental record that the comparison becomes anomalous.
So if I am to understand you correctly, your sole point is that the Northern Hemisphere proxy reconstructions by themselves do not show any higher temperatures than those during medieval times (because they cut off early and don't even try to include current temperatures). You don't consider the instrumental record to be pertinent to this point.
Is that it? Because if that really is the point you were trying to make, I'm left wondering why you bothered. It's abundantly clear that temperatures in the last couple of decades have shot well past those medieval levels, which is surely more relevant to today's discussions.
All I see is you repeating what you said, over and over, waving away any the research that disagrees with you, and never citing any of your own - just more flat declarations that we're supposed to take on faith.
I understand what you're claiming quite well, but I disagree. I cited research that supports my opinion, whereas you dismiss it all as "a bunch of people with an agenda". How is this not pure denial?
Bangladesh is gaining sedimental land in some parts (which will take decades before it's useful farmland) - but it's still low-lying, and at the mercy of storm surges like this one. And that's still only one example. If you want to convince me that these analyses are flatly wrong, you'll have to do better than more unsourced declarations.
I said that it will do so independent of any policies we adopt.
I heard you the first time, and you still haven't provided any reason for me to believe you. Whereas adopting policies that restrict and phase out fossil fuels absolutely will greatly slow atmospheric CO2 level rises, since that is demonstrably the largest source.
the cost of dealing with climate change and the cost of avoiding it are about the same
That same report also says:
* that the costs are very likely to be greatly underestimated,
* that costs will scale up dramatically past 3-4 degrees of warming,
* that unmitigated warming adds numerous risks and uncertainties that could potentially add greatly to the bill,
* that there are numerous mitigation strategies with net-negative costs (i.e. they save more money than they cost),
* and that the financial costs do not take into account the significant human and social costs, which can also be reduced by mitigation.
Your clear example of cherry-picking the one quote you want to hear just highlights your own agenda.
the incorrect assumption that without government intervention, people won't switch to renewables
And how do you think people can switch to renewables when they have no choice about their electricity source? How do you propose to convince the fossil fuel companies to abandon their campaign of discrediting renewables at every point, to compete fairly in the market (they're currently given a free pass for offloading their external emissions costs, which costs us hundreds of billions annually), and to not make full use of their existing infrastructure, vast scale, and trillions in assets to do their utmost to block renewables from displacing them completely from the energy market?
Government intervention would not be required if the market were actually free, but it will never be free as long as carbon emitters don't have to pay for the costs of their emissions. Governments around the world have already intervened in numerous similar cases (sulfur emissions, ozone emissions) with highly successful results, yet some people remain utterly convinced that in this case any possible action is somehow doomed to failure.
Rapid changes in global temperatures can absolutely cause mass extinctions.
Rising sea levels are "easy" to adapt to for us - but not cheap. We have a lot of valuable property on low-lying coastal areas, and billion-dollar floods from storm surges will only get more common, until we either build massive levees (where possible) or start relocating vast amounts of city infrastructure. Who gets stuck with that bill, the taxpayers? Owners of private homes who can no longer insure them? And that's assuming it doesn't turn out to be a lot worse than we expected.
Rising sea levels are not so easy to adapt to for the hundreds of millions in less-developed countries, where e.g. tens of millions of people depend on river delta farmland that will get flooded with salt water. (BTW, claiming there's no evidence of that is simple denial).
As for food production, the research shows both positives and negatives up until about 3K warming - and then highly likely to be negative after 3 degrees. It also shows that again, developing countries are least able to adapt and will experience more of the negatives (in part due to lower latitudes).
it is going to happen no matter what policies we adopt
Citation certainly needed for that. Sure we're stuck at 400ppm and probably higher, but we can still avoid far larger increases by phasing out fossil carbon as soon as practical. We're locked in to significant warming and we'll have to deal with that, but it will certainly get far worse (and far more expensive) if we stick our heads in the sand. The business-as-usual case is likely to see 3.7 to 4.5 degrees this century - much higher than the 2.0-2.5 we're hoping we can keep it to.
Have you looked at the likely impacts with a mere 1K of warming? Because those are real problems and potentially very expensive - a long way from "meh", and particularly for the global poor who can least afford to adapt.
But there's absolutely no reason to assume the lowest outcome in that range - in fact, competent disaster planning would more likely work on the assumption of the worse case of 4.5K, even if we can hope for a lower result.
Nobody is claiming all the science is done and complete - the only thing that's completely "settled" is whether it's happening at all, though we've got a pretty good idea about how & why, and of the range of things that could happen. But if you think it should be better, then shouldn't you join the call for more focus and investment in climate research, rather than trying to undermine what's been done so far?
Yeah I read what you said the first time. I'm curious why you feel you can interpret his data better than he can, since he clearly disagrees with you. Are you assuming that he is ignoring this bias himself, despite him describing it clearly in his graphs and his results? Did you factor in any of his mentioned caveats, such as the "divergence problem" of recently-declining tree-ring sensitivity (accounted for in Fig.2 B)?
Yes, I too looked at the data, and unless you're just slapping an arbitrarily-large boost onto the proxy data, I don't see anywhere that it supports your own conclusion. E.g. the CPS Land proxy slightly overestimates the instrumental record (in the period of overlap of Fig.3), and comes nowhere close to modern levels (even if you add on a generous 0.4C bias from Fig.2 B). Moberg 2005, Esper 2002, and Mann & Jones 2003 are similarly in the same ballpark as the instruments. The EIV proxies barely overlap the instrumental record at all, but you could perhaps assume about a 0.2C underestimation where they do (though this is not well supported by Fig.2 C/D) - and adding that back to the peaks of the proxy around 1000AD still falls short of current temperatures by over 0.6C. As Mann said, "The EIV reconstructions suggest that temperatures were relatively warm (comparable with the mean over the 1961–1990 reference period but below the levels of the past decade) from A.D. 1000 through the early 15th century". So which part of his data are you referring to?
It seems to me that you're taking an out-of-context quote about finding a bias, making an unsupported assumption as to how big that bias must be, then reinterpreting his conclusion to suit yourself (assuming that Mann has entirely ignored this bias himself), and directly contradicting his own findings.