Well my first impression was that I didn't see any obvious error in logic, other than where he said this showed no greenhouse effect for earth or Venus; what he demonstrates is no EXTRA greenhouse effect on Venus. A couple of commenters call him on this but he misses it. Just a side issue though. So, I did a search to see if anybody else had anything to say, and I find this http://joannenova.com.au/2011/... The gist of which is that this is coincidental, in that the albedo difference, which was left out, turns out to be the factor which accounts for the missing heat, which he can show by identifying it with the altitude of the venusian cloud layer. There is additional information, in the form of a graph of temp vs pressure for both planets. It's a bit confusing. The green is labeled earth temp, so the blue must be Venus temp, and the two red lines ?? They're symmetrical around the blue so maybe confidence interval? Anyway, you can see that the temps are parallel from pressures equal to earth surface (50 km up in Venus) to 60 km up, Venus ( up is to the left of the graph). According to this guy, that's the altitude of the cloud level on Venus, so below that venus' atmosphere will be (1/1.1) the temp due to the reduced albedo. Up from there, you can see that the Venus temp falls off more quickly than the earth temp, as expected by the additional CO2 absorbing the IR more; greenhouse effect warms the surface and lower atmosphere while cooling the upper atmosphere. And on the right side of the graph you can see that as the pressure rises above earth 's surface level, towards Venus ' surface, the temp continues to rise as expected until you get to the proverbial hellhole. I checked the guy's primary source for that temp graph and it checks out, and I looked for altitude of Venus' cloud and that checked out with this site http://www.esa.int/Our_Activit... So I have to decide which model/argument to follow. I chose the second guy, because 1) he can explain the observations in terms of well established mechanisms, whereas the no - greenhouse model has the mystery of why there is no greenhouse. (This is something not well understood in the big debate; when you have something as well understood as CO2 absorbing IR, and you can even see it operate in that graph of earth's emission spectrum, if you say it doesn't exist you are ADDING an effect, not subtracting one, and Occam's razor works against you unless you have proof of why it doesn't operate. Maybe this is what trips the guy up regarding his not understanding that his calculations leave the greenhouse effect operating on earth, but having the same effect on Venus, rather than his jump to it not opetating in either place) 2) and the second guy provides more data, demonstrating that the equivalence only occurs below the venusian cloud layer, which would require even more complication for the no - greenhouse theory to explain. But, bottom line, for me as a somewhat informed reader, I couldn't see the holes In the first guy's theory without copying off the expert's test paper.
I will give you a hint, pro-climate change scientists tend to be funded by universities and in some cases governments.
Deniers tend to be funded by Exxon, and their like.
So tell, me who gets tot see the world on expenses - the deniers or the scientists?
If you can't see the answer than that tells me who is funding your internet connection. After all the deniers have expressly admitted paying people to spread lies.
The fact that so many of the denialist arguments echo the "smoking causes cancer" denialist arguments (the science isn't all in yet, there is no consensus, it might be something else, nobody looks at xxxx, etc); and in fact many of those echoing the arguments are the same folks who said them about smoking in the first place, suggests to me that the problem is not a conspiracy of lies among the AGW believers.
The problem here that people are failing repeatedly to grasp is that science does not actually have an overarching "THEY" who will police the system and prevent rubbish papers being published. Science works on peer review, meaning that the peers (i.e. other scientists in the same field) of the person submitting the paper get to police what is written in the paper. This works if the peers are more or less skeptical, and fails badly if most peers either subscribe to or have a vested interest in supporting a set world-view. In the case of climatologists, a prophesy of doom is just what is needed to keep the grant money rolling in, hence there is a presumption that any paper that agrees with this orthodoxy must be correct.
The second bug in the system is how research is funded. Research grants typically fund a post-doctoral researcher (a person who has taken a degree and a doctorate in the subject) to work on the topic for three years. Typically this means a year to work out how to do the work, a year to actually achieve something and a year of blowing one's own trumpet to try to secure another post-doc posting. This is, as you might imagine, an inefficient way to fund research.
The third bug in the system is a lack of research support for climatologists. To be a good climatologist you have to know a lot of physics, a good deal of mathematics and a smattering of biology, meteorology and so on to actually have a vague clue how a climate system works. To model climate you need a doctoral-grade level of skill in quite sophisticated programming, including how best to use massively parallel machines. If instead of looking at the emails from the University of East Anglia leak you go and look at the code, and the HARRY_README file, then you see how this is working or rather not working in practice. The UoEA code was mostly cobol. Mostly, because Cobol sucks rather for manipulating strings; the coder used shell calls to handle these bits. You or I would likely use Perl or Python to do the same thing and would make a much better job of it, but the coder in the UoEA case was self-taught. Two words that ought to send a shudder through anyone tasked with debugging and maintaining code: Self. Taught.
That code was a mess. A complete and utter dog's dinner. The original coder was learning by making mistakes, the sorts of mistakes that get drummed out of newbie coders in their first year of a degree. Things like a sub-program failing silently, instead of screaming blue murder on STDERR, for instance. Things like not keeping adequate backups. The UoEA lost their input raw data, because they didn't have enough storage. Once the raw data was gone, they had no way to start again from scratch.
Climatology is like particle physics was fifty years ago. Particle physicists started off as jacks of all trades, and very quickly realised that an army of engineers and computer techies was needed to support a few researchers. Climatologists have yet to quite realise that they need a small army of coders and computer sysadmins to provide them with the kit and the code to run their simulations, and no, this support cannot be done by the hired help on a shoestring. Until they realise this, we will not be able to trust their results.
Meanwhile, we have all those nice folks saying 1) we need more research before we do anything about AGW 2) they're only making up AGW to get more research money And you seem to be adding 3) this research should be better funded so it can be done well I'm not sure where all this combined leads, but I don't think it leads in a good direction.
Let's say that the climate change will cause people in the UK one unit of inconvenience, to Syrians, three units of inconvenience, and chemical weapons will cause Syrians thirty units of inconvenience. The problem is, you could invade Syria and destroy the chemical weapons withing months, if you wanted. That's at most fifteen unit-years of inconvenience. But those three units of inconvenience due to climate change will apparently persist in Syria for *at least* many decades, if not a century or more. That's already dozens of unit-years of inconvenience, perhaps hundreds. Also, people have a tremendous capacity for dismissing long-term problems. Perhaps asking Syrians what they are worried about, while usually valid, isn't valid universally.
Most humans are more upset when they break a shoelace than over whatever the current risk of world catastrophe is, whether AGW, nuclear war, or stray asteroid.
I once saw an economist get up in a symposium and claim that the carrying capacity of the Earth -- the number of humans it could support -- was infinite.
Technically correct, if most of them are dead and decomposed.
You guys are looking at it all backwards. Entropy always increases. Sequestered carbon in any form will eventually return to atmospheric dispersion. Potential energy will eventually end up as dispersed heat; sequestered carbon will eventually be oxidized. Ecological niches which offer access to resources with minimal competition will eventually be populated, as long as they exist. That fossil carbon buried underground is, almost by definition, only metastable; as is its consequence of a cooler drier planet. Eventually that potential energy in that reduced carbon will result in its oxidation, and the planet will return to the high CO2, hot, humid state which was normal for most of its history. We are just the catalyst for this happening. Evolution by random chance came up with a species which can utilize this really huge resource, and as with any species suddenly given access to a vast resource, we've really proliferated, knocking the previous equilibrium for a loop and stressing the hell out of the other species which do not share in our windfall. Eventually, either the species' wealth of resources runs out, or its waste products overwhelm it; how far back it falls depends on how inhospitable it made the environment and how well it affairs to its new environment. But that just demonstrates what life really is, cosmically speaking; a collection of catalysts that expend the potential energy sources and asked up their return to entropy, in the processing using dune of that energy to facilitate their own existence and reproduction. Some species was eventually going to make a meal of all the plant life represented by that fossil fuel; turned out to be us. When we make that process impossible, whether by AGW now or by using it up not too far in the future, cosmically speaking, we will be obsolete. Maybe we will be able to grab a next rung in the ladder, whether renewable energy, or nuclear, or fusion, or Dyson spheres, or go back to muscle power of humans and animals, it's not a given that we'll be moving in the direction of more abundant and cheaper energy. And it's not a given that our vast intelligence and wonderful imagination and blah blah blah will be able to think our way into keeping up civilization 's momentum without proper energy resources; after all, dolphins are pretty smart, but what the heck can they accomplish living in the ocean with no access to even fire? Brains alone won't get you a machine shop. So, right now, we're just nature's way of disposing of that deposit of potential energy in the ground, as the universe moves on its inevitable path from big bang to heat death. Maybe we will be able to transcend that role and move forward, in which case we will really be exceptional, but at this point it's a little premature to be confident that we will transcend that role and move forward because of our exceptionalism.
Unfortunately, it's a lot more extreme that you are considering. The heat that has been stored in the oceans will take a long time to be lost.
OTOH, it's quite plausible that it's only our current civilization that is doomed, and that may well take 50 years or so. This may be long enough for a realtively reasonable transition to whatever will follow. The real problem is that there is as yet not even a acceptance that we're going to need radical change, much less an agreement of "change into what?" So we do lots of play-acting pretense that we say will let us keep things the same, or at least not much different.
Actions we have already taken have committed us to a drastic change. They haven't determined what form that change will take. Every year that we let pass without acknowledging that some change will be necessary removes some options. Every technological advance offers options, some of which may open new possibilities. I don't know where the best balance is. If we wait too long, the only option will be collapse into a new stone age civilization, with over a 90% die-off of the population in the process...and likely over 99%. We could also get into a war with a mix of advanced technologies and kill off considerably more, perhaps 99.99% or 99.999%. Then the survivors need to stabilize the remaining population, this will probably lead to a further decline over the succeeding 50 years. Then any surviving population may being to grow.
But this coulld be avoided by proper action, if we only knew what proper action was. We don't. We do know that what we're doing is only satisfying short term goals, and that in the long term it's disasterous. But the short term is where we live, so we tend to overly discount both long term gains and losses.
I don't know. Do you think we can go back from an urbanized economy where food is purchased by most of the population from sources all over the world, to the preindustrial situation where the majority of the population is involved in agriculture, even if we have 50 years? And will we need extensive use of fossil fuel to provide the energy to clear farmland out of current urban and suburban areas, or the forests that have replaced abandoned farmland in the northeast, for example? We are having a tough time just negotiating the transition from an industrial economy to an information economy. And without, for instance, the ability to drive to a nearby hospital, or be airlifted? While everyb ody gets exposed to the reservoir of contagious microorganisms which is a farm? It'll happen one way or another, but it won't be fun
Our food crops are all massively bio-engineered. [...] They are all optimized for colder temperatures. We will may end up with greater biomass, but with less food.
So you're saying that food crops, when grown in conditions a few degrees warmer and with more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, will be less productive? I think operators of greenhouses would disagree with you.
Yes, the vast corn and soy greenhouses of the Midwest, with Tim's of CO2 piped in, covering thousands of square miles.
One would think that agricultural lobbies worldwide, which are often quite politically powerful, would be screaming their heads off about climate change affecting crop yields. Have I simply failed to notice or have they been silent on the issue?
No, there is no argument against Creationism, because there doesn't need to be any argument against Creationism. There is simply no evidence, as in none whatsoever, to support it. Therefore it is nothing more than a supposition, not worth anyone's time.
Which is entirely different from global warming/climate change, whatever the f*ck they are calling it today. The arguments against which are that 1. the evidence in support of it is flawed; 2. the scientists who argue for it may have or likely have been influenced by the incentive inherent in their own need to collect a paycheck; 3. That political persons and entities most definitely have been corrupted by said incentives.
Two entirely different things. In the case of climate change, the first argument against should, eventually, be resolved by solid facts. The 2nd and 3rd arguments are extremely difficult if not impossible to refute. The implications are that IF you expect people who are at this point skeptical to be convinced by your arguments, you had better be polite and professional when you state your views. Remember, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence!
I have reached the point where I simply trust no one on this. This is after being strongly in agreement that global warming was occurring, was probably caused by humans, and probably would cause trouble if something wasn't done. That is entirely decoupled from what I think or may have thought *should* be done, and whether or not I believe that humans are capable of doing whatever needs to be done without screwing things up even worse. Back to the point...
The more the climate change people crystalize into a faction, which assumes things about anyone who is skeptical and starts calling names like "denialist" etc., rather than politely explaining their position no matter how long it takes, the less I trust any of them.
I work with scientists at a national laboratory. If you think they won't suddenly change their research interests when it is necessary to do so in order to continue to receive a paycheck, then you really don't understand the reality of what we are as human beings. There is nothing wrong with that of course. What would be wrong would be to fudge the science to collect a paycheck. But if you think that people can consistently draw the ethical line there just because they have Ph.D. after their name, then you are a fool.
Finally I have only ever experienced bona-fide intolerance, to the point of nearly having someone spit in my face simply because I offered a contrary position as a purely intellectual exercise, from some people on one particular side of the political spectrum. I won't say which. But the answer is the ironic one. And the ones currently doing most of the name calling.
So you are shooting yourselves in the foot folks. As soon as this name calling "denialist" bullshit started, you signed the check for your own demise. If you were really working from objectivity, you would have been smarter than that.
I'll inform nature that she should pull herself into shape and ensure that all experimental results are in exact agreement with a theory, whichever theory she chooses; after all, in physics one never had to put up with a puzzling result that doesn't match current theory and has to be merely shelved until further understanding explains it. Because to just look at a zillion lines of evidence from a zillion different disciplines and see the basic underlying process looming through the noise is nothing a scientist can do.
The US can always pay the interest on its loans denominated in US dollars by making dollars.
In any case, in 2013, the current interest on the US debt is about 400 billion USD. The US GDP is 16,803 billion USD, so the interest payment is about 2.3% of GDP. The US GDP could go down a bunch further.
This is a completely different situation from actually changing the global composition of physical molecules in the atmosphere, which cannot be redefined by any human action. The risk of long-term nearly irreversible changes in the physical environment vs human-to-human financial contracts?
Well, as you know, economics is an exact science, well validated by exhaustive experimental evidence, whereas the climate is apparently just too complicated for us dumb humans.
That kind of can - do confident problem - solving gung-ho attitude, so exemplary of the talented and competent engineer, is exactly how the former Soviet Union became the ecological hell hole so much of it is. You'd think the same folks who always caution against central planning as socialism, and tell us how it never works and has unexpected consequences, would see the aftermath of this technological solution after technological solution to solve the problems caused by the previous technological solution and realize that conservatism involves carefully preserving the important things which have worked well for us over time, which you'd think might include the planetary climate.
I certainly hope that the inhabitants of Florida and the Los Angeles basin will have time to safely evacuate, before their welcome and long overdue submersion beneath the lapping waves...
Risk/benefit analysis. If everybody believes in AGW and I do too, and it turns out to be right, then I'm just another mediocre tinker. But if I am in the tiny opposition, and that turns out to be right, then I'm a friggin' genius. And since I can't understand hide nor hair in order to make a decision based on the data, might as well go for the big payoff.
Yes, in that the launch of every weather satellite, the head student crunching deep sea pH data, and Branson's biofuels startup and everything in between are all counted on one side of the ledger, while the other consists of only industry 's PR output. All those scientists whose research you guys feel debunks AGW, the actual researchers, not the press release generators; aren't they paid from the same grant money as the AGW believers, even though they come to opposite conclusions, over years and years? Or do you think that Exxon is launching its own satellites to get accurate temperature measurements, and has a lab somewhere where they pay a guy to measure atmospheric CO2 every day? If you can't tell the difference between research and marketing, well you have already succumbed to the marketing.
Keeping everybody who is ignorant, paranoid, uneducated, or otherwise incapable of rational debate on the subject makes sense. This is not so biased; I wouldn't expect to have a seat at the table regarding the infrastructure of the next Mars rocket, for instance; even though I do admit that Mars exists. The fact that the deniers fall into this class doesn't exempt them. Or would you include those parties who wish to debate whether it is true that God would never permit such a disaster, or is this the beginning of Armageddon? They are currently unrepresented too.
I've met and seen many scientists argue against GWA. In fact, many meterologists and geologists....which mind you, until the recent creation of "climatology" were the DE FACTO experts on climate.
I've seen numerous staticians cite incorrect methods.
I've watched laymen document poor evidence collection methods en masse.
I've seen and heard blatant fear mongering, and antagonism, and professional censoring of anyone who disagrees.
Heck, per the old school definitions, the earth is STILL in an ice age.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,: dragging themselves through oh wait, isn't this the poetry slam? Next door? Ok, thanks.
Yes, because there are so many "opposition" voices which accept AGW but offer alternative solutions. Other than "we'll figure something out". Anyway, I fail to see in Hansen ' s work from 25 years ago where he's doing all the politics you have found. Maybe you could point us to it.
But in that graph, I can eyeball at least 6 flat or declining spots that look identical to the current one; yet the overall tend is still upwards. I therefore adopt the null hypothesis that the current flat spot does not signal any change in the continuing pattern.
"1. No area of science offers as much funding as there is for pro-AGW studies. Yes, these are apparently the same studies where "the science is settled" and therefore should no longer need any funding." uh huh. And you know this because...? You did some research? But you won't show us the data?
Slashdot Mirror
Well
my first impression was that I didn't see any obvious error in logic, other than where he said this showed no greenhouse effect for earth or Venus; what he demonstrates is no EXTRA greenhouse effect on Venus. A couple of commenters call him on this but he misses it. Just a side issue though.
So, I did a search to see if anybody else had anything to say, and I find this
http://joannenova.com.au/2011/...
The gist of which is that this is coincidental, in that the albedo difference, which was left out, turns out to be the factor which accounts for the missing heat, which he can show by identifying it with the altitude of the venusian cloud layer.
There is additional information, in the form of a graph of temp vs pressure for both planets. It's a bit confusing. The green is labeled earth temp, so the blue must be Venus temp, and the two red lines ?? They're symmetrical around the blue so maybe confidence interval?
Anyway, you can see that the temps are parallel from pressures equal to earth surface (50 km up in Venus) to 60 km up, Venus ( up is to the left of the graph).
According to this guy, that's the altitude of the cloud level on Venus, so below that venus' atmosphere will be (1/1.1) the temp due to the reduced albedo.
Up from there, you can see that the Venus temp falls off more quickly than the earth temp, as expected by the additional CO2 absorbing the IR more; greenhouse effect warms the surface and lower atmosphere while cooling the upper atmosphere.
And on the right side of the graph you can see that as the pressure rises above earth 's surface level, towards Venus ' surface, the temp continues to rise as expected until you get to the proverbial hellhole.
I checked the guy's primary source for that temp graph and it checks out, and I looked for altitude of Venus' cloud and that checked out with this site http://www.esa.int/Our_Activit...
So I have to decide which model/argument to follow. I chose the second guy, because 1) he can explain the observations in terms of well established mechanisms, whereas the no - greenhouse model has the mystery of why there is no greenhouse. (This is something not well understood in the big debate; when you have something as well understood as CO2 absorbing IR, and you can even see it operate in that graph of earth's emission spectrum, if you say it doesn't exist you are ADDING an effect, not subtracting one, and Occam's razor works against you unless you have proof of why it doesn't operate. Maybe this is what trips the guy up regarding his not understanding that his calculations leave the greenhouse effect operating on earth, but having the same effect on Venus, rather than his jump to it not opetating in either place)
2) and the second guy provides more data, demonstrating that the equivalence only occurs below the venusian cloud layer, which would require even more complication for the no - greenhouse theory to explain.
But, bottom line, for me as a somewhat informed reader, I couldn't see the holes In the first guy's theory without copying off the expert's test paper.
Who exactly do you think gets 'expenses'?
I will give you a hint, pro-climate change scientists tend to be funded by universities and in some cases governments.
Deniers tend to be funded by Exxon, and their like.
So tell, me who gets tot see the world on expenses - the deniers or the scientists?
If you can't see the answer than that tells me who is funding your internet connection. After all the deniers have expressly admitted paying people to spread lies.
The fact that so many of the denialist arguments echo the "smoking causes cancer" denialist arguments (the science isn't all in yet, there is no consensus, it might be something else, nobody looks at xxxx, etc); and in fact many of those echoing the arguments are the same folks who said them about smoking in the first place, suggests to me that the problem is not a conspiracy of lies among the AGW believers.
The problem here that people are failing repeatedly to grasp is that science does not actually have an overarching "THEY" who will police the system and prevent rubbish papers being published. Science works on peer review, meaning that the peers (i.e. other scientists in the same field) of the person submitting the paper get to police what is written in the paper. This works if the peers are more or less skeptical, and fails badly if most peers either subscribe to or have a vested interest in supporting a set world-view. In the case of climatologists, a prophesy of doom is just what is needed to keep the grant money rolling in, hence there is a presumption that any paper that agrees with this orthodoxy must be correct.
The second bug in the system is how research is funded. Research grants typically fund a post-doctoral researcher (a person who has taken a degree and a doctorate in the subject) to work on the topic for three years. Typically this means a year to work out how to do the work, a year to actually achieve something and a year of blowing one's own trumpet to try to secure another post-doc posting. This is, as you might imagine, an inefficient way to fund research.
The third bug in the system is a lack of research support for climatologists. To be a good climatologist you have to know a lot of physics, a good deal of mathematics and a smattering of biology, meteorology and so on to actually have a vague clue how a climate system works. To model climate you need a doctoral-grade level of skill in quite sophisticated programming, including how best to use massively parallel machines. If instead of looking at the emails from the University of East Anglia leak you go and look at the code, and the HARRY_README file, then you see how this is working or rather not working in practice. The UoEA code was mostly cobol. Mostly, because Cobol sucks rather for manipulating strings; the coder used shell calls to handle these bits. You or I would likely use Perl or Python to do the same thing and would make a much better job of it, but the coder in the UoEA case was self-taught. Two words that ought to send a shudder through anyone tasked with debugging and maintaining code: Self. Taught.
That code was a mess. A complete and utter dog's dinner. The original coder was learning by making mistakes, the sorts of mistakes that get drummed out of newbie coders in their first year of a degree. Things like a sub-program failing silently, instead of screaming blue murder on STDERR, for instance. Things like not keeping adequate backups. The UoEA lost their input raw data, because they didn't have enough storage. Once the raw data was gone, they had no way to start again from scratch.
Climatology is like particle physics was fifty years ago. Particle physicists started off as jacks of all trades, and very quickly realised that an army of engineers and computer techies was needed to support a few researchers. Climatologists have yet to quite realise that they need a small army of coders and computer sysadmins to provide them with the kit and the code to run their simulations, and no, this support cannot be done by the hired help on a shoestring. Until they realise this, we will not be able to trust their results.
Meanwhile, we have all those nice folks saying
1) we need more research before we do anything about AGW
2) they're only making up AGW to get more research money
And you seem to be adding
3) this research should be better funded so it can be done well
I'm not sure where all this combined leads, but I don't think it leads in a good direction.
Let's say that the climate change will cause people in the UK one unit of inconvenience, to Syrians, three units of inconvenience, and chemical weapons will cause Syrians thirty units of inconvenience. The problem is, you could invade Syria and destroy the chemical weapons withing months, if you wanted. That's at most fifteen unit-years of inconvenience. But those three units of inconvenience due to climate change will apparently persist in Syria for *at least* many decades, if not a century or more. That's already dozens of unit-years of inconvenience, perhaps hundreds. Also, people have a tremendous capacity for dismissing long-term problems. Perhaps asking Syrians what they are worried about, while usually valid, isn't valid universally.
Most humans are more upset when they break a shoelace than over whatever the current risk of world catastrophe is, whether AGW, nuclear war, or stray asteroid.
I once saw an economist get up in a symposium and claim that the carrying capacity of the Earth -- the number of humans it could support -- was infinite.
Technically correct, if most of them are dead and decomposed.
You guys are looking at it all backwards. Entropy always increases. Sequestered carbon in any form will eventually return to atmospheric dispersion. Potential energy will eventually end up as dispersed heat; sequestered carbon will eventually be oxidized. Ecological niches which offer access to resources with minimal competition will eventually be populated, as long as they exist.
That fossil carbon buried underground is, almost by definition, only metastable; as is its consequence of a cooler drier planet. Eventually that potential energy in that reduced carbon will result in its oxidation, and the planet will return to the high CO2, hot, humid state which was normal for most of its history.
We are just the catalyst for this happening. Evolution by random chance came up with a species which can utilize this really huge resource, and as with any species suddenly given access to a vast resource, we've really proliferated, knocking the previous equilibrium for a loop and stressing the hell out of the other species which do not share in our windfall. Eventually, either the species' wealth of resources runs out, or its waste products overwhelm it; how far back it falls depends on how inhospitable it made the environment and how well it affairs to its new environment. But that just demonstrates what life really is, cosmically speaking; a collection of catalysts that expend the potential energy sources and asked up their return to entropy, in the processing using dune of that energy to facilitate their own existence and reproduction.
Some species was eventually going to make a meal of all the plant life represented by that fossil fuel; turned out to be us. When we make that process impossible, whether by AGW now or by using it up not too far in the future, cosmically speaking, we will be obsolete. Maybe we will be able to grab a next rung in the ladder, whether renewable energy, or nuclear, or fusion, or Dyson spheres, or go back to muscle power of humans and animals, it's not a given that we'll be moving in the direction of more abundant and cheaper energy. And it's not a given that our vast intelligence and wonderful imagination and blah blah blah will be able to think our way into keeping up civilization 's momentum without proper energy resources; after all, dolphins are pretty smart, but what the heck can they accomplish living in the ocean with no access to even fire? Brains alone won't get you a machine shop.
So, right now, we're just nature's way of disposing of that deposit of potential energy in the ground, as the universe moves on its inevitable path from big bang to heat death. Maybe we will be able to transcend that role and move forward, in which case we will really be exceptional, but at this point it's a little premature to be confident that we will transcend that role and move forward because of our exceptionalism.
I call it a report written by climatologists. You know, SCIENTISTS...
I get it. It tells you things you don't want to hear, so you have this need to cast aspersions on it.
I hate those scientists, they have an agenda. They even question God's intelligent design.
But wait; God created those guys and caused them to write the report! He's trying to send us a message!
Unfortunately, it's a lot more extreme that you are considering. The heat that has been stored in the oceans will take a long time to be lost.
OTOH, it's quite plausible that it's only our current civilization that is doomed, and that may well take 50 years or so. This may be long enough for a realtively reasonable transition to whatever will follow. The real problem is that there is as yet not even a acceptance that we're going to need radical change, much less an agreement of "change into what?" So we do lots of play-acting pretense that we say will let us keep things the same, or at least not much different.
Actions we have already taken have committed us to a drastic change. They haven't determined what form that change will take. Every year that we let pass without acknowledging that some change will be necessary removes some options. Every technological advance offers options, some of which may open new possibilities. I don't know where the best balance is. If we wait too long, the only option will be collapse into a new stone age civilization, with over a 90% die-off of the population in the process...and likely over 99%. We could also get into a war with a mix of advanced technologies and kill off considerably more, perhaps 99.99% or 99.999%. Then the survivors need to stabilize the remaining population, this will probably lead to a further decline over the succeeding 50 years. Then any surviving population may being to grow.
But this coulld be avoided by proper action, if we only knew what proper action was. We don't. We do know that what we're doing is only satisfying short term goals, and that in the long term it's disasterous. But the short term is where we live, so we tend to overly discount both long term gains and losses.
I don't know. Do you think we can go back from an urbanized economy where food is purchased by most of the population from sources all over the world, to the preindustrial situation where the majority of the population is involved in agriculture, even if we have 50 years? And will we need extensive use of fossil fuel to provide the energy to clear farmland out of current urban and suburban areas, or the forests that have replaced abandoned farmland in the northeast, for example? We are having a tough time just negotiating the transition from an industrial economy to an information economy. And without, for instance, the ability to drive to a nearby hospital, or be airlifted? While everyb ody gets exposed to the reservoir of contagious microorganisms which is a farm? It'll happen one way or another, but it won't be fun
Our food crops are all massively bio-engineered. [...] They are all optimized for colder temperatures. We will may end up with greater biomass, but with less food.
So you're saying that food crops, when grown in conditions a few degrees warmer and with more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, will be less productive? I think operators of greenhouses would disagree with you.
Yes, the vast corn and soy greenhouses of the Midwest, with Tim's of CO2 piped in, covering thousands of square miles.
One would think that agricultural lobbies worldwide, which are often quite politically powerful, would be screaming their heads off about climate change affecting crop yields. Have I simply failed to notice or have they been silent on the issue?
Does INTERNATIONAL FOOD POLICY RESEARCH INSTITUTE count?
http://www.ifpri.org/node/8438...
No, there is no argument against Creationism, because there doesn't need to be any argument against Creationism. There is simply no evidence, as in none whatsoever, to support it. Therefore it is nothing more than a supposition, not worth anyone's time.
Which is entirely different from global warming/climate change, whatever the f*ck they are calling it today. The arguments against which are that 1. the evidence in support of it is flawed; 2. the scientists who argue for it may have or likely have been influenced by the incentive inherent in their own need to collect a paycheck; 3. That political persons and entities most definitely have been corrupted by said incentives.
Two entirely different things. In the case of climate change, the first argument against should, eventually, be resolved by solid facts. The 2nd and 3rd arguments are extremely difficult if not impossible to refute. The implications are that IF you expect people who are at this point skeptical to be convinced by your arguments, you had better be polite and professional when you state your views. Remember, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence!
I have reached the point where I simply trust no one on this. This is after being strongly in agreement that global warming was occurring, was probably caused by humans, and probably would cause trouble if something wasn't done. That is entirely decoupled from what I think or may have thought *should* be done, and whether or not I believe that humans are capable of doing whatever needs to be done without screwing things up even worse. Back to the point...
The more the climate change people crystalize into a faction, which assumes things about anyone who is skeptical and starts calling names like "denialist" etc., rather than politely explaining their position no matter how long it takes, the less I trust any of them.
I work with scientists at a national laboratory. If you think they won't suddenly change their research interests when it is necessary to do so in order to continue to receive a paycheck, then you really don't understand the reality of what we are as human beings. There is nothing wrong with that of course. What would be wrong would be to fudge the science to collect a paycheck. But if you think that people can consistently draw the ethical line there just because they have Ph.D. after their name, then you are a fool.
Finally I have only ever experienced bona-fide intolerance, to the point of nearly having someone spit in my face simply because I offered a contrary position as a purely intellectual exercise, from some people on one particular side of the political spectrum. I won't say which. But the answer is the ironic one. And the ones currently doing most of the name calling.
So you are shooting yourselves in the foot folks. As soon as this name calling "denialist" bullshit started, you signed the check for your own demise. If you were really working from objectivity, you would have been smarter than that.
I'll inform nature that she should pull herself into shape and ensure that all experimental results are in exact agreement with a theory, whichever theory she chooses; after all, in physics one never had to put up with a puzzling result that doesn't match current theory and has to be merely shelved until further understanding explains it. Because to just look at a zillion lines of evidence from a zillion different disciplines and see the basic underlying process looming through the noise is nothing a scientist can do.
The US can always pay the interest on its loans denominated in US dollars by making dollars.
In any case, in 2013, the current interest on the US debt is about 400 billion USD. The US GDP is 16,803 billion USD, so the interest payment is about 2.3% of GDP. The US GDP could go down a bunch further.
This is a completely different situation from actually changing the global composition of physical molecules in the atmosphere, which cannot be redefined by any human action. The risk of long-term nearly irreversible changes in the physical environment vs human-to-human financial contracts?
Well, as you know, economics is an exact science, well validated by exhaustive experimental evidence, whereas the climate is apparently just too complicated for us dumb humans.
Ted Danson said in 1998 that we had 10 years to save the oceans or else.
Al Gore said in 2006 that we had 10 years to stop global warming.
The entire Republican party and most of the Democrats said in 2003 that we had to stop Saddam Hussein from WMDing us.
That kind of can - do confident problem - solving gung-ho attitude, so exemplary of the talented and competent engineer, is exactly how the former Soviet Union became the ecological hell hole so much of it is. You'd think the same folks who always caution against central planning as socialism, and tell us how it never works and has unexpected consequences, would see the aftermath of this technological solution after technological solution to solve the problems caused by the previous technological solution and realize that conservatism involves carefully preserving the important things which have worked well for us over time, which you'd think might include the planetary climate.
I certainly hope that the inhabitants of Florida and the Los Angeles basin will have time to safely evacuate, before their welcome and long overdue submersion beneath the lapping waves...
"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn"
Oh, when they see the water coming they will definitely evacuate alright.
Risk/benefit analysis. If everybody believes in AGW and I do too, and it turns out to be right, then I'm just another mediocre tinker. But if I am in the tiny opposition, and that turns out to be right, then I'm a friggin' genius. And since I can't understand hide nor hair in order to make a decision based on the data, might as well go for the big payoff.
Yes, in that the launch of every weather satellite, the head student crunching deep sea pH data, and Branson's biofuels startup and everything in between are all counted on one side of the ledger, while the other consists of only industry 's PR output.
All those scientists whose research you guys feel debunks AGW, the actual researchers, not the press release generators; aren't they paid from the same grant money as the AGW believers, even though they come to opposite conclusions, over years and years? Or do you think that Exxon is launching its own satellites to get accurate temperature measurements, and has a lab somewhere where they pay a guy to measure atmospheric CO2 every day?
If you can't tell the difference between research and marketing, well you have already succumbed to the marketing.
Keeping everybody who is ignorant, paranoid, uneducated, or otherwise incapable of rational debate on the subject makes sense. This is not so biased; I wouldn't expect to have a seat at the table regarding the infrastructure of the next Mars rocket, for instance; even though I do admit that Mars exists.
The fact that the deniers fall into this class doesn't exempt them.
Or would you include those parties who wish to debate whether it is true that God would never permit such a disaster, or is this the beginning of Armageddon? They are currently unrepresented too.
I've met and seen many scientists argue against GWA. In fact, many meterologists and geologists....which mind you, until the recent creation of "climatology" were the DE FACTO experts on climate.
I've seen numerous staticians cite incorrect methods.
I've watched laymen document poor evidence collection methods en masse.
I've seen and heard blatant fear mongering, and antagonism, and professional censoring of anyone who disagrees.
Heck, per the old school definitions, the earth is STILL in an ice age.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,: dragging themselves through
oh wait, isn't this the poetry slam? Next door? Ok, thanks.
Yes, because there are so many "opposition" voices which accept AGW but offer alternative solutions. Other than "we'll figure something out".
Anyway, I fail to see in Hansen ' s work from 25 years ago where he's doing all the politics you have found. Maybe you could point us to it.
I like the idea of friggin' gills. Better than the boring regular kind.
But in that graph, I can eyeball at least 6 flat or declining spots that look identical to the current one; yet the overall tend is still upwards. I therefore adopt the null hypothesis that the current flat spot does not signal any change in the continuing pattern.
"1. No area of science offers as much funding as there is for pro-AGW studies. Yes, these are apparently the same studies where "the science is settled" and therefore should no longer need any funding." ..? You did some research? But you won't show us the data?
uh huh. And you know this because.
Yes; if he were a real skeptic nothing could possibly change his mind. That's the definition of skeptic, right?
Well there's no sense in you actually looking at the primary sources to find out that your paranoia is baseless.