Indeed, while that's anything but a legal argument, it's very clear how that can be perceived as a moral argument.
Come on, just tax us for the loss and then decriminialize it already. If you have trouble figuring out how to split the money, offer up (on a voluntary basis) Nielsen-style media player software add-ons for the most popular media players that report how likely a given person is to play a given work (ignoring how many times they play it, so no person has undue influence), and then distribute funds on a (preferably less-than-linear) proportional basis.
Quite true. Coperincus had a lot more tact, and kept out of trouble largely thanks to that. Galileo even went so far as to personally try to interpret scripture to match his theory.
Bah, what Galileo did wasn't special. Anyone with just a regular old consumer grade digital camera and a tripod can do the same (shorter exposure later that summer).
Once again, you're quoting amateurs who don't know what they're talking about. In this case, West Virginia Office of Miner's Safety chief engineer, Monte Hieb. Here's his webpage. Now, you might be asking yourself why you're getting your science data from a mine safety engineer. If not, you probably should!
Here's the huge blunders he makes in his numbers:
1) He only credits a small portion of the CO2 to anthropogenic emissions. Why? He doesn't say it, but one can only assume that it's because natural emissions are higher than anthropogenic emissions. The problem with this argument is that natural emissions of CO2 are nearly perfectly balanced with natural sinks of CO2; that's why CO2 levels have historically fluctuated by such small amounts on the order of thousands of years. We haven't had CO2 levels this high in at least the past 15 million years. Picture a half-full bathtub draining water at a constant rate, with water being added to it at the same rate. The level of the tub remains the same. Now start adding extra water -- even a small amount. The bathtub will steadily fill up. Our emissions are not matched by corresponding sinks.
CO2 levels in the atmosphere are very easily measured. Past levels are very readily measured from air bubbles trapped in ice cores. Here's what you see. That's the addition to the atmosphere that is not balanced out by a corresponding CO2 sink. The atmosphere's C13/C12 ratio changed 1/5th as much in the entire last glacial as it changed in the past 150 years (the C13/C12 ratio shows how much of our atmosphere is made of old, deep carbon rather than fresh surface carbon).
You should also know that Hieb faked this graph. Go compare his graph to the DOE's that he "cites". He adds a "natural" and "manmade" column that exists nowhere on his reference, thus making it sound like the DOE believes what he's trying to imply.
2) He does no calculations to determine his water vapor forcing. None of his references are primary sources, and in fact, one of them states that the elimination of CO2 entirely from our atmosphere would lower heat-trapping efficiency by 12% and elimination of water vapor would lower it by 36%. That said, all of his references for the "95%" number trace back, ultimately, to "Solar Radiation Absorption by Carbon Dioxide, Overlap with Water, and a Parameterization for General Circulation Models" (Ramaswamy, 1993). Please pay attention to the title. Solar radiation absorption. That is, incoming radiation, not outgoing. Here's the abstract. You probably don't have access to the full paper, but I do. The very first line is, "A proper representation of the absorption of solar radiation in the atmosphere is important to determine accurately the radiative fluxes and heating rates in weather forecasting and climate models." Got that? Solar, not re-radiated infrared from Earth's surface. The greenhouse effect is based on absorbing as *little* solar radiation as possible and as *much* re-radiated infrared as possible.
Want real references and numbers for the *total* greenhouse contribution? Here you go. For a more layman's version, here. These numbers all come from first principles.
I hate to dump on Hieb so hard for this, but this is what you get when you go to a coal mine safety engineer for science.
3) As has been mentioned to you before, and is something Hieb completely ignores, water vapor is not forcing. It's feedb
I publish and I have read the papers (My physics department had a climate group). Simulations are not and never will be the same as an experiment. They cannot do anything outside of the assumptions and parameters you put in, where an experiment is not so constrained. I should know, the bulk of my papers are simulation papers, and I have to be careful with what i claim or reviews will reject it outright.
Simulations absolutely can do things "outside of the assumptions and parameters you put in", in that if you put in assumptions and parameters for events that have already occurred, you can see if they match the outcome.
I'm surprised that you didn't mention the *actual* weakness of this sort of validation, in that hindcasting accuracy implies but doesn't inherently grant forecasting accuracy (for a good example, see hindcasts vs. forecasts of the intensity of hurricane seasons). But I will note that you didn't address at all that models are just a small part of climate science, and are really just used to provide specifics rather than the broad generalizations we can tell just from laboratory experiments and first-principles calculations.
Concerning the models: There's very little uncertainty associated with the models except on a few fields. Cloud formation being the major one, which generally necessitates the use of statistical models. GCR used to be a significant (related) unknown, but its significance has been downplayed by a number of recent papers and it's much better constrained now. Also the role of carbon black has been found to be higher than previously thought, and there have been some changes in our understanding of how arctic sea ice behaves (for the worse, sadly). And there's always more research being done on how important increasing granularity is. In general, however, the overwhelming majority of what goes on the simulations is pretty well constrained and understood.
Interesting link. Yes, it looks like you could build a vortex that way. But there's nothing in that paper that describes how you could draw off that energy into useful work.
The fans at the air inlets at the base that help initiate the vortex become generators, making use of the air that streams into the base of the vortex to generate power.
Thanks for the info on Mars, but you failed to mention any reasoning for the other planets warming such as Uranus, maybe Neptune's warming.
Because you didn't ask about them. Duh.
The only part of Uranus itself that is warming is its northern hemisphere. Its southern hemisphere is cooling. Why? Because it's becoming freaking spring on Uranus. This is the pathetic quality of denier "research".
Uranus's moon Triton is warming because it's entering its summertime. It's extremely sensitive to albedo variations. Comparing atmosphere-less or low-atmosphere bodies with no oceans to a body with an atmosphere and huge oceanic heat sink is ridiculous, because there's such a huge difference in thermal inertia, so small changes have greater effects on the former.
Neptune is also entering spring, and is experiencing the exact same thing as Uranus -- one hemisphere warming while the other cools.
I can tell by your line of argument that you believe in one of the dumbest denier lines -- the "solar output is increasing!" argument. Right. The sun is changing without us noticing it. The freaking sun, the most intensively studied object outside of Earth. We watch it from all over the surface, from satellites in orbit, from satellites at the Lagrange points -- but it's sneakily warming everything without us noticing! That tricksy sun!
Can you see how ridiculous that argument is?
There's an entire chapter in the IPCC report about solar variation, which cites the current research papers on solar output and its impact on Earth. Dozens of them. Please read them. Need links? If you'll actually read them, I'd be glad to dig them up for you.
Your statement of consensus of CO2 relating to Global Warming is such example. While CO2 may indeed be a contributing factor, you fail to mention that the factor may be as little as a fraction of a percent.
No, it is not. The forcing from CO2 within its confidence interval dwarfs all other forcings within their confidence intervals. The only one that comes close is methane.
If you keep water vapor in the picture, CO2 is finally in the strong single digits of a percentage of a greenhouse gas present in our atmosphere.
Water vapor makes up about 35-70% of the planet's greenhouse effect, depending on the time of year and weather. Water vapor causes both warming and cooling, as clouds increase the planet's albedo. Water vapor, however, is *not* forcing because it has a very short average atmospheric residency (days to weeks), while CO2 has an very long atmospheric residency (hundreds of years). If you took all of the water vapor out of the atmosphere, we'd be back to normal in just a couple months. In short, the average amount of water vapor-induced warming will always be a response to whatever *other* factors are forcing the climate (along with some random fluctuation -- we call that fluctuation "weather").
In the long term (hundreds of thousands of years), you see the exact same thing with CO2. On the order of hundreds of years, CO2 is forcing. But on the scale of hundreds of thousands of years, it averages out as just a response to other factors -- a feedback. For example, Milankovitch cycles drive Earth's glacial and interglacial periods. However, the amount of forcing they provide is significantly less than the temperature variations between glacials and interglacials. The rest is made up of feedbacks. The warm phase of Milankovitch cycles leads to increased emissions of CO2, amplifying their warming trends.
Another example someone gave was watts per meter. The Earth showed warming of about 1 watt per square meter.
Actually, about 2.4W/m^2, but let's go on.
If you want to picture them as little lightbulbs, picture them inside a vacuum-sealed cooler (our planet drifts in a vacuum).
When you stand next to a fire, do you feel warm because of the radiant energy, or the CO2 being created?
For years I had been taught that Venus was blanketed in clouds of Sulphuric acid which also contributed to its greenhouse environment.
If you wrote that on a 7th grade science test, you'd fail.
There is a small amount of sulfuric acid on Venus which makes up part of its uppermost cloud layers, increasing the albedo (reflectivity) of the planet. Increasing the albedo means *more* reflection, meaning *less* light hits the planet, meaning *cooler* temperatures. Sulfuric acid *is* the prime cause of volcanic winter.
Venus's atmosphere is overwhelmingly CO2. This has been known for ages.
Get an education.
I am sure a CO2 answer is forthcoming on the current warming trend on Mars and other planets in the solar system
No, Mars had a small hemispheric warming trend due to its ice being covered by a planet-wide dust storm, lowering its albedo. The locations and intensity of the warming directly correspond to the albedo changes.
Sulfuric acid decreases albedo, lowering the radiative equilibrium. On Earth, we know it as "volcanic winter". Plus, there's not actually that much sulfuric acid on Venus.
You don't even know what code you're posting, do you?
****** APPLIES A VERY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION FOR DECLINE*********... Specify period over which to compute the regressions (stop in 1960 to avoid ; the decline
You don't even know what "the decline" is, do you?
This is where I started having a major issue with the global warming movement a long time ago. The SECOND you start picking out sites as unreliable, you are left with data points missing and every other weather station becomes human choice on whether its included in your modeling.
Please skip down several posts. It's not a manual process. It's a fully automated, peer-reviewed process that is validated in numerous ways.
Show us the CODE! Give us ALL the raw data, every last scrap, and let us see the code behind the models
The overwhelming majority of it IS available. Pick a random paper and I can with a high degree of confidence get you all of the code and data for it. There is a small amount of data, however, that is not publicly available. Most notably, meteorological data from a number of national meteorological agencies. It sucks, but they consider this proprietary. But it's hardly the scientists' fault that some national meteorological agencies won't make their data public.
How the hell can do do the "scientific method" on a planets climate!
Perhaps you should, you know, actually read the papers?
Models are not facts and they are not experiments.
Science doesn't deal in absolutes. But models absolutely are experiments. For example, you apply a climate model to data from the 1950s and see how well it forecasts what happens after that. And our earliest models are decades old now. If you want to see peer-reviewed analysis of earlier literature and how closely it matched its predictions, many of those have been published, too.
Contrary to popular belief, models are just a tiny fraction of climate science. And also contrary to popular belief, they largely trace back to first principles -- only a few things that are unusually hard to model, such as cloud formation, are based on statistical models. Models aren't used to see whether global warming will happen. They're used to get a good handle on what form it will take, how it will be distributed, what sort of effects it will carry with it on different regions (precipitation changes, etc), and so forth.
Papers on the major climate models probably number several dozen, perhaps a bit over a hundred if you count with a very broad brush. Out of the thousands of papers on climate science.
And for gods sake I am not allowed to publish "predictions/claims/etc" without the data i used to arrive at these claims, why should this be any different.
The overwhelming amount of data used in climate science *is* public. Name the sort of data you want and odds are I'll be able to give you a link to it. There is, however, a small amount that isn't, and any request that includes this data (even among other, public data) will be denied. This primarily comes from various national meteorological agencies who consider their data proprietary. That sucks, but it's anything but the scientists' faults that it's proprietary.
Now, some scientists such as Jones have used that to deliberately try to deny as many of the requests of these amateur deniers as possible -- but you need to understand where he was coming from. Jones used to respond to each and every FOI request (which the amatuer deniers have been making increasingly common, leading to a perception among many scientists that they're just trying to waste their time and money in responding to them). One of the requests he filled was to a day trader who fancied himself an amatuer "climate scientist". He found "error" in Jones' partner's work, and literally tried to get the FBI to arrest him. A university investigation cleared his partner of any and all wrongdoing, but after that, Jones tried to deny every amateur-denier FOI request he got, for any reason he could. And honestly, I can't blame him.
Ok, so here's another one. What are coral islands really? What's the carbon levels in the sea as well as atmosphere over the geological timescales corals have existed?
For God's sake, can't you look up basic facts before you ask stupid questions? The coral that makes up atolls is *young*; it doesn't last because of wave erosion. To pick a random example, Narau's surface corals date from 300,000 to 5,000,000 years old. The last time we had a major ocean acidification event was the PETM, 55.8 million years ago.
The corals are going nowhere
Coral response to pH is extremely well understood, and it's very negative. Warming of water is also extremely dangerous to corals, who live within very narrow temperature bands and are not mobile. Anyone who's ever had a reef tank is well aware of this. You can see this effect in the wild with calcium carbonate-shelled organisms living near volcanic vents.
As for "the corals are going nowhere", how profoundly ignorant of the plight of the world's corals can you be? Over half of the world's reefs have already completely disappeared or are rapidly declining. Most of this so far had been due to pollution and overexploitation, but an increasing percent is due to the warming and increasingly acidic waters, measurements of which routinely exceed what corals can withstand. They're incredibly delicate organisms. The extremely hot 2005 Gulf of Mexico waters that fueled Katrina and Rita, for example, caused such a massive die-off that they put the Elkhorn and Staghorn corals on the endangered species list.
Seriously, read about a topic before you post on it.
and no, the seas aren't going acidic either.
"Anthropogenic ocean acidication over the twenty-rst century and its impact on calcifying organisms". Ocean pH has decreased by approximately 0.075 since the industrial revolution.
And look, this isn't the first time this has happened. The exact same thing happened 55.8 million years ago. It was devastating. It left the world such a different place that we give it a new era name. We don't want to recreate that.
The notion that the overwhelming majority of the world's climate scientists are lying for some nefarious reason sure fits the definition.
Also, isn't the vast majority of official temperatures all distributed by the same group in the UK that was proven to have manipulated the data?
Re, "manipulated": See my other reply, below. Nothing even remotely close to that occurred, and if you knew anything about the process in which the dataset was assembled rather than listening to Russian economic thinktanks, you'd know that.
Re, datasets: No. The CRU's is just one of the three most widely used datasets. NASA's and NOAA's are the other two. And there are a number of lesser-used datasets. And they're all assembled in different ways, and often from different data sources.
There's also documentation of the temperatures being collected in all sorts of places that don't fit the guidelines for where they should be placed - such as some that have been found placed directly under the vent from a buildings furnace.
Which is why you automatically eliminate bad stations, something you were just criticizing the CRU for doing, re. Russia.
But hey, why bother actually truly looking at the facts
I can tell you ascribe to that philosophy to a tee.
Go read a peer-reviewed paper. For once. Follow it with a few thousand more. Then come back here and talk.
Ah, I see you've been hitting the full "Amateur Denier Circuit". One by one!
1) oppressing scientists who disagree with them
By "oppressing", you mean "badmouthing them in -private- emails, and arguing against their papers (which they think are unsound) in public review". Contrast with, say, the Bush administration actively blocking global warming materials from being mentioned in reports and threatening to fire scientists who go public.
2) ignoring data that doesn't suit their agenda (such as ignoring 75% of the temperature recording stations in Russia)
Your "science" in this case comes from a Russian equivalent of the Heritage Foundation -- the Russian Institute of Economic Analysis. As with most amateurs, they don't know what the heck they're talking about (and failed to get several papers past peer review because of it).
Contrary to what most amateur deniers believe, the MET office's dataset is NOT simply an average of the readings of all land stations. Why? Because of precisely something that the deniers criticize the surface stations for -- they're not all good! In fact, some of them are run-down pieces of junk. Deniers love to post pictures of these, naively assuming that they're all just averaged in.
The process of building up a climate dataset from such sources has a number of steps. First off, you need to figure out just how closely temperatures are correlated over various distances. I.e., if you're in a heat wave in NYC, you're probably also in a heat wave in Philadelphia, but not necessarily in Los Angeles. Secondly, for each datapoint, you analyze that region with its correlation factor and look for discontinuities in your station record. You also look in abrupt changes in station readings to detect faults or changes in the station's surrounding that affect its accuracy or introduce various biases. Bad stations are either eliminated or detrended. Most importantly, this is all done in an automated manner.
After all of this, you do numerous studies to make sure that you're eliminating such errors properly. For example, one approach involves keeping a reference network of closely monitored stations in ideal conditions and comparing the results you get on the reference network to those you get on the broader network. Another involves comparing the results from windy days to those of calm days to see whether the data is being contaminated by the urban heat island effect (which varies with wind). And so forth.
In short, the elimination of a large number of stations is *part of the process*. But what you need to know is that it's done in a fully automated manner that has been subjected to extensive peer-review.
blatantly alter data to show the outcome they desire (such as the one scientist who's email showed that he added X amount to the recorded temperatures to show an upward trend)
You're referring to this:
"From: Phil Jones To: ray bradley,mann@xxxxx.xxx, mhughes@xxxx.xxx Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000 Cc: k.briffa@xxx.xx.xx,t.osborn@xxxx.xxx Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm, Once Tim's got a diagram here we'll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow. I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline. Mike's series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998. Thanks for the comments, Ray."
First off, check the date. You're arguing about something that's a *decade old*. Secondly, "Mike's nature trick" and "the decline" are about a dendrochronological anomaly in which the data series after 1961 deviated from the instrumental record. The
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe you don't understand what I meant.
Solar Chimneys have already had the R&D done and the pilot plants built.
What, you mean one little plant in Spain? Versus a structure nearly as tall as the Burj Dubai?
Yeah, the prototype AVEs aren't as big as the Spain prototype, but they've been prototyped as well. Both are techs still quite in their infancy.
Indeed, while that's anything but a legal argument, it's very clear how that can be perceived as a moral argument.
Come on, just tax us for the loss and then decriminialize it already. If you have trouble figuring out how to split the money, offer up (on a voluntary basis) Nielsen-style media player software add-ons for the most popular media players that report how likely a given person is to play a given work (ignoring how many times they play it, so no person has undue influence), and then distribute funds on a (preferably less-than-linear) proportional basis.
He didn't have the advanced technology of cheapo digital cameras
Well, maybe he should have gotten off his butt and GOTTEN A JOB so he could afford one? Lazy heretic.
Quite true. Coperincus had a lot more tact, and kept out of trouble largely thanks to that. Galileo even went so far as to personally try to interpret scripture to match his theory.
Bah, what Galileo did wasn't special. Anyone with just a regular old consumer grade digital camera and a tripod can do the same (shorter exposure later that summer).
What a bragger.
Once again, you're quoting amateurs who don't know what they're talking about. In this case, West Virginia Office of Miner's Safety chief engineer, Monte Hieb. Here's his webpage. Now, you might be asking yourself why you're getting your science data from a mine safety engineer. If not, you probably should!
Here's the huge blunders he makes in his numbers:
1) He only credits a small portion of the CO2 to anthropogenic emissions. Why? He doesn't say it, but one can only assume that it's because natural emissions are higher than anthropogenic emissions. The problem with this argument is that natural emissions of CO2 are nearly perfectly balanced with natural sinks of CO2; that's why CO2 levels have historically fluctuated by such small amounts on the order of thousands of years. We haven't had CO2 levels this high in at least the past 15 million years. Picture a half-full bathtub draining water at a constant rate, with water being added to it at the same rate. The level of the tub remains the same. Now start adding extra water -- even a small amount. The bathtub will steadily fill up. Our emissions are not matched by corresponding sinks.
CO2 levels in the atmosphere are very easily measured. Past levels are very readily measured from air bubbles trapped in ice cores. Here's what you see. That's the addition to the atmosphere that is not balanced out by a corresponding CO2 sink. The atmosphere's C13/C12 ratio changed 1/5th as much in the entire last glacial as it changed in the past 150 years (the C13/C12 ratio shows how much of our atmosphere is made of old, deep carbon rather than fresh surface carbon).
You should also know that Hieb faked this graph. Go compare his graph to the DOE's that he "cites". He adds a "natural" and "manmade" column that exists nowhere on his reference, thus making it sound like the DOE believes what he's trying to imply.
2) He does no calculations to determine his water vapor forcing. None of his references are primary sources, and in fact, one of them states that the elimination of CO2 entirely from our atmosphere would lower heat-trapping efficiency by 12% and elimination of water vapor would lower it by 36%. That said, all of his references for the "95%" number trace back, ultimately, to "Solar Radiation Absorption by Carbon Dioxide, Overlap with Water, and a Parameterization for General Circulation Models" (Ramaswamy, 1993). Please pay attention to the title. Solar radiation absorption. That is, incoming radiation, not outgoing. Here's the abstract. You probably don't have access to the full paper, but I do. The very first line is, "A proper representation of the absorption of solar radiation in the atmosphere is important to determine accurately the radiative fluxes and heating rates in weather forecasting and climate models." Got that? Solar, not re-radiated infrared from Earth's surface. The greenhouse effect is based on absorbing as *little* solar radiation as possible and as *much* re-radiated infrared as possible.
Want real references and numbers for the *total* greenhouse contribution? Here you go. For a more layman's version, here. These numbers all come from first principles.
I hate to dump on Hieb so hard for this, but this is what you get when you go to a coal mine safety engineer for science.
3) As has been mentioned to you before, and is something Hieb completely ignores, water vapor is not forcing. It's feedb
So I'm guessing that's why Arizon isn't using an undeveloped technology that may not even be workable.
You mean like a solar chimney?
I publish and I have read the papers (My physics department had a climate group). Simulations are not and never will be the same as an experiment. They cannot do anything outside of the assumptions and parameters you put in, where an experiment is not so constrained. I should know, the bulk of my papers are simulation papers, and I have to be careful with what i claim or reviews will reject it outright.
Simulations absolutely can do things "outside of the assumptions and parameters you put in", in that if you put in assumptions and parameters for events that have already occurred, you can see if they match the outcome.
I'm surprised that you didn't mention the *actual* weakness of this sort of validation, in that hindcasting accuracy implies but doesn't inherently grant forecasting accuracy (for a good example, see hindcasts vs. forecasts of the intensity of hurricane seasons). But I will note that you didn't address at all that models are just a small part of climate science, and are really just used to provide specifics rather than the broad generalizations we can tell just from laboratory experiments and first-principles calculations.
Concerning the models: There's very little uncertainty associated with the models except on a few fields. Cloud formation being the major one, which generally necessitates the use of statistical models. GCR used to be a significant (related) unknown, but its significance has been downplayed by a number of recent papers and it's much better constrained now. Also the role of carbon black has been found to be higher than previously thought, and there have been some changes in our understanding of how arctic sea ice behaves (for the worse, sadly). And there's always more research being done on how important increasing granularity is. In general, however, the overwhelming majority of what goes on the simulations is pretty well constrained and understood.
Interesting link. Yes, it looks like you could build a vortex that way. But there's nothing in that paper that describes how you could draw off that energy into useful work.
The fans at the air inlets at the base that help initiate the vortex become generators, making use of the air that streams into the base of the vortex to generate power.
Thanks for the info on Mars, but you failed to mention any reasoning for the other planets warming such as Uranus, maybe Neptune's warming.
Because you didn't ask about them. Duh.
The only part of Uranus itself that is warming is its northern hemisphere. Its southern hemisphere is cooling. Why? Because it's becoming freaking spring on Uranus. This is the pathetic quality of denier "research".
Uranus's moon Triton is warming because it's entering its summertime. It's extremely sensitive to albedo variations. Comparing atmosphere-less or low-atmosphere bodies with no oceans to a body with an atmosphere and huge oceanic heat sink is ridiculous, because there's such a huge difference in thermal inertia, so small changes have greater effects on the former.
Neptune is also entering spring, and is experiencing the exact same thing as Uranus -- one hemisphere warming while the other cools.
I can tell by your line of argument that you believe in one of the dumbest denier lines -- the "solar output is increasing!" argument. Right. The sun is changing without us noticing it. The freaking sun, the most intensively studied object outside of Earth. We watch it from all over the surface, from satellites in orbit, from satellites at the Lagrange points -- but it's sneakily warming everything without us noticing! That tricksy sun!
Can you see how ridiculous that argument is?
There's an entire chapter in the IPCC report about solar variation, which cites the current research papers on solar output and its impact on Earth. Dozens of them. Please read them. Need links? If you'll actually read them, I'd be glad to dig them up for you.
Your statement of consensus of CO2 relating to Global Warming is such example. While CO2 may indeed be a contributing factor, you fail to mention that the factor may be as little as a fraction of a percent.
No, it is not. The forcing from CO2 within its confidence interval dwarfs all other forcings within their confidence intervals. The only one that comes close is methane.
If you keep water vapor in the picture, CO2 is finally in the strong single digits of a percentage of a greenhouse gas present in our atmosphere.
Water vapor makes up about 35-70% of the planet's greenhouse effect, depending on the time of year and weather. Water vapor causes both warming and cooling, as clouds increase the planet's albedo. Water vapor, however, is *not* forcing because it has a very short average atmospheric residency (days to weeks), while CO2 has an very long atmospheric residency (hundreds of years). If you took all of the water vapor out of the atmosphere, we'd be back to normal in just a couple months. In short, the average amount of water vapor-induced warming will always be a response to whatever *other* factors are forcing the climate (along with some random fluctuation -- we call that fluctuation "weather").
In the long term (hundreds of thousands of years), you see the exact same thing with CO2. On the order of hundreds of years, CO2 is forcing. But on the scale of hundreds of thousands of years, it averages out as just a response to other factors -- a feedback. For example, Milankovitch cycles drive Earth's glacial and interglacial periods. However, the amount of forcing they provide is significantly less than the temperature variations between glacials and interglacials. The rest is made up of feedbacks. The warm phase of Milankovitch cycles leads to increased emissions of CO2, amplifying their warming trends.
Another example someone gave was watts per meter. The Earth showed warming of about 1 watt per square meter.
Actually, about 2.4W/m^2, but let's go on.
If you want to picture them as little lightbulbs, picture them inside a vacuum-sealed cooler (our planet drifts in a vacuum).
When you stand next to a fire, do you feel warm because of the radiant energy, or the CO2 being created?
Horrible analogy, for several reasons.
1) Most of the e
Someone failed physics, but applied for a patent anyway.
Apparently tornadoes and hurricanes have failed physics, too.
Is there some efficiency to be gained by building a four square mile device over, say, 2560 one acre devices? Energy efficiency? Cost?
Yes. Yes.
Right! Because I'm sure they're going to import all of the raw materials from Australia and bring in a massive Australian construction force, right?
Does everything have to be 100% USA for you? Amerika Uber Alles?
these couldn't be built for a small fraction the price by using an atmospheric vortex engine instead of a tower.
For years I had been taught that Venus was blanketed in clouds of Sulphuric acid which also contributed to its greenhouse environment.
If you wrote that on a 7th grade science test, you'd fail.
There is a small amount of sulfuric acid on Venus which makes up part of its uppermost cloud layers, increasing the albedo (reflectivity) of the planet. Increasing the albedo means *more* reflection, meaning *less* light hits the planet, meaning *cooler* temperatures. Sulfuric acid *is* the prime cause of volcanic winter.
Venus's atmosphere is overwhelmingly CO2. This has been known for ages.
Get an education.
I am sure a CO2 answer is forthcoming on the current warming trend on Mars and other planets in the solar system
No, Mars had a small hemispheric warming trend due to its ice being covered by a planet-wide dust storm, lowering its albedo. The locations and intensity of the warming directly correspond to the albedo changes.
Sulfuric acid decreases albedo, lowering the radiative equilibrium. On Earth, we know it as "volcanic winter". Plus, there's not actually that much sulfuric acid on Venus.
You don't even know what code you're posting, do you?
****** APPLIES A VERY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION FOR DECLINE********* ...
Specify period over which to compute the regressions (stop in 1960 to avoid
; the decline
You don't even know what "the decline" is, do you?
This is where I started having a major issue with the global warming movement a long time ago. The SECOND you start picking out sites as unreliable, you are left with data points missing and every other weather station becomes human choice on whether its included in your modeling.
Please skip down several posts. It's not a manual process. It's a fully automated, peer-reviewed process that is validated in numerous ways.
Show us the CODE! Give us ALL the raw data, every last scrap, and let us see the code behind the models
The overwhelming majority of it IS available. Pick a random paper and I can with a high degree of confidence get you all of the code and data for it. There is a small amount of data, however, that is not publicly available. Most notably, meteorological data from a number of national meteorological agencies. It sucks, but they consider this proprietary. But it's hardly the scientists' fault that some national meteorological agencies won't make their data public.
How the hell can do do the "scientific method" on a planets climate!
Perhaps you should, you know, actually read the papers?
Models are not facts and they are not experiments.
Science doesn't deal in absolutes. But models absolutely are experiments. For example, you apply a climate model to data from the 1950s and see how well it forecasts what happens after that. And our earliest models are decades old now. If you want to see peer-reviewed analysis of earlier literature and how closely it matched its predictions, many of those have been published, too.
Contrary to popular belief, models are just a tiny fraction of climate science. And also contrary to popular belief, they largely trace back to first principles -- only a few things that are unusually hard to model, such as cloud formation, are based on statistical models. Models aren't used to see whether global warming will happen. They're used to get a good handle on what form it will take, how it will be distributed, what sort of effects it will carry with it on different regions (precipitation changes, etc), and so forth.
Papers on the major climate models probably number several dozen, perhaps a bit over a hundred if you count with a very broad brush. Out of the thousands of papers on climate science.
And for gods sake I am not allowed to publish "predictions/claims/etc" without the data i used to arrive at these claims, why should this be any different.
The overwhelming amount of data used in climate science *is* public. Name the sort of data you want and odds are I'll be able to give you a link to it. There is, however, a small amount that isn't, and any request that includes this data (even among other, public data) will be denied. This primarily comes from various national meteorological agencies who consider their data proprietary. That sucks, but it's anything but the scientists' faults that it's proprietary.
Now, some scientists such as Jones have used that to deliberately try to deny as many of the requests of these amateur deniers as possible -- but you need to understand where he was coming from. Jones used to respond to each and every FOI request (which the amatuer deniers have been making increasingly common, leading to a perception among many scientists that they're just trying to waste their time and money in responding to them). One of the requests he filled was to a day trader who fancied himself an amatuer "climate scientist". He found "error" in Jones' partner's work, and literally tried to get the FBI to arrest him. A university investigation cleared his partner of any and all wrongdoing, but after that, Jones tried to deny every amateur-denier FOI request he got, for any reason he could. And honestly, I can't blame him.
Ok, so here's another one. What are coral islands really? What's the carbon levels in the sea as well as atmosphere over the geological timescales corals have existed?
For God's sake, can't you look up basic facts before you ask stupid questions? The coral that makes up atolls is *young*; it doesn't last because of wave erosion. To pick a random example, Narau's surface corals date from 300,000 to 5,000,000 years old. The last time we had a major ocean acidification event was the PETM, 55.8 million years ago.
The corals are going nowhere
Coral response to pH is extremely well understood, and it's very negative. Warming of water is also extremely dangerous to corals, who live within very narrow temperature bands and are not mobile. Anyone who's ever had a reef tank is well aware of this. You can see this effect in the wild with calcium carbonate-shelled organisms living near volcanic vents.
As for "the corals are going nowhere", how profoundly ignorant of the plight of the world's corals can you be? Over half of the world's reefs have already completely disappeared or are rapidly declining. Most of this so far had been due to pollution and overexploitation, but an increasing percent is due to the warming and increasingly acidic waters, measurements of which routinely exceed what corals can withstand. They're incredibly delicate organisms. The extremely hot 2005 Gulf of Mexico waters that fueled Katrina and Rita, for example, caused such a massive die-off that they put the Elkhorn and Staghorn corals on the endangered species list.
Seriously, read about a topic before you post on it.
and no, the seas aren't going acidic either.
"Anthropogenic ocean acidication over
the twenty-rst century and its impact on calcifying organisms". Ocean pH has decreased by approximately 0.075 since the industrial revolution.
And look, this isn't the first time this has happened. The exact same thing happened 55.8 million years ago. It was devastating. It left the world such a different place that we give it a new era name. We don't want to recreate that.
Hmm.. a kids page or the World Health Organization, who to believe, who to believe....
Tip: Colder temperatures don't cause the *elimination* of malaria-carrying mosquito populations, but they do make them *less common*.
You clearly haven't kept up on the papers on sea level rise since the AR4 reports.
And where did I present a conspiracy theory?
The notion that the overwhelming majority of the world's climate scientists are lying for some nefarious reason sure fits the definition.
Also, isn't the vast majority of official temperatures all distributed by the same group in the UK that was proven to have manipulated the data?
Re, "manipulated": See my other reply, below. Nothing even remotely close to that occurred, and if you knew anything about the process in which the dataset was assembled rather than listening to Russian economic thinktanks, you'd know that.
Re, datasets: No. The CRU's is just one of the three most widely used datasets. NASA's and NOAA's are the other two. And there are a number of lesser-used datasets. And they're all assembled in different ways, and often from different data sources.
There's also documentation of the temperatures being collected in all sorts of places that don't fit the guidelines for where they should be placed - such as some that have been found placed directly under the vent from a buildings furnace.
Which is why you automatically eliminate bad stations, something you were just criticizing the CRU for doing, re. Russia.
But hey, why bother actually truly looking at the facts
I can tell you ascribe to that philosophy to a tee.
Go read a peer-reviewed paper. For once. Follow it with a few thousand more. Then come back here and talk.
Ah, I see you've been hitting the full "Amateur Denier Circuit". One by one!
1) oppressing scientists who disagree with them
By "oppressing", you mean "badmouthing them in -private- emails, and arguing against their papers (which they think are unsound) in public review". Contrast with, say, the Bush administration actively blocking global warming materials from being mentioned in reports and threatening to fire scientists who go public.
2) ignoring data that doesn't suit their agenda (such as ignoring 75% of the temperature recording stations in Russia)
Your "science" in this case comes from a Russian equivalent of the Heritage Foundation -- the Russian Institute of Economic Analysis. As with most amateurs, they don't know what the heck they're talking about (and failed to get several papers past peer review because of it).
Contrary to what most amateur deniers believe, the MET office's dataset is NOT simply an average of the readings of all land stations. Why? Because of precisely something that the deniers criticize the surface stations for -- they're not all good! In fact, some of them are run-down pieces of junk. Deniers love to post pictures of these, naively assuming that they're all just averaged in.
The process of building up a climate dataset from such sources has a number of steps. First off, you need to figure out just how closely temperatures are correlated over various distances. I.e., if you're in a heat wave in NYC, you're probably also in a heat wave in Philadelphia, but not necessarily in Los Angeles. Secondly, for each datapoint, you analyze that region with its correlation factor and look for discontinuities in your station record. You also look in abrupt changes in station readings to detect faults or changes in the station's surrounding that affect its accuracy or introduce various biases. Bad stations are either eliminated or detrended. Most importantly, this is all done in an automated manner.
After all of this, you do numerous studies to make sure that you're eliminating such errors properly. For example, one approach involves keeping a reference network of closely monitored stations in ideal conditions and comparing the results you get on the reference network to those you get on the broader network. Another involves comparing the results from windy days to those of calm days to see whether the data is being contaminated by the urban heat island effect (which varies with wind). And so forth.
In short, the elimination of a large number of stations is *part of the process*. But what you need to know is that it's done in a fully automated manner that has been subjected to extensive peer-review.
blatantly alter data to show the outcome they desire (such as the one scientist who's email showed that he added X amount to the recorded temperatures to show an upward trend)
You're referring to this:
"From: Phil Jones ,mann@xxxxx.xxx, mhughes@xxxx.xxx
To: ray bradley
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@xxx.xx.xx,t.osborn@xxxx.xxx
Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim's got a diagram here we'll send that either later today or
first thing tomorrow.
I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps
to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from
1961 for Keith's to hide the decline. Mike's series got the annual
land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land
N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999
for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with
data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
Thanks for the comments, Ray."
First off, check the date. You're arguing about something that's a *decade old*. Secondly, "Mike's nature trick" and "the decline" are about a dendrochronological anomaly in which the data series after 1961 deviated from the instrumental record. The