Yeah, and both Iraqis and Iranians just love us for doing that...
The last thing we need is to add *yet another* case of trying to dictate to them how their country is to be run to the laundry list of times we've done it before that hardliners repeatedly have used, successfully, to rally support to their side.
I loved Jon Stewart's comments last night. They played a montage of clips of pundits talking about how America is going to be perceived by the world based on what we do with Iran, what's America going to say, how's America going to promote the cause of the protesters, and so on -- who which he responded something to the effect of, "Because, of course, what's going on over there is all about us!"
It's not about us. It's about Iran. It's their election and their struggle for democracy. The biggest complaint held almost universally by Iranians is that we've meddled in their affairs for too damn long -- propping up the Shah, funding Iraq in a war against them, sponsoring MEK, and so forth. The last thing they want is the US government yet again trying to tell them how their society is to be run. That's a perfect recipe for the US to be a foil to the hardliners. Nothing will rally conservative forces in Iran more than the belief that the US is supporting a coup against them yet again.
On the other hand, support from *individual Americans*, that's completely different.
Your points are just plain WRONG. The US isn't the world, no
I'm glad to see you admit your error where you conflated warming in the US, which you accused of being false, with proving that AGW was wrong.
but it's one of the few countries that has been able to maintain almost continuous sensor coverage. Places like Russia/Western Europe (a vast expanse) just haven't
Russia has 35 stations that have been operational since 1961, many of them earlier. Spain, 9; Portugal, 3; France, 17; UK, 17. And so on. And these are just for self-monintoring, modern stations. Individual measurements have a far longer history. Written temperature records in the UK go all the way back to the 1600s.
The majority of temperature stations are in the US. A lot of those stations are cited in idiotic locations, vulnerable to the Urban Heat Island affect.
You *want* to know what the heat island effect is. Did you completely skip reading my post where I talked about detrending?
Secondly, the satellite temperature anomaly differs from the surface temperature anomaly and they only come into agreement via. "adjustment"
A complete misunderstanding of how the MSU dataset was assembled. It has to be adjusted because it's not all data from one satellite; it's a data from many different satellites, each with differences. *And* the data doesn't come as temperatures; it comes as radiance measurements, which have to be interpreted. Different algorithms have been used over the years to interpret the data. And lastly, we only care about the temperature for the lower troposphere when talking about warming trends, so the effects of the upper troposphere and stratosphere have to be mathematically removed. It's a very complex science, and has nothing to do with the notion you present of scientists looking at a satellite data reading and saying, "Let's move it a couple degrees to match what it says on the surface!" In some cases, ground readings are taken into account, but only to measure how the data gathered by the satellites corresponds to a known point or point on the surface, to better understand how to interpret the satellite data.
There's also radiosonde balloon data, but that's even more complicated than the satellite data.
For information about just how dodgy a lot of these temperature stations actually are, take a look at Surface Stations.
I already have an entire post on this thread busting that notion. I'm not going to repeat myself. Anyone who makes this argument has made it blatantly obvious that they have never once looked at surface station climate reconstruction methodologies.
Yes, it is well within the bounds of natural variation.
Completely and utterly false, as even a most cursory look at the data shows.
This is the process where so called Scientists massage the data to make it fit their pre-conceived ideas. For further information about "adjustment", I refer you to Climate Audit.... As I understand it, temperature records from Roman times are hard to come by. Dendro records have their own problems (climate audit has a very comprehensive review of the issues, if you care to look).
Peer review has a very comprehensive review of the issues, thank you very much. There are dozens of papers on this topic. Pointing people to a website of one of the couple dozen professional deniers (out of thousands who don't) is the antithesis of science.
Your idiotic graph stops in the year 1990. We've had 20 years of data since then.
20 years out of 1200 is essentially meaningless and would barely be visible on the graph. And the hottest years on record have been since 1990, so you're not helping your case.
Moreover, a large part of the increasing trend shown starts around 1900, so is obviously not man-made CO2 based.
The sort of idiot who knows that the "extensive study" you talk of is, to put it mildly, immature
And you know that from reading a whopping zero papers on the subject. Come back when you know what you're talking about.
Your view, that we know all we need to know already to make 50 year predictions, is idiotic.
That's just the tiniest fraction of the data used. Of course, no surprise that you'd make that argument, since you've read a whopping zero papers on the subject. Come back when you know what you're talking about.
Would you have the same confidence in an economic model as you have in these climate models?
Yes, if it had as much study and peer review behind it.
Oh yes it is, you're making the assumption that peer review is some guarantee of correctness.
I'm making the assumption that it's infinitely better than a slashdotter whose read no papers on the subject talking out their arse.
If you've read the Wegman report, you'll know what I'm talking about.
You mean a non-peer-reviewed report? Cute. Keep avoiding peer review. It shows what you think of science.
And, FYI, I have read it. And, FYI, fixing of the errors reported by the Wegman report doesn't change the shape of the reconstruction. And, FYI, that's about one single paper out of many thousands. Including many more on the exact same topic using different methodologies that reach the exact same conclusion (the most recent, for example, is "Proxy-based reconstructions of hemispheric and global surface temperature variations over the past two millennia"):
Following the suggestions of a recent National Research Council report [NRC (National Research Council) (2006) Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years (Natl Acad Press, Washington, DC).], we reconstruct surface temperature at hemispheric and global scale for much of the last 2,000 years using a greatly expanded set of proxy data for decadal-to-centennial climate changes, recently updated instrumental data, and complementary methods that have been thoroughly tested and validated with model simulation experiments. Our results extend previous conclusions that recent Northern Hemisphere surface temperature increases are likely anomalous in a long-term context. Recent warmth appears anomalous for at least the past 1,300 years whether or not tree-ring data are used. If tree-ring data are used, the conclusion can be extended to at least the past 1,700 years, but with additional strong caveats. The reconstructed amplitude of change over past centuries is greater than hitherto reported, with somewhat greater Medieval warmth in the Northern Hemisphere, albeit still not reaching recent levels.
But no surprise you'd conflate a single, now obsolete paper to somehow be the keystone of all of climate science. On, and one more FYI: if you read the original paper, it's actually all about the uncertainty levels at different points in time.
While we are often told about the "2,500 scientists" who contributed to the latest IPCC report, the vast majority of these contributors had no influence on the conclusions expressed by the IPCC and were not asked if they endorsed those conclusions
Would you like polls, then? How'sthis? According to polls, more climate scientists think the IPCC was too lax with their conclusions than too harsh, 97% of climate scientists say that temperatures have risen, and 97% think humans are responsible.
Its Summaries for Policymakers (SPM) are produced by a small group of scientists and are revised and agreed to, line-by-line, by representatives of member governments before they are made public (McKitrick 2007).
Given that almost ALL of the energy circulating in the oceans originates from the Sun, not the atmosphere, it's interesting that you don't raise an eyebrow at a significantly strong El Nino in 1998. I mean the oceans heat capacity is over 1,000 times that of the atmosphere, so I would suggest you have your cause and effect back to front (I could also say that about temperature preceeding CO2 rise, which is obvious from the record).
Once again, what sort of idiot would assume that the strength of El Nino's and La Nina's influence on the climate hasn't been extensively studied? Seriously! And not just ENSO, but other oscillations, such as the PDO. Even in the deep La Nina's we've been dealing with for the past two years we've been in the top 10 hottest years in recorded history. It's easily removed white noise on top of the signal. Its effects are trivially calculable and it broadcasts itself quite visibly when it happens.
especially loving the arguments from authority
Argument from peer review is not argument from authority. It's argument from science. Try it some time instead of just making sh*t up.
They have a much broader perspective on what we sceptics call, "Natural Variation"
Which you'd be aware has been *extensively* studied, literally thousands of papers, had you actually read the IPCC reports.
It's also interesting to note that the "blatantly obvious signal", is not a signal of anthropogenic climate change, it's a signal of some (very small) increase in temperature, well within the bounds of natural variation.
Far outside the bounds of natural variation. Which again, you'd know if you actually read peer-reviewed science. And the strength of all major forcings for the temperature trends have been well quantified, and the anthropogenic factors are far greater than the natural factors. If you disagree, you've got hundreds of papers to refute, so start busting your arse.
Given that the met office has just installed a computer system that uses around 1.2mw of electricity (enough to power a small town) and that its models failed to predict the temperature trend post 1998 to present day
The scientifically illiterate deniers, having never actually read a paper on their subject to save their life, often just latch on to the median of the range and act like it's supposed to tell them exactly how hot it's supposed to be at any point in time. Which is ridiculous; that's never going to happen. There's always going to be noise in the signal. But the signal itself will always remain.
The worst about this are people like Monckton who I can only conclude are *deliberately* trying to sow confusion on this by taking a starting point, taking a long-term projection, drawing a line from the start to the end -- *leaving out the curve* -- and then literally making up a fake confidence interval.
Good lord, what a load of rubbish. The surface temperature, mostly measured in the USA (as it has by far the majority of sensors), mostly with stations cited next to air conditioning units, tarmack and barbeque's, surrounding by half a century of urban growth, has shown a small increase
Three major fallacies in one sentence -- good job!
1) The US is not the world. The US has been warming slower than the rest of the world. 2) Surface stations are only one method of measuring the planet's temperature. 3) If you knew anything about how surface station temperature measurements are used, you'd know that this is already compensated for *and* validated. First off, each individual station is de-trended. This means looking for periods where it goes out of whack with other stations in its area. So, for example, someone puts an exhaust fan up near a station, its temperature spikes, and it is detrended to compensate for the artificial input or removed from collection entirely if a statistical analysis shows that its data is no longer useful. City stations are compared with rural stations to determine the urban heat island effect, and this is removed. The removal of the urban heat island effect is validated by comparing data on windy days with data on calm days, since windy days reduce the heat island effect by bringing in rural air faster. The validation checks out almost flawlessly. The detrended urban station data is compared with the rural data and the results must coincide; they do. Surface station temperature trends for specific regions are compared with satellite data readings for the same regions; the strength of artificial heat sources is validated. And about twenty other validation and detrending steps.
What, you thought they just dumped the raw data from all stations and averaged them out? Perhaps if you actually read papers on the subject you wouldn't be so ignorant.
An increase, I have to say, well within the bounds of natural variation
It just so happens that I'm reading a book right now called, "Irrationality" - there is a chapter in it for the Warmists. It's called: Distorting the evidence.
Well, good to know that you keep up on climate science by reading a book by a psychiatrist! If you'll excuse me, I need to go take a class on biology taught by a carpenter and then get a patent prepared by a stonemason.
It wasn't a cite. It was "don't make me have to explain everything about it" insta-link. I didn't want to have to spend a long time digging up a better backgrounder.
You can tell that I didn't spend a lot of time on it because apparently I linked to a redirect.
I corrected my post on the billion / trillion issue, but not soon enough, I see. But either way, the point still remains. There's no way the Earth supported 50 million saurupods, much less 50 million Apatosaurus.
If you eat plant matter, you produce methane, I have seen nothing to ever dispute this.
I eat plant matter. I produce a tiny fraction as much methane as a ruminant of the same mass. Ruminants produce so much methane because they have an anerobic digestion process.
150 million years ago there were tens of thousands of Apatosaurus and other very large ruminants. World wide, there would have been millions more.
1) Apatosaurus was not a ruminant, that much is known. They weren't even mammals, much less Artiodactyla. 2) Ruminants didn't even exist at the time. Heck, *mammals* didn't even exist at the time. 3) We don't know how many there were in the US -- only that they weren't being fed mass-produced intensive selectively-bred fertilizer-pumped weed-suppressed grain in massive, efficient feedlots after millenia of animal husbandry. 4) Why on Earth would you expect scaling up from "tens of thousands" in North America (16.5% of the world's land mass currently) to "millions" worldwide?
Not a dumb question at all!:) You brought up one of the biggest misunderstandings of physics that is the basis for innumerable perpetual motion/free energy scams: the concept of heat as energy.
Yes, heat *is* energy. But you can't harvest it directly; you can only harvest heat from differences in temperature. Why? Entropy. A hot material is more "disordered" than a cold material. Hence, you harvest energy from heat alone, sure, you wouldn't be violating enthalpy, but you would be violating entropy. Entropy must always increase. Now, if you have a hot reservoir and a cold reservoir, you can harvest some energy from heat, so long as you increase the entropy of the cold reservoir more than the hot reservoir lost.
If this law of the universe didn't exist, perpetual motion would be possible. Picture a closed system where you have a "heat harvester" that produces electricity without a cold reservoir, surrounded by a working fluid. It then runs some electrical appliance. The waste heat from the electrical appliance goes back into the working fluid, where it's harnessed again to make more electricity by the "heat harvester". Ad infinitum. Perpetual motion. And entropy forbids it.
if you sound the alarm bell, you get press and you get funding.
Just the opposite. Any scientist willing to deny global warming has an automatic lucrative job lined up for them in the oil, gas, and coal industries. Period. And extensive press coverage to boot. There are about two dozen (out of the world's several thousand professional climatologists) who deny global warming. They get almost as much coverage as the rest of them combined.
You don't make a name for yourself in the scientific community by simply repeating what others have said; you make a name for yourself by saying the opposite. And frankly, I'm sick and tired of every scientist in the world being accused of caring more about grants than funding, and the notion that the world's peer-review processes are a giant conspiracy.
i believe global warming is a real force and we need to do something about it. but i'm hard pressed to worry about corals disappearing in an acid ocean on any time scale that is supposed to mean something
Read about the PETM. It's happened before. We're doing it again.
And again, it doesn't matter what you *believe*; it matters what peer-reviewed science says. It's not a matter of belief. It's a matter of empirical data. We have models, field data, lab data, and historical data all saying the exact same thing about ocean acidification. You can deny it until you're blue in the face, but that won't change the facts.
Ack, sorry -- it's 2 billion cattle, not trillion. Either way, though -- cattle aren't the only ruminants, there weren't an equivalent number of sauropods, and the only reason we can support as many as we do is modern high-density agriculture.
Wow. Your source is Bob Carter, one of about two dozen (out of the world's several thousand professional climatologists) who is a public skeptic. And actually, he's not really a climatologist; he's a paleonolotist -- but don't let that stop you.
FYI: 1998 was one of the strongest El Nino events in modern history. El Nino raises the atmosphere's temperature by slowing the upwelling of deep, cold water in the eastern pacific. La Nina cools it by just the opposite. It doesn't change the long-term picture, of course; the rate at which water cycles in the ocean has no bearing on how much total heat input there is into the system; ocean waters aren't magically decoupled from the rest of our atmosphere. It's just a source of white noise on top of the blatantly obvious signal.
But don't let that stop you deniers from picking it as your starting point.
And, also FYI: only one of the three major global climate databases lists 1998 as the hottest. The other two list 2005 (they were close). But again, don't let that stop you.
As I understand it, methane is a bigger problem them CO2
You understand wrong. It is a large problem, but CO2 is larger by over threefold.
They tell us to not fart anymore.
Who, your roomate? Certainly not the scientific community. Most animal-based methane emissions come from ruminants. And not from "farting", but "belching" (the initial breakdown occurs in the rumen, and the bolus moves back and forth between the mouth and the rumen). "Farting" isn't even the second leading cause of ruminant methane emissions -- that goes to manure decomposition.
Livestock-sourced methane is only one significant anthropogenic component. Others include rice agriculture, peatland/wetlands development, the oil and gas industry, landfills, and biomass burning. Other significant human-sourced methane emissions, including ruminant raising, are nearly double those of natural emissions. Ruminants may be the largest single anthropogenic component, but they're less than a sixth of total human-sourced methane emissions.
And yet, when those monster Apatosaurus, including the popular, but obsolete synonym Brontosaurus roamed the earth. I dare say one herd/tribe/pod produced a much methane as all the cattle that currently populate the earth.
Little is known that could lead one to draw any conclusions about the large sauropods in terms of methane emissions. They weren't ruminants, although they did eat large quantities of plant matter. We don't know their herd size, and haven't even conclusively shown that herding behavior was significant for them. And more importantly, we don't know their total worldwide population. However, as large herbivores, one thing can be certain: they didn't have a particularly high global population density. It just wouldn't support them.
There are approximately 1 trillion cattle worldwide. This is just cattle -- not counting other ruminants. These average about 1.5 tons at adulthood. An adult apatosaurus is estimated to weigh about 30 tons. If we assume a weight equivalence, that's the equivalent of 50 billion apatosaurus. It is extremely unlikely that there were that many apatosaurus -- or even total sauropods. We support this much cattle mass cattle via modern intensive agriculture and research.
Furthermore, your notion is based on a premise -- that either the atmosphere is static or it's always changing harmlessly. But that's not the reality. The atmosphere has changed dramatically over history. Generally these changes are very slow; that's not a problem. It's when changes are rapid that there are problems. The last atmospheric change similar to what we're forcing nowadays was the PETM (Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum). The causes are still unknown, but one thing is known: over the course of hundreds or thousands of years (the blink of an eye by geologic standards), there was a CO2 and heat spike. This triggered a methane spike, which amplified the heat spike. The total warming input was approximately what we'll have locked in to if we continue the "business as usual" scenario through 2100. The results were dramatic and catastrophic. Entire ocean currents shifted. The climates of regions across the planet dramatically altered. Forests became plains became deserts became forests. The ocean became acidic, and most of the world's corals and carbonate-shelled plankton died, causing a massive upheaval in the oceanic food chains. The planet was left such a changed place that we give it a different name -- the Eocene.
Now, my question to you is this: do you really want to create the Anthropocene?
what is major component of this buffer? us. living critters and how they react to an increase in CO2
Wow! Amazing that all of those egghead boffins living in their ivory towers with their hoity-toity "science" missed that one! Thank you so much for pointing it out!
Except for the fact that most ocean life is not primarily constrained by CO2, but nutrients, especially iron. Whoops.
I never ceased to be amazed at people who insist that something must be wrong with the science on a subject when they haven't done even the most rudimentary amount to educate themselves on what the science of the subject actually is. You could at least start by reading the relevant sections of the IPCC technical reports to see what actually has been studied and how. I guarantee you, it's way, way more than you ever expected.
There's a reason why people go to college for years to get a degree in these fields. This isn't high school baking-soda-and-vinegar-volcanoes here. It's an incredibly complex science that you need a solid background in. At least spend a week reading peer-reviewed papers on the subject before you put fingers to keyboard. You're coming across like if someone who had never used a computer started talking about how programmers should make every piece of software be run by voice commands in spoken English sentences like "Could you open up the letter to my grandmother and edit out the part where I told her about my chihuahua?", and have the software figure out what you want it to do. You're broadcasting ignorance on the topic like a beacon.
Do these climate models take into account the fact that Volcanoes erupt from time to time, spewings tons of ash into the atmosphere, which reflects sunlight, and thereby cools the earth?
Yes. And it's not the ash that primarily reflects the sunlight; it's the SOx. And the cooling is only temporary. And volcanoes also emit CO2. But a small fraction as much as humans release.
The paper talked about optical, infrared, *and* radio telescopes. Most of the discussion was about scopes in general -- thermal deformation, gravity deformation, field of view, difficulty of aiming, etc -- things which you refuse to comment on. You've also refused to comment on the insidious nature of moon dust on machinery and the moon's ionosphere.
And no, it did not say that the *only* free-space alternative is to send a scope far away; it said that was a possibility.. And what is wrong with spacecraft going far from Earth anyway? Do you have a problem with SOHO? WMAP? ACE, WIND, Genesis, ISSE, SMART-1, STEREO, New Horizons, Planck, Herschel, Gaia, and James Webb? And that's just some sitting in Lagrange points, which there's no requirement for such a spacecraft to do. It's certainly no worse sending a spacecraft far away than having to have a communications relay constellation around the moon.
Counterpoint all you want, but look at how Japanese, Chinese and French auto- and battery makers are flocking to Bolivia to get a hold of their lithium salt fields. ( google news, bolivia, lithium )
What, you think they'd rather get lithium for $25/kg from seawater than $5/kg from Bolivian brines? Duh they're going to go for the cheapest sources first.;) The issue is not where it's cheapest; the issue is whether prices could ever rise high enough to make li-ion batteries unrealistic. And the answer to that is a resounding no.
Well pardon the pun as well, but maintenance will be possible remotely.
So you think NASA sends billion dollar service missions to Hubble for the fun of it? You think they put the ISS crew's lives on the lines with spacewalks because they get a kick out of it?
Note as well that a kilogram of solar cells is a lot of surface
Space-rated solar panels produce about 300W/kg. Not a lot. Even if you 10x it, that's nowhere close to enough. And the bigger you make it, the more you increase your other problems, like stationkeeping.
that micrometeorite and radiation damage are on par with desert storms
Absolutely not! You've clearly never looked at studies on degradation of solar arrays in space.
a huge advantage of an orbit-based power plant is its ability to bring energy to even very remote locations
That was the very first widespread use of *ground based* solar panels on Earth. Powering remote transmitters and the like.
Right now, the Sahara is big enough for Earth's consumption, but if it is to grow one hundred fold (hey, China is coming and they are building electric cars) the Sahara will begin to be too small.
No, it won't. First, the last number I saw stated that 0.3% of the Sahara could power all of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Second, nobody is forecasting even remotely close to 100-fold power consumption growth, ever. Third, the more you expand modern human settlement, the more rooftop, parking lot, and road surface you create, all of which can support solar. And fourth, even if all of our vehicles were electric, it'd only increase our total generation by about a third.
It concluded that if the flow rate of sea water were equivilient to the amount of world wide oil production
Why on Earth would you make that ridiculous assumption? The flow rate of oil is to the flow rate of the world's oceans as a bacteria is to a blue whale.
They're setting up a straw man. Nobody is proposing to process lithium via oil refineries. Here's a random example for you: a first generation seawater lithium extraction process that costs $22-$32/kg of lithium (versus $5-8/kg lithium carbonate from conventional sources). A li-ion battery pack generally uses 1-2kg of lithium carbonate per kWh, and currently costs about $500 per kWh. Do the math.
This is just one of many approaches (evaporation ponds). Others include a technique used for uranium seawater extraction, where you make thin strands of plastics which preferentially bond with the ion of choice, dangle them in ocean currents, then collect them months later, extract the ion, and return them to the sea, in a continuous rotating process. And I'm sure there are more that I haven't read about.
And anyway, L2 is unstable and requires constant station keeping.
Minimal.
they don't ever drift apart from each other
Flying in formation is a solved problem.
The moon is a big hunk of rock.
Comprising a gravity well covered in nasty electrostatic dust and exerting a force on any structures, requiring them to have dramatically greater structural integrity.
Plus, the lunar far side is also blocked from the Sun for two solid weeks at a time, which also eliminates another big source of radio noise.
This can also be a bad thing for a lunar telescope, as it's going to dramatically change it's temperature over the course of a lunar month, altering its shape. Which is a huge problem. Also, the moon has a (tenous) ionosphere, and even "aurora"-like phenomena from electrostatically levitated dust.
Here's some dudes at Caltech laying out the arguments
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, and both Iraqis and Iranians just love us for doing that...
The last thing we need is to add *yet another* case of trying to dictate to them how their country is to be run to the laundry list of times we've done it before that hardliners repeatedly have used, successfully, to rally support to their side.
I loved Jon Stewart's comments last night. They played a montage of clips of pundits talking about how America is going to be perceived by the world based on what we do with Iran, what's America going to say, how's America going to promote the cause of the protesters, and so on -- who which he responded something to the effect of, "Because, of course, what's going on over there is all about us!"
It's not about us. It's about Iran. It's their election and their struggle for democracy. The biggest complaint held almost universally by Iranians is that we've meddled in their affairs for too damn long -- propping up the Shah, funding Iraq in a war against them, sponsoring MEK, and so forth. The last thing they want is the US government yet again trying to tell them how their society is to be run. That's a perfect recipe for the US to be a foil to the hardliners. Nothing will rally conservative forces in Iran more than the belief that the US is supporting a coup against them yet again.
On the other hand, support from *individual Americans*, that's completely different.
Your points are just plain WRONG. The US isn't the world, no
I'm glad to see you admit your error where you conflated warming in the US, which you accused of being false, with proving that AGW was wrong.
but it's one of the few countries that has been able to maintain almost continuous sensor coverage. Places like Russia/Western Europe (a vast expanse) just haven't
Russia has 35 stations that have been operational since 1961, many of them earlier. Spain, 9; Portugal, 3; France, 17; UK, 17. And so on. And these are just for self-monintoring, modern stations. Individual measurements have a far longer history. Written temperature records in the UK go all the way back to the 1600s.
The majority of temperature stations are in the US. A lot of those stations are cited in idiotic locations, vulnerable to the Urban Heat Island affect.
You *want* to know what the heat island effect is. Did you completely skip reading my post where I talked about detrending?
Secondly, the satellite temperature anomaly differs from the surface temperature anomaly and they only come into agreement via. "adjustment"
A complete misunderstanding of how the MSU dataset was assembled. It has to be adjusted because it's not all data from one satellite; it's a data from many different satellites, each with differences. *And* the data doesn't come as temperatures; it comes as radiance measurements, which have to be interpreted. Different algorithms have been used over the years to interpret the data. And lastly, we only care about the temperature for the lower troposphere when talking about warming trends, so the effects of the upper troposphere and stratosphere have to be mathematically removed. It's a very complex science, and has nothing to do with the notion you present of scientists looking at a satellite data reading and saying, "Let's move it a couple degrees to match what it says on the surface!" In some cases, ground readings are taken into account, but only to measure how the data gathered by the satellites corresponds to a known point or point on the surface, to better understand how to interpret the satellite data.
There's also radiosonde balloon data, but that's even more complicated than the satellite data.
For information about just how dodgy a lot of these temperature stations actually are, take a look at Surface Stations.
I already have an entire post on this thread busting that notion. I'm not going to repeat myself. Anyone who makes this argument has made it blatantly obvious that they have never once looked at surface station climate reconstruction methodologies.
Yes, it is well within the bounds of natural variation.
Completely and utterly false, as even a most cursory look at the data shows.
This is the process where so called Scientists massage the data to make it fit their pre-conceived ideas. For further information about "adjustment", I refer you to Climate Audit. ... As I understand it, temperature records from Roman times are hard to come by. Dendro records have their own problems (climate audit has a very comprehensive review of the issues, if you care to look).
Peer review has a very comprehensive review of the issues, thank you very much. There are dozens of papers on this topic. Pointing people to a website of one of the couple dozen professional deniers (out of thousands who don't) is the antithesis of science.
Your idiotic graph stops in the year 1990. We've had 20 years of data since then.
20 years out of 1200 is essentially meaningless and would barely be visible on the graph. And the hottest years on record have been since 1990, so you're not helping your case.
Moreover, a large part of the increasing trend shown starts around 1900, so is obviously not man-made CO2 based.
Huh? You are awa
The sort of idiot who knows that the "extensive study" you talk of is, to put it mildly, immature
And you know that from reading a whopping zero papers on the subject. Come back when you know what you're talking about.
Your view, that we know all we need to know already to make 50 year predictions, is idiotic.
That's just the tiniest fraction of the data used. Of course, no surprise that you'd make that argument, since you've read a whopping zero papers on the subject. Come back when you know what you're talking about.
Would you have the same confidence in an economic model as you have in these climate models?
Yes, if it had as much study and peer review behind it.
Oh yes it is, you're making the assumption that peer review is some guarantee of correctness.
I'm making the assumption that it's infinitely better than a slashdotter whose read no papers on the subject talking out their arse.
If you've read the Wegman report, you'll know what I'm talking about.
You mean a non-peer-reviewed report? Cute. Keep avoiding peer review. It shows what you think of science.
And, FYI, I have read it. And, FYI, fixing of the errors reported by the Wegman report doesn't change the shape of the reconstruction. And, FYI, that's about one single paper out of many thousands. Including many more on the exact same topic using different methodologies that reach the exact same conclusion (the most recent, for example, is "Proxy-based reconstructions of hemispheric and global surface temperature variations over the past two millennia"):
Following the suggestions of a recent National Research Council report [NRC (National Research Council) (2006) Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years (Natl Acad Press, Washington, DC).], we reconstruct surface temperature at hemispheric and global scale for much of the last 2,000 years using a greatly expanded set of proxy data for decadal-to-centennial climate changes, recently updated instrumental data, and complementary methods that have been thoroughly tested and validated with model simulation experiments. Our results extend previous conclusions that recent Northern Hemisphere surface temperature increases are likely anomalous in a long-term context. Recent warmth appears anomalous for at least the past 1,300 years whether or not tree-ring data are used. If tree-ring data are used, the conclusion can be extended to at least the past 1,700 years, but with additional strong caveats. The reconstructed amplitude of change over past centuries is greater than hitherto reported, with somewhat greater Medieval warmth in the Northern Hemisphere, albeit still not reaching recent levels.
But no surprise you'd conflate a single, now obsolete paper to somehow be the keystone of all of climate science. On, and one more FYI: if you read the original paper, it's actually all about the uncertainty levels at different points in time.
While we are often told about the "2,500 scientists" who contributed to the latest IPCC report, the vast majority of these contributors had no influence on the conclusions expressed by the IPCC and were not asked if they endorsed those conclusions
Would you like polls, then? How's this? According to polls, more climate scientists think the IPCC was too lax with their conclusions than too harsh, 97% of climate scientists say that temperatures have risen, and 97% think humans are responsible.
Its Summaries for Policymakers (SPM) are produced by a small group of scientists and are revised and agreed to, line-by-line, by representatives of member governments before they are made public (McKitrick 2007).
You know, you could at least not
Given that almost ALL of the energy circulating in the oceans originates from the Sun, not the atmosphere, it's interesting that you don't raise an eyebrow at a significantly strong El Nino in 1998. I mean the oceans heat capacity is over 1,000 times that of the atmosphere, so I would suggest you have your cause and effect back to front (I could also say that about temperature preceeding CO2 rise, which is obvious from the record).
Once again, what sort of idiot would assume that the strength of El Nino's and La Nina's influence on the climate hasn't been extensively studied? Seriously! And not just ENSO, but other oscillations, such as the PDO. Even in the deep La Nina's we've been dealing with for the past two years we've been in the top 10 hottest years in recorded history. It's easily removed white noise on top of the signal. Its effects are trivially calculable and it broadcasts itself quite visibly when it happens.
especially loving the arguments from authority
Argument from peer review is not argument from authority. It's argument from science. Try it some time instead of just making sh*t up.
They have a much broader perspective on what we sceptics call, "Natural Variation"
Which you'd be aware has been *extensively* studied, literally thousands of papers, had you actually read the IPCC reports.
It's also interesting to note that the "blatantly obvious signal", is not a signal of anthropogenic climate change, it's a signal of some (very small) increase in temperature, well within the bounds of natural variation.
Far outside the bounds of natural variation. Which again, you'd know if you actually read peer-reviewed science. And the strength of all major forcings for the temperature trends have been well quantified, and the anthropogenic factors are far greater than the natural factors. If you disagree, you've got hundreds of papers to refute, so start busting your arse.
Given that the met office has just installed a computer system that uses around 1.2mw of electricity (enough to power a small town) and that its models failed to predict the temperature trend post 1998 to present day
Actually, it did. I don't have a graph for you starting at 1998, but I have one for you starting at 2002, if you're interested: . I point this out to you to show you that big gray area around the line. See that? That's the 95% confidence interval on their forecasts. See how almost all of this random noise falls within it? The models aren't designed to predict the noise; they're designed to predict the trends. It's like weather forecasting. We can only predict the weather a few days in advance before the "noise" (the weather) becomes dominant. But we can still tell farmers quite accurately whether a certain region will be dryer or wetter than usual and by how much, hotter or cooler than usual and by how much, and so forth. The long range projections can't tell you when an individual front will be passing, but they can quite reliably estimate how many total fronts will cross, how much rain they'll dump, etc. This is known as "convergence". Convergence is a statistically verifiable phenomenon.
The scientifically illiterate deniers, having never actually read a paper on their subject to save their life, often just latch on to the median of the range and act like it's supposed to tell them exactly how hot it's supposed to be at any point in time. Which is ridiculous; that's never going to happen. There's always going to be noise in the signal. But the signal itself will always remain.
The worst about this are people like Monckton who I can only conclude are *deliberately* trying to sow confusion on this by taking a starting point, taking a long-term projection, drawing a line from the start to the end -- *leaving out the curve* -- and then literally making up a fake confidence interval.
If you want to see the forecast confidence i
Why do people post "corrections" without bothering to look for whether the author already corrected their post? Several times?
BTW I was in a Physics department that didn't side with the press on this one. We all have different jobs now.
Back it up or it didn't happen.
None of us received a dime from the oil industry nor got new jobs in the oil industry.
Then you weren't looking. Exxon, for example, has an outstanding offer to pay scientists to publish papers against global warming.
Good lord, what a load of rubbish. The surface temperature, mostly measured in the USA (as it has by far the majority of sensors), mostly with stations cited next to air conditioning units, tarmack and barbeque's, surrounding by half a century of urban growth, has shown a small increase
Three major fallacies in one sentence -- good job!
1) The US is not the world. The US has been warming slower than the rest of the world.
2) Surface stations are only one method of measuring the planet's temperature.
3) If you knew anything about how surface station temperature measurements are used, you'd know that this is already compensated for *and* validated. First off, each individual station is de-trended. This means looking for periods where it goes out of whack with other stations in its area. So, for example, someone puts an exhaust fan up near a station, its temperature spikes, and it is detrended to compensate for the artificial input or removed from collection entirely if a statistical analysis shows that its data is no longer useful. City stations are compared with rural stations to determine the urban heat island effect, and this is removed. The removal of the urban heat island effect is validated by comparing data on windy days with data on calm days, since windy days reduce the heat island effect by bringing in rural air faster. The validation checks out almost flawlessly. The detrended urban station data is compared with the rural data and the results must coincide; they do. Surface station temperature trends for specific regions are compared with satellite data readings for the same regions; the strength of artificial heat sources is validated. And about twenty other validation and detrending steps.
What, you thought they just dumped the raw data from all stations and averaged them out? Perhaps if you actually read papers on the subject you wouldn't be so ignorant.
An increase, I have to say, well within the bounds of natural variation
No.
It just so happens that I'm reading a book right now called, "Irrationality" - there is a chapter in it for the Warmists. It's called: Distorting the evidence.
Well, good to know that you keep up on climate science by reading a book by a psychiatrist! If you'll excuse me, I need to go take a class on biology taught by a carpenter and then get a patent prepared by a stonemason.
Or have made a typo that I corrected above.
It wasn't a cite. It was "don't make me have to explain everything about it" insta-link. I didn't want to have to spend a long time digging up a better backgrounder.
You can tell that I didn't spend a lot of time on it because apparently I linked to a redirect.
Ack, again, I should proofread better: "because they have an anerobic fermentation process". :P
I corrected my post on the billion / trillion issue, but not soon enough, I see. But either way, the point still remains. There's no way the Earth supported 50 million saurupods, much less 50 million Apatosaurus.
If you eat plant matter, you produce methane, I have seen nothing to ever dispute this.
I eat plant matter. I produce a tiny fraction as much methane as a ruminant of the same mass. Ruminants produce so much methane because they have an anerobic digestion process.
150 million years ago there were tens of thousands of Apatosaurus and other very large ruminants. World wide, there would have been millions more.
1) Apatosaurus was not a ruminant, that much is known. They weren't even mammals, much less Artiodactyla.
2) Ruminants didn't even exist at the time. Heck, *mammals* didn't even exist at the time.
3) We don't know how many there were in the US -- only that they weren't being fed mass-produced intensive selectively-bred fertilizer-pumped weed-suppressed grain in massive, efficient feedlots after millenia of animal husbandry.
4) Why on Earth would you expect scaling up from "tens of thousands" in North America (16.5% of the world's land mass currently) to "millions" worldwide?
Why can't my car use it?
Not a dumb question at all! :) You brought up one of the biggest misunderstandings of physics that is the basis for innumerable perpetual motion/free energy scams: the concept of heat as energy.
Yes, heat *is* energy. But you can't harvest it directly; you can only harvest heat from differences in temperature. Why? Entropy. A hot material is more "disordered" than a cold material. Hence, you harvest energy from heat alone, sure, you wouldn't be violating enthalpy, but you would be violating entropy. Entropy must always increase. Now, if you have a hot reservoir and a cold reservoir, you can harvest some energy from heat, so long as you increase the entropy of the cold reservoir more than the hot reservoir lost.
If this law of the universe didn't exist, perpetual motion would be possible. Picture a closed system where you have a "heat harvester" that produces electricity without a cold reservoir, surrounded by a working fluid. It then runs some electrical appliance. The waste heat from the electrical appliance goes back into the working fluid, where it's harnessed again to make more electricity by the "heat harvester". Ad infinitum. Perpetual motion. And entropy forbids it.
if you sound the alarm bell, you get press and you get funding.
Just the opposite. Any scientist willing to deny global warming has an automatic lucrative job lined up for them in the oil, gas, and coal industries. Period. And extensive press coverage to boot. There are about two dozen (out of the world's several thousand professional climatologists) who deny global warming. They get almost as much coverage as the rest of them combined.
You don't make a name for yourself in the scientific community by simply repeating what others have said; you make a name for yourself by saying the opposite. And frankly, I'm sick and tired of every scientist in the world being accused of caring more about grants than funding, and the notion that the world's peer-review processes are a giant conspiracy.
i believe global warming is a real force and we need to do something about it. but i'm hard pressed to worry about corals disappearing in an acid ocean on any time scale that is supposed to mean something
Read about the PETM. It's happened before. We're doing it again.
And again, it doesn't matter what you *believe*; it matters what peer-reviewed science says. It's not a matter of belief. It's a matter of empirical data. We have models, field data, lab data, and historical data all saying the exact same thing about ocean acidification. You can deny it until you're blue in the face, but that won't change the facts.
Ack, sorry -- it's 2 billion cattle, not trillion. Either way, though -- cattle aren't the only ruminants, there weren't an equivalent number of sauropods, and the only reason we can support as many as we do is modern high-density agriculture.
Wow. Your source is Bob Carter, one of about two dozen (out of the world's several thousand professional climatologists) who is a public skeptic. And actually, he's not really a climatologist; he's a paleonolotist -- but don't let that stop you.
FYI: 1998 was one of the strongest El Nino events in modern history. El Nino raises the atmosphere's temperature by slowing the upwelling of deep, cold water in the eastern pacific. La Nina cools it by just the opposite. It doesn't change the long-term picture, of course; the rate at which water cycles in the ocean has no bearing on how much total heat input there is into the system; ocean waters aren't magically decoupled from the rest of our atmosphere. It's just a source of white noise on top of the blatantly obvious signal.
But don't let that stop you deniers from picking it as your starting point.
And, also FYI: only one of the three major global climate databases lists 1998 as the hottest. The other two list 2005 (they were close). But again, don't let that stop you.
As I understand it, methane is a bigger problem them CO2
You understand wrong. It is a large problem, but CO2 is larger by over threefold.
They tell us to not fart anymore.
Who, your roomate? Certainly not the scientific community. Most animal-based methane emissions come from ruminants. And not from "farting", but "belching" (the initial breakdown occurs in the rumen, and the bolus moves back and forth between the mouth and the rumen). "Farting" isn't even the second leading cause of ruminant methane emissions -- that goes to manure decomposition.
Livestock-sourced methane is only one significant anthropogenic component. Others include rice agriculture, peatland/wetlands development, the oil and gas industry, landfills, and biomass burning. Other significant human-sourced methane emissions, including ruminant raising, are nearly double those of natural emissions. Ruminants may be the largest single anthropogenic component, but they're less than a sixth of total human-sourced methane emissions.
And yet, when those monster Apatosaurus, including the popular, but obsolete synonym Brontosaurus roamed the earth. I dare say one herd/tribe/pod produced a much methane as all the cattle that currently populate the earth.
Little is known that could lead one to draw any conclusions about the large sauropods in terms of methane emissions. They weren't ruminants, although they did eat large quantities of plant matter. We don't know their herd size, and haven't even conclusively shown that herding behavior was significant for them. And more importantly, we don't know their total worldwide population. However, as large herbivores, one thing can be certain: they didn't have a particularly high global population density. It just wouldn't support them.
There are approximately 1 trillion cattle worldwide. This is just cattle -- not counting other ruminants. These average about 1.5 tons at adulthood. An adult apatosaurus is estimated to weigh about 30 tons. If we assume a weight equivalence, that's the equivalent of 50 billion apatosaurus. It is extremely unlikely that there were that many apatosaurus -- or even total sauropods. We support this much cattle mass cattle via modern intensive agriculture and research.
Furthermore, your notion is based on a premise -- that either the atmosphere is static or it's always changing harmlessly. But that's not the reality. The atmosphere has changed dramatically over history. Generally these changes are very slow; that's not a problem. It's when changes are rapid that there are problems. The last atmospheric change similar to what we're forcing nowadays was the PETM (Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum). The causes are still unknown, but one thing is known: over the course of hundreds or thousands of years (the blink of an eye by geologic standards), there was a CO2 and heat spike. This triggered a methane spike, which amplified the heat spike. The total warming input was approximately what we'll have locked in to if we continue the "business as usual" scenario through 2100. The results were dramatic and catastrophic. Entire ocean currents shifted. The climates of regions across the planet dramatically altered. Forests became plains became deserts became forests. The ocean became acidic, and most of the world's corals and carbonate-shelled plankton died, causing a massive upheaval in the oceanic food chains. The planet was left such a changed place that we give it a different name -- the Eocene.
Now, my question to you is this: do you really want to create the Anthropocene?
Thank you for so hilariously summing up the deniers in one simple post. ;)
what is major component of this buffer? us. living critters and how they react to an increase in CO2
Wow! Amazing that all of those egghead boffins living in their ivory towers with their hoity-toity "science" missed that one! Thank you so much for pointing it out!
Except for the fact that most ocean life is not primarily constrained by CO2, but nutrients, especially iron. Whoops.
I never ceased to be amazed at people who insist that something must be wrong with the science on a subject when they haven't done even the most rudimentary amount to educate themselves on what the science of the subject actually is. You could at least start by reading the relevant sections of the IPCC technical reports to see what actually has been studied and how. I guarantee you, it's way, way more than you ever expected.
There's a reason why people go to college for years to get a degree in these fields. This isn't high school baking-soda-and-vinegar-volcanoes here. It's an incredibly complex science that you need a solid background in. At least spend a week reading peer-reviewed papers on the subject before you put fingers to keyboard. You're coming across like if someone who had never used a computer started talking about how programmers should make every piece of software be run by voice commands in spoken English sentences like "Could you open up the letter to my grandmother and edit out the part where I told her about my chihuahua?", and have the software figure out what you want it to do. You're broadcasting ignorance on the topic like a beacon.
Do these climate models take into account the fact that Volcanoes erupt from time to time, spewings tons of ash into the atmosphere, which reflects sunlight, and thereby cools the earth?
Yes. And it's not the ash that primarily reflects the sunlight; it's the SOx. And the cooling is only temporary. And volcanoes also emit CO2. But a small fraction as much as humans release.
And yes, volcanic ash is acidic.
The paper talked about optical, infrared, *and* radio telescopes. Most of the discussion was about scopes in general -- thermal deformation, gravity deformation, field of view, difficulty of aiming, etc -- things which you refuse to comment on. You've also refused to comment on the insidious nature of moon dust on machinery and the moon's ionosphere.
And no, it did not say that the *only* free-space alternative is to send a scope far away; it said that was a possibility.. And what is wrong with spacecraft going far from Earth anyway? Do you have a problem with SOHO? WMAP? ACE, WIND, Genesis, ISSE, SMART-1, STEREO, New Horizons, Planck, Herschel, Gaia, and James Webb? And that's just some sitting in Lagrange points, which there's no requirement for such a spacecraft to do. It's certainly no worse sending a spacecraft far away than having to have a communications relay constellation around the moon.
Counterpoint all you want, but look at how Japanese, Chinese and French auto- and battery makers are flocking to Bolivia to get a hold of their lithium salt fields.
( google news, bolivia, lithium )
What, you think they'd rather get lithium for $25/kg from seawater than $5/kg from Bolivian brines? Duh they're going to go for the cheapest sources first. ;) The issue is not where it's cheapest; the issue is whether prices could ever rise high enough to make li-ion batteries unrealistic. And the answer to that is a resounding no.
Well pardon the pun as well, but maintenance will be possible remotely.
So you think NASA sends billion dollar service missions to Hubble for the fun of it? You think they put the ISS crew's lives on the lines with spacewalks because they get a kick out of it?
Note as well that a kilogram of solar cells is a lot of surface
Space-rated solar panels produce about 300W/kg. Not a lot. Even if you 10x it, that's nowhere close to enough. And the bigger you make it, the more you increase your other problems, like stationkeeping.
that micrometeorite and radiation damage are on par with desert storms
Absolutely not! You've clearly never looked at studies on degradation of solar arrays in space.
a huge advantage of an orbit-based power plant is its ability to bring energy to even very remote locations
That was the very first widespread use of *ground based* solar panels on Earth. Powering remote transmitters and the like.
Right now, the Sahara is big enough for Earth's consumption, but if it is to grow one hundred fold (hey, China is coming and they are building electric cars) the Sahara will begin to be too small.
No, it won't. First, the last number I saw stated that 0.3% of the Sahara could power all of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Second, nobody is forecasting even remotely close to 100-fold power consumption growth, ever. Third, the more you expand modern human settlement, the more rooftop, parking lot, and road surface you create, all of which can support solar. And fourth, even if all of our vehicles were electric, it'd only increase our total generation by about a third.
It concluded that if the flow rate of sea water were equivilient to the amount of world wide oil production
Why on Earth would you make that ridiculous assumption? The flow rate of oil is to the flow rate of the world's oceans as a bacteria is to a blue whale.
They're setting up a straw man. Nobody is proposing to process lithium via oil refineries. Here's a random example for you: a first generation seawater lithium extraction process that costs $22-$32/kg of lithium (versus $5-8/kg lithium carbonate from conventional sources). A li-ion battery pack generally uses 1-2kg of lithium carbonate per kWh, and currently costs about $500 per kWh. Do the math.
This is just one of many approaches (evaporation ponds). Others include a technique used for uranium seawater extraction, where you make thin strands of plastics which preferentially bond with the ion of choice, dangle them in ocean currents, then collect them months later, extract the ion, and return them to the sea, in a continuous rotating process. And I'm sure there are more that I haven't read about.
And anyway, L2 is unstable and requires constant station keeping.
Minimal.
they don't ever drift apart from each other
Flying in formation is a solved problem.
The moon is a big hunk of rock.
Comprising a gravity well covered in nasty electrostatic dust and exerting a force on any structures, requiring them to have dramatically greater structural integrity.
Plus, the lunar far side is also blocked from the Sun for two solid weeks at a time, which also eliminates another big source of radio noise.
This can also be a bad thing for a lunar telescope, as it's going to dramatically change it's temperature over the course of a lunar month, altering its shape. Which is a huge problem. Also, the moon has a (tenous) ionosphere, and even "aurora"-like phenomena from electrostatically levitated dust.
Here's some dudes at Caltech laying out the arguments
And here's serious criticism of it.