Woodfortrees.org is a great resource when claims like these set off your BS detector. Here is the monthly sunspot number with a 138 month mean to smooth out the 11.5 year cycle. It shows rapid decline since 1985 - exactly the period when temperatures have shot up. I'd say you were right to be skeptical: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/sidc-ssn/mean:138/from:1900/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1900
Likely because the results fall somewhere between "well duh" and "hey wait, that was already well established decades ago". It makes a good story because it is headed by a Koch funded skeptic, but it makes no impact on the scientific literature.
You are very right that calculating the true cost is difficult and we will certainly not get it right. Impacts are as likely to be overstated as understated. There are certainly cases of both. Go too far in either direction and we will pay (potentially very much) more than we ought to.
The cost of the externality is not zero though, so we already have it wrong. We should not make perfect the enemy of good. There are reasonable and moderate steps that can be taken to address the imbalance without driving us into economic disaster.
I have very much enjoyed our conversation. This is truly where the debate ought to be. Even the BEST study noted in this slashdot submission covers territory that was well established in the scientific literature for well over a decade. It makes a good story because it is headed by a Koch funded skeptic, but it makes no impact on the science.
One further point of clarification - DDT was never banned in third world countries and is still used to combat malaria today. The problem is that the pests are becoming resistant due to overuse. Reduction of DDT use was the right thing if we are interested in preventing resistance in the critters we are trying to eliminate and extinction of those we ain't. I score that one a win for environmentalists. I won't argue GMO or forest fires. I'm agnostic about logging - haven't we struck a good balance there?
His focus is based on a cost analysis (skip to point 6). He finds that we are better off financially if we take action now vs doing nothing and vs taking action later.
Regarding economic engineering, I understand your reservations and obviously we will need to take a measured approach. It is worth mentioning that we are currently supporting a system that flies in the face of libertarian values and a free market system. A core principal of each is that the cost of the good should be paid by the person consuming the good. The system we are supporting forces part of the cost (the financial impacts of climate change) on a person not even involved in the transaction. Just by including this cost in the transaction we can allow the free market to solve the problem.
That is a very good summary of the two political sides of the "debate". The problem is that the consensus science that sits between 'runaway' and 'counteracted' shows a temperature increase that would prove extremely expensive.
Attribution is exactly what this study means to address. Their findings are hardly novel or surprising to the scientific community but for public consumption it makes a good headline to see a Koch funded skeptic reach the same conclusions as everyone else.
Given the recent observations of massive arctic methane releases, I think we're really well-and-truly-(in a lot of trouble already, sir).
maybe not. We are obviously nudging against/toppling some tipping points in the arctic, but look at these posts from one of the folks at realclimate.org for another perspective. Both more or less conclude that:
"The methane hydrates in the ocean, in cahoots with permafrost peats (which never get enough respect), could be a significant multiplier of the long tail of the CO2, but will probably not be a huge player in climate change in the coming century."
The work is consistent with every other temperature reconstruction including satellite data. They used an unbiased statistical method to combine the data. Yet you presume that nefarious fudging of data took place to support a 'desired' conclusion? I think someone ought to update the Wikipedia page on climate denial to include a reference to your post;)
Where are the scientific studies that prove that renewables, carbon capture and storage, fossil fuel phase-out or carbon taxation, etc. leave us globally with a better standard of living?
Good point. There are many studies that investigate the cost of implementing various strategies vs the cost of climate change - for some examples look at the works of William D. Nordhaus.
There are also some strategies that would ease us away from carbon fuels without imposing high economic impacts. One such option is a revenue neutral carbon tax. By making this revenue neutral it also has the advantage of lowing taxes on things that we ought to be encouraging like income and spending.
If we just plug up the volcanos, everything will be fine!
Someone should really update the summary given the amount of confusion in the comments on this. Volcanic eruptions do not contribute to a rise in temperature but rather cause a short term drop in temperature due to particulate blocking incoming solar radiation.
Interestingly, it turns out that if you look at the trend for El Nino years, La Nina years, and ENSO neutral years you also find a rise of 0.16C/decade for all three. The advantage of doing this is that most of the annual variation is caused by the ENSO cycle. Removing this allows you to see the true trend and is a very cool way to tease the signal from the noise. You can see the details here: http://www.skepticalscience.com/was-2012-hottest-la-nina-on-record.html
Incidentally, if I had wanted to cherry pick I could have shown a rise from -0.6 to 0.6 in just 13 years (1985-1998). If I had wanted to cherry pick the other way your example above of picking 1998 as a start date would be a worth investigating. Both of these are obviously nonsense. It is the long term trend that we should be looking at rather than the year to year variance. This is what was chosen in my woodfortrees.org link.
Here is a classic case of cherry-picking your data in order to try to prove your point.
It is the entire satellite record. I am comparing the start of the trend line to the end of the trend line. No individual measurement was selected. No cherry picking here:P
Temperatures have gone from -0.25 to 0.25 since 1980. That is 0.5C in 30 years or 0.16C/decade. Even at the current rate the 1.6C added this century will push us over the 2C tipping point that we are trying to avoid. Even at the current rate the added 1.6C would put us right in the middle of the IPCC B1 scenario of 1.1 – 2.9C (with best estimate of 1.8) by the end of the century. - http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/syr/en/spms3.html
You can use woodfortrees.org to plot various climate indexes. For example, here is solar activity plotted against global temperatures. There is very good agreement between the two from 1850-1980. Since then they have gone in opposite directions: woodfortrees.org
The volcanic activity is needed to explain the dips in temperatures. It doesn't contribute to the rise. Volcanic activity blocks out the sun and cools the earth for a few years after the event.
Curiously the draft report does not seem materially different from the 2007 report. In fact, that is the very point of the linked article! Dispite this, people seem to alternate between claiming that the IPCC is alarmist and claiming that their reports are 'hardly a doomsday scenario'. Sometimes within the same posting.
For the record, I think anthropogenic climate change is very plausible, but as a computational physicist who has looked at some climate models I also think the detailed predictions are likely quite wrong, as in fact they have proven to be every single time they have been put to test.
All models are wrong (climate or otherwise), but some are useful. Things could get chaotic as feedbacks kick in, but so far the models have given us a good sense of the trajectory for global temps/sea level/etc.
Right, but things like this make me doubt the 'scientific consensus':
It's important to understand the denominator when looking at these kinds of lists. You have 100 people with a PHD that doubt the consensus. Over 34,000 science doctorates are turned out each year. The Intelligent Design people put out these kinds of lists as well. They are meaningless when you consider the denominator.
One series of these e-mails called out the journal Climate Research, which had the audacity to publish a paper surveying scientific literature that didn't support Mann's claim that the last 50 years are the warmest in the past millennium... Editors resigned.
There is a very good reason that they resigned. It became clear that the journal was the victim of 'pal review' - http://www.skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=427 . Basically Pat Michaels was submitting papers directly to his CATO institute colleague and free market sympathiser Chris De Fraitas which were then rubber stamped. These papers were easily shown to be bunk and made the journal a laughing stock. The chief editor resigned saying that certain Climate Research editors were systematically publishing methodologically flawed papers.
That article I linked gives an explanation as to how 1) water vapor is far more effective a 'greenhouse gas' than carbon dioxide
This is not unknown to scientists, and is specifically why scientists are worried about Carbon. Added carbon will heat the atmosphere. A warmer atmosphere will hold additional water vapour. Additional water vapour will warm the atmosphere... etc. This is what is known as a feedback. Currently there is about 4% more water vapour in the atmosphere due to atmospheric warming.
and 2) carbon dioxide levels rise after the globe warms up, not before. The argument sounds credible to me.
This is only half true. Carbon levels will rise when the globe warms, but of course it can also rise for other reasons such as the burning of fossil fuels. BTW, a hotter world will release more carbon into the atmosphere which will warm the world... looks like another feedback.
Did you read the Super Freakonomics chapter about global warming? It says that just 20 years ago people were complaining that we were entering a cooling period and we had to do something to warm the globe up.
We have a survey of the literature from over 20 over years ago called the IPCC FAR. http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/far/wg_I/ipcc_far_wg_I_chapter_08.pdf . The conclusion was: "Global mean temperatures have increased by 0.3 - 0.6 C over the last 100 years. The magnitude of this warming is broadly consistent with the theoretical predictions of climate models." Looks like the Freakonomics guys are out to lunch.
Hint: There's a reason people are starting to call it "climate change" now instead of "global warming".
To a scientist these mean different things. They use Climate Change when they are referring to changes in climates, and global warming to refer to the warming of the globe. Politically though it was Republican strategist Frank Luntz who suggested using Climate Change rather than Global Warming because it sounded less scary: http://www.ewg.org/files/LuntzResearch_environment.pdf
Because stuff like the ClimateGate emails makes it seem like a lot of those 'experts' care more about being right
Science is fiercely competitive. Of course they care about being right. It's a meritocracy.
Slashdot Mirror
Woodfortrees.org is a great resource when claims like these set off your BS detector. Here is the monthly sunspot number with a 138 month mean to smooth out the 11.5 year cycle. It shows rapid decline since 1985 - exactly the period when temperatures have shot up. I'd say you were right to be skeptical: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/sidc-ssn/mean:138/from:1900/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1900
Here is solar irradiance. The red line shows the 11.5 year running average. Again the direction is down while the temperatures go up: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/pmod/mean:138/plot/pmod
You can even plot temperatures against sunspots and see how they correlate. (spoiler - not well since the 80's): http://woodfortrees.org/plot/sidc-ssn/mean:138/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:12/scale:90/offset:80
Likely because the results fall somewhere between "well duh" and "hey wait, that was already well established decades ago". It makes a good story because it is headed by a Koch funded skeptic, but it makes no impact on the scientific literature.
You are very right that calculating the true cost is difficult and we will certainly not get it right. Impacts are as likely to be overstated as understated. There are certainly cases of both. Go too far in either direction and we will pay (potentially very much) more than we ought to.
The cost of the externality is not zero though, so we already have it wrong. We should not make perfect the enemy of good. There are reasonable and moderate steps that can be taken to address the imbalance without driving us into economic disaster.
I have very much enjoyed our conversation. This is truly where the debate ought to be. Even the BEST study noted in this slashdot submission covers territory that was well established in the scientific literature for well over a decade. It makes a good story because it is headed by a Koch funded skeptic, but it makes no impact on the science.
One further point of clarification - DDT was never banned in third world countries and is still used to combat malaria today. The problem is that the pests are becoming resistant due to overuse. Reduction of DDT use was the right thing if we are interested in preventing resistance in the critters we are trying to eliminate and extinction of those we ain't. I score that one a win for environmentalists. I won't argue GMO or forest fires. I'm agnostic about logging - haven't we struck a good balance there?
His focus is based on a cost analysis (skip to point 6). He finds that we are better off financially if we take action now vs doing nothing and vs taking action later.
Regarding economic engineering, I understand your reservations and obviously we will need to take a measured approach. It is worth mentioning that we are currently supporting a system that flies in the face of libertarian values and a free market system. A core principal of each is that the cost of the good should be paid by the person consuming the good. The system we are supporting forces part of the cost (the financial impacts of climate change) on a person not even involved in the transaction. Just by including this cost in the transaction we can allow the free market to solve the problem.
That is a very good summary of the two political sides of the "debate". The problem is that the consensus science that sits between 'runaway' and 'counteracted' shows a temperature increase that would prove extremely expensive.
Attribution is exactly what this study means to address. Their findings are hardly novel or surprising to the scientific community but for public consumption it makes a good headline to see a Koch funded skeptic reach the same conclusions as everyone else.
Given the recent observations of massive arctic methane releases, I think we're really well-and-truly-(in a lot of trouble already, sir).
maybe not. We are obviously nudging against/toppling some tipping points in the arctic, but look at these posts from one of the folks at realclimate.org for another perspective. Both more or less conclude that:
"The methane hydrates in the ocean, in cahoots with permafrost peats (which never get enough respect), could be a significant multiplier of the long tail of the CO2, but will probably not be a huge player in climate change in the coming century."
just because those people (look, I called them people, not denialists!) don't really care about facts.
And just what exactly do you mean by "those people"! ;)
Well said!
The work is consistent with every other temperature reconstruction including satellite data. They used an unbiased statistical method to combine the data. Yet you presume that nefarious fudging of data took place to support a 'desired' conclusion? I think someone ought to update the Wikipedia page on climate denial to include a reference to your post ;)
Where are the scientific studies that prove that renewables, carbon capture and storage, fossil fuel phase-out or carbon taxation, etc. leave us globally with a better standard of living?
Good point. There are many studies that investigate the cost of implementing various strategies vs the cost of climate change - for some examples look at the works of William D. Nordhaus.
There are also some strategies that would ease us away from carbon fuels without imposing high economic impacts. One such option is a revenue neutral carbon tax. By making this revenue neutral it also has the advantage of lowing taxes on things that we ought to be encouraging like income and spending.
If we just plug up the volcanos, everything will be fine!
Someone should really update the summary given the amount of confusion in the comments on this. Volcanic eruptions do not contribute to a rise in temperature but rather cause a short term drop in temperature due to particulate blocking incoming solar radiation.
Interestingly, it turns out that if you look at the trend for El Nino years, La Nina years, and ENSO neutral years you also find a rise of 0.16C/decade for all three. The advantage of doing this is that most of the annual variation is caused by the ENSO cycle. Removing this allows you to see the true trend and is a very cool way to tease the signal from the noise. You can see the details here: http://www.skepticalscience.com/was-2012-hottest-la-nina-on-record.html
Incidentally, if I had wanted to cherry pick I could have shown a rise from -0.6 to 0.6 in just 13 years (1985-1998). If I had wanted to cherry pick the other way your example above of picking 1998 as a start date would be a worth investigating. Both of these are obviously nonsense. It is the long term trend that we should be looking at rather than the year to year variance. This is what was chosen in my woodfortrees.org link.
Here is a classic case of cherry-picking your data in order to try to prove your point.
It is the entire satellite record. I am comparing the start of the trend line to the end of the trend line. No individual measurement was selected. No cherry picking here :P
Here is a graph of global temperatures using skeptic Roy Spencer's satellite reconstruction: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/plot/uah-land/trend
Temperatures have gone from -0.25 to 0.25 since 1980. That is 0.5C in 30 years or 0.16C/decade. Even at the current rate the 1.6C added this century will push us over the 2C tipping point that we are trying to avoid. Even at the current rate the added 1.6C would put us right in the middle of the IPCC B1 scenario of 1.1 – 2.9C (with best estimate of 1.8) by the end of the century. - http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/syr/en/spms3.html
You can use woodfortrees.org to plot various climate indexes. For example, here is solar activity plotted against global temperatures. There is very good agreement between the two from 1850-1980. Since then they have gone in opposite directions: woodfortrees.org
The volcanic activity is needed to explain the dips in temperatures. It doesn't contribute to the rise. Volcanic activity blocks out the sun and cools the earth for a few years after the event.
Yesterday bumped Dec 20, 1972 out of third place and 1985 off the chart. Here's an updated list:
The good news is that it looks like it is starting to cool down. We will likely see a few more records broken before the end of the heat wave though.
Curiously the draft report does not seem materially different from the 2007 report. In fact, that is the very point of the linked article! Dispite this, people seem to alternate between claiming that the IPCC is alarmist and claiming that their reports are 'hardly a doomsday scenario'. Sometimes within the same posting.
For the record, I think anthropogenic climate change is very plausible, but as a computational physicist who has looked at some climate models I also think the detailed predictions are likely quite wrong, as in fact they have proven to be every single time they have been put to test.
All models are wrong (climate or otherwise), but some are useful. Things could get chaotic as feedbacks kick in, but so far the models have given us a good sense of the trajectory for global temps/sea level/etc.
Volume also depends on precipitation. More snow means more volume. Warmer air holds more moisture which can increase precipitation.
Right, but things like this make me doubt the 'scientific consensus':
It's important to understand the denominator when looking at these kinds of lists. You have 100 people with a PHD that doubt the consensus. Over 34,000 science doctorates are turned out each year. The Intelligent Design people put out these kinds of lists as well. They are meaningless when you consider the denominator.
One series of these e-mails called out the journal Climate Research, which had the audacity to publish a paper surveying scientific literature that didn't support Mann's claim that the last 50 years are the warmest in the past millennium... Editors resigned.
There is a very good reason that they resigned. It became clear that the journal was the victim of 'pal review' - http://www.skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=427 . Basically Pat Michaels was submitting papers directly to his CATO institute colleague and free market sympathiser Chris De Fraitas which were then rubber stamped. These papers were easily shown to be bunk and made the journal a laughing stock. The chief editor resigned saying that certain Climate Research editors were systematically publishing methodologically flawed papers.
That article I linked gives an explanation as to how 1) water vapor is far more effective a 'greenhouse gas' than carbon dioxide
This is not unknown to scientists, and is specifically why scientists are worried about Carbon. Added carbon will heat the atmosphere. A warmer atmosphere will hold additional water vapour. Additional water vapour will warm the atmosphere... etc. This is what is known as a feedback. Currently there is about 4% more water vapour in the atmosphere due to atmospheric warming.
and 2) carbon dioxide levels rise after the globe warms up, not before. The argument sounds credible to me.
This is only half true. Carbon levels will rise when the globe warms, but of course it can also rise for other reasons such as the burning of fossil fuels. BTW, a hotter world will release more carbon into the atmosphere which will warm the world... looks like another feedback.
Did you read the Super Freakonomics chapter about global warming? It says that just 20 years ago people were complaining that we were entering a cooling period and we had to do something to warm the globe up.
We have a survey of the literature from over 20 over years ago called the IPCC FAR. http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/far/wg_I/ipcc_far_wg_I_chapter_08.pdf . The conclusion was: "Global mean temperatures have increased by 0.3 - 0.6 C over the last 100 years. The magnitude of this warming is broadly consistent with the theoretical predictions of climate models." Looks like the Freakonomics guys are out to lunch.
Hint: There's a reason people are starting to call it "climate change" now instead of "global warming".
To a scientist these mean different things. They use Climate Change when they are referring to changes in climates, and global warming to refer to the warming of the globe. Politically though it was Republican strategist Frank Luntz who suggested using Climate Change rather than Global Warming because it sounded less scary: http://www.ewg.org/files/LuntzResearch_environment.pdf
Because stuff like the ClimateGate emails makes it seem like a lot of those 'experts' care more about being right
Science is fiercely competitive. Of course they care about being right. It's a meritocracy.
awesome!