"Or maybe it's because ordinary people recognize that chaotic systems are not predictable.
Yes but how many "ordinary people" realise that is a red-herring because the statistics of chaotic systems are stable? Examples: Turbulent water flow does not mean you can't measure the rate of flow. The n-body problem of celestial mechanics is chaotic but that does not prevent us from exquisite accuracy in the trajectory of space probes.
Weather is chaotic, climate is the statistics of weather and by comparison is stable over centuries/millenia. To be pedantic climate is in dynamic equilibrum over all but extremely long time periods.
Many "ordinary people" have been duped into beliving science does not apply, ordinary people have kids, grandkids, nieces, nephews, ect, who will be affected by much more than wet carpet in much less than a century.
so how am I supposed to react?
Keep defending science and common sense as you have done in the past...and maybe build a well stocked bunker on high ground...
The fact that the first hit on a google search for 'icecap "global warming"' is the icecap.us site would indicate your pessimisim is warranted. I actually had someone reply to me the other day who said something like "you don't get to quote Nature and Science as evidence for AGW because they are not statisticians".....sigh.
"When shit gets bad enough people will finally start calling for solutions."
Yes, but will anyone listen?
"One warning sign that a dangerous warming is beginning in Antarctica, will be a breakup of ice shelves in the Antarctic Peninsula just south of the recent January 0C isotherm; the ice shelf in the Prince Gustav Channel on the east side of the peninsula, and the Wordie Ice Shelf; the ice shelf in George VI Sound, and the ice shelf in Wilkins Sound on the west side." Mercer, Nature 1978 v271.
The ice shelves in that quote are ~10Kyrs old and have all collapsed in recent years, except for the Wilkins shelf which is collapsing as we speak.
"Apparently, Holder felt it more important to punish the prosecution on this one than nail Senator Tubes."
To me this indicates the judge thinks getting free shit is part of high office, sorta like some supreme court judges think it's ok to shot a fleeing "prowler". Sure it's sloppy work (or mischief) but he was convicted by jury, should this not go to appeal to a jury rather than one judge overturning 12 angry men?
Disclaimer: Not from US, not red or blue, sorta purple and green....
Re your sig; I first learnt the philosophy of science not from HS (which I dropped out of in '76) but from reading a book by Randi ~30yrs ago so I checked out your amazon link and lo and behold it's Sagan's masterpiece.
Seriously, genuine skeptcisim is a SKILL that needs constant practice but will serve you well in all aspects of daily life, I highly recommend the authors in aepervius' sig.
You may enjoy Dyson's out of character rant against prediction but if your theory does not make a prediction that can be tested then it's not science...
"One warning sign that a dangerous warming is beginning in Antarctica, will be a breakup of ice shelves in the Antarctic Peninsula just south of the recent January 0C isotherm; the ice shelf in the Prince Gustav Channel on the east side of the peninsula, and the Wordie Ice Shelf; the ice shelf in George VI Sound, and the ice shelf in Wilkins Sound on the west side." - Mercer, Nature, 1978, v271 pp.321-325
The Wilkins shelf in TFA is ~10Kyrs old and is the 10th ancient ice shelf on the peninsula to break up in recent years.
There are two extremes in the political debate; one says stop everything now, the other says ther isn't a problem. What is actually being proposed at all these UN meetings is a cap and trade treaty, the aim of the treaty is to stabalise CO2 concentrations at twice the pre-industrial levels by 2050-60. To do that we need to reduce our total emmissions from ~10Gt/yr to ~3Gt/yr, personally I think that's simpler than world peace but OTOH I grew up in the 60's during the height of the cold war and never thought I would be sitting next to Russians at work.
Ummm, second link in case you have some non-standard definition of "Late Roman" and "Middle Ages". Note that it is a logical fallacy to claim that we don't know what is causing the current warming because the causes of the MWP (or some other past event) are unclear.
As for Egypt, the ice shelf in TFA is ~10Kyrs old? - Reconstructions that cover the interval of 10-2,000 years ago are not good enough to claim that the entire planet was definitely hotter at any time during that period but it may have been for periods that were obviously not long enough to melt said ice shelf. There is also a statistical problem comparing very long reconstructions to the last 50-100yrs, ie: if the period is long enough then short events (such as AGW, MWP, LIA) fall under the definition of noise and disappear under the smoothing techniques that MUST be used for them to be statistically valid.
The link to the Milankovich cycles was to demonstrate that most large climate variations in the distant past can be convincingly explained.
Ignorance is not an insult. As for arrogance and stupidity, you do realise the scientists who made the reconstructions of past climate that you use to support your tropical Earth fantasy are the same scientists who are warning you that AGW will NOT create a tropical paradise, right?
Both major parties have had plans and trials to filter the internet since before DSL and cable were available, still hasn't happened. The reason for this is that we have occasionally have independent senators who's votes need to be bought. It's sort of like 1984's continous war except it's aim is to keep censorship nuts running in circles.
Labor promised that a clean feed would be available to every connection a child could access, nowhere have they stated that their policy is a mandatory filter for everyone. It was and is a hollow promise since the previous government has already set up such a voluntary filter after a similar trial that included mandatory filters and an independent senator with a censorship platform.
In other words it's same political theater we Aussies have been watching for over a decade.
We don't have free speech enshrined in the constitution but our governments are theoretically bound by article 19 of the UN declaration on human rights. I say theoretically because there have been some specific instances of censorship over the last decade. One related to a senator's "right to die" website, the other to an Islamic fundementalist book in a university library. Kiddie porn is evidence of a crime and I have no problems with authorities following the trail to the perps and subsequently dismantling their distribution networks using due process.
Oil, gas and concrete are minor contributors when compared to coal. Every coal fired plant on the planet has been built and sometimes rebuilt since I was born. I see no reason why we cannot acomplish a similar feat with windmills, nukes, solar, etc, in the next 50yrs other than the coal industry objections to it's own extinction.
You do realise that the complete 4.5Gyr history of earth also includes it being...
A boiling hot ball of lava.
Being totally encased in ice several times.
At leat a billion years with a toxic atmosphere.
Roughly 2.5 billion years without multi-cellular life.
Inumerable strikes by huge space rocks, one of which formed the moon.
How is any of that relevant to the physical properties of our emmissions and the observed effect they are having on the current climate?
In your last post to me you started by claiming "Academia is a liberal bastion of socialist thought by people who couldn't get a job doing what they teach", now you want to appeal to acedemia again. I have already pointed you to 50 peer-reviewed papers from Nature and Science alone that use the GRACE data to show Antarctica and Greenland are losing mass and contributing to the observed sea level rise. Those 50 papers are just a small (but credible) portion of the evidence that exists to debunk what seems to be your favorite website's claims about the ice caps.
As for the Icecap site, they don't actually have any data, what they do is cherry pick data from other ACADEMICS work which they the contort into nonsense conclusions. I have no intention of playing your bullshit political games anymore so please stop following me around like a yapping poodle, it's creeping me out.
"It was making me wonder, how much spare time to you really have?"
I'm an old fart, I don't feel the need to try and impress people with how busy I am.
I don't edit WP but let's go with your little rant and assume I only come to slashdot to make posts on AGW and was not drawn here because of my computer science background.
Roughly 5,000 posts at (say) 5min per post is about 10x40hr weeks but don't worry I don't feel any shame for informing myself and speaking my mind over the last decade. The best reward has been my own edification but looking back at the change in slashdotter attitudes to the issue over that time I don't think my independent and intellectually honest efforts to pusuade others to look at the science have been a total waste.
OTOH I do agree it's a waste of time answering common trolls but sometimes (me:wipes mouth) I get all foamy when I sense fear in an anti-science astroturfer.
Our ancestors did survive the ice age because the change was slow enough for them to simply walk away from it but when the Himalayan glaciers disappear where do you think the billion plus people who depend on them will walk to? - They can't walk to Bangladesh as it will have become part of the sea bed.
"At worst it will be the end of a civilisation, not even the whole human race."
Yes there were a few hundred natives left many years after they cut all the trees down on Easter Island but I already have one grandchild and would prefer not to condem her to nomadic goat hearding in her old age.
Ice extent starts to grow/recede around the time of the equinox. March is always the low point for sea ice in the south, September is always the low point in the north. The high points are also marked by the equinox so that September is the high point in the south, March in the north.
You have a good nose, without reading your entire link that particular group has become known as the Inhofe 400 (random link that I breifly scanned, I believe the list is also on WP somewhere). It's not the only machevelian stunt the senator has performed wrt AGW.
Your nose is probably sensing phrases in the link such as "these scientists hail from prestigious institutions worldwide" rather than "these scientists represent prestigious institutions worldwide" as is the case with the IPCC. They cannot claim that because most of the institutions who house these people do not agree with them and would come down on them with an army of lawyers to protect their reputation. The fact that they tolerate people such as Dr Ball flies in the face of accusations that there is some sort of conspiracy to repress them.
Not all of the people on the list are hacks, many are simply misrepresented using out of context quotes, like Ray Kurzweil who does not dispute the IPCC consensus but thinks the problem will soon be solved by nanotechnology (exactly how I'm not sure), a few people on the list have also contributed to the IPCC reports. Anyway I will leave it to you to compare what the qualified scientists on the list actually say to Inhofe's cherry-picked quotes.
"What happens when the natural positive feedback of CO2 adds to what we've already dumped into the atmosphere?"
I assume due to the rate of the current warming the feedback rate will also be more rapid and that quite a bit of the feedback CO2 will initially be released as methane.
Just out of curiosity, would you say that the IPCC reports are conservative in their pronouncements due to the inherent difficulty of getting that many experts to agree on the claims they publish in their reports?
BTW: IANAClimatologist and you are the first I have seen here since I started debating AGW on slashdot almost a decade ago. I hope you can find the time to post more often in these stories.
Slashdot Mirror
"Or maybe it's because ordinary people recognize that chaotic systems are not predictable.
Yes but how many "ordinary people" realise that is a red-herring because the statistics of chaotic systems are stable? Examples: Turbulent water flow does not mean you can't measure the rate of flow. The n-body problem of celestial mechanics is chaotic but that does not prevent us from exquisite accuracy in the trajectory of space probes.
Weather is chaotic, climate is the statistics of weather and by comparison is stable over centuries/millenia. To be pedantic climate is in dynamic equilibrum over all but extremely long time periods.
Many "ordinary people" have been duped into beliving science does not apply, ordinary people have kids, grandkids, nieces, nephews, ect, who will be affected by much more than wet carpet in much less than a century.
so how am I supposed to react?
Keep defending science and common sense as you have done in the past...and maybe build a well stocked bunker on high ground...
Quick call Al Gore, the parent post just solved the puzzle! Or maybe not. /sarcasm
What on Earth makes you think that an ice age that ended more that 10Kyrs ago has got anything to do with the melt observed over the last decade?
Just because you personally don't understand it well enough to make sound risk management decisions does not imply others are in the same prediciment.
"No-one gives a shit about warning signs dude."
Perhaps that's because organised astroturfers have conviced many people science doesn't apply to AGW.
The fact that the first hit on a google search for 'icecap "global warming"' is the icecap.us site would indicate your pessimisim is warranted. I actually had someone reply to me the other day who said something like "you don't get to quote Nature and Science as evidence for AGW because they are not statisticians".....sigh.
"When shit gets bad enough people will finally start calling for solutions."
Yes, but will anyone listen?
"One warning sign that a dangerous warming is beginning in Antarctica, will be a breakup of ice shelves in the Antarctic Peninsula just south of the recent January 0C isotherm; the ice shelf in the Prince Gustav Channel on the east side of the peninsula, and the Wordie Ice Shelf; the ice shelf in George VI Sound, and the ice shelf in Wilkins Sound on the west side." Mercer, Nature 1978 v271.
The ice shelves in that quote are ~10Kyrs old and have all collapsed in recent years, except for the Wilkins shelf which is collapsing as we speak.
"Apparently, Holder felt it more important to punish the prosecution on this one than nail Senator Tubes."
To me this indicates the judge thinks getting free shit is part of high office, sorta like some supreme court judges think it's ok to shot a fleeing "prowler". Sure it's sloppy work (or mischief) but he was convicted by jury, should this not go to appeal to a jury rather than one judge overturning 12 angry men?
Disclaimer: Not from US, not red or blue, sorta purple and green....
Thanks, I was looking for someone with a clue.
Re your sig; I first learnt the philosophy of science not from HS (which I dropped out of in '76) but from reading a book by Randi ~30yrs ago so I checked out your amazon link and lo and behold it's Sagan's masterpiece.
Seriously, genuine skeptcisim is a SKILL that needs constant practice but will serve you well in all aspects of daily life, I highly recommend the authors in aepervius' sig.
You may enjoy Dyson's out of character rant against prediction but if your theory does not make a prediction that can be tested then it's not science...
"One warning sign that a dangerous warming is beginning in Antarctica, will be a breakup of ice shelves in the Antarctic Peninsula just south of the recent January 0C isotherm; the ice shelf in the Prince Gustav Channel on the east side of the peninsula, and the Wordie Ice Shelf; the ice shelf in George VI Sound, and the ice shelf in Wilkins Sound on the west side." - Mercer, Nature, 1978, v271 pp.321-325
The Wilkins shelf in TFA is ~10Kyrs old and is the 10th ancient ice shelf on the peninsula to break up in recent years.
As Godel elegantly demonstrated we cannot compute everything.
Yep that was Lorenz. I assume the brain map in TFA will be useful to the Blue brain project
There are two extremes in the political debate; one says stop everything now, the other says ther isn't a problem. What is actually being proposed at all these UN meetings is a cap and trade treaty, the aim of the treaty is to stabalise CO2 concentrations at twice the pre-industrial levels by 2050-60. To do that we need to reduce our total emmissions from ~10Gt/yr to ~3Gt/yr, personally I think that's simpler than world peace but OTOH I grew up in the 60's during the height of the cold war and never thought I would be sitting next to Russians at work.
Ummm, second link in case you have some non-standard definition of "Late Roman" and "Middle Ages". Note that it is a logical fallacy to claim that we don't know what is causing the current warming because the causes of the MWP (or some other past event) are unclear.
As for Egypt, the ice shelf in TFA is ~10Kyrs old? - Reconstructions that cover the interval of 10-2,000 years ago are not good enough to claim that the entire planet was definitely hotter at any time during that period but it may have been for periods that were obviously not long enough to melt said ice shelf. There is also a statistical problem comparing very long reconstructions to the last 50-100yrs, ie: if the period is long enough then short events (such as AGW, MWP, LIA) fall under the definition of noise and disappear under the smoothing techniques that MUST be used for them to be statistically valid.
The link to the Milankovich cycles was to demonstrate that most large climate variations in the distant past can be convincingly explained.
Ignorance is not an insult. As for arrogance and stupidity, you do realise the scientists who made the reconstructions of past climate that you use to support your tropical Earth fantasy are the same scientists who are warning you that AGW will NOT create a tropical paradise, right?
Both major parties have had plans and trials to filter the internet since before DSL and cable were available, still hasn't happened. The reason for this is that we have occasionally have independent senators who's votes need to be bought. It's sort of like 1984's continous war except it's aim is to keep censorship nuts running in circles.
Labor promised that a clean feed would be available to every connection a child could access, nowhere have they stated that their policy is a mandatory filter for everyone. It was and is a hollow promise since the previous government has already set up such a voluntary filter after a similar trial that included mandatory filters and an independent senator with a censorship platform.
In other words it's same political theater we Aussies have been watching for over a decade.
We don't have free speech enshrined in the constitution but our governments are theoretically bound by article 19 of the UN declaration on human rights. I say theoretically because there have been some specific instances of censorship over the last decade. One related to a senator's "right to die" website, the other to an Islamic fundementalist book in a university library. Kiddie porn is evidence of a crime and I have no problems with authorities following the trail to the perps and subsequently dismantling their distribution networks using due process.
"What makes one an official "scientist"? Science is like Journalism.
Same thing that makes one an official journalist, "publish or perish". However that's where the analogy ends.
Oil, gas and concrete are minor contributors when compared to coal. Every coal fired plant on the planet has been built and sometimes rebuilt since I was born. I see no reason why we cannot acomplish a similar feat with windmills, nukes, solar, etc, in the next 50yrs other than the coal industry objections to it's own extinction.
You do realise that the complete 4.5Gyr history of earth also includes it being...
A boiling hot ball of lava.
Being totally encased in ice several times.
At leat a billion years with a toxic atmosphere.
Roughly 2.5 billion years without multi-cellular life.
Inumerable strikes by huge space rocks, one of which formed the moon.
How is any of that relevant to the physical properties of our emmissions and the observed effect they are having on the current climate?
Hello....again. You have one thing right, I'm too old to have the inclination or patience to argue with dogmatic fools.
In your last post to me you started by claiming "Academia is a liberal bastion of socialist thought by people who couldn't get a job doing what they teach", now you want to appeal to acedemia again. I have already pointed you to 50 peer-reviewed papers from Nature and Science alone that use the GRACE data to show Antarctica and Greenland are losing mass and contributing to the observed sea level rise. Those 50 papers are just a small (but credible) portion of the evidence that exists to debunk what seems to be your favorite website's claims about the ice caps.
As for the Icecap site, they don't actually have any data, what they do is cherry pick data from other ACADEMICS work which they the contort into nonsense conclusions. I have no intention of playing your bullshit political games anymore so please stop following me around like a yapping poodle, it's creeping me out.
Total ignorance is rare but you seem to have pulled it off with that 'insightfull' post.
"Academia is a liberal bastion of socialist thought by people who couldn't get a job doing what they teach."
Sorry, I didn't read past your dogma this time.
"It was making me wonder, how much spare time to you really have?"
I'm an old fart, I don't feel the need to try and impress people with how busy I am.
I don't edit WP but let's go with your little rant and assume I only come to slashdot to make posts on AGW and was not drawn here because of my computer science background.
Roughly 5,000 posts at (say) 5min per post is about 10x40hr weeks but don't worry I don't feel any shame for informing myself and speaking my mind over the last decade. The best reward has been my own edification but looking back at the change in slashdotter attitudes to the issue over that time I don't think my independent and intellectually honest efforts to pusuade others to look at the science have been a total waste.
OTOH I do agree it's a waste of time answering common trolls but sometimes (me:wipes mouth) I get all foamy when I sense fear in an anti-science astroturfer.
Our ancestors did survive the ice age because the change was slow enough for them to simply walk away from it but when the Himalayan glaciers disappear where do you think the billion plus people who depend on them will walk to? - They can't walk to Bangladesh as it will have become part of the sea bed.
"At worst it will be the end of a civilisation, not even the whole human race."
Yes there were a few hundred natives left many years after they cut all the trees down on Easter Island but I already have one grandchild and would prefer not to condem her to nomadic goat hearding in her old age.
Ice extent starts to grow/recede around the time of the equinox. March is always the low point for sea ice in the south, September is always the low point in the north. The high points are also marked by the equinox so that September is the high point in the south, March in the north.
You have a good nose, without reading your entire link that particular group has become known as the Inhofe 400 (random link that I breifly scanned, I believe the list is also on WP somewhere). It's not the only machevelian stunt the senator has performed wrt AGW.
Your nose is probably sensing phrases in the link such as "these scientists hail from prestigious institutions worldwide" rather than "these scientists represent prestigious institutions worldwide" as is the case with the IPCC. They cannot claim that because most of the institutions who house these people do not agree with them and would come down on them with an army of lawyers to protect their reputation. The fact that they tolerate people such as Dr Ball flies in the face of accusations that there is some sort of conspiracy to repress them.
Not all of the people on the list are hacks, many are simply misrepresented using out of context quotes, like Ray Kurzweil who does not dispute the IPCC consensus but thinks the problem will soon be solved by nanotechnology (exactly how I'm not sure), a few people on the list have also contributed to the IPCC reports. Anyway I will leave it to you to compare what the qualified scientists on the list actually say to Inhofe's cherry-picked quotes.
"I don't think any physicist seriously doubts the warming properties of CO2."
A rare species indeed, but they do exist.
"What happens when the natural positive feedback of CO2 adds to what we've already dumped into the atmosphere?"
I assume due to the rate of the current warming the feedback rate will also be more rapid and that quite a bit of the feedback CO2 will initially be released as methane.
Just out of curiosity, would you say that the IPCC reports are conservative in their pronouncements due to the inherent difficulty of getting that many experts to agree on the claims they publish in their reports?
BTW: IANAClimatologist and you are the first I have seen here since I started debating AGW on slashdot almost a decade ago. I hope you can find the time to post more often in these stories.