No need to apologise I understand what you are saying, a big SUV to an Aussie is a Nissan Patrol, but I'm an older Aussie and can remeber when F-100's were popular. There is also a streched Hummer near where I work, it has got to be the most ridiculous thing I've seen on the road since the goggomobil went out of fashion.
I may be a 'greenie' but that doesn't mean I have tossed capitalisim out the window.
My point was that individuals are too...ummm...individual...to make much difference by changing personal habits out of the kindness of their heart. Carbon needs an internationaly agreed and enforced CAP on total emmissions in order to create an economically and environmentally sound market to TRADE it. This is no different in concept to many existing internationally enforced rules on trade, travel, the environment, space exploration, slavery, etc.
If the guy with an army surplus tank is prepared to pay for the damage it does to natural and made made infrastructure such as the road, the atmosphere, etc, (ie: willing to play by market rules) then he can knock himself out as far as I am concerned. Of course if CO2 emmissions, oil, ex army tanks, are all finite resources and everyone wants to drive one then it will become a very expensive proposition, matter of fact it already is. If he is not willing to play by the rules then he doesn't get the benifits of the market, it's quite simple really and has worked that way since humans started bartering Mamoth steaks for sex.
You could introduce a carbon market to Aussie motorists without changing the price at the pump, simply replace the very high excise on fuel with carbon permits. After all the excise was supposedly introduced to reduce fuel compsumption during the oil crisis in the seventies. I believe the UK are in a similar position. However if you have been following KRuddy's carbon market legislation you will know it's not so much the oil industry that are putting up roadblocks, it's the coal industry who are panicking about their own future survival.
You say you did research 3 years ago. Was it published or did the peer-review point out you missed the IPCC temprature reconstructions that have been generally accepted for about a decade now?
Excellent stuff. Not telling you how to suck eggs, I'd just like to add that the bit about "CO2 always increased 600 years AFTER the temperature started to increase" has been used ad-nausem by psuedo-skeptics to "prove" that warming causes CO2 and not the other way around. However the rise in CO2 after an ice age is best explained by melting permafrost and adds to whatever is already forcing the temprature up.
In other words it's an expected positive feedback to a warming globe.
Con job and spin are the correct terms for that particular web site.
This is the second time this site has popped up in the last few days. It's run by one J. D'Aleo who is paid to do so by the "Science and Public Policy Institute", they are in turn backed by "Frontiers of Freedom" which is the lobbying brain child of this guy. They have a donate button on their site but their funding is otherwise obscured.
Older readers may recall the "Frontiers of Freedom" also backed the tabacoo industry in their anti-science campaign.
Disclaimer: I don't have anything against lobbyists or politicians until they pretend to be something they are not.
"Yep, all those scientists that disagree, we'll just sweep them under a rug."
Get back to us when you have looked under the rug and asked one for their name, hypothisis and evidence. Don't forget to check the couch there could be a couple hiding there as well.
"You did link to a couple of google searches. Kinda ironic that you limited them to a single source each. This from a guy who's been hammering the trustworthiness of sources limits his search to a two sources."
You do realise journals are ranked in acedemia don't you, Nature is ranked #1, I threw in the lowly Science rag as backup.
"Antarctica is NOT losing ice"
Refer to the NASA link and the previous list of 50 Nature and science articles. Also the site you link to does not mention that climate models predicted higher rates of warming in the Artic and The antartic pennisula, exactly what we have been observing, see IPCC wrt polar amplification.
"but this fact is dwarfed by the mounting evidence the overall ice mass of Antarctica is increasing"
So why post a link to a paper that only talks about increased snow in East Antarctic? You do realise that climate models predict a rise is snowfall above 3000ft, right? And that this was a psuedo-skeptical favorite for causing confusion a few years back when talking about similar phenomena in Greenland.
"due to a cooling trend that has taken place since 1998."
If you believe cherry picked crap I have a bridge to sell you.
Also ice is less likeley to sublimate at the poles than elswhere due the the high pressure ceters that are permanently over them. Sublimation rate is due to related vapour pressure and has nothing to do with humidty (until the air is saturated).
I am quite capable of debunking your red-herrings but do not wish to spend all my time spoon feeding idiots, why you keep posting ancient psudeo-skeptical crap is beyond me.
The intellectual coward has it the wrong way around. The "It's natural" red-herring is stage two of the standard psudeo-skeptical denial that comes when they can no longer deny the globe is warming to a particular audience. The next stages include, "it's good for us", "economic armageden" and "god wouldn't allow it to happen".
So by your reasoning we Aussies should not be arresting arsonists who are responsible for starting about 1/3 of all our bushfires. We should let them continue with their bussiness as usual because we know that the other 2/3 of bushfires are started by natural causes.
BTW: This particular environmentalist doesn't care if you drive an SUV, a sherman tank, or a skateboard.
I don't know what the "IT" you are talking about actually is, you haven't stated what what the hell you are on about.
The two bullshit graphs are supposedly for the southern hemisphere, the article talks about the northern hemisphere and is unrelated. One graph indicates it's colder the other indicates nothing has changed.
A common psuedo-skeptical technique is to conflate the two hemispheres, add them together or pick one particular sensor. I don't know what idiocy they have used in their political marketing and since they don't even credit the data for the second graph I couldn't care less.
As for data to debunk it, unless you have a memory problem you are already aware that I have posted it. Have another look at the NASA links from the GRACE sattelite and the 50 peer-reviewed papers from Nature and Science I posted.
Was there some specific point on the page you want me to refute because quite frankly there is so much wrong with it I don't know where to start?
Thing is I've never heard of that link before but it's full of the standard red-herrings and half-truths, when I'd read enough of them I looked at the names of their so called scientists. Some stand out like dogs balls, the names also pop up in connection with the heartland institute. You would probably recognise such luminaries as Fred Singer, Dr Ball, George Will, senator Inhofe?
Don't know why you were modded troll, I also practiced air raids in primary school in the 60's and that was on the outskirts of the middle of nowhere in Australia.
Ok, sorry I have missunderstood what you were saying. Yeah I think it's an interesting thought but I don't think it applies to ice shelves, they are normally a couple of meters thick and already exposing a high ratio. I think glacial bergs might reflect a bit more but you need to take into account that about half the standing cliffs would be in the shade. I don't think it would be significant to climate due to the size of the ice cap to total size of iceberg ratio. If you did have enough bergs to cause a noticable global cooling it would only last a year or so and most of humanity would have already gone down the tubes.
I have never heard of it being specifically modeled.
I became aware of politics in the late 60's, from what I've seen over the years there are more political conspiracies than there are politicians. Problem is that nowadays the parodies and the theories are all starting to look alike. I can't tell if you are taking the piss, if I'm missing a joke, or if you are just another conspiracy nut.
Either way the geeky looking guy in the white shirt lost me with the "I'm not a scholar I'm just a reporter presenting facts" routine. It the same sales pitch the author of the DaVinci code used much more expertly to sell his half-truths as the real deal, even Michael Moore gets some points for lampooning Bush while it was unpopular.
"Perhaps it's just US humour but I think I will leave the red pill alone", said Alice.
"Do you believe everything your government tells you as they are trying to take things away from you? Seriously? You don't even ask?"
Seriously don't you get tierd of projecting your faults on to others? We have had this discussion, in it we discovered your belief system is based on political dogma and a brand of 'skepticisim' that translates to calling bullshit on anything that does not match your politics. When offered contra-information you ignore it and change the subject. If you want to grow up, be a real skeptic and get some sort of consistency and methodology to your arguments then you need to start questioning your conspiricy theories. I would add that you should practice that for a while before you start comparing yourself to Einstein but the horse has already bolted.
OTOH: Your worldview may becoming an endangered meme but it doesn't makes you stupid or evil, you have every right to parade your willfull ignorance and incorrectly label yourself a skeptic. Personally I can no more see eye to eye with the intellectual dishonesty in that philosophy than I can see eye to eye with a rabid creationist. What more is there to say? Seriously?
"With the increase in icebergs comes an increase in high albedo reflective surface on the ocean. [snip] The white surface area has increased 25 times."
Your calculations assume all the ice on the berg is above the water and thus able to reflect more light because of a greater suface area. However 90% is underwater and at a depth of 10 meters nearly all light has been absorbed.
"It seems possible that a free floating ice shelf the size of Connecticut could become a reflective surface the size of Pennsylvania before it melts away completely."
I don't see why not since it's already an efficient reflective surface when it's not moving. However I doubt that breaking a mirror makes it reflect more light.
"While I would agree that we are losing ice, what I would want to know is this: how does this compare to the "long warm" we experienced during the middle ages?"
Look at the age of the ice shelves that have collapsed over the last decade or so, does the fact that the ice they are composed of predates the medieval warm period by millenia tell you anything?
"I have yet to see any studies that answer all of these questions."
Then you haven't looked very hard. Your questions are full of incorrect assumptions, false assertions, and ancient red-herrings but here are some terse answers just in case you have been living in a basement for the last decade...
1. Yes, the later half of the 20th century was warmer than the medieval warm period (MWP), the MWP did not last to the little ice age(LIA). Every year in the 21st centry has been hotter than any year in the 20th centutry except 1998.
2. Solar output has gone down over the last decade but temps are still going up albeit on a shallower slope than the 90's. In other words the physical effects of the sun do not make the physical effects of CO2 magically dissapear.
3. The "scientists predicted an ice age in the 70's" is a myth, the myth is based on an article in the Nation Geographic and subsequent newspaper articles. The national academies of science warned humans were warming the world in the 50's, they also said soot has a cooling effect, some people have trouble holding two ideas in their head at the same time.
Since you obviously haven't looked further than outdated right-wing opinion columns here is a list of common myths, you will find most of your post in there.
"I think it is better to have ALL the answers before we order the entire planet to change(and make people like Gore and his "carbon credits" scam rich) don't you?"
AFAIK Gore is already rich. Regardless of what you think Gore says or does, his behaviour does not excuse you from ignoring basic risk management and making alarmist claims on the economy which are unsupported by fact.
Dust is an areosol that has always been there, human areosols are also known to have a large negative forcing (ie: cooling effect) although as you can be seen by the error bars there are some large uncertainties with various forcings they are not enough to reject the overal conclusion in the net anthropogenic component.
"Note that more information isn't needed by those that claim irreversible HIGW afects."
Best effort says we stabalise at a doubling of pre-industrial levels by 2050, this means stabalising 2 degrees higher than now. It is true that it's not impossible to reverese that or the trend on Artic sea ice and see it back the way it was when I was born (1959), it's much more likely we won't meet that best effort target, either way the Artic will be open water in the summer of 2059, I'm unlikely to live that long but my newborn grandchild will have just celebrated her 50th.
Slashdot Mirror
No need to apologise I understand what you are saying, a big SUV to an Aussie is a Nissan Patrol, but I'm an older Aussie and can remeber when F-100's were popular. There is also a streched Hummer near where I work, it has got to be the most ridiculous thing I've seen on the road since the goggomobil went out of fashion.
I may be a 'greenie' but that doesn't mean I have tossed capitalisim out the window.
My point was that individuals are too...ummm...individual...to make much difference by changing personal habits out of the kindness of their heart. Carbon needs an internationaly agreed and enforced CAP on total emmissions in order to create an economically and environmentally sound market to TRADE it. This is no different in concept to many existing internationally enforced rules on trade, travel, the environment, space exploration, slavery, etc.
If the guy with an army surplus tank is prepared to pay for the damage it does to natural and made made infrastructure such as the road, the atmosphere, etc, (ie: willing to play by market rules) then he can knock himself out as far as I am concerned. Of course if CO2 emmissions, oil, ex army tanks, are all finite resources and everyone wants to drive one then it will become a very expensive proposition, matter of fact it already is. If he is not willing to play by the rules then he doesn't get the benifits of the market, it's quite simple really and has worked that way since humans started bartering Mamoth steaks for sex.
You could introduce a carbon market to Aussie motorists without changing the price at the pump, simply replace the very high excise on fuel with carbon permits. After all the excise was supposedly introduced to reduce fuel compsumption during the oil crisis in the seventies. I believe the UK are in a similar position. However if you have been following KRuddy's carbon market legislation you will know it's not so much the oil industry that are putting up roadblocks, it's the coal industry who are panicking about their own future survival.
You say you did research 3 years ago. Was it published or did the peer-review point out you missed the IPCC temprature reconstructions that have been generally accepted for about a decade now?
Excellent stuff. Not telling you how to suck eggs, I'd just like to add that the bit about "CO2 always increased 600 years AFTER the temperature started to increase" has been used ad-nausem by psuedo-skeptics to "prove" that warming causes CO2 and not the other way around. However the rise in CO2 after an ice age is best explained by melting permafrost and adds to whatever is already forcing the temprature up.
In other words it's an expected positive feedback to a warming globe.
You may be right but your pessimisim about AGW does not match the optimisim for world peace as expressed in your sig.
So let me get this straight, your suggesting we ignore the leak in the hull and keep bailing?
Con job and spin are the correct terms for that particular web site.
This is the second time this site has popped up in the last few days. It's run by one J. D'Aleo who is paid to do so by the "Science and Public Policy Institute", they are in turn backed by "Frontiers of Freedom" which is the lobbying brain child of this guy. They have a donate button on their site but their funding is otherwise obscured.
Older readers may recall the "Frontiers of Freedom" also backed the tabacoo industry in their anti-science campaign.
Disclaimer: I don't have anything against lobbyists or politicians until they pretend to be something they are not.
"Yep, all those scientists that disagree, we'll just sweep them under a rug."
Get back to us when you have looked under the rug and asked one for their name, hypothisis and evidence. Don't forget to check the couch there could be a couple hiding there as well.
"Congratulations!"
Now you are pretending it was some sort of test?
"You did link to a couple of google searches. Kinda ironic that you limited them to a single source each. This from a guy who's been hammering the trustworthiness of sources limits his search to a two sources."
You do realise journals are ranked in acedemia don't you, Nature is ranked #1, I threw in the lowly Science rag as backup.
"Antarctica is NOT losing ice"
Refer to the NASA link and the previous list of 50 Nature and science articles. Also the site you link to does not mention that climate models predicted higher rates of warming in the Artic and The antartic pennisula, exactly what we have been observing, see IPCC wrt polar amplification.
"but this fact is dwarfed by the mounting evidence the overall ice mass of Antarctica is increasing"
So why post a link to a paper that only talks about increased snow in East Antarctic? You do realise that climate models predict a rise is snowfall above 3000ft, right? And that this was a psuedo-skeptical favorite for causing confusion a few years back when talking about similar phenomena in Greenland.
"due to a cooling trend that has taken place since 1998."
If you believe cherry picked crap I have a bridge to sell you.
Also ice is less likeley to sublimate at the poles than elswhere due the the high pressure ceters that are permanently over them. Sublimation rate is due to related vapour pressure and has nothing to do with humidty (until the air is saturated).
I am quite capable of debunking your red-herrings but do not wish to spend all my time spoon feeding idiots, why you keep posting ancient psudeo-skeptical crap is beyond me.
"Good luck and NO HELP THIS TIME!"
You want me to dance for you? - fuck off!
The intellectual coward has it the wrong way around. The "It's natural" red-herring is stage two of the standard psudeo-skeptical denial that comes when they can no longer deny the globe is warming to a particular audience. The next stages include, "it's good for us", "economic armageden" and "god wouldn't allow it to happen".
So by your reasoning we Aussies should not be arresting arsonists who are responsible for starting about 1/3 of all our bushfires. We should let them continue with their bussiness as usual because we know that the other 2/3 of bushfires are started by natural causes.
BTW: This particular environmentalist doesn't care if you drive an SUV, a sherman tank, or a skateboard.
"You have the free will to believe what you wish, i can do no more for you."
I don't want you to do any more. I decided a long time ago that my freedom to believe whatever I like must be constrained by reason.
I don't know what the "IT" you are talking about actually is, you haven't stated what what the hell you are on about.
The two bullshit graphs are supposedly for the southern hemisphere, the article talks about the northern hemisphere and is unrelated. One graph indicates it's colder the other indicates nothing has changed.
A common psuedo-skeptical technique is to conflate the two hemispheres, add them together or pick one particular sensor. I don't know what idiocy they have used in their political marketing and since they don't even credit the data for the second graph I couldn't care less.
As for data to debunk it, unless you have a memory problem you are already aware that I have posted it. Have another look at the NASA links from the GRACE sattelite and the 50 peer-reviewed papers from Nature and Science I posted.
Was there some specific point on the page you want me to refute because quite frankly there is so much wrong with it I don't know where to start?
Thing is I've never heard of that link before but it's full of the standard red-herrings and half-truths, when I'd read enough of them I looked at the names of their so called scientists. Some stand out like dogs balls, the names also pop up in connection with the heartland institute. You would probably recognise such luminaries as Fred Singer, Dr Ball, George Will, senator Inhofe?
You can rant about FACTS all you like but that site doesn't tell you where it gets it's so called facts from and even when it does give you some clues their primary source does not agree with them on at least one major point.
Don't know why you were modded troll, I also practiced air raids in primary school in the 60's and that was on the outskirts of the middle of nowhere in Australia.
I also looked at your links and lo and behold it's a "swift boat" site that just happens to agree with your politics...
Speficially they are part of this ex-senators lobbying efforts, you may recall he also set up a similar shop to assist the tabacco industry.
Ok, sorry I have missunderstood what you were saying. Yeah I think it's an interesting thought but I don't think it applies to ice shelves, they are normally a couple of meters thick and already exposing a high ratio. I think glacial bergs might reflect a bit more but you need to take into account that about half the standing cliffs would be in the shade. I don't think it would be significant to climate due to the size of the ice cap to total size of iceberg ratio. If you did have enough bergs to cause a noticable global cooling it would only last a year or so and most of humanity would have already gone down the tubes.
I have never heard of it being specifically modeled.
I became aware of politics in the late 60's, from what I've seen over the years there are more political conspiracies than there are politicians. Problem is that nowadays the parodies and the theories are all starting to look alike. I can't tell if you are taking the piss, if I'm missing a joke, or if you are just another conspiracy nut.
Either way the geeky looking guy in the white shirt lost me with the "I'm not a scholar I'm just a reporter presenting facts" routine. It the same sales pitch the author of the DaVinci code used much more expertly to sell his half-truths as the real deal, even Michael Moore gets some points for lampooning Bush while it was unpopular.
"Perhaps it's just US humour but I think I will leave the red pill alone", said Alice.
"Do you believe everything your government tells you as they are trying to take things away from you? Seriously? You don't even ask?"
Seriously don't you get tierd of projecting your faults on to others? We have had this discussion, in it we discovered your belief system is based on political dogma and a brand of 'skepticisim' that translates to calling bullshit on anything that does not match your politics. When offered contra-information you ignore it and change the subject. If you want to grow up, be a real skeptic and get some sort of consistency and methodology to your arguments then you need to start questioning your conspiricy theories. I would add that you should practice that for a while before you start comparing yourself to Einstein but the horse has already bolted.
OTOH: Your worldview may becoming an endangered meme but it doesn't makes you stupid or evil, you have every right to parade your willfull ignorance and incorrectly label yourself a skeptic. Personally I can no more see eye to eye with the intellectual dishonesty in that philosophy than I can see eye to eye with a rabid creationist. What more is there to say? Seriously?
"With the increase in icebergs comes an increase in high albedo reflective surface on the ocean. [snip] The white surface area has increased 25 times."
Your calculations assume all the ice on the berg is above the water and thus able to reflect more light because of a greater suface area. However 90% is underwater and at a depth of 10 meters nearly all light has been absorbed.
"It seems possible that a free floating ice shelf the size of Connecticut could become a reflective surface the size of Pennsylvania before it melts away completely."
I don't see why not since it's already an efficient reflective surface when it's not moving. However I doubt that breaking a mirror makes it reflect more light.
"Take the Red Pill"
Judging by the economic alarmisim and conspiracy theories in your post I'd say you should leave the pills alone.
You admitted you were a psuedo-skeptic, why are you trying to be all sciency again? - How many people occupy your head and do they all get along?
"The ice levels of your childhood were extremely high."
You must be extremely high to believe that.
"While I would agree that we are losing ice, what I would want to know is this: how does this compare to the "long warm" we experienced during the middle ages?"
Look at the age of the ice shelves that have collapsed over the last decade or so, does the fact that the ice they are composed of predates the medieval warm period by millenia tell you anything?
"I have yet to see any studies that answer all of these questions."
Then you haven't looked very hard. Your questions are full of incorrect assumptions, false assertions, and ancient red-herrings but here are some terse answers just in case you have been living in a basement for the last decade...
1. Yes, the later half of the 20th century was warmer than the medieval warm period (MWP), the MWP did not last to the little ice age(LIA). Every year in the 21st centry has been hotter than any year in the 20th centutry except 1998.
2. Solar output has gone down over the last decade but temps are still going up albeit on a shallower slope than the 90's. In other words the physical effects of the sun do not make the physical effects of CO2 magically dissapear.
3. The "scientists predicted an ice age in the 70's" is a myth, the myth is based on an article in the Nation Geographic and subsequent newspaper articles. The national academies of science warned humans were warming the world in the 50's, they also said soot has a cooling effect, some people have trouble holding two ideas in their head at the same time.
Since you obviously haven't looked further than outdated right-wing opinion columns here is a list of common myths, you will find most of your post in there.
"I think it is better to have ALL the answers before we order the entire planet to change(and make people like Gore and his "carbon credits" scam rich) don't you?"
AFAIK Gore is already rich. Regardless of what you think Gore says or does, his behaviour does not excuse you from ignoring basic risk management and making alarmist claims on the economy which are unsupported by fact.
Your brain needs potassium yet it explodes on contact with water...
I've tried the red pill with a self proclaimed physicist and it left me unsatisfied. Do you have anything to add?
Dust is an areosol that has always been there, human areosols are also known to have a large negative forcing (ie: cooling effect) although as you can be seen by the error bars there are some large uncertainties with various forcings they are not enough to reject the overal conclusion in the net anthropogenic component.
"Note that more information isn't needed by those that claim irreversible HIGW afects."
Best effort says we stabalise at a doubling of pre-industrial levels by 2050, this means stabalising 2 degrees higher than now. It is true that it's not impossible to reverese that or the trend on Artic sea ice and see it back the way it was when I was born (1959), it's much more likely we won't meet that best effort target, either way the Artic will be open water in the summer of 2059, I'm unlikely to live that long but my newborn grandchild will have just celebrated her 50th.