No, my point has been and continues to be that _landfalling_ hurricanes as a small percentage of total hurricanes do not offer enough data to make significant conclusions. These studies look at full basins, or even global frequencies, in order to examine trends.
They also chart said trends against actual sea surface temperatures so they can make statements about the potential links between them, which gives more data than just looking at a temporal trend.
I encourage you to take a look at the realclimate analysis of the Hockey Stick controversy. McIntyre & McKitrick is by no means the last word in this discussion, and the general consensus among climate scientists (including those at MIT) is that the broad brush of the hockey stick is correct.
Changes in Tropical Cyclone Number, Duration, and Intensity in a Warming Environment.
P. J. Webster, G. J. Holland, J. A. Curry, and H.-R. Chang (2005).
Science 309: 1844-1846
Emanuel, "Increasing Destructiveness of Tropical Cyclones Over the Past 30 Years"
Nature 436, 686-688 (4 August 2005)
Trenberth et al., Science: "An important measure of regional storm activity is the Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) index (see the second figure) (1). Since 1995, the ACE indexes for all but two Atlantic hurricane seasons have been above normal; the exceptions are the El Niño years of 1997 and 2002. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the hurricane seasons from 1995 to 2004 averaged 13.6 tropical storms, 7.8 hurricanes, and 3.8 major hurricanes, and the ACE index was 169% of the median."
Prof. Emanuel, MIT: "Data on U.S. landfalling storms is only about 2 tenths of one percent of data we have on global hurricanes over their whole lifetimes. Thus while we can already detect trends in data for global hurricane activity considering the whole life of each storm, we estimate that it would take at least another 50 years to detect any long-term trend in U.S. landfalling hurricane statistics, so powerful is the role of chance in these numbers."
So I'm saying that your statement of "we don't see trends in these numbers, therefore nothing is happening" is equivalent to a global warming alarmist saying "the last couple of years have been hot, therefore the world is ending!"
We do see statistically significant trends in increased frequency of Atlantic hurricanes overall. Now, it is possible that the long term trend will show that despite increased Atlantic hurricanes, we are actually getting decreased US hurricanes... but we don't have enough data to say that yet!
In addition, when we do have data, I would suggest that number and category of landfalling hurricanes are not the only factors that need to be considered, but also duration and size of storm.
Finally you state "That the US has been hit by a historically low number of hurricanes in the last 5 years is a simple observation." This is a simple but WRONG observation. I count 13 landfalling hurricanes in the last 5 years, 6 of which have been category 3 or higher. That looks quite exceptional in historical terms. The data you pointed us at convenientally leaves out 2005 with its 4 landfalls and 3 majors. But again, I will point out that 13 hurricanes in 5 years is a number small enough that we can't make statistically confident statements about whether this is the sign of a trend or an abberation.
What do you mean by saying that the Mann "hockey stick" was proved wrong at MIT? The MIT climate scientists I know mostly agree with the following realclimate article...
The numbers you are looking at are too small to make valid statistical claims. That is why real scientists use total hurricanes in the Atlantic Basin, or even better, global hurricanes. Oh - wait, but you are trying to make a hysterical political claim by using data sets that are too small to draw valid conclusions from! mmm, the flavor of hypocrisy...
On his webpage, Kerry Emanuel has some data going back to 1930. But North Atlantic data isn't reliable until 1949, and global data (eg satellite era) in 1970. We have data on landfalling hurricanes going back further, but that is such a small sample that you can't make statistically significant arguments based on them.
We would _love_ to be able to apply this statistical methodology back in time, but we just don't have the data. That's the simple answer.
I have serious doubts about how this so-called "excellent" paper got through peer review - oh, wait, was it not published in a peer-reviewed journal?
I recognize that the man may be one of the world experts on hurricane skill prediction, but the man clearly needs some basic education in climate physics. To start with, the man doesn't even realize that forcing from increases in CO2 concentration aren't linear!
Quote: "and from 1975 to 2005 it [CO2 energy forcing] was raised by 46/290x4.2 = 0.67 w/m2". Now, the standard CO2 forcing approximation (ideally, you use MODTRAN or the equivalent software package, but this will do) is F = f(c)-f(c0) where f(c) = 4.996 ln (c+0.0005c^2). For the same 330 ppm to 378 ppm increase that Gray claims is 0.67 w/m2 (or, in your excerpt, 0.65 w/m2), I calculate about 0.78 w/m2. So Dr. Gray is off by a whopping 16% on what should be an elementary calculation that I would expect any competent first year grad student to be able to do.
Now of course, CO2 isn't the only greenhouse gas. Other gases have contributed some 1.5 W/m2 forcing increase since preindustrial. Nor does he seem to ackowledge the cooling properties of sulfate aerosols (extremely important when understanding the difference between the 1950 to 1975 period and the 1975-present period), or the fact that climate models do an extremely good job of matching the cooling resulting from volcanic eruptions like Pinatubo that his theories would clearly totally fail on, various fingerprinting routines to look at temperature change patterns, or any one of a hundred other issues.
So how about I don't call myself a weather prediction expert unless I want to do some serious research into your methodology, and you (or Dr. Gray) don't try pretending to be experts on climate science unless you can understand at least the elementary issues?
My understanding is that Figure 3 in that graph involved first subtracting out a linear trend (sadly, I am not near my library right now, and I don't think JGR is online so I can't go to the original study). There is a growing body of experts who believe that the so-called "Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation" does not even exist. It will be interesting to see the experts fight it out in the literature in the next few years... but from the data I have seen, I personally am now leaning to the belief that the increased Atlantic hurricane frequency is due to sea surface temperature increases due to global warming.
2) Direct CO2 forcing is responsible for 9 to 26% of radiative forcing depending on how you do your calculations (realclimate calculations)
Warming due to CO2 will also lead to more water vapor in the atmosphere in a positive feedback.
3) I have no idea where you are getting your numbers. Please cite some sources? Again, realclimate has reprinted a figure showing 6 different temperature reconstructions of the past 1000 years. None of them have medieval warm periods that are even as warm as today's temperatures, much less your absolutely ridiculous 2 degree C number.
Finally: Yes, historically CO2 has not been the prime mover in Ice Age oscillations - that would be orbital variations (Milankovitch cycles). However, given that the forcing changes due to orbital wobbling are small, most paleoclimatologists believe that there was a nice positive feedback loop: slight warming leads to CO2 outgassing leads to more warming leads to ice sheet retreat leads to more warming leads to more CO2 leads to... you get the picture. And our evidence for the CO2-warming link is not just "mere correlation" - there is significant science that goes into measuring all sorts of forcing agents from volcanoes to aerosols to GHGs to solar variations - and studies using these forcings find it very, very hard to explain the last 40 years of warming without taking into account anthropogenic GHG changes.
Hurricane generation and intensity is a complicated and poorly understood subject matter. We know that factors involved include, but are not limited to, upper sea surface temperature, temperatures below the surface (the best hurricanes thrive on cold deep waters under hot surface waters, I think), wind shear, and upper troposphere atmospheric temperatures. Certainly, a higher sea surface temperature leads to higher potential hurricane intensity, but hurricanes rarely come anywhere near their maxiumum intensities. And it is only in the last couple of years, with studies by Emanuel at MIT and Judith Curry at Georgia (cited in the article), that researchers have found good statistical evidence that sea surface temperatures are linked to high intensity storms (worldwide) and higher frequency storms in the Atlantic. Note that outside the Atlantic basin there are no obvious trends in hurricane frequency.
So we didn't already know this. Admittedly, for the purposes of making policies, we did know we were playing with variables that were _likely_ to make things a lot worse. But evidence that it is already happening is much more convincing that projections that it might happen in the future.
You might want to check out the analysis by Prof. Kerry Emanuel at MIT. If you look at the statistical analysis, there is a very clear link between global hurricane intensity (as measured by area, duration, and wind speed) and ocean temperatures. While there has been no change in global hurricane frequency, Atlantic hurricane frequency _has_ been linked to ocean temperatures. Skeptics are still trying to claim that this is a result of the AMO, but many ocean experts are of the opinion that the AMO is a data artifact and not a good explanation for hurricanes.
To sum up: the data DO show a change in hurricane patterns. (Of course, if you look at property damage caused by hurricanes, it is skyrocketing mostly because people are dumb and build lots of expensive property by the beach, but that doesn't mean that hurricanes aren't getting worse at the same time as people are building more stuff in their path)
First: your own study says that the NET increase in absorption is only 1 billion tons per year, much less than the 4-5 billion tons that you cite (and even smaller if you add in the ~2 billion tons carbon emissions from deforestation, and smaller yet if you note that all projections are that we will be INCREASING emissions in the future)
Second: We have way more than 100 years of fossil fuels left. Coal reserves are HUGE, plus shale oil, tar sands, maybe methane hydrates...
Third: I will raise your government study with a Science Magazine article by one of the world experts on iron fertilization, Penny Chisholm at MIT: "Despite the concerns of many oceanographers and environmental groups, the concept of industrial ocean fertilization is winning advocates. Proponents claim that ocean fertilization is an easily controlled, verifiable process that mimics nature; and that it is an environmentally benign, long-term solution to atmospheric CO2 accumulation (14). These claims are, quite simply, not true."
Chisholm, S.W., P.G. Falkowski, and J.J. Cullen. Dis-Crediting Ocean Fertilization. Science 294:309-310. (2001)
"Your rebutal was silly though as you attributed the WHOLE 278ppm to 370ppm CO2 level increase soley on humans. Geological data suggests all warming trends are accompanied by CO2 increases." So, it turns out that if you measure the quantity of CO2 emitted by humans (order of 7 Gt C/year) and the amount of C increase in the atmosphere every year (order of 3 to 4 Gt C/year), the natural system is actually a net SINK of carbon (and has been since we've been measuring this). So, yes, I am quite confident that the WHOLE CO2 level increase is due to human influence. See also this realclimate post.
And it is nice to know that your life will improve if we have warmer climate and higher ocean levels. Sucks to be the millions of people who live on the coasts, or the developing nation farmers who won't be able to deal with their climate changing, or the areas that depend on water from snowpack, or the people who have built on permafrost, or the alpine ecosystems that will disappear, or... Human civilization pretty much developed in a system where worldwide temperatures were fairly stable for the past few thousand years, it won't be easy to adapt to temperatures increasing by several degrees celsius because all of our infrastructure is designed around the current climate (it won't be the end of civilization, we are pretty resourceful folk, but perhaps it might be worth some investment to reduce the amount of change we'll be seeing?).
"Chances are anyhow that there is a temperature threshold in the current atmosphere in which water droplets(clouds/fog) would start to overpower water vapor and reflect more of the suns entergy causing a genaral cooling." Really? "Chances are"? What studies have you been reading which suggest this? The role of clouds in the feedback cycle are still poorly understood - but my understanding is that a majority of experts don't think that there is a feedback here that will lead to any significant cooling (also remember that clouds trap heat at night). But perhaps you can publish (or cite) a definitive paper suggesting otherwise?
I would think that the DOE numbers would agree with mine. See a webpage of theirs on carbon sequestration for example (please provide a cite to a DOE webpage that contradicts this). Or the EPA . Though I personally like the IPCC TAR as a good place to find a summary of climate change research.
Concentrations of long-lived gases like CH4, CO2, and N2O are fairly well-mixed globally - hemispheric mixing times are on the order of 1 to 2 months, global mixing times are on the order of 1 year (Seinfeld & Pandis, a standard atmospheric chemistry textbook). We measure them all over the place (from the peak of Mauna Loa to Antarctica) and come up with similar results. Google "Keeling" and "CO2" to see information on studies since 1955 in this area.
And yes, water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas. But water vapor concentrations are a function of the state of the system, and most scientists agree that increasing anthropogenic greenhouse gases will lead to an increase in water vapor too. But given that you don't even have basic comprehension of the carbon cycle and our ability to measure concentrations, I would suggest you consider whether your "lick of common sense" may be totally useless without some real scientific understanding to back it up.
Oh, yeah. I guess you are right. The thousands of climate experts out there have no idea what is going on. I'm glad that you are around to tell them they are all fools based on a couple of Russian studies...
Now, let's get down to science: "On top of that factor just the study of whether greenhouse gas levels in modern times are driven primarily by anthropogenic causes or not is nearly an impossible thing to quantify reliably." Your statement here indicates a TOTAL lack of actual understanding. Even your favorite climate skeptics (pick any of Lindzen, Christy, Michaels, Singer, Soon, Baliunas) would tell you that statement is pure BS. The rise in CO2, CH4, and N2O from preindustrial is indisputably due to human emissions.
Looking at exact figures: "Now you can MAYBE say 4% of those are man made since the begining of industrialization if you check data at the US department of energy's data. It's taken us 200+ years to add this 4%, all while nature has added 20% according to the same data." Where do you get these numbers??? The three major (non-water) GHGS are CO2, CH4, and N2O. CO2 levels are ~370 ppm, from 278 ppm. CH4 1760 ppb, from 700 ppb. N2O 316 ppb from 270 ppb. By mass CO2 dominates, so basically humans have led to a 30% increase (by mass) in GHGs, with the bulk of that coming in the past few decades. Now, mass is kind of a dumb measure, because different gases have very different radiative absorption profiles - most people talk about this issue in W/m^2, in which case, humans have added about 2.2 watts/m^2 in direct forcing from the well-mixed gases (not counting black carbon warming, sulfate aerosol cooling, albedo issues from land use change, or any of the various positive feedback mechanisms such as increased water vapor or ice retreat). Added up over the entire Earth's surface over an entire year - that's a LOT of watts, and it would be really surprising if that _didn't_ lead to warming. And business as usual projections put us at 7 or 8 W/m^2 over preindustrial levels by the end of the 21st century, which is equivalent to making the Sun several percent brighter, which is way beyond any variability we've measured or reasonably expect
But I guess you and Mr. Deutsch have special sources that conveniently tell you that the world doesn't work this way...
Well, I see that someone is following in Mr. Deutsch's footsteps. Looking for a political appointee job with the Bush administration?
You can certainly find "some credible scientists" (for certain values of "some", "credible", and "scientists") who believe that the consensus on climate change is wrong, the same way you can find some who believe that the consensus on/the Big Bang/Evolution/the Ozone Hole/name your pet theory/ is wrong too.
Why don't you go to an AGU meeting and attend a sampling of climate talks and see what the real state of the science is? You'll see a lot of acknowledgment of uncertainty, but basically, if you interview 100 attendees at the conference, I would guess that 98 would be willing to place money down that next century will be warmer than this one due to anthropogenic causes, and maybe 90 of them would say that it was something to worry about. The basic science behind this has been understood for more than a century (see Svante Arrhenius), and the evidence just keeps mounting.
And please don't trot out the global cooling canard: Realclimate (among other sources) debunks that nicely.
And I love that the article that YOU linked to states "Most of the prominent organisations making the case against mainstream climate science have an avowed agenda of promoting free markets and minimal government. They often accept funding from the fossil-fuel industry. Few employ climate scientists."
The magnitude and even sign of the water vapor feedback is one of the biggest uncertainties in determining the climate sensitivity.
Water vapor is a greenhouse gas, which makes a positive feedback. But as you state, cloud cover also has a role. Clouds (whose formation is hard to predict in global models with resolution > 100 km^2) serve to increase albedo during the day but also serve as additional insulation during the night. It is hard to know exactly how the interaction of increased water vapor and increased temperature will interact to change cloud altitude, type, duration, etc. (and that's before you throw in changes in lofted particulates - BC, OC, SOx, etc. - which serve to change cloud attributes as well)
In any case, many groups estimate that the change in temperature due to a doubling of CO2 ranges from 1 degree to 5 degrees, mainly due to this confusion about the role of water vapor.
First, the "ice age" connection is not due to the energy it takes to melt ice. Rather it is due to the very topic of grandparent article. Namely the theory is that in the past the gulf stream shutdown (which is due to the fact that melted ice is less dense than salt water) led to a cooling of the European land mass, leading to extension of glaciers down from the north pole, leading to a higher albedo Earth, leading to cooling of the whole planet.
However, this time around we have higher GHG concentrations than in previous cycles and high projected global mean temperatures, so it seems unlikely that Europe will cool to the point where increased snowcover will lead to an ice age, even in the case of complete gulf stream collapse.
But I don't think that any respectable climatologist talks about runaway greenhouse effects with the Earth anymore. While there may be significant positive feedbacks in the climate system, there is no evidence that they are that large. As a climate scientist myself, I believe that we do need to reduce our GHG emissions as much as is feasible in order to avoid all sorts of unfortunate climate changes, but boiling the earth's oceans just isn't in the cards.
Um. Where do we start. How about with "EVOLUTION ISN'T RANDOM YOU IDIOT!" There's this little process you might have heard of called "natural selection"? Eg, the chance of my rolling eight 10 sided dice and coming up with all ones is 1x10-8. If I have 100 chances, it is approximately 1x10-6. However, if I have 100 chances, where every time a 1 is rolled, I _keep_ that one, suddenly my chances become 99.98% that I'll get to those eight ones. I acknowledge that this an an oversimplified example, but I think it serves its point, namely that if you can use selection processes, you can throw your standard probability calculations out the window.
Now, perhaps you were talking about the probability of the _first_ self-replicating molecule. While abiogenesis is NOT evolution, the talkorigins site does address some of the common abiogenesis probability arguments. Namely, that the simplest self-replicating molecules do not have to be hundreds of base pairs
long, and again, once you've gotten one self-replicator, the magic of natural selection plus billions of years plus billions of self-replicators can get you some pretty neat things.
Now, can I prove that God or some alien didn't step in and tweak a step in the evolution process? No, I can't. But the point is that we don't need to appeal to the supernatural to explain anything we currently observe. And the advantage of scientific over supernatural explanations is that science enables us to make predictions. For example, science will predict that where synonomous codons exist (eg, UUU and UUC both code for phenylalanine), two closely related organisms will use the same coding more often than two distantly related organisms. Intelligent design would predict absolutely nothing useful about this issue. And the fact that time and time again, the predictions of science turn out to be right shows that either evolution is right or God really wants to screw with our heads.
The only way in which I was surprised was how blatantly stupid this website is. I would hope that most middle schoolers could pick this page apart. At least Intelligent Design has _some_ infintesimal philosophical merit, your drdino site is just absurd.
The problem is that Intelligent Design _is_ junk science, the same way that Uri Geller claiming to bend spoons with his mind is junk science. With the difference that Intelligent Design has a scary consortium of religious freaks pushing it so hard that it makes people who don't really understand biology think that there is reasonable grounds for disagreement.
And just one note: why is it so hard for you to believe that the human species originated from a single celled organism when you yourself were once a single cell?
Now, go learn something about molecular biology. Then spend some time comparing amino acid sequences for a given protein between animals that are closely related (say two mammals) and animals that are distantly related (say a mammal and a fish). Just this one exercise done properly will show you how ridiculous it is to believe that current species don't have common ancestors.
The important thing is that history stays self consistent. I think that some weirdo journal like New Scientist once published a time travel paper which included a "pool table" example. This example posited that Pocket A of the table connected via a time travel wormhole to Pocket B, such that a ball entering Pocket A would exit Pocket B 5 seconds in the past.
Now, imagine a universe in which you hit a pool ball (X) straight between the two pockets. It hits the wall, ricochets back, everything is fine.
Except that one time you do this, a ball Y comes flying out of Pocket B, knocking into ball X such that ball X goes into Pocket A at exactly the right time and angle that it would emerge from pocket B in the past as ball Y...
Now you have two possible universes, both of which are perfectly self consistent. Which one happens?
Erm. The interhemispheric mixing time is on the order of a year. I don't know what your "very little mixing" comes from.
eg:
"Southern hemispheric mixing ratios of methyl chloroform peaked in 1992 and northern hemisphere mixing ratios peaked a little more than a year earlier (Figure 5.9). The time lag is similar to the known interhemispheric mixing time. The large north to south gradient before 1993 is indicative of very strong northern hemisphere sources." (Prinn et al., 1995)
Slashdot Mirror
They also chart said trends against actual sea surface temperatures so they can make statements about the potential links between them, which gives more data than just looking at a temporal trend.
Changes in Tropical Cyclone Number, Duration, and Intensity in a Warming Environment. P. J. Webster, G. J. Holland, J. A. Curry, and H.-R. Chang (2005). Science 309: 1844-1846
Emanuel, "Increasing Destructiveness of Tropical Cyclones Over the Past 30 Years" Nature 436, 686-688 (4 August 2005)
Trenberth et al., Science: "An important measure of regional storm activity is the Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) index (see the second figure) (1). Since 1995, the ACE indexes for all but two Atlantic hurricane seasons have been above normal; the exceptions are the El Niño years of 1997 and 2002. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the hurricane seasons from 1995 to 2004 averaged 13.6 tropical storms, 7.8 hurricanes, and 3.8 major hurricanes, and the ACE index was 169% of the median."
Good enough?
So I'm saying that your statement of "we don't see trends in these numbers, therefore nothing is happening" is equivalent to a global warming alarmist saying "the last couple of years have been hot, therefore the world is ending!"
We do see statistically significant trends in increased frequency of Atlantic hurricanes overall. Now, it is possible that the long term trend will show that despite increased Atlantic hurricanes, we are actually getting decreased US hurricanes... but we don't have enough data to say that yet!
In addition, when we do have data, I would suggest that number and category of landfalling hurricanes are not the only factors that need to be considered, but also duration and size of storm.
Finally you state "That the US has been hit by a historically low number of hurricanes in the last 5 years is a simple observation." This is a simple but WRONG observation. I count 13 landfalling hurricanes in the last 5 years, 6 of which have been category 3 or higher. That looks quite exceptional in historical terms. The data you pointed us at convenientally leaves out 2005 with its 4 landfalls and 3 majors. But again, I will point out that 13 hurricanes in 5 years is a number small enough that we can't make statistically confident statements about whether this is the sign of a trend or an abberation.
What do you mean by saying that the Mann "hockey stick" was proved wrong at MIT? The MIT climate scientists I know mostly agree with the following realclimate article...
We would _love_ to be able to apply this statistical methodology back in time, but we just don't have the data. That's the simple answer.
I recognize that the man may be one of the world experts on hurricane skill prediction, but the man clearly needs some basic education in climate physics. To start with, the man doesn't even realize that forcing from increases in CO2 concentration aren't linear!
Quote: "and from 1975 to 2005 it [CO2 energy forcing] was raised by 46/290x4.2 = 0.67 w/m2". Now, the standard CO2 forcing approximation (ideally, you use MODTRAN or the equivalent software package, but this will do) is F = f(c)-f(c0) where f(c) = 4.996 ln (c+0.0005c^2). For the same 330 ppm to 378 ppm increase that Gray claims is 0.67 w/m2 (or, in your excerpt, 0.65 w/m2), I calculate about 0.78 w/m2. So Dr. Gray is off by a whopping 16% on what should be an elementary calculation that I would expect any competent first year grad student to be able to do.
Now of course, CO2 isn't the only greenhouse gas. Other gases have contributed some 1.5 W/m2 forcing increase since preindustrial. Nor does he seem to ackowledge the cooling properties of sulfate aerosols (extremely important when understanding the difference between the 1950 to 1975 period and the 1975-present period), or the fact that climate models do an extremely good job of matching the cooling resulting from volcanic eruptions like Pinatubo that his theories would clearly totally fail on, various fingerprinting routines to look at temperature change patterns, or any one of a hundred other issues.
So how about I don't call myself a weather prediction expert unless I want to do some serious research into your methodology, and you (or Dr. Gray) don't try pretending to be experts on climate science unless you can understand at least the elementary issues?
Warming due to CO2 will also lead to more water vapor in the atmosphere in a positive feedback.
3) I have no idea where you are getting your numbers. Please cite some sources? Again, realclimate has reprinted a figure showing 6 different temperature reconstructions of the past 1000 years. None of them have medieval warm periods that are even as warm as today's temperatures, much less your absolutely ridiculous 2 degree C number.
Finally: Yes, historically CO2 has not been the prime mover in Ice Age oscillations - that would be orbital variations (Milankovitch cycles). However, given that the forcing changes due to orbital wobbling are small, most paleoclimatologists believe that there was a nice positive feedback loop: slight warming leads to CO2 outgassing leads to more warming leads to ice sheet retreat leads to more warming leads to more CO2 leads to... you get the picture. And our evidence for the CO2-warming link is not just "mere correlation" - there is significant science that goes into measuring all sorts of forcing agents from volcanoes to aerosols to GHGs to solar variations - and studies using these forcings find it very, very hard to explain the last 40 years of warming without taking into account anthropogenic GHG changes.
So we didn't already know this. Admittedly, for the purposes of making policies, we did know we were playing with variables that were _likely_ to make things a lot worse. But evidence that it is already happening is much more convincing that projections that it might happen in the future.
To sum up: the data DO show a change in hurricane patterns. (Of course, if you look at property damage caused by hurricanes, it is skyrocketing mostly because people are dumb and build lots of expensive property by the beach, but that doesn't mean that hurricanes aren't getting worse at the same time as people are building more stuff in their path)
Second: We have way more than 100 years of fossil fuels left. Coal reserves are HUGE, plus shale oil, tar sands, maybe methane hydrates...
Third: I will raise your government study with a Science Magazine article by one of the world experts on iron fertilization, Penny Chisholm at MIT: "Despite the concerns of many oceanographers and environmental groups, the concept of industrial ocean fertilization is winning advocates. Proponents claim that ocean fertilization is an easily controlled, verifiable process that mimics nature; and that it is an environmentally benign, long-term solution to atmospheric CO2 accumulation (14). These claims are, quite simply, not true." Chisholm, S.W., P.G. Falkowski, and J.J. Cullen. Dis-Crediting Ocean Fertilization. Science 294:309-310. (2001)
And it is nice to know that your life will improve if we have warmer climate and higher ocean levels. Sucks to be the millions of people who live on the coasts, or the developing nation farmers who won't be able to deal with their climate changing, or the areas that depend on water from snowpack, or the people who have built on permafrost, or the alpine ecosystems that will disappear, or... Human civilization pretty much developed in a system where worldwide temperatures were fairly stable for the past few thousand years, it won't be easy to adapt to temperatures increasing by several degrees celsius because all of our infrastructure is designed around the current climate (it won't be the end of civilization, we are pretty resourceful folk, but perhaps it might be worth some investment to reduce the amount of change we'll be seeing?).
"Chances are anyhow that there is a temperature threshold in the current atmosphere in which water droplets(clouds/fog) would start to overpower water vapor and reflect more of the suns entergy causing a genaral cooling." Really? "Chances are"? What studies have you been reading which suggest this? The role of clouds in the feedback cycle are still poorly understood - but my understanding is that a majority of experts don't think that there is a feedback here that will lead to any significant cooling (also remember that clouds trap heat at night). But perhaps you can publish (or cite) a definitive paper suggesting otherwise?
Concentrations of long-lived gases like CH4, CO2, and N2O are fairly well-mixed globally - hemispheric mixing times are on the order of 1 to 2 months, global mixing times are on the order of 1 year (Seinfeld & Pandis, a standard atmospheric chemistry textbook). We measure them all over the place (from the peak of Mauna Loa to Antarctica) and come up with similar results. Google "Keeling" and "CO2" to see information on studies since 1955 in this area.
And yes, water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas. But water vapor concentrations are a function of the state of the system, and most scientists agree that increasing anthropogenic greenhouse gases will lead to an increase in water vapor too. But given that you don't even have basic comprehension of the carbon cycle and our ability to measure concentrations, I would suggest you consider whether your "lick of common sense" may be totally useless without some real scientific understanding to back it up.
Now, let's get down to science: "On top of that factor just the study of whether greenhouse gas levels in modern times are driven primarily by anthropogenic causes or not is nearly an impossible thing to quantify reliably." Your statement here indicates a TOTAL lack of actual understanding. Even your favorite climate skeptics (pick any of Lindzen, Christy, Michaels, Singer, Soon, Baliunas) would tell you that statement is pure BS. The rise in CO2, CH4, and N2O from preindustrial is indisputably due to human emissions.
Looking at exact figures: "Now you can MAYBE say 4% of those are man made since the begining of industrialization if you check data at the US department of energy's data. It's taken us 200+ years to add this 4%, all while nature has added 20% according to the same data." Where do you get these numbers??? The three major (non-water) GHGS are CO2, CH4, and N2O. CO2 levels are ~370 ppm, from 278 ppm. CH4 1760 ppb, from 700 ppb. N2O 316 ppb from 270 ppb. By mass CO2 dominates, so basically humans have led to a 30% increase (by mass) in GHGs, with the bulk of that coming in the past few decades. Now, mass is kind of a dumb measure, because different gases have very different radiative absorption profiles - most people talk about this issue in W/m^2, in which case, humans have added about 2.2 watts/m^2 in direct forcing from the well-mixed gases (not counting black carbon warming, sulfate aerosol cooling, albedo issues from land use change, or any of the various positive feedback mechanisms such as increased water vapor or ice retreat). Added up over the entire Earth's surface over an entire year - that's a LOT of watts, and it would be really surprising if that _didn't_ lead to warming. And business as usual projections put us at 7 or 8 W/m^2 over preindustrial levels by the end of the 21st century, which is equivalent to making the Sun several percent brighter, which is way beyond any variability we've measured or reasonably expect
But I guess you and Mr. Deutsch have special sources that conveniently tell you that the world doesn't work this way...
You can certainly find "some credible scientists" (for certain values of "some", "credible", and "scientists") who believe that the consensus on climate change is wrong, the same way you can find some who believe that the consensus on /the Big Bang/Evolution/the Ozone Hole/name your pet theory/ is wrong too.
Why don't you go to an AGU meeting and attend a sampling of climate talks and see what the real state of the science is? You'll see a lot of acknowledgment of uncertainty, but basically, if you interview 100 attendees at the conference, I would guess that 98 would be willing to place money down that next century will be warmer than this one due to anthropogenic causes, and maybe 90 of them would say that it was something to worry about. The basic science behind this has been understood for more than a century (see Svante Arrhenius), and the evidence just keeps mounting.
And please don't trot out the global cooling canard: Realclimate (among other sources) debunks that nicely.
And I love that the article that YOU linked to states "Most of the prominent organisations making the case against mainstream climate science have an avowed agenda of promoting free markets and minimal government. They often accept funding from the fossil-fuel industry. Few employ climate scientists."
The magnitude and even sign of the water vapor feedback is one of the biggest uncertainties in determining the climate sensitivity.
Water vapor is a greenhouse gas, which makes a positive feedback. But as you state, cloud cover also has a role. Clouds (whose formation is hard to predict in global models with resolution > 100 km^2) serve to increase albedo during the day but also serve as additional insulation during the night. It is hard to know exactly how the interaction of increased water vapor and increased temperature will interact to change cloud altitude, type, duration, etc. (and that's before you throw in changes in lofted particulates - BC, OC, SOx, etc. - which serve to change cloud attributes as well)
In any case, many groups estimate that the change in temperature due to a doubling of CO2 ranges from 1 degree to 5 degrees, mainly due to this confusion about the role of water vapor.
Erm. I think you are both wrong.
First, the "ice age" connection is not due to the energy it takes to melt ice. Rather it is due to the very topic of grandparent article. Namely the theory is that in the past the gulf stream shutdown (which is due to the fact that melted ice is less dense than salt water) led to a cooling of the European land mass, leading to extension of glaciers down from the north pole, leading to a higher albedo Earth, leading to cooling of the whole planet.
However, this time around we have higher GHG concentrations than in previous cycles and high projected global mean temperatures, so it seems unlikely that Europe will cool to the point where increased snowcover will lead to an ice age, even in the case of complete gulf stream collapse.
But I don't think that any respectable climatologist talks about runaway greenhouse effects with the Earth anymore. While there may be significant positive feedbacks in the climate system, there is no evidence that they are that large. As a climate scientist myself, I believe that we do need to reduce our GHG emissions as much as is feasible in order to avoid all sorts of unfortunate climate changes, but boiling the earth's oceans just isn't in the cards.
Not to mention all the cool things bacteria have evolved to deal with our antibiotics.
Or the entirely new viruses which have emerged over the years.
I would check your so-called "proven facts".
Now, perhaps you were talking about the probability of the _first_ self-replicating molecule. While abiogenesis is NOT evolution, the talkorigins site does address some of the common abiogenesis probability arguments. Namely, that the simplest self-replicating molecules do not have to be hundreds of base pairs long, and again, once you've gotten one self-replicator, the magic of natural selection plus billions of years plus billions of self-replicators can get you some pretty neat things.
Now, can I prove that God or some alien didn't step in and tweak a step in the evolution process? No, I can't. But the point is that we don't need to appeal to the supernatural to explain anything we currently observe. And the advantage of scientific over supernatural explanations is that science enables us to make predictions. For example, science will predict that where synonomous codons exist (eg, UUU and UUC both code for phenylalanine), two closely related organisms will use the same coding more often than two distantly related organisms. Intelligent design would predict absolutely nothing useful about this issue. And the fact that time and time again, the predictions of science turn out to be right shows that either evolution is right or God really wants to screw with our heads.
It supports the 6000 year old Universe theory!
The only way in which I was surprised was how blatantly stupid this website is. I would hope that most middle schoolers could pick this page apart. At least Intelligent Design has _some_ infintesimal philosophical merit, your drdino site is just absurd.
The problem is that Intelligent Design _is_ junk science, the same way that Uri Geller claiming to bend spoons with his mind is junk science. With the difference that Intelligent Design has a scary consortium of religious freaks pushing it so hard that it makes people who don't really understand biology think that there is reasonable grounds for disagreement.
And just one note: why is it so hard for you to believe that the human species originated from a single celled organism when you yourself were once a single cell?
Now, go learn something about molecular biology. Then spend some time comparing amino acid sequences for a given protein between animals that are closely related (say two mammals) and animals that are distantly related (say a mammal and a fish). Just this one exercise done properly will show you how ridiculous it is to believe that current species don't have common ancestors.
-Marcus
The important thing is that history stays self consistent. I think that some weirdo journal like New Scientist once published a time travel paper which included a "pool table" example. This example posited that Pocket A of the table connected via a time travel wormhole to Pocket B, such that a ball entering Pocket A would exit Pocket B 5 seconds in the past.
Now, imagine a universe in which you hit a pool ball (X) straight between the two pockets. It hits the wall, ricochets back, everything is fine.
Except that one time you do this, a ball Y comes flying out of Pocket B, knocking into ball X such that ball X goes into Pocket A at exactly the right time and angle that it would emerge from pocket B in the past as ball Y...
Now you have two possible universes, both of which are perfectly self consistent. Which one happens?
-Marcus
eg:
"Southern hemispheric mixing ratios of methyl chloroform peaked in 1992 and northern hemisphere mixing ratios peaked a little more than a year earlier (Figure 5.9). The time lag is similar to the known interhemispheric mixing time. The large north to south gradient before 1993 is indicative of very strong northern hemisphere sources." (Prinn et al., 1995)
NOAA.gov