Scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, and their colleagues have produced the first clear evidence of human-produced warming in the world's oceans, a finding they say removes much of the uncertainty associated with debates about global warming.
Reagrding the point you don't want me to argue, I totally disagree. Sciences with less controversy attached to their results are more stably funded. It's getting to the point that the US has more dollars going to Mars science than to Earth science.
How much ink do you have to add to water to make its color visibly change? Not much. The same thing is at work. The physics of radiative transfer has to do with the color of the atmosphere, at frequencies we can see and at frequencies we can't. Greenhouse gases darken the atmosphere at the frequencies that the earth radiates back to space, without much changing the transparency of the atmosphere at the frequencies the sun sends energy to the earth.
The earth warms up so as to maintain an energy equilibrium,
A little bit of CO2 goes a fairly long way in this regard. The dominant components of the atmosphere (O2 and N2) have no absorbtion in the infrared band, so the temperature of the earth's surface is largely set by water vapor and CO2.
That is assuming no big changes in the sun, which there aren't on these time scales.
There's a "jury is still out" or not quality to scientific progress. Sometimes things get decided. When there's political controversy involved (not to mention deliberate obfuscation) it may take the public a while to catch up. In this case the catching up is long overdue.
Tim Barnett is a serious senior oceanographer at Scripps who has made major contributions to statistical approaches to oceanography. Presumably if he is standing up and making such a strong statement he has got some serious evidence to back it up.
It sure would be nice if these articles linked to primary sources, though. I don't think Slashdot should link to fluff. Either they should find something meatier or they should wait.
I doubt your calculation is correct, but it is in any case irrelevant.
Exhaled CO2 does not introduce new carbon into the system, as the carbon is obtained by plants from the air, (and possibly passed through animals) and ingested as food. Mining fossil fuels gets new carbon out of very slow reservoirs and into the active parts of the system. It's the newly injected carbon that is causing the difficulties.
Apologies if this is redundant; I'm not following the thread.
You could make a real business model rather than some sort of silly charity. Reduced cost for buying a DVD set of the season before the season is filmed.
I can think of better causes to contribute to than Star Trek, but I would have no difficulty signing up to support a series a liked on this basis, especially if it eliminated the need for commercial breaks.
mt
Regarding extensive bibliographies, it's an old junk science propaganda trick, used by slimy characters on the fringes of any serious issue. Just because someone has a lot of references doesn't mean the references say what they claim.
Regarding Chrichton, he twists science around for his living, which is fearmongering for entertainment. His accusations might be just based on projection of his own behavior rather than any deep understanding of science.
Monitoring the natural processes of the earth is surely an important reason to be in space. NASA designs, builds, launches and operates the orbiting instruments in cooperation with earth and planetary science institutions.
mt
The Arctic, being a sea surrounded by mostly unglaciated ice, can get darker due to less snow and ice cover, which absorbs more sunlight, which makes it warmer. Also, there's a very critical component of the climate system in the ocean between Greenland and Iceland, and some scientists believe that rapid Arctic changes will affect the whole world by cutting off a lot of deep water formation.
If we burn all the fossil fuels, the Antarctic may well melt down eventually but that will be centuries into the future. Most people don't think that far ahead. Meanwhile it will stay a huge chunk of ice. It is however true that the bit of Antarctica that sticks north into warmer latitudes is experiencing a very large warming trend.
I've enjoyed your peculiar sig so I'm happy to offer an answer.
Human local warming (direct heating through power consumption, mostly) is much smaller than grenhouse gas warming. (About three orders of magnitude.) Greenhouse gases accumulate over decades and are well-mixed in the atmosphere. So it doesn't really matter who emits the CO2, it will warm everywhere, but more in the Arctic than elsewhere because that's where the amount of snow and ice cover can change, which leads to an albedo feedback.
I didn't have a political point to make, just a historical one. A hundred years ago the immigration process was cruel and often arbitrary. People would go to great risk and trouble and expense to get to Ellis Island, and a good number of them were shipped back in worse shape than when they came over. I read your post as saying we should have more or less an open imigration policy like we did 100 years ago. That's historically inaccurate.
"Of course, the obvious question is 'Do I trust Firefox less than IE?'"...
In fact the best choice in most cases is to not choose at all
So if you choose to run no browser, how did you post to Slashdot? And, as a matter of fact, if most people vote for nobody, it's not the case that nobody becomes president.
The methodology was explained. No additional scrutiny is required. If you don't believe it you try to replicate it.
You can refute it directly by finding an article with "climate change" in its keyword list in a peer reviewed journal after 1993 that disputes the existence of anthropogenic climate change.
If you really want to challenge the result, you may have better luck arguing that the sample was somewhat biased. Maybe people who manage to convince themselves that there is no significant anthropogenic climate change don't tend to use "climate change" as keywords. You still are likely to find a very small proportion.
"That hypothesis was tested by analyzing 928 abstracts, published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and listed in the ISI database with the keywords "climate change" (9)."
Apparently Lindzen published no papers matching the criteria. It is not the case that every relevant paper would have "climate change" in the keyword list. Or perhaps his grudging acceptance of a very small sensitivity to anthropogenic forcing is taken to include him in the consensus.
It may indeed be the case that this choice of keyword phrase skews the sample.
That said, my personal experience corroborates the study. I see a great deal of conversation in the climate community dedicated to how much anthropogenic change is to be expected and when, and somewhat less to the political and moral implications. There is essentially no discussion of 'whether or not" this is occurring. It is a settled question in most professionals' estimation.
Because the government is much more likely to fund research into something that's "no big deal" than something that's a crisis.
This just isn't true in the US these days. The government, be it consciously or unconsciously, wants research supporting their policies. In the US, the climate change consensus challenges rather than supports the policies of the dominant political party.
1) It wouldn't come up in the sample because the words "climate change" do not appear in the abstract.
2) While they may be arguing for a small sensitivity, they do not argue that contemporary climate change is natural. Their concluding sentence is "It is our hope that this study may contribute to our understanding of the complexities of climate dynamics and ultimately to quantification of its response to potential anthropogenic impact" would probably not qualify it as skeptical about the existence of anthropogenic impacts, though I admit you can read the word "potential" a couple of ways.
Slashdot Mirror
Scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, and their colleagues have produced the first clear evidence of human-produced warming in the world's oceans, a finding they say removes much of the uncertainty associated with debates about global warming.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
Tell it to the casino.
Weather is a spin of the wheel. Climate is the house winning at the end of the day.
The casino wins even with an honest wheel. That is because the statistics of chaotic processes are computable even if the trajectories aren't.
I'm really tired of this one. It's wrong.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=114
Reagrding the point you don't want me to argue, I totally disagree. Sciences with less controversy attached to their results are more stably funded. It's getting to the point that the US has more dollars going to Mars science than to Earth science.
CO2 is opaque to the infrared.
How much ink do you have to add to water to make its color visibly change? Not much. The same thing is at work. The physics of radiative transfer has to do with the color of the atmosphere, at frequencies we can see and at frequencies we can't. Greenhouse gases darken the atmosphere at the frequencies that the earth radiates back to space, without much changing the transparency of the atmosphere at the frequencies the sun sends energy to the earth.
The earth warms up so as to maintain an energy equilibrium,
A little bit of CO2 goes a fairly long way in this regard. The dominant components of the atmosphere (O2 and N2) have no absorbtion in the infrared band, so the temperature of the earth's surface is largely set by water vapor and CO2.
That is assuming no big changes in the sun, which there aren't on these time scales.
There's a "jury is still out" or not quality to scientific progress. Sometimes things get decided. When there's political controversy involved (not to mention deliberate obfuscation) it may take the public a while to catch up. In this case the catching up is long overdue.
Tim Barnett is a serious senior oceanographer at Scripps who has made major contributions to statistical approaches to oceanography. Presumably if he is standing up and making such a strong statement he has got some serious evidence to back it up.
It sure would be nice if these articles linked to primary sources, though. I don't think Slashdot should link to fluff. Either they should find something meatier or they should wait.
I doubt your calculation is correct, but it is in any case irrelevant.
Exhaled CO2 does not introduce new carbon into the system, as the carbon is obtained by plants from the air, (and possibly passed through animals) and ingested as food. Mining fossil fuels gets new carbon out of very slow reservoirs and into the active parts of the system. It's the newly injected carbon that is causing the difficulties.
Apologies if this is redundant; I'm not following the thread. You could make a real business model rather than some sort of silly charity. Reduced cost for buying a DVD set of the season before the season is filmed. I can think of better causes to contribute to than Star Trek, but I would have no difficulty signing up to support a series a liked on this basis, especially if it eliminated the need for commercial breaks. mt
Regarding extensive bibliographies, it's an old junk science propaganda trick, used by slimy characters on the fringes of any serious issue. Just because someone has a lot of references doesn't mean the references say what they claim.
Regarding Chrichton, he twists science around for his living, which is fearmongering for entertainment. His accusations might be just based on projection of his own behavior rather than any deep understanding of science.
Monitoring the natural processes of the earth is surely an important reason to be in space. NASA designs, builds, launches and operates the orbiting instruments in cooperation with earth and planetary science institutions. mt
The Arctic, being a sea surrounded by mostly unglaciated ice, can get darker due to less snow and ice cover, which absorbs more sunlight, which makes it warmer. Also, there's a very critical component of the climate system in the ocean between Greenland and Iceland, and some scientists believe that rapid Arctic changes will affect the whole world by cutting off a lot of deep water formation. If we burn all the fossil fuels, the Antarctic may well melt down eventually but that will be centuries into the future. Most people don't think that far ahead. Meanwhile it will stay a huge chunk of ice. It is however true that the bit of Antarctica that sticks north into warmer latitudes is experiencing a very large warming trend.
Interesting idea. If only it were just time we were killing...
I've enjoyed your peculiar sig so I'm happy to offer an answer. Human local warming (direct heating through power consumption, mostly) is much smaller than grenhouse gas warming. (About three orders of magnitude.) Greenhouse gases accumulate over decades and are well-mixed in the atmosphere. So it doesn't really matter who emits the CO2, it will warm everywhere, but more in the Arctic than elsewhere because that's where the amount of snow and ice cover can change, which leads to an albedo feedback.
Could they change that idea, please?
I didn't have a political point to make, just a historical one. A hundred years ago the immigration process was cruel and often arbitrary. People would go to great risk and trouble and expense to get to Ellis Island, and a good number of them were shipped back in worse shape than when they came over. I read your post as saying we should have more or less an open imigration policy like we did 100 years ago. That's historically inaccurate.
You mean like this?
Hmm, I've got mod points but there's no "-1 wrong" on the pulldown. mt
So if you choose to run no browser, how did you post to Slashdot? And, as a matter of fact, if most people vote for nobody, it's not the case that nobody becomes president.
You can refute it directly by finding an article with "climate change" in its keyword list in a peer reviewed journal after 1993 that disputes the existence of anthropogenic climate change.
If you really want to challenge the result, you may have better luck arguing that the sample was somewhat biased. Maybe people who manage to convince themselves that there is no significant anthropogenic climate change don't tend to use "climate change" as keywords. You still are likely to find a very small proportion.
I quote from the article:
"That hypothesis was tested by analyzing 928 abstracts, published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and listed in the ISI database with the keywords "climate change" (9)."
Apparently Lindzen published no papers matching the criteria. It is not the case that every relevant paper would have "climate change" in the keyword list. Or perhaps his grudging acceptance of a very small sensitivity to anthropogenic forcing is taken to include him in the consensus.
It may indeed be the case that this choice of keyword phrase skews the sample.
That said, my personal experience corroborates the study. I see a great deal of conversation in the climate community dedicated to how much anthropogenic change is to be expected and when, and somewhat less to the political and moral implications. There is essentially no discussion of 'whether or not" this is occurring. It is a settled question in most professionals' estimation.
This is so wrong from top to bottom it would take hours to demolish it properly.
This just isn't true in the US these days. The government, be it consciously or unconsciously, wants research supporting their policies. In the US, the climate change consensus challenges rather than supports the policies of the dominant political party.
Untrue, at least as far as the scientific community is concerned. See Was an imminent Ice Age predicted in the '70's?
2) While they may be arguing for a small sensitivity, they do not argue that contemporary climate change is natural. Their concluding sentence is "It is our hope that this study may contribute to our understanding of the complexities of climate dynamics and ultimately to quantification of its response to potential anthropogenic impact" would probably not qualify it as skeptical about the existence of anthropogenic impacts, though I admit you can read the word "potential" a couple of ways.
If you "must read" this 30 year old journalistic fluff, you should also read William Connelley's summary of the 70's ice age scare.
Really makes you stop and think, doesn't it?
It does, actually. It makes me stop and think you get your scientific information from Rush Limbaugh.