Funny how Michael Crichton doesn't seem to think so... And you'll be hard pressed to find an author who does as much factual research on the subjects he writes about.
Calder is not a scientist. He is a rather shallow pop science journalist.
Lindzen is perhaps the only major scientist that the denial camp has. (He is my direct scientific ancestor - his student's student was my PhD thesis adviser.) He has some important work to his credit.
However, most of this was some considerable time ago. His "iris effect" theory did not pan out and lately he has simply resorted to attacking the consensus view without proposing an alternative.
The quoted study claims what it claims in a pretty testable fashion. Go refute it if you don't believe it.
Apparently no such article comes up under a search for "climate change". Sociologist Peiser now needs to come up with specific counterexamples, show why the search was biased, or repeat the search and obtain different results.
The comparison to Stalin is so ludicrous that I'm having trouble taking proportionate offense. No one is throwing people with alternative opinions into the Gulag. There just are very few of them that have any idea what they are talking about. It really is a consensus based on evidence, which is rather different from capitulation to state terror, I would think.
The review of the literature quoted wasn't intended to support the global warming consensus. That's done very well by the IPCC Scientific Assessment and would therefore be redundant. This review of the literature was intended to establish that a consensus exists among the overwhelming majority of participants in relevant scientific communities.
Nobody writes papers of the sort "global warming, yes or no?" in scientific journals. They write papers like, um, these. (result of a search for papers with abstract including the words "climate change" in J. Clim. in 2003-2004)
Despite what you hear on Slashdot comments and in the press, very large and imminent anthropogenic climate change is not controversial within the relevant sciences. The question for the public to consider is only whether Michael Crichton and the Wall Street Journal editorial page know more about this subject than the membership of AGU and AMS and AAAS and NAS and pretty much every similar group worldwide.
It has everything to do with the market NOT FUCKING WORKING THAT WAY.
You mean superior products at lower prices don't tend to win in the end?
Most companies who sell software will eventually end up competing head to head with people who give the stuff away. It turns out that software made by a few dedicated people enjoying themselves typically works better than bloatware built by armies of resentful wage slaves. The smaller, happier and more effective group can usually get by on a service model somehow.
Are you serious?
So basically EVERY software co. in the world should just give it up and become a services company and OS their software?
I don't tend to make sweeping statements like that, but for the most part, yeah. There may be exceptions, but software licensing itself is not usually going to be a reasonable business model because nothing will prevent your competitor from giving away the competing product and living off the t-shirts and the concert tickets.
Interestingly, this tactic was in some ways pioneered by Microsoft. Remember Netscape? The fact that the marginal cost of a unit of software is zero makes for a very interesting marketplace.
Given I can't read them, can someone elighten me as to wether or not my conception of model development is correct.
Mostly not, I'm afraid.
Basically, while I can see how you got your ideas, they really aren't right. First of all, there is a range of scientific studies and approaches that support the global warming consensus, not just models. Secondly, the models are not developed to study global warming,. They are developed to study the earth as a system. Global warming prediction is an important output, but far from the only one.
In fact, we build the models from the physical principles, with the hope that realistic model behavior emerges. We have millions of data points, thousands of phenomena, and thousands of person-years of research into the physics and chemistry of the atmosphere, ocean and ice systems that we attempt to capture in these models.
The curve-fitting exercise you describe is trivial compared to the actual efforts underway.
I don't know why you think you can't afford to read the full-fledged climate models by the way. They are open source. You may not be able to afford to run them, but that's reasonable; they require supercomputers to run. They just require patience to read.
Here's one.. Let me warn you that you will have difficulty reading it. Unlike you, I actually do have to read this thing and so far I am not enjoying it.
While I see where you are coming from with your questions, it doesn't seem fruitful to take them all on at once. As in any science, the answers are not immediately accessible in the sense that an outsider can expect to follow all the arguments in detail in a reasonable amount of time. If you want to study the subject in detail, no one is stopping you. Start with, say, Wallace and Hobbs and see if you have a taste for this stuff.
If not (and to be honest I've never encountered anyone who learned this material outside a university classroom) another alternative is to skip trying to understand the material in detail and simply survey it.
Fortunately that is possible. Every few years the scientific community publishes a report that describes what is known and what is strongly suspected in this field. Even this isn't easy reading, but if you are diligent you can understand this with just the sort of basically sound scientifically influenced thinking you display. The most recent one (getting a bit stale now) is here
Your concluding paragraph, unfortunately, is insightful.This is ultimately the problem with democracy. None of us has the time and energy to know everything. If the network of trust between the public and the experts with relevant knowledge breaks down, we can only throw up our hands and punt. I find the fact that you are not coy about doing so refreshingly honest.
I appreciate your comments and while I doubt you'll find it as helpful as you wanted, I hope you'll take this reply in the constructive spirit in which it was intended.
Tim, how do you protect your competitive advantage when your competitors can just look at your source code and cherry-pick the best ideas?
Maybe you can't, really. But in the end you'll be competing with someone else who's perfectly willing to operate on those terms. You'll often find them catching up with your functionality quicker than you expected.
Not every company in the world can just become a services company and compete on price.
Exactly. And most of those companies who can't adapt are in big trouble.
The fact that many companies can't adapt to the situation doesn't change the situation, does it? People are willing and able to undercut your price with superior products. Deal with it or find another line of work.
What a lousy counterargument: "this is inconvenient so it can't be true". Right.
Obviously we would look something like that up. It's hard for me to understand why you find that worth stating, much less repeating.
I'm not entirely sure what to make of "all they can say". The best summary of all we can say is here. That's as of '01. The fourth IPCC assessment is expected next year.
You will find a great deal more there than just the instrumnental record, but of course when you have a direct measurement you use it.
I am guessing that if I picked a year at random (for which they have records) they could not determine what the temperature was for that summer (without consulting the records that is).
Right, observational climatology is based on casual recollection. Why should I have to bother to look at data to get into a prestigious peer-reviewed journal?
Are you suggesting that stuff gets published in respected journals about observational trends that people make up without looking at the records? Is this some kind of troll?
It's an important and clever study. One big question on the observational side of climate change studies is how much the direct observation of warming is due to local rather than global heating. Thermometers tend to be clustered near where people are, and there are local heating effects around cities that, while pretty trivial on a global scale, might be showing up.
The cited paper addresses this question and shows that this bias in the estimate is small. It does this by showing very similar trends in nighttime temperature on windy days as on calm days, though (for compelling and obvious reasons) the local heating effect is (and can be shown to be) much larger on calm days.
The strident denial camp, (many of them paid in the style of 'tobacco scientists') of course, loves the "urban heat island" hypothesis and often parades it around so as to deny one part of the science.
This paper goes a long way toward demolishing that argument. That's one reason why it's very important. The linked breathless journalism article is pretty unclear about that, unfortunately.
This work is also interesting as a lovely demonstration of how science works. I'd teach this one in high school science if I were teaching high school science.
You're off by a couple of orders of magnitude. Volcanic emissions in the very long run are the source of our carbon, but the annual rate of volcanic emissions is about 1 % of human conversion of fossil fuels to CO2.
Water vapor emissions have a trivial effect on the climate because the processes removing water form the atmosphere and into the ocean respond very quickly. Essentially, any extra vapor you put into the atmosphere just amounts to that much more rain.
Carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere by a couple of slow processes. The fast processes (the biotic carbon cycle) don't really count because the exchanges go both ways. The slow process that matters most to atmospheric composition, to first order, is mixing into the deep ocean, a process with a time constant of roughly a thousand years.
The total amount of cabron in the biosphere/atmosphere/upper ocean is increasing rapidly (by comparison with natural processes) as a result of human activity. The same is not true of water vapor, even though industrial activity certainly does release a lot of steam.
I don't know anything about this superheated water to combustible hydrogen process. That said, I'm sure that if it's feasible, it will not cause a greenhouse gas problem.
Note that three out of the four sampling locations on that graph are in Antarctica, while the fourth location - the orange spike, for which only measurements from the present are shown - is Mauna Loa, an active volcano. I'm not suprised that there's more CO2 to be found at an active volcano than in ice sheets in Antarctica.
The atmosphere is well-mixed. The differences in CO2 measurements from one point to another are much smaller than the vertical range of the graph, as I pointed out elsewhere in the thread.
The orange spike is not a measurement. It is the curveof direct measurements over the last half century. The entire orange range has been measured at Mauna Loa. It's not just one point. Also, Mauna Loa is not continuoulsy active, and was chosen specifically for its isolation from carbon dioxide sources.
Also the green points (all of them) are obtained using the same method. The reason you see a few of them as distinct while the others blend into a curve is because, um, the curve abruptly starts rising at an unprecedented rate at the end there.
The 'reconstruction procedure' is a measurement of CO2 content in bubbles trapped in ice cores. It's pretty damned robust.
Finally, if the spike shown at the present time can only be explained by industrial activity, as you seem to imply, what accounts for the equally significant spike rising between 20,000 and 10,000 years ago
Um, the retreat of the glaciers? You don't know very much about paleoclimate, do you?
Anyway, the important thing to understand is that the SLOPE of the green and orange parts of the curve ARE DIRECTLY MEASURED. Even the collapse of the last glacial maximum, a very abrupt event by geophysical standards, is hugely slower than the current spike. There simply is no other explanation possible.
This is even before accounting for isotopic evidence, showing that the newly injected carbon has the same isotopic signature as fossil fuels and not as part of any active reservoir.
You can't imagine how exasperating it is to be "debating" the stuff that's already settled. There are a lot of open questions in the global change business. How the hell is democracy supposed to function on moderately complicated questions when we can't even get the public to agree on the aspects that are about as certain as anything in science?
the only two problems of the pocket pcs are quite short battery times and the somewhat instable operating system
and the only problem with my car is that it gets six miles to the gallon and that it stalls out on the highway all the time. Oh, yeah, those and that it's pig ugly. Otherwise I like it fine.
I love how we don't class human influence as natural.
There's always a balance between precision and accessibility in public communication.
There is an important distinction being made for which the strictly correct words are "anthropogenic" and "non-anthropogenic", but just cutting corners and saying "artificial" and "natural" is easier to read and clear enough. Nobody is saying that human activity is supernatural or unnatural.
If you have better words to express this distinction, then go ahead and use them. Please understand, though, that there is something important and unprecedented being discussed here. It's more important to communicate the important ideas effectively than to choose the poetically perfect phrase.
Also, there's the related matter that Earth's temperature has been warming up for the last 10,000 years. This is no time to use the Razor.
However, the current period of warming is the fastest known in the entire history of the Earth. The obvious candidate is us; Occam's Razor.
Both wrong, sorry. The world has been gradually cooling since about 4000 BC. There's some debate about how smoothly. The current rate of CO2 accumulation is indeed unprecedented, but it's not obvious that the recent rate of global warming is. On the other hand, there's good physical reasons and paleoclimatological analogs that cause most scientists working in the climate field to believe that the warming over the next few decades will be unprecedented.
You seem to be confusing this matter with some other red herring that someone has cooked up.
These are air bubbles whose composition is measured directly to obtain the CO2 spike.
Some of the points you are trying to repeat have some validity and cannot be dismissed so easily, but we're talking about the CO2 itself here. The human casued increase of greenhouse gases is not any more speculative than, oh, gravity. Your statement that "The end result of increasing greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere seems to be speculative" is absolutely incorrect.
Most century scale carbon cycle analyses I've seen don't even mention the volcanic component.
Here's a link which doesn't agree with your claim http://volcano.und.nodak.edu/vwdocs/Gases/man.html. In fact it has it the other way around - 150 years of volcanic emissions are roughly equal to one year of human emissions.
Also, if you're right, exactly where is the huge spike in atmospheric carbon coming from, anyway? See http://www.climate.unibe.ch/clim_recon/co2.html. See that orange spike on the right? That look natural to you?
Note that this data is directly measured from well-dated bubbles trapped in ice cores. This is not a speculative reconstruction. It's observational data.
"My sense of ethics says we need something that applied equally".
Good idea. Let's think about how that would look.
Now CO2 is a cumulative problem. So every country should have a cumulative cap on per capita emissions that is the same, right? That means that the countries that have already emitted the most need to stop totally, and other countries need to stop when they catch up.
OK, that's too harsh. Let's let bygones be bygones. Every country should have the same cap on emission rates, right? Well that still impacts the more industrialized countries the most, since they are doing the most emitting.
Still too harsh? How about if we let every country emit what they were emitting in 1992. That means the countries that were doing the most damage get a special right to continue to do the most damage, just slightly less than they would otherwise. This impacts countries least that emit the most. Since that doesn't make any sense for the totally undeveloped countries, we'll cut them a break, but that's not a big deal, relatively speaking.
Unfair? To whom?
For the countries with the highest 1992 emissions to resist this is not only shortsighted and immoral. It's also shortsighted in the sense of being strategically stupid.
Kyoto gives a built-in-advantage to the countries with the biggest consumption in 1992, essentially forever. I've never been able to grasp the argument that this is unfair to the US.
Not that Wikipedia is authoritative, but the article you cite very specifically says:
The controversy occurs almost entirely within the press and political arenas. In the scientific press and amongst climate researchers, there is little "controversy" about global warming, only a desire to investigate a scientific problem and determine its consequences. As Kevin E. Trenberth writes:
In 1995 the IPCC assessment concluded that "the balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate". Since then the evidence has become much stronger... Thus the headline in IPCC (2001) is "There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities"... While some changes arising from global warming are benign or even beneficial, the economic effects of the weather extremes are substantial and clearly warrant attention in policy debates... Consequently, there is a strong case for slowing down the projected rates of climate change from human influences. [1]
Paleoclimatology is a well-developed field. We have essentially direct measurements of atmospheric composition and total ice volume going back 800,000 years and proxy evidence of various kinds for about the last half billion.
Also we have some pretty solid physics that indicates that rapid greenhouse gas accumulation is a problem.
Climate is not weather. Weather is the part of atmospheric conditions that is not predictable beyond a few weeks. Climate is the rest of it.
Will it snow on Christmas? Nobody can say. It's a weather question. WIll Christmas be colder than the Fourth of July? Well, yeah, at least here in Chicago. That's a climate question.
Rapid climate change exacerbates environmental stress, as ecosystems experience conditions increasingly different from the one they evolved into. This is exacerbated by the increasing fragmentation of ecologically complex zones, preventing continuous migration oif species ranges.
Climate change is definitely germane to biodiversity issues.
My "saga" (the name was given it by one of the more competent SBC employees I talked to) will be even more incomprehensible unless you know that SBC Illinois, SBC Wisconsin, and SBC Yahoo! DSL Internet are served by three separate toll freee numbers and three distinct bureaucracies. Here goes:
1) Move to Illinois from Wisconsin, both have lines owned by SBC. (Having had nightmares getting 3rd party DSL working I capitulated.) Call SBC number listed on phone bill to inform them of the move. "Oh, that's handled by a different region, here's the number, but be sure and call us back so we can have the forward set right on your old number"
2) Call second number, order DSL and POTS effective ASAP. Answer all sorts of stupid questions, of which the most irritating is "what operating system do you use?" "all of them" "no which one really?" "linux" "I have to put something" "linux" "sorry sir, which operating system, WIndows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2000, spam spam spam?" "Macintosh OS X" "OK" OK, so far everything according to spec at least, if a bit irritating. "Thank you for choosing SBC Yahoo General Mills Procter and Gamble Internet Service with Sugar on Top. How did you like my service today, on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being most satisfied?" "5, thanks"
3) Oops, can't call Wisconsin back with the forwarding number, they didn't give me my new phone number. Better call back and get it. "Sorry sir, they did not complete your order. There is no order pending for service at that address" "Are you SURE?" "Yes sir" "I just placed it, maybe it hasn't gone through the system to your terminal yet?" "No sir, the order was not completed. We'll have to start over again" "(sigh)"...innumerable questions...."what operating system do you use" "I have a Macintosh running OS X" "do you plan to run more than one computer on this DSL connection?" "yes" "How many?" "uhhh...." etc. etc. "Your new phone number will be 555 - 1234. Thank you for choosing SBC Yahoo Nike Sear Roebuck Internet Service with a Cherry on Top. How did you like my service today, on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being most satisfied?" "(sigh) 5, but I gave the last guy a 5 and he got it wrong. Can I just give you his 5?"
HINT: you can see where this is going, can't you?
4) A few days pass. My cel phone voicemail gets a confused call from the SBC install people. We have two install orders but you have only one line. Did you have an order pending to install the other line?
5) Verify existence of dial tone. Call SBC, assure them that I only want one line, and have dial tone, would like ot know the number on it. "It's 555-9090" "Are you sure that 555-9090 is installed and 555 - 1234 is pending?" "Yes sir" "Absolutely sure?" "Yes sir" "I suppose I have two DSL orders pending too, right?" "Yes sir, probably so" "So I should cancel the one for 555 -1234 because the one for 555-9090 is correct" "Yes sir" "I would hate to cancel the wrong one. Are you sure?" "Yes sir, your connection on 555 - 9090 is definitely now live. Thank you for choosing SBC Yahoo Nike Merrill Lynch Pearce Fenner & Smith Internet Service with Whipped Cream on It. How did you like my service today, on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being most satisfied?" "(sigh) 5, but I gave the last lady a 5 and she got it wrong. Can I just give you her 5?"
6) Call the separate DSL number, tell them the story, and cancel DSL on 555 - 1234, leaving order pending on 555 - 9090. This was my mistake. As they say in the chess reports, "???". I have caller ID on my cel phone. I should have checked. Of course my number is 555 -1234, the one I cancelled. Also call Wisconsin and give them the bogus forwarding number.
7) Get email that inbound calls aren't reaching me. Try the caller ID thing. 555 - 1234.
The sickening feeling in my stomach that starts to appear does not forebode adequately, that in a few months I'd be getting threats from collection agencies. But I'm getting ahead of myself....
The following misses the point of the article altogether.
Problem is, it's not like one side or the other does this. They both do it.
Take global warming. Same deal. Both sides have issues about this, and neither wants to pay any attention to the other. Each calls the other side "a bunch of nuts", another both sides are dead set against listening to the other. Examples like this go on and on.
There are not two debating "sides" in climate issues as matters stand. There is a spectrum of scientific and policy opinion among scientists about climate change, and there's a loud group of political hacks issuing propaganda that essentially lies completely outside the fold of scientific discussion.
Almost all stories in the press present this as a "debate", but it completely misrepresents the state of what is controversial and what is uncontroversial within the science and within the policy options as seen by people familiar with the science. The professional advocacy group has the public unsure whether global warming has been observed, unsure whether human activity is the primary cause, and unsure as to whether the greenhouse effect is established physics. These are not open questions in science.
The US press (actually the press in other English-speaking countries is to some extent following along) presents the broad spectrum that contains almost all legitimate science and the loud but narrow group that contains essentially no professional researchers as equals in some hypothetical "debate".
This incompetent laziness in the press is a major root cause of America's increasing incapacity to absorb the real evidence on matters of great public importance.
Equal time for sense and nonsense is journalistic malfeasance, not balance.
Slashdot Mirror
Not so hard really. How about these guys?
Lindzen is perhaps the only major scientist that the denial camp has. (He is my direct scientific ancestor - his student's student was my PhD thesis adviser.) He has some important work to his credit.
However, most of this was some considerable time ago. His "iris effect" theory did not pan out and lately he has simply resorted to attacking the consensus view without proposing an alternative.
The quoted study claims what it claims in a pretty testable fashion. Go refute it if you don't believe it.
The comparison to Stalin is so ludicrous that I'm having trouble taking proportionate offense. No one is throwing people with alternative opinions into the Gulag. There just are very few of them that have any idea what they are talking about. It really is a consensus based on evidence, which is rather different from capitulation to state terror, I would think.
Nobody writes papers of the sort "global warming, yes or no?" in scientific journals. They write papers like, um, these. (result of a search for papers with abstract including the words "climate change" in J. Clim. in 2003-2004)
Despite what you hear on Slashdot comments and in the press, very large and imminent anthropogenic climate change is not controversial within the relevant sciences. The question for the public to consider is only whether Michael Crichton and the Wall Street Journal editorial page know more about this subject than the membership of AGU and AMS and AAAS and NAS and pretty much every similar group worldwide.
You have your doubts about gravitation too, then? mt
You mean superior products at lower prices don't tend to win in the end?
Most companies who sell software will eventually end up competing head to head with people who give the stuff away. It turns out that software made by a few dedicated people enjoying themselves typically works better than bloatware built by armies of resentful wage slaves. The smaller, happier and more effective group can usually get by on a service model somehow.
Are you serious?
So basically EVERY software co. in the world should just give it up and become a services company and OS their software?
I don't tend to make sweeping statements like that, but for the most part, yeah. There may be exceptions, but software licensing itself is not usually going to be a reasonable business model because nothing will prevent your competitor from giving away the competing product and living off the t-shirts and the concert tickets.
Interestingly, this tactic was in some ways pioneered by Microsoft. Remember Netscape? The fact that the marginal cost of a unit of software is zero makes for a very interesting marketplace.
Mostly not, I'm afraid.
Basically, while I can see how you got your ideas, they really aren't right. First of all, there is a range of scientific studies and approaches that support the global warming consensus, not just models. Secondly, the models are not developed to study global warming,. They are developed to study the earth as a system. Global warming prediction is an important output, but far from the only one.
In fact, we build the models from the physical principles, with the hope that realistic model behavior emerges. We have millions of data points, thousands of phenomena, and thousands of person-years of research into the physics and chemistry of the atmosphere, ocean and ice systems that we attempt to capture in these models.
The curve-fitting exercise you describe is trivial compared to the actual efforts underway.
I don't know why you think you can't afford to read the full-fledged climate models by the way. They are open source. You may not be able to afford to run them, but that's reasonable; they require supercomputers to run. They just require patience to read. Here's one.. Let me warn you that you will have difficulty reading it. Unlike you, I actually do have to read this thing and so far I am not enjoying it.
While I see where you are coming from with your questions, it doesn't seem fruitful to take them all on at once. As in any science, the answers are not immediately accessible in the sense that an outsider can expect to follow all the arguments in detail in a reasonable amount of time. If you want to study the subject in detail, no one is stopping you. Start with, say, Wallace and Hobbs and see if you have a taste for this stuff.
If not (and to be honest I've never encountered anyone who learned this material outside a university classroom) another alternative is to skip trying to understand the material in detail and simply survey it.
Fortunately that is possible. Every few years the scientific community publishes a report that describes what is known and what is strongly suspected in this field. Even this isn't easy reading, but if you are diligent you can understand this with just the sort of basically sound scientifically influenced thinking you display. The most recent one (getting a bit stale now) is here
Your concluding paragraph, unfortunately, is insightful.This is ultimately the problem with democracy. None of us has the time and energy to know everything. If the network of trust between the public and the experts with relevant knowledge breaks down, we can only throw up our hands and punt. I find the fact that you are not coy about doing so refreshingly honest.
I appreciate your comments and while I doubt you'll find it as helpful as you wanted, I hope you'll take this reply in the constructive spirit in which it was intended.
Maybe you can't, really. But in the end you'll be competing with someone else who's perfectly willing to operate on those terms. You'll often find them catching up with your functionality quicker than you expected.
Not every company in the world can just become a services company and compete on price.
Exactly. And most of those companies who can't adapt are in big trouble.
The fact that many companies can't adapt to the situation doesn't change the situation, does it? People are willing and able to undercut your price with superior products. Deal with it or find another line of work.
What a lousy counterargument: "this is inconvenient so it can't be true". Right.
I'm not entirely sure what to make of "all they can say". The best summary of all we can say is here. That's as of '01. The fourth IPCC assessment is expected next year.
You will find a great deal more there than just the instrumnental record, but of course when you have a direct measurement you use it.
Right, observational climatology is based on casual recollection. Why should I have to bother to look at data to get into a prestigious peer-reviewed journal?
Are you suggesting that stuff gets published in respected journals about observational trends that people make up without looking at the records? Is this some kind of troll?
It's an important and clever study. One big question on the observational side of climate change studies is how much the direct observation of warming is due to local rather than global heating. Thermometers tend to be clustered near where people are, and there are local heating effects around cities that, while pretty trivial on a global scale, might be showing up.
The cited paper addresses this question and shows that this bias in the estimate is small. It does this by showing very similar trends in nighttime temperature on windy days as on calm days, though (for compelling and obvious reasons) the local heating effect is (and can be shown to be) much larger on calm days.
The strident denial camp, (many of them paid in the style of 'tobacco scientists') of course, loves the "urban heat island" hypothesis and often parades it around so as to deny one part of the science.
This paper goes a long way toward demolishing that argument. That's one reason why it's very important. The linked breathless journalism article is pretty unclear about that, unfortunately.
This work is also interesting as a lovely demonstration of how science works. I'd teach this one in high school science if I were teaching high school science.
You're off by a couple of orders of magnitude. Volcanic emissions in the very long run are the source of our carbon, but the annual rate of volcanic emissions is about 1 % of human conversion of fossil fuels to CO2.
Carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere by a couple of slow processes. The fast processes (the biotic carbon cycle) don't really count because the exchanges go both ways. The slow process that matters most to atmospheric composition, to first order, is mixing into the deep ocean, a process with a time constant of roughly a thousand years.
The total amount of cabron in the biosphere/atmosphere/upper ocean is increasing rapidly (by comparison with natural processes) as a result of human activity. The same is not true of water vapor, even though industrial activity certainly does release a lot of steam.
I don't know anything about this superheated water to combustible hydrogen process. That said, I'm sure that if it's feasible, it will not cause a greenhouse gas problem.
The atmosphere is well-mixed. The differences in CO2 measurements from one point to another are much smaller than the vertical range of the graph, as I pointed out elsewhere in the thread.
The orange spike is not a measurement. It is the curveof direct measurements over the last half century. The entire orange range has been measured at Mauna Loa. It's not just one point. Also, Mauna Loa is not continuoulsy active, and was chosen specifically for its isolation from carbon dioxide sources.
Also the green points (all of them) are obtained using the same method. The reason you see a few of them as distinct while the others blend into a curve is because, um, the curve abruptly starts rising at an unprecedented rate at the end there.
The 'reconstruction procedure' is a measurement of CO2 content in bubbles trapped in ice cores. It's pretty damned robust.
Finally, if the spike shown at the present time can only be explained by industrial activity, as you seem to imply, what accounts for the equally significant spike rising between 20,000 and 10,000 years ago
Um, the retreat of the glaciers? You don't know very much about paleoclimate, do you?
Anyway, the important thing to understand is that the SLOPE of the green and orange parts of the curve ARE DIRECTLY MEASURED. Even the collapse of the last glacial maximum, a very abrupt event by geophysical standards, is hugely slower than the current spike. There simply is no other explanation possible.
This is even before accounting for isotopic evidence, showing that the newly injected carbon has the same isotopic signature as fossil fuels and not as part of any active reservoir.
You can't imagine how exasperating it is to be "debating" the stuff that's already settled. There are a lot of open questions in the global change business. How the hell is democracy supposed to function on moderately complicated questions when we can't even get the public to agree on the aspects that are about as certain as anything in science?
and the only problem with my car is that it gets six miles to the gallon and that it stalls out on the highway all the time. Oh, yeah, those and that it's pig ugly. Otherwise I like it fine.
There's always a balance between precision and accessibility in public communication.
There is an important distinction being made for which the strictly correct words are "anthropogenic" and "non-anthropogenic", but just cutting corners and saying "artificial" and "natural" is easier to read and clear enough. Nobody is saying that human activity is supernatural or unnatural.
If you have better words to express this distinction, then go ahead and use them. Please understand, though, that there is something important and unprecedented being discussed here. It's more important to communicate the important ideas effectively than to choose the poetically perfect phrase.
However, the current period of warming is the fastest known in the entire history of the Earth. The obvious candidate is us; Occam's Razor.
Both wrong, sorry. The world has been gradually cooling since about 4000 BC. There's some debate about how smoothly. The current rate of CO2 accumulation is indeed unprecedented, but it's not obvious that the recent rate of global warming is. On the other hand, there's good physical reasons and paleoclimatological analogs that cause most scientists working in the climate field to believe that the warming over the next few decades will be unprecedented.
You seem to be confusing this matter with some other red herring that someone has cooked up.
These are air bubbles whose composition is measured directly to obtain the CO2 spike.
Some of the points you are trying to repeat have some validity and cannot be dismissed so easily, but we're talking about the CO2 itself here. The human casued increase of greenhouse gases is not any more speculative than, oh, gravity. Your statement that "The end result of increasing greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere seems to be speculative" is absolutely incorrect.
Most century scale carbon cycle analyses I've seen don't even mention the volcanic component.
Here's a link which doesn't agree with your claim http://volcano.und.nodak.edu/vwdocs/Gases/man.html . In fact it has it the other way around - 150 years of volcanic emissions are roughly equal to one year of human emissions.
Also, if you're right, exactly where is the huge spike in atmospheric carbon coming from, anyway? See http://www.climate.unibe.ch/clim_recon/co2.html. See that orange spike on the right? That look natural to you?
Note that this data is directly measured from well-dated bubbles trapped in ice cores. This is not a speculative reconstruction. It's observational data.
Good idea. Let's think about how that would look.
Now CO2 is a cumulative problem. So every country should have a cumulative cap on per capita emissions that is the same, right? That means that the countries that have already emitted the most need to stop totally, and other countries need to stop when they catch up.
OK, that's too harsh. Let's let bygones be bygones. Every country should have the same cap on emission rates, right? Well that still impacts the more industrialized countries the most, since they are doing the most emitting.
Still too harsh? How about if we let every country emit what they were emitting in 1992. That means the countries that were doing the most damage get a special right to continue to do the most damage, just slightly less than they would otherwise. This impacts countries least that emit the most. Since that doesn't make any sense for the totally undeveloped countries, we'll cut them a break, but that's not a big deal, relatively speaking.
Unfair? To whom?
For the countries with the highest 1992 emissions to resist this is not only shortsighted and immoral. It's also shortsighted in the sense of being strategically stupid.
Kyoto gives a built-in-advantage to the countries with the biggest consumption in 1992, essentially forever. I've never been able to grasp the argument that this is unfair to the US.
Not that Wikipedia is authoritative, but the article you cite very specifically says:
The controversy occurs almost entirely within the press and political arenas. In the scientific press and amongst climate researchers, there is little "controversy" about global warming, only a desire to investigate a scientific problem and determine its consequences. As Kevin E. Trenberth writes: In 1995 the IPCC assessment concluded that "the balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate". Since then the evidence has become much stronger ... Thus the headline in IPCC (2001) is "There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities"... While some changes arising from global warming are benign or even beneficial, the economic effects of the weather extremes are substantial and clearly warrant attention in policy debates... Consequently, there is a strong case for slowing down the projected rates of climate change from human influences. [1]
Also we have some pretty solid physics that indicates that rapid greenhouse gas accumulation is a problem.
Climate is not weather. Weather is the part of atmospheric conditions that is not predictable beyond a few weeks. Climate is the rest of it.
Will it snow on Christmas? Nobody can say. It's a weather question. WIll Christmas be colder than the Fourth of July? Well, yeah, at least here in Chicago. That's a climate question.
Climate change is definitely germane to biodiversity issues.
My "saga" (the name was given it by one of the more competent SBC employees I talked to) will be even more incomprehensible unless you know that SBC Illinois, SBC Wisconsin, and SBC Yahoo! DSL Internet are served by three separate toll freee numbers and three distinct bureaucracies. Here goes:
...innumerable questions... ."what operating system do you use" "I have a Macintosh running OS X" "do you plan to run more than one computer on this DSL connection?" "yes" "How many?" "uhhh...." etc. etc. "Your new phone number will be 555 - 1234. Thank you for choosing SBC Yahoo Nike Sear Roebuck Internet Service with a Cherry on Top. How did you like my service today, on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being most satisfied?" "(sigh) 5, but I gave the last guy a 5 and he got it wrong. Can I just give you his 5?"
1) Move to Illinois from Wisconsin, both have lines owned by SBC. (Having had nightmares getting 3rd party DSL working I capitulated.) Call SBC number listed on phone bill to inform them of the move. "Oh, that's handled by a different region, here's the number, but be sure and call us back so we can have the forward set right on your old number"
2) Call second number, order DSL and POTS effective ASAP. Answer all sorts of stupid questions, of which the most irritating is "what operating system do you use?" "all of them" "no which one really?" "linux" "I have to put something" "linux" "sorry sir, which operating system, WIndows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2000, spam spam spam?" "Macintosh OS X" "OK" OK, so far everything according to spec at least, if a bit irritating. "Thank you for choosing SBC Yahoo General Mills Procter and Gamble Internet Service with Sugar on Top. How did you like my service today, on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being most satisfied?" "5, thanks"
3) Oops, can't call Wisconsin back with the forwarding number, they didn't give me my new phone number. Better call back and get it. "Sorry sir, they did not complete your order. There is no order pending for service at that address" "Are you SURE?" "Yes sir" "I just placed it, maybe it hasn't gone through the system to your terminal yet?" "No sir, the order was not completed. We'll have to start over again" "(sigh)"
HINT: you can see where this is going, can't you?
4) A few days pass. My cel phone voicemail gets a confused call from the SBC install people. We have two install orders but you have only one line. Did you have an order pending to install the other line?
5) Verify existence of dial tone. Call SBC, assure them that I only want one line, and have dial tone, would like ot know the number on it. "It's 555-9090" "Are you sure that 555-9090 is installed and 555 - 1234 is pending?" "Yes sir" "Absolutely sure?" "Yes sir" "I suppose I have two DSL orders pending too, right?" "Yes sir, probably so" "So I should cancel the one for 555 -1234 because the one for 555-9090 is correct" "Yes sir" "I would hate to cancel the wrong one. Are you sure?" "Yes sir, your connection on 555 - 9090 is definitely now live. Thank you for choosing SBC Yahoo Nike Merrill Lynch Pearce Fenner & Smith Internet Service with Whipped Cream on It. How did you like my service today, on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being most satisfied?" "(sigh) 5, but I gave the last lady a 5 and she got it wrong. Can I just give you her 5?"
6) Call the separate DSL number, tell them the story, and cancel DSL on 555 - 1234, leaving order pending on 555 - 9090. This was my mistake. As they say in the chess reports, "???". I have caller ID on my cel phone. I should have checked. Of course my number is 555 -1234, the one I cancelled. Also call Wisconsin and give them the bogus forwarding number.
7) Get email that inbound calls aren't reaching me. Try the caller ID thing. 555 - 1234.
The sickening feeling in my stomach that starts to appear does not forebode adequately, that in a few months I'd be getting threats from collection agencies. But I'm getting ahead of myself....
8) Call Wisconsin and unbogi
Problem is, it's not like one side or the other does this. They both do it.
Take global warming. Same deal. Both sides have issues about this, and neither wants to pay any attention to the other. Each calls the other side "a bunch of nuts", another both sides are dead set against listening to the other. Examples like this go on and on.
There are not two debating "sides" in climate issues as matters stand. There is a spectrum of scientific and policy opinion among scientists about climate change, and there's a loud group of political hacks issuing propaganda that essentially lies completely outside the fold of scientific discussion.
Almost all stories in the press present this as a "debate", but it completely misrepresents the state of what is controversial and what is uncontroversial within the science and within the policy options as seen by people familiar with the science. The professional advocacy group has the public unsure whether global warming has been observed, unsure whether human activity is the primary cause, and unsure as to whether the greenhouse effect is established physics. These are not open questions in science.
The US press (actually the press in other English-speaking countries is to some extent following along) presents the broad spectrum that contains almost all legitimate science and the loud but narrow group that contains essentially no professional researchers as equals in some hypothetical "debate".
This incompetent laziness in the press is a major root cause of America's increasing incapacity to absorb the real evidence on matters of great public importance. Equal time for sense and nonsense is journalistic malfeasance, not balance.