I wish there is a way to tag this article 'the comments in this thread reduce my faith in humanity'.
For crying out loud, no one's robbing anyone. It's not like third world countries are a massive component of profits. Even if we tax to pay for this, i.e. tax to directly incentivise medical research, this is scarcely going to cut into your hamburger budgets.
Nobody chooses where they are born. Screw whether poor people 'deserve it', and start asking yourself what is the human thing to do.
Maybe, but wikipedia's internal search allows you to customise search results by namespaces, and includes things that google doesn't index - in particular, talk pages, user pages, and internal policy pages.
You missed the effect of atmospheric layering
on
Global Warming Debunked?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Since we are all stating credentials here, I am a mathematician.
The problem with the calculations above is that is is based on the measurements of the Earth's albedo as a whole. It is somewhat plausible, then, that the calculation gives a somewhat reasonable result for some sort of whole-earth lambda, including some certain adjustments for the change in pressure as we increase altitude.
However, this value is not relevant to GW study, because in GW we are not interested in an averaged temperature over all of the volume of the atmosphere, but an averaged temperature at sea level over the surface of the Earth - for example, a consequence of GW is that air temperature at certain levels in the atmosphere actually cools, and so a large factor in this is the movement of high temperature from high levels to low levels in the atmosphere, something that is cancelled out in your calculations. Stefan Boltzmann, which uses idealised surfaces, does not capture this effect.
In fact, it is impossible to capture this effect without detailed measurements and modelling of how the atmosphere is structured. In this, the UN is fully correct in adjusting its estimates as measurements change and become more detailed, and Monckton incorrect in dismissing the details needed in this calculation.
I'll point out here that it's the climate change deniers that are calling for further research, while the supporters say that enough research has been done to come to a conclusion.
No. ice cores work somewhat like tree rings - with winter summer and so on, the snow deposited that form the ice change in character. This means that if you look at the ice using a magnifying glass, you will see bands and striations corresponding to seasonal cycles, with each band being one year. So, because we have ice cores with over 600 bands on them, we can see that ice in the Artic are at least 600 years old, and are not broken by a instance where, say, all of the arctic melted. (In fact http://www.physorg.com/news68305951.html implies at least 55 million years of ice history at the north pole)
In summary, it isn't the depth that gives the chronological information, but the layers. This is illustrated by:
So how the hell is he going to ever prove a theory along the lines of 'If you do X, then Y will happen?'
Are saying that every prediction about a result of an experiment must predict whether the experiment will take place? That a guy who thinks that if you press the big red climate emissions button a bomb will explode must keep silent, because he doesn't know whether or not you are going to press the button? The evidence was for the previous years in the past from which his model matches the data. The predictions are for the years in the future, and have nothing to do with evidence to argue for or against the premise of the paper.
But no, because the article is arguing that modelling is not required to measure lambda. The is demonstrably false, because changes in situations like ice cover and cloud cover and vegetation level can dramatically change the Earth's value of lambda over time. If the author declares that he can directly apply Stefan Boltzmann to the Earth without modelling and get lambda out of it, then he is simply doing it wrong.
So unless you want to believe the maths of a journalist who gives no information on how he did his calculations and who seems to show a misunderstanding of the methods involved over peer reviewed papers that have been around for quite some time, I'd suggest that this statement is bullshit.
Well, the iceless Arctic 'theory' is rather idiotic, if you think about it, because we have pretty direct evidence that it isn't true. I mean, unless you want to go tell a large number of polar scientists that the mid-low layers of their ice cores don't actually exist....
This was 1988. A large number of variables are undefined between then and 2000. Forcings, in this case, refer to carbon dixoide emissions. What the statement is saying is that because we cannot predict the economy for the next 12 years (or we'd be rich), what we will do is lay out a number of if... then scenarios, for what would happen with the climate if carbon dioxide went up, or if a volcano injected a bunch of sulphates into the air, cooling the earth down. Hansen, you see, was not an economist, or a volcanologist, so he stuck to what he could do. The graph was in ignorance of what the inputs to the equation would be, but based on what the models and calculations dictate.
What should Hansen have done? Lie and pretend he could predict the future? When you don't have the numbers, the honest thing is to say that you don't have the numbers, but IF the numbers were X, which seems plausible, then blah.
Throwing unattributed numbers around and using sciency words like TFA does is not doing actual honest science.
First, the UN implies that carbon dioxide ended the last four ice ages. It displays two 450,000-year graphs: a sawtooth curve of temperature and a sawtooth of airborne CO2 that's scaled to look similar. Usually, similar curves are superimposed for comparison.
Yes, but where did the UN actually say that CO2 ended the ice ages? How is the author reading their minds? Such a view would certainly be contrary to must of mainstream science, of course, so where's the evidence that the author isn't setting up a strawman?
The Co2 graphs show the reliability of ice core CO2 data as a proxy for finding out historical temperature levels, and also the potential for positive feedback effects if temperatures rise. They give an idea as to the sensitivity of the situation to perturbations.
They gave one technique for reconstructing pre-thermometer temperature 390 times more weight than any other (but didn't say so).
So how does the author know, then?
They used a computer model to draw the graph from the data, but scientists later found that the model almost always drew hockey-sticks even if they fed in random, electronic "red noise".
This is pure and simply a lie. It's a lie, because all of these critics have ever show is the tendency for hockey sticks in PV01. But PV01 is a certain statistical consequence that is not the same as the actual reconstruction. Studies searching for the hockey stick tendency in the full reconstruction have come up with nothing, because there are other components in the full reconstruction that cancel out the first term.
This graph is comparing apples to oranges. The top graph is a global temperature anomaly graph. The bottom is the temperature of a relatively small continent, dominated by a warm ocean current. One is a average data over the world, and the other is strongly affected by local effects - such as the medieval warm period. The top graph is what global warming is talking about. The bottom graph is not relevant to the debate at all.
You don't need computer models to "find" lambda. Its value is given by a century-old law, derived experimentally by a Slovenian professor and proved by his Austrian student (who later committed suicide when his scientific compatriots refused to believe in atoms). The Stefan-Boltzmann law, not mentioned once in the UN's 2001 report, is as central to the thermodynamics of climate as Einstein's later equation is to astrophysics.
From wikipedia:
The Stefan-Boltzmann law, also known as Stefan's law, states that the total energy radiated per unit surface area of a black body in unit time (known variously as the black-body irradiance, energy flux density, radiant flux, or the emissive power), j*, is directly proportional to the fourth power of the black body's thermodynamic temperature T (also called absolute temperature):
Stefan Boltzmann applies to a perfect blackbody. The Earth is not a perfect blackbody. In fact, not alot of things are. Doesn't it seem wrong to say that energy exposure always raises temperature to the same degree regardless of the object?
Hansen's testimony to congress: Hansen presented three graphs, giving three possible scenarios of future events. The 0.3 (in fact, 0.45 C) claim comes from Scenario A.
But the fact that it is called Scenario A is because there are also scenario B and C. A is a 'business as usual' scenario, involving exponential growth in emissions. What happened since 1988 was nothing like that. If anything, industrialisation declined in the West, creating a situation closer to B and C - moderate controls to emissions.
It's not like this is secret information. NASA itself has discussed this.
The objective was to illustrate the broad range of possibilities in the ignorance of how forcings would actually develop. The extreme scenarios (A with fast growth and no volcanos, and C with terminated growth of greenhouse gases) were meant to bracket plausible rates of change.
By quoting this assertion, the author of this article has shown that he is either deliberately deceptive, or has not looked at all of the evidence. Don't listen to the regurgitated rants of this non-expert.
When was the last time the UN actually agreed on anything? Certainly, members of the UN would individually do bad things, but they are unlikely to dominate comittees on their own.
The committee would never be made up solely of China, Cuba, Libya, Iran, and North Korea because each of them individually has dozens of enemies in the general assembly, who would demand that other powers be put in to counterbalance them (e.g. China-Japan, NK-SK, Iran-Israel, Cuba-USA...). The more crazy states in the UN are generally isolated, and for good reason.
Cripes, the EU can't even agree on a Constitution....making them perfect at preserving the status quo and not introducing any new freedom restricting measures.
Well, I think it's better to stay clear of the established arguments and get students to work out their own positions. The shrill responses of both sides really isn't helpful. Build up from the bottom along the lines of:
1. What are the goals of an information economy? What do we want to achieve? 2. Why does copyright exist in the first place? - the incentive model of IP, the programmers must eat argument. Does this incentive actually work? 3. To what extent does IP protection devalue the information it protects? 4. Comparison of protected and unprotected copyright systems. 5. Alternative models of incentivising production.
Yeah. I was going to make this point too - the property of this date isn't really that rare - it's rare and not rare depending on the part of the milennium you are in. For the last 500 years, when the year went from 15xx to 199x, there was obviously little chance of having a total that added to 13. Saying that the fact that it hasn't happened in the last 500 years means that it is 'rare' is just cherry picking.
Now, as for the other spike... It doesn't show in the extinctions graph because that is a marine fossil diversity graph. The disruption appears to have mostly occurred for land creatures, but is still mentioned in numerous other article referring to it.
Yeah, it's an embarrassing error, but my general point still stands. There's no justification for saying that warming events are always good, and extinction events are always cooling.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish there is a way to tag this article 'the comments in this thread reduce my faith in humanity'.
For crying out loud, no one's robbing anyone. It's not like third world countries are a massive component of profits. Even if we tax to pay for this, i.e. tax to directly incentivise medical research, this is scarcely going to cut into your hamburger budgets.
Nobody chooses where they are born. Screw whether poor people 'deserve it', and start asking yourself what is the human thing to do.
I guess the system didn't recognise his write-in vote of 'ME'.
Maybe, but wikipedia's internal search allows you to customise search results by namespaces, and includes things that google doesn't index - in particular, talk pages, user pages, and internal policy pages.
Bada boom
/ heatbucket3.html
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Study/HeatBucket
Modelled ocean heat storage vs observed values.
Since we are all stating credentials here, I am a mathematician.
The problem with the calculations above is that is is based on the measurements of the Earth's albedo as a whole. It is somewhat plausible, then, that the calculation gives a somewhat reasonable result for some sort of whole-earth lambda, including some certain adjustments for the change in pressure as we increase altitude.
However, this value is not relevant to GW study, because in GW we are not interested in an averaged temperature over all of the volume of the atmosphere, but an averaged temperature at sea level over the surface of the Earth - for example, a consequence of GW is that air temperature at certain levels in the atmosphere actually cools, and so a large factor in this is the movement of high temperature from high levels to low levels in the atmosphere, something that is cancelled out in your calculations. Stefan Boltzmann, which uses idealised surfaces, does not capture this effect.
In fact, it is impossible to capture this effect without detailed measurements and modelling of how the atmosphere is structured. In this, the UN is fully correct in adjusting its estimates as measurements change and become more detailed, and Monckton incorrect in dismissing the details needed in this calculation.
I'll point out here that it's the climate change deniers that are calling for further research, while the supporters say that enough research has been done to come to a conclusion.
Actually, meh, ignore my first link. That was referring to something else.
No. ice cores work somewhat like tree rings - with winter summer and so on, the snow deposited that form the ice change in character. This means that if you look at the ice using a magnifying glass, you will see bands and striations corresponding to seasonal cycles, with each band being one year. So, because we have ice cores with over 600 bands on them, we can see that ice in the Artic are at least 600 years old, and are not broken by a instance where, say, all of the arctic melted. (In fact http://www.physorg.com/news68305951.html implies at least 55 million years of ice history at the north pole)
7 f/GISP2_1855m_ice_core_layers.gif/384px-GISP2_1855 m_ice_core_layers.gif
In summary, it isn't the depth that gives the chronological information, but the layers. This is illustrated by:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/7/
And we have.
That's why we are on scenario B and C, not on the cataclysmic scenario A.
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/edu/gwdebate/00fig1.gif
So how the hell is he going to ever prove a theory along the lines of 'If you do X, then Y will happen?'
Are saying that every prediction about a result of an experiment must predict whether the experiment will take place? That a guy who thinks that if you press the big red climate emissions button a bomb will explode must keep silent, because he doesn't know whether or not you are going to press the button? The evidence was for the previous years in the past from which his model matches the data. The predictions are for the years in the future, and have nothing to do with evidence to argue for or against the premise of the paper.
See my post earlier up the comments tree.
But no, because the article is arguing that modelling is not required to measure lambda. The is demonstrably false, because changes in situations like ice cover and cloud cover and vegetation level can dramatically change the Earth's value of lambda over time. If the author declares that he can directly apply Stefan Boltzmann to the Earth without modelling and get lambda out of it, then he is simply doing it wrong.
So unless you want to believe the maths of a journalist who gives no information on how he did his calculations and who seems to show a misunderstanding of the methods involved over peer reviewed papers that have been around for quite some time, I'd suggest that this statement is bullshit.
Well, the iceless Arctic 'theory' is rather idiotic, if you think about it, because we have pretty direct evidence that it isn't true. I mean, unless you want to go tell a large number of polar scientists that the mid-low layers of their ice cores don't actually exist....
This was 1988. A large number of variables are undefined between then and 2000. Forcings, in this case, refer to carbon dixoide emissions. What the statement is saying is that because we cannot predict the economy for the next 12 years (or we'd be rich), what we will do is lay out a number of if... then scenarios, for what would happen with the climate if carbon dioxide went up, or if a volcano injected a bunch of sulphates into the air, cooling the earth down. Hansen, you see, was not an economist, or a volcanologist, so he stuck to what he could do. The graph was in ignorance of what the inputs to the equation would be, but based on what the models and calculations dictate.
What should Hansen have done? Lie and pretend he could predict the future? When you don't have the numbers, the honest thing is to say that you don't have the numbers, but IF the numbers were X, which seems plausible, then blah.
Throwing unattributed numbers around and using sciency words like TFA does is not doing actual honest science.
Yes, but where did the UN actually say that CO2 ended the ice ages? How is the author reading their minds? Such a view would certainly be contrary to must of mainstream science, of course, so where's the evidence that the author isn't setting up a strawman?
The Co2 graphs show the reliability of ice core CO2 data as a proxy for finding out historical temperature levels, and also the potential for positive feedback effects if temperatures rise. They give an idea as to the sensitivity of the situation to perturbations.
So how does the author know, then?
This is pure and simply a lie. It's a lie, because all of these critics have ever show is the tendency for hockey sticks in PV01. But PV01 is a certain statistical consequence that is not the same as the actual reconstruction. Studies searching for the hockey stick tendency in the full reconstruction have come up with nothing, because there are other components in the full reconstruction that cancel out the first term.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/graphics/2006/11/
This graph is comparing apples to oranges. The top graph is a global temperature anomaly graph. The bottom is the temperature of a relatively small continent, dominated by a warm ocean current. One is a average data over the world, and the other is strongly affected by local effects - such as the medieval warm period. The top graph is what global warming is talking about. The bottom graph is not relevant to the debate at all.
From wikipedia:
Stefan Boltzmann applies to a perfect blackbody. The Earth is not a perfect blackbody. In fact, not alot of things are. Doesn't it seem wrong to say that energy exposure always raises temperature to the same degree regardless of the object?
And so on and so forth.
Hansen's testimony to congress: Hansen presented three graphs, giving three possible scenarios of future events. The 0.3 (in fact, 0.45 C) claim comes from Scenario A.
http://www.cato.org/testimony/images/pm072998a.gi
But the fact that it is called Scenario A is because there are also scenario B and C. A is a 'business as usual' scenario, involving exponential growth in emissions. What happened since 1988 was nothing like that. If anything, industrialisation declined in the West, creating a situation closer to B and C - moderate controls to emissions.
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/edu/gwdebate/00fig1.gif
It's not like this is secret information. NASA itself has discussed this.
By quoting this assertion, the author of this article has shown that he is either deliberately deceptive, or has not looked at all of the evidence. Don't listen to the regurgitated rants of this non-expert.
Then with global warming, we'd be truly screwed, eh?
When was the last time the UN actually agreed on anything? Certainly, members of the UN would individually do bad things, but they are unlikely to dominate comittees on their own.
The committee would never be made up solely of China, Cuba, Libya, Iran, and North Korea because each of them individually has dozens of enemies in the general assembly, who would demand that other powers be put in to counterbalance them (e.g. China-Japan, NK-SK, Iran-Israel, Cuba-USA...). The more crazy states in the UN are generally isolated, and for good reason.
Cripes, the EU can't even agree on a Constitution. ...making them perfect at preserving the status quo and not introducing any new freedom restricting measures.
Unfortunately, it's the crazies who have been hoarding those guns all these years. Wanna bet whose side they'll be on?
How is that not flamebait?
Endless wars over whether Bush sux or not sux are getting kinda tiring.
Well, I think it's better to stay clear of the established arguments and get students to work out their own positions. The shrill responses of both sides really isn't helpful. Build up from the bottom along the lines of:
1. What are the goals of an information economy? What do we want to achieve?
2. Why does copyright exist in the first place? - the incentive model of IP, the programmers must eat argument. Does this incentive actually work?
3. To what extent does IP protection devalue the information it protects?
4. Comparison of protected and unprotected copyright systems.
5. Alternative models of incentivising production.
Yeah. I was going to make this point too - the property of this date isn't really that rare - it's rare and not rare depending on the part of the milennium you are in. For the last 500 years, when the year went from 15xx to 199x, there was obviously little chance of having a total that added to 13. Saying that the fact that it hasn't happened in the last 500 years means that it is 'rare' is just cherry picking.
Also, now I have two counterexamples, instead of just one.
Ooops. Still, I can try to salvage something.
a t_dying.html
8 /5720/398?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT= &fulltext=permian+warming&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0& resourcetype=HWCIT
The graph may be for the wrong event, but we still do have a general scientific consensus that the Permian extinction involved warming.
http://www.livescience.com/environment/050120_gre
Referring to
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/30
Now, as for the other spike... It doesn't show in the extinctions graph because that is a marine fossil diversity graph. The disruption appears to have mostly occurred for land creatures, but is still mentioned in numerous other article referring to it.
Yeah, it's an embarrassing error, but my general point still stands. There's no justification for saying that warming events are always good, and extinction events are always cooling.