"Of course, Exxon has billions in revenue, but they only spend a small portion of that on global warming."
Actually, 100% of what Exxon spends goes toward global warming, for the simple reason that they are in the fossil-fuels business. Every once of oil they extract and refine ultimately winds up in the atmosphere and creates more carbon dioxide leading to more and more global warming. How much they spend on propaganda is largely immaterial to the consequences of what they do to create their profits.
For someone pretending to have a grasp on statistics, you should be aware that confidence limits are the widest at the ends of a regression line, whether the fit is linear or not. It is completely spurious to look only at the ends of a regression line, in this case the last few years (in this case the independent variable is scaled in years) of any trend, especially one of 130 years and conclude that because the last 10 when taken alone do not show the same correlation as that of the entire sample there is no significant correlation. One thing scientist can not do that sophists like yourself can is to remove "the inconvenient truths" of data points so that "miraculously" your new analysis fits your preconceived notions.
In any event as noted by Hansen et al your preconceptions about both climate change and statistics are irrelevant for the reasons they indicate. The problem for deniers is that as the models become more and more accurate, there is less and less error the modelers have to "explain away" and more and more that the deniers have to "explain away". What is worse for deniers is that totally independent lines of evidence that comes from biology and other earth sciences are providing an ever increasing confirmation of the predictions by the climate modelers. The real question is not whether global warming due to carbon dioxide forcing is occurring or even whether that forcing is occurring within the error bounds predicted by a variety of different models, rather it is now how long will the fossil fuels industry will like the tobacco industry before it stay in denial before it is is forced to confront its reality by the res of society. The real question is whether it will be in time to save humanity.
Considering the well documented trend over the past 200 years, give or take a few years hardly makes a difference, except to those who like to cherry-pick the data.
Opinions one way or the other are irrelevant. What is relevant is that the evidence from multiple sources indicate that unquestionably the earth is warming and the increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is in all probability the cause. There is nothing that any of these 16 guys claim that says otherwise. They merely state that it is THEIR economic interest to ignore it.
Actually, this may prove a good thing. As the earth warms more and it becomes increasingly clear that global warming will be the largest challenge ever faced by humanity, the this issue of the Wall Street Journal will be useful when Ruppert Murdoch is tried for crimes against humanity. Even if he has to be dug up out of his grave, it will probably of value to go ahead and hold the trial just to educate the last few remaining doubters.
In other words, you are going to do what you damn well please regardless of how it affects future generations. No doubt the only that will prevent someone like you from driving your oversized and overweight Escalade with the AC on full blast, will be a bunch of Saudi's who start finding it so damn hot that they stop exporting oil so that they can keep their Escalades and AC's on full blast. With temperatures now regularly getting into the 40-45 C range in Saudi Arabia, perhaps you won't have to wait too long before they cut you off.
"Even though we've learned a lot about the climate in the last 30 years, we still know next to nothing about it. We shouldn't be accepting the results essentially heuristic computer models as rock solid predictions for the future, and we should still be working to understand the climate better first and foremost."
No, we should wait until ecosystems have entirely collapsed and it will not only be too late to do anything about it, it will be too hot to grow food in sufficient amounts.
You talk about costs. What do you think the costs are going to be as, if every single plant ecosystem on the planet is expected to shift in species composition on average by about 85% within 300 years? To put that in perspective, imagine arid or desert conditions extending well into Montana, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, with the largest changes being in the loss of temperate forests worldwide. Keep in mind that just because its warmer in high latitudes does not mean that plants will grow well there, particular since the soils, if they even exist, are extremely poor, and most plants don't do well without substantial sunlight during the "winter".
First you are looking at old data. The current mean CO2 in the atmosphere is not 393 parts per million ( http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/ ). Second, the volume of all the lungs in the world is a very tiny percentage of the entire atmosphere and certainly far smaller than the 33,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide put out through the burning of fossil fuels. Its basically totally irrelevant to the phenomenon under discussion. As a consequence, your sophism is irrelevant.
Yes. The problem is that that is for the next 100 years only. After that we add still more and it gets hotter and hotter. If you figure a human lifespan is on average about 75 years. That means there there is an increasing probability that if the problem is left unattended and we start adding tar sands to the mix, as well as melting permafrost, clathrates, etc., we can be pretty confident in predicting that the bulk of humanity will likely not survive more than about another 5-10 generations into the future. That's sort of a pretty lousy thing to do to our children's, children's, children's, children's, children. '
Don't be so foolish to think its only going to be the third world that is affected. Those who attempt to cattle ranch in West Texas and Oklahoma can tell you it ain't as easy as it used to be. Millions are currently relocating in Northern Mexico right now as the extreme drought has made farming their impossible. Do you really think there will be no effect just a few hundred miles north of the border?
Humans produce about 330,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually. In contrast all the world's volcanoes produce average about 220,000,000 tons annually. The problematic aspect is that each year what we put in previously is still there, so the effect is cumulative.
Humans produce about 330,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually. In contrast all the world's volcanoes produce average about 220,000,000 tons annually. The problematic aspect is that each year what we put in previously is still there, so the effect is cumulative.
Actually, the resultant carbon dioxide weighs more than the gasoline, because when it is oxidized oxygen molecules are attached. Oxygen is more massive than than carbon.
The reality is that even from its high to its low, the difference between solar output by our sun as a result of the solar cycle and sunspots activity is relatively small percentage. The variation caused by the sunspot cycle to solar output is relatively small, on the order of 0.1% of the solar constant (a peak-to-trough range of 1.3 W.m^2 compared to 1366 W.m^2 for the average solar constant). This has been documented over several hundreds of years of observations. This compares to a difference of between 1,413 – 1,321 W/m^2 between Perihelion and Aphelion. Consequently, changes is solar activity CAN NOT be used to explain the massive amount of of observed heating within the past 200 years. Nor obviously, there is no evidence that the earth's orbit has wildly changed in the past 200 years. In contrast, as carbon dioxide based models show, they explain the variance observed extremely well.
Just out of curiosity, how fast does Shaviv think we are moving through these arms? They are pretty big, so we must be moving pretty fast. Does he really have any data so suggest that the light from all those distant stars is growing so bright that its actually increasing the temperatures of the earth? Surely, you must be joking.
That's quite true, but we have never had both higher carbon dioxide levels and humans. Keep in mind also those very high levels of carbon dioxide were achieved only over millions of years of far slower progressive change, with only a few brief (20,000 year) periods such as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, that even approach the rapidity we have seen temperatures rise in the past 200 years. All such periods led to massive changes is species composition.
Actually, the historical record reveals some very nasty periods in earth history that humans wouldn't likely have survived through In fact there is evidence that the Toba eruption may have cut the human population down to a few thousands of individuals. Very rapid fluctuations as we are seeing now have always resulted in massive extinction events. Whether we get through the next 50-200 years will be anybody's guess.
You can be sure that the crop losses and costs of rebuilding ports and moving hundreds of millions of people out of the way of sea level rise will be very large indeed. In 100 years time it will be necessary to being the process of moving Wall Street itself. How much do you think that's going to cost or do you anticipate most traders arriving to work by water taxi? Do you think the less fortunate are going to have more food to eat as continents and their soils grow hotter and dryer? Chances are good they will be dining on the 1% before they stand idly by for that.
If the ice caps over LAND melt, a lot of people are going to be without drinking and irrigation water. This is already becoming a problem in Bolivia.
If it melts over water the result will also be bad as it will cause the tongues of most arctic glaciers to melt very quickly thus releasing huge amounts of friction and inertia that must be overcome by upland ice as it moves down to the sea. This will greatly accelerate the loss of glaciers on land as well. So far from being 0 the effect will be quite large, as is already being seen in the glaciers of southeastern Greenland as well as in Alaska.
The problem with your argument is that the amount of carbon that enters the atmosphere from fossil fuels is about 330,000,000,000 tons per year. The amount that results from destroying rainforests is a much smaller fraction of that, not that it wouldn't still be a good idea to stop cutting down rainforests such as the estimated loss of about 70,000 species per year.
Termites don't actually add much carbon dioxide to the system, they merely form part of the carbon cycle. The part that returns carbon fixed by plants from decomposition. Uptake and decomposition are roughly in balance, except when we, as you point out cut down massive amounts of forest. However, the burning of fossil fuels releases vast reservoirs of previously trapped carbon back into the atmosphere.
This is only true, if you do like all denies do and look at only cherry picked parts of the world temperature records. How about a link to that dataset and a few scientific papers that cite using it.
Slashdot Mirror
"Of course, Exxon has billions in revenue, but they only spend a small portion of that on global warming."
Actually, 100% of what Exxon spends goes toward global warming, for the simple reason that they are in the fossil-fuels business. Every once of oil they extract and refine ultimately winds up in the atmosphere and creates more carbon dioxide leading to more and more global warming. How much they spend on propaganda is largely immaterial to the consequences of what they do to create their profits.
For someone pretending to have a grasp on statistics, you should be aware that confidence limits are the widest at the ends of a regression line, whether the fit is linear or not. It is completely spurious to look only at the ends of a regression line, in this case the last few years (in this case the independent variable is scaled in years) of any trend, especially one of 130 years and conclude that because the last 10 when taken alone do not show the same correlation as that of the entire sample there is no significant correlation. One thing scientist can not do that sophists like yourself can is to remove "the inconvenient truths" of data points so that "miraculously" your new analysis fits your preconceived notions.
In any event as noted by Hansen et al your preconceptions about both climate change and statistics are irrelevant for the reasons they indicate. The problem for deniers is that as the models become more and more accurate, there is less and less error the modelers have to "explain away" and more and more that the deniers have to "explain away". What is worse for deniers is that totally independent lines of evidence that comes from biology and other earth sciences are providing an ever increasing confirmation of the predictions by the climate modelers. The real question is not whether global warming due to carbon dioxide forcing is occurring or even whether that forcing is occurring within the error bounds predicted by a variety of different models, rather it is now how long will the fossil fuels industry will like the tobacco industry before it stay in denial before it is is forced to confront its reality by the res of society. The real question is whether it will be in time to save humanity.
Considering the well documented trend over the past 200 years, give or take a few years hardly makes a difference, except to those who like to cherry-pick the data.
Opinions one way or the other are irrelevant. What is relevant is that the evidence from multiple sources indicate that unquestionably the earth is warming and the increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is in all probability the cause. There is nothing that any of these 16 guys claim that says otherwise. They merely state that it is THEIR economic interest to ignore it.
Actually, this may prove a good thing. As the earth warms more and it becomes increasingly clear that global warming will be the largest challenge ever faced by humanity, the this issue of the Wall Street Journal will be useful when Ruppert Murdoch is tried for crimes against humanity. Even if he has to be dug up out of his grave, it will probably of value to go ahead and hold the trial just to educate the last few remaining doubters.
In other words, you are going to do what you damn well please regardless of how it affects future generations. No doubt the only that will prevent someone like you from driving your oversized and overweight Escalade with the AC on full blast, will be a bunch of Saudi's who start finding it so damn hot that they stop exporting oil so that they can keep their Escalades and AC's on full blast. With temperatures now regularly getting into the 40-45 C range in Saudi Arabia, perhaps you won't have to wait too long before they cut you off.
"Even though we've learned a lot about the climate in the last 30 years, we still know next to nothing about it. We shouldn't be accepting the results essentially heuristic computer models as rock solid predictions for the future, and we should still be working to understand the climate better first and foremost."
No, we should wait until ecosystems have entirely collapsed and it will not only be too late to do anything about it, it will be too hot to grow food in sufficient amounts.
You talk about costs. What do you think the costs are going to be as, if every single plant ecosystem on the planet is expected to shift in species composition on average by about 85% within 300 years? To put that in perspective, imagine arid or desert conditions extending well into Montana, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, with the largest changes being in the loss of temperate forests worldwide. Keep in mind that just because its warmer in high latitudes does not mean that plants will grow well there, particular since the soils, if they even exist, are extremely poor, and most plants don't do well without substantial sunlight during the "winter".
First you are looking at old data. The current mean CO2 in the atmosphere is not 393 parts per million ( http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/ ). Second, the volume of all the lungs in the world is a very tiny percentage of the entire atmosphere and certainly far smaller than the 33,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide put out through the burning of fossil fuels. Its basically totally irrelevant to the phenomenon under discussion. As a consequence, your sophism is irrelevant.
Yes. The problem is that that is for the next 100 years only. After that we add still more and it gets hotter and hotter. If you figure a human lifespan is on average about 75 years. That means there there is an increasing probability that if the problem is left unattended and we start adding tar sands to the mix, as well as melting permafrost, clathrates, etc., we can be pretty confident in predicting that the bulk of humanity will likely not survive more than about another 5-10 generations into the future. That's sort of a pretty lousy thing to do to our children's, children's, children's, children's, children.
'
Don't be so foolish to think its only going to be the third world that is affected. Those who attempt to cattle ranch in West Texas and Oklahoma can tell you it ain't as easy as it used to be. Millions are currently relocating in Northern Mexico right now as the extreme drought has made farming their impossible. Do you really think there will be no effect just a few hundred miles north of the border?
Humans produce about 330,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually. In contrast all the world's volcanoes produce average about 220,000,000 tons annually. The problematic aspect is that each year what we put in previously is still there, so the effect is cumulative.
Humans produce about 330,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually. In contrast all the world's volcanoes produce average about 220,000,000 tons annually. The problematic aspect is that each year what we put in previously is still there, so the effect is cumulative.
Actually, the resultant carbon dioxide weighs more than the gasoline, because when it is oxidized oxygen molecules are attached. Oxygen is more massive than than carbon.
The reality is that even from its high to its low, the difference between solar output by our sun as a result of the solar cycle and sunspots activity is relatively small percentage. The variation caused by the sunspot cycle to solar output is relatively small, on the order of 0.1% of the solar constant (a peak-to-trough range of 1.3 W.m^2 compared to 1366 W.m^2 for the average solar constant). This has been documented over several hundreds of years of observations. This compares to a difference of between 1,413 – 1,321 W/m^2 between Perihelion and Aphelion. Consequently, changes is solar activity CAN NOT be used to explain the massive amount of of observed heating within the past 200 years. Nor obviously, there is no evidence that the earth's orbit has wildly changed in the past 200 years. In contrast, as carbon dioxide based models show, they explain the variance observed extremely well.
Just out of curiosity, how fast does Shaviv think we are moving through these arms? They are pretty big, so we must be moving pretty fast. Does he really have any data so suggest that the light from all those distant stars is growing so bright that its actually increasing the temperatures of the earth? Surely, you must be joking.
That's quite true, but we have never had both higher carbon dioxide levels and humans. Keep in mind also those very high levels of carbon dioxide were achieved only over millions of years of far slower progressive change, with only a few brief (20,000 year) periods such as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, that even approach the rapidity we have seen temperatures rise in the past 200 years. All such periods led to massive changes is species composition.
Actually, the historical record reveals some very nasty periods in earth history that humans wouldn't likely have survived through In fact there is evidence that the Toba eruption may have cut the human population down to a few thousands of individuals. Very rapid fluctuations as we are seeing now have always resulted in massive extinction events. Whether we get through the next 50-200 years will be anybody's guess.
Everything is a pollutant if the concentration rises high enough. Drink too much water and you will drown.
You can be sure that the crop losses and costs of rebuilding ports and moving hundreds of millions of people out of the way of sea level rise will be very large indeed. In 100 years time it will be necessary to being the process of moving Wall Street itself. How much do you think that's going to cost or do you anticipate most traders arriving to work by water taxi? Do you think the less fortunate are going to have more food to eat as continents and their soils grow hotter and dryer? Chances are good they will be dining on the 1% before they stand idly by for that.
Of course not. For the oil, gas and coal industries global warming is as someone noted "an inconvenient truth".
Actually, if you look at night time lows you can see, as predicted they are getting fewer and fewer. The nights will warm faster than the days.
If the ice caps over LAND melt, a lot of people are going to be without drinking and irrigation water. This is already becoming a problem in Bolivia.
If it melts over water the result will also be bad as it will cause the tongues of most arctic glaciers to melt very quickly thus releasing huge amounts of friction and inertia that must be overcome by upland ice as it moves down to the sea. This will greatly accelerate the loss of glaciers on land as well. So far from being 0 the effect will be quite large, as is already being seen in the glaciers of southeastern Greenland as well as in Alaska.
On average you are likely to be one handed, or no handed depending upon how long you leave the water in the ice bath.
The problem with your argument is that the amount of carbon that enters the atmosphere from fossil fuels is about 330,000,000,000 tons per year. The amount that results from destroying rainforests is a much smaller fraction of that, not that it wouldn't still be a good idea to stop cutting down rainforests such as the estimated loss of about 70,000 species per year.
Termites don't actually add much carbon dioxide to the system, they merely form part of the carbon cycle. The part that returns carbon fixed by plants from decomposition. Uptake and decomposition are roughly in balance, except when we, as you point out cut down massive amounts of forest. However, the burning of fossil fuels releases vast reservoirs of previously trapped carbon back into the atmosphere.
This is only true, if you do like all denies do and look at only cherry picked parts of the world temperature records. How about a link to that dataset and a few scientific papers that cite using it.