Republicans Make Being An Idiot Litmus Test For Serving On Global Warming Committee
| March 22nd, 2007From the Gannett News Service:
House Republican Leader John Boehner would have appointed Rep. Wayne Gilchrest to the bipartisan Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming — but only if the Maryland Republican would say humans are not causing climate change, Gilchrest said.
“I said, ‘John, I can’t do that,’ ” Gilchrest, R-1st-Md., said in an interview. [...]
Gilchrest didn’t make the committee. Neither did other Republican moderates or science-minded members, whose guidance centrist GOP members usually seek on the issue. [...]
Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, a research scientist from Maryland, and Michigan’s Rep. Vern Ehlers, the first research physicist to serve in Congress, also made cases for a seat, but weren’t appointed, he said.
“Roy Blunt said he didn’t think there was enough evidence to suggest that humans are causing global warming,” Gilchrest said. “Right there, holy cow, there’s like 9,000 scientists to three on that one.”
According to Raw Story, all six Republican choices to sit on the panel are global warming denialists. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI), the ranking minority member of the committee, said in a statement: “Recent fluctuations in the Earth’s climates and temperatures have led to numerous sensational headlines describing an eminent doomsday scenario.”1
Fortunately, the six Republican denialists will be outnumbered on the committee by nine Democrats who haven’t been actively selected for their anti-reality delusions, so maybe this committee could actually get something worthwhile done (although I have no illusions that anything the Dems propose will be enough). But still, it indicates a lot about the current corruption of the Republican party: it’s not just that they don’t select the best people for the job. They actually make being incompetent and stupid a requirement.
- An “eminent” doomsday scenario? What is that, a doomsday scenario with an impeccable reputation compared to the other doomsday scenarios? The Representative needs office help who know the difference between “eminent” and “imminent.” Yeesh. (back)
March 22nd, 2007 at 2:21 pm
So, visited Isreal lately? :P
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
March 22nd, 2007 at 3:03 pm
(Clarification for the less spelling-obsessive; Amp has been misspelling “Israel” for a decade that I’ve known him.)
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
March 23rd, 2007 at 1:03 am
Tbe earth hurtling into the sun is the truly eminent doomsday scenario. But polar ice caps melting? pshaw, truly only a pauper planet would accept such a doomsday.
This comment was written by Raznor.Report this comment to the moderators
March 23rd, 2007 at 10:25 am
Folks, there is a difference between denying global warming and doubting that global warming is anthropogenic. Personally, I *cough* “believe in” global warming, but I do not think that it is man-made.
This comment was written by Deep Thought.Report this comment to the moderators
March 23rd, 2007 at 11:07 am
Personally, I *cough* “believe in” global warming, but I do not think that it is man-made.
Which means that you don’t believe the world scientific consensus and, frankly, which I find head-in-the-sand, conspiracy theory worthy, weird. But let’s go with this.
What if there is a only 50/50 chance that global warming is “man-made?” What’s the worst that can happen if we take steps to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and it turns out that humanity is not the cause of global warming? We waste a lot money creating a cleaner atmosphere and, possibly, a different group of people becomes super-rich. Now, what if humanity is the cause of global warming and we do nothing? What is the worst that can happen? Well, we can ask our grandkids & great-grandkids, I guess. Coastal flooding, increased and less predictable climatological phenomena (hurricanes, flooding, drought, etc.), a precipitous loss of bio-diversity, possible huge reductions in agriculture, a huge loss of fish population and so on.
Which of those possible responses has the better risk/reward ratio? I know which way I go on this.
This comment was written by Jake Squid.Report this comment to the moderators
March 23rd, 2007 at 11:16 am
Actually, Jake, if you really believe that global warming would cause such terrible catastrophes, then a rational risk management approach would take the possibility of non-anthropogenic warming very, very seriously.
If the warming is mostly non-anthropogenic, and we focus our energy on carbon reduction and general environmental fuzziness, then we all die when the warming (caused by solar variability or whatever other non-human-controllable factor) really gets going. Plus, we wasted a lot of years huddling in the dark and the cold.
If we are actually concerned with dealing with the warming - regardless of the cause - then we can invest in technologies and approaches that will actually increase our control over the planetary temperature. Technologies that will work to cool the planet whether the problem is Mr. Sun or my new Lexus SUV with special carbon-emitting diamond wheels.
Kind of like just buying a bulletproof vest, rather than spending a year trying to figure out just who exactly is shooting at us.
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
March 23rd, 2007 at 11:22 am
As far as I can tell, this is similar to the difference between “creationism” and “intelligent design.” Since the original nonsensical view has lost all credibility outside of extremist right-wing circles, people move to a “new” nonsensical position that’s actually only a slightly modified version of the old, discredited position.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
March 23rd, 2007 at 11:46 am
What’s nonsensical about it, Amp? The natural variability of climate even in historical times is quite sufficient to make “the planet is getting really warm all by itself and we need to find ways to cope” a perfectly reasonable point of view.
If anything, the non-human-but-real-problem position is more likely to result in taking effective steps. Reducing carbon is a crap idea anyway, and everybody knows this; solutions to problems predicated on everyone becoming good and unselfish are lovely for children’s stories, but have a pretty poor record out here in the real world. (Would you like to dismantle the welfare state and let private charity take care of the poor? If everyone would just give 10% of their money and time to helping others, that would suffice…so why do we need all this government? Oh right - because people suck, and aren’t going to behave nicely.)
Let’s just learn how to manage the surface and atmospheric temperature, and pick up some weather control knowledge while we’re at it, and fix the problem in the way we know we’re good at, instead of in the way we know we suck at.
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
March 23rd, 2007 at 12:11 pm
Robert wrote:
Robert, please name a single Democratic leader (someone comparable in prominece to, say, John Boehner) whose approach to global warming can fairly be described as a call for “years huddling in the dark and cold”?
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
March 23rd, 2007 at 12:18 pm
Amp, why do you hate poetry?
(And America.)
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
March 23rd, 2007 at 12:36 pm
The view that current global warming is unrelated to human activities is irrational because it ignores the overwhelming scientific evidence and near-100% scientific consensus that human activities are a significant contributor to current global warming.
Yes, because it’s much more likely that humans will invent a big global temperature control machine than it is that we’ll invent cell phones, carbon-efficient vehicles, more efficient light bulbs, and so on.
Do you understand that statements like this make you look like someone who simply has no conception of reality, Robert?
You don’t think carbon reduction is a good idea. Neither do all of your idealogical fellow-travelers, who have such a good track record on this issue that most of them were denying that global warming even existed only five years ago. But the vast, vast majority of people whose track records on this issue don’t indicate that they have a problem with denying reality, think that carbon reduction is a good idea. That your arguments are so incredibly out of touch with reality that you actually state these people don’t exist only subtracts from your credibility.
But carbon-reduction isn’t selfless; it’s something that governments need to do as a matter of selfishness. An underwater, hurricane-blasted New York City is not something we all want because of selfishness, for example. It’s just a political and technological problem, not an overcoming-basic-human-nature problem.
To use your welfare example as an illustration, charity alone is no replacement for welfare. However, it has in practice been possible to put together a political coalition which will pass laws redistributing wealth in a manner that pretty much wipes out poverty (in much of Europe), or at least causes big reductions in poverty (in the US). Of course global warming isn’t identical to poverty (this is your example, not mine), but the basic principle that it’s possible to do things for the common good through political coalitions is what’s important.
Please link to some evidence that we are “good at” managing the surface and atmospheric temperature without addressing causes, and that we are “good at” effectively controlling larges-scale weather systems
In other words: “Let’s not stop the people firing bullets, or even reduce the number of shooters, because that would be too difficult; instead, let’s just create a machine which automatically and effectively makes being shot through with a bullet painless and harmless.”
Yes, a machine that made speeding bullets harmless to all would vastly reduce the motivation to stop people shooting other people. But those of us who are more reality-based will recognize that as hard as stopping shooters is, inventing the render-bullets-harmless machine is not a more promising approach.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
March 23rd, 2007 at 12:40 pm
Reducing carbon is a crap idea anyway, and everybody knows this; solutions to problems predicated on everyone becoming good and unselfish are lovely for children’s stories, but have a pretty poor record out here in the real world.
Sure, that’s true if your strategy is for voluntary reduction. If, however, laws and regulations require it, there is a good chance of that happening. For example, unleaded gas isn’t sold at gas stations in the US any more and seatbelts are required in all new cars.
Actually, Jake, if you really believe that global warming would cause such terrible catastrophes, then a rational risk management approach would take the possibility of non-anthropogenic warming very, very seriously.
Only if you believe that possibility is credible. I mean, by that approach, it’s important to take the possibility of a serial killing Easter Bunny seriously if I want to have a rational risk management approach to reducing murder. I’ll take the possibility of non-anthropogenic warming seriously when the consensus of the scientific community is that non-anthropogenic warming is a real possibility. Unfortunately, for the non-anthropogenic cause crowd, the scientific community stands solidly behind the fairly whelming evidence that global warming is being caused by people.
Now, I’d agree with your statement if I really thought there was even a 5% chance that humans weren’t the cause of our current, unprecedented in geologic history, global warming trend. But, given the evidence and the support given to the theories engendered by that evidence by the scientific community, that isn’t the case.
If anything, the non-human-but-real-problem position is more likely to result in taking effective steps.
How so?
Technologies that will work to cool the planet whether the problem is Mr. Sun or my new Lexus SUV with special carbon-emitting diamond wheels.
Unfortunately for that strategy, human impact goes beyond heating the planet. Look at the carbon concentrations of the oceans - they’re at levels that haven’t been seen in millions of years. Accordingly, even if we stopped all carbon emissions today, it would take 10,000 years for the carbon levels in the oceans to return to where they were 150 years ago. This increase in carbon leads to a decrease in pH which impacts the lower levels of the food chain enormously.
Honestly, this isn’t the most pressing issue on my agenda (no kids, no care and all). The only reason I really care about it is in a sentimental kind of way. It’d be a shame to share in the blame for the impending mass extinctions (which we have seen on the same scale but never in such a short time frame). Well, I guess there are other reasons - it’s embarrassing to be part of such collective stupidity and short-sightedness, I hate the idea of being part of yet another generation that is more than willing to put costs off to future generations unnecessarily, a general warm, fuzzy feeling of wonder that I get when I look at the earth’s ecosystems, and that sort of thing.
But, at least I won’t feel guilty about creating people who will suffer through a catastrophe that could have been prevented. Why folks with kids would care less than I do about this is bewildering.
This comment was written by Jake Squid.Report this comment to the moderators
March 23rd, 2007 at 6:28 pm
Also, if you want to control the global thermostat, controlling the global atmospheric CO2 levels is a great way to do it. Easy? No, but then controlling the global thermostat is never going to be easy.
So even in Robert’s fantasy land, pushing down the atmospheric CO2 levels is one of the best ways to combat non-anthropogenic global warming that we have. The source of the global warming doesn’t actually matter. If the radiation from the sun were getting hotter, we would still need to cool the earth by decreasing green house gases. If we had the technology, we could prevent anthropogenic global warming by building a giant space sun screen that cut the amount of energy reaching the atmosphere.
Of course, one of those methods is readily available, and the other one is a crack pot fantasy.
Robert, what technologically feasible solutions to global warming other than reducing atmospheric green house gases are you proposing?
Of course, as Jake points out, global warming is not the only problem that our sudden massive increase in CO2 release is causing, so what is your solution to continuing and increasing acidification of the ocean surface waters other than decreasing CO2 emissions?
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
March 23rd, 2007 at 6:45 pm
Robert, what technologically feasible solutions to global warming other than reducing atmospheric green house gases are you proposing?
Albedo reduction is the easiest. Cover Arizona in tin foil, etc.
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
March 23rd, 2007 at 6:52 pm
I’m not following this discussion. What difference does it make if humans cause global climate change or not?
For example, what strategies will work against human-caused climate change not against naturally-cause change? What stategies will work against naturally-caused climate change but not human-caused change?
This comment was written by nobody.really.Report this comment to the moderators
March 23rd, 2007 at 6:56 pm
Accordingly, even if we stopped all carbon emissions today, it would take 10,000 years for the carbon levels in the oceans to return to where they were 150 years ago.
This is the type of thing that I mean. If you’re right, then the sequestration/reduction approach is a pointless waste of time and resources; the oceans are doomed. Better to figure out ways of getting along without seafood.
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
March 23rd, 2007 at 6:59 pm
Amp, by everyone thinking carbon reduction is crap, I mean that ordinary people who understand that carbon reduction = less economic activity thinks that isn’t going to happen. Not that nobody in the whole world wants to see carbon reduction.
We can get collective political action to deal with things that are urgent and immediate. We have never yet gotten collective political action to deal with something long-term and vaguely defined. (You might get the political illusion of action - wind and fog from pols to fill human emotional needs - but you won’t get actual effective action.) We just don’t work well that way. We DO work well at finding technical solutions to specific problems, though.
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
March 23rd, 2007 at 7:03 pm
Accordingly, even if we stopped all carbon emissions today, it would take 10,000 years for the carbon levels in the oceans to return to where they were 150 years ago.
This is the type of thing that I mean. If you’re right, then the sequestration/reduction approach is a pointless waste of time and resources; the oceans are doomed. Better to figure out ways of getting along without seafood.
Dude, this doesn’t make stopping human carbon emission pointless. At this point in time, the ocean isn’t yet dead. If we continue to add carbon to the oceans at an astronomical rate, they will be. Thus, stopping carbon emission now may save your descendants.
Or you can stick your fingers in your ears, shout, “I can’t hear you,” and let future generations suffer the consequences of your irresponsibility.
This comment was written by Jake Squid.Report this comment to the moderators
March 23rd, 2007 at 7:16 pm
Dude, this doesn’t make stopping human carbon emission pointless.
Sure it does. If a 100% carbon stop - which isn’t going to happen - isn’t sufficient to fix the problem, what is the use of a 10% reduction? You’re saying “the patient is DOA, he bled out an hour ago, let’s get him on an IV drop and get some aspirin in him, immediately!”
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
March 23rd, 2007 at 7:27 pm
. If a 100% carbon stop - which isn’t going to happen - isn’t sufficient to fix the problem, what is the use of a 10% reduction? You’re saying “the patient is DOA, he bled out an hour ago…
Did I say the oceans are dead? I thought I made it clear that they are in immediate danger.
In fact, rereading my comment I find this statement:
At this point in time, the ocean isn’t yet dead. If we continue to add carbon to the oceans at an astronomical rate, they will be. Thus, stopping carbon emission now may save your descendants.
How you come up with, “the oceans are dead now,” from, “At this point in time, the ocean isn’t yet dead,” is beyond me.
If we stop carbon emissions altogether today, we know that the oceans won’t die. If we start reduction immediately, we can slow down the rate of acidification now and, hopefully, avoid killing the oceanic microorganisms on which we all depend. If, however, we continue to increase our emissions (or even maintain today’s levels indefinitely) we know that we are in for disaster.
Your interpretation is absurd and I suspect that you know it.
This comment was written by Jake Squid.Report this comment to the moderators
March 23rd, 2007 at 7:36 pm
OK, well, maybe I’m misinterpreting you, Jake. You say that if we stop adding carbon now, it’ll take ten thousand years for the oceans to recover. That strikes me as a statement of doom, particularly since we know that we can’t stop adding carbon and are more likely, in fact, to increase carbon emissions than to decrease them. If things are as bad as you say, then I don’t see how marginal mitigation has any point other than making our finger-flutterers less anxious.
The three billion ghosts in this conversation, by the way, are the Indians, Chinese and African people who are bound and determined to get Western standards of living.
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
March 23rd, 2007 at 7:37 pm
No, Robert, the oceans have been acidified to some degree, and they will get even more acidified as we keep upping the Co2 levels. If we stop upping the CO2 levels, then the oceans will get acidified less. We don’t know the exact rate at which more acidification will translate to deader oceans, so we aren’t sure to what extent the oceans are doomed.
Your response seems to be, “Well, the oceans are either doomed already, or it won’t be a problem no matter how much CO2 we dump into the atmosphere, so we should either accept that the oceans are dead and keep burning fossil fuels, or the oceans will be safe no matter how much fossil fuels we burn.” This a nonsensical reduction to a binary that makes no sense in this case. Both of your binary options are almost certainly wrong. We can still probably salvage much of the environmental function of the ocean, and we are probably capable of doing even more damage to the environmental function of the ocean, and changing the amount of CO2 we pump out is probably the most effective way to do either of those things.
Of course you also engage in the absurdist trivialization of ocean death by equating it to “doing without seafood”, a rhetorical strategy that probably sounds great to you when you type it in, but merely makes you look like a ridiculous ass who knows absolutely nothing about this subject and is merely talking for the shear pleasure of forming words with a keyboard to pretty much everyone else.
Likewise, carbon emission reduction does not equal less energy use, as was demonstrated with the idiotic fufara around Al Gore’s electric bill.
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
March 23rd, 2007 at 8:00 pm
I may not be the most informed person on the planet when it comes to global warming and environmental science (especially from the carbon angle), but compared to you Robert, I’m a Nobel laureate. Any time I speak up on the subject I am prepared to be corrected since I’ve read only a small amount and may have misunderstood some of what I read. You, Robert, carry the same authority on this subject that I carry on Finnish history, which is none. I suggest that you read some of the science before you continue to spout nonsense on the subject
This comment was written by Jake Squid.Report this comment to the moderators
March 23rd, 2007 at 8:13 pm
Ah, Finland
Finland, Finland, Finland
The country where I want to be
Pony trekking or camping
Or just watching TV
Finland, Finland, Finland
It’s the country for me
You’re so near to Russia
So far from Japan
Quite a long way from Cairo
Lots of miles from Vietnam
Finland, Finland, Finland
The country where I want to be
Eating breakfast or dinner
Or snack lunch in the hall
Finland, Finland, Finland
Finland has it all
You’re so sadly neglected
And often ignored
A poor second to Belgium
When going abroad
Finland, Finland, Finland
The country where I quite want to be
Your mountains so lofty
Your treetops so tall
Finland, Finland, Finland
Finland has it all
Finland, Finland, Finland
The country where I quite want to be
Your mountains so lofty
Your treetops so tall
Finland, Finland, Finland
Finland has it all
Finland has it all
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
March 23rd, 2007 at 8:59 pm
And there I was going to go off on a tangent about, “fufara,” but thought better of it. Well, as long as we’re going on tangents bout “f” words, I’ll just say that in the context of voicemail, “Fagurger” is a hysterically funny name.
This comment was written by Jake Squid.Report this comment to the moderators
March 26th, 2007 at 9:21 pm
A consensus? Even assuming that all scientists working in related fields (The 1.4 million economists and social scientists shouldn’t have a vote) are actually scientifically polled on the subject, it doesn’t really mean much. Newton’s laws were not voted on; they were confirmed. Even though they were confirmed and are very useful today Einstein showed they were still not exactly correct. Some day special, or more probably, general relativity (the gravity theory) will probably be shown to not exactly be correct. No vote will influence the ultimate outcome.
History is replete with widely held scientific views that turned out to be wrong. The fact is that there is a debate about the causes and the extent of global climate change. There simply is, whether you read about it in the NYT or not.
The problem is that this has moved beyond the realm of scientific debate into political realm. Michael Creighton made an interesting case that it has moved into the religious realm. So many people seem to have this almost religious like conviction on this issue. They just “know.” All the passion clouds the issue. Notice the relatively new term “denier” when referring to skeptics. Almost as though it is some proven physical law being denied. Or some concrete part of history like denying the holocaust. It isn’t.
I have no idea to what extent humans are influencing global climate change. Through all the noise I see one humbling fact:
The earth has been both warmer and cooler several times over its history. What that should tell us that there are mechanisms completely independent of humans that DO cause global climate change. So are we peeing in the bathtub or peeing in the ocean? No one knows for sure, but eventually they will figure it out and the debate will be over.
IMHO we should be patient skeptics and let the experts work it out.
This comment was written by FormerlyLarry.Report this comment to the moderators
March 26th, 2007 at 11:09 pm
There are still cranks who argue that the sun rotates around the Earth, Larry. So “the fact is that there is a debate about” if the Earth rotates around the sun. Just because a debate exists doesn’t mean that it’s a legitimate debate, or that one side of the debate isn’t overwhelmingly composed of ignorant people.
There are mechanisms completely independent of humans that can cause leaves to move (they fall off trees, they get blown in the breeze, animals can move them, etc.). Nonetheless, it is possible to look at the evidence and conclude that the habit of leaves to form into big piles and then gather into garbage bags in autumn is, in fact, a result of human acts.
The experts have worked it out, Larry. The debate is over. Humanity is having an effect on global warming.
Regarding Michael Crichton, keep in mind that he’s not a scientist. I’m not saying he should therefore be ignored, merely that he can’t really be used as an example of lack of consensus within the scientific community. Anyhow, for rebuttals of Michael Crichton’s scientific claims regarding global warming, see this post on RealClimate (a blog written by climate scientists) as well as this article on a skeptic’s website.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
March 27th, 2007 at 12:07 am
Looks like we’ll be building a lot of nuclear power plants, then. I’ll look forward to the support of liberals and environmentalists on the coming moves to junk the onerous regulatory regime that makes new nuclear plant construction essentially impossible in this country. We’ll need at least 50 new plants in the next couple of decades.
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
March 27th, 2007 at 12:36 am
There is not a debate in scientific community about whether the sun rotates around the earth. There is about global climate change.
An effect? Sure, termites also have an effect. As do trees and every other living thing on the planet as well as complex weather systems and even things not on the planet (the sun). The debate, whether you acknowledge it or not, is the extent of our effect. If I compile list of some actual scientists working in the field not sold on the whole idea will you simply dismiss them as crackpots because they don’t subscribe to your personal 2nd hand belief system? (I describe as that because I am assuming you are not a scientist working in the field and are not busy peer reviewing scientific papers in your spare time.)
I didn’t use him as evidence for anything. I merely referenced his interesting article that compared evo belief systems and its parallels with religion. It was brilliantly done.
I didnt know I needed evidence to support my contention. Its rather self evident. Anyone who has studied science (hard sciences) would be familiar with the fact that they don’t hold votes on the outcomes. When not polluted by politics and religion that’s one of the beautiful things about the scientific process: in the end your personal opinion doesn’t mean squat (usually). Though the process usually isn’t pretty it is humanities ultimate quest for truth (imho).
This comment was written by FormerlyLarry.Report this comment to the moderators
March 27th, 2007 at 1:28 am
“Looks like we’ll be building a lot of nuclear power plants, then. I’ll look forward to the support of liberals and environmentalists on the coming moves to junk the onerous regulatory regime that makes new nuclear plant construction essentially impossible in this country. We’ll need at least 50 new plants in the next couple of decades.”
I don’t know if this is some sort of weird funky serendipity, but Jonathan Chait just released an article making fun of conservatives’ knee jerk embrace of nuclear in the climate change debate, which basically reveals their ideology to be little more than hippie-hating. Spiteful children, all.
This comment was written by sylphhead.Report this comment to the moderators
March 27th, 2007 at 1:50 am
It’s not so much hating hippies as loving nukes.
I don’t see how we can ever have enough nukes.
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
March 27th, 2007 at 3:10 am
FormerlyLarry,
You don’t actually show any sign of understanding what consensus means, which makes arguing with you about this rather pointless.
As far as I can tell, you seem to think that consensus involves voting. Interesting.
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
March 27th, 2007 at 9:18 am
Charles, how does one determine if you have a consensus? The most common way is to ask and tally the answers and compare that number to the population. In my book Tallying opinions is voting, whether the vote is formal or not makes no difference.
But all that is beside the point. A group of opinions are still just opinions and they matter not a whit in the end. Its just a “best guess” right now. Best guessing is fine for engineering, but its not for science. Even if I might grant that its the current prevailing theory or model, current prevailing theories are not physical laws.
This comment was written by FormerlyLarry.Report this comment to the moderators
March 27th, 2007 at 10:56 am
Tallying opinions is voting…
No it’s not. Tallying opinions is conducting a survey. Voting entails a formal expression of opinion. If I say, “Vanilla is the bestest flavor of all!” and you mark it down for a tally that you’re keeping, I haven’t voted. If, however, I walk up to you while you’re sitting at a table with a big banner that says, “Vote for your favorite flavor,” and I tell you that vanilla is my favorite, then I have voted.
I know, it’s a subtle difference.
This comment was written by Jake Squid.Report this comment to the moderators
March 27th, 2007 at 12:04 pm
FormerlyLarry-
You are confusing the actual epistimology of science with the practical epistimology of people outside of science. Actual climate change scientists cannot rely on the consus of their peers when they make a judgement about the causes of global warming, they must apply their own expertise to make an independant judgement.
But science is hard. Those of us who are not climate change scientists must rely on the consus - counting up how many scientist think one thing and how many think another. And no, a simple marjority is not enough. If 40% of the appropriate scientists disagree, we non-scientists must take seriously the possibility that the 40% are right. But if it is 99 to 1, the rest of us would be foolish to take the 1% seriously. If the 1% are right, and they might be, it is the job of that 1% not to convince the rest of us, but to convince their colleages first. Science has a reward structure that gives top honors to those who overturn their most basic beliefs. That’s what the doctors who believed that ulcers were caused by bacteria did, and that is why we now believe them and they won the Nobel. But most of the time, the 1% ARE wrong, and it is up to the scientific comumity to determine which 1% apostates are correct, not the rest of us.
This comment was written by Decnavda.Report this comment to the moderators
March 27th, 2007 at 1:06 pm
Decnavda,
I didn’t confuse anything. In fact you kind of helped to make my point. That is why in my previous post I suggested that we all remain patient skeptics and let the experts figure it out. People hold these strong, heart felt, 2nd or 3rd hand opinions about very complicated things that even the experts don’t fully understand. I think that the dreadful state of science education in the US is such that most people probably have no understanding of the scientific method.
Regarding your point about the 1% needing only to convince fellow scientists. Yes normally I would agree, but the dynamics of this debate are different than most other scientific debates. Normally its just egos, reputations, and possibly funding on the line. Now its public excoriation and ridicule. It has even been suggested that if you are a scientific skeptic on the issue you should loose your job or not get credentialed. The debate has moved well beyond science into politics and I think it could end up (or already has) tainting the science in the short term. In the long term none of it matters (for the science), not the scientist’s opinions but especially not the public’s opinions, because they will eventually figure it out.
This comment was written by FormerlyLarry.Report this comment to the moderators
March 27th, 2007 at 2:09 pm
Larry,
It’s the rule of “best data.”
Data are NEVER perfect. Well, in statistics class, maybe, but not in the real world.
So if science is war, you go to war with the data you have, not the data you wish you had. ;)
There is no particularly compelling reason to assume that either global warming, or the lack of global warming, are correct. There’s no objectively better null hypothesis. We need data to decide.
Many denialists claim they’re just being “skeptical.” this is an error.
Skepticism in the face of huge changes in science is logical: if I claim to reverse gravity, you should be skeptical. Skepticism in the face of lack of knowledge is unjustified.
If I claim to know that the next turn in the road will be to the right, you have no logical reason to automatically attack the truth of the statement. you may attack my lack of knowledge but that doesn’t give you info on the statement itself. If i don’t know, then that means I don’t know, not that the next turn in the road is, in fact, to the left.
So far, the data, as analyzed by large numbers of people who have done their best to come to conclusions based on said data, support the existence of global warming as a human-caused problem. So far, the data appear to be good enough to support said conclusion.
Are those data perfect? nope. We don’t know for sure. We can’t.
HOWEVER, those are the best data we have. And you have one of only three choices, really:
1) you can pretend that you have some sort of ‘higher ability’ to see that global warming ISN’T happening unless it’s proven. Returning to the example above, you can claim to have the magic ability to know that because I haven’t seen the road yet and neither have you, the turn is actually to the left.
2) you can bet on the odds: nobody knows, but 99 scientists who agree are, historically, much much much more likely to be correct than the line dissenter. Yeah, everyone talks about galileo and all that but the majority of lone dissenters were, and are, plain old wrong. perpetual motion, alchemy, etc… the annals of science are filled with those who defied authority and lost. Turns out, you see, that what they were often about was the “defy authority” part and not the necessary “…by using good science” followup.
3) you can bet against the odds. you won’t get burned at the stake any more if you’re wrong, but your grandkids might.
What’s your bet?
This comment was written by Sailorman.Report this comment to the moderators
March 27th, 2007 at 2:54 pm
Exactly! That drives me nuts. If Galileo weren’t the exception to the rule, why would he be so damn famous for overturning accepted knowledge?
This comment was written by defenestrated.Report this comment to the moderators
March 28th, 2007 at 12:52 am
they are supposed to do” bent; that certainly includes fathers and mothers.) I’m not anti-child support. But undischargeable debts bother me. ■Comment on Republicans Make Being An Idiot Litmus Test For Serving …（Google Blog Search: a-blog） http://www.amptoons.com/blog/archives/2007/03/22/republicans-make-being-an-idiot-litmus-test-for-serving-on-global-warming-committee/#comment-268592 Larry,. It’s the rule of “best data.” Data are NEVER perfect. Well, in statistics class, maybe, but not in the real world. So if science is war, you go to war with the data you have, not the data you wish you had. ;) …
This comment was written by a-blog馬鹿.Report this comment to the moderators
March 28th, 2007 at 6:48 am
BTW - Galileo was wrong. No, really - he insisted on the Sun being the center of the universe and all planets having perfectly circular orbits. Neither is true.
The number of scientists who upset the consensus is actually rather large: Pasteur and germ theory (he finally proved the consensus wrong after decades of scientists that proposed germ theory being branded ‘fringe cranks’); the Michelson-Morley Experiments that proved a small group of scientists right and disproved the consensus on the aether; Rumford’s and Joule’s separate works that proved that heat is not a fluid that seeps from hot things to cool areas; Lavosier and Lomonosov finally disproving the phlogiston theory of fire; Aristotlean gravity was proven wrong by Newton - Newtonian gravity was proven wrong by Einstein - quantum gravity may well prove Einstein wrong; Carey’s theories of an expanding earth were quite popular for a time, but false; and let us not forget how proponents of Eugenics (which was a field of research and study at major universities around the world and was considered the ‘consensus opinion’) used fear as a weapon to draft coercive laws for our own good.
See, if global warming is not anthropogenic then the models showing an “Underwater, hurricane-blasted New York” are junk. If global warming is, indeed, a natural phenomenon then we can search the historical record for past weather pattern shifts and see that, well, it won’t be so bad at all. If global warming is not anthropogenic then the massive, expensive ‘for our own good’ coercing of governments will just keep poor people poor, make governments more powerful, and change nothing.
This comment was written by Deep Thought.Report this comment to the moderators
March 28th, 2007 at 7:37 am
Yay!!! It’s Deep Thought. Thanks for pointing out more exceptions, DT. You really think that you’ve named (or can name) the majority of lone dissenters? I appreciate the attempt to do so and I appreciate the effort that you, and many other Global Warming deniers, put into justifying your disregard of the science on the subject.
This comment was written by Jake Squid.Report this comment to the moderators
March 28th, 2007 at 9:03 am
Jake,
Does this guy sound like an idiot or a quack?
http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/20/2/2/1
He could be wrong, but he is not an idiot. The point is that there are actual scientists arguing about the science. You have people nitpicking through data, arguing about methods, theory, and at any underlying assumptions. Science needs these vigorous skeptics and even contrarians. That is the way it is supposed to work. Falsification.
There is still vigorous debate about the science and some scientists even question the existence of the so called “consensus.” There are too many unanswered questions, the dynamics of the earth’s weather systems and the sun are not well understood right now, computer models are thought to be flawed. Small errors (or changes) in non-linear systems can produce drastically different outcomes. The science of global climate change is relatively new and this stuff takes time for the scientific community to hash out.
Here is a transcript of a recent debate on the subject. It was designed for the public so its not too technical:
http://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/TranscriptContainer/_GlobalWarming-edited%20version%20031407.pdf
Beyond the posturing, both sides make some good points. If you are a “true believer” for either side it will have something for you. I personally don’t have a strong opinion on the subject, but I do have tentative opinion. I am skeptical of some of the wild doomsday apocalyptic predictions. From everything I have read I would say that there is good chance that humans have a significant impact on global climate change. But a “good chance” isn’t enough for me to quit my job, sell my stuff, buy some land in the country, build a grass hut and live off the land.
This comment was written by FormerlyLarry.Report this comment to the moderators
March 28th, 2007 at 9:26 am
FormerlyLarry,
The point isn’t that there are NO reasonable, credible scientists who don’t agree that the evidence shows that human activity is (at least in large part) responsible for Global Warming. The point is that there are ALMOST NO (that is a very, very tiny minority) of credible scientists who believe the evidence does not support the theory that human activity is responsible for Global Warming. Given that almost every single credible, qualified scientist is on the side of anthropogenic warming, it would seem reasonable to start taking actions to minimize or repair the situation.
Could the consensus be wrong? Sure it could. But the chances are pretty small and the consequences of ignoring the considered opinion of the vast, vast, vast majority of credible, qualified scientists could be devastating. Do you want to gamble with your children’s and grandchildren’s lives? I don’t.
This comment was written by Jake Squid.Report this comment to the moderators
March 28th, 2007 at 9:37 am
Given that almost every single credible, qualified scientist is on the side of anthropogenic warming…
Actually, no. Most of the credible, qualified scientists who have already come to a conclusion are on the side of anthropogenic warming. Most scientists don’t really know, or say we need more information. It’s the people who have already decided who have (mostly) come down on one side.
That doesn’t prove a scientific consensus; it shows that all of the people willing to jump to a conclusion have jumped to one particular side.
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
March 28th, 2007 at 10:08 am
Most scientists don’t really know, or say we need more information.
I think that you’re wrong about this. Where have you heard that? The most recent numbers I’ve seen indicate that over 2/3 of qualified (meaning that Global Warming can be addressed their by their particular field) believe Global Warming to be caused by human activity.
A 2004 essay by Naomi Oreskes in the journal Science reported a survey of abstracts of peer-reviewed papers related to global climate change in the ISI database.[13] Oreskes stated that of the 928 abstracts analyzed, “none contradicted” the view of the major scientific organizations that “the evidence for human modification of climate is compelling.”
A critic of Oreskes’, Benny Peiser admits that:
…the overwhelming majority of climatologists is agreed that the current warming period is mostly due to human impact.
He does however, go on to say:
However, this majority consensus is far from unanimous.
So, I think that you are dead wrong on this. Unless you want to include social scientists, biologists, and so on who do not study climate, in which case I’ll concede your point while deeming it irrelevant.
This comment was written by Jake Squid.Report this comment to the moderators
March 28th, 2007 at 10:29 am
I’m sure that most scientists have an opinion, or a tendency. I seriously doubt that the majority of climatologists have come to a decisive conclusion, however, in the way that you’re alleging. Every time I’ve seen a “1000 scientists say…”-type report, it’s always been that there was some survey of what people thought was most likely. There’s a distinction between everybody thinking something is a known fact, and everybody thinking that maybe the way to bet is X.
Scientists tend to be squishy people, and for good reason.
Do you have a source on the 2/3 report you assert? If you do, I’ll look at it.
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
March 28th, 2007 at 10:51 am
I’m sure that most scientists have an opinion, or a tendency. I seriously doubt that the majority of climatologists have come to a decisive conclusion, however, in the way that you’re alleging.
Yes, it’s true that very few climatologists say, “Global warming is caused by human activity. I am 100% on this.” And it’s true that I am using some hyperbole. But most of them say that they’re 90% or 95% sure that Global Warming is caused by human activity. As long as they’re 90% sure, I’m going to advocate action based on what they think is a near certainty. When I’m 90% sure in my area of expertise, I’m almost always correct.
I don’t have a source on the 2/3rds and it was some time ago that I read it, so I don’t remember where it was. I should think that Naomi Oreskes paper should suffice as a source. She found that of 100% of 928 peer-reviewed papers, none contradicted the anthropogenic cause of the current Global Warming trend. The thing is, even critics of her paper concede that the overwhelming majority of climatologists agree that the current warming period is mostly due to human impact.
This comment was written by Jake Squid.Report this comment to the moderators
March 29th, 2007 at 7:42 am
Jake,
Yay! Jake totally misses the point - again! I do not “deny” global warming. The environment is getting warmer. BUT - earth’s climate is cyclic and I believe, as someone with the ability to evaluate evidence and access to such, that the current climate cycle is not anthropogenic.
And I appreciate your admission of hyperbole, but you keep pointing to climatologists. The astrophysicists who have an opinion overwhelmingly land in the ’solar variability’ camp.; is that a consensus? If it is, which consensus “wins”? Anthropologists and paleontologists who specialize in weather point to ‘natural climate variation divorced from human action’; if they combine with astrophysicists, will that “win”?
This comment was written by Deep Thought.Report this comment to the moderators
April 1st, 2007 at 6:56 pm
will make you laugh, cry and shake your fist in fury at the indifference of the heavens. Once more, with feeling, there is no Social Security crisis. Maybe you can be a conservative and not look like an idiot, Rep. Bartlett, but the House Republican leadership has yet to grasp this point. Pandagon: The book club post for “When Abortion Was A Crime”. Get out the popcorn, the bigots are fighting amongst themselves. Can you really be in favor of free trade but not free immigration? Yes, little wingnuts,
This comment was written by Pacific Views.Report this comment to the moderators
April 3rd, 2007 at 2:15 pm
There is an enormous difference between a postulation ‘not being contradicted’ and a postulation that is *proven*.
This comment was written by Steven.Report this comment to the moderators
April 16th, 2007 at 12:39 am
I ignored this thread because I remember when “Global Cooling” was all the rage in the 1970’s. I also learned, years ago, that many of the surface temperature sensors were being affected by the “Urban Island Effect”, which is the tendency of developed areas to be dramatically warmer — about 3 or 4 degrees Fahrenheit — than the area just a few miles away from the center of a city. I became even more aware of how dramatic this is when I bought my current car because it displays the outdoor temperature on the rearview mirror.
Anyway, so I made my usual joke about “Global Cooling” on a friend’s LJ and she pointed me at a video that’s current on YouTube — “The Great Global Warming Swindle” which explains why Algore is just plain wrong. Another video that’s on YouTube is “Global Warming — Doomsday Called Off”. Both can be found by searching on YouTube.
These are very scientific videos — one is a Channel 4 documentary and the other from CBC. For those of you who believe in Global Warming, I encourage you to view both from beginning to end. For those of you who know Global Warming is a crock, I encourage you to spread the names of these videos as far and wide as possible.
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
April 16th, 2007 at 1:44 am
I believe, as someone with the ability to evaluate evidence and access to such, that the current climate cycle is not anthropogenic.
In the barrage of opinion, I’m beginning to be willing to concede that maybe it’s partially anthropogenic, partially the result of human-independent cycles/events. Either way, it does appear to be beginning to happen, and that is all that is particularly relevant. We have to start actually doing something about it - more likely, a bunch of different somethings. I’m disinclined to think that Al Gore’s ideas will prove of much use, but it’s possible that I could be wrong. There are a lot of other people who are likely to have some better ideas.
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
April 16th, 2007 at 6:27 am
Robert writes:
I can see the bumper stickers now –
“Outlaw Sunspots!”
This paper happens to include several hundred years worth of sunspot counts. If you look at the early 1800’s you’ll see that the period of below average temperatures correspond to low sunspot activity, and the period from the early 1900’s through 1940’s correspond to warming in the first half of the 1900’s, followed by declining counts that led to cooling through the mid 1970’s, then increasing again into the end of the 20th century.
I’m all for anything you can do to get the sun to behave itself better. We should send a crew of cleaning people up there and clean up all those sunspots. They could do it at night when the sun is dark.
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
April 16th, 2007 at 9:28 am
Note, Julie, that I said we needed to do something about it - not that we need to try and stop the process by freezing the inputs to the system at a fixed point. We can’t do anything about sunspots, but we can take steps to, for example, control our planet’s albedo.
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
April 16th, 2007 at 9:52 am
Control our planet’s libido — is that the Republicans’ solution for EVERYTHING?
This comment was written by nobody.really.Report this comment to the moderators
April 16th, 2007 at 10:08 am
Is it just me, or is it getting awfully globally warm in here? (Slides out of shirt.)
Come sit on the couch with me and we can spoon and talk about carbon offsets.
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
April 16th, 2007 at 11:45 am
Julie writes:
Global cooling may have been “the rage” in non-scientific publications, but in peer reviewed science journals there was no wide-scale consensus on global cooling the way there is now on global warming.
The 1975 US National Academy of Sciences report on understanding climate change – which has been cited by global warming denialists as evidence of an alleged 1970s global cooling scare — mentions global cooling in an appendix, but only as something with a “finite probability’ of happening in the next century, but more likely to happen over thousands of years. The main thrust of the report is that it isn’t possible to make predictions given the state of research at the time, so more research is needed.
So in the 1970s, contrary to what you’re implying, there was no widespread scientific consensus about global cooling. This is totally unlike today, when there is a near-total consensus among climate scientists that global warming is a real and immediate problem.
It’s called the Urban Heat Island Effect, and it appears to have little or no effect on measurements of global warming.
What on earth do you think “scientific” means, Julie? Neither of those documentaries was produced by any scientific institution, nor are they peer-reviewed.
The channel 4 (C4) documentary is a real winner, by the way. It’s been out less than two months, and already the producer has been forced to admit to misleading viewers about the source and the timing of his data. From the newspaper The Independent:
So why didn’t they use data from after the early 80s? Because the last 20 years of data shows beyond any doubt that solar activity can’t account for recent global temperatures. (Source). The article in the Independent discusses other wrong or deceptive data used in the C4 documentary.
Durkin, the person behind this documentary, takes criticism very well:
It should be noted that in the past, Durkin has been officially reprimanded for dishonesty in his reporting (using out-of-context quotes to change people’s meanings, for instance). And already, the most respectable scientist to appear in “The Great Global Warming Swindle,” MIT’s Carl Wunsch, has accused Durkin of distorting his views with out-of-context clips and deceiving Durkin about the purpose and theme of the documentary. (See the first letter to the editor following this article in the Guardian. The article itself is quite good, as well.)
As far as the data on sunspots goes, you’re simply wrong. To quote from the above-linked Guardian article:
See also this post on RealClimate (the blogger, incidentally, is a climatologist who works for NASA).
[Edited to correct a mistake: I referred to the C4 documentary's graph as being about "sunspot activity," when it was actually about solar activity. --Amp]
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
April 16th, 2007 at 12:04 pm
Robert,
I’m not sure how we can control the earth’s albedo, short of telling men they can’t flush Viagra down the drain (sorry — nobody.really made me do it!)
The biggest impact on Earth’s albedo isn’t anything we do, it’s cloud cover. From space, asphalt parking lots are invisible — they can’t even be seen, but giant clouds are visible from the moon, even. And clouds aren’t controlled by what we do down here, more or less, they are controlled — and I don’t know anyone knowledgible who disputes this — by cosmic radiation seeding in the atmosphere.
There are some things we’ve done that are bad for the environment on a massive scale, but even those aren’t global climate drivers. The damming of the Colorado river has altered the local climate. Not sure it altered it in a “bad” way, but definitely — the creation of the reservoirs on the Colorado has dramatically increased evaportation in that watershed and it’s changed water temperatures and species distributions and some of that might be “bad”, depending on your point of view. But it’s definitely not driving the global climate.
The problem with ‘doing something’ is that what are we even supposed to “do”, strictly on the subject of climate change. Not “we should stop using non-renewable fuels because we really will run out some day”, but “we should stop burning fossil fuels because they are climate drivers.”
The planet really has survived warm periods much warmer than what we have now, and for centuries on end. Since our fixation on fossil fuels is relatively short-lived in the grand scheme of things, I simply don’t see any way to conclude that WE are driving global climate change.
We might be harming the environment, and our long term viability as an industrialized planet, but not because we’re actively warming or cooling the entire planet. Where things make sense from both a long term economic and environmental survival standpoint, as well as from the unproven and unsupportable “anthropogenic global warming” perspective, let’s do those things. But calling for, as many have done, an end to the industrialization of the developing world, that’s just insanity. Let’s get the developing world up and running on 20th century fossil fuel technology, then, once the infrastructure is in place, let’s bring them into the 21st century with renewable energy techologies, which by then will be much cheaper and much more plentiful.
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
April 16th, 2007 at 5:54 pm
Amp,
One of the points from those films — and I read about the bogus science of “Global Warming” about 2 decades ago, those films are just something convenient because they are on YouTube — is that of course scientists “agree”. They’d like to gets their money.
But what they also pointed out was that you can use the data to forecast the weather. Figuring I’d go look at some recent data, and see if there was anything interesting, I happened to stumble across sunspot data for both 2005 and 2006. If “sunspots cause cosmic rays and clouds to go bye-bye” hypothesis is true, there should be predictable weather events based on 2005 and 2006 sunspot counts.
What the data (it’s from the January 2007 edition of the NOAA space weather report “The Weekly”) show is that 2005, and particularly 2005 during the northern hemisphere’s tropical cyclone season, was a particularly intense period of sunspot activity with significantly more (by SWAG about twice) sunspots in the same time period that 2006. Additionally, 2005 was above where it should have been given that the solar minimum is this year. Extra high sunspot level after the solar maximum in 2000 sounds like it supports the “high sunspots make the clouds go buh-bye” hypothesis.
Here’s the 2005 raw data –> Click me!!!
Here’s the 2006 raw data –> Click me!!!
You’re, uh, free to read them. You might also want to look at July and August 2005 and think about names like “Katrina”.
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
April 16th, 2007 at 7:50 pm
Julie,
I thought about trying some point by point responses, but when you have already declared that any peer reviewed science that you don’t believe in is created by nefarious liars out for research money, there isn’t any way to discuss things with you. I could cite a hundred peer reviewed articles and go out and research the current state of climate science and come back with a massive summary explaining why the science supports the significance of anthropogenic climate change, and you would simply claim that the research is all lies and then make some eyeballed guesses about how Hurricane Katrina was caused by sunspots (which you claim “make the clouds go buh-bye,” which is a bit odd for something that you claim was responsible for an unusually hot year and massive hurricanes - what is it you think makes up a hurricane? Also, why is it that 2006 was only a tiny bit less than the hottest year on record - just short of 2005, when it had massively less sunspots? No wait, don’t bother to make up a reason, it really isn’t worth it).
When you cite a documentary in support of your argument that is complete junk, and then ignore the criticism of the documentary by explaining that scientists all lie (except the ones funded by Exxon and right wing foundations…) and then excuse this by claiming that most of your knowledge of climate science is 20 years out of date, I’m not sure that there is any reason that you are deserving of anything other than mockery (well, other than basic human decency…).
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
April 16th, 2007 at 7:56 pm
“The planet really has survived warm periods much warmer than what we have now, and for centuries on end.”
The planet has.
We would have been unhappy in the Carboniferous.
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
April 16th, 2007 at 8:32 pm
Actually, I think we’d have been pretty happy in the carboniferous era, it is just the process of shifting to the carboniferous over a few centuries that is the problem. Just as there is nothing wrong with having oceans that are 20 meters deeper than they are now, but you don’t want to be around while they are flooding the state of Florida, it is the warming, not the warmth that is the problem.
Temperature change isn’t our only problem. If the planet has ever seen a rate and scale of change in CO2 concentrations anything like the current rate and scale (doubling within a 2 century period), it has only happened accompanying some of the great extinction events, and even then, it is unlikely that the rate was as fast. The effects of this change on the oceans are profound and not beneficial for most things that live in the ocean.
I’m sure that Julie can drag out a few canards about the geological scale carbon cycle and volcanoes to amuse us all.
We already have the first extinction event that has hit terrestrial plant diversity. We are in the middle of one of the great extinction events to hit terrestrial animals, and now it appears that we are going to also cause a marine extinction event as well (rapid change in CO2 concentrations cause acidification of the ocean surface, slow change in CO2 concentrations cause slow acidification of the entire ocean, since the surface waters have a much smaller volume than the entire ocean, the acidification will be more severe with rapid CO2 change, potentially enough to produce an extinction event).
But hey, no need to do anything to make it possible for the third world to leap-frog over the 20th c 1st world technologies directly to a 21st c post-fossil fuel era. No, China needs to build a few billion cars with the fuel efficiency of a 1950’s Ford first before it starts building hybrids or electric cars. The magic of the market place will solve all our problems, anything else would be equivalent to calling for the complete dismantling of industrial society. :p
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
April 16th, 2007 at 8:43 pm
No, China needs to build a few billion cars with the fuel efficiency of a 1950’s Ford first before it starts building hybrids or electric cars.
It’s funny because it’s true!
I was thinking the same thing when I saw that comment earlier.
This comment was written by Jake Squid.Report this comment to the moderators
April 16th, 2007 at 9:10 pm
“Just as there is nothing wrong with having oceans that are 20 meters deeper than they are now, but you don’t want to be around while they are flooding the state of Florida, it is the warming, not the warmth that is the problem.”
My (possibly flawed) understanding is that it would also reduce the amount of, or at least radically alter the composition of, land that we would find habitable.
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
April 17th, 2007 at 5:23 am
Mandolin writes, quoting me –
No, it would have been the Medieval Warm from 800CE to about 1300CE. Must have been those fossil fuel burning oxcarts.
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
April 17th, 2007 at 7:09 am
Yeah, yeah. But what we really need to know is, will carbonating the oceans make them fizzy like soda/pop? I mean, you gotta admit, surfing in salty Mountain Dew would be awesome, right?
So let’s not lose perspective here….
This comment was written by nobody.really.Report this comment to the moderators
April 17th, 2007 at 7:15 am
Charles writes:
This would be funny if it weren’t impossible to happen.
A warmer ocean is less able to hold CO2. At all. It’s why the ocean CO2 cycle releases CO2 in warm waters. So, we warm the oceans, they release CO2.
Are we seeing the threat of extinction in the oceans? Sure — but not from global warming. Right outcome, wrong cause. And this is why many of us don’t believe in anthropogenic CO2 for many of these problems — because there is very strong evidence that the cause is somewhere entirely different. While you’re peddling CO2 related gloom-and-doom for the Earth’s oceans, there are fleets of commercial fishing boats out there destroying the oceans through over-fishing. Giant fleets of bio-deisel fueled ships are no less a threat than giant fleets of dino-deisel fueled ships. One is “green”, the other not, and both can result in fisheries collapse. While you peddle doom-and-gloom no-more-dino-fuels, those of us who aren’t all that hot on the prospects of strip mining Venezuala and Canada for oil sands would like to see a reduction in dino-fuels. While you’re advocating injecting CO2 into the ground, some of us are remembering that injecting things into the earth isn’t all that safe.
Of course, much of what’s being done is based on the false assertion that there is this “consensus” of scientists on the subject, when no such consensus exists. If the “2,500 scientists” number is what supports the validity of your argument, a much larger number should support mine.
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
April 17th, 2007 at 7:27 am
This would be funny if it weren’t impossible to happen.
A warmer ocean is less able to hold CO2. At all. It’s why the ocean CO2 cycle releases CO2 in warm waters. So, we warm the oceans, they release CO2.
May I respectfully direct your attention to http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/11/20/061120fa_fact_kolbert ?
This is an abstract of an article about ocean acidification. You can find the complete text at your local library.
Trust me, it isn’t overfishing that is the long term danger, it is the loss of the teeny tinies at the bottom of the oceanic food chain that is the large, long term problem. Fish populations can, and have, recovered from overfishing with proper management. Marine life can not recover if the bottom of the food chain is eliminated.
Although several of us are willing to cite the facts that contradict your dubious (at best) claims, the combination of your conspiracy theory about scientists scamming for dollars and your outright dismissal of, at this point, well established science is bizarre and makes it pointless to discuss this with you.
This comment was written by Jake Squid.Report this comment to the moderators
April 17th, 2007 at 9:48 am
Jake,
I’d rather read peer-reviewed articles, such as this than a piece in the New Yorker by an “environmental journalist”.
Really — go read this article. In regards to this ocean acidification, I refer you to page 1, which puts current ocean carbon sequestration at some 39,000 gigatons and contrasts that against the 5.5 gigaton annual human output, as well as the 750 gigatons that exist already in the atmosphere. I also refer you to the magnitude of the model uncertainties on page 4, as well as results of applying the IPCC model to environmental conditions as they existed in 1979 (for those of you who don’t have graphical monitors, or who are afraid to look, the answer is that the IPCC model predicts global warming that never did occur — which is how we know the IPCC model is broken, it can’t even predict the present from the past). When someone comes up with a model that accurately predicts the present from past conditions and events, I will believe whatever that model says about the future. That’s what people trained in the sciences do.
(In response to Amp’s assertion that the Urban Heat Island Effect doesn’t exist, or doesn’t affect the numbers, there is a chart on page 5 of that paper which shows a 0.1C increase per order of magnitude population increase in the counties where the measurements were taken.)
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
April 17th, 2007 at 10:50 am
Actually, you’ve already established that if a peer-reviewed scientist says something that doesn’t match your ideology, you say that they’re lying for the money. This makes you someone with no credibility at all.
As far as the “peer-reviewed” article you linked to goes, here’s the official National Academy of Sciences press release regarding that article:
* Regarding the Urban Heat Island Effect, of course I don’t dispute that it exists. However, even if you consider only heat measurements that are taken outside of urban areas, global warming still exists. If you were intending to imply that global warming is just statistical mismeasurement caused by a failure to account for UHIE, then you’re mistaken.
* I’m sure overfishing does harm as well. Logically, there’s no either-or choice between believing that overfishing causes harm and that acidification causes harm. Beyond that, I’ll let Charles — who is, to put it mildly, much more familiar with the science than I am — to discuss this further if he wants to.
The petition you refer to is the infamous and long-discredited “Oregon Petition.”
There’s a difference between getting as many signatures as possible (including some clearly fake signatures) through a deceptive process, as the Oregon Petition did, and the rigorous process used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which involved many steps of peer-review and careful proceedings. Also, every one of the 2500 is a qualified scientist in a relevant field; in contrast, Scientific American looked at the Oregon Petition roughly estimated that it includes approximately 200 actual climate researchers who actually agreed with what the petition said.
And by the way, the Oregon Petition didn’t state disbelief in global warming. Tim Lambert has a good post about the Oregon Petition.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
April 17th, 2007 at 11:01 am
Amp writes:
Uh, no, that wouldn’t describe my position at all.
My position, in a nutshell, is that before I’m going to believe scientific claims, the claims must explain both the past and present, and be verifiable against present conditi0ns using past data.
That’s it.
The IPCC report fails that test, and so I reject it on that basis and that basis alone.
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
April 17th, 2007 at 11:27 am
It does describe the position you stated earlier this thread:
If you’d like to explicitly back away from that ridiculous position, that’s fine with me. But it certainly is the position you took.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
April 17th, 2007 at 12:43 pm
Amp,
That’s a motivation for why scientists go with junk science. It happens in a variety of fields, not just environmental / climate science.
The ultimate test of science is reproducibility. It’s what the entire scientific method is about — you construct experiments, you run experiments, you publish. Then someone else picks up your work and reproduces it. If they get the same results, great. If not, you go back and figure out why. Without reproducibility, science is just a great way to spend large piles of money guessing at stuff.
The reason I reject — reason, not “why I think junk science is being embraced” — the climate models is because they just don’t work. They fail the most basic standard of “science”. People keep building bigger computers and better models, and they still go wildly wrong. The “skeptic” papers have one thing correct — the unknowns are simply so great that if you change parameters by even a small amount, the results can vary wildly.
Here’s another reason why I’m skeptical — if you look at some of the better papers, they explain the relationship between pollutants and cooling, and greenhouse gases and warming. The really good papers will explain that part of the warming is due to the air being cleaner — fewer aerosols are having a warming effect. What if, as some scientists claim, we really are heading back towards a cooling? What if the trend that started in the 1950s and ended in the mid-1970’s, was only stopped because we cleaned up the air? If we run off and reduce CO2, is there a chance that the cooling that occured up until 1975 will resume, and we’ll be heading back downwards? Then what would you suggest we do?
I’m concerned about this — besides the fact that I’ve come to enjoy warm weather — because the models that are being used to project into the future simply cannot project the present from the past. We know, with a high degree of accuracy, what the various inputs were and we still can’t get a model to project 2007’s climate from 1970’s era climate and CO2 and etc. data. If you believe someone has done that work, please — PLEASE — provide a cite. The biggest, baddest, most thorough models going can’t even get that simple feat right, and again, with minor changes in input parameters or assumptions, the models forecast all manner of results.
So … unless there’s some model out there that can start with, say, the 1970’s climate data, and accurately produce the 2007 climate, I’m going to remain skeptical of anything else their models project.
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
April 17th, 2007 at 1:05 pm
Julie,
The review article you link to is 9 years old and the total CO2 budget of the ocean is not the issue. If you are going to assert the primacy of the technical literature (like, oh, that psuedo-documentary you cited earlier?), you might want to look at the literature from the most recent decade. This is a field that is progressing very quickly.
Anyway, I’ll try to find the peer reviewed literature on the acidification of the ocean surface later today. You do realize that while temperature is one of the parameters for ocean CO2 concentration, CO2 concetration in the atmosphere is another parameter, right? What happens to the ocean in your view when you double the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere?
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
April 17th, 2007 at 1:14 pm
Julie,
The paper you link to is not a peer reviewed paper (that will show me to trust anything you say). Do you not know what peer review is, were you suckered by the fact that the crank propaganda outlet that produced it claimed it was peer reviewed (and given that none of the authors were climate scientists, maybe it was reviewed by their peers, just not by actual climate scientists :P ), or are you just trying to drag as much dishonest shit into this discussion as possible?
For a discussion of OISM and this paper, you could look here.
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
April 17th, 2007 at 1:42 pm
Charles,
Same offer to you — find a model which predicts the weather in 2007 using the well-known, and well-understood climate data from the 1970’s.
When you can do that, come back and we’ll talk.
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
April 17th, 2007 at 1:50 pm
Are 1970’s climate change theories under discussion? My impression was that we’re talking about modern models.
This comment was written by Myca.Report this comment to the moderators
April 17th, 2007 at 2:03 pm
The point of using the 1970s data would be the idea that a model that takes yesterdays known facts as inputs and comes up with something wildly different than what we actually see today, is very likely a crap model.
Julie’s wrong; the planet is warming up, and there is good evidence for that. But she’s correct that the models developed by climate scientists are crap.
That’s not a slam against the scientists, by the way. Models are fairly difficult to do even for straightforward iterative real-world processes. For complex random systems, they’re a cast-iron sexist epithet. It’ll take decades to develop models that are of much use for anything other than making pretty graphs.
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
April 17th, 2007 at 2:24 pm
Robert,
I don’t doubt that the planet is warming. This is the first winter in several I’ve had to wear coats or jackets regularly.
What I doubt is that the climate models are correct. Since you agree they are crap, well, we’re in perfect agreement.
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
April 17th, 2007 at 7:38 pm
Julie,
Maybe you are looking for something like this: Meehl, G.A., W.M. Washington, C.A. Ammann, J.M. Arblaster, T.M.L. Wigleym and C. Tebaldi (2004). “Combinations of Natural and Anthropogenic Forcings in Twentieth-Century Climate”. Journal of Climate 17: 3721-3727.
I know, I know, you are demanding that we be able to predict the path of Katrina (the weather) with a model run starting from 1970 (or some such, your language was vague), but this study demonstrates (and it is one of many) that we can model the climate (and this is a numerical model, not a statistical model) with a reasonably high degree of accuracy and match the global temperature change over the last century. Furthermore, by playing around with the inputs, we can model the last century with a variety of forcings, and from this we can determine that only by including anthropogenic inputs are we able to match the historical climate trend.
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
April 17th, 2007 at 9:00 pm
Charles,
I realize that you haven’t the slightest idea what I’m looking for, so I’ll ignore the implied (and not so implied!) insults and give the article a read.
Without commenting on the article,which I’ve given a cursory read (MUST. DO. TAXES.), what I can say is that it’s also not the article I’ve asked for. What I’m looking for is an article that presents a model and then using the model and assumptions for various inputs — not actual inputs, but their assumed values — recreates the current climate. Remember that what IPCC has done is make predictions. So the only way to scientifically validate the model is to see if it predicts what we’ve got using assumptions about what will happen. And as any climatologist should tell you, those models all blow up in one direction or another.
I’ll explain more betterly after taxes. I promise.
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
April 17th, 2007 at 11:27 pm
Julie,
Please give me a cite to a peer reviewed journal article in a legitimate scientific journal for the claim that models using assumed inputs blow up in one direction or another.
Also, can you respond to (or at least acknowledge) the rebuttals of anything that you have said that has been rebutted so far? There is something very weird about having someone make a claim, rebutting that claim, and having them neither acknowledge the rebuttal nor continue to make the claim. It feels both very one-sided, and also as though you are simply trying to throw as many of the denialist arguments out there as you can, without worrying whether they are valid or that you can’t (and won’t) defend them. It feels as though you are just trying to pollute the idea-space with propaganda, rather than actually attempting to argue a position. That is probably part of why I have been being insulting.
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
April 17th, 2007 at 11:36 pm
Back. The joys of paying taxes at the last possible moment in time.
One of the reasons that I’m extremely picky about seeing models is that the assumptions that go into the models …. determine the results that come out.
For example, if you look at the paper you referred me to, Fig 1(e) shows the greenhouse gas related data. It’s page 2 for those of you who haven’t fallen asleep from boredom yet. If the model that’s used to predict future values continues to assume that line is going to go up indefinitely, that would be a good thing to know. And we could look at the basis for those assumptions and tear them apart, I mean, carefully analyze them for accuracy.
Let’s consider, for a moment, CO2 related rises. What, exactly, is the main component of CO2 to the atmosphere? Fossil fuels, correct? Stuff like … petroleum — dino-oil, dino-gas, dino-farts. If you take some hypothetical “They” and say “Well, THEY say that dino-oil and dino-gas consumption will continue to rise for the next 100 years, blah, blah, blah” you can then look at the folks who make that stuff to see if they also think the amount of dino-oil is going to rise on that same curve for the next 100 years. Remember — Kyoto says we have to stop being such pigs and cut back to some earlier level.
Once you know their inputs, you can start finding out related facts. Like, have we reached peak oil production yet and things can’t get higher from here? Will Adam Smith’s invisible hand turn off the gas pump faster than the oil stops flowing? These are all uncertainties, including how much we really get out of oil sands? And will people realize they are oil addicts before Alberta and Venezuela are strip mined? Will people decide that spiral light bulbs are just as good as the old round ones and get over their irrational hatred of compact flourescent lights?
These are all questions that directly impact whether or not we even need Kyoto and they are the kinds of issues that I’ve never, not once, seen addressed in a climate model. Doesn’t mean someone hasn’t modeled future fossil fuel usage based on projected production, just means I’ve never seen anyone bother. Oh, and your paper doesn’t bother either.
If you look at what Kyoto wants, and you look at this picture, what you see is probably an anthropogenic global warming believer’s wet dream. Have you ever seen peak oil discussed in a climate model? Well, there are some articles, but the global warming debate has been completely dominated by folks who toe the Kyoto / IPCC line. What, then, does the IPCC think about fossil fuel use? Well, I don’t know exactly who produced this chart, but they at least think like me. It’s from an article titled ‘Too Little’ oil for global warming.
See where I’m going with this? In order for the results of the IPCC take place, we need fossil fuels to burn in ever growing amounts, but fossil fuels are non-renewables, so it can’t be fossil fuels because we’re going to run out long before we get to the values the IPCC used in its climate model.
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
April 18th, 2007 at 12:02 am
Charles,
The problem with climate models becoming inaccurate is well-understood by climate modelers. Go ask the climatologists on the “good” weather blogs you hang out on. But, I’ll humour you since you admitted you’re being intentionally insulting –
It’s from this article.
I’m going to sleep. Good night!
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
April 18th, 2007 at 3:12 am
Ah fuck, I left ‘climatology’ or ‘atmospheric science’ or ‘physical sciences’ out of my list of requirements, so you snuck in a social science article. Damn, I thought I’d taken out your wiggle room. :p But hey, it cites Peter Gallison, so how can I not love it?
I haven’t made it all the way through that paper yet, but it is quite good social science of science (I love that stuff, I half thought about trying to shift over to history of science after reading Gallison’s Image and Logic). I can see why you feel it is relevant (and parts of it are definitely recognizable to me), but I think you are misreading it if you are taking it to mean that the models can simply be ignored:
from your paper:
Also, if we are going to take this paper as claiming that climate modelers are too deeply invested in their models to realize they are bunk (that isn’t what the paper says, but it seems to be how you are reading it - maybe I’m wrong, and you are just providing it because you thought I’d find it a cool insight into my life :| ), then you also have to recognize what the paper says about the corrective roll of empiricists.
From your paper:
Then, if you are going to think about how this paper applies to the question of the analysis of climate change, consider this:
Susan Solomon, the American member of Working group I of the IPCC, appears (looking at her vita) to be an empiricist with strong links to modeling. If you misread the passage I just cited, you might think that makes her biased in favor of models (like the modelers), but that is clearly a misreading of your paper. Empiricists are the check on the culture of modelers that the paper describes.
Also, on the issue of the science of modeling continually and rapidly improving, let me just pair these two quotes.
Your social science paper (and your quote from the paper):
My paper:
I stand by my cited paper as providing what you asked for.
Come back to me when you are willing to cop to any of the outrageous errors and lies that you have cited and then been called out on in this thread, and we’ll talk more (and I’ll start treating you with less mockery and derision, as long as you also stop citing more crap propaganda).
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
April 18th, 2007 at 8:01 am
Charles,
Okay — I’ll stop posting my propaganda when you stop posting yours.
How about you pick one of IPCC’s scenarios that you think is the most likely to occur, then we’ll sit down and discuss how that scenario is going to occur and the validity of the models used to reach their conclusions.
As a favor, I’ll provide you with a link to the IPCC slide that shows their scenarios and how horrible each one’s emissions are, and then you can pick one you think is likely. How’s that sound? Be sure to pick one you REALLY like.
Anthropogenic emissions of CO2, CH4, N2O and SO2 for the six SRES scenarios
(for those of you without a PowerPoint viewer, here is a JPEG)
One of my problem with your propaganda is that it’s just, well, absurd. The IPCC assumes that carbon-based energy somehow doesn’t cost so much to mine / pump / refine that people begin to avoid it. This is basic economics — increasing prices lead to decreasing consumption. I’ve given this article a quick read, and you might find it interesting or useful or whatever. This chart isn’t taken into consideration by the IPCC in their models because they are climate models. For example, this chart of emissions is the emissions it takes to produce a particular CO2 concentration. It ignores (because it’s a climate model presentation) the likelihood of sustaining that level of emissions. In other words, not only is the “available” carbon-based fuel subject to debate, but the likelihood of even consuming that carbon-based fuel is subject to debate. With global oil production running as fast as it can, and getting slower every day, SER scenario A2 looks completely implausible, and B1 looks more likely, given what I know about production and costs. But A2 is one of the worst and the implausible (given limited non-renewable resources) scenarios are used not only as the upper range in climate projections, but the upper range of its uncertainty is used in scare-mongering. Not only is the sky falling, but the sky becomes a giant slab of concrete painted blue with pretty white clouds.
You’ve objected to my non-scientific paper pointing out that coupled models go off in wild directions (not sure why the paper has to be “scientific” — the study of scientists is a science itself, just because it’s a social science doesn’t mean it isn’t a science …), but even the non-coupled papers you love (I guess you love them), ignore significant aspects, economics and resource availability being just two of the many I’ve touched on here. I’m not surprised (no, really, not at all) that adding the carbon cycle to climate models produced the outrageous results it did. I expect when they add vegetation into the models we’ll see things a lot less outrageous. And if they ever get around to adding natural resource availability and economic feedback, things will become even less outrageous.
At which point we have to worry about getting back on the lower trendline on this chart, and all that noise about “global cooling” will start picking back up — because if we are successful at stopping global warming, that’s where the trend really was, global cooling, and even the folks at IPCC admit it. I mean, it’s their chart, so of course they admit it. Even if all manner of CO2 emission reductions are adopted tomorrow and 350ppm is picked as the target for CO2, some day, sooner or later, we’ve got to deal with global cooling. That’s what a complete conversion to non-carbon, renewable resources gives us — we pick right back up where we left off 150 or 200 years ago.
(Here is one of my favourite slides — I love PowerPoint presentations.)
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
April 18th, 2007 at 8:03 am
(Blarg? Big post explaining problems with IPCC go bye-bye?)
[For some reason, the akismet spam-catcher thought it was spam. I rescued it from the Akismet catche. Remember to let me know immediately if this happens again in the future -- the sooner I find out about it, the better the odds of rescuing the comment. --Amp]
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
April 18th, 2007 at 8:08 am
Charles,
I posted what I think is a fairly comprehensive explanation of why the IPCC report is broken. In particular, I focused on what I think are flawed assumptions in the extreme data used for CO2 emissions based on declining carbon-based energy reserves and increasing prices, with subsequent declines in consumption based on standard economic kinds of stuff.
I don’t know if it’s disappeared into the ether or what, but if it reappears we can discuss it. If not, I’ll have to figure out why it didn’t show up and recreate it.
What I’d like you to consider is current carbon-based fuel consumption, production, costs and all the other natural resource and economic factors in the validity of the IPCC reports. Since that’s the report everyone seems to love so much, I think focusing on its flaws is the best approach to tackling the overall flaws in the global warming conversation. Given that many of the scenarios that are presented by IPCC seem unattainable, from a sheer consumption standpoint, I think getting the implausible scenarios out on the table for discussion might be productive.
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
April 18th, 2007 at 8:27 am
Hey Julie,
let’s go back to that paper for a moment.
I understand you to be saying that any climate model must be able to accurately match past/present data in order for you to accept it.
What do you think the models do?
Let’s take that paper that you cheerily brushed off.
The charts show the degree to which the predicted models match the measured data.
What do we see there?
Well, unsurprisingly, the measured data (which obviously includes all influences) fails to match the data predicted using only one single influence. As you would expect.
However, when they consider ALL the predictive data, it matches very well with the measured data. See, e.g., chart “c” on p. 3723.
So here we appear to have a paper taht meets your “demand” of matching existing data with a model.
Do you accept it? It doesn’t look like it–instead, now you’ve moved into a NEW avenue, going on about “dino-oil”. It’s a bit like that Web game where you try to click the dot–except that every time you try, the dot moves.
If you ask for something and you GET IT, you need to concede that point. Otherwise you’re not arguing, you’re preaching.
This comment was written by Sailorman.Report this comment to the moderators
April 18th, 2007 at 11:36 am
Sailorman,
The papers DOESN’T do what I asked for. I’m sorry, but what it does is use statistical methods to “fit” the data. It then replays events that actually occurred to see if the statistical fit it is using is correct What it needs to do is step back to the past, and using projected values, recreate the current climate, then validate the model against the current climate. Indeed, you can actually LOOK at those charts and see that they aren’t predictions. I mean, how do you predict a volcano erupting in a specific year in a MODEL? Look at the figures you referred me to — there’s a d@mned volcanic eruption in there. That’s what IPCC is claiming they do — take their model and run it forward, and models run in that way consistently fail.
Robert understands that, and if you look at how long-term climate models have HISTORICALLY failed to accurately predict climate, you’d understand the point as well.
The point with dino-oil, that you think is a meaningless diversion, is that climate models that DO NOT accurately reflect their inputs are meaningless. And a climate model, which includes the ones in the IPCC report (in the now-missing post), that make assumptions (SER scenarios other than B2 and perhaps B1) that are not supportable giving existing resources and current petroleum production projections are just plain junk.
The absolute worst-case scenarios in the IPCC report, which I think are A1B and A1T2 (I think — I’m on a lunch break, so not much time) — it’s the A’s — are based on fossil fuel production and consumption values that no one in that industry expects to occur. There are ways to get that oil (and coal, because people are now talking about coal gasification and liquification), but they are increasingly impractical, increasingly expensive, and require massive developments of new technology and infrastructure. Here’s one link from the missing post — Oil Price History and Analysis, and here is another — Peak Oil (Wikipedia), that I might have provided earlier.
The point of introducing economic theory, which I did in the missing post, is that global climate models that don’t take into consideration economics as an input (and none that I’ve found do) will consistently over-estimate consumption, and that over-estimation is non-linear because commodity prices do not progress linearly in the face of scarcity. In other words, a 10% decline doesn’t result in a 10% increase in commodity prices. So, as scarcity approaches, supply and demand are forced into a lower equilibrium than what 100% production would produce. People who cannot afford $5 gasoline certainly can’t afford the same amount they purchase at some price when gasoline reaches $6 a gallon, and as scarcity sets in, the price rises further still, and ever more rapidly.
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
April 18th, 2007 at 2:03 pm
Hi Julie
Can you imagine what will happend if the IPCC runs the models backwards ?
The data is manipulated for the last several decades, it will ends up with an Big Ice Age less than 150 years ago.
But it’s a fact it getting a bit warmer up here in the Northern part of Greenland. We only have one huge problem !!!!
The waste product of global climate change is actually “pure clean fresh cold drinking water” . In connection to the IPY not one single project out of 123 trying to handle the waste product to the best of humanity or to a thirsting 3. world.
I apologize for my bad English, not native born or speaking !
Best regards from the coolest place in the world…Greenland
Greenland Art Review
This comment was written by S.E.Hendriksen.Kangerlussuaq
Greenland
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April 18th, 2007 at 4:19 pm
Julie,
1) Those aren’t statistical models. Do you understand the difference between a statistical model and a numerical model? The global climate models are numerical models.
2) Are you now agreeing that the majority of the global warming in the last century was anthropogenic, and that the only major question is whether there will actually be enough fossil fuels burned in this century to produce the predicted outcomes?
3) Robert doesn’t actually have any technical background in numerical models that I am aware of. Citing him as your backup for “climate models suck” is not actually very impressive.
You still are completely failing to respond to the rebuttals of any of your previous points, but now you are trying to move on from claiming that their isn’t any evidence for anthropogenic causes for global warming to claiming that we can’t know what is going to happen next century (except that you are claiming that the oil industry can predict what is going to happen, and that the extreme outlier of oil production forecasts is the one we should be paying attention to) so we can’t know if there is going to be further anthropogenic global warming. This is simply silly.
Oh, actually, I guess you are defending the “climate models suck” position.
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
April 18th, 2007 at 10:30 pm
Charles,
This has degraded to “He said, She said”.
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
April 18th, 2007 at 11:32 pm
Julie,
If you need a model to give you a perfect prediction after 30 running years, do you believe that the Earth’s magnetic field has reversed over time? We can’t make models that are accurate within the tiny window of 30 years, although we can make models that, given a chaotically convecting iron/nickel outer core, will naturally reverse several times at million-year time scales. These data are matched to the rock record, which shows magnetic field reversals.
Similarly, looking at fractionation of stable isotopes of oxygen and carbon can tell us the relationship between warming and amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. We have a very good curve of global temperature, tied to CO2 concentrations. Thus, we know that this dino carbon we are burning, that was in the atmosphere when most of the United States was an inland sea, actually had quite a lot to do with trapping the Earth’s radiated infrared rays.
Knowing this relationship between CO2 (and methane and water vapor, both of which get released more upon warming) and temperature increase, we can then look at how much carbon is being released and see that the two are rising together yet again.
As far as fluctuations in temperature in the past, we know what those are about. We know what Milenkovich cycles are. We know the effects of the amount of exposed continental shelf. Thus, we know when we have a large deviation from it, just as we know what mass extinction events are, separate from normal background extinction rates.
This comment was written by Geoid.Report this comment to the moderators
April 19th, 2007 at 3:16 am
Should anyone take Julie’s dismissive hand-waving at Jake’s reference to a New Yorker article concerning ocean acidification seriously, they can look up a summary of the peer reviewed literature (hat tip for the link to Real Climate). The pdf linked at the bottom of that page has a 4 page bibliography if anyone prefers to look at the peer reviewed literature directly.
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
April 19th, 2007 at 7:20 am
And should anyone question whether or not the scenarios by which that’s claimed to be possible, I’d encourage them to study long-term projected fossil fuels production, population trends and economics. I’d look at population growth trends in the industrialized nations, and per capita GDP growth in the non-industrialized world. The CIA World Fact Book is a useful resource. You can also find drilling reports, crude oil production figures and capacity in various places. Baker Hughes provides an active rig report. You can find an excellent resource here. If you’re still not convinced these scenarios are unrealistic, try to find answers to the question “What is the percentage of personal income spent on energy for each of these scenarios?” If you STILL think these scenarios are possible, there’s nothing I can do to help you.
Just some tidbits — current global population sits at about 6.5 billion. Long range UN population projections put peak population right around 9 billion (cite) as far out as 2300, with a peak of 9.22 billion (c.f. page 15) in 2075. With much of the industrialize world reproducing at less than replacement levels (2.3 births per female — look up some industrialized nations in the Fact Book to get an idea), the “burden”, as it were, to continue consuming fossil fuels will fall to fewer and fewer members of industrialized nations (and not to worry, with other nations industrializing, their population growth rates will decline as well — the cure to population growth is industrialization). Which means, as I explained upthread, that the increasingly scarce fossil fuels, which will cost increasingly more to purchase, will have to be purchased by increasingly fewer people. Thus, as I explained above, the costs per unit of fuel will not only increase non-linearly, but the per-capita expenses associated with each person, in order to maintain that rate of consumption, will increase at an even greater rate.
Unless Charles makes any more insulting posts, this is all I have to say. He’s free to stop being an insulting ass, but he’s admitted he has no intention of doing so as long as I keep disagreeing with him.
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
April 19th, 2007 at 8:24 am
Julie, can you link to or cite a single paper, in a legitimate peer-reviewed climatology or physics journal (not another paper formatted to deceive people into believing it’s peer-reviewed), which supports your claim that scarcity of fossil fuels going into the future means we don’t have to worry about anthropogenic global warming?
Or, if that’s not your claim, can you explain to me what your central claim is?
Also, I for one would like you to address these two questions Charles asked:
1) Those aren’t statistical models. Do you understand the difference between a statistical model and a numerical model? The global climate models are numerical models.
2) Are you now agreeing that the majority of the global warming in the last century was anthropogenic, and that the only major question is whether there will actually be enough fossil fuels burned in this century to produce the predicted outcomes?
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
April 19th, 2007 at 9:41 am
Amp,
The proper place to look for data about fossil fuel production is in estimates on reserves and production, not in the work of physicists or climatologists. Those are the experts — not the environment guys. The environment guys and physicists can tell you what happens if the event occurs, the oil field guys will tell you if there’s enough oil to make that occur, and the economists will tell you if people will buy oil at those prices. I know you hate the “17,000 people agree with us” thing, but it has one advantage over the work you’re relying on — more people from more diverse fields of study. Every field of study has a bearing on what the climate is going to be like — and that includes civil engineers who can tell you if we can build the roads and bridges for all that cars that will be burning all that fuel. The question “Can we build the infrastructure to consume all that addition carbon?” isn’t addressed in any paper I’ve read, and that’s something civil engineers need to be answering, not climatologists who wouldn’t know a warren truss from Warren Harding’s truss.
The US reached peak oil production a few decades ago (feel free to look that up), other oil fields are in a similar situation (and look that one up as well), etc. Bush thinks we’ve got oil to go on forever, the response (and I can’t remember where the quote is, but someone else can find it if they like) by the Saudi’s was that Bush is being overly optimistic. Back in the 80’s the Saudis could throw lawn darts and hit oil, that’s not the case anymore. Again — do the research (and I’ve posted links to documents which explain it,and which contain appropriate references to peer-reviewed materials) and you’ll find that we’re in a declining oil situation. One of the papers I referenced up above pointed out that global reserve production is at or below 1 million barrels per day. You’ve been provided an abundant supply of genuine peer-reviewed material.
I’ve never denied that there is anthropogenic global warming. My bone of contention, time and again, is that there are no existing global climate models whose predictive ability, going forward, has ever been validated. I have an additional bone of contention with temperature records, and continue to be amazed that you don’t understand the relationship between the Urban Heat Effect and record temperatures. I’m 15 miles from downtown, and when we have record heat downtown, we very often don’t have record heat out here on the Cat Farm (and it’s not really a farm — it’s a suburban area in the midst of about 1 million people or more). The IPCC projections are using predictive models (obviously — it’s not even 2008 yet). QED, their validity is suspect. Feel free to ask your friends on RealClimate what happens with predictive models, or just recall the comment I made about the 2006 hurricane projections. If they can’t even get that right, what the heck makes you think they get the IPCC projections right? Not models where historical inputs are statistically fit to observed data, but models where assumptions about solar forcing, volcanic activity, atmospheric interactions, carbon emissions, etc., are fed in to a previous date — pick 1970 or 1900 — and that model run forward, using ONLY average or projected values. You can’t predict wars, or post-war booms, or volcanic eruptions, and you can’t assume that $0.19 per gallon gasoline in 1965 has any relationship to gas consumption when I paid $2.94 a gallon on Monday.
As for “statistical”, yes, they are “statistical” — statistical methods are being used to fit the various observations together. That might not make them “Statistical Models(tm)”, but those models make heavy use of statistical methods to fit data together. Read the papers and they talk about least-squares fit and other statistical methods. When I was taking graduate statistics I learned all about the problems with statistical modeling, which is why the phrase “There are lies, damned lies, and statistics” is so funny to some of us.
Since the famous “Hockey Stick” is what triggered the current political debate, I’ll tell you my thoughts on that as well. We’re currently coming to solar minimum for cycle 23 (y’all can look that up). Cycle 23 has some interesting features, including a possible double maximum. Scientists aren’t sure if it’s “really” a double maximum, or not. However, whether it’s a double maximum, or just a “long” maximum or whatever, this current cycle has been fairly active. As I posted above, the summer of 2005 was especially active for a year that’s supposed to be two years before the projected solar minimum. We had a record hurricane season. 2006 was less active, solar-wise, and the projections for a near-record hurricane season were grossly over-stated (the NASA website can provide you with information and some very nice videos — I watched a video yesterday of an explosion on the sun’s surface that spread somewhere around 1 million km/hr — very awesome). That, to me, argues strongly that space weather is driving terrestrial weather of late. Has anyone heard anything about the 2007 season? I’ve not, and with family in the New Orleans area, I pay a lot of attention to what’s going on it the Gulf basin. Other space weather events have been pretty spectacular as well, and many of y’all might remember the aurora displays over the past few years. There have also been record size flares, coronal mass ejections, and other events. I mean, just some absolutely spectacular space weather. Since there is no dispute about solar cycles and weather (no, really — the dispute is over whether or not solar weather results in global climate change, as opposed to regional weather patterns), I feel this is a bad cycle to be basing some “hockey stick” on. By all indications, 2007 is going to be a low point in solar activity, and when this year is done and gone, and we move into the next cycle, I think the argument for or against the “hockey stick” being man-made will be a lot clearer, one way or the other.
My experience of 2007 thus far is that I’m right and you’re wrong. I have a vested interest in mild weather, and thus far, this year isn’t treating me badly in the least. If I get a chance I’ll post some pictures and that will be clearer. But really — with solar activity down for a change, some of my personal interests are working out a lot better. If solar activity stays down and the weather heads worse, I’ll be a lot easier to convince.
One last thing before I click “Submit” and go eat lunch — the prize for winning the battle on “Global Warming” really is “Global Cooling”. Whichever way we go on this thing, that needs to be kept in mind. And hopefully your friends on RealClimate will be honest enough to tell you that winning the battle against Global Warming means we get to experience Global Cooling.
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
April 19th, 2007 at 12:26 pm
Julie at the beginning:
Julie now:
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
April 19th, 2007 at 1:50 pm
IIRC, the “the earth just has cycles of warming and cooling” thing is true — but, unfortunately, I think we’re supposed to be cooling at the moment.
Also, I believe the projections are that the earth’s heat will be substantially higher than the medieval warming period. :-P
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
April 19th, 2007 at 8:31 pm
Charles,
Oh, geez, Charles.
Do I believe we caused the hockey stick, which is what the IPCC and the “Global Warming(tm)” crowd is about?
No.
Do I believe we’re making things warmer?
Yes.
These are not mutually exclusive statements. They are only mutually exclusive if you are so stuck in some binary thought world in which us raising the temperature 0.1 or 0.2 degrees means we’re response for 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 entire degrees.
It’s this Either/Or fixation people like you have that makes talking about global climate change just utterly futile and impossible. The problem with talking to someone like you is that as soon as someone like me cops to “humans change climate”, we get attacked if we don’t support the entire doomsday scenario foisted upon us by the IPCC. And if we don’t cop to your doomsday scenarios you pick and pick and pick and pick, trying to force us into the equally absurd position that people aren’t affecting the climate.
And you have some nerve saying I don’t answer your questions — I’ve asked you numerous ones, like which scenario from the IPCC report do YOU think is most likely. And the answer was …. ? Well, you don’t have an answer because this isn’t about reality for you, it’s about bashing people. It’s feel-good-ism, like Algore and his recent request to put up a whopping 33 (oh, boy) panels on his house. Assuming he’s putting up 33 200 watt panels (about the biggest people put on their houses), he’s going to generate a whopping 6600 peak watts for an average of 4.45 hours a day, or about 29 kilowatts per day or all of 890 kilowatt hours a month. Oh, boy, howdy — he’s DOING something. Except he uses, like, 22,000 kilowatt hours a month. But he’s plenty rich and can go buy carbon offsets, so that makes being a profligate waster of energy okay by you, and you worship the very ground he walks on.
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
April 19th, 2007 at 8:32 pm
You just pulled “warming the environment” out nowhere. The two statements never used that phrase. You used “anthropogenic global warming” in both statements (and you put it in scare quotes the first time). Are you really claiming that:
is not a denial of anthropogenic global warming? Are you pretending to not know why you put that phrase in scare quotes? Are you pretending to not know what “unsupportable” means?
This is simply ridiculous. Admit that you were wrong. Admit that you did indeed start off denying anthropogenic global warming, but that you can’t actually defend that denial by argument, so have been reduced to claiming that you never denied it (which is simply sad). If you can’t admit those things, if you can’t admit being wrong, if you won’t stand by the things you’ve claimed, then there is really no purpose to talking with you (except to ensure that they lies you repeat are not simply allowed to stand unchallenged). But for some reason, I’ll argue with you anyway.
Actually, I missed that comment because it got moderated, and therefore showed up earlier in the thread than the last comment I’d seen. I haven’t ever looked at the reasoning that went into the IPCC emission scenarios, so I’ll have to get back to you on that after I have finished reading. However, I’ll note that you keep talking about peak oil as though oil were are only source of fossil fuels. How are our coal supplies doing? They were just fine last I checked. Please point me to some predictions from the fuel industry showing that China will not be able to supply it’s ever increasing power requirements from ever more coal power plants for the next century.
On solar cycles, I’ve ignored that because you don’t seem to understand that solar inputs are already incorporated into the models (with the exception of galactic cosmic rays, the effects of which seem to be not settled science, and which don’tseem to have show substantial variance over the past century from what little I’ve now read). For instance, check out figure 1b in the paper I referenced earlier. This shows what effect a particular model estimates the cycle of solar inputs has had on the climate over the past century. It is noticeable, but not as large as the effects from volcanic eruptions, which are still not nearly as large (or as long lasting) as the effects from anthropogenic greenhouse gases. You have given no reason for thinking that your back of the envelope ideas about solar cycles are more valid than the numerical models.
These aren’t statistical models. They really aren’t. You agreed they aren’t, but then you back track immediately and start talking about statistical models. These models do not use statistical methods to fit the observations together (that would be a statistical model), they use numerical solutions of discretized physical functions to approximately model the climate based on forcings. They are not statistical models, they do not use statistical methods to fit forcings to observations.
The particular paper I referenced uses standard statistical methods to demonstrate that climate models run with various different forcings can be summed to produce the same results as climate models run with the combination of forcings. So you could argue that that paper constructs a statistical model of the numerical models to support an argument about one of the characteristics of the numerical models, but merely mentioning “lies, damned lies, and statistics” is not a sufficient rebuttal to the statistical work in that paper (and is irrelevant to the underlying numerical models).
Also, you claim that the model in the paper I referenced is an uncoupled model. You are simply wrong. Let me quote from the paper:
Validating a numerical climate model is difficult (claiming that “those scientists” have “refused” is beneath you), but we will certainly be getting more of that sort of validation over the next decade (you can’t validate on the data you used to calibrate your model (particularly when it is a small set of data), and we only have one set of global temperature data, so validation requires new data, something that only time will provide). However, the climate models are testing in a multitude of ways other than proper validation. Validation would be very beneficial, but since “those scientists” have cruelly refused to use their time machines to go get future data, we are stuck working with the methods we have available.
You also have still made no acknowledgment of any of the points you have tried to raise that have been shot down, for instance the fact that the science-like “documentary” you mentioned is rubbish or that the OISM paper you implied was peer reviewed was actually a pathetic piece of crankery which has been thoroughly debunked and was intentionally designed to look like it was a peer reviewed article, which it manifestly is not. You also keep bringing up the Urban Heat Island effect, as though it were not accounted for in modern calculations of global warming trends, something which has been pointed out to you by Amp, but which you then claim is merely him not understanding the Urban Heat Island effect. If you would acknowledge and retract your errors, I would be much more likely to treat you with respect. Likewise, you dismissed Jake’s article for not being peer reviewed, but I don’t see you attempting to rebut the peer reviewed basis of the article he cited. Will you agree that the oceans are indeed getting more acidic, and that they are going to get even more acidic over the next century?
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
April 19th, 2007 at 8:36 pm
since “those scientists” have cruelly refused to use their time machines…
They have time machines? And they aren’t using them to bring advanced computer game systems back from the future? Screw those scientists, man. They’re dicks.
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
April 19th, 2007 at 8:38 pm
One funny thing is that the proper societal response to peak oil is pretty much the same as the proper societal response to anthropogenic global warming: we need to switch over to non-fossil fuel based energy supplies as quickly as possible, and we need to ensure that developing countries like China and India do not develop as fossil fuel reliant economies, but instead leap directly to post-fossil fuel technology.
Think of the 1A scenarios as being the demand for fossil fuels, and the peak oil curve you provided as being the supply. If we don’t do something pretty massive to switch ourselves away from fossil fuels, those two curves are going to hurt. Likewise, compliance with Kyoto or even stricter limits becomes much easier if the supply dries up that fast, so agreeing to Kyoto will be largely irrelevant if you are right, while it will be critical but inadequate if you are wrong.
Of course, this is ignoring the importance of coal, which will be a power source that will not run out soon, but will contribute mightily to global warming.
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
April 19th, 2007 at 10:06 pm
Charles writes:
I ignore most everything you write because you are little more than a trained parrot, so far as I can tell.
I have explained more than once now how to validate climate models without use of a time machine. If you don’t understand it, or if you’ve asked an “expert” and they are looking for a time machine, I’d be more than happy to explain it to you ALL.OVER.AGAIN.
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
April 19th, 2007 at 11:50 pm
I asked an expert to come into this thread, and he did, Julie. I didn’t see you address his response.
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
April 19th, 2007 at 11:54 pm
Geoid -
The difficulty with analogizing climate models (of whatever sort) to models of magnetic reversal is that geophysicists aren’t predicting “there is a 3.5% chance that the poles will reverse next month”. The claim being made by the model isn’t nearly so strong. We believe in the claim made by geophysicists (she’s gonna flip one of these days) because it’s plausible and there’s evidence of it happening. If that claim, on the same evidence, were “it’s going to flip in September of 2097″ - well, we need a little more from the model, now.
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
April 20th, 2007 at 12:41 am
Robert,
I understand where you’re coming from here. The big problem with climate models is that there are hundreds of feedbacks, many of which have large error bars. Increased temperature makes more clouds because of increased precipitation, increased cloud cover increases planetary albedo, is a cooling effect, etc. This makes it very hard to predict how much things are going to change if you alter a couple of the parameters.
However, this limits the predictive power of the model in terms of how much of an effect there is, not whether or not there is an effect. We do understand what these parameters do, basically. If you increase carbon in the atmosphere and ocean, you just plain get a warming effect, with a lot of feedbacks to increase that effect. Therefore, if you pump huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, you will increase global temperatures.
So in one sense we require more in the predictive power of these climate models, but in another sense we don’t: no one is arguing that the Earth’s magnetic field doesn’t change polarity, but people doubt that these parameters do what we say they do. What we are arguing here is that we know what effect adding carbon to an atmosphere/ocean system is, which we do.
Personally, I find the record of Earth’s history to be much more intellectually satisfying when thinking about global climate change. The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (about 55 million years ago) was a time of a spike of warming and CO2 and methane addition to the atmosphere. The methane addition is a sudden phenomenon, occuring when methane hydrate ice that exists in marine sediments is warmed to the point that it gets released all at once. Methane is a stronger greenhouse gas than CO2, per concentration, and the sudden release has a very real warming effect.
So I guess my question is, where is the disconnect? Where does the “anthropogenic carbon doesn’t contribute to warming” come from? It seems simple enough to me. 1) People add carbon to the global system. 2) We have historical data that shows what addition of carbon to the global system does to temperature, among other things. 3) Temperature increases.
The problem with the models is degree; we aren’t sure exactly how the feedbacks will affect each other, so we don’t know exactly how much, or how soon. But as with floods and earthquakes, we make estimates based on data. We have models of river stage over time and talk about 100 year floods. Well, they don’t happen every hundred years, on the dot. But no one argues that floods don’t happen, or that dumping excess water into the system doesn’t increase the chance of flooding.
This comment was written by Geoid.Report this comment to the moderators
April 20th, 2007 at 1:09 am
1) People add carbon to the global system.
Well, people move carbon around. And certainly some of those movements have far-reaching consequences. But we aren’t actually importing anything to the planet and the ecosystem that isn’t already here.
I find your other arguments/points generally persuasive.
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
April 20th, 2007 at 1:12 am
I would also like to say something in response to the monumental effort Charles is putting out here.
a) He has a lot of good information about modeling, its limitations, and its abilities. I have been intentionally not talking about modeling, as it isn’t part of what I do, and I think that the geological record is a much better thing to use for the purpose of convincing yourself that global climate change is real and that anthropogenic carbon is a real input.
b) He made a point about solar cycles that I think deserves reiteration and deepening. Global warming (and anthropogenic warming) deniers often talk about the cyclicity of global temperature, and how that’s the cause of warming in this case. I would like to point out that it’s the same scientists that are investigating global warming that both discovered the cyclicity of global temperature and use it to make predictions. Like Charles said, we incorporate solar cycles (Milenkovich cycles) into models. If a scientist didn’t, they would stop getting funding. That would be an idiotic model that didn’t incorporate these cycles. Other effects have to do with the position of the continents, amount of continental shelf space, and tectonics that affect volcanism. These are all inputs. Possibly inputs with error bars that are large (not for Milenkovich cycles; we understand those quite well). But these are all accounted for. Therefore you cannot say that the warming is due to this cyclicity. We have factored it in and are looking at the effects that aren’t due to it.
This comment was written by Geoid.Report this comment to the moderators
April 20th, 2007 at 1:17 am
And actually Robert, while we are definitely not creating new carbon, we are liberating carbon that hasn’t been exposed to the rest of the system since the Carboniferous and Cretaceous, both of which we know were much warmer than today.
This comment was written by Geoid.Report this comment to the moderators
April 20th, 2007 at 3:45 am
Yup, that’s me, worshiping the ground Al Gore walks on. Now you are justing getting weird, Julie.
I’m still reading through the emission scenarios, so I still can’t answer your one lonely question. What is it that is keeping you from acknowledging any of the lies you’ve been caught out in? I guess it is because you don’t actually read anything that I write, so you obviously are simply here to repeat your propaganda.
—-
A little while later…
Oh my God, I never clicked through your link on how sunspot activity correlates to wars and economics (in which no actual correlation analysis is performed, just eyeballing and hand waving).
Since there is actually a link between sunspot activity and the global temperature regime, I had assumed that you had linked to a legitimate source documenting this link (although I expected it to be a denialist source that would attempt to argue that despite the fact that solar activity is included in the GCMs, somehow the solar activity explained the entirety of the climate change). I had no idea you had linked to piece by a paranoid crank that had no basis whatsoever and had nothing to do with climate change. I can’t imagine how you could have hit that piece by accident, so I can only assume that it is something you have bookmarked because you actually believe it.
Let me just quote the best bit, here is Julie’s idea of science:
I’m sorry Julie, I’m not going to try to discuss climate change with you anymore. Your ’scientific’ sources cite the landing of extra-terrestrials at Roswell and the foundation of the CIA “shadow government” as proof that historical events are driven by sunspots. And here I thought it was a crazy bit of psuedo-science even before I hit that bit…
Anyway, I’ve done some interesting reading sparked by rebutting you, so thanks for that, and thanks also for the laugh that that sunspot “paper” provided.
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
April 20th, 2007 at 4:36 am
For anyone else who is interested:
On the question of the emission scenarios that Julie raised, I’ve been reading around, and I thought this discussion of the emission scenarios was much more helpful than the IPCC summary for policy makers, which does not provide nearly as many lovely charts.
Also, this summary of the plausibility of the emission scenarios with regard to available fossil fuels provides a good answer to the “peak oil” concerns that Julie raised. I sentence summary: yes, many of the scenarios have implausible oil consumption levels, but if you include the substitutability of coal for oil, then most of the scenarios are brought back into the plausible range.
The author of those pages, Jean-Marc Jancovici, has some eccentricities to his English (he’s French) but his content seems pretty sound (and heavily drawn from official sources). He is not a research scientist, but seems to have sufficient qualifications to be able to understand the material that he is presenting. If he believes in UFOs or is any other sort of madman, I could find no references to such in the pages I read through. :p
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
April 20th, 2007 at 5:26 am
For anyone else who is interested: On the question of the emission scenarios that Julie raised, I’ve been reading around, and I thought this discussion of the emission scenarios was much more helpful than the IPCC summary for policy makers, which does not provide nearly as many lovely charts.
Also, this summary of the plausibility of the emission scenarios with regard to available fossil fuels provides a good answer to the “peak oil” concerns that Julie raised. I sentence summary: yes, many of the scenarios have implausible oil consumption levels, but if you include the substitutability of coal for oil, then most of the scenarios are brought back into the plausible range.
The author of those pages, Jean-Marc Jancovici, has some eccentricities to his English (he’s French) but his content seems pretty sound (and heavily drawn from official sources). He is not a research scientist, but seems to have sufficient qualifications to be able to understand the material that he is presenting. If he believes in UFOs or is any other sort of madman, I could find no references to such in the pages I read through. :p
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
April 20th, 2007 at 7:42 am
Mandolin,
The only response I’ve seen that sounds like it comes from an expert is Geoid’s, and I think I was asleep when he made the more interesting post of his.
I don’t think Charles has ever had a science course beyond putting baking soda and vinegar in a glass and watching them fizz.
–
I’m glad to see Geoid admit that models don’t work over 30 year intervals (I kept hoping Charles would, but he didn’t), but that’s still not a valid excuse for not validating the models that are being used by the IPCC folks — we have data going back hundreds and thousands of years, and they’re free to run the same model against that data from however far back they want and see if it predicts the current climate. If Geoid has an example of where that’s been done, I’d be happy to look at it. And just to be clear, because I keep having to say it over and over again, I’m referring to a model predicts the current climate the same exact way the models referenced by the IPCC folks predict the climate 100 years from now.
In regards to his comments about solar cycles, I made a comment a while back about my thoughts regarding the recent upturn in the temperature record and solar cycles (and I mean “recent” as in last decade). Whether it’s just a bad coincidence for climatologists or not, a solar cycle that’s produced the sorts of record activity that scientists would predict would increase global temperatures, can’t just be dismissed. That’s why I said upthread that I’ll be convinced one way or the other when we get into the solar minimum. I also said that based on what I see, I’m leaning on the side of disbelief.
Geoid does make an interesting remark, and something I’d not considered because I don’t recall seeing a paper that presents the data. And that is, if the carbon in the atmosphere today is “old” carbon that’s not being exchanged, because there’s just too much of it (because that’s the crux of the carbon caused warming argument — we’re pumping more in than the system can take out), we should be able to see that from the isotopes. I tried to Google this, hoping I’d find something that supported that the atmosphere is aging, but didn’t find any hits. If he’s got any papers on that subject, I’d love to read them.
Papers such as this support a link between atmospheric carbon and temperature, but don’t make any points about the ratios between carbon isotopes in the current environment (I’m not surprised). They do include this sort of chart, which is either an unfortunate coincidence or proof that we’ve been pumping CO2 into the atmosphere for more than the past 100 years. That sort of chart, not some self-delusional act of disbelief, has more of an influence on why I disbelief the IPCC report than just about anything else.
To me, this tabular data is just damning for those guys — that’s a very, very clear and steady rise in the pre-industrial era’s atmospheric carbon. Bad coincidence for climatologists or proof of a non-human cause? What would be, I think, a sound argument that this is just an unfortunate coincidence would be to see how the C14 to C12 ratio in the atmosphere is shifting. If the majority of the increase is dino-era carbon, I’d think the proportion of C12 to C14 would be dramatically shifted in the direction of C12. If Geoid has a paper which shows that, I’d be convinced. Cynically, I also think that if anyone had that paper, it would have been more widely distributed because it would show where the carbon is coming from.
In terms of current climate, I’m skeptical for the two reasons I’ve given –
1). The atmospheric carbon record shows a clear upward trend starting well before the current industrial era.
2). The current solar cycle has produced a number of record-sized events, and as even Geoid admits, the solar cycle has an impact on temperature.
In terms of projected CO2 emissions, I’m skeptical for the two reasons I’ve given –
1). While the overall reserves of total carbon are indeed quite huge, those reserves are not getting any easier to recover and this will increase their cost and reduce demand according to well-understood principles of supply and demand.
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.2). The increasing costs of fossil carbon fuels will drive technology to produce renewable resource versions of carbon fuels and those renewable forms will not increase net atmospheric carbon.
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April 20th, 2007 at 7:58 am
Julie,
that comment regarding Charles was nasty and uncalled for. Not only do I suspect it to be vastly untrue, but as you do (or should) know, it’s irrelevant to his arguments.
We could get into the “battle of the scientific background” argument. You know how those go.
But what would be the point? You happily insulted Charles’ background because you disagree with him (or was it that he pointed out the reference to aliens in your link, hmm?) I don’t think there’s going to be a huge line of folks lining up for similar insults.
This comment was written by Sailorman.Report this comment to the moderators
April 20th, 2007 at 8:09 am
Sailorman,
Hey, Charles is the one who admits he insults me because I disagree with him. I should get a couple of free pot-shots in from time to time. I still think that Charles understands neither science nor economics. He’s free to demonstrate some kind of science understanding beyond linking to papers and reading websites that support or oppose those papers.
As for the space aliens link, I didn’t provide it for the humour value, I provided it because it shows, as do so many exactly identical graphs, the connection between the solar cycle and the temperature. If people who believe in space aliens get that right, I have a hard time understanding why Charles doesn’t …
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
April 20th, 2007 at 8:43 am
Urph. I knew I forgot something.
3). If current carbon fuel consumption is maintained using renewable resources, there will be a net decline in carbon in the atmosphere as carbon is deposited into the deep ocean in stable forms and new carbon is not introduced from fossil sources.
Sorry. It’s a complete line of thinking and I’d stopped at the economic argument part of it.
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
April 20th, 2007 at 10:51 am
Julie,
You actually don’t know the research on carbon isotope ratios? Try googling a little harder. If you can’t find it before this evening (or if Geoid doesn’t provide it to you before then) I’ll post some links for you.
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
April 20th, 2007 at 10:54 am
And your link to the fact that there is a CO2 cycle that corresponds to the cycle of ice ages, as though it were a proof that the rise in global CO2 levels in the past century is non-anthropogenic demonstrates:
1) that you are engaging in the bizarre binary thinking on this question that you accuse me of.
This comment was written by Charles.2) you really don’t know the research on this subject
3) you are once again implicitly denying anthropogenic global warming (which is fine, I just wish you wouldn’t lie about it later)
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April 20th, 2007 at 11:03 am
I would like to say how much I value the information posted here by Charles and Geoid. It’s nice to be able to learn from , you know, actual scientists about climatology and modeling (statistical vs numerical for example) and so on in a dialogue. It’s kind of like reading Galileo - J,COH serves as Simplicio.
This comment was written by Jake Squid.Report this comment to the moderators
April 20th, 2007 at 11:20 am
“Geoid does make an interesting remark, and something I’d not considered because I don’t recall seeing a paper that presents the data.”
Hey Julie,
Geoid’s my fiance (can I say that it just makes me indescribably happy when I see him make sense on these threads?), so I get a lot of his stuff second hand when he hears or reads papers. That’s why I said earlier that we were on our way to a warm period like the Carbiniferous; my understanding (and again, I’m a science fiction writer not a scientist, so I am not an expert) is that carbon which was around in the Carbiniferous got stored in oil, where it was dormant. Now we’re using that oil as fuel and releasing the carbon back into the atmosphere, which means that for some amount of time, we’ve been returning to the amount of carbon that was in the atmosphere during the C-fous, when we know the earth was much hotter.
I can’t cite, but I’ll bother him and maybe he can. He’s working on his thesis, so I have to poke him to get him to come check. I think he’s enjoying the discussion, though. He used to read a lot of the feminist threads, but not know what to say.
(For what it’s worth, whether or not Charles has had a lot of science classes, Geoid felt he accurately presented the research. [I don't know if that means he agreed with every point Charles has made, but certainly with the bulk.])
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
April 20th, 2007 at 11:26 am
Is any of your work published, either on dead tree or on the internet tubes? I’d be curious to read it.
(Also, let me say that I also really appreciate Geoid and Charles taking the time to share their knowledge in this thread).
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
April 20th, 2007 at 1:47 pm
I’ve really appreciated Geoid’s participation as well. I know next to nothing about the geological record side of the climate change arguments (I am purely an interested amateur), so it is nice to have someone who knows that side of things. It is also really nice to know that people are finding the stuff I’m saying useful. I don’t really have any hope of changing Julie’s mind on any of this (certainly not of getting any acknowledgment that I have changed her mind on any of this…), so it is nice to know that my work on this has not been pointless.
On the modeling side, this paper has a really nice discussion of the problem of model drift (it isn’t the main topic, although the main topic is related).
In a nut shell (okay, it turned out to be a really big nut, I really didn’t men for this to get so detailed), if you start a model with inadequate knowledge of the ocean conditions, then the model can take centuries of run time to reach equilibrium. Since we haven’t had an adequate knowledge of the ocean conditions, the models have had to be run for centuries to produce a stable ocean condition (it is only within the past ~10 years that we have reached the point where this was computationally reasonable, so earlier models had to include cheats to counter-balance the drift caused by incorrect ocean conditions).
One solution is to run the model for thousands of years and then use the resulting stable ocean conditions as the initial conditions for the real model run. Another solution (which this paper reports) is to take the best available ocean condition information (which has improved hugely in the past few decades: older GCM runs have used the Levitus climatology, which has limitations of accuracy and resolution, and is a climatology for an extended period. I’ve worked with Levitus ocean climatology and while it is an impressive accomplishment, it has serious problems as a model input) and start the ocean from that (this paper used the estimate ocean conditions for 1995).
The result that the paper shows is that:
1) the PCM (the numerical model used in this study and the study I referenced previously) run for a thousand years under historical CO2 conditions and steady state solar and volcanic conditions settles down to a stable ocean that is an average of 0.1 C away from the estimated 1995 actual ocean! This is astoundingly good.
2) running the next century simulation using the 1995 estimated ocean conditions instead of the thousand year developed conditions produces only trivial differences in the 2000-2090 results (which is convenient, because it removes the need to rerun the 20th century for each model run, thereby cutting in half the length of each projection, and removes the need to run the 1000 year run to generate initial conditions).
This is some truly impressive stuff (and I have Julie to thank for getting me to take a closer look at the GCMs). If some of that is as clear as mud to anyone, ask and I’ll try to make it clearer.
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
April 20th, 2007 at 1:57 pm
Okay, one last thing before I get back to work.
Google “CO2 isotope ratios global warming”: first link, scroll down to “It becomes important to determine the source of the increase in CO2 from 280 to 380 parts per million by volume between 1800 and 2005.” This gives a good thumbnail of the CO2 isotope question Julie raised (and there is a bibliography at the bottom if anyone wants to go to the source literature).
One last last thing. For some reason, I couldn’t post last night, but I have some great links on peak oil and the emissions scenarios that I will post some time tonight. Nut shell version: the emissions scenarios are not strictly realistic, but are quite close if you allow for the substitution of coal for oil (you can create oil from coal, so there is a direct substitution at a price). Also, as should be obvious to anyone who has thought about this, the people who generated the emissions scenarios were economists and energy experts, not climate scientists, exactly the people Julie claims should have been consulted.
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
April 20th, 2007 at 2:00 pm
Arg, something is eating my posts (both last night and today):
Super short repeat: google “CO2 isotope ratios global warming” (without the quotes) and click the first link and scroll half way down for some good information on carbon isotopes and how they demonstrate that the increased CO2 in the atmosphere over the last century is anthropogenic and not oceanic in origin.
[fingers crossed that this one without links gets through]
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
April 20th, 2007 at 2:19 pm
Charles, it’s the nanobots!
Crazy nanobots. They’ll eat anything!
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
April 20th, 2007 at 4:05 pm
Charles,
No, believe it or not (hard for you to grasp, I’m sure) I neither know everything nor even CLAIM to know everything.
And equally contrary to what you and your binary thinking seem to think, I’m aware that burning fossil fuels should be changing the isotope ratios, I’ve just not seen the information presented in a way that says “Hi!”. For example, I went to your paper and look at footnotes 4, 5 and 7 (just so you can know htat I actually do read the stuff you point me at) and all of them say either “we know this” or “I’d tell you all about it, but you wouldn’t understand.” Well, this reader really would understand.
Briefly I’ll ’splain it to you.
Production of C14 — Carbon 14 — occurs in the upper atmosphere as a result of a nitrogen atom (N14) and a neutron (courtesy of the dreaded Cosmic Radiation …) joining together. The new atom then emits a hydrogen atom (H), leaving behind a new atom of C14. (It’s radioactive decay in the upper atmosphere — which means it’s illegal in certain parts of California, but I digress.)
This goes on all the time (except for in certain parts of California) and this C14 is then taken in by plants, absorbed into the ocean, blah, blah, food chain, blah, blah. Then all those things die and their C14 goes with them. Over time, because C14 is radioactive (and therefore illegal in Berkley), it decays into N14 through beta decay (a neutron emits an electron and becomes a proton, so carbon becomes nitrogen — really neat stuff).
Carbon from dinos has no C14 because all of the C14 has busily radiated itself into N14 over the past 10’s of millions of years. It’s just … not there.
The result is a really simply equation — C14-2007 = C14-1800’s (ignoring the ways we’ve managed to create C14 by blowing things up) because C14 production and removal is more or less constant (except it isn’t, but I’m going to stay real simple on this) and C12-2007 = (380ppm / 280ppm) * C12-1800’s. Not really all that hard of a concept to understand — it’s 6th or 7th grade math.
THAT process produces this nice ratio — 1.36 — of the increase in C12 relative to a (reasonably constant …) C14. If the increase in CO2 is from fossil fuels, the ratio of C12 to C14 should have increased somewhat proportionally to the fraction of pre-1800’s. There really should be a CHART out there somewhere, not some comment on RealClimate that we can’t understand this stuff.
Uh, right. How about the chart you patronizing idiots.
ANYWAY, it should be a pretty straighforward matter to calculate how much more C12 there would have to be if the increase from 280ppm to 380ppm is “fossil” based, and I’ve kindly provided you with a first order approximation. I mean, the short answer is “well, almost all of it”, which has some really ugly implications for carbon dating, but it should be just about as trivial as can be to produce a chart and show, on some scale or another, the fraction of the atmosphere that is C14 — the reduction in C12 to C14 should fit that number up above. If Geoid has a reference to such a chart, I’d be happy to look it over. I’ve been all over RealClimate of late and there aren’t even footnotes to articles that would show this.
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
April 20th, 2007 at 4:22 pm
So Julie, I looked at the article you cited dealing with atmospheric CO2 levels in ice cores and graphed them. Indeed they show the cycle of ice ages, and we are in a warming trend. However, the numbers are pretty damning for your argument. The maximum CO2 concentration is about 290 ppmv, with an average of about 240 ppmv. I looked at that, then added the post-industrial data to the graph. Here’s the paper to get values from (by the way, this is the paper cited in Gore’s slideshow): Keeling & Whorf, 2005 (Click on Graphics in the top left corner)
Now this shows atmospheric concentrations very well above the maximum from the near-recent ice core record you cited. I encourage you to input a couple of those values into a spreadsheet with the ice core values, and see what results. When I did it, I got a vertical line jumping up to three times as much as the previous maximum changes. This is not part of that trend.
I wish I could just put this spreadsheet up here; I don’t have hosting ability. Is there a way I could send this to someone who can post it? I’m just using Excel.
This comment was written by Geoid.Report this comment to the moderators
April 20th, 2007 at 4:38 pm
Ah, just noticed that you are already up on the CO2 increase.
Still a cool graphic.
Anyway, I noticed that you are concerned about C14. I hadn’t really heard a lot of people talking about radiogenic carbon when dealing with climate change. I usually hear about C13, a stable isotope of carbon that fractionates due to photosynthesis and other things. The delta C-13 value (amount of fractionation) can tell you about atmospheric CO2 concentration from times where we don’t have atmosphere samples from, like the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (about 50 million years ago), when the climate was much warmer than today, and the concentration of CO2 was much higher. Here’s a link relating delta C-13 with delta O-18, a stable isotope of oxygen that is a very good proxy for temperature: Singh & Lee, 2007. I’m sorry for the PDF; if you want a real full-text article, it kind of has to be one.
I’ll look into the carbon 14 stuff you were talking about; I’m really not familiar with it enough to comment at this time.
This comment was written by Geoid.Report this comment to the moderators
April 20th, 2007 at 4:41 pm
Also, Julie, the weird radioactivity comments aren’t really appreciated. I’m in the Bay Area myself, and given that scientists work with radiological material all the time it’s not very pertinent. Implying that we hippies are so afraid of nuclear energy that we disallow all radiogenic materials is kind of rude.
This comment was written by Geoid.Report this comment to the moderators
April 20th, 2007 at 4:56 pm
Also, a first order understanding I can convey of oxygen isotopes is that “heavier” isotopes of oxygen with more neutrons (O-18 instead of O-16) are harder for physical processes like evaporation to take out of seawater. So when it’s hotter and there’s more evaporation, which preferentially takes O-16 out of the ocean, the concentration of O-18 relative to O-16 of the ocean increases. This allows us to find temperatures from the rock record.
This comment was written by Geoid.Report this comment to the moderators
April 20th, 2007 at 5:03 pm
Geoid,
Well … do you have a chart showing the ratio of C12 to C14 over time? Sorry — had to ask ;)
My issue with that paper really is that we were already heading up from a low of 188ppm 32.8KY ago. There’s an article on RealClimate which makes the point that had all of the fossil carbon stayed in the atmosphere we’d be at, I think I’ve got this correct, circa 780ppm right now, based on 500ppm added to a pre-industrial base of 280ppm. As various people have said, including over on RealClimate, “We don’t know why more isn’t in the atmosphere”.
A lot of people I know who doubt the IPCC work have a response — “Because the system works better than you think it does?” I worked for an oil company about 20 years ago, and that’s why my answer is also “What, you think we have an infinite supply of the stuff?” Not that I’m going to run out and buy a pedal car any time soon, but I think that if some of that science the “general public” isn’t supposed to understand were published, more of us with science backgrounds would cause less trouble. Or more trouble. It all depends.
I’m not sure what I can do by way of hosting or posting the spreadsheet, but I can convert Excel spreadsheets into graphs (along with most everyone else who uses Excel a lot). If you can get me the spreadsheet I can turn the data into a JPEG and put it up on Photobucket. Amp has my real e-mail address, which I don’t post much of anywhere because I hate SPAM. If you can get an annotated C12:C14 ratio chart with major artificial events, like atmospheric nuke testing, overlaid on a atmospheric CO2 chart that would also be sweet. Or not.
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
April 20th, 2007 at 5:04 pm
” Implying that we hippies are so afraid of nuclear energy that we disallow all radiogenic materials is kind of rude.”
I missed this implication, but I’ve got to agree, it’s silly. Reed College has a nuclear research thingamajig. Just sayin’.
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
April 20th, 2007 at 5:06 pm
Ah, here’s what you’re talking about. I found an abstract (Levin & Kromer, 1997)about decreasing C-14/C-12 ratios, due to addition of anthropogenic carbon to the atmosphere. This followed a local phenomenon of addition of CO2 without radiogenic carbon (dino-carbon) to an atmosphere with radiogenic carbon. The ratio was compared to the maritime mean nearby, where the plumes of anthropogenic CO2 hadn’t travelled. I can’t find out how to get the link to you; I have subscriptions to papers I’m not sure I’m allowed to post abstracts of, and the link will bounce you, I’m pretty sure. I’ll try to put the link in, anyway, just in case: Levin & Kromer, 1997. This is only the abstract; I can’t seem to get the whole paper. I’ll keep looking at this.
This comment was written by Geoid.Report this comment to the moderators
April 20th, 2007 at 5:15 pm
Geoid,
I’m not looking for O16:O18 ratios as an indicator of temperature — if you read my posts you should be aware that I’m familiar with the history of temperature change, even if some people like the claim the Medieval Warm and Little Ice Age weren’t global events.
What I’m looking for is a way to demonstrate that the increase in CO2 is from an increase in C12 released from fossil sources. If the carbon cycle is being overwhelmed completely I’d expect there to be an increase in C12 to C14 that’s fairly drastic. Perhaps not as drastic as 380 / 280 ppm (1.36), but certainly greater than unity. If, however, the exchange mechanisms are working, I’d expect the change to be much closer to unity than 1.36. Knowing the second derivative of the change would be sweet as well. If it’s completely anthropogenic, I’d expect the second order derivative of C12:C14 to be positive. It’s too late on a Friday to come up with a reason why it wouldn’t be positive regardless, but a nice, large positive number would be very convincing.
As for the jokes about radioactivity, it’s all part of my charming personality and comes from listening to environmental extremists who wanted to outlaw Cl a few years back to solve the ozone problem. If you want me to stop making cracks about radiation being illegal in Berkley, you’ve got to get the other guys to stop suggesting that chlorine be outlawed …
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
April 20th, 2007 at 5:30 pm
Geoid,
The URL had your session ID embedded in it, so that wasn’t going to work.
You should be able to post just the graphics to Photobucket and publish a link here under “Fair Use” doctrine, since we’re definitely having an educational discussion.
Is this the graphic in the article? I found something by them at this URL. However, as they note, there’s this small matter of nuke-related C14.
A longer time series, even with nuke C14 in it, would be really good. Nukes should show up as single events in the series (more or less) with some amount of stability once it was all mixed into the atmosphere. So, if there’s a time series going back to 1800, C12:C14 should increase with (or not) CO2, with changes in C12:C14 that correspond to various nuke tests, then resuming the trend after the CNTBT had been in effect for a while (and picking up again courtesy of India and Pakistan and N. Korea and …)
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
April 20th, 2007 at 5:31 pm
Oh, JOURNAL. What journal was it published in? I’m about 15 miles from a major university and wouldn’t mind bopping down there to check it out.
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
April 20th, 2007 at 5:39 pm
Any images or files that people want available to download can be sent to me at barry (at) amptoons (dot) com, and I’ll make them available the next time I’m at my computer. (Depending on the time of day and my work schedule, that could be immediate, but it could also take hours…. sorry.)
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
April 20th, 2007 at 5:54 pm
Julie,
If you have access to a university library, you could try checking out the sources listed in the 2 paragraph explanation of the issue here: http://www.radix.net/~bobg/faqs/scq.CO2rise.html
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
April 20th, 2007 at 6:07 pm
Charles,
I’ll see if I can find Butcher in the library, but as it’s a fairly phat book, I’m not even going to promise to read any of it.
Pictures. I don’t need pictures because I’m st00pid, I need pictures because I’m BUSY.
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
April 20th, 2007 at 6:46 pm
I’m not sure if I’m in moderation or if I didn’t actually submit the comment I meant to, so here’s a repeat:
I just talked to a climate guy in my department about bomb carbon. Apparently its addition to the atmosphere in 1955 screwed up any radiocarbon dating younger than that. If you look at a curve for C-14 from 1955 to now, this is what you see: NIWA Data. So while I’m sure the addition of old carbon to the system is reducing the ratio of C-12/C-14, you won’t be able to see it because of the huge impact the bomb carbon has had and continues to have on the record.
This comment was written by Geoid.Report this comment to the moderators
April 20th, 2007 at 10:40 pm
I’ve put an excel spreadsheet Geoid emailed me online, so folks can download it.
I’ve also put an image from that spreadsheet online, so that folks without Excel can at least take a look at the graph.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
April 20th, 2007 at 10:49 pm
Julie,
I get that. If I find a good picture, I’ll put it up. I’m putting up references because that’s what I’m finding.
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
April 20th, 2007 at 11:16 pm
Julie, any response to the modeling paper I described in comment 123?
What is it about running a model for a thousand years (with no flux adjustments) and missing the average ocean temperature by 0.1 C (although they mention that they do worse (0.3 C drift) in the deep ocean) in 1995 that you would describe as the model skewing off in one direction or another? The numerical models of the climate used to always skew off in one direction or another if they weren’t adjusted to stay on target, but that isn’t the case anymore. The models have gotten better.
So yes, one more time please explain, in detail, what that model run was doing and why it doesn’t meet your criteria.
(I don’t count that as validation because the historical data has inevitably been indirectly involved in calibrating the model (you have to calibrate on something, and really you have to calibrate on everything you possibly can, given the paucity of detailed data for the global climate), but I think that it is as close as we can get to validation without a time machine or a lot of patience).
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
April 21st, 2007 at 12:15 am
Charles,
It’s precisely that they used to (still do, so far as I know) veer off in one direction or another that’s the problem. Keeping it on track doesn’t mean it’s right, it means they kept it on track.
There’s a lot to be said for those of us who remember such things, and “such things” includes really bad models from years gone by, and the 1970’s “Global Cooling” that you like to downplay, and so many other things.
Stop and think what’s being asked of the planet — to seriously grind a lot of things to a near halt. Those guys had better be right, and they’d better not be hiding behind “Gee, it’s going to be hard for us!”
Are there ways around fossil fuels? Sure, and many of them are becoming cheap enough that NOT being “green” is stupid. I wrote over on RealClimate about CF lights because someone was going to do some kind of energy fair about them. I cut my electric bill by 30% switching to them. I was going to put it off until all the bulbs burned out, but after seeing how much less electricity they used, I switched them all over a two week time. In six months time they’ll be paid for. Are they “green”? I could care less — I saved a mess of money last month and this month I’ll save even more. Anyone who isn’t using CF lights now should just grab a stack of $10 bills and light them on fire, and everyone who is using them should compare bills with their neighbors.
On a final note, your badgering me has become really, really creepy. I’ve explained my various positions to you many times, I’ve read articles you’ve asked me to read, and I’ve spent a lot of time on this discussion. To put it bluntly, you’re creeping me out. One other thing — skepticism and denial aren’t the same thing. Don’t treat skeptics like we’re “global warming deniers”. I don’t “deny” global warming — were this a discussion going the other way, I’d be arguing on the side of global warming because I’m skeptical of the “no global warming!” side as well.
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
April 21st, 2007 at 1:39 am
Julie, you denied global warming earlier this thread. You’re not honest enough to own up to it, but there is no other reasonable interpretation of your referring to anthropogenic global warming as
Except that you think that anthropogenic global warming is “unproven and unsupportable.”
You seem incapable of taking responsibility for your own actions, Julie. You chose to say it; no one held a gun to your head and forced you to type in such an idiotic statement. Nor did anyone force you to link to a fraudulent paper while implying it was peer-reviewed; nor did anyone force you to imply that the overwhelming majority of climate scientists lie about global warming for the money; nor did anyone force you to link to a crank paper about how sunspots control human history written by people who believe in CIA-led UFO conspiracies; etc, etc..
You chose to do all those very stupid things; Charles didn’t make you do them. And your choice to lie about what you’ve said, rather than take responsibility for your own words (i.e., “point well taken, I shouldn’t have linked to that, my bad. Moving on…”), is also your responsibility, not Charles’.
In short, don’t blame Charles for the fact that you’ve been acting like a fool.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
April 21st, 2007 at 4:59 am
Julie,
This model doesn’t veer off in one direction or another, does it? Maybe you mean something by that other than what I think you mean?
I can’t even parse “Keeping it on track doesn’t mean it’s right, it means they kept it on track.” If they kept it on track so that it hit the correct ocean temperature within 0.1 C, what does it mean to say that they didn’t get it right, just on track? Also, how can you square saying that the models still do veer off in one direction or another with agreeing that the model stayed on track (i.e. did not veer off in one direction or another)?
Also, I don’t really understand why you think that the fact that the models have improved by huge leaps and bounds in the past 4 decades means that the models can not be trusted now. The fact that some model run in the past produced a frozen ocean has pretty much no relevance to the fact that a model run now can take an approximate ocean climatology, freak out for a hundred years and then stabilize, then run for a thousand years and only miss the ocean temperature by 0.1 C at the end of that 1000 years (other than showing exactly how far we’ve come and how fast…).
I can see how experience with climate models 20 or 30 years ago would make you suspicious of climate models in general, but I can’t see why it would prevent you from being willing to reevaluate your opinions of climate models based on the newest climate model capabilities.
I’m also puzzled that you find it creepy that I am arguing with your stated positions, and that I keep asking for your response to points raised in response to your previous points. Do you really find it strange that someone who is arguing with you would expect you to explicitly concede points that should be conceded, rather than just allowing you to drop those points without acknowledging the rebuttals? I’m sorry you find it creepy that I’m arguing with you. I certainly don’t intend to be creeping you out. I’m certainly finding arguing with you about all this fairly frustrating and annoying (if still fairly interesting for what it is leading me to read), but I’m not sure why that would come across as creepy.
Anyway, I have been spending way too much time on this argument this past week, and we seem to be incapable of communicating effectively with each other, so perhaps we should simply end this discussion for now (actually, I’m really interested to see what Geoid makes of the carbon isotope research, but perhaps we should end this other than Geoid posting whatever conclusions he reaches on that subject if he wishes to).
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
April 21st, 2007 at 5:14 am
[this is my comment from last night that the spam filter ate. I have salvaged it from the akismet spam filter.]
For anyone else who is interested:
On the question of the emission scenarios that Julie raised, I’ve been reading around, and I thought this discussion of the emission scenarios was much more helpful than the IPCC summary for policy makers, which does not provide nearly as many lovely charts.
Also, this summary of the plausibility of the emission scenarios with regard to available fossil fuels provides a good answer to the “peak oil” concerns that Julie raised. I sentence summary: yes, many of the scenarios have implausible oil consumption levels, but if you include the substitutability of coal for oil, then most of the scenarios are brought back into the plausible range. The most extreme scenario has implausible but barely conceivable fossil fuel consumption.
The author of those pages, Jean-Marc Jancovici, has some eccentricities to his English (he’s French) but his content seems pretty sound (and heavily drawn from official sources). He is not a research scientist, but seems to have sufficient qualifications to be able to understand the material that he is presenting.
One interesting point that Jancovici makes that is unfortunately under-emphasized in coverage of the IPCC results is that the difference between the high end temperature estimates for 2100 and the low-end estimate is almost entirely a matter of uncertainty in which future we will choose (or will be forced upon us by running out of fuel…), not a matter of uncertainty in the climate models.
Another point which I mentioned earlier is that the correct societal response to the doomsday scenarios of peak oil is to try to get alternative technologies developed before the fuel crisis hits. Surely, a collapsing economy is not the ideal time to be trying to do massive technological conversions. This is the same solution as the scenarios that lead to the low-end CO2 production levels (although those scenarios also require that our alternative fuel sources not be synthetic coal-derived oil, which can solve our “peak oil” problems, but not our anthropogenic global warming problems).
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
April 21st, 2007 at 5:38 am
Apparently, short posts with multiple functional links equals instant death for my posts…
Here is my post from last night on the emissions scenarios question that Julie raised. Its an interesting issue.
—————-
I thought this http://www.manicore.com/anglais/documentation_a/greenhouse/emission_scenario.html
discussion of the emission scenarios was much more helpful than the
http://www.ipcc.ch/pub/sres-e.pdf
IPCC summary for policy makers, which does not provide nearly as many lovely charts.
Also, this http://www.manicore.com/anglais/documentation_a/articles_a/ERCA_a.html
of the plausibility of the emission scenarios with regard to available fossil fuels provides a good answer to the “peak oil” concerns that Julie raised. I sentence summary: yes, many of the scenarios have implausible oil consumption levels, but if you include the substitutability of coal for oil, then most of the scenarios are brought back into the plausible range.
——————-
Sorry for the ugly formating.
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
April 21st, 2007 at 6:29 am
Amp,
I stand by the comment that you seem to think got me into this mess. Until the predictive models are properly validated, which they haven’t been, there is no way to say that the claims of the anthropogenic global warming crowd have been proven.
In a field that has a consistent track record of being wrong (the climate modeling field, just so you know), suddenly saying “Hey, we got it right this time!” isn’t going to cut it. Climate modelers have been saying “Hey, we got it right this time!” for my entire life. If they got it right this time, it’s going to be a first. And if you want to talk about conceding points, I’d like to see you, Charles, and everyone else here concede just that one very simple, very plain, very basic point. That’s a point I’ve been explicitly raising ever since #74.
And I do hold Charles responsible for his behavior. No one else made him decide to act the way he admitted to acting in #86. Had Charles admitted this
this entire fiasco would have ended 70 posts ago. So, neither you nor Charles have any business lecturing me about “conceding points”.
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
April 21st, 2007 at 1:25 pm
Julie,
So all you wanted from me was that I agree that the Levitus climatology is a poor starting point for a numerical climate model, but that if you run a modern climate model for a hundred years, it will eventually correct the bad values in the Levitus climatology and produce something much closer to the true ocean values? Surely that isn’t what you wanted me to admit?
Surely what you wanted me to admit was that:
So the deep ocean temperatures still skew off by 0.03 C per century. There is still a slight tendency of one part of the model to skew weirdly off in the wrong direction (the deep ocean is very slow, so you’d have to run the models for a very long time to get the deep ocean temperatures to self correct).
If all there is left to argue about is how we each conducted the argument, then I think we are definitely done.
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
April 21st, 2007 at 4:57 pm
By the way, I think Geoid has been trying to post, but his comments aren’t going through for some reason (site-related, not mod-related).
I also do have some publications I can share — even one related to energy crises. ;-) I’ll sit down and put together a post a bit later when I have more time.
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
April 22nd, 2007 at 3:09 am
I looked in the akismet spam filter (which ate some of my posts recently) and I didn’t see any sign of Geoid’s posts. Maybe he could email his post to Amp (barry at amptoons dot com)?
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
April 22nd, 2007 at 8:09 am
Charles,
Climate modeling has a decades-long history of being wrong. Climate models have, as you in your own words said, a tendency to “freak out for a hundred years”, and as others have said “freeze the oceans”.
While the new models may well be right, I’ll just point out that a broken watch is right twice a day, and if they are right, it would be the first time in my entire life.
If there’s anything in this post that you can actually disagree with, I’d love to know how you manage to do so. You can try to weasel around them being wrong by saying “They didn’t know” or “They didn’t know enough” or “They’ve gotten much better!”, but the bottom line is they have a DECADES long history of being wrong. If you understood the significance of that, you’d understand the significance of what I’ve said about validating their models against the modern climate.
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
April 22nd, 2007 at 10:09 am
I think CHARLES understands the significance of that. Do you?
Look, a bad model that got used in the past says a lot about that model. What the proper response to your attacks on old models that are known to be faulty and which aren’t even used anymore? “Yeah, Julie, but you were wrong 20 years ago” perhaps?
The reason you’re not getting the responses you want is that you’re approaching the ridiculous: It’s not clear that you can separate your specific views on what’s being discussed from your overall views of the scientific community at large. It’s a bit like a generalistic ad hominem attack. (and it sort of creeps me out, by the way; I wish you’d stop.)
This comment was written by Sailorman.Report this comment to the moderators
April 22nd, 2007 at 11:29 am
Sailorman,
I understand that many people think the current models are right. I understand that perfectly well. But there’s no evidence that the new models really are any better at long-range — and a century or two is pretty long range - climate forecasting. They might be better, they might even be a lot better, but they might also “freak out for a hundred years”, as Charles said. Do we know that once they are done “freaking out for a hundred years” that the results are really valid?
There’s a scientific history of making doomsday predictions that never come true.
Malthusian Catastrophe
As regards your accusations of some kind of generalised ad hominem attack, I don’t have problems discussing scientific topics with scientists. People with science educations generally understand the limits of science. Lay people tend to be less aware of the uncertainties in science.
I do find it amusing that Algore is such a green advocate, but rather than cut his consumption (like those of us who don’t have his wealth to spare would have to do), he keeps sucking up electricity like a drunk on a payday binge. So I enjoy making fun of him. I’d think that if he really, truly, and deep down, believed what he’s spewing that he’d find his way clear to cut that 22,000 KWH down to something more reasonable. Like, maybe, closer to the 660 KWH I used last month, or the 630 KWH the month before. Don’t you find that just the least little bit suspicious?
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
April 22nd, 2007 at 3:18 pm
“Like, maybe, closer to the 660 KWH I used last month, or the 630 KWH the month before. Don’t you find that just the least little bit suspicious? ”
I’m guessing you don’t read Pandagon.
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
April 22nd, 2007 at 3:50 pm
Julie,
You show no sign of having understood anything that I said other than the bit that supported you position. You don’t seem to have understood why the models “freak out for a hundred years” or why they stop freaking out, or that they don’t freak out if you feed them better initial conditions. Nor do you seem to understand that the models can now be run for a thousand years and end up with correct results for the modern day.
There is another point, which I’m sure you will also not be willing to understand: the models 17 years ago were (for all their problems) correct. Their results (interpreted intelligently) were roughly accurate at predicting the climate change we have seen in the past 17 years (the strictest form of validation possible), and the much better modern models simply confirm the results that could be extracted from the older models.
This is from the 1990 IPCC first assessment report (the full document doesn’t seem to be online, so I am quoting from here):
So the models were pretty bad in 1990, and their raw results were obviously wrong, but by massaging the model results in various ways (mostly, by looking at the difference between scenarios, rather than at the specific results of individual scenarios), it was possible to make predictions with them.
Over the past 17 years, the central tendency of those predictions have been shown to have underestimated the degree of global warming, but the actual degree of global warming did fall within the uncertainty range of the predictions.
The models 17 years ago (used intelligently) were right.
The modern models are much better than the models 17 years ago (so you can now try to predict regional climate change, rather than just global trends), but at the gross level, they are simply confirming the results of the models from 17 years ago.
So returning to your comment (first sentence, third paragraph, you asked me to explain how I manage to disagree with anything in your comment. I disagree with just about every line of your comment, so I’m afraid what follows is pretty much a fisking, minus the wit. I consider fisking rude, so I wouldn’t do it if you hadn’t asked me to) :
The sense in which this is true is irrelevant, as I demonstrated above with the model based predictions from the 1990 IPCC report.
I explained already why this happens, and it is not something that will suddenly start happening in the middle of a model run, so it is irrelevant to predicting the next century.
This has never been a significant problem with climate models, and is certainly not a significant problem with climate models now. Certainly, if you set up the model inputs incorrectly, you can get nonsensical results. This provides great denialist sound bites, but is completely irrelevant.
This is simply idiotic.
As I demonstrated above, you are completely wrong here. The models correctly predicted the direction and rough magnitude of global climate change over a 17 year period nearly 20 years ago.
I’m willing to oblige your request, but after this I’m done arguing with you.
They didn’t know! They’ve gotten much better!
While that’s true, (used intelligently) they also (17 years ago) correctly predicted the future climate trend of the past 17 years (do I repeat myself? I repeat myself). I understand the significance of that, and I understand the significance of that as validation of the models against modern climate.
I’d ask if you understand the significance of that, but we are done here. I am done discussing this with you, and you are done discussing this here.
You are wrong about the climate models and you have been wrong about them for twenty years. And, unlike the modelers, you haven’t learned anything from your error, and you refuse to acknowledge either that you were wrong then (when being wrong on this was reasonable scepticism) or that you are wrong now (when being wrong on this is unreasonable denialism).
[Moderator hat on: Julie, please don't post anymore in this thread. I don't have the time to continue explaining why you are wrong, and you have had plenty of posts to explain your position. It has been a frustrating discussion, but the material I've read over the past week has been interesting, so thanks for giving me a reason to go read it.]
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
April 22nd, 2007 at 4:52 pm
(Ignoring Charles for a second so I can thank Mandolin …)
Thanks for the link. I read the entry on Pandagon that I think you’re referring to. I made this post recently and will make another post on a similarly related topic in the near future (for those of y’all into LJ …)
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
April 22nd, 2007 at 6:32 pm
Julie,
Actually, I was being unfair. If you’d like to make a final post on this thread, that is okay.
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
April 22nd, 2007 at 7:46 pm
Charles,
I think I’ve made plenty of “final posts” already. I will make one that hopefully you’ll like a bit better.
First, just as Charles has thanked me for prodding him to read so much these past few days, I’d like to thank him for prodding me to do likewise. I’m still skeptical, but that’s just me. Just as Charles as prodded me into reading more about climate modeling than I had in a few years, I hope Charles reads about developments in the development of alternative and renewable energy as a cost-effective alternative to non-renewable fossil fuels. Long term my thoughts are that technology and free-market capitalism is going to be what saves us.
Whatever the answer — global warming or running out of fossil fuels — our current behavior is unsustainable and both scenarios will cause dramatic changes in our lifestyles if we don’t change now.
I’ll again repeat this link. There are always ways to cut our energy usage and the last three months have taught me a thing or two.
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators
April 23rd, 2007 at 5:45 am
Here is the current data on the sunspot graphs, and the correlation with warming. This is apparently available on the sites listed, or by any search, but the spreadsheet here allows us to look for ourselves.
search result:
http://people.uleth.ca/~dan.johnson/sunspots.htm
This comment was written by News.Report this comment to the moderators
April 24th, 2007 at 2:37 am
News,
Actually, the post you link to shows the wrong feature of sunspot activity. The suggested connection is between the length of the sunspot cycle and the global average temperature. The effective rebuttal (the paper that showed the correlation made some extremely significant errors of calculation and used a dodgy combination of smoothed and unsmoothed data, correcting the data problems causes the late 20th century correlation to largely vanish) can be found here.
Sunspot cycle period does seem to show a substantial contribution to the early to mid-20th century warming, but my understanding is that it is only a partial component (~25%?) of the late 20th century global warming (this estimate is also supported by the general climate models). The other 75% (or more, there seems to also be a cooling trend that is being completely overwhelmed) is believed to be from anthropogenic CO2.
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
April 24th, 2007 at 8:09 am
Heh, you’re welcome. I was being a bit grumpy, but thank you for taking me at face value. I’m glad you found it useful.
It’s very cool to have your livejournal link. I’ll try to drop by there occasionally to read.
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
April 24th, 2007 at 10:54 am
Mandolin,
If you have an LJ account, let me know the ID. Most of my entries are closed and if you’re interested in reading more than just that one link, you’ll need to be friended. I made a closed post about the link upthread and Charles (who has an LJ account) responded.
So … if you have an LJ account, lemme know and you can join in that discussion. I’d like to know what your fiance has to say about C14:C12 ratios as that thread never evolved over here.
This comment was written by Julie, Herder of Cats.Report this comment to the moderators