Lord Iggy, I made the mistake of reading facebook and I saw someone post this:
[SNIP]
What do you think is a proper reply to this gentleman? I ask you because 1. you have the most expertise 2. you're the most polite
I don't want the guy to think he's actually smart, but I don't want to be snarky either. But I'm not intelligent enough on this issue to be thorough
I can write a reply for you to forward to him.
Climate Change Questioning Fellow said:
"Politics aside, the reality is that we don't understand our climate at a microscopic level.
We understand our climate fairly relatively well, what is much harder to predict is the weather. This is true in the same sense that it is difficult to predict what you will roll the next time you toss a die, but it is possible to predict that if you throw the die several times, your average value will tend towards 3.5. Weather is what happens on a given day, while climate is the average weather over a long period of time.
I'm assuming human activity, including fossil fuels, has an effect but we just plain don't know how negatively feed-backed our biosphere is.
Our planet and its atmosphere, biosphere, geosphere and other various spheres are governed by various different feedback systems. The famous example of the lynx and the hare is an example of negative feedback. When lynx populations are high, many hares are eaten, leading to low hare populations, which leads to lynx starvation, which leads to reduced predation, which leads to increased hare populations, which leads to increased prey availability, which leads back to high lynx populations. This is a self-regulating negative feedback system.
In our current context, however, climate change is a positive feedback system. As the world warms up, we will progressively lose our ice cover, as ice sheets are replaced by blue water and brown/green land. Ice has high albedo, so it reflects lots of incoming sunlight. However, water and land have low albedo, so they will absorb lots of incoming sunlight. Picture a dark shirt and a white shirt on a sunny day, to experience the albedo effect firsthand!
Thus, when things get hotter, the world's surface gets darker, leading to more absorbed sunlight, leading to even more warming. Making things worse, it's likely that, when
methane clathrate ices begin to melt with these changing conditions, they will release even more greenhouse gases (in the form of methane, which is a stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide), which contributes further to the whole positive feedback cycle.
We live right now in the quaternary glaciation and we are currently in the middle of a minor interglacial and we've been warming for 20,000 years.
This is correct. The main issue is that the annual rate of warming has been relatively small over much of this period, but over roughly the last 200 years, the rate of warming has gotten massively higher, and it doesn't match up with non-human explanations (such as changes in orbital eccentricity, the amount of light produced by the sun, and the like).
We could slip into a deep glaciation in 10,000 to 50,000 years....
With human impacts disregarded, that's roughly what we'd expect from the cycle of glacial and interglacial periods and orbital forcing.
Milankovitch cycles do a pretty good job at predicting how much solar energy is going to hit the earth. However, our current climate change issues exist in the next few decades and centuries. We're not in imminent threat of a new ice age, our problems are much more immediate.
and so long as we have big land masses at to near the poles like Antarctica and Greenland the world will remain glaciated.
Unfortunately, nothing is forcing our large polar landmasses to stay frozen. Yes, glaciers can refrigerate themselves, but once they begin to degrade they will likely continue to degrade, for the reasons of albedo I mentioned earlier.
We need to set politics aside on this matter and truly let science work.
Damn straight!
The intersection of science and politics is pretty messy, because politics is about popular approval, while science is based off of repeatable investigation. Scientific results can't change themselves because they're unpopular.
Geology does not work on 10 year scales and an increase of co2 from 0.032% to 0.037% is likely meaningful but not catastrophic.....
Geology and climatology are roughly connected, but this comparison is not meaningful. It's like saying that flies last less long than houses. Climate changes far faster than the earth's geology does. Also, the numbers you provided in your examples aren't quite right. Before humans, carbon dioxide levels varied over periods of glaciation, falling down to 180 parts per million during deep freezes, and rising up to 280 in the peaks of the interglacials. We were around 280 at the dawn of the industrial revolution, but we've pushed it up to 400 parts per million since then, and we could conceivably get quite a bit higher. This is a huge, and unprecedented change in a relatively brief time period, so it could very well be the trigger for changes that could be described as 'catastrophic'.
and yes I get the whole club of Rome Kissinger finding a new common enemy thing....but the reality is that there are plenty of real monsters in the world to deal with....without manufacturing make believe hypnotic ones.
Um... I don't give much credence to the Club of Rome hypothesis, but I guess that's a side point. There are indeed many problems the world has to deal with, but climate change is a major and imminent one. It hasn't been manufactured to scare people, even though it can be a scary thing. It's a major problem that we can see coming, and we have a chance to mitigate it if we take action sooner rather than later.
No that doesn't align with political correctness but by gosh...CONVINCE ME WITH SCIENCE NOT RHETORIC!
I don't think political correctness has anything to do with this. Science isn't about political correctness, or popularity. I do want to try to convince you with science, and I hope I'm doing a bit of that with this response.
I'm not stupid so please stop assuming I am (not to the poster nor the article but to the worlds scientists).
I won't and don't assume stupidity, but I can't assume expertise in a specific field and a knowledge of climate jargon. However, I can explain it in lay terms and help you to make sense of things.
Climate Change Explained:
Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. It absorbs infrared radiation (which is one of the ways that the earth can radiate heat into space), then releases it as thermal energy, trapping it in our atmosphere.
This video gives a great explanation of this effect.
Humans have burned fossil fuels (one of the planet's stores of carbon) for the last few centuries, which has created a large amount of carbon dioxide. This has added a huge amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which accelerates the greenhouse effect, warming the earth.
As the earth gets warmer, ice melts, releasing water (which raises sea levels) and decreasing the earth's albedo (which brings on further warming). Also, increased carbon dioxide concentrations acidify the oceans as they form carbonic acid in water, this is a side-effect of global warming.
Changing climate will affect the world's rainfall and temperature patterns, which will cause massive changes in agriculture and food production, trigger large-scale human movement, and likely destabilize many of the institutions of our civilization, leading to wars and other resource crises. Ocean acidification could massively upset the ecosystems of the world's oceans, which could compound our problems. Climate change can potentially lead to some pretty humongous harm to humanity. It almost certainly won't wipe us out, but it will hurt a lot, and the longer it takes us to take action, the worse the squeeze will get.
I'm literate, convince me....I'll listen and read and understand but understand that I'm scientifically literate and so are the majority of petroleum engineers.
I'll be happy to talk to you and answer more questions, and address your doubts about climate change.
And science is all about discussion, experimentation, and the development of the best explanations we can find to the phenomena that we observe!
/End Response.
You could also add the quote from Upton Sinclair, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!", given that he's a petroleum engineer whose industry could potentially be harmed by some of the actions taken to combat climate change, but that might not be the smartest decision when trying to convince someone of something new.
Pretty sure he'd get fired if he mentioned climate change under Harperstan.
Harper can muzzle all of the government-funded scientists talking about climate and ecology, but he can't silence me because I'm currently not employed in my field of study.
I did this with predictably loltastic results. First he compared the IPCC to the Vatican, then he got insulted that I would insinuate he hasn't read the reports and informed me he HAD read them in-depth. So either he's too stupid to get even a basic understanding of ice (as NK points out) or he's lying because I'm skoolin him in the skoolyard.
Well, you can explain the nature of the IPCC: it was created to be deliberately overcautious and lightfooted.
Spencer Weart said:
The Reagan administration wanted to forestall pronouncements by self-appointed committees of scientists, fearing they would be 'alarmist.' Conservatives promoted the IPCC's clumsy structure, which consisted of representatives appointed by every government in the world and required to consult all the thousands of experts in repeated rounds of report-drafting in order to reach a consensus. Despite these impediments the IPCC has issued unequivocal statements on the urgent need to act.
If you're going to trust anyone about the climate, you should trust the IPCC.
