Global Warming is Stuck in the Ice

[CavLancer]

Derision is what I didn't come to this discussion for, and people with reason don't turn to it when their logic runs amiss. It was once possible to discuss things, long ago. There was a time when people could accept that we might be wrong, even about stuff that is important to them. That was before everything became someone's fault.

Now I see the sun ramping down, something that has never happened to this extent since humanity walked the Earth, according to some. To the Russian scientists its going to be nothing more than a 200 years minimum. So I throw that in the arena for... discussion, and I'm a denier, or whatever. That was a thread or two ago, and when I first learned to stop discussing. Why? Because nobody knows how to answer about stuff that isn't in those misbehaving models. Smoke, mirrors and BS are not much of a foundation when the warming stops. But! It cannot stop, you guys have too much invested. This guilt has become part of your identity and you would be lost without it. Imo anyway.

You may be at fault for raising CO2, but not to worry, its a good thing. Time to stop transfering your guilt to the oil companies and "deniers" and start taking some credit for a job well done.

...and lets move on and start looking into what's really happening to the planet.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

Derision is what I didn't come to this discussion for, and people with reason don't turn to it when their logic runs amiss.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=12804419&postcount=1018

But AGW? Give me a break, you are being played for suckers.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=12808781&postcount=1040

Reality has become the enemy of AGW "scientists". No matter what is posted to the contrary it has been "debunked" which I guess means its been rejected by those whose financial welfare depends on government grants. No matter what dubious crap is presented to undo "deniers" it is accepted as fact because these sources are to be trusted while any source which goes against is suspect. CO2 as the main driver of AGW must be maintained under any circumstance no matter how incredible the argument is and its possible because people are just that gullible.

Holier than thou attitude minus two notches,

 

[CavLancer]

Played for suckers and gullible, Ziggy? Bad Lance, bad!

Now I'm "Holier than thou", just more of the same Ziggy. You are stuck and can't get free. Someone tries to give you a hand and you strike out at it.

 

[Bootstoots]

Beggars can't be choosers. We needed a messenger who could project, because god knows plenty of people ignore/mistrust scientists. At least you are forced to hear Al Gore, he riles up the haterz. These haterz then proceed to crap all over themselves when arguing against global climate change, as this thread is an example of. If that was indeed the strategy, it was brilliant and probably what converted me to believing in GCC.

If getting the haterz to crap all over themselves in climate change debates all over the internet was the goal, I agree that he succeeded. But I doubt that was the goal, and if it was then it wasn't a very good one.

In the US (and seemingly also Australia and to some extent Canada and the UK) simply believing the science behind climate change is now considered a left-wing belief. The Republican Party, in its drift toward rigid party orthodoxy, has essentially prevented any of its elected officials from speaking about climate change, even though a number of its politicians (e.g. John McCain) were vocally concerned about it in the early 2000s. Within the Democratic Party, it is a subject that Democrats in vulnerable districts/states have to tiptoe around, especially in fossil fuel-rich districts.

I don't think this is a situation that's conducive to actually getting anything done in regards to the actual problem at hand. If somebody else with a high public profile, but not as much political baggage or potential for ad hominem attacks, had presented the documentary, it would likely have been better from a policy perspective.

But I doubt that it would have been all that much better, because the global economy is dependent on huge consumption of energy in forms that only fossil fuels provide in enough quantity, enough energy density, and without intermittency or nuclear waste. Still, major efforts to add renewables and make carbon emission more expensive will have some nontrivial impact, and efforts to do that here have been substantially weakened by climate change "skepticism".

 

[classical_hero]

The problem is that they have made many predictions and they aren't coming up.

 

[Hygro]

The problem is that they have made many predictions and they aren't coming up.

Such as?

 

[classical_hero]

Arctic summers ice-free 'by 2013'

http://www.science.org.au/nova/newscientist/105ns_001.htm
Here Tim Flannery said we should be getting used to very little rain, then we had our wettest year on record.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

Arctic summers ice-free 'by 2013'

Have you read the article or just the headline?

I concede the questionmark at the end of the sentence is dishonest. It wasn't really a question.

 

[Hygro]

Arctic summers ice-free 'by 2013'

http://www.science.org.au/nova/newscientist/105ns_001.htm
Here Tim Flannery said we should be getting used to very little rain, then we had our wettest year on record.

Your active participation in these threads over the years should have left you educated enough to know that if climate change exacerbates extreme weather, and since specifics of local weather (weather, not climate) are hard to predict, "wettest year on record" is a different manifestation of the same phenomena. BTW we're in a severe and unusual drought here in California.

 

[CavLancer]

Such as?

http://wattsupwiththat.com/climate-fail-files/

I suggest you start attacking the site to get out of this one.

 

[Dale]

if climate change exacerbates extreme weather

It doesn't. There's been heaps of science in the last few years showing that it is not true. Extreme weather is a manifestation of the severity of the difference between cold and hot weather cells. In a warming world the difference is reduced, which results in less extreme weather.

There's also a small amount of science that shows it's quite possible that cooling increases extreme weather, not warming. But it's still early days for that line of thinking.

 

[classical_hero]

Your active participation in these threads over the years should have left you educated enough to know that if climate change exacerbates extreme weather, and since specifics of local weather (weather, not climate) are hard to predict, "wettest year on record" is a different manifestation of the same phenomena. BTW we're in a severe and unusual drought here in California.

Australia has always been a land of droughts broken by flooding rains. Everything happens in cycles, just like the recent polar weather in the US happens only every so decades. We simply haven't seen the increase in extreme weather, just weather hitting more people due to more of us being around.

 

[Hygro]

Australia has always been a land of droughts broken by flooding rains. Everything happens in cycles, just like the recent polar weather in the US happens only every so decades. We simply haven't seen the increase in extreme weather, just weather hitting more people due to more of us being around.

Cycles doesn't mean "most extreme on record" though.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

It doesn't. There's been heaps of science in the last few years showing that it is not true. Extreme weather is a manifestation of the severity of the difference between cold and hot weather cells. In a warming world the difference is reduced, which results in less extreme weather.

No idea where I got this from, but I remember someone arguing that climate change also meant the areas where extreme weather occurs were shifting. So areas which weren't usually struck by extreme weather were struck by it now. That could mean other areas had less extreme weather.

And since: "No extreme weather today" isn't a headline, more reports were made of extreme weather.

 

[Hygro]

No idea where I got this from, but I remember someone arguing that climate change also meant the areas where extreme weather occurs were shifting. So areas which weren't usually struck by extreme weather were struck by it now. That could mean other areas had less extreme weather.

And since: "No extreme weather today" isn't a headline, more reports were made of extreme weather.

The synthesis of Dale and your posts means less aggregate extreme weather and more localized record breaking. Of course that can wreak havoc on natural habitats if the pace is too rapid.

Where I am we're having a mega drought, by the by.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

Sure, that could be very well true.

 

[timtofly]

The synthesis of Dale and your posts means less aggregate extreme weather and more localized record breaking. Of course that can wreak havoc on natural habitats if the pace is too rapid.

Where I am we're having a mega drought, by the by.

You should have a chat with your local jet stream coordinator.

 

[Hygro]

I don't know what that means.

 

[timtofly]

The jet stream has not been favorable to the western states, but it is dumping a lot of moisture on the central and eastern states.

 

[Dale]

No idea where I got this from, but I remember someone arguing that climate change also meant the areas where extreme weather occurs were shifting. So areas which weren't usually struck by extreme weather were struck by it now. That could mean other areas had less extreme weather.

And since: "No extreme weather today" isn't a headline, more reports were made of extreme weather.

Quite possibly true. We know the stratospheric jetstreams have moved slightly, which is going to change how the tropospheric cells turnover. This in term will move where particular weather events form and the direction they head.

As we also know, natural cycles also play their part in where extreme weather forms. As an example, with the flipping of ENSO from positive to negative cycles, tropical storms in the eastern Pacific have reduced whilst they've increased in the western Pacific.

I think at the end of the day though, that natural cycles play a far more important role in extreme weather than human impact.

The synthesis of Dale and your posts means less aggregate extreme weather and more localized record breaking. Of course that can wreak havoc on natural habitats if the pace is too rapid.

Where I am we're having a mega drought, by the by.

I would hesitate to say "more localised record breaking". The observations don't really support that. At this point in time it appears the "localised record breaking" has moved, with places recording extreme weather in the past, now not, but places that didn't in the past, now have. Perfect example is tropical storms. US used to get hit by a number of major storms (hurricanes) each season whilst Asia (Phills/Japan/China) didn't (cyclones/typhoons). The last few years its reversed. But that's more to do with the flipping of ENSO than human impact.

EDIT:
It should be stated that if you go back 40-60 years, you'll find the location of ENSO extreme weather swaps again. The ENSO cycle flips approximately every 35 years. So during the period 70-00, ENSO was in positive and producing warming which over-shadowed the human impact, whilst now ENSO is in negative and hiding the human impact.