Global Warming 'very likely' human made

[Leonel]

Right now those emails are just emails. They could either be genuine or completely manufactured by global warming skeptics.

 

[Ecofarm]

To say that humans are 100% responsible is to ignore geologic history.

It's not much different than religion or manbearpig.



ps. If bears get H1N1, we are do0med.

 

[El_Machinae]

We are now 4 degrees fairenheit below the 20th century average and had the 3rd coldest October on record.

Really?
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/


According to the Global-mean monthly, annual and seasonal dTs based on met.station data (title copied from link at the bottom of the page), The last two months have been the second warmest this decade. That's met stations, of course, so obviously suspect.

But the Global-mean monthly, annual and seasonal land-ocean temperature index (a couple links down from the first one) agrees.


Even Dr. Spencer's super-fun java-script says the last two months have been warmer than the last two years' Sept & Oct
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/execute.csh?amsutemps+001

 

[Brighteye]

You apparently didn't bother to download and read the emails before the link was shut down. I haven't made it through even a fraction of them, but it is very damaging evidence. However, what is available for you on the web is damaging enough.

No, I didn't read them. All I heard was a radio report about it. There was no clear evidence that anything's been falsified. There is clear evidence that a campaign group who didn't like his results pestered him and wasted his time with numerous freedom of information requests, and that this began to annoy him.
I'd say that the e-mails show that climate-change-sceptics don't engage properly with his science.

I have been told in the past that if I can show a specific result then I can get government funding.

By whom? By the funding body? Have you any ideas why that might be the case?

 

[El_Machinae]

The funding bias is to show a change. Results that report steady-state are (a) boring and (b) statistically difficult.

I'm more interested to hear that sea grass is declining globally at 7% than to find out that sea crab numbers around sea vents don't change with ocean acidity.

 

[Ayatollah So]

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index....6-4a61-8c2e-78fa8de4850d&Region_id=&Issue_id=

Ah, so your source is a Republican Senator. Color me skeptical of your "skepticism", then.

And then we have ...

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aBBQO5XgLQu4
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/?report=national&year=2009&month=10&submitted=Get+Report

...two USA-specific temperature reports which have extremely little value in addressing what's up with global climate.

I've read the emails from the russian ftp site that they went up on, but I will only give a link to those who have published some of them. I will not publish any that I do not see online.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/...ently-been-hacked-hundreds-of-files-released/

The quoted portions contain two, count 'em, two, authors of emails. Four if you count quoted-emails-within-emails, and one of those is a "skeptic". In those quoted portions only one author, Phil Jones, is doing something wrong. (The other guy, Jonathan Overpeck, is quoted refusing(!) to join in a political appeal - not that there's necessarily anything wrong with a scientist making a political appeal.) I only read the portions written by the website's author, so if the comments section has more, I missed it, but I'm not going to wade through that ... stuff.

Josh Willis from the Jet Propulsion laboratory showed that temperatures of the currents and deeper parts of the ocean have actually gotten colder.

Link? And how about a link to your previously-mentioned solar scientists?

Perhaps some parts of the ocean have gotten colder, but the sea level is rising. The primary driver of sea volume changes is thermal expansion. You do the math.

 

[Thomas1]

Ah, so your source is a Republican Senator. Color me skeptical of your "skepticism", then.

Link? And how about a link to your previously-mentioned solar scientists?

Perhaps some parts of the ocean have gotten colder, but the sea level is rising. The primary driver of sea volume changes is thermal expansion. You do the math.

I am not going to go search for a link which I posted the predictions of on this same forum a couple years ago. Yes, that was prior to it happening this year. ... Even if there was a well-publicized bet between a couple Russian solar scientists and the Global Warming scientists.

I have yet to see any prediction you have linked to that has come true.

You are dead wrong with your assumption about sea level rising due mainly to thermal expansion in the ocean, but that is a different topic altogether than Global Warming theory which says that warming temperatures are caused by man made events.

Just to humor you, the sea levels have risen about 4 feet per century ever since the last ice age. In the past century, sea levels have risen about one foot. In the latter half of the past century, the sea level has risen slower than the first half. You do realize however that you need to consider that ice is less dense than water just above freezing.

And what does that have to do with Global Warming being caused by CO2? Nobody has presented an accurate model of climate change based on man-made emissions. Including you. It is a stretch at best to claim that rising temperatures prove your assumptions that man is the cause. Especially when those assumptions came about after the trend of rising temperatures was discovered. Amazingly, before that trend was discovered, it was claimed that lowering temperatures proved that man was the cause of global cooling.

http://nov55.com/oceans.html

Where's your link that a specific event was predicted to have been caused by man-made global warming? That is what Global Warming theory is all about. Where is your link that shows where someone predicted an event based on the Global Warming models? Right now, the best model of Global Warming has about a 5% success rate.

 

[Thomas1]

No, I didn't read them. All I heard was a radio report about it. There was no clear evidence that anything's been falsified. There is clear evidence that a campaign group who didn't like his results pestered him and wasted his time with numerous freedom of information requests, and that this began to annoy him.
I'd say that the e-mails show that climate-change-sceptics don't engage properly with his science.


By whom? By the funding body? Have you any ideas why that might be the case?

Yes, I know why it was the case. People like to see "progress". And "progress" to many people means supporting a theory instead of contributing to disprove it. For example, in this case, it is more difficult to prove actual causes than to match data to a pre-conceived trend. It also takes longer, we don't have the equipment, and haven't taken in enough data.

Don't get me wrong about my objection to the Global Warming scientists. I am very much pro-environment. But I also don't like to see science being misused. Especially for political purposes.

On another side note, I find it ironic that we tend to burn more fossil fuels when the weather gets colder.

 

[El_Machinae]

I'm not saying that the last two months confirm warming, but I will say that the last two months have been the second hottest this decade. This will disprove whatever point you were trying to make about the cold October, I think.

If you click your user name, you can "find all posts" by you. It should be possible to spin through them to find a link your earlier predictions on this very forum. All your posts are in this thread, even.

Additionally, please use the multi-quote feature in order to post replies to multiple people in one post.

 

[GinandTonic]

I am not going to go search for a link which I posted the predictions of on this same forum a couple years ago. Yes, that was prior to it happening this year.

You have 19 posts.

Thats less than one page of results.

Under which circs it is not unreasonable to say, put up or shut up.

 

[Dachs]

And all in the same thread...

 

[GinandTonic]

Is it just my cynicism that believes that a poster who posts 19 times in two years in one very politically sensitive thread is in danger of being misconstrued as a plant?

 

[Brighteye]

The funding bias is to show a change. Results that report steady-state are (a) boring and (b) statistically difficult.

I'm more interested to hear that sea grass is declining globally at 7% than to find out that sea crab numbers around sea vents don't change with ocean acidity.

And if everyone says that sea grass is declining, then you're very interested to hear that it isn't. Yes, it's always nice to show something different. At this stage in the debate I don't think that such a bias favours one side over another.
In my fields there are a number of vigorous debates and funding goes to people because they write in their papers and grant applications that they are overturning someone else's work; that they are doing ground-breaking work that is re-defining a field of study.
With such bias I would expect so-called 'sceptics' to get more funding.

Yes, I know why it was the case. People like to see "progress". And "progress" to many people means supporting a theory instead of contributing to disprove it.

That might be the case in your fields, but it isn't, as I have just written, in mine.

Is it just my cynicism that believes that a poster who posts 19 times in two years in one very politically sensitive thread is in danger of being misconstrued as a plant?

No, not at all. But if someone wants to have an argument, I'm often willing, even if the person doesn't want the social consequences of such an argument in other threads.

 

[Ayatollah So]

I have yet to see any prediction you have linked to that has come true.

You are dead wrong with your assumption about sea level rising due mainly to thermal expansion in the ocean, but that is a different topic altogether than Global Warming theory which says that warming temperatures are caused by man made events.
[...]
http://nov55.com/oceans.html

There are two main drivers of sea level: ice cover forming/melting on land, and thermal expansion. Conventional wisdom has it that the glaciers haven't melted all that much and that the sea level rise is therefore mostly due to thermal expansion. Of course, you are welcome to argue that the sea level rise is in fact caused by melting glaciers, but I don't see how this helps your case. And, the source you just cited claims that ice sheets are getting thicker - which means that thermal expansion is required just to keep sea levels steady.

How is this relevant? Because your Russian scientists predicted global cooling (so you say). The sea level change disproves that prediction. The oceans are the primary storehouse for earth's heat budget, so if they're warming, we're warming.

Your source does show - touche - that sea level has changed negligibly since 2006. (But not fallen, as claimed in that site. The original data source, with barometric corrections applied, shows a very slightly higher level in 2009 than 2006.) But, essentially flat sea level still disproves the Russians' (as reported by you) prediction. With some caveats (if you assume that, contrary to some of your sources, ice sheets are thinning, and if you assume that this is precipitation-driven not temperature-driven, you can save the hypothesis that the earth cooled lately).

I don't care a fig whether climate change is caused by humans, solar changes, or orbital changes - the important thing is that it not happen too fast or too far, because civilization will suffer. If the sun is about to go into a long phase of reduced activity, then we had better crank up the CO2 or methane production, or some such. But if not (and if none of the other forcings is about to chill us), then we had better not.

You want testable predictions? Try these: CO2 will continue to absorb in the infrared, in bands that are not all fully saturated. The earth will continue to receive energy primarily in the visible and near-IR and discharge it in the IR. The laws of thermodynamics will continue to apply to the earth. Now those are testable. But I wouldn't bother testing them much; they're too well-established. One more prediction, going very slightly out on a limb: adding CO2 and/or heat to the atmosphere will not magically make daytime cloud cover increase enough to essentially cancel the greenhouse forcing by CO2.

 

[Berzerker]

There are two main drivers of sea level: ice cover forming/melting on land, and thermal expansion.

and they can work together to "negate" each other - warmer waters means increased evaporation = more snow/rain over ice sheets reducing the amount of water in the oceans, even moreso than melt and returning run-off. I dont know for sure but I read somewhere that sea levels lowered during the warm period from 1900-40 and then sea levels rose during the cool period 1940-70.

 

[Ayatollah So]

You have 19 posts.

Thats less than one page of results.

Under which circs it is not unreasonable to say, put up or shut up.

Using your hint, I found the reference to the bet made by Russian solar scientists. Then I googled their names and got this:

Solar physicists Galina Mashnich and Vladimir Bashkirtsev, of the Institute of Solar-Terrestrial Physics of the Siberian Division of the Russian Academy of Sciences, believe the climate is driven by the sun and predict global cooling will soon occur. The two scientists are so convinced that global temperatures will cool within the next decade they have placed a $10,000 wager with a UK scientist to prove their certainty. The criteria for the $10,000 bet will be to “compare global temperatures between 1998 and 2003 with those between 2012 and 2017. The loser will pay up in 2018,” according to an April 16, 2007 article in Live Science.

So, the prediction has yet to be tested. Testing starts in 2012. Gotta say, including the anomalously high temperature year 1998 in the reference point was a clever move by those Russians. I doubt it will help them much, though.

 

[MeteorPunch]

This is a good summary of the truth about climate change. I don't believe in recklessly polluting and destroying the earth, but the taxes aspect is silly and has got to make people wonder.


Link to video.

 

[Thomas1]

Right now those emails are just emails. They could either be genuine or completely manufactured by global warming skeptics.

Except that a number of people who were originally copied on those emails have verified their accuracy and that they are the real deal. However, some people could use this opportunity to introduce faked emails. And I have no doubt they will. However, of the ones that had been on the ftp server that reporters have contacted people who they were sent to, I have heard nothing but verification and no comments.

 

[MeteorPunch]

New Zealand has been faking their weather data as well. Lots of good info and comments on this site.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/...ells-a-different-story-than-the-official-one/

In New Zealand’s case, the figures published on NIWA’s [the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric research] website suggest a strong warming trend in New Zealand over the past century:


But analysis of the raw climate data from the same temperature stations has just turned up a very different result:

 

[aelf]

Is it just my cynicism that believes that a poster who posts 19 times in two years in one very politically sensitive thread is in danger of being misconstrued as a plant?

I'm thinking the same thing. For someone talking about ulterior motives, he seems to be very suspicious himself.

It's been the trend for skeptics to pretend they understand the science, but I guess they now pretend to be scientists themselves.

I admit I'm far from having any sort of expertise, but I'm satisfied by the empirical data showing AGW that has been provided by scientific bodies, all of whom, I'm supposed to believe, are engaged in a billion-dollar scam. I guess the logic is since laymen can't investigate the physical truth for themselves, they should not believe the scientists, who must have some sort of sinister agenda. Similarly, since I can't know myself what the solar system looks like, I might as well believe that the people who came up with the model are engaging in an elaborate scam.

All the while, traditional fossil fuel-based industries are still raking in so much profit from the status quo. I guess they got bored and decided to move on to something they are involved in making up. R&D with a twist.

So, rather than believe scientific bodies, we are supposed to believe conspiracy theorists, whom in all their nutty glory are able to post Youtube videos as part of their indisputable evidence.

I'm convinced, really.