Global Warming

[gene90]

What authority do you want on Global Warming?

I'm not interested in authority. Nor do I care what the majority of scientists think, I want to know why they think that. I will judge if it is worthy of the fuss people are making over it.

 

[gene90]

Yes, it's an interesting gamble! Let’s cross our fingers and hope for the best

Do a Google search on "Pascal's Wager". Pay special attention to treatment from agnostic/atheist sources.

 

[gene90]

gene90 wrote Again I ask, what part of the science do you disagree with?

I disagree with your plugging of numbers into software models and forecasting doom. You have a lot staked on minimal data and don't seem to mind including feedback models that others on your side have repeatedly admitted are poorly understood.

Further, your model outputs are not falsifiable in a relevant timeframe. I am convinced that the very premise is untestable at this junction and therefore irrelevant to political debate, and is, dare I say, questionable science until it is testable. I am not saying you shouldn't have all the funding you need, because it is potentially important. I am saying that GW is blown way out of proportion.

This is not a peer reviewed journal, as such it must be looked at as basically a magazine (i.e. it reflects the opinions of the editor).

You just took a piss on one of the most important journals in geology.

However, I have verified that that particular portion of the journal only requires editorial consent.

 

[BasketCase]

Further, your model outputs are not falsifiable in a relevant timeframe. I am convinced that the very premise is untestable at this junction and therefore irrelevant to political debate, and is, dare I say, questionable science until it is testable.

My opinion exactly. With the advent of the theory that global warming could cause an Ice Age, anything the planet does, whether it gets warmer or colder, could be blamed on global warming.

 

[carlosMM]

[snip]perhaps CarlosMM.

They are into climate modeling, which is speculative. I'm into geology, which deals with past climates, and is based on observation. I do not mean to question their science on this ground, both views are important. But when observation conficts with a model, observation always wins.[/snip]

Well, you'd be right if I was into modelling
But not only am I not, but the people I have my information from are all owrking in a geology department. Most do various ways of modeling past climates (and obviously check them against the evidence) to achieve a better understanding of climate change processes, whcih then can be applied to recent climate models.

They have gotten tot eh point where modeling the climate of larger Asia for the last few thousand years gives exact results if the (historic) deforestation of the Tibet plateau is taken into account - so their models are fairly good. And that is why I trust them in principle (though the margin of error is not exactly small). The trends are obvious.

I'm sure they're good scientists, but they are modelers. Modelers have this nasty habit of sitting in dark rooms and never going outside to check their data. They also have a tendency to define the real world by models, instead of defining models by the real world. A prof once told us of dealing with one of these guys. In a professional meeting, he was told by a modeler that a cave did not exist because the model said it didn't. He told the modeler that he would be sure to inform the cave of that on his next visit.

I've met them, too, and we acutally have them in our Applied Geoscience Department. But not our climate guys.

I look to the past to understand the future, they use computers.

now add to this sentence:
use computers to improve the understanding and evaluate the old data.

The type of modeler you critizise is exactly the kind I'd like to kick in the lower back.

150 years is a long time to atmospheric physicists, it is no more significant than a summer breeze in my view of climate.

It will sound very very strange to the ears of any biologist (and it does sound to me), but complex systems tend to react funny - think punctuated equilibrium! If (and that is what you are contesting) the last 150 years are a period of accelerated and unusual change, and if that change is fundamental (i.e. outside the fluctuation that get stabilized away by self-weakening processes), then we will get a sudden change. Very sudden.

They see a sea level of 66 meters higher than that of today as unusually high, I see today's sea level as unusually low.

Let's take a step back here and check our paradigms, OK?

You say that TODAY should be comapred to LONG AGO - Eocene or Miocene or maybe the Cretaceous?
Well, you are then right, and even a far shorter time back you will get a significantly different climate.


But look at the time in which mankind arose and spread around the world - in ALL THAT TIME (and this is after all what is interesting to us!) the cliamte was in the glacial / interglacial range, with the usual confusing Milankovich cycles. And ATM our temp and athmospheric composition are leaving developing AGAINST the cycle, and rapidly. This sure smells like a system change. And, honestly, current sea levels may be extremely low, but would you like the midwest to become a shallow warm sea for your kids to swim in?

They see a sea level rise as catastrophy, I see it as inevitable even without human intervention, and even if there were not secular change in climate.

True, but in what timeframe?

as for the rest: I must leave work in 2 hours for a work trip and thus have no time now. Sorry.

 

[carlosMM]

@mods: I know some here will see this post as US bashing. It is in no way intended to be, and I am willing to elaborate more if that should be needed for clarification of my position. The following is my honest opinion, derived from professional contact with Americans and Europeans.

You just took a piss on one of the most important journals in geology.

However, I have verified that that particular portion of the journal only requires editorial consent.

That certain journal is getting a lot of here lately. This may have to do with the American way of debate (get data, see where it points you, pick that position a priori and then defend it to hell) and the European way of debate (get data, look where it points you, produce a hypothesis, check it to hell, then pick your position). No, I am not joking, the culture of science is definately different. There would NEVER be such an idiotic debate like the T. rex-scavenger/predator one in Europe! Used to be, but not anymore. People tend to ask people in related fields (as neither of the loudmouth contestants did in the debate I mentioned), tend to adapt their ideas to new data (it is not a sin to have been wrong, but the American media have a way of pretending it is) etc.

And that leads to a certain consternation about many American researchers here in the EU. I'd say that 80% do good work, but the loudest and most reknown and most published have a quota of at the very least 50% bad guys.
And the recent changes in our funding systems lead to a similar effect here, too

 

[carlosMM]

Most of the State of Louisianna.

Sorry, but one tiny state with a few tiny swamps left is not in any way capable of taking up all that CO2 (which, btw, is proven by the fat that the level is shooting up). Also, we'd need MORE swamps, not fewer - and when was the last time any state INTENTIONALLY swamped a large area and left it alone to rot?

no, we are drying out land all over the place, reducing CO2 sinks (and also methane production, which is good).

And when sea level does come up, and it is inevitable with or without anthropogenic GW, the area of coal swamp will increase and CO2 sinks will increase proporitionately. Not just in swamps but in carbonate banks as well, and also as forests advance across what was formerly tundra.

In a world more comparable to the Mesozoic then to last century......

You have chicken-and-egg issues here. The reason there were so many sinks in the Mississippian was because it was warm and sea level was up. It is cold now and sea level is low, so there aren't as many sinks.

Entirely ture.

Check again my post above - we use different paragims here! Thus you did not 'get' what I was driving at!

 

[Pikachu]

This was answered with the analogy to the invasion of Iraq, in which we spent hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives because Saddam might have had WMDs. And yet for the same side that argues that we should take drastic action to mitigate alleged global warming; the Iraq invasion was unjustified.

Oh, please! Why didn’t you pay attention to what the weapon inspectors said before the war? The experts told us that USA tried to pull a bluff to justify the war. Some of the world leaders didn’t buy the bluff though. To compare Powel’s pathetic attempt to deceive the UN with the excellent research done on global warming is very speculative.

if "corporations" caused asteroid impacts we'd be hearing about it as much as we hear about GW.

Of course we would! To cause asteroid impacts would be a completely unacceptable behavior, even if it was a byproduct of something we need. If corporations caused asteroid impacts we would be willing to do anything to stop them.

Do a Google search on "Pascal's Wager". Pay special attention to treatment from agnostic/atheist sources.

Stupid analogy! Pretending to believe in God just in case wouldn’t work. The faith has to be sincere to have any potential effect. You cannot fool God!

Can we go back to discussing global warming now, instead of all these meaningless analogies?

Because the amount of money invested in correcting an alleged problem should always be directly proportional to the evidence that the problem even exists.

Simple concept.

(…)

Ok. Let's dump several hundred billion dollars into Spaceguard Survey.

There you go again! You are mixing the acknowledgement of the problem with the costs of fixing it. How can you deny that how real the problem is has nothing to do with the costs of fixing it? Don’t let your economic motives affect how you see reality!

What we want to do about the problem does however have everything to do with how expensive it will be. Of course we can choose inaction even if we acknowledge that the problem is real. Maybe the side effects of the cure will be worse than the disease? Then it we would be better off to just live with the disease.

False dichotomy.

The human influence may not even be detectable.

The human contribution is massive! Unless something else cancels out the effect, the human influence will necessarily be very detectable. It is already detectable, by the way, but two different human influences are currently almost canceling each other out (Increased greenhouse effect and aerosols), so the net result is minimal. That balance will soon change though.

So it's obviously not about humans not changing the environment, it is about whether it matters.

True! So why do you have to reject that humans are changing the global climate? Shouldn’t you instead be arguing that it doesn’t matter that we change the climate?

In other words, you don't know if we're causing global warming, and you don't know if it's by CO2, and if it is, you don't know if Kyoto will have any affect.

That would only be true if direct observations alone was the only way to understand how the world works. It is however a widespread belief in the scientific community that there are some physical relations we can understand and use to predict some effects of some actions. It appears like some of the most fundamental laws of physics never fail. From such physical relations I know that more CO2 in an isolated case causes global warming, and Kyoto will have a minor effect on reducing this disturbance. I don’t know what end results the disturbance will give, but that we do disturb the planet’s energy balance is undeniable.

 

[bigfatron]

gene

I'm really frustrated now - unless I've missed it you are deliberately failing to respond to my direct question, which is a little annoying given you opened up the debate.

here it is again, in as simple form as I can manage:

In respect of global warming/climate change, you reject the conclusion that climate change is a genuine risk. The grounds you employ, if I have interpreted them correctly, are that the projections supporting the risk assessment are models of complex systems incorporating a number of subtle boundary conditions and therefore not fully reliable, that these models produce a range of outcomes that prevents identification of clear consequences, observed outcomes are not 100% consistent with predicted outcomes, and that feedback mechanisms may inhibit damaging outcomes.

In respect of economic change arising from energy eficiency/control measure, you accept uncritically the conclusion that climate change action is not just a risk, but certainly economically damaging. Yet these economic projections supporting the risk assessment are models of complex systems incorporating a number of subtle boundary conditions and therefore not fully reliable, these models produce a range of outcomes that prevents identification of clear consequences, observed outcomes are not 100% consistent with predicted outcomes, and there exist feedback mechanisms may inhibit damaging outcomes.

What is more, in this case we have actual, observable and comparable experience which contradicts the assertions made.

So, we have two relatively similar cases, one economic and one climatic, except that in one case - economic damage - we have observable, real world contradiction of the main hypothesis.

Yet you insist that the climatic hypothesis is unreliable, whilst accepting the weaker, economic hypothesis as gospel truth. Why is this?

 

[Gothmog]

Gene90 wrote:

Here is the source of the difference of opinion between myself and Gothmog, and perhaps CarlosMM.

They are into climate modeling, which is speculative. I'm into geology, which deals with past climates, and is based on observation. I do not mean to question their science on this ground, both views are important. But when observation conficts with a model, observation always wins.

I'm sure they're good scientists, but they are modelers. Modelers have this nasty habit of sitting in dark rooms and never going outside to check their data. They also have a tendency to define the real world by models, instead of defining models by the real world. A prof once told us of dealing with one of these guys. In a professional meeting, he was told by a modeler that a cave did not exist because the model said it didn't. He told the modeler that he would be sure to inform the cave of that on his next visit.

Well, actually I’m currently employed as a Physicist and earth scientist and I do employ computers for much of my work right now, but my training is in chemistry. Analytical, Atmospheric, and Inorganic chemistry, where I’ve done much lab work and field work. I’ve been unusually interdisciplinary, and it’s been a blessing and a curse to me. I agree that observation wins in most cases. It’s like the old joke…

What’s the difference between a theoretician and an experimentalist?
The theoretician always believes the results of the experimenter prove the validity of his/her theory.
The experimenter never even believes his own results.

150 years is a long time to atmospheric physicists, it is no more significant than a summer breeze in my view of climate.

Unfortunately 150 years is a very significant period of time wrt human development.

They see a sea level rise as catastrophy, I see it as inevitable even without human intervention, and even if there were not secular change in climate.

We also read different journals and go to different professional meetings. In fact, GothMog called AAPG Bulletin 'not peer-reviewed'. That shows me how much our two disciplines are communicating right now.

Of course I agree that sea level rise, and climate change are inevitable. I’ve said as much in this thread. I apologize if the AAPG Bulletin is indeed peer reviewed, I thought it was a weekly magazine much like ‘Physics Today’, ‘EOS’, or ‘ACS Chemical & Physical Sciences News’. I read those publications and did not mean to piss on anything, they have a roll to play. But there is a big difference between a peer reviewed article and an editorial.

However, I have verified that that particular portion of the journal only requires editorial consent.

Thank you for your honesty, I assumed that was the case.

It's called Clean Coal Technology and it will seriously alleviate the energy crisis.

I’ve actually worked on this technology, a major institute is in the next building over. I also have worked on carbon sequestration, and even the problem of deflecting meteorites. I have no worries about my funding for various reasons.

Nor do I care what the majority of scientists think, I want to know why they think that. I will judge if it is worthy of the fuss people are making over it.

Please look into it in more detail then, and not just on web sites that lead you to post totally discredited science (i.e. that all climate variance is controlled by the sun, leaving no room for an anthropogenic impact), or other plots that you don’t fully understand the implications of.

I doubt anyone will actually read this but I want to give another summary of the reasons why the handwaving arguments about ‘oh climate has changed a lot in the past’ don’t hold any water with me. Like this little bit written by BasketCase

What actually happened in this thread was this: whenever I pointed out a place where the two didn't match up, somebody said "various other factors" blabbity blah. Mysteriously, every single time CO2 and temperature fail to correlate, it's seems to be for this reason (although I must point out that nobody knows what those other factors are.....) If those "various other factors" are keeping temperature spikes in check so often.....then a pattern begins to emerge.....

This is an unfair comparison, we have much more data about what factors currently drive the climate. For example, oceanic circulation. We know a lot about how the ocean circulates today, we don’t know as much about 10000 years ago much less 100000 years ago. The same goes for the current state of aerosols and trace gasses in our atmosphere, and even general atmospheric circulation. We know a lot about the current biosphere, much less about past ones. Less and less as you go back further and further. Again for glaciation, we know the current state of affairs, less and less as we go back. I know about paleoclimatological records of glaciation, but their time resolution gets worse and worse as we go back in time. Same goes for the distribution of gas hydrates in the ocean. etc. etc.

So to make an argument about CO2 and temperature not correlating at a few points in the past 500000 years is not convincing to me at all. Not only that but it shows a basic ignorance about what current climate models can and cannot do.

If we had data equivalent to what we have for the modern climate then we could explain what the controlling factors were. We do not have that data. Thus, it is not a fair comparison.

We do understand the current state of affairs wrt the earth system’s energy balance. We do understand that CO2 is having a major impact, increasing the amount of heat retained significantly. We even have a pretty good idea how that is affecting things on a human type timescale (clouds are still a bit iffy). We do not know the details of how the earth system will respond to that change on longer time scales. We do know that the last 10000 years have been very kind to the human race.

The question of what to do with this knowledge is really a political one.

I think Kyoto is a good idea because it asks for so little (as pointed out in detail by bigfatron), and it provides an institution that can develop to deal with the larger issues of climate change. Under Kyoto we will still burn every bit of reduced carbon we can get our hands on, it only changes the time scale in a very minor way. But it creates an institution that can offer a way of doing things if we decide things need to be done. It is simply a pragmatic thing to get started. Humans will need beter systems to help deal institutionally with climate change at some point in the not too distant future.

 

[gene90]

In a world more comparable to the Mesozoic then to last century......

Not only the Mesozoic but most of geologic time. Before the Cenozoic, how much time had Kansas spent as not being the bottom of a sea? Part of the Permian and part of the Jurassic?

We often like to say that 'the present is the key to the past', but I think one prof summed it up better to say that 'the past is the key to the present'. When we look at maps of paleogeography, it is not the paleogeographic maps that are "weird" because of the current lowstand, it is our own. How long will sea levels stay this low? I'd say that they're eventually coming up anyway even if we didn't have industry.

I'll try to re-examine your post above so hopefully you won't have to spend more time explaining. At the moment, I don't have a lot of time.

 

[gene90]

In respect of global warming/climate change, you reject the conclusion that climate change is a genuine risk.

Climate change, both human-driven and natural, is a real risk. It will happen, even if we throw all our toys away and go back to chipping flint.

The grounds you employ, if I have interpreted them correctly, are that the projections supporting the risk assessment are models of complex systems incorporating a number of subtle boundary conditions and therefore not fully reliable, that these models produce a range of outcomes that prevents identification of clear consequences, observed outcomes are not 100% consistent with predicted outcomes, and that feedback mechanisms may inhibit damaging outcomes.

Yes.

In respect of economic change arising from energy eficiency/control measure, you accept uncritically the conclusion that climate change action is not just a risk, but certainly economically damaging.

To the tune of $10 billion US dollars every year, with a disproportionate amount of financial hardship being directed at the elderly. Over 50 years, that's $500 billion US dollars (in today's value). Before Kyoto is done, it is likely that the United States alone will have spent more money than it would cost to provide every human being on Earth with clean and safe drinking water.

Fossils fuels will be replaced with more expensive technologies, some of which may have greater environmental impact and which will consume more raw materials in construction, such as solar and windfarms.

The treaty that would mandate such measures would be unenforceable. And some industrial nations like Mexico would not be bound by it. Industries would flee the United States even more rapidly than they already do to nations with more lax environmental and worker protection laws. American workers would lose jobs at an even faster pace, and net global pollution in everything but CO2 would increase.

Yet these economic projections supporting the risk assessment are models of complex systems incorporating a number of subtle boundary conditions and therefore not fully reliable, these models produce a range of outcomes that prevents identification of clear consequences, observed outcomes are not 100% consistent with predicted outcomes, and there exist feedback mechanisms may inhibit damaging outcomes.

But it's irresponsible to "kick the system", remember?

By the way, your anecdotal evidence about the UK's economy doesn't mean that CO2 emission controls don't cause harm. It could just as easily be that that nation's growth would be even more rapid without it. You are fallaciously assuming a cause-and-effect, and you don't have enough information to support it.

 

[gene90]

Some of the world leaders didn’t buy the bluff though. To compare Powel’s pathetic attempt to deceive the UN with the excellent research done on global warming is very speculative.

I'm not going to hijack the thread.

But the problem is, that I haven't seen any evidence of anthropogenic global warming. I see a 150 year temperature curve with a net increase, and I see CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere going up. The rest are software models.

Stupid analogy! Pretending to believe in God just in case wouldn’t work. The faith has to be sincere to have any potential effect. You cannot fool God!

I agree. But whether or not God can be fooled is irrelevant to the analogy.

Can we go back to discussing global warming now, instead of all these meaningless analogies?

It's not meaningless, because the logic behind supporting the Kyoto Protocol without knowing if GW is real is exactly the same.

There you go again! You are mixing the acknowledgement of the problem with the costs of fixing it.

They cannot be separated. Before we pay to fix the problem, we should at least know that the problem exists.

If we spend 10 billion dollars on the problem, the evidence should be much stronger than it would take for us to spend 10, do you agree? Therefore economic ramifications are relevant to our standards of how much evidence we should have.

The human contribution is massive!

A 5% contribution to the total carbon budget, according the previously cited AAPG Bulletin article I was rereading today. It was a secondary cite from some US government source dated 1998. I need to look up the primary source when I have time.

Unless something else cancels out the effect, the human influence will necessarily be very detectable.

Will it? Does an increase of CO2 into the atmosphere warm the atmosphere? Do you have direct evidence of this?

It is already detectable

I disagree. There has been a warming over the last 150 years. But if that is our doing we don't know.

True! So why do you have to reject that humans are changing the global climate?

I'm sure we have having some effect, somewhere. But that is not the same as bringing out the hockeystick and saying that all of it is our fault.

Shouldn’t you instead be arguing that it doesn’t matter that we change the climate?

I've said that too.

That would only be true if direct observations alone was the only way to understand how the world works.

It is. You can use models to approximate unknown values, such as in Monte Carlo simulations. But you still have to verify it against the real world when you're done.

It is however a widespread belief in the scientific community that there are some physical relations we can understand and use to predict some effects of some actions. It appears like some of the most fundamental laws of physics never fail. From such physical relations I know that more CO2 in an isolated case causes global warming

We know the atmosphere works by the laws of physics, and there are highly sophisticated computer models of the atmosphere. But our models usually give somewhat contradictory results, and none of them can even predict exactly where a hurricane will make landfall even 24 hours in advance. In fact, I'm told that any forecast past about five days is pretty iffy.

You have fallen into the trap of believing that just because a system works by known laws, we have full understanding of it. We don't. You also used the word "isolated case". Nothing we are talking about here is isolated.

 

[gene90]

I apologize if the AAPG Bulletin is indeed peer reviewed, I thought it was a weekly magazine much like ‘Physics Today’, ‘EOS’, or ‘ACS Chemical & Physical Sciences News’. I read those publications and did not mean to piss on anything, they have a roll to play.

Parts of Bulletin are PR'd. I thought the GeoHorizons section was too because underneath the first page of the article it had the date of submission, and the date at which the revised version was received.

I would point out that such an article in such a journal would show that there is a considerable number of holdouts on the GW issue, at least in that community.

I am in no way offended, but rather amused that our subdisciplines apparently aren't reading the same journals.

So to make an argument about CO2 and temperature not correlating at a few points in the past 500000 years is not convincing to me at all.

In another post, Pikachu made the implication that because we know the thermodynamic properties of CO2, we must also know that increasing CO2 will increase temperature. Do you agree, or disagree with him on this point?

My point is that if we see CO2 concentration going up without temperature going up afterwards, this discredits the theory of anthropogenic global warming.

You can try to explain this by saying that there are a bunch of variables that we don't know and so it may not apply to today. And you would probably be right. But if you do, it makes anthropogenic GW untestable. I suspect that it is, but if it is proven, then I will oppose it even more strongly than I ever have before.

We do understand the current state of affairs wrt the earth system’s energy balance. We do understand that CO2 is having a major impact, increasing the amount of heat retained significantly.

If you have time, could you elaborate on the above?

 

[MattII]

Check out a period known as the Younger Dryas, a rapid ice age that happened 11,000-12,000 years ago, temperatures afterwards rose by four degrees in two decades overall, and by as much as eight degees in a decade in some places. Another known ice ages is the Cryogenian. For 20 million years after attaining (relatively) its current position at the south pole, Antarctica remained covered in plants and animals.

 

[bigfatron]

Climate change, both human-driven and natural, is a real risk. It will happen, even if we throw all our toys away and go back to chipping flint.

OK - I used climate change as shorthand for human-induced, harmful climate change. With that modifier, I believe you would reject the conclusion?

Yes.

At least that one is clear!

To the tune of $10 billion US dollars every year, with a disproportionate amount of financial hardship being directed at the elderly. Over 50 years, that's $500 billion US dollars (in today's value). Before Kyoto is done, it is likely that the United States alone will have spent more money than it would cost to provide every human being on Earth with clean and safe drinking water.

Fossils fuels will be replaced with more expensive technologies, some of which may have greater environmental impact and which will consume more raw materials in construction, such as solar and windfarms.

The treaty that would mandate such measures would be unenforceable. And some industrial nations like Mexico would not be bound by it. Industries would flee the United States even more rapidly than they already do to nations with more lax environmental and worker protection laws. American workers would lose jobs at an even faster pace, and net global pollution in everything but CO2 would increase.

No, no no!!!!!

What basis do you use for these 'statements of fact'? Economic projections! These use simple models to predict the behaviour of complex systems, subject to even more complex boundary conditions than those affecting the climate. These models are frequently proven to be inaccurate at predicting economic behaviour, especially as they include simplifying assumptions, some of which are known to be false but are used anyway for convenience.

Moreover these models show massive discrepancies - Margo Thorning, who presented to the Senate concerning these impacts on an anti-Kyoto slant stated that the spread of predictions was a reduction of 1 - 4% of GDP, (although even her report showed all but three of the economists cited were predicting 0.9% to 1.6% GDP impact, with one outlier at 0.3% and two outliers in the 3 - 4% range). That is, the largest of predicted impacts was over ten times greater than the smallest, a far greater level of uncertainty than the climate change models whose conclusions you reject!

How is this different from your complaints about the range of outcomes from climate change models, and the implied uncertainty they represent?

There is also strong evidence from competitor countries that emissions controls lead to enhanced efforts to promote energy efficiency and low-emission technology. For instance, the insulation business has boomed in the UK - the most effective way to reduce the impact of these proposals at an indivdual basis is to insulate your home. Sales of fuel-efficient cars have increased; new industries have sprung up producing wind turbines, emissions scrubbers and the like. There appears to be little or no attempt to take these positive effects on the economy into account in assessing GDP impact.

Remember what we are actually doing here - we are proposing to place a tax on use of energy and use that money to reduce taxes on income, or other taxes. Why should that be so massively negative for the economy? What was our experience when we converted income taxes into consumption taxes in the past? Certainly the economy didn't collapse as the doomsayers would have you believe.

I still can't see why you accept one set of imperfect, model-based predictions as gospel whilst rejecting the other outright!

But it's irresponsible to "kick the system", remember?

By the way, your anecdotal evidence about the UK's economy doesn't mean that CO2 emission controls don't cause harm. It could just as easily be that that nation's growth would be even more rapid without it. You are fallaciously assuming a cause-and-effect, and you don't have enough information to support it.

I didn't mean to imply that control of emissions was totally cost free, but that the experience of the UK suggests that impact was negligible when compared to existing economic trends (in fact, very similar to your argument about man-made climate change!). Certainly, if the US economists models are accurate there should have been SOME identifiable economic impact when the UK implemented these controls?

Strange how observational data that conflicts with your views is dismissed by you as 'anecdotal' - the same fault for which you had previously lambasted others!

 

[Pikachu]

It's not meaningless, because the logic behind supporting the Kyoto Protocol without knowing if GW is real is exactly the same.

So what is the logic behind denying that GW is real because you oppose Kyoto? You can oppose Kyoto independently from what you think about science. Kyoto is a political treaty that has very little to do with science. And in the spirit of your argumentation: I don’t think there is any proof that Kyoto will be bad for our economy, so I don’t know why you are so upset about it.

They cannot be separated. Before we pay to fix the problem, we should at least know that the problem exists.

If we spend 10 billion dollars on the problem, the evidence should be much stronger than it would take for us to spend 10, do you agree? Therefore economic ramifications are relevant to our standards of how much evidence we should have.

The more expensive fixing the problem will be should make us more reluctant to if we really want to fix it at all, but I don’t think it should delude our understanding of how real the problem is.

A 5% contribution to the total carbon budget, according the previously cited AAPG Bulletin article I was rereading today. It was a secondary cite from some US government source dated 1998. I need to look up the primary source when I have time.

5% IS A LOT!!!!!

I disagree. There has been a warming over the last 150 years. But if that is our doing we don't know.

That’s right; the temperature change is probably caused by giant radioactive monkeys. The observations I had in mind was measurements of how much less sun rays that hits the surface now than a few decades ago, and measurements confirming that the atmosphere has become less opaque to infrared radiation.

It is. You can use models to approximate unknown values, such as in Monte Carlo simulations. But you still have to verify it against the real world when you're done.

The whole point with models is to be able to simulate cases you for some reason cannot measure directly. Models have proved to be very useful for such purposes, and are used extensively in all kinds of research and technologic development with a remarkable success.

We know the atmosphere works by the laws of physics, and there are highly sophisticated computer models of the atmosphere. But our models usually give somewhat contradictory results, and none of them can even predict exactly where a hurricane will make landfall even 24 hours in advance. In fact, I'm told that any forecast past about five days is pretty iffy.

Climate models are in now way intended to predict anything remotely as detailed as a weather forecast. They operate at a completely different level. It is a lot easier to predict long term statistical mean values than to predict detailed local events. From climate models we don’t expect the results to give much detail at all, so they are not very comparable to weather forecasts.

The weather forecast analogy does however show that models of very complicated systems can be quite reliable. Of course even the best models sometimes fail, but most of the time they are not to far off. I suppose you would take a hurricane warning seriously if you were living in an exposed area, wouldn’t you?

You have fallen into the trap of believing that just because a system works by known laws, we have full understanding of it. We don't. You also used the word "isolated case". Nothing we are talking about here is isolated.

I don’t believe we have full understanding of how the system works, but I believe we do have some understanding. We have enough understanding of the system to know that when we change an important parameter it will have an effect.

When something will definitely have a huge effect in an isolated case, it is reasonable to assume that it could have an effect even in a system that is too complex to fully understand. It must at least have the effect that it triggers an event that cancels out its isolated effect.

In another post, Pikachu made the implication that because we know the thermodynamic properties of CO2, we must also know that increasing CO2 will increase temperature. Do you agree, or disagree with him on this point?

No!
Increasing CO2 disturbs the energy balance of our planet. This will necessarily have an effect on our climate. Exactly what kind of effect it has in the end is unknown. The global temperature doesn’t necessarily have to increase, even though that is the most likely result.

Edit:

I'm not going to hijack the thread.

Why not? We have already hijacked it! The opening post specifically said “Lets not turn this into a discussion of what is causing global warming”.

 

[Gothmog]

Parts of Bulletin are PR'd. I thought the GeoHorizons section was too because underneath the first page of the article it had the date of submission, and the date at which the revised version was received.

I would point out that such an article in such a journal would show that there is a considerable number of holdouts on the GW issue, at least in that community.

I am in no way offended, but rather amused that our subdisciplines apparently aren't reading the same journals.

Yeah, it sounds like GeoHorizons is much like ‘Environmental Science & Technology’ – it has an editorial ‘magazine’ section in the front along with peer reviewed articles in the back. So it looks like you are basing much of your argument on an editorial and a complete misunderstanding about the 11-year solar cycle plot you originally posted.

Care to meet my challenge to find even one peer reviewed article (in a journal with at least a middling ISI ranking and within the last decade) that makes the claim that the correlation between the sun and climate is so strong that ‘it leaves little room for anthropogenic influence, or much of anything else’?

I provided a number of references in the best journals by respected scientists within the last few years that make a strong case for the sun being a small player within the last decades.

I don’t read GoeHorizons, there are so many journals that one has to pick and choose. The best journals are certainly read by myself and people in your subdiscipline.

The publications of the ‘American Geophysical Union’ are typically considered the best in the field (and of course Science and Nature), I’m sure these are read by people in your subdiscipline, Yes?

In another post, Pikachu made the implication that because we know the thermodynamic properties of CO2, we must also know that increasing CO2 will increase temperature. Do you agree, or disagree with him on this point?

We know that increasing CO2 will increase atmospheric opacity to infrared radiation, which in turn increases the amount of solar radiation trapped in our atmosphere as energy. I’ve said that over and over.

My point is that if we see CO2 concentration going up without temperature going up afterwards, this discredits the theory of anthropogenic global warming.

No. There are many ways for energy to be distributed within the earth system. You need to have data about other variables as well, as we do for our current climate. Now, we do expect to see some increase in temperature before other feedbacks kick in. Time scales are very important. I’ll mention here that there is very strong evidence that increased sulfate in the atmosphere leads to an increased reflectivity in clouds (volcanic and anthropogenic). This effect must be included in climate models to match temperature variations since the industrial revolution (about the only time period we have good data for). As I’ve said over and over, CO2 is not the only anthropogenic variable related to climate change.

You can try to explain this by saying that there are a bunch of variables that we don't know and so it may not apply to today. And you would probably be right.

But we do know what the variables are in the current climate, so again not a fair comparison.

But if you do, it makes anthropogenic GW untestable.

As I already mentioned, one prediction from climate models is a decrease in stratospheric temperature. This has been shown after being predicted – current research suggests that this affect may be increasing stratospheric/tropospheric mixing (as shown by stratospheric water vapor and methane mixing ratios).

I suspect that it is, but if it is proven, then I will oppose it even more strongly than I ever have before.

What does this mean? Do you even know what a process model is?

If you have time, could you elaborate on the above?

I have done that in this thread, here are links to my posts:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=2498579&postcount=135
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=2505176&postcount=140
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=2511095&postcount=151
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=2512607&postcount=153
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=2516292&postcount=159
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=2527447&postcount=199
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=2527451&postcount=200
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=2527499&postcount=203
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=2527589&postcount=209
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=2527846&postcount=216
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=2528112&postcount=218
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=2529945&postcount=228
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=2532521&postcount=231
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=2533454&postcount=235

Now, having read these again (or for the first time) do you have any questions about my position on the science involved?

 

[BasketCase]

That’s right; the temperature change is probably caused by giant radioactive monkeys.

Actually, we anti-global-warming people don't have to explain why Earth has had hot spikes in the past at all (this is that "past ten thousand years" thing again). Earth has had warm periods--warmer than now--when there were no cars or factories to produce that warming. We don't have to know how those spikes happened; it is sufficient for us to know those spikes CAN happen without people causing them.

 

[carlosMM]

finally - I managed to corner my boss and he gave me the name of that guy who researched pre-industiral anthropogenic climate change.

Ruddiman, W.F. (2003): THE ANTHROPOGENIC GREENHOUSE ERA
BEGAN THOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO. - Climatic Change 61: 261–293

I have a pdf.

I'll quote the abstract:

Abstract. The anthropogenic era is generally thought to have begun 150 to 200 years ago, when the industrial revolution began producing CO2 and CH4 at rates sufficient to alter their compositions in the atmosphere. A different hypothesis is posed here: anthropogenic emissions of these gases first altered atmospheric concentrations thousands of years ago. This hypothesis is based of three arguments. (1) Cyclic variations in CO2 and CH4 driven by Earth-orbital changes during the last 350,000 years predict decreases throughout the Holocene, but the CO2 trend began an anomalous increase 8000 years ago, and the CH4 trend did so 5000 years ago. (2) Published explanations for these mid- to late-Holocene gas increases based on natural forcing can be rejected based on paleoclimatic evidence. (3) A wide array of archeological, cultural, historical and geologic evidence points to viable explanations tied to anthropogenic changes resulting from early agriculture in Eurasia, including the start of forest clearance by 8000 years ago and of rice irrigation by 5000 years ago. In recent millennia, the estimated warming caused by these early gas emissions reached a global-mean value of ∼0.8 ◦C and roughly 2 ◦C at high latitudes, large enough to have stopped a glaciation of northeastern Canada predicted by two kinds of climatic models. CO2 oscillations of ∼10 ppm in the last 1000 years are too large to be explained by external (solar-volcanic) forcing, but they can be explained by outbreaks of bubonic plague that caused historically documented farm abandonment in western Eurasia. Forest regrowth on abandoned farms sequestered enough carbon to account for the observed CO2 decreases. Plague-driven CO2 changes were also a significant causal factor in temperature changes during the Little Ice Age (1300–1900 AD).

and a nice little graph for the 'the sun does it' crowd:

Note in B how in the younger Dryas methane production seperated from insolation, but soon fits the curve again - then TOTALLY leaves both insolation and projected methane curve at around 5000BC.



If anybody wants the PDF, PM me your mail.