Very interesting 80~minute film on the science and politics of climate change. It decidedly puts forward the sceptical case, that global warming is a real phenomenon but has nothing to do with human activity and CO2, that the Sun is actually responsible for it, that there's a ~conspiracy~ to keep developing countries shitty and dependent and all sorts of other exciting things... I am currently watching part 6 of 8.
Youtube Link:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=u6IPHmJWmDk&mode=related&search=
It was shown on (I think) Channel 4 (UK) last week, and is being shown again on More4 at 22:00, tonight.
The most pervasive greenhouse gas is water vapor, responsible for 95% of the greenhouse effect. CO2 ranks in at a mere 3%. Manmade production of CO2 is a mere 3.5% of the total CO2 in the atmosphere. Evil Capitalism's contribution to the greenhouse effect that will kill us all? About one part in a thousand.
You may stop freaking out now.
>>201
[citation needed]
Those numbers are all pulled from the IPCC report apart from the water vapor number*, although, for some odd reason, the IPCC report seems to discount or ignore water vapor's humongous role in global warming.
Almost as if they had an agenda...
> Almost as if they had an agenda...
Almost as if you're paranoid...
Right, because CO2, good for about 3% of the greenhouse effect, is going to cause grevious harm to the whole world by raising the temperature up 2 to 5 degrees over the next hundred years.
Even though that's never happened before.
Even though previous hot times proved to be really good for life.
Even though we're actually about 2000 years overdue for another ice age.
Even though any given CO2 molecule would be lucky to last five years before being eaten by a plant or sucked up by the ocean.
Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight...
Easy way to solve the excess CO2 problem. Add a tenth of an inch of fertile topsoil to every farm. That should lock it up good.
>>205
For god's sake you don't know a single thing about gas exchange, economics, the requirements for human life, or the fact that a single species already nearly wiped out most all life on earth eons ago (and that was motherfucking bacteria).
> Even though that's never happened before.
stupid
> Even though previous hot times proved to be really good for life.
abysmally stupid
> Even though we're actually about 2000 years overdue for another ice age.
waste-of-oxygen stupid
> Even though any given CO2 molecule would be lucky to last five years before being eaten by a plant or sucked up by the ocean.
proof-i'm-involved-in-a-turing-test stupid
..
> Easy way to solve the excess CO2 problem. Add a tenth of an inch of fertile topsoil to every farm. That should lock it up good.
Sounds like something Chairman Mao would come up with.
I don't know whether to laugh at you, cry for humanity or just be quietly embarrassed on your behalf.
> Right, because CO2, good for about 3% of the greenhouse effect
Ozone is 3%. CO2 is several times higher.
As for water vapor, that's quite the nasty thing, isn't it? We don't control the amount of water vapor, but we're pulling up carbon from the ground and dumping into the atmosphere, which increases the global mean temperature.
If we raise a global temperature by a few degrees, it means the atmosphere can hold more water, and evaporation increases. More evaporation means more water vapor. More water vapor means higher temperature. And...
Jolly good show, old chap. That's some charming amplification you have there if I do say so myself.
> going to cause grevious harm to the whole world by raising the temperature up 2 to 5 degrees over the next hundred years.
Do you know what happens to a person whose body temperature is five degrees above or below normal? It's a medical emergency. It can even kill them.
Now please consider that a lot of life out there is used to fairly constant temperatures and lack any form of thermoregulation. A deviation of a few degrees will result in mass death and the destruction of entire ecosystems.
> More evaporation means more water vapor. More water vapor means higher temperature. And...
More evaporation means more water vapor. More water vapor means more clouds. More clouds means more sunlight reflected back into space. More clouds means more rain. Turns out water vapor regulates itself pretty effectively. You might not have noticed this if you live somewhere where it doesn't rain much.
> Do you know what happens to a person whose body temperature is five degrees above or below normal? It's a medical emergency. It can even kill them.
Do you know how a greenhouse works? You put plants inside this big room made mostly of glass, and it gets really hot inside. Now what is a greenhouse for? What happens when you raise plants in a greenhouse? Do they die quickly from the higher temperature?
> Now please consider that a lot of life out there is used to fairly constant temperatures and lack any form of thermoregulation. A deviation of a few degrees will result in mass death and the destruction of entire ecosystems.
Fascinating. Good thing the earth isn't a human body.
Gee, it's also a good thing we don't have regular summers and winters every year, or everything would be dead by now from the constant excessive temperature changes every year.
When's the last time the temperature was up a few degrees for a long period? Oh yeah, the Medieval Warm Period. That time of worldwide devastation where people grew crops in Greenland and various northern European countries, and wine grapes grew in Britain, thanks to the horrible retreat of the arctic circle.
Evidence has been found of the Medieval Warm Period affecting Taiwan, China, and Japan as well. Ironically, a lot of that evidence was found in Kyoto.
http://www.john-daly.com/hockey/hockey.htm
It would be a disaster if the Brits started making wine again, given how awful most of their Haute British Cuisine turned out.
>>207 You are exactly the kind of person that Stalin called "useful idiots." Keep your mouth shut. Grownups are talking.
> You are exactly the kind of person that Stalin called "useful idiots." Keep your mouth shut. Grownups are talking.
ideological-blog-comment-spam-repeating-robot stupid
> ideological-blog-comment-spam-repeating-robot stupid
Your eloquent argument has swayed me sir. I have revised my feelings on the matter. Clearly, global warming is real and the world is going to spaz out and wipe out 80% of all life unless we all do what the activists say.
>the world is going to spaz out and wipe out 80% of all life unless we all do what the activists say.
Straw man fallacy.
>>213 Dork.
>>215 global warmer.
So, I still haven't seen any evidence out of you for why you claim that an entire field of science is lying.
Mmmm'kay. Be good and try to read the whole thing before denouncing it, alright?
AUSTRALIAN FINANCIAL REVIEW
9 September, 2007. Supplement page 8.
Global warming sceptics fuel hot debate
Mark Lawson
The ranks of the doubters are legion and speaking up as the climatic change debate rages, writes Mark Lawson.
Despite being scorned, derided and accused of links with oil companies, the climate change sceptics are still out there and, although the greenhouse lobby will never admit it, occasionally scoring major points. They may also be more numerous than the greenhouse lobby or politicians believe.
One example of this scepticism breaking to the surface is a dissenting minority report issued by a group of federal government backbenchers as part of a parliamentary committee investigation into viability of geosequestration (burying carbon produced deep underground).
The report by four MPs - three Liberal and one National - declared that the evidence that humans were altering climate was “not compelling”, but it was largely derided by the media.
A much more serious, if not devastating, attack on greenhouse claims concerning likely future temperature increases was the recent release of a paper entitled Global Warming: Forecasts by Scientists versus Scientific Forecasts.
Written by J. Scott Armstrong, a professor of marketing at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and Kesten Green, a visiting fellow at the business and economics forecasting unit at Monash University in Melbourne, the paper assessed, as forecasts, the temperature projections made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change earlier this year. It found little to approve.
In the paper prepared for the International Symposium on Forecasting 2007, Armstrong and Green conclude, “the forecasts in the report were not the outcome of scientific procedures. In effect, they present the opinions of scientists transformed by mathematics and obscured by complex writing.”
The paper also points to one of the recognised rules of forecasting, namely that “unaided judgement forecasts by experts have no value. This applies whether the opinions are expressed by words, spreadsheets or mathematical models. It also applies regardless of how much scientific evidence is possessed by the experts.” A group of experts is little better.
Kesten Green told The Australian Financial Review that there were plenty of examples of experts being wrong, both individually and collectively, about their own area of expertise. Albert Einstein, for example, famously declared that atomic power was not possible. Other examples are in the treatment of stomach ulcers and head injuries, where the medical establishment held to treatments which harmed rather than helped for many years.
continued next post...
But in the greenhouse debate it is incorrect to say that there is overwhelming agreement or that there is no doubt about the science behind it, he says. For every aspect of the theory which the greenhouse lobby declares has been settled, it is possible to find eminent scientists who strongly disagree. “It is a case of where a statement is repeated
often enough everyone takes it as fact, and the media has to bear much of the blame for this,” he says.
The Armstrong-Green paper is particularly scathing of one IPCC approach - a cornerstone of its work - of fitting models to match historical results and then claiming the model is accurate enough to make forecasts. They say the approach has been shown not to work in forecasting.
A number of distinguished scientists have spoken publicly against the prevailing orthodoxy that the IPCC forecasts are correct. One of the more vocal local dissidents is Bob Carter, a research professor and former head of the School of Earth Sciences at James Cook University in Townsville. He says that there is no established theory of climate as there is, say, of gravity and planentary motion, which can be used to make predictions.
“We have a hypothesis that increases in carbon dioxide increase temperatures, but that hypothesis fails all tests. Global average temperatures are known to have varied little since 1997 - just moving up and down - but in that same period carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by 15 parts per million or 4 per cent.”
Stewart Franks, an associate professor in hydroclimatogy at the University of Newcastle, says the alarm over climate has grown sharply in the past 10 years, “but in that time temperatures have been stable, so it's a case of never mind the evidence”.
He says the greenhouse effects of the atmosphere's water content (known as humidity at ground level) and of clouds are many times greater than that of carbon dioxide, which still counts as only a small part of the total atmosphere. Yet very little is known about the mechanisms behind variations in humidity or cloud cover.
Despite sceptical voices there is also no doubt that many eminent scientists are on the side of the IPCC. However, a recent paper by David Henderson, formerly head of economics and statistics at the OECD and now visiting professor at the Westminster Business School in London, argues that part of this support is due to those eminent scientists trusting the IPCC to get it right. But he also argues that their trust in the panel is misplaced, as it is taking a very one-sided view of global warming.
His paper states that one major example of that bias is the dispute over the Hockey Stick graph. This was an early piece of research indicating a direct link between industrial emissions and temperatures (its shape was that of a hockey stick), which featured prominently in its reports. However, two Canadian statisticians discovered a major flaw in the statistical analysis which made it valueless. After a great deal of dispute the issue went to two high-level committees of eminent statisticians which both confirmed the flaw. Although the hockey stick has been dropped from the panel's documentation, he says the panel has never admitted any error, made any comment on the committee findings, or announced any review of its processes to prevent such problems from recurring.
Henderson says the panel seems reluctant to admit any error.
Among many other suggestions for reform he recommends thorough audits of the IPCC work and that environmental scientists adopt the best practice of economic journals, of submitting data and computer code along with any papers for publication so that others can reproduce the analysis. This would avoid some of the worst features of the hockey stick debate, Henderson says.
This 21-page PDF goes into greater detail:
http://www.forecastingprinciples.com/Public_Policy/WarmAudit31.pdf
You should read all of these articles too. Pay special attention to the scientists' credentials at the end of each article.
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/environment/story.html?id=4432a41c-7c52-4b74-934e-f0dac3b2bcb8
in other words: INTERNATIONAL JEWISH CONSPIRACY
I honestly don't know who to believe in this highly politicized matter.
I think since this is ultimately about protecting the environment, there are probably more pressing issues we could address since global warming isn't as well understood as we would like it to be.
We should look at how China is terribly polluted, or how other emerging industries an bursting populations will effect our society and prepare for that. We also have a massive fishing crisis that needs to be addressed, land use that is killing our ecosystem, deforestation and massive erosion in the middle east and elsewhere, big issues that could effect us much faster than an excess of Co2. Let's think about our air and water quality. If that means reducing emissions, so be it, but there are other things we should be focusing on than the Co2 content of our emissions.
> More evaporation means more water vapor... More clouds means more rain.
Are you aware of how supersaturation can be achieved? Or why the water content of air in the Arctic is lower than the Namib desert?
The higher the temperature, the more water can be held in the air without precipitation.
> Fascinating. Good thing the earth isn't a human body.
Oh? Which part of "a lot of life out there is used to fairly constant temperatures and lack any form of thermoregulation" did you not catch? You won't be affected directly by a 5C external change, but other things will.
> When's the last time the temperature was up a few degrees for a long period?
With an open carbon cycle, the question is where will it stop? And in the meantime, there's going to be a mass migration of humanity going on while they move to more fertile areas. And if it doesn't stop, we'll really have problems.
I'll pass.
I didn't miss any part of that life is too fragile to adapt to changing conditions argument. I'd just like to see some proof of it. If you can find solid evidence of a plant or animal that can't cope with a few degrees of extra warmth, let me know.
If you consider the last decade's temperatures, it already has. We've added an extra 15 parts per million CO2 into the air, and temps have stayed steady over that time.
The UN, through the IPCC, is advocating strong action on the hypothesis that CO2 causes global warming, and there quite simply is no evidence to validate that hypothesis.
>>224, you should read the other stuff I posted above.
>>225
http://assets.panda.org/downloads/birdsclimatereportfinal.pdf
http://www.amap.no/acia/index.html
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/foci/sebscc/SEBSCC_final_report.pdf
http://www.usgcrp.gov/usgcrp/Library/nationalassessment/10Alaska.pdf
http://www.geog.umd.edu/resac/outgoing/GEOG442%20Fall%202005/Lecture%20materials/extinctions%20and%20climate%20change.pdf
http://www.journals.royalsoc.ac.uk/content/27230th7l7473773/
> I honestly don't know who to believe in this highly politicized matter.
Believe the scientists. http://realclimate.org/ is very representative of their views.
> If you can find solid evidence of a plant or animal that can't cope with a few degrees of extra warmth, let me know.
You do realize that life will tend to expand until it reaches the limits of its environmental endurance? An organism that is living well within its comfort zone won't be affected by a small change in temperature. One living right on the edge, however, will.
As far as I can tell that's an attack on the IPCC. I asked for some evidence that the entire field of climate science is lying to us, not an attack on a single panel of scientists.
See, the IPCC is not the entirety of climate science. It doesn't matter how many times you try and refute them, because even if you were successful, you'd still have the entire body of scientific results left.
Yeah, the IPCC is more about climate politics.
> I asked for some evidence that the entire field of climate science is lying to us, not an attack on a single panel of scientists.
That's largely impossible to get, seeing as there is no clear consensus on the issue among climate scientists. If you skip the summary and read the whole IPCC report, they practically admit that they don't know enough about how the climate works to predict anything with any certainty. The summary, on the other hand, has been vetted for politicians, contains very little science, and is really about forcing an extreme environmentalist agenda.
> If you can find solid evidence of a plant or animal that can't cope with a few degrees of extra warmth, let me know.
Fishy, fishy in da sea. Not all fishy warm like me.
Of course, not only are fish cold-blooded (and used to a narrow temperature range, ergo not developing multiple energy paths like land-based cold-blooded critters), but their homes don't take well to temperature variation either.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is basic biology. Elementary, even. And the coral die-off, particularly of warm-water coral reefs, isn't news either.
> they practically admit that they don't know enough about how the climate works to predict anything with any certainty.
I fail to see how this is in the least bit damning.
We can't, with any certainty, predict the course of evolution or human behaviour, either.
> The summary, on the other hand...contains very little science
That's why it's called a summary
> is really about forcing an extreme environmentalist agenda.
In other words, you're a political drone and think that everyone who disagrees with your opinion is conspiring to do evil.
Nothing is certain in science (or anything else short of religion). It's all confidence intervals and other statistics.
I dunno, maybe when it really starts getting warm I'll believe them, but so far, when you consider how warm Europe was historically and how cold our recent, modern history has been, there doesn't seem to be anything abnormal about our current temperatures.
This is what I don't understand. How can climate scientists detect a distinct abnormality in temperatures that have been climbing since the 17th Century?
If someone could really explain it to me I'd probably believe them, but it seems that a lot of global warming theories are based on faith more than empiric reason.
>>235
Core samples of quickly forming ice (in greenland, for example) reveal the history of (local/global) temperature and atmospheric composition, for one.
There are a lot of ways these things are measured, and the amount of factors going into this kind of thing make it far more complex than some would have you believe (CO2 is far from being the only thing that affects this).
Seeing as it is unlikely there are any respected climatologists, geologists or atmospheric scientists frequenting this board, you'd best learn from a google search for "climate change"
The ice core samples are not all that reliable:
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=25526754-e53a-4899-84af-5d9089a5dcb6
Quoting the important part:
Ice, the IPCC believes, precisely preserves the ancient air, allowing for a precise reconstruction of the ancient atmosphere. For this to be true, no component of the trapped air can escape from the ice. Neither can the ice ever become liquid. Neither can the various gases within air ever combine or separate.
This perfectly closed system, frozen in time, is a fantasy. "Liquid water is common in polar snow and ice, even at temperatures as low as -72C," Dr. Jaworowski explains, "and we also know that in cold water, CO2 is 70 times more soluble than nitrogen and 30 times more soluble than oxygen, guaranteeing that the proportions of the various gases that remain in the trapped, ancient air will change. Moreover, under the extreme pressure that deep ice is subjected to -- 320 bars, or more than 300 times normal atmospheric pressure -- high levels of CO2 get squeezed out of ancient air."
Because of these various properties in ancient air, one would expect that, over time, ice cores that started off with high levels of CO2 would become depleted of excess CO2, leaving a fairly uniform base level of CO2 behind. In fact, this is exactly what the ice cores show.
"According to the ice-core samples, CO2 levels vary little over time," Dr. Jaworowski sates. "The ice core data from the Taylor Dome in Antarctica shows almost no change in the level of atmospheric CO2 over the last 7,000 to 8,000 years -- it varied between 260 parts per million and 264 parts per million.
Another important part:
Is there an alternative to ice-core samples, which are but proxies from which assumptions about the historical composition of the atmosphere can be made? "Yes, there are several other proxies, and they lead to different findings about CO2," Dr. Jaworowski states. "But we don't need to rely on proxies at all.
"Scientists from numerous disciplines have been examining CO2 since the beginning of the 19th century, and they have left behind a record of tens of thousands of direct, real-time measurements. These measurements tell a far different story about CO2 -- they demonstrate, for example, that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have fluctuated greatly, and that several times in the past 200 years CO2 concentrations have exceeded today's levels.
"The IPCC rejects these direct measurements, some taken by Nobel Prize winners. They prefer the view of CO2 as seen through ice."
National Post? Ugh. My head hurts every time I see than newspaper.
Please, find a source from somewhere else. :(
IPCC report? Ugh. My head hurts every time I see than summary.
Please, find a source from somewhere else :(
Anonymous Scientist? Ugh. My head hurts every time I see than collectivist identity.
Please, find a source from somewhere else :(
>>237
The national post is not all that reliable.
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=6626a0fa-99de-4f1e-aebe-bb91af82abb3
Can you name a paper that is all that reliable? Most of them make mistakes all the time.
However, disparaging the source instead of pointing out exactly how the articles themselves are wrong re/AGW is lame.
Maybe you don't live in Canada, but National Post is pure tripe.
Considering that I am not a climatologist, I have to rely on others. I am not going to rely on National Post, but if someone provides some articles in a respected peer-reviewed journal, I'm all eyes.
Also, to the clown who implicitly compared IPCC to National Post (or any newspaper): you're clueless. The IPCC at least provides references to articles, as opposed to "X says that..."
> National Post is pure tripe.
Is this your scientific opinion?
Why yes. Based on a random sample of 125 National Post papers, we can conclude that it is composed of 95% fecal matter, with a standard error of...
Anyway, respected peer-reviewed journal or it didn't happen.
>>245
Based on it's founding principles of 'balancing' the media with a neo-conservative agenda... It's as close to physical truth as we can get.
The Iranian 'Yellow Badge for Jews' is among the five most irresponsible journalistic errors made in the past five years.
Right up there with Koran-Flushing and the collective US media in the years after 9/11.
So, in other words, there's no point in actually reading the articles linked to, then forming an intelligent response as to why those articles fail to convince you, because you can tar them all based on occasional crappy news coverage of unrelated subjects.
Yeah, I guess that's the easy way out, you lazy fuck.
> on occasional crappy news coverage of unrelated subjects.
Occasional? You're not familiar with National Post.
> Yeah, I guess that's the easy way out, you lazy fuck.
To reply in turn: why are you not giving us references to articles of quality? You're quite adamant over this one National Post article.
So, if you don't mind, I shall reiterate: respected peer-reviewed journal or it didn't happen. I hope you caught it this time.
Did you read them in order to determine their individual shittiness, or are you just avoiding reading something that challenges your UN-sponsored faith in the amazing power of manmade CO2 to destroy the planet by raising temperatures about 2.5 degrees C over the next hundred years saying "that papr sux every1 nos it" as if everything in that paper were written by exactly one person?
Try reading them anyway. See what happens.
I fucking dare you to open your mind a little bit.
> I fucking dare you to open your mind a little bit.
I fucking double-dare to you get a grip on reality.
Already there my man. There's room here for you and your friends if you like.
>>252
Ideology is not reality.
You're full of yourself.
>>253
And reality does not come from the mouths of politicians.
You're a sucker.
Honestly, I want to believe, but the current science hasn't yet offered convincing evidence to back up the IPCC's claims, at least not for me. On the other hand, the skeptics often seem to be political conservatives, or presented by political conservatives who are weary of the environmental movements or any policy that demands government intervention or limitations on corporate activities.
So all there is for me is a big puddle of political mud.
I guess I ask myself, what does the UN get by pushing a climate theory like this out of proportion? That might be the best question, the only answer I can see is a kind of evangelical environmentalism based more on faith and a kind of ethical ideology, or maybe hysteria, than hard science.
The UN itself? Not much. That irritating, lying group of lunatic socialist anti-global anti-corporate activists who hijacked the otherwise valuable environmental movement and turned it from a sensible approach to caring for the earth into a freaky WE HATE PROGRESS party? They get to push everyone in the whole world around, and make a lot of money off of carbon offset bookkeeping while doing it.
> the current science hasn't yet offered convincing evidence to back up the IPCC's claims
The problem with (some definitions of) convincing evidence is that we might not survive it all that well.
> They get to push everyone in the whole world around, and make a lot of money off of carbon offset bookkeeping while doing it.
For some reason I doubt they'd fair too well against multinationals, especially when a select group also owns most of the media.
>>254
And reality does not come from the mouths of lobbyists and PR Firms.
You're a sucker.
> Honestly, I want to believe, but the current science hasn't yet offered convincing evidence to back up the IPCC's claims
How would you know? By the sound of it, you haven't studied any of the science at all, but merely listened to the media circus.
>> I asked for some evidence that the entire field of climate science is lying to us, not an attack on a single panel of scientists.
> That's largely impossible to get,
Then why are you claiming that they are lying?
> seeing as there is no clear consensus on the issue among climate scientists.
That, however, is a lie: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=86
> That irritating, lying group of lunatic socialist anti-global anti-corporate activists who hijacked the otherwise valuable environmental movement and turned it from a sensible approach to caring for the earth into a freaky WE HATE PROGRESS party?
You sure like setting up strawmen and beating them down, don't you? And you also sure like to change your position around however it suits you.
Now tell us: Are the majority of climate scientists "lunatic socialist anti-global anti-corporate activists"?
>>261
Please don't feed the trolls.
So I should trust the heavily biased "realclimate.org" site simply because it has the word "real" in it?
Fascinating site. Every time someone's comments suggest that natural warming may be occurring, there's a polite response that insists that "We know that the current CO2 rise is anthropogenic". He never bothers to link to any studies that prove this one way or the other. He just insists that it's true.
(reading further...)
OMG he still thinks the Mann Hockey Stick graph is valid!!!!
> Now tell us: Are the majority of climate scientists "lunatic socialist anti-global anti-corporate activists"?
Probably not. But the talking heads who front the whole Global Warming - er, I'm sorry, "Climate Change" activism are.
> OMG he still thinks the Mann Hockey Stick graph is valid!!!!
He has elucidated why here: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=11
You're free to indicate why that's wrong.
Also, it seems we've deviated wildly from the /science/.
> So I should trust the heavily biased "realclimate.org" site
Proof of bias, please. The fact that somebody disagrees with you is not enough.
>> Now tell us: Are the majority of climate scientists "lunatic socialist anti-global anti-corporate activists"?
> Probably not.
Then why do you keep insisting that they are fucking lying?
It pains me to do so, but I have to back up our local drone's claims of realclimate.org being biased.
Simply run a whois on the domain, and follow the hierarchy.
Not that this matters, all the "proof" relating to climate change is offsite. Relatively unbiased sources follow.
Here, from motherfucking NASA, which has surprisingly not been tainted by Republican politics:
> “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal.”
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Library/GlobalWarmingUpdate/
University of Oxford:
http://www.eo.ucar.edu/basics/index.html
For the absolutely clueless, here's a pretty, interactive slideshow:
http://www.begbroke.ox.ac.uk/climate/interface.html
> Simply run a whois on the domain, and follow the hierarchy.
what
> Then why do you keep insisting that they are fucking lying?
Working on a response to that. Meanwhile, here's some good reading:
Reply to Lockwood and Fröhlich - The persistent role of the Sun in climate forcing:
http://www.spacecenter.dk/publications/scientific-report-series/Scient_No._3.pdf
And some OMG Leftist Conspiracy stuff too:
http://www.activistcash.com/organization_overview.cfm/oid/225
And another good one, but a pretty long read:
Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics
http://eprintweb.org/S/article/physics/0707.1161
I think the panic over this matter is generated by the fact that over the last 50 years, temperatures have spiked dramatically. Usually they don't do that, not so high, not so fast, natural fluctuation is more subtle and prolonged. Now, if the temperatures spike down again over the next 30 years and level off, we will feel like complete idiots for falling for the alarmists, but why should we believe this mounting spike will fall?
It's a frightening time. Especially since reducing emissions probably won't have any noticeable effect on temperature, at least not for many many decades, so even in a century we may not be able to know how much of the heating was caused by anthropogenic gases, if any, and how much of it might have been caused by the sun.
I think the panic over this matter is generated more by the fact that alarmists are insisting that temperatures have spiked dramatically over the last 50 years, not that it's actually happened. Remember that before this, we had the Big ol' Giant Ice Age caused by too much industrially generated particulate matter in the air cooling everything down to sweater temps scare too. Many of the people behind that scare are behind this one too.
Look, come back when you have some actual peer-reviewed science to present and not random web pages or arXiv garbage.
Dude, I just LOVE that open mind of yours!
BTW, could you find a peer-reviewed, clear exposition of exactly how 2xCO2 leads to 2.5 deg C? That'd be great.
> that alarmists are insisting that temperatures have spiked dramatically over the last 50 years
Strawman.
> before this, we had the Big ol' Giant Ice Age caused by too much industrially generated particulate matter in the air cooling everything down to sweater temps scare too
First time I've heard of this.
I'm still waiting for the second coming of Christ, myself.
>>275
This address your claims.
http://www.begbroke.ox.ac.uk/climate/interface.html
>>268
Sorry about the technical terms.
realclimate.org is run and funded through various lobbying/non-profit groups aligned with Democratic Party interests. I can barely untangle these complex money chutes that political cash flows through, but you can look it up yourself by searching for "whois" and using those tools to discover a website's registrant and from that information, discover it's affiliates. Running web searches on names/organizations helps, as well as reading Financial Statements (if you're really dedicated).
All purely political sites and blogs are automatically biased due to human cognitive dissonance, so don't bother looking those up.
It's true that weather balloon data supports the anthropogenic theory pretty solidly. If it was just solar heating the troposphere wouldn't be heating the way it is. It's definitely in the atmosphere. Just how much it will heat/cool local weather or what that will be like? I think that's up to more questions.
> First time I've heard of this.
There's this stuff that went on before you were born called "history." You should take a look at it sometime.
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Posted 9/21/2007
Climate Change: Did NASA scientist James Hansen, the global warming alarmist in chief, once believe we were headed for . . . an ice age? An old Washington Post story indicates he did.
On July 9, 1971, the Post published a story headlined "U.S. Scientist Sees New Ice Age Coming." It told of a prediction by NASA and Columbia University scientist S.I. Rasool. The culprit: man's use of fossil fuels.
The Post reported that Rasool, writing in Science, argued that in "the next 50 years" fine dust that humans discharge into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuel will screen out so much of the sun's rays that the Earth's average temperature could fall by six degrees.
Sustained emissions over five to 10 years, Rasool claimed, "could be sufficient to trigger an ice age."
Aiding Rasool's research, the Post reported, was a "computer program developed by Dr. James Hansen," who was, according to his resume, a Columbia University research associate at the time.
So what about those greenhouse gases that man pumps into the skies? Weren't they worried about them causing a greenhouse effect that would heat the planet, as Hansen, Al Gore and a host of others so fervently believe today?
"They found no need to worry about the carbon dioxide fuel-burning puts in the atmosphere," the Post said in the story, which was spotted last week by Washington resident John Lockwood, who was doing research at the Library of Congress and alerted the Washington Times to his finding.
Hansen has some explaining to do. The public deserves to know how he was converted from an apparent believer in a coming ice age who had no worries about greenhouse gas emissions to a global warming fear monger.
This is a man, as Lockwood noted in his message to the Times' John McCaslin, who has called those skeptical of his global warming theory "court jesters." We wonder: What choice words did he have for those who were skeptical of the ice age theory in 1971?
People can change their positions based on new information or by taking a closer or more open-minded look at what is already known. There's nothing wrong with a reversal or modification of views as long as it is arrived at honestly.
But what about political hypocrisy? It's clear that Hansen is as much a political animal as he is a scientist. Did he switch from one approaching cataclysm to another because he thought it would be easier to sell to the public? Was it a career advancement move or an honest change of heart on science, based on empirical evidence?
If Hansen wants to change positions again, the time is now. With NASA having recently revised historical temperature data that Hansen himself compiled, the door has been opened for him to embrace the ice age projections of the early 1970s.
Could be he's feeling a little chill in the air again.
> INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Would you stop linking this kind of garbage already? Look up your browser window. What does it say in that URL? Science.
Now post some fucking science, fool.
Why don't you ever argue about the information contained in those posts? You always attack the source, and thereby neatly sidestep the content. I suspect that if I posted iron-clad scientific proof, with all the data, formulas and historical records to prove that global warming was a fiction, you'd complain because it didn't come from Al Gore or something.
The problem is that it's hard to find skeptic information about global warming from the scientific community, the only people willing to host those views are conservative papers.
Here's something I could find, a criticism of Gore's film from the NY Times, a liberal paper.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/13/science/13gore.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
> Why don't you ever argue about the information contained in those posts?
First post something worth arguing over.
Once again: respected peer-reviewed articles or it didn't happen.
>>269 is getting somewhere; there's some meat to it, although it doesn't look like it was peer-reviewed or published. It'll be interesting to see the response.
How would you know if a post is worth arguing over if you never read them?
>>283
Because I don't have the time to waste on dubious claims. If it doesn't fulfill the aforementioned criteria, it's not worth my time.
I don't listen to street bums for business advice either.
Then why do you spend so much time here?
> global warming alarmist in chief,
tl;dr
Ugh.
Now that we're done with the stupid irrelevant questions, back to /science/:
http://mysite.verizon.net/mhieb/WVFossils/Carboniferous_climate.html
The Carboniferous Period and the Ordovician Period were the only geological periods during the Paleozoic Era when global temperatures were as low as they are today. To the consternation of global warming proponents, the Late Ordovician Period was also an Ice Age while at the same time CO2 concentrations then were nearly 12 times higher than today-- 4400 ppm. According to greenhouse theory, Earth should have been exceedingly hot. Instead, global temperatures were no warmer than today. Clearly, other factors besides atmospheric carbon influence earth temperatures and global warming.
refs:
http://www.scotese.com/climate.htm
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Reference_Docs/Geocarb_III-Berner.pdf
> Clearly, other factors besides atmospheric carbon influence earth temperatures and global warming.
Hey, now we're getting somewhere!
So lets not go around echoing that CO2 is the only thing that has been claimed to affect a system as complex as global climate, k?
So, plain and simple, how does one prove that most of the warming over the last fifty years is caused by anthropogenic gases? Because almost everyone seems very confident about that. It seems like I might be missing that one little piece of evidence that would make the greenhouse theory click for me as an imminent man-made problem.
So, plain and simple, prove prove to me that this one little piece of evidence would actually convince you, and your not just going find a reason to dismiss it. Otherwise, why should we waste our time?
> how does one prove that most of the warming over the last fifty years is caused by anthropogenic gases?
Prove, in the scientific sense? With current data it can't be done. We'd need at least two planet earths and a century.
Even so, there'd be a number of confounding variables. Our society is quite dependent on gasoline.
From CO2 Science:
Then Again? Rethinking Climate Change Reference
Hansen, J., Sato, M., Ruedy, R., Lacis, A. and Oinas, V. 2000. Global warming in the twenty-first century: An alternative scenario. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, Early Edition. Online at: http://tinyurl.com/yvcghk
What was done
The authors provide their best estimates of radiative climate forcings since 1850 and discuss their implications for past and future climate change.
What was learned
The radiative forcing of the atmospheric CO2 increase experienced between 1850 and 2000, according to the authors, was 1.4 W/m2, which is equivalent to that of all other (non-CO2) greenhouse gases (GHGs). Also of the same magnitude, but of opposite sign, was the radiative climate forcing attributable to atmospheric aerosols.
What it means
Since fossil fuel use is the main source of both CO2 and aerosols, the authors state that "it follows that the net global climate forcing due to processes that produced CO2 in the past century probably is much less than 1.4 W/m2." Indeed it is. Their own estimates, in fact, suggest it would be zero. "A corollary," as they put it, "is that climate forcing by non-CO2 GHGs is nearly equal to the net value of all known forcings for the period 1850-2000." Put more bluntly, their conclusion is that essentially all of the radiative climate forcing of the past 150 years was provided by things other than fossil fuel usage.
Assuming this conclusion is correct - and we believe it must be very close to reality - what does that say about the Kyoto Protocol? Simply that it is absolutely and undeniably unnecessary. It is, in fact, ludicrous in the extreme to attempt to ameliorate future climate change by regulating activities that have had absolutely nothing to do with the climate change of the entire industrial era.
>> how does one prove that most of the warming over the last fifty years is caused by anthropogenic gases?
> Prove, in the scientific sense? With current data it can't be done.
And yet this site, linked to a few posts, insists that it's a fact:
http://www.begbroke.ox.ac.uk/climate/interface.html
I meant to say "a few posts above".
Mornings suck.
> Why don't you ever argue about the information contained in those posts? You always attack the source, and thereby neatly sidestep the content.
I have, again and again, argued with the content. And you ignore it every single time. After a while, it gets a little bit boring to make an argument and have it ignored, and just have a new "HERE READ THIS ARTICLE FROM COTTAGE CHEESE EATERS MONTHLY" shoved in my face. At that point, you kind of start to request some actually reliable sources so you don't have to go to the effort to read the garbage, type key phrases into Google, and find out where it was refuted again and again.
You know, you could do that yourself. If you were actually a skeptic, you would be applying as much questioning to the sources you agree with as the ones you disagree with. But you don't, you just find the next article in the big mountain of garbage and demand everybody answer to that one. And when they do, you pick the next one.
THEREFORE, once again, try posting some actual science. Your refusal to do so just underscores that apparently you can't find any science to back up your claims, so you have to resort to the junk pile.
Yeah, but your arguments with the content did not apparently involve you actually reading any of it. You just complained about it without even giving the content itself a glance.
Sorry if I don't spend all my time using Google for some idiot on the internet who is too sure that he is smarter than everyone else to do it himself.
>>298 Same here.
Besides, the links were provided, what would you need Google for?