Climate change

[Winstonm]

No, I am not part of the religious right, and no, I am believing what I want based on irrationality.

 

As a scientist, I do not require 100% in anything, it simply not possible. While CO2 increases are certainly a plausible explanation, is it the most reasonable? The vast majority of scientists accept the results that a doubling of CO2 in a closed system leads to ~1C temperature increase. However, how that transcends to an open and chaotic climate system is not generally accepted. Most acknowledge that there are atmospheric feedbacks that affect the overall response, but differ as to the direction and magnitude. Hence, a wide range of values have been calculated (generally from 0.5 to 5), based on certain measured criteria. Much of the difficulty arises in separately the natural component from the manmade. This is where the proxy data are important. Namely, how can we determine the natural effects. To say the most reasonable answer to the warming lies in human CO2 production shows bias, based on Western perception. Why is it more reasonable than solar or oceanic circulation? Most Russian scientists have come to the conclusion that the sun has played the largest role, and some are maintaining that we are above to enter a new Little Ice Age:

 

http://principia-scientific.org/images/TSI-Abdussamatov-Feb2012.JPG

 

It is certainly plausible, but is it reasonable?

 

 

 

I also agree that the jury got it wrong.

 

It is interesting that as a scientist you pull out the opinions of some unnamed Russians who may or may not be climatologists - scientist is a broad spectrum term that does not make one an expert outside his specialty, as you should know.

 

You also pull out a lot of knowns and present them as important probabilities - but climate researchers have already factored in these known variables.

 

I am still unclear as to what you are after. No one - not a single person - claims that AGW is a 100% ironclad fact. AGW simply has a high degree of confidence from 90% of the world's climate scientists. The facts build a strong circumstantial case in support of that position.

[Daniel1960]

It is interesting that as a scientist you pull out the opinions of some unnamed Russians who may or may not be climatologists - scientist is a broad spectrum term that does not make one an expert outside his specialty, as you should know.

 

You also pull out a lot of knowns and present them as important probabilities - but climate researchers have already factored in these known variables.

 

I am still unclear as to what you are after. No one - not a single person - claims that AGW is a 100% ironclad fact. AGW simply has a high degree of confidence from 90% of the world's climate scientists. The facts build a strong circumstantial case in support of that position.

 

The Russian is an astrophysicists, a.k.a. James Hansen. People seem to pay him a lot of attention. I do not knoe where you are getting yuor 90% figure, because there appears to be a lot fewer that give AGW a high degree of confidence. Unless of course, you mean that 90% feel that CO2 is contributing at some degree, rather than the predominant factor.

[Winstonm]

Study shows concensus...

 

From the New York Times:

For example, of the top 50 climate researchers identified by the study (as ranked by the number of papers they had published), only 2 percent fell into the camp of climate dissenters. Of the top 200 researchers, only 2.5 percent fell into the dissenter camp. That is consistent with past work, including opinion polls, suggesting that 97 to 98 percent of working climate scientists accept the evidence for human-induced climate change.

 

The study demonstrates that most of the scientists who have been publicly identified as climate skeptics are not actively publishing in the field

 

This seems to be a consistent meme - those scientists actually involved in climate science almost unanimously agree on warming while the dissent comes from outside that specialty.

[Daniel1960]

Study shows concensus...

 

From the New York Times:

 

 

 

 

This seems to be a consistent meme - those scientists actually involved in climate science almost unanimously agree on warming while the dissent comes from outside that specialty.

 

Once again, by selectively choosing ones study group and definitions, someone can show whatever they want. By lab elling dissenters as those who expressed opposition to the IPCC, and everyone else as supporters tells us nothing. By lumping all the neutral scientists into his supporters column, he effectly dilutes his study. This is similar to the Doran study whereby everyone who agreed that the Earth has warmed in the past century were labelled as supporters of AGW. This study no more supports the AGW movement that the Marcott study.

 

Which brings me to my other question, if the data is so robust and irrefutable, then why are some people going to such great lengths to show that more people believe it? That reminds me of the statement, "if you have to tell people that you are an expert, you probably aren't."

[FM75]

I did post graduate work in physics - not atmospheric science.

 

That said, the climate debate has serious flaws by parties on both sides in blogs like this. What are sides? For the most part, they seem to be "believers", not researchers, or people with open minds with the ability to question in any useful way a claim, prediction, or a methodology.

 

1) Science is not democratic 100% of scientist believe ... is junk. The most significant advances in science have been made by people like Einstein, Heisenberg, and many others who discovered disruptive principles by thinking outside the box of what contemporary scientists believed.

2) Scientists - even big name ones - make mistakes. Einstein - God does not play dice - could not agree to quantum mechanics. Enrico Fermi (Italian walk on water level physicist) gets Nobel Prize in physics for discovery of fission, which Lise Meitner questioned and was right - oops - was a chemistry issue, not fission. (Which would be very embarrassing to the Nobel Prize Committee, if it were better known.)

3) Yogi Berra - "Prediction is very hard, especially about the future" - The corollary to this is that the further into the future you predict, the harder it is. So 50-70 year predictions about the earth are simply bunk. They project today's conditions AND predictions about populations, politics, and all sorts of non-physical variables into physical models. In 1890 - the same modeling technique would have had us awash in horse manure based upon population growth and current (at the time) transportation options.

4) Plain old Newtonian physics is rock solid. That said, we can't accurately predict solar orbits 100 years into the future. Even with low uncertainties about, mass, position, and speed of various asteroids, our window of where they will be in the future is more a problem of things like solar flux, the cross section of the object and how it moves and rotates, than even the multi-body uncertainties of the other solar objects in the solar gravitational field. If you do not know this, look at NASA predictions for potential catastrophic collisions with the earth. Measurement of time, position, mass, speed, etc. are orders of magnitude higher than things like temperature.

5) True science is testable under controlled conditions. - Climate science can't do this. They can't set up two earths and keep all variables constant except one, and compare predictions about the two.

6) Atmospheric science is inherently statistical - Statistical mechanics for temperature, heat flow, chemistry, etc. Everything about climate science is statistical modeling combined with atmospheric chemistry, atmospheric physics and that BIG FAT rock and water planet below the atmosphere. (This is more like predicting stock prices - you might be right or wrong, and less likely to be right the further into the future you make the predictions - see drunken walk problem.)

7) Dynamic atmospheric models depend on differential equations, measurements of constants in those equations, and boundary conditions. (The butterfly effect limits the valid time frame of a model.) - Meteorologists use entirely different models to predict the temperature over the next 24 hours, (next week?), next month, next year, future decades.

8) Scientists will agree - not that it proves anything - with most of what has been said in 1-7.

9) That does not mean that climate science predictions are wrong.

10) It also does not mean that when scientists discover that the polar ice melted faster than the model predicted [substitute any predictive error here] that things are worse than they predicted. Hello - it means that their modeling was wrong - nothing more or less.

11) Most of what you read (unless you are reading original scientific literature - you aren't doing this if you are not an expert in the field), was written by some reporter, whose primary skill is writing - not science.

12) Much of the source material for the writers in 11 are things like the IPCC reports, which are written by politicians, not scientists.

13) That said, even the IPCC reports are a bit beyond the scientific comprehension of journalists - and certainly beyond their ability to discern fact from opinion, so what you get from them is the "executive summary".

 

What should you believe? This might be hard to swallow, but you should probably believe nothing that you have read [if you are reading scientific publications, you should look at the facts - and question whether they are both plausible and whether how they were measured has flaws]. It is probably much more useful to understand the knowledge, perspectives, expertise, and motives of the parties writing what you see and question what you have read.

 

Other things to consider.

1) Does what somebody ask, scale? If he suggests converting your car to run on used french fry oil, try to consider how many fries, and how much oil is being used in your town. This is good enough, because all towns wil have the same answer. (Hint - if your family does not eat enough fries to run your car(s), the town's families have the same problem.)

2) If his hypothesis is that the problem is caused by the US, consider the world population - nearly 7 billion - versus US populations 0.3 billion. The rest of the world has a 20 times bigger effect than the US. Sure maybe the US is 2nd or third now - It used to be first in CO2... But the rest of the world fully intends to catch up - quickly - How many coal electric generation plants did India and China (Germany) build last year?. What will we do to prevent that - LOL. If we are buyers of their cheap products... If we are selling our services to them ...

3) Motives and "religion" of the person proselytizing - Does he read Mother Jones or does he realize that nuclear energy (fission) is viable and far cleaner today than any scalable alternatives.

4) Does he understand that today's decisions have to be based on reality? Energy density is important. If you are generating it, it must be consumed at the same rate, or the difference stored. It can't be consumed at a higher rate than generated. When the sun goes down in the summer or winter, we still need energy for cooling or heating. When it gets hot and the wind stops blowing - not that that ever happens simultaneously - LOL, consumers still need energy to connect to BBO.

5) Should you just ignore the "problem". No! It is very likely real.

6) It is very important that you select the most likely options to work - practice finesses are not solutions.

 

 

What can I do?

1) Educate yourself to the point that you could get an A in high school physics.

2) Same thing in chemistry.

3) Mathematics - at least algebra and calculus. Statistics and numeracy are probably important, too.

4) Do you know the difference between power and energy? The units of either? (Most reporters do not, so if you don't, you have company - not good company)

a) Power is the rate at which energy is generated or consumed. Think of energy like miles and power like speed. So power is expressed in kilowatts and energy in kilowatt hours.

b) If somebody says that a plant generated 1000 megawatts last year, you know he does not know what he is talking about. It would be the equivalent of him trying to describe how many miles you drove and saying the you drove 75 mph last year.

5) Question what you read critically - Yesterday I read an article, from what should be a reputable source, that suggested that gun homicides only trailed 4 other causes of death for people in the US - it trailed accidents, unintentional poisoning, gun suicides, falls and some category that I can't remember offhand. Credibility check - 2010 homicides were about 11,000. Suicides are about 38,000 per year - half of which were by firearms, auto accidents 30,000 ish. Would you quickly come to the conclusion that Americans are not dying, or are emigrating fast enough to make up for a birth rate. Check CDC.. Suicides are the TENTH most common cause of death (but only if you aggregate all the cancers into one category. In the real world, in 1000 deaths, only 4 are likely to be as the result of a gun homicide.

 

Why did I say credibility check?

Follow the numbers - 340,000,000 people in the country and only 11,000 died from the 5th leading cause of death! It doesn't take much to imagine that if the average life expectancy is about 75 years that we must be seeing about 2,500,000 people dying each year - unless we are pretty much celibate or emigrating. Ratios. Population:deaths:gun homicides = 340,000 : 2,500 : 11.

 

http://www.cdc.gov/n...tats/deaths.htm

For a reality check, think of all the people that you personally know that have died (not people that have been reported to have died). In which of the top ten categories in that link were they? For me 1-6 had at least one, 7-9, zero, and 10 - 2 both minors, neither involving guns.

[Daniel1960]

Very nice FM.

[Winstonm]

The Russian is an astrophysicists, a.k.a. James Hansen. People seem to pay him a lot of attention. I do not knoe where you are getting yuor 90% figure, because there appears to be a lot fewer that give AGW a high degree of confidence. Unless of course, you mean that 90% feel that CO2 is contributing at some degree, rather than the predominant factor.

 

Dr. James Hansen is not a Russian, nor a denier. He is not one of the mysterious Russian scientists to whom you alluded. Dr. Hansen

[blackshoe]

Global Warming is an alien conspiracy designed to transform our planet's atmosphere to be more compatible with their needs. They take the long view - it may take us many years to complete the job, but once we do — which will of course result in the extinction of the human race — they'll have a ready-made colony effectively for free.

 

What the Hell, it's as likely as some of the "theories" I've heard about AGW — on both sides of the argument. :ph34r:

[Daniel1960]

Dr. James Hansen is not a Russian, nor a denier. He is not one of the mysterious Russian scientists to whom you alluded. Dr. Hansen

 

Sorry, my mistake - that should read a la (was in a hurry, and hit a 'k' instead of an 'l'. Why do you refer to him as being "mysterious?" He is only a leading Russia space research scientist and head of the Russian portion of the ISS.

[PassedOut]

Carbon Dioxide Level Passes Long-Feared Milestone

 

Scientific monitors reported that the gas had reached an average daily level that surpassed 400 parts per million — just an odometer moment in one sense, but also a sobering reminder that decades of efforts to bring human-produced emissions under control are faltering.

 

The best available evidence suggests the amount of the gas in the air has not been this high for at least three million years, before humans evolved, and scientists believe the rise portends large changes in the climate and the level of the sea.

 

“It symbolizes that so far we have failed miserably in tackling this problem,” said Pieter P. Tans, who runs the monitoring program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that reported the new reading.

 

Ralph Keeling, who runs another monitoring program at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, said a continuing rise could be catastrophic. “It means we are quickly losing the possibility of keeping the climate below what people thought were possibly tolerable thresholds,” he said.

 

The new measurement came from analyzers high atop Mauna Loa, the volcano on the big island of Hawaii that has long been ground zero for monitoring the worldwide carbon dioxide trend.

 

Devices there sample clean, crisp air that has blown thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean, producing a record of rising carbon dioxide levels that has been closely tracked for half a century.

 

Carbon dioxide above 400 parts per million was first seen in the Arctic last year, and had also spiked above that level in hourly readings at Mauna Loa. But the average reading for an entire day surpassed that level at Mauna Loa for the first time in the 24 hours that ended at 8 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time on Thursday, according to data from both NOAA and Scripps.

 

Carbon dioxide rises and falls on a seasonal cycle and the level will dip below 400 this summer, as leaf growth in the Northern Hemisphere pulls about 10 billion tons of carbon out of the air. But experts say that will be a brief reprieve — the moment is approaching when no measurement of the ambient air anywhere on earth, in any season, will produce a reading below 400.

 

“It feels like the inevitable march toward disaster,” said Maureen E. Raymo, a Columbia University earth scientist.

It does indeed. Of course those who will be most affected have yet to be born, a fact not lost on those fighting against action now.

[FM75]

As opposed to passing 397, 398, or 399!

 

Huh? Why was 400 the magic number? 2 zeros? I think 402 was the tipping point. ROFL.

 

Is π a power of 10? How about e. Or c, the speed of light. Avogadros' number?, Planck's constant?

[PassedOut]

As opposed to passing 397, 398, or 399!

 

Huh? Why was 400 the magic number? 2 zeros? I think 402 was the tipping point. ROFL.

 

Is π a power of 10? How about e. Or c, the speed of light. Avogadros' number?, Planck's constant?

Milo of Croton

 

He was said to have achieved the feat of lifting the bull by starting in childhood, lifting and carrying a newborn calf and repeating the feat daily as it grew to maturity.

B-)

[mike777]

I watches a report tonight on cbs/abc that really ticked me off.

 

 

1) co2 levels highest in several million years.

2) that =global disaster.

 

 

in no way did they show one=two but that was the report.

 

It was a complete shoddy news piece ..a piece of crap.

 

 

actually based on the info one could just as easy claim higher c02 was good news...great news.

 

my point is not what was said but what was not said or reported.,,....crap.

I call this bias.

[mike777]

"What should you believe? This might be hard to swallow, but you should probably believe nothing that you have read [if you are reading scientific publications, you should look at the facts - and question whether they are both plausible and whether how they were measured has flaws]. It is probably much more useful to understand the knowledge, perspectives, expertise, and motives of the parties writing what you see and question what you have read."

 

 

 

you make these important points.....but then even you seem to disregard them...so?

edit....my point sounded a bit too harsh.....you raised it.

 

IN OTHER POSTS I posted the point if phrased a bit different.

 

Put simply I tend to trust studies that look for one thing and find another...I distrust studies that look for something and find it.

[PassedOut]

actually based on the info one could just as easy claim higher c02 was good news...great news.

 

my point is not what was said but what was not said or reported.,,....crap.

I call this bias.

They looked hard to find a credible person to make the case that the dramatic increase in CO2 is good news...great news, but could find no one. Do you think that is sufficient reason to suppress the story?

 

Were you equally angry at the stories about the Dow breaking 15,000 because no one came on to make the case that reaching that milestone was a bad thing?

[Winstonm]

"What should you believe? This might be hard to swallow, but you should probably believe nothing that you have read [if you are reading scientific publications, you should look at the facts - and question whether they are both plausible and whether how they were measured has flaws]. It is probably much more useful to understand the knowledge, perspectives, expertise, and motives of the parties writing what you see and question what you have read."

 

 

 

you make these important points.....but then even you seem to disregard them...so?

edit....my point sounded a bit too harsh.....you raised it.

 

IN OTHER POSTS I posted the point if phrased a bit different.

 

Put simply I tend to trust studies that look for one thing and find another...I distrust studies that look for something and find it.

 

How do you determine the motive of those who create studies? In other words, how do you know a study's purpose was to look for a specific result?

[Al_U_Card]

How do you determine the motive of those who create studies? In other words, how do you know a study's purpose was to look for a specific result?

 

Cui bono :ph34r:

[Al_U_Card]

They looked hard to find a credible person to make the case that the dramatic increase in CO2 is good news...great news, but could find no one.

 

Someone(s)

[Al_U_Card]

 

Were you equally angry at the stories about the Dow breaking 15,000 because no one came on to make the case that reaching that milestone was a bad thing?

 

Quantitative easing and the inflation of asset bubbles...

 

Anger management courses required :P

[PassedOut]

Someone(s)

You can always find someone to take a given position. Some even maintained that the 9/11 attacks were a US government conspiracy (if the shoe fits, wear it). That doesn't mean that every notion merits coverage.

 

News organizations have differing standards for credibility.

[PassedOut]

Climate Milestone: Earth’s CO2 Level Passes 400 ppm

 

The last time the concentration of CO2 was as high as 400 ppm was probably in the Pliocene Epoch, between 2.6 and 5.3 million years ago. Until the 20th century, it certainly hadn't exceeded 300 ppm, let alone 400 ppm, for at least 800,000 years. That's how far back scientists have been able to measure CO2 directly in bubbles of ancient air trapped in Antarctic ice cores.

 

But tens of millions of years ago, CO2 must have been much higher than it is now—there's no other way to explain how warm the Earth was then. In the Eocene, some 50 million years ago, there were alligators and tapirs on Ellesmere Island, which lies off northern Greenland in the Canadian Arctic. They were living in swampy forests like those in the southeastern United States today. CO2 may have been anywhere from two to ten times higher in the Eocene than it is today. (See related: "Hothouse Earth.")

 

Over the next 45 million years, most of it was converted to marine limestone, as CO2-laden rains dissolved the ingredients of limestone out of rocks on land and washed them down rivers to the sea. CO2-belching volcanoes failed to keep pace, so the atmospheric level of the gas slowly declined. Some time during the Pliocene, it probably crossed the 400 ppm mark, as it's doing now-but back then it was on its way down. As a result, at the end of the Pliocene, it became cold enough for continental ice sheets to start forming in the northern hemisphere. The Pliocene, says geologist Maureen Raymo of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, "was the last gasp of warmth before the slow slide into the Ice Ages."

 

What was Earth like then? In Africa, grasslands were replacing forests and our ancestors were climbing down from the trees. (See related: "The Evolutionary Road.") On Ellesmere, there were no longer alligators and cypress trees, but there were beavers and larch trees and horses and giant camels—and not much ice. The planet was three to four degrees Celsius warmer than it was in the 19th century, before man-made global warming began.

 

If anything, those numbers understate how different the Pliocene climate was. The tropical sea surface was about as warm as it is now, says Alexey Fedorov of Yale University, but the temperature gradient between the tropics and the poles—which drives the jet streams in the mid-latitudes—was much smaller. The east-west gradient across the Pacific Ocean—which drives the El Niño-La Niña oscillation—was almost nonexistent. In effect, the ocean was locked in a permanent El Niño. Global weather patterns would have been completely different in the Pliocene.

 

And yet the two main drivers of climate—the level of CO2, and the parameters of Earth's orbit, which determine how much sunlight falls where and at what season—were essentially the same as today. Fedorov calls it the Pliocene Paradox.

 

Climate scientists are just beginning to crack it, he says. Maybe clouds outside the tropics were darker in the Pliocene, such that they bounced less sunlight back to space. Maybe the warm ocean was stirred by a lot more hurricanes.

 

Hanging over this academic research is a very nonacademic issue: Could our climate be capable of flipping to a completely different state? "That's the big question—whether CO2 can move us to the Pliocene," says Fedorov.

Conservatives do not want to take that risk, even if most of the damage will be born by future generations.

[Al_U_Card]

You can always find someone to take a given position. Some even maintained that the 9/11 attacks were a US government conspiracy (if the shoe fits, wear it). That doesn't mean that every notion merits coverage.

 

News organizations have differing standards for credibility.

Yes, and many just regurgitate what is fed to them without analysis or critique.

 

Not being swayed by appeals to authority and the lure of consensus will ensure that our grandkids have a better result that what we have to deal with.

[Winstonm]

Cui bono :ph34r:

 

In other words, if you agree with the findings it is sound but if you disagree the author must have had a hidden agenda? Sounds reasonable. ;)

[Daniel1960]

In other words, if you agree with the findings it is sound but if you disagree the author must have had a hidden agenda? Sounds reasonable. ;)

 

I find this statment more true than I care to admit. Too many people with which I have argued use the statement, "so and so cannot be trusted because he is a ____" (fill in the blank with whatever fits the current topic).

[Cascade]

I am still unclear as to what you are after. No one - not a single person - claims that AGW is a 100% ironclad fact. AGW simply has a high degree of confidence from 90% of the world's climate scientists. The facts build a strong circumstantial case in support of that position.

 

And this is the settled science?

 

If you really believe that then surely you would be keen for scientists to explore the possibility that the theory is incorrect.