Discussion Topic |
|
This thread has been locked |
Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
|
|
|
Jun 11, 2010 - 01:44pm PT
|
However, woolly myths (including those of blahblah) are in plentiful supply on this thread.
|
|
blahblah
Gym climber
Boulder
|
|
|
Jun 11, 2010 - 02:05pm PT
|
Nothing any of the nitwits have posted have changed the fact that humans have spread from where they evolved to occupy virtually every ecological niche on the planet, including ones that exhibit large variation in weather over any scale.
Ed's theory that humans can only survive in some sort of incredibly stable environment is laughable, provable BS.
And dirtbag, your comment was so freaking boring it's about to put me to sleep. Triple yawn to ya, sport.
|
|
dirtbag
climber
|
|
|
Jun 11, 2010 - 02:14pm PT
|
Actually Ed and a few others have been extraordinarily patient explaining things to you.
This is exactly the preeminent philosophy I speak of.
Ed and a few others know a ton about this subject.
They are experts.
I am not--I am ignorant. Most people are ignorant about this. I could name names, but I won't.
So I appreciate it when someone who knows a lot about a topic bothers to explain things to me that I do not understand.
|
|
blahblah
Gym climber
Boulder
|
|
|
Jun 11, 2010 - 03:10pm PT
|
Ed and a few others know a ton about this subject.
They are experts.
I am not--I am ignorant. Most people are ignorant about this. I could name names, but I won't.
So I appreciate it when someone who knows a lot about a topic bothers to explain things to me that I do not understand.
I can accept that he is an expert in a certain field and I appreciate his sharing that expertise with us.
But once he (and his cohorts) stray from their area of expertise and start spouting off on other subjects that are only tangentially related their expertise, if that (e.g., humans ability to adapt to changing environments):
Ed's got his opinions. We all got 'em, just like the well known saying goes about opinions and other things.
|
|
TomT
Trad climber
Aptos.
|
|
|
Jun 11, 2010 - 03:49pm PT
|
I'm a bit late to this discussion so forgive me if I don't read the previous 1500 posts. I don't see the logic of Chiefs line of questions.
There are probably many fires, big ones in the history of the Sierra: the causes of different fires vary, many are set off by lighting, some by humans. We can assume those set prior to humans are not set by humans.
Are we not discussing here whether this particular fire (GW) is set by humans? Fires set by lighting would be irrelevant.
|
|
Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
|
|
|
Jun 11, 2010 - 08:11pm PT
|
Despite Ed's patient, heroic efforts, some folks are just science-proof.
In an alternative spirit of entertainment for the many others who aren't....
A few pages back I mentioned Don Easterbrook, the retired geologist whose "global cooling" talks have been featured at the Heartland caucus, on Fox News and all over the Internet, not least in citations to this thread by blahblah and bookworm. Anyway, I posted earlier that bloggers including Gareth Renowden on Hot Topic and Tim Lambert at Deltoid had noticed that a key slide used in Easterbrook's talk had been copied without permission from Wikipedia. Then Easterbrook slyly erased and relabeled the graph to make some false claims in support of his counterfactual "global cooling" thesis. Here's the original graph (by Global Warming Art) as it appeared in Wikipedia,
and here's Easterbrook's edited version, with markings for recent temperatures erased and a new, suspiciously lower baseline drawn in and labeled "present day temperature." Anyone who knows climate data would know this was a fraud, but not a single "skeptic" was skeptical.
But after the bloggers publicized this dishonesty, Easterbrook struck back with an open letter to NYT reporter Andy Revkin in which he quickly switched graphs, and (confusing Renowden with Lambert, who grows truffles) wrote that
The charge by 'the truffle grower' that I used a graph “prepared by Global Warming Art” and that I "altered it to fraudulently bolster his case" is an outright, contemptible lie.
Unfortunately for Easterbrook's "contemptible lie" accusation, the missing link between these two graphs was soon discovered in an earlier talk by Easterbrook (Easterbrook's complete PowerPoint for this presentation is here, if you want to check it out). In this graph, he's only gone part way in erasing the modern-temperature markings from the original. Looking closely at the pixels, which people have done, you can see that Easterbrook put in that "Medieval Warm Period" label to hide the fact that he had erased part of the blue curve in order to get rid of the inconvenient truth of the "Recent Proxies" box in the original.
This really, provably, was fakery, unlike the false accusations of "climategate." Can you imagine the outcry if a scientist had been so dishonest to show global warming? But there's been no counter-cry against Easterbrook, no retractions, and "global cooling" lives forever on the Internet -- 215,000 hits on Google for "Don Easterbrook global cooling."
|
|
TomT
Trad climber
Aptos.
|
|
|
Jun 11, 2010 - 08:32pm PT
|
Chief,
I see your point, although climate research and grants is not a particularly great way to fund oneself. I know because I am a researcher (not in climate) and have raised my salary for 20 years- most people give up after about 5 years of such madness. It is much less secure than owning your own business and the pay is moderate. Climate researchers could do much better writing critiques of climate research than actually doing the research, which is tedious and the grant process hit and miss.
Actually, there are plenty of researchers focused on adapting to climate change, studying seawall needs (Bangladesh, the Gulf coast, Florida, etc..), costing out moving big coastal cities inland, building more water storage in places that rely now on snow and glacial water (the Sierra, Andes and the Alps) , and in general moving big rural populations in Africa and Asia to distant locations that will have more water. Some of their ideas are interesting.
Climate change will happen, I think most scientists are thinking that we need to reduce carbon in 50 years so as to avoid greater positive feedback that could cause the sort of massive warming events you are referring to in paleo history
|
|
Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
|
|
|
Jun 11, 2010 - 08:47pm PT
|
The funny story with the Easterbrook graphs is not that he copied and altered them from Wikipedia, then blusterously denied it. The funnier thing is where that "Present day temperature" baseline that he built his graph around actually comes from.
Easterbrook is not alone in this, uh, mistake. Lord Monckton has shown similar graphs in countless public talks, and there are many versions passed as truth around the Internet. CC, for instance, has posted such a graph on ST. This family of false graphs all convey the impression that the present is much cooler than most of the recent past -- as in Easterbrook's red-and-blue graph above, or this different version of the same idea that he tried to pass off to Revkin:
There are four labeled sections in the graph above -- and every single one of them is wrong! The "Medieval Warm Period" arrow points to Roman times, the "Little Ice Age" comes a thousand years too soon, the "Present global warming" is a century too early, and of course the "Present temperature" is not. But none of that is the funny part.
|
|
Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
|
|
|
Jun 11, 2010 - 09:04pm PT
|
The funniest part IMHO is where that "Present temperature" baseline comes from, and what's really at the "Present global warming" end of the graph.
See, this whole family of graphs is based on a temperature reconstruction by Richard Alley, using the GISP2 Greenland ice core. And that GISP2 reconstruction only goes up to 1905. So when Easterbrook, Monckton, and others wave at these graphs to illustrate how the past was warmer than the present, and "Present global warming" is insignificant -- they're really comparing the past not to the present at all, but to the ending years of the Little Ice Age. And yup, the past was often warmer than that.
Possibly, Easterbrook and Monckton don't know that their "present day" graphs end in 1905, in which case they are deeply ignorant about the data they're using. Or possibly they do know but don't mind being dishonest, and assume that their "skeptical" audiences won't notice. Which they don't.
|
|
Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
|
|
|
Jun 11, 2010 - 09:06pm PT
|
So, how much difference does it make if you pretend 1905 Greenland temperatures represent the "present day"? Here's my own version of the GISP2 reconstruction, following Easterbrook's coloring scheme, and with 1905 as the baseline. Everything looks warmer than that!
|
|
Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
|
|
|
Jun 11, 2010 - 09:09pm PT
|
But, based on historical records from the nearest weather station in Angmagssalik, Greenland, it's a reasonable bet that recent temperatures on the ice sheet have been about 2 degrees C warmer than they were a century earlier, as Greenland emerged from the Little Ice Age.
In that case, the same coloring scheme leads to this graph, which you'll never find a denialist using.
|
|
Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
|
|
|
Jun 11, 2010 - 09:16pm PT
|
Chiloe...
Can you answer my question... please.
Chief, that's not a real question, is it? Billions of years ago earth's surface was a magma ocean. There were times the seas went anoxic, other times they froze over, a huge meteorite hit Yucatan, flood basalts erupted over millions of years, all kinds of stuff happened. There have been Great Extinctions and little ones, funny plants and critters of all kinds that aren't here anymore, supercontinents that broke up, island arcs crushed between plates, collisions piled up great mountain ranges and other ones worn down, those pretty sandstones in Utah were all mountain ranges once that have long since been ground into sand then uplifted again. Everything changes. No one pretends the planet is unchanging, why does this seem like an "answer" you need?
Nor does any of that stuff prove that we can't choke on our own pollution, if we're stupid enough as it sometimes seems we might be.
|
|
blahblah
Gym climber
Boulder
|
|
|
Jun 11, 2010 - 09:21pm PT
|
Actually Chiloe the apparent mistakes you note are interesting and important, but not just for the reason you think.
Earlier in this thread you castigated me for having the temerity to suggest that, on occasion, some "scientists" may fudge the data a bit in order to advance their position. You've had it in for me ever since.
But now you ADMIT that reputable climate change scientists HAVE BEEN CAUGHT manipulating data! Thanks for proving my point, finally.
Or would you now have us believe that it's only scientists who posit global cooling who fudge, but those who posit global warming are all saints, and above all reproach?
(And I still got you on the trees; there is no freaking way that you can claim that tree ring data used to be a great proxy for temperature (when we don't really know whether they were or they weren't), but now they just don't work any more so we'll throw out recent tree ring data.)
|
|
Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
|
|
|
Jun 11, 2010 - 09:38pm PT
|
But now you ADMIT that reputable climate change scientists HAVE BEEN CAUGHT manipulating data!
Ah, seeing the world through blahblahvision.
|
|
Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
|
|
|
Jun 11, 2010 - 10:00pm PT
|
Chief, I still can't follow your logic. The fact that Earth's surface was molten in the past does not mean that a fire won't burn my hand, does it?
And yes, that 26 gigatons of CO2 we're pumping into the atmosphere each year (along with a lot of other crap) represents pollution just as surely as the (at least!) 40 thousand barrels of oil per day spilling into the Gulf of Mexico. We're running a huge experiment with every facet of our planetary space suit.
|
|
Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
|
|
|
Jun 11, 2010 - 10:36pm PT
|
Thanks, Ed, that's a fun graphic. Hadn't seen it before.
|
|
blahblah
Gym climber
Boulder
|
|
|
Jun 17, 2010 - 01:09pm PT
|
More carbon dioxide is good, since it makes plants grow better. This might be true if we could increase carbon dioxide without greenhouse heating, but high temperatures are not good for most plants.
What a load of BS.
What does "high" mean in high temperatures?
Different plants thrive at different temperatures. In any given location, new plants may grow optimally if the temperature goes up a few degrees. Big deal.
Anyway, in most the the world, you use HOTHOUSES to help grow plants that don't grow well naturally, and to improve/extend the growing season. Haven't heard of too many COLDHOUSES!
The alarmists cannot deny that global warming is projected to increase the biomass of the planet. (That's a good thing, in case you're kind of slow, like some of the alarmists' lackeys who like to pipe in now and them.)
I'll try to make it simple (all caps usually helps): there are HUGE PARTS OF THE PLANET THAT ARE UNPRODUCTIVE BECAUSE THEY ARE TOO COLD. IF IT WARMS UP, WE'LL BE ABLE TO USE THOSE CURRENTLY UNPRODUCTIVE AREAS AND MAYBE HAVE A SHOT AT PREVENTING MASS STARVATION.
|
|
blahblah
Gym climber
Boulder
|
|
|
Jun 17, 2010 - 01:24pm PT
|
Dr. Fail,
Your post is so lame (all of them, in case you're wondering which one) that most people don't see any need to respond to such drivel.
And they're boring.
|
|
|
SuperTopo on the Web
|
Let us know!