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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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Dec 29, 2010 - 07:58am PT
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“‘When it doesn’t snow, global warming proponents blame global warming, and when winters are cold, they blame global warming, etc. This is what you call unfalsifiable science,’ Michaels said. ‘It’s not science because it can’t be falsified.’”
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Douglas Rhiner
Mountain climber
Truckee , CA
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Dec 29, 2010 - 09:02am PT
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Exactly worm.
So look at the long term evidence and real science. Not just snapshots out your window.
The earth's atmosphere IS getting warmer.
Weather or not humans are responsible can be debated all you want.
However all inhabitants of this planet will have to deal with the ramifications of a warming planet REGARDLESS of whom or what has caused it.
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dirtbag
climber
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Dec 29, 2010 - 10:15am PT
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“‘When it doesn’t snow, global warming proponents blame global warming, and when winters are cold, they blame global warming, etc. This is what you call unfalsifiable science,’ Michaels said. ‘It’s not science because it can’t be falsified.’”
Are you really that ignorant, or just dishonest (and really, just an as#@&%e)?
I suspect the latter.
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dirtbag
climber
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Dec 30, 2010 - 04:19pm PT
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Corniss, you are a goddamned idiot.
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HighTraverse
Trad climber
Bay Area
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Dec 30, 2010 - 11:13pm PT
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There are Global Warming skeptics. They truly haven't made up their minds.
The Global Warming deniers on the other hand have no mind to make up. Let's not go into that psychology.
The evidence is irrefutable that the CURRENT global warming is largely caused by CO2 emissions from hydrocarbon combustion by or for humans since the late 19th century. Emissions that are still increasing year by year. Methane is another contributor but to a lesser degree. These are scientific facts.
Global Warming is a term preferable to Climate Change for precisely the reason that global warming is measurable, and predictable if you know the rate of hydrocarbon production. This is fundamentally NOT new science, it's been known for at least 20 years.
The difficulty with the term Climate Change is precisely because it's not very predictable. Largely because our understanding of the interaction of large scale climate systems is presently poorly understood.
Even so, some climatologists have predicted that Northern Europe and possibly NEastern US and Canada will become cooler and wetter.
How? you might ask. It certainly sounds counter intuitive.
Think Gulf Stream. That fantastic heat engine that gives Long Island, Cape Cod and Maine bathing beaches and gives most of the British Isles snow - free winters.
Briefly, the Gulf Stream is driven by the temperature DIFFERENCE between the Atlantic sub tropical zone (think that region between Africa and the southern part of the Caribbean) and the Arctic zone (think Greenland).
As the oceans warm up overall, the high latitude oceans are warming faster than the sub tropical oceans. It's not a BIG change in ocean temperature. It's a huge change in heat difference from the sub tropics to the arctic. The Gulf Stream will slow down due to the reduced temperature difference.
When the Gulf Stream slows down, it will carry less warm water North even though the water will be slightly warmer. Making Northern winters and summers colder and wetter.
This mechanism is difficult to model at best.
Short term (over a few years) climatic changes are so chaotic (random, or poorly understood) that it's difficult to say whether or not this particular winter is evidence of Global Warming or evidence to the contrary.
What is certain is the that until we significantly reduce hydrocarbon consumption, the atmosphere and oceans WILL get warmer and climate WILL change.
Our lifestyles will be forced to change, there will be economic and social dislocations worse than any we've seen in modern history. As usual, some of the rich and powerful will become richer and more powerful. Certainly the poor will become poorer. Ayn Rand would say "Bravo".
A large percentage of land available for agriculture will be lost to the rising oceans. A large percentage of San Francisco Bay industrial and residential development will either be retaken by the bay or will require construction and maintenance of dikes. Can you say higher food prices and higher taxes?
It's not yet too late to reverse the warming trend. If we continue as we are, someday in the not too distant future (15 years? 40 years?) it will reach a tipping point beyond which the earth will slowly get warmer...and warmer....and warmer.
Quick not so trivial question: Ocean rise is already being measured. Is it mostly due to the ice caps melting or is it due to the oceans becoming warmer?
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August West
Trad climber
Where the wind blows strange
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Dec 31, 2010 - 01:55pm PT
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Dingus
If I had to bet, I would bet that civilization will face catastrophic climate change within the next two or three hundred years (I don't know why everyone is fixated on 2100, its not like the problem is going to go away at that point). China/India and the US will continue to point the finger at the other while carrying on business pretty much as usual.
But there is still plenty that we could do without putting us at an economic disadvantage. For instance, being more agressive in forcing energy efficiency which can actually pay for itself in the long run.
Another example: Getting people out of SUVs/Mini Vans and into smaller hybrid/electric cars. A $30,000 car cost $30,000. It doesn't hurt our economy. There is a tradeoff in use, ease of putting a couple of kids and groceries in a large car versus a car that is much easier to drive around a parking lot. Owning an electric sport sedan status symbol instead of a large SUV status symbol.
I also think we should pass legislation that would compel us to large cuts in greenhouse gases if the other large emmiters (read China and India) do the same. For those that are so convinced that China and India would never agree, then it is an empty bluff but would make clear to the world (and clear to ourselves) that we are ready to be part of the solution instead of just a major part of the problem.
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DrDeeg
Mountain climber
Mammoth Lakes, CA
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The black carbon problem is inherently fixable in a realistic future. The Greenland ice cores show, for example, that black carbon from North America was worse 50 years ago than today. In India, China, and much of Asia, affordable improved cooking stoves would emit less than the current stoves used.
On the oceans, the estimate is that about half the sea level rise is caused by expansion from the warming, another half by melting ice. Raising water temperature by one degree C decreases density by about 0.2 kg/m^3. Ocean water's density is around 1025 kg/m^3, so that density decrease is just 0.02%. Doesn't sound like much, but translate that to a 4000 m deep water column (average depth of the ocean) and you would get an 80 cm rise in sea level from thermal expansion alone.
As we go into the future, the satellites that measure gravity (GRACE and its follow-ons) measure the mass (not the volume) changes in the ocean and can thereby distinguish between expansion and increase in the actual water itself.
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Batrock
Trad climber
Burbank
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Has this letter been posted yet?
10/11/10 Dear Curt:
When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago). Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?
How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.
It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.
So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it. For example:
1. About a year ago a few of us sent an e-mail on the subject to a fraction of the membership. APS ignored the issues, but the then President immediately launched a hostile investigation of where we got the e-mail addresses. In its better days, APS used to encourage discussion of important issues, and indeed the Constitution cites that as its principal purpose. No more. Everything that has been done in the last year has been designed to silence debate
2. The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety. (They did admit that the tone was a bit strong, but amazingly kept the poison word incontrovertible to describe the evidence, a position supported by no one.) In the end, the Council kept the original statement, word for word, but approved a far longer “explanatory” screed, admitting that there were uncertainties, but brushing them aside to give blanket approval to the original. The original Statement, which still stands as the APS position, also contains what I consider pompous and asinine advice to all world governments, as if the APS were master of the universe. It is not, and I am embarrassed that our leaders seem to think it is. This is not fun and games, these are serious matters involving vast fractions of our national substance, and the reputation of the Society as a scientific society is at stake.
3. In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.
4. So a few of us tried to bring science into the act (that is, after all, the alleged and historic purpose of APS), and collected the necessary 200+ signatures to bring to the Council a proposal for a Topical Group on Climate Science, thinking that open discussion of the scientific issues, in the best tradition of physics, would be beneficial to all, and also a contribution to the nation. I might note that it was not easy to collect the signatures, since you denied us the use of the APS membership list. We conformed in every way with the requirements of the APS Constitution, and described in great detail what we had in mind—simply to bring the subject into the open.<
5. To our amazement, Constitution be damned, you declined to accept our petition, but instead used your own control of the mailing list to run a poll on the members’ interest in a TG on Climate and the Environment. You did ask the members if they would sign a petition to form a TG on your yet-to-be-defined subject, but provided no petition, and got lots of affirmative responses. (If you had asked about sex you would have gotten more expressions of interest.) There was of course no such petition or proposal, and you have now dropped the Environment part, so the whole matter is moot. (Any lawyer will tell you that you cannot collect signatures on a vague petition, and then fill in whatever you like.) The entire purpose of this exercise was to avoid your constitutional responsibility to take our petition to the Council.
6. As of now you have formed still another secret and stacked committee to organize your own TG, simply ignoring our lawful petition.
APS management has gamed the problem from the beginning, to suppress serious conversation about the merits of the climate change claims. Do you wonder that I have lost confidence in the organization?
I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I’m not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.
I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends.
Hal
Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, former Chairman; Former member Defense Science Board, chmn of Technology panel; Chairman DSB study on Nuclear Winter; Former member Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards; Former member, President’s Nuclear Safety Oversight Committee; Chairman APS study on Nuclear Reactor Safety
Chairman Risk Assessment Review Group; Co-founder and former Chairman of JASON; Former member USAF Scientific Advisory Board; Served in US Navy in WW II; books: Technological Risk (about, surprise, technological risk) and Why Flip a Coin (about decision making)
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corniss chopper
climber
not my real name
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There they go again! Warmists demonstrate their selective hearing
impairment when solutions are in the works.
The Garland of Rivers project in India's Himalaya is in the process of damming every river to provide clean power and water for the sub continent. Most rivers will get many dams as they fall from the roof of the world down to the thirsty Indian planes.
http://www.grist.org/article/oko-dam/
Nuclear Power in China
# Mainland China has 13 nuclear power reactors in operation, 25 under
construction, and more about to start construction soon.
# Additional reactors are planned, including some of the world's most
advanced, to give more than a tenfold increase in nuclear capacity to 80
GWe by 2020, 200 GWe by 2030, and 400 GWe by 2050.
# China is rapidly becoming self-sufficient in reactor design and
construction, as well as other aspects of the fuel cycle.
While coal is China's main energy source, most reserves are in the north or
northwest and present an enormous logistic problem – nearly half the
country's rail capacity is used in transporting coal. Because of the heavy
reliance on old coal-fired plant, electricity generation accounts for much
of the country's air pollution, which is a strong reason to increase
nuclear share. China recently overtook the USA as the world's largest
contributor to carbon dioxide emissions. The US Energy Information
Administration predicts that China's share in global coal-related
emissions will grow by 2.7% per year, from 4.9 billion tonnes in 2006 to
9.3 billion tonnes in 2030, some 52% of the projected world total. Total
carbon dioxide emissions in China are projected to grow by 2.8% per year
from 6.2 billion tonnes in 2006 to 11.7 billion tonnes in 2030 (or 28% of
world total). In comparison, total US carbon dioxide emissions are
projected to grow by 0.3% per year, from 5.9 billion tonnes in 2006 to 7.7
billion tonnes in 2030.3
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf63.html
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dirtbag
climber
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You two prove that there is no shortage of fools.
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blahblah
Gym climber
Boulder
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^ ^ ^
Hey genius, actually two is a pretty freaking small number, so even if "you two" are fools, that in no way proves or even supports your contention.
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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"The Economist"
Back from the brink
The UN climate conference achieved some results, albeit modest ones
Dec 16th 2010 | CANCÚN | from PRINT EDITION
WATCHING a man being rolled over by a bulldozer, reflected a negotiator at the Cancún climate conference in the small hours of the morning, is unpleasant. The man in question was Pablo Solon, the head of Bolivia’s delegation to the UN talks. The bulldozer was the other 193 countries’ determination to get a deal, even if only a modest one.
In a rancorous all-night debate in 2009 Bolivia and a handful of others had kept the “Copenhagen accord” put together by heads of government from being fully adopted as part of the UN’s climate negotiations. But at the final session of the 2010 conference, standing alone, Mr Solon was unable to repeat that feat. The principle of consensus on which the conference runs does not give one country the right to veto the will of all the others, ruled Patricia Espinosa, Mexico’s foreign secretary and the conference’s chair. Delegates stood and cheered. The bulldozer rolled.
The deal that passed over Mr Solon’s flattened dissent found a significant amount of common ground between the rich and the developing worlds. At its heart were some elements co-opted from Copenhagen’s accord. One was a pledge of $100 billion a year from north to south to help pay for emissions cuts and climate adaptation by 2020. Developing countries like that. The deal describes the money as being “mobilised”, however, which suggests a role for private-sector money. That pleases rich countries. A similar balance came with the establishment of a new fund for some of the money to flow through. Poor countries like that. But in a nod to the rich world, the fund gained some independence from the climate conference itself.
Another bit of the deal was an agreement on REDD+, a system to reward countries for lowering (or not raising, depending on their history) rates of deforestation. This includes safeguards meant to ensure the fair treatment of indigenous people. A new adaptation framework makes dealing with the effects of climate change a bigger part of the UN process. A final element was a deal on technology transfer.
All of these now need to be turned from paper agreements into practical ones. That is something that parties to the talks have shown little flair for in the past. In particular the clean development mechanism, which moves money from rich-world carbon markets to developing countries, is in dire need of reform.
The Cancún agreement missed out some topics. Moves towards a deal on shipping and aircraft fuels, unpopular with oil producers, fell out of the text. They took with them—quite unfairly—worthy proposals in nearby paragraphs for new work on agriculture, a greenhouse-gas emitter on a par with deforestation.
The big countries got the specific things that they were after. China wanted not to be blamed for a failure, as it was after Copenhagen. America wanted pledges made in that summit’s accord to be recognised, plus progress on verification.
Keeping the sushi chilled
Most controversially, Japan wanted to be clear that it would not make a new commitment to emissions cuts under the Kyoto protocol after 2012, when its current promise runs out. Developing countries, which like the Kyoto protocol a lot (it demands nothing concrete of them), said this was an outrage. But the subtly constructed final text in essence gave Japan its way.
The all but universal buy-in to the agreements, though, was not just a testimony to Mexican diplomacy (much admired here), balanced outcomes, great-power satisfaction and textual finesse. It was also an act of desperation. The UN talks were in bad shape. Failing to meet the very modest expectations of Cancún would have been fatal. Nobody wanted that: hence the bulldozing.
It was not done without some pangs of regret. The Cancún meeting has given the UN process a new wind and the chance of real progress on forests, on footing the bill (if rich countries stump up) and on adaptation. But, as Mr Solon argued, the pledges made in the Copenhagen accord, and now annexed to the UN process, are nowhere near strong enough to limit climate change to an increase of two degrees, which is what the Cancún texts require. Bolivia may have been an irritant and an obstruction but the other negotiators knew it was right about this.
Many negotiators still say they will fight on for legally binding targets for all major economies that go well beyond their Copenhagen pledges. Evidence such as Japan’s success at Cancún suggests strongly that such targets will never be applied while specific countries resist, as some—America, China and others—always will. And treating hard targets as a make or break issue would surely lead to another, perhaps final, breakage. The UN climate process did quite well out of Cancún. The climate, not so well.
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JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
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If anyone is really interested in practical solutions to a problem that has lots of practical uncertainty, you might want to look at "Designing Climate Mitigation Policy" by Joseph Aldy, Alan Krupnick, Richard Newell, Ian Parry and William Pizer (Journal of Economic Literature 2010, 48:4, 903-934) published by the American Economic Association.
Although written for economic generalists (as opposed to a general audience), it summarizes quite well the state of current economic research in the area. It also has a good review of the literature on trying to make a rational policy that takes into account economic costs, benefits, and risk aversion given the range (as opposed to the point forecasts) of possible climate scenarios.
I know those who think anthropogenic climate change is a hoax won't like it, because it acknowledges the probability that such change is real. I know that those who want that probability to end the industrial revolution also won't like it, because it recognizes that proposed policies have costs that often exceed benefits. Maybe that means it's reasonably objective.
John
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