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k-man
Gym climber
SCruz
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 1, 2011 - 09:12pm PT
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Hufpo has the answer!
Actually, the article says that scientists from NASA are modeling the scenario.
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corniss chopper
climber
breaking the speed of gravity
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Mar 22, 2011 - 06:44pm PT
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Association Of Irritated Residents Defeats California Air Resources Board’s Global Warming Plan
They insist on max regulation of emissions by CARB rather than what is in the works and the judge agreed.
Hilarious if you don't think of how much prices will go up on everything.
http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=3650
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bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, CA
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Apr 13, 2011 - 12:41am PT
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The film's basic premise is that the current scientific opinion on the anthropogenic causes of global warming has numerous scientific flaws, and that vested monetary interests in the scientific establishment and the media discourage the public and the scientific community from acknowledging or even debating this. The film asserts that the publicised scientific consensus is the product of a "global warming activist industry" driven by a desire for research funding. Other culprits, according to the film, are Western environmentalists promoting expensive solar and wind power over cheap fossil fuels in Africa, resulting in African countries being held back from industrialising.
More research, Ed? More current? How long will this charade go on??? It may even be true, but the data isn't there. Or it is there if you choose to look at weather cycles from history.
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TGT
Social climber
So Cal
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Apr 13, 2011 - 11:19pm PT
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It's all the potheads fault!
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2011/04/12/marijuana-causes-global-warming.html?ana=e_pft
In California, some 400,000 authorized growers use about 3 percent of the state’s electricity for their business.
“This corresponds to the electricity use of 1 million average California homes, greenhouse-gas emissions equal to those from 1 million average cars, and energy expenditures of $3 billion a year,” Mills says. However, since California is such a green state, it only generates 20 percent of national carbon dioxide emissions from pot growing, while using 70 percent of nationwide energy for this industry.
Read more: Marijuana causes global warming, uses 1% of U.S. electricity | San Francisco Business Times
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JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
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May 13, 2011 - 02:12pm PT
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Ed,
The NRC study is important because it included economists as well as scientists. It is one of the better studies attempting to integrate scientific findings with economic analysis. For that reason alone, it is worth reading, even if it was commissioned by a highly partisan Congressional request.
I think economists will have some trouble with its conclusions, because they make, sub silencio several assumptions about costs, benefits and risk aversion that greatly influence their conclusions, but I think it's an excellent start.
John
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Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
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May 13, 2011 - 02:38pm PT
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always throw a little doubt of skepticism in by finding something about the "source"
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JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
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May 14, 2011 - 01:50am PT
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Bruce,
Ten years ago, the climate science was well under way, but the economics wsa non-existent. Unfortunately, we still aren't that far along. A recent AEA paper deals with trying to determine a workable framework for analyzing the economics of climate change. The obvious problem is trying to measure marginal costs, where we have only the crudest of proxies.
Most of the papers I've read either ignore the economics, or admit that there's almost no credible measurement of the parameters. This paper at least has a cogent discussion of the issue.
In general, my experience as an economist and as an attorney has been that the scientific community's work doesn't make it far enough into the economic decision-making, in part because the two disciplines have interst in different things. The interested parties usually provide lots of useless data. The environmentalists will tell us the total cost of pollution, but not its marginal cost. The anti-environmentalists will tell us the economic disruption in total elimination of pollution, but not the marginal cost.
Ideas like cap and trade, that make economic sense, are still not well understood by people who should know better. For example, the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal -- a publication that should know better -- calls cap and trade a mere tax increase. If, in fact, carbon emissions have a cost (and I know of no scientific literature that says otherwise), cap and trade simply places more of that cost on the emitters. Sure, we don't know the precise amount of the marginal costs, but trial and error should be able to get us pretty close.
The reason I find this study important is that it helps span the rhetorical gap between scientists, politicians, lawyers and economists. Put another way, it helps focus people in one discipline to provide analysis and data useful to interrelated disciplines. As I've said ad nauseum, what to do about carbon emission is, ultimately, a decision about resource allocation. That makes it an economic one.
John
P.S. Do you think anyone in Canada would mind if I start a CARCA chapter in Fresno? I could call it the California Avalanche Rescue Cat Association.
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blahblah
Gym climber
Boulder
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May 14, 2011 - 05:11pm PT
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Even scarier is why people have stopped thinking global warming is real. One major reason pollsters say is we had a very cold, snowy winter. Which is like saying the sun might not be real because last night it got dark. And my car’s not real because I can’t find my keys.
If "scientists" think those are good analogies, it's nor surprising that more and more people are tuning them out.
Separately, lots of us can at least entertain the notion that there is a certain amount of GW occurring, and it's been caused in least in part by mankind.
This thing is, we just don't give a rat's ass. There is already huge variation in climate where people live--if the climate where you live gets a little shift over the course of many decades, big freaking deal. And to a large extent the changes will be positive.
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corniss chopper
climber
breaking the speed of gravity
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May 14, 2011 - 06:11pm PT
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Main stream media
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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May 15, 2011 - 07:32pm PT
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Carbon warming too minor to be worth worrying about
By David Evans
The debate about global warming has reached ridiculous proportions and is full of micro-thin half-truths and misunderstandings. I am a scientist who was on the carbon gravy train, understands the evidence, was once an alarmist, but am now a skeptic. Watching this issue unfold has been amusing but, lately, worrying. This issue is tearing society apart, making fools out of our politicians.
Let’s set a few things straight.
The whole idea that carbon dioxide is the main cause of the recent global warming is based on a guess that was proved false by empirical evidence during the 1990s. But the gravy train was too big, with too many jobs, industries, trading profits, political careers, and the possibility of world government and total control riding on the outcome. So rather than admit they were wrong, the governments, and their tame climate scientists, now outrageously maintain the fiction that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant.
Let’s be perfectly clear. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and other things being equal, the more carbon dioxide in the air, the warmer the planet. Every bit of carbon dioxide that we emit warms the planet. But the issue is not whether carbon dioxide warms the planet, but how much.
Most scientists, on both sides, also agree on how much a given increase in the level of carbon dioxide raises the planet’s temperature, if just the extra carbon dioxide is considered. These calculations come from laboratory experiments; the basic physics have been well known for a century.
The disagreement comes about what happens next.
The planet reacts to that extra carbon dioxide, which changes everything. Most critically, the extra warmth causes more water to evaporate from the oceans. But does the water hang around and increase the height of moist air in the atmosphere, or does it simply create more clouds and rain? Back in 1980, when the carbon dioxide theory started, no one knew. The alarmists guessed that it would increase the height of moist air around the planet, which would warm the planet even further, because the moist air is also a greenhouse gas.
This is the core idea of every official climate model: For each bit of warming due to carbon dioxide, they claim it ends up causing three bits of warming due to the extra moist air. The climate models amplify the carbon dioxide warming by a factor of three — so two-thirds of their projected warming is due to extra moist air (and other factors); only one-third is due to extra carbon dioxide.
That’s the core of the issue. All the disagreements and misunderstandings spring from this. The alarmist case is based on this guess about moisture in the atmosphere, and there is simply no evidence for the amplification that is at the core of their alarmism.
Weather balloons had been measuring the atmosphere since the 1960s, many thousands of them every year. The climate models all predict that as the planet warms, a hot spot of moist air will develop over the tropics about 10 kilometres up, as the layer of moist air expands upwards into the cool dry air above. During the warming of the late 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, the weather balloons found no hot spot. None at all. Not even a small one. This evidence proves that the climate models are fundamentally flawed, that they greatly overestimate the temperature increases due to carbon dioxide.
This evidence first became clear around the mid-1990s.
At this point, official “climate science” stopped being a science. In science, empirical evidence always trumps theory, no matter how much you are in love with the theory. If theory and evidence disagree, real scientists scrap the theory. But official climate science ignored the crucial weather balloon evidence, and other subsequent evidence that backs it up, and instead clung to their carbon dioxide theory — that just happens to keep them in well-paying jobs with lavish research grants, and gives great political power to their government masters.
There are now several independent pieces of evidence showing that the earth responds to the warming due to extra carbon dioxide by dampening the warming. Every long-lived natural system behaves this way, counteracting any disturbance. Otherwise the system would be unstable. The climate system is no exception, and now we can prove it.
But the alarmists say the exact opposite, that the climate system amplifies any warming due to extra carbon dioxide, and is potentially unstable. It is no surprise that their predictions of planetary temperature made in 1988 to the U.S. Congress, and again in 1990, 1995, and 2001, have all proved much higher than reality.
They keep lowering the temperature increases they expect, from 0.30C per decade in 1990, to 0.20C per decade in 2001, and now 0.15C per decade — yet they have the gall to tell us “it’s worse than expected.” These people are not scientists. They overestimate the temperature increases due to carbon dioxide, selectively deny evidence, and now they conceal the truth.
One way they conceal is in the way they measure temperature.
The official thermometers are often located in the warm exhaust of air conditioning outlets, over hot tarmac at airports where they get blasts of hot air from jet engines, at waste-water plants where they get warmth from decomposing sewage, or in hot cities choked with cars and buildings. Global warming is measured in 10ths of a degree, so any extra heating nudge is important. In the United States, nearly 90% of official thermometers surveyed by volunteers violate official siting requirements that they not be too close to an artificial heating source.
Global temperature is also measured by satellites, which measure nearly the whole planet 24/7 without bias. The satellites say the hottest recent year was 1998, and that since 2001 the global temperature has levelled off. Why does official science track only the surface thermometer results and not mention the satellite results?
The Earth has been in a warming trend since the depth of the Little Ice Age around 1680. Human emissions of carbon dioxide were negligible before 1850 and have nearly all come after the Second World War, so human carbon dioxide cannot possibly have caused the trend. Within the trend, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation causes alternating global warming and cooling for 25 to 30 years at a go in each direction. We have just finished a warming phase, so expect mild global cooling for the next two decades.
We are now at an extraordinary juncture. Official climate science, which is funded and directed entirely by government, promotes a theory that is based on a guess about moist air that is now a known falsehood. Governments gleefully accept their advice, because the only ways to curb emissions are to impose taxes and extend government control over all energy use. And to curb emissions on a world scale might even lead to world government — how exciting for the political class!
Even if we stopped emitting all carbon dioxide tomorrow, completely shut up shop and went back to the Stone Age, according to the official government climate models it would be cooler in 2050 by about 0.015 degrees. But their models exaggerate 10-fold — in fact our sacrifices would make the planet in 2050 a mere 0.0015 degrees cooler!
Finally, to those who still believe the planet is in danger from our carbon dioxide emissions: Sorry, but you’ve been had. Yes, carbon dioxide is a cause of global warming, but it’s so minor it’s not worth doing much about.
Financial Post
David Evans consulted full-time for the Australian Greenhouse Office (now the Department of Climate Change) from 1999 to 2005, and part-time 2008 to 2010, modelling Australia’s carbon in plants, debris, mulch, soils, and forestry and agricultural products. He is a mathematician and engineer, with six university degrees, including a PhD from Stanford University in electrical engineering. The comments above were made to the Anti-Carbon-Tax Rally in Perth, Australia, on March 23.
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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May 15, 2011 - 11:11pm PT
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I've been looking at a lot of ice data lately, but here's something a bit different about the changing oceans.
Global estimates of sea surface temperature:
And heat content down to 700 meters depth:
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corniss chopper
climber
breaking the speed of gravity
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May 15, 2011 - 11:28pm PT
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Evans is believable because he's not riding the gravy train of global warming money like the scare mongering Warmists who preach gobbledegook
end of the world BS.
Must we go down this road and count coup on you alarmists again?
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the Fet
climber
Tu-Tok-A-Nu-La
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May 16, 2011 - 02:34am PT
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Evans is believable because he's not riding the gravy train of global warming money like the scare mongering Warmists who preach gobbledegook
end of the world BS.
What gravy train pays better the pro or anti global warming one? Here's a hint what kind of money pays for anti global warming propaganda, that's right big oil with BILLIONS of dollars. Where is all the money for scientists warning of climate change?
And once again no one but the right wing spin machine says it's about the end of the world. It's simple economics. If we don't work on the problem now it will cost WAY more to deal with the aftermath.
But subconsciously you already know all this don't you?
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apogee
climber
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May 16, 2011 - 02:37am PT
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The only thing that cchopper knows is what the Roger Ailes mothership tells her.
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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May 16, 2011 - 09:47am PT
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first, if i find something interesting, i post it to an appropriate forum; i don't necessarily "believe" evans, but he makes sense to me because he presents his ideas in a manner comprehensible to a layperson
as for his credentials (or lack thereof), i have more respect for his candor than scientists who conspire to manipulate the peer-review system to eliminate any scientists who disagree with them, then deny such conspiring despite the emails published worldwide
why i might be persuaded by evans...
well, first, i was a global warming skeptic but then it became clear that the globe wasn't warming so the global warmists stop referring to global warming and started referring to "climate change" which, as it turns out, refers to ANY change in the climate (or weather) which, as it turns out, effectively blocks their claims from dissent because no matter what the climate (or the weather) the climate changists can declare their data and models are accurate because they can point to ANY change as evidence of change so now i find myself having to be a climate change skeptic even though i KNOW the climate is changing just as it has been changing since the beginning of, well, climate
you know there was a time when i thought the global coolists were crazy because, obviously, the globe didn't cool; then the warmists came along and made the coolists look not exactly sane but less fringey or even mainstream--in the climate science community anyway; now there are no more warmists, just changists...i wonder if there will be a global temperatists movement in the coming decades; now, that would be radical
so i guess i'll just continue to enjoy and marvel at the cold and snowy winters and the cool and rainy springs and the hot and humid summers and the cool autumns and then the temperate and snowless winters and the warm and rainless springs and the cool and pleasant summers and the warm autumns and the hysteria that ensues when the weather takes an unusual (meaning not in recent memory) turn just as i have done for 46 years
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rottingjohnny
Sport climber
mammoth lakes ca
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May 16, 2011 - 10:09am PT
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Bookworm....you understand evans because he presents evidence that is understandable to the layperson...maybe that explains why you are more than wiling to swallow the fox news bait on a regular basis....? and the gravy train flows from the oil companies who have made obscene profits the past several years...you have a teaching degree...? no wonder education is on the ropes...
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rottingjohnny
Sport climber
mammoth lakes ca
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May 16, 2011 - 10:37am PT
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Malemut...it's pointless to try and point out the obvious to these evasive narrow minded skeptics...facts are irrelevant to them and become another point in the argument for them to hide behind...If the liberals were saying that the planet was cooling , the morons would take the opposite tack......for the skeptics it's not about science ...it's all about cheering for their home team , the political correctness that they always try to accuse the other side of ...it's fun to watch people who base their opinions on propaganda rather than reality try to function in the real world...like watching a raven trying to crack a walnut...
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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May 16, 2011 - 10:43am PT
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bookworm:
then it became clear that the globe wasn't warming so the global warmists stop referring to global warming and started referring to "climate change"
Here's a pop quiz for bookworm the teacher. What does the CC in IPCC stand for? When was it founded?
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