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dirtbag
climber
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Apr 29, 2009 - 09:18am PT
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We should hold a candlelight vigil to bring attention to the plight of the AGW skeptics.
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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Apr 29, 2009 - 09:36am PT
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ok, chiloe, i've never claimed to "know anything" about science...i am a voter and a taxpayer who wants to know the truth and i become very concerned when those on one side of a debate denounce and try to silence those on the other side
you quote steig:
"Ice volume should lag temperature by about 10,000 years, due to the relatively long time period required to grow or shrink ice sheets."
ok, doesn't this mean that the alleged melting of current ice sheets is actually caused by temps that rose 10,000 years ago? which means it's NOT caused by current human activity? which means the current (alleged) rising temps will not have any effect on ice sheets for another 10,000 years?
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dirtbag
climber
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Apr 29, 2009 - 11:24am PT
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If you're refering to this post:
"We should hold a candlelight vigil to bring attention to the plight of the AGW skeptics."
Then please show me the ad hom.
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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Apr 29, 2009 - 04:13pm PT
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dingus, i didn't quote crichton's book (and, of course, al gore didn't make any money on his books, speeches, and/or film); how about discussing the points crichton makes in his speech?
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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Apr 29, 2009 - 04:19pm PT
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"Smoking Gun #4: Infrared radiation doesn’t penetrate the oceans, and is absorbed in the very top “micro-layer” of the oceans. The greenhouse effect does not warm the oceans, and yet evidence shows that both the surface and deep oceans are warming. That means that there are either two systems at work here 1) one that is warming the atmosphere and another that is warming the oceans or 2) the same system is warming both the atmosphere and the oceans. Common sense would lead one to conclude that the same system that is warming the oceans is also warming the atmosphere. If that is the case, the sun is essentially the only source of warming for the oceans."
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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Apr 29, 2009 - 04:38pm PT
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"You once raked me over the coals for reading fiction you deemed unworthy."
i did? i don't recall that, but i'm fairly sure i'm sorry (i mean, if you're reading harlequin romances, then you deserve it)
i haven't read crichton's "state of fear" but i do think he makes some excellent points in his speech about scientific debate
i'm sure you all heard about this (from the ap):
"Al Gore said Tuesday the world must act quickly to slow the melting of the world's polar ice packs and glaciers before it reaches a critical rate for global warming."
but what about this:
"The research aircraft "Polar 5" today concluded its Arctic expedition in Canada. During the flight, researchers measured the current ice thickness at the North Pole and in areas that have never before been surveyed. The result: The sea-ice in the surveyed areas is apparently thicker than scientists had suspected.
Normally, newly formed ice measures some two meters in thickness after two years. "Here, we measured ice thickness up to four meters," said a spokesperson for Bremerhaven's Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research."
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Apr 29, 2009 - 05:48pm PT
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I'm surprised you guys didn't point out that a prominent Princeton physicist, William Happer, testified about the lack of science behind the warming debate here. I know WIll Happer and I can understand some of his points and not others, but in the end he believes this is a science issue, which is not entirely true either, but it is true that we scientists are at home in the science.
Follow the links to the transcription of his remarks, unfortunately his remarks are only picked up on the side of the debate which supports him... he is a careful scientists and his remarks should probably be examined and discussed.
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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Apr 29, 2009 - 07:28pm PT
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thanks, ed; here's an excerpt:
"Many distinguished scientific journals now have editors who further the agenda of climate-change alarmism. Research papers with scientific findings contrary to the dogma of climate calamity are rejected by reviewers, many of whom fear that their research funding will be cut if any doubt is cast on the coming climate catastrophe."
here's a scientist declaring that money IS a factor in global warming alarmism
"Certainly, it is a bit unnerving to read statements of Dr. James Hansen in the Congressional Record that climate skeptics are guilty of “high crimes against humanity and nature.”
skeptics are guilty of “high crimes against humanity and nature”? sounds a little like an INQUISITION
"Even elementary school teachers and writers of children’s books are enlisted to terrify our children and to promote the idea of impending climate doom."
more money
Having observed the education of many children, including my own, I am not sure how effective the effort will be. Many children seem to do just the opposite of what they are taught. Nevertheless, children should not be force-fed propaganda, masquerading as science. Many of you may know that in 2007 a British Court ruled that if Al Gore’s book, “An Inconvenient Truth,” was used in public schools, the children had to be told of eleven particularly troubling inaccuracies. You can easily find a list of the inaccuracies on the internet, but I will mention one. The court ruled that it was not possible to attribute hurricane Katrina to CO2. Indeed, had we taken a few of the many billions of dollars we have been spending on climate change research and propaganda and fixed the dykes and pumps around the New Orleans, most of the damage from Hurricane Katrina could have been avoided."
chiloe, any comments? anyone else?
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dirtbag
climber
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Apr 29, 2009 - 07:36pm PT
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I already suggested a candlelight vigil for the persecuted skeptics.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Apr 30, 2009 - 12:13am PT
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don't go too overboard, bookworm, Happer is taking issue not with the warming, which he says is happening, but with what the effect will be, and he makes a set of presumptions which may or may not be correct. His major problem, however, is with the politicization of the climate science.
Now when I read Happer's testimony, I was struck by his representation of the "hocky stick" curve, which he said showed no sign of the Medieval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age. I had remembered that both of those events were in the reconstructed data. Looking on Wikipedia you see the reconstruction generally showing both of those climate features. At least the reconstruction is consistent with those climate events.
The Nation Academy of Science report Surface Temperature Reconstruction for the Last 2,000 Years (which you can download for free) has this to say in its introduction:
Science is a process of exploration of ideas—hypotheses are proposed and research is conducted to investigate. Other scientists work on the issue, producing supporting or negating evidence, and each hypothesis either survives for another round, evolves into other ideas, or is proven false and rejected. In the case of the hockey stick, the scientific process has proceeded for the last few years with many researchers testing and debating the results. Critics of the original papers have argued that the statistical methods were flawed, that the choice of data was biased, and that the data and procedures used were not shared so others could verify the work. This report is an opportunity to examine the strengths and limitations of surface temperature reconstructions and the role that they play in improving our understanding of climate. The reconstruction produced by Dr. Mann and his colleagues was just one step in a long process of research, and it is not (as sometimes presented) a clinching argument for anthropogenic global warming, but rather one of many independent lines of research on global climate change.
Their summary:
• It can be said with a high level of confidence that global mean surface temperature was higher during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period during the preceding four centuries. This statement is justified by the consistency of the evidence from a wide variety of geographically diverse proxies.
• Less confidence can be placed in large-scale surface temperature reconstructions for the period from A.D. 900 to 1600. Presently available proxy evidence indicates that temperatures at many, but not all, individual locations were higher during the past 25 years than during any period of comparable length since A.D. 900. The uncertainties associated with reconstructing hemispheric mean or global mean temperatures from these data increase substantially backward in time through this period and are not yet fully quantified.
• Very little confidence can be assigned to statements concerning the hemispheric mean or global mean surface temperature prior to about A.D. 900 because of sparse data coverage and because the uncertainties associated with proxy data and the methods used to analyze and combine them are larger than during more recent time periods.
This is an interesting report and probably something that people should read.
Here is a section on the historic record of two different adaptations to the onset of the Little Ice Age:
"It is also possible to find examples of climatic changes that were not accompanied by any obvious direct social consequences, and to find cases where the same climatic change had sharply contrasting consequences for different social groups in the same area. A clear example of contrasting adaptations and success/failure in the same environment is provided by the Inuit and the Vikings in western Greenland and the Arctic during the onset of the Little Ice Age. The Norse settlements of Greenland were always marginal, not only because climatic conditions were poorly suited for agriculture but also because of isolation from their parent cultures in northern Europe. In the face of increasingly harsh climatic conditions, populations declined, the western Viking settlement was abandoned around 1350, and the eastern settlement followed suit about a century later. The Norse perceived the adverse changes in climate as a function of cosmological disorder and built ever more impressive churches, rather than adopting new technologies or searching for new sources of food (Barlow et al. 1997, Buckland et al. 1996, McIntosh et al. 2000, Diamond 2005, Rosen in press).
During the same period of medieval warmth that had encouraged Norse expansion, retreating sea ice appears to have allowed an eastward migration of native Inuits along the Arctic shore from Alaska, and thence southward into the same areas of west Greenland being colonized by the Vikings. And like the Norse, these Thule Inuit cultures were challenged to adapt constantly in order to exploit the available resources; for example, their methods of whale hunting had to adjust depending on whether the sea ice was close to, or far removed from, the shore (Wohlforth 2004). There appears to have been little contact between the Norse and the Thule peoples and no cultural exchange, so that the Norse may not even have been aware of the successful Inuit adaptations for use of marine resources. During the period of the Little Ice Age, the Inuit peoples had to adapt to changing environmental conditions once again. For example, to continue whaling, their populations on Alaska’s North Slope congregated in the few places on the coast where open water could still be reached, such as Nuvuk (Point Barrow). As a result of this and other choices, the Inuit—unlike the Norse—survived in the Arctic up to modern times."
Their reconstruction looks like this:
and they point to the areas of future research in this area, as you would expect from a scientific review.
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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Apr 30, 2009 - 07:05am PT
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"His major problem, however, is with the politicization of the climate science"
and this is what i quoted, ed, which, by your own account, isn't "overboard"
ok, temp increase occurred over the last few decades of the 20th century, but this fact raises questions, too; what about the period of rapid industrialization between 1850 and 1950, especially in america? this period was fueled primarily by coal, oil burning machines did not have catalytic converters, and let's not forget the massive use of ordinance through two world wars (including two nuclear bombs) and beyond...in the last few decades of the 20th century, we were already well into the environmental movement; cars and trucks were far less polluting; factories were more fuel efficient (that's just good business) and more environmentally friendly
so, shouldn't we have seen an increase in temps in the first half of the 20th century (as well as the last half of the 19th)? and doesn't the arguably anomalous increase in the second half point to other factors? and doesn't the decrease in temps over the last decade suggest that our efforts in the last few decades of the 20th century were effective, thereby negating the need for any new, drastic measures?
"Smoking Gun #5: The sun is getting hotter and its output has a higher correlation with temperatures
than CO2. This is also consistent with a warmer ocean. Ironically, records show that the solar output
began its increase near the beginning of the industrial age. This chart shows both the solar output and
atmospheric CO2. Clearly, solar output has a much greater correlation with temperatu
ting re than CO2."
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Apr 30, 2009 - 09:39am PT
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if you looked at this report bookworm, you will see that the radiative forcing due to the increased solar input, does not account for the increased temperatures...
Either I'm a failed teacher, or you are not really interested in learning. I'm thinking it is more that latter than the former.
Happer is talking about his experiences...
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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Apr 30, 2009 - 10:09am PT
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ed, i'm not a scientist; i'm a high school english teacher because i couldn't hack chemistry in college, which dashed my dreams of becoming the next Marlin Perkins
many of my colleagues would say you're a bad teacher because you abuse your students for asking questions
no, i can't absorb everything you presented at once; i was trying to break it down one point at a time and focused on the first bullet in your last post
dingus, why attack me for pointing out an apparent contradiction between what al gore (the global warming guru and not a climate scientist himself though he tries to play one on tv) and what some real scientists apparently discovered recently?
i'm asking because i'm concerned about the economic impact as well; i don't want to see the government pour billions (trillions?) of dollars into unnecessary programs that could cripple our economy, not to mention allow china and india to push forward...i don't know; it seems you and i might be on the same side
i'm not trying to be a climate scientist...the report i continue to excerpt was written by an economist who shares our concerns...his language is much easier to understand than the report ed presents, but i'm doing my best to understand both...see, the scientists are influencing policy so i think it's important that i try to understand the science...if i'm persuaded the science is sound, then i'll support whatever means are necessary to address the problem...but, as with everything else (regardless of who's president) i need to be persuaded
and policy moves much more quickly than science...the global warming alarmists have dominated the media for the last 10 years; thankfully, congress was more concerned with the economy than the environment and refused to ratify kyoto, which bought us some time...now the global warming doubtists are starting to be heard, and so far, i'm more persuaded by their claims mainly because they seem to be keeping their heads
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Apr 30, 2009 - 10:58am PT
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bookworm, it is disingenuous for you to liken yourself to a child student. I say this because you do not appear to be interested in learning from people who could teach you so much as winning a debate. Learning and debating are two very different things with two very different set of tactics.
When you divide the world of climate change into "believers" and "doubters" you are making a debating point. This is commonly done by a large number of people, and it gets in the way of healthy scientific argument, where nuance is necessary and important.
You have no interest in abandoning your "smoking gun #N" statements, yet they are, by now, trivial and irrelevant. There is a whole lot of undone science in the process of being identified and worked out. The story is not black and white, and it is wonderfully complex.
Unfortunately, the outcome is hugely important to humans, as the possibility that they are now driving aspects of the climate could greatly change human institutions.
What if the regional climate change decreased the amount of water available to California farmers in the central valley? Last time I looked, these farmers (and they are not Ma and Pa, but big agribusiness entities) produced 20% of the food products in the nation. The loss of that economy would certainly effect the nation.
Rising sea levels might change the distribution of coastal cities, some might even have to move, or just attenuate... what happens to Florida?
Now it is important to understand what is driving the climate change. Unfolding all of the components is important. But when there are such huge political issues at stake, science can be badly served. You love to cite your sources claiming that the variability of solar irradiance is a major cause, yet the very satellite missions that could answer that question have been on the back burner. The last administration decided it was a higher priority to have NASA work on a manned mission to Mars than to execute a science program. The end result is we do not have the data we could have had to address the very issue of solar irradiance, and earth albedo.
How could this be? Two things, in my mind. The first is that going to Mars was deemed important for national image. We are in a race with the Chinese... I always thought it would be best to have our robotic rovers greet the Chinese on their arrival, and bid them fair-well on their departure, and then go back to exploring Mars. That is the future of space travel, not overcoming the daunting task of putting people out there.... Secondly, the result of a scientific investigation is not known. What if we spent all that money on satellites and found out that the solar power output was not the driving the climate. Now we actually don't know the answer to that question, and that ignorance worries politicians. Scientists would welcome an answer, it would help them understand what is going on.
You are not interested in the science, you are interested in the politics.
Don't insult us by meek protests that you are a poor student who is just trying to learn something and has bad teachers. You do not respect your teachers, though they are among some of the best doing research in these area. You don't respect them because of your political beliefs.
It's your problem if you would squander this opportunity to learn something, rather than demonstrate that you can make some "gottcha" points in political debating. At this point, it would be a waste of time to continue to address your questions.
You have demonstrated, amply, that you are not interested in answers that do not agree with your own, ignorant, point of view.
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DrDeeg
Mountain climber
Mammoth Lakes, CA
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Apr 30, 2009 - 11:27am PT
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I must say I hesitate to jump in, as Ed & bookworm seem to be talking past each other. Generally, Ed is correct and has done his homework.
To keep this post short, here is what I think we know:
1. Solar variability happens, but is apparently not enough to account for all the warming (Judith Lean, Physics Today, 2005).
2. Yes, during the Ice Ages and their Interglacials, CO2 lagged the warming. However, the timing of the Ice Ages coincides with variability in Earth's orbit, but orbital variability does not explain the last 1000 years.
3. bookworm asks why we didn't see as much warming in the early part of the 20th century, even though CO2 was going up. The answer (we think) is that sulphate aerosols associated with coal burning caused a slight increase in Earth's reflectivity. In the 1970s we were worried that global cooling would be a problem. The aerosols countered the CO2 a bit, but not completely. More recently, scrubbers have reduced the sulphate output of coal-fired power plants.
4. Some posters have posited that warmer is better. The problem is the pace of change. No one is arguing that civilization would not have occurred if pre-industrial CO2 had been 450 ppm instead of 270 ppm (although the locations of ports and the cradle of agriculture might have been in different places). The issue now is that some change is happening faster than human infrastructure and some ecosystems can adapt. If sea level over the last 10,000 years were 10 m higher than it is, we would be OK, but if sea level rises 1 m in a century, it causes huge distress in places like New Orleans and Bangladesh, as well as substantially more coastal erosion even where the coast is steep, like much of California.
5. Finally, warming is consistent with conceptual physics. Earth's atmosphere is largely transparent to solar radiation. The Sun therefore mostly heats Earth's surface, and the surface re-radiates in the infrared wavelengths. In the atmosphere, some gases (CO2, water vapor, methane, nitrous oxide, etc) absorb the infrared radiation, so the atmosphere is heated from below. Logically, if you increase the concentration of the absorbing gases, the lower atmosphere will warm. You need a model to predict just how much it will warm, and how the changes will be distributed with season and latitude, but you don't need a model to predict that it will warm. C'mon, you folks are climbers! What do you expect to happen if you buy a thicker sleeping bag?
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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Apr 30, 2009 - 12:18pm PT
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"Learning and debating are two very different things with two very different set of tactics."
well, socrates might beg to differ; of course, he's dead because he asked a lot of questions and challenged the "consensus"
"There is a whole lot of undone science in the process of being identified and worked out. The story is not black and white, and it is wonderfully complex."
why am i the only one who gets this treatment? i'm not the one claiming "the evidence is indisputable"...i'm trying my best to understand the "wonderfully complex" story, which even you admit is still being "worked out"...you posted a set of bullets; i responded to the first bullet with what i thought was a reasonable query (thanks, deeg, for your clear response and, especially, the qualification--'we think')
if the claims made by my sources are so stupid, then why can't you provide a clearly stated explanation that makes the stupidity evident? at best, you post a response that is full of jargon, which i do my best to make sense of, which includes asking questions...but most of the time i'm accused of being motivated by ideology
"You are not interested in the science, you are interested in the politics."
oh the irony: "The last administration decided it was a higher priority to have NASA work on a manned mission to Mars than to execute a science program."
"Unfortunately, the outcome is hugely important to humans, as the possibility that they are now driving aspects of the climate could greatly change human institutions."
absolutely. but the government is moving toward making those "great changes" now; you seem to approve even though you admit the outcome is unknown...let's say we ratify kyoto (which, by the way, was rejected by the senate 98-0) and impose draconian limits on our own industry while simultaneously condoning the more rapidly expanding and far worse polluting of china and india; the consequences would be hugely significant and i argue hugely detrimental to our economy, especially at a time when the global economy hangs in the balance...then what if the alarm turns out to be false? would we be able to recover?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Apr 30, 2009 - 01:07pm PT
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I don't think I've written anything which approves or disapproves of gov't policy except as it affects the execution of science, which is my job, both to effect policy and to point out the shortcomings of it.
There are arguments that go on in my household regarding environmental and climate policy, and I am not accused of being "on the left" by a long shot. Once again, you need to put people into a "belief" of "doubt" box, it is much more complex than that.
One can always hide behind the charge that the experts can't be understood because they use "jargon" but we all face that wall in our educational experience and learn how to overcome it. Sometimes it is by asking a question, but the answer isn't always easy to understand. You have to put some work behind it. If, as is evident in your case, the asker isn't going to do that work, it's possible that there are other students that are more worth the time to educate. As it is not my job to do that, especially here, I might not wish to spend the time.
And by the way, the ancient Greeks, while making some progress in science, could not advance very far because they didn't know about the scientific method of Newton... which turns out to be the most important idea on how to make advances in knowledge, at least scientific knowledge.
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corniss chopper
Mountain climber
san jose, ca
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Apr 30, 2009 - 02:31pm PT
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My direct observations of the IR insulating ability of
water vapor vs CO2 is that water vapor beats CO2 hands down.
-no frost on the ground after a 'cloudy night' with 100's of smoldering campfires creating a thick CO2 blanket.
-lots of frost on the ground after a 'clear sky night' with 100's
of smoldering campfires creating a thick CO2 blanket.
conclusion is CO2 lets IR radiate out into space easily no matter the concentration. CO2 adds a tiny part to the greenhouse effect and can be ignored.
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DrDeeg
Mountain climber
Mammoth Lakes, CA
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Clouds are not water vapor, they are drops of liquid water, which is highly absorptive in the infrared. Yes, a cloudy night is warmer.
As greenhouse gases, CO2 and H2O are coupled. Extra CO2 warms, causing more evaporation, causing more water vapor, which in turn causes more warming. This is called a water-vapor feedback, so indeed about half the warming caused by increasing CO2 is from this extra water vapor. Among the climate models, the warming caused by CO2 directly is rather straightforward to calculate, and nobody really disagrees about its magnitude.
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corniss chopper
Mountain climber
san jose, ca
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Ah hah! good catch there Dr. Cloud droplet size is a good
IR reflector, several magnitudes better than CO2.
The linkage
you and others suggest would seem to self regulate and cool the planet, so are we in danger of bringing on an Ice Age with
exhaling all this yummy CO2 for the worlds plant life to eat?
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