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Pablo27
Trad climber
Santa Cruz, CA
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Oct 21, 2011 - 12:25pm PT
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Global warming is a problem. If it has been caused by humans, which it looks like it has, it has something in common with most of the worlds problems. We do not have the resources, technology or will to support such a large population. Please stop making babies!
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cliffhanger
Trad climber
California
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Oct 21, 2011 - 03:52pm PT
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Former darling of the skeptics, physicist Richard Muller, says the climate models showing warming are right after all:
So in 2010 he started up the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project (BEST) to show the world how to do climate analysis right. Who better, after all? "Muller's views on climate have made him a darling of skeptics," said Scientific American, "and newly elected Republicans in the House of Representatives, who invited him to testify to the Committee on Science, Space and Technology about his preliminary results." The Koch Foundation, founded by the billionaire oil brothers who have been major funders of the climate-denial machine, gave BEST a $150,000 grant.
But Muller's congressional testimony last March didn't go according to plan. He told them a preliminary analysis suggested that the three main climate models in use today—each of which uses a different estimating technique, and each of which has potential flaws—are all pretty accurate: Global temperatures have gone up considerably over the past century, and the increase has accelerated over the past few decades.
complete article: http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/10/climate-skepticism-takes-another-hit |
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Oct 21, 2011 - 05:21pm PT
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Dr. F, the irony is that the BEST group, despite Koch funding, came to exactly the opposite conclusion from what some people expected. Namely, they discovered for themselves (and now publicly announced) that climate scientists had been right all along.
* Yep, temps are increasing.
* Nope, it's not urban heat islands, if anything the very rural sites have warmed faster.
* And yep, what the BEST group came up with after starting over from basics looks pretty much like NASA's famous GISTEMP time series.
I don't think that Muller himself expected to reach that conclusion, so props to him for telling it like it is.
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Oct 22, 2011 - 11:01am PT
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This graph from BBC well illustrates how closely the BEST do-over ended up matching the NASA GISS record. Basically, BEST confirmed that the NASA team had it right all along.
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Oct 22, 2011 - 11:04am PT
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Source: BBC
The BEST temperatures, like those of NASA and NOAA, show more warming than the alternative HadCRU index. There's another irony here:
The HadCRU team were the targets of the "climategate" email theft, and widely though falsely accused of somehow cheating to make their data look warmer. But when it turned out that the HadCRU data actually had a cool bias rather than a warm one, those same critics switched to embracing HadCRU as the index that best supported their "no warming since 1998" declarations (it's a moving target, so some of these claims have recently shifted to "no warming since 2002").
Thus, another contribution of BEST is that they end up supporting the global temperature indexes (NASA and NOAA) that showed greater warming.
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corniss chopper
climber
breaking the speed of gravity
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Oct 22, 2011 - 03:05pm PT
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Climatologist Martin Herzberg, Ph.D : "... Water in the form of oceans, snow, ice cover, clouds and vapor 'is overwhelming in the radiative and energy balance between the Earth and the sun. ... Carbon dioxide (CO2) and the greenhouse gasses are, by comparison, the equivalent to a few farts in a hurricane'."
The climate change scam is nothing more than another excuse to grow the
federal government, impinge upon your freedom with more control of your
behavior, extract more cash from your wallet and redistribute it to the
government's green industry cronies. It is another convenient way for the
progressive/socialist elite to feel self-righteous and superior
(the word "hubris" comes to mind)
for "saving the Earth" for us skeptical, Neanderthal types.
This scam can be summed up in one word, "Solyndra!"
http://www.shreveporttimes.com/article/20111013/OPINION0106/110130318/Terry-Plamondon-scam-can-summed-up-one-word-Solyndra-?odyssey=mod|newswell|text|FRONTPAGE|s
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k-man
Gym climber
SCruz
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 24, 2011 - 02:27pm PT
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Two degrees C puts humanity on a new hotter, stormier planet that is less compatible with human survival.
As for staying below 1.5 degrees C, as African nations, Pacific Island states and others believe is essential for survival, it may already be too late. In all the 193 scenarios examined by Rogelj et al, there were only two that suggest is it possible to stay below 1.5 C during this century. And that includes heavy use of bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration.
It ain't lookin' pretty.
Durban May Be Last Chance to Stabilize Climate Under Two Degrees
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DrDeeg
Mountain climber
Mammoth Lakes, CA
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Oct 25, 2011 - 09:43pm PT
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Corniss,
The reason CO2 is more important than its concentration would indicate is that it absorbs in a wavelength range (around 15 mu-m) where water vapor is not absorptive. Over most of the infrared spectrum water vapor is indeed the major absorber, as the graph below shows (the jagged line is emitted radiation at the top of the atmosphere, the smooth curves are for blackbody radiators at a variety of temperatures). The calculation is for a standard tropical atmosphere with a surface temperature of 294.2 K (21 C). If there were no atmospheric absorption, the jagged curve would lie on the top smooth curve.
And yes, the extra CO2 is from fossil fuels. The declining ratio of the stable isotopes C-14 and C-13 to the normal C-12 shows that the extra carbon is very old. If it were from the ocean or the land biosphere, the ratio would not be changing so dramatically.
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k-man
Gym climber
SCruz
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 26, 2011 - 10:11pm PT
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Its over for the Denialists
Unfortunately, this is not a game--it's not like the Birther's banter about birth certificates, which is nothing but a smokescreen brought forth to waste our thoughts on insignificant "news."
No, this is not a game and there is no "We Win, You Lose" scenario here.
All the deniers in this thread, from bookie, to CC, to The Chief, on and on. They are not losers on the opposite side of our winnings.
Sooner or later, the truth behind the forces that propped up the Denial crowd will be outed. The science will prevail. Hopefully this realization will open the eyes of the folks who were conned, the chance is here for them to understand the ways in which they were mislead.
For some, it will be too much to admit. For others, a change of perspective will take place.
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tradmanclimbs
Ice climber
Pomfert VT
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Oct 30, 2011 - 01:16pm PT
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WASHINGTON (AP) — A prominent physicist and skeptic of global warming spent two years trying to find out if mainstream climate scientists were wrong. In the end, he determined they were right: Temperatures really are rising rapidly.
The study of the world's surface temperatures by Richard Muller was partially bankrolled by a foundation connected to global warming deniers. He pursued long-held skeptic theories in analyzing the data. Yet he found that the land is 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than in the 1950s.
His finding of a warming world is no different from what mainstream climate scientists have been saying for decades.
What's different and why many are paying attention is that some research money came from the Charles Koch Foundation, whose founder is a big backer of skeptic groups and the conservative tea party movement.
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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Oct 31, 2011 - 06:53am PT
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from ed morrissey:
"I got an e-mail from him challenging me on this point, saying the correlation between rising temperatures and mass release of CO2 was undeniable. I explained to him that AGW skepticism doesn’t rest on the notion that global temperatures aren’t rising, but that the AGW crowd has yet to show causation between CO2 release and actual warming. He replied that correlation was enough to prompt action, but that’s neither scientific or wise. Correlation only shows that two trends parallel each other; if one isn’t the cause of the other, then “solutions” designed to change one trend won’t impact the other anyway — and it will waste time, money, and perhaps lives while the perceived problem continues unabated."
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rottingjohnny
Sport climber
mammoth lakes ca
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Oct 31, 2011 - 09:23am PT
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Corniss...Stop worrying about global warming...It's a hoax...There...Do you feel better..?
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Oct 31, 2011 - 12:08pm PT
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bookworm marches tirelessly, a foot soldier for the dumbing down of America.
I am 100% sure he has not analyzed, and does not know how to analyze, the data in the graph he cut and pasted without bothering to credit the real source -- so it's just "Credit: bookworm" for here.
The "flat" (actually, it still goes slightly up) trend in the small slice of data shown in the lower graph is an artifact of the outlier value for April 2010. See how out-of-place that one outlier looks? To data analysts, that's a red flag suggesting possible data-quality problems. And sure enough, in the same dataset the BEST team give their uncertainty estimates, which show that uncertainty for the April and May 2010 values is about 28 times greater than it is for earlier values. In other words, they don't trust those two numbers, due to incomplete data. Only a fool, or someone who knew their audience was eager to be fooled, would jump on one poorly-measured outlier from a dataset with 2,524 other data points to make a headline.
If you re-analyze the data setting aside the two poorly-measured months, the upward trend turns out to be similar to what has been found all along. I get .16 degrees C/decade. Warming did not stop.
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Oct 31, 2011 - 01:05pm PT
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That temperature-graph tale bookworm brought us above just got funnier. Nick Stokes reports that the BEST data for March 2010 came from 14,488 stations. The data for April 2010, the outlier that seemingly pulls down the trend, came from just 47 stations. All in Antarctica.
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Thailand's heart attack
By Michael D. Lemonick
November 2, 2011
An obese, middle-aged man is running to catch a bus. Suddenly, he clutches his chest, falls to the ground and dies of a massive heart attack. It turns out that he's a smoker and a diabetic, has high blood pressure, eats a diet high in saturated fat and low in leafy green vegetables, pours salt on everything, drinks too much beer, avoids exercise at all costs and has a father, grandfather and two uncles who also died young of heart attacks.
So what killed him? Most people are savvy enough about health risks to know this is a trick question. You can't pick out a single cause. His choices and his genes all contributed to the heart attack — but you can say with confidence that the more risk factors that pile up, the more likely it is to end badly.
Somehow, though, people think that it makes sense to ask whether a given extreme weather event — a devastating heat wave or a punishing drought or a deadly torrential rainstorm — is caused by climate change.
PHOTOS: Thailand floods
That's a trick question too. Scientists know that the increasing load of greenhouse gases we're pumping into the atmosphere doesn't "cause" extreme weather. But it does raise the odds, just as a diet of triple bacon cheeseburgers raises the odds of heart disease.
The floods that have been threatening to inundate Bangkok, Thailand, for nearly a week now are a perfect example. Since last summer, torrential rains have been pounding the Thai highlands, swelling the country's rivers, including the Chao Phraya, which flows through the capital. Many people have fled for drier ground, fearful that the city's dikes might not hold back the water — especially over the weekend, as the virtual tsunami from the north tried to empty into the Gulf of Thailand just as unusually high tides were pushing up the river. "It seems like we're fighting against the forces of nature," Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra told the New York Times last week.
That's partly true. But as experts in risk management have come to realize, it's not just nature that has put coastal cities like Bangkok in the cross hairs of catastrophe. Monsoons and floods have drenched Asia for thousands of years. But before cities like Bangkok, Jakarta, Manila and Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) arose, climate-related disasters affected relatively few people.
Now, as the latest edition of the Climate Change and Environment Risk Atlas from Maplecroft, a London-based risk assessment firm, makes clear, swelling populations and shaky infrastructure, especially in poorer nations, put millions in harm's way.
The very existence of mega-cities, then, is one risk factor for weather and climate disasters (the Bangkok metropolitan area holds nearly 15 million people) — it's the high blood pressure, you might say, of disaster.
But climate change is an additional risk factor. Scientists have shown that torrential rains have gotten heavier in recent years, in large part because of human-caused global warming. This year's Southeast Asian monsoon may or may not have the fingerprints of climate change all over it, but in general, the trend toward heavier rains is likely to continue. Last weekend's high tide doesn't have anything to do with rising sea level; it was caused by an unusual alignment of Earth, moon and sun. But as climate change does raise sea levels over the coming century — by an average of 3 feet by 2100, according to the current best estimate — rain-swollen rivers will have a harder and harder time emptying quickly into the ocean.
But wait, (as they say on infomercials) there's more! Another consequence of climate change is that hurricanes and typhoons may get more intense, fueled by warmer ocean waters. That means stronger storm surges will be pushing on higher seas and driving them farther inland — and as survivors of Hurricane Katrina know very well, it's not so much the winds and rain that get you; it's the surge.
This time, it's Thailand's turn to have a heart attack. Last summer, it was Texas and Oklahoma, with parching drought and the hottest summers on record. In the fall, it was Vermont and other parts of the Northeastern U.S., inundated with devastating rains and floods. A couple of weeks ago, it was Central America, where nearly 5 feet of rain fell in 10 days, causing deadly floods and mudslides. This week, it was the Northeast again, hammered by the sort of storm that normally holds off until December or even later.
All of these disasters might have happened in any case, for purely natural reasons, just as people without any obvious risk factors sometimes have heart attacks. But with the extra factor of human-generated climate change added to the mix, the odds of a bad result are just that much higher. And if we keep adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, those odds will keep on rising.
PHOTOS: Thailand floods
Michael D. Lemonick is a senior writer for Climate Central, a nonprofit science and journalism organization in Princeton, N.J.
Copyright © 2011, Los Angeles Times
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Studly
Trad climber
WA
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The sh#t is about to hit the fan, and unfortunatly the fan is running.....on high. Its not going to be pretty.
Anyone that thinks that man can't affect climate just needs to visit eastern China. About one day there should do it. People grow up there their whole lives and never see the stars...they are lucky sometimes to see the building across the street. Its LA on steroids times 1000.
Climate change deniers are usually people that do not travel outside the US, and like to keep their head up their hiney.
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DrDeeg
Mountain climber
Mammoth Lakes, CA
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I want to emphasize that Ed Hartouni is correct. It’s too bad he has to continue to explain again and again.
We understand how radiative transfer between the surface and the atmosphere warms the atmosphere. We know from laboratory measurements how CO2 and other gases absorb infrared radiation in specific wavelengths, and we can calculate how their concentrations affect atmospheric temperature profiles.
We also agree that natural processes change climate, but in the period of record the known variability of solar radiation would affect climate about 1/10th as much as the CO2 has. Sulfate aerosols from coal combustion indeed cool climate, but their effect has not been enough to counteract CO2. The worry in the 1970s about global cooling was entirely legitimate. It and the conjectures about the climatic effects of nuclear war led to a lot of good work about scattering and absorption of radiation by the aerosols. We now know that sulfate aerosols and soot aerosols affect climate in different directions. Soot warms, both in the atmosphere and by getting into snow and ice and increasing the melt rate by increasing absorption of solar radiation.
Over the long term, regular variability in Earth’s orbit affects climate (causing the Ice Ages for example) but these variations have periods of 20,000-100,000 years and are insignificant in the last 1,000 years.
In climate science, we do consider and are really interested in uncertainties, and the current political “climate” makes it hard to soberly discuss them (as this forum has illustrated all too well). Some important ones to investigate and discuss are:
Regional variability – as Earth’s average temperature rises, some areas will warm more than others. Evidence is showing that the Arctic is warming more, particularly in winter.
Precipitation – more evaporation from a warmer ocean must mean more global precipitation. But atmospheric circulation will change, so some areas will likely become drier, like continental interiors. Some precipitation that currently falls as snow will likely be rain instead, so the snowpack “reservoir” will not hold as much water into the summer.
Sea level – in the last decade we have measured more rapid flow of tidewater glaciers into the sea, and spectacular breakoffs of Antarctic ice shelves have occurred. We have no data at all, yet, about the rate at which the ocean warms the bottoms of the ice shelves, because getting down to the ocean through 200-800 meters of ice is a hard problem.
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dirtbag
climber
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Yeah, what Dr. F said.
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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luv ya, f
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2055191/Scientists-said-climate-change-sceptics-proved-wrong-accused-hiding-truth-colleague.html
here's a taste:
"‘This is nowhere near what the climate models were predicting,’ Prof Curry said. ‘Whatever it is that’s going on here, it doesn’t look like it’s being dominated by CO2.’ …
‘Of course this isn’t the end of scepticism,’ she said. ‘To say that is the biggest mistake he [Prof Muller] has made. When I saw he was saying that I just thought, “Oh my God”.’
In fact, she added, in the wake of the unexpected global warming standstill, many climate scientists who had previously rejected sceptics’ arguments were now taking them much more seriously.
They were finally addressing questions such as the influence of clouds, natural temperature cycles and solar radiation – as they should have done, she said, a long time ago."
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k-man
Gym climber
SCruz
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Topic Author's Reply - Nov 4, 2011 - 01:03pm PT
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Perhaps the most showing about bookworm was when he posted an article about Global Warming. He thought the article backed his case that AWG wasn't happening. But the article, in a no nonsense, matter-of-fact conclusion stated that global warming was indeed happening and that its main cause was the burning of fossil fuels. It also stated that the rise in temperature was in line with the scientific predictions of climatologists.
I pointed out the articles conclusion to bookworm, but of course he didn't respond. Obviously he doesn't read what others post, doesn't read what he himself posts, and could care less what the science says. Because of this, I no longer read his posts.
It is simultaneously sad and scary that folks like this exist.
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