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TGT
Social climber
So Cal
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Dec 18, 2009 - 07:44pm PT
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For complete disclosure, the hysteria is very good for business. This whole carbon capture thing could provide for a very comfortable retirement.
It is hysteria though. The world isn't coming to an end.
We have no fur.
We evolved in significantly warmer climes.
From the Greenland ice cores.
We have been in a downtrend for most of the Holocene. The hockey stick doesn't amount to more than random noise.
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JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
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Dec 19, 2009 - 01:26am PT
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Santer's open letter troubles me. Santer has a big stake in the
Climategate debate. As claimed in an op-ed piece by Patrick Michaels in
today's Wall Street Journal , one of the emails from Santer to Phil
Jones says Santer is "very tempted" to "beat the crap' out of Michaels
for publishing "The Dog Ate Global Warming" -- a story about CRU
allegedly losing primary data -- in National Review.
In that circumstance, the gentleman doth protest too much, methinks. If I
were CC, I would cite that letter as evidence of the poverty of Santer's
ideas. Michaels' column cites facts about pressure to conform. Santer's
just has self-righteous complaints that the bad guys are intimidating his
side, but lacks a single, verifiable example. Can he cite where his views
are being censored? Without that, the letter does more harm than good.
In particular, I think wasting time on the alleged intimidation of those
who support theories of anthropogenic climate change plays into the hands
of deniers. Chiloe, Ed, and Base104 point the way out -- give 'em the
data. Read 'em and weep. This is science. Surely the modern world is
even less able to hide scientific observation than the Catholic Church
could stifle Galileo. (Incidentally, this is a criticism of both sides of
the "Climategate" controversy). Quit your griping, publish your findings,
and let the world decide.
John
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JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
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Dec 19, 2009 - 06:30am PT
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Ed,
I criticized Santer's letter for its ineffective advocacy. His allegation that powerful forces are suppressing his point of view needed substantiation. I contrasted his letter with the Michaels' WSJ column because the latter gave specific examples of the alleged misconduct, but Santer's letter did not, other than the allusion to hacking emails and publishing them in an incomplete, out-of-context fashion.
I had no intention of criticizing his science, nor that of anyone else. I was simply offering my take, as a professional advocate, on the underwhelming impact to me, as someone who is neither a climatologist nor a Lawrence Livermore employee, of his letter. He addressed his letter to fellow climatologists, who probably need no evidence from him. I find it ineffective for convincing the rest of us, though, because we need more than mere conclusions.
John
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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Dec 19, 2009 - 04:17pm PT
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Global Warming and an Odd Bull Moose
What one angry animal taught me about nature and its infinite complexities.
By DANIEL B. BOTKIN
One pleasant June evening years ago, I took a break from ecological research at Isle Royale National Park and went canoeing in a large inlet named Washington Harbor, hoping to see some of the moose populating that isolated wilderness island in Lake Superior. Upstream, an old cedar arched gracefully over the waters, framing the forest and the deepening sky beyond.
The serenity and beauty of the scene rivaled the best of America's landscape painting. For that moment, the remote island wilderness appeared as tranquil as a still-life, as permanent in form and structure as brush strokes on canvas at the Louvre.
Soon after I had pushed out from shore, a large bull moose stepped carefully into the cold lake waters and began a slow traverse of the shallows, searching for water irises, lilies and other water plants that were some of his favorite summer foods. He circled the shallows for 20 minutes, rarely stopping to feed. In this northern wilderness, June was too early for water plants, and as the moose edged his way over to the north shore, he found little to eat. Suddenly, he galloped through the shallows, scrambled out of the inlet, and began kicking vigorously at the shore. He dashed up a short bluff, breathing rapidly, turned, raced down and kicked again where the sand and waters met. It was as if he were furious with the harbor for denying him food, but I never did understand why he acted that way.
Nothing could have contrasted more with the idyllic scenery of that evening than the moose's bizarre, chaotic and perplexing behavior. But in the almost half-century that I have studied nature's character, I have come to realize that the seeming constancy of the harbor symbolized a false myth about nature, while the moose that kicked at the shore—complex, changeable, hard to explain, but intriguing and appealing in its individuality—was closer to the true character of biological nature, with its complex interplays of life and physical environment on our planet.
With the Copenhagen climate conference drawing to a close, and the perhaps-compromised science of global warming everywhere in the news, the big bull moose came to mind as a reminder of the difference between the way much of environmental science has been approached and the way nature actually works.
Most of the major forecasting tools used in global-warming research, including the global climate models (known as general circulation models of the atmosphere) and those used to forecast possible ecological effects of global warming, paint a picture of nature more like a Hudson River School still-life than like the moose that kicked at the shore. These forecasting methods assume that nature undisturbed by people is in a steady state, that there is a balance of nature, and that warnings the climate is at a tipping point mean that the system is about to lose its balance.
In fact, however, nature has never been constant. It is always changing, and life on Earth has evolved and adapted to those changes. Indeed many species, if not most, require change to persist. So there is something fundamentally wrong in most approaches to forecasting what might happen if the climate warms. The paradigm is wrong and has to change. But such fundamental change in human ideas never comes easily, and it is often resisted by those whose careers have been based on the old way of thinking. In addition, the general circulation models are such complex computer programs, and have been developed over so many years, that a fundamental change in the entire way of thinking about climate dynamics and its ecological implications is all the more difficult.
The recently revealed emails from the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, better known as "Climategate," illustrates the difficulty of letting go of old, perhaps flawed methods. We who work in environmental sciences and on global warming need to open ourselves to a much greater variety of ways of thinking about nature. We need to develop forecasting methods that are appropriate for always-changing, non-steady-state systems where chance—randomness—is inherent.
Among the various things I have tried over the course of four decades of work on the effects of global warming were a few computer models of the carbon-dioxide cycle, small computer programs, taking quite different approaches than the standard at the time to the question of what might happen if carbon dioxide were to increase rapidly from human actions. I created a strange little model of little boxes, each representing what we ecologists call "biomes"—major ecosystems on Earth, like all tropical forests. These "competed," so to speak, for CO2 in the atmosphere through their photosynthetic organisms, and returned some of that CO2 back to the atmosphere as the model's "creatures" respired or died and decayed.
The results were as strange and surprising to me as the moose who kicked at the shore. The CO2 in the atmosphere didn't just build up over hundreds of years and then slowly decline to the same perfect equilibrium concentration in the Earth's atmosphere prior to the industrial age. No, instead it oscillated strangely, because the biome that had the fastest rate of uptake "out-competed" the others, pulling the CO2 concentration down so far that the plants and algae in other biomes didn't have enough and died back, giving up their stored CO2 to the atmosphere.
That strange little computer model was at the time just as ephemeral for me as that evening canoe ride at Isle Royale. It got me thinking about how a complicated, intricate, always-changing system could respond to a novel input. The computer, caring even less about me than did the bull moose, simply showed me exactly what the consequences of my assumptions were.
I didn't publish that work because it was so simple, yet different, and seemed more a personal insight than a definitive forecast. But looking back now at the bull moose and that little computer model, I believe that we have been on the wrong path in our view of the way nature works, and we need a fundamental change in our paradigm.
This can come about only in an intellectual atmosphere that is open, free, and wildly experimental. It would be an atmosphere that let us accept that natural ecological systems are likely to be full of surprises, like a moose kicking at the shore.
And once we open ourselves to those possibilities, perhaps we won't find ourselves caught between defending weak science or lashing out, like that bull moose, and kicking at what seems to stand in our way.
Mr. Botkin, professor emeritus in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is the author, most recently, of "Powering the Future: A Scientist's Guide to Energy Independence," to be published in March by Pearson/FT Press.
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JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
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Dec 20, 2009 - 12:05am PT
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Don't be too cynical, Ed. Some of us are interested in being educated, and deeply grateful for your comments here.
John
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Lamberto
Sport climber
Italy
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Dec 20, 2009 - 04:39am PT
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Climate changes? It is a human intraspecific war. 400 million indians said something obvious: it is impossible switch off the light you have not. An ecological translation of this fact is that the human ecology is part of planet ecology. The rich white human of the west atlantic countries works, as winning part of his species, to change a basic rule of the life: the adaptation to the environment. He tries to adapte the environment to his own needs. But the evolution does not play the same game. Modern technology and wellness in west countries reduced the human adaptation with health protection and reducing the number of generations/century (most of money used for increase the life span over biological need and depletion of youth work and reproductive chances). The costs of this trend are paid by the socalled loosers, africans and east countries populations, which have unconsciously a strong adaptation, by disease pressure, intraethnic wars, 5-6 generations/century. They will win...at the end..in the human intraspecific contest. The white atlantic man is collapsing his life on the planet, not the life of others which are every day in war for survive nor the life of other species used in the battle for selection. The rich white man wants a profitfull steady state: it will be his unglorious end, the nature will not permit. So guys...climb...before time changes! More in www.camurrilamberto.it
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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Dec 20, 2009 - 03:26pm PT
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copenhagen illustrates perfectly the basis for agw skepticism...ok, i can see the planet appears to be warming, SLOWLY; and, i think it's reasonable to assume, even absent scientific evidence, that human activity is contributing--that's logical; however, the THEORY has morphed into a religious-like BELIEF...propoganda is accepted as science (goracle) and scientists are deified, not necessarily with god-like powers but with a god-like air of purity and infallibility even when many of those scientists are proven to have falsified their research and conspired to silence debate
but what happens when one of these "scientists" is proven to have significant monetary interests in promoting agw (and i'm not talking about gore)?
from today's telegraph:
"No one in the world exercised more influence on the events leading up to the Copenhagen conference on global warming than Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and mastermind of its latest report in 2007.
Although Dr Pachauri is often presented as a scientist (he was even once described by the BBC as “the world’s top climate scientist”), as a former railway engineer with a PhD in economics he has no qualifications in climate science at all.
What has also almost entirely escaped attention, however, is how Dr Pachauri has established an astonishing worldwide portfolio of business interests with bodies which have been investing billions of dollars in organisations dependent on the IPCC’s policy recommendations.
These outfits include banks, oil and energy companies and investment funds heavily involved in ‘carbon trading’ and ‘sustainable technologies’, which together make up the fastest-growing commodity market in the world, estimated soon to be worth trillions of dollars a year.
Today, in addition to his role as chairman of the IPCC, Dr Pachauri occupies more than a score of such posts, acting as director or adviser to many of the bodies which play a leading role in what has become known as the international ‘climate industry’.
It is remarkable how only very recently has the staggering scale of Dr Pachauri’s links to so many of these concerns come to light, inevitably raising questions as to how the world’s leading ‘climate official’ can also be personally involved in so many organisations which stand to benefit from the IPCC’s recommendations."
the debate is now over; even if agw is real, the agw industry is so corrupt that the only viable option is to start over; first, remove ALL financial incentive for certain results and incentivize, instead, objective science...give the money to institutions/individuals that produce the best work regardless of their conclusions
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corniss chopper
Mountain climber
san jose, ca
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Dec 27, 2009 - 08:05pm PT
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Jesse Ventura's , Conspiracy Theory - challenges the Global Warming
theory. On next Comcast ch 65 , 5:00pm.
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Dec 28, 2009 - 12:33am PT
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Bush & friends believed in a lot of things, but science, experience, and common sense weren't among them.
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Norwegian
Trad climber
Placerville, California
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Dec 28, 2009 - 09:23am PT
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the whisper between your ears
is not mine.
no amount of screaming at me can alter that.
hence the fractured progression of time's continuum.
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tooth
Trad climber
The Best Place On Earth
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Dec 31, 2009 - 11:55am PT
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American Geophysical Union (2009, December 31). No rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide fraction in past 160 years, new research finds. ScienceDaily. Retrieved December 31, 2009, from http://www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2009/12/091230184221.htm
Apparently atmospheric carbon levels haven't changed in 150 years?
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Studly
Trad climber
WA
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so we had the opportunity to launch a spacecraft that would determine the facts on climate change, and the Bush administration had it crated and put away in a warehouse and the program squashed. Sounds like a typical Repub tactic, scream for facts after you shoveled them into a hole in the back room....
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corniss chopper
Mountain climber
san jose, ca
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Suggest they shift some resources to study the
"Al Gore Effect": The phenomenon that leads to unseasonably cold temperatures, driving rain, hail, or snow whenever Al Gore visits an area to discuss global warming. Hence, the Gore Effect.
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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"One could also posit that the G.W. Bush administration focus away from programs like MEDUSA didn't help the IC prepare for the recent incident."
i know this is not the political thread, but i can't let this go
so bush is responsible for the "recent incident"? (by the way, let's call it what it is a TERRORIST attack)
so, he was responsible for 9/11 which occured only 8 months into his presidency, and now he's responsible for 12/25 which occured 11 months into barry's presidency?
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JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
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Geez, I thought we had the partisan politics contained to one thread. Unfortunately, by Bush-izing the story on Medea [i.e., "It is unclear why Medea died in the early days of the Bush administration, but President George W. Bush developed a reputation for opposing many kinds of environmental initiatives,"] the NY Times article picks partisan scabs, with the usual partisasn results.
If it's unclear why it died, why add the part about Bush's reputation? That looks too much like the sorts of tricks we play in court, particularly in jury cases, to sneak in what would otherwise be inadmissible evidence.
In any case, I think Ed makes a good point. If we can get information we need -- from any source -- at relatively low marginal cost, why not use it? More data on this subject should lead to smarter choices.
John
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SuperTopo on the Web
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Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme
Let us know!