Scientific skepticism is a healthy thing. Scientists should always challenge themselves to expand their knowledge, improve their understanding and refine their theories. Yet this isn't what happens in global warming skepticism. Skeptics vigorously criticise any evidence that supports anthropogenic global warming and yet eagerly, even blindly embrace any argument, op-ed piece, blog or study that refutes global warming.
So attacks on climate change as if it were a "theory" make very little sense. Greenhouse gas accumulation is a fact. Radiative properties of greenhouse gases are factual. The climate is not going to stay the same. It can't stay the same. Staying the same would violate physics; specifically it would violate the law of energy conservation. Something has to change.
The simplest consequence is that the surface will warm up. That this is indeed most of what happens is validated pretty much in observations, in paleodata, in theory and in simulation. Further, all those lines of evidence converge pretty much about how much warming: about 2.5 C to 3C for each doubling of CO2. (It's logarithmic in total CO2, not in emitted CO2, guys, by the way.) There's no single line of reasoning for this. There are multiple lines of evidence.
In fact, only three factors determine the planet's energy balance: the sun's output, the Earth's reflectivity, or albedo, and the thermal properties of the atmosphere, which are affected by the level of certain trace gases like carbon dioxide and water vapor. Reduced to its essentials, the greenhouse effect is a problem in 19th-century classical physics, and the basic theory was worked out with pencil and paper in the 1890s. To say that increasing CO2 levels leads to more heat trapped in the atmosphere is really no more scientifically controversial than saying you'll feel warmer if you put on a sweater.
First, they have not come up with any plausible alternative culprit for the disruption of global climate that is being observed, for example, a culprit other than the greenhouse-gas buildups in the atmosphere that have been measured and tied beyond doubt to human activities. (The argument that variations in the sun's output might be responsible fails a number of elementary scientific tests.)
Second, having not succeeded in finding an alternative, they haven't even tried to do what would be logically necessary if they had one, which is to explain how it can be that everything modern science tells us about the interactions of greenhouse gases with energy flow in the atmosphere is wrong.
As my original reference to “the venerable tradition of skepticism” indicates, I am in fact well aware of its valuable and indeed fundamental role in the practice of science. Skeptical views, clearly stated and soundly based, tend to promote healthy re-examination of premises, additional ways to test hypotheses and theories, and refinement of explanations and arguments. And it does happen from time to time – although less often than most casual observers suppose – that views initially held only by skeptics end up overturning and replacing what had been the “mainstream” view.
Appreciation for this positive role of scientific skepticism, however, should not lead to uncritical embrace of the deplorable practices characterizing what much of has been masquerading as appropriate skepticism in the climate-science domain. These practices include refusal to acknowledge the existence of large bodies of relevant evidence (such as the proposition that there is no basis for implicating carbon dioxide in the global-average temperature increases observed over the past century); the relentless recycling of arguments in public forums that have long since been persuasively discredited in the scientific literature (such as the attribution of the observed global temperature trends to urban-heat island effects or artifacts of statistical method); the pernicious suggestion that not knowing everything about a phenomenon (such as the role of cloudiness in a warming world) is the same as knowing nothing about it; and the attribution of the views of thousands of members of the mainstream climate-science community to “mass hysteria” or deliberate propagation of a “hoax”.
Everywhere I look, I see statements like "Scientists believe that the Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago," and it drives me up the wall. Scientists infer that the Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago, based on their reliance on data and logic. We have physical evidence (lead isotope ratios from three different radiogenic systems, measured in Earth rocks and in meteorites) that all suggest the solar system's solid-state clock started counting 4.5 billion years ago. Because we've never observed anything other than the steady, statistical decline of radioactive parent isotopes to produce daughter isotopes, we assume that the past worked in the same way as today (actualism/"uniformitarianism") and that these empirical measurements have meaning. We logically deduce that the Earth is the implied age, but we don't "believe" it.
Similarly, I get apoplectic when students ask me "Do you believe in global warming?" No, I don't believe it; I'm convinced of it on the basis of (a) physical evidence (data) and (b) logical inference from that data. To spell it out:
1. CO2 absorbs infrared radiation. 2. Infrared radiation is reflected upwards from the surface of the Earth. 3. CO2 is produced by the burning of coal, oil, natural gas, wood, ethanol, and biodiesel. 4. We burn a lot of these carbon-rich fuels by oxidizing them. 5. CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere are measurably increasing. 6. Oxygen concentrations in the atmosphere are measurably decreasing. 7. Globally, average temperatures are observed to be increasing. 8. Therefore, based on #1-7, the increase in CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere is causing the increase in temperature.
There's nothing there to believe in. It just is. Fact, fact, fact, fact, fact, fact, fact, and a logical inference that stems from those facts.
Ditto for the theory of evolution by natural selection. It's not something I believe in; it's something I'm convinced of because it's logically coherent and supported by reams of data gathered over 150 years of hypothesis-testing.
If there is one thing that scientists believe in, it's that the universe makes sense. Our starting assumption is that the physical world operates according to unchanging laws which may be deduced if we're clever enough. On the other hand, if the universe is mercurial in its physical laws, then science doesn't have a chance of figuring things out because the laws that apply on Tuesday will be different from the laws that apply on Wednesday. It should go without saying that, as far as we can tell, this is not the case. The universe does behave in a consistent and predictable manner, insofar as we can tell. Ergo, science is an appropriate way to go about elucidating its structure and properties. No belief necessary.
Videos: The American Denial of Global Warming
Newsnight: CO2,they call it life,we call it a greenhouse gas
Royal Society says to CEI: Cease and desist your lies!
The Denial Machine
Great Teachers: Translation, Replication and Credibility of Research Findings
Beyond Belief: Candles in the Dark - Naomi Oreskes
Smoke and CO2: How to Spin Global Warming
Class dismissed.
Heretic
Posts : 3520
Subject: Re: Anthropogenic Global Warming 101 1/6/2009, 1:44 pm
Let me know if any links aren't working. It's an updated version of an old list. Things may have been shuffled around.
Heretic
Posts : 3520
Subject: Re: Anthropogenic Global Warming 101 1/6/2009, 2:33 pm
Sometimes people are right about a statement and then draw the wrong conclusion about it. Noting that science doesn't 'do' consensus is such a case. By the time you've progressed to the point of general agreement -- and all a consensus is is general agreement, not universal agreement -- the point has dropped out of being live science.
The science is in the parts we don't understand well. That's effectively part of the definition for doing science. Dropping two rocks of different mass off the side of a building and seeing which one hits the ground first is no longer science. We reached consensus on that some time back. Now if you have a new experiment which tests something interesting (i.e., we haven't tested that one to death already), have at it and do that science.
I didn't appreciate it properly at the time, but a sign on the chemistry department door in my college put it best: "If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be science." The live part of science involves learning new things. If you already know what will happen, you're not learning new things so aren't doing science. After you've learned something new, and others have tested it and confirmed your learning, then we have a piece of scientific knowledge. It isn't live science any more, but it's a contribution to the world and can be used for other things. A consequence of this is that you wind up knowing a lot if you stay active in doing science. But it isn't the knowing that motivates scientists (certainly not me) it is the finding out new things about the world.
So we have two sides to science -- the live science, where you don't have consensus -- and the consensus, the body of scientific knowledge that can be used for other things (engineering, decision making, ...). The error made by the people who try to deny, for example, the conclusions of the IPCC reports because 'science doesn't do consensus' is that they're confusing the two sides. The live science, which is summarized in the IPCC reports, doesn't have consensus. That's why it's live and why folks have science to do in the area. The body of scientific knowledge, which is also summarized in the reports, does have a consensus, which is being described in detail as to what the consensus is about and how strong it is.
It is possible that the consensus is wrong in its conclusions. But the folks denying it need not only for it to be wrong, but to be wrong in a very specific way. If they wanted to make scientific arguments, which is what, say, Wegener did in advancing continental drift in the 1920s, they can do so. But it is their responsibility to make the arguments scientifically and back them with strong scientific evidence, as Wegener himself noted. They don't do that.
Guest Guest
Subject: Re: Anthropogenic Global Warming 101 1/13/2009, 9:32 am
Quote :
Full Text :COPYRIGHT 2008 San Francisco Chronicle Byline: Debra J. Saunders
Here's another reason why people don't trust newspapers. When science reporters write about, say, hormone therapy or drinking red wine, they report on studies that find that hormones or red wine can be good for you, as well as studies that suggest otherwise. Any science involving complex organisms is rarely black and white.
When it comes to global warming, newspapers play up stories that reinforce the prevalent the-sky-is-falling belief that global warming is human-caused and catastrophic. But if a study or scientist does not portend the end of the world as we know it, it rarely rates as news.
In that spirit, many papers (including The Chronicle) have reported on a UC San Diego science historian who reviewed 928 abstracts of peer-reviewed articles on global warming published between 1993 and 2003, and concluded, "Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position."
Over 10 years, not one study challenged the orthodoxy - does that sound right to you? If that were true, it would strongly suggest that, despite conflicting evidence in this wide and changing world, no scientist dares challenge the politically correct position on the issue.
No wonder David Bellamy - an Australian botanist who was involved in some 400 TV productions, only to see his TV career go south after he questioned global warming orthodoxy - wrote in the Australian last week, "It's not even science any more; it's anti-science." Bellamy notes that official data show that "in every year since 1998, world temperatures have been getting colder, and in 2002, Arctic ice actually increased." Exhibit B: MIT Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences Richard S. Lindzen recently wrote, "There has been no warming since 1997 and no statistically significant warming since 1995."
Such findings rarely are reported, even though - as Marc Morano, communications director for the Republicans on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, told me - "Scientists keep coming out of the woodwork" to challenge the so-called consensus. "It's almost like a bandwagon effect."
The Global Warming Petition Project urges Washington to reject the Kyoto international global warming pact because there is "no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. So far, the Politico reports, more than 31,000 scientists have signed it.
The latest skirmish in the global warming war - barely reported in America - occurred after two bloggers found that the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies data wrongly cast October as the warmest in recorded history. It turns out that the mistake was due to an error that wrongly tapped September temperature records from Russia. Christopher Booker of the Sunday Telegraph of London found the mistake startling in light of other contrary climate statistics, including National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration findings of 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month.
In an e-mail, Goddard researcher Gavin Schmidt said, "The incorrect analysis was online for less than 24 hours." (Thank bloggers Anthony Watts, an American meteorologist, and Steve McIntyre, a Canadian computer analyst, for catching the mistake.) The error occurred because a report "had the wrong month label attached. There is quality control at NOAA and GISS but this particular problem had not been noticed before and the existing QC procedures didn't catch it. These have now been amended."
As for the snowfall records and low temperatures cited by Booker, Schmidt chalked them up to "cherry picking" data. He added, "Far more important are the long-term trends."
Now honest mistakes happen - even in high-powered, well-funded research facilities. Just last year, again thanks to the vigilance of Watts and McIntyre, Goddard had to reconfigure its findings and recognize 1934 - not 1998, as it had figured - as the hottest year on record in American history.
Alas, it is hard to see Goddard as objective when its director, James Hansen, testified in a London court in September in support of six eco-vandals. A jury then acquitted the six Greenpeace activists on charges of vandalizing a British coal-fired power plant based on the "lawful excuse" defense that their use of force would prevent greater damage to the environment after Hansen predicted the one Kingsnorth plant could push 400 species into extinction.
Source Citation:Saunders, Debra J. "Warming Science and science fiction.(Column)." San Francisco Chronicle. (Nov 30, 2008): G6.
Guest Guest
Subject: Re: Anthropogenic Global Warming 101 1/13/2009, 9:35 am
Quote :
Full Text :COPYRIGHT 2009 McClatchy-Tribune Information Services Jan. 10--Remember how mankind's abuse of fossil fuels was going to cause the North Pole's ice cap to melt completely in 2008? Remember how the beloved polar bear was in danger of soon becoming extinct because there was too little sea ice from which bears could hunt their favorite dinners of ringed seal pups? It turns out that both of these global warming scare stories were as full of it as Al Gore's Oscar-winning docu-comedy "An Inconvenient Truth." It's true that North Pole sea ice had been tracking lower in recent years and throughout much of 2008. But fresh data from the University of Illinois Arctic Climate Research Center show that Arctic sea ice levels -- which have a natural, cyclical habit of expanding, shrinking and thickening -- have rebounded rapidly this winter. In fact, polar ice is now essentially equal to levels measured in January 1979, when satellites were first used to record data. Unfortunately, this scientific "surprise" will never get the attention -- or critical analytical spin -- it deserves from the green mainstream media. Nor will the good news about the long-term fortunes of the "imperiled" polar bear be heard by those who need it most -- the nation's brainwashed and unduly alarmed kindergartners.
But with the sea ice's dramatic return, there's no denying that the climate change industry has lost another million square kilometers of its melting credibility.
Subject: Re: Anthropogenic Global Warming 101 1/13/2009, 3:14 pm
i actually saw a story yesterday where the russians are now claiming we are at the onset of a once in 12000 year ice age.
if the ruskies are right global warming may be the only chance we have to save ourselves!
Guest Guest
Subject: Re: Anthropogenic Global Warming 101 1/13/2009, 3:38 pm
science is the new old religion
Guest Guest
Subject: Re: Anthropogenic Global Warming 101 1/15/2009, 9:45 am
Obama Inaugural A CO2 Disaster About to Happen! Will Green Loving Media Report?
By Warner Todd Huston (Bio | Archive) January 15, 2009 - 09:22 ET
It ain't easy being green, and in the case of Barack Obama's inaugural, it seems like he's not even trying to green it up. According to the Institute for Liberty, the Obamathon in Washington will produce about 575 million pounds of CO2 emissions.
In a study titled Carbon Bigfoot, the IFL concludes that the CO2 glut will be substantial. From the global warming wrecking celebs flying all over the place in their many private jets, to the many hundreds if not thousands of vehicles that will be used to get people to and in the midst of the inaugural, the CO2 carnage is at the amazingly high level.
The IFL finds:
Celebrities, politicians, and bigwigs using 600 private jets will produce 25,320,000 POUNDS of CO2 Personal vehicles could account for 262,483,200 POUNDS of CO2 n the parade, horses alone will produce more than 400 POUNDS of CO2 The IFL also came up with a revealing illustration about what this all means.
It would take the average U.S. household 57,598 years to produce a carbon footprint equal to that of the new president’s housewarming party
Granted the IFL scoffs at the very notion of worrying, as greenwits do, that all this revenue generating travel and commerce is a bad thing.
But, it is interesting that the folks that claim to be the best, most mean and green, tree hugging, global warming priests around are going to be responsible for this conflagration of globalony destruction.
The Obamathon in Washington will be a global warming catastrophe... but here's guessing that no one will say a cross word in the Old Media!
Subject: Re: Anthropogenic Global Warming 101 1/15/2009, 11:09 am
not to mention the cost( of the inaugeration) but the dems have a different set of rules for their own.
Heretic
Posts : 3520
Subject: Re: Anthropogenic Global Warming 101 1/15/2009, 12:00 pm
Bill B wrote:
Quote :
Full Text :COPYRIGHT 2008 San Francisco Chronicle Byline: Debra J. Saunders
Well... that didn't take long.
Quote :
In that spirit, many papers (including The Chronicle) have reported on a UC San Diego science historian who reviewed 928 abstracts of peer-reviewed articles on global warming published between 1993 and 2003, and concluded, "Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position."
Over 10 years, not one study challenged the orthodoxy - does that sound right to you?
Yes.
Quote :
If that were true, it would strongly suggest that, despite conflicting evidence in this wide and changing world, no scientist dares challenge the politically correct position on the issue.
Or b) it happens to be an accurate representation of reality. For instance, during that same time period, there have also been zero papers published challenging heliocentrism, the spherical earth, evolution, atomic theory, plate tectonics, and germ theory. Journals simply don't publish bad science. Though I can understand why a women who's okay with the teaching of creationism in the classroom would disagree.
Quote :
No wonder David Bellamy - an Australian botanist who was involved in some 400 TV productions, only to see his TV career go south after he questioned global warming orthodoxy...
Interesting. Just one or two problems with this story.
For one thing Bellamy’s career tanked in 1994, a dozen years before Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.” Long before 99% of the media had even heard of climate change, much less had any sort of official or unofficial policy or attitude about it.
Are we being asked to believe that the BBC was so forward thinking as to be suppressing climate skepticism in 1994, while at the same time not actually producing any programing advocating climate science, or giving it any particular attention in the news cycle? Was it some sort of passive aggressive Draconian indifference then? Is that the suggestion?
Like I said, Gore's the new Lex Luthor. He can even time travel.
Quote :
...wrote in the Australian last week, "It's not even science any more; it's anti-science." Bellamy notes that official data show that "in every year since 1998, world temperatures have been getting colder, and in 2002, Arctic ice actually increased." Exhibit B: MIT Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences Richard S. Lindzen recently wrote, "There has been no warming since 1997 and no statistically significant warming since 1995."
The evidence is clear – the long-term trend is that global temperatures are rising, and humans are largely responsible for this rise. Global warming does not mean that each year will be warmer than the last. Natural phenomena will mean that some years will be much warmer and others cooler. You only need to look at 1998 to see a record-breaking warm year caused by a very strong El Niño. In the last couple of years, the underlying warming is partially masked caused by a strong La Niña. Despite this, 11 of the last 13 years were the warmest ever recorded. Average global temperatures are now some 0.75 °C warmer than they were 100 years ago. Since the mid-1970s, the increase in temperature has averaged more than 0.15 °C per decade. This rate of change is very unusual in the context of past changes and much more rapid than the warming at the end of the last ice age. Sea-surface temperatures have warmed slightly less than the global average while temperatures over land have warmed at a faster rate of almost 0.3 °C per decade. Over the last ten years, global temperatures have warmed more slowly than the long-term trend. But this does not mean that global warming has slowed down or even stopped. It is entirely consistent with our understanding of natural fluctuations of the climate within a trend of continued long-term warming.
Quote :
The Global Warming Petition Project urges Washington to reject the Kyoto international global warming pact because there is "no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. So far, the Politico reports, more than 31,000 scientists have signed it.
The latest skirmish in the global warming war - barely reported in America - occurred after two bloggers found that the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies data wrongly cast October as the warmest in recorded history. It turns out that the mistake was due to an error that wrongly tapped September temperature records from Russia.
It's clearly true that the more eyes there are looking, the faster errors get noticed and fixed. The cottage industry that has sprung up to examine the daily sea ice numbers or the monthly analyses of surface and satellite temperatures, has certainly increased the number of eyes and that is generally for the good. Whether it's a discovery of an odd shift in the annual cycle in the UAH MSU-LT data, or this flub in the GHCN data, or the USHCN/GHCN merge issue last year, the extra attention has led to improvements in many products. Nothing of any consequence has changed in terms of our understanding of climate change, but a few more i's have been dotted and t's crossed.
But unlike in other fields of citizen-science (astronomy or phenology spring to mind), the motivation for the temperature observers is heavily weighted towards wanting to find something wrong. As we discussed last year, there is a strong yearning among some to want to wake up tomorrow and find that the globe hasn't been warming, that the sea ice hasn't melted, that the glaciers have not receded and that indeed, CO2 is not a greenhouse gas. Thus when mistakes occur (and with science being a human endeavour, they always will) the exuberance of the response can be breathtaking - and quite telling.
A few examples from the comments at Watt's blog will suffice to give you a flavour of the conspiratorial thinking: "I believe they had two sets of data: One would be released if Republicans won, and another if Democrats won.", "could this be a sneaky way to set up the BO presidency with an urgent need to regulate CO2?", "There are a great many of us who will under no circumstance allow the oppression of government rule to pervade over our freedom—-PERIOD!!!!!!" (exclamation marks reduced enormously), "these people are blinded by their own bias", "this sort of scientific fraud", "Climate science on the warmer side has degenerated to competitive lying", etc… (To be fair, there were people who made sensible comments as well).
The amount of simply made up stuff is also impressive - the GISS press release declaring the October the 'warmest ever'? Imaginary (GISS only puts out press releases on the temperature analysis at the end of the year). The headlines trumpeting this result? Non-existent. One clearly sees the relief that finally the grand conspiracy has been rumbled, that the mainstream media will get it's comeuppance, and that surely now, the powers that be will listen to those voices that had been crying in the wilderness.
Alas! none of this will come to pass. In this case, someone's programming error will be fixed and nothing will change except for the reporting of a single month's anomaly. No heads will roll, no congressional investigations will be launched, no politicians (with one possible exception) will take note. This will undoubtedly be disappointing to many, but they should comfort themselves with the thought that the chances of this error happening again has now been diminished. Which is good, right?
And it turns out the error was NOAA’s GHCN data, as even John Goetz notes:
Quote :
The NOAA error seems to be with the processing of the .dly files. I did a spot check of a couple Russian sites that have the September / October twins at GISS. The NOAA .dly files show a clear difference in temperature. The resulting NOAA GHCN v2 file, however, contains the twins.
So a software glitch that corrupted a small segment of the data set was noticed and fixed within 48 hrs. That is how peer review works.
Quote :
Christopher Booker of the Sunday Telegraph of London found the mistake startling in light of other contrary climate statistics, including National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration findings of 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month.
Which, unfortunately for Christopher "asbestos isn't bad for you" Booker, wasn't enough to offset the global trend. Turns out Oct 2008 was the second hottest on record. Startling, indeed.
Quote :
Now honest mistakes happen - even in high-powered, well-funded research facilities. Just last year, again thanks to the vigilance of Watts and McIntyre, Goddard had to reconfigure its findings and recognize 1934 - not 1998, as it had figured - as the hottest year on record in American history.
Of course Saunders leaves out the details. The correction changed Hansen's "fraudulent" temperature data set from this:
to this:
It's obviously a Big Government Conspiracy.
Quote :
Here's another reason why people don't trust newspapers.
Agreed. Saunders columns are a reason why people don't trust newspapers.
Heretic
Posts : 3520
Subject: Re: Anthropogenic Global Warming 101 1/15/2009, 12:00 pm
Quote :
Full Text :COPYRIGHT 2009 McClatchy-Tribune Information Services
Second verse, same as the first...
Quote :
It's true that North Pole sea ice had been tracking lower in recent years and throughout much of 2008. But fresh data from the University of Illinois Arctic Climate Research Center show that Arctic sea ice levels -- which have a natural, cyclical habit of expanding, shrinking and thickening -- have rebounded rapidly this winter.
Sea ice extent averaged over the Northern Hemisphere has decreased correspondingly over the past 50 years (shown right). The largest change has been observed in the summer months with decreases exceeding 30%. Decreases observed in winter are more modest.
As well as providing this graph. No obvious decline there. The confusion comes from the fact that record melts are followed by record freezes. As the National Snow and Ice Data Center states in their 2008 review:
Quote :
Arctic sea ice in 2008 was notable for several reasons. The year continued the negative trend in summer sea ice extent, with the second-lowest summer minimum since record-keeping began in 1979. 2008 sea ice also showed well-below-average ice extents throughout the entire year.
The ice cover in 2008 began the year heavily influenced by the record-breaking 2007 melt season. Because so much ice had melted out during the previous summer, a vast expanse of ocean was exposed to low winter air temperatures, encouraging ice growth. Although still well below average, March 2008 saw slightly greater ice extent at the annual maximum than measured in recent years. However, the ice was also thin: less than a year old and vulnerable to melting in summer. Even the geographic North Pole was covered with thin ice, capturing the imaginations of many in the media and general public.
Would 2008 break the 2007 record low summer minimum extent? Would the geographic North Pole be ice free for the first time in the satellite era? From May through July, cooler temperatures and winds less favorable to ice loss slowed the decline in ice extent. Nevertheless, by August the rate of ice loss was much faster than average—even faster than in 2007—as the effects of a warm Arctic Ocean worked against the thin ice cover. The melt season became a race: waning sunlight versus rapid ice loss.
Ultimately, summer 2008 finished with the second-lowest minimum extent in the satellite record, 9% above the 2007 minimum and 34% below average. A more diffuse ice cover and a thinner pack nevertheless suggested a record-low ice volume (ice area multiplied by thickness) at the end of summer.
As the sun set in the Arctic with the advent of autumn, seasonal ice growth was initially quite rapid, but slowed during early November. Average ice extent in December was well below average and very close to that measured in 2007. Heading into 2009, the Arctic sea ice cover is again young and thin; given this set-up, a continuation of well-below-average sea ice extent in 2009 is a near certainty.
So this isn't the rebound he was hoping for.
Quote :
In fact, polar ice is now essentially equal to levels measured in January 1979, when satellites were first used to record data.
As usual, he doesn't cite his source, so I'm not entirely sure what he's referring to. The only reference I could find regarding the "same as 1979" stat is in regards to Antarctica ice, which is still a bogus argument against AGW:
But with the sea ice's dramatic return, there's no denying that the climate change industry has lost another million square kilometers of its melting credibility.
And with this awful editorial, there's sadly no denying that the skeptic standard for accuracy hasn't improved during my absence...
tater wrote:
science is the new old religion
...or that the standard creationist canards have yet to go out of style.
Guest Guest
Subject: Re: Anthropogenic Global Warming 101 1/15/2009, 3:54 pm
tater wrote:
not to mention the cost( of the inaugeration) but the dems have a different set of rules for their own.
Robin Banks
Posts : 1545
Subject: Re: Anthropogenic Global Warming 101 1/23/2009, 4:28 pm
This is why I find the calls to sue/debate Al Gore hilariously disingenuous (especially the claims to sue). He's quite seriously only the messenger, constrained to reading from the litany of peer reviewed research put forth by our government. But of course, you never, ever see calls do debate any of the authors of said research... It'd be much more difficult to sell as a Great Liberal/Environmentalist Conspiracy that way.
Scorpion
Posts : 2141
Subject: Re: Anthropogenic Global Warming 101 2/11/2009, 10:51 pm
Heretic wrote:
I'm always surprised to find out just how old some of the material on AGW is. Here's two new ones:
This is why I find the calls to sue/debate Al Gore hilariously disingenuous (especially the claims to sue). He's quite seriously only the messenger, constrained to reading from the litany of peer reviewed research put forth by our government. But of course, you never, ever see calls do debate any of the authors of said research... It'd be much more difficult to sell as a Great Liberal/Environmentalist Conspiracy that way.
Thanks for the links! It's really pretty amazing how accurate these predictions turned out to be.
Guest Guest
Subject: Re: Anthropogenic Global Warming 101 2/12/2009, 2:01 am
Still wondering here why the last few years have been colder when we are supposed to be in global warming.
The earth has been generally warming ever since the ice age. As it should. So in reality why is this a bad thing??
And isn't there a theory that goes something along the lines of when there are more sun spots we have warmer winters/ summers and when there are few sun spots we have colder winters/ summers?
Heretic
Posts : 3520
Subject: Re: Anthropogenic Global Warming 101 2/12/2009, 4:10 pm
Mirage wrote:
Still wondering here why the last few years have been colder when we are supposed to be in global warming.
The evidence is clear – the long-term trend is that global temperatures are rising, and humans are largely responsible for this rise. Global warming does not mean that each year will be warmer than the last. Natural phenomena will mean that some years will be much warmer and others cooler.
Which is obvious to anyone who's ever actually looked at the global temperature record (though I not obvious enough, apparently).
They continue...
Quote :
You only need to look at 1998 to see a record-breaking warm year caused by a very strong El Niño. In the last couple of years, the underlying warming is partially masked caused by a strong La Niña. Despite this, 11 of the last 13 years were the warmest ever recorded.
Average global temperatures are now some 0.75 °C warmer than they were 100 years ago. Since the mid-1970s, the increase in temperature has averaged more than 0.15 °C per decade.
This rate of change is very unusual in the context of past changes and much more rapid than the warming at the end of the last ice age.
Sea-surface temperatures have warmed slightly less than the global average while temperatures over land have warmed at a faster rate of almost 0.3 °C per decade.
Over the last ten years, global temperatures have warmed more slowly than the long-term trend. But this does not mean that global warming has slowed down or even stopped. It is entirely consistent with our understanding of natural fluctuations of the climate within a trend of continued long-term warming.
These natural fluctuations include the El Niño Southern Oscillations (ENSO) in the Pacific Ocean. In El Niño years – those when cold surface water is not apparent in the tropical eastern Pacific – global temperature is considerably warmer than normal. A particularly strong El Niño occurred in 1998 resulting in the warmest year on record across the globe. In La Niña years – when cold water rises to the surface of the Pacific Ocean – temperatures can be considerably colder than normal. Volcanic eruptions can also cause temporary drops in global temperatures because of huge amounts of dust thrown high into the atmosphere that reduce the amount of sunlight that reaches the surface. A La Niña was present throughout 2007 and much of 2008; despite this temporary cooling, 2008 is currently the tenth warmest on the global record.
Projected climate change poses a serious threat to America’s national security. The predicted effects of climate change over the coming decades include extreme weather events, drought, flooding, sea level rise, retreating glaciers, habitat shifts, and the increased spread of life-threatening diseases. These conditions have the potential to disrupt our way of life and to force changes in the way we keep ourselves safe and secure. In the national and international security environment, climate change threatens to add new hostile and stressing factors. On the simplest level, it has the potential to create sustained natural and humanitarian disasters on a scale far beyond those we see today. The consequences will likely foster political instability where societal demands exceed the capacity of governments to cope.
Climate change acts as a threat multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world. Projected climate change will seriously exacerbate already marginal living standards in many Asian, African, and Middle Eastern nations, causing widespread political instability and the likelihood of failed states. Unlike most conventional security threats that involve a single entity acting in specific ways and points in time, climate change has the potential to result in multiple chronic conditions, occurring globally within the same time frame. Economic and environmental conditions in already fragile areas will further erode as food production declines, diseases increase, clean water becomes increasingly scarce, and large populations move in search of resources. Weakened and failing governments, with an already thin margin for survival, foster the conditions for internal conflicts, extremism, and movement toward increased authoritarianism and radical ideologies. The U.S. may be drawn more frequently into these situations, either alone or with allies, to help provide stability before conditions worsen and are exploited by extremists. The U.S. may also be called upon to undertake stability and reconstruction efforts once a conflict has begun, to avert further disaster and reconstitute a stable environment.
Projected climate change will add to tensions even in stable regions of the world. The U.S. and Europe may experience mounting pressure to accept large numbers of immigrant and refugee populations as drought increases and food production declines in Latin America and Africa. Extreme weather events and natural disasters, as the U.S. experienced with Hurricane Katrina, may lead to increased missions for a number of U.S. agencies, including state and local governments, the Department of Homeland Security, and our already stretched military, including our Guard and Reserve forces.
Climate change, national security, and energy dependence are a related set of global challenges. As President Bush noted in his 2007 State of the Union speech, dependence on foreign oil leaves us more vulnerable to hostile regimes and terrorists, and clean domestic energy alternatives help us confront the serious challenge of global climate change. Because the issues are linked, solutions to one affect the other. Technologies that improve energy efficiency also reduce carbon intensity and carbon emissions.
I have no reason to doubt their assessment. Do you?
Mirage wrote:
And isn't there a theory that goes something along the lines of when there are more sun spots we have warmer winters/ summers and when there are few sun spots we have colder winters/ summers?
Subject: Re: Anthropogenic Global Warming 101 2/14/2009, 12:49 am
Mirage wrote:
And isn't there a theory that goes something along the lines of when there are more sun spots we have warmer winters/ summers and when there are few sun spots we have colder winters/ summers?
Why do I accept global warming science as being true? Well, it’s partly because I followed the many claims of the global warming “skeptics,” and although their arguments had been debunked numerous times by experts (for example, read RealClimate’s Responses to common contrarian arguments), the so-called skeptics kept repeating the already debunked arguments. After a while you just start thinking, “but that’s been explained already,” and stop taking those people seriously. So that would be my initial reason. But the other main reason would have been the thousands of articles published every year in peer reviewed scientific journals, virtually all of them supporting the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) hypothesis.
And even goes on to mention the "science is religion" bullshit...
Quote :
What we have here is trust in the scientific method. And we trust it because we have reason to believe it works – just look around you. (You’re reading this on a computer aren’t you?) And on a blog that promotes science and the scientific method, I’d have to be pretty perverse, or have a very good reason, to oppose thousands of peer reviewed scientific papers.
Note that what we should have is trust in science. This is not the same as faith, which is what Nova claimed I have. Faith is belief without evidence, while trust is acceptance of something based on what we have experienced before – ie what has worked and what has been right. In other words, trust of the scientific method is based on evidence that it works. Claiming that trust and faith are the same thing is the fallacy of equivocation that I have written about before. The fallacy is to use the same word in different meanings in an argument, implying that the word means the same each time. Implying that trust is the same as faith is actually the classic example I gave two years ago to explain the fallacy. Hilariously, Nova responded to this point with dictionary definitions of trust, that I think were supposed to show that trust can be defined in the same way as faith. But duh, that’s the point. They can be defined in the same way. But they can also be defined differently. And employing these ambiguous definitions s how they can be used to make a fallacious argument. Just because a dictionary gives definitions of the two words, and some of the definitions are similar, that doesn’t mean that trust in the scientific method is the same as faith. Nova even debunked her own point by writing “Planes don't fly on "trust". They fly on physics.” Yes. But I don’t need to understand the physics to get on a plane. I get on a plane because I trust that planes fly – and that trust is based on what we see in the real world (all those planes in the sky) not on faith.
Or it could be a massive government conspiracy. 'Cause that somehow makes sense... :shakehead:
happy jack
Posts : 6988
Subject: Re: Anthropogenic Global Warming 101 2/14/2009, 11:29 am
A Valentine from Al Gore to Tipper:
My love for you is as hot as the Earth will be after global warming kills us all!
Guest Guest
Subject: Re: Anthropogenic Global Warming 101 2/14/2009, 12:39 pm
And Tipper to Al-
Roses are red, pansies are pink, all this global warming talk is heating me up and making my pits stink...
PS- meet me in our yacht, I've upped our carbon credits so we're safe tonight with all our hot CO2 expulsions...
happy jack
Posts : 6988
Subject: Re: Anthropogenic Global Warming 101 2/17/2009, 4:09 pm
http://www.bizjournals.com/denver/stories/2009/02/16/daily10.html Obama tours solar-power facility at Denver museum President Barack Obama inspected a solar-power facility at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science Tuesday just before he signed the $787 billion economic-stimulus package. The museum's rooftop solar photovoltaic system consists of 465 solar panels on the southeast and southwest wings of the museum. The panels generate a portion of the museum's electrical power. The tour was in keeping with the alternative-energy theme of the bill-signing event at the museum.
“Obama will use as much energy in flight to CO as the museum’s solar panels can produce in 4 years.”
Thought you might find this interesting - according to the info I found on Boeing’s website and elsewhere, the 747-200 that operates as Air Force One uses anywhere from 5 to 7 gallons of fuel per mile, depending on how full it is. At roughly 1500 miles from DC to Denver, that’s at least 15,000 gallons of fuel round trip. There are 33.4 kilowatt hours of energy in a gallon of fuel, meaning this trip will use about 500,000 kilowatt hours of energy. According to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science’s own website, their solar installation has generated only 90,000 kilowatt hours of energy since it was installed last June!
"This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal."
edge540
Posts : 1165
Subject: Re: Anthropogenic Global Warming 101 2/17/2009, 4:45 pm
Wow
I find it utterly amazing how the lunatic, right wing fringe all of the sudden is so concerned NOW with CO emissions.
happy jack
Posts : 6988
Subject: Re: Anthropogenic Global Warming 101 2/17/2009, 4:59 pm
edge540 wrote:
Wow
I find it utterly amazing how the lunatic, right wing fringe all of the sudden is so concerned NOW with CO emissions.
I don't think the concern is over the CO emissions. To paraphrase the Clintons: It's the hypocrisy, stupid.
edge540
Posts : 1165
Subject: Re: Anthropogenic Global Warming 101 2/18/2009, 11:40 am
Right. Hypocrisy indeed. Sort of like the hypocrisy when it comes to the born again cons that have suddenly as of January 20, 2009 become fiscal conservatives after 8 years of record deficits under George Bush & a Republican Congress.
happy jack
Posts : 6988
Subject: Re: Anthropogenic Global Warming 101 2/18/2009, 5:19 pm
edge540 wrote:
Right. Hypocrisy indeed. Sort of like the hypocrisy when it comes to the born again cons that have suddenly as of January 20, 2009 become fiscal conservatives after 8 years of record deficits under George Bush & a Republican Congress.
edge: Could you please direct me to the thread that's dedicated to the deficits? I may want to comment on that subject, BUT I'D REALLY, REALLY HATE TO GO OFF-TOPIC BY TALKING ABOUT IT IN THIS THREAD.
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