Climate Change & Global Warming

[Gibber]

but for now the morons are running the madhouse

 

You mean the family of chipmunks in your head pulling the levers?

 

so don't mind me just sit back and enjoy your unending confusion.

 

Yeah, skin up while you're at it. Why not have a look out the window?

[ArabiaTerra]

The Universe is a work in process and always has been as galaxys are born from other galaxys and new suns come out to play.

Steady state just means no big bang, that's all. The term was coined by Fred Hoyle, who also coined the term "Big Bang" (which he disagreed with).

 

Ok then, if the universe has been around forever, and it is infinite, then how come the night sky isn't lit up like daylight? After all, in an infinite universe it doesn't matter how many megapixels you have on your telescope, every one will cover a star, and if the universe is eternal then all the light from those stars has had plenty of time to reach us.

[Gibber]

Ok then, if the universe has been around forever, and it is infinite, then how come the night sky isn't lit up like daylight? After all, in an infinite universe it doesn't matter how many megapixels you have on your telescope, every one will cover a star, and if the universe is eternal then all the light from those stars has had plenty of time to reach us.

 

This is Olbers' Paradox.

 

There is an answer to this

 

...that I've forgotton

[ArabiaTerra]

^^^^ Yes the answer is the Big Bang/expanding universe theory, also known as the standard model. ^^^^

[paulb]

so weres the 90% of matter thats missing. when science invents a theory it has to fit all the facts. they can not answer all the questions so the theory is not science fact. go back to the 19th century they invented mythical particals to explain away things that went against there theory.

[KOYAANISQATSI]

This is Olbers' Paradox.

There is an answer to this

 

A fashionable explanation for why the sky appears black is that the universe is finite and expanding, therefore the light is redshifted. So often, Olber's Paradox is explained by, and therefore used as a piece of evidence in support of the Big Bang Theory.

But there is an alternate and simpler solution, Don Scott has written on this subject, explaining it as simply a result of the limitations of the human eye, which cannot perceive light beyond a certain magnitude.

 

It may also help to remember that the human eye is different from

photographic film or a CCD chip. It does not integrate over time. The

longer we expose a photographic plate to starlight the brighter the image

becomes. (There is a limit even to this process in film due to what is

called reciprocity failure.) But, humans can stare at the night sky all

night long and not see anything they didn't see after the first few minutes.

Things don't get brighter for us the longer we look at them. So

theoretically the longer we expose our CCD camera chip, the brighter the

image (deeper into space we can see). This is not true for the human eye.

We can see the 8400 or so stars that we can see, and all the zillions of

others might as well not be there AT ALL as far as our humble naked human

eyes are concerned.

 

Olber's Paradox is not a paradox at all if you look at it correctly. It is

yet another example of theoretical mathematics applied incorrectly to a real

world phenomenon. Or a mathematician might say, "They got the upper limit

on the integral wrong."

[Muppet]

Ok then, if the universe has been around forever, and it is infinite, then how come the night sky isn't lit up like daylight? After all, in an infinite universe it doesn't matter how many megapixels you have on your telescope, every one will cover a star, and if the universe is eternal then all the light from those stars has had plenty of time to reach us.

 

Thats's pretty much like saying that if you light a candle in a room, it will eventually blind you. After all, it keeps producing light energy which will just keep bouncing around the room and increasing.

 

Or maybe light loses energy?

[Spinner72]

They have to do with Global Warming and climate change because they are all theorys just the same as the theory of Man Made Global Warming.

That's the creationist argument. Which just goes to show that, just like them, you don't know the difference between a "theory" as defined in the dictionary and a "scientific theory".

 

I assumed on a thread like this we were talking exclusively about scientific theories, as that is what the idea of Man Made Global Warming claims to be.

 

(note - trying to argue any case whilst quoting from wikipedia is doomed for failure, if not ridicule. Obviously where well known definitions are concerned thats one thing, but many people are can become deluded into thinking that what they read there will be factual)

 

However, enough of the boring stereotypical "pick it apart" forum debating style (lets leave that to the bebo/facebook crowd) and lets stick directly to the topic and the relevant science and atemt to ignore the political propeganda for the movement.

 

Lets consider the views of many of those who originally contributed to the IPCC report so many take as fact, and which governments the world over use whenever they need to make a case for something they can pretend will help.

 

Rather than repeat things myself, since i am not a scientist, I'll leave it to this extract from the report compiled by climate scientist Dr. John Christy, former lead author of the IPCC, former CSIRO scientist Dr. Dennis Jensen, Hon Jackie Kelly, Hon Danna Vale and Mr. David Tollner in 2007.

 

"We disagree with the report's unequivocal support for the hypothesis that global warming is caused by man—so-called anthropogenic global warming (AGW). We are concerned that the Committee's report strays well outside its terms of reference.'

 

 

Their objections are as follows;

 

Conclusion

 

Climate change is a natural phenomenon that has always been with us, and always will be. Whether human activities are disturbing the climate in dangerous ways has yet to be proven. It is for this reason that we strongly disagree with the absolute statements and position taken in this review regarding AGW. We have taken no evidence regarding the science of AGW, yet a strong position has been taken regarding this.

 

 

i) The science related to anthropogenic global warming is not, despite the assurances of some, settled in the scientific community. In particular, Yuri Israel, Vice Chairman of the IPCC, has stated ‘There is no proven link between human activity and global warming’.

 

 

 

 

 

ii) The critical area of the fallibility and shortcomings of computer modelling is not mentioned anywhere.

 

iii) There is no detectable warming in the lower troposphere, the place where the enhanced greenhouse effect is claimed to be evident.

 

iv) The observed surface warming that is highlighted by the IPCC must therefore have a different cause, which is probably the biasing of the records by urban heat effects.

 

v) The full IPCC report ...represents a consensus of government representatives rather than of scientists.

 

vi) There are also other scientific factors that contribute to climate that are not even considered by the IPCC, such as the role of cosmic ray activity in cloud formation.

 

vii) Warming has also been observed on Mars, Jupiter, Triton, Pluto, Neptune and others. It is the natural property of planets with fluid envelopes to have variability in climate. Thus, at any given time, we may expect about half the planets to be warming. This has nothing to do with human activities.

 

viii) Science is a discipline which relies on testing hypotheses and exposing flaws, not on consensus, in order to further scientific understanding. Scientific fact is not a democracy. The laws of physics are not subject to the democratic vote of a group of scientists; they cannot be repealed by a popular vote.

 

ix) The report on geosequestration also gives a false impression of the importance of carbon dioxide on the greenhouse effect. All of the gases mentioned in section 2.5 are minor contributors to greenhouse. Between 75%-95% of the greenhouse effect is the result of water vapour and cloud. The understanding of the influence of the latter is low, by the IPCC’s own admission.

 

x) Doubling CO2 will only increase the natural greenhouse effect less than 2%. This would produce warming of the order of 1 degree Celsius in the absence of negative feedbacks which are the norm in sustainable physical systems.

 

xi) The IPCC does not explain how that despite the concentration of atmospheric CO2 increasing fairly rapidly following the Second World War, the period between 1940 and 1975 was associated with a reduction in global surface temperatures.

 

xii) Or why in the nine years since 1998, global temperatures have been relatively stable despite rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.

 

xiii) IPCC states that snow cover and ice extent have decreased. [but] it is generally accepted that the main Antarctic ice cap is, in fact, both cooling and increasing its ice mass.

 

xiv) Sea levels all over the globe have been rising for centuries; this is not due to anthropogenic global warming, but merely a recovery from the last ice age. A recent analysis has found that no statistically significant ocean warming has occurred over the late 20th century.

 

xv) It is a pity that the report uses the Stern Review as a basis for the scientific understanding of anthropogenic global warming. Not only has this report been thoroughly debunked in a scientific and economic sense, but Stern acknowledges that he had zero understanding of the issue less than one year before the Stern Review.

 

xvi) Also it is worth noting that the Stern Review was commissioned because UK Prime Minister Blair and Chancellor of the Exchequer Brown did not like the findings of the House of Lords Report into climate change.

 

xvii) It is a matter of public record that some scientists have withdrawn from the IPCC process because of dissatisfaction with its probity and methods.

 

xviii) Most of the public statements that promote the dangerous human warming scare are made from a position of ignorance—by political leaders, press commentators and celebrities who share the characteristics of lack of scientific training and lack of an ability to differentiate between sound science and computer-based scaremongering.

Link

 

Personally - i think when the "there is probably no god" stickers wear out on the london busses, they should replace them with point 18 above

[ArabiaTerra]

Well done Spinner! That's the first thing anybody has posted that I haven't been able to refute within 5 minutes.

(note - trying to argue any case whilst quoting from wikipedia is doomed for failure, if not ridicule. Obviously where well known definitions are concerned thats one thing, but many people are can become deluded into thinking that what they read there will be factual)

For scientific stuff, Wiki is reliable, as long as the stuff you are posting carries references to the original research (which I always check before posting).

i) The science related to anthropogenic global warming is not, despite the assurances of some, settled in the scientific community. In particular, Yuri Israel, Vice Chairman of the IPCC, has stated ‘There is no proven link between human activity and global warming’.

Not all scientists agree. I already knew that. And anyway, "no proven link" does not mean that there is no link, simply that the link is not scientifically proven. The IPCC report, itself, says the link is 90% probable, not "proven". That's good enough for me.

ii) The critical area of the fallibility and shortcomings of computer modelling is not mentioned anywhere.

Computer modelling is not perfect, but neither is it useless. This is no reason to discard it. The authors of your report may have some issues with how the IPCC report is worded, but that doesn't invalidate the conclusions of the computer models.

iii) There is no detectable warming in the lower troposphere, the place where the enhanced greenhouse effect is claimed to be evident.

Wiki disagrees, tho' this quote does need a citation :-Temperatures in the lower troposphere have increased between 0.12 and 0.22 °C (0.22 and 0.4 °F) per decade since 1979, according to satellite temperature measurements.

iv) The observed surface warming that is highlighted by the IPCC must therefore have a different cause, which is probably the biasing of the records by urban heat effects.

This is opinion only, and again Wiki disagrees :-Global temperatures have increased by 0.75 °C (1.35 °F) relative to the period 1860–1900, according to the instrumental temperature record. This measured temperature increase is not significantly affected by the urban heat island effect.

v) The full IPCC report ...represents a consensus of government representatives rather than of scientists.

Selective editing here. The summary represents a consensus of government reps rather than scientists.

vi) There are also other scientific factors that contribute to climate that are not even considered by the IPCC, such as the role of cosmic ray activity in cloud formation.

I will have to look this one up.

vii) Warming has also been observed on Mars, Jupiter, Triton, Pluto, Neptune and others. It is the natural property of planets with fluid envelopes to have variability in climate. Thus, at any given time, we may expect about half the planets to be warming. This has nothing to do with human activities.

Irrelevant, it's the Earth we're talking about. And anyway we have records on Earth going back 600,000 years that show the present warming is unprecedented. The records for the other planets barely go back 50 years.

viii) Science is a discipline which relies on testing hypotheses and exposing flaws, not on consensus, in order to further scientific understanding. Scientific fact is not a democracy. The laws of physics are not subject to the democratic vote of a group of scientists; they cannot be repealed by a popular vote.

Yes, so?

ix) The report on geosequestration also gives a false impression of the importance of carbon dioxide on the greenhouse effect. All of the gases mentioned in section 2.5 are minor contributors to greenhouse. Between 75%-95% of the greenhouse effect is the result of water vapour and cloud. The understanding of the influence of the latter is low, by the IPCC’s own admission.

I've never disputed that most of the greenhouse effect is natural. But that effect has always been there, the extra CO2 we've emitted hasn't and it's the extra that's causing the problem. If this extra CO2 is causing more water evaporation and increasing the greenhouse effect, this is a feedback loop, the root cause is still the extra, man made, CO2.

x) Doubling CO2 will only increase the natural greenhouse effect less than 2%. This would produce warming of the order of 1 degree Celsius in the absence of negative feedbacks which are the norm in sustainable physical systems.

This directly contradicts the the predictions of up to 6.5 degrees made by the IPCC report, and also assumes "negative feedbacks which are the norm in sustainable physical systems". The feedbacks which seem to be kicking in just now such as the melting polar ice cap and tundra are all positive feedbacks so I would question that assumption.

xi) The IPCC does not explain how that despite the concentration of atmospheric CO2 increasing fairly rapidly following the Second World War, the period between 1940 and 1975 was associated with a reduction in global surface temperatures.

I'm sure I read somewhere that this fall (shown in the first graph Paulb posted earlier) was an illusion due to instrumental error. The UK did the measuring before the war and the US continued it after the war, using different instruments and techniques and got lower readings. I will have to find a reference for this, however.

xii) Or why in the nine years since 1998, global temperatures have been relatively stable despite rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.

This is due to two natural climate oscillations coinciding. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation and La Nina are both in cooling phases right now. When La Nina changes back to El Nino and the Pacific oscillation reverses then you can expect temperatures to rapidly rise. I think this is due in the next 5-10 years.

xiii) IPCC states that snow cover and ice extent have decreased. [but] it is generally accepted that the main Antarctic ice cap is, in fact, both cooling and increasing its ice mass.

Not sure about this one so I'll have to do some research.

xiv) Sea levels all over the globe have been rising for centuries; this is not due to anthropogenic global warming, but merely a recovery from the last ice age. A recent analysis has found that no statistically significant ocean warming has occurred over the late 20th century.

This may well be true, however, GW is forecast to increase the sea level rise over and above any natural rise. As for temperature, Wiki disagrees :-Since 1979, land temperatures have increased about twice as fast as ocean temperatures (0.25 °C per decade against 0.13 °C per decade). I suppose it all depends what you call "significant".

 

(In case you aren't sure, all the Wiki quotes have notes and references backing them up except where noted.)

[north]

Interesting story about David Bellamy and Global warming.

 

http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/posts/view/69623

[north]

Interesting!

 

 

The world has never seen such freezing heat

By Christopher Booker

Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 16/11/2008

 

 

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

 

This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China's official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its "worst snowstorm ever". In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

 

So what explained the anomaly? GISS's computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

 

The error was so glaring that when it was reported on the two blogs - run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, the Canadian computer analyst who won fame for his expert debunking of the notorious "hockey stick" graph - GISS began hastily revising its figures. This only made the confusion worse because, to compensate for the lowered temperatures in Russia, GISS claimed to have discovered a new "hotspot" in the Arctic - in a month when satellite images were showing Arctic sea-ice recovering so fast from its summer melt that three weeks ago it was 30 per cent more extensive than at the same time last year.

 

A GISS spokesman lamely explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: the figures published by Dr Hansen's institute are not only one of the four data sets that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others.

 

If there is one scientist more responsible than any other for the alarm over global warming it is Dr Hansen, who set the whole scare in train back in 1988 with his testimony to a US Senate committee chaired by Al Gore. Again and again, Dr Hansen has been to the fore in making extreme claims over the dangers of climate change. (He was recently in the news here for supporting the Greenpeace activists acquitted of criminally damaging a coal-fired power station in Kent, on the grounds that the harm done to the planet by a new power station would far outweigh any damage they had done themselves.)

 

Yet last week's latest episode is far from the first time Dr Hansen's methodology has been called in question. In 2007 he was forced by Mr Watts and Mr McIntyre to revise his published figures for US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s, as he had claimed, but the 1930s.

 

Another of his close allies is Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, who recently startled a university audience in Australia by claiming that global temperatures have recently been rising "very much faster" than ever, in front of a graph showing them rising sharply in the past decade. In fact, as many of his audience were aware, they have not been rising in recent years and since 2007 have dropped.

 

Dr Pachauri, a former railway engineer with no qualifications in climate science, may believe what Dr Hansen tells him. But whether, on the basis of such evidence, it is wise for the world's governments to embark on some of the most costly economic measures ever proposed, to remedy a problem which may actually not exist, is a question which should give us all pause for thought.

[ArabiaTerra]

Dr Pachauri, a former railway engineer with no qualifications in climate science,

Whereas Christopher Booker, a historian, is an expert?

 

Interesting though. Looks like someone has made an almighty cock-up somewhere. The implication that this casts doubt on the whole theory of man-made climate change is a bit of a stretch though and, I might add, not one made by the original reporter of this anomaly as far as I can see.

[sheepshagger]

Irrelevant, it's the Earth we're talking about. And anyway we have records on Earth going back 600,000 years that show the present warming is unprecedented. The records for the other planets barely go back 50 years.

 

How can the warming of half a dozen planetary bodies that we share the solar system with be irrelevant.

 

man made global warming is attributed to our activity over the last 50 years, so the tempreture record of these other planets over the last 50 years is completly relevant.

 

you cant cherry pick the figures that make your argument and disregard the figures that break it, then expect the rest of us to believe your conclusions.

but that does seem to be the way of the man made climate scaremongers.

[Spinner72]

^^ Exactly.

 

And Chris Booker is just writing about the evidence discussed by Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, who definitely do know what they're talking about.

 

The thing is that the theory of man made global warming, or rather, the severity of it, is drifting further and further from the real scientific evidence as time goes on.

 

Yes, some people will blindly believe what some people say, even when they are presenting evidence which climatologists have agreed is rubbish, simply because it makes a good story and gives them something to campaign for.

 

I wonder how many more years the tempratures will continue dropping for until the public at large realise they've been scammed.

[ArabiaTerra]

Irrelevant, it's the Earth we're talking about. And anyway we have records on Earth going back 600,000 years that show the present warming is unprecedented. The records for the other planets barely go back 50 years.

 

How can the warming of half a dozen planetary bodies that we share the solar system with be irrelevant.

 

man made global warming is attributed to our activity over the last 50 years, so the tempreture record of these other planets over the last 50 years is completly relevant.

It's irrelevant because we have no idea what was normal on the other planetary bodies previous to 50 years ago, whereas we have data for the Earth going back 600,000 years. If all of the rest of the Solar system was obviously warming then you would have a point, but it isn't, only some of the moons and planets studied are showing warming. Other bodies are showing no change or are cooling so I'm not the one cherry-picking data.

And Chris Booker is just writing about the evidence discussed by Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, who definitely do know what they're talking about.

True, but Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre are not explicitly implying that this mistake makes all the science which supports the theory of man-made climate change wrong, Chris Booker is.

But whether, on the basis of such evidence, it is wise for the world's governments to embark on some of the most costly economic measures ever proposed, to remedy a problem which may actually not exist, is a question which should give us all pause for thought.

The above quote is Chris Bookers own conclusion, not that of Anthony Watts or Steve McIntyre.