Climate Change & Global Warming

[ArabiaTerra]

Good points well made^

 

 

This business of the dendrochronology is a bit of an elephant in the room is it not?

 

No.

How is it that the tree growth rings provide accurate climatic referencing throughout history, until now, where we have an astonishing quantity of data on every nuance of nature and suddenly the tree growth no longer seems to correlate directly to atmospheric conditions? Does this not suggest that the same situation may have arisen before? Or simply that we do not know enough about it to do more than hypothesise?

There may be a perfectly straightforward answer to this but not one that I've seen.

 

Try reading my posts over the last 2 or 3 pages, please!

[ArabiaTerra]

AT, when your side of this (definitely *not* settled!) argument can explain how human GG generation on Earth can also cause the warming on other planets in the Solar System which has been noticed over a period of some 10 or more years, I may be persuaded, though the argument will have to be pretty good.

This is an old denier lie.

 

Refuted here and here.

[DamnSaxon]

1 ... the Sun is in the cool phase of it's cycle, so we should be cooling ... 2. Could you please explain how we can increase the amount of a proven greenhouse gas in the atmosphere by more than 30% (280ppm-384ppm) and not affect the climate? ... to say we don't know what the sun is doing is rubbish.

 

1. We are cooling, and have been for about a decade.

2. I'd still be more interested to know how a tiny increase in a minor "greenhouse gas" on one planet affects the other planets around us ... and ...

If I seemed to suggest that we don't know what the Sun is doing, I apologise. What I was trying to point out is that we don't know what the Sun can do. Remember only a few years ago when a big flare turned off the power across half of North America? - it is very big and very powerful, and it can take us completely by surprise because we don't know what it is capable of.

 

Re "the warmest decade since records began" and suchlike claims, dare I point out that our instrumental records go back about 150 years, and that we know there was a "little Ice Age" about 250 years ago? I should sincerely hope that the planet is warming back up after that. It's gradually moving back towards its normal temperature. Given that the Romans were growing vines when they were over here, this sounds more of a desirable thing than an undesirable one. Move along please, nothing to see here.

 

And please let us agree that the science is not settled. If there is going to be a "consensus" at all, consider:

 

(The pro-AGW camp:)

"I think the only thing that counts is numbers. The media is going to say "1000 scientists signed" or "1500 signed". No one is going to check if it is 600 with PhDs versus 2000 without. They will mention the prominent ones, but that is a different story.

Conclusion -- Forget the screening, forget asking them about their last publication (most will ignore you.) Get those names!"

(J. Alcamo, in 0876437553.txt, 1997)

 

I believe they claim two or three thousand "top scientists" (for which, read: "yea-sayers"), although you only ever seem to hear two or three dozen of them.

 

(We Stupid, Left-Behind Sceptics:)

(see http://www.petitionproject.org/)

"Signatories are approved for inclusion in the Petition Project list if they have obtained formal educational degrees at the level of Bachelor of Science or higher in appropriate scientific fields. The petition has been circulated only in the United States.

The current list of petition signers includes 9,029 PhD; 7,157 MS; 2,586 MD and DVM; and 12,714 BS or equivalent academic degrees. Most of the MD and DVM signers also have underlying degrees in basic science.

All of the listed signers have formal educations in fields of specialization that suitably qualify them to evaluate the research data related to the petition statement. Many of the signers currently work in climatological, meteorological, atmospheric, environmental, geophysical, astronomical, and biological fields directly involved in the climate change controversy." (Emphasis mine)

 

And, after that screening, the project gained 31000-odd signatures - in the US alone - before being ignored by the politicians. That is absolutely not a "consensus that manmade global warming is happening". That is, if we are going to talk "consensus" at all, a consensus that it's not, and, specifically, among the group of people who ought to have the best ideas about what's happening.

 

One thing nobody ever seems to mention, but which really unsettles me. As any student of thermodynamics (which pans out at most science and engineering students) learns in the first year, ALL the energy we use ultimately ends up as waste heat lost to the environment. Since the Industrial Revolution, we have put an awful lot of Joules of energy in the form of heat directly into the environment. Why is nobody pointing out that putting colossal quantities of "waste" heat - effectively, almost all of the energy we've used since we discovered how to - into the environment is by definition going to increase its temperature? It's a much more plausible cause of heating than the CO2 effect, and no mechanism of any kind is needed to explain it. If we could build nuclear (or "Zero Point", or whatever) energy plants without generating any CO2 at all, all that "waste" energy would still be heating us up as we used it. There's your manmade heating.

 

And since nobody used my comment about the Mayan calendar to cast doubts on my sanity (thanks!), consider one rather unsettling thought:

 

They only had to know about one Solar System cycle which we haven't discovered yet to predict calamity in 2012. Can we be certain they didn't, given that we do know that the ancient astronomers were pretty hot? Just a thought. Sorry if it makes anyone else lose sleep.

[Carlos]

1. We are cooling, and have been for about a decade.

As you pointed out previously, global weather is a chaotic system, so we need to be careful about short term trends.

How does the temperature record look on a 5 or 10 year average?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Instrumental_Temperature_Record.svg

 

And since nobody used my comment about the Mayan calendar to cast doubts on my sanity (thanks!), consider one rather unsettling thought:

 

They only had to know about one Solar System cycle which we haven't discovered yet to predict calamity in 2012.

If the Mayans thought the world was going to end in 2012, it's strange that they made predictions for dates after that......

 

Misinterpretation of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar is the basis for a New Age belief that a cataclysm will take place on December 21, 2012. December 21, 2012 is simply the last day of the 13th b'ak'tun. But that is not the end of the Long Count because the 14th through 20th b'ak'tuns are still to come.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_calendar

[ArabiaTerra]

1. We are cooling, and have been for about a decade.

No we are not. We are not cooling. Cooling is not happening. Cooling is a lie spread by Deniers.

 

http://www.edf.org/content_images/graph-no-cooling-in-sight.jpg

2. I'd still be more interested to know how a tiny increase in a minor "greenhouse gas" on one planet affects the other planets around us

It doesn't. We don't have enough data about any of the other planets in the Solar System to reach any meaningful conclusions about climate on other planets. And BTW, Uranus is cooling. How do you explain that?

Re "the warmest decade since records began" and suchlike claims, dare I point out that our instrumental records go back about 150 years, and that we know there was a "little Ice Age" about 250 years ago? I should sincerely hope that the planet is warming back up after that. It's gradually moving back towards its normal temperature. Given that the Romans were growing vines when they were over here, this sounds more of a desirable thing than an undesirable one. Move along please, nothing to see here.

This is the warmest decade. And as for Romans growing vines, how much wine is produced in England at the moment?

 

http://climateprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/WMO09.gif

From here.

 

Please google those petitions. You will find they are garbage. And they don't change the science. The science says we are warming. The science says the warming is due to man made emissions of greenhouse gases.

 

DamnSaxon, you have bought the denier lie, hook line and sinker. Please subject your sources to the same scrutiny that you use on mine. You might learn something.

 

This is a good place to start.

 

And here, all your arguments are addressed and shown to be nonsense. Please spend some time reading these links, please.

[paulb]

http://www.accuweather.com/video-on-demand.asp?video=41870064001&channel=VBLOG_BASTARDI&title=Is%20the%20Earth%20Cooling,%20or%20Is%20the%20Data%20Just%20Fooling

found this intresting.

 

http://www.accuweather.com/video-on-demand.asp?video=39454465001&channel=VBLOG_BASTARDI&title=Some%20Extra%20Post

 

and this is too.

[Carlos]

Copy of an article published in New Scientist Aug 2008 about the difficulties in short term (10-20 year) climate predictions, including PDO cycles.

 

http://www.science.org.au/nova/newscientist/016ns_009.htm

[crofter]

This is a good place to start.

 

 

realclimate is not an objective site though.

[crofter]

1. We are cooling, and have been for about a decade.

As you pointed out previously, global weather is a chaotic system, so we need to be careful about short term trends.

How does the temperature record look on a 5 or 10 year average?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Instrumental_Temperature_Record.svg

 

 

Why does the blue line stop in 2000? (still heading up) There are six red dots after that, why is the next 5 year blue dot not there?

[Carlos]

Various ways of doing a 5 year average, not sure which one is in that graph.

 

Looks like the red line at 2000 is the average of 1995-2000, so it could have carried on further, but the average is missing for the first and last 6 years, which might suggest they are doing something more complicated with the maths.

[crofter]

the average is missing for the first and last 6 years, which might suggest they are doing something more complicated with the maths.

 

Perhaps. But by 2010 I think we will see the line flatten or begin to drop. 1940 is interesting. Any theories?

[Carlos]

I'd call that peak as showing the effects of the PCO pretty clearly.

http://www.science.org.au/nova/newscientist/ns_diagrams/016ns_009image2.jpg

 

It's also why there are predictions of no/low temperature rises in the next 10-20 years, as the PCO cooling part of the cycle kicks in and takes the edge off things for a while.

Yes, that probably means the more extreme extrapolations from the 1980-2000 rises may be tempered, but again, it's the longer term changes that need to be looked for, with the PCO likely to swing back to warming around 2025 at the latest.

 

If the longer term average temperature keeps on going up while the PCO is cooling, you'll know it's looking bad.....

[Gorgonzola Butt-cheese]

May I congratulate crofter and damn saxon in being the most rational voices on this subject firstly . Secondly I ask what do you make of the Copenhagen talks ? what an utter load of complete bollox i ever did see is my opinion , big hype about reductions ..... in 40 years time , very handy most of us will be dead and that reductions probably fit the projected availibility or lack off oil and gas due to it becoming more difficult to extract .

What are they saying in the short term - nothing other than another huge financial burden , 800 million from bankrupt britain as part of new 6-7 billion euro fund to help build flood defences in places like bangladesh ??? ever heard of king canute?

If it is really so serious why are they not saying , only one car per household , 25 litres of petrol a week , no power between 2300 and 0700 i could go on and on with real measures like this and if I was in charge and believed what they say to us they beieve these measures would be happening now.

No we have a government that go on about this endlessly , yet at the same time put a huge prop under the car industry and make bold new tax concessions to the oil companies wanting to extract the deepwater reserves west o shetland ??? they are nearly as neurotic as Arabia Terra !

For me climate change is unstoppable , what ever is causing it i dont really know anything about it , at the end of the day we are all just nerdy geeks trawling the internet to satisfy what we have decided to think on the subject . I agree that trying to use fossil fuels aslittle as possible is n a good thing and i would put human population and natural habitat destruction as the big issues we should be tackling . ( china took 1 million tons of hardwood out of Gabon last year - virgin rain forest ... )

And lastly i dont agree with energy efficient light bulbs , poisonus items , and although you think you arte using less power , you probably end up putting your heating up a notch to make up the difference for the heat an old fashioned bulb gave you , end result more energy used over all and more pollution from there manufacture .

[trout]

*smeeg*

[ArabiaTerra]

the average is missing for the first and last 6 years, which might suggest they are doing something more complicated with the maths.

 

Perhaps. But by 2010 I think we will see the line flatten or begin to drop. 1940 is interesting. Any theories?

2010, with the strengthening El Nino we have going on at the moment and predicted to last well into the new year, looks like it's likely to be the warmest year ever, and if the Sun wakes up as well, which it's long overdue to do.....

 

As far as 1940 goes, around that time there was a change in the way the temperature measurements were taken which may have contributed to the peak, so some of it may be due to instrumental error (the argument about how much instrumental error there was is ongoing). WW2 may also have contributed. Remember, most of the 30's were part of the Great Depression, followed by a rapid expansion of industrial output as the world geared up for war. Or, it could simply be a natural fluctuation. I'd like to see what ENSO and the Sun were doing in the early 40's.