Here is an incomplete version of the carbon cycle.
What does the video skip over? A type of rock. Limestone. What is limestone?
Limestone is a sedimentary rock composed primarily of calcium carbonate (CaCO3) in the form of the mineral calcite. It most commonly forms in clear, warm, shallow marine waters. It is usually an organic sedimentary rock that forms from the accumulation of shell, coral, algal and fecal debris. It can also be a chemical sedimentary rock formed by the precipitation of calcium carbonate from lake or ocean water.http://geology.com/rocks/limestone.shtml
How are carbonate rocks formed?
1. Carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere by dissolving in water and forming carbonic acid
CO2 + H2O -> H2CO3 (carbonic acid)
2. Carbonic acid is used to weather rocks, yielding bicarbonate ions, other ions, and clays
H2CO3 + H2O + silicate minerals -> HCO3– + cations (Ca++, Fe++, Na+, etc.) + clays
3. Calcium carbonate is precipitated from calcium and bicarbonate ions in seawater by marine organisms like coral
Ca++ + 2HCO3– -> CaCO3 + CO2 + H2O
-
the carbon is now stored on the seafloor in layers of limestone. (from here)
What is the point? When we listen to the environmentalists, we get the impression that once we burn fossil fuels the CO2 that results is stuck in the atmosphere. That is not true. Natural processes already exist for removing CO2 from the atmosphere. What should concern us is these three problems:
- How fast can the oceans remove CO2 from the atmosphere? That is, do we have the capacity to upset the earth’s CO2 balance sufficiently to cause harm? To answer that question, we need to consider Le Chatelier’s Principle. Le Chatelier’s Principle can be stated as follows:
A change in one of the variables that describe a system at equilibrium produces a shift in the position of the equilibrium that counteracts the effect of this change.
What does that mean with respect to burning fossil fuels? Because we produce more CO2, the oceans and other carbon sinks (like green plants) absorb more CO2 from the atmosphere.
Because of the role of CO2 in climate, feedbacks in the carbon cycle act to maintain global temperatures within certain bounds so that the climate never gets too hot or too cold to support life on Earth. The process is a large-scale example of LeChatelier’s Principle. This chemical principle states that if a reaction at equilibrium is perturbed by the addition or removal of a product or reactant, the reaction will adjust so as to attempt to bring that chemical species back to its original concentration. For example, as carbonic acid is removed from solution by weathering of rocks, the reaction will adjust by producing more carbonic acid. And since the dissolved CO2 is in equilibrium with atmospheric CO2, more CO2 is removed from the atmosphere to replace that removed from solution by weathering. (from here)
Thus, the issue is the responsiveness of the processes that maintain the CO2 in the atmosphere at the desired equilibrium. Since we are just beginning to understand those processes, we don’t exactly know how responsive those processes might be. All we can say is that so far the doomsayers are exaggerating. Burning fossil fuels doesn’t seem to have much effect on the world’s climate.
- How do we remove the substances from fossil fuels that do form pollutants when burned? Smog is what results when we fail in our efforts to clean up what comes out of a car’s tailpipe. Since coal contains substances like sulfur and mercury, burning it can be problematic. Sulfur forms a highly corrosive acid. Mercury poisoning is called the mad hatter’s disease.
- What do we use for fuel when fossil fuels become to costly to get out the ground? Currently, we are still finding less expensive ways to extract fossil fuels from the earth. Thus, we are using fossil fuels from sources that at one time would have been considered too expensive to use. Thus, fossil fuels remain inexpensive. Can that situation last forever? No.
How do we decide what we should do? We must remember that we make decisions based upon our understanding of the information available to us. Currently, our government provides most of our educational instruction, and our government also provides most of the information we have with respect to Global Warming. Is that a good situation? Of course not.
There is no such thing as a perfectly objective person. So there is no such thing as a perfectly objective teacher or scientist. Therefore, if we want to make an objective decision, we must consider information from multiple sources, that is, information on the same subject that comes from different people with different biases. We need a marketplace of ideas. Unfortunately, because politicians run both our education system and fund most of the research on Global Warming, when it comes to this subject we do not have a marketplace of ideas. What we have is a government-run monopoly that presents only one point-of-view.
Other References
- Limestone (www.eoearth.org)
- Le Chatelier’s Principle: The Carbon Cycle and the climate (wiki.chemprime.chemeddl.org)
- Climate change feedback (en.wikipedia.org)
- The Slow Carbon Cycle (earthobservatory.nasa.gov)
- It’s official: 2014 was the hottest year in recorded history (www.washingtonpost.com)
Citizen Tom 
You get called names if you continue to deny reality it’s right to arbitrate claims made about it. As this video shows (10 min.), we have a high degree of confidence based on independent evidence to hold climate change deniers in great contempt, and this will get far, far worse as ongoing climate change adversely affect more and more people who will demand to know who failed to respond in a timely manner, who failed to advocate for change, but who insisted that they not be held accountable for their actions. Climate change denialism is fast approaching criminal intention.
tildeb
I spent about year in the interior of Alaska. Definitely a cold place. After routinely experiencing -40 degrees F, I have a glimmer of an idea of what permafrost is and why it might make construction difficult. So I think your video has a point. What it has to do with proving global warming, however, ….. Shrug.
You want cast insults? Well, it is your mouth, your pen, and your keyboard.
You may wish to read Aesop’s fable about the sun and the wind.
Because the permafrost line is advancing north while the sea eats it southwards. The amount of released methane – trapped for tens of thousands of years but released when the ground thaws – is a fairly large concern (methane being a significant greenhouse gas) (also, my brother-in-law has told me what it’s like to fly through a methane burp and it’s pretty scary but far more common with each advancing year).
Yeah, and the ice caps are melting too. Not!
It was sad to see eDX offer this climate propaganda course; the online college has done good work and I’ve previously used their services.
I suppose you’re aware of the much larger degree of permafrost melting back in the 1930s and 40s. Lots of pictures from those times, and lots of concern … which somehow gets omitted from current discussion. Here’s an article on the topic from the 1940s, for example.
Some years later, it got colder, and previously receding glaciers began to advance again. We’re seeing this pattern beginning to repeat — but certain folks are inclined to call it “unprecedented” because that generates better reactions.
Historically, the catastrophists employ another trick from paleological climate proxies: They smooth these very erratic records into typically 50- or 100-year averages, but then compare individual current years to those averages. With the raw data, you can see individual years then that were all over the range, but that doesn’t produce the desired effect. (And proxies that don’t produce the desired effect are omitted, or turned upside down. Even after it is pointed out that they are upside down.)
Do you remember NASA stating flatly that the surface temperature station records were quite unreliable and to use the satellite troposphere records as the reliable indicator of Earth’s temperature? Recently, those records are exposing the “adjustments” made to the surface temperature stations to create the “hottest [time period] ever” false pronouncements from the last year or so.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
We’re seeing this pattern beginning to repeat
We? Only climate deniers. Not real scientists. Not climate scientists. Denialists. And you see only the pattern you wish to see by selecting only the data points you choose and not the aggregate. But you know this. You dismiss out of hand the overwhelming cryogenic aggregate evidence. And that evidence is uni-directional as far as any trends are concerned. The trend is warming. To deny that is to deny reality. But that’s what you do.
You frequently assert or imply, as you’ve done here, that no “real scientists” disagree with your notion of climate change being a human-caused catastrophe.
Let me get you on record here with two questions:
Do any real scientists believe that climate change is NOT an imminent human-caused catastrophe?
Do any climate scientists believe that climate change is NOT an imminent human-caused catastrophe?
As usual, begin with Yes/No/Don’t know and then expand if you like.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
In any large group of people sharing a professional, you will always have some fringe element. That’s why it’s important to understand that about 97% of climate scientists agree with AGW. And, like any large group of professionals, you’ll find various disagreements about the minutia. That is what feeds you denialists… the minutia. What you ignore is the reality: the consensus, and that’s where almost all of the climate scientists live. Your piddling misrepresentations and diversions and contra-reality denialist beliefs wave away this consensus every time and then cherry-pick a sentence or two from thousands of climate papers whose authors are very much part of the consensus to make it seem like they’re not because of the quibble. And you do this to pretend you’re actually interested in the science and dedicated to understanding it. You aren’t. You are a climate change denialist and you should be held in contempt for your lack of intellectual integrity.
And that’s why you try to ask people like I am these kinds of loaded questions where no matter how I answer them you’ll use as if it represents my honest opinion. My honest opinion you don’t want, namely, that we have compelling reasons to grant a very high degree of confidence to the scientific consensus that we are responsible for AGW. But you and your denialist ilk don’t want to hear that because you can’t misrepresent me. What you want is to try to discredit any scientifically valid opinion by distorted and dishonest means… like asking such loaded questions and then demanding they be answered one way or the other… not to reveal what is true but to give you fodder to continue to do what you do: misrepresent, divert, distort, and, if necessary lie and slander. What you cannot abide is what’s true and respect how we come to know about it. And AGW is true… AND, in spite of cowardly denialism and absurdly childish attempt to shirk responsibility for dealing with this problem, you too know it is. That’s why you are pathetic.
So, just to be clear, you consider any of the thousands of scientists including climate scientists who don’t think that climate change is a catastrophe in the making are merely a “fringe element.”
And you consider any scientist who includes in a paper a reference to global warming (because, of course, it is very difficult to continue in a publishing career otherwise), that they have fully supported your “catastrophe” notion. You refer to islands sinking, a scare story that’s been debunked. You referred to accelerated sea-level rise, but this is not seen at all on tide gauge, only on fiddled records connecting different satellites, and superimposing a new geoid model that effectively creates the acceleration in direct observations.
When your co-religionists at the mis-monikered SkepticalScience wrote about this, they described “pot holes and speed bumps” in the sea level rise rate. And they graphed recent changes, and asserted that the rise was “on the upper end of IPCC projections.” But I challenge you to find any long-duration tide gauge that actually reflects this. Like the temperature rise (over the hot 1930s and 1940s), this catastrophic rise is created by way of altering the data.
I imagine that you are greatly disappointed, as many catastrophists are, by the relative dearth of extreme weather, and are hoping for hurricanes and tornadoes to return in force and support your efforts with death and destruction.
You are welcome to call me “pathetic.” Against the money and vested interests of the government-supported catastrophist religion, perhaps it is true. Nevertheless, your co-religionists have been forced to attempt to end debate by outlawing or punishing dissent, as opposed to actually discussing the science itself — where you are quite weak. The endless failed predictions, and the iconic catastrophist papers using known bad data, inverted data, data with “inconvenient” portions cut off the ends … this is pretty terrible as an example of science in action. Pathetic, one could even say.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
So, just to be clear, you consider any of the thousands of scientists including climate scientists who don’t think that climate change is a catastrophe in the making are merely a “fringe element.”
No, I never said that. You did.
If Keith misinterpreted your words, it wasn’t his fault. I think anyone would have a difficult time reaching any other conclusion. Of course, you support your 97% of climate scientists agree with AGW with the same sort of convincing proof with which you support AGW. So I suppose your ambiguity should surprise no one.
Is the problem that you just need an excuse to insult people?
Incidentally, I agree with AGW. Specifically, in answer to the questions posed on the famous survey, that it has warmed in recent decades and that humans have contributed some non-zero amount to this.
Where you do not have a consensus is on CAGW, “catastrophic anthropogenic global warming.” Many who understand the issues involved have noted that the small amount of warming recovering from the Little Ice Age has had and will continue to have beneficial effects, and that the continuation of this is extremely unlikely to be “catastrophic” and may even be a net positive. There is a reason that we have called past periods warmer than now “climate optimums.” And these same scientists have also noted that human contributions to the climate are evidently modest, and swamped by natural variabilities which are not well understood or reproduced in current climate models.
But it is easy to sympathize with those who express great concern that a third of the Arctic ice has disappeared over the past 50 years. The problem is the lack of knowledge of history: That statement predates mankind’s substantial production of CO2, as the report is from 1940.
The link also discusses and demonstrates changes to the warm temperatures around 1940 to make them more in line with the notion of modern warming. And it also cites the discussions and plans by the core group of CAGW cheerleader scientists to “remove at least part of the 1940s blip” as they said, and later their conspiring together to get rid of the emails containing such discussions. I read with great sadness the Penn State “exoneration” of these folks, who merely accepted statements that they didn’t really delete the emails despite what they said. The Penn State panel performed no further investigation on the topic.
I have been watching this process and reading research papers on it since approximately 1970, and am utterly unimpressed with these cheerleaders and their government and academia protectors and enablers, and saddened by the politicization of science here. You and your like-minded comrades are doing to climate science exactly what creationists have incorrectly accused scientists of doing with regard to evolution, making that area of real science (which I have written about for four decades) harder to defend. Thousands of my discussion posts explaining evolution to creationists are still online, dating back around two decades or so. But now I have to contend with leftist distortions of climate science, to which young-Earth creationists can point and say “See? See? Look what they are doing!” To such accusations I must now, sadly, agree, while showing the distinction between science and propagandists like yourself.
The distinction here is that evolution has not been a subject of huge potential taxation and empowerment of governments. CAGW is. If you can propagandize enough, you can get people to agree that our lives must be run by leftist masterminds for our own good. We’ve seen this well along already.
Evolution has important implications in medicine, and is the foundation for many aspects of modern disease care. But it has not been the tool of a power-grab … the sort of power grab that you are now advocating, while trying to silence any evidence or any view that could interfere with it.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
Two quotes of interest. One is from Robert Heinlein, an extraordinary writer and long considered the dean of science fiction, writing in 1939:
The other is by famous statistician Wm. Briggs in 2013, with the Heinlein quote specifically in mind and agreeing with it:
Both of these are good first-order approximations of the condition that now obtains in government-supported and government mandated climate science.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
Ah yes, the denialist’s “government mandated climate science” that simply ignores the relatively long history of government denialism to even admit there’s a problem and turns it into a inverted gambit whereby suddenly government is using climate science as a make work project! (This is so stupid it boggles the mind that any rational person could go along with it:
From Rationalwiki: “There actually is a conspiracy surrounding climate change, and it’s not what you’ll hear from most conspiracy theorists: between 2003 and 2010, more than $7 billion were spent by conservative billionaires to fund anti-AGW organizations such as the Heritage Foundation, the Heartland Institute, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.[22] Follow the money, indeed.”
Or how about Isaac Asimov, an extraordinary writer and long considered the modern dean of science fiction, speaking in this video not from 1939 but 1989 (a little better informed by the science, perhaps?).
I agree with the greenhouse effect, obviously, as Asimov does. Though he was misinformed on forests, he is brilliant, but cannot be expected to be all-knowledgeable on all things.
You continue to propagate the notion that anyone (and in fact, the main folks) proposing science that contradicts government climate propaganda are funded by “evil corporate billionaires”. This fell apart on Heartland after Peter Gleick’s illegal stunt, but you insist on repeating it. Jeffrey Sachs just did as well, ascribing Heartland’s climate funding to the Koch brothers, despite Gleick’s admitted identity and document theft proving that assertion to be false. Since your side gets hundreds of billions in funding, that must be the motivation for the other side too, right? Like British Petroleum’s half-a-trillion-dollar gift to … whoops, to leftist Berkeley. Oil companies fund catastrophism, as they position themselves to reap the new government crony harvest.
How much do you think the two key sources, http://www.ClimateAudit.com and http://www.WattsUpWithThat.com, are funded by these “evil billionaires”? The answer is zero. But there is no clearer demonstration than that in ClimateAudit’s thousands of analyses of how pitiful the core catastrophist cheerleaders’ research actually is. Privately, the catastrophists admit this (as the emails revealed) while publicly attacking and smearing Steve McIntyre, and privately working to silence him.
Do you think the “consensus” means that 97% of scientists believe that “global warming” is an imminent catastrophe? As usual, start with Yes/No/Don’t know and expand if you wish.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
Hah. As soon as I posted, I spotted that my “half-a-billion” was auto-corrected to “half-a-trillion.” That’s an appropriate order of magnitude for the US government’s funding of the climate industry, but not for the $500 million dollar gift to Berkeley by BP. No way to fix it, unfortunately.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
A post in WUWT is interesting. It discusses a new paper by discredited catastrophist psychologist Lewandowsky and one of the people involved in the discredited ‘97% concensus” Oreskes.
The paper “researches” the issue of talking about the 18+ year pause in warming (which they contend does not exist), and the fact that it is producing the horrible result (to them) of causing climate scientists to re-examine their theories, model and data. Terrible!
This Lewandowsky is the same fellow who claimed that climate skeptics also believed that the Moon landing was faked, after doing a survey and finding exactly zero people who fit this description. That paper has been shredded mercilessly, and his results wound up pointing to psychological problems among catastrophists instead, while having ridiculous methodology which changed mid-stream, and no human subjects approval from the university which the university has been trying to cover up. Honesty among catastrophists is not a stock-in-trade.
In the meantime, the article notes that co-author Oreskes is complaining on Twitter to scientists who use the word “pause,” whining that “you can’t say that” to which scientists reply “but lots of scientists are talking about it!” Oreskes doesn’t care — because it’s bad for the cause and gives skeptical folks ammunition. The truth does not matter, and the resulting hand-waving by Oreskes would be pathetically amusing were the stakes not so high.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
Amusing. You pick a low point to start from, ignoring that it was likely warmer than now 80 years ago than now, and certainly was around 1000 years and 2000 years ago. And it was warmer than now for most of thousands of years centered on about 5000 years ago, when humans flourished and developed agriculture. But the one degree rise you display, on the back of tweaked temperatures, is to you a catastrophe. And that last low year is the “hottest year ever” if you use the right adjustments.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
Amusing how wrong NASA is. But you and your internet connection are much better suited to determine long term climate trends, eh? Maybe you should go fix that.
No, it’s rather sad, really. I am better equipped than the climate team at NASA in one important sense: I am honest.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
A climate change denier is honest?
Now there’s an oxymoron of great entertainment value. Thanks for that gem, Keith. It’s a keeper.
And you insist on calling me a “climate change denier,” demonstrating clearly that you are not honest. But you’d already shown this.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
No, you’re a denialist in the same way that a creationist does the macro-micro mambo.
I suppose you’re aware of the much larger degree of permafrost melting back in the 1930s and 40s. Lots of pictures from those times, and lots of concern … which somehow gets omitted from current discussion. Here’s an article on the topic from the 1940s, for example.
Have you actually read that article, that you purport to support your claim? It’s about permafrost melting beneath buildings, streets and runways due to lack of thermal insulation. It’s about engineering, not change in climate.
You pick a low point to start from, ignoring that it was likely warmer than now 80 years ago than now
And here’s your standard slight of hand again: tildeb presents data on global mean temperature, you claim that the US48 record is representative of the entire world. This gets tiring. Worse so, as I have yet to see a single self-professed skeptic to call you out on that stunt (I’m looking at you, too, Tom).
Here’s the promised update to that Cherry Peak Bloom
And just in case you try to sneak out by claiming cherries are the exception to the rule, no they are not:
“Earlier plant flowering in spring as a response to global warming in the Washington, DC, area”, Abu-Asab, Peterson, Shetler, Orli, Biodiversity and Conservation 10: 597•612,2001.
Ask yourself, Tom, who is misleading about the data in this comment section?
Sorry your comment went into moderation. Sometimes I can only guess what the spam filter thinks it is doing.
“This gets tiring.”
Indeed. Point to where I “claim that the US48 record is representative of the entire world.” Not only have I not said that, I did not ever refer to the continental US in the comment you’re talking about.
As an aside, Alaska is a US state, but it is not one of the 48.
The adjustments have taken place — are still taking place — all over the world. When I mentioned the Soviet Union upthread, and its massive loss of thermometers, I can hardly credit you thinking that the US has adopted that country.
I have a few hundred links on file, and just picked one at random. This one happens to be Reykjavik, Iceland. Note the statement from the country’s own weather office: “The GHCN ‘corrections’ are grossly in error in the case of Reykjavik.”
Perhaps they are wrong. Perhaps it isn’t an error. But the nearly two-degree correction centers quite nicely on 1940, interestingly enough.
In the meantime, go find my reference to the US48 in the comment, making sure that you pick the one where I say that it is “representative of the entire world.”
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
@marmoewp
It is Friday evening, and I have a busy week. I am tired and need to sleep.
When I was in college, I took a Psychology and Sociology courses. One the things that amazed me is how people made grandiose assertions when they really had not proved anything for certain. Nevertheless, insufficient evidence did not stop the “experts” from claim their theory was the correct one, and the other guy’s theory was wrong. All they accomplished was to undermine respect for their professions.
As far as I can tell, this sort of thing, preposterous claims, is growing more common in the hard sciences. Why? I think Keith has already explained the sources of the temptation.
Is there significant man-made global warming? What would be significant? Do we have enough data to distinguish the between natural and man-made effects? As one of tildeb’s denying idiots, I don’t think so, and I am afraid people are abusing the data we do have.
I don’t consider the stories about when the cherry blossoms bloom anything other than funny. The cherry blooms are in the middle of a large urban area that keeps growing larger and more populated. Because they are located in the middle of a huge heat island, when the cherry blossoms bloom is more representative of population growth than anything else. And yet we keep getting pestered with the earlier bloom times of urban flowers as evidence of global warming.
🙄
My bottom-line is the only thing our leaders want from global warming is the “proof” it provides that we must grant them more power. Yet the plain fact is that our leaders don’t have a clue as to how they are going to solve the problem of global warming. When our leaders have not proposed anything that would actually reduce the use the worldwide use of fossil fuels, why condemn ordinary people as deniers? When people in charge, people who claim they believe man-made global warming is real actually are not taking you seriously, why should I?
What is the denier’s crime? We don’t see enough evidence of global warming to wreak havoc on our economy and starve a bunch of people. I try not to call anyone names. I emphatically oppose Socialism. Socialism is not a fix. Empowering politicians is not a fix. Where Socialism has been tried, both the environment and the economy eventually suffer.
Global warmist politicians, on the other hand, speak out of both sides of the mouths; they are just using global warming believers, and the proof is that they don’t actually intend to do anything that would actually stop global warming, assuming the problem actually exists.
Say what you will, but you have yet to convince the people who matter. Instead focusing on your opponents, have you considered giving the solution to this supposed problem some serious attention?
“that it was likely warmer than now 80 years ago than now”
Keith, which geographic region were you refering to, based on which dataset/observations?
@Tom: My comment simply had too many links/images. I’ve had a look, WordPress default is to hold comments with more than two links/images for moderation. I’ll keep that in mind for the future, unless you want to cut us some slack and increase that limit at MySite/Settings/Discussion/Comment Moderation
It had not occurred to me that WordPress would treat the images (and videos) as links, but I guess that is what they are. Anyway, you can now add three links.
Generally, I prefer comments with fewer links. Two things happen when we take the time to put what we believe in our own words: (1) we take the time to think about what we believe, and (2) we specifically address our response to the intended audience. Hence, I think links should be to supporting data, explanatory charts, or such (which you have for the most part provided), not a long list of highly partisan articles few will take the time to read.
What annoys me about the debate over global warming is that the “warmists” insist that the “deniers” are just a tiny fringe group. That contention is absurd, but it puts those who believe global warming is a sham in the position of defending the simple fact that many respectable scientists don’t believe man is causing global warming.
The debate should be whether man is causing global warming and what we are suppose to do about if man is causing global warming. Instead, we get a bunch of childish name calling. Name calling just makes people mad, and mad people don’t produce constructive results.
Tom, I agree that calling people deniers will not change their mind. I am aware that a good half of the American population does not believe that AGW is happening. Most of these people also think, that there is still a lot of debate among climate scientists, whether mankind’s actions are the cause of the warming or not. There is no evidence for that kind of division and/or discussion in the scientific literature. The by far overwhelming amount of papers (> 90%, as a low ball) either fills holes in our understanding of AGW or simply accepts AGW as a fact and works on that basis. Can we agree on this assessment of mine, or do you think otherwise?
As an aside, Keith turned my comment on earlier spring in general into a discussion focused on cherry blossoms in DC only. You may want to have a look at the changes in the US hardiness map (based on average winter minimum temperature) between 1990 and 2012, it gives you an idea of what I am talking about:
http://www.arborday.org/media/map_change.cfm
Excellent graphic. I wish it went to 2014 to show the extent of this northward progression.
@marmoewp
When I was in Colorado, the locals had a little joke. “You don’t like the weather? Wait five minutes.” And there were times, particularly in the mountains, when it did not seem like much of an exaggeration.
Consider the origin of the word “weather.”
In time the weather is good, and in time the weather becomes bad. The weather always changes, from day to day and from year to year.
Given that our government pays for most of the research and most of academia, would it not be surprising if most of the research did not incline one way. In addition to the fact that people have to eat, most are ambitious. So most do what the guy paying the bills want. And our leaders want climate change and an excuse to seize more power.
Perhaps you have noticed. Perhaps not, but our government of the people, by the people, and for the people has become quite corrupt. We are led by people who take an oath of office. They take that oath with the intent of ignoring it, and we let them do it. Most Federal spending is in fact unconstitutional. Perhaps that is why so many people think we have good reason to be skeptical of anyone who thinks that a majority vote should constitute scientific proof.
Haven’t we already done this sort of thing with the Theory of Evolution? Don’t most scientists act like the Theory of Evolution is proven science? Does the theory make sense? I suppose so. Does it fit the data we have? I suppose so. Is it proven? No, and we don’t know how to prove it. Nevertheless, with religious conviction, most scientists appear to believe the Theory of Evolution is the Fact of Evolution, but it is not.
Anyway, it seems to me that you and tildeb are the devotees of a self-destructive faith. To stop a phenomena they don’t know how to stop, our leaders demand increasing power. They could do something simple. They could tax fossil fuels instead of something else, but they want power instead. And we are suppose to believe these power hungry liars when they tell us global warming is settled science? Why isn’t your argument with them? Why me? Whereas so-called deniers like Keith and myself are just skeptical, those politicians are actually undermining the credibility the global warmists. They are taking advantage your “crisis” and using it to acquire power and wealth. And yet you complain about the “deniers,” not the liars.
@CT
Well said. We all are aware of this axiom: he who has the gold makes the rules. Research funded by grants, be it public or private, is no different. The grantor has the gold (i.e., funds) and thus makes the terms and conditions for the grantee. Any research funded by grantors — either government or private sector — make the rules. There is no such thing as “unbiased” research, which is a misnomer in both the academic and scientific communities, of course, no one in one of those communities will humble himself to admit it — too much pride and arrogance therein. (I have yet to witness any “unbiased” research, and I have yet to encounter any “unbiased” scientist.) The grantee (i.e., the researcher) receives name recognition via publication, and the grantor (i.e., government or corporation) receives the desired effect or result — win-win situation. I witnessed this in the academia.
Tom, I think I can summarize your position as
a) It’s all natural fluctuations only
b) The proposed solution suits the socialists/communnists, therefore AGW is a ruse.
c) The scientists are all only in it for the money/fame.
d) The ruse is run by current politicians, despite Svante Arhenius having pointed out that fossil fuel use could result in enhancing the greenhouse effect back in 1896.
And yes, the vast majority of scientists treat AGW as fact, just as they treat as fact the Theory of Evolution, the Theory of General Relativity, Classical Mechanics, Electrodynamics and a whole host of other theoretic frameworks. I count myself among them.
BTW, I am German and living in Germany. We are trying to transition to renewable energy, despite the risks to our economy. Just to make it clear, that your government is not my government and still sees AGW as a tremendous risk. That conspiracy seems to be working all over the world, across vastly different political systems and across all major scientific unions, even those competing with climate science for funding.
I thought I could reach you, Tom, but obviously I have failed. I would still like to see Keith explain his assertion “that it was likely warmer than now 80 years ago than now” so I will hang around a little longer.
@Matthew
Thank you.
@marmoewp
You sound like a true believer blaming a potential convert for being too vile to accept the perfect truth. That’s foolish. The truth doesn’t belong to you or to me. We each simply choose to believe what we believe.
Some Christians, for example, get angry, when their message is rejected. That is foolish, of course. God changes hearts, not men. All any man can do is tell others about Jesus.
a) Do I believe it is all natural fluctuations only? No. We can produce significant local effects. Heat islands, for example. What else we can do I don’t know.
b) Do I believe AGW is a ruse? I don’t think the argument over AGW started that way, but some men will use anything to suit their own purposes.
c) Do I believe the scientists are all only in it for the money/fame? No. “The scientists” don’t exist. Some scientists believe in AGW, and some don’t. Most people, even scientists, look at issues like AGW and scratch their heads. We have all been indoctrinated by the news media and the public schools to believe AGW. Most people don’t examine their beliefs too carefully. They fear being different. They fear being called “deniers” and ridiculed.
d) Do I believe the ruse is run by politicians? I am not a conspriracy theorist. I have just observed that people are opportunists. So I don’t think the politicians are working together all that closely. They simply have shared interests.
Consider yourself, marmoewp. You demand I that believe in AGW, but you have said nothing about the consequence. If our leaders are just going to abuse this crisis, what difference does it make if I believe?
Before we can reform this planet, don’t you think we need to reform ourselves first?
Because all the knowledge in the world, no matter how clear and compelling the evidence may be, no matter how uniformed the trends are, isn’t going to affect your contrary opinion that makes the problem worse for everyone, I hope you understand why you have earned contempt and ridicule for your anti-intellectual, anti-science, pro-conspiracy position.
tildeb
What Jesus told us to do about enemies is difficult, but there are much more difficult things.
What did he tell us to do?
Love your enemies. Yes, that is hard, we can be more easily hurt by our friends, and we can more easily hurt our friends.
Therefore, I won’t say that I don’t care what you think, but your anger and scorn does not much concern me.
I have no hatred towards you.
Sure, I’m disappointed that deniers – many of them paid deniers – are immune from reasonable and rationale information in the aggregate. This is deeply anti-scientific. I am aware of the Keith-approach, to micromanage only that information that appears to cast doubt on scientific consensus but knows perfectly well that all scientific activities contains quibbles about the minutia and trivialities. That is what the Keiths of this world magnify for a reason other than respecting what’s true and what’s knowable and thus he and his ilk create a massive distortion they think is reflective of reality… as if they are far smarter and more perceptive armed by an internet connection than those working scientists doing the actual field research and collating information in the aggregate and testing it at every major scientific organization in the world.
Think about that hubris. And Keith has an abundance of it. Every denier has to have an abundance of arrogance and hubris. Those are your allies. Not the climate scientists who brought you the awareness of ozone depletion and acid rain.
I am simply pointing out why your rejection of knowledge about climate science and why AGW is probably the most important issue of our generation… an issue we are failing to adequately address not because of any actual weakness in the science but because of the dedicated actions of motivated deniers. Their job is to create uncertainty in people like you and dress it up to look like you’re supporting skepticism rather than what it is: supporting duplicitous, pernicious, and distorted information that when understood reveals a breath-taking scope and depth of lies and deceit. This is what you’re supporting and it disappoints me that you’ve fallen for it.
That falling for the denier’s position is what is deserving of ridicule and scorn because it’s the opposite of skepticism; it’s a rejection of what reality is telling us. Any time people reject scientific consensus in favour of personal opinion far less informed by knowledge and often contrary to it invites contempt and ridicule.
I think only contempt and ridicule is the only appropriate response to your faith-based belief that AGW is a conspiracy. Your willingness to campaign against reasonable and timely action based on this knowledge is richly contemptible because you’re hurting other people based on your own arrogance and hubris.
Here’s a thought: why not err on the side of caution… you know, just in case your personal opinion sold to you by disreputable people like Keith is factually wrong as tens of thousands of working climate scientists at every major scientific organization IN THE WORLD is telling you? I mean, you being wrong might conceivably be a possibility, don’t you think? And that’s the very problem people like Keith and other merchants of doubt want to promote and get people like you to their dirty work for them: by feeding you just enough misinformation and skewed conclusions to get you to not support taking any action on the basis that the scientific consensus is what deserves skepticism.
Think about that.
Going along with that absurdity – that Keith can see through the scientific consensus because, gosh, he’s just so darn smart, and he suspects a global conspiracy at work – is the problem you create by holding up people like Keith as a friendly and supportive voice for your fringe position. This reveals the lack of critical thinking you allow to happen. You do this. You choose to do this. You reject scientific consensus in this one special case and you substitute a ludicrous conspiracy to support what you claim is a reasonable skepticism. It’s not. It’s gullibility. And that gullibility deserves contempt because it’s going to fool you every time you rely on it and make you a willing and supportive dupe.
tildeb
You don’t hate me, but you apparently think you have an obligation to act like you hate me? And you wonder why I don’t take your arguments for AGW seriously?
Is Keith arrogant? I think he argues his case logically and patiently, and I don’t see him assuming he has an obligation (or is it a “right”) to ridicule or show contempt for anyone.
Do Keith and I have numbers on our side? Are numbers important? Not with respect to science. It is folly to base science on consensus. It isn’t even science. Science requires proof, results that justify a hypothesis. What people choose to believe and call science is an entirely different matter.
On the other hand, government spending (spending other people’s money) and seizing unconstitutional power only requires a consensus. So you may be in the majority, but I don’t think that good company.
Am I obligated to play it safe, to err on the side of caution? I think the answer to that question is yes. Since I cannot claim certainty, that’s the principle reason I have for my position.
I see little evidence of AGW, and given what our government has proposed as their “solution” for global warming, I want no part of it. It is self-destructive, and it accomplishes nothing — unless you like Socialism.
I have asked you and marmoewp over and over again to talk about your solution for AGW. If you have one, I don’t see any sign of it. What do you think of the politicians who support AGW? When their abuses of power show nothing but contempt for the “masses,” why should I want those people in charge of anything? They will just make any problem worst.
You sound like a true believer blaming a potential convert for being too vile to accept the perfect truth. That’s foolish. The truth doesn’t belong to you or to me. We each simply choose to believe what we believe.
You are playing games on words, you are mixing the different meanings of “to believe”. On the one hand, there is believe in deities, i.e. believe in the sense of religious faith. The two of us happen to share the same faith. On the other there is “believe” in a scientific theory in natural sciences in the sense that one acknowledges it as a being capable of explaining aspects of the past material world and making predictions about the future of the material world. You can believe that you will fly when stepping off a cliff, however the material world is going to give you a rude awakening if you put this believe to a test.
That said, I don’t consider you to be vile, but I do not consider you to be a skeptic, either; a skeptic in the sense of someone who is not jumping to conclusions, but applying reason to methodically investigate an issue. Unlike Faith, the Natural Sciences are not in search of The Truth, instead they are looking for workable models that allow reliable predictions about the material world we live in. You can not prove a theory in Natural Sciences. Proof is a mathematical concept, where you can start out from a set of axioms and deduce the rest by logic. You can not do that for Classical Mechanics. You can not do that for Quantum Mechanics. You can not do that for the Theory of Evolution. However, they have stood the test of time in the sense, that you can make testable, useful predictions based on their application to the real world and they hold up within the borders of their applicability. Classical Mechanics is gives you wrong results when applied to the structure of atoms or when objects have relativistic speeds. It is still useful in day-to-day life.
The theories and models of global climate change are not as well established as the theories mentioned above. For example, we still have a rather large margin for the climate sensitivity to doubling the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. Other aspects are beyond reasonalbe doubt. CO2 absorbs infrared radiation outgoing from Earth at wavelengths not covererd by water and in high parts of the atmosphere where there basically is no water to speak of.
We do not have perfect knowledge, but we have good enough knowledge to assess that there will be much suffering in the future of mankind, if we do not act now to stop the increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration.
I have reached out to you, because I gave you the benefit of doubt of being a true skeptic. The problem of Global Climate Change can only be addressed successfully if the large emitters of fossil CO2 work together, which includes China, the US, Europe including Russia and in the forseeable future India. I see the Republican Party and the Tea Party to be major forces opposing action on Climate Change in the US and that won’t change until their voters are convinced that Climate Change is a threat to their well-being. Hence I talk to people where I see a chance to convince them, one at a time.
“Before we can reform this planet, don’t you think we need to reform ourselves first?”
I believe, that we were appointed as the stewards of this Earth and are doing a lousy job at the upkeep. I am not sure, how much of an ecosphere will be left, if we were to wait and first reform ourself. I see Global Climate Change as a clear and present danger, one of several. We can choose to invest in mitigation and/or adaption and we can choose to suffer the consequences of not doing enough. How much we do for the former will determine how much we get of the suffering bit. If you want nightmare fuel, try this:
http://web.science.unsw.edu.au/~stevensherwood/wetbulb.html
marmoewp
I apprecitate the fact you are making a sincere effort in persuasion.
Am I playing a game with words? I don’t think so. I think it is logical to believe in God. I agree that there are limits to what we can prove, and we cannot prove God exists. Similarly, as you say, there are limits as to what we can scientifically prove with respect to the natural science. At some point, when we must act, we must put our faith in what the preponderance of evidence suggests to be true. As a matter of fact, you just made a good argument for exactly that.
Now let’s consider your own words about AGW.
Does the preponderance of evidence suggests an oncoming crisis? Will there be a great deal of suffering in the future if we do not act now to stop the increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration? All I can say is that I have serious doubts. You provided that UNSW article, and it is interesting, but we have yet to see anything to suggest we are rapidly approaching a 10C warmer global mean temperature. So while that article may be interesting, so what? We have to act because AGW might be true? What would we do?
Are the Republican Party and the Tea Party major forces opposing action on Climate Change in the US? No. The Tea Party is focused primarily on constitutional abuses, and elected Republicans focus primarily on getting reelected. The so-called environmentalists and elected Democrats pose the real problem. Whether AGW is real or not, their proposes solutions are not sensible solutions.
Unless we want the people who would suffer the most from the rising heat of AGW to starve, we cannot suddenly stop using fossil fuels. Destroying the US economy is not going to stop the rest of the world from using fossil fuels. So those are not viable options, but that’s what these people have effectively proposed.
You may have heard of mercantilism. Back when the USA was still a colony, the European powers wanted colonies to provide raw materials so that they could provide manufactured goods. As a practical matter, because our leaders are “environmentalists,” America and Western Europe risk becoming colonies for the developing world. That’s going to fix AGW? I think not. All we are doing is preparing the way for WW III.
What the politicians have proposed won’t work. And all the global warmists want to do is prove AGW is real — that we face an impending crisis. But what is this crisis? Since the warmists started using the phrase “climate change,” it is not even clear what they are trying to prove is real.
So like it or not, I think the warmists have to get their act together. Until they reform themselves, they cannot help the rest of us. If the warmists cannot put together a viable plan to do something about it, what is the point of convincing anyone AGW is real?
This video offers us a on-the-ground glimpse of why deniers like the kind we find on this blog are going to cost all of us untold trillions of dollars more responding to climate change.
I’m curious, why you think that limestone formation is an important aspect of the carbon cycle that needs to be considered with regard to climate change, when the flux of carbon going into sediments and rock weathering is estimated to be 10 times smaller than the flux by humans burning fossil fuels. Yes, in the long run on the timescale of a few millenia this process will play its role. You’ll find it in the IPCC reports, too. If we were to stop emitting CO2 today, we could epect the CO2 level to go back by about half of the extra we put into the atmosphere in the course of 50 to 100 years. It would go down further, down to about 15% of the extra in a few millenia and roughly stay there as the new equilibrium value. The most important processes seem to be absorption in the ocean surface and subsequent transport into deeper ocean, which takes several couple of centuries.
As for Le Chatelier’ Princilple, keep in mind that the reaction does not return to the old equilibrium. The Principle does not tell you anything about dynmics and timescales, either. In the case of shell formation, the equilibriums constants of the reactions as well as the solubility of Aragonite and Calcite are strongly dependent on temperature, pressure and salinity. Any ad hoc reasoning is likely to be wrong, you’ll need to have a look in detail.
P.S.: Your hopkinsschools.org link is confused, as it seems to be a mystery to the author, that most of the CO2 emitted from fossil fuels that does not stay in the atmosphere ends up dissolved in the ocean surface layer. I considered that well-known and well-documented, you can’t really miss reports about ocean acidification (or pH reduction, if you should prefer that term).
We had this article today in The Washington Post => http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/for-some-washington-area-gardeners-paradise-lost/2015/04/19/5f323b76-e226-11e4-905f-cc896d379a32_story.html. I think some people’s expectations for global warming exceeded half a degree Centigrade.
When science get as politicized as has been Global Warming Science, I will readily admit confusion. When I was in college, I asked a crusty old geologist about Global Warming, and he just glared at me. That subject made him distinctly unhappy. Perhaps he had run into someone like tildeb.
Nevertheless, I got the distinct impression that the Global Warming theory angered that crusty old geologist. When I discovered carbon dioxide dissolves into seawater to form carbonates, that gave me a clue as to why.
How fast do the oceans absorb carbon dioxide and form limestone? I don’t know. I doubt anybody knows. The computer models may be getting better, but they have an awful track record. So we can speculate, but until we do the experiment (and we are doing the experiment), we won’t know.
http://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/18888-embarrassing-predictions-haunt-the-global-warming-industry
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/barbara-hollingsworth/climate-scientist-73-un-climate-models-wrong-no-global-warming-17
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2419557/Climate-change-models-accurate-study-finds-widely-overestimated-global-warming.html
http://www.nature.com/news/climate-change-the-case-of-the-missing-heat-1.14525
At best, what the modelers have been doing for decades is correcting their models to match the observed data.
That said, am I happy about burning fossil fuels? The fact we have so many people on our planet? No and no. However, what people have proposed to fix the problem of Global Warming will not accomplish anything useful; their “solutions” just give more power to politicians. Socialism is just a crummy way to run an economy, not a fix for Global Warming.
So where do I stand? If environmentalists want a national sales taxes designed to tax fossil fuels, I am okay with that. I think that would be a great replacement for the income tax and a fine excuse to abolish the IRS. However, we don’t need taxed more. We are taxed enough already. We also don’t need to be regulated more. We are regulated enough already.
Why that stance? When environmentalists won’t give up anything to avoid what they call an impending catastrophe, why take them seriously?
“I don’t know so nobody else will know” is not really a good argument, to put it kindly. It get’s even worse, when stated about a field of science by a non-specialist, who could not be bothered to try and read up on the subject.
Some replies to your articles:
WaPo: Global Warming does not mean no more winters. You may however have observed that spring comes a few days earlier than in your youth.
NewAmerican: The tried old “First they predicted an ice age, now they predict warming”. I do remember the 70s, too. What I only found out later that this was more of a media scare than scientific consensus. Even back then there were more scientific papers about global warming than about cooling due to aerosols. You can take a look here
Click to access 2008bams2370%252E1.pdf
I expect Keith to tell you that the article is unreliable and authored by a rabid warmista. Thankfully, you do not have to take either Keith’s word, nor the word of the authors of that paper. You could simply make up your own mind by searching for yourself on scholar.google.com
cnsnews/dailymail: Christy knows full well that the GCM results are projections, i.e. likely outcomes. Nobody claims they can deliver date accurate forecasts. Oh, and yes, individual runs do show decades long lulls in temperature. But mentioning that would run averse to Christy’s messaging. That’s reasoning along the lines: “Hey, that car can’t bake bread, hence it’s useless.”
nature: “But none of the climate simulations carried out for the IPCC produced this particular hiatus at this particular time.” And it would have been mere chance if one of them had, see above. (P.S.: keep in mind that is simply a reporter writing, not a peer-reviewed article)
Note to Marmoe: “Spring comes a few days earlier” translates to “the latest cherry blossom time on record.” That’s where Citizen Tom lives. I’d call it “the real world” but it is uncomfortably close to Washington, DC.
I hope to live long enough to see you deny that you ever supported this stuff, just as you deny that scientists ever pushed Global Cooling in the 1970s.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
Keith, reading comprehension! There were scientists saying an ice age may come. Some of the papers did not stand up to scrutiny (e.g. Rasool & Schneider) and the majority of papers was about warming due to increased CO2, already.
As for the cherry blossom time in Washington D.C., translates to “the latest cherry blossom time on record.” is only true, if you start your records in 2002, otherwise it is at odds with reality. We’ve had this discussion before. I even made an annotated graphics back then. Guess what, I updated it, just for you:
I am still jamming on a project. The ‘earliest on record” was a news line I had seen, but cannot now locate. It does not seem supported, and I retract it. Rare for me to not dig further in something like this; it was a mistake. Conditions have been quite cold in the eastern US, pre-adjustment of course, but evidently not with the result I noted. The Great Lakes Ice has certainly been astonishing.
While I appreciate your drawing my attention to the mistake, you should probably not try to represent me as someone ignorant of the difference between “peek” and “peak.” Perhaps I have made that mistake as well, but it seems surprising.
The graph and our original discussion deserve more attention. I have a project to complete by Friday night, but felt that a preliminary answer here was appropriate and needful. More later.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
Sorry, some labels did not come out right in the original. Here’s the corrected version
you should probably not try to represent me as someone ignorant of the difference between “peek” and “peak.”
As I can see from the file timestamps I have created the graph back in April 2012. The quotes are taken verbatim from
http://level-head.livejournal.com/572341.html
and I don’t remember noticing the typos back then, I was only made aware of them by your above comment. There certainly was no intent to represent you as ignorant on my part involved, especially as I have commited typos of this kind myself in the past, too.
However, there may have been a mistake in my thinking that you were aware of the data. As I remember I was angry at your misrepresentation and either made an LJ post, had a discussion on this on your LJ or an e-mail exchange, but I can’t find any trace of an exchange. You have better access to your archived posts, maybe you can help me out and dig something up for “cherry blossom”. Anyway, do you remember such an exchange or is it simply me misremembering?
I do have one reference to “peek.” Shimatta. But you do not show up there at all, you apparently went off and set up your own post to attack mine. Not even a pingback shows up.
I have never deleted any of your comments, except at your request to correct a misfire such as failing to log in. As you know, my policy is not to delete anyone’s comments. (Though now I do narrow “anyone” to exclude obvious robotic advertising posts; there is no point in leaving that spoor around.)
My search for blossom times was to references in the New York Times, as the post indicates. As it also indicates, plants are growing earlier (and better) because of the extra CO2 in the atmosphere, which in retrospect makes the late bloom this year more significant.
I have always limited my temperature adjustment discussions to the US48, including Australia, New Zealand, Iceland, Europe, South America, Antarctica, Greenland and the Soviet Union. You and I have had discussions on most of these, including on the effects of the massive die-off of tracked world thermometer stations at the time of the Soviet Union’s collapse.
The Global Cooling business, during which scientists were predicting a global food crisis because it would be too cold to grow crops in ten years, just got a mention:
https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2015/04/22/lenins-global-cooling-birthday-1970/
Back to work…
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
I suspect the news line you remember was supplied by Tony Heller with a slight variation:
https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2015/04/01/latest-cherry-blossoms-on-record-in-washington-dc/
but unlike the headline is stating he is actually referring to the “florets visible” stage. As far as I am aware this detailed data on the cherry bloom only goes back to 1992, the full record being linked to by Heller:
http://www.nationalcherryblossomfestival.org/about/bloom-watch/
whereas the date of peak bloom has been recorded since 1921. For “florets visible” Heller is correct for the 1992 to 2015 data.
For Peak Bloom, the usual measure, the bloom in 1993 was later and prior to 1980 later blooms were quite common. However, my earlier claim for 2001 turns out to be incorrect. Copying the data from the PDF to my spreadsheet necessitated lots of reformatting and I missed one cell. Hence, in 2001 the Kwanzan peak bloom day was falsly listed as Yoshino peak bloom day. So one point (and the affected 9-year averages) in my plot is incorrect, I will post a revised version later, I want to do further error checking first.
But you do not show up there at all, you apparently went off and set up your own post to attack mine.
Thanks for checking. So I only prepared the plot and never posted it or an post on it. I indeed misremembered. As this is the case, I owe you an apology for claiming we had this discussion before and implying you were aware of all the data in the plot. Sorry.
I have never deleted any of your comments, except at your request to correct a misfire such as failing to log in.
I know, so I did not claim such action. I simply had a false memory and wanted to check.
Some useful links:
http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/climate-scientists-subverted-peer-review
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/feb/02/hacked-climate-emails-flaws-peer-review
(including related articles on the gray literature fiasco (Pachauri glacier fallacy).
You allow two, right?
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
I guess the two link restriction prevented you from mentioning de Freitas and his jolly group at the journal Climate Research from 1997 to 2003?
http://web.archive.org/web/20110719032339/http://coast.gkss.de/G/Mitarbeiter/storch/CR-problem/cr.2003.htm
Oh, right, those were the “good” guys like Soon and Baliunas, who perpurted to show no warming over the last 1000 years. Never mind.
Tom, the above names ought to be enough for you to do your own digging, if you choose to.
I respect the energy and tenacity both Keith and tildeb bring to this. But I think neither is likely to convince the other.
It’s a tough subject for the layman. About as far as I have been able to advance is that I accept data that show temperatures increasing and polar ice/glaciers receding. I also accept that some of the cause is man-generated, although I find it hard to extricate from the man-generated component other factors that may influence cyclical climate change.
From a public policy perspective, however, and that is where we find the heat of the political debate, the question becomes (for me, the one who knows very little about the ins and outs of the scientific debate, but who acknowledges that the great weight of opinion in the scientific community is that global warming has a substantial man-generated component), even assuming that we have climate warming that is largely man-generated, what is the rational public sector response? Are there measures that can affect this trend and, if so, at what cost over what time? If we do not act, what are those costs and are those costs offset by any advantages (e.g., pineapple plantations in the Yukon)? Finally, even if no workable political consensus about measure can evolve, are there other reasons to conclude that alternative energy sources (renewables and other CO2-reducing measures) are a desirable thing regardless of where we stand on the warming issue? I happen to think that the proliferation and expansion of wind/hydro/solar/tidal/nuclear etc. energy sources are probably, on balance, a very good thing both for the Nation and globally, independent of whether man is causing the current warming trends.
The temperature has increased about a half a degree Centigrade, at worst. That’s about one degree Fahrenheit. So no one will be growing pineapples in the Yukon any time soon.
Is the threat of Global Warming sufficient to justify giving government officials ever more power? Do we need to mutilate our economy and stop using fossil fuels right now? If the rest of the nations in the world were willing to cooperate (they probably won’t), we would impoverish and probably starve billions. That is what it would take to reduce carbon dioxide emissions worldwide. That’s the probable cost. Is it worth it?
Would the proliferation and expansion of wind/hydro/solar/tidal/nuclear etc be a good thing? Maybe, but government subsidies just lead to a tremendous waste of money. Government subsidies also provide mechanism for crony capitalism. At best, to encourage the use alternative energy sources, we could tax fossil fuels, but alternative energy sources have their own problems. Everything involves trade-offs. Besides, giving government officials the power arbitrarily decide what to tax and by how much is to give them extraordinary power, power they will most certainly abuse. So we better have some assurance Global Warming is real, and we don’t.
Is the threat of Global Warming sufficient to justify giving government officials ever more power? Do we need to mutilate our economy and stop using fossil fuels right now? If the rest of the nations in the world were willing to cooperate (they probably won’t), we would impoverish and probably starve billions.
So many assumptions, so much fear. Look at Denmark. Look at Germany. How well are we going to compete if industries there can pay next to nothing for their power while North America pays a substantial per unit cost on a grid that cannot pay for itself?
Your concerns are legitimate but the solutions are not extreme and the examples we have now really are quite effective without being as disruptive as you fear. That’s why I pointed out that utilities are losing court cases against the most unlikely of allies in this energy production and distribution change-over: Tea Partiers and environmentalists and ranchers on one side and big businesses on the other (coal, oil, nuclear, and utilities)!
You also conveniently forget how many billions of dollars tax payers now subsidize every year the current unsustainable model. Are you seriously suggesting we have a ‘free market’ when nearly all subsidies go these industries but that any subsidy to renewables will entail some kind of fascist government and starving masses of people? This is the messaging that pays for material to be used by climate denialists to sew doubt where none legitimately exists. You can see its effect… on the very people who champion the opposite of what these industries actually do!
tildeb
I am against subsidizing private industry. To the extent we subsidize the fossil fuel industry, and we really don’t, I am against it. Tea Party people don’t support crony capitalism.
Do I want to replicate Demark or Germany here? Not particularly. I want a free market. What the panicked warmers have propose is anything but free. Europe taxes the stuffing out of fossil fuels. That tends to promote efficiency, but efficiency alone won’t fix your imaginary problem. France uses lots of nuclear energy, but people here will not accept it, particularly after what happened in Japan.
You run around calling people names and spreading fear. Then when people point out obvious problems with what you propose (whatever it is), you call them fearful.
🙄
As far as I can see, your fix is to call people deniers and make fun of them. At best, that will only get you a cold shoulder.
There is a subtle difference between tax breaks given to entice large industries (including fossil fuel) to bring their jobs and tax revenue to a particular state, versus loan guarantees and cash subsidies paid to entities run by well-connected political donors. The tax breaks are modeled on a plan to produce a net positive for the jurisdiction; the subsidies are simply payoffs for favors.
Differential taxation of energy sources distorts the marketplace, which is quite capable of finding its own solutions to real problems. Renewables, or at least some of them, may make economic sense one day. And they have uses now, in special circumstances or when conditions favor them (such as hydroelectric plants as part of dams). But wind power has been especially dismal; the return on investment was poor indeed even before the high maintenance costs and bearing failure rates became public.
Tlldeb still has not offered up an example of this pattern of extreme weather he fears. If pressed, I suppose he’d go with “well, there are fewer hurricanes and tornadoes and droughts and wildfires, but now when they happen they’re caused by global warming!”
I have never seen any catastrophist give global warming the credit for these reductions and the lives saved. It would seem that they cannot treat the matter even-handedly and still get paid. But pretending that we are living in a time of extraordinary, extreme weather is a bit much.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
Here’s a little taste of the political process that goes into a “science” statement on climate change. As it happens, I have had a fair amount of correspondence with some of the players in the American Physical Society since about 2010. The original 2007 statement was a surprise to the members, and got immediate complaints; the 2015 statement began as much more reasonable. But the political payback and maneuvering to get rid of skeptics in positions of power have been effective:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/physicists-battle-over-meaning-of-incontrovertible-in-global-warming-fight/
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
By my ball park calculation, oil and gas enjoyed a $37 billion dollar tax subsidy in the US in 2014 as well as another 30 billion expenditure for direct funding in various energy subsidies and support, much of that for utilities. Loan guarantees for nuclear are about 100 billion and I don’t know how subsidies play out between utilities and the different kinds of energy plants that supply electricity. The fact is, however, that the public investment in private for-profit industries are privileged to to the tune that dwarfs any equivalency in clean renewables. In Canada, I know that 2014 cost the tax payers over 7 billion in tax subsidies to oil and gas companies that makes untold billions of dollars in profit but a hundred million invested in enough wind power to replace the energy output all coal fired power plants in Ontario is painted as the-sky-is-falling fiscal disaster.
Already, many US States have a significant portion of their electrical power obtained from wind and solar. This trend is rising and the per watt cost close to or cheaper than fossil fuel burning alternatives. As that portion rises, the cost is less, while the cost to the fossil fuel burning plants rise with fewer customers. That’s the current battle being wages by utilities who are trying to get the government to legislate against private ownership and us of renewables because it’s killing their archaic business model.
You also present a false dichotomy in your comment about fear between climate change and the fear of economic disaster if we act responsibly now.
These are not equivalent fears.
Climate change is real and in need of addressing. The fear from understanding how this will play out is justified because there are going to be major problems. There is going to be much more property damage over shorter periods of time than the historical avereage and very expensive repercussions for all of us.
Many people are going to have to deal with weather pattern changes that alters the geography of their regions. They are going to have to face unusually severe weather events at unprecedented frequencies and amplitudes. Hot will be hotter. Cold will be colder. Wet will be wetter. Dry will be drier. This rate information available to all is what drives transnational insurance underwriters to raising base rates for all insurance companies and even decline coverage to major insurance companies having to deal with payouts from ‘natural’ but destructive weather events (especially flooding).
There is already a significant economic cost to doing too little to reduce the cause of these altered weather patterns. Just look at the economic effects for a single region, namely, California, from the historic loss of snow pack, the historic increase in wild fire season, the historic loss of aquifers, the historic drying out of surface soil on farming and the historic loss of slope stability in the foothills. Now have a weather event that produces a month of rain in 24 hours (almost all which becomes run off even in a drought landscape) and see what mudslides do to property values. And this is just a localized effect. Combine these unprecedented conditions with raising the temperature of the ocean slightly, decreasing its salinity slightly, and watch what economic effect it has on fishing and aquatic wildlife.
We know these changes are happening. We know they are happening at unprecedented rates in unprecedented ways. To deny this is to deny reality. Go look at the satellite imagery of the snow pack over the past 25 years. Look at the wild fire season over the past 150 years. Compare and contrast. The change is obvious and in one direction: an unprecedented increase in frequency and amplitude of historic weather patterns.
We know a major El Nino is coming and we know what effect that has on California in particular as well as on the weather patterns across North America and what this does to North Atlantic weather, which then hands of the effects to Britain first and then Europe. All of these local effects produce an altered weather pattern future for all. And these kinds of local changes (presented in many different ways globally) can be plotted by the thousands from different parts of the world leading to what is called ‘climate change’. The canary in the coal mine is our polar regions and the change here is not only profound but the fastest. (Because Canada has a particular interest in changes to the northern polar region, we started doing significant polar research and announced disturbing findings decades before Hansen reported the warning to the US senate in the early 80s. That’s why I was able to work on ice core samples related to their historical research value in order to compare and contrast local changes to historical.)
None of this unprecedented change is imaginary and none of it is plausibly deniable. Facing such an uncertain future is legitimate cause for deep concern.
In comparison, the fear of economic collapse and/or calamity from addressing the root cause of climate change is imaginary. We can make smart and sustainable changes to business-as-usual that will cost money and will be disruptive. It will involve government. It will require legislation and regulation and oversight. It will require concerted efforts between nations. Most importantly, it requires us to recognize that we even have a problem. That’s where you come in and all those who aren’t quite sure if skepticism is warranted. By all means contribute to solutions even if this involves criticizing how changes need to be implemented. But for the love of humanity, stop pretending there isn’t a problem.
@tildeb, who wrote:
Are you seriously suggesting that these are good places to buy electricity? The industrial energy had been kept artificially low as most of the subsidies for this were loaded up onto the consumer, who is paying record high rates. But the subsidies are happening at a different level for solar and wind, and all this was unworkable … and is being phased out:
http://www.dw.de/german-electricity-price-is-half-taxes-and-fees/a-17849142
This entry shows Denmark and Germany at the top of the list of electricity costs, with both around 30 cents per kilowatt-hour. They note that the US (pre-EPA damage) was at 1 cent to 4 cents for coal-powered electricity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_pricing
Now, try that line about competition again. Germany’s industrial electricity is 400% to 15,000% or so the cost of US coal-fired industrial electricity. The only way the American Left could harm the US’s competitive position here is to come up with some scheme to kill off coal-fired electricity in the US — while China and Germany add to their coal usage.
Your deal with China (and by “your” I mean the American Left) shaves a small portion from US carbon dioxide production, which will nevertheless come at great cost to its citizens, while allowing China to add an entire United States-worth of CO2 several times between now and 2030. Hurrah, you’ve solved … nothing, except the problem of America’s economic growth giving it strength in the world. You’ve killed it. And your deal with Iran is accomplishing something similar in the military vein, as much of the Middle East will have nuclear weapons thanks to another unsubmitted, unofficial “deal” with another totalitarian regime.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
The latest.
Compare and contrast what this video presents to the denialist camp. You see, the denialists have no science. They’re not the ones out doing this kind of work. They’re not the ones building the satellites and collating the data, not the ones looking under the ice , not the ones measuring the outflow of fresh water from receding glaciers, not the ones trying to understand what’s going on but replacing good science with their contrarian beliefs. . They’re not the ones considering what it might mean to add 3 meters of sea level rise nor how that might be amplified in places like the Chesapeake. They’re not the ones having to establish insurance rates for the tens of millions of property owners who live in just this one region. No, they’re the ones committed to misrepresenting this science, pouring over each peer reviewed and publish study to find some cherry picked phrase to try to tell us it means something other than what the author clearly means, while committed to assuring all of us that business-as-usual is the only right and proper way to address these non concerns about supposed changes to climate and the supposed causes for it. More importantly, it is the deniers who assume that they are the only ones who really know what’s going on… and it’s a conspiracy!
2015 looking pretty hot… again, the first three months hottest on record.
Nothing to see here, I guess. Denialists insist that record breaking heat patterns are good evidence for global cooling, that up really means down, black really means white, and some vast conspiracy is responsible for their inability and unwillingness to face reality.
Anything can be “the hottest on record” if you can change the records. In the meantime, the more accurate, unaltered measures of temperature show nothing exciting. And the divergence between these and the manipulated surface temperature record is more blatant every month.
Incidentally, here is an article about Germany, with more in the “related” links at bottom:
http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/europe/item/15502-tna-online-german-firms-flee-to-us-to-avoid-merkel-s-staggering-green-energy-costs
German electricty!
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
Yes, it’s all about changing the records. That’s why the glaciologists are in the Antarctic… to fabricate their data to align with your conspiracy theory.
You’re a real piece of work and dishonest to the core.
You are welcome to spurt your insults; they don’t seem to be affecting reality. Interesting that in the article you linked, there is a subtle admission that Greenland is NOT melting. Antarctica, they say, is “probably the only place” that is. But they go back to 1994, the time of the ERS satellites, that showed those same areas growing, and are relying on the problematic GRACE pair of satellites for their assertions of catastrophic melting beginning exactly when GRACE came online in 2003.
This conflicts with other estimates, of course. But you really want to believe, and don’t have the science background or even the inclination to question — to you, questioning is evil! — so go ahead and remain on the hard Left of statism as, in your mind, the only way to save the Earth from humans.
In the meantime, crop yields continue to increase and the only “global warming deaths” are from the policies you vote for. I’d guess this does not bother you.
This is an interesting article, discussing the underlying beliefs of the upcoming Paris conference. I’ll bet you’d get close to a 1.0 on the score:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/04/16/the-paris-paradigm-the-what-is-your-skeptic-score/
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
Quoting Wattsupwiththat about climate change is like quoting the Discovery Institute for evolution; you have to be willing to bet that your audience readership are idiots. Greenland’s ice volume is dramatically down. Of course, you follow standard operating denialist procedure to conflate volume with area but some of us remember our elementary school math and know that these are not the same thing. Yes some ice sheets have spread (just like polar ice) but you have to be an idiot to think that this means total ice mass is growing. It’s not. It’s shrinking… dramatically. It spreads by getting thinner but what a handy lie to spread to those who don’t see through your obvious deceit.
I am not surprised you have found reality to be “hard Left”. Bummer for you.
Very good, poisoning the well this time. Your repertoire of fallacious argument techniques is impressive, and you can do other things besides ad hominem attacks. But speaking of that, where exactly did I do what you explicitly accuse me of (“Of course, you follow standard operating denialist procedure to conflate volume with area”)?
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
Golly gee whiz, Keith, I wonder where you misrepresented, lied, and intentionally tried to deceive? Oh right, throughout this thread. Over and over again. But you missed that detail in your self-examination, I see.
You lie that all climate scientists who concur in AGW are liars and you lie that they are part of a global conspiracy. You lie when you say it’s “easy to set records when you change the records”. This is a lie. You lie about Mann, you lie about governing bodies misrepresenting what their members think, you lie about why climate change caused by AGW is supposedly false. Your entire reason for commenting on this thread is to put forth lies and misrepresent others and their scientific work in order to deceive and sew doubt where none factually exists. That’s why you’re a piece of work relying on the credulity of others to go along with you and your deceitful views based on deceitful methodology. That’s why I say that your character is the problem because it allows you to discard any sense of intellectual integrity in the pursuit of denying reality. And those who go along with you are as much victims as idiots. You’re taking advantage of others to make yourself feel valued.
I write these comments because I think reality deserves more respect than a liar like you.
Now here are the Russians supposedly changing their records to fit with your deceitful narrative. Never mind that people are dying from heat wave fires in April in Russia, for crying out loud. That’s normal in your denialist world but that’s not the real one and so far from the normal patterns of weather that it’s laughable yet tragic that people like you can look reality straight in its face and pretend it and not your counterfactual beliefs is magically wrong.
You’ve made yet another specific statement that does not match reality. Let’s try this again:
Where exactly did I do what you explicitly accuse me of (“Of course, you follow standard operating denialist procedure to conflate volume with area”)?
You are welcome to admit that you misspoke about this, of course. One step at a time.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
You conflate when you say ” there is a subtle admission that Greenland is NOT melting. Antarctica, they say, is “probably the only place” that is. But they go back to 1994, the time of the ERS satellites, that showed those same areas growing
The two bold are the conflation. But you already knew this. You’re trying to deflect attention from your intentional dishonesty by pretending you’re going to ‘help’ me get over my ‘bias’ one step at a time as you try to lead me down into your rabbit hole of denialism.
Not going to happen.
As much as it may be a blow to your super-inflated ego, I’ll stick with scientific consensus and real scientists at every major scientific institution and professional organization that works with climate modeling, thank you very much. Your opinions and intentional deceit isn’t very enticing, I’m afraid. I’m not susceptible to your ‘charms’.
As for the ‘next’ steps, when you start respecting reality and start speaking here with honesty rather than intentional deceit, only then will there be any semblance of recognizing who is doing the ‘misspeaking’ here. It’s you and your denialist position, Keith. But you already know this; you just don’t care about what’s true. So the real question is why should anyone pay any attention to someone like you who doesn’t care about what’s true?
The town of High River is famous, for that flood and for many others just like it. A history of the town, which seems to often find its river flowing down its main street, is interesting. Sometimes they are hit more than once in the same year:
http://www.ourroots.ca/e/page.aspx?id=872244
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
The unusual cause of the flooding was the point: it was unprecedented for a very slow moving and moisture laden Gulf weather system from the southeast to head northwest to High River. High River flooding has historically been from rising river affected upstream by spring melts, ice jams, and foothills precipitation. That’s not why I used the example. I used it because it demonstrates part of the change I was talking about. But several floods – one very severe – have now been caused by the same and altered weather pattern over several years. The pattern has changed because the jet stream has changed and the jet stream has changed because warmer air over the pole creates more moderate isobar differentials and makes the jet stream meander like and old river creating oxbows. This is the change that allowed weather systems to head in a direction they historically couldn’t head and why the explanation demonstrates once again how the global warming model fits the evidence reality is imposing on us.
Connections – real world connections – are important, Keith, if you care about understanding what’s going on, how to model it, why and how today’s altered patterns are creating tomorrow climate. But you don’t care about any of that; you care more about your denialist beliefs having to be defended from reality’s arbitration of them. That’s why you don’t do science and why you have to dismiss almost all of the climate scientists in the world and their findings because it simply doesn’t fit your wishful thinking.
First of all, the quote was accurate; make of it what you will (or rather, refuse to make of it what you cannot for the Maxwell’s Demon you seem to operate in your mind).
However, are you so unschooled in climate science as to think that anyone seriously talks about Greenland’s ice area? Greenland is an island, sea ice directly from it is of little consequence other than the formation of glaciers, and sea ice extent is associated with the Arctic in general, not Greenland in particular. It is rare indeed to encounter anyone speaking or writing of Greenland in terms of ice area; I’ve never done so myself.
So you have struck out on this, and exposed your lack of understanding of glacial dynamics. You criticize my linking to a post on WattsUpWithThat, which consistenty wins awards as a top science site, while you are quoting the, ah, folks at SkepticalScience. This is amusing, but hardly strengthens your own position.
Greenland is rising from the ocean a bit over a quarter-inch per year; this isostatic rise (from the loss of massive glaciation 20,000 years ago) has been tough for the GRACE satellites to deal with, and there is also a magma/vulcanism component that propels bursts of glacier melt along the fringe from time to time. During those bursts, it is much in the news. In between, it’s “let’s talk about something else, or use data from years ago.”
When we measure Greenland directly, using radar satellites, we can track both the isostatic uplift and the buildup of the massive central ice sheets, as noted in papers up to 2003. But in 2003, the ERS radio-ranging satellites were retired (one had already gone offline) and the GRACE satellites went up instead. They immediately began reporting a precipitous decline in ice mass (never mind that this was reported largely where there was no ice, in the open ocean). And GRACE has kept up this projection, creating an absolutely stark and abrupt changepoint from the two ways of tracking ice, direct measurement and inference by local gravity calculations in which the noise is approximately five times the detected signal. At least they moved the center of their mass measurements onto the land.
The ERS paper has been subsequently challenged by one that indicated that laser altimeters were more accurate (translation, showing less gain) than radar altimeters because of low estimates near the margins — but the radar altimeter paper had specifically discarded that edge data because of the unreliability issue. The laser estimate was for a reduced gain, less than the overall inch-and-a-quarter or so overall gain of ice the radar satellites had reported. The margins represent only a small portion of this giant volcanic island.
The laser altimeter folks did not mention, but other papers later discussed, their own reliability problems because their narrow beams meant that the same place was never measured twice in quick succession, and often never measured twice at all. Only at orbital crossover points could determinations be made, and with Greenland’s highly seasonal nature this presents its own problems.
A great pity that the two systems (radar and laser) were not run in parallel. Here’s a discussion of a paper from the previous ERS satellites from the European Space Agency:
http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Observing_the_Earth/ERS_altimeter_survey_shows_growth_of_Greenland_Ice_Sheet_interior
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
“Greenland is NOT melting” and then offer up an article more than a decade out of date with a sound bite you need about the miniscule growth of interior ice sheets. If you followed your own logic and actually had an understanding of glaciation, then you’d verify these findings by how they present. Golly gee whiz, Keith, how should an increase look? Should it look like retreating glaciers? Should it look like increased rates of retreat? Should it look like unprecedented outflow of fresh water? Should it look like increased lakes on it surface? Should it ever register above zero melting across the entire sheet? Should it present darker snow?
No. All of this evidence is incompatible with growing ice sheets… not that you care. You’re merely after the sound bite for your denialist cherry picking.
Greenland is actually an archipelago of five islands with an interior ‘basin’ below sea level That’s why calculations for Greenland’s rate of unprecedented melt is so important for us to understand. And trying to understand what’s really going on is what real scientists actually do… not that you’re willing to listen. You’ve got your contrary beliefs to uphold so why listen and reconsider your own opinions in the face of expertise? They must all be wrong because Keith doesn’t want to risk his beliefs. That’s why you’re intellectually bankrupt on this issue and why I continue to claim that you don’t care about what’s true.
Now let’s pop over to Jason’s site – you know, a guy who actually spends a lot of time doing just this kind of science in Greenland – and see what’s really going on, shall we? After all, deniers like you don’t do good science so somebody has to come up with hard data for you to search for cherry picked phrases that allow you to present up as down and black as white and climate change caused by AGW isn’t true.
I listened to that video. What does quite a bit warmer mean? The guy says each decade it gets quite a bit warmer. Can you quantify that?
There’s tremendous variation per location, which is why quantifying ‘how much warmer’ is so problematic in this very short talk. That’s why averages are important to consider – local, state, national, and international – as well as over time… in the last graph he’s talking decade comparisons for the continental US. The actual national temperature averages are then compared to the 20th century average to determine if a recent decade is above or below a century average to get some idea if there’s a trend. And obviously there is when someone under the age of thirty in the US has never experienced a year below that 20th century average; all have been above and, as importantly, that trend continues ever upwards.
If global warming was not true or even questionable, then all of this data would and should present differently. That’s why I keep harping about reality because global averages are trending upwards even though some local regions – like this past winter’s northeastern US – was very cold. That cold also figures into the global averages and still we find the upward trend. In fact, on some days the northeast approached the coldest on the planet; one would think the polar regions should reliably enjoy this award but the displaced air mass in the northern hemisphere that brought record high temperatures to Alaska and Siberia and the Canadian territories shifted down over the northeast. This effect has also been understood, which is why a significant minority of meteorologists who once doubted climate change even as late as the 90s are now some of the strongest spokespeople because their professional models have changed as global warming increases so they see the differences more starkly than most people who deal with weather as it comes.
For example, a town called High River in Canada received a very strange northwest flow of moist Gulf air. The older meteorologists know perfectly well that weather systems pass from west to east (because of the rotation of the earth) and so a sustained northwest flow was singularly unusual. That it last for three days (because of the huge bending of the jet stream with lower than usual isobars, which mean fronts travel more slowly, which means weather hangs around longer, which means all kinds of unusual things) created a thousand year flood. That it happened again the following year, and then again the following year, told meteorologists that ‘the normal’ was changing. Add that to a hurricane heading east (Sandy) convinced most meteorologists that the old models needed updating because the jet stream was undergoing a fundamental pattern change. When thunderstorms in winter were added to their daily news cycle and historic rains, historic snow dumps, historic droughts, you get a lot of very excited weather people who are beginning to realize just how profound are the challenges to predicting local weather when the ‘averages’ by comparison are no longer meaningful. In other words, meteorologists are at the forefront of the new ‘normal’ and it’s anything but.
Anyway, your question is a good one but it varies for location and for the majority mostly up… also by various amounts.
That’s a lot of words to say nothing.
That’s not saying nothing, CT; it’s explaining why answering your question is not simple. The answer is both complex and connected. That you aren’t willing to understand why it is complex and connected is not a reflection of the explanation itself but a statement about your lack of willingness to understand. That’s the problem with denialism: it’s easier to go along with the merchants of doubt and wave reality away than it is to actually understand what’s really going on in reality with climate change. This Fox News comment of yours reveals that unwillingness in spades. And it demonstrates a level of idiocy necessary to continue waving away reality.
Fox News comment? I am not sure what that refers to. However, it is apparent that you think anyone who disagrees with you is an idiot.
Here is something for you to think about. I don’t think you are an idiot, at least not relative to other human beings. I just think that with respect to the subjects of God and Global Warming you are wrong. Of course, I suspect you are wrong about a lot of other things too.
As human beings, we don’t know much, but we like to think we do, and that is usually the first mistake of many.
it is apparent that you think anyone who disagrees with you is an idiot.
No. I think anyone who disagree with the world’s scientific community and continues to do so on intentional lies and deceit – even after these lies and deceits are pointed out time and again and countered by every major scientific body in the world – must be an idiot by definition. There’s no excuse for this level of stupidity and ignorance other than some kind of mental handicap that denies reality.
I think anyone with access to the internet who continues to accept climate change denialism as the stronger case is also an idiot.
The important thing to grasp is that deniers tell us the climate either hasn’t changed over the past 16 years (a nice example of how to cherry pick data to make it look like it’s saying what it doesn’t say) or is even a bit cooler. What the data tells us unequivocally is that every year over the past 30 is warmer THAN THE 20th CENTURY AVERAGE. That fact blows denialism out of the water and reveals it for the huge lie it is.
That you missed this central point doesn’t surprise me in the least because you’re not trying to understand anything; all you really want to do is justify your denialism. That’s why you’re an idiot.
You accuse the “deniers” of cherry-picking data? That’s funny!
The point is obvious. We are pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at the highest rates ever, and the average world temperature is static.
Yet you have the gall to compare the past 30 years to the 20th century average. What is the relevance? Why stop at 20th Century. Did the world did not begin at the start of the 20th Century? According to those who have studied the matter the earth has experienced both warm spells and cold spells. Other than the fact we are here (we are soooo special), what makes our time special?
the average world temperature is static…
How many ways can I say and show this point? Maybe if I slow it down.
No.
It.
Is.
Not.
This statement of yours is not true. It is factually wrong. It is in error. It is a mistake. It is claim unsupported by reality.
There’s your mental handicap once again at work impeding reality from having a deciding influence on what you believe about it.
you have the gall to compare the past 30 years to the 20th century average. What is the relevance?
You asked about the video. The video talked about exactly this and pointed out that the lie denialists use about some ‘static’ temperature is factually wrong… not that that has any sway on you apparently.
Why let a little thing called reality interfere with a good old fashioned contrarian belief that you presume is equivalent to any other? Maybe this will help clarify.
tildeb
Obama is a serial liar. I don’t want to believe it, but it is too easy to prove. So when he leads the cast of your video, I just wince. There he goes again.
Do I think the earth’s average temperature is static? No, but I don’t know what caused those ice ages and tropical periods the experts say occurred in the past either. I am also not trying to make any predictions.
We have no proof the average world temperature is rising because of anything mankind has done. Any changes we might attribute to fossil fuels are so small, we can’t prove anything out of the ordinary is going on.
Has the AVERAGE world temperature changed SIGNIFICANTLY in the last thirty years? No. Then it has effectively been static. You think I am idiot for believing that? Then why are you wasting your time?
What caused the ice ages and tropical periods of the past? You don’t know. Like as not the heat the earth receives from the sun varies, but we don’t know.
When panicky people keep making predictions that fail to materialize, what is the point of taking them seriously? If someone cries wolf several times, even if we don’t see a wolf, we know there are wolves. So if we are worried a wolf might show up, the best thing to do is to get replace the joker crying wolf with a more reliable watcher.
In this case, however, we have warnings of a threat that does not even seem to exist. If carbon dioxide is a wolf, it is a wolf without any bite. Therefore, I don’t understand either your anger or your panic.
Yes, yes, yes, you’re not a climate scientist but…. you’re willing to promote zombie lies.
I think anyone who disagree with the world’s scientific community and continues to do so on intentional lies and deceit – even after these lies and deceits are pointed out time and again and countered by every major scientific body in the world – must be an idiot by definition. There’s no excuse for this level of stupidity and ignorance other than some kind of mental handicap that denies reality.
Fire is hot and will burn. Do we need the world’s so-called scientific community to confirm this fact? Obviously not because true science is not subject to consensus. AGW is pseudo-science and politically motivated. The earth’s temperature rises or decreases one or two degrees, which is perfectly normal. We know the earth’s temperature fluctuates — this is elementary science. It is okay, Tildeb, you are still alive and well. There is nothing to worry about — put down the AGW Kool-aid.
As someone convinced humanity can learn to live sustainably, I find the greatest hurdle to overcome is a kind of mental illness so many people have that refuse to allow reality to arbitrate claims made about it and insist that he or she has the right to impose their beliefs on it and then act in unsustainable ways. This refusal creates the conflict.
There is no conflict, no debate, no doubt, that we are causing our climate to change in ways that shall have ever-increasing negative consequences when we ask reality to arbitrate what effect we are having on our climate. There is doubt created, debate created, conflict created by people like you and others who refuse to allow the reality we share to have its rightful say and who refuse to respect its verdict for an assortment of reasons and motivations elevated by belief to be equivalent to the world’s scientific consensus. I think the only way people can make compatible their contrary beliefs with reality is by allowing a kind of mental illness, a brain dysfunction from recognizing where their own thinking leaves respecting reality in order to enter the warren world of denialism.
And like any effective therapy, the problems produced from acting on the illness have to become severe enough so that the person takes that first step out of the warren by first recognizing that there’s a problem. Until sufficient numbers of people stop going along with respecting the illness some of us have more than the reality we share, you and others who are committed to denialism will continue to make sustainability a far off dream more difficult to obtain by the day.
Future generations I think will look back on these early exchanges and marvel at how poorly some of us who tried to evince the issue on those suffering from their own delusions made little headway and how strongly entrenched was the denialism meme in those like you where reality holds no sway over your beliefs. To those future generations forced to live with repercussions of doing so little for so long, I apologize for my insufficiency but it’s not from lack of trying. The problem is severe and the dysfunction great and the effects from it far reaching. But they’re too idiotic to realize the scope and extent of their selfishness and stupidity and, instead, seem to feel proud of resisting reality’s arbitration of their denialism. Please hold them in the contempt and condemnation they so richly deserve.
“Has the AVERAGE world temperature changed SIGNIFICANTLY in the last thirty years?”
Tom, sorry, the talking point is that over the last _17_ years there has been no statistical significant warming. Claim 30 years and you’d be wrong. You need to be more careful, talking points break easily.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1800/compress:12/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1844/compress:60/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1984/trend
The plot has annual, 5-year averages and the latest 30-year linear trend.
Is this your kind of “static”? About 0.5°C over the last 30 years.
Various analyses have striven mightily to show that the Medieval Warm Period and Roman Warm Period and Holocene Climate Optimum were not warmer than today. They do not do well under scrutiny.
Separately, one of the problems with most graphs is that they show 20- or 50- or 100-year smoothed averages of past temperature, and then compare that to individual temperatures. Lost from view is the fact that the individual proxies show years quite far from the “average” — just as a century-scale “average” of this period will likely seem unremarkable in the distant future. And a lot of jiggering and known bad data goes into those past reconstructions, from shifting the time of seabed cores by 500 years to get a better result to chopping off data that doesn’t produce the right “story” to ignoring entire datasets that don’t play along at all.
ClimateAudit.org does an excellent job of picking these apart, to the extent that the underlying data sources are published. And, as you know, lots of them refuse to publish code and/or data because it exposes too much of the cutting room floor and “adjustments” that were done to produce the Coming Catastrophe effect. Steve McIntyre at ClimateAudit.org does an excellent job of publishing code and data, and when he makes a mistake (rare, but it happens) he is quick to make corrections and acknowledge the mistake. A number of catastrophists, caught out, issue corrections after their work has appeared on ClimateAudit.org, but they do not give Steve credit at all. Except privately, of course, which was revealed inadvertently in a couple of cases.
On DeFreitas & co.: Indeed, the political firestorm engendered by the catastrophist ringleaders against them was interesting, and their ultimate cowering rather sad to see. And discussed at the links I posted.
Extreme weather has become less common, though I think this might reverse if the current cooling trend continues. And the hurricane cycle, which runs about 40 years or so, will eventually go into an upswing again — which I have seen catastrophists desperately hoping for. They fervently pray for death and destruction to further their cause. (And some also call for the death or imprisonment of people like me.) This strikes me as rather sad, and evidence of a destructive, anti-human mindset. You and I have discussed that mindset before; it is far too common.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
Incidentally, that’s about 0.5°C over a decade or so late in the 20th century, and essentially nothing since. That’s pretty static, especially since (prior to “adjustments”) this was just a recovery from the low point of the 1950s-1980s from the 1930s-1940s peak. That peak was embarrassing (as revealed in internal emails) so it was later largely adjusted out of existence.
For Tom’s benefit, here’s an email from ClimateGate talking about the plan for the warm period:
The temperature adjustments to sea surface temperatures, derived from guesses as to methods in use, were subsequently examined and shown to be problematic.
Partly they cooled the 1930s-1940s (this has been repeatedly done in surface station temperatures, to the point where they’re now more than a degree cooler than they were at the time) and partly by warming the cool 1950s and 1960s. Each technique softens the “blip,” and both are used.
Here’s a discussion of a mild later correction to the sea surface temps:
http://climateaudit.org/2011/07/12/hadsst3/
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
Oh, yeah, corrections for known instrumentation issues are evil! Just look at how much NASA/Goddards Land + Ocean index has GLB.TS+dSST.txt has changed from 1997 to 2015, taken from archive.org (http://web.archive.org/web/19970714134650/http://www.giss.nasa.gov/Data/GISTEMP/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt) and GISS
Here’s the plot
Horrifying. All those differences!!!!
I see that a sarchasm just opened up in the ground.
Perhaps we agree on some things:
— The changes you show are small, and thus not to be too worried about. Hence, you are not worried.
— If the changes were actually much larger, you would be quite reasonably concerned about them, right?
— A correction for “time of observation” bias, in which max temperatures taken at the hottest time of the day (!) could cause the same max temperature to show for two days in a row, should not apply when the following day is hotter yet, right?
— An adjustment for the instrumental bias you mentioned could and should be applied to 1934, to pick a year. But it should not change 1934 over and over and over again, for many years, as whatever “mistake” you believe was corrected for 1934 should not have changed, right?
— Or, alternatively, if it is felt by you that such continuous readjustment of history is necessary, then you should not use the old, massively adjusted data to compare to current data and call it “hottest,” right? At that point it had become a rather arbitrary number.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
BTW – I have read a few of your debates with Keith. You obviously don’t agree, but the sarchasm doesn’t seem to be a bitter divide.
Keith keeps bringing up changes to US48 land record when everyone else in the discussion is talking about global means. What’s worse, he does not mention that he is arguing US48 and not global. The changes shown in my plot are miniscule. If they were large, then yes, I would want to look into it. In the US48 record we had one large change with the introduction of TOBS and a few other corrections of known biases. I want to look into some of the minor changes Keith mentioned in the (far) future. Possible reasons are later additions to the data base by digitization campaigns, different quality control and small bug fixes in the code. One of those fixes was using a linear fit to extrapolate the mid-month temperature instead of simply taking the mean of the data. This matters, when the monthly data is incomplete and e.g. preferentially the data of the last days is missing.
Climate change deniers are either “crooks or dumb asses” according to these anglers. The money quote: “If we let this slide, we’ve failed.” And that’s the goal deniers are trying to achieve: creating the right conditions to ensure failure addressing the root cause of AGW in a timely manner. And we’re supposed to believe that these anglers are shrill Left Wing ‘catasrophists’ with a political agenda to take money out of your pocket. It’s a ludicrous and disingenuous caricature they sell and one has to be not just an idiot to buy into it but someone at least deaf if not disassociated from every day reality.
See what I mean about Keith? He’s not interested in finding out about what’s true: he’s motivated to vilify and dismiss anything contrary to his denialism. That’s his operating procedure. That is what denialists do, to obfuscate the main points that have consensus and double down on trivialities of scientific disagreements. It’s a tried and true method, used to great effect, for example, by the tobacco companies to try to slow down the effect of scientific consensus on the preventable harm caused by tobacco.
It is the same companies – often the same deniers – who get their big, fat paychecks from those industries most affected by changes to their business-as-usual concerns. He then scares people by suggesting that disagreement with him really means harming your self interest… regardless of how compelling is the evidence that business-as-usual causes preventable harm!
The opposite, of course, is true but – as I’ve said – people like Keith aren’t concerned with what’s true because they’re not the ones on the planning committees of local governments dealing with what increased flooding means, they’re not the oncology doctors dealing with lung, throat, and mouth cancers, not the water management committees overseeing what hotter heat waves mean, not the urban planning team having to deal directly with what unprecedented droughts mean. He’s not taking on the transnational insurance underwriters or the US military or NASA or the Royal Society and showing them why they’re all wrong when their models seem to be quite predictive even if on the conservative side; you see, that’s what real scientists have to do if the models they support don’t work! He’s all about convincing you that those who understand why there is scientific consensus are the radicals, the extremists, the true believers, and he will say and do whatever it takes to make your choice seem more reasonable to become a denier when that is exactly what serves you the least. Every time Keith posts, the Koch brothers are well pleased. Think on that.
Tildeb, your comment reeks of Communist rhetoric, which is unfortunate. If the people practiced capitalism, the “companies. . .who get their big, fat paychecks” to commit harm against the people — as you suggest — would cease to exist. Why? The market (i.e., the people) would refuse to do business with that company. The market (i.e., the people) decides what company will rise and survive or fall and bankrupt, of course, this consequence is based on the quality, not so much quantity, of the product or service. Unfortunately, and I venture to say that you and I may see eye-to-eye on this problem, cronyism and l-o-v-e of money, not capitalism, are corrupting every aspect of civilization; be it religion, science, education, research, government, companies, academia, etc., etc. You have a legitimate complaint in that respect. I think you and I mutually agree in that attention.
Well, we’re getting there. In spite of long campaigns well financed against renewables, the monied interests in coal, oil, nuclear, and natural gas are losing law suits that allow land owners to generate and benefit from their own clean power. The utilities are entering their death spirals where fewer customers mean higher prices, which drives people towards renewables.We see this in some European countries already. It’s interesting to note that the greatest proponents of a carbon tax are now the heads of the world’s largest oil producers and not government as the denial lobby try to paint it. They see the writing on the wall and economics will propel us into a much more self-reliant and renewable energy future. Couching this movement as sounding ‘communist’ is terminology that no longer pertains. Why Americans are so contrary to anything that smells of ‘socialism’ is a fine example of how people fool themselves into supporting political policies that really are ‘social’ in effect but that tend to harm their self interest and benefit the very wealthy.
Though you and I may mutually agree concerning cronyism and corruption, we are not in agreement about AGW. As I stated before, elementary science, including the carbon cycle, alone dispels the AGW cult. AGW insults my intelligence. The AGW cult desires to control the behavior of people in the name of environmentalism, or “Mother Earth.”
Hey, I know; rather than pretend elementary science has somehow escaped notice by tens of thousand of working scientists, how about you play the “Find the Denialist Claim” game here and then you read how the denialist claim is debunked.
Not only does elementary science disprove the AGW hypothesis, but also the following studies discredit the AGW hypothesis:
Brindley, H., Sagoo, P., Bantges, R., & Harries, J. (2001, October 15). Changes in the Earth’s resolved outgoing longwave radiation field as seen from the IRIS and IMG instruments. 11th Conference on Satellite Meteorology and Oceanography. Lecture conducted from American Meteorological Society, Madison, WI.
Harries, J., Brindley, H., Sagoo, P., & Bantges, R. (2001). Increases in greenhouse forcing inferred from the outgoing longwave radiation spectra of the Earth in 1970 and 1997. Nature, 410, 355-357.
Chen, C., Harries, J. Brindley, H., & Ringer, M. (2007). Spectral signatures of climate change in the Earth’s infrared spectrum between 1970 and 2006. Joint 2007 EUMETSAT Meteorological Satellite Conference & 15th Satellite Meteorology & Oceanography Conference of the American Meteorological Society. Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 24-28 September 2007.
So you’re suggesting that this physicist’s work supports the climate denial camp?
Sorry Matthew. I have to ask: have you lost you mind or simply borrowing bullshit from Wattsupwiththat?
Did you actually read the studies, Tildeb? They disprove the hypothesis of AGW and put the AGW argument to rest — forever.
Oh, Matthew; I’m quickly giving up hope on you. You didn’t give the links and teh Googles failed to provide me with the abstracts so I queried the lead author and collaborators. You know, for example, that she works with Bruce Wielicki, who has a name for his monitoring of decadal climate change from space using spectral radiances and GPS observations, right? Does that sound like a climate denier to you?
Come on, think.
Google failed, eh?
Click to access 24874.pdf
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v410/n6826/abs/410355a0.html
Click to access pdf_conf_p50_s9_01_harries_v.pdf
How can an elderly man as I find them, yet you cannot? Plus, read the whole article; abstracts do not provide the details.
I had to approve your comment. One of the ways I limit the spam I get is by moderating any comment with more than a couple of links.
From the first link:
The question:
Several authors have suggested the possibility of
utilizing measurements of spectrally resolved outgoing
longwave radiation (OLR) to monitor the climatic state
(e.g. Goody et al., 1998). The idea is attractive since
even a moderate degree of spectral resolution allows the
assignation of changes seen in the OLR to a particular
cause. However, its practical implementation has been
hampered by a lack of suitable observational data.
The answer:
By comparing spectrally resolved observations from
the IRIS and IMG instruments we have identified clear
signatures due to long term changes in trace gas
amounts. Although these strongly affect the OLR the
atmospheric temperature and humidity response cannot
be unequivocally determined owing to the snapshot
nature of the observations.
Good to know, but does not do what you think it does: “disprove the hypothesis of AGW and put the AGW argument to rest — forever.” Far from kit: it takes what might be a good idea for climate change measurement and determines that it doesn’t work very well.
From the second link:
“The evolution of the Earth’s climate has been extensively studied1, 2, and a strong link between increases in surface temperatures and greenhouse gases has been established3, 4. But this relationship is complicated by several feedback processes—most importantly the hydrological cycle—that are not well understood5, 6, 7. Changes in the Earth’s greenhouse effect can be detected from variations in the spectrum of outgoing longwave radiation8, 9, 10, which is a measure of how the Earth cools to space and carries the imprint of the gases that are responsible for the greenhouse effect11, 12, 13. Here we analyse the difference between the spectra of the outgoing longwave radiation of the Earth as measured by orbiting spacecraft in 1970 and 1997. We find differences in the spectra that point to long-term changes in atmospheric CH4, CO2 and O3 as well as CFC-11 and CFC-12. Our results provide direct experimental evidence for a significant increase in the Earth’s greenhouse effect that is consistent with concerns over radiative forcing of climate.”
That study challenges with data the assertion that rapid climate change is not happening because these gases are simply part of some natural cycle. You’ve brought evidence to the party opposed to your assertion. Thanks, I guess.
The third link is broken.
Look Matthew, why do you think every major scientific body in the world agrees with AGW? Are they all idiots and dupes and members of some vast conspiracy? Seriously? Try to get three scientists to agree on anything! Yet here we are in consensus. That’s no small feat in any scientific undertaking and this undertaking has been massive because it is a great threat to a great many people… especially to those generations who will follow us. The most difficult part is identifying if there is a problem (and there is) and then modelling how the effects we see are linked to a casue. This hard work has been done. Now you come along and seem to honestly think it is wrong.
Hey, here’ an idea: maybe, just maybe, it be that YOU don’t understand why there is scientific consensus. Isn’t that even a possibility in your mind?
The gist of the three articles: over a 30-year period, there is no reduction of OLR emissions in wavelengths that CO2 absorb; therefore, the AGW hypothesis is discredited. Moreover, computer-simulated results based on climate models are never a replacement for actual measured data, thus they should never be used to draw conclusions when actual measured data contradicts them.
Can you not defend your science at all? Are you so limited as to have, as your only defense, that someone who points out serious flaws in the paper you’re referring to is a bad guy? The data and methods of the critique are public! Show them to be wrong! You can’t make your case by alleging that I and thousands of other interested parties receive “big, fat paychecks.” The most famous names among those pointing out these flaws — the ones most stridently feared by the catastrophists — are pure hobbyists who don’t get paid by anyone to analyze these flawed and politicized bastardizations of science.
But you cannot address the actual science; you are reduced to pointing at me and shrilling “Koch brothers” … pathetic.
You are losing this debate, tildeb. How many countless others have you lost in attempting to debate science with serious skeptics?
Your link to the Baltimore sea level rise scare — they’re predting a 2.1 foot rise by 2050 in that video and 5.1 feet by 2100. But the actual data, after decades of “catastrophic global warming,” shows no spike, no increase, no rise in trend. Maryland, my home state, is sinking as it has been for 20,000 years, and the sea is rising gradually as it also has been since then. It rose about a foot, net, last century and is on track for a foot this century:
http://www.psmsl.org/data/obtaining/stations/148.php
But all of a sudden, they are predicting that there will be a rise in the rate of increase, which no one has seen, and that this rise will have to hit about 800% of the current rate to meet their 2050 target.
No, it’s not doing that now, of course, though they don’t mention that. But they’re sure that catastrophe is coming Real Soon Now. And why would it affect Baltimore more than other places?
The subsiding lands bit is correct, of course, as the contentinal plate readjusts from the loss of a mile of ice. But there is no good evidence for a slowing Gulf Stream; that has been proffered and debunked repeatedly by papers showing otherwise and pointing out errors in the approach. And melting land ice (not happening, of course) in Antarctica, should it ever start happening, would not go specifically to the Bay but not raise global levels.
The video makes a number of absurd claims, including that the current loss of ice in Greenland is causing sea level to drop at Scotland. This is nonsense; Scotland’s rise is due to the well-known continental rise from the end of the last glaciation, and has been documented for centuries. The GRACE satellite data (of ice mass) has suffered badly in various challenges, and has been repeatedly revised, but it is the early, scary data that is used in these sorts of reports.
Greenland was consistently gaining about a half-inch of ice per year (and rising out of the ocean by about a quarter-inch per year) when we measured the levels directly for well over a decade (1992-2003). Then they took those satellites offline, and used the GRACE pair which infers mass (roughly) from gravitational effects. These suddenly showed massive ice losses in Greenland immediately! But, when the data was exposed, this loss was centered hundreds of miles off the coast where there was no ice. The GRACE team solved this problem: They hid those charts.
With Greenland’s volcanic underpinnings, it has areas of bedrock that heat up and cool down, and these drive local, short term spikes in glacier flow. (Antarctica is the same.) When a spike happens, the news is “Armageddon!” But if, two years later, the spike disappears, there is no news media to cry “False alarm!” It is still noticed, though. (The AGU got in trouble for this, and had to make later statements saying, effectively, “We believe! Really we do!”)
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
There is no debate, Keith. That’s why you are very much part of the problem utilizing ‘research’ bought and paid for by invested parties like the Koch brothers. You’re the one trying to use science to deny science. I’m not going to argue with you or even get in your way, busy little beaver that you are disseminating your favourite distortions; I have much greater confidence in NASA and the National Academy of Science, the Royal Society, Goddard Space Institute, NOMA, and so on than I do some menial little blogger utilizing standard denialist talking points. You’re not worth directly debating because you don’t care about what’s true and have no respect for scientific expertise that goes against your contrarian beliefs. Get over yourself. But I don;t think you can. You already have all the answers you’ll ever need.
I see that you have no science, tildeb, and have switched to politics. You were just recently hollering about your imaginary “well funded” campaign by oil companies (you have zero evidence for this as it is simply not true, but now suddenly assert that the oil companies are on your side. You need to keep up, sport: Big energy has been funding the catastrophists for decades, merely because cronyism is the name of the game to survive in a crooked Washington DC. Enron was a key mover on the Kyoto Protocol, Shell and others show up as contributors in the Climategate emails (along with a plan to break up the US into 50 different countries to reduce its power), and the largest ever donation to any college in history was by an oil company to the most left-wing, strident catastrophists on the planet: BP’s $500,000,000 gift to Berkeley.\
You make statements and post links that you cannot defend, and when I post charts and research papers you duck and attack my character instead. You’re not looking good, tildeb.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
I’m not your opponent, Keith: NASA is. The National Academy of Science is. The American Meteorological Society is. The European Academy of Science and Arts is. The French Academy of Science is. The German Academy of Natural Scientists is. The National Association of State Foresters is. The National Center for Atmospheric Research is. The Goddard Institute for Space Studies is. The National Science Foundation is. The PEW Center on Global Climate Change is. The IPCC is. The National Research Council is. The Norwegian Academy of Science is. The Royal Astronomical Society is. The Soil Science Society of America is. The World Health Organization is. The National Center for Science Education is. And the list of reputable scientific organizations and institutes… hundreds of such organizations… goes on and on.
Then there’s you, Keith, and your pathetic little band of deniers. You are an extreme fringe group. That’s why your intellectual integrity is very much the central question here and not your borrowed charts and pseudo-scientific arguments. You don’t care about what’s true and this tells everyone how much confidence to place in your denialist claims.
None.
Let’s weigh the science, Keith…. and figure out exactly how tens of thousands of working scientists and thousands of climate scientists are all part of some grand Left Wing conspiracy so we can’t trust their cherry picking data… the same scientists, we really should remember, who pointed out the very real problems of ozone deletion and acid rain. I guess their so-called ‘climate science’ (snicker, chortle, wink, wink) was good enough in that regard for those issues but, hey, when it comes to planetary warming by pumping out billions of tons year after year of the known greenhouse gas we call CO2, well… all of sudden Keith assures us that they’ve all got it wrong because he can produce quibbles. He has a chart! He knows Michael Mann’s science is dubious (not only cleared of all false charges made against him and his academic standing fully restored by his university but by the college of Geophyscists after the denialist smear campaign, but won a libel suit that used the same so-called data our good buddy Keith continues to enlist) because he says so and all these findings are irrelevant to his continued use of denialist bullshit. And that’s what he’s peddling. Just another hundred thousand scientists to go, Keith. Better get a bigger shovel.
The denialists like Keith use these same under-handed tactics and smear jobs to effect… all to try to convince people to entertain doubt about settled science. They win when others think there’s a reasonable level of uncertainty about the causes of rapid climate change. That’s what denialists do. They sell doubt and claim it’s proper and even healthy skepticism. It isn’t. The science is unequivocal. There is scientific consensus on this scientific issue. There is much greater scientific expertise than mine or Keith’s and almost every one of them stands contrary to what Keith is saying and what Keith is selling, This matters. To then go along with such a radical and fringe position of doubt sold by people like Keith is as idiotic as going along with Father McGonagle who thinks performing an exorcism to cast out the demons from inoperable small appliances is a reasonable alternative to fixing the real problems with real solutions. That’s why buying into the doubt is very much a problem for all of us when such doubt translates into lowering the political capital needed to face these real problems and produce real solutions. Doubt solves nothing but allows the problem to grow ever larger and ever more expensive to effectively address.
You appeal to authority and to the majority as the foundations of your belief (religious belief?) in global warming, and you are an atheist? On top of that you sound like a torturer during the Inquisition. You speak of Keith as evil incarnate. HERETIC! Burn him at the stake! Are you trying to give Keith nightmares, visions of being on a rack, or beneath a blade that drops incrementally closer each time it swings by.
Seriously, if the primary appeal of being a panicked warmist is being in the majority, I have to wonder why you are an atheist. Do you sense a shift towards godlessness? Are you positioning yourself to be in the majority?
What is it you worship tildeb? And you do worship something. Everyone does. Everyone gives their heart to something. If nothing else, we love our self and put our self before everyone and everything else.
I am untroubled by tildeb, and will not have nightmares. In mobs (and in governments!) such people are problems, but individually are cowards. And amusing, though such science-detractors are not worth much effort.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
This is the topic described by Wiki:
“Climate change denial is a denial or dismissal of the scientific consensus on the extent of global warming, its significance, or its connection to human behavior, especially for commercial or ideological reasons.[1][2] Typically, these attempts take the rhetorical form of legitimate scientific debate, while not adhering to the actual principles of that debate.[3][4] Climate change denial has been associated with the fossil fuels lobby, the Koch brothers, industry advocates and free market think tanks, often in the United States.[5][6][7][8][9] Some commentators describe climate change denial as a particular form of denialism.[10][11][12][13][14][15][16]
Although there is a scientific consensus that humans are warming the climate system,[17][18] the politics of global warming combined with some of the debate in popular media has slowed global efforts at preventing future global warming as well as preparing for warming “in the pipeline” due to past emissions. Much of this debate focuses on the economics of global warming.
Between 2002 and 2010, conservative billionaires secretly donated nearly $120 million (£77 million) via two trusts (Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund) to more than 100 organizations seeking to cast doubt on the science behind climate change.”[19]
This is how it’s done from (from this paper).
“Climate skepticism comes as an anti-reflexive counter-movement to beat
back the ontological threats to Western modernity, organized through conservative
think tanks, mostly in the US, with some in the UK.(14) The true ideological
and material objectives of the counter-movement are camouflaged by several
tactics that confuse fair-minded citizens but empower those ready to deny climate
change.(15) While most climate deniers do not have substantial climate expertise,
(16) well-credentialed contrarians serve as spokesmen (mostly men) to media
forums outside peer-reviewed journals. Thus, it appears to policy elites,
journalists, and of course the general public that there are two equally legitimate
“sides” and that each should receive equal attention.(17) Climate denial advocates
sow confusion in a public that is often unaware that core elements of
climate science have far more vetting, good-faith witnesses, corroboration, and
merit.”
This is why climate deniers fall prey to disinformation that is so well funded:
“The counter-factual for climate deniers is that climate change is an authentic
threat. The implied reason for their movement is that, if they were to consider
the counter-factual real, they would agree it needs effective and decisive action
on multiple intersecting scales. At the same time that climate science offers imminent
critique of the industrial base of Western modernity, it tempts us to
think of authentic changes to the world political economic structure because it
is so irreparably unsustainable.”
This explains the link between the shared psychology of climate denial with historical denial (like the holocaust):
“(T)here are fundamental aspects to the history of denial. One theoretical key is that organized deflection of accountability is driven by a movement aimed at defending an ideology, and it does so through surreptitious means. “Acknowledgment” and “denial” are not the only choices, but this diversity does not make organized and willful denial more ethically or epistemologically defensible.”
To wave away the identical scientific consensus (by the same organizations and many of the same climate scientists that brought us awareness of acid rain and ozone depletion) is the key revelation that demonstrates just how dismissive and dishonest climate denial must be to gain traction in the minds sympathetic ideologically to wishing this global concern were not real and pressing.
To replace reality with confidence in climate denial dishonesty is truly idiotic. Those who do so truly are idiots.
Your list of groups looks credible, tildeb. The political leaders of such groups come up with statements in support of the governments that allow them to exist and in many cases support them substantially. But the list divides into two characteristics: Either the statement in support is so softly worded that I could support it, or the organization is riven by internal strife because the membership does not support the statement by the political leadership.
Even the American Meteorological Society, among the first you quoted, can hardly be used to support the notion that “climate change is a looming catastrophe that must be addressed.” They could barely get half of their membership to agree that it was happening at all and that humans contributed. Both of those propositions I agree with, although I am aware of how such polls are played with.
Now, they did find that a much higher percentage of the AMS members supported those propositions, more than 90%, if they made their living publishing papers in support of the propositions. That can hardly be surprising.
Your other link posted to Matthew revealed a falsehood at the very first data point I looked at, since we were just talking about carbon dioxide effects on plants. That link asserts that for C4 plants, the average improvement for a doubling of CO2 is zero. This is plainly false, as any Google scholar search would amply demonstrate.
Don’t you have science supporting you, tildeb? Are you limited to fallacious arguments? Your “thousands” of climate scientists is actually “dozens” of key players and a larger bunch of go-alongs (who complain internally about the bad science while keeping up the front for “the cause” in public); it is not as impressive as you seem to think.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
I always said you show me who paid for the study and I can pretty well tell you the results!
Why some other people cannot figure that out I don’t know.
“The Gospel of Barney” was careful to qualify this as “pretty well.” That is appropriate, as it is not true of good science, regardless of who pays for it. The problem in climate science is not just funding, it’s gatekeeping. You cannot get a study or project funded unless you have indicated in advance that you are a True Believer and are going to produce results that support the cause of catastrophic global warming in some way.
But for an alternative, consider a study from a few years ago funded (in part) by the Koch brothers, whom the left considers consummately evil. (They like Soros.) This study at Berkeley produced a temperature record that nominally supported the catastrophists’ position, and decidedly contrary to what one would expect from something with such dastardly funding involved. There were, and are, serious problems with the study, but its results, and its sinister funding source, have been touted ever since.
Pharmaceutical companies pay for studies all the time that produce negative results. They need these to be good science, otherwise they would be spending a billion-plus dollars on running a drug through the FDA process that does not work well or has problems. Overlooking these in the name of “paid-for science” would put them out of business.
The process is not perfect, and the average approval is now $1.6 billion (!), but it is more impartial than you’d think from the comments here.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
I think the motive of those paying for the study always has to be considered. As you observed, the pharmaceutical companies need good science. On the other hand, what politicians too often need is good political cover.
If it is done as good science, with methods and source data published and replicable, then it does not matter who pays for it. The gatekeeper effect still applies, in that if you only fund pro-global-catastrophe studies that’s what you’ll get.
The real problem is not just the gatekeeper bit, though. The methods and/or source data are so frequently withheld or disguised by the catastrophists that it’s rather pathetic. And tremendously damaging to science.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
When government pays for the studies, they gatekeep who does the “replication.”
I recently watched Snowpiercer, (Set in a future where a failed climate-change experiment kills all life on the planet except for a lucky few who boarded the Snowpiercer, a train that travels around the globe, where a class system emerges.) This rather poor movie had some interesting and disturbing themes. The government, in their quest to solve global warming, injected a cooling substance into the atmosphere. Unfortunately, their calculations about global warming were way off and based more on hysteria and fear than science, so they wound up freezing the planet and making it inhospitable, kind of like trying to live in liquid nitrogen.
That’s one of my fears, governments can be really good at trying to fix things that aren’t broken based more on hyperbole and hysteria than sound reasoning. It’s one thing for them to tinker with our light bulbs, but an entirely different matter to try and “fix” the planet. I’m really grateful there are still “denialists” in the world who seek to identify the problem properly before leaping to fix it.
You may be amused by a little short story I wrote years ago, called Greenspace. It begins, “In space, no one can hear you’re green. It’s a pity.” But it deals with addressing global warming through technology. And there’s a movie tie-in, but not to the one you mentioned.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
That was well done, thanks for the link. It’s reassuring that some of these things are being pondered in our science fiction. At least I know there are people questioning and following things to their logical conclusions, which of course, involving humans, means not logical at all.
The world of science fiction is very much affected/afflicted by politics. So much so that a group spun off of the increasingly Left-controlled Hugo Awards called the “Sad Puppies,” and a group reacted to that by forming the “Rabid Puppies.” Very strange.
Hah! Just searching around, I see that this is a current topic.
I try to keep contemporary US politics out of my science fiction. In a novel about a far-future society of descendants of octopuses, their society is an odd mix of enterprise, state (really tribe) control, and other variations. And their family relationships are both familiar and very strange. Readers have not attempted to guess my politics, and the readers have been all over the map. My job was to take creatures that are literally cold and slimy and make you care about them. Reports back suggest that I was successful.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
Read your little short story too. Well done!
What I think is more likely is that the climate panicked will starve those they call the masses. No jobs. No food. No clothing. No shelter. Just a big, poor bureaucratic state designed to save the planet by emptying it of people.
This is happening now, driving up the price of corn for “green” ethanol leading to starvation as famously happened in Mexico, but is much more widespread. And the Left has already killed tens of millions of people through the anti-science DDT ban.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
“Green” ethanol is something I have no trouble opposing. The DDT ban is something I wonder about. When I was growing up, birds of prey were scarce. I hardly ever saw a blue bird. Something killed off all those birds, and now, with DDT banned, they are back. Coincidence? Then I want to know what killed those birds.
Supposedly, DDT made the egg shells of predatory birds too fragile. Why that did not seem to affect robins I don’t know. Nevertheless, once observed and hypothesized, if true this effect should not have been difficult to verify with some lab testing. Hawks and eagles can survive and reproduce in captivity.
Admittedly, I have never investigated this particular matter, but I also have never heard a Conservative properly refute the science. I have just heard Conservatives complain that the DDT ban is not based upon science. Maybe, but sometimes, as was the case with banning Freon, the reasoning for not using a chemical not ordinarily found in nature is sound. Such chemicals can produce side affects we did not anticipate and definitely don’t want.
“Coincidence?” No. Media hype amplifying a human tendency toward selective memory.
The entire ban was based on politics rather than science, and pushed by environmentalists over the objections of scientists. It was banned after taking scientific testimony showing that it should not be.
In very recent times, we’ve gradually starting admitting this, and we are now allowing DDT usage again in African countries, gradually stemming the Left-generated slaughter that had obtained there for decades.
Here’s a bit of background.
http://junkscience.com/2015/03/22/driessen-on-the-deceptions-that-are-the-ddt-bans-shame-on-the-enviros-and-the-epa-led-by-ruckleshaus/
Death toll from the Left’s ban of DDT is estimated between 30 and 60 million so far, mostly children.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
So I am that gullible? Possibly, but I don’t think this is one of those cases.
I lived on the Gulf Coast for years. I don’t recall seeing any pelicans. I hardly ever saw a hawk or any other predatory bird.
Obviously, where we live makes a difference. When I lived in more urban areas, I would not have expected to see too many hawks. But where I lived in Ocean Springs was near a wildlife refuge, and my father loved to take us fishing.
As it is, I don’t listen to very much media hype. I threw out the TV over thirty years ago. Nevertheless, I have enjoyed seeing more birds of prey, and I was surprised to see those birds, not conditioned.
Anyway, that article you linked to is exactly the sort I was talking about. Does DDT work? Of course it does. However, the charge against it is that it accumulated in the body fats of predators as it moved up the food chain. That created a problem for predatory birds. The article you referenced does not address that issue. Instead, it attacks the credibility of the environmentalists and EPA Administrator William Ruckelshaus.
The issues are whether the necessary research was done and what were the results. What was happening to the populations of the birds of prey? Were there any lab tests that demonstrated a direct correlation between DDT levels in a bird and the thickness of their egg shells? If that research was not done, then we have a problem. Because they are making wild claims without proof, we don’t need to slam the credibility of the environmentalists and EPA Administrator William Ruckelshaus. Unfortunately, that article skirts the issue. I understand we can bath in DDT. However, we don’t lay eggs. What happens when a bald eagle lays an egg?
I did not mean the comment as an attack on you. This is what everyone heard, from every source, as it was universally discussed. And it’s still portrayed that way. Just as “eggs are bad for your heart” — a decades long understanding that “everybody knows” that is not true … but that, now, is finally being admitted as having never been true.
What happens when politicized science lays an egg? Bald eagles are excellent example of the DDT myth (generated through reducing the calcium in the food of laboratory birds, an experiment later denounced but still held as “proof” of DDT harm). Bald eagles were thought of as “pests” in the US in the 19th and early 20th century, and shot in large numbers. Decades before DDT, we had almost eliminated this bird which was widely considered a nuisance animal.
It was 1940 when Congress finally decided to halt this, and passed an act protecting the Bald Eagle. Their numbers began to grow, and have ever since. As it happens, their growth coincides with the invention and widespread use of DDT in the states. Eagle population growth continued independent of the 1973 ban on DDT, and was unrelated to it.
And yet, you can see articles now that state that the low point of eagle populations was 1963 (utterly false, but many sources just drop the data before that point), and that the rise from 1963 was due to the DDT ban a decade later. (Isn’t it interesting that the ban solved the problem retroactively ten years before the ban, during the time of heaviest DDT usage?)
Scientists had been tracking (and concerned about) eggshell thinning for decades before the invention of DDT. Eventually posited a link between acid rain, acidic soils, snail populations, and reduced eggshell calcium. Here are some research articles if you’re interested.
But this was inconsistent, and not as large of an issue as has always been portrayed. And it is hard to put this forward into the headwind of “everyone knows it’s DDT.”
Hah! I just turned up a comment from a fellow at the Audubon Society. He points to a different article which I have not been able to access:
I don’t know what article he was referring to, but his information is consistent with what I have read over many years.
A reminder; the Bald Eagle Protection Act of 1940, the start of the population rise, is before DDT was coming into large use in the US. You could argue that DDT was our most important weapon in winning World War II. It saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of soldiers, and allowed us to fight, and win, campaigns that were otherwise impossible.
I have the full transcript and evidence package for the DDT hearings from forty years ago, during which the pro and con folks made their best cases, the judge reviewed all of it and determined no credible reason for the ban, and then Nixon’s fellow (who did not see this data, nor evidently care) banned it anyway under pressure from his leftist friends.
I’d be happy to send it to you.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
I was not particularly offended, just annoyed. We have to careful we don’t sound like tildeb and encourage him. He is bad enough as is.
I have a technical background, and I majored in Environmental Science so I have an interest in the subject. However, I am not naive enough to believe that just earning the degree is sufficient to pierce the smoke screen the government and the news media throw up. Even with the Internet, unless we are willing to pay for the access and take the time to read the primary research articles, we may not understand the issues, much less reach the right conclusions.
That said, even if you are correct about the bald eagle, they are more birds of prey than just bald eagles that have started reappearing in large numbers. Hence, I presume Congress’ protection extended itself to larger numbers of birds than just the bald eagle. That probably came through endangered species protection, and that could explain the recovery in the numbers of these birds.
Here are the kind of articles on egg thinning that are readily available on the Internet.
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF01956171#page-1
Click to access eco-ssl_ddt.pdf
http://www2.ucsc.edu/scpbrg/pefaddt.htm
http://www.epa.gov/caddis/si_step5_ddtiteration_popup.html
http://www.fws.gov/contaminants/info/ddt.html
Click to access ddttech.pdf
http://reason.com/archives/2004/01/07/ddt-eggshells-and-me
http://www.forbes.com/sites/henrymiller/2012/09/05/rachel-carsons-deadly-fantasies/
http://dwb.unl.edu/Teacher/NSF/C06/C06Links/www.altgreen.com.au/Chemicals/ddt.html
http://spectator.org/articles/48925/ddt-fraud-and-tragedy
http://sciencenordic.com/ivory-gulls-threatened-eggshell-thinning
It is apparent they were egg thinning studies, and it is apparent the results of the research were not crystal clear. I don’t believe the researchers came up with a biochemical explanation for what was happening or why some birds are more affected by DDT than others. Moreover, there doesn’t appear to have been much research since the ban. Hence, many people decide this problem is more imagined than real. I am still not certain.
Given all the questions and the possible cost in human life, that is sad. This strikes me as the sort of problem where persistence would be rewarded, and we should have an unambiguous answer. I am afraid the powers that be decided they knew enough and did not care to know more.
One other observation. The Conservatives publications complaining about the DDT ban faulted the egg thinning science, but I did not see much effort to explain why birds of prey disappeared and then came back. To counter the complaint that DDT is a problem, that needs to be explained. In addition, DDT and its buy products stay in environment for awhile, and they are also blamed for killing aquatic life. So I don’t think putting that pesticide back in use is going to be an easy sell, no matter what, a fact which to some extent excuses the lack of curiosity by the politicians who would use our money to pay for the research.
The link I provided was to a long list of papers on the topic, including perhaps a dozen different things that were each determined to be the cause of eggshell thinning. The list of papers also addresses other birds and DDT.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
I am afraid I have been tied up a bit. Wife wants me to car shop, and the local party has me helping to organize a firehouse primary in my district.
I don’t think the Science News link does what you wanted.
The Google link is interesting. I obviously need to explore Google extensions. It may have been around awhile, but the scholar extension is new to me. Where I work they block some things that might be nice to have, and I have not been curious enough to investigate all the search features. Dumb, I suppose.
Distracted, I did not quite get the point of your google search terms. Even though the possibility of eggshell thinning from DDT may not be the subject of current studies, other culprits are being looked at.
This post is grossly misleading. Trapped carbon is inert. Burned carbon is not. Consider limestone:
These deposits are the result of a very thick layer of prehistoric sea animal shells and skeletons being laid down on the ocean floor. These shells and skeletons were largely composed of calcium carbonate. Over a period of five hundred million years this deposit was under high temperature and high pressure, and the deposit changed to a coarsely crystallized limestone.
Yes, the earth’s carbon cycle is closed so altering it from this state to that state will always yield a net change of zero. Yeah? So? You have to be an idiot to think LeChatelier’s Principle is therefore somehow applicable to making the tripling of atmospheric CO2 from ground-covered inert states doesn’t really change anything. You conveniently forget to mention what happens when the oceans absorb more CO2. Well, gosh, golly, darn it all, wouldn’t you know it: it does exactly what we’re seeing: it WARMS, it rises, it slows ocean currents, it causes El Ninos, it melts polar ice caps and glaciers. And all of this just so happens – contrary to Lord Moncton’s insane ramblings – to have a PROFOUND effect on climate that changes from various forced feedings.
Duh.
Look, you’re being fooled by the likes of Keith and his denialist allies. Neither reality we share nor the science that models what’s going on is on their side. You don’t have to be, either. But to choose to be a denier is to choose to deny reality and choose to deny how science works. And you know it does. So choosing denialism is idiotic and those who continue to believe the idiotic over reality and the best method we have to describe it are quite accurately described as idiotic.
tildeb,
When minuscule is tripled, the result is still minuscule.
400 parts per million atmospheric CO2 is minuscule.
The strident hollering of tildeb is interesting; apparently this person is possessed (in a demon-like sense) of the opinion that the current reduction in tornadoes and hurricanes and droughts is “extreme weather.” Since tildeb refers to the “obvious weather pattern whiplashing effects globally” — in other words, a general reduction in extreme weather events, all tildeb can do is point to every single incident, no matter how much less frequent these days, and call it “disruptive climate change.”
Of course, it helps to forget history. “Hottest summer ever” the politicized reports said in Australian ignoring their own recorded history. The temp adjustments helped, of course.
Tildeb evidently really wants to tie “extreme weather” to CO2, thus ignoring the science as reported by his own heroes at the IPCC who note that no definitive link can be established. (Perhaps this is primarily because they don’t want to tie carbon dioxide to improving conditions.)
Tildeb’s histrionic anti-science screaming is loud, but not otherwise impressive. The data is what it is.
Incidentally, the “tripling” tildeb mentioned is from recent pre-industrial CO2, or about 280ppm to around 750ppm or so. This is still rather less than is used in greenhouses to obtain the best crop production. Tildeb would have us believe that restoring a tiny fraction of the CO2 that plants evolved to use will result in catastrophe, despite zero evidence of this. Warmer has always been better for life on this planet, and the warmer, higher CO2 times have been golden days of biodiversity and productivity. Or, as tildeb calls it, “extreme climate disruption.”
I suppose that if you really think humans are a blot on the world, your worldview would mean that anything that is demonstrably good for people is evil and deserves screaming at. I don’t agree, of course, but the dwindling number of “tildebs” in the world are interesting to watch. They’re the folks that take the actual science reports of the IPCC and produce the political “summaries for policymakers” after most of the scientists have departed. The upshot: Read the science, and keep a jaundiced eye on the hysterically political folks like our visitor here. The unfortunate aspect: Governments and NGOs directly benefit from the hysteria, support it, and continue feeding tildeb a diet of dire end-of-the-world predictions which he dutifully carries off to fora like this one.
As you pointed out, these predictions are problematic, since we are all already dead by some of the ones that have already passed their “convince-by” dates. But they do not learn … and why should they? They’re paid to do what they do, with no more science backing than Obama’s “global warming causes asthma” pronouncements. Horrific “crop failures and food riots” by 1995 in the US (when of course it’s been a time of spectacular yield increases. No more snow. Ski industries (now booming) will have long-since collapsed. Washington DC under water by 2008. And so on. Here’s one list, hardly complete.
We used to have some really extreme weather. Under Obama, there have been zero major hurricane strikes on the US mainland. Under Grover Cleveland, there were three in a month. And not long after, was the most damaging of all — taking America’s fourth-largest city essentially off the map. But they looked at the problem and fixed it, exactly unlike Jerry Brown and the politically amplified California drought.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
I use to live near Galveston. They still talk about that storm. It killed 6000 people, and it did not leave much behind. No FEMA then. Was that a good or a bad thing?
One problem they did not have then is subsidence. Suck all the oil or fresh water out of the rock strata below and the land sinks. In some places, it has sunk 6 feet. Nothing to sneeze at when you are worried about a storm surge.
tildeb
Misleading? I suppose to some extent. I am only one of the idiots. Unlike some, I don’t have the perfect truth.
Anyway, limestone is what it is, and there is plenty of it. Is it trapped carbon or not? Well, it is definitely not carbon dioxide.
Since we have only seen about a half a degree Centigrade increase (at worst) in the world’s temperature, all that carbon dioxide we have been generating must have went elsewhere. Where? Do you know? Since you claim to have the perfect Truth (you have not called yourself an idiot yet), and the rest of us are idiots, you must know.
The climate panicked have been predicting catastrophic global warming into a future they keep pushing into the future for years. As an idiot, I can only suppose their theory is missing a fundamental detail. When we add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, the atmosphere does heat up slightly, but the rate of plant growth and the formation of limestone also increases. That’s chemistry, not climatology. Limestone is something geologists know about. You don’t suppose somebody forgot to consult them. After all, lots of geologists work for those evil, idiot oil companies.
How do we decide what we should do? We must remember that we make decisions based upon our understanding of the information available to us. Currently, our government provides most of our educational instruction, and our government also provides most of the information we have with respect to Global Warming.
False.
Has it occurred to you that you are hysterical? Well, I suppose not.
tildeb,
The world is drowning in petroleum.
What we need is $5 a barrel oil so that our society becomes filthy rich enough to fund future advances in energy production.
Wind power is a 500 year trip back to a future of widespread poverty, disease and starvation.
Solar power is a 10,000 year trip back to a future when man discovered agriculture and was on the edge of extinction like all other animals.
The reason you think going backward is going forward is because you believed the government propaganda that pervades public education, science, media, and politics.
The answer? Sarah Palin said it best:
DRILL, BABY DRILL!!!
All fossil fuel use has accomplished is to lift billions of people out of starvation, poverty and misery. If you are anti-human, this is not a good outcome, and the prospect of continually improving standards of living is something that needs to be stopped, somehow. So: strident calls against capitalism, against fossil fuels, against mankind in general as a “virus” plaguing the Earth. And invention of bad things, always phrased as “already happening” (like sea level rise acceleration) but when pinned down, they can only say that the bad things (like sea level rise acceleration) are going to begin “imminently.” And by tinkering with satellite splicing, and adding geodetic “correction factors,” they can ignore the tide gages and pretend it’s already happening after all. But of course, beaches are affect by water, not by models.
Still they scream doom and destruction, as tildeb is doing here. Sad, isn’t it?
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
If we are deniers, then they are the panicked. Then that could catch on? Ahh, probably not. Conservatives don’t have the same enthusiasm for robotic name calling.
If you have ten minutes, you might want to take a look at this and then see if you can figure out how it fits with your explanatory model. You don’t need to respond; I suggest it only as a consideration.
If you do watch the video, then you may want to compare and contrast it with this up to date article that I think expresses some of the complexity for these associated concerns quite well. Note that good criticisms are also included.
These are the kinds of studies coming out daily and waving them all aside I think is really quite remarkably dishonest when claiming that one is honestly interested in understanding why climate change is happening at this rapid rate. It is on this understanding that one then begins to see why CO2 is considered the primary driving engine for it rapidity. And when one understands this connection, then one can begin to see why the dramatic weather pattern changes in frequency and amplitude today are so profoundly different than anything in our planet’s history.
tildeb
You call anyone who disagrees with you a dishonest idiot. Then you have the gall to say this?
Climate change is happening at a rapid rate? I think the fact there is so little evidence that anything is happening is why people think the theory lacks sufficient evidential support to be taken seriously.
Anyway, when I get time, I will take a glance at what you have provided.
You see, CT, I think the difference between you and Keith is that it’s not you as a person of character saying these things: I think it’s your ignorance (meaning a lack of knowledge) driving what you say. Keith is a person who lacks intellectual integrity claiming to be respectful of science, claiming to have ‘worked’ in climate science, yet intentionally selecting only bits and pieces of information that when presented makes doubt about rapid climate change seem reasonable. But it’s not reasonable. It is intentionally disingenuous. It is meant to misrepresent, to mislead, to clothe dishonesty in a patina of scientific respectability. It is climate denialism in action and it is reprehensible when, if the same methodology used to produce cell phones and land a spacecraft on a distant and tumbling comet produces an explanatory model that works in climate science showing a causal link between AGW and climate change, an honest scientist will realize why scientific consensus has been reached.
I think given the best information rather than the predigested denialism pap Keith spreads over the truth, you will see that AGW requires political action. And i hold out this hope because you mentioned DDT and happened to notice that its ban seemed to produce positive casual effects in sea bird populations. Keith tries to sell these positive effects as an inappropriate coast to he lives lost to malaria and typhus and other insect diseases. That there are other treatments chemical and otherwise doesn’t matter to Keith because he needs to paint the issue a certain way so that he can then vilify anyone who quite rightly understands why DDT was so problematic. He doesn’t care about what’s true and isn’t concerned about being honest; he has a denialism agenda and he will stick with it no matter what.
I don’t think you’re that far gone and I think the same is true for many of your readers. But I do think people like Keith rely on the ignorance of others so that they can do what they do and try to swell their ranks by this kind of indoctrination wrapped in the flag of what they claim is science. What they sell is anti-science and they’re motive is to dupe you. That’s not how science works. He’s really not smarter than those same scientists who work for JPL and NASA and who populate senior universities and scientific organizations around the world. He’s really not, and agreeing with him is not an invitation to join the ranks of the smartest people in the world. It’s an invitation to take a shortcut into belief and then learn how to cherry pick data to make that belief seem scientifically based even though everyone knows there is scientific consensus contrary to this sales job, this false advertising denialists must rely on. They don;t have to do the3 hard work involved in gathering global data about climate; I’ve spent summers working with ice core samples from Russia and the Antarctic. I’ve done field work for the geology department of my local university figuring out ways to track ground flow data for hydrology. This is difficult and challenging work but this is how real science is done… by first collecting important sources for data and then creating explanatory models to account for it. Only then do you go forth and test that model over and over again by seeing how well or poorly reality aligns with the model. Changing the model for refinement is absolutely typical and yet people like Keith will use these changes, use the squabbling and disagreements to suggest to the uninitiated that this demonstrates a lack of consensus. It doesn’t, and suggesting it does is obviously dishonest to any scientist who has actually worked doing science. That’s why the target audience for denialists are those who lean towards conspiracy thinking, who don’t require much pushing to distrust the real experts and who are more willing to trust the local guy as if he or she were an equivalent expert. For every Keith there stands 97 working scientists who unanimously disagree with his opinions. And those 97 sceintists have tens of thousands of studies that fit the explanatory model of climate change by AGW to inform their opinions. Keith, in comparison, has… conspiracy theories, and debunked talking points based on a highly prejudicial selection. He’s got no model so he denies there’s a phenomena. Christian Science faith healers do the same thing: wave the hands and claim there never was a disease… all the while watching real people die real deaths from understandable and treatable disease processes. That’s what Keith is selling: to stand by and pretend the world is different than it is.
The video has lots of scary pictures of flooding, and notes (correctly) that Maryland is sinking as a result of continental rebound from the loss of ice from 20,000 years ago. I suppose you could call this “climate change.”
But while they confidently predict a rise of sea level of 5.1 feet, they don’t actually show you what’s happening. The same old foot-per-century as has been happening since 1901 when tracking began in Baltimore.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
@tildeb, who wrote:
Pick one. Let’s take a look at one of these “weather patterns” that have you so panicked on behalf of mankind that you want to curtail the quality of life of the world’s (really, America’s) humans in order to save them.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
Incidentally, that ‘exceptional slowdown” in the current was obtained by dropping some data (that went the wrong way), using other data upside down (again! Mann is famous for this), and extending an untested and illogical hypothesis about the meaning of the data, in opposition to other current research. It was debunked as soon as released. But it makes for good, scary headlines — and it is all that is needed to convince some folks.
Here’s a recap of the issues, and a link to lots of evidence and analysis. In other words, science, with data and methods exposed:
It goes on, with charts and data. The next posts continue to explore this remarkable exercise in … overreach is putting it nicely.
Jump on in, tildeb. Prove them wrong. Show that the original developers of the isotope charts have them upside down, and that Mann and Rahmstorf really have it right. And show how damaged tree rings from the western US and contaminated lake settlements from Scandinavia are really the best way to determine subtle changes in the rate of flow of the Atlantic ocean current.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle