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Blitzen
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Climate Change
I don't think I believe people are the cause of global warming. There's just so much contradictory theories.
But looking back through history we seem to always have had cycles of climate change that weren't man made, for instance 1000 years ago (1150 AD) the world was 2 degrees warmer.
If we've only been measuring climate change for the last thirty years how do we know it isn't just a natural cycle?
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2/16/2009, 1:18 am
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QS2
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Re: Climate Change
Hmmm, so I deleted my really long answer, in hopes of this answer being a bit shorter and aimed more specifically at the points you brought up.
The first point is that our data record certainly isn't 30 years old, that would be about the start of satellite observation instead I believe. We've had weather stations scattered across the entire globe since about 1870 or so though, before that we were still missing a bit much, so data previous to that is considered less reliable for deriving actual climate data. (Obviously because areas you don't see could be much colder or warmer after all and we wouldn't want to get that all to wrong)
As for older data, there are a great many proxies used, from the well known ice cores which do much more then just detect CO2 levels, but can also for example be used to estimate temperature and ice amounts via the isotope balances of the ice itself, or how wet the local region was based on ice layer thickness. These proxies are of course most accurate for the permanent ice covered areas and cover a hundred thousand years or more, also luckily for us they managed to entrap some information about areas far beyond the permanently ice covered regions as well.
Another way to get fairly good information on past climates is palynology where you find pollen (which comes from plants, just in case you didn't know), which can survive very well in oxygen poor environments and have been found in vast amounts even in millions of years old rock. The great advantage of this one is, is that plants live in very well known climate types and that you can find the balance between many different plants in an area via pollen (Because each plant has unique pollen shapes and known pollen production). So thanks to this, it becomes possible to create a fairly accurate climate of the area, including amounts of rainfall in summer and winter as well as the temperatures in those seasons. The great disadvantage of this system is, is that it takes rather much work and you can only find it in oxygen poor areas, like for instance lake sediments. Never the less if these match other records like the ice cores, they obviously give great extra weight to the overall evidence of past temperatures and climate.
There are quite a few more aside of these that also give useful data like tree rings, glaciers and sedimentation of materials in the oceans, due to them being sedimentary basins. Many of these facors are also briefly touched on here. I would also like to note when you combine all these factors together and take a worldwide view of climate, then the warmer period of 1150 AD turns out to be much much weaker, being mostly a European phenomenon and the rest of the planet not having the same benefits. So it wasn't the world being 2 degrees warmer, but just Europe. Also Europe seems now to be about as warm as back then, most likely even warmer considering some plant indicators.
All this I hope helps point out we aren't just basing this on some lark of short term data, but that we actually have large amounts of data covering a rather long stretch of time. Sadly I'm not sure what to say about your contradictory theories, because as far as I know the only still accepted one is the one based on CO2 warming with positive feedback loops. All the others have been shown as far as I know to be insufficient to explain the current observed effects, even if you put them all together and assume the most climate altering numbers for them. Maybe you can say which ones are bothering you in specific? Perhaps the solar cycle theory? Ocean circulation theory? Something else? In any case, maybe you could specify a bit, because trying to cover them all would obviously make this very long post much much much longer yet.
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2/16/2009, 3:10 pm
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Reythia
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Re: Climate Change
quote:
Blitzen wrote:
I don't think I believe people are the cause of global warming. There's just so much contradictory theories.
First off, despite what the media might have you believe, there are NOT many contradictory SCIENTIFIC theories. Really. Scientists like to be the ones to figure out new things (and get their names attached to them!). If there were any other viable scientific theories, they'd be presented in all the biggest papers and all the best conferences. But I read those papers (regrettably!) and I go to those conferences. There are no alternative SCIENTIFIC theories to be found.
I highlight the word "scientific" because, of course, we all hear about alternative theories in the news. Of course, the media rarely distinguishes between a geophysicist who's studied climate for 30 years and a biologist who just threw in his two cents. Not kidding. Go look into the credentials of some of the supposed "experts". The media especially likes picking scientific people outside the field of climatology whom they can legitimately title "Professor" or "Dr.".
I've heard people claim before that we should encourage the media to give these people their "fair say". That both science and democracy are founded on the openness of ideas. Which is true, to a certain extent. But is it right to weigh the opinion of a person who's studied the field for 30 years the same as the opinion of someone who's never seen the raw data and, while probably an expert in his own field, has no real experience relating to climate change? I wouldn't trust the opinion of a climatologist over a medical doctor if I was sick. Nor will I trust the opinion of a medical doctor over a climatologist when it's the planet that's ailing.
quote:
But looking back through history we seem to always have had cycles of climate change that weren't man made, for instance 1000 years ago (1150 AD) the world was 2 degrees warmer.
If we've only been measuring climate change for the last thirty years how do we know it isn't just a natural cycle?
QS covered the details of this topic rather well, so I won't repeat them. I'd like to show two images, though.
The first is the mean temperature record for the Earth over the last 2000 years. There are temperature records going back further than that, but they're often based off models, simply because we don't have access to the types of data sources QS2 mentioned back that far. We can get back to the last ice age (~10000 years ago) pretty well, though. In any case, take a look.
This one's just from Wikipedia, but I've seen similar plots elsewhere, including at the American Geophysical Union conferences that I go to each year. The reason I like this plot is that it shows a whole bunch of different estimates -- those are all the different colored lines -- based on different collections of data, different assumptions, etc. That gives you a good idea of how potentially inaccurate our estimates might be. You can be pretty sure the real answer falls somewhere in between all the curves that are up there.
The big thing to notice is that, despite how different some of the curves are from each other, they ALL show that the last 2000 years were significantly cooler than the last 50. From the warmest (in about 1000) to the coolest (in about 1600), the mean temperature changed at MOST 0.8 degrees. Compare that to the ~1 degree rise since 1900. If you look just at the numbers, it seems like such a degree-high rise might be possible due to just natural causes. But you also have to look at the time scale. In the last 2000 years, there have been no other drops or rises that are of the same size as the one we're going through now AND which happen as quickly.
Which makes sense! Most things in nature do not happen so quickly -- the climatologic timescale is measured in decades and centuries, and the geological timescale in millenia. There ARE things in the more distant past that have created such sharp spikes in mean temperature, of course. Huge meteorite hits and immense or chained volcanic eruptions, for sure. Those can both lift enough dust into the sky to cool the temperature by at LEAST a full degree in only a couple of years.
But we haven't had any large meteorite hits or huge volcanic eruptions in the last 100 years. Nor have we seen anything else changing at such a scale and pace to so dramatically effect the whole Earth's temperature and climate. Except humans. We're the only things on this Earth growing and changing fast enough to explain such a big change so fast.
If you can think of a better explanation for what's happening, I'd love to hear it. I've never heard one that will explain both magnitude and pace of change adequately. Which is why the only accepted scientific theorys for climate change are those profoundly impacted by people.
I'll leave you with a reference which has the basics of climate history on it, as well as two really nice (and well-used) plots. Enjoy!
"Earth's Climate History" and plot of the last ~100 years of temperature change
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2/16/2009, 5:12 pm
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Blitzen
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Re: Climate Change
Those posts were really interesting. I'll reply to them properly later, but for now I just want to point out that when I was talking about the world being warmer in AD 1100, I wasn't talking about Europe. From the research I've read, America was a desert for sixty years.
But thanks for the pointers, I'm off to follow the links.
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2/16/2009, 6:33 pm
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Re: Climate Change
Okay, that was an interesting read. So was the book Six Degrees which I've recently started reading and which prompted me to want to chat about this. I have some further issues.
Firstly, there are alternative scientific theories, the chief one being that the sun drives climate change. This is given credence by the fact that between 1645 and 1715 there were very few sun spots observed on the sun, and earth entered a period known as the Little Ice Age.
According to Dr Sami Solanki (the link is to Wikipedia, it will show he is qualified) who has been studying concentrations of a beryllium isotope in ice gores in Greenland, the sun has never been as active in the past 1500 years as it has been in the past 60. Over the last 20 years, however, the number of sun spots has remained constant. Now, if the earth was warming that may point to greenhouses gases but... according to the best estimates of global air temperatures (from American weather satellites) there have been wobbles of temperature increase/decrease but no overall change since 1999.
Yet, of course, everyone knows the world is getting warmer. That is why the Arctid ice has decreased by 15% and swallows are coming home to roost earlier.
But London has been hit by the worse snow in 20 years, crops in CALIFORNIA have been wiped out by frost, penguins are cape prellets are turning up at their spring nesting sites nine days later than the did in 1950, and the southern oceans sea ice has increased by 8%.
Henrik Svernsmark (again
qualified) said in the 90s that cosmic rays could affect cloudiness. More cosmic rays, more clouds. The suns magnetic field bats these cosmic rays away, but when the sun becomes lazy, as during the Little Ice Age, more cosmic rays get through and the world cools. With our sun in hyperactive mode right now, the cloud numbers lessen and the world heats up.
Of course, the idea was instantly dismissed by meteorologists. Good job he was able to prove it in 2005. Except that journal after journal refused to publish it, until it finally appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society in 2006.
And as to why the journals mostly report on global warming caused by greenhouses gases, wouldn't that be because most scientists are looking into greenhouse gases because that is where the money is. That is what grants are given out for...
(From Wikipedia
quote:
A 2006 op-ed by Richard Lindzen in The Wall Street Journal challenged the claim that scientific consensus had been reached, and listed the Science journal study as well as other sources, including the IPCC and NAS reports, as part of "an intense effort to suggest that the theoretically expected contribution from additional carbon dioxide has actually been detected."[37] Lindzen wrote in The Wall Street Journal on April 12, 2006,[38]
“ But there is a more sinister side to this feeding frenzy. Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis. ”
Similarly, Timothy Ball asserts that skeptics have gone underground for "job security and fear of reprisals. Even in University, where free speech and challenge to prevailing wisdoms are supposedly encouraged, academics remain silent."[39]
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2/17/2009, 2:31 am
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Reythia
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Re: Climate Change
First off, the solar cycle. Let's start with a well-known (scientifically, at least) plot:
This shows the number of sunspots in any given year. More sunspots means more solar activity. You'll notice that there's a wide variation: anywhere from 0 to 200 sunspots per year. The two most recent minima and the current maxima are marked (the Maunder, in particular, had fascinating historical consequences, by the way.) Also, note the very distinct 11-year solar cycle. If you go by the theory that all (or even most) of global temperature changes are caused by solar activity, then you're saying that global temperature ought to have a pronounced 11-year signal to it. Which it doesn't.
Also, you might also note that we're not only at the end of a solar cycle, but also that for the last two years, we've had almost NO sunspots at all. See here, for example:
"Sun Goes Longer Than Normal Without Producing Sunspots"
It's making all of us aerospacers ecstatic (since it allows our orbits to decay MUCH less!), but it's not normal. So if the solar cycle were all that was causing global warming, then the last two years of no sunspots ought to have put us right back to the temperatures of the "Little Ice Age" during the Maunder Minimum -- which hasn't happened at all.
Now, don't get me wrong. Most scientists AGREE that the solar cycle affects global temperatures and long-term climate change. That's not a debate.. Because of this, all long-term climate models have solar fluctuation built into them. They have to, or they'd be totally wrong. And yes, there have been numerous articles suggesting that some noticable percentage of the temperature rise since 1900 can be attributed to natural solar-driven cycles. So yes, in that, you're right.
But no one's arguing otherwise!
What the vast majority of climate-related scientists ARE arguing is that solar weather has not changed as noticably as global temperature has, and thus the majority of the cause behind the temperature rise must come from other means. Look back at the plot I posted before. Note how the "Little Ice Age" involves a smaller dip in temperature than the current warming has an increase? Then look back at the sunspot image. Yes, the average number of sunspots (the black line) IS larger now than before. But it's not THAT much bigger than anytime since 1750 (or before the Maunder Minimum, for that matter). If such a HUGE and LONG of a dip as the Maunder Minimum only changed global temperatures by maybe half a degree, then how could a SMALLER, SHORTER rise change temperatures by twice that much? No one's saying that the sun doesn't have an effect. The point is just that the effect isn't anywhere close to big enough. Occasionally, I've heard someone estimate that the solar effect was causing 10-20% of the mean temperature rise since 1900. Most scientists will say it's even less than that. But that's a valid and well-discussed point of contention, far from settled. This is the first I've ever heard of anyone claiming larger than about 20% -- and even Wikipedia debunks it. That, combined with even a rough eyeballing of the above two plots and a knowledge that there's no 11-year cycle in the temperature data, suggests to me that the solar cycle is NOT the prime mover of climate change.
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2/17/2009, 3:18 am
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Reythia
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Re: Climate Change
quote:
Blitzen wrote:
But London has been hit by the worse snow in 20 years, crops in CALIFORNIA have been wiped out by frost, penguins are cape prellets are turning up at their spring nesting sites nine days later than the did in 1950, and the southern oceans sea ice has increased by 8%.
...I don't know what to say except, "ARGH!"
First off, I don't know where you're getting your ice sheet data, but the Antarctic ice sheet and sea ice is also melting. Here's a non-technical example. (If you want technical, I've got several and can certainly find you dozens.)
"Antarctica's Ice Melting Faster"
The other major satellite mission run by my work is ICESat, which measures (as one might guess from the name), ice. My best friend takes the raw data and makes maps of ice growth and loss in Antarctica and Greenland. He spent months studying the Kamb Ice Stream. He wrote a whole dissertation on the subject. Yes, there are localized regions in both Antarctica and Greenland where ice is accumulating -- as predicted by climate models and as driven by global WARMING, actually.[1] But overall, both mass and altimetric estimates show that the net flow of water is from melting ice out to the oceans and land. Most of the time when someone claims thatthe ice sheet is growing, they just forgot to take post-glacial rebound (recently renamed "global isostatic adjustment") into account. It makes a HUGE difference. Also, it's possible that the article you read was talking about EAST Antarctica (generally higher and drier and thus gaining ice), not west Antarctica (losing mass quickly) or all of Antarctica (losing mass more slowly, since it's a combination of the previous two).
As for the rest of it... Well, I admit to knowing next to nothing about penguin nesting habits, so I'll leave that one alone. On the other hand, there WAS just a similar article about fish migration, which supports the premise of global warming. But I think I'll just back out of the whole animal-based discussion now, since I'd really be WAY out of my league.
The frost in California, however, as well as the generally cold winter weather this past year are not evidence against global warming, though. They're actually one of the reasons why NASA and NSF now prefer us to say "climate change" instead of "global warming". Because the fact is, climate change doesn't make everyplace colder all the time. Instead, since there's a general upset in the balance of things, everything gets more acute. That is, droughts become drier, floods become wetter, winters become colder, and summers become hotter. "Temporal variablity increases" is the scientific way to generalize it. The trick is to look at the mean temperature -- over the whole year and the whole globe -- after smoothing it with a couple-year window, to take the short-term effects out. There's natural variability -- "noise" -- in the signal, so some years temperature will decrease, while in others it will rise. You have to fit a trend to the data in order to say anything meaningful.
If you want more details on what I mean, feel free to find your own plot of global mean temperature, and I'll explain.
[1]Global warming tends to make ice melt accumulate at low elevations and at the edges of ice packs. It doesn't have much of an effect high up, where the temperatures are cooler. However, a secondary effect of all the melting low-elevation ice is more water evaporating into the atmosphere. More water in the atmosphere means more precipitation, some of which falls as increased snow in the high-elevation, interior ice regions.
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2/17/2009, 3:42 am
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Reythia
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Re: Climate Change
quote:
Blitzen wrote:
Henrik Svernsmark (again
qualified) said in the 90s that cosmic rays could affect cloudiness. More cosmic rays, more clouds. The suns magnetic field bats these cosmic rays away, but when the sun becomes lazy, as during the Little Ice Age, more cosmic rays get through and the world cools. With our sun in hyperactive mode right now, the cloud numbers lessen and the world heats up.
Again, the sun is in the exactly OPPOSITE of "hyperactive mode" right now. But I suspect that Svernsmark did his research 5-10 years ago, which would have been mid-solar-cycle, so I'll excuse that. (Realize, though, that when you say things like that which are blatantly wrong, it makes it hard to take the rest of your argument seriously.) Secondly, I poked around on the internet a bit, since I didn't know the current state of scientific affairs when it came to clouds. It was tough to find things (probably since I didn't know the best places to look, on this subject), but I did eventually find two separate opinions. One showed that the number of high-altitude clouds increased over the past decade or so. A whole bunch of others showed that cloud cover at all altitudes either decreased or stayed about the same over the past 50 years. Now, I don't know enough about cosmic rays to know whether they do or don't cause clouds -- it's certainly possible, given how everything is interconnected. But even assuming the solar cycle has a huge impact on cloud-formation, that's not very relevant when the number of clouds hasn't increased! I thoroughly understand the concept of albedo and the impact of clouds on global temperature. But there's just no evidence that cloud cover has changed all that significantly in the last few decades.
However, again, it's entirely possible that some small fraction of the global mean temperature rise might be caused by solar-caused albedo effects. Albedo, however, IS embedded in most climate models. They might use different reflectivities and percentage cloud cover, but the concept is nothing new. From the articles I found online, the percentage cloud cover, at least, is under debate. That's as it should be. No one's denying the fact that clouds (however they're formed) have an effect on climate change. However, unless the cloud cover has changed tremendously in recent years (which I found no evidence for in my admittedly short search), the time-varying effect of albedo could not be the prime mover of climate change.
quote:
And as to why the journals mostly report on global warming caused by greenhouses gases, wouldn't that be because most scientists are looking into greenhouse gases because that is where the money is. That is what grants are given out for...
WRONG. The US federal government, especially under Bush (thank God he's gone), would have LOVED to give money to people who could show climate change either wasn't happening or was naturally-driven. Did you know that a lot of nationally funded folks (a lot of them at NASA) were forbidden to write "global warming" under terms of their contract. Oh, we found a lot of ways around it ("climate change", "mean sea level rise", "global temperature increase", etc), but it was there to make it harder to publish things supporting global warming.
Moreover, remember that the most exciting thing to a scientist is to get his name attached to SOMETHING. The guy who conclusively demonstrated that climate change wasn't occuring would be FAMOUS! Well, within technical circles, at least. He'd definitely at least get a theory named after him. How cool would that be!? So don't think scientists didn't try, especially ten years ago. But one by one, they were forced to conceded -- by the DATA, not the government -- that climate change is happening, and that humans are mostly the cause.
Blitzen, the debate about climate change is NOT over. It's as lively as ever. But it's changed. It's no longer about WHETHER the climate is changing. It's about how much, how fast, and exactly what the effects will be. There are a lot of disagreements and differing positions. The fact that (almost) none of those positions are that climate change isn't happening or that it's caused by natural drivers should say something to you. Scientists aren't, by nature, very good on agreeing. Yet we agree, almost unanimously, on this. That makes it about as "solid" a science as the theory of gravity, for the record.
I also looked up Lindzen in Wikipedia and found this line:
quote:
The film has been criticized for misuse of data and out of date research, for using misleading arguments, and for misrepresenting the position of the IPCC.
I don't know Lindzen personally, nor have I seen his film. I do know, however, that the first two criticisms are usually made with reason. The articles I've read that get tagged with such comments usually ARE mis-using data or using only old data. (I've seen whole treatises written "proving" global warming... by not using any data from the last 20 years. Well, sure, if you take away half the exponential, it's a whole lot less obvious!) So I admit skepticism towards him.
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2/17/2009, 4:12 am
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QS2
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Re: Climate Change
I noticed some of the data you quoted wasn't accurate (I assume your sources embezzled on them or something), for instance ice loss in the Arctic isn't a mere 15% just the summer of 2007 showed additional ice surface area losses of almost 25% I believe (Never mind total losses). Going by volume I believe the losses are even worse and there isn't much multi-year ice left in the Arctic ice fields any more. Which has Lead some to speculate the place might be ice free in summer some time next decade already.
Reythia has already covered sunspots somewhat extensively, though I seem to know one thing she forgot to mention. Namely that the atmospheric effects of increased sunlight to Earth and Heat trapping gasses is somewhat different. If I remember correctly if you add more sunlight to the mix, everything is supposed to warm up a bit. However if you capture heat with for instance CO2, then the lower portion of the atmosphere should heat up and expand, as that is where the heat is captured and the higher area, which we call the stratosphere, should cool down. Which is of course what we've been observing for quite some time now.
As for the grant money, obviously global warming has been politically unwelcome for many decades. Consider how much of a nuisance it must be to the coal industry, the oil industry, the car industry , the air industry. Just to name a few large industries which are severely inconvenienced by the entire matter and would obviously prefer and thus lobby to its non existence. This obviously means thus that global warming is extremely unwelcome politically (Considering how influential so many large industries would be) and typically you'd only expect it to be supported on the merits on the claims made. I've also heard said that the IPCC, which represents the scientist/government viewpoint, typically tends to bias towards underestimating global warming effect, cause some governments try to water down what you could actually safely say from the data. So I would say that no, it isn't really where the grant money should be, it can only possibly be there because some one has an awfully convincing story, that has convinced against the bias in to afford more money to the matter.
PS, People who claim persecution from a science field in general tend to be some what unreliable in my experience.
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2/17/2009, 9:11 am
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Blitzen
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Re: Climate Change
Okay, Reythia, you're misinterpreting one thing. I don't deny climate change is happening. It's effect is obvious. What I'm disputing is the media's reports that all scientists are 100% definately sure that it is caused exclusively by man.
From the scientific books I've read, and reports on the net etc, scientists are saying they are 90% correct that the climate is changing because of Man.
All I'm saying is that until we are 100% convinced that its caused by man and can exclusively prove this, we shouldn't try to solve the "problem."
A recent thing on TV talked of stopping global warming by putting tinfoil on the arctic ice, or mirrors in space. Someone on this board mentioned terraforming earth. But if it is a natural occurence, some kind of long term cycle that is so long term we can't point to it happening before, and we go out and "fix" it we could make everything worse in our ignorance.
We see the same debate with extinction. Oh, extinction is wrong, blah blah blah. No, it is part of evolution. Only forced (man-made) extinction is wrong.
But there are so many conflicting opinions on climate change, how can we know for sure that it is man-made?
And the source I used in my last post was 2 years old. I'm not used to using sources; it never occurred to me to check. My apologies, I will be more careful this time.
Oh, and yes, I meant the east antarctic. Apologies for not being clearer.
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2/17/2009, 11:05 am
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Blitzen
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Re: Climate Change
Timothy F Ball, who has a PHD in Climatology, believes that global warming isn't man-made.
For one thing, water vapour is the most important of the greenhouse gases. Now, yes, it only lasts up there for a few days, but...
quote:
Water vapour will play a huge role in the centuries to come, though. Climate models, backed by satellite measurements, suggest that the amount of water vapour in the upper troposphere (about 5 to 10 kilometres up) will double by the end of this century as temperatures rise.
That was from New Scientist, in 2007.
Also, Tim Ball has said quote:
"Water vapor is effectively ignored in the computer models. Yes, that's right. The climate models used as the basis for the entire global warming argument do not include the effect of clouds."
Another page on wikipedia pointed out that although all computer models are claimed to use the same data and be constrained by the same laws of physics, they come up with different answers. This proves that computer models only act as ways for the people using them to give mathematical credence to their theories.
Then there is the Urban Heat Island effect, the idea that weather stations report amplified heat because they are placed around cities.
In response to my earlier claim that journals wouldn't publish alternative theories
quote:
In 2008, Fergus Brown, Roger A. Pielke and James Annan submitted a paper titled "Is there agreement amongst climate scientists on the IPCC AR4 WG1?"[47] It was rejected for publication by the AGU publication EOS and Nature Precedings. Pielke writes: “From this experience, it is clear that the AGU EOS and Nature Precedings Editors are using their positions to suppress evidence that there is more diversity of views on climate, and the human role in altering climate, than is represented in the narrowly focused 2007 IPCC report.
Pielke is a climatologist, as is Annan.
Further, release of CO2 increased between 1940 and 1970, but temperature went down.
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2/17/2009, 11:48 am
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Re: Climate Change
And Peikle claims local warming, not global warming is the cause of Arctic ice melting.
quote:
However, in terms of relating to the global average lower tropospheric temperature changes, in June 2007 (which is the latest data posted), the global average anomaly is +0.22 after being as high recently as +0.51C in January. Thus, it is regional warming, not “global warming” that appears to be the reason for this melting
As to Antartica
quote:
The Antarctica cooling controversy relates to the question of whether or not current temperature trends in Antarctica contradict or cast doubt on the theory of global warming. Observations unambiguously show the Peninsula to be warming. The trends elsewhere show both warming and cooling but are smaller and dependent on season and the timespan over which the trend is computed
You could get your friend to see if he agrees or disagrees with that, Rey. I would be interested to know.
quote:
Climate models predict that future trends in Antarctica are much smaller than in the Arctic
And people who say that global warming is caused by fossil fuels point out that the sceptical scientists tend to be paid by the oil companies. Well... they have to get their funding from somewhere. Regardless of where the funding comes from, are they really expected to be so unprofessional as o lie about their data?
Reid Bryson, an atmospheric scientist, geologist, and meteorologist, has said
quote:
"All this argument is the temperature going up or not, it’s absurd," Bryson continues. "Of course it’s going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we’re coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we’re putting more carbon dioxide into the air."
and
quote:
If you want to be an eminent scientist you have to have a lot of grad students and a lot of grants. You can't get grants unless you say, 'Oh global warming, yes, yes, carbon dioxide
He's not the only one to say this... Marcel Leroux, a climstologist, Roy Spencer, formerly a senior scientist for climate studies at Nasa, climatolgist John Christy and biogeographer Philip Stott all say the same thing.
So is it any wonder that sceptics turn to the oil companies for cash when they can't get grants?
Still don't think the world governments are pro-greenhouse gases? quote:
As a result of scientific doubts he has expressed regarding global warming, the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control reportedly attempted to remove David Legates from his office of Delaware State Climatologist
And also
quote:
In late 2006, Virginia Governor Tim Kaine (D) reportedly began an investigation of Virginia State Climatologist and global warming skeptic Patrick Michaels.
It seems that anyone who disagrees with anthropomorphic climate change is quashed by the establishment.
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2/17/2009, 12:31 pm
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Reythia
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Re: Climate Change
quote:
Blitzen wrote:
What I'm disputing is the media's reports that all scientists are 100% definately sure that it is caused exclusively by man.
NO. WRONG.
I don't know what more to say than that. I've never heard any scientist actually say that there is no natural variability. That might be what some newspapers report, but it's not what the scientists (or their technical papers) are actually saying.
If you won't accept my judgment, as a scientist in a climate-related field, on what the generally-held scientific position even IS, then I may as well stop commenting on this thread. We can't hold a debate or a discussion when we don't even know each other's premises!
So let me be very blunt and state for the record what the vast, vast majority of real scientists currently working with real climate-related data believe:
1.) The mean global temperature of the Earth has been increasing for at least the last 100 years, and has accelerated greatly in the last 50.
2.) Some of the cause of this is natural variability, caused by a combination of factors including solar activity, ocean circulation effects, the impact of a constantly-changin biosphere, and general interdecadal variability.
3.) However, the majority of the change, especially in the last ~50 years, is driven by man.
4.) As evidence, we cite the fact that never in the history of natural climate changes have we observed climate to change as much and as rapidly as it is today, unless accompanied by a driver of disasterous proportions (ie: an asteroid, massive volcanic eruption, etc).
5.) We cannot change or significantly impact the natural variability cycle. However, we can impact the variability caused by humans.
6.) It would be generally useful to halt the acceleration of climate change, because the effects of such rapid change on today's stable world are difficult to predict and will impact humanity greatly. Those effects which we can predict and understand (increased probability of both floods and droughts, the rising of sea level, the extinction or migration of species) may be beneficial for some local regions, but will cause difficulty and death in most areas of the world.
7.) We scientists are people too, and we don't want the guilt of millions of deaths on our heads, if we don't warn people about what we know is going to happen.
8.) Also, as ordinary people, we love our world and want to share it, like it is, with our children. We don't want them to inherit a difficult-to-solve problem just because we backed away from it. And we know that, if nothing is changed, the problem will only get worse and harder to solve as time goes on.
9.) We scientists don't always agree on the exact numbers we estimate, but that's true in ALL fields of science. Different techniques, data sources, and approximations mean different answers. But we almost all agree with the basics stated above.
10.) We are frustrated with certain groups in the general public and a few outliers within our own ranks who continually stir up trouble. Our experience has been that these folk misuse data, or only tell part of the story. Yet they are given near-equal weight in the media, which angers us. As a parallel, I'll remind you that many people believed (and some still do) that illness is an effect of the soul -- that is, that God makes you sick for being "unclean" in some spiritual way. Today, we know that it is usually bacteria or viruses causing the illness. Imagine, then, how a respected doctor would feel if the media gave equal weighting to the spiritual solution to an illness as to the medical one. That's how we climate scientists feel now. Why doesn't the media do this to the medical field, since there are two positions? We're not sure, but we wish they wouldn't do it to us, either.
11.) What we'd REALLY like is for people (on both "sides" of this issue) to stop repeating things blindly and to actually THINK about the plots, graphs, and papers we've published. Look at the speed and magnitude of the changes we're seeing now and just THINK about what it means. That's all we're asking. That and to be allowed to finish our research, so we can better come to concensus and answer your questions more fully.
--- -- YAR! |
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2/17/2009, 5:10 pm
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Firlefanz
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Re: Climate Change
The basic idea behind human-induced global warming is very simple physics. Put more CO2 into the atmosphere, and it will retain more heat. We've doubled the CO2 content of the atmosphere in the last 200 years. That can be proven, and I think you agree with this. So, it's not really surprising that our planet is heating up.
I also think we need to make a firm distinction between "weather" and "climate". This is something that confuses many people.
Weather is what happens from day to day. Temperatures, rainfall or snow can be measured, same as cloud cover and winds. That's easy. Meteorologists are doing it every day, and I bet you and I are also checking temps every morning.
Climate on the other hand, is the average of weather over a long time. It's not even the average of one year, since you only have one take of each season. To study climate, people have to use the weather measurements from many places and look at them over time. A lot of statistics are involved in this.
This means one thing: You cannot diagnose climate change because of changes in the weather. Climate change *hides* behind those weather data. And that's why this winter's snow in England doesn't mean climate change isn't happening. This winter is weather, not climate. The same goes for a single hot summer. However, we've had plenty of unusually hot summers in Europe recently, and that's a sign something is happening. See what I mean?
Just a little thing I wanted to throw in.
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2/17/2009, 5:12 pm
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Blitzen
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Re: Climate Change
I haven't read your whole post yet, ray, but what I said was quote:
that all scientists are 100% definately sure that it is caused exclusively by man.
From the scientific books I've read, and reports on the net etc, scientists are saying they are 90% correct that the climate is changing because of Man.
And that 90% figure wasn't taken from one source. If you want me to go back and list them all, I will. It came from about 8 different places on the net. I thought 8 randomly picked sites would give enough variation, and they all reported the same thing.
I know we can't be 100%. We're not even 100% sure about evolution. Anyway, I'm going to read more than the first line of text now.
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2/17/2009, 5:17 pm
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On a side note on the 90%, I'm almost sure it's from the IPCC report. However, I believe the scientists wanted to use 99% originally, but got voted down to 90% by the USA and China. At the time both governments had interest in denying the problem (Think of Bushes policies in general, economy over nature) and at the moment China still does of course, wanting to expand it's economy.
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2/17/2009, 5:34 pm
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Reythia
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Re: Climate Change
Firle, an EXCELLENT point. Very, very true.
quote:
Blitzen wrote:
From the scientific books I've read, and reports on the net etc, scientists are saying they are 90% correct that the climate is changing because of Man.
Wait. Do you mean that 90% of scientists believe all the climate change is due to Man's influences? Or that all scientists believe that 90% of climate change is due to Man's influences? I'm confused!
Based on what you said before, I was assuming you meant the former. If you really meant the latter, I apologize. Yes, I think that "all" (okay, almost all) scientists believe that 90% (or something like it) of climate change is due to Man's influences. That could definitely be supported by a lot of sources, technical and otherwise.
quote:
I know we can't be 100%. We're not even 100% sure about evolution.
Of course not. No science (or anything else!) is perfect. If it was, we wouldn't need scientists -- and, really, if we understood and knew everything, wouldn't life be boring?
But while climate change isn't 100% understood, the points I mentioned above are AT LEAST as well-understood as my old friend gravity. We don't understand specifically what causes gravity. There's a roaring scientific debate even about the
theory of gravity (ie: F = GMm/r^2 may not be right, even neglecting relativity!) But we still teach our kids what we know and we still live as if what we know is right. What else can we do?
I treat climate change the same.
--- -- YAR! |
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2/17/2009, 10:02 pm
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Blitzen
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quote:
1.) The mean global temperature of the Earth has been increasing for at least the last 100 years, and has accelerated greatly in the last 50.
Ah, no. I found graphs of my own but don't know how to paste them.
Okay, so the graph showed that the temperature increased towards the end of the 19th century, fell to it's lowest point in 1910, rose until the 30s, fell in the 40s and didn't reach the height of the 30s again until the 1980s. It has continued to increase since then.
Infact, 1974 was so cold that the scientific community was insisting we were facing a new Little Ice Age.
quote:
4.) As evidence, we cite the fact that never in the history of natural climate changes have we observed climate to change as much and as rapidly as it is today, unless accompanied by a driver of disasterous proportions (ie: an asteroid, massive volcanic eruption, etc).
The evidence is the absence of any evidence? Never in the natural history of our sun has it gone supernova, so we can use this as evidence that it will never go supernova... maybe I am oversimplifying things, but that looks like what you are saying.
quote:
It would be generally useful to halt the acceleration of climate change, because the effects of such rapid change on today's stable world are difficult to predict and will impact humanity greatly. Those effects which we can predict and understand (increased probability of both floods and droughts, the rising of sea level, the extinction or migration of species) may be beneficial for some local regions, but will cause difficulty and death in most areas of the world.
This is the bit I really don't buy into. And it isn't science, it is ethics. If people are causing global warming, then yes we should stop.
But if people aren't causing global warming, do we have any right to alter climate change? Yes, the world could alter, yes people could die... but in the grander scheme of things, over the course of centuries or millenies as opposed to mere generations, is there not a chance we might do more damage than good?
quote:
Also, as ordinary people, we love our world and want to share it, like it is, with our children.
It's not OUR world, we just live here. If it is changing shouldn't we just change with it?
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2/18/2009, 1:58 am
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Blitzen
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Hit post there by mistake. Here's the rest...
quote:
10.) We are frustrated with certain groups in the general public and a few outliers within our own ranks who continually stir up trouble. Our experience has been that these folk misuse data, or only tell part of the story. Yet they are given near-equal weight in the media, which angers us. As a parallel, I'll remind you that many people believed (and some still do) that illness is an effect of the soul -- that is, that God makes you sick for being "unclean" in some spiritual way. Today, we know that it is usually bacteria or viruses causing the illness. Imagine, then, how a respected doctor would feel if the media gave equal weighting to the spiritual solution to an illness as to the medical one. That's how we climate scientists feel now. Why doesn't the media do this to the medical field, since there are two positions? We're not sure, but we wish they wouldn't do it to us, either.
The people I'm quoting are climatologists. If medical doctors said God was making people ill they would probably receive media attention. Just like news papers don't report on taxi drivers who think global warming is baloney.
Oh, and as to the sun spot decreasing in the passed two years, funny that that should coincide with this...
quote:
The average temperature on earth has declined over the past two years by about half a degree Celsius - an amount that similar to the temperature increases reported over the past century. This year may be the coldest on record in the past century.
Or this
quote:
All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) reported that during the period of January 2007 to January 2008, global temperatures have dropped significantly.
And sorry for any earlier confusion, but apparently it is not the number of clouds but the types of clouds that are affected by the sun spots.
Prof Niv Shaviv says quote:
"The sun's activity is cyclical. When it's more active, the wind that blows from it is stronger and then fewer cosmic rays reach the earth. Cosmic rays cause ions to be produced in our atmosphere, which are one of the factors required for the creation of the surface upon which clouds form, primarily above the ocean's surface. When there are fewer ions, the clouds that are formed are composed of large drops. Clouds of this type are less white and refract less of the sun's rays outward, and so the heat is preserved and the earth gets warmer."
He goes on to say that the climate of the earth is affected on a scale so vast its kind of hard to measure it (my words there). He believes a new ice age occurs every 145 million years, every time the earth crosses a spiral arm of the milky way. If climate change can be so long term, how could we expect to know anything about it by observing it for a few decades or centuries?
Ah, of course, we measure it in the ice cores...
quote:
Temperature and CO2 concentration in the atmosphere over the past 400 000 years. Over the last 400,000 years the Earth's climate has been unstable, with very significant temperature changes, going from a warm climate to an ice age in as rapidly as a few decades. These rapid changes suggest that climate may be quite sensitive to internal or external climate forcings and feedbacks. This figures have been derived from the Vostok ice core, taken in Antarctica.
Sources J.R. Petit, J. Jouzel. et. al. Climate and atmospheric history of the past 420 000 years from the Vostok ice core in Antarctica, Nature 399 (3June), pp 429-436, 1999
Firle wrote quote:
The basic idea behind human-induced global warming is very simple physics. Put more CO2 into the atmosphere, and it will retain more heat.
but Jan Vries a Canadian geologist who made geochemical measurements to record earth's temperature over the passed 550 million years discovered no relationship between CO2 levels and temperature.
quote:
For example, 450 million years ago, it was much colder than it is today, but the amount of carbon dioxide was much, much higher.
Of course it was hard to get such a work published. He was told by the editors of journals that he submitted to that he was wrong, because EVERYONE knows CO2 causes the earth to heat up.
And, of course, there are places in the world where the temperatures rise, and then the CO2 levels rise afterwards.
And at the end of the day, it's in the scientific communities best interests to keep saying global warming is man-made, and to squash any opposition. Why?
quote:
In recent years, the amount of federal funds that the United States is spending on climate research has climbed to nearly $2 billion. You have to understand how many people are dependent on this money. They can't just come one day and say, 'Oops, we made a mistake. You paid all that money for nothing. This global warming thing really isn't that important.'
As to the fossil fuel industries, they are dying anyway. We may already have reached peak oil. If we have, resource wars could be as close as a mere two decades away. But activists have been trying to turn people away from the fossil fuels for years. The "they're running out" idea never seemed to cut it. But, oh look, "they're causing global warming" just might.
And yes, the IPCC report was mentioned.
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2/18/2009, 2:39 am
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Reythia
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Alright, Blitzen, I give in. The whole "global warming" thing is a vast conspiracy made up by scientists like me who have nothing better to do with our time and the piddly salaries we are paid than to make up things in order to cause everyone else grief. Obviously, all the plots I've made using my own data are either lies or unfortunate misunderstandings on my part. Ditto with the work that my boss, friends, and colleagues have done for the past 30 years. Those few scientists and engineers who won't accept this conspiracy are professionally ostracized for no reason whatsoever but that they're giving away the Big Secret. The Earth isn't being affected in any way by anything that we humans are doing, so we should really go on however we want without worrying about how things are going to be tomorrow.
That's more or less what you're saying, isn't it?
I'm not going to argue details with you anymore. It's clear that you've made up your mind, and so have I -- at least until opposing credible data presents itself. While I'm willing to believe that many of the things you've posted are part of the natural variability of the Earth's climate, nothing you've shown demonstrates that that variability is as large as the man-made variability. You might note that, except for the temperature profile that you can't find the citation for, I haven't actually disagreed with anything you've said. I just weight it differently. If you think that the scientific community hasn't looked into all these things and included most of them in their models and theories, you're wrong. On the other hand, is there ANY of my data that you accept at all?
In any case, if you won't believe my data and I won't believe the full extent of yours, I see no point in continuing the debate. Moreover, I'm somewhat insulted that you think that I, personally, am part of some giant scientific conspiracy (since that really IS what you're saying, given my profession, you know).
But mostly I'm just tired. I don't know what to say to people who don't want to listen to thousands of people's professional conclusions and don't want to work the raw data and the full, complex logic behind the theories. It's like arguing evolution with a biblical fundamentalist: he can always simply claim your information is wrong, and that's that. And I know you're doing the same, since TWICE in your last two posts you've said things that clearly demonstrate you don't understand even the basic difference between short-term weather and long-term climate. Put simply, you don't understand the topic. That means we don't even speak the same language on this issue, so I'm just going to stop after this. Maybe Firle and QS can explain better, if they'd care to try. I'm just... tired. You wonder why so many scientists don't speak out about climate change? This is why.
To end, then, I'll comment on one last thing you said:
quote:
Never in the natural history of our sun has it gone supernova, so we can use this as evidence that it will never go supernova... maybe I am oversimplifying things, but that looks like what you are saying.
And I say, no. That would be absurd, since:
1 -- THEORY.) We have a pretty good theoretical idea of what would cause a supernova (based on other stars and just plain physics).
2 -- OBSERVATION.) All observational evidence suggests that none of those predicted things are happening to our sun now.
Because of this combination of theory and observation, I'm not going to worry too much about the sun exploding now!
On the other hand, for climate change:
1 -- THEORY.) Despite what you seem to believe, we have a pretty good idea of both natural and non-natural things which would cause a planet to heat up (take a look at Venus and Mars for comparison), which gives us a decent -- but incomplete and imperfect -- theoretical explanation for broad-scale climate change.
2 -- OBSERVATION.) We have a ton of observational evidence of fair to excellent quality (depending on its age), which supports (within error limits) the hypothesis that the climate is changing due largely (but certainly not entirely) to Man's activities. We also know what sort of effects large shifts in climate have on plants, animals, and people (from the fossil record and the corresponding climate profile), and it's not pretty.
Because of this combination of theory and observation, I think it's a good idea to worry about climate change. The evidence for climate change is absolutely the opposite of that for your supernova example. I'd argue that, just as it would be absurd for us to worry about an immenent supernova, it is absurd for us NOT to worry about global climate change.
There's a chance we could be wrong -- and DEFINITELY a good chance we could get the speed or magnitude wrong, no scientist worth his salt denies that! -- but the probability of us all being totally wrong is very low, and the consequences of taking no action are cruel and difficult to undo.
When your child is playing near the stove, you pull him away before he can burn his hand. There's a small chance that he could remain there forever without anything bad happening, but still, you don't wait and see if he touches the hot element before you do something about it. When the probability of danger is high, it's wise to head off the problem before it starts -- or in the case of climate change, before it gets worse.
But speaking of global conspiracies, I saw Elvis talking to an alien yesterday about how we never walked on the moon, and...
--- -- YAR! |
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2/18/2009, 3:40 am
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Blitzen
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Re: Climate Change
quote:
The whole "global warming" thing is a vast conspiracy made up by scientists like me who have nothing better to do with our time and the piddly salaries we are paid than to make up things in order to cause everyone else grief.
I've never denied global warming is happening. I'm just wondering if it is man-made, and if it is not man-made than might we make things worse by trying to fix it?
quote:
Obviously, all the plots I've made using my own data are either lies or unfortunate misunderstandings on my part. Ditto with the work that my boss, friends, and colleagues have done for the past 30 years.
I thought you worked on a communication satellite, but I don't know why I thought that. I'm not saying the work is lies but you are not an expert in climate change and global warming. No one is. You may well be the foremost expert in your area of expertise but climate change is a vast area and no one knows every part of it.
Computer models and graphs of global warming didn't predict the temperature going down, as it currently is. It only predicted an upwards rise... sometimes people see what they expect to see. Perhaps you will say I expect to see global warming is not man-made. I like to think I am more open-minded than that. If it was exclusively proved it was man-made, I would back your theories all the way. On the other hand, if startling new evidence came to light in the next few months or years thar proved you were wrong, without a shadow of a doubt, could you and the rest of the scientific community accept that, and would the governments that have been advised that the climate change is man-made accept the scientific communities shrug and muttered, "gee, we were wrong... but we never said we were 100% sure so you can't really blame us"?
Are you, by saying it is lies or wrong, stating that you could not be mistaken? On miscalculation in any piece of the data you use, by you or anyone else, or one omission, would render the whole thing invalid, would it not? Did you collect, check and double check every single piece of data you use yourself? I doubt it - scientists always build on the works of their predecessors, otherwise they would constantly be re-inventing the wheel.
One mistake, by anyone at any point through the process, would render the whole thing invalid? Are you telling me you know every scientist in the world whose work you have referenced has never made a mistake?
quote:
Those few scientists and engineers who won't accept this conspiracy are professionally ostracized for no reason whatsoever but that they're giving away the Big Secret.
I never said it was a conspiracy. I don't believe it is. But the fact is that scientists who do try to show otherwise, even someone like Niv Shaviv who believed CO2 caused global warming, and wasn't investigating climate change at all, but stumbled upon a climate change discovery that changed his entire way of thinking, has been told by other scientists that he should "just go along with the CO2 story because otherwise the green charities will go out of business." He donated 1000 euros to plant trees. He believes people should stop using fossil fuels for several reasons including pollution and the fact they are running out. All he denies is that they cause global warming.
quote:
The Earth isn't being affected in any way by anything that we humans are doing, so we should really go on however we want without worrying about how things are going to be tomorrow.
No, that is not what I am saying. Pollution is a problem. Deforestation is a massive problem. Peak oil is a problem. Peak coal is a problem. Unbiodegradable waste is a problem. Dwindling fishing stocks is a problem. These are all things we know we are causing, and we can work towards fixing.
I hate the way we are destroying the environment. I recycle, lots. I cycle to work. More than anything else, I try to instill in my kids a sense that the earth is precious and its resources must not be squandered. Through our children we will save or destroy our planet.
I just don't agree that we should try to "fix" something that might not be broken, thatmight just be part of a natural cycle.
I don't think you, or anyone else, is part of a conspiracy. But I think that individuals and companies maybe spinning things slightly to one side or the other to get their points across. No human being doesn't have their own agenda. We are all biased.
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2/18/2009, 11:30 am
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David Meadows
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Re: Climate Change
quote:
Blitzen wrote:
No, that is not what I am saying. Pollution is a problem. Deforestation is a massive problem. Peak oil is a problem. Peak coal is a problem. Unbiodegradable waste is a problem. Dwindling fishing stocks is a problem. These are all things we know we are causing, and we can work towards fixing.
While I disagree with Blitzen on global warming, I can see -- and agree with -- what he is getting at here. The Earth has a huge number of problems that are demonstrably man made. Yet such is the huge hype surrounding global warming (ignore whether it's true or not) that I feel other issues are being frozen out.
Try getting an old style tungsten filament light bulb in the UK. It's almost impossible, because the government has decided we all need to use low energy bulbs to reduce our carbon emissions. Yay!
Nobody mentions what they put in low energy light bulbs, or how toxic it is, or how many of them are going into landfills. (I'm not even going to mention how many of these crappy-quality bulbs I need in my house to give me a light level somewhere near that of a tungsten bulb!)
That's just one random example. I could come up with many more, and I'll bet Blitzen could too.
The point is, global warming hysteria is blinding us to other real problems and even causing new problems that may be as important or even more important.
Last edited by David Meadows, 2/18/2009, 12:19 pm
---
And all the whores and politicians will look up and shout "save us!"...
...and I'll look down and whisper "no."
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2/18/2009, 12:17 pm
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Re: Climate Change
This is getting a bit confused like this, if no one minds I would like to concentrate the issue a bit on one subpart of the problem. That way we can finally fully and properly answer that one question, instead of getting lost in the chaos of a dozen different separate issues and no real understanding on any of them forming.
As such for this thread I suspect the most important subsection would be CO2 and wether it can cause warming and the answer to this was actually already known in the 19th century.This article talks about it a bit and if you look at the second half of the first paragraph, you'll notice the principle discovers and people to quantify it are 19th century people and the rest of the article just shows how it is basic physics. (I'm to lazy to quote that all.  )
What this means is, is that there is really no real question on if CO2 can cause warming, because it can and just to be entirely sure we have a few other planets to look at which very neatly show the calculations to be roughly accurate. (You always have interfering factors that complicate matters after all, but things fall within reasonable error margins)
So CO2 being a greenhouse gas was discovered ages before we ever worried about anything like global warming and tests over time have really shown anything wrong with this very basic piece of physics.
Now I bet the first thing you think of is, if it's so unarguably a greenhouse gas, then why do past events not show CO2 as rising first. And there is really a very simple answer to that, namely it isn't typically CO2 that starts a climate change. More oftenly it is some other factor, like a change in the shape of the Earth orbit or the movement of continents or so many other factors. Which means in such cases CO2 follows after and is a cause of helping to cause the climate to stabilize at a new point instead. There is really nothing controversial about that at all, I got it in my lessons on large climate transitions in the geological history.
However, there is a trick to this, what if somehow for some unusual reason CO2 would start rising first? It is a global greenhouse gas after all, as basic physics dictates it must be and observations of other worlds confirms it is. Taking these basic factors in to account, it then must get warmer, no question, however, by how much? I mean, it isn't the most powerful greenhouse gas and it isn't the one with the most overall effect either. So how much could it really change the overall planetary temperature really? And also, might we have changed the distribution of other greenhouse gasses?
To the second question the answer is yes and in general we've been adding more to the atmosphere of them, easy example being methane which has increased quite a bit in more modern times.
To get an idea for the first question, you'd have to work out how much warming CO2 causes on Earth at current. Which turns out to be somewhat non trivial, because the greenhouse gasses can interact with each other and for instance magnify effects. So depending on other greenhouse gasses and some uncertainties in the exact strength of CO2 effects, it is estimated to be in the 9-26 percentage range. (You can get more precise numbers if you know the atmospheric composition though, which we do, but I'm being a tad to lazy to try and find it after such a long post) However there is a graph which shows the error ranges and amounts of human caused warming effects more precisely here, as you can see it covers quite a bit of them, even a few things that counteract warming effects are listed there as well as the overall effect. Water vapor in general is not mentioned, because it isn't a human made effect, unlike water vapor in the stratosphere, which is added by us flying jets around up there. Also the rest of the water vapor tends to be a fairly constant figure, due to the fairly stable cloud cover as you yourself have mentioned in a previous post and that the amount of sunlight reaching Earth due to this is constant to within a tenth or a percent roughly I think, it is in any case not a very large shift. Which means overall water vapor levels also tend to barely budge. (So you can pretty much deal with it as a constant)
Now taking those factors in to account, if I remember correctly it turns out they are insufficient to explain all the warming observed by a rather large margin, I think they are good for about a third of it all if I remember correctly previous articles on this matter (If we take all the greenhouse gasses in to account that is, though as the graph shows, CO2 is a very large fraction of them) ,Reythia might know this fraction to considerably more precise values then I do though. The rest of the warming is due to things like feedback loops in the climate and changes in solar activity, etc etc etc. I'm not getting in to them here because we are only talking about the CO2 and in passing other greenhouse gasses.
And we in fact can even prove that the greenhouse gasses are responsible for that fraction of warming, as I once mentioned in a previous post. This is because depending on the source of warming, which parts of the atmosphere will warm and how vary. For instance CO2 tends to cause troposphere warming and stratosphere cooling, which has most definitely been observed for a long time now. I believe there might be yet more effects, but I'm not familiar with them, atmospheric sciences not being my study area really.
So if you have any comments on this particular subsection, I'd be interested to hear about it. I think I've covered all the logical points of this part atleast..., but I might have missed something... 
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2/18/2009, 1:34 pm
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Blitzen
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Re: Climate Change
Okay, what you say all sounds feasible. As equally feasible as what the opposition says.
There is a graph here that shows temp and CO2 levels for millions of years. Quite often the C02 seems to rise first, and fall last.
For instance, 400 000 years ago CO2 levels were a lot higher than temperature. 350 000 years ago they had both fallen, but then CO2 shot up, followed by temperature. 300 000 years ago CO2 levels were still pretty high whilst the temp was falling. You'll be able to see it for yourself.
So...
1) If CO2 causes temprature to rise, and CO2 levels went up back then, what caused it? I mean, some of those temperatures look like ice ages.
2) If some natural occurence, such as the clathrate gun hypothesis, has been responsible in the passed (I know that's for the sudden release of methane from the permafrost, but I'm not sure what increased the CO2) do we know that this isn't occuring today?
quote:
Now I bet the first thing you think of is, if it's so unarguably a greenhouse gas, then why do past events not show CO2 as rising first. And there is really a very simple answer to that, namely it isn't typically CO2 that starts a climate change.
The above graph, which shows the measurements of CO2 in the ice core in Antartica, shows CO2 rising before temperature. Is there any chance CO2 might be a side effect of some unknown thing forcing climate change?
And last thing for now, what do you make of this? quote:
(1) Measurements prove that the pre-industrial damp blanket trapped 94.7% of all the infrared radiation as it escaped into space leaving a mere 5.3% to warm the great interstellar sink directly. All this thanks to the fact that the spectral escape window was partially blocked by what we now call the greenhouse gases that kept the Earth warm.
(2) If we took no notice of the IPCC’s health warnings and burned all the known reserves of natural gas, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would rise to 454 ppmv.
(3) Now throw caution to the wind and burn all the oil reserves we know about and the CO2 concentration would go up to 489 ppmv. Still nowhere near the dreaded doubling figure of those “halcyon” pre industrial days.
(4) So lets pull out all the stops and burn at least one third of coal reserves in all its forms. With an awful lot of mining we would make the now much-feared figure of 570 ppmv. A point, at which IPCC’s super computer models warn that the sky might soon come falling down.
Some 600 million tonnes of extra potential plant fertilizer and about 1 billion tonnes of extra irrigation water hanging about up there, continuing to help balance the biosphere while increasing the atmospheric pressure by a mere 0.3 millibars.
The atmospheric blanket now traps 95.6% of the infrared radiation (a mere increase of 0.9% over those pre-industrial days) and the potential absorption by the combination of water vapour and CO2 is almost complete thanks to the logarithmic relationship between concentration and radiance/absorption.
(5) Simple arithmetic also proves that at this moment of time in the IPCC’s countdown to catastrophe the annual increase of CO2 pouring into the atmosphere is a mere 3% of the natural turn over of this very important gas in the atmosphere. Thus leaving little doubt that there is massive buffering capacity in the system.
(6) Simple mathematics proves that all the much “feared” doubling of the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere actually accomplishes is a slight narrowing of the infrared ‘window’ through which radiation escapes to space.
(7) Checking the spectra also shows there is a window in that infrared escape route that can never be closed because there are no natural gases with the right spectral bands. If there were the temperature might then go up by around 5 degrees Celsius.
(8) Measurements also show that the infrared absorption spectra of all the greenhouse gases overlap to a certain extent, in consequence their cumulative effect can never be realized. A cumulative effect that is already nearing saturation when no further heat will be trapped, thanks to the fact that the relationship between the concentration of any of the green house gases and radiance/absorption is logarithmic.
(9) Despite all this incontrovertible evidence that the increase of the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a benign and almost spent force, the global warmers beg to differ. Their conclusions drawn from a plethora of complex computer models leads them to warn the World that an increase in trapped radiation of only 0.9% might trigger a catastrophic course of events. A chain reaction that could be responsible for a runaway enhancement of global warming that could pose a threat too much more than our way of life. To give their argument teeth they appear to put all their eggs into the basket of what they call radiative forcing, building into their models only positive feedbacks related to water vapour that trap more heat.
(10) Newton’s Law of cooling perhaps drops the largest apple on the head of both the IPCC and the Kyoto Protocol arguments of a melt down scenario. In the simplest of terms it proves that if the non-radiative properties of water, (evaporation, albedo, mass transfer etc.,) were not already at work at the earth/ atmosphere interface the Earth’s surface would be some 13°C warmer. So again there is a lot of negative feedback in the system.
The global warmers can hypothesise as much as they like about the cause and effect of trapping the last few percent of the available infrared radiance by the greenhouse gasses but without admitting that there is another source of heat at play in the system their scare mongering is no more than hot air.
I'd be interested in what you think. I'm not sure I fully understand that passage.
Last edited by Blitzen, 2/19/2009, 10:19 am
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2/18/2009, 7:39 pm
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Blitzen
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Re: Climate Change
David, this one is for you, and it is terrifying.
If low energy bulbs are even slightly dangerous, the public should know.
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2/18/2009, 10:43 pm
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David Meadows
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Re: Climate Change
quote:
Blitzen wrote:
David, this one is for you, and it is terrifying.
If low energy bulbs are even slightly dangerous, the public should know.
Yes I've see that before (not that particular report), which I why I chose the example. We're stocking our landfills (therefore rivers, fields, etc.) with heavy metals. Brilliant idea 
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2/19/2009, 12:28 pm
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Loud G
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Re: Climate Change
This is why a global warming debate always leaves a bad taste in my mouth. We seem so worried about the carbon footprint that we seem to forget that lots of other environmental idiocies are being committed too.
I definitely think whe should stop burning carbon material to make energy, but we should also stop deforestation, prevent acid rain, and a host of other things that fall to the wayside.
Stricter waste management and emissions laws would cover not only carbon output but any other chemical being pumped into the ground/atmosphere.
There is far too much emphasis on this one aspect of the environment. Like Meadows' example, we let ourself get too issue driven and in our path to fix one thing, we break other things.
We need to be more environmentally conscious all around, not just in one area.
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2/19/2009, 2:01 pm
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QS2
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Re: Climate Change
The bulbs aren't anywhere as dangerous as thought you know, there contributions to heavy metals is utterly insignificant compared to what say a coal plant does and that assumes you don't for instance recycle them, something we are certainly capable of.
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2/19/2009, 2:11 pm
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Blitzen
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Re: Climate Change
Yes, but if you smash one you have to vacate the room for fifteen minutes, do not clean it with a hoover, and take it to the council for disposal. And it does NOT mention this on the packing, only on websites like the BBC I linked to.
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2/19/2009, 2:31 pm
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QS2
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Re: Climate Change
And now lets see what I can say about the greenhouse gas debate.
That graph isn't all to great (raw data can be more helpful at times to figure out relationships) and while the CO2 and temp aren't always in sync, they oftenly do tend to be, as you can see in it. Some divergences at times happen and there are any number of possible reasons for that, but they are not related to CO2 warming effect, which is simple basic physics and is easily observable in lab tests and reality. What this means is, is that times of divergence usually are due to other climate factors which can at times be as significant or greater then the CO2 changes you see there. However, there we are concentrating on CO2 right now, I will not get in to that at the moment, we can discuss those a bit later on, once we've cleared up CO2.
For your questions, there are some sources of CO2 possible, one you actually mentioned yourself I believe awhile ago, the methane clathrates. While they in principle start with releasing CH4 (Methane), Methane is non stable in an oxygen atmosphere and will I believe with a halving time of 20 years change to CO2, which means in your ice records a massive methane release will show up as a CO2 spike. Other ways is decomposition of plant life, volcanic eruptions in for instance lime stone I believe can also cause it, peat fields defrosting and decomposing, etc etc etc. There are plenty of carbon sources really and many of them aren't extremely stable if you change their circumstances enough.
As for some of these sources happening right now? Well yes, some are happening right now, some of the methane clathrate fields have destabilised as the permafrost above them has melted and have started gradual releases (Thankfully) as well as permafrosted areas in Siberia and Canada, with frozen carbon reserves like peat bogs etc etc, that have started decomposing. But this is getting a bit away from the narrowed focus again.
So as for CO2 being a side effect of other things forcing climate, most definitely and for sure. In fact, I was saying it tends to be the side effect which reinforces the climate change, instead of the cause. So many past events have to do with other things, like orbital changes. In fact the ice age cycle are mapped to orbital periods of Earth, though we have to note the changes are only something like a tenth of a percent I believe 0.1% or so thus. Once again, won't mention for now how such minor changes might do something though. Back to CO2... actually I'm letting myself be dragged away more from it then I should right now... 
Soo..... for list of points you brought up, points 2,3,4 are inaccurate and don't match conservative predictions from the oil, coal industry.. The reason for that is that reserves are typically only the most proven and exploitable of them, obviously over time this changes. Which then leads to 'new' reserves becoming accessible etc etc etc. Total available carbon reserves are much greater then those tiny figures.
Point 1 is irrelevant, so what if there are a lot of greenhouse gasses already? I'm not sure at all what the point of that is at all actually, unless they are trying to prove that greenhouse gasses are real and work and we already have a lot of them throughout the planets history...
Point 5 is absolutely true, however it is also very disingenuous and tries to distract from what that turnover actually is. Namely nearly the entire turnover they are talking about pretty much consists of CO2 dissolving in to water, the water of course already having CO2 as well, then releases CO2 to the atmosphere again. Obviously we have a lot of water surfaces with all our oceans, so this happens a lot. Of course, this does absolutely nothing to reduce CO2 at all either, it's just balancing the amount of CO2 between the atmosphere and water after all. (In graphs depicting this, the arrows going in to the oceans and back out are thus of near the exact same size, release is actually slightly lower, cause we are dumping our CO2 in the atmosphere first and as CO2 concentration rises there, some small amount of CO2 is forced in to the oceans permanently)
Point 6 talks about a slight narrowing of the window, as if this makes it unimportant. I'm not sure what their point is, but I would note that as our planet typical loses heat via Infrared, the section we might want to look at is how small the hole really is, so for instance a drop from 4 to 3 percent, means that 25% less infrared can escape and will thus remain that much longer here on Earth to heat stuff up.
Point 7 and 8 is kind of irrelevant as no one claimed that CO2 would do most of the heating, as I said before it's only a fraction of the heating cycle. However it is the one that is forcing the start of the heat increase in this case, so that's why I started with it first, just to make clear what its role in the entire matter is. (The reason to reduce CO2 is thus to remove this initiating heating factor before the others kick in)
Point 9,10 are clearly a straw man argument, claiming something which isn't actually the case. Which is that they only look at positive reinforcements, for instance the graph I showed some posts back also showed negative effects. In fact the negative facts are documented and checked for as properly as the positive ones and the models of course incorporate them as well, also this isn't about CO2 so I'm ignoring it further for now.
Fixed a few grammar problems.
Last edited by Firlefanz, 2/19/2009, 3:19 pm
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2/19/2009, 3:01 pm
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