Fact-Man wrote:Coito ergo sum wrote:
But you offered the comment in the context of a discussion about GW and climate change and hence I took it that way. Not too surprising, eh?
And, rightly so, because it falls into the same category - constant overhyping of the issue in order to "raise awareness" a la Al Gore.
That’s nonsense. We’re talking about
climate science, which is conducted rigorously and with great regard for error.
In 1989 we (the world) created a climate science body to look after and monitor the climate for us and to report to us what the science is saying, which they do every five years. This is a science agency, the IPCC, some 2,500 scientists woking gratis collecting, accumulating and integrating some 10,000 scientific papers (or books), then evaluating them and figururing out what their data are showing and describing that in language we can understand.
AR4, published in Spring 07, is 3,000 pages of reporting on our climate, all of which are freely available on the web in convenient PDF files. It is the product if five years of analyzing, testing, refining, correlating, comparing, structuring, normalizing and otherwise dealing with and coming to understand mountains of climate data published in 10,000 peer reviewed papers.
That can’t be done in an undisciplined manner, garbage in, garbage out. It must be disciplined and it is indeed so, as we would expect to find in any scientific undertaking. Discipline is a functioning attribute of working with the scientific method. It keeps science sane and great and ordered, which allows things that we build to work as intended, airplanes fly for example, Apollo went to the moon.
Climate scientists who are active in climate science are of this discipline, make no mistake. It is serious business. The entire world can read their reporting and comment thereon, and it does. You too can read it for youself. Just don’t expect to find any wild assertions or doomsday pronouncements therein, you won’t find them, they are not there.
And that’s the voice of climate science. Thewre is no other voice that speaks for the science,
none.
Everything else is like static on the radio, noise generated by a host of competing interests, the fossil fuel industry’s propaganda campaign, the auto industry’s resistance, political machinations, they’re all in that mix. What you hear from them isn’t the science, nor even about the science, it's propaganda, it's spin, it's poor reporting.
If some blogger goes bonkers and writes a doomsday scenario off his interpretation of what he’s heard (he probably doesn’t read much) that’s
him talking, not climate science. If some scientist, whom Exxon is paying $200K a year to speak for them, gets up and says “Al Gore is an alarmist and a hype artist,” that’s Exxon speaking, not the scientist and certainly not the science.
It is necessary to distinguish the meaningless from the meaningful. The only words that have any real play in this thing are the one’s the scientists write, most of all else is meaningless and irrelevant … to the central issue.
Thus we should not equate any scientific prognostication published by the IPCC to the ranting of environmental doomsdays expressed in times past. The former is in a completely different league. It is organized. It is a Manhattan project. With 2,500 scientists from more than 100 countries, the IPCC’s process almost assures reasonableness and a scientifically appropriate treatment of the facts and evidence. The world can’t do any better than that. The IPCC is mission oriented, the mission is dedication to climate science.
Coito ergo sum wrote:Fact-Man wrote:
Most of the claims to which you refer weren’t made by scientists or were made by men who thought they were scientists or who wished to be. With the media paying a role by blowing their prognostications out of all proportion, e.g. the Ice Age scare in the 1970’s, which had zero science behind it, was mainly a hype job by the media.
Of course, and much of what general global warming proponents propagate is what is described in the media - overhyped, out of context claims that bear little resemblance to the actual science. There's the engineer who builds something, and then there's the salesmen.
This is not exactly the truth of it.
Distinguish between the science and the rhetoric spewed by the media, but watch what’s expressed in the media a bit more closely, because it is far and away biased toward the hoax idea than any reality. I told you that Exxon had succeeded very well in confusing the nation, which includes the media.
There has not been an army of “proponents” of GW; Gore stands out because he made a movie and won a Nobel (half of which went to the IPCC), but the Al Gore’s are few and far between in media coverage of the issue. And over the past six months this has greatly intensified by climategate, a huge ruckus stirred up by a criminal attack in e:mail servers at East Anglia University’s Climate Reserch Center, a
criminal attack.
Did I say something about hardballl?
Coito ergo sum wrote: Fact-Man wrote:
Today’s climate scientists are a much more reserved, mature, and disciplined group of people who aren’t given to wild claims or predictions.
You wouldn't know that from the number of things, like the hockey stick graph, and the email scandal, that appear to be exaggerated.
Don’t let the media fool you, and think about it for a moment yourself. The Hockey stick issue was put to bed seven or eight years ago, all of the world’s leading scientific institutions accept the hockey stick as published and say so publicly.
Hand’s criticism are a dollar short and a day late and too weak to make a difference.
The “email scandal” has already been investigated by the Royal Society for the veracity, honesty, integrity, and scientific validity of what was discussed in them
... and found to be clean on that score, nothing was deemed to be unethical and nothing was revealed that would put the theory of AGW at risk or bring it into question.
Nothing!
The colloquial nature of the e:mails stems from them involving private conversations never intended to be released to the pubic, more than a decade in the past. They're like whjat we call barracks talk in the army. The thief who stole these e:mails spent a good deal of time and effort scouring through them to find what he thought would be the most damaging and incriminating, which turned out to be some 2,500 out of fifteen or 20,000 that were stolen, building in a bias in the whole body of work by releasing only 2,500 with the best potential for supporting calls of unethical conduct.
Hardball.
The media went for it hook, line and sinker because it intensified the conflict and the media thrives on conflict. The more conflict the better as far as the media’s concerned. The denialosphere went into a frenzy. But it all died down pretty quickly after the investigative reports were published recently.
The criminal investigation of the hack continues.
Now compare that to the (6 * 2,500 * 2K hours) or 30,000 man-years of scientific research carried out by IPCC over the same time frame and see that the email “scandal” and the hockey stick aren’t where the real action is, either in terms of value or in scale or in word count. There may have been 3,000 man-years of effort expended on the e:mail scandal, a pittance compared to the 30,000 man-years of research that was conducted during the same period.
That’s where the real action is. That’s the ball we should have our eyes on.
The science grinds away, the rhetoric comes and goes, so much static on the radio. Never let a propagandist trick you into listening to him.
Coito ergo sum wrote:Fact-Man wrote:
This is illustrated by more recent discussions involving the notion that the IPCC may have been too conservative in its predictions, which does now appear to be the case.
I'll wait for the data on that.
We all will. The next AR is slated to be published in 2013, that’s when we’ll learn something about where IPCC thinks it has been going and whether they’ll invoke any fundamental revisions to the scenario that have envisioned.
Fact-Man wrote:Coito ergo sum wrote:
The AVERAGE goes up and down long term over long periods of time, but there are spikes and valleys above and below the trending mean. That means that one year or decade can be cooler or warmer than another by a lot. But the average temperature trends more slowly.
Spikes and valleys rarely exceed swings of more than 1.5 degree C year-over.
Coito ergo sum wrote:But, they sometimes do.
Rarely. Not frequently enough to make much of a difference. Read the damned paper.
Coito ergo sum wrote:
It's just like how we are told we can't judge declining temperatures based on relatively short periods of time. By the same token, one can't judge rising temperatures based on relatively short periods of time.
There’s a lot more to it than this. Climate is defined as the average of what occurs over the proceeding three decades, 30 years. It was defined that way by the British Meteorological Society in 1865 and is considered standard and used as such.
That’s the basis of the idea that we can’t see a decline or an increase in the longer-term temperature trend in any given year, it takes 30 years for the trend to become visible in the data … if you’re talking about climate change, which is what we’re talking about. It’s basically a technical consideration. If you read the Hansen paper I referred you to you’ll see that we can and do indeed know the temp right now and on any given day and we can rank years by the hottest of them recorded, which has been done. But we can’t deal with the longer-term trend until we get close to the 30-year span. If it’s 2C warmer today or this year than it was 30 years ago, we can say the long-term trend is rising, and only then. In the decade of 2000-2010, we measured eight of the hottest years ever recorded, and 1998 was a record setter too. What does that tell us about the trend?
It’s going up and going up fast.
Coito ergo sum wrote:Fact Man wrote:
See in "Current GISS Global Surface Temperature Analysis" by J. Hansen, R. Ruedy, M. Sato, and K. Lo, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, New York, USA, available for download as a PDF from:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/paper ... ft0319.pdf
This is an interesting paper because it reviews and illustrates the datasets, methods, and procedures employed to measure global temperature. Which is a very complex beast.
And, up until VERY recently, an extremely inaccurate beast.
I figured you’d not read the paper.
“extremely inaccurate” meaning what? You don’t award a 95% probability to phenomena that you think are “extremely inaccurate.” You only award such a high degree of probability when you are ultra-confident that your data is rock solid. That’s how science works, that’s how science does it.
It is true that we do not yet have super resolution of the temp trend, but our resolution gets better each passing year and so far that work hasn’t revealed that we’re on the wrong path, which means it very likely won’t ever show that. We have become simply too good at it and work too hard at it to be fooled or lulled into thinking we’re right when we’re actually dead wrong. We’re right and we know why we’re right and we have a good handle on magnitudes.
The actual extent of C02 forcing remains a debatable issue, as I described in an earlier post. But all-in-all, we have a very good understanding of the climate and where it’s headed. Better resolution always helps. We need to deploy many more sensors in the oceans for example and across Antarctica to gain in resolution, but those things cost money, sometimes lots of money, so they are hard to come by.
And of course there are other evidences of a warming planet, acidification of the oceans, melting of the cryosphere, changes in the intensity of weather events, geographical distribution of storm activity, amounts of precipitation, and so on.
All these data tend to corroborate one another and help maintain the temp trend line within reasonably accurate boundaries. The odds against IPCC’s projections being off by any significant margin are long indeed.
Coito ergo sum wrote: Fact-Man wrote:
What's crucial about climate change today is the rapidity with which it is occurring, as much as the absolute increases in temperature we're likely to see and have in fact already seen. More than a seventh of the 7C rise that ended the last Ice Age has occurred just since 1900, and IPCC's projections show us hitting somewhere between a 2C and a 6C or 7C rise rise by the year 2100. The pace of that change is at rocket speed compared to what happened several thousand years ago to end the last Ice Age.
So regardless of the degree of exaggeration in Mann's hockey stick graph, we are facing a wholly unprecedented rate of increase in earth's MAT, who's absolute number is literally gargantuan in scale, albeit it's expressed in digits that we normally associate with small changes, that is, between 2 and 7C degrees.
Then why would someone exaggerate the hockey stick graph?
A denier or any Mann detractor might exaggerate it to make it appear to be wrong. [/quote]
No, the hockey stick graph was, apparently, shown to be based on improper methodology, etc., according to the article, and was wrong in the sense of exaggerating the upswing.[/quote]
That’s exactly what I said, “make it appear to be wrong” = make ot appear to be exaggerated.”
As I said:
Coito ergo sum wrote: Fact-Man wrote:
I’m sure that Mann does not think he exaggerated anything when he prepared it. The last several decades of his data came directly from the instrumented record, how exaggerated could it be? His pre-instrumented record data came from analyses of tree ring data. Apparently, some deniers claim that his method of splicing these two datasets is where the exaggeration occurs, an argument that never made any sense to me, nor to any mainstream climatologist or science organization.
Professor David Hand does."The particular technique they used exaggerated the size of the blade at the end of the hockey stick. Had they used an appropriate technique the size of the blade of the hockey stick would have been smaller," he said. "The change in temperature is not as great over the 20th century compared to the past as suggested by the Mann paper."
Few accept that this criticism is correct. It is insufficienly robust, it does not counter the fact that the last several decades of Mann’s data is from the instrumented record, it isn’t some wild ass guess, it is what gauges recorded, how exaggerated could it be?
That stick has become a focal point in the controversy surrounding climate change and what to do about it. AGW researchers see it as a clear indicator that humans are warming the globe; skeptics and denialists argue that the climate is undergoing a natural fluctuation not unlike those in eras past, but have not been able to prove it. But Mann has not been deterred by the attacks. "If we allowed that sort of thing to stop us from progressing in science, that would be a very frightening world," he has said.
To construct the hockey-stick plot, Mann, Raymond S. Bradley of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Malcolm K. Hughes of the University of Arizona analyzed paleoclimatic data sets such as those from tree rings, ice cores and coral, joining historical data with thermometer readings from the recent past. In 1998 they obtained a "reconstruction" of Northern Hemisphere temperatures going back 600 years; by the next year they had extended their analysis to the past 1,000 years. In 2003 Mann and Philip D. Jones of the University of East Anglia in England used a different method to extend results back 2,000 years.
In each case, the outcome was clear: global mean temperature began to rise dramatically in the early 20th century. That rise coincided with the unprecedented release of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases into the earth's atmosphere, leading to the conclusion that industrial activity was boosting the world's mean temperature.
Other researchers subsequently confirmed the plot.
The work of Mann and his colleagues achieved special prominence in 2001. That is when the IPCC placed the hockey-stick chart in the
Summary for Policymakers section of the panel's Third Assessment Report. (Mann also co-authored one of the chapters in the report.) It thereby elevated the hockey stick to iconic status--as well as making it a bull's-eye. A community skeptical of human-induced warming known as the "denialosphere" argued that Mann's data points were too sparse to constitute a true picture, or that his raw data were numerically suspicious, or that they could not reproduce his results with the data he had used. Take down Mann, it seemed, and the rest of the IPCC's conclusions about anthropogenic climate change would follow.
That led to "unjustified attack after unjustified attack," complains climatologist Gavin A. Schmidt of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Although questions in the field abound about how, for example, tree-ring data are compiled, many of those attacking Mann's work, Schmidt claims, have had a priori opinions that the work must be wrong. "Most scientists would have left the field long ago, but Mike is fighting back with a tenacity I find admirable," Schmidt says. One of Mann's more public punch backs took place in July 2003, when he defended his views before a congressional committee led by Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, who has called global warming a "hoax." "I left that meeting having demonstrated what the mainstream views on climate science are," Mann asserts.
Mann battled back in a 2004 corrigendum in the journal
Nature, in which he clarified the presentation of his data. He has also shown how errors on the part of his attackers led to their specific results. For instance, skeptics often cite the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warming Period as pieces of evidence not reflected in the hockey stick, yet these extremes are examples of
regional, not global, phenomena. "From an intellectual point of view, these contrarians are pathetic, because there's no scientific validity to their arguments whatsoever," Mann says. "But they're very skilled at deducing what sorts of disingenuous arguments and untruths are likely to be believable to the public that doesn't know better."
Mann thinks that the attacks will continue, because many skeptics, such as the Greening Earth Society and the Tech Central Station Web site, obtain funds from petroleum interests. "As long as they think it works and they've got unlimited money to perpetuate their disinformation campaign," Mann believes, "I imagine it will go on, just as it went on for years and years with tobacco until it was no longer tenable--in fact, it became perjurable to get up in a public forum and claim that there was no science" behind the health hazards of smoking.
As part of his hockey-stick defense, Mann co-founded with Schmidt a Weblog called RealClimate (
http://www.realclimate.org). Started in December 2004, the site has nine active scientists, who have attracted the attention of the blog cognoscenti for their writings, including critiques of Michael Crichton's State of Fear, a novel that uses charts and references to argue against anthropogenic warming. The blog is not a bypass of the ordinary channels of scientific communication, Mann explains, but "a resource where the public can go to see what actual scientists working in the field have to say about the latest issues."
The most challenging aspect today, Mann thinks, is predicting regional disruptions, because people are unlikely to take climate change seriously until they see how it operates in their backyard. In that regard, he has turned his attention to El Nino, a warming of eastern tropical Pacific waters that affects global weather. Mann notes that comparisons with the paleoclimatic record seem to confirm a mechanism proposed by other researchers. Specifically, radiative forcings--volcanic eruptions and solar changes, for instance--do in fact alter El Nino, turning it into more of a La Nina state, with colder sea-surface temperatures. Understanding how El Nino has changed with past radiative forcings is a first step to understanding how it will change in an increasingly greenhouse-gassed world.
Such efforts are essential, because the blade of Mann's hockey stick will get longer. He notes that "we're already committed to 50 to 100 years of warming and several centuries of sea-level rise, simply from the amount of greenhouse gases we've already put in the atmosphere." The solution to global warming, he observes, "is going to be finding an appropriate set of constraints on fossil-fuel emissions that allow us to slow the rate of change down to a level we can adapt to."
Fact-Man wrote:Coito ergo sum wrote:
Reducing emissions is a very thorny problem if it is to be done within the context of the existing economic schema, which presents obstacles that are nearly impossible to overcome. This is why the schemes we’ve seen to date are so poor and doing the job. Many of them are nothing more than money grubbing schemes. I don’t think the question has been addressed in any serious way yet, we’re just dancing round the edges of it. But the day is coming when we’ll have to get serious about it, and it isn’t very far off, a decade at most.
The answer is - stop burning as much fossil fuels. Dramatically reduce that. In order to do that, we have replace the energy with energy from another source(s): nuclear, solar, wind, tidal, thermodynamic, and hydroelectric. Generate vast amounts of electricity, and power most things, including automobiles with electricity.
The thing is, the political groups have other agendas at work, some of which involve redistribution of wealth and a change in human lifestyle. They are pissing in the wind there, and just holding up the show, IMHO. What we need is a Manhattan Project for clean nuclear power, and generate gobs and gobs of it, and we should also expand the solar and wind power, etc., to make other groups happy. But, nuclear power is the only viable option for producing the amount of power that could replace the amount of power we get from fossil fuels - in my humble opinion.
It probably is, but we can also greatly reduce the amount of energy we consume if we acted more rationally in what we use. Do we really need to keep the city of Las Vegas lit up like a Christmas tree 24/7 for years on end? Not really. Tone it down, provide what’s needed with solar and wind. The auto industry (along with the fossil fuel industry) resisted more stringent CAFÉ standards and the former sued the state of California over its more stringent emissions requirements, delaying their implementation for years (Obama has finally enacted much better CAFÉ standards, they will require the fleet average to be upped to 35 mpg by 2016, well over the current actual fleet average of some 16-18 mpg, sixteen years after we knew these standards had to be made more stringent. Another dollar short and a day late.
Your assertion regarding the socialist agenda of some of the political players are irrelevant to a discussion of the science. Those things should be dealt with at the ballot box. There are always political agendas at work, left, right, and in the middle. But the science just grinds on, the earth just keeps getting warmer.
Studies have shown that any transition from a fossil fuel base to a renewable/nuclear fuel base is a 25 or 30 year project … if we go at it in a dead serious manner and fund it appropriately. And we have yet to even start.
Coito ergo sum wrote:
Once again, though, the policy is made by the legislators, which is why they are ignoring the scientists. But, nevertheless, the answer is quite simple. If pollution from fossil fuels is causing global warming, then we have to stop burning fossil fuels. But, the reality is that we need the power, and we're not going voluntarily give up modern life for some agrarian hippie utopia.
This is really dumb talk, terribly uninformed. Talk about exaggeration. The only people talking this line are the deniers, who do it to convince people like you and everyone else that we should do nothing. It’s a bald faced lie that we have to transform ourselves into some agrarian hippie utopia, whatever the hell that is.
Many jurisdictions around the country and several interstate regional agreements are pushing hard for better energy efficiency and for less use through conservation. We can cut demand by some notable extent. Collectivbely, these efforts are known as being “power smart.” Building codes have been amended to require better efficiencies in the use of energy in buildings and plants.Then we have to get busy and start making the 30-year transition from fossil to renewable/nuclear ASAP and with great vigor and robust funding.
But that won’t happen so long as the fossil fuel industry sustains its propaganda campaign and its war on the science, in which it shows no sign of letting up.
It isn’t quite crunch time yet. That will come around the year 2020, when the window of time we have left to act has drawn down to the last possible moment and push does indeed come to shove. What’s a President gonna do when 36 of the world’s leading climate scientists sit in the White House and tell him the time is now, the time has come, we must start reducing emissions or there will be hell to pay in 80 years time? Is he going to say “No?”
Exxon will say “no,” and Big Coal will say it and all the deniers will say it, but those 36 scientists will know the truth and truth will be that it will be time, with not a moment to lose. What’s a President going to do? By that time the physical evidence will have accumulated into a mountain, undeniable and perfectly visible evidence, mainly in the form of ice losses and in further acidification of the oceans, and probably in even worse weather events.
What’s a President going to do?
You tell me, but I was in the WH the day that Kennedy cancelled Boeing’s SST, a multi-billion dollar undertaking Boeing was betting on to secure its future
... cancelled, fust like that. And it was cancelled because two dozen scientists sat with JFK and told him what would happen to the ozone layer if it wasn’t cancelled, and what would happen to the ozone layer was not a pretty sight, it was in fact an intolerable sight. So JFK did the right thing and cancelled the project. Boeing of course screamed bloody murder, but did not develop its SST.
Science almost always wins these battles, that’s the track record. Facts ultimately speak louder than rhetoric.
Coito ergo sum wrote:
It's not the scientists I'm worried about, it's the interest groups.
Well, then, become politically active and combat them.
Coito ergo sum wrote:
That's not true. Automobiles are far cleaner than they were 30 years ago. What comes out of a new car's tailpipe is not very dirty at all.
Surely you jest.
First, there are a lot more cars and trucks and airplanes, and locomotives now days, 250,000 18-wheelers rolling on America’s highways at any given time. Fuel consumption has risen, not declined. CO2 emissions have gone up, not down. An auto’s exhaust may be cleaner in terms of particulate matter but it contains as much C02 as ever. Be careful how much Exxon Kool Aid you drink. The fleet average mpg has actually gone down over the past decade, not up; hence, Obama’s new CAFÉ standards.
Fact-Man wrote: Coito ergo sum wrote:
and the window of time we have in which to act is an incredibly shrinking window, closing very quickly. We have about a decade.
There's the doomsday claim. I'm not sure where you get the "we have a bout a decade" from, but I heard that in 1995 too.
No, actually you didn’t hear it 1995, not from climate science you didn’t. The fact that you don’t know where the “we have about a decade” comes from shows an appalling lack of knowledge of the issue.
The notion that we only have about a decade to act comes from looking at the data on emissions, the data on the dynamics of the density of C02 in the atmosphere, and working out what’s going to happen when by applying the science to the data. We know what C02 density in the year 2020 will be, from that we can calculate what the long-term temp trend line is going to do over the next 80 years (and more). And the result of this work shows that if we are still emitting at predicted rates in the year 2020, we will have created a situation in which a 6C rise in earth’s MAT will be inevitable by the year 2100.
And a 6C rise in earth’s MAT is essentially intolerable to civilization, as we have known it.
See, that wasn’t so hard, was it?
It is of course much more complicated than this, but that’s the summary.
As I said,
Fact-Man wrote:
If we don’t institute a major effort to cut emissions by 2020 we might as well not do anything, because there will be enough C02 in the atmosphere by that time to inevitably cause intolerable warming by the year 2100.
Coito ergo sum wrote:
I don't know what study says that. I freely admit you may no much more than I about it. I just haven't seen it.
Well, how about doing some research and seeing it. Go to
http://www.copenhagendiagnosis.com, download the report titled
“The Copenhagan Diagnosis,” and give it a read.
Here’s the summary:
The most significant recent climate change findings are:
Surging greenhouse gas emissions: Global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels in 2008 were nearly 40% higher than those in 1990. Even if global emission rates are stabilized at present-day levels, just 20 more years of emissions would give a 25% probability that warming exceeds 2°C, even with zero emissions after 2030. Every year of delayed action increases the chances of exceeding 2°C warming.
Recent global temperatures demonstrate human-induced warming: Over the past 25 years temperatures have increased at a rate of 0.19°C per decade, in very good agreement with predictions based on greenhouse gas increases. Even over the past ten years, despite a decrease in solar forcing, the trend continues to be one of warming. Natural, short-term fluctuations are occurring as usual, but there have been no significant changes in the underlying warming trend.
Acceleration of melting of ice-sheets, glaciers and ice-caps: A wide array of satellite and ice measurements now demonstrate beyond doubt that both the Greenland and Antarctic ice-sheets are losing mass at an increasing rate. Melting of glaciers and ice-caps in other parts of the world has also accelerated since 1990.
Rapid Arctic sea-ice decline: Summer-time melting of Arctic sea-ice has accelerated far beyond the expectations of climate models. The area of sea-ice melt during 2007-2009 was about 40% greater than the average prediction from IPCC AR4 climate models.
Current sea-level rise underestimated: Satellites show recent global average sea-level rise (3.4 mm/yr over the past 15 years) to be ~80% above past IPCC predictions. This acceleration in sea-level rise is consistent with a doubling in contribution from melting of glaciers, ice caps, and the Greenland and West-Antarctic ice-sheets.
Sea-level predictions revised: By 2100, global sea-level is likely to rise at least twice as much as projected by Working Group 1 of the IPCC AR4; for unmitigated emissions it may well exceed 1 meter. The upper limit has been estimated as ~ 2 meters sea level rise by 2100. Sea level will continue to rise for centuries after global temperatures have been stabilized, and several meters of sea level rise must be expected over the next few centuries.
Delay in action risks irreversible damage: Several vulnerable elements in the climate system (e.g. continental ice-sheets, Amazon rainforest, West African monsoon and others) could be pushed towards abrupt or irreversible change if warming continues in a business-as-usual way throughout this century. The risk of transgressing critical thresholds (“tipping points”) increases strongly with ongoing climate change. Thus waiting for higher levels of scientific certainty could mean that some tipping points will be crossed before they are recognized.
The turning point must come soon: If global warming is to be limited to a maximum of 2 °C above pre-industrial values, global emissions need to peak between 2015 and 2020 and then decline rapidly. To stabilize climate, a decarbonized global society – with near-zero emissions of CO2 and other long-lived greenhouse gases – needs to be reached well within this century. More specifically, the average annual per-capita emissions will have to shrink to well under 1 metric ton CO2 by 2050. This is 80-95% below the per-capita emissions in developed nations in 2000.
This report was prepared last November by climate scientists at the University of New South Wales in Australia (with an international cadre of climate scientists) at the behest of the IPCC and on their behalf. It updates what the IPCC published in its 2007 Assessment Report, AR4. It is the very latest official science from IPCC.
If you study this report you’ll see where “we have about a decade left to act” comes from and how it was derived.
Coito ergo sum wrote:
But, I have the answer: Build enough nuclear power plants in the US, Canada and Mexico to power 70% of our energy needs, and get the balance from solar, wind, tidal, hydroelectic and some burning of fossil fuels which we get from our own lands.
Peachy keen, but much harder to actually do than to say, unfortunately. Try telling it to Senator Inhof or to the denialosphere or to the fossil fuel industry. I guarantee you won’t get any takers. Tell it to the people who’d have a new nuke in their backyards, no takers there either. And while you’re at it, just try to find a sufficient number of sites for new nuke plants with adequate cooling water.
Today, economics trumps the science; tomorrow may be a different deal, with "tomorrow" being 2020 or thereabouts.
Coito ergo sum wrote:
Well, I never want to waste money.
No, but in America wasting money is a national pastime. George Bush spent a $trillion on a misguided war in Iraq, a war that will eventually cost $2 trillion when veteran's care is added in. Obama’s repeating the error in Afcrapistan. Waste money? How about a bridge to nowhere? How about $billion no-bid cost-plus contracts to Halliburton to serve chow to troops in Iraq? How about 19 diffrent Auditor General investigation of wasteful spending in the Iraq rebuilding effort? How about Paul Bremer
losing $12
billion in cold, hard, shrink wrapped US cash when he was head of the CPA in Iraq?
Coito ergo sum wrote: Fact-Man wrote:Coito ergo sum wrote: Fact-Man wrote:
Although probably large, they are not draconian nor are they beyond our means.
That would be, of course, a matter of opinion. How much do you estimate the cost would be?
I have no idea.
Then you don't know that it wouldn't be draconian or beyond our means.
Look, pal, when civilization as we have known it is at stake,
nothing is too draconian or beyond our means, you kidding?
But I know enough about it to know that we can do it. The longer we wait to begin, the more it's gonna cost.
Coito ergo sum wrote:
I can tell you exactly how those initial studies will come out. They'll have glamorous conclusions about how "modest" and "manageable" the costs will be to combat the "disastrous" and "civilization threatening" problem. Subsequent studies will call foul and claim they are not taking into account all the applicable costs. The left will line up with the former, and the right will line up with the latter, and we'll have a battle of the experts and finger pointing.
So? A SNAFU moment, situation normal, all fucked up. You’ve described crunch time in the year 2020. What’s a President going to do?
It will be a political choice, not a scientific one.
Fact-Man wrote:Coito ergo sum wrote:
For one thing nobody but the fossil fuel industry, led by Exxon, has spent $millions to confuse the public about global warming, as a leaked Exxon memo said, “Our mission is to sow doubt and confusion among the public.”
Well, the other side exaggerates and "tricks the numbers" etc., and Al Gore makes movies.
For which he won half a Nobel and an Oscar. Wake the fuck up. Don’t try to bamboozle us into thinking you’re smarter and better informed than Al Gore, the Nobel Committee or the Association of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, you’re not.
Exxon has promulgated
mountains of disinformation, the science has expressed
no disinformation, none, not a drop. The media has been in lock step with Exxon and its denialosphere. The science does not play “tricks” with the numbers, either, that they do is just Exxon propaganda, Big Coal Kool Aid, which dunderheads drink and absorb and regurgitate but smart people avoid like the plague.
Coito ergo sum wrote:
Of course. It's a difficult topic, and so many biased and self-interested parties are fucking with both sides of the issue, that one always needs to be careful.
Read IPCC’s AR’s, read the Copenhagan Diagnosis, rely on the science.
Coito ergo sum wrote: Fact-Man wrote:
Denialism has become an industrial scale movement,
As has the doomsday industry.
This is bullshit, an assertion made by a guy who’s self-admittedly and demonstratively (and woefully) under informed on the issue, which he then proves by making such a pronouncement. You have no idea what you’re talking about.
Coito ergo sum wrote:Fact-Man wrote:
pounding the science and its practitioner’s beyond all reason and decorum, a dirty, sordid undertaking similar to the way the tobacco industry denied that smoking is a health risk (and using some of the same people and PR firms to do it). Big Tobacco got away with it for 60 years, fossil fuel has gotten away with it for 25 years, same program, same techniques.
Their efforts have cost us 25 years during which we could have been acting.
Doing what, exactly? What would he have done?
He? Who he? I mentioned no “he’s” I said WE.
That you have to ask this question is a mind numbing proposition. Aren’t you getting any of this? Can you follow a narrative for Pete’s sake?
Let me rephrase,
“Their efforts have cost us 25 years during which we could have transitioning from fossil fuels to renewables and nuclear, you know, that little 30 year project I referred to earlier, damn, we’d almost be done with it had we started 25 years ago.
Coito ergo sum wrote: Fact-Man wrote:
Al Gore went to the Science Teacher’s Association of America (STAA) and offered them 50,000 copies of his movie on DVD gratis, if they’d distribute them to their members for showing in High School science classes. They turned him down. Puzzled, Gore looked into it. He discovered that Exxon was funding the STAA to the tune of $5million a year while providing them with tons of anti-global warming materials for handout to science students, and they had threatened the STAA with cutting off this funding if they accepted Gore’s gift.
Al Gore's movie is hype.
And you are full of bullshit. You're just regurgitating propaganda.
Whilst having nothing to say about Exxon funding the STAA and giving it tons of anti-GW material to distribute in science classrooms across the country?
Coito ergo sum wrote: Fact-Man wrote:
The war on climate science is a sordid, hardball affair, filled with stories like this. It makes it difficult to impossible for those who are informed about it to have any sympathy whatsoever for the fossil fuel industry, which such persons see a an enemy of the people and of all that’s right and reasonable.
They have endangered the lives of everyone and threatened the planet. They should be charged with crimes and imprisoned.
And yes they do operate in a vacume, a virtual one anyway. Consumers have no idea what they’re doing, they are asleep at the wheel, behaving mostly in an autonomic mode, reacting to massive advertising and promotion, buying whatever’s presented to them without so much as a single critical thought. Given full knowledge no sane person would drive a gas guzzler, yet millions do exactly that. We burn 13 million bbls of oil every day just to commute back and forth to work, which is 60 per cent of what we burn in total.
Your comments are quite clearly from an underinformed persona,
No they don't. Stop being patronizing.
Stop taking out of your ass, stop regurgitating denialist talking points.
Coito ergo sum wrote:
Please identify the specific statement of mine that was false. Let's talk about it. Or, are you castigating me for something I didn't say? Something you assume I believe?
I’m castigating you for being woefully underinformed and talking like you’re not. I’m castigating you for confusing punditry for science and for being unable to apprehend a narrative, for having what I perceive to be a very skewed view of what’s going on and a very closed mind about realities.
Coito ergo sum wrote:
I'm not a victim of any propaganda, but I'm not an alarmist either.
All victims of propaganda think this. You won’t realize it until you do some study and open up your mind.
Define “alarmist” for me.
Coito ergo sum wrote: Fact-Man wrote:
I don’t say these things to be disparaging, you are as innocent as everyone else, but the sad fact is you don’t know what the hell is going on and that’s purposeful. They don’t want you to know, and hence you don’t.
But, you are privy to the secret knowledge...
It isn’t “secret” dude but it does take a very long time to apprehend and one hell of a lot of study to get it, which I have done and you haven’t. I’ve been at this for fifteen motherfucking years, you’ve been at it what, a week? So don’t be going all smart ass on me with dumbassed comments like this.
You have to read the fookin’ science.
Coito ergo sum wrote:
I guess we're fucked then. So, we better buy what you're selling now, right now, buy buy buy - or, it'll be too late - don't wanna miss this deal....won't be available tomorrow...
No, you simply have to read the science, which you clearly have not done. It is freely available on the web, there for all to see and for all to read, and for all to get. But it takes effort, and lots of it.
Coito ergo sum wrote:Fact-Man wrote:
We aren’t going to stop emitting, not if the fossil fuel industry has its way (and so far it is having its way), so we’re not looking at a 2C increase in the year 2100, we're looking at more than that, up to as high as a 7C rise. And that will be an unmitigated disaster for civilization, as we know it.
Well, if people in the "green" movement really thought that, then they would stop emitting now. You don't see Al Gore or those like him doing it, do you? He and they are some of the biggest polluters on the planet. If someone REALLY thinks we have 80 or so years left to live, then they're not going to keep driving their cars, they're going to act like it. They don't.
This line of hooey is older than dirt, and as untrue as ever.
Coito ergo sum wrote: Fact-Man wrote:
I don’t particularly enjoy being the bearer of bad news, but the truth is the truth and the facts are the facts and the evidence is the evidence, and none of it can be denied. We have to face it and do something about it or we will be toast, quite literally.
What do you want to do about it?
I want you to read the fuckin’ science and get a grip, that’s what. Then you can make up your own mind, you can talk about the issue and not be spewing a load of bollocks and regurgitating denialist talking points.
For starters you can think about this a little:
Scientists in stolen e-mail scandal hid climate data
Ben Webster, Environment Editor, and Jonathan Leake
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/e ... 004936.ece
The university at the centre of the climate change row over stolen e-mails broke the law by refusing to hand over its raw data for public scrutiny. The University of East Anglia breached the Freedom of Information Act by refusing to comply with requests for data concerning claims by its scientists that man-made emissions were causing global warming. The Information Commissioner’s Office decided that UEA failed in its duties under the Act but said that it could not prosecute those involved because the complaint was made too late, The Times has learnt. The ICO is now seeking to change the law to allow prosecutions if a complaint is made more than six months after a breach.
The stolen e-mails , revealed on the eve of the Copenhagen summit, showed how the university’s Climatic Research Unit attempted to thwart requests for scientific data and other information, and suggest that senior figures at the university were involved in decisions to refuse the requests. It is not known who stole the e-mails.
Professor Phil Jones, the unit’s director, stood down while an inquiry took place. The ICO’s decision could make it difficult for him to resume his post. Details of the breach emerged the day after John Beddington, the Chief Scientific Adviser, warned that there was an urgent need for more honesty about the uncertainty of some predictions. His intervention followed admissions from scientists that the rate of glacial melt in the Himalayas had been grossly exaggerated.
In one e-mail, Professor Jones asked a colleague to delete e-mails relating to the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
He also told a colleague that he had persuaded the university authorities to ignore information requests under the act from people linked to a website run by climate sceptics.
A spokesman for the ICO said: “The legislation prevents us from taking any action but from looking at the emails it’s clear to us a breach has occurred.” Breaches of the act are punishable by an unlimited fine.
The complaint to the ICO was made by David Holland, a retired engineer from Northampton. He had been seeking information to support his theory that the unit broke the IPCC’s rules to discredit sceptic scientists.
In a statement, Graham Smith, Deputy Commissioner at the ICO, said: “The e-mails which are now public reveal that Mr Holland’s requests under the Freedom of Information Act were not dealt with as they should have been under the legislation. Section 77 of the Act makes it an offence for public authorities to act so as to prevent intentionally the disclosure of requested information.”
He added: “The ICO is gathering evidence from this and other time-barred cases to support the case for a change in the law. We will be advising the university about the importance of effective records management and their legal obligations in respect of future requests for information.”
Mr Holland said: “There is an apparent Catch-22 here. The prosecution has to be initiated within six months but you have to exhaust the university’s complaints procedure before the commission will look at your complaint. That process can take longer than six months.”
The university said: “The way freedom of information requests have been handled is one of the main areas being explored by Sir Muir Russell’s independent review. The findings will be made public and we will act as appropriate on its recommendations.”
Literally thousands of articles like this between November 2009 and late March of 2010, many making much worse accusations than are expressed here.
Then, just a few days ago, we get this:
International Panel & Royal Society Find No Fraud in “Climategate”
Posted by mattusmaximus on April 16, 2010
http://skepticalteacher.wordpress.com/2 ... imategate/
I blogged recently about the conclusion of one of three independent investigations into the so-called Climategate concerning claims of fraud and cover-up of climate science data. As I mentioned in that first entry (titled “Climategate Ends With a Fizzle”), that investigation found absolutely no evidence of fraud. Now the second investigation, conducted by an international panel of experts in conjunction with the Royal Society, has come to similar conclusions.
And here are a few key findings…
The Panel was set up by the University in consultation with the Royal Society to assess the integrity of the research published by the Climatic Research Unit in the light of various external assertions. …
We saw no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit and had it been there we believe that it is likely that we would have detected it. Rather we found a small group of dedicated if slightly disorganised researchers who were ill-prepared for being the focus of public attention. As with many small research groups their internal procedures were rather informal. …
We cannot help remarking that it is very surprising that research in an area that depends so heavily on statistical methods has not been carried out in close collaboration with professional statisticians. Indeed there would be mutual benefit if there were closer collaboration and interaction between CRU and a much wider scientific group outside the relatively small international circle of temperature specialists. …
It was not the immediate concern of the Panel, but we observed that there were important and unresolved questions that related to the availability of environmental data sets. It was pointed out that since UK government adopted a policy that resulted in charging for access to data sets collected by government agencies, other countries have followed suit impeding the flow of processed and raw data to and between researchers. This is unfortunate and seems inconsistent with policies of open access to data promoted elsewhere in government. …
A host of important unresolved questions also arises from the application of Freedom of Information legislation in an academic context. We agree with the CRU view that the authority for releasing unpublished raw data to third parties should stay with those who collected it. …
And you should be aware that CRU received two or three FOI requests in each of the years 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008, and more than 60 in 2009, when the denialosphere inundated the agency with requests, most of which were frivolus and many of which sought data that the agency was under legal consraints to release.
And this:
Climategate Probe Finds No Evidence of Scientific Malpractice
By Alex Morales
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid= ... lcXLsrxPys
April 14 (Bloomberg) -- An investigation by a panel of scientists into the so-called climategate leaked e-mail flap found no evidence of scientific malpractice at the University of East Anglia, the U.K. school at the center of the probe.
The inquiry, the second of three into research at the school in eastern England, said methods used by the university to compile historical records of global temperatures were “fair and satisfactory.” It also said allegations of deliberate misrepresentation of data derived from tree rings weren’t valid.
“There was no hint of tailoring results to a particular agenda,” the scientists said in a report posted today on the school’s Web site. “Their sole aim was to establish as robust a record of temperatures in recent centuries as possible.”
Thousands of e-mails stolen from the school’s server in November showed scientists discussing a “trick” to hide a decline in temperatures and blocking some papers from inclusion in the most comprehensive United Nations report into climate change. That fuelled criticism from skeptics of man’s contribution to global warming of data being manipulated.
The panel said the school’s “sins were of omission rather than commission” in not keeping fuller records of their methods. They also said the scientists should work more closely with professional statisticians carrying out their analysis of temperatures.
“We do see the sense in engaging more fully with the wider statistics community to ensure that the most effective and up- to-date statistical techniques are adopted and will now consider further how best to achieve this,” the university said in a statement on its Web site.
Further Investigations
The probe was carried out by a panel of six scientists based at universities in the U.K., U.S. and Switzerland and was chaired by Ron Oxburgh, former chairman of Shell Transport & Trading Plc and a member of the U.K. House of Lords, Parliament’s upper chamber. They were appointed by the university at the recommendation of the Royal Society, the U.K.’s national science academy.
A first investigation into the scandal, carried out by Parliament’s Science and Technology Committee, said on March 31 that Britain’s global-warming scientists damaged their reputation with the “unacceptable” withholding of data in response to freedom of information requests. Their 59-page report cleared Phil Jones, head of UEA’s Climatic Research Unit, of wrongdoing, saying he acted “in line with common practice” in not publishing all his methods and computer codes.
Today’s report was into the science produced by the university. The school has also commissioned an investigation into the content of the leaked e-mails to determine whether there is any evidence of manipulation of scientific data.
That review, led by Muir Russell, former Vice Chancellor of Glasgow University in Scotland, is due to report in the spring, according to UEA. It said no specific date has been established.
U.K. police are also investigating who hacked into the e- mails.
To contact the reporter on this story: Alex Morales in London at
amorales2@bloomberg.net.
[/quote]
A tsunami of all sort and manner of accusations of wrongdoing in January, a clean bill of health in April.
That ought to tell you something, albeit you would have to
think to arrive at it, you'd have to learn how to connect the dots.
Go read the science, get yourself up to speed, then come back and we'll chat about it. If you want to discuss this further with me, that's what you'll have to do. I'm a busy guy, too busy for the woefully underinformed and heavily propagandized.
It's never smart to try to carry on a discourse on a topic one is unfamilar with and not fully knowledgeable of. That's what you're doing here. You aren't qualified to discuss any of this, that's the tragic and painful reality. Face it and do something about it. This is not kid's stuff.
