Mysturji wrote:Fact-Man wrote:"Peak heat" doesn't hardly amount to a hill of beans. It only took a 7C rise in earth's mean annual temperature (MAT) to bring an end to the last Ice Age.
Pardon me for finding an ice age impressive. There's a term I learned at University. "Invalidation/invalidating". This means simply dismissing something with a wave of the hand and a "Pfffft", as though it merits no consideration. I'll be using it again later.
No pardon needed, the last Ice Age was indeed impressive, no argument on that score.
But check my point, it didn't take but a relatively small increase in the Earth's Mean Annual Temperature (MAT) to bring the last Ice Age to an end and melt nearly all of the ice it had created, vast untold volumes of the stuff in fact. And I should add that this relatively small increment of change in Earth's MAT occurred over thousands of years.
What's the relevance you ask?
The relevance is what a small increment of change in Earth's MAT can do to climate. We're now looking at a similar degree of change in Earth's MAT over the next 90 years, a rapidity that's absolutely unprecedented in the climate record.
In other words, if a 7C degree rise can end an Ice Age and melt nearly all the ice created during it, what do we think a 6C degree rise will do over the next 90 years? Doesn't sound like a picnic to me.
Let's take these one at a time. My comments about these pieces will come after we review them each:
http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2009/ ... -you-think
Mr. Drum writes about what he perceives to be some mis-communication between a Washington Post reporter, the United Nations Environment Program, and the Climate Action Initiative....a group that collaborated with climate researchers at the Vermont-based Sustainability Institute, Massachusetts-based Ventana Systems and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to do an analysis of a recently published UNEP report.
Kevin Drum/ME News wrote:
Juliet Eilperin reports in the Washington Post:
Climate researchers now predict the planet will warm by 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century even if the world's leaders fulfill their most ambitious climate pledges, a much faster and broader scale of climate change than forecast just two years ago, according to a report released Thursday by the United Nations Environment Program.
That's odd. This is 3.5 degrees Celsius. A couple of hours ago that same story said 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit, or 4 degrees Celsius. But if you click on the link and read the UN report, neither of those numbers appears. At least, not that I can find. What's going on?
Robert Corell, who chairs the Climate Action Initiative....collaborated with climate researchers at the Vermont-based Sustainability Institute, Massachusetts-based Ventana Systems and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to do the analysis. The team has revised its estimates since a new U.N. report went to press and has posted the most recent figures at ClimateInteractive.org.
The group took the upper-range targets of nearly 200 nations' climate policies — including U.S. cuts that would reduce domestic emissions 73 percent from 2005 levels by 2050, along with the European Union's pledge to reduce its emissions 80 percent from 1990 levels by 2050 — and found that even under that optimistic scenario, the average global temperature is likely to warm by 6.3 degrees.
Ah. The number comes not from the UN report, but from Robert Corell. And it's been updated, which presumably accounts for the Post story being updated.
Except that if you go to ClimateInteractive.org, their graph still says 4 degrees Celsius. And it seems to be based on a model called C-ROADS, not the UN report.
So color me confused. Except for one thing: both the UN report and Corell's analysis agree that climate change is much worse than we thought even a few years ago. Virtually every measure of warming is increasing faster than our models predicted — something that regular readers of this blog already know.
From the first chapter of the UN study:
The climate forcing arriving sooner-than-expected includes faster sea-level rise, ocean acidification, melting of Arctic sea-ice cover, warming of polar land masses, freshening in ocean currents, and shifts in circulation patterns in the atmosphere and the oceans.
Kevin Drum/ME News wrote:
....In early 2008, a team of scientists published the first detailed investigation of vulnerable Earth System components that could contain tipping points. The team introduced the term ‘tipping element’ for these vulnerable systems and accepted a definition for tipping point as “...a critical threshold at which a tiny perturbation can qualitatively alter the state or development of a system...”
The nine tipping points are below. Three of them could happen within ten years, and two more are possible within 50. Time to quit mucking around, folks.
This last sentence merely reflects things that have been known for some time and which have been previously reported in many instances.
Next:
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate ... ario_N.htm
In this article reporter Doyel Rice writes that
"Pundits and journalists like to deal in "worst-case scenarios" in stories about weather and climate. Like it or not, eye-grabbing headlines like "Worst drought on record;" "Worst hurricane season ever;" "Worst loss of Arctic since records began" really do catch readers' eyes, even if the period of record is as low as 30 years."
Ahem, pundits and journalists, not necessarily climate scientists
Reporter Rice goes on to write about Professor Stephen Schneider of Stanford University, whom he claims does just that in an opinion piece in this week's journal
Nature, looking at the absolute "worst-case" climate-change scenario, based on an atmosphere with 1,000 parts of carbon dioxide per million by the year 2100. (Current levels are about 390ppm.) The essay is a companion piece to the studies out in the same
Nature issue covered in this Reuters story out today, which talks about how the world can "safely" burn only 25% of the planet's remaining coal, oil and gas.
Next:
http://www.independent.co.uk/environmen ... 43957.html
In this piece, Lord Stern, the economist who produced the single most influential political document on climate change, says he underestimated the risks of global warming and the damage that could result from it.
The situation was worse than he had thought when he completed his review two-and-a-half years ago, he told a conference yesterday, but politicians do not yet grasp the scale of the dangers now becoming apparent.
"Do politicians understand just how difficult it could be, just how devastating rises of 4C, 5C or 6C could be? I think, not yet," Lord Stern posed to the meeting of scientists in Copenhagen.
It appears to me that Mr. Stern was reacting to the UNEP report referred to above, the introduction of which is reproduced here:
UNEP Report Intro wrote:
Climate Change Science Compendium 2009
The Climate Change Science Compendium is a review of some 400 major scientific contributions to our understanding of Earth Systems and climate that have been released through peer-reviewed literature or from research institutions over the last three years, since the close of research for consideration by the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report.
The Compendium is not a consensus document or an update of any other process. Instead, it is a presentation of some exciting scientific findings, interpretations, ideas, and conclusions that have emerged among scientists.
Focusing on work that brings new insights to aspects of Earth System Science at various scales, it discusses findings from the International Polar Year and from new technologies that enhance our abilities to see the Earth’s Systems in new ways. Evidence of unexpected rates of change in Arctic sea ice extent, ocean acidification, and species loss emphasizes the urgency needed to develop management strategies for addressing climate change.
An up-dated version of the Climate Change Science Compendium 2009 was uploaded to the Internet on 21 October 2009. It follows feed-back from researchers, experts and members of the public following the launch last month. UNEP welcomes further constructive comments so that the report evolves as a living document containing the latest peer-reviewed science.
In effect, this report updates the IPCC's 4th Assessmet report, AR4.
You may refer to your referenced articles as being "scaremongering" but close examination shows them to be rather routine reporting on a new scientific publication, UNEP's "Climate Change Science Compendium 2009," which does indeed update the findings published in AR4 and does indeed make it clear that the view of what we can expect to occur climate-wise over the coming 90 years is probably worse than what was portrayed in AR4. Note that UNEP's report is predicated upon and reflects "some 400 major scientific contributions to our understanding of Earth Systems and climate that have been released through peer-reviewed literature or from research institutions over the last three years," and is, hence, built on what we can only consider to be good science.
Now, pundits and journos can write anything they wish (and can get past their editors and publishers), nobody has much control over that. And pundits and journos aren't known for their accurate reporting of science and do in fact have a strong tendency to do what Mr. Rice of USA Today alleges, which is to write "eye-grabbing headlines like "Worst drought on record;" "Worst hurricane season ever;" "Worst loss of Arctic since records began" really do catch readers' eyes," and, I would add, they do this to help sell newspapers.
Any of us who are following this issue have learned a long time ago to ignore what pundits and journos are reporting and go directly to the science they are reporing on.
The plain truth is that things might well be worse than we thought, which is no crime but a simple reality, the kind of reality that often emerges from time to time as science improves and gets better at what it's doing, with better resolution.
For example, when the Brits and the French developed the
Concorde they had no idea that their airplane would ultimately be prevented by law from overflying populated geographies owing to its damaging sound footprint at ground level. But by the time they got
Concorde into the air better science showed that flying it over populated geographies simply would not work because of the mayhem its sound footprint would cause in communities and on farms.
Concorde was never allowed to overfly such geographies at its cruising speed and not allowed to engage in transcon flights in the US or in Canada.
We can probably assume that this was not good news for the builders and operators of
Concorde, but they had to abide by it anyway, and they did.
In climate science we cannot be absolutely assured of any predicted state at any given time because the science itself is still maturing and developing its capacity to predict at high levels of confidence.
The articles that you consider to be "scaremongering" are no such thing, despite their apparent bad news scenarios. They aren't scaremongering because they are to a very great extent based on good science, as published by UNEP.
I wrote that you'd have to show
"some evidence of AGW scientists or adherents to it actually propagandizing with scare mongering before I'll award your remark any merit," and neither Mr. Drum nor Mssrs. Rice and Stern are AGW climate scientists nor do they appear to necessarily be adherents of it. Mssrs. Drum and Rice are journos, Mr. Stern is an economist.
You may claim that UNEP's report is "scaremongering," but it too isn't that either. It is science, and while science can sometimes be scary, the act of
scaremongering is considered to be the spreading of frightening rumors, and rumor isn't either science or fact and is more commonly pure invention, and UNEP's report is not a rumor.
So if you will pardon me, I will say that you haven't met the test. Try again.
Mysturgi wrote:Fact-Man wrote:Mr. Bellamy has been thoroughly debunked, in case you hadn't noticed.
Yes I had. In fact I can poke holes in that article myself. But that's not the whole issue, is it? The way most people see it is this:
Here's a well-known, well-liked, respected
scientist who (at the time) was frequently seen on national TV enthusing about plants and forests and all things natural and living, explaining scientific facts about living things and making it interesting and he obviously cares about the environment, but here he is saying that the climate change people are exaggerating the problem and it's really not that bad, they're just trying to scare us. OK, he's wrong about some things, but calling him a "botanist" as though it's synonymous with "idiot" is just invalidation. As an argument, it's no better than his. It won't convince anyone, and in the meantime, some people are getting the feeling they're being lied to. Yes. There is propaganda on both sides. "Pfft" won't make it go away.
No member of the public who needs "convincing" is reading this forum.
If I were to go after Mr. Bellamy in a more widely read public domain, my case would be broader and deeper than merely saying "he's a Botanist."
But in general it remains true that a Botanist, even a well known and well liked one, isn't quite qualified to speak on the subject nor does he have the credential or track record to speak on it authoritatively. He can issue forth with opinions and his readers can judge them as they will, but he cannot speak as an authority.
What I've brought to your three articles is
discipline, the discipline to look more closely, to apprehend what their writers were doing with their reportage, find the basis for what they've reported (in this case a new scientific Report) and read that report (which I did weeks ago).
The tendency to jump to conlcusion and not apply a requiste degree of discipline in evaluating such articles is a common failing of those in the denialosphere, because they aren't really interested in the truth or even cogent analyses, they're after headlines, as nearly any good propagandist will be.
You've said you're not an outright denier or heavyweight skeptic, yet your commentaries in this formum appear to belie that because to me they do come off much in the way and manner of those who are truly in the deniers camp. This may well be a misperception on my part but having been engaged in this issue for more than decade I know how those in the denier camp come off, I've reads tens of thousands of their words and engaged in debates with too many of them to count.
Perhaps it's a matter of degree, these lines can be hard to draw. Perhaps as this thread unfolds your position will gain clarity. But right now, your attitude and your commentaries strike me as reflecting one who is pretty staunchly in the denier camp.
But that's more of an impression than any particularly factual thing, an impression that can and will change when you earn it.
You think THAT'S pedantic? This is Rationalia. You'll find out. 
, the more I think what's the point?
