NASA Study: Mass Gains of Antarctic Ice Sheet Greater Than Losses
nasa.gov
nasa.gov
1) This is going to be used, fast, by the climate change denial camp to show "everything is OK", sad but true.
2) Increased snow and ice build up in the interior, while the ice shelves surrounding the continent disappear, will have unpredictable consequences. It's not necessarily a good thing. The increased mass in the interior will increase the rate of flow out of the centre - which could ultimately hasten thinning.
3) This article doesn't mention it, but the paper itself does - they do compensate for bedrock motion.
Nice science.
IMHO we probably are warming the world with all of our machines, but the history of science is full of cases where it didn't know as much as it claimed, so let's keep some humility in the discussion and admit we still don't infact know everything for certain.
However, it seems to me you don't quite appreciate how strong the case for the general picture of climate change really is. The evidence for it is so vast, coming from so many different sources, that it is really quite indisputable. That doesn't imply at all that the picture of it is complete, or that we know exactly how it works. This finding doesn't diminish the strength of other forms of evidence at all. It merely adds to our understanding of the details of climate change and the development of new insights on the details of climate change.
Climate change theory isn't some young and untested field of science. People have been trying to disprove (that's what science is! that's what this study is doing!) climate change hypotheses for decades now, and what is left today is a proper scientific theory.
Just because a lot of debate happens on the veracity of climate change findings doesn't mean that the proper thing to do is to take a 'nuanced' position. Not if it is not aligned with experimental evidence. It might feel counterintuitive to do in a political discussion - which is what climate change has sadly become - but when the discussion is about what's true, one should always look for the answers that are intellectually honest instead of those that are politically acceptable or 'balanced'.
> the history of science is full of cases where it didn't know as much as it claimed,
I don't think this is true at all. Name one such scientific consensus that was, like climate change, the result of different sources of experimental evidence, that turned out to completely wrong.
> I don't think this is true at all. Name one such scientific consensus that was, like climate change, the result of different sources of experimental evidence, that turned out to completely wrong.
Here's one: Before the discovery of Vitamin C, it was known by the British navy that lime juice prescribed to sailors on long voyages prevented scurvy. As technologies improved, voyages became shorter, which allowed someone in the navy to start sourcing less expensive limes (which happened to have less Vitamin C). Fast forward some years, and someone does an experiment. The (new) limes don't cure scurvy! So, naturally, everyone concludes that the limes-cure-scurvy thing is an old wives' tale, which they believe to now be "debunked". It's not until Vitamin C is discovered that people actually start to figure out what's going on.
(I believe this is from Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, but I could be wrong. It is also documented on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scurvy)
Lemon juice. They switched to limes in the 1860s. http://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm
> So when the Admiralty began to replace lemon juice with an ineffective substitute in 1860, it took a long time for anyone to notice. In that year, naval authorities switched procurement from Mediterranean lemons to West Indian limes. The motives for this were mainly colonial - it was better to buy from British plantations than to continue importing lemons from Europe. Confusion in naming didn't help matters. Both "lemon" and "lime" were in use as a collective term for citrus, and though European lemons and sour limes are quite different fruits, their Latin names (citrus medica, var. limonica and citrus medica, var. acida) suggested that they were as closely related as green and red apples. Moreover, as there was a widespread belief that the antiscorbutic properties of lemons were due to their acidity, it made sense that the more acidic Caribbean limes would be even better at fighting the disease.
Fortunately, empirical works wonderfully when it comes to nutrition. We know in vague terms what most foods do to us, while having a limited understanding in more complete scientific terms. We're still in maybe the second inning of understanding the human body fully (eg we're still discovering in basic terms how the immune system links to the brain [1]).
[1] http://io9.com/scientists-discover-a-new-link-between-the-br...
The geocentric model, the heliocentric model, keplers laws, newtons laws, the luminiferous aether...all of these were established scientific concepts that later turned out to be inaccurate. When you learn a new thing and discover a new model, the previous state of the art is necessarily wrong to some degree.
I will absolutely grant that scientists for centuries have made prevailing wisdom out of untested hypotheses. I'm just pointing out that climate change is neither prevailing wisdom (of that kind) or an untested hypothesis.
I'm quite sure that there's a lot more to discover in climate change akin to how there was a lot more to discover after Newton described his laws of motion. That does not mean we should commit the Nirvana fallacy and disregard our current efforts as fruitless, untrue or unhelpful when they are the complete opposite.
On the other hand, the claim that rising CO2 levels are responsible for a majority of the changes in the earth's temperature could be "completely wrong".
... and in what sense is "the sun is the center of the universe" not completely wrong?
In a sense that there's no obvious preferred reference frame (and if you believe Einstein, there's none at all) for the universe, so you may as well pick up the sun to be (0, 0, 0).
Also, as long as you adjust for the observable evidence, the only difference between heliocentric and geocentric model is how much are you willing to complicate your maths. Those two descriptions can always be translated into one another.
This is really an important point many people miss about science, and well, about thinking itself. There are many equivalent ways to describe a given phenomena, taking into account all available evidence, and the model we pick as "official" is usually the simplest one.
In the sense that you can make a lot of really accurate predictions about the motion of the planets, with a heliocentric model. For that matter, you can get a lot done proceeding from the assumption that the Earth is flat because, to a reasonable approximation, Earth is flat.
I think the fact that the climate is changing isn't what some people have a problem with. Of course it is changing, we see it happening and know about cases throughout history (the "Little Ice Age", the Medieval Warm Period). What people have a problem with is being told they have to do something about it.
You initially observe some phenomenon. You do not have an immediate explanation for it. You come up with an explanation for that phenomenon. You cannot then use the original phenomenon to support your explanation. In order to test your explanation, you must figure out what else must happen if your explanation is true. You then devise experiments, or find other, different observations, which can falsify your explanation. That is, if the experiments come out a certain way, or you observe certain things, you can rule out your explanation. If, instead, you cannot rule out your explanation, but the other things your explanation predicts to happen does happen, then those new observations are experimental evidence that support your explanation.
The consequences already are catastrophic. But the impact doesn't directly affect most people, and even if it does, the reasons can still be obscured.
How so? BTW please don't highlight normal catastrophic things like droughts or hurricanes as those have obviously always been with us.
Even if CO2 were implicated, this issue has absolutely zero to do with the theory of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming.
So anthropogenic CO2 (we know it's anthropogenic because of satellite measurements showing seasonal variations around population centers) caused anthropogenic climate change. Even if an unknown effect serves to counteract the massive greenhouse effect of all of our CO2, temperature is only one effect of climate change. There is also changing ocean currents due to meltwater changing salinity and temperature of the ocean, shifting of precipitation to other regions creating droughts and floods, the aforementioned acidification, etc.
2013 holds the longest number of days on record between hurricane landfalls.
The phlogiston theory comes to mind. Combustion was surprisingly hard for science to get a handle on.
The evolution of various atomic models prior to Bohr is also a case where one "consensus" after another was overturned by new evidence. And even Einstein was reluctant to let go of the notion of a luminiferous ether.
And that's just physics. I'm sure biology and anatomy/physiology experts could fill volumes with accounts of false consensuses that took a long time to reverse.
Note the important characteristic of model change in science: all new models must explain the same observational evidence old models did. Bohr did not propose a new model that turned atoms into literal apple pies; the matter kept behaving the way it did, we only learned some additional details. Moving from phlogiston to current chemistry didn't make combustion suddenly work, it always worked.
Given the amount of evidence we collected on climate, it's nigh impossible that we'll come to a new model that says "yeah, it's not humans doing it, we can ignore it".
Taking this further, even if we did somehow find out that humans weren't changing a thing it would still be in our best interests to prevent or slow the changes. Laying blame is an exercise in futility.
For example, let's say that we were somehow wrong about cows not actually being the #1 contributor to global warming (which they aren't[1]). Climate change deniers would have a day of rejoice for being right that it wasn't humans, and then what? Asphyxiate in cow fart.
It don't care if it's humans, cows, an alien beam from outside the galaxy or the hamster people. It's a problem, I stopped caring who's to blame a long time ago. We're currently going for the lowest hanging fruit (carbon emissions), which is the best approach. If tomorrow it turns out it was something different, changing that would be the correct thing to fix. Proving that humans aren't to blame does not exempt us from fixing it.
Models like the 'plum pudding' were known to be incorrect; they were just used at the time because they were the best available.
In general, though, personal confidence in our personal understanding is indeed a very fuzzy thing that probably does have a lot to do with popular acceptance. Eventually neuroscience will help us understand this better.
But, the scientific method and mathematics together provide a way to escape the limitations of perceived correctness now. Instead of our brains judging what's correct, we have logically independent methods (science proper and math) that can make the decisions for us.
Second, and more important, this horrible public debate is being framed in the most disingenuous terms possible. I am consistently being told that people either believe in imminent danger requiring bold political action -- or they are science deniers. Pardon me, but that's just bullshit. As the GP pointed out, there are an infinite number of intermediate positions; and no amount of hand-waving about the possible dangers is going to change that.
There are a bunch of logical steps a person must take in order to support political action. Is there a change coming? Are we the cause? Is the change going to cause more harm than good? Can we control the outcome? What is the "proper" outcome? How much action is warranted by the change indicated? And so on. I could list these exhaustively, but it would be pedantic.
This list is not just a bunch of rhetorical obstacles to make sure nothing happens. These are logical and discrete steps that must be looked at and evaluated. Many of them are yes/no questions, but some involve qualitative opinions or numerical differences. If any of these steps come up short, i.e., if there's going to be massive change but the change has more of a positive impact than negative? The whole shebang falls apart. That's not moving the goalposts, that's not trying to throw up a bunch of obstacles. That's just how the reasoning works out.
"The climate is changing" is a trivial statement. Of course it is. "What's left today is a proper scientific theory" looks like a pretty big stretch to this layman. Even granting that somehow we have a falsifiable, reproducible (and how would that work, anyway? Got another Earth nearby?) theory, still looks like a bunch of political types at the IPCC voting on what the change will be. Voting. On the numerical result of a supposedly proper scientific theory. Show me the corresponding physics body that is voting on the mass of the proton and maybe we could get somewhere.
And even then, even if there wasn't so much BS -- even assuming something as rock solid as a huge asteroid heading towards Earth -- a democracy still makes decisions by the persuasion of the voters. I've heard many a climate catastrophist talk as if the average voter is too stupid to make life or death decisions for themselves and the society they live in. If that's what they believe, then we need to start talking about the wisdom of setting up a select group of scientists as the new priestly class, able to understand the mysterious ways of the universe and make decisions about what is just and good for the rest of us.
I've said it before: this is a terrible debate, full of scientists who shouldn't be advocates, politicians who are looking for the latest bandwagon to jump on, the vast morass of uniformed folks who want to look knowledgeable and the poor voter stuck in the middle of all of it.</rant>
As an aside, I would really love to see some discussion about the fact that models based on Cellular Automata always tend towards runaway conditions. Anybody who's worked with such models know this, but it seems to have been left out of the discussion.
Yes, climate science deals with problems are that more difficult to solve with the "hypothesis->experiment->new hypothesis" approach that works so well for some other fields. People try their best with models and paleo- studies, but it's far, far from ideal. As a result, the IPCC must use other methods to assess consensus.
Many of the fundamental tenets of climate science are reproducible and falsifiable (absorption spectra of the atmosphere with different pollutants; the effect of acidification on marine carbonates; the ways in which glacier ice deforms and flows, as examples). But figuring out how they fit together on the scale of a planet is an enormous challenge.
Ultimately, there's a lot of uncertainty, which some have argued is intrinsic to the problem. What if we can't answer your train of questions in a reasonable amount of time with yes/no? If the answers are variations on "maybe" (they usually are), how should we manage risk? Does ethics come into play?
Finally, there is a pretty rich history of people (scientists included) inadvertently radically-changing their environments because the time scales are too long to grasp.
Agreed that the many/most of the tiny pieces of climate science are about as settled as you can get. Nobody's debating the absorption spectrum of CO2. Everybody knows what the temperature of the Earth would be if it were a black body.
But, as you note, this ain't Newtonian physics. If you think about it, the Earth's climate is the most amazingly complex system we could possibly assess using science. We have myriad chemical processes. Add to those a plethora of biological processes. Throw in a heap of meteorological processes. Finally don't forget the astrophysics of the thing. And if you want to have the discussion to the natural conclusion, don't forget geo-politics, economics, demographics, and a pile of other human-oriented sciences.
Geesh Pete, that's a ton of separately enormously complex systems, many of which have huge knowledge gaps, many of which we cannot model well worth a hoot, all working together. To do what? I'm not even sure we understand the question, much less have any clue on how to model the answers.
You also make an excellent point about unplanned consequences of mankind taking various actions. I am reminded of an archaeology article I read a while back about a Roman village. The village was home to a large silver mining industry. As such, the people there prospered. The empire grew. But at the same time they poisoned their water supply. There was much suffering.
I doubt it would be possible to remove most of the ecological changes (I will not use the loaded term "damage") that economic growth has caused without us all living in bearskins and dying of measles by age 30. That's not acceptable. So it's always going to be a discussion about appropriate trade-offs. It's been that way for all of recorded history, assuming the sky gods remain happy, all we have is this reasoning by induction to use on the climate question.
I am honestly at a loss to tell you what the stock market is going to do over the next year. I cannot tell you how the economy will fare over five years. I have completely no idea what changes technology will bring over the next decade or two. Asking for political consensus about what some folks _guess_ might be a few inches of sea level change over the next century? It's simply a non-starter. I don't mean that in a pejorative way. I'm sure folks mean well and are acting in good faith. It's just the entire line of argumentation is far too tenuous, shaky and relies way too much on emotional verve for me to get any traction on it at all. I see a lot of anger, haughty condescension, and political ugliness, but that's just a terrific reason for serious scientists to have nothing to do with the advocacy part of this. There's no there there.
Not really true, or at least that black body temp is not useful in determining the "extra" warmth. The 255K number is the result of a "simple educational tool" that makes for "a good algebra lesson". I haven't seen what the correct number would be, but probably closer to the mean temperature of the moon ~200K. So there is some combination of atmospheric effects that raises mean temperature ~90K, rather than the usually quoted 33K. https://www.skepticalscience.com/postma-disproved-the-greenh...
Yes, but beware the Average Joe who doesn't like the conclusion of those models and therefore seeks "we don't know" as a free pass to disbelieve. Scientific consensus represents the best state of human knowledge so far. I.e. just because we aren't dead sure about those 13.4 billion years doesn't give you free pass to believe the Universe is 6000 years old. Humility is cool and all, but one has to remember that if there was another reliable way to get information about the universe, it would have been incorporated into scientific process.
> and how would that work, anyway? Got another Earth nearby?
Venus. That's where we discovered the concept of runaway global warming in the first place.
> I've said it before: this is a terrible debate, full of scientists who shouldn't be advocates, politicians who are looking for the latest bandwagon to jump on, the vast morass of uniformed folks who want to look knowledgeable and the poor voter stuck in the middle of all of it.
Yeah, it's just a huge mess. That's what always happens when a topic gets politicized - when it can be used to push agendas and persuade voters.
"Name one such scientific consensus that was..."
Asks for examples, shoots them all down with no true scotsman argument...
No one is denying climate change.
Probably very little compared to GH gases contribution, see here: http://skepticalscience.com/waste-heat-global-warming.htm
There is a lot of energy coming to the Earth in the form of sunlight. We could power world economy with it many times over.
For comparison, the Earth's fiery core is about 45TW of radioactive decay and sunlight hitting Earth is about 173PW.
Of course, we've historically increased our energy use by around 5% per year, so if that trend held (which you should expect about as much as any other exponential trend holding...), in about 50 years waste heat would begin outweighing greenhouse gasses.
I just wanted to address possibly wrong belief of GP that waste heat can be the primary cause of GW.
If objectivity is lacking, it is lacking almost exclusively because certain right-wing groups took a scientific issue, turned it into a political issue, and set their politics to oppose the science.
Certainly, there exist fanatic, non-objective people on both sides. But they're not exactly common, and it gets tedious to see comments like yours in every discussion about this issue, and almost always directed at the reasonable people who actually look at the facts, and not at the the people who think climate change isn't science, who think that increased ice mass must be evidence against global warming regardless of the reason for it, or who think global temperatures stopped rising in 1998.
But you seem a reasonable person. Maybe you could help me understand the last 20 years of the UAH 6.0 data and the RSS data which matches it within +-.2C?
These are two separate organizations, who's data (with UAH's 6.0 update) is within .2C of each other. UAH is University of Alabama in Huntsville in partnership with NASA. RSS is a private atmospheric research company. Both their data sets start in 1979.
Without discounting their data, what theory of anthropogenic global warming accounts for this length of no warming during the period where 1/3rd of all man made CO2 was released into the atmosphere? I'm extremely curious and have had no luck getting an answer anywhere.
The data is easy to find, but I can link it if you want to run it yourself. The UAH 6.0 data is still in Beta, but NASA started accounting for loss of orbit and are working on an updated record.
http://www.le-telegraphe.ch/docus/warming.pdf
So if you're interested in the latest, reading that is probably a good start. It looks to me like there's a lot more than just satellite data to examine.
And the HADCRUT4 people wave off the satellite data with "they don't adjust for satellite drift or sensor degradation", but that's all NASA/UAH and RSS do with the data. But even so, their data shows a pause going back 13 years.
And this is exactly what I find everywhere when looking for info about the satellite data. Not an explanation of what it means, but attacks on its veracity. Which goes back to my original point or attacking the questioner instead of explaining what the satellite data means.
Personally I find it hard to believe that a mishmash of thousands of types of land based weather stations, in thousands of different microclimates and variable conditions, could possible be superior to simply measuring the total energy released by a slice of 75% of the atmosphere.
The temperature data you mention is a composite from several space-based instruments, that have to be stitched together. Calibration of any space-based measurement is not easy, so your statement "simply measuring the total energy released by a slice of 75% of the atmosphere" is not really that simple at all!
In particular, radiometers (like AMSU, where the UAH numbers come from) are really good when used for band ratios (taking the ratio, in essence, can allow instrument sensitivity to cancel out). And they are at their best for short-term studies where instrument temperature and component drift cannot accumulate. But radiometers are not nearly so good at absolute measurements over long time bases. There is a literature on this, for instance: how AMSU temperature drift affects its measurements.
In general, I'd suggest that your expertise may not be great enough to dismiss one measurement and favor other, very specific, measurements. Remember that the IPCC contributors have literally devoted half their life to studying these problems. It's hard for an educated enthusiast to keep up. (Source: I work with several IPCC contributors, and their expertise is humbling.)
Independent verification?
That NOAA paper you linked has some interesting issues. But even if it is correct (it's probably not), it shows a low sensitivity to CO2.
Anyway, I'm afraid I can't really help, I just don't know enough about all the various issues involved. The interpretation of temperature data seems to boil down to a whole bunch of "it's complicated." I lean heavily towards the people who say "it's complicated, but when you analyze it properly it shows warming" over the people who say "the data shows there is no warming" just because the latter tend to see calibration as a ploy and tend not to be well versed in the actual science, whereas the former is usually from people who study this stuff for a living. I will certainly admit that this is not the most solid approach, but it seems to be about the best a person can do without dedicating a significant part of your life to studying it in depth.
After working through tons of this stuff, reading papers, replicating the math where I can (hard to get source data, and harder to get actual algorithms), I'm left with "who knows?" But the satellite data is clear (and is the only contiguous pole to pole measurement of the atmosphere we have). No warming for over 20 years.
Positive feedback loop systems tend to move in cycles, only each cycle has a greater amplitude than the previous one.
By all means, in the scientific field, maintain humility and approach each result with skepticism. But #1 is more a political problem than a scientific one. The nation's (and world's) response to climate change is vastly insufficient. As educated individuals in a high-tech field, we have a duty to call a spade a spade, and sometimes preemptively calling the opposition's bullshit is a means to this end.
Also, while you're at it, have a look at the "Argument to Moderation" logical fallacy.
Antarctica is losing ice from its ice sheets - It shows global warming is happening and things might get worse.
Antarctica is gaining more ice than it's losing - We speculate that it might lead to another consequence that we haven't observed or modeled which would mean things still get worse.
That's bias if I ever saw it.
The fact is, we really don't know what will happen. Predictions range from 10m sea level rise in 50 years to nothing noticeable. It's a risk. A risk of things that might go very bad or might not. So we need to worry in case it does go bad. But the general public can't understand risk - they need black and white certainty which doesn't yet exist in this field. Proponents fear that people will choose black so they try to convince them it's white. Even though it's wrong, at least it seems like the safer choice of wrong.
Seems pretty fair, doesn't it? I mean, any decreases have certainly been used by AGW promoters to show "the sky is falling".
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Anthropogenic: "there's more snow falling in Antarctica than ice melting" says nothing about humans being responsible one way or the other.
Global: more snow falling in Antarctica says nothing about overall global conditions, e.g. average surface temperature. Changes in circulation patterns can cool one spot and warm another.
Warming: more snow falling in Antarctica does not, by itself, even say anything about temperatures in Antarctica. It's not like raising the average there (-49C) by a few degrees would turn snow into rain. It could however increase the likelihood of precipitation.
I fail to see how "part of Antarctica sees increased snowfall due to raising temperature" is an evidence against AGW. At best, its an evidence against cartoon-version strawman AGW where every corner of the world warms up by an equal amount and every ice in the world starts to slowly melt away at the same pace.
Right - because warming increases mass of water vapor that air can hold. Which there is plenty of in the ocean, so then all the slightly warmer air melting the exterior ice allows the air to pick up moisture. Then as the air moves over the interior, temperatures drop and snow falls leading to the accumulation of snow mass that has been observed.
For example,
(1) A novel physical mechanism is discovered that increases the surface temperature of the Earth without any relation to greenhouse gases. Moreover, the mechanism has such a characteristic that it was steadily increasing in the past fifty years or so, roughly matching mankind's CO2 emission by pure coincidence. (I.e., "mankind is fucked, the universe decided to kill us off" scenario.)
(2) Average global temperature starts to drop unexpectedly, and continues to drop for a decade or more (so that we can rule out yearly statistical noise), despite the increased level of CO2.
(3) A new natural source of CO2 is discovered, and it is determined that the atmospheric increase of CO2 so far was actually due to this natural source. At the same time, a new independent natural sink of CO2 is discovered, and it is also determined that all the CO2 mankind has been generating was actually consumed by this sink. Even more unexpectedly, this big CO2 producer/consumer pair, while being pretty much in lockstep until 2015, is shown to diverge starting 2015, which refutes the whole point of "Mankind is responsible for increased CO2" argument. (This actually sounds like a variation of (1), but still.)
(4) Fish stocks and marine ecosystem unexpectedly starts to rebound across the ocean, thanks to increased photosynthesis by marine microorganisms. Upon further research, this is found to be linked with increased CO2 level. (This will at least partially falsify "this is a bad thing" part.)
I know, these are tough scenarios, but falsifying established science is hard. Falsifying it in a way that disproves its original successful predictions is even harder: it almost never happens. (Even after General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, if Newtonian mechanics had predicted a railway to be dangerously curved, it would still remain dangerous in exactly the same way.)
Your point (1) has a huge assumption about "kill us off". There's no sign that mankind is being killed off. We're doing just fine. The novel mechanism might be transient and the increases in CO2 might be found to reverse.
Sounds like you would actually prefer that scenario to the mundane scientific consensus, where all we have to do is demolish the fossil fuel industry, cut back CO2 emission, and hopefully we could keep the number of displaced people in the order of several millions by the end of this century. Well, to each his own.
> I know, these are tough scenarios, but falsifying established science is hard.
It is also very hard to falsify the theory that invisible pink unicorns are causing global warming. It's not necessarily a good thing that a theory is hard to falsify.
For 2): there has been a 15-year global warming pause, which none of the models predicted. With your definition 2), that's actually close to a falsification of AGW.
A point I do agree on, which was also the point of my comment: a 10 or 15 year period is too short to say anything about climate. A pertinent question is then: what is a long enough period?
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2015/noaa-analysis-journ...
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jun/04/global-wa...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2015/06/15/a-pause-in...
"Evidence Against a Global Warming Hiatus?"
based on the scientific paper titled
"Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus"
Also, that is a single paper, based on adjusting historical temperature data for a single data set, which then shows less of a hiatus. Compare that to the fifth IPCC report, based on a large number of data sets and a very large number of studies, which states unequivocally
“[global temperature] has shown a much smaller increasing linear trend over the past 15 years [1998-2012] than over the past 30 to 60 years.”
No, it doesn't have to drop. It just has to not rise. Which is exactly what has been happening for close to two decades now.
Furthermore, the level of CO2 has not just increased--it has increased by close to the "business as usual" scenario in the models--i.e., the worst case scenario, which the models predicted would show significant temperature rise that has not happened. In other words, the models have already been falsified.
> falsifying established science is hard.
Climate science is not "established science" in the way that GR or QM is. Falsifying GR or QM within their established domains of validity would be extremely hard, yes--but that's because their established domains of validity are nailed down by mountains of evidence from controlled experiments that matches the theoretical predictions to ten or more decimal places. Climate science is not even close--not even within orders of magnitude--to that kind of accuracy.
In fact, we should not expect climate science to be anywhere close to GR and QM in accuracy, because it's still a fairly new science, its domain is very complex, and it's not possible to do controlled experiments in most of the domain. We can't re-start the Earth's climate of fifty years ago with slightly different initial conditions and see how it performs.
None of this, in itself, disqualifies climate science as a science, or means that climate scientists are not doing important work. But it does mean that climate science simply cannot make the kinds of claims that GR or QM make about what is going to happen if we do or don't do particular things. The honest thing for climate scientists to do would be to admit that.
In addition, this is an interactive page that lets you plot yearly global temperatures up to now. Now look at this graph and please tell me if temperature did not rise in the 21st century.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/time-series/global/globe/land_o...
Finally, this page [2] compares IPCC's 2001 prediction with observed temperatures up to 2010. Look at the graph titled "2001 Projections vs. Observations", and see how closely the prediction matches reality starting 2001. (Which is not surprising, considering that it's only 10 years.) And now ponder what would happen if this "trend" continues for another 90 years.
[1] http://www.csicop.org/si/show/has_global_warming_stopped/
[2] http://www.skepticalscience.com/lessons-from-past-climate-pr...
These aren't "graphs", they're histograms, and it's impossible to read any trend lines off of them. So they're useless for this discussion.
> Look at the graph titled "2001 Projections vs. Observations", and see how closely the prediction matches reality starting 2001.
First of all, since the IPCC TAR was published in 2001, anything before 2001 is not a "projection", it's a "fit of model to past data". (And notice that the model does not fit all of the past data very well; before the mid-1900s in Figure 2 there is significant divergence. A model that can't retrodict the past can't be expected to predict the future.)
Second, these graphs are useless because they just give the "prediction" as a single line, with no error bars and no differentiation between the different sets of model runs that were based on different assumptions for how CO2 would rise. In other words, these graphs are spin, not science.
That's just not true: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2014/12/recent...
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/06/03/el-nino-strengthens-th...
Also note the graph showing the increasing mismatch between models and observations.
Of course many will object to my choice of source, just as I objected to RealClimate as a source. But the data set used is an "official" one (the RSS satellite data), though not one you hear as much about.
Furthermore, there are independent measurements of sea level changes showing how much it's rising per year, even if we don't know where it's coming from.
The real consequences of this finding are explained in the article:
"The good news is that Antarctica is not currently contributing to sea level rise, but is taking 0.23 millimeters per year away," Zwally said. "But this is also bad news. If the 0.27 millimeters per year of sea level rise attributed to Antarctica in the IPCC report is not really coming from Antarctica, there must be some other contribution to sea level rise that is not accounted for."
From the article, the ice accumulation seems to be from increased snowfall during the Holocene. How this will ultimately be affected by warming isn't clear, but for now it seems somewhat orthogonal to AGW.
[0] Instead, most mass loss from Antarctica appears to be at the margins and driven by ocean processes.
This is explained in the article.
The article explains that there are two competing processes affecting the total amount of ice in Antarctica. One is the process of formation of ice mass from snowfall, the rate of which has been steady for the past 10,000 years (this study has now measured it at 200 billion tons per year). This affects the total amount of ice across Eastern Antarctica and the interior. Unfortunately, this process has not _increased_ either.
The second process is the thinning of the glaciers. The rate of _this_ process has increased since 1992-2008 by 65 billion tons. As the article points out, if this continues, than Antarctica will begin to see a mass decrease.
I'm not entirely sure how this can be interpreted as a point against AGW, or what it has to do with the anthropogenic part at all, nor do I see how it can seen as evidence against simple GW (regardless of cause), as the melting process is still increasing. At best, it can be seen as evidence that things haven't gotten out of hand yet. Now, if the Antartic snow growth was accelerating, then we could start arguing that we don't need to worry about CO2 increases, as the planet will just compensate any shift with some (unknown) homeostatic counter process. However, as it stands, this report provides no evidence for that.
http://muller.lbl.gov/pages/IceAgeBook/history_of_climate.ht...
i.e. AGW might be a not entirely bad thing, from the northern hemisphere's limited point of view at least, were it to be sufficiently finely calibrated to maintain the interglacial period indefinitely.(I suppose if the many worlds interpretation is correct, there's got to be at least one earth that gets lucky.)
However be aware, there is also a theory floating around that it might in fact trigger the next ice age, if it shuts down the global conveyor belt currents, in particular the gulf stream.
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2004/05...
And that, as much as anything, is why it's called climate change, rather than global warming these days.
(emphasis original)
Who cares? Once you've asked whether something is bad, why on earth would it matter whether humans are causing it? It matters to the environmentalist movement, because it is a tenet of that movement that the same change is good if not metaphysically related to humans but bad if it is. That's not a viewpoint I'd endorse, though.
That's a misconception you're holding onto. Those working on mitigating carbon in the atmosphere don't' care what the source of the carbon is. Whether we caused it or not simply doesn't matter.
> If we didn't cause it, the whole edifice crumbles.
The attempts to stop a calamity are worthwhile regardless of the original source of the calamity. Engineering the environment does not depend on whether we think we accidentally engineered it before.
Climate change is the more broader and comprehensive view of man's impact on the current climate and it goes far beyond greenhouse gases and the common causes of global warming. Greenland for example which is one of the current largest contributors to the rise of sea level is melting not only due to warmer sea and air temperatures but as latest studies show due to changes in the albedo mainly due to (black) carbon deposits in the ice.
The change in the albedo of glaciers in some areas was not considered until fairly recently to be the major contributor and catalyst to them melting, and this also affects land glaciers which were previously considered more resilient to sea temperature changes and could even serve to mitigate or dampen the affect.
Climate change also deals with other issues such as massive deforestation, salinity and acidity changes in water which affect gas absorption which can lead to thermal and molecular expansion, as well as many other things.
The climate is complicated and the fact that moisture from the air is deposited on land based ice in Antarctica doesn't change the fact that man made climate change is a real fact, heck pretty much all climate change models actually predicted that land ice thickness would increase when sea ice is lost at increasing rates as the increased moisture of the air would increase precipitation, and precipitation over Antarctica isn't a good thing it means that the air is getting considerably warmer because cold air has almost no capacity for water vapor[0].
This of course also that droughts would increase in places that we actually need them because air is getting warmer and the global jet streams whisk it away and before when the air would normally get colder and lose it's water vapor capacity and condense which would make it rain over land and most importantly populated areas we see now more precipitation in places like Antarctica and worse the oceans.
http://web.gccaz.edu/~lnewman/gph111/topic_units/Labs_all/Wa...
This issue is way too complicated which is probably one of it's biggest issues because people who like to dig their heads into the sand like to use simple anecdotes to disproof something which sadly we know too little about to understand, but enough to know that we should be quite afraid of.
So while it's still increasing in mass, the current ∂∂m indicates it will start decreasing in 20-30 years.
My understanding is that GRACE still was seeing Antarctic mass losses, but perhaps that has changed.
“The good news is that Antarctica is not currently contributing to sea level rise, but is taking 0.23 millimeters per year away,” Zwally said. “But this is also bad news. If the 0.27 millimeters per year of sea level rise attributed to Antarctica in the IPCC report is not really coming from Antarctica, there must be some other contribution to sea level rise that is not accounted for.”
Complete conjecture, but my money is on IPCCs estimates for other sources being a little too conservative, not some entirely new explanation.
(Other sources are what? Arctics? Heat expansion?)
Anyway, I particularly like that they are doing observations rather than just faffing around with models. Models are good, but data is better.
You need both the models and the data. Facts without theory answer only what happened, not why, you can't make projections without theory. Theory without facts... pretty obvious problem there.
- The ocean expands as it warms, which is the single largest contributor right now (1.1 mm/yr).
- Mountain glaciers are next, as they are very rapidly melting (0.76 mm/yr, with large uncertainties).
- Then Greenland, as mentioned by another poster (0.43 mm/yr).
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/27/world/greenlan...
('greenland' in the search box returns a bunch of articles from a span of a few years)
These two combine to be a global tax administered by new supranational organizations that can alternatively bribe and control development and the standard of living of every country on the planet. The governance of these entities will likely go the way of the IMF and the World Bank. Thus, it's just too convenient of a way to administer an empire. No wonder the countries that would get the short end of all this, such as the BRICS, are skeptical.
I realize we here in America have got to keep all these schemes going to keep the great balancing act we perform running the world moving right along. Heck, we need all the help we can get to keep the BRICS at an economic disadvantage. Too bad it's such a waste of smart people producing climate change B.S.
Putin takes over Russia, and proceeds to do absolutely nothing to develop the economy away from its commodity dependency. Instead, he falls back onto the focus on energy that doomed the USSR. The US dollar goes on a big run, China's growth slows, US oil producers add four million barrels per day, and just like that Russia sinks into the abyss again. Russians are now spending half their income on just food alone, with their economy collapsing by 1/3 in dollar terms in just 18 months.
What did the US do to cause that? That's Russia's fault.
The same goes for what is happening to Brazil right now. They rode the fake boom good times on the back of a debased US dollar. Now that fake boom is over, the weak dollar has gone away, and with that tide going out, so has Brazil's economy.
Whose fault is that? It's only Brazil's fault.
Did the US force China to take on tens of trillions in debt to fake economic growth where there was none after the global consumer crashed in 2008? Nope, just like Japan before them, they did it to themselves willingly so they wouldn't have to admit the party was over.
The US hasn't had to do anything to these countries to hold them at an economic disadvantage, they're doing it to themselves.
Personally, I think that there are much more important problems on the table before sea level rise, but nevertheless, climate change or not, pollution should be addressed on all fronts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:West_Antarctic_Collapse.o...
Faith: X is true! Because! Science: Is X true? Are we certain? Lets try and find evidence counter to X.
I see a lot of people (from each side) trying to prove their point, rather than disprove it.* The former is faith, the latter is science.
* Not referring to people here, just the population in general
Think of a similar word "faithful". Being faithful means you can be relied upon. When one is described as being faithful, there is normally some form of evidence behind it, whether tangible or not. And thus "faith" is the evidence of things unseen. You therefore can have "faith" in someone that is "faithful" because you know it to be true. You saw it, you felt it, you know it, ect.
Actually that's not the definition of science, it's a definition of science, and whether it is a complete definition of science depends heavily on one's thoughts on philosophy of science. Falsification as the central concept has at times been popular and at times unpopular; right now, it is less popular than it was, say, about eighty years ago.
Luckily it doesn't work like that at all. Science progresses when incorrect theories are falsified. No army of philosophers will ever be able to change that with a silly meta argument.
Besides, not all scientific progress is made by falsifying incorrect theories. Quoting Max Planck:
> A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
(Of course, whether to call this a "scientific progress" is a matter of debate, but frankly if it advances mankind's state of understanding nature then that's good enough for me.)
Falsificationism is one possible solution that's been proposed, but it is not the only one, is not universally accepted, and you really should probably do some background research on the topic before arrogantly spouting off about how you have the one true answer that some "army of philosophers" with "silly meta arguments" can't manage to come up with.
Belief, in general, is a psychological attitude towards a claim.
Your definition of faith is more like my definition of fundamentalism: All evidence to the contrary of X is meaningless because X is true.
The distinction is subtle but note that faith uses the concept of faith as adjunct to rationality, rather than as replacement.
So there's a feedback mechanism that, as air temperatures rise, sequesters more liquid water that would otherwise raise sea levels. How will that be interpreted by the climate change alarmist camp as a portent of disaster?
You can survive 100-degree dry-bulb temperatures without problem, which is the reason why so many places of the world have a temperature above human core body temperature yet are still quite survivable. Now with wet bulb? Literally all these places can become literally unlivable for humans.
Why do you think that the former is a good reason to ignore the latter?