World won't cool without geoengineering, warns report
newscientist.com
newscientist.com
The draft report says the available evidence now suggests that above a certain threshold of warming, the Greenland ice sheet will almost disappear within approximately 1000 years, which will result in 7 metres of global sea-level rise. It estimates that the threshold may lie between 1 °C and 4 °C of warming, but is not confident of this figure.
So what they're saying is they are not confident that some degree of warming may occur within a huge band which may do something that sounds really bad (but they don't actually spell out the bad things) in the next 1,000 years.
I am a scientifically literate person with a strong conservation and environmental bent. But when I read something like this even I roll my eyes. Because I want people to actually conserve, please take the following advice to the AGW crowd:
First, stop using the disaster du jour to say, "See!?! We can expect more of this from now on!" Because when you did this with Katrina and then we had 8 years of relatively quiet hurricane seasons you sound like a "sky is falling" fool. The fact that "An Inconvenient Truth" came out shortly after Katrina with a hurricane on the movie posters and box covers was ridiculous.
Second, stop making inaccurate predictions about what is going to happen. For example - for a while everyone was decrying that snow was a thing of the past because of global warming (example: http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/snowfalls-are-now-j...) When we then had record snowfalls throughout many areas of the world, the same people changed their tune and said, "Exactly! Global Warming will actually bring more snow!" Enough of this nonsense.
Stop using things like carbon credits to live a ridiculously lavish lifestyle while telling everyone else to live simply.
Finally, stop trying to profit off of AGW. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/business/energy-environmen...
There are many people that you will never convince of the reality of AGW. But there are many more people that you are turning away from believing you because of the things above. Because I think finite resource conservation is the right thing to do, please stop hurting this cause.
Almost everything associated with how climate change research is reported makes it reek of bad science and propaganda.
The science says that the Earth is getting warmer, and it's getting warmer because of people. If you think this interpretation is bad science and propaganda, then you are simply mistaken.
I was not commenting on the science, I was commenting on how it is being reported.
Sadly, I was educated that perfection is impossible and to always question because sometimes people get it wrong when they thought they were right.
The media won't give them any coverage unless they throw out some disaster quotes, but the public has become tired of the same disaster scenarios that have been possible since 1995.
The 'things above' being two insignificant newspaper articles over the last 13 years? Get real. People reject AGW[1] because of a very well funded propaganda campaign that spreads disinformation and because the existence of AGW is incompatible with the conservative, capitalist political philosophies held by most people in the anglosphere. There are studies demonstrating the latter effect:
Why does public conflict over societal risks persist in the face of compelling and widely accessible scientific evidence? We conducted an experiment to probe two alternative answers: the “Science Comprehension Thesis” (SCT), which identifies defects in the public’s knowledge and reasoning capacities as the source of such controversies; and the “Identity-protective Cognition Thesis” (ICT) which treats cultural conflict as disabling the faculties that members of the public use to make sense of decision-relevant science. In our experiment, we presented subjects with a difficult problem that turned on their ability to draw valid causal inferences from empirical data. As expected, subjects highest in Numeracy — a measure of the ability and disposition to make use of quantitative information — did substantially better than less numerate ones when the data were presented as results from a study of a new skin-rash treatment. Also as expected, subjects’ responses became politically polarized — and even less accurate — when the same data were presented as results from the study of a gun-control ban. But contrary to the prediction of SCT, such polarization did not abate among subjects highest in Numeracy; instead, it increased. This outcome supported ICT, which predicted that more Numerate subjects would use their quantitative-reasoning capacity selectively to conform their interpretation of the data to the result most consistent with their political outlooks.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2319992
A few misguided newpaper articles that over excitedly exaggerated uncertain predictions didn't make any difference to anything. Neither did Al Gore's personal finances. People ranting about Al Gore were never going to be won over by scientific arguments, their position is based on emotion and politics, not logical reasoning.
[1] people in the aglosphere that is, it's a much less prevalent phenomenon elsewhere
Then again, he's not the one saying Al Gore's (manbearpig! hurr hurr hurr) finances prove or disprove climate change
No one said this. Are you interested in actual discussion or snide comments?
What's the point of implying that climate change is just a scam to pad people's banks accounts?
I'm often frustrated by media coverage as well. What I once heard a professor describe as 'climate porn'; photos of polar bears on ice bergs along with cataclysmic predictions of 20 meter sea level rise. It's not productive because it makes the problems seem totally intractable and causes many people to just give up because they feel hopeless. Often the articles like that are based on a single more pessimistic paper/scientist[1] when really we should be looking at all the available models not cherry picking the most extreme (which of course is the purpose of the IPCC reports).
[1] although I will say that the more conservative IPCC 2007 predictions for arctic ice sheet loss are looking pretty unlikely and the more pessimistic ones have been much closer to what has happened over the last 5 years. I've no idea if those dates have been revised downwards in the new report.
You're right - I do not reject the science of AGW. Here is my absolute concrete position:
It is foolish to squander finite resources. I believe fossil fuels and clean air are finite resources.
So while I don't reject AGW science, I think its messengers are terrible at PR and practice a level of dishonesty to attempt to further their cause (which so far has had the opposite effect). Having said that - I think for the most part we want the same thing - conservation.
I have 3 kids; I want them and their descendants to have the same chance at life that I had. It sickens me to think that we might selfishly destroy the world's ability to sustain human life.
That is pretty misleading. We don't claim to be able to model temperature over periods of time that short. You can easily pick other 15 year spans where the rate of warming was well above 'projected temperatures'. For example 1992 - 2006 was 0.28 deg.C/decade[1]. Were you going around in 2006 talking about how badly climate scientists had screwed up because warming was so much faster than they predicted? If not why are you doing it now?
Right, that's why we get graphs with confidence intervals, right? From my understanding, the previous warming was still within the alleged confidence intervals. However, instead of accelerating as expected, it's about to fall out of the projected intervals completely[1]
[1]http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/2157446...
Well, no.
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wXkm-8pKPKE/UjhUMlXq44I/AAAAAAAAC8...
It is not.
(And you should perhaps read that chart again if you think it is showing you that the "IPCC has been lowering predictions".)
It is just incredibly embarrassing that global warming deniers can't even read the reports which they so vehemently believe to be false.
As a person interested in science, I consider this a fatal objection to any theory. AGW is not excepted. Anyone who has the mental gymnastic strength to talk themselves past this problem is merely demonstrating that they are not actually interested in science at this point, as the disparity between theory and fact is pretty clear at this point.
If "the public" are having problems with AGW for the wrong reasons, well, it's hardly the first time the correct conclusion has been reached for the wrong reasons.
At best, you are exaggerating. Tell me which of the following claims in the article are false:
1) BBC reported in 2007 global warming would leave Arctic ice-free in summer by 2013
2) Almost a million more square miles of ocean covered with ice than in 2012
You said it's complete bollocks so let me know how the two items above are false or kindly admit you were exaggerating which does nobody advocating for AGW any favors.
There are obviously serious problems with the article - for example - I thought this part was ridiculous:
The Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific has remained blocked by pack-ice all year. More than 20 yachts that had planned to sail it have been left ice-bound and a cruise ship attempting the route was forced to turn back.
Their apparent surprise of "The Northwest Passage" being blocked as being a major thing is just silly. It was blocked for most of the year until 2009. But I think it's better to point out things like that than to dismiss it as "complete bollocks" which is fairly easily falsifiable which reduces your credibility.
>1) BBC reported in 2007 global warming would leave Arctic ice-free in summer by 2013
Well that isn't strictly true. The BBC reported that some US scientists had made a prediction that the arctic 'could' be ice free by 2013. Of course the BBC reporting of that was pretty irresponsible, at least in the headline. Maslowski's actual prediction was for a range of years, with 2013 being at the low end and he is quoted in the article[1] saying "It might not be as early as 2013 but it will be soon, much earlier than 2040". For what it's worth I still think his productions will prove closer to reality than the not ice free till after 2040 ones.
>2) Almost a million more square miles of ocean covered with ice than in 2012
I will assume that this statistic is correct, but it is still very misleading. That is not a 'recovery' when you look at the longer trend: it doesn't make up for the losses to extent over recent years never mind decades. That is why I linked the above graph to put it into context. An increase from the all time low is hardly surprising at all. So this is an example of a lie of omission: they neglect to put the figure into the wider context. We could also quibble about mentioning only extent and not volume.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/...
So here's the lesson. Say what you mean without exaggeration.
Because when you said it's "complete bollocks" what you actually meant was that it was misleading. When you exaggerate like that, it makes it seem like you're pushing an agenda.
"Sometime earlier this week a cargo ship passed through the Northwest Passage into Baffin Bay, along Greenland’s southwestern coast, making it the first bulk carrier ever to make the voyage. This journey was completed by the Nordic Orion, a 225-meter, ice-strengthened vessel loaded with coal in Vancouver, British Columbia and headed for Finland."
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/09/26/2683481/northwes...
Which predictions in particular?
The Met Office in Britain is one of the clearest. Are they predicting a wet summer for Britain? Brits should buy suntan lotion. Are they predicting a hot, dry summer? Brits should plant something that likes wet, dark conditions. They are the source of one of the models in the IPCC report, and they're predictions for a year or two out are wrong, consistently.
And I find the idea that a climate model can't predict a year in advance, consistently, but can be used for 10 or 100 years in advance to be absolutely ludicrous. Utter mathematical illiteracy is required to think that is true of a chaotic system. It remains unclear to me whether climate researchers actually understand that "a chaotic system" is actually a mathematically meaningful statement and not "an excuse for why we were wrong, again". (No sarcasm, it truly remains unclear to me. Chaos theory is a real thing, and I'd really like to think that climate researchers would know a lot about it, but I've only seen faint traces of it, where I expect the terminology to dominate the discourse.)
Given the utter failure of these predictions on a year and a decade scale (as I've said before, had the climate scientists said "hey, there's going to be a 15-year plateau because of this and this which will mask the problem but then this is going to happen", I'd be fine with that), I see no reason to believe they'll work on a century scale.
At the moment, the most reasonable explanation is that the models used by the IPCC up to this point have been grossly wrong about their positive heating feedback claims, which if you dig, were never really that well substantiated by actual evidence, they have always been modeling choices. In the real science world, those claims are being walked back quite rapidly with a variety of peer reviewed studies providing both evidence of this and potential models for explanations; this has not penetrated to the political portion of the AGW crowd yet. This is probably because the science, to my eyes, is rapidly converging on "global warming is unlikely to be a problem in this century, and may even be a net benefit to humanity". I wouldn't be surprised this is the dominant science consensus in ten years.
That doesn't mean that you cannot predict the kinds of behaviour the system will exhibit. You can still predict, for example, that in the long term summers will be hotter and drier. In fact everyone relies on this to some extent - even though it's impossible to predict the weather more than a few days in advance for the same reason, you're still more likely to pack shorts in summer than winter.
The same is true of simple, rigourously analysed chaotic systems like the Lorentz attractor - someone's actually proved that the long-term behaviour of that system is completely stable and will remain that way even in the face of outside noise, but also that even the slightest noise makes it impossible to predict the exact state of the system more than a small amount of time into the future.
Are you saying that global temperatures aren't rising? Is the arctic icecap not rapidly getting smaller? I believe even the rising sea level is already measurable (though still small at this point).
The predictions are coming true in a quite alarming fashion.
They haven't for the last 15 years, so that may be exactly what he is saying.
>Is the arctic icecap not rapidly getting smaller?
It is, but is the antarctic icecap not rapidly getting larger?
To the best of our knowledge the East Antarctic Ice Sheet is gaining mass[1] due to increased precipitation and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is losing mass[2] due to acceleration of glaciers. I believe there is also an increase in Antarctic sea ice extent [3]. As far as I know these increases are not enough to offset the reduction in mass in the Arctic but I don't have a comparison to hand. Wait a few days and the IPCC report will probably have a decent summary.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Antarctic_Ice_Sheet#Ice_m... [2] http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/12/the-he... [3] http://tamino.wordpress.com/2013/03/16/antarctic-sea-ice-gai...
I hear people claim that, but I can't find anything that backs it up. From what I can tell, average global temperature in the mid-90s was lower than today. Since about 2000, the rapid rise from before seems to slowing or halting, but it seems a bit early to say that this is a persistent change in the long term trend. The steep climb from before is undeniable.
In other words, the last 15 years have still been a lot warmer than anything before.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics/Escalator_2012_500....
Yes, see http://www.latimes.com/science/la-sci-climate-change-uncerta...
> Is the arctic icecap not rapidly getting smaller?
Well, it's not. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2415191/Global-cooli...
> I believe even the rising sea level is already measurable
Sure. Global Sea Level Rise Dampened by Australia Floods - http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130819141610.ht...
#3: Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.
#5: Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.
#13: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
All in one sentence at that. Excellent.
Science news almost universally overstates the effects of particular findings. These sources are more or less fine for announcing a new finding, but when you start to get into debating particular facts, they are utterly inappropriate sources.
In a forum such as Hacker News, you can expect most participants to be capable of reading the relevant portion of a peer reviewed study, and so that is the sort of citation that should be offered. News/op-ed articles bring nothing to the discussion.
And just to be clear, the ancestors our posts made unsubstantiated assertions based on their interpretation of the evidence, so in a sense, they are citing themselves, which in this sort of discussion, I think is fine. It's the appeal to low quality scientific authorities that is the issue.
[1]No offense intended by this at all, just giving a different perspective. ACQQ's comment was a catalyst for my own comment.
Really? The Daily Mail? And you think a one-year fluctuation contradicts a long term trend?
Had you actually looked into this subject, instead of clinging to some random image that seems to say what you wish to be true, you might have known that 2013 is still the sixth lowest year for arctic icecap size. And the other 5 are in the past 6 years.
You think a random image proves anything, but the only thing it proves is your own ignorance on the subject. The arctic icecap is rapidly getting smaller.
What is your evidence for the current course not being catastrophic? How are you defining catastrophic? To the human species? Or to the daily lives of a couple of billion people? Those are quite different, and the first at least isn't seriously being suggested by scientists that I'm aware of.
And to be honest, as far as I'm concerned one must seek out predictions that have come true, quite selectively. If you randomly sample the ones that have completion dates in the past, they are almost uniformly false. You speak as if you feel yourself in a position of moral authority, but I do not accept the moral authority of people who choose words over the plain science.
And there's always the big one... those big curves drawn where temperatures go up, up, up over this entire century, where instead they've stayed flat, flat, flat, and we've fallen out of most of the confidence intervals (and very nearly out of the rest). The spinning on how this really is what we predicted all along is getting quite mind boggling. No, the temperature trend of the last 15 years is never what was predicted. It is merely what actually happened.
Goodness help us all if those who think the solar activity level actually sets our temperature on a several-year delay are correct, and the global temperature starts going down. How will that be spun, I wonder? (Though that is merely one possibly theory. At this point I consider the late-1990s catastrophic model that still dominates the discourse plainly false, but it remains rather unclear what is true. I'd still put quite a bit of probability on "the chaotic system is fundamentally unpredictable past a few years" myself. It's been the smart money for the past 20 years and I don't see a lot of reason to move it.)
Since 1975, global average surface air temperature has increased at a rate of 0.17 deg.C/decade (estimated by linear regression using either the NASA GISS or HadCRUT4 data sets). But the rate of increase hasn’t been perfectly constant over that entire time span.
As a matter of fact, there’s a 15-year time span during which the rate is notably different. Fifteen whole years!!! By at least one calculation, the difference is “statistically significant.”
That 15-year time span covers the years 1992 through 2006, during which the rate of warming was 0.28 deg.C/decade. That’s a lot faster than the warming rate from 1975 to now.
What was your position in 2006, given that 15 year trend? Is your argument that when the 15 year trend is above the longer term trend it's due to natural variability and doesn't indicate a long term change but when it's below then it's due to a real shift and that global temperatures are about to start going down?
What measure of evidence do your require?
Ditto the case for anthropocentric (human caused) contribution to climate change.
Another piece of advice - stop verbally attacking people that are sympathetic to your cause.
For full disclosure, I voted for Al Gore in 2000. Tell me again how I'm politically rabble rousing against him.
Is it at all possible I'm just calling out hypocrisy when I see it?
It might be relevant if we were talking about carbon credits or some specific policy that Al Gore is involved in, but the rest of the time it's just going to take the discussion in a bad direction.
It may seem like I'm saying 'ignore the problem and it will go away' (the problem being Al Gore's hypocrisy). But there will always be people involved with or supportive of a cause that one can find negative things about. Expecting purity from everybody who just happens to agree with you, especially if they are politicians, means you will be waiting forever before you get anything done.
Because Al Gore is not a part of the scientific community and has no relevance to whether anything is happening or not. Any invocation of his name in this debate is simply a sign of severe bias and an attempt to manipulate the argument with emotions instead of facts.
This kind of behavior does not help the pursuit of scientific knowledge in any way.
Especially when they presume to tell me what my opinion on the matter is before I've even stated it.
I'm perfectly happy with that cautious sentence, as it is as true as it can be stated given today's knowledge (I assume; I haven't looked into it). It's not a very good headline, but reality has a habit of being complicated.
"Luckily", we have plenty of people who are more interested in saying simple things that everybody can understand, like "snow is a thing of the past". Unfortunately, exciting scientific headlines have a habit of being wrong…
This is why they renamed it to Climate Change, which is a win situation in any outcome :)
No, what they are saying is that in addition to all the other effects of global warming, melting of a particular chunk of ice will be absolutely irreversible past a particular cutoff point, but the cutoff point is difficult to determine with precision. We are interested in the cutoff point because it will drown billions (sic) of human beings, but any lack of precision about that doesn't mean that the rest of global warming is somehow a mirage.
Most likely we have already passed the cutoff point and melting of the Greenland ice sheet is irreversible.
Just because you're too dim to understand the science here doesn't give you an excuse to mock it.
You right, me stupid.
Does that make you feel better to de-intellectualize someone who gives suggestions? Keep attacking people sympathetic to the cause and see where that gets you.
Why did you use "(sic)"? I always thought it stood for "Spelling InCorrect", but lately I keep seeing people use it in other contexts.
Hopefully we've invented boats by then.
This is "effective" advocacy at its finest. Write an otherwise useful response, then sneak in a personal attack to ensure the other person will not bother listening to you or particularly thinking about what you said.
I will save all of us a bit of time by pointing out in advance the hypocrisy of statements like: "well, if they're going to get emotional instead of being reasonable, piss on them".
That definitely fails my sniff-test, but I'm no scholar in the area, so could could please explain how the science do indeed tell us that? Of particular interest is the justification of the word "will", of course meaning definite and inevitable, not some theoretical worst case scenario. The usage of the word also implied that the substantial mitigation efforts surely expected to be undertaken by those at risk will be catastrophically inadequate. Also, the word "drown" strikes me as oddly specific. I always assumed that the most potent causes of death caused by global warming would be secondary, such as starvation, malnutrition, dehydration, severe civil unrest or even war etc.
What's with the insults?
What? In the quote you included, they do spell out the bad things: the complete melting of the Greenland ice sheet, resulting in 7 meters of global sea-level rise. What's unclear about that?
A bit more subtle is what that 1-4 degrees warming means. That's not how much they think the earth will get warmer, that's what they think the threshold for the complete melting of Greenland's ice sheet is. So if we manage to limit the temperature rise to 2 degrees C, there's a good chance it won't melt completely, but if the threshold turns out to be on the low end of the range, it might still melt.
There's also nothing excessively alarmist about this. It's up-front about the 1000 year time scale.
Also, don't blame the scientists for what less-informed alarmists are shouting. Though I agree that it would be easier to inform people if there weren't a ton of people shouting nonsense.
Well, it sure sounds bad. But to most people it will be an abstract concept - what does that mean? It's like saying, "dihydrogen monoxide is the principal ingredient in acid rain". Makes water sound scary, doesn't it?
So what does a 7 meter rise in water over 1,000 years mean? Like I said, it sounds scary but is that:
a) We'll lose 3 miles of coastal land scary
OR
b) We'll be in Kevin Costner Water World scary
I don't know the answer to that. They should spell out what the actual impact will be, not make an abstract statement few people have a point of reference about.
If we have 1000 years to prepare for it, it most likely means that we will gain several miles of coastal land as we discover the best places (which may well be some way out to sea) to build dikes around the (relatively few) places where it's impractical to just move the population.
The Netherlands are often mentioned as the first place to go, but that's disingenuous: Nowhere else is better prepared to slap 50cm each century on top of their existing dikes. No, it's not quite that simple, but it's orders of magnitude simpler than constructing building a dike from scratch around, say, New York City.
No, we won't be the first place to go; that'll be the Maldives. And we probably can afford the extreme expenditure necessary to increase those dikes. But wouldn't it have been better to prevent that extreme expenditure in the first place?
The "extreme expenditure" to build dikes is a lot less than the expenditure to not just stop, but revert global warming. Nobody knows if it's even possible, so we might end up wasting all that money and then still having to build dikes.
Fortunately, 1000 years is a long time. I've read that Netherland will be able to adapt to a sea level rise of 1 meter in the next century (or maybe two centuries, which would already be a problem), but if it continues to rise at that speed, we'll have to figure out better solutions. In any case, it's going to cost a lot of money. Some minor investment now could prevent a lot of trouble in the future.
But "apres moi le deluge" seems to be the reigning attitude.
Really?
You link to an article specifically about snowfall in Britain and then dismiss it with the counter evidence of record snowfall else where.
You need to try harder.
...losing the war of public opinion.
FUD. Good job. Please. Continue.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/weather/9950516/Worst-Marc...
Let's review. First article states, perhaps poorly, that snow will become less frequent and more extreme. Pretty much in line with all predictions.
Second, I learned that it can snow in the UK. Terrific.
Third, it actually snowed in the UK. A lot. Everyone's shocked. You cite this as bad PR or bad predictions or something.
I'm going to call this one a push. I'll now give you the benefit of the doubt. You blame the scientists for irresponsible reporting done by the corporate entertainment industry. I think that's unfair. But you probably haven't ever tried to get "the media" to cover an important story, correctly, much less at all.
Snow becomes less frequent and more extreme as compared to what? On a big enough timeline you could probably show a series of different outcomes relating to climate that will say whatever you want it to say. Who's to say that less frequent but more extreme snow is a bad thing? Maybe it used to be normal, become less common, and now we're returned to what used to be normal.
I admit though that I've never been to the UK nor was I around for the last major ice age so I don't know about snowfall in the UK over the years.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Merchants-Doubt-Handful-Scientists-Obs...
Unfortunately some AGW proponents are guilty of fear-mongering, but I would also draw a distinction between predicting a bad outcome and spreading fear for fear's sake; it's hard to predict a catastrophe without inspiring a little bit of fear in the audience.
But the only fear mongering I've really seen come from climate change "accepters". "Accepters", see how silly it looks when you use silly names?
I've seen people who deny the science, they don't particularly concern me as they are often easy to spot as they refuse to listen to reason. But much the same can be said of the extremes on both sides of a debate.
As for uncertainty and doubt, I thought those were important in science.
It seems we're never going to wean ourselves off of petroleum, and most efforts to meaningfully curtail its use are politically untenable (outside of Europe that is).
I think if people who believe in global warming are serious about solving the problem and not just hand waving about driving less and turning off our lights, then they'd start devoting some serious attention to geoengineering.
(Note I'm not poking at a straw man in the paragraph above. Check out the NRDC page on global warming solutions [http://www.nrdc.org/globalwarming/solutions/]. I see a lot about restricting pollution and remaking our lifestyles, but NOTHING at all about geoengineering.)
Alter the inputs and weighting in the models by merest fractions, or try take new factors into account and the whole house of cards comes tumbling down, yet on the basis of this Billions, if not Trillions of dollars are being moved around and new laws are being made, among many other side effects.
Who decided exactly what inputs are needed for calculations and which should be left out? Who decided their relative weightings? Who decided the exact nature of the interactions inside the models?
It is just crazy.
They just keep building more models yielding new predictions to cover all the bases so, when the future does come, they can claim success and forget all the failures.
No offense to economists.
Oh wait, "denialists" made those accusations. We can ignore them right? After all, who cares about an opposing viewpoint when you can give them condescending names? Just mock them until they shut up. I mean, real science doesn't need people with different viewpoints duplicating the results, right? You display your bias like a badge of honor.
What good is a full data set if it was collected in a way to push an agenda in the first place? Which I notice you don't address at all in responding to my post. I can go out and get you data that says whatever you want it to say, provided I'm allowed to question the motives of anyone that says my data collection protocols might be faulty.
I'm sure you would like me to read just the "key" papers that support your contentions. Let's ignore "key" papers that might disagree or even agree with a slightly different viewpoint that doesn't present such a drastic outlook. Heck, we should even go out of our way to prevent opposing papers from being even considered in peer-reviewed journals, right? Sorry, that's old news not worth considering anymore I guess.
You seem to be an example (granted, I admit I could be wrong as I don't know you, just going off your condescending words) of what's wrong with this "debate" that has people already deciding what is truth or not. You have no freaking clue what my opinions on this matter are nor what I've read. You see that I might possibly disagree with you and therefore I must be spoken down to as someone who isn't paying enough attention nor is reading the correct materials.
But you are correct in one thing, this is an important issue that could heavily influence the future of people around the world. I, for one, want to at least attempt to get it right because if we're wrong then at best we waste resources and at worst we multiply the problems. To get it right definitely includes listening to people who may have different ideas or even opposing viewpoints.
Here are some indisputable facts (well, to dispute them, you would need to overturn quantum physics, not impossible, but quite a hard task):
1) CO2 absorbs more infrared light than visible light. This can be demonstrated in a laboratory, and we even know why this is the case, thanks to quantum physics.
2) When sunlight hits the Earth, some is absorbed, and then re-emitted red-shifted. Again, we have direct satellite measurements of this, and we also have the theoretical explanation as to why, thanks you again quantum physics.
3) We know that we are increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Again, direct measurements show this, plus we know that we are producing CO2 with our industrial processes.
Put those 3 facts together, and the baseline conclusion is that unless there is some unknown fourth factor, our planet is going to get hotter. Scientists noticed this back in the sixties, and started conducting experiments to see if this was indeed the case. All of our measurements since then show that global temperature is increasing, on average, which ties in nicely with what we expect from theory (points 1-3 above).
Anybody that wants to make a serious claim that climate change isn't happening needs to either demonstrate that one of points 1-3 is wrong, or that there is a fourth factor. A fourth factor would be something like "as the world's oceans become more acidic due to absorption of CO2, past a certain threshold value the surface becomes more mirror-like, increasing the albedo, and hence reducing the amount of red-shifting of light". A paper that demonstrated this, and demonstrated that the effect would be big enough to overcome the increased absorption caused by increased CO2 would indeed have demonstrated that climate change would indeed be limited by the threshold value. If such a paper were to come out, I personally would probably breath a deep sigh of relief and then throw a party.
If someone tries to claim that climate change isn't happening without demonstrating that points 1,2 or 3 are wrong, and without demonstrating an unknown factor that hadn't yet been taken into account can be safely dismissed. You can question the specifics of the models, like "is the Greenland ice sheet going to melt in 10 years? 100 years? 1000 years?" That's fair game, and if you go and read the papers, you will see scientists doing just that. But the overarching question of climate change? That's settled business already, and anyone claiming otherwise deserves the title of "denialist".
In no way have I stated that I disagree with the three facts that you stated. As I said before, which you chose to ignore; you have no clue as to what my opinion on this matter is. You are simply assuming things because I'm in a different section of the same ship. It's not my fault you decided to not get out of your cabin and meet other people.
Do I deny that changes in the climate exists, possibly producing negative results for the environment and/or human race? No.
Do I have a problem with the science that's been used to predict doomsday and to force the drastic measures that some say is necessary for the human race to survive? Yes.
Why do I have a problem with the science? Because it's been shoddy work, it's been corrupted, and people who support the science go out of their way to shut down those that may question the methods used. I have a third-grader that is currently learning that is not the way to do proper science, why can't the so-called adults understand this? You claim in your last paragraph that questioning the models involved is fair game. That's what I've been doing and yet you still have the condescending tone and name-calling. You are too quick to label people "denialist" without thinking and it makes you look petty.
I highly disagree that we know for a fact that the climate changes we've seen in the past few decades is solely the cause of human activity. There are numerous possibilities that must be explored before we can say we know for a fact of anything pertaining to this. Too many people do not want to do this and just move forward trying to fix something that we don't understand nor know how to fix. It's an effort "to do something" ignoring the fact that method of governing often doesn't turn out so well.
I grew up with this nonsense way of thinking. I remember as a kid the global cooling catastrophe we were heading for. I remember the urgency to do something about CFCs. I remember global warming being a problem until people realized the globe isn't really warming that much so it changed to climate change. This is not science, this is politics.
So, forgive me if I don't jump on the bandwagon of people doing half the work, declaring themselves the only source of the truth, demanding that people spend countless amounts of resources doing things their way, and subjecting anyone who dare question their data and methods to needless ridicule without actually bothering to answer the questions that they raise.
You are not helping your cause.
The trick is to answer those questions of what data is used and how things are weighted etc. well, and that's exactly what the scientists who work on these models do.
The radiative physics can tell us a lot about basic climate sensitivity, but modelling the feedbacks inherent in such a complex system must be near impossible. Saying that climate change is "simple radiative physics" is very misleading, it is a little bit like saying that if I kick a ball it will accelerate away from me and that is "basic Newtonian physics". Well yes, but I may be standing at the bottom of a steep valley, in which case the larger system exerts a negative feedback, and the ball rolls back to my feet.
but it has the positive side effect that we prepare ourselves for Peak Oil what will happen anyway.
Public policy decisions cannot be based on "proof". There is never going to be proof positive of what the climate will do in the next 100 years until we arrive at 2113, and even then there will be aspects of the picture that will be unclear; not everything is easily measurable, and not everything you might like to know will be measured.
Actual science covers more ground than schoolwork where you have one variable and everything else is controlled. Climate change is a global-scale issues with innumerable variables that can not be controlled.
That's not the same as saying we can know nothing about it, or that we must make no decisions about what we can figure out with some reasonable level of certainty.
> Who decided exactly what inputs are needed for calculations and which should be left out? Who decided their relative weightings? Who decided the exact nature of the interactions inside the models?
Are you saying that because you don't know how to do this stuff, no one can make predictions with a reasonable margin of error?
This is the whole basis of Science. It is required to be provable, or it is just someone's opinion, and my opinion might be different to yours.
Perhaps you should research the Spanish Inquisition and the many atrocities committed by various religions for further insight into why this matters.
EDIT: Strictly speaking Science must be falsifiable
If you've got a conclusion which is invariant under all possible evidence, it stops being science.
It also isn't that difficult to demonstrate the underlying principles that are in action. The greenhouse gas effect is fairly easy to measure experimentally (it was first experimentally measured in 1859).
Modelling the climate accurately is a very hard problem but we don't have an untouched completely controllable alternate climate on which to perform experiments. It's still better than throwing up our hands and declaring understanding impossible.
It's certainly difficult to do; that is not the same as saying they are producing no valid & valuable information.
There's been a lot of panic over the rise of sea levels and a warmer climate, but why exactly is this a world-ending disaster? Yes, the coastlines may change and yes, people will be displaced.
Such has been the case for all of recorded history, and far before. Humans can adapt: they have, and they will again.
I find the idea of geoengineering far more terrifying than global warming. The community that can't get their models to explain the last few years of observations now wants to throw a massive new wrench into the works? Madness.
If the sea levels rise ten meters over a couple decades, people will get the heck out when the water's at their ankles, instead of patiently waiting a few years until it's over their heads.
Or figure out a local civil engineering solution like diverting the water with levees and dams, that's at worst a local disaster if it doesn't work out.
Actually, I'm assuming they were greatly exaggerating which seems to be commonplace in these types of discussions so I decided to poke a little fun at that one. Something about learning to swim and inventing something called a boat.
Gee, we're making 1000 predictions right now? How are those predictions made 10-30 years ago faring?