Your Warming World: Climate change where you live 1894 – 2013
warmingworld.newscientistapps.com
warmingworld.newscientistapps.com
Look at the Dow Jones index. If you look at it today, it looks like a dramatic drop. If you look at it in the span of several years, that drop looks somewhat trivial.
Same thing goes for climate change. Go back 1 billion years, and you will find that the earth has warmed and cooled far more dramatically than in the last 100 years. I'm not denying anthropogenic global warming, I'm just saying that correlation does not necessarily equal causation.
(And for the record, I'm not pushing one political agenda or the other, I'm just trying to look at a given data set rationally).
Edit: either way, I encourage the pursuit of clean energy and reusable resources.
For example, the IPCC report itself.
What is the worst thing that happens if we try to address global warming, human caused or not? We get to keep the beneficial conditions that we've had since the beginning of humanity as we know it? Our children get to inherit a functioning and healthy planet? Society can continue on the way it has for many, many generations without plague or famine?
Stop it.
I asked you what would be the worst thing to happen if we tried to stop global warming. Then I told you to stop it; I would like to repeat that statement here, again.
Stop it.
In scientific context it is neutral. In political context it absolutely isn't.
For example, it's also the (ridiculous) argument used to argue that smoking doesn't cause cancer, or that you can't prove whether smoking causes cancer or whether cancer and smoking have a hidden shared cause. This became a fairly large debate in the 90s, even though the science is pretty one sided. If a scientific discussion can be derailed by arguments that are technically valid, that's a political problem.
In the case of global warming scientists can still disagree among themselves (as good scientists should), but from a political perspective there's consensus science has been settled 30 or so years ago. It's real, it's caused by us and now action has to be taken. Truisms like "Correlation does not imply causation" in a political context just impede the political change we need.
It's quite unsettling that anyone who debates climate science is told to STFU by people like you.
It seems that you cannot reason people out of a position they didn't reason themselves into, though I do see some glimmers of rational thinking and not just a whole pile of please shut up.
Anyone who just graduated high school has not seen any 'global warming' since they started kindergarten. These facts don't seem to get mentioned a lot, but 'consensus' gets a whole lot of airing. It saddens me to see so much fashionable rather than rational thinking. Perhaps it is an artefact of information overload that people can't get to the nub of a debate and discuss it rationally.
"Deniers and believers".
Please give us some tangible ways to determine it.
// I'm in the only way to stop current energy generation techniques is to invent something cheaper than gas and coal. Anything else won't stop the upcoming economies (e.g. China) from using gas and coal no matter how they pollute.
Didn't happen.
Remember seeing Al Gores film where he said the ice caps would vanish by 2012?
You don't mean this, do you?
http://drexel.edu/now/news-media/releases/archive/2013/Decem...
He was just making the point that you need to have context when looking at data. Framing data to prove your point doesn't make your point correct (though, it doesn't make it incorrect either). Weather at a macro level is extremely complicated. Knowing if we understand all the variables involved is a very difficult task.
Be careful to the conclusions you jump to on such a small data set. Even 1000 years of perfect weather data when a planet that is billions of years old may not be as helpful as one would hope.
It costs money. And why should we? If humans are really able to have a significant impact on the climate, we should try to warm the planet. I would personally prefer about 3 C warmer climate (central europe).
> Stop it.
No, you stop being so fucking patronizing.
3 C rise in atmospheric temperature is not what I'd be worried about. It's the increased sea temperature, which will result in higher sea levels and greater levels of moisture in the air. Meteorological events could become vastly more frequent and powerful. But you are right, 3 C rise will be balmy. You know best.
I'm sure we'll deal with it. It's a (good) price for low energy prices.
> Meteorological events could become vastly more frequent and powerful.
I hope so, the weather is pretty boring here.
Of course the climate is changing. Like it has done for millions of years. Big whoop.
Sounds a whole lot like you're trying to cast doubt on it. There's as close to a scientific consensus as you're likely to ever get that the Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate, and we're the cause of it.
What matters is predictions, hypotheses and observations. These are the essence of science. You should be making arguments based on how a hypothesis has been tested against real world observations, not how many people agree with a particular position.
The parent quite rightfully points out that correlation doesn't necessarily equal causation, and you want to ping them for casting doubt. What you should be doing, in the spirit of scientific enquiry, is trying to find out how, in this case, causation can be disproven, to better advance knowledge.
Trying to throw someone from the temple for casting doubt belongs to religion, not science.
Can you clarify what you mean by 'climate denial'. I don't know what that is supposed to describe.
Climate models are tough and it's very difficult for us to forecast what the results of global warming will be, especially at local scales. That doesn't change the fact, well supported by science and not seriously doubted by any meaningful number of climate scientists, that the Earth is getting warmer and it's almost certainly due to our burning of fossil fuels.
There are two groups who try to make AGW seem less certain than it is: energy companies who have a financial interest in not seeing government action against carbon emissions, and libertarians who feel threatened by the reality of AGW as it would seem to mandate large-scale, international government regulations. That would call into question deeply held libertarian beliefs about the ability of the free market to achieve societal goods and avoid evils. Just as religious people (rightly) view evolution as a threat to their beliefs and respond by attacking evolution, so too do libertarians view AGW as a threat to theirs and respond in the same fashion.
ID is a specific theory which you either support or you don't.
When does a person specifically support 'climate denial'?
If I say that the observed sensitivity is less than the forecast sensitivity from models, am I in denial?
If I note that the warming period from around 1979-2000 has paused, am I in denial?
If I state that the regulatory frameworks suggested and implemented have failed, am I in denial?
If I make statements that project historical climate change shows large variations, am I in denial?
The reason I ask this is there seems to be a drive to lump people into a category called 'denier', and I'm uncertain was to what that boundary is, as defined by the people who use it.
Everything you just stated about AGW falls into the same category, and is cherry-picked "evidence" intended to dispute that AGW is a fact, which for all intents and purposes it is. Neither you nor I have the ability to judge to what degree this or that deviation from predictions affects the theory as a whole. You know who does? Climate scientists. You know what they've concluded? It's still a fact.
You seem to be very concerned that you not be labelled a science denier (as well you should be), while simultaneously being very concerned about denying the conclusions reached by scientists. Like IDers, you seem to want to pick this or that small part of the theory or this or that piece of evidence, cast doubt on it, then claim that disproves (or at least discredits) the theory as a whole.
"Denial" is the correct term, here. In both cases, there are well-supported and widely accepted theories that particular groups of people don't want to believe for ideological reasons. In both cases, the drive to defend ideology takes the form of an attempt to piece together enough seemingly rational pieces of disjointed evidence to discredit the theory that threatens that ideology. And, in both cases, the attempt to deny the theory is refuted and dismissed by those best equipped to judge it.
You can claim to be a skeptic, just as the person who claims there are holes in evolution that can only be explained by an intelligent designer claims to be a skeptic, but you're not. A skeptic is not someone who disbelieves or discredits, but rather is someone who reserves judgement and attempts to find counterarguments until the preponderance of evidence suggests that a claim is valid. Both evolution and AGW are supported by the vast preponderance of evidence. Disbelieving either is no longer skepticism, but denial.
I can point out a long laundry list where the 'consensus' was completely wrong, yet every person with a letter behind their name supported it.
Consensus doesn't prove anything but the fact that a bunch of people agree on something. It doesn't make that thing true or false.
10 years ago if I had a stomach ulcer, all the researchers and doctors would have told me I had stress and that is what caused it. They would have prescribed me treatments and told me to change my behaviours, which would have all been ineffective.
Two researchers thought outside the box, went against the consensus, ignored what all the researchers said, and proved that stomach ulcers were caused by a bacteria. An entire industry and field was turned upside down, and Nobel Prizes were handed out.
What's my point? You can never tell when research is right or wrong, so you must always be sceptical, and never say 'the science is settled, because there is a consensus'. You can never rely on the word of researchers, only on the proof that they have or have not generated.
Edit : I re-read the parent, which goes like this: >"Unfortunately, in this case there is a correlation: "In the scientific literature, there is a strong consensus that global surface temperatures have increased in recent decades and that the trend is caused primarily by human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases"
I read this statement as saying correlation is proven by consensus - which is wrong no matter what the topic.
The reason 'healers' are wrong about mental illness is because their hyphotheses are either untested, or proven to be wrong. Not because lots of researchers agree with the opposite.
The 'ordinariness' of a person is immaterial - Einstein was a patent clerk who had a book published refuting his views by 100 experts. He was still right.
The point I am making here is that you should never argue a point by consensus, or by authority, for that matter. You should argue a point based on the results of testing a hypothesis and finding it true or false.
Scientists of any discipline do not become automatically right because they don a white cloak and publish in a journal - not when one does it, not when an entire industry does it. It is a fundamental mistake to believe in an argument from authority or an argument from consensus. Quite frequently, authorities do get it right (precisely because they have studied it for a long time), and most of the time, they all agree with each other (forming a consensus). But these things flow from the fact that something is right (and observable, and reproduceable) - not the other way around.
I say this to try and elevate the level of debate quite apart from climate science, or GMO, or any of the other fashionable arguments.
The difference is a) the rate at which it is warming and b) the fact that all living things have adapted to a completely different climate.
Climate change means mass famines and suffering, mass disruptions in commerce as whole industries implode, increased conflicts over dwindling resources, and mass extinction. It's a big deal.
As far as agriculture, crops have evolved to certain soil types and climactic conditions. For examples, yield rates are going down for grains like wheat due to warmer nights, and the soil in Iowa in 2012 was too hot for seeding corn! It won't be a simple as moving the crops northward as the world gets hotter: soil types and ecological conditions are important for crops too.
As far as mass famine and suffering: whole countries will be wiped off the map. That means refugees. It means fewer resources for more people.
As far as more more violence associated with climate change: see dwindling resources and refugees. The US Department of Defense predicts that there will be armed conflicts over desertifying regions, especially Africa, which experience some of the worst climate change [1]. The USDOD is not made up of hippies.
As far as mass extinction: it's already happening. Due to CO2, the ocean is 30% more acidic than it was in the 70s, and the shell fish industry on the wet coast is dying [2]. (Shellfish are particularly sensitive to ocean acidficiation.) This is just the beginning, and the great coral reefs of the world are dying too.[3]
Basically, in my view, climate change is the single most consequential event in human history, and its scope will extend beyond humans too. The aggregate pain and suffering and the unimaginable loss will have a profound effect on the human psyche.
If anyone reading this is concerned, I urge them to join 350.org [4], which is a climate change activist organization. 350 is named after NASA scientist James Hansen's estimate for the upper bound of acceptable CO2 PPM for humanity to thrive in. We passed 400PPM in 2012; humanity evolved in the upper 200's. James Hansen was head of NASA's Goddard Institute before he retired to organize against climate change full time [5].
350.org's main initiative at the moment is divestment: getting major educational institutions to divest from fossil fuels as a social statement. To sign the petition for your school, go to http://gofossilfree.org/ [6] .
The climate change movement desperately needs conscientious, scientifically aware individuals to stand up!
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/science/earth/09climate.ht...
[2] http://apps.seattletimes.com/reports/sea-change/2013/sep/11/...
[3] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ocean-acidificatio...
[4] http://350.org
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hansen#Research_and_publi...
'Whole countries wiped off the map'..'mass famine and suffering'...'yield rates going down'...
These are unsupported by real world observations. I understand you wish to alarm people into joining your activist groups, and the more dramatic language, the better (I assume this has been A/B tested). But I think the dramatic language undermines your cause.
The last report I saw was that grains harvest have recently broken records, despite a smaller overall percentage of land devoted to crops. This is mostly due to technology improvements in farming and grain types.
Climate change is an ongoing process which humans have had to, and will have to, deal with. They will use ingenuity, technology and skill to deal with whatever arises.
So you're free to say and believe whatever you want, but I don't think this was really the place for a long recruiting ad.
That's just logic. If calling that situation "mass famine and suffering" is "alarmist" of me, what words would you prefer?
As far as yield rates, climate change will decrease yield rates [2], but you're right that science will mitigate and address some of these issues. From my link:
> Through the years of 1985 through 2011, wheat breeding programs boosted average wheat yields by 13 bushels per acre, or 0.51 bushels each year, for a total increase of 26%. A simulation also found that 1.8 degree Fahrenheit in projected mean temperature was found to decrease wheat yields by 10.64 bushels per acre or nearly 21%.
Yes, humans will adapt. But in the process, hundreds of millions of people will suffer very gravely, and an innumerable # of species will go extinct in the ocean alone. I'm a huge tech guy, but it's silly to think technology will be able to address all of these issues.
I stand by what I said. Conviction is important to move the ball forward.
[1] www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/02/the-island-president-mohamed-nasheed_n_1383413.html
[2] http://www.agriculture.com/crops/wheat/climate-chge-may-affe...
Also, as positive feedback loops kick in (e.g., trapped methane will be released from the ice, and methane is a 50x stronger greenhouse than CO2), heating will occur much more rapidly.
Finally, ice sheets will melt pretty rapidly, as melting water acts as a lubricant, and encourages faster ice breakage and melting. There's a documentary on this I'll try to link.
And on that basis the case for punitive taxation no longer makes sense, and attention should be focused on the development of alternative, efficient and productive energy sources. This should be regarded as a technology challenge, rather than a public policy crisis whereby the blunt instruments of taxation and regulation should force the use of inefficient and costly energy sources.
And you'd be correct. You shouldn't be so shy about stating your position. I understand that stating a realist position has become unfashionable, but in the spirit of the PG essay 'What you can't say' [1] - I always make a point of saying the unfashionable thing. And that is that early models or climate sensitivity were wrong, and the public policy positions generated from those are counter-productive and ineffective.
You're confusing a wide range of historical temperatures with a rate of change. Today's rate of change is unprecedented. A temperature change of 10 or 20 degrees Celsius over ten million years isn't likely to wipe out species, but that same change over 500 years is much more likely to greatly reduce populations of species that cannot adapt fast enough -- including us.
If more people gave 10% of their income we can stave off the apocalypse, end of humanity, rapture, end times, whatever you want to call it. The rich will never inherit the kingdom of Mother Earth.
Solar panels are a poor choice, they help somewhat but they are far too expensive for what they provide.
If you actually want to make a difference then agitate for more nuclear power. There is absolutely nothing else that will help.
The worlds population has doubled in the last 30 years, placing ridiculous demands on our planet.
And then there is this "small detail":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_radioactive_waste_ma...
Governments around the world are considering a range of waste management and disposal options, usually involving deep-geologic placement, although there has been limited progress toward implementing long-term waste management solutions. This is partly because the timeframes in question when dealing with radioactive waste range from 10,000 to millions of years, according to studies based on the effect of estimated radiation doses.
and
Hannes Alfvén, Nobel laureate in physics, described the as yet unsolved dilemma of high-level radioactive waste management: "The problem is how to keep radioactive waste in storage until it decays after hundreds of thousands of years. The geologic deposit must be absolutely reliable as the quantities of poison are tremendous. It is very difficult to satisfy these requirements for the simple reason that we have had no practical experience with such a long term project. Moreover permanently guarded storage requires a society with unprecedented stability."
So much for solutions that actually exist. There is no long term solution to nuclear fission, not yet anyway, while on the other hand, the sun does exist, so does technology to harness solar power. The tricky part, other than building it all of course (robots and nanobots surely will help there, both with building as well as with getting/making the materials required), is getting the energy from there to here. Microwave? Converting it into chemical energy on-site and sending titanic pocket warmers to Earth? That's not even that important, since even 0.00001% efficiency would net us more energy than we could otherwise have in our wildest dreams. [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_%28energy%2... ]
Do you really think it would take us even 5000 years to get to the point of being able to build a dyson sphere? Hmm. At any rate, that's something that would work; on the other hand, we might find ways to use/defuse/store nuclear waste, we might not. We simply don't know yet.
So yeah, I'll be doing that.
Nuclear power requires a huge amount of fossil fuels in its life cycle. From building the plant to mining the uranium then decommissioning it. All energy extensive.
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/04/nuclear-is-not-a-low-...
http://mediamatters.org/mobile/research/2013/11/07/myths-and...
Right now nuclear compares to other renewables
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparisons_of_life-cycle_green...
however it is though if it is widely adopted, uranium will become more energy intensive to mine uranium and convert it to fuel.
And renewables are MUCH worse. You don't need much uranium to make energy, but you need a TON of metal to capture wind or sun energy.
> however it is though if it is widely adopted, uranium will become more energy intensive to mine uranium and convert it to fuel.
And again, renewables are worse in that regard. They do well now only because they aren't used a lot.
But use them a lot and the price (due to rarity) will go up, meaning the resources needed will go up.
There is no perfect energy source. It's just a matter of relative harm.
I love statistics :-)
http://warmingworld.newscientistapps.com/about.html
"Surface temperature measurements are not evenly distributed across the globe. So the NASA team interpolates from the available data to calculate average temperatures for cells in a global grid, with each cell measuring 2 degrees latitude by 2 degrees longitude. The analysis extrapolates up to 1200 kilometres from any one station, which allows for more complete coverage in the Arctic – where monitoring stations are sparsely distributed, but where the warming trend is especially strong."
I'm pretty sure there should be an OSM attribution on this map.
Don't think of it as an increase in warmth, think of it as increased pressure in a closed system.
Sounds like fun to me.
I was assuming that the climate change scam would go away with today's headlines, but maybe it will be like the Loch Ness monster -- forever some people still think it might be real.
"Energy balance"? Sure, but that's close to just a tautology. The 'rub' is working effectively with the collection of all the fine details that determine energy balance.
For how to predict the weather 50 years from now, when we can't predict it five days from now, is a bit much to swallow.
Actually, the global warming alarmists are no closer to good science and have nothing better than the Lock Ness Monster devotees.
Maybe 50 years from now the temperature of the earth will be higher, lower, or just the same as now, and no one knows the answer, no matter what within the realm of reason we assume about CO2, methane, water vapor, sun spots, volcanoes, ocean currents, snow cover, deforestation, etc. E.g., the IPCC's Ramaswamy's 'radiative forcing' fills a much need gap in the literature and would be illuminating if ignited.
There has been a big crowd of global warming alarmists: Some see global warming as not a problem but a way to talk the public into other things that they like such as 'renewable' energy. Some are using global warming alarms as a way to raise money, get government funding, sell books, do venture capital deals, get attention, get a professorship, etc. Some people want to get some new taxes they can use for whatever. Some want to 'stick it' to the oil companies or whomever would get hurt by attempts to respond to global warming. Some people want subsidies for high speed trains, wind farms, solar panels, biofuels, high 'feed in tariffs', etc. The list of reasons some people find to go alone with the alarms is endless and with next to nothing actually to do with science. So, the whole thing is looking like, say, the people who stand to make money off the Lock Ness Monster. That was my main point -- global warming alarms will continue for much the same reason as the Lock Ness Monster.