The Real Problem With the Climate Science Emails
business.theatlantic.com
business.theatlantic.com
... the fact is, everything we know about carbon dioxide
indicates that it has a greenhouse effect, because it is
more efficient at passing sunlight through to the earth,
than at allowing that energy to reradiate back into space
as heat.
313 ppm in 1960 to 383 ppm in 2009 is 3.2%? Or is there indication that this increase isn't human caused?
> which comprises 0.28% of the greenhouse effect on earth
It's 9-26% for CO2, according to Wikipedia. (Which is a surprisingly large range.) Why the disparity with your figure?
I don't know anything about climate science, and I don't have an agenda, but I'm just wondering if your figures are based on anything.
Is there serious scientific support for what your claim?
There are (seemingly legitimate) sources like realclimate.org that claim that the increases in CO2 are virtually entirely caused by human activity, and that this isn't seriously questioned by scientists.
E.g. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/how-do...
That article claims that humans release quite a bit more carbon than would be needed to raise CO2 by the observed levels, but that effects like absorption into the ocean compensate.
I think we can all agree that the highly modded-up parent that claims two significant figures of accuracy at 0.28% is completely wrong though, right?
Anyway, I hope you'll visit this site. It's pretty good. I have others, so tell me if this doesn't answer your questions better than I did.
Also, if you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you'll see that that page hasn't been updated in a very long time:
"This site last updated October 5, 2007"
I guess that's pretty recent for geologists, though :)
Regarding the page I referenced, it's not a religious document, and I make no claims that it's special. In fact, if it were special, it would be more suspect, not less. That said, who cares when it was updated? Have there been ground-breaking changes in CO2 measurement, greenhouse coefficients or anything else pertinent in the last two years?
I care when it was last updated. There's been a lot of extra data, and lots of scientific papers published in the intervening two (probably closer to three) years.
Anyway, I wanted you guys to know that you’re free to use RC Rein any way you think would be helpful. Gavin and I are going to be careful about what comments we screen through, and we’ll be very careful to answer any questions that come up to any extent we can. On the other hand, you might want to visit the thread and post replies yourself. We can hold comments up in the queue and contact you about whether or not you think they should be screened through or not, and if so, any comments you’d like us to include.
http://www.examiner.com/x-25061-Climate-Change-Examiner~y200...
Anyway, no, the 3.2% I reference is just by mass. 3.2% of the CO2 in the atmosphere is man-made.
If you care, only 2.2% of the warming caused by global warming gasses (excluding water vapor) is caused by man-made CO2, since different gasses are better or worse greenhouse gases, and CO2 isn't nearly as efficient as a greenhouse gas as some other gases, just using mass isn't quite accurate, in terms of percentage of greenhouse effect.
Now, again, ignoring water vapor, which is insane to do, but is "customary", your control of the system, if you eliminated all CO2 from every person on earth (perhaps we'll let you breath, but no campfires) is 2.2%. (Again, it's actually 0.28%, but just for the sake of argument, say water vapor is not a green-house gas, even though it is) So, how confident are you, that 2.2% is enough control to effect a reversal of the temperature rise? Now, given that you aren't going to get anywhere near a 100% elimination of man-made CO2, short of killing everybody, how much money are you willing to spend on this exercise, and shouldn't a little bit of number crunching (dollars per degree) be undertaken, before we start down this path?
I'm not making any economic recommendations; I'm just someone who doesn't know very much, who is trying to find, say as an impartial Martian might, what the best interpretation of facts are given the available data.
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html
For one thing, the wiki article (which, again, is quoting realclimate.org, so is already tainted) is giving you a number of how much total contribution CO2 has on earth's greenhouse effect. It's not telling you how much effect _man-made_ CO2 is having, which is obviously less, as even they would admit that CO2 is not purely made my humans.
In particular, they give figures of 75 W/m2 for water vapor and 32 W/m2 for CO2. The link to the original paper where those figures came from is broken but here's a fixed one: http://www.atmo.arizona.edu/students/courselinks/spring04/at... Look at Figure 3, they also go into some depth about the assumptions and observations behind those figures.
As scientists and engineers this should disgust us. The sanctity of the scientific process is a much bigger deal than climate change. It embodies all our technological decisions and it cannot be tainted.
It would be as if the supreme court was burying evidence to convict people they thought were guilty. It's wrong. Even if we think it achieves the right result. Once you lose faith in the system, it ceases to be useful.
Lost faith will be a dominant trend for the foreseeable future, not limited to science. Sadly.
The interesting thing here is that having a bad model should have been okay -- you'd expect science to iterate a lot over the course of a few decades as it learned more and more about the climate. But for some reason it wasn't okay to be wrong any more. And whenever that moment passed it stopped being science and started being a religion, at least to some of those involved. Religions have "us against them" they have the elite and the unwashed masses, they have "we know the solution, just tell me your problem" They frequently have end-of-world predictions, a hierarchy of who can form dogma, a culture of secrecy, an emotional and visceral response to anybody who questions their beliefs, etc.
I'm not trying to beat a dead horse, only to say once again that this story is much more than just about the politics of climate change. It's about how professional science and professional scientists carry out their business. It's very easy to get emotionally wrapped up with whatever you're doing, especially if you think you're saving the world. It's critical that we establish sort of system of ethics to make thinking and acting like this anathema to professional scientists no matter what field they are in.
Also, climate scientists have strong incentive for there to be AGW. If it turns out AGW isn't happening then most will be out of work, and their expertise will be deemed relatively useless.
If they don't then it doesn't matter, if they do then we should study to what extent.
Reduction to extremes shows that we do, after all, every organism affects the biosphere simply by being alive, and we do a lot more than just being alive.
So the question to answer is not whether or not global warming is 'real' or not. If it is we'll find out eventually.
We need to find out long before it becomes evident whether or not we have a positive, a negative or a neutral effect.
If the planet is heating up and we can't influence it we can stop the debate. If the planet is warming up or cooling down and we can influence it we first need to ask ourselves if influencing it is a good thing, and if we can we need to figure out the best way to go about it.
The current 'fix' to me looks more like development aid in disguise, where rich countries give poor countries some money so the rich countries can continue to pollute much like they did before. That certainly won't solve anything, in the words of Douglas Adams, it isn't the green pieces of paper that are unhappy. It is us that will be unhappy if we do not take these issues seriously.
One of the bigger issues with the climate science emails is that anything that is developed outside of the light of day usually can't stand the light of day. So we need transparency and really well performed very well checked science, where each and every result is available to all parties.
With the adversarial nature of the subject I don't doubt there will be plenty of interpretations of the data so we don't have to worry about finding people to 'peer-review' the data. The upside is that by the time that the truth will be out it will be unassailable, whatever it is.
Open source is a great model to apply to science, many eyes works well for finding bugs, whether it is in software or in climate models that shouldn't make too much difference.
And then once we all agree on the facts we can look for a solution, if we have to, and if there is one.
There are so many different ways to go with global warming, even if it is true, but we're constantly just told to be scared out of our minds about it and do whatever the experts tell us will save our hides. A sure recipe for manipulation if there ever was one.
Think about it: if we realize the Earth will turn into Venus 2.0, we will see a lot of money being invested in the development of cheap and reliable space travel...
The majority of history has seen a warmer earth. Warmer means life-friendly. I just worry that we fail the transition.
The planet earth is currently in the middle of an ice age. At regular intervals polar ice caps expand, causing widespread glaciation and causing widespread devastation to the planet's ecosystems.
An argument for global warming: http://timtyler.org/end_the_ice_age/
Whether humans are the primary cause or not, this is climate change, and its nothing like the pleasant Hawaiian vacation you seem to imagine it to be. I don't see the bright side.
The local effect in the Amazon river basin is just as likely the result of local deforestation as the global carbon dioxide level. As someone else pointed out Tsunamis are known to be caused by earthquakes not weather. So it seems that your examples may not the best ones.
Now the effect of rising sea levels on my pleasant vacation on a pacific island is much less in doubt, some low lying areas will be underwater if the Antarctic or Greenland ice melts, which seems like it will take quite a while.
The greenhouse effect makes the biggest difference at the poles in the coldest time of the night. So people will be able to live and farm further north in Russia and Canada.
The cost of global warming seems to be about the cost of change, and the cost risk, rather than the cost of a definitively less hospitable climate.
Paying attention for the last decade includes a cooling for the recent past associated with short term patterns. Global warming is not about the cost of what we have seen, it is about what we will see if we emit CO2 at various levels in the future, which we don't know. And not knowing is not a reason to do nothing, but it is also not a reason to claim calamity is certain.
These are tautologies:
* Human have affected the climate or they have not. * Humans either do affect the climate or they don't.
But this is not:
* Either humans are affecting the climate or they don't
You may have meant something different, but it is common flaw in reasoning about climate. Just because the smaller increases in CO2 levels so far have had a small impact on the climate so far, does not mean that future larger increases in CO2 will have no effect forever.
So what I meant to say was:
There are only two possibilities:
- we have an effect on the environment
- we do not have an effect on the environment
Since it is trivially simple to prove that we have are having an effect on the environment the remaining task is to measure how our effect on our environment translates into an effect on the climate and what direction and magnitude that effect is.
I hope that is more clear to you, sorry for causing you distress :)
The climate models must be specified somewhere in the literature. Data can be munged. What stands in the way? Is the data in some legal netherworld that prevents redistribution?
It's easy to imagine loons (or worse) getting access to the data, publishing findings that prove the warming is indeed caused by the decline in the pirate population, getting airtime in Fox News and other similar media outlets and making, thus, it true to a large chunk of the populace.
We don't need people, deliberately or not, spreading disinformation.
What if there is a ton of money in media outlets to voice those reports?
It would be foolish to disregard such a threat.
In the current state of affairs, you can bet many people will publish wrong results for money, fame or any combination of both. It's not about you arriving at a correct answer, but if someone can be trusted to do real analysis on the data and not spin it in ways that suit their purpose.
Not all news outlets have a strong peer-review process for publishing news. Not all research organizations do real research.
If some of the scientists that have access to this dataset are right, the delay in addressing climate change caused by such confusion could mean our extinction.
I would not even suggest this as a correct course of action if there weren't so many different economic interests at play. Lots of people stand to lose a staggering amount of money and they won't place truth above their yearly bonuses, with little concern if a billion or so people die of thirst in the next 100 years.
If the standard for claims is such that code and data must be publicly available, claims made without such backing would be more easily dismissed.
As it is right now, the CRU is behaving exactly as I would expect a manipulative liar to act, and the justification seems to be that it's done to control prevent manipulative lying.
It's not a compelling argument, because it doesn't, really, and since no one is showing up with runnable code and complete data, all sorts of claims appear to have equal footing.
"Lots of people stand to lose a staggering amount of money and they won't place truth above their yearly bonuses, with little concern if a billion or so people die of thirst in the next 100 years."
Are there no millions to be made or lost for some of those arguing that climate change is man-made? Please; scumbags will play any side for a dollar.
I am not sure Joe Sixpack can be convinced the claims have little merit if they have flashy graphics.
As for the CRU... Well... This is not a shining example of scientific conduct, but, as I said before, I am not too eager to blame them. Right now, they are in the middle of a very dangerous game.
And yes. Scumbags will play both sides. It's just that the "global warming doesn't exist" side has more money right now, so, most scumbags seem to line up on that side.
So, better to assume the audience is too stupid or ignorant to think for themselves, and restrict open discussion and examination of the data and process?
That's bullshit.
Is this really what "science" has come to?
And, in fact, if CNN and huffpo decided to say all priests are pedophiles, they would be spreading a lie.
How would that serve the truth?
I wish the AGW folks would get out in front of this and stop acting like partisan hacks. As it stands today, many people have written off AGW as a fraud, nevermind whatever other other evidence may exist. Appeals to science and its trappings of legitimacy will fall on deaf ears if the researchers at the CRU all keep their positions and the data is not made publically available.
Here is the media completely ignoring the issue of data deletion, utterly shitty code and scientific misconduct: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/21/science/earth/21climate.ht...
Here is a policy maker ignoring it: http://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2009/11/25/25climatewire-obama-...
Quote from article: Programmer-written comments inserted into CRU's Fortran code have drawn fire as well. The file briffa_sep98_d.pro says: "Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!" and "APPLY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION." Another, quantify_tsdcal.pro, says: "Low pass filtering at century and longer time scales never gets rid of the trend - so eventually I start to scale down the 120-yr low pass time series to mimic the effect of removing/adding longer time scales!"
It's a complex, messy subject, and as an engineer I hate the reliance on computer models to make predictions, but the dramatic increase in CO2 levels is a fact. It's plain common-sense that a big increase in one of the inputs to the climate has a good chance of causing disruptive change.
There's also accumulating evidence from independent sources that the temperature is rising, but pretend it wasn't there, would an increase in CO2 from 313ppm to 383ppm over 50 years worry you?
It is rarely noted (but undisputed) that the baseline climate response is logarithmic in carbon dioxide concentration (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius#Greenhouse_eff...). Since, absent feedback effects, exponential increases in CO2 levels lead to linear temperature changes, it's likely that common sense is not a reliable guide.
http://www.economist.com/images/mt_blog/democracyinamerica/c...
Is that geometric? Or worse?
So it's considerably better, not worse.
A little calculus goes a long way.
Don't nobody jump down my throat or anything, the juxtaposition just made me laugh.
in non-linear models with feedback is often times incorrect.
would an increase in CO2 from 313ppm to 383ppm over 50 years worry you?
Sorry, I couldn't resist. You really are talking ppm here, so keep in mind the number of 0's to the right of the decimal point before getting too concerned. That's not to say that in some systems, ppm increases are not concerning. However, your point was "it looks like a lot", and that's not valid, without actual perspective on how much a 1 ppm increase will effect the system.
I assume you don't dispute that CO2 acts as a significant greenhouse gas in our atmosphere?
Did anyone really expect all the political and economical interests to sit quietly and not try to interfere with scientific research that could be a matter of life and death to them?