"Global Warming" or not? Doesn't matter.

[doobs]

How could it possibly be beneficial overall? If scientists are correct in their predictions, places like NYC, Shanghai, Kolkata (Calcutta), etc. will be under water. That will displace millions of people and kill who knows how many. And at what point does it end? If scientists are correct then we're causing all of this. We'll continue to heat and destroy our planet. So I'm asking, what are your boundaries for global warming being a good thing? Will it take a temperature rise of several degrees worldwide to make you think it's a bad thing?

What? Are you just repeating the plot to The Day After Tomorrow? If you don't realize the crazy assumptions you're making, then I suppose my comments are wasted on you.

Am I convinced that global warming is bad? No. Am I convinced that global warming is good? No. It's an uncertainty, and nerdy guy fails to really consider that.

[Shastafarian]

What? Are you just repeating the plot to The Day After Tomorrow? If you don't realize the crazy assumptions you're making, then I suppose my comments are wasted on you.

Oh I see you don't understand global sea levels and the impact of melting ice. My mistake.

Am I convinced that global warming is bad? No. Am I convinced that global warming is good? No. It's an uncertainty, and nerdy guy fails to really consider that.

HOW COULD IT POSSIBLY BE GOOD?

[Shastafarian]

Are you using John Stossel to say if ice continues to melt global seas levels will remain the same? Has anyone taken remedial science courses here?

[doobs]

Oh I see you don't understand global sea levels and the impact of melting ice. My mistake.

HOW COULD IT POSSIBLY BE GOOD?

You're missing the main point, which doesn't surprise me.

You merely parrot alarmist doomsday scenarios and insist that we must therefore "act" to combat global warming. You're making assumptions about the consequences of global warming, and about man's role in contributing to global warming, and about the effectiveness of "doing something about it." That kind of hysteria creeps me out. I'm advocating the status quo, for now, because of the uncertainties associated with global warming, as I pointed out previously. You should be willing to admit, at the very least, that the supposed consequences of global warming are purely speculative and tenuous at best.

Anyway . . . how could it possibly be good? I don't know, maybe you should look to the 13th Century, a fairly prosperous time when the average global temperature was probably about 7 degrees warmer than it is today. Again, you must be assuming that melting ice will wash cities away and kill millions in a space of hours or days, like in The Day After Tomorrow.

First of all, ice is actually thickening in many parts of the world, so the concern about San Francisco or New York being submerged is unproven hysteria at this point. Secondly, if sea levels are indeed rising due to melting ice and global warming, it will be a fairly slow process. People will adjust and move inland.

In short, NO ONE knows with any certainty what the consequences of global warming will be. Scientists are making guesses, based on questionable models and, to some extent (if I may be so frank), skewed political perspectives. Go ahead and live your life in fear, but I sleep very well at night.

[Shastafarian]

You're missing the main point, which doesn't surprise me.

You merely parrot alarmist doomsday scenarios and insist that we must therefore "act" to combat global warming. You're making assumptions about the consequences of global warming, and about man's role in contributing to global warming, and about the effectiveness of "doing something about it." That kind of hysteria creeps me out. I'm advocating the status quo, for now, because of the uncertainties associated with global warming, as I pointed out previously. You should be willing to admit, at the very least, that the supposed consequences of global warming are purely speculative and tenuous at best.

Actually I've done none of that. I was giving you a hypothetical situation in which global warming is real.

Anyway . . . how could it possibly be good? I don't know, maybe you should look to the 13th Century, a fairly prosperous time when the average global temperature was probably about 7 degrees warmer than it is today. Again, you must be assuming that melting ice will wash cities away and kill millions in a space of hours or days, like in The Day After Tomorrow.

No I'm not a complete idiot. I don't look to movies to get my information. If seas levels rise because of the melting ice in Greenland and Antarctica, then those places I mentioned would be under water.

First of all, ice is actually thickening in many parts of the world, so the concern about San Francisco or New York being submerged is unproven hysteria at this point. Secondly, if sea levels are indeed rising due to melting ice and global warming, it will be a fairly slow process. People will adjust and move inland.

Wow. Ignorance must be bliss. Where should these people move? I can't see any problems arising out of millions of people moving. Nope. Not a one.

In short, NO ONE knows with any certainty what the consequences of global warming will be. Scientists are making guesses, based on questionable models and, to some extent (if I may be so frank), skewed political perspectives. Go ahead and live your life in fear, but I sleep very well at night.

Who says I live in fear? I guess you don't understand hypothetical situations. Again, my mistake.

[DarrinS]

Are you using John Stossel to say if ice continues to melt global seas levels will remain the same? Has anyone taken remedial science courses here?

I guess you missed the part in the video where Al Gore's "do entary" stated that sea levels could rise by 20 FEET and that IPCC's worst case scenario was 7 to 20 INCHES.


Based on my redmedial science, 7-20 inches is much less than 20 feet.

[doobs]

I guess you missed the part in the video where Al Gore's "do entary" stated that sea levels could rise by 20 FEET and that IPCC's worst case scenario was 7 to 20 INCHES.


Based on my redmedial science, 7-20 inches is much less than 20 feet.

But . . . but . . . but . . . global warming is bad. Drugs are bad. Mkay.

[DarrinS]

Good article

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/ear...l-warming.html

No one can deny that in recent years the need to "save the planet" from global warming has become one of the most pervasive issues of our time. As Tony Blair's chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, claimed in 2004, it poses "a far greater threat to the world than international terrorism", warning that by the end of this century the only habitable continent left will be Antarctica.

Inevitably, many people have been bemused by this somewhat one-sided debate, imagining that if so many experts are agreed, then there must be something in it. But if we set the story of how this fear was promoted in the context of other scares before it, the parallels which emerge might leave any honest believer in global warming feeling uncomfortable.

The story of how the panic over climate change was pushed to the top of the international agenda falls into five main stages. Stage one came in the 1970s when many scientists expressed alarm over what they saw as a disastrous change in the earth's climate. Their fear was not of warming but global cooling, of "a new Ice Age".

For three decades, after a sharp rise in the interwar years up to 1940, global temperatures had been falling. The one thing certain about climate is that it is always changing. Since we began to emerge from the last Ice Age 20,000 years ago, temperatures have been through significant swings several times. The hottest period occurred around 8,000 years ago and was followed by a long cooling. Then came what is known as the "Roman Warming", coinciding with the Roman empire. Three centuries of cooling in the Dark Ages were followed by the "Mediaeval Warming", when the evidence agrees the world was hotter than today.

Around 1300 began "the Little Ice Age", that did not end until 200 years ago, when we entered what is known as the "Modern Warming". But even this has been chequered by colder periods, such as the "Little Cooling" between 1940 and 1975. Then, in the late 1970s, the world began warming again.

A scare is often set off - as we show in our book with other examples - when two things are observed together and scientists suggest one must have been caused by the other. In this case, thanks to readings commissioned by Dr Roger Revelle, a distinguished American oceanographer, it was observed that since the late 1950s levels of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere had been rising. Perhaps it was this increase that was causing the new warming in the 1980s?

Stage two of the story began in 1988 when, with remarkable speed, the global warming story was elevated into a ruling orthodoxy, partly due to hearings in Washington chaired by a youngish senator, Al Gore, who had studied under Dr Revelle in the 1960s.

But more importantly global warming hit centre stage because in 1988 the UN set up its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC). Through a series of reports, the IPCC was to advance its cause in a rather unusual fashion. First it would commission as many as 1,500 experts to produce a huge scientific report, which might include all sorts of doubts and reservations. But this was to be prefaced by a Summary for Policymakers, drafted in consultation with governments and officials - essentially a political do ent - in which most of the caveats contained in the experts' report would not appear.

This contradiction was obvious in the first report in 1991, which led to the Rio conference on climate change in 1992. The second report in 1996 gave particular prominence to a study by an obscure US government scientist claiming that the evidence for a connection between global warming and rising CO2 levels was now firmly established. This study came under heavy fire from various leading climate experts for the way it manipulated the evidence. But this was not allowed to stand in the way of the claim that there was now complete scientific consensus behind the CO2 thesis, and the Summary for Policy-makers, heavily influenced from behind the scenes by Al Gore, by this time US Vice-President, paved the way in 1997 for the famous Kyoto Protocol.

Kyoto initiated stage three of the story, by formally committing governments to drastic reductions in their CO2 emissions. But the treaty still had to be ratified and this seemed a good way off, not least thanks to its rejection in 1997 by the US Senate, despite the best attempts of Mr Gore.

Not the least of his efforts was his bid to suppress an article co-authored by Dr Revelle just before his death. Gore didn't want it to be known that his guru had urged that the global warming thesis should be viewed with more caution.

One of the greatest problems Gore and his allies faced at this time was the mass of evidence showing that in the past, global temperatures had been higher than in the late 20th century.

In 1998 came the answer they were looking for: a new temperature chart, devised by a young American physicist, Michael Mann. This became known as the "hockey stick" because it showed historic temperatures running in an almost flat line over the past 1,000 years, then suddenly flicking up at the end to record levels.

Mann's hockey stick was just what the IPCC wanted. When its 2001 report came out it was given pride of place at the top of page 1. The Mediaeval Warming, the Little Ice Age, the 20th century Little Cooling, when CO2 had already been rising, all had been wiped away.

But then a growing number of academics began to raise doubts about Mann and his graph. This culminated in 2003 with a devastating study by two Canadians showing how Mann had not only ignored most of the evidence before him but had used an algorithm that would produce a hockey stick graph whatever evidence was fed into the computer. When this was removed, the graph re-emerged just as it had looked before, showing the Middle Ages as hotter than today.

It is hard to recall any scientific thesis ever being so comprehensively discredited as the "hockey stick". Yet the global warming juggernaut rolled on regardless, now led by the European Union. In 2004, thanks to a highly dubious deal between the EU and Putin's Russia, stage four of the story began when the Kyoto treaty was finally ratified.

In the past three years, we have seen the EU announcing every kind of measure geared to fighting climate change, from building ever more highly-subsidised wind turbines, to a commitment that by 2050 it will have reduced carbon emissions by 60 per cent. This is a pledge that could only be met by such a massive reduction in living standards that it is impossible to see the peoples of Europe accepting it.

All this frenzy has rested on the assumption that global temperatures will continue to rise in tandem with CO2 and that, unless mankind takes drastic action, our planet is faced with the apocalypse so vividly described by Al Gore in his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth.

Yet recently, stage five of the story has seen all sorts of question marks being raised over Gore's alleged consensus. For instance, he claimed that by the end of this century world sea levels will have risen by 20 ft when even the IPCC in its latest report, only predicts a rise of between four and 17 inches. There is also of course the harsh reality that, wholly unaffected by Kyoto, the economies of China and India are now expanding at nearly 10 per cent a year, with China likely to be emitting more CO2 than the US within two years.

More serious, however, has been all the evidence ac ulating to show that, despite the continuing rise in CO2 levels, global temperatures in the years since 1998 have no longer been rising and may soon even be falling.

It was a telling moment when, in August, Gore's closest scientific ally, James Hansen of the Goddard Ins ute for Space Studies, was forced to revise his influential record of US surface temperatures showing that the past decade has seen the hottest years on record. His graph now concedes that the hottest year of the 20th century was not 1998 but 1934, and that four of the 10 warmest years in the past 100 were in the 1930s.

Furthermore, scientists and academics have recently been queuing up to point out that fluctuations in global temperatures correlate more consistently with patterns of radiation from the sun than with any rise in CO2 levels, and that after a century of high solar activity, the sun's effect is now weakening, presaging a likely drop in temperatures.

If global warming does turn out to have been a scare like all the others, it will certainly represent as great a collective flight from reality as history has ever recorded. The evidence of the next 10 years will be very interesting.

[RandomGuy]

That risk management video is really stupid. Really, really, really stupid.

First of all, he doesn't really explain what he means by "action." He also assumes that whatever "action" is taken will be effective at combating global warming. What if man-made global warming is real and a threat to our very existence, and we undertake costly governmental intervention that completely fails to address the problem? Then we will have spent a ton of money, endured economic consequences from now until our extinction, and still suffered the "catastrophic" consequences of global warming. That scenario sounds pretty miserable to me.

Which brings me to my next point. He assumes that global warming is a bad thing. He assumes "catastrophic" consequences. What if man-made global warming is real, and we do nothing to address it, but the consequences are far from catastrophic? What if global warming is actually a good thing, and brings prosperity?

Is global warming even occurring?

If so, is global warming even a bad thing? How so?

To what extent is man actually the cause of global warming, and to what extent is global warming attributable to a natural warming trend?

If it is a bad thing, and if man is the cause, what can actually be done to effectively combat global warming? (That is, poorly-defined "action" is not enough. As with any government program, there is a risk of throwing money around with no results. As with any regulatory scheme, there is a risk of unnecessarily hindering business with no results.)

Which of these questions have actually been answered, to a thinking person's satisfaction?

There are just way too many variables for me to seriously consider some nerd's oversimplified, bull dry erase board demonstration.

Not even sure where to start. For one thing pretty much everything in this post has already been addressed in one form or another.

I will say merely: you are mistaken as to what the guy was saying, and what the guy was assuming.

Go back and read through the rest of the thread to catch up.

[RandomGuy]

endured economic consequences from now until our extinction,

I think a lot of people tend to take AGW with a much higher degree of certainty than the science suggests. It is a popluar idea.

Whether it is a crisis, is also something I am not entirely convinced of.

As I have said before though, it seems to be at least a fair possibility that it is both real and catastrophic.

I don't know if the gun is loaded, or if there is a round in the chamber, so I am not going to point it at my face and pull the trigger.

There is, also, a very strong possibility that the fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas) causing the problem are going to get VERY expensive in 10-20 years.

The benefits of avoiding energy sources that rely on these coincides with low CO2 emissions.

That is why the case for doing something now has two potential benefits:

1. Avoiding the cost swings associated with commodity fuels, as well as a massive compe ive advantage over those who don't.
2. Avoiding the worst case scenario of AGW.

WC's worst case scenario is in MY area of expertise, and I judge his worst case scenario as being about as remote as he judges the worst case AGW theory. Not only is it highly unlikely, there is a pretty fair possibility that the exact opposite is true.

I CAN provide data and reasoning showing this, and have given some of it here.

He wants to dismiss this as being irrelevant, because it suits him on some emotional level I guess, but any consideration of a course of action must take into account possibility of occurance. It suits WC's confirmation bias to do so in one case, but to be blind to that fact when it comes to his own assertions. That is partly why I assign his conclusions so little weight.

I don't have first-hand knowledge of IPCC bias, but WC's is readily apparent.

[Wild Cobra]

How could it possibly be beneficial overall? If scientists are correct in their predictions, places like NYC, Shanghai, Kolkata (Calcutta), etc. will be under water.

etc. etc. etc...

This is a prime example of needless fear mongering. Anyone who has a grasp of the sciences and applicable data knows better.

Shasta... do you have any idea how much warmer the Earth would have to be to melt that ice at the temperature it averages? Not just 5 to 10 degrees warmer average, but probably 20 or more. Life would be devastated long before Antarctica and Greenland melt.

[Shastafarian]

This is a prime example of needless fear mongering. Anyone who has a grasp of the sciences and applicable data knows better.

Shasta... do you have any idea how much warmer the Earth would have to be to melt that ice at the temperature it averages? Not just 5 to 10 degrees warmer average, but probably 20 or more. Life would be devastated long before Antarctica and Greenland melt.

And where are you getting these numbers? The usual place? Cuz if it's the usual place can you spray something, I don't like my "facts" smelling like .

[Shastafarian]

Virtually everyone agrees that the complete disappearance of the 2-mile-thick (3-kilometer-thick) Greenland Ice Sheet would cause an estimated 23-foot (7-meter) rise in global sea levels. That would inundate coastal regions around the world. At the same time, virtually everyone also agrees that even under the worst-case scenario, it would take centuries of warmer weather for Greenland's ice to disappear completely.

It's the rate of change in the ice sheet, and its variability over time, that is at issue.

Rignot and Kanagaratnam say their calculations indicate that the Greenland melt currently contributes about two-hundredths of an inch (0.5 millimeters) to the annual 0.12-inch (3-millimeter) rise in global sea levels. The glacier speed-up is responsible for more than two-thirds of that contribution, they say.

Moreover, the type of speed-up seen in Greenland may be affecting glaciers elsewhere as well, Rignot said.

"We think something very similar is happening in the Antarctic Peninsula, where the ice shelves in front of these glaciers has collapsed," he told MSNBC.com, specifically pointing to 2002's demise of the Larsen B ice shelf.

Mark Chandler, a climate researcher at Columbia University, said the fate of the world's ice sheets is "probably the biggest concern that people are looking at right now" in the field of climate prediction.

"There's a lot of fear out there right now, even among scientists, that ice caps are not all that stable," he told MSNBC.com. If the pace of global ice loss accelerates, sea levels might conceivably rise 6 to 16 feet (2 to 5 meters) over the course of a century, which he said would be "devastating."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11385475/

[Wild Cobra]

Today's edit in brackets [].

WC is of the impression that we clearly have done research that can support reliable predictions about the effects of CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions.

If you want to make that case, then take it up with WC.

First of all, I have only addressed CO2 on the issue [in regards to greenhouse gasses]. Such spectral and blackbody radiation sciences are well known [when concerning heat absorption and intensities]. I know with absolute certainty that more CO2 is harmless to the Earths temperature [unless you wish to challenge the known thermal sciences and Spectrocopy as wrong]. I blame solar activity and soot from Asia for nearly all the warming we see. I've been looking into tidal activity as well, but have nothing reliable.

Again Random, even the IPCC says the sun has increased in intensity by 0.24% to 0.3%. These are scientifically accepted numbers by those who you say are peer reviewed. Thermal calculations are simple linear math problems until there are also chemical reactions or state changes. Pick a no sun temperature and calculate how much 100% solar radiation is and how much 100.24% solar radiation is.

0 Celsius = 273.15 Kelvin.

The Earth is about 15 Celsius now, average.

Considering the coldest recorded surface temperature is -89 Celsius, you have to give the solar component over 100 degrees of influence. 100 x 1.0024 is an absolute minimum of 0.24 degrees of influence. I think most geoscientists would say the sun has at least 200 degrees of influence, or a minimum of about a half of a degree with that 100 year change acknowledged by the IPCC.

Honestly. How can CO2 attribute as much as you would like to believe in the IPCC scenario?

Pssst...

A little hint. Climatologists are not a proper authority for global warming. Geoscientists are!

[doobs]

So who here has bought their robot insurance?

And, seriously, why haven't we started construction on the Death Star to protect against alien invasion?

[AlamoSpursFan]

[Shastafarian]

So who here has bought their robot insurance?

And, seriously, why haven't we started construction on the Death Star to protect against alien invasion?

The proper analogy would be that we detect an incoming alien warship. We're not sure if them detecting our energy output (radio signals, etc) is causing them to come but we know they're on their way. We can either 1) do nothing and hope they can't detect us or we can 2) change the way we output energy and bank on our improved technological advances being able to mask our existence.

[RandomGuy]

So who here has bought their robot insurance?

And, seriously, why haven't we started construction on the Death Star to protect against alien invasion?

There are two dimensions of risk.

One is magnitude and the other is probability.

If one does risk mitigation one considers both, as has already been addressed.

The problem with your standpoint is that you likely haven't spent the time to accurately assess and understand the data on both sides of the debate.

What you so inexpertly attempt to allude here is that we can't really know the probability of AGW with certainty, which I agree with, but we do have evidence and data that suggests it is a fairly real possibility.

If you have any research data that suggests a real possibility of an alien invasion or robot attack, feel free to present it.

If you can't, then your emotional comparison is not only invalid, but illogical.

[Winehole23]

We will not have certain data to act on and must choose a course of action based on incomplete data, as is often the case in anything.

"Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises."

- Samuel Butler

[RandomGuy]

bump. just so I can have this thead a bit more accessible.

[DarrinS]

I hear people in Austrailia are bursting into flames.

[Wild Cobra]

I hear people in Austrailia are bursting into flames.

I should get a winter home there. I love the heat. I've been a Popsicle too long now.

[RandomGuy]

I hear people in Austrailia are bursting into flames.

Any thoughts on the new study of our south pole that shows that overall it hasn't really been getting colder?

Doesn't that take away another talking point for the skeptics who have been using that as some kind of "proof" to debunk the AGW theory?

[RandomGuy]

I should get a winter home there. I love the heat. I've been a Popsicle too long now.

Maybe you should get to work on publishing all that science in actual peer-reviewed journals.

That might warm you up.

[DarrinS]

Any thoughts on the new study of our south pole that shows that overall it hasn't really been getting colder?

Doesn't that take away another talking point for the skeptics who have been using that as some kind of "proof" to debunk the AGW theory?

There are thousands (yes thousands) of scientists that are skeptical of AGW theory, but don't worry, Obama's spending the money anyway, so you can sleep well at night now.