Co2 Acquittal

[Turtle]

Originally Posted by freeztar

The AGU (with a membership of 50,000) issued it's formal stance on climate change, and guess what....

Human Impacts on Climate

Takk Freezter. Fifty thousand people can't be wrong. The down-side if you should make me a convert is, my solutions are even more unappetizing than my dissent. Minimalist multifunctionism finds the dog sleeping...

[freeztar]

Originally Posted by Turtle

my solutions are even more unappetizing than my dissent.

Try me.
I've heard some pretty unappetizing solutions...

[HydrogenBond]

Part of the problem with the global warming debate is assuming the rise in temperature is due to human action. There is a temperature rise, but the human factor is inconclusive. What I would like to see is longer term data, for the past 100 million years. One can find many warm cycles even when humans were not around. What caused these and why is it not even on the table as part of the reason for this current cycle? The science is not very scientific in that it is using about 50-100 years of the data. The burden of proof should require explaining the past and then eliminating that before introducing a trump card.

Science, research and universities are competitive businesses. If you want to get funding one needs to go where the money is. Right now there is more money spent on the global warming angle. If you did a comparison of all the scientists pro and con for global warming, it would be interesting to see how well it correlates to the disproportionate funding level.

What I would like to see happen is for the the global warming money to split equally into two. Give half of it to the pro and half to the con. The ship jumping will occur when the funding gets balanced. The current bucks were decided politically to force fit science to a particular end. The research funding distribution makes me very skeptical. Even a burger flipper is not going to criticize the food if he wants to keep his job. But normalize the funding, people will be able to do their science and talk freely.

If we project into the future, if the human global warming angle is able to pay off its research investment, what is the next card on the table? This has already been thought out, since the funding is designed to be a sure thing. Since it is a Democratic issue, the goal is more government and more taxes. Research is seed money with the hope of a large return on investment. In a free market culture, one has to admire them if it pays off. Going "green' is an inside joke in some circles. They are really thinking greenbacks.

[Chris C]

Originally Posted by HydrogenBond

Part of the problem with the global warming debate is assuming the rise in temperature is due to human action. There is a temperature rise, but the human factor is inconclusive. What I would like to see is longer term data, for the past 100 million years. One can find many warm cycles even when humans were not around. What caused these and why is it not even on the table as part of the reason for this current cycle? The science is not very scientific in that it is using about 50-100 years of the data. The burden of proof should require explaining the past and then eliminating that before introducing a trump card.

Hi, I'm not going to respond to the "motivation" and funding part; that stuff doesn't work for me.

Scientifically, the logic of 'natural cycles' generally comes down to saying that a person walking out of a burning building with a kerosene bottle and matches is innocent because "fires always happened."

I'm not sure what you're reading, but natural/past variability is intensely studied, and in fact the reason you know about them, is because someone took the time to document it. Greenhouse gases actually play a large role in past climate variability, even in ice age cycles, and in previous extinction events. Changes in solar output, changes in plate tectonics, the oxygenetion of the atmosphere, asteroid impacts, volcanic eruptions, etc all have played a role in past climate variability...and if you want to be more specific on a certain time period, there is going to be a good deal of literature on it until you go back to the pre-Cambrian around 550 million years ago, but then we have much less record.

These things are being studied today, and we don't select 'humans' out of a hat. There is a good deal of understanding that goes into the fact that adding CO2 gives you warming, including well known radiative physics (so even if you're getting some big possible-but-undetectable natural variation, that could only amplify it). But if you want to suggest some natural phenomena that we do not know about, the scientific community is all ears.

Just to self advertise some more, this post may be helpful
(http)chriscolose.wordpress.com/2007/12/18/the-scientific-basis-for-anthropogenic-climate-change/

[Chris C]

For those interested, Dr. Roger Pielke and I are having an exchange on his blog post at (http)climatesci.org/2008/01/26/963/ . The comments are actually on my piece, if you go through with his link.

[InfiniteNow]

Originally Posted by HydrogenBond

Part of the problem with the global warming debate is assuming the rise in temperature is due to human action. There is a temperature rise, but the human factor is inconclusive.

No. Actually, ALL of the problem with the debate is that there are people like you who still sincerely believe this.


A Global Warning, Scientist Says Global Warming Intensifies Storms, Raise Sea Levels - CBS News

There's been a debate burning for years about the causes of global warming. But the scientists you're about to meet say the debate is over. New evidence shows man is contributing to the warming of the planet, pumping out greenhouse gases that trap solar heat.

CBS News Video - Top Stories and Video News Clips at CBSNews.com

CBS News Video - Top Stories and Video News Clips at CBSNews.com

CBS News Video - Top Stories and Video News Clips at CBSNews.com

Mayewski says we haven't seen a temperature rise to this level going back at least 2,000 years, and arguably several thousand years.

As for carbon dioxide (CO2) levels, Mayewski says, "we haven't seen CO2 levels like this in hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions of years."

What does that tell him?

"It all points to something that has changed and something that has impacted the system which wasn't doing it more than 100 years ago. And we know exactly what it is. It's human activity," he says.

It's activity like burning fossil fuels, releasing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The U.S. is by far the largest polluter. Corell says there's so much greenhouse gas in the air already that more temperature rise is inevitable.

Even if we stopped using every car, truck, and power plant — stopping all greenhouse gas emissions — Mayewski says the planet would continue to warm anyway. "Would continue to warm for another, about another degree," he says.

That's enough to melt the Arctic — and if greenhouse gases continue to increase, the temperature will rise even more. The ice that's melting already is changing the weather by disrupting ocean currents.

There are skeptics who question climate change projections like that, saying they’re no more reliable than your local weatherman. But Mayewski says arctic projections done decades ago are proving accurate.

"That said, the skeptics have brought up some very, very interesting issues over the last few years. And they've forced us to think more and more about the data that we collect. We can owe the skeptics a vote of thanks for making our science as precise as it is today," says Mayewski.

Corell, who first studied the issue for President Reagan, believes the climate change facts are in, even if President Bush does not.

"When you look at the American government, which is saying essentially, 'Wait a minute. We need to study this some more. We can't flip our energy use overnight. It would hurt the economy.' When you hear that, what do you think?" Pelley asked.

"Well, what I do then is, I try to tell them exactly what we know scientifically. The science is, I believe, unassailable," says Corell. "I'm not arguing their policy, that's their business, how they deal with policy. But my job is to say, scientifically, shorten that time scale so that if you don't push out the effects of climate change into the long, long distant future. Because even under the best of circumstances, this natural system of a climate will continue to warm the planet for literally hundreds of years, no matter what we do."

[Michaelangelica]

Isn't anthropomorphic (human caused) CO2 rising a done deal?
Who is stupid enough to challenge it?

[Chris C]

Originally Posted by Michaelangelica

Isn't anthropomorphic (human caused) CO2 rising a done deal?
Who is stupid enough to challenge it?

anthropogenic*

It is certainly rising, and it is certainly from us. We also know its radiative effect and greenhouse strength, and so it is possible to determine its effect. What is a bit more uncertain is how the climate will react to those CO2-caused temperature changes (i.e., what will happen with clouds, atmospheric circulation, how will ice respond, etc). This can be highly misleading because although the foundation of AGW is remarkably solid, many details are not, such as how hurricanes might respond, or how tropical diseases may be spread.

Unfortunately, the uncertainly now leaves much more room for bad things to happen than it does for good things to happen...it's an experiment destined to turn out bad, but without every detail quantified, we can't say when or how bad.

[pmaust]

Well, I've been away reading and observing. Here is what global warming looks like in the sunny Southern California high desert.

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Snow in Bagdad, China, frigid cold in the mid-west of the US. The evidence is not very convincing. Brrrr.....

[pmaust]

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