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Moderated Global Warming Discussion

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I've always felt that it should be called "Global Weather Instability". Then every time the weather gets violent people will think, "hey, maybe GWI is actually real!"
 
3bodyproblem said:
The paradox.

If you call it Global Warming and then say colder winters people look at you cock eyed.
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Depending on the people and where they live. Tell people in Greenland they're having colder winters and they'll give you a very strange look.

Call in climate change and no one cares, because the climate always changes.
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Call it climate disruption and they start to make the connection. The idea that "climate always changes" is not deeply-bedded in popular culture because it hasn't been a common experience since civilisation began. The Little Ice Age and so on were only invented in the 20thCE as a historiographical fad.

People understand disruption and they don't like it.
 
Stray Cat said:
I agree that to even start to understand what natural climate change may or may not be doing at the moment, we have to somehow counter the effect humans have had on the climate.
In short, stop doing the things that science tells us are bad for the climate (that's stop doing them, not taxing them) and once the man made stuff is out of the way, we'll have a better idea of the natural climate change we will have to learn to live with because there is nothing we can do about it.
So I don't agree that natural climate change is irrelevant. I believe it is inevitable. That doesn't mean of course we can abandon our responsibility to put right the damage we have caused.
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Definitely approaching a more reasonable consideration of the issues.

Most natural climate change is irrelevent for several reasons, the primary one being that it tends to encroach on time scales of tens of millenia rather than decades-centuries. Impacts can be fairly rapid once tipping points are breached, but for the most part the approach is obvious long before those points become eminent.

I agree that the best solution would be to simply place a global ban on the mining/drilling, refinement and open-cycle combustion of all fossil fuels, but it is a solution that is unlikely to be enacted or enforced until there are viable alternatives in place. Without such a ban, the next best option is to price the carbon fuels so that their full detrimental impact is accounted for, or so that alternative energy systems are a lower cost competitive option. As for the plastic bag tax that has little to do with climate change issues, and is actually more a land-fill/pollution issue as such bags generally do not break down in the environment for inordinately long periods of time so we end up with a lot of plastic bags throughout our environment. Paper is a renewable resource and breaks down fairly rapidly in the environment,...a much better option, IMO.
 
macdoc said:
I think you need to understand the consequences of what we have already done.
There is no reset switch.
Stopping carbon emissions will not reset the climate anything short of thousands of years.

You seem very confused between local climate variability ( ENSO, NAO etc) and natural forcings which are primarily orbital ( very long cycle ), continental positioning ( even longer cycle ) and volcanic - very short cycle.

Local variability does not alter the radiative balance - the others do.
Local variability is simply the expression of energy in the atmosphere from changes in the crysopshere, hydrosphere - for instance shifts in ocean currents or pools of hot or cold in ocean basins.

This can have dramatic affect as we've seen with a strong La Nina in Australia but these variables lay on top of climate change induced by forcing.....in our case fossil carbon and to a degree methane.

So ENSO may magnify the forcing or mitigate it.....some call La Nina the air conditioner for North America.

Disruptions in the polar patterns ( this winter and last ) due to the consequences of a warmer Arctic Ocean with more open water mean deep continental cold.
This does not change the radiative balance - it simply is local change - natural variability some induced by the longer term forcing of orbital, continental placement, volcanic and now AGW

The latter cannot be stopped or reset - we have already altered the climate out to at least 100k years.....perhaps completely over riding the ice age that would have been part of the next 10k years.

Carbon is forever in human terms
http://www.nature.com/climate/2008/0812/full/climate.2008.122.html

these changes are not reversable by stopping the carbon emissions
ttp://www.pnas.org/content/106/6/1704.full

No foolin' guys we've made a mess of it ...and it's not going away.
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Very much this!!!
MacDoc and I don't always see eye-to-eye, but on this issue our understandings are very similar,...as the science demands.
 
"Coldest Winter on Record!"

"Hottest Summer on Record!"

The Earth is somewhere around 4.5 billion years old...give or take a few hundred million.

So how much of those 4.5 billion years are part of the "Record" that's being claimed as extraordinary and/or troubling??
 
deepatrax said:
"Coldest Winter on Record!"

"Hottest Summer on Record!"

The Earth is somewhere around 4.5 billion years old...give or take a few hundred million.

So how much of those 4.5 billion years are part of the "Record" that's being claimed as extraordinary and/or troubling??
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can you Imagen living in a global ice age? i don't think we are to adaptable to huge changes in climate, and as long they don't occur naturally atm, we should prevent from changes do to our greenhouse gas output.
 
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DC said:
can you Imagen living in a global ice age? i don't think we are to adaptable to huge changes in climate, and as long they don't occur naturally atm, we should prevent from changes do to our greenhouse gas output.
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agreed...in so much as we can try to maintain a hospitable climate for us to live, we should.

But don't be under any illusion that A) Man is the sole cause for the climate changing or that B) Man can stop it.

You mention an ice age...

I think it's a bit amusing that the Polar Bear is brought into this so much by people saying, "we have to save the Polar Bear's environment!".

When the polar bear is believed to be have been descended from brown bears who got cut off up north during the last Ice Age...and they adapted

Maybe they wanna come back down south again where it's warmer :)
 
deepatrax said:
agreed...in so much as we can try to maintain a hospitable climate for us to live, we should.

But don't be under any illusion that A) Man is the sole cause for the climate changing or that B) Man can stop it.

You mention an ice age...

I think it's a bit amusing that the Polar Bear is brought into this so much by people saying, "we have to save the Polar Bear's environment!".

When the polar bear is believed to be have been descended from brown bears who got cut off up north during the last Ice Age...and they adapted

Maybe they wanna come back down south again where it's warmer :)
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A) we are not the sole cause, but the main cause.
B) We can take our input out of the equation.

i have no fear Life itself will die off. i don't think so, but even though i often moan around about Humans, i do like them somehow and would like them to not end up like the Neanderthals. ;)
yes i have a pro human bias and would not like to loose our top position in the tree of life.
 
Stray Cat said:
I agree that to even start to understand what natural climate change may or may not be doing at the moment, we have to somehow counter the effect humans have had on the climate.
In short, stop doing the things that science tells us are bad for the climate (that's stop doing them, not taxing them) and once the man made stuff is out of the way, we'll have a better idea of the natural climate change we will have to learn to live with because there is nothing we can do about it.
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We know what natural climate change we have to live with because we've been living with it since civilisation began. All the evidence is that we've come through it very well, and there's no reason to think it would be any more of a problem given modern technology.

We will understand what AGW does for us because it will overwhelm any natural influences short of major vulcanism or some other catastrophe. Vulcanism we have a pretty good handle on anyway, the Sun is in a stable phase of its very long life, and asteroid strike means all bets are off anyway.

When a society becomes as concerned with climate change when it's happening (which is the case globally now), then there is an issue. No historian will have to look back and identify a 21stCE Warm Period, as they did with the Little Ice Age, Medieval Warm Period, Dark Ages Cloudiness Period, and all the other Periods nobody remarked on at the time. We've noticed it, and, boy, are we remarking on it. That's why you and I are here discussing the subject, after all.

So I don't agree that natural climate change is irrelevant. I believe it is inevitable.
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Inevitable and irrelevant. A meaningless distraction.

That doesn't mean of course we can abandon our responsibility to put right the damage we have caused.
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Don't paint me as responsible for any meaningless distractions, or concerns about carbon costs I might pay. If everyone had my carbon-footprint there wouldn't be a problem.

Blame my generation or blame my species, but don't blame me.
 
Thunder said:
and who is claiming that?

or is this just another Glenn Beck/Rush Limbaugh strawman.
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Yea, I just make this stuff up...

"NOAA on Miami Florida: Coldest December on Record"

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/12/30/noaa-on-miami-florida-coldest-december-on-record/

"Coldest winter (so far), coldest December in British history"

"It was confirmed yesterday that December had been the coldest since national records were first kept in 1910, with the average temperature little more than -1.5C"
 
DC said:
A) we are not the sole cause, but the main cause.
B) We can take our input out of the equation.

i have no fear Life itself will die off. i don't think so, but even though i often moan around about Humans, i do like them somehow and would like them to not end up like the Neanderthals. ;)
yes i have a pro human bias and would not like to loose our top position in the tree of life.
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Climate change is a fairly major evolutionary force. Despite your bias, evolution doesn't have one.
 
deepatrax said:
Yea, I just make this stuff up...

"NOAA on Miami Florida: Coldest December on Record"

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/12/30/noaa-on-miami-florida-coldest-december-on-record/

"Coldest winter (so far), coldest December in British history"

"It was confirmed yesterday that December had been the coldest since national records were first kept in 1910, with the average temperature little more than -1.5C"
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Kind of odd that a guy buried under much more than average snowfall for the season thinks you made that up.
 
deepatrax said:
"Coldest Winter on Record!"

"Hottest Summer on Record!"

The Earth is somewhere around 4.5 billion years old...give or take a few hundred million.

So how much of those 4.5 billion years are part of the "Record" that's being claimed as extraordinary and/or troubling??
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The tiny bit at the end that involves human civilisation. In particular the bit around now, with nearly seven billion people on the planet and rising.

To the five Great Extinctions of the planet's history we're adding a sixth. That's an extraordinary achievement for a single species. Admittedly, changing the planet's climate is only one contribution to that, but it's a significant one. It amplifies all the others.
 
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