Moderated Global Warming Discussion
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CapelDodger
Penultimate Amazing
That would certainly give everyone pause and indicate some radically new science. It's presumably what proponents of "warming is due to some unknown natural factor" are hoping for - after all, it could turn around any time. It would be an odd unknown natural factor that only causes warming, hasn't been seen operating ever before, and kicks in just when AGW was predicted fifty years ago (and in principle over a century ago).
So far it just keeps getting warmer. Which I, along with many others, was expecting. I fully expect the world will keep warming. The biggest unknown on the interaction front is methane feedback, and that's definitely positive, however insignificant it might be.
r-j
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I don't know what you mean. Both studies seem to rely on computer models, both say contrails cause warming. The earlier one (yours) says " An important but poorly understood component of this forcing is caused by ‘contrail cirrus’—a type of cloud that consist of young line-shaped contrails and the older irregularly shaped contrails that arise from them. "
The newer one gives a value and amount of warming caused by the cloud changes. It's an interesting area of study, especially since it's something that can be changed with out stopping all air travel.
I haven't read anything about the polar effects, but since the stratosphere dips over the poles, and so many flights go over the poles, the amount of warming there could be much higher.
lomiller
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I'm not sure what your question is. Weather and climate are different things and you can't make any conclusions about climate based on weather.
Climate does not change without attributable causes those causes can be discovered, studied and predicted. These predictions can be and are tested.
lomiller
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Even if it were you would need to explain why the things we already know about the behavior of CO2 are wrong.
It's worth nothing that "it could be some unknown factor" is not falsifiable. It could always be some unknown factor just as it could always be God manipulating every atom in the universe to control everything we observe. The problem is you can't make meaningful predictions from either one of these hypothesis so they are not scientific in nature.
Pixel42
Schrödinger's cat
It would actually have to be due to two unknown natural factors: a cooling one which cancels out the warming basic physics tells us must occur as a result of the 40% increase in atmospheric CO2 human activity has caused, and a warming one which by an amazing coincidence produces exactly as much warming as the increase in CO2 would have produced if it hadn't been cancelled out by the cooling factor.
r-j
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He is far more reliable than some unknown person making things up on an internet forum.
What do you get out of such off hand commentary? The show reflected the science of the time, which it turns out was right. The pollution at the time, combined with volcanoes, and natural cycles, was cooling the planet.
Which is what some researchers thing is happening now.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/04/global-warming-china-air-pollution_n_889897.html
In this case, the cooling, combined with the reduced solar energy, has led to no warming. (warming + cooling = no trend up or down)
As they point out, this is temporary, especially when China cleans up it's pollution.
And the sun starts behaving "normally" again. And volcanoes stop erupting for a long time. And trees stop growing so fast. As somebody pointed out, short of a nuclear winter, an asteroid impact, or a string of big eruptions, things eventually will get warmer.
Who knows, if the science is right, we may have put off another little ice age. Or, we may not have.
r-j
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That makes no sense at all. Did you just make that up?
It isn't a documentary! Just a TV show, spurred on by the record cold winter before, and alarms over climate change at the time. There was all kinds of talk about the cold.
It must have been a terrible time to be trying to warn about warming, when cold and arid conditions were causing millions to die.
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lomiller
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Leonard Nimoy makes a lot of woo-woo “documentaries” about aliens and bigfoot. It’s usually a safe bet that anything he is narrating does not reflect the science, and that holds true in this case.
By the time that video was made there was already a strong consensus that CO2 emissions would cause the earth to warm and the estimate for how much warming were already in place. There were some unknowns like why ice ages occurred at regular intervals, but that process is much better understood (and is tightly tied to CO2). There were also questions about the cooling effect of aerosols and what impact they may have on this glacial cycle.
The only known at the time that video was made is that CO2 has a warming effect, there were some unknowns that needed investigation but your video doesn’t present these as such it presents them as such.
The entire premise this article is based on is flawed. There is no evidence global warming has stopped or slowed down. In fact the last decade is right on trend for the warming that’s been seen since the 1970’s and what’s predicted by climate models.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1975/to:2010/plot/gistemp/from:1975/to:2012/trend
uke2se
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It makes perfect sense, and no, I did not make it up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Schneider
Peter Hadfield (Potholer54) has the inside story on the "global cooling in the 70s" PRATT.
Weather isn't climate.
Piggy
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You're mistaking pop culture for science.
There was the Time magazine cover and accompanying to-do in the popular media, but if you look back at journal articles of the day, the cooling scenario was never a majority opinion.
In any case, we have done much more research in the intervening years, so even if that had been the prevailing theory of the day, it would be irrelevant now.
uke2se
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Did Schneider say the world was heading for a new ice age in 1978 (he didn't in your video)? Because if he did, he was contradicting other things he said around that time.
The paper he retracted was written in 1971 and argued that global temperatures would cool as much as 3.5 degrees Celsius. As I said, Schneider realized that he'd underestimated the warming effects, and retracted the paper in 1974.
A video from 1978 where Schneider doesn't explicitly state that there's going to be another ice age, and that is contradicted by things he said in other places doesn't change the fact that there was not many scientific papers predicting global cooling, and none predicting a new ice age in the 1970s.
lomiller
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Yup
http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/Myth-1970-Global-Cooling-BAMS-2008.pdf
Furthermore there was never a single year where papers predicting cooling outnumbers papers predicting warming. The highest number of “cooling” papers in any single year was 2 in 1971, one of which is the withdrawn paper mentioned above. By 1978 papers predicting cooling had disappeared completely.
r-j
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I've read multiple times that the cooling that ended in the late seventies is now attributed to pollution. The same sort of pollution that China is now pumping out, in such quantities it's the reason for no warming since 1998.
But, it's pretty clear the consensus in regards to what will happen is as nebulous as the consensus over what did happen already. None of this is giving much reason to have faith in the dire predictions about the horrors of warming.
It may turn out the same as the population bomb, and the dozen or so other dire predictions of how the future will be bad.
But, it's pretty clear the consensus in regards to what will happen is as nebulous as the consensus over what did happen already. None of this is giving much reason to have faith in the dire predictions about the horrors of warming.
It may turn out the same as the population bomb, and the dozen or so other dire predictions of how the future will be bad.
r-j
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I seemed to have touched a nerve in regards to the ideas being bandied about in the seventies, as to what to do if the cooling didn't stop.
Harbors were unusable, people were trapped by snow, the temperatures had been falling for so long, there was even a huge report to congress about it. The scientists who said it was pollution, combined with volcanoes, it turns out they were right.
I also remember when Pinatubo went off, and the whole world cooled down. Even the experts were shocked at how quickly the warming began again, after the short lived sulfur particles were cleaned out of the atmosphere.
That the warming trend stopped, and the sun has gone quiet (another thing the predictions about were 100% wrong it seems), it makes sense with the huge increase in coal use from China, that warming would be stalled.
The irony is it seems the people claiming this years record cold is due to warming, can't also be right, if there isn't warming. That there is argument over the global mean, that casts some serious doubt about the state of climate science in the world today.
Harbors were unusable, people were trapped by snow, the temperatures had been falling for so long, there was even a huge report to congress about it. The scientists who said it was pollution, combined with volcanoes, it turns out they were right.
I also remember when Pinatubo went off, and the whole world cooled down. Even the experts were shocked at how quickly the warming began again, after the short lived sulfur particles were cleaned out of the atmosphere.
That the warming trend stopped, and the sun has gone quiet (another thing the predictions about were 100% wrong it seems), it makes sense with the huge increase in coal use from China, that warming would be stalled.
The irony is it seems the people claiming this years record cold is due to warming, can't also be right, if there isn't warming. That there is argument over the global mean, that casts some serious doubt about the state of climate science in the world today.
Trakar
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Effects of Urban Surfaces and White Roofs on Global and Regional Climate - http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/Others/HeatIsland+WhiteRfs0911.pdf
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