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Moderated Global Warming Discussion

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Megalodon said:
Actually, as I explained previously, he's far wronger than that, due to ocean acidification and the shift in the ocean's carbon chemistry.
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There's always been an enormous imbalance between the attention given to AGW and to ocean acidification as consequences of carbon pollution. This is entirely understandable, given that weather hits us where we live, and does mean that the denier position on acidification is undeveloped. It's just vague hand-waves and triumphant declarations that in proper scientific nomenclature the oceans are just getting less alkaline. "Acidification" is alarmist rhetoric, oceanographers and marine biologists are all after research grants, yadda yadda, it's all terribly weak.

Ocean acidification has yet to find its Steve McIntyre or its Watts. They might be out there, though, minnows now but one day to be Titans of the Deep.

I've long been of the opinion that the first food catastrophe we'll hit won't be down to agricultural failure so much as ocean collapse, not just from AGW and acidification but also from industrial fishing and run-off and sheer vandalism. We'll see crises from agriculture and cereals, but catastrophe from the oceans and the protein it provides.

Only then will the McIntyre or Monckton of the oceans emerge from the slime to lead the chorus of denial that this is not really a bad thing (no shark attacks with no sharks, so what now, you're in favour of shark attacks? Your pseudonym, your avatar, now it all becomes clear, you're a sharkist) and it's a natural cycle which is now recovering, and it's meant as a distraction from AGW which hasn't turned out as bad as the alarmists said.

From the security of my own worldview I find it all so predictable. Which gives me comfort.
 
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CapelDodger said:
Ocean acidification has yet to find its Steve McIntyre or its Watts. They might be out there, though, minnows now but one day to be Titans of the Deep.
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I've always seen failing those who attempt that. It requires some grasp in different disciplines that are not usually find together in the same cerebrum, so teem work is required. The only team work deniers do well is attacking the science behind AGW simultaneously from a hundred of dissimilar ways at the same time what may look like a bee hive defending itself but it is more like a bunch of looters each one pillaging to their own satisfaction but trying to break through the law enforcers at the same time, with the only gallantry of not plundering each other.

Besides the multi-disciplinarian needs, deniers face a situation they don't like: if warming doesn't kill it, acidification will. They are more the like of "CO2 is a trace gas with an effect that is almost saturated, hence all that is built upon it falls down", and they don't like being "attacked" from two fronts simultaneously. Even if deniers are eager and willing to fight that way like romantic musketeers, they fail miserably by being constantly caught having inexcusable gaps in their scientific knowledge, and there's something they hate more than letting AGW grounds go uncontested and that is make totally fools of themselves -to the grade they are able to perceive it, I mean ;)-. A year ago or so I caught in SkepticalScience one of the most "brilliant" comment-section resident deniers you can find in the internet woods with an elaborate theory of his about UV-A rays warming 800 metre deep ocean layers all wrongly based on properties of distilled clear water. And this individual is not only an adamant arguer but pretty knowledgeable in a couple of areas. His intention was promoting the idea that ocean mixing is pretty easy and it'll take care of our circumstantial imbalances, so any development today is just anecdotal and you may rest assured "the next car to turn around the corner will be blue".
 
CapelDodger said:
There's always been an enormous imbalance between the attention given to AGW and to ocean acidification as consequences of carbon pollution.
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Well, it has to do to how horribly underfunded ocean sciences are, when compared to other branches.

This is entirely understandable, given that weather hits us where we live, and does mean that the denier position on acidification is undeveloped. It's just vague hand-waves and triumphant declarations that in proper scientific nomenclature the oceans are just getting less alkaline. "Acidification" is alarmist rhetoric, oceanographers and marine biologists are all after research grants, yadda yadda, it's all terribly weak.
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When seawater becomes truly acidic we are beyond any kind of argument or remedy.

Ocean acidification has yet to find its Steve McIntyre or its Watts. They might be out there, though, minnows now but one day to be Titans of the Deep.
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As Alec rightly says, first they would have to get around to understand it enough to misrepresent it. Fat chance of that, I think.

I've long been of the opinion that the first food catastrophe we'll hit won't be down to agricultural failure so much as ocean collapse, not just from AGW and acidification but also from industrial fishing and run-off and sheer vandalism. We'll see crises from agriculture and cereals, but catastrophe from the oceans and the protein it provides.
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The oceans are collapsing, no doubt about it. And surprisingly OA is not the top threat. Overfishing, ghost fishing and bycatch; nutrient pollution and resultant coastal eutrophication; global warming and habitat change; coastal nursery habitats destruction... all of these are happening fast and relentlessly, and are arguably a bigger deal than OA.

Only then will the McIntyre or Monckton of the oceans emerge from the slime to lead the chorus of denial that this is not really a bad thing (no shark attacks with no sharks, so what now, you're in favour of shark attacks? Your pseudonym, your avatar, now it all becomes clear, you're a sharkist) and it's a natural cycle which is now recovering, and it's meant as a distraction from AGW which hasn't turned out as bad as the alarmists said.
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I disagree... when the ocean collapses it will be sudden and brutal. The decades of denial are behind us, just much less mediatic than the AGW denial. However, scientific predictions keep panning out, and advice keeps being shunned by politicians. So it's just a question of watching the train wreck, and store up on the "I told you so".

From the security of my own worldview I find it all so predictable. Which gives me comfort.
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I find comfort in trying to find solutions, which I actually think I might have found to a very small extent. By this time next year I'll have known if it went through, or if it was a fluke.
 
Megalodon said:
As Alec rightly says, first they would have to get around to understand it enough to misrepresent it.
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I think you and Alec are setting the bar too high for what passes as credibility in bizarro-world. A smattering of terminology is all that's really required, and a few individual marine scientists to attack. With promotion from the likes of Watts ("check out this excellent website") the field will have been built and the crackpots will come. When the whale-poop hits the ocean gyre there will be no end of people seeking the comfort of being told it ain't so.

Or not, whatever. If it doesn't happen memory of this prediction will fade; if it does happen I score a Told You So, which is what I live for :). (Well, that and the hope of Wales winning the Rugby World Cup one day, something I've never been dumb enough to actually predict.)

The oceans are collapsing, no doubt about it. And surprisingly OA is not the top threat. Overfishing, ghost fishing and bycatch; nutrient pollution and resultant coastal eutrophication; global warming and habitat change; coastal nursery habitats destruction... all of these are happening fast and relentlessly, and are arguably a bigger deal than OA.
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That's very much the impression I get, as an interested amateur.

... However, scientific predictions keep panning out, and advice keeps being shunned by politicians. So it's just a question of watching the train wreck, and store up on the "I told you so".
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That too is my conclusion.

I find comfort in trying to find solutions, which I actually think I might have found to a very small extent. By this time next year I'll have known if it went through, or if it was a fluke.
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Intriguing. I'm guessing this is to do with empowering sharks to take back the seas (given your well-known sharkist sympathies :cool:) and will look forward to hearing about it. We always need something to keep us interested when Arctic summer is over.
 
Well, I would add that there is probably a matter of marketing there. People don't tend to identify themselves with ocean life (with the exception of Flipper, Willy and a few more). On the contrary, many people who is waiting for retirement to move to Florida may be enchanted by the fact that Florida is moving towards them without earthquakes, so they may find that "warming can't be so bad". So it's not surprising that snow, floods, hurricanes and droughts is in everyone's mind as they can picture themselves suffering consequences, so some sort of advantage can be perceived from considering everything is OK. On the other hand, coral bleaching is just a decorative thing and the prospect of the sea water becoming even a sort of salty club soda doesn't scare them.

Then, what's the use of having an oceanic Watts if there's not much public to impress?
 
aleCcowaN said:
So it's not surprising that snow, floods, hurricanes and droughts is in everyone's mind as they can picture themselves suffering consequences ...
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Indeed; this is what I mean by "weather hits us where we live". It's not just an obsession for us Brits (well, we do get a heck of a lot of it) but has been of great interest throughout civilisation. Interest in the oceans has mostly been confined to the surface.

Visibility has a lot to do with it, I think. If people could see the damage bottom-trawling has done and is doing to sea-floors they might well be horified.

This may need a thread of its own, we are drifting a little here :). It's that post-Arctic-Summer hiatus again.
 
CapelDodger said:
This may need a thread of its own, we are drifting a little here :). It's that post-Arctic-Summer hiatus again.
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Because it is part of the human waste management issue — a reasonable sidebar to the global warming discussion and what we can do in response to mitigate it — the drift into the discussion of ocean acidification seems natural to me.

That said, here is a link to a recent article in the LA Times that indicates some people are starting to "get it" and are attempting to present the issues clearly and without hyperbole.

Oceans' rising acidity a threat to shellfish — and humans

"There's no debating it," said Barton, who manages Whiskey Creek, which supplies three-quarters of the oyster seed to independent shellfish farms from Washington to California. "We're changing the chemistry of the oceans."
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leonAzul said:
Because it is part of the human waste management issue — a reasonable sidebar to the global warming discussion and what we can do in response to mitigate it — the drift into the discussion of ocean acidification seems natural to me.
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It's in the lap of the mods. I'm not going to raise a complaint :).

That said, here is a link to a recent article in the LA Times that indicates some people are starting to "get it" and are attempting to present the issues clearly and without hyperbole.

Oceans' rising acidity a threat to shellfish — and humans
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Not much of comfort in there, is there? Hyperbole not required.

"These reefs, formed by the exoskeletons of small animals, are exposed to abnormally high levels of acidity because of carbon dioxide bubbling up from undersea volcanic vents. In areas with slightly elevated acidity, elkhorn, tabletop and other branching corals disappear. In areas with higher levels, even the sturdier mounding corals give way to fields of seaweed".
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So if the bleaching doesn't get them acidity does. Malcolm Kirkpatrick's earlier choice of table coral as the hope of the future is looking even more ill-advised.
 
to win us to our harm

CapelDodger said:
I think you and Alec are setting the bar too high for what passes as credibility in bizarro-world. A smattering of terminology is all that's really required, and a few individual marine scientists to attack....
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hi guys,

nice to see lots of lively discussion continuing here, although having such diversity on a single thread seems odd...

I am looking for recent reviews of/sources of anti-science (re: climate) that passes over the higher bar. Not attacks on individuals, nor loud shouts of nonsense, but what on first glance (and ideally on second) appears to be sound argument. Any pointers? Again: the aim is to identify and respond to well-argued and misleading claims that might mislead
policy makers (not obvious hogwash).

While lots of scientific societies have put out "why it is real" pages, there is a perceived need for (soft spoken) scientific rebuttal of specific (ill founded) arguments. Does such a place already exist?

thx
lenny
 
But Phil Jones disagrees? Isn't this the same man who, according to the Daily Fail, admitted a couple of years ago that global warming ended in 1998?
 
logger said:
Good news for you libs

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet...-report-quietly-released--chart-prove-it.html
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relying on the mail as a source of science:boggled:

try some peer reviewed science http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/6/4/044022

We analyze five prominent time series of global temperature (over land and ocean) for their common time interval since 1979: three surface temperature records (from NASA/GISS, NOAA/NCDC and HadCRU) and two lower-troposphere (LT) temperature records based on satellite microwave sensors (from RSS and UAH). All five series show consistent global warming trends ranging from 0.014 to 0.018 K yr−1. When the data are adjusted to remove the estimated impact of known factors on short-term temperature variations (El Niño/southern oscillation, volcanic aerosols and solar variability), the global warming signal becomes even more evident as noise is reduced. Lower-troposphere temperature responds more strongly to El Niño/southern oscillation and to volcanic forcing than surface temperature data. The adjusted data show warming at very similar rates to the unadjusted data, with smaller probable errors, and the warming rate is steady over the whole time interval. In all adjusted series, the two hottest years are 2009 and 2010.
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The 1975-1995 trendline extrapolated to 2011 vs. the 1975-2011 trendline:



so no, the warming didn't stop, or slow down significantly...
 
So if a cool day in April is no warmer than the warmest day in March, that means that "the warming has stopped" and the basic physics that tells us that the Northern hemisphere warms between January and July is wrong?
 
Unbelievable, why does the press keep spreading this obvious quackery? What's in it for them? What's in it for the people who spread this malicious quackery, too?
 
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