Moderated Global Warming Discussion

[aleCcowaN]

In any case, it's not the same as what it is being compared to. Tides are not effected by trends of any kind.

What?

Tell that to those people suffering today an acqua alta in Venice.

Instead of making more mistaken assertions, why don't you stick to your critic to the example involving short and long term? You were pretty right on that and I think the best result will come from discussing that further and not by dispersing it all. But there's a catch: once you prove you have a good portion of reason on that matter other more important things you asserted would become clearly false.

 

[CapelDodger]

That's not what they say about Krakatoa.

It is indeed what "they" say about Krakatoa.

They said it cooled the planet for decades and cooled it by 22 degrees.

Scientists say nothing of the sort. History reports it as one of those "years without a summer" and the impact was all gone in a couple of years. There was probably a cumulative impact of numerous climate-altering volcanos from the late 18thCE until the very early 20thCE, via a slow oceanic signal, but the obvious effects were much more short-lived. And 22 degrees anything is simply not near the ballpark.

So if that can happen in one week and the planet isn't freezing solid why do you think raising the temperature 1 degree in a decade would do worse.

Like I said not trying to be contrary here, it just seems like a who heck of a lot of overreacting.

Given that your "22 degrees" (I'm thinking Fahrenheit?) is fantasy you might want to reconsider the implications of a 2C increase from what we are, as a civilised people, used to - and after that, of course, comes more of the same. This is not an incident, this is a trend.

 

[Polaris]

Sorry if this has been gone over here, but I don't have the time to wade through 150+ pages and 275 search results.

My dad asked me today why polar bears are threatened by AGW if their population is increasing. I hadn't heard this before (in fact the opposite was, I thought, indisputable), so I did a little digging and found one article by some blogger named PJ Gladnick of Newsbusters (translation: garbage) and a Forbes piece next to other articles decrying AGW as myth.

Anybody know a good debunking of this crap, or a website with some basic facts about AGW? I get the feeling we'll be seeing more of this as climate change becomes a mainstream issue in the next 4 years.

 

[bit_pattern]

.

Anybody know a good debunking of this crap, or a website with some basic facts about AGW? I get the feeling we'll be seeing more of this as climate change becomes a mainstream issue in the next 4 years.

Skeptical Science is your one stop shop for debunking climate denial, they've even published a short synthesis of the body of work on how to effectively debunk misinformation

http://www.skepticalscience.com/Debunking-Handbook-now-freely-available-download.html

Here's their page on polar bears

http://www.skepticalscience.com/polar-bears-global-warming.htm

 

[CapelDodger]

The history of humankind shows us that obvious ideas can be ignored for thousands of years.

It really doesn't. It shows us that comfortable cultures can ignore
them for a while, and even deny them a while longer, but they do not emerge as winners in the new world. Of course it's the fate of all cultures to end their careers in failure, often for reasons which seem terribly obvious in retrospect.

I don't think we've got this far in one interglacial by neglecting the obvious.

 

[bobwtfomg]

Tides are not influenced by random factors, .

the height of the next high tide is influenced by air pressure, wind speed and direction.

And sea level, and earthquakes, and land movement,

So you now admit that tides are influenced by random factors, actually it doesn't affect the analogy whether they are or not.

r-j

And it is easy to predict the height of the next wave on a beach by observing the height of the wave offshore as it starts to break, before it gets to the beach.

bobwtfomg

I'm skeptical,there must surely be other factors at play than just wave height,do you have any evidence or was it just pure speculation?

r-j

There are several other factors that influence wave run up on a beach, the most important one is the previous wave height. The back wash down the beach from a large wave will influence the next wave, as well as the slope of the beach. But it is quite possible to predict based on observation.

No evidence then, more speculation but now backpedaling from easy to quite possible. Again either way it doesn't really affect the analogy.
r-j

Waves do not have a relation to tides like temperatures have to climate.

The relationships are not exactly the same but they are similar enough for it to work as an analogy.
When the tide is higher the waves will tend to reach higher up the beach, no? So if all the waves were perfectly regular and totally unaffected by random factors, if the tide was coming in each successive wave would reach higher up the beach. Therefore it would be possible to tell which way the tide was moving (i.e. the underlying trend) by observing 2 waves. Similarly with climate if there were no random factors, e.g. the way energy moved around the oceans and between the oceans and atmosphere was totally regular and there was no variation in volcanic activity etc. etc. then it would be possible to determine the rate of global warming by measuring average surface temperatures for just a year or two. Of course that situation is totally hypothetical and IIRC climatologists generally reckon they need 30 years of data.

 

[CapelDodger]

Sorry if this has been gone over here, but I don't have the time to wade through 150+ pages and 275 search results.

My dad asked me today why polar bears are threatened by AGW if their population is increasing.

Rather than get distracted you might ask him if he thinks polar bears are what it's all about. Which, of course, it really isn't, but you can see how it might give some people comfort to think of it as a problem of that order. Save the Whale, yadda-yadda, heard it all before.

The real issues being about where most things live, including us. Which is more towards the middle, obviously.

 

[CapelDodger]

Anybody know a good debunking of this crap, or a website with some basic facts about AGW? I get the feeling we'll be seeing more of this as climate change becomes a mainstream issue in the next 4 years.

I think we're going to see less of it myself, in the mainstream, and AGW will be increasingly treated as a given. These last couple of years in the US pretty much make that a certainty. Even a snowy winter there will find people more open to the point that warmer oceans mean more precipitation, and look how quickly it melts ...

No doubt this is mostly coincidence, but it's a coincidence which was going to happen sometime soon. There's a good chance an El Nino will pick up the baton next year but even a neutral year will finish off the "no warming since ..." line. Another La Nina would strongly suggest that something's gong on, and would likely be warmer again than 2011 anyway.

Climate denial will soon be following birtherism into the special preserve of a certain swivel-eyed viscount. For serious people there's obviously nothing to be gained from it.

 

[bit_pattern]

. Even a snowy winter there will find people more open to the point that warmer oceans mean more precipitation, and look how quickly it melts ...

This caught my eye earlier:

Weather affects beliefs about global warming especially for people with conservative political ideology

How do people update? The effects of local weather fluctuations on beliefs about global warming - Deryugina (2012) [FULL TEXT]

Abstract: "Global warming has become a controversial public policy issue in spite of broad scientific consensus that it is real and that human activity is a contributing factor. It is likely that public consensus is also needed to support policies that might counteract it. It is therefore important to understand how people form and update their beliefs about climate change. Using unique survey data on beliefs about the occurrence of the effects of global warming, I estimate how local temperature fluctuations influence what individuals believe about these effects. I find that some features of the updating process are consistent with rational updating. I also test explicitly for the presence of several heuristics known to affect belief formation and find strong evidence for representativeness, some evidence for availability, and no evidence for spreading activation. I find that very short-run temperature fluctuations (1 day–2 weeks) have no effect on beliefs about the occurrence of global warming, but that longer-run fluctuations (1 month–1 year) are significant predictors of beliefs. Only respondents with a conservative political ideology are affected by temperature abnormalities."

Citation: Tatyana Deryugina, Climatic Change, DOI: 10.1007/s10584-012-0615-1.

 

[CapelDodger]

Skeptical Science is your one stop shop for debunking climate denial, they've even published a short synthesis of the body of work on how to effectively debunk misinformation

http://www.skepticalscience.com/Debunking-Handbook-now-freely-available-download.html

Here's their page on polar bears

http://www.skepticalscience.com/polar-bears-global-warming.htm

I have utmost respect for SkS and the resource they've created. Any field of research subject to anti-science assault now has a model to follow in response. Same respect for RealClimate, tamino, and others.

It's all feeling a bit game-over for me. What was once tomorrow's climate is now just weather.

 

[CapelDodger]

This caught my eye earlier:

Weather affects beliefs about global warming especially for people with conservative political ideology

My concern is with people who have no ideological investment in climate denial, which is the great majority. Denial is old, stale, self-referential, whining - just consider its recent manifestations here - and what's left is discussing weather and the price of fish.

AGW denial died this year. Watch Fox, you'll see . There'll be a lag but the trend will become obvious in a year or two.

 

[Pixel42]

The relationships are not exactly the same but they are similar enough for it to work as an analogy.

Thank you for defending my analogy in my absence, bobwtfomg. It was indeed simply a way of explaining the difference in predictability between a small "signal" (the response of the oceans to the gravity of the sun and moon/the response of global temperatures to a steady increase in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere) and the "noise" which can drown such a signal out over the short term.

If r-j doesn't like that analogy, perhaps he'll prefer this one: it's easier to predict whether July will be warmer or colder than January than it is to predict whether April 20th will be warmer or colder than April 10th.

 

[bit_pattern]

Thank you for defending my analogy in my absence, bobwtfomg. It was indeed simply a way of explaining the difference in predictability between a small "signal" (the response of the oceans to the gravity of the sun and moon/the response of global temperatures to a steady increase in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere) and the "noise" which can drown such a signal out over the short term.

If r-j doesn't like that analogy, perhaps he'll prefer this one: it's easier to predict whether July will be warmer or colder than January than it is to predict whether April 20th will be warmer or colder than April 10th.

This video is a good explainer

 

[bit_pattern]

OK, so this is just an exercise in humour. I had to share because it was too good not to. Someone posted this as a source on another forum

http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2011/1...y-3rd-world-owes-co2-reparations-to-the-west/

Dunno if its Poe but reads suspiciously like http://denialdepot.blogspot.com.au/

 

[aleCcowaN]

http :// denialdepot. blogspot.com. au/

I can't stop laughing!

"If you live in Europe, Norway, USSR" (The chaps living in the USSR were already frosted 25 years ago)

 

[aleCcowaN]

http: // chiefio.wordpress.com/ 2011/ 10/ 31/ japanese-satellites-say-3rd-world-owes-co2-reparations-to-the-west/

Well, the author/s of that piece of manure looks like he is explaining what he sees in a Rorschach Inkblot test made from assorted climate-related images, and certainly some patterns emerged -nothing flattering for the chap/s-

Not only the great bulk of misinterpretations, but some points that should have begged some questions, like what is producing so much CO2 in the southern tip of Ellesmere Island during April. Here's another image developed by the IBUKI (GOSAT)

Look how Northern Bolivia is a b**** in all this business of flooding us with CO2. We also have to include some place near Karthoum, another near Murmansk, several spots in Yukon Territory, another dangerous spot in Turkey next to Armenia, and a place that should be Sydney, but it isn't.

The kind of people that write the sort of stuff in the broken link above believe that they are connoisseurs just because they ignore science en masse. For them and for all the good people who really want to learn, here's this famous image of CO2 changing with latitude and season during the last decade.

http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/globalview/images/gvco2_lg_movie.gif

You can also perceive how the pool is being filled by the constant pouring of GHG.

 

[metzomagic]

OK, so this is just an exercise in humour. I had to share because it was too good not to. Someone posted this as a source on another forum

http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2011/1...y-3rd-world-owes-co2-reparations-to-the-west/

Sorry to disappoint you, but Chiefio is just another example of what passes for 'science' on WTFiUWT. He's a regular guest poster and commenter there. Just Google:

site:wattsupwiththat.com chiefio

So yes, Chiefio is a classic example of a Poe: you can't tell whether it's satire or the actual earnest output of a fundamentalist/nutcase. In other words, perfectly suited to WTFiUWT!

Dunno if its Poe but reads suspiciously like http://denialdepot.blogspot.com.au/

Denial Depot is, of course, an actual climate skeptic parody site, and my personal favourite. My fav post was the one complaining about the width of pencils used to draw climate-related graphs, and how using thicker lead allowed scientists to produce intentionally misleading results.

 

[bit_pattern]

Bear with me Alex, I've only got a rudimentary grasp of the broad strokes of climate science but struggle with the detail, so you may need to dumb things down a bit for me, but:

Well, the author/s of that piece of manure looks like he is explaining what he sees in a Rorschach Inkblot test made from assorted climate-related images, and certainly some patterns emerged -nothing flattering for the chap/s-

Not only the great bulk of misinterpretations, but some points that should have begged some questions, like what is producing so much CO2 in the southern tip of Ellesmere Island during April. Here's another image developed by the IBUKI (GOSAT)

Can you elaborate on this a little? I was going to dismiss the whole crank site out of hand but might go in and do a deconstruction of the crap.

The kind of people that write the sort of stuff in the broken link above believe that they are connoisseurs just because they ignore science en masse. For them and for all the good people who really want to learn, here's this famous image of CO2 changing with latitude and season during the last decade.

http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/globalview/images/gvco2_lg_movie.gif

You can also perceive how the pool is being filled by the constant pouring of GHG.

So what you're essentially saying is that the CO2 observed in those charts from JAXA are showing CO2 that is accounted for already in the carbon cycle, right?

Or is it more of a case that the author doesn't understand the latitudinal shift of CO2 distribution and thinks the CO2 is being produced in the countries where the dots are being recorded on the charts?

 

[bit_pattern]

This was the reply I came up with

http://www.bigfooty.com/forum/threads/is-australia-carbon-neutral.418704/#post-26418126

Thoughts? Did I get it about right do you reckon?

 

[aleCcowaN]

Bear with me Alex, I've only got a rudimentary grasp of the broad strokes of climate science but struggle with the detail, so you may need to dumb things down a bit for me, but:

(It's Alec!)

You're too modest.

So what you're essentially saying is that the CO2 observed in those charts from JAXA are showing CO2 that is accounted for already in the carbon cycle, right?

Right! They show just totals. CO2 that "is just there".

Or is it more of a case that the author doesn't understand the latitudinal shift of CO2 distribution and thinks the CO2 is being produced in the countries where the dots are being recorded on the charts?

That, among other things, like noise, wild fires, a narrow sensor passing over a new oil well which is burning one million cubic meters of natural gas a day. Another map shows percentages of data correction, and the blogger finds China, Equatorial and Western Africa and the Amazon Basin with high percentages (the image he "drew better") of what jaxa shows as "The rate of reduction in the uncertainty of monthly surface CO2 flux estimates, attained via the addition of GOSAT XCO2 retrievals to the dataset of GLOBALVIEW surface observations. The values shown are annual means over the June 2009-May 2010 analysis period."

That is, they compared values gotten with the satellite and values measured on surface in order to calibrate the sensors. Our blogisto made it into a preposterous race for the third and fourth world to taint the planet with GHG.

This was the reply I came up with

http://www.bigfooty.com/forum/threads/is-australia-carbon-neutral.418704/#post-26418126

Thoughts? Did I get it about right do you reckon?

You are quite right. You can say more, but that's more than enough for those hillbillies of the Blue Mountains or wherever. I'd only remind them once and again why they are denialists and not sceptics, as they are so gullible that they swallow hook, line and sinker when they find something that might conform to their personal belief.