Moderated Global Warming Discussion

[a_unique_person]

See your false dichotomy, there is no field of climate change research. It is climate research and if the climate changes, then it changes. If the climate doesn't change then it doesn't.

There are jobs for climate scientists if the climate is changing or not.

 

[aleCcowaN]

Don't be so sure. I've long wondered, if we can build a national highway system, why not a national aqueduct or pipeline system?

Remember a few years ago when North Dakota had its main rivers at 25 feet above flood stage? Virtually the same time Georgia was being baked in an epic drought.

Where there is a will, there is a way.

The subject comes up when it's necessary, it always seems to be forgotten by the first big rainfall.

I don't think a warmer planet means less ability for good agriculture... in fact it's probably the opposite.

Less gloom and doom and more stoic searching for solutions to the inevitable is probably helpful.

Certainly, you can design texts with a message. But in this forum and thread we have to know science from advertisement. We also have to check the soundness of an argument, being it science, advertisement or anything else. For instance:

Where there is a will, there is a way.

No. Suppose there's a will about changing the outcome of Salamis, or the speed Nazi scientists developed a nuclear bomb in 1940. Is there a way? Would it be positive that way in the crazy case it existed? The sentence looks excellent in front of a rostrum, but does it stand analysis?

I don't think a warmer planet means less ability for good agriculture... in fact it's probably the opposite.

Can you define "good agriculture"? I don't think a warmer planet to be bad for flies and cockroachs, but that doesn't mean it's good. I mean, by definition "climate change" affects everything. We can sympathize with your point of view that sees sugar beet disappearing and sugar cane replacing it, another reason for moving water from the Dakotas to a warming Georgia provided you don't want to buy it in Cuba, though you should compare costs. But pointing that global warming is good for something is the same cherry picking of selecting a hundred of cold records to tell the world is cooling instead of warming. Specially when the cooling is false in spite of the cherry picked records being real, while your hope about "good agriculture" is just a personal perception.

Less gloom and doom and more stoic searching for solutions to the inevitable is probably helpful.

Indeed! I didn't feel discouraged by your post. In this thread we deal scientifically with everything related with curbing AGW and the remediation of its effects, as part of adaptation. So you're very welcome to provide information on that other than your opinion.

 

[DC]

Don't be so sure. I've long wondered, if we can build a national highway system, why not a national aqueduct or pipeline system?

Remember a few years ago when North Dakota had its main rivers at 25 feet above flood stage? Virtually the same time Georgia was being baked in an epic drought.

Where there is a will, there is a way.

The subject comes up when it's necessary, it always seems to be forgotten by the first big rainfall.

I don't think a warmer planet means less ability for good agriculture... in fact it's probably the opposite.
Less gloom and doom and more stoic searching for solutions to the inevitable is probably helpful.

based on which studies do you make that claim?

 

[jimbob]

This article from the current edition of Scientific American about a climate scientist describes a dedicated researcher who subjects himself to discomfort to get the data despite ill health.

Interesting counterpoint to the image proposed by Batvette.

The ice melt is also a pretty good proxy for temperature.

 

[GeneMachine]

So how will they finance the building of this pipeline system? Through taxation I'm guessing. So you are happy for a socialist solution as long as it's your socialist solution. What if you build a pipeline between place A and place B and both are hit by a drought? Or does global warming mean that one location is going to be constantly flooded and the other is constantly in drought?

I find this line of argument particularly fascinating - on the one hand, every suggested measure to reduce carbon dioxide emissions will "destroy the economy", while on the other hand mitigation measures like a "national pipeline system", or well, hey, let's just relocate the coastal cities when the sea level rises far enough are easy. Consistency seems too be missing here....

What also seems to be missing are links to actual evidence for those claims.

 

[Dancing David]

Not sure about that.
Can you extrapolate on the point?

Politics is not science?

 

[CapelDodger]

Don't be so sure. I've long wondered, if we can build a national highway system, why not a national aqueduct or pipeline system?

You're not the first to think of it, and can find information about it on the internet. Estimated building and operating costs, stuff like that. It may come to it at some point.

Remember a few years ago when North Dakota had its main rivers at 25 feet above flood stage? Virtually the same time Georgia was being baked in an epic drought.

Stuff happens. Epic droughts happen over much longer periods than floods so best not base all your planning on this conjunction.

Where there is a will, there is a way.

Where there's a bill there's something in the way.

The subject comes up when it's necessary, it always seems to be forgotten by the first big rainfall.

It would be done if it were free no doubt, but in these days of austerity and deficits taxes would have to carry the burden. Unless the free market takes it up, but so far they haven't. It would tie up a lot of money and modern capitalism prefers more liquid investments. They might deal in derivatves based on water futures though, I can see that catching on.

I don't think a warmer planet means less ability for good agriculture... in fact it's probably the opposite.

Unpredictable floods and droughts are not good for agriculture. Extreme weather generally is not good for agriculture. More of all of those are coming so your opinion is not likely to prove correct.

Less gloom and doom and more stoic searching for solutions to the inevitable is probably helpful.

One doesn't solve the inevitable, you accept and cope with it. Acceptance is the first stage, then comes data-gathering, then planning, then implementation. That's not going to happen on a global scale but on a local and regional scale it will have to be. That's inevitable.

 

[Reality Check]

This is also right, batvette:
If the consensus on Climate Change reverses, the funding dries up, the field again becomes obscure and significant. Instead of having a voice which speaks and people listen, nobody pays attention to them.

I have thought about this a bit more and it looks like the first bit is actually wrong.
If the consensus on Climate Change reverses, the funding will explode.
This is because the known laws of physics state that changing levels of CO2 = changing temperatures (the greenhouse effect). We measure that CO2 is increasing and so temperature must also increase which we also measure!
So even if an attack of ignorance infects all of the climate scientists D), there will be a need to find out why global temperatures are increasing and why the increase in CO2 is not the dominant cause. That increase in research will need funding.

 

[macdoc]

Been chatting about changes in ENSO - notably La Nina as the ocean heat grows and wondered if the ocean current flow - notably Kuroshio would be altering or already is changing it's flow northward.
Led me to this fine scientist with relevant papers and articles.

http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/cdeser/

There are quite a number of links on the CV.

Ben - wondered if you had considered the change in currents across the Arctic since we know now there is biota shift from the Pacific north to the Atlantic....surely that must mean some change in the ocean heat transfer across as well.....the cork is loosening.

It segued from this article
snip

In 2010, researchers identified an imbalance in our global energy arithmetic. If we measure the energy that's being trapped by increasing greenhouse gases, some of it seems to disappear—there wasn’t enough warming in the atmosphere or shallow ocean to account for all that extra energy— and there's been a deficit since 2004. (Though a later study suggested the mismatch might be within the margin of error for the temperature estimates.)

Some expected the “missing energy” would be found in deeper waters, but we didn’t have the data to demonstrate that. Meanwhile, the rapid atmospheric warming trend of the 1990s, boosted by strong El Niños, slowed in the La Niña-ridden 2000s, prompting some to posit that global warming was over and the scientists could all go home.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/oceans-continue-to-warm-especially-the-deeps/

It appears that perhaps this focus on the atmosphere is rather ...ahem..."shallow" given the massive scale of changes in the ocean.

Comments?...or Ben if you prefer bring back your Arctic thread as it's somewhat a separate issue.

 

[batvette]

There are jobs for climate scientists if the climate is changing or not.

Sure, just like all over the internet there would be heated discussions about climate. Just climate. Not that it were changing, or that public policies affecting people's lively hoods were at stake, we'd all just be debating climate just the same as we are here now if it weren't changing.


DID YOU HEAR? IT WAS 35 DEGREES IN ROME IN THE YEAR 700 A.D.

A degree cooler than yesterday. Let's set up a government office of scientists just to study THAT, for no reason at all.

Nonsense.

 

[GeneMachine]

I have thought about this a bit more and it looks like the first bit is actually wrong.
If the consensus on Climate Change reverses, the funding will explode.
This is because the known laws of physics state that changing levels of CO2 = changing temperatures (the greenhouse effect). We measure that CO2 is increasing and so temperature must also increase which we also measure!
So even if an attack of ignorance infects all of the climate scientists D), there will be a need to find out why global temperatures are increasing and why the increase in CO2 is not the dominant cause. That increase in research will need funding.

Exactly. If someone could conclusively show that the observed increase in energy in the global system - which, by the way, does at the moment not manifest itself primarily in the atmosphere, but in the oceans - was NOT connected to the equally observed increase in CO2, a mad scramble to search for the real cause would begin, since this would overthrow all our basic understanding of radiative physics. I would advise Batvette to think his allegiations through to the logical end before slandering a whole profession.

 

[Dancing David]

Don't be so sure. I've long wondered, if we can build a national highway system, why not a national aqueduct or pipeline system?

Seriously, have you any idea of the size of material investment in the highway system? Irrigation of all the current fields in cultivation would be thousands of times that.

 

[Dancing David]

The subject comes up when it's necessary, it always seems to be forgotten by the first big rainfall.

In my area we have on average just barely enough water in July and August for the crops to work. If the temperature rise by 5 degrees F that would be quite serious and damaging to the maize crop, especially during pollination. The timing for soya is just as crucial.

An increase in temperatures with the same rain would be bad, an increase in temperature with more latency between rain events would be very bad.

My guess is you know very little about agriculture in the Midwest.

 

[Puppycow]

Article in Bloomberg about Germany's no-nukes transformation:

Merkel’s No-Nuke Stumble May Erode Re-Election Support

It's not going as smoothly as planned.

 

[aleCcowaN]

Sure, just like all over the internet there would be heated discussions about climate. Just climate. Not that it were changing, or that public policies affecting people's lively hoods were at stake, we'd all just be debating climate just the same as we are here now if it weren't changing.

DID YOU HEAR? IT WAS 35 DEGREES IN ROME IN THE YEAR 700 A.D.

A degree cooler than yesterday. Let's set up a government office of scientists just to study THAT, for no reason at all.

Your post is just a caricaturization without any scientific content. It also fails to connect with the social, political, economical, und so weiter, aspects of the subject, as we are here debating climate in a thread devoted to debunk (A)GW or the assertions of people saying "it ain't real!". There are other threads dealing with other related topics, like those that seem to interest you. Being on-topic in this thread doesn't imply a stale state of business, neither it implies the disregard of other social, political, economical, e cosi via, aspects of (A)GW as the denial of its occurrence hides an attempt to avoid all what has to be done socially, politically, economically, et caetera.

Nonsense.

Ditto.

Or did you say that in another sense?

 

[Reality Check]

batvette, Can you give your source for the temperature of Rome in 700 AD

...DID YOU HEAR? IT WAS 35 DEGREES IN ROME IN THE YEAR 700 A.D.

DID YOU HEAR, batvette? BETWEEN 700 AD AND TODAY THERE WAS A THING CALLED THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION. Human beings started to measurably change the composition of the atmosphere and thus started to change global temperatures.

Sorry, batvette, but that statement is just wrong on so many grounds .

1. You have no citation for this assertion.
2. We are talking about climate, not weather in Rome during 1 year.
3. We are talking about global warming, not the local temperature in Rome during 1 year.
4. The Romans were not pumping out enough CO2 to measurably effect the temperature of the Earth.
5. There wre no known large variations in climate around this period. The nearest one looks like the Medieval Warm Period.

However it is an interesting fact so:
batvette, Can you give your source for the temperature of Rome in 700 AD?
(that this is a number you made up is also an answer )

 

[Pixel42]

Can you give your source for the temperature of Rome in 700 AD?

Did a bit of googling, best I could find was this paper (published in Science in 2011):

2500 Years of European Climate Variability and Human Susceptibility

Climate variations influenced the agricultural productivity, health risk, and conflict level of preindustrial societies. Discrimination between environmental and anthropogenic impacts on past civilizations, however, remains difficult because of the paucity of high-resolution paleoclimatic evidence. We present tree ring–based reconstructions of central European summer precipitation and temperature variability over the past 2500 years. Recent warming is unprecedented, but modern hydroclimatic variations may have at times been exceeded in magnitude and duration. Wet and warm summers occurred during periods of Roman and medieval prosperity. Increased climate variability from ~250 to 600 C.E. coincided with the demise of the western Roman Empire and the turmoil of the Migration Period. Such historical data may provide a basis for counteracting the recent political and fiscal reluctance to mitigate projected climate change

The full text is here: http://www.globalwarming.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/buntgen_science_2011.pdf

and here's the graph.



Reconstructed AMJ precipitation totals (top) and JJA temperature anomalies (bottom) with respect to the 1901–2000 period. Error bars are +/-1 RMSE of the calibration periods. Black lines show independent precipitation and temperature reconstructions from Germany (19) and Switzerland (18). Bold lines are 60-year low-pass filters. Periods of demographic expansion, economic prosperity, and societal stability are noted, as are periods of political turmoil, cultural change, and population instability

 

[DC]

Sure, just like all over the internet there would be heated discussions about climate. Just climate. Not that it were changing, or that public policies affecting people's lively hoods were at stake, we'd all just be debating climate just the same as we are here now if it weren't changing.


DID YOU HEAR? IT WAS 35 DEGREES IN ROME IN THE YEAR 700 A.D.

A degree cooler than yesterday. Let's set up a government office of scientists just to study THAT, for no reason at all.

Nonsense.

scientists have resaerched glaciers and ice Ages and the causes off them Long before there was any big debate about climate Change. so your Point is very weak. surewhen there is a Problem, more Money will be invested into researching it. but that does not mean its corrupted or they would have nothing to Research otherwise.
we could say the same about cancer, so much Money is pumped into researching cancer. they would all be out of work if they admitted there is no cancer.

 

[aleCcowaN]

http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/oceans-continue-to-warm-especially-the-deeps/

It appears that perhaps this focus on the atmosphere is rather ...ahem..."shallow" given the massive scale of changes in the ocean.

I have waited months and months for you to finally admit that.

That comes with the simple arithmetic used for reality check. The actual global mean energy budget imbalance is estimated to be about 0.6 W/m2 (0.2, 1.0), following Loeb et al (2009), Stephens et al (2013), Trenberth and Fasullo (2012) and Wild et al (2012). That imbalance has been pretty constant for two decades or more.

Let's suppose that imbalance is to be absorbed only by the ocean -there would be no glacier net melting, and land and air absorption would be considered "negligible"-. Well, that is about 1 x 10²²J/year (0.3 ...; 1.7 ...). In fact the average heat gain of the 0-2000 m layer (about 52-55% of all global ocean waters) has been reported to be about 60-80% of that value -and glaciers are melting; and there's more ocean- as an average of the last decade. But back to the arithmetic, let's suppose that imbalance of 1 x 10²²J/year is totally absorbed by the 0-2000 m layer (take 6.6 x 10⁸km3 for your quick arithmetic, the heat capacity of fresh water, and a triangular shape to distribute the heat gain, with a maximum at the surface and no heat gain at 2000 m), how much would be the temperature raise at the ocean surface per year?

a) 0.000072 °C
b) 0.0003 °C
c) 0.00072 °C
d) 0.003 °C
e) 0.0072 °C
f) 0.03 °C
g) 0.072 °C
h) 0.3 °C
i) 0.72 °C
j) 3°C

Once any of you have answered that question, and considering that glaciers and ice sheets are melting, that half of the ocean is deeper and it can gain thermal energy -even caused for the a decreasing ice volume formed in the poles each cold season-, what value would you consider to be logical for warming over a whole decade at sea surface? And for five decades? I remind you that global ocean surface temperatures were last February 0.42°C above the twentieth century average.

 

[CapelDodger]

Sure, just like all over the internet there would be heated discussions about climate. Just climate. Not that it were changing, or that public policies affecting people's lively hoods were at stake, we'd all just be debating climate just the same as we are here now if it weren't changing.

Of course we wouldn't. Climate would be a specialist interest, as it was before the likelihood of near-term climate change was recognised. The subject remains of interest because near-term climate change has in fact occurred

DID YOU HEAR? IT WAS XXXV DEGREES IN ROME IN THE YEAR DCC A.D.

Fixed that for you. Did they use Fahrenheit or Centigrade in those days? Whatever, they won't have been using a Stevenson screen for their thermometer so like-to-like comparison is impossible. All the same, the Vatican weather records would be something to see, and Monckton would finally find a use for his Latin degree (beyond making himself appear erudite to audiences of rubes).

A degree cooler than yesterday. Let's set up a government office of scientists just to study THAT, for no reason at all.

Since there's no reason let's not. Why divert effort from investigating Solyndra and Whitewater?

Nonsense.

Well that we can agree on.