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Moderated Global Warming Discussion

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rwguinn said:
A large part of the disconnect is simply because in the 1950's up until the early 1980's , we were always told that "Scientists say we are heading for another Ice Age".
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Utter nonsense. We were not "always" told any such thing. Yes, there were a few scientists who authored a few papers about global cooling. This meme about "scientists said this now they say the opposite" is a myth.
 
***sigh***

The 30 years of campaigning against logic and science on the part of the nutty liberal community has to take a great deal of the blame. Their actions were simply stupid, and led to the "all ideas are equal" nonsense.

Then, 20 years of the totalitarian, racist right taking advantage of that stupidity in order to spread their anti-evolution, anti-liberty, anti-human misery campaign has gotten us to where we are today.
 
jj said:
The 30 years of campaigning against logic and science on the part of the nutty liberal community has to take a great deal of the blame. Their actions were simply stupid, and led to the "all ideas are equal" nonsense.
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Yes, the uber-left has played a role but I think pegging it at "a great deal" is a gross overstatement. While they did ply the conspiracy angle, they never had anything other than a very, very minor media presence to push this meme onto the general public. By contrast, the nutty right community had enormous media presence; money is, indeed, political speech.
 
rwguinn said:
A large part of the disconnect is simply because in the 1950's up until the early 1980's , we were always told that "Scientists say we are heading for another Ice Age"--then they "Changed their minds--we're warming up!"
What with "science experts" (Nominated for the position by media idiots) telling us one thing, then the next day another, on everything form climate to bacon to coffee, older folks ran out of mental resilience to accept science as fact (look at the age of the folks resisting).
I now believe that there is truth to the matter (The evidence is overwhelming), but remain skeptical as to the root causes...
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A majority of science papers and more importantly climate science understandings, have indicated anthropogenic warming due to the burning of fossil fuels since the late 1800s. The misunderstood impact of aerosol coolings in times when there was a lot of air pollution led to some small number of scientists to speculate that Milankovitch's epicycles might be driving such coolings (and they were right, they were just off in degree and timing - the cycles indicate we should be in a gradually cooling cycle from the Holocene Optimum approaching a return to advancing ice and glaciation in the next 30k years or so - if all the CO2 we've pumped into the atmosphere hadn't aborted the process). But it is easy to point to the numbers which indicate there was far more published, even in the '70s, about CO2 driven climate warming, than epicycle cooling.
 
Ray Brady said:
Personally, I suspect the disconnect stems from the fact that much of the basic, underlying science supporting these conclusions is not being distributed to general public.

The basic premise of AGW is that average world temperature has increased by a degree or so over the past century. The question that immediately leaps to my mind is: how do we know this? How is the average world temperature calculated now? How was it calculated a hundred years ago? WAS it calculated a hundred years ago, or are we now determining this information based on historical records? How accurate are those historical records?

Even if you accept that the temperature information is correct, you're now faced with the question of how we can know what's causing it. How do we know that sunspots, or volcanic activity, or natural weather patterns aren't more to blame than greenhouse gases?

None of the televised news stories that I have seen addressing Global Warming have even pretended to address these questions. Instead, the media focuses almost exclusively on what the projected consequences of the problem are going to be. We're told incessantly about the future dangers of rising sea levels, glacial erosion, and wildlife extinctions, but for obvious reasons, the general public has grown a bit weary of doomsday predictions.

In terms of public education, the Global Warming debate has generally taken the tone of "all reputable scientists believe this, so you should to." I suspect the general public doesn't have quite the same confidence in "all reputable scientists" as most posters here.

Explain the problem in terms that allow people to reach the same conclusion that climatologists have, and you'll sway public opinion. Keep telling people they're idiots if they don't believe this, and they'll simply entrench themselves further in their position.
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This seems an advocacy for much more money being spent on education and perhaps is even implying that polling tests and advanced level educational skills testing is necessary for anyone who legislates or votes for legislators in this country?
 
Trakar said:
A majority of science papers and more importantly climate science understandings, have indicated anthropogenic warming due to the burning of fossil fuels since the late 1800s. The misunderstood impact of aerosol coolings in times when there was a lot of air pollution led to some small number of scientists to speculate that Milankovitch's epicycles might be driving such coolings (and they were right, they were just off in degree and timing - the cycles indicate we should be in a gradually cooling cycle from the Holocene Optimum approaching a return to advancing ice and glaciation in the next 30k years or so - if all the CO2 we've pumped into the atmosphere hadn't aborted the process). But it is easy to point to the numbers which indicate there was far more published, even in the '70s, about CO2 driven climate warming, than epicycle cooling.
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The papers published NOW (and since sometime in the 1980's-1990's) indicate that the trend started in the 1800's. Stuff published in the eras I speak of indicated otherwise.
It was not so clear in the 1950-1960-1970 years, when we were just starting to get data from Earth Observation satellites (Believe it or not, we didn't have ANY satellites of any kind until 1957--and very primitive satellites, mostly communication until the late 1960's). Everybody had to rely on historical trends. The upper atmosphere experiments and barium releases started occurring in the early-to-mid 1970's --and they provided a lot of data on atmospheric processes and the effects of suspensions/ionizations, etc--the results of which were not published for some time.
Hindsight is nearly always 20-20 or better.
 
rwguinn said:
The papers published NOW (and since sometime in the 1980's-1990's) indicate that the trend started in the 1800's. Stuff published in the eras I speak of indicated otherwise....
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This is simply incorrect,..my earlier statements are correct and convey accurate information.


American Journal of Physics -- May 1956 -- Volume 24, Issue 5, pp. 376
Effect of Carbon Dioxide Variations on Climate
http://ajp.aapt.org/resource/1/ajpias/v24/i5/p376_s1?isAuthorized=no

Atmospheric dustiness, man, and climatic change
Biological Conservation
Volume 2, Issue 2, January 1970, Pages 125-128
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0006320770901473

The influence of man on climate
Geoforum
Volume 7, Issue 2, 1976, Pages 99-106
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/001671857690004X

Climatic changes and the atmospheric radiocarbon level
Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology
Volume 10, Issues 2-3, October 1971, Pages 199-202
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0031018271900277

Carbon Dioxide and the climate
American Scientist, Vol. 44, No. 3, JULY 1956
http://www.jstor.org/pss/27826805

The Carbon Dioxide theory of Climate change
August 9, 1955
http://nsdl.org/archives/onramp/classic_articles/issue1_global_warming/n7._Plass__1956corrected.pdf

The Temperature of the Lower Atmosphere of the Earth
Phys. Rev. 38, 1876–1890 (1931)
http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PR/v38/i10/p1876_1


And these are just a handful of the papers that I pulled from my own database of relevent publications from the periods in question. Literally thousands upon thousands of papers published on the subject between Arrhenius's early papers and the advent of Mann in the 1990s
 
I was aware of the 1976 paper-it being one of the first to start blaming the human load on the planet.
Many of the others, especially prior to that one, draw correlations between atmospheric CO2 load and climate in past eras, and, as the 1956 paper states in the abstract, the CO2 hypotheses had fallen out of favor in the previous 50 years.
While there were, obviously, voices in the wilderness, apparently a lot of "mainstream scientists" poo-pooed them--I was there, as a kid, and I remember it well, up into High School--"We are approaching another Ice Age".
Obviously, they were incorrect, as was I about published papers prior to the mid-to-late 70's...
It is interesting that the Plass paper makes the comment:
When the total CO2 is reduced below a critical value, it is found that the climate continuously oscillates between a glacial and interglacial stage with a period of tens of thousands of years; there is no possible stable state for the climate.
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The balance is indeed fairly delicate.
 
rwguinn said:
...
While there were, obviously, voices in the wilderness, apparently a lot of "mainstream scientists" poo-pooed them--I was there, as a kid, and I remember it well, up into High School--"We are approaching another Ice Age".
Obviously, they were incorrect, as was I about published papers prior to the mid-to-late 70's...
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I was there as well, I'm a boomer and remember the mainstream science considerations quite well, though I will admit that climate was not a very well understood nor much discussed pop-sci topic in the fifties and sixties. There was some consideration of cooling later on, but the mainstream consideration of climate science, even in this early period, was well familiar and confident of the causes and effects of increasing atmospheric fractions of CO2. Efforts to accumulate and organize global temperature records began in the 1870s. The first analysis to show long-term warming trends was published in 1938. There were some concerns of cooling between the 40s and 70s but even at the time, the analyses of the cooling seemed to indicate that it was predominantly northern hemisphere, and strongly correlated with industrialization pollutants. A specific look at climate papers discussing such issues even at the peak period of such concerns (the 70s) indicate a roughly 6-1 ratio of researchers projecting continued and increasing warming over those expressing concerns of continued or increasing cooling.
 
rwguinn said:
1956 paper states in the abstract, the CO2 hypotheses had fallen out of favor in the previous 50 years.
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Not quite. no one doubted increasing CO2 levels would warm the planet but before the late 50's it was believed fossil fuel emissions couldn't appreciably change atmospheric CO2, but this proved to be based on false assumptions about ocean behavior.

In the late 50's there was a string of papers that showed the oceans would not rapidly absorb our CO2, that CO2 levels were rising and that the increase was from burning fossil fuels.

rwguinn said:
While there were, obviously, voices in the wilderness, apparently a lot of "mainstream scientists" poo-pooed them--I was there, as a kid, and I remember it well, up into High School--"We are approaching another Ice Age".
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So because you believed something back then it "had to be" what the scientists were saying?

The fact is that in the 70's papers saying the earth was going to warm from human CO2 outnumbered papers suggesting cooling by something like 10:1. You believed the 10% because you couldn't filter out the science from a sensationalistic report in the popular media of time.


http://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/131047.pdf
 
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Skeptic Ginger said:
Who is this "far left" in your world fantasy? Got any examples?
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You can start with Durkin (the Swindler) and that whole Living Marxism crowd. I've argued environmental issues of all sorts with Marxists, Stalinist and Trotskyist, and they are all dismissed as bourgeois distractions and the imposition of Western romantic ideals on subject native peoples. Nothing limits the power of the people united, doncha know. Just as nothing limits the power of the free market for those of a different ideology.

The ideologies (Marxism and laissez-faire) have much in common. Both were devised in the Industrial Revolution, from the 1830's. Both maintain that the only problem facing mankind is how society is organised - get that right and all else falls magically into place. There is nowhere in the structure to accomodate resource limits or externalities. Let's not forget, the people who still hold to these ideologies are far from being the sharpest tools in the box.

Marx and Adam Smith were more aware than the belief systems constructed on them, but that's often the fate of founders. It's the Sauls and Kochs who design the actual cult.
 
Beerina said:
The island was sinking.
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Sorry, my mistake. I assumed you were referring to such places as Tuvalu and the Marshall Islands, not (for argument's sake) some mudpat on the Virginia coast. I guess I'm out of practice; I should be more careful with "I read this thing somewhere that said ..." comments.

This was CNN's report, not mine.
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Not a great recommendation, and I didn't suggest it was yours. If it had been said that Tuvalu is sinking (and it has been) I think you'd have found it was at best a misdirection. And CNN does have to provide balance on this sort of story, whatever the provenance or accuracy.

Nor should that an island is sinking be unusual -- there are any number of such regions (e.g. Louisiana delta).
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Not, perhaps, the best of examples if you consider why the delta is sinking these days. Norfolk, UK, is perhaps better, since it's a completely natural process (glacial rebound).

You are confusing the report with your mental model of reality, which only includes that any actual story is just lies.
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I suggest you not try to fathom the workings of my mind. It's not as simple as you may think.

In any case, the point was it was misused for rhetorical purposes.
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So you say. Did the report actually claim that sea-level rise would come in "like a tsunami", or did they use the depth of the Fukushima tsunami as an illustration? If you could look out a link to the origin it would be helpful, but I know how hard that can be if you surf a lot.
 
rwguinn said:
I was aware of the 1976 paper-it being one of the first to start blaming the human load on the planet.
Many of the others, especially prior to that one, draw correlations between atmospheric CO2 load and climate in past eras, and, as the 1956 paper states in the abstract, the CO2 hypotheses had fallen out of favor in the previous 50 years.
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Not actually the case. In those pre-political days cliimate science was essentially about the "why ice ages?" question, which in turn came down to making Milankovich cycles carry the load. It was obvious that they could, but amplification by albedo couldn't do it when you ran the figures. Only when CO2 amplification was recognised (warmer oceans and melting premafrost increase atmospheric CO2, cooling oceans and expanding permafrost decrease it) could the figures work. Far from being out of favour, CO2 was climate flavour of the century.

While there were, obviously, voices in the wilderness, apparently a lot of "mainstream scientists" poo-pooed them--I was there, as a kid, and I remember it well, up into High School--"We are approaching another Ice Age".
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I was at UEA in the mid-70's (perhaps the same period as your High School?) and climate-involved scientists were deeply annoyed by the "New Ice Age" theme that journalists took away from a couple of interviews about the real work being done. Which, let's recall, was about ice ages and of no interest to lobbyists and politicians. Climate science didn't become politicised until the 80's, when the implications started to sink in. Margaret Thatcher was the politician who dragged the subject onto the world stage, and I don't think that was just to screw the miners and promote nuclear. I'm open to persuasion otherwise (and my first reaction was deeply cynical) but I'm pretty sure she was sincere.
 
This thread may be based on a misapprehension :

http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/...nk-polls-americans-believe-in-global-warming/

Politicians and pundits and the public have all been told by the media and others that public belief in global warming has dropped sharply. Except that it hasn’t, as polling by Stanford and Ipsos and Reuters make clear.
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Study available here http://woods.stanford.edu/docs/surveys/Global-Warming-Survey-Stanford-Reuters-September-2011.pdf

Appearances may be deceptive, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, and certainly whereever Murdoch has influence. Or has had in the recent past, anyway :D.
 
CapelDodger said:
Not actually the case. In those pre-political days cliimate science was essentially about the "why ice ages?" question, which in turn came down to making Milankovich cycles carry the load. It was obvious that they could, but amplification by albedo couldn't do it when you ran the figures. Only when CO2 amplification was recognised (warmer oceans and melting premafrost increase atmospheric CO2, cooling oceans and expanding permafrost decrease it) could the figures work. Far from being out of favour, CO2 was climate flavour of the century.



I was at UEA in the mid-70's (perhaps the same period as your High School?) and climate-involved scientists were deeply annoyed by the "New Ice Age" theme that journalists took away from a couple of interviews about the real work being done. Which, let's recall, was about ice ages and of no interest to lobbyists and politicians. Climate science didn't become politicised until the 80's, when the implications started to sink in. Margaret Thatcher was the politician who dragged the subject onto the world stage, and I don't think that was just to screw the miners and promote nuclear. I'm open to persuasion otherwise (and my first reaction was deeply cynical) but I'm pretty sure she was sincere.
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I made the point about experts "appointed by the media"--and you 1970's is 10 years late. I did mention the 50's and 60's, i swear I did.
So if you young whippersnappers want to lecture me on what they taught in the 50's and 60's, go right ahead.
I admitted that I was mistaken on the number of papers and the general concern over CO2 during that time. I honesty did not know--and neither did a helluvalot of others.
If admitting an error is not good enough for you, and you insist on continuing to attack the position I recall being held in general, the have at it. The keep on attacking when the opponent concedes is one of the major reasons people don't listen to you.
I'm *********** done with it.
 
bit_pattern said:
Is climate scepticism a largely Anglo-Saxon phenomenon?
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Thanks for the link. I've gained that impression, but this firms it up somewhat. Of course, even where the problem is generally recognised there's no great sense of urgency, what with all the more pressing issues.

It's noticeable that in Europe generally, AGW denial and nationalism go hand-in-hand. Make of that what you will.

I reckon AGW denial has another two, at most three, electoral cycles (or People's Congresses) left in it. After that the political arguments will have to be about actual policies, not the existence of the problem itself.
 
mike3 said:
Why does it seem there's such a huge disconnect between scientists and the public concerning belief in the existence of human-caused global warming? And it looks to be getting bigger -- the scientific evidence continues to mount, while the public sinks deeper and deeper into denial. What's going on?
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Two words: Kevin Costner. :cool:
 
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