Moderated Global Warming Discussion

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lomiller said:
CurtC’s graph covers an appropriate range of temperatures for what we are looking at, what value do you think needs to be in it that are not present?
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The minimum plotted value. CurtC's graph cuts off actual measured data. Is that good reporting of measurements? Look, I'm not any kind of activist on global warming, but show all of the collected data. The fact that the plot cuts off some of the measured data should elicit screaming opposition from skeptics and any scientist, who need data to make conclusions. It is an example of ideological interference in a scientific debate.
 
Finn McR said:
The minimum plotted value. CurtC's graph cuts off actual measured data. Is that good reporting of measurements? Look, I'm not any kind of activist on global warming, but show all of the collected data. The fact that the plot cuts off some of the measured data should elicit screaming opposition from skeptics and any scientist, who need data to make conclusions. It is an example of ideological interference in a scientific debate.
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He probably should have take the scale down another 1/2 a degree but you insistence that this distorts the interpretation of the graph. involves some form of malice or is in any way comparable to what the original did is laughable.
 
Dinwar said:
Obviously by "science" you don't mean "a critical examination of the data available", because [Muller] did that all through this as I understand it.
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There's your misunderstanding. Muller started mouthing off about the problems he'd discovered on WattsUpMyButt and in the stolen CRU emails which "in his mind" made him doubt the integrity of the climate science field. This was three years ago and, like others, he discovered how this stance raised his public profile and tickled his ego. Naturally he started to hang out where he felt the right strokes.

Being an actual scientist he noticed that in that environment data was something to be demanded via FoI or gathered and shuffled out of sight (Surface Stations, the funniest thing ever before BEST) but not something to use, and it struck him that he could be the first to do it - to huge fanfares (and something nice for his daughter, I can respect that). And so it came to be, with Koch money even. What could possibly go wrong?

It couldn't go wrong for Muller. He either proves that Watts's obsession with the UHI effect is actually justified (quite accidentally, since it was never based on any data, but it did make Watts famous) or he'd find otherwise; either way his public profile was going to be boosted.

What does this amount to in the end? Damn-all in scientific terms. In other terms, it amounts to Muller being a media-whore who deserves no respect as a person, let alone as a scientist.

Again, it's not the conclusions that I'm interested in, but the process. I'd much rather be wrong for the right reasons than right for the wrong ones, because at least if I'm wrong for the right reasons I can correct myself.
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Muller is wrong for the wrong reasons, and doesn't really care. He's out there pitching crap still, not apologising for anything, and getting his ego stroked. That's the world we live in, but it was ever thus ...
 
The buffer is almost gone.

If you haven't dropped in to the arctic sea ice thread, I invite you to do so, but please read the first post for the thread rules before you post in it.

Astounding things are happening in the arctic right now.

We are at a lower point for this date than any prior year and that is by any measure; Extent, Area, Volume.

It is a realistic prospect that we could be down to 2000 cubic kilometers of ice volume at the end of this season.

And we are starting to feel the consequences.

Polar ice in the annual climate acts like a very large capacitor hooked across an oscillating signal. It blunts the peak and lowest amplitudes and slows the rate of change.

This is because it takes a lot of heat to melt ice in the summer, due to a thing known as latent heat of fusion. And in the winter, water has to give up a lot of heat to freeze.

The result of this is that there is usually exactly one temperature for liquid water in surface layers of the arctic ocean; Right at freezing.

With the ice gone, and in a few years it will be gone, the water will be able to heat up.

I'm not enough of a meteorologist to tell you what will happen then in detail, but I know enough physics to know that this will provoke weather we have never seen before.

And I suspect that this will be making Greenland melt off a lot faster than anybody suspects.

Fasten your seat belts; We're in for a bumpy ride.
 
Since this thread has been pretty well behaved recently and not required much moderation at all, it is being taken off moderated status. Any return to the previous bickering and incivility, however, will be frowned upon.
Posted By: Cuddles
 
Ten years ago, when I first got involved in the AGW discussion here, there was wide agreement amongst the science-minded contributors that the Arctic (and especially Arctic sea-ice) was going to be the primary indicator of global warming in the medium-term. Geography and physics pretty much dictate that. I doubt any of us realised how short the medium-term would turn out to be.

The canary hasn't quite croaked yet, of course, but it's time we started thinking about our next family pet. Himalayan glaciers, perhaps? The goat-to-golf-course ratio in Spain? The Mediterranean generally?

Or the big one - the West Antarctic Ice-Sheet? Predicted timings there may well turn out to be just as conservative as they've proved to be in the Arctic - it is, after all, in the nature of science to be conservative.
 
CapelDodger said:
Ten years ago, when I first got involved in the AGW discussion here, there was wide agreement amongst the science-minded contributors that the Arctic (and especially Arctic sea-ice) was going to be the primary indicator of global warming in the medium-term. Geography and physics pretty much dictate that. I doubt any of us realised how short the medium-term would turn out to be.

The canary hasn't quite croaked yet, of course, but it's time we started thinking about our next family pet. Himalayan glaciers, perhaps? The goat-to-golf-course ratio in Spain? The Mediterranean generally?

Or the big one - the West Antarctic Ice-Sheet? Predicted timings there may well turn out to be just as conservative as they've proved to be in the Arctic - it is, after all, in the nature of science to be conservative.
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Think of all the temporary cooling (and instant sea level rise) that would occur if the WAIS surged into the sea.

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/floods.htm
 
CapelDodger said:
The canary hasn't quite croaked yet, of course, but it's time we started thinking about our next family pet.
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Given that the loss of the Arctic sea ice seems to be somewhat predictable in the near term, I was thinking that the methane and CO2 being released, both from the northern permafrost melting as well as the melting of the clathrates on the Eastern Siberia shelf, is now the most compelling aspect of AGW that we can observe and which may indeed be our final trip off the cliff.

Then again some other break in the food chain such as ocean acidification and temperature spikes, which could kill plankton or coral reefs on a global scale, may take out a lot of humans out much sooner. I'm still waiting to see what happens to coral reefs worldwide as our normal temperatures match the temperature spike that killed reefs around the world during the 1998 El-Nino event. The temperatures are just about even on the GISS graph. Having spent thousands of hours underwater I have no doubt that ocean life will quickly alter and adjust to temperature changes over time but I'm not sure just how quickly that might happen and what the new life forms may be. It's interesting to see jellyfish dominating some depleted areas.

I was looking at all the new projects coming online in the oil sands as well as all the new pipelines that are being built in the US and Canada. Off the cliff we go.

Good times!
 
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BenBurch said:
We will see major changes in Greenland now because we will have huge arctic storms nearly every year. RAIN will come to northern Greenland. And rain will mean melting.

And melting will mean sea level rise.
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Does this warming and reduction in salinity up there mean we're likely to lose the North Atlantic Drift?
 
BenBurch said:
Note that the data set has a lot of spikes in it like that.
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In both directions, that's the fertile ground of distortion in the short term and why smoothed averages over 5 (10, 20, 30) years is necessary to help minimize the outlier noise of natural variability.
 
dlorde said:
Does this warming and reduction in salinity up there mean we're likely to lose the North Atlantic Drift?
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The Gulf Stream is untimely a wind driven phenomenon so as long as continents are laid out as they are and the earth keeps spinning it will not go away. Salinity changes in the arctic could have an impact on where it sinks into the deep ocean which could have climate implications for parts of North-western Europe, but AFAIK there is no real evidence of this happening in the near future.
 
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