The Truth, Still Inconvenient

[purpleoscar]

Most likely we will have to wait until there is a cheap alternative. Also some new science is casting doubt that CO2 is the main climate driver.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/05/0...limate-change/

http://www.space.dtu.dk/upload/insti...limatology.pdf

To me it seems obvious that we should spend research resources on natural causes to climate change before we put all our eggs in one basket.

[BVS]

John Coleman, not exactly THE founder of the Weather Channel, is a weather anchor he is NOT a scientist.

Why do the deniers keep clinging on to the words of non-scientists? Your point would be so much more respected if you all knew how to approach the subject.

[purpleoscar]

Originally Posted by BVS

John Coleman, not exactly THE founder of the Weather Channel, is a weather anchor he is NOT a scientist.

Why do the deniers keep clinging on to the words of non-scientists? Your point would be so much more respected if you all knew how to approach the subject.

He was pointing out in layman's language what Svensmark discovered who is a scientist. Not everyone on the warmest side is a scientist either.

[BVS]

Originally Posted by purpleoscar

He was pointing out in layman's language what Svensmark discovered who is a scientist. Not everyone on the warmest side is a scientist either.

Well, he was interpreting Swensmark's discoveries, and I was commenting more about the denier website and how they setup Coleman as a viable source on the matter. Svensmark's discoveries have been put to major doubt by at least 3 papers in the last decade.

And yes, not everyone who talks about climate change is a scientist or better yet an expert on climate, but guess what? I don't listen to them or see them as viable sources either.

[purpleoscar]

Originally Posted by BVS

Well, he was interpreting Swensmark's discoveries, and I was commenting more about the denier website and how they setup Coleman as a viable source on the matter. Svensmark's discoveries have been put to major doubt by at least 3 papers in the last decade.

Yet it correlates better than CO2. I also listen to non-scientists because of the political and economic ramifications. I also listen to scientists that used to be on the bandwagon and have changed their tune:

The Belief That CO2 Can Regulate Climate Is “Sheer Absurdity” Says Prominent German Meteorologist

factum: So we don’t need to do anything against climate change?

Puls: There’s nothing we can do to stop it. Scientifically it is sheer absurdity to think we can get a nice climate by turning a CO2 adjustment knob. Many confuse environmental protection with climate protection. it’s impossible to protect the climate, but we can protect the environment and our drinking water. On the debate concerning alternative energies, which is sensible, it is often driven by the irrational climate debate. One has nothing to do with the other.

[digitize]

A couple of things worth pointing out:

Puls: These are speculative model projections, so-called scenarios – and not prognoses. Because of climate’s high complexity, reliable prognoses just aren’t possible. Nature does what it wants, and not what the models present as prophesy. The entire CO2-debate is nonsense. Even if CO2 were doubled, the temperature would rise only 1°C. The remainder of the IPCC’s assumed warming is based purely on speculative amplification mechanisms. Even though CO2 has risen, there has been no warming in 13 years.

Well, it has doubled, and 1°C is not insignificant.

Puls: That’s a misleading conclusion. Even if the entire North Pole melted, there would be no sea level rise because of the principles of buoyancy.

[BVS]

Originally Posted by purpleoscar

I also listen to non-scientists because of the political and economic ramifications.

And this IS the problem. So, basically what you are saying is that even if it was fact and you believed this fact then you would listen to those speaking out against the "political and economic" ramifications and not support action to remedy the situation.

Originally Posted by purpleoscar

I also listen to scientists that used to be on the bandwagon and have changed their tune:

The Belief That CO2 Can Regulate Climate Is “Sheer Absurdity” Says Prominent German Meteorologist

This guy is a quack. Just look at the article you posted:

To this day I still feel shame that as a scientist I made presentations of their science without first checking it.

So I'm suppose to listen to a 60 something year old scientist that just developed scientific ethics 7 years ago? No thanks.

Let's take a look at some of his other hard facts about sea level change:

Klaus-Eckart Puls: Sea Level Rise Is Slowing Down – “There’s Going To Be No Acceleration”

Not everyone is convinced sea levels will rise quickly. Qatar just built a stadium on a man-made island.

^Can't make this shit up.

It’s not the climate that’s a catastrophe – it’s the media.

Ah, taken straight from your handbook.

His interpretations of OTHER RESEARCHERS data has been regarded as incomplete and inconclusive by many scientists.

Plus I'm not a big fan of taking Meteorologists as experts in this field.

[BVS]

Puls: That’s a misleading conclusion. Even if the entire North Pole melted, there would be no sea level rise because of the principles of buoyancy.

That is fucking awesome...

[Canadiens1131]

Originally Posted by purpleoscar

I agree. They shouldn't stoop to the level of the warmists.

The fact that the anti-climate change folks have given a cutesy name (warmists) is pretty sad.

That makes them just as bad as the irritating, agitant athiest crowd who use "fundies" to refer to religious people.

Very much kiddy shit, as is calling the ACA Obamacare instead.

Originally Posted by purpleoscar

Yet it correlates better than CO2. I also listen to non-scientists because of the political and economic ramifications. I also listen to scientists that used to be on the bandwagon and have changed their tune:

But apparently, you have to resort to what every other person against even the possibility of climate change being affected by man does: cherry picking a choice few scientists who support your viewpoint from an overwhelming majority who lean the other way.

Originally Posted by purpleoscar

This is really ridiculous. You fall into the same trap INDY does....going after a relatively small, nuts group of environmental activists who are basically crazy (the environmental version of PETA).

Rational people (including liberals) know PETA, and radical environmentalists, are batshit nuts.

[purpleoscar]

Originally Posted by BVS

That is fucking awesome...

You do realize that ice floating in water when it melts that sea level won't rise? If Greenland and Antarctica melts it will add to sea level rise because it moves from land to sea.

[digitize]

Originally Posted by purpleoscar

You do realize that ice floating in water when it melts that sea level won't rise? If Greenland and Antarctica melts it will add to sea level rise because it moves from land to sea.

I'm not sure if that's entirely true, because ice that's somewhat elevated may hold more water than an area of just liquid water, but the real issue with his statement is that he ignores the negative effects of Greenland and Antarctica having their ice sheets melt (as well as Canadian Arctic islands).

[BVS]

Originally Posted by purpleoscar

You do realize that ice floating in water when it melts that sea level won't rise?

Well no shit, but it's simpleton science. If the entire North Pole melted there wouldn't be a problem. Except this statement ignores the underlying problem, what's causing the melting, and can this cause effect land caps?

Don't fall for the simpleton science.

[elevated_u2_fan]

Uh, on top of that, the ice caps aren't exactly floating right now... They're kind of attached to land...

[purpleoscar]

Originally Posted by digitize

I'm not sure if that's entirely true, because ice that's somewhat elevated may hold more water than an area of just liquid water, but the real issue with his statement is that he ignores the negative effects of Greenland and Antarctica having their ice sheets melt (as well as Canadian Arctic islands).

It's because he doesn't think that CO2 regulates temperature as much as other natural effects and he's being flippant about it. We should be seeing an accelerating of melting and it's not there. Then there's the natural warming that's been happening since the end of the little ice age. Obviously most of that is natural and since there isn't an acceleration that shows CO2 as a cause then it looks like it has been exaggerated. We've had 10 times the CO2 and colder weather before. It's not the magic compound that controls everything. Within nature we've had the "snowball earth" and periods where all the ice melted. What's happening now is insignificant and quite boring despite the scare tactics. And believe they are scare tactics.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/op...mate.html?_r=1

James Hansen, who said New York would be flooded by the year 2000:

Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now. That level of heat-trapping gases would assure that the disintegration of the ice sheets would accelerate out of control. Sea levels would rise and destroy coastal cities. Global temperatures would become intolerable. Twenty to 50 percent of the planet’s species would be driven to extinction. Civilization would be at risk.

That is the long-term outlook. But near-term, things will be bad enough. Over the next several decades, the Western United States and the semi-arid region from North Dakota to Texas will develop semi-permanent drought, with rain, when it does come, occurring in extreme events with heavy flooding. Economic losses would be incalculable. More and more of the Midwest would be a dust bowl. California’s Central Valley could no longer be irrigated. Food prices would rise to unprecedented levels.

If this sounds apocalyptic, it is. This is why we need to reduce emissions dramatically. President Obama has the power not only to deny tar sands oil additional access to Gulf Coast refining, which Canada desires in part for export markets, but also to encourage economic incentives to leave tar sands and other dirty fuels in the ground.

More scare tactics. We've lived long enough to see all of those predictions being wrong at some point the predictions go so far that we won't be alive to see what happens and we supposed to take on their assertions without evidence because "we have to act and there's no time to wait". It looks more like confidence tricksters than scientists. To me if people make pathetic predictions I don't believe what they say and to destroy the economy without enough reason is a huge moral problem for me. I've said it already. If the public can't handle austerity measures to balance a budget they certainly can't handle shutting down coal plants and stopping the oil sands. It's all talk and no action even from the believers.

[digitize]

Originally Posted by purpleoscar

It's because he doesn't think that CO2 regulates temperature as much as other natural effects and he's being flippant about it. We should be seeing an accelerating of melting and it's not there. Then there's the natural warming that's been happening since the end of the little ice age. Obviously most of that is natural and since there isn't an acceleration that shows CO2 as a cause then it looks like it has been exaggerated. We've had 10 times the CO2 and colder weather before.

When?

If the public can't handle austerity measures to balance a budget they certainly can't handle shutting down coal plants and stopping the oil sands. It's all talk and no action even from the believers.

Here I completely agree with you (and I cannot claim to be any better than most believers).

[purpleoscar]

Originally Posted by digitize

When?

New CO2 data helps unlock the secrets of Antarctic formation

The study's findings, published in Nature online, confirm that atmospheric CO2 declined during the Eocene - Oligocene climate transition and that the Antarctic ice sheet began to form when CO2 in the atmosphere reached a tipping point of around 760 parts per million (by volume).

Of course they say a lowering CO2 level led to a tipping point to prove the CO2 connection except they are talking about 760ppm.

Then you have Richard Lindzen:

Richard Lindzen: A Case Against Precipitous Climate Action | Watts Up With That?

The notion of a static, unchanging climate is foreign to the history of the earth or any other planet with a fluid envelope. The fact that the developed world went into hysterics over changes in global mean temperature anomaly of a few tenths of a degree will astound future generations. Such hysteria simply represents the scientific illiteracy of much of the public, the susceptibility of the public to the substitution of repetition for truth, and the exploitation of these weaknesses by politicians, environmental promoters, and, after 20 years of media drum beating, many others as well. Climate is always changing. We have had ice ages and warmer periods when alligators were found in Spitzbergen. Ice ages have occurred in a hundred thousand year cycle for the last 700 thousand years, and there have been previous periods that appear to have been warmer than the present despite CO2 levels being lower than they are now. More recently, we have had the medieval warm period and the little ice age. During the latter, alpine glaciers advanced to the chagrin of overrun villages. Since the beginning of the 19th Century these glaciers have been retreating. Frankly, we don’t fully understand either the advance or the retreat.

Svensmark’s Cosmic Jackpot: “Evidence of nearby supernovae affecting life on Earth” | Watts Up With That?

So the reason why skeptics are excited by cosmic rays has to do with a better correlation in deep geological time to temperatures. Lindzen looks at a doubling of CO2 effect to be around 0.7 degrees per century. Not 3-6 degrees. Even with the cooler sun argument for the far ancient past the sensitivity as predicted today would fry the planet before evolution would get to humans.

So I'm not afraid of CO2 but more afraid that we will run out of fossil fuels in a couple of centuries but by then we will likely have more advanced nuclear power like nuclear fusion to fuel the planet or something else nobody has thought of yet. There's need for research and development but we don't have to decrease our living standards drastically right now and we certainly shouldn't prevent poor countries from developing. All Bono's charity work would go for nothing if Africa can't develop using fossil fuels.

[digitize]

That is interesting data. My only question is what the rest of the composition of the atmosphere was at that point. When we start going back hundreds of millions of years, there are a lot of other factors that influence climate.

I'm not at all delusional enough to believe that carbon dioxide is all that influences climate. Hell, there are other greenhouse gases that have much larger contributions to climate change by volume that carbon dioxide does. But I still see no reason to doubt that carbon dioxide doesn't have *some* impact on climate change. And the problem is that, more than ever before, we've built up an international civilization that's really incredibly dependent on very fixed climate conditions. There are a lot of factors that could mess with that, but carbon dioxide seems to still be one that has impacts that act in the short term. They may not seem huge, but society is fairly dependent on fairly fixed conditions. Eventually, that will be a problem, climate change or no, barring incredibly well-done geoengineering.

[purpleoscar]

I think methane is even bigger but from the quantity and timescales if CO2 was such a nightmare then the stability of the planet would be called into question. The only cooling compound I've heard of is SO2, but again we need to see some correlation. My view is that CO2 creates marginal warming (negative feedback) whereas warmers believe in positive feedback on cloud reactions. Since water vapor is the largest greenhouse gas the debate gets complex on figuring out if more CO2 will increase or decrease cloud cover. Some recent projections showing part of the atmosphere warming up have been disproved by weather balloons and Richard Lindzen's "Iris effect" studies show negative feedback. When you look at satellite data you get less warming than on land based temperature measurements so skeptics have been looking for urban island heat effects on stations as cities grow and found good examples of it. Then when you see that in 1990 many colder stations were removed from the data set you may see how that might accelerate the warming compared to satellites further (though the BEST project was supposed to have solved it in favor of the warmists the data appears to be virtually the same as Phil Jones used leaving skeptic arguments unanswered). Now we get to Michael Mann who used some trees to make a temperature proxy that eliminates the historical medieval warming period to make this period much warmer. So as you can see the debate will go on and half the public will balk at trillions in taxes to"save" the planet with so much uncertainty.

[BVS]

Colbert: North Carolina Sea Level Rise Findings Can Simply Be Made Illegal (VIDEO)

[Moonlit_Angel]

I liked the way he covered that story. Yeah, so, that's a beyond stupid idea.