The Truth, Still Inconvenient

[Jive Turkey]

Originally Posted by INDY500

How about IF it is occuring and IF it is occuring because of the activities of man that it is something that MUST be feared? That seems like opinion to me.

What is the "normal" temp above which is warming? What is the "optimal" temp above or below which has a negative impact on human life?

And even if it's all true and potentially dangerous when can it be mentioned that the political and scientific "remedies" may have a more negative impact on humans (less individual freedom in the form of lower energy use, restrictions on travel, higher taxes -- relinquished national sovereignty -- and less economic wealth to deal with dislocation, famine, medicine, future technologies) than climate change itself?

No offense indy, but your 'views' on this topic are that of an ignorant fool

[Jive Turkey]

Hey you guys, don't even worry about it. It's just getting hot out, that's all! It's all good. We'll still have our individual freedoms, baby! Plus, our money for medication and famine won't be disappear in some completely convoluted and intellectually insincere round-about way! Win win!

[U2DMfan]

Originally Posted by INDY500

How about IF it is occuring

I am confused. Perhaps you'll give me a more straightforward answer.

The scientific consensus is that there is a 90% chance that humans are affecting climate change. Argue that 10% dissent all you want. But that there *IS* climate change - at all - is not even debated by the quack brigade.

There is no "IF" in that instance. It's not an opinion up for debate.

So how did Diemen miss your point?

[BVS]

Rush has told him it's all a hoax, there is no climate change AND there is no consensus.

[the iron horse]

Originally Posted by BVS

Two well known frauds. Harris studied insurance law and Mann was a weather man(one who never even actually got a degree in meteorology). Their chart is so full of holes it's not even worth touching. Please don't pretend to respect "science" only when it's shaped to fit your agenda.

So? Where are the charts full of holes?

Post charts that disprove the charts.

[Irvine511]

The burden of proof is on you and the rest of the 3%ers.

[BVS]

Originally Posted by the iron horse

So? Where are the charts full of holes?

Post charts that disprove the charts.

I'm gonna take a page from your playbook.

Why Do Conservatives Deny Global Warming? - CareCure Forums

Reading is fun

[Jive Turkey]

Hey Iron Horse, what is it that makes you want to believe that data rather than the data that over 90% of the scientific community agrees is correct?

[the iron horse]

Originally Posted by Jive Turkey

Hey Iron Horse, what is it that makes you want to believe that data rather than the data that over 90% of the scientific community agrees is correct?

Remember that almost all scientific facts accepted today by the
majority of scientists were in the past, when they first appeared,
viewed as false.

I'm just a skeptic on this global warming / climate change position.
There seems to me, a lot more going into it than just data.

I know some here believe it is fact that cannnot be disapproved or questioned.

I disagree.

[PhilsFan]

Originally Posted by the iron horse

Remember that almost all scientific facts accepted today by the
majority of scientists were in the past, when they first appeared,
viewed as false.

I'm just a skeptic on this global warming / climate change position.
There seems to me, a lot more going into it than just data.

I know some here believe it is fact that cannnot be disapproved or questioned.

I disagree.

"Scientists centuries ago got things wrong" is not a rebuttal. Put together an actual thought if you're going to keep posting.

[BVS]

Originally Posted by the iron horse

Remember that almost all scientific facts accepted today by the
majority of scientists were in the past, when they first appeared,
viewed as false.

I'm just a skeptic on this global warming / climate change position.
There seems to me, a lot more going into it than just data.

I know some here believe it is fact that cannnot be disapproved or questioned.

I disagree.

That's not a rebuttal, that's a cop out. Tell us specifically why you choose to be "skeptical" about this and not the theory of gravity or the structure of light? You don't seem to really respect science, so it just seems to almost everyone in here that there's more going on that just "skepticism".

Why not be honest?

[Jive Turkey]

Originally Posted by the iron horse

Remember that almost all scientific facts accepted today by the
majority of scientists were in the past, when they first appeared,
viewed as false.

Not really. Rather, new theories are subjected to all manner of scrutiny before being accepted as fact. It's part of the reason the scientific method is so structurally sound; extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. That should give you confidence that when a theory stands up to the rigorous testing, you can accept it as true (*cough* evolution *cough* ). What we have here isn't a new theory being put forth, but a complete disregard for the facts. A different tin of beans

[IWasBored]

Originally Posted by PhilsFan

"Scientists centuries ago got things wrong" is not a rebuttal. Put together an actual thought if you're going to keep posting.

His argument is actually worse than that. It's "well, remember how when scientists said the earth was round? Lots of people refused to believe them and continued to think it was flat. I'm just one of those people."

[purpleoscar]

Climate change: A cooling consensus | The Economist

GLOBAL warming has slowed. The rate of warming of over the past 15 years has been lower than that of the preceding 20 years. There is no serious doubt that our planet continues to heat, but it has heated less than most climate scientists had predicted. Nate Cohn of the New Republic reports: "Since 1998, the warmest year of the twentieth century, temperatures have not kept up with computer models that seemed to project steady warming; they’re perilously close to falling beneath even the lowest projections".


Mr Cohn does his best to affirm that the urgent necessity of acting to retard warming has not abated, as does Brad Plumer of the Washington Post, as does this newspaper. But there's no way around the fact that this reprieve for the planet is bad news for proponents of policies, such as carbon taxes and emissions treaties, meant to slow warming by moderating the release of greenhouse gases. The reality is that the already meagre prospects of these policies, in America at least, will be devastated if temperatures do fall outside the lower bound of the projections that environmentalists have used to create a panicked sense of emergency. Whether or not dramatic climate-policy interventions remain advisable, they will become harder, if not impossible, to sell to the public, which will feel, not unreasonably, that the scientific and media establishment has cried wolf.

Dramatic warming may exact a terrible price in terms of human welfare, especially in poorer countries. But cutting emissions enough to put a real dent in warming may also put a real dent in economic growth. This could also exact a terrible humanitarian price, especially in poorer countries. Given the so-far unfathomed complexity of global climate and the tenuousness of our grasp on the full set of relevant physical mechanisms, I have favoured waiting a decade or two in order to test and improve the empirical reliability of our climate models, while also allowing the economies of the less-developed parts of the world to grow unhindered, improving their position to adapt to whatever heavy weather may come their way. I have been told repeatedly that "we cannot afford to wait". More distressingly, my brand of sceptical empiricism has been often met with a bludgeoning dogmatism about the authority of scientific consensus.

Of course, if the consensus climate models turn out to be falsified just a few years later, average temperature having remained at levels not even admitted to be have been physically possible, the authority of consensus will have been exposed as rather weak. The authority of expert consensus obviously strengthens as the quality of expertise improves, which is why it's quite sensible, as matter of science-based policy-making, to wait for a callow science to improve before taking grand measures on the basis of it's predictions.

Anyway, Mr Cohn cites a few scientists who are unruffled by the surprisingly slow warming.

It might seem like a decade-long warming plateau would cause a crisis for climate science. It hasn’t. Gerald Meehl, a Senior Scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, has seen hiatus periods before. They “occur pretty commonly in the observed records,” and there are climate models showing “a hiatus as long as 15 years.” As a result, Isaac Held, a Senior Research Scientist at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, says “no one has ever expected warming to be continuous, increasing like a straight line.” Those much-cited computer models are composed of numerous simulations that individually account for naturally occurring variability. But, Meehl says, “the averages cancel it out.”
Isn't this transparently ad hoc. The point of averaging is to prune off exceedingly unlikely possibilities. It does not vindicate a model to note that it gives no weight—that it "cancels out"—its only accurate constitutive simulations.

If "hiatus periods are commonly observed" is the right way to think about the current warming plateau, then the rest of Mr Cohn's article, examining various explanations of the puzzle of the hiatus would be unnecessary. But, as all the pieces discussing the warming plateau make perfectly clear, climate scientists are actually pretty baffled about the failure of their predictions. Is it the oceans? Clouds? Volcanoes? The sun? An artifact of temperature data?

As a rule, climate scientists were previously very confident that the planet would be warmer than it is by now, and no one knows for sure why it isn't. This isn't a crisis for climate science. This is just the way science goes. But it is a crisis for climate-policy advocates who based their arguments on the authority of scientific consensus. Mr Cohn eventually gets around to admitting that

In the end, the so-called scientific consensus on global warming doesn’t look like much like consensus when scientists are struggling to explain the intricacies of the earth’s climate system, or uttering the word “uncertainty” with striking regularity.
But his attempt to minimise the political relevance of this is unconvincing. He writes:

The recent wave of news and magazine articles about scientists struggling to explain the warming slowdown could prolong or deepen the public’s skepticism.But the “consensus” never extended to the intricacies of the climate system, just the core belief that additional greenhouse gas emissions would warm the planet.
If this is true, then the public has been systematically deceived. As it has been presented to the public, the scientific consensus extended precisely to that which is now seems to be in question: the sensitivity of global temperature to increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Indeed, if the consensus had been only that greenhouse gases have some warming effect, there would have been no obvious policy implications at all. As this paper has maintained:

If ... temperatures are likely to rise by only 2°C in response to a doubling of carbon emissions (and if the likelihood of a 6°C increase is trivial), the calculation might change. Perhaps the world should seek to adjust to (rather than stop) the greenhouse-gas splurge. There is no point buying earthquake insurance if you do not live in an earthquake zone. In this case more adaptation rather than more mitigation might be the right policy at the margin. But that would be good advice only if these new estimates really were more reliable than the old ones. And different results come from different models.

We have not been awash in arguments for adaptation precisely because the consensus pertained to now-troubled estimates of climate sensitivity. The moralising stridency of so many arguments for cap-and-trade, carbon taxes, and global emissions treaties was founded on the idea that there is a consensus about how much warming there would be if carbon emissions continue on trend. The rather heated debates we have had about the likely economic and social damage of carbon emissions have been based on that idea that there is something like a scientific consensus about the range of warming we can expect. If that consensus is now falling apart, as it seems it may be, that is, for good or ill, a very big deal.

[digitize]

The Economist published nearly this exact same article a few months ago as well. Warming has slowed down considerably lately (in aggregate), it's true. It's foolish to take that as any policy prescription against addressing climate change, and it's a little scary, because it probably will.

My cynical side says that the world is utterly incapable of addressing climate change barring a massive technological breakthrough (e.g. nuclear fusion, the discovery of a large source of antimatter floating around nearby, or the invention of a machine that cheaply separates carbon and oxygen atoms) at the moment. I can imagine it wrecking economies and livelihoods, and the political will is not there, especially when relatively few people of political power are actually feeling, in a deep way, the effects of climate change at the moment. Maybe it will take flooding Manhattan to get to the point where that changes, I don't know. This issue honestly scares me more than any other.

[Badyouken]

President Obama is Taking Action on Climate Change - Whitehouse.gov

Obama will deliver a speech on Tuesday outlining his plan to address climate change, in light of inaction in Congress. According to the New Yorik Times, this will likely revolve around limits on existing and new coal plants, more stringent energy efficiency standards, and increased investment in renewable energy.

I'll be tuning in.

[digitize]

Nice to know that he's at least thinking about the issue.

[Badyouken]

There's only so much he can do using executive powers. Putting a price on carbon outright - using cap-and-trade or a carbon tax - would require congressional approval. It's been tried in the past, and it failed to pass.

In other climate news, China is rolling out cap-and-trade systems in select cities and provinces, although there are significant hurdles to overcome if it is to become truly effective.

[Jive Turkey]

The concept of coal burning energy plants seems so foreign to me. Growing up, I was just so used to referring to hydro stations that it never occurred to me that there might be other ways of producing electricity until sometime in my early teens. I even sometimes still refer to the 'hydro' being out during a power outage. The idea of continually burning coal to provide so much energy seems so dirty

[digitize]

Originally Posted by Jive Turkey

The concept of coal burning energy plants seems so foreign to me. Growing up, I was just so used to referring to hydro stations that it never occurred to me that there might be other ways of producing electricity until sometime in my early teens. I even sometimes still refer to the 'hydro' being out during a power outage. The idea of continually burning coal to provide so much energy seems so dirty

It's a horrible way to create electricity.

I do feel bad for the people whose livelihood depends on the stuff, though. Even when coal was more in demand, West Virginia was the heart of the poorest part of the United States. With regulations and (especially) cheap natural gas, the place has been torn asunder.

But coal is still a horrible way to create electricity.