What Do We Think About Climate Change

[Boston]

another little jewel is that one third of amphibians are endangered one third are threatened and one third are in decline.

half the primates are endangered

there has been a fifty percent drop in north American song bird numbers

and fisheries are dropping like flies ( west coast salmon for example )

but it has nothing to do with mankind's activities ?

[Dave Gudeman]

Originally Posted by Boston

as if you were not aware
Rapid Global Climate Change is the proper name of the theory; global warming is the misnomer insisted on by deniers and ignorant media types

That's a bit of historical revisionism, Boston. Up until a few years ago everyone called it "global warming". It is only recently that the alarmists decided that "climate change" was a better marketing term. I think there are two reasons that they wanted to change the name. First, it is hard to terrify most people by talking about "warming". Most people think of sunny days in spring or heating up a bit of cold pizza in the microwave. Not scary images.

Another reason they want to change the name is because they like to point to all extreme weather conditions as signs of the impending catastrophe, and there are some PR problems with pointing to snow storms as signs of "global warming".

As a side note, have you ever noticed that when someone points at extreme cold weather and makes fun of global warming, some alarmist points out piously that "weather is not climate", but when someone points to warm weather as a sign of global warming, none of these same alarmists seem to think that any correction is required?

[Dave Gudeman]

By the way, for people who claim that all of these errors found in the IPCC documents and other alarmist publications are simple mistakes, can you explain why every single one of these "mistakes" was in the direction of supporting the alarmist position? If they were really random mistakes, shouldn't they be about equally in both directions?

[Zed]

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, YES!

[Boston]

well if you really want to know the development of the name it goes something like this

from the NASA web site

To a scientist, global warming describes the average global surface temperature increase from human emissions of greenhouse gases. Its first use was in a 1975 Science article by geochemist Wallace Broecker of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory: "Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?"1

Broecker's term was a break with tradition. Earlier studies of human impact on climate had called it "inadvertent climate modification."2 This was because while many scientists accepted that human activities could cause climate change, they did not know what the direction of change might be. Industrial emissions of tiny airborne particles called aerosols might cause cooling, while greenhouse gas emissions would cause warming. Which effect would dominate?

For most of the 1970s, nobody knew. So "inadvertent climate modification," while clunky and dull, was an accurate reflection of the state of knowledge.

The first decisive National Academy of Science study of carbon dioxide's impact on climate, published in 1979, abandoned "inadvertent climate modification." Often called the Charney Report for its chairman, Jule Charney of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, declared: "if carbon dioxide continues to increase, [we find] no reason to doubt that climate changes will result and no reason to believe that these changes will be negligible."3

In place of inadvertent climate modification, Charney adopted Broecker's usage. When referring to surface temperature change, Charney used "global warming." When discussing the many other changes that would be induced by increasing carbon dioxide, Charney used "climate change."
Definitions

Global warming: the increase in Earth’s average surface temperature due to rising levels of greenhouse gases.

Climate change: a long-term change in the Earth’s climate, or of a region on Earth.

Within scientific journals, this is still how the two terms are used. Global warming refers to surface temperature increases, while climate change includes global warming and everything else that increasing greenhouse gas amounts will affect.

During the late 1980s one more term entered the lexicon, “global change.” This term encompassed many other kinds of change in addition to climate change. When it was approved in 1989, the U.S. climate research program was embedded as a theme area within the U.S. Global Change Research Program.

But global warming became the dominant popular term in June 1988, when NASA scientist James E. Hansen had testified to Congress about climate, specifically referring to global warming. He said: "global warming has reached a level such that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and the observed warming."4 Hansen's testimony was very widely reported in popular and business media, and after that popular use of the term global warming exploded. Global change never gained traction in either the scientific literature or the popular media.

But temperature change itself isn't the most severe effect of changing climate. Changes to precipitation patterns and sea level are likely to have much greater human impact than the higher temperatures alone. For this reason, scientific research on climate change encompasses far more than surface temperature change. So "global climate change" is the more scientifically accurate term. Like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we've chosen to emphasize global climate change on this website, and not global warming.

Rapid Global Climate Change is the term used at Woods Hole
most recently in the following
http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=12455&tid=282&cid=54347

referring to overall climate as global warming is an incorrect use of the term

[hoytedow]

NASA has gone over to the "dark side" so I am leery of their data.

[Boston]

Hey G
hows it today

found an article you might enjoy

Konrad Hughen, Associate Scientist
Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry Department
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Source: Oceanus Magazine


Natural materials such as shells, ice, corals, and tree rings contain clues to help scientists piece together how our oceans, atmosphere, and land have changed in the past. The history of the Earth is recorded in many different chemical codes and languages, however, so we geochemists and paleoceanographers create tools that help us translate what the planet is telling us.

My research focuses on developing tools to trace environmental changes that occurred over millennia and centuries, and even over decades and years—long before humans were recording them. The trouble is that sometimes these paleo-science tools give us conflicting information; we construct or interpret a story of the past, and then new observations upset that story.

Recently, my colleagues and I encountered such a problem. While some environmental clues tell us that the sun had a crucial role in ancient atmospheric changes on Earth, we found other clues suggesting that the oceans also play a central part. My research group is looking closely at the environmental tracers themselves to see if our current history of the Holocene Epoch (the past 10,000 years or so) is a work of fiction or nonfiction.

Follow the isotopes
One of our most important tools is an isotope of carbon known as radiocarbon, or 14C. It is incorporated into living and nonliving things and then radioactively decays at known rates into daughter isotopes. It is incredibly useful for dating events in Earth’s past. However, radiocarbon fascinates me for a different reason: It is quite valuable as a geochemical tracer of how carbon cycles through the Earth system.

The amount of radiocarbon in the atmosphere and in the surface of the ocean is controlled by changes in two things: how much radiocarbon is produced in Earth’s atmosphere and how it is distributed among various places on Earth—in the atmosphere, in living things, and particularly, in the deep ocean.

Radiocarbon is generated by cosmic rays that penetrate Earth’s upper atmosphere. When the sun is more magnetically active, more sunspots spew more radiation; that blocks cosmic rays from reaching our celestial neighborhood, and less radiocarbon is produced. When the sun is less active, fewer cosmic rays are blocked, and more radiocarbon is created.

Cosmic rays also produce beryllium-10 (10Be) in the atmosphere, making it another useful isotope to trace the sun’s activity. More solar activity generates less 10Be, and less gets incorporated into snow that falls out of the atmosphere and accumulates on glaciers. Analyzing cores from glaciers, scientists can reconstruct past levels of 10Be and solar activity.

There is a significant difference between beryllium and radiocarbon, however. Unlike beryllium, radiocarbon from the atmosphere dissolves into the ocean surface. The oceans’ circulation sometimes draws down radiocarbon from the surface and mixes it into deeper waters, where it decays over time. So the amount of radiocarbon in the atmosphere can also be influenced by the oceans.

What goes around comes around
My colleagues and I ran into our problem in the process of developing a record of climate changes as the Earth was emerging from the last ice age, about 15,000 to 11,000 years ago. We examined sediments cored from the seafloor in the Cariaco Basin off Venezuela. The sediments accumulate in layers over time, and they contain fossil shells of surface-dwelling microscopic marine animals. The shells incorporate radiocarbon and other isotopes from seawater that existed when the animals lived, and hence provide a record of past ocean conditions.

We were trying to correlate the timing of abrupt shifts seen in the Cariaco marine records with climate shifts on land that were detected by other researchers using 10Be in ice cores and 14C in tree rings. We got a near-perfect match of events.

The problem is that the fit was too good. The marine and terrestrial records of radiocarbon should not be a one-to-one match. Because the oceans draw down a portion of dissolved radiocarbon into the depths, there should be less radiocarbon in surface waters (and in fossil shells) than in the atmosphere.

A possible explanation for this discrepancy is that the oceans’ deep circulation sometimes stalls—a periodic phenomenon that we now know can drive major global climate changes. When these slowdowns in ocean circulation occur, less radiocarbon in the ocean surface is drawn down to the depths, leaving more radiocarbon to accumulate in the air and sea surface.

So if radiocarbon levels in the atmosphere increased solely because of changes in solar activity, then beryllium and radiocarbon deposits on land would have increased; seafloor deposits would have increased, too, but not as much. On the other hand, if the radiocarbon changes were caused by a shift in ocean circulation, marine sediments and terrestrial tree rings should agree—as they seem to—but then beryllium levels should not have increased.

Muddy, but telltale, clues
As paleoclimatologists, our instinct is to say that changes happened for one reason or another—either the sun caused the change, or the ocean did. But perhaps it is both. Perhaps the sun, in triggering changes in isotopes, also triggered small changes in temperatures or another process that slowed deep ocean circulation—which, in turn, would accelerate and amplify the isotopic changes.

Such a scenario is speculative and highly controversial. We cannot build such a case from just one event in geologic time, so now we are trying to learn more from the rich data trove of Cariaco Basin sediments. The ocean basin is a unique place, where a confluence of environmental conditions makes its sediments very sensitive detectors of climate changes.

So now we are going back to our seafloor cores, hoping to analyze the records they preserve of global climate at other times in the past 10,000 years, when substantial and somewhat abrupt changes occurred. Will those periods show the same mysterious and contradictory mix of solar activity and ocean cycling? Only the mud will tell.

This research was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Comer Science and Education Foundation, through the WHOI Ocean and Climate Institute.

[Boston]

the Dark Side eh
ok

seems like a simple definition to me
but Dark Side it is

actually the acronym for NASA in many other agencies is "never a straight story"

[hoytedow]

Originally Posted by Marco1

But no what do they do the horses donkey?
amalaya....niguirisa sagarasa funcardito


However I did like the bit about Climate change is not about cooling or warming.
Of course it is not, why do you think it changed from Global warming?
Because it is not warming right?
So if it is not warming what are we talking about CO2 warming the planet?
Is it CO2 cooling the planet now. In which possible way is a greenhouse gas cooling? Are greenhouses cooling houses now? Have we all gone raving mad?
"Rapid changing" rapid in comparison to what? Climate changes rapidly, of course it does, It has been changing for millions of years...very rapidly without our help.

In case anyone wasn't paying attention, I thought it should be repeated.

[hoytedow]

Guillermo, how you say never in Latin? Is it nunc? Some could be Equus hemionus, no you.

Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc!

[Boston]

4706 is a perfect example of agnotism

Agnotology, formerly agnatology, is a neologism for the study of culturally-induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data. The term was coined by Robert N. Proctor,[1][2] a Stanford University professor specializing in the history of science and technology.[3] Its name derives from the Neoclassical Greek word ἄγνωσις, agnōsis, "not knowing" (confer Attic Greek ἄγνωτος "unknown"), and -λογία, -logia.[4] More generally, the term also highlights the increasingly common condition where more knowledge of a subject leaves one more uncertain than before.

A prime example of the deliberate production of ignorance cited by Proctor is the tobacco industry's conspiracy to manufacture doubt about the cancer risks of tobacco use. Under the banner of science, the industry produced research about everything except tobacco hazards to exploit public uncertainty.[4][5] Some of the root causes for culturally-induced ignorance are media neglect, corporate or governmental secrecy and suppression, document destruction, and myriad forms of inherent or avoidable culturopolitical selectivity, inattention, and forgetfulness.[6]

or as Jerry said

you aint going to learn
what you dont want to know

[Marco1]

But doesn't that make you the horse's ass...

If you attempted to put that sentence into Spanish, you get 10 points for bravery. Clearly not an easy task.

A horse's ass is a jackass who's job is to produce mules with a mare. I am not sure how it got down to become a symbol of scumbag, but you can clearly not translate that and must use an equivalent expression. The fact that your English version starts with 'but' does not help. Bad English would turn into worst Spanish for sure.

Best to use local expressions in local lingo.
"Tienes razón, yo soy un burro" would be one way.

another....
" Si es que a burro no me gana nadie "

or perhaps...
Que burrada!

Only kidding....

[Marco1]

Agnotology, formerly agnatology, is a neologism for the study of culturally-induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data. The term was coined by Robert N. Proctor,[1][2] a Stanford University professor specializing in the history of science and technology.[3] Its name derives from the Neoclassical Greek word ἄγνωσις, agnōsis, "not knowing" (confer Attic Greek ἄγνωτος "unknown"), and -λογία, -logia.[4] More generally, the term also highlights the increasingly common condition where more knowledge of a subject leaves one more uncertain than before.

A prime example of the deliberate production of ignorance cited by Proctor is the tobacco industry's conspiracy to manufacture doubt about the cancer risks of tobacco use. Under the banner of science, the industry produced research about everything except tobacco hazards to exploit public uncertainty.[4][5] Some of the root causes for culturally-induced ignorance are media neglect, corporate or governmental secrecy and suppression, document destruction, and myriad forms of inherent or avoidable culturopolitical selectivity, inattention, and forgetfulness.[6]

Boston, I understand that the person who originally posted that snippet, intended to target the sceptics' camp. However after reading it again, don't you think it actually describes the actions of government institutions and global warming alarmist to a t?

the study of culturally-induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data.

Under the banner of science, the industry produced research about everything except tobacco hazards to exploit public uncertainty.

Some of the root causes for culturally-induced ignorance are media neglect, corporate or governmental secrecy and suppression, document destruction, and myriad forms of inherent or avoidable culturopolitical selectivity, inattention, and forgetfulness.

[Boston]

My Spaniard friends seldom if ever swear, my Mexican friends swear with a passion but its all pretty basic. kinda leaves a gap in my language skills which I suppose starts with my English. I guess I should have just stuck with French but after 40 or so years without it I cant even really say I know that language anymore either.

I am a man without a country

oh well
waving a beer at someone usually says it all



apparently this girl is a porn star
imagine that eh

I wonder how she feels about global warming

[Zed]

Originally Posted by Boston

My Spaniard friends seldom if ever swear, my Mexican friends swear with a passion but its all pretty basic. kinda leaves a gap in my language skills which I suppose starts with my English. I guess I should have just stuck with French but after 40 or so years without it I cant even really say I know that language anymore either.

I am a man without a country

oh well
waving a beer at someone usually says it all



apparently this girl is a porn star
imagine that eh

I wonder how she feels about global warming

Say...

fo-toe-shhh-opp.

Shes about as real as 'global warming'!

whoops I thought that was the term the mentally lacking media use?