What Do We Think About Climate Change

[Jimbo1490]

Thomas,

Yeah, I know it was 'covered' the same way that the lack of causality 'tween rising CO2 and rising temps is 'covered' on realclimate.org; with obfuscations that don't satisfy anyone but believers. As I pointed out, when you look at their response in detail, they are still falling back on the old argument, which means that the causality issue really is a problem that is not being addressed. The basic answer is they don't know but are willing to bet. Fence sitters should note that they have lost each and every one of the previous 'bets'.

The one 'test case' we can look to for a reliable 'micro time' (in geological terms) examination of the causality is the 20th century. If CO2 causes temps to rise on those elusive "smaller time scales" mentioned at realclimate.org, then surely we should be able to see such warming in the 20th century temp record. And we don't need no stinkin proxies to get the temps, just historical weather data

But when we do look, we don't see a warming trend; not one in the right place. Now the AGW crowd introduces a further obfuscation here, stating that this must be because of a 'masking effect' from something else that caused a cooling event that lasted the next 40 years, which not only canceled out the supposed warming, but even counteracted it, causing a net cooling event. The usual suspect the AGW guys point to is volcanic sulphate aerosols.

This particular obfuscation is so BoOoOoO-gus, that I think even Boston might be able to see through it (OK well maybe not him ) but I think you'll be able to. Volcanic aerosols last a couple of years in the atmosphere, max. We've got plenty of data that confirms this, both direct observation in the 20th century and from ice/dirt cores of past events. Additionally, the hemisphere where the eruption in question occurs gets cooler. Think of it as a very large scale local event. This skews the global temp down, which is what the AGW crowd claims happened from ~1940-~1980.

The problem is, the hemisphere with the eruptions warmed (slightly) instead of cooled! It was the other hemisphere which cooled drastically, despite being the hemisphere with most of the new anthropogenic CO2! And no place in history, ever, never ever, has the sulphate aerosols from an eruption caused a 40 year long cooling event. The whole thing is just BOGUS!

So you are with Mann in eliminating the LIA, diminishing the MWP and all the rest, despite literally HUNDREDS of multi-proxy recons which state otherwise? Keep in mind that if ONE SINGLE PROXY DATA SET is excluded from MBH-98 (the famous bristlecone pines ) then NO net warming is evident. So the whole thing boils down to ONE SINGLE proxy data set! If you still concur, then you are biased, not at all open-minded as you claim, because the MBH-98 is, objectively speaking, a demonstrably flawed, weak recon which was rightly discredited.

Don't be misled by these people at NASA; they are NOT objective!

The oceans can be either a net carbon sink or a source, depending on the ocean's temp. A warmer ocean is a source, which is where we are now.

Remember about carbon emissions that it still all about context. The context for anthropogenic carbon is an atmosphere that 'trades' amounts of carbon at least two orders of magnitude larger than our releases. It makes sense still to look to the source/flux balance as the source of increasing atmospheric CO2. That balance is largely a function of ocean temperature, which is rising recently.


Thomas, that's probably NOT the final word on MBH-98. Another report that came to a different conclusion, more supported in the facts:

http://republicans.energycommerce.ho...man_Report.pdf


There's also a summary or 'fact sheet here:

http://republicans.energycommerce.ho...fact_sheet.pdf


Excerpted:


‘It is important to note the isolation of the paleoclimate community; even though
they rely heavily on statistical methods they do not seem to be interacting with
the statistical community. Additionally, we judge that the sharing of research
materials, data and results was haphazardly and grudgingly done. In this case
we judge that there was too much reliance on peer review, which was not
necessarily independent. Moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that
this community can hardly reassess their public positions without losing
credibility. Overall, our committee believes that Dr. Mann’s assessments that the
decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the millennium and that 1998 was
the hottest year of the millennium cannot be supported by his analysis.’
– Excerpt from Wegman report


Jimbo

[Jimbo1490]

millions of gigatons

Wikipedia lists worldwide CO2 emissions at 27,245,758 metric tons annually. This is 27 gigatons, NOT millions of gigatons.

Jimbo

[masalai]

"we owe our lives to the Americans who voted Obama." and don't anyone forget that fact....

[Boston]

Wikipedia lists worldwide CO2 emissions at 27,245,758 metric tons annually. This is 27 gigatons, NOT millions of gigatons.

we are not talking just co2 when considering human contributions to the atmospheric chemistry though are we
and no I didnt exaggerate I did however make a mistake
I meant millions of tons
this forum is hardly reviewed nor edited sooooooo have a field day if you feel the need
it actually feels nice being able to admit ones errors
you should give it a try some time

any one else familiar with the first law of thermodynamics or the conservation of mass
remember eons ago in school when you burned something in a closed test tube and it seemed to disappear
but the tubes still weighed the same

now I ask you
how many tons of oil do we burn through in a year

4,602,592,038 short tons
82.59 million barrels a day
138.8 kg pr barrel
365 days
4,184,174.58 million kg of crap we spew into the air we breath in oil alone
or


lets consider coal
6,771 million short tons
considered in kg we have
1,606,624.1745 million kg that gets mostly converted to various waist gasses during combustion and shat into the atmosphere

one short or us ton is 907 kg

Im not going to bother with the rest of this but you get the picture
if you want to consider wood or dung or natural gass next you are welcome to
but I think Ive made the point

we are spewing a lot more than just co2 into the air we breath and there is no way its not having an effect

[Guillermo]

Originally Posted by Jimbo1490

http://republicans.energycommerce.ho...man_Report.pdf

Demolishing.....

Cheers.

[Guillermo]

About sea level changes:

"At best, the determination and attribution of globalmean
sea level change lies at the very edge of knowledge
and technology. The most urgent job would appear
to be the accurate determination of the smallest
temperature and salinity changes that can be determined
with statistical significance, given the realities of
both the observation base and modeling approximations.
Both systematic and random errors are of concern,
the former particularly, because of the changes in
technology and sampling methods over the many decades,
the latter from the very great spatial and temporal
variability implied by Figs. 2, 6, and 8. It remains
possible that the database is insufficient to compute
mean sea level trends with the accuracy necessary to
discuss the impact of global warming—as disappointing
as this conclusion may be. The priority has to be to
make such calculations possible in the future."

WUNSCH ET AL . 15 DECEMBER 2007
American Meteorological Society
http://ocean.mit.edu/~cwunsch/papers..._published.pdf

Cheers.

[Jimbo1490]

Most of those other things cause atmospheric cooling (maybe, depending on who you ask ) Anyway, you exaggerate the amount of CO2, which is the subject of the discussion. Why not, though? You exaggerate the climate's sensitivity to CO2, why not exaggerate the amount, too. Makes it all so much more scary looking.

We've really not made much of a dent in the greenhouse effect one way or the other, that's all about water vapor; you know, the stuff essentially ignored in the big WG-1 report.

By most accounts, the air in the developed nations is pretty clean. It was much dirtier 100 years ago. Yes, there are still 'hot spots' but for the most part the air in the industrialized world is on the mend.

It might shock you to learn that worldwide,most air pollution is natural in origin. Yep, completely natural. If we stopped emitting tomorrow, there'd still be those darn 'background levels', in other words, natural pollution levels. As an example, a single Mexican volcano, the Popocatepetl volcano, was observed to emit about 250,000 metric tons of fine particulates (not too different from our coal soot emissions) in a ONE MONTH period between Dec 2000 and Jan 2001. This was just a random month under study; there may have been months of exceptionally high output, we don't know. On ONE SINGLE DAY during that same month of study, a SO2 cloud of some 16,500 tons was observed. If you try in your mind to extrapolate that to all the active volcanoes in the world, you can easily see that what I'm saying is true; most air pollution is entirely natural. And Popocatepetl is not really a 'big' volcano, as big goes in volcanoes. The US alone has 65 active volcanoes.

The thing about volcanic pollution is that it happens around active volcanoes, where (USUALLY)hardly anybody lives; active volcanoes are bad neighbors, I hear The problem with anthropogenic pollution is that its produced right where people live, which makes us sick and shortens our lives

Note that the natural world around us already copes well with HUGE amounts of air pollution from volcanoes and forest fires, so our little bit more doesn't really harm the natural world, it harms US. The idea that we are somehow destroying the whole wide world with our little bit of soot and CO2 is absurd when you again consider the context. We need clean air so we can live in good health WHERE WE LIVE, not because we must 'save the world'. The 'save the world' mantra is just an example of 'sloganeering' to get people motivated. There's little reality behind it.

Jimbo

[Guillermo]

An intriging actor in climate change out of the talking:
"It appears that the tides are, surprisingly, an intricate part of the story of climate change, as is the history of the lunar orbit."
http://ocean.mit.edu/~cwunsch/papers...ate_nature.pdf

Cheers.

[Jimbo1490]

Excerpted from the above paper for which Guillermo provided the link:

"There cannot be a primarily convectively
driven circulation of any significance"

What? No such thing as a 'thermohaline' circulation? Then how can there be 'rapid climate change' from the stopping of same? I guess there can't

Oh, well. It's back to the lab for Pinky and the Brain

Jimbo

[Boston]

Most of those other things cause atmospheric cooling

another famous admission Jim ?
are you saying that the crap we spew into the atmosphere is having an effect
a "cooling" effect
sound like once again your caught with your foot in your mouth

you exaggerate the amount of CO2, which is the subject of the discussion.

wrong again Jim
the subject is global climate change

that, among your innumerable other misunderstandings is why you are incapable of comprehending the obvious

man is effecting the environment around him

lets start with a simple admission
97% agreement constitutes a consensus

once you can cross that hurdle then maybe we can go on

and no I didnt exaggerate, what I did was make a error
what I meant was millions of tons
I gotta say its a nice place to be when you can make mistake, admit it, and go on
you might think of trying it some time

after all
if your not making the occasional error
your probably just not willing to admit it

thrmohaline

[Frosty]

On the 22nd of December the Earth will have tilted to its max and will start to tilt back again, A slight jolt maybe felt by those on the equator as it reaches its full stop.

[Boston]

hey G
your beating a dead horse again brother
we have already given you that the sun is a significant mitigating factor in determining the weather and the place would be a lifeless rock without it

the tides have been mentioned eons ago in a previous post and yes they are another mitigating factor

as are humans obviously a mitigating factor

for instance
dioxon
there was a total of only about 13,100 kg of dioxin found released into the environment pr (1990) year according to an industry rag http://www.ejnet.org/dioxin/
decidedly unfriendly to the environmental movement

The total deposit of PCDD/PCDF to land was calculated to be 12,500±1,300 kg sum (not I-TEQ!) per year. No world wide data were available for deposits into the oceans, but limited data and non-detects in Antarctica points to remote area deposits which are approaching zero. The authors therefore add 610±1,500 kg sum TCDD/F for the deposition into oceans. That makes a total of 13,100±2,000 kg sum TCDD/F.

yet it has been determined that safe limits of dioxins are

In 1990 the WHO set a safe daily exposure level of 10 picogrammes per kilogram of body weight.

A picogramme is one millionth of a millionth of a gram. However, following further studies this was re-evaluated in 1998 to one to four picogrammes per day.

it was later determined that no safe limit of dioxin could be found
however

95-98% of total human exposure to dioxins is directly related to food consumption. The estimated average dietary exposure for consumers within the EU is currently in the range 1-3 pictogram (10-12g) toxicity equivalents per kilogram body weight per day (pg TEQ/kg body weight/day). This does not include dioxin-like PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), which are estimated to contribute roughly 50% of total dietary exposure measured as toxic equivalents (TEQs). If dioxin-like PCBs are taken into account, exposure could be in the range of 2-6 pg TEQ/kg body weight/day. It is recognised that, at these levels of background exposure, subtle health effects might occur in the general population.

now I chose dioxin because although it is a naturally occurring chemical it was not a chemical found in the food chain until the advent of its production by man and subsequent controls on same, Hays and Aylward (2003)
http://www.dioxinfacts.org/dioxin_he...oodsupply.html

the point being that although this man made influence on a naturally occurring compound did not have an effect on weather it does clearly show that man can pollute the environment to a detrimental degree with relatively minuscule amounts of pollutants

therefore proving that man is capable changing the chemistry of his environment on a global scale
(if that doesnt convince you we could talk about plastics)

if only a few thousand kg of a relatively rare chemical can find its way throughout the worlds food supply
how much more will say
4,184,174.58 million kg of oil fumes
or say
1,606,624.1745 million kg of coal fumes
and dont forget to add to that
2,000,000,000 cubic meters of wood burned every year
or the 2 trillion cubic feet of natural gas we burned last year
how much will all that monkey up the works

a more direct example would be that Utah was stealing rain from Wyoming
when they seeded clouds causing a drought in Wyoming
they got sued
and the court found and determined against Utah
as they had altered the naturally occurring patterns of the weather
http://www.weathermodification.org/JWM/vol39abs.htm
so it seems man can relatively easily alter things like rain patterns

the arguments thus far have all taken the tact of our incomplete understanding of any scientific theory
I could note the search for so called dark mater in response to our not fully understanding basic cosmology let alone the finer points
or our questions as to the basic structure of the sun
let alone pulsar's
I could mention the electric universe theory
or variable light speed theory
all are incomplete
as is relativity
special relativity and that most dubious of all theories
string theory
if you could get 97% of physicists to agree on anything it would go down in history as the day the world stood still

your welcome to believe whatever you chose
but when 97% of the researching scientists find themselves making the same conclusion
and its the opposite of yours
you might reevaluate your position

always a pleasure
B

[Knut Sand]

Originally Posted by Boston

How much more will say
4,184,174.58 million kg of oil fumes
or say
1,606,624.1745 million kg of coal fumes
and dont forget to add to that
2,000,000,000 cubic meters of wood burned every year
or the 2 trillion cubic feet of natural gas we burned last year
how much will all that monkey up the works

if you could get 97% of physicists to agree on anything it would go down in history as the day the world stood still

Hey Boston... In my absence you've done a good job trying to convince a few stubborn poeple here..... I'm pretty close to your opinion here, but not quite....

I do not quite agree with you on the 2 000 000 000 Cu m of wood, not quite... Normal trend is to burn old forest, normally new denser forests grow up, and new forests, if i recall correctly tend to be better to collect CO2 again, so, the total calculation for that again is probably somewhat better.

On oil/ coal fumes, I do not know where you have gatered those numbers, but that may well be correct. Are these numbers ALL gases related to burning of these fuels? CO2, NOX..? Do you have the CO2 release (from oil/coal) for one recent year, alone? (Just gathering info here...)

And:
if you could get 97% of physicists to agree on anything it would go down in history as the day the world stood still

Or the day I'd buy a ticket in the lottery..... Where 2 physicists are gathered, there's normally at least 4 opinions....

[Boston]

I was just alluding to the vast quantities of fuels burned and there overall conversions to the gaseous state
there was a lot of room for rebuttal given that nothing burns completely and yup, stuff grows back (sometimes)
but I think I got them pretty well hunkered down waiting out the storm
I dont suspect they will be admitting anything anytime soon though
course first thing Im going to drill home till something cracks is that 97% is not just a consensus
its a bloody miracle

I gave up on the analytical approach way back when when I could see that it was irrelevant to there opinions
even though they harp on and on about some dissenting study or another, always along with the same old questions
they seem stuck on things like Mann's graph and people like All Gore
nothing really new going on here since I gave up on em the first time
seems like whenever Ild have em on the ropes they would, rather than admit anything
pull some other rabbit out of there hat and start singing taa daa

so this time around I just stuck to the obvious
they start pointing at the sun as a source of climate change
and the obvious answer is "no **** Sherlock"
its all kinda of a no brainer
with the simple argument being the best
there are many mitigating factors governing climate
and human activity is one of em

hole silly thing just gives the readers a chance to see how ridiculous the detracting view is
and that its major contributors are the industry pseudoscientists with a few sour grapes thrown in
although Guillermo's use of Fairbridge's work from Mackey (2007) was bordering on brilliant
the distraction would have been endless had anyone been sucked into it
I am going to have to look up Mackey and find out what his affiliations are
that was one dense article and I suspect he's not an independent

nice to hear from you
it had been a while
hope all is well
B

[Jimbo1490]

Originally Posted by Boston

another famous admission Jim ?
are you saying that the crap we spew into the atmosphere is having an effect
a "cooling" effect
sound like once again your caught with your foot in your mouth

Dude, it's the AGW fools that say this, and this time they are saying it to lend some credibility the idea that rising CO2 drives temperatures upward, even though there's not even one case in history when this happened. But there is considerable evidence that this is NOT true; that soot and other black colored fine particles actually cause warming. It doesn't really matter either way, as the climate DID NOT warm during the time period in question, which time period is the ONE AND ONLY TEST CASE for whether increasing CO2 levels drive temperatures upward in the 'smaller times scales' mentioned at realclimate.org.

As I pointed out in my previous post, temperatures fell for the ~40 years after 'climatologically significant' (a term used by AGW leaners, not me) releases of CO2 began.

Originally Posted by Boston

lets start with a simple admission
97% agreement constitutes a consensus

Every time you mention this your stock goes down a bit. This is nothing more than an 'appeal to authority', which is one of the basic logical fallacies. Why not try to address the questions raised by the fact that rising CO2 levels have never caused rising temperatures The so-called 'rebuttal' from realclimate.org is severely wanting as it falls back on the old mantra, this time asserting that while the recons do not show the cause and effect relationship the AGW crowd expected, better (future?) recons will show that in 'smaller time scales' the 'expected' relationship will emerge. (At least that's what they are betting on. The 20th century historical weather data was no so generous )


Nothing else in your last rant was worth a response or comment, but I must compliment you on the new rant format; it is much more readable. (Now if you'd only use 'spellcheck' )

Jimbo