What Do We Think About Climate Change

The only '"crazy theory" out there is that any minor greenhouse gas can leverage its greenhouse potential to become, in effect, the regulator of the temperature of the entire planetary atmosphere. This implies that the climatic system is an unstable equilibrium (something virtually NEVER SEEN in nature), and that we have just been very lucky all these years that so fickle a quantity as minor greenhouse gas concentration has never run away before.

Makes you wanna thank God or someone

But don't worry; there's a big authoritarian government solution to the whole 'problem' if we can just convince everyone that it exists.

Jimbo

 

?

he who knows all is always baffled by this little jewel

 

I don't know why you would be baffled, as all your favorite climate alarm
gurus have been saying this for many years now, unless of course you are actually unaware of what your camp says. Hmmm....

So we have yet another thing that you apparently don't know with respect to what your camp has been saying for years

It's just like when you apparently were unaware that your camp also admits that CO2 by itself is relatively unimportant as a greenhouse gas. (You thought that it was important, and set out to prove it )

Silly boy; it's only important if it can change the amount of water vapor up there


Look what your heroes are saying about unstable equilibrium and climate:

http://robertghansen.blogspot.com/2006_08_01_archive.html

http://www.physics.nmt.edu/~raymond/classes/ph332/notes/energyflows/energyflows.pdf

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/refs/Safari_Scrapbook2/Rapid Climate Change.html


I'm beginning t think I can argure your position better than you can; if only I was a "true believer", like you



Jimbo

 

Jimbo, the problem seems to be that your explanation is morphing as we go along. That's OK, of course, only dumb asses hold to ideas proven wrong. But look at your explanation quoted above, then look at your more recent explanation about four posts up where you are talking (I think) about differential cloud dispersal (from what mechanism?) giving rise to differential albedo? Which is in a negative feedback relationship to global warming? Do you see why I might be confused by this?

What say we give this another try. Let me pose the question once again. By what physical mechanisms are you claiming that an increase in CO2 (did we agree that it's increasing?) which is well established as a greenhouse gas for the simple reason that you can easily demonstrate this effect in a laboratory, does NOT result in global warming. Or is it that you don't think that all this CO2 which you can measure with instruments and is turning the oceans acid really exists? At this point I've lost track of what you are trying to say. Really!

I really think that if we can just stick to the evidence as presented by whomever, and known and well established physics, we can get this thread finished!

Oh, and who gets the promotion to "He who knows all?" It sounds useful!

BillyDoc

 

From Sunday's speakers:

"The first Plenary Address was given by President Vaclav Klaus, who is President of both the Czech Republic and (for a 6 month current term) the European Union. His talk was greeted, both before and after, with standing ovations.

In response to a question, he reported a just-released Czech poll, which shows that only 11% of persons questioned in a recent poll believe that man has a significant influence in warming the global climate.

The President commenced his talk by commenting that little change had occurred in the global warming debate since his talk, 12 months earlier, at the Heartland-1 conference. He likened the situation to his former experience under communist government, where arguing against the dominant viewpoint falls into emptiness. No matter how high the quality of the arguments and evidence that you advance against the dangerous warming idea, nobody listens, and by even advancing skeptical arguments you are dismissed as a naïve and uninformed person."

.....................................

"Dr Lindzen started by making the important observation that being skeptical about dangerous human-caused global warming does not make one a good scientist, and nor does endorsing global warming necessarily make one a bad scientist.

He then pointed out the professional difficulties that are raised for many skeptics when scientists whose research they respect nonetheless endorse global warming. In most such cases, however, the science that such persons do is not about global warming in the strict sense. It’s just that supporting global warming makes their life, and especially their funding life, easier.

Thus, it is a particular problem for young scientists to oppose the prevailing alarmist orthodoxy, because to do so is to cruel their chances of receiving research funding. For as long as it is the AGW spin that attracts the research funds, for so long will there be a strong disincentive for most scientists to question the hypothesis in public.

Lindzen commented that the politicization of the AGW issue has had an extraordinarily corrupting influence on science. Most funding that goes to global warming would not be provided were it not for the climate scare. It has therefore become standard to include in any research proposal the effect of presumed AGW on your topic, quite irrespective of whether it has any real relevance or not"

...............................

 

If the scientific community were convinced that we could reliably forecast future climates, or that the consequences of some warming would be catastrophic, then perhaps no price would be too high to pay to save the Earth. But that is not what the scientific community is telling us. According to the most recent international poll of climate scientists,

Most climate scientists believe global warming “is a process already underway.”

But that “consensus” drops to below 60 percent when climate scientists are asked if “climate change is mostly the result of anthropogenic causes.”

65 percent of climate scientists do not believe “climate models can accurately predict climate conditions in the future.”

68 percent do not believe “the current state of scientific knowledge is able to provide reasonable predictions of climatic variability on time scales of ten years.”

73 percent do not believe it is possible to predict climate “on time scales of 100 years.”

About 70 percent of climate scientists think “climate change might have some positive effects for some societies.”

Finally, on the question that might matter the most, climate scientists are perfectly split over the question of whether they know enough about global warming to turn it over to policymakers to take action, with 44 percent saying we do and 46 percent saying we do not.

 

Guillermo, could you please post a source for these data?

Thanks,

BillyDoc

 

Hey Boston, you're going to love this guy!
Ian R. Plimer Ph.D. is an Australian geologist and academic. He is a prominent critic of creationism and of the theory of human-induced global warming. He has published over 120 academic papers and six books.

I think you'll find interesting his presentation:

http://www.sydneyminingclub.org/presentations/2008/november/plimer/player.html

I love the very last slide....

Cheers

 

The same place where Boston found his 97%.....

Cheers.

 

I cannot resit the temptation of posting the text of the last slide of Plimer's presentation:

"It's easy to stop climate change, all we have to do is:

- STOP bacteria doing what bacteria do
- STOP ocean currents changing
- STOP plates tectonics and continent moving
- STOP orbital changes to Earth
- STOP variations in energy released from Sun
- STOP orbit of Solar system in galaxy
- STOP supernoval eruptions
(*)

When we've stopped these natural processes, if human-induced then:
PERSUADE China and India to stay poor"

Wonderful, excellent, delicious....I have not enough adjectives....

(*)I'd add one more:
- STOP the jovian cycles.

Cheers and good night.
See you tomorrow.

 

Hi Guillermo, Boston got his 97% here:

Are you SURE yours came from the same source? (originally in post 2100 on page 140)

BillyDoc

 

Billy,

Let's get something straight: CO2 is a 'greenhouse' gas in our atmosphere, and that being the case, can be expected to cause some greenhouse warming in accord with it's physical characteristics (as a greenhouse agent) and in proportion to its prevalence in the atmosphere, logarithmically weighted, as the Beer-Lambert equation dictates.

When you do the math subject to the above conditions, you cannot conclude anything but that CO2 is only a minor greenhouse gas, and that a doubling of CO2 from ~280ppm to ~560 ppm will result in a warming effect of about .6C. As a percentage, CO2 is responsible for something like ~3.5% of the total greenhouse effect. CO2 is believed to have been at 280ppm at around the turn of the 20th century, and has increased to about 380ppm. (Though it's not often mentioned, scientists can reliably attribute about 70ppm of that increase to natural sources, with the remaining ~30ppm reliably attributed to anthropogenic sources.)

But this is not what the 'warmer' camp says will happen. They claim that there is a strong positive feedback between CO2 concentration and water vapor concentration. This is important because unlike CO2, water vapor is the Big Cheese of the greenhouse gases, responsible for about 95% of the greenhouse effect. So if this sort feedback does exist, then CO2 is not responsible for ~3.5% of the greenhouse effect, an insignificant amount, but rather something more like 25% of the total greenhouse effect, which would be quite significant.

So here we are, back to the basic problem with the AGW via CO2 theory: You can't get any alarming amount of greenhouse heating with CO2 acting alone. Especially not with a doubling from 280ppm to 560ppm; the math is just not there. So the warmers insist that when an additional greenhouse gas (like CO2, but could be any greenhouse gas, or any other heating source for that matter) is added to the atmosphere, the resulting heating causes more oceanic evaporation, which (assuming that water vapor then dwells in the atmosphere) causes more heating.

What 'skeptic' Scientists like Lindzen, Christy, Balliunas, Spencer and others are asserting is that the concentration of water vapor in the atmosphere is subject to its own set of strong negative feedback mechanisms connected with cloud formation, and that this mechanism works as I've outlined about six times during this thread so far.

My explanation has not 'morphed' as you've said, it has just become more detailed, because that is what you specifically asked for. I'm not going to get any more detailed than I have already, since the presentations by the authoring scientists have been posted to the thread, and these guys do a much better job of explaining the mechanism than I ever could. If you are really interested in learning more about it, then simply watch the presentations.

I can promise you that no physical laws are harmed in any way during the making of these presentations

Jimbo

 

Guillermo,

Thanks for posting The Plimer presentation!
Very informative! He even used some of the same graphs that Boston posted

Jimbo

 

Thomas,

If you're still following this crazy thread, go right to frame 68 in the Plimer presentation! It's a real eye-opener!

Jimbo

 

Hello Jim-

Bit busy of late so have not weighed in ......

Saw dust is piling up and I am happy to have a build going.