Global Warming a fake?

[C1ay]

I want to discuss the question, "Global Warming a fake?" Is anyone else willing to present any arguments or information?

 

Global warming is real. Archeological climate history shows the planet has historically been warmer than it is now and that we are on a warming trend back to tropical temperatures.The only debate here is on man's contribution in accelerating that trend.

[REASON]

The only debate here is on man's contribution in accelerating that trend.

 

This is correct. And from my point of view, just saying that it has been warmer in the past is not scientific enough. Sceince is used to try and understand the processes and causes, not just to identify the effects. There is, and always has been, a cause for climatic changes. If we are willing to agree that warming is occurring, then from a scientific point of view, we have to agree that something, or a bunch of things together, is causing it to occur. And as it currently stands, there is no alternative scientific explanation that can supplant human borne carbon emmissions promoting an enhanced greenhouse effect as the cause. As I've stated before, the evidence is all around us.

 

We just have to be willing to take responsibility for our actions. I believe whether we do so or not, there will be a price to be paid. So now it becomes about how to minimize the costs.

[C1ay]

There is, and always has been, a cause for climatic changes. If we are willing to agree that warming is occurring, then from a scientific point of view, we have to agree that something, or a bunch of things together, is causing it to occur. And as it currently stands, there is no alternative scientific explanation that can supplant human borne carbon emmissions promoting an enhanced greenhouse effect as the cause.

 

Greenhouses gases may contribute but the amount to which man made gases contribute is something hard to segregate from other causes. Climate history seem to indicate that the planet is naturally a warmer place than it is now, tropical the world over. That we are simply recovering from the last ice age. In a tropical world much more of the water would be in the atmosphere as water vapor which is even more of a greenhouse gas than CO2, methane or CFCs. This is a natural greenhouse gas that will increase as the planet naturally warms back to it's historical nominal temperature. I doubt we will ever be able to conclusively separate the effect of man's gases from water vapor to have a definitive measure of our impact.

 

Aside from that though we do know that many of the gases we contribute to the atmosphere are poisonous to biological life as a whole including ourselves. For the sake of a cleaner environment it should be obvious that we need to do better on being cleaner. I wonder sometimes just how much rubbish people think we can put in the garden without affecting the tomatoes they grow there.

[REASON]

Greenhouses gases may contribute but the amount to which man made gases contribute is something hard to segregate from other causes. Climate history seem to indicate that the planet is naturally a warmer place than it is now, tropical the world over. That we are simply recovering from the last ice age. In a tropical world much more of the water would be in the atmosphere as water vapor which is even more of a greenhouse gas than CO2, methane or CFCs. This is a natural greenhouse gas that will increase as the planet naturally warms back to it's historical nominal temperature. I doubt we will ever be able to conclusively separate the effect of man's gases from water vapor to have a definitive measure of our impact.

 

These are good points and I would agree with you except that my understanding is that the concern surrounds the rate of increase. Where the natural warming cycle takes place over millennia, our current warming trends are accellerating within the span of a century or two suggesting additional input into the system.

 

I guess I just have a hard time imagining that there would be such concern within the scientific community if what we are experiencing is following a normal historical progression. Sudden dramatic environmental changes can prove devastating to animal and plant life if for no other reason than they don't have enough time to adapt to the changing conditions. While a few hundred years may seem like a long time compared to our lifetimes, it's the blink of an eye in terms of climatic cycles.

 

 

Aside from that though we do know that many of the gases we contribute to the atmosphere are poisonous to biological life as a whole including ourselves. For the sake of a cleaner environment it should be obvious that we need to do better on being cleaner. I wonder sometimes just how much rubbish people think we can put in the garden without affecting the tomatoes they grow there.

 

I absolutely agree.

[C1ay]

These are good points and I would agree with you except that my understanding is that the concern surrounds the rate of increase. Where the natural warming cycle takes place over millennia, our current warming trends are accellerating within the span of a century or two suggesting additional input into the system.

 

And what hard sample points do we really have regarding past warming cycles? Readings we have deduced from fossil records? That fact is that we have no calibrated samples to go by so our current deductions are really nothing more than educated speculation and that's not science. Without the data to support real science on the issue I think we would be better off trying to sell the idea of erring on the side of caution. We can't say to what degree man is helping to accelerate warming but convincing people that maybe, just maybe , the possibility exists that we are bringing our descendants future harm should be enough for the responsible people among us to act accordingly for their future. I don't think anyone could successfully argue in favor of continued pollution and that should be enough for us to act on.

[DFINITLYDISTRUBD]

p.s. To be clear, DD, you're quoting my post (critique of 3-line graph from chrisrich, post #157/160)

uncitable graph, post #157, from page 15,

not quoting about the p.16 graph I repeated immediately "above" your post here, right?

Last edited by Essay; 16 Hours Ago at 01:26 AM.. Reason: add p.s.

right

[Essay]

Hmmm.... I think that should have been pages 16 and 17 (posts 157 & 169), but whatever....

 

I like that single line graph that tracks temperatures for the past 10,000 years -since the end of the last glaciation- showing how temperatures generally fall slowly (after the initial rapid warm-up that ends the glacial mode) until it is cold enough for another glaciation to begin again.

....Same pattern as in the Vostok record also, I think.

 

So I guess it's a myth that global warming is just "ice-age abatement," or the "natural warming" that "must obviously" follow an "ice age."

[BrianG]

Global warming is real. Archeological climate history shows the planet has historically been warmer than it is now and that we are on a warming trend back to tropical temperatures.The only debate here is on man's contribution in accelerating that trend.

 

Is the climate warming? Sure, we are in an interglacial period, but over the long run, what is the overall climate trend? Hasn’t the Earth been cooling since it condensed out of incandescent gas? Slowly over more than four billion years the Earth’s crust hardens and thickens. Life evolved, first in the oceans for protection from the heat, feathers and fur are a recent evolutionary adaptation to overall cooling.

[Michaelangelica]

Y

There is enough truth in the graph (as two valid, yet unrelated plots) that it could easily trick anyone who is trying to learn "the truth" about global warming. After all, it'd be real nice to have a scale that converts CO2(ppmv) directly into temperature, as that graph seems to manage.

 

Please don't propagate that composite, misleading (bogus) graph around to any sites that aren't science or math oriented. It looks good enough to be taken as valid by media outlets or any generally well-educated people browsing the web; but it's intentionally (imho) misleading.

I found the graph on this blog with a dubious interpretation and? attribution

The following graph comes from a website titled Friends of Science, here.

The graph shows that surface atmospheric temperature correlates closely with "sunspot cycle length", and not with increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.

 

This supports the observations that warming causes carbon dioxide levels to increase, not the other way around. The data for this graph needs to be carefully documented and verified. Can anyone do this?

Peter

 

 

 

Above graph after Friis-Christensen & Lassen - 1991, [science 254, #5032] adapted by Dr. Tim Patterson.

Pete'sPlace: August 2007

 

Reminds me of the frightening graph my stats teacher used to show about the amazingly high correlation between the number of fireman at a fire and the intensity of the fire. An incredibly high correlation.

[lemit]

I'm curious about something that I seem to recall seeing in various data sets I've tried to untangle and have gleaned mostly confusion from.

 

Have there been other events that matched the timeline of the Little Ice Age? Have there been other events that matched the timeline of the Medieval Warming Period? Have there been other events that matched the combination of the two? If not, why not?

 

(That last question is for extra credit--up to 15% of your total grade.)

 

Thanks.

 

--lemit

 

p.s. All of you know I have trouble with Math. How much is 15% of zero?

[Michaelangelica]

Don't do sums.

 

 

That is a graph that correlates very highly with my age.

So if you can get me to be younger . . ?

[BrianG]

How are these historical emission audits done?

[Buffy]

Is the climate warming? Sure, we are in an interglacial period, but over the long run, what is the overall climate trend? Hasn’t the Earth been cooling since it condensed out of incandescent gas? Slowly over more than four billion years the Earth’s crust hardens and thickens. Life evolved, first in the oceans for protection from the heat, feathers and fur are a recent evolutionary adaptation to overall cooling.

It's good for you to go through this intellectual exercise in statistics, because that's where a lot of the misinformation that's been bandied about comes from. This particular point is very true, and completely misleading.

 

It's exactly equivalent to John Maynard Keynes quote: "The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead."

 

It's probably a safe prediction to say that the earth 4 billion years from now will be cooler than it was 4 billion years ago, but that has no relevance whatsoever as to what it will be in 50, 100 or 10,000 years because the statistical variation in effects over the different timescales is subject to completely different sets of causes, and "long term solar system loss of energy" is negligible over those shorter timescales.

 

Does that make sense?

 

Now the gist of your argument so far is that you've been advocating the position that the world is actually cooling, and as C1ay said, there's really no disputable evidence of that. As was pointed out earlier by several people, some of the evidence you have presented to support this argument has been falsified.

 

Something that has come up in past threads on this argument but not in this thread is the fact that some people who analyze the cycles of the various inputs that naturally take us over time from glacial to tropical climates world wide, have shown that we actually should be heading into a glacial period, and that turns out to be one of the arguments supporting the notion that the current period of global warming is man-made.

 

If we should be cooling off, and we're warming up, man's contribution is actually much more severe than we expect.

 

And possibly this also means that a modest amount of work to ameliorate the affect we have on the climate will actually have a significant effect toward minimizing the extremely rapid move from "normal."

 

It's important to repeat what C1ay said earlier: there's no question we're getting warmer, the only debate is about a) the relative contribution of the sources (thus look at what I mention here about cycles), and :eek_big: what we should do about it.

 

Saying "there is no warming" is merely fooling one's self with intellectual dishonesty, although I'll admit that intellectual dishonesty about everything scientific has become a very popular--but quite disturbing--trend among political conservatives.

 

That's why before you believe anyone, you might want to first "follow the money" and figure out what financial incentives some folks may have for trying to get the less-scientific folks to think that there is no warming.

 

If you don't think there's a lot of short-term (i.e. the current quarter's financial results), very expensive public relations going on here (and in other debates), you're not paying attention.

 

The real distinction is between those who adapt their purposes to reality and those who seek to mold reality in the light of their purposes, :thumbs_up

Buffy

[BrianG]

...Saying "there is no warming" is merely fooling one's self with intellectual dishonesty, although I'll admit that intellectual dishonesty about everything scientific has become a very popular--but quite disturbing--trend among political conservatives.

 

That's why before you believe anyone, you might want to first "follow the money" and figure out what financial incentives some folks may have for trying to get the less-scientific folks to think that there is no warming.

 

If you don't think there's a lot of short-term (i.e. the current quarter's financial results), very expensive public relations going on here (and in other debates), you're not paying attention.

 

The real distinction is between those who adapt their purposes to reality and those who seek to mold reality in the light of their purposes, :thumbs_up

Buffy

 

I find intellectual dishonesty disturbing even when it comes from liberals.

 

Isn't there significant significant financial incentives on the climate change mitigation side of the debate too? Sure, I use fossil fuel products every day, and I have a direct financial interest in low prices. On the other side, we are already spending billions on conservation, alternate energy and energy saving buildings, ethanol and CFL bulb mandates, there's plenty of money to follow in this issue, it's not all on one side or the other.

 

I'm skeptical of climate forecasts, the atmosphere is the biggest thing on Earth. Add in the oceans and ice and we have an enormously complex, chaotic system for moving heat from sunlight. This isn't about molding reality, its about finding out what's going on.

[Buffy]

I find intellectual dishonesty disturbing even when it comes from liberals.

 

Isn't there significant significant financial incentives on the climate change mitigation side of the debate too?

That's right, and I encourage you to follow *all* of it. Simply dismissing this argument as pedantic intellectual dishonesty is, well, intellectually dishonest!

 

If you want to really follow the money here, take a look at the *relative amounts* of money spent by the various parties involved. Do you think they're all equal? And what are the motives? Ask C1ay's question about what the different benefits are that people are really going to end up with in following these various paths. When thought through, are they all really reasonable?

 

Part of the reason so many of your arguments have been hit with derision here is that they're past being proven, and you're beating dead horses. When you attack even people like C1ay who do question whether the impact is man-made, it makes it clear that a little bit more thinking on your part is called for.

 

I'm not telling you how to think, just pointing out that people's perceptions of your arguments are not as out of line as you'd like to think, and doing a bit more homework might prevent further embarrassment.

 

You do not need to be a librul, tree-huggin' climate change freak in order to see that Climategate is an organized and well-financed PR campaign and you may be an unknowing and unwilling participant in the process.

 

Are you sure you're not? If you do, then you might have picked some of the *other* points in my post, rather than simply ignoring them, because that's where the *real* arguments lie.

 

If you want to be skeptical about sources of data, all I argue is that you don't just cherry pick the data in the same way you accuse others of doing.

 

You'll notice in this thread that the initial reaction to the news from the scientific types here was one of openness to the inquiry, but when we all looked at it, it wasn't very impressive. On the other hand, you've pretty much spouted the party line from the Climategate promoters and have continued to ignore requests asking you to tie specific quotes to something actually nefarious that's not otherwise pretty easy to explain when the quotes are taken in context.

 

If you're going to be intellectually honest here, you need to engage in that part of the debate, and start to question your own--obviously unquestioned--sources of analysis of the whole affair.

 

I'm not asking you to stop questioning, I'm asking you to do something harder: start questioning even the stuff you'd prefer to believe.

 

That's especially important if the stuff you're arguing isn't actually true, and is simply a self-serving "big lie." It can be less embarrassing.

 

The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the Nation’s greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable, especially when that questioning is disinterested, for they determine whether we use power or power uses us, :thumbs_up

Buffy

[BrianG]

...

If you want to be skeptical about sources of data, all I argue is that you don't just cherry pick the data in the same way you accuse others of doing...

 

I don't believe I've accused anyone of cherry picking data, would you please provide a citation so I can improve my discourse?

 

There is massive government spending on the climate change mitigation side of the debate, check this out: Climate Money: The Climate Industry: $79 billion so far – trillions to come

[CraigD]

Is the climate warming?

Though it’s a bad idea, I think, to use “climate” as a synonym for such terms as “global average temperature”, because many factors, not just temperature, are important to the measurement of climate, I think Brian’s using it in this sense in his post, so will answer the question “is the global average temperature increasing?”

 

According to direct measurement using thermometers, which have been available in adequate quantity and quality since around 1860, and by satellite, which have been available since 1979, global average temperature has been increasing.

 

Detailed data supporting this is available from many free public sources, such as Data @ NASA GISS: GISS Surface Temperature Analysis: Station Data. As it’s technically complicated and time consuming to calculate average global temperatures from this data, I recommend a source of calculate averages, such as http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts.txt

Sure, we are in an interglacial period, but over the long run, what is the overall climate trend?

As regards the total amount of heat in the Earth’s water and atmosphere, it is significantly warming.

 

This is simply data that can’t be rationally denied by anyone who believes that thermometers measure temperature.

Hasn’t the Earth been cooling since it condensed out of incandescent gas?

According to the best accepted present day theory of the formation of the Solar System, the Earth and other inner planets did not condense out of incandescent gas, but through the accretion of increasingly larger cool particles of the same protostellar nebula from which the Sun formed.

 

Brian, I suspect you’re the victim of an out-of-date science education, in the form of the theory that the planets were ejected by the Sun. Because of then unsolved problems with the presently accepted “nebular hypothesis” (also known as the “Laplacian model”), the theory that the mater that formed the planets was ejected by the Sun when it was perturbed by a close pass of another star became popular in the early 20th century (notably as articulated by Chamberlin, Moulton, and Jeans), and was widely taught in school science classes through the 1970s. Not until the early 1980s, as large and high speed computers sufficient to test numeric simulations of hypothetical models became available, were gross mechanical problems of the nebular hypothesis solved enough for it to become almost completely accepted.

 

M.M.Wolfson’s 1991 The Solar System – Its Origin and Evolution gives a readable if somewhat lengthy and dated overview of the history of theories of the formation of the Solar System.

Slowly over more than four billion years the Earth’s crust hardens and thickens.

The Earth’s history is theorized to be much more interesting and varied than this, involving not only beginnings as a molten mass, but a giant impact ejecting material found on the Moon, and a couple of long (10+ million year) periods in which it was very cold, possibly with deep ice layers over its entire surface.

 

This history is presented in many texts, videos, and websites, including the wikipedia article “history of the Earth”

Life evolved, first in the oceans for protection from the heat, feathers and fur are a recent evolutionary adaptation to overall cooling.

Life existed for billions of years when the Earth’s surface temperature was warmer, colder, and about the same, as today, yet is theorized to have appeared on land only after existing in the oceans for about 1.4 billion years.

 

According to best theory, there are 2 major reasons for this. First, it was necessary for life to evolve to physical forms that could survive without the structural support and water. Second, the atmosphere had to accumulate sufficient oxygen for ozone ([ce]O3[/ce]) molecules to absorb enough ultraviolet light that early life forms could avoid fatal sunburn without the protection of a covering of water.

 

To summarize, characterizing the temperature of the Earth on long time scales as a steadily cooling isn’t accurate. However, best theory states with high certainty that the long term future of the Earth will be one of steady heating, due to the steady increase in luminosity of the Sun. In about 2 billion years, they predict that Earth will have no remaining liquid water on its surface and a temperature of about 70 °C. About 3 billion years after that, they predict that the Earth will be either rendered molten by or consumed by the then giant Sun. (see wikipedia article “future of the Earth”).