Which is itself based on some poor science.
One source (tree samplings) does not make a world trend.
There’s also this.
As well as this
I would disagree, as well as note that crippling our economy (which Kyoto may very well do) will result in worse envormental problems in the long run.
Keep in mind I am car free and still feel this way. Where is my vested insterest? If anything, I’d want fewer cars on the road. But I’m realistsic, not panic-prone.
Okay, so you asked me whether Science was a fringe magazine and when I pointed out that you had posted fairly selectively from a 6-year old article to make your case and gave you more recent links to editorials by the Editor-in-Chief of the magazine, you come back and post links to what is indeed completely fringe science including the infamous “Oregon Petition” that we have debunked in the previous threads on this subject (which I linked to earlier here).
And, now you claim that the IPCC report is based on poor science. Well, if you think that Science is a reputable source of scientific info (and I strongly agree), then I challenge you to find papers on climate change there that say that the IPCC science is poor. Hell, you’ll be hard-pressed to find many papers that don’t have the IPCC report as one of their first cites, usually when they are referencing the current state of understanding in the field. If the scientists publishing in good peer-reviewed journals believe the IPCC report accurately represents the current state of understanding and you and John Daly believe otherwise, who do you expect us to believe?!?
First of all you didn’t realkly debunk the Oregona petition. You compained about it not being peer reviewed (its a petition) and linked to an article that complained about it being infairly sent (as if the signees were duped., and that non on eon the list of 19,000 is worthy of judging. etc. ) I was not impressed by this. Certainly not impressed to say it was a hoax, as clamis the Sierra Club. The debunking of this is, to say the least, insulting.
Science, nor the IPCC is infallible. I’ve neversaid otherwise. My point is that your attempts to dismiss disagreeers of GW as little more than the equivelant of Creationists is insulting. The comparison does not even come close.
Meanwhile, more and science is starting to find better correlation between solar activity and any temperature changes on the earth:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/sun_output_030320.html
http://www.tmgnow.com/repository/solar/lassen1.html
Oh and there’s that data in the hostorical record showing CO2 rates follwing warming trends by an order of 800 years or so.
Disagree with it if you like, but this is not the Paluxy footprints.
Is this crippling going to occur in the same sense of BP was crippled when it met slightly stronger than Kyoto targets several years early and claims to be saving a few hundred million dollars a year?
Well, congratulations on being car-free (as is Kimstu). I alas am not although I do drive a fairly energy-efficient 1992 car (~35 mpg overall with my driving habits) and try to use alternatives such as foot and bicycle when I can. I am also eagerly awaiting the release of the 2004 Toyota Prius hybrid as my likely next vehicle.
You may think that you are just being realistic, but I don’t think listening to John Daly and the Oregon Petition Project constitutes realism. I’ll admit that believing that the most dire predictions are 100% certain to come to pass is not realistic either. But, believing that this is a very serious problem that we must face up to it and start taking precautions, in spite of some uncertainties in how bad its effects will be, is realistic. (Hell, that last sentence is no more extreme than what has appeared on BP’s website! Do you think BP has become unrealistically alarmist on global climate change?!?)
And, as for the appeals-to-authority issue rather than engaging in a debate on the scientific merits: I admit this is not the ideal state of affairs and in past threads I did, at considerable cost in my own time, try to debunk a select few “facts” gleaned from sites such as Daly’s. However, the reality of the situation is that neither you nor I are qualified to really debate the details of the science and it is actually pretty arrogant, in my opinion, to believe otherwise. My PhD is in condensed matter physics, which probably puts me in the top few percent in terms of credentials of those who signed on to the Oregon Petition; nonetheless, I do not have the sort of detailed knowledge of the field of global climate change to make my own pronouncements.
Thus, I feel that my role is not to personally get in to the nitty-gritty of the science (besides an occasional dabbling…reading a Science article here and there). Rather, it is to keep up with what the current general state of the science is…i.e., what is believed by people actively working and publishing in the field…and to communicate that to others. In that regard, of course, I am helped by the fact that there are unimpeachable sources such as the IPCC and the National Academy of Sciences that have weighed in on these questions.
As an intelligent layman, but not a professional in this field, I need some correcting here, seriously, to my assumptions about the global climate - some of which I have learned here. I’ve read each of the threads up to this point. Now I feel the need to give another point of view. Please correct me where I am wrong. Maybe this will jump start this motivating thread out of the quagmire that it seems to have just fallen into. Then again, maybe I’ll just get flamed. Either way, it will be entertaining for all.
Besides the minimal amounts of cosmic debris that adds to the Earth’s mass each year, the recipe of what the Earth consists of has always stayed the same. So this new CO2 that is being added to the atmosphere has always existed on Earth. This CO2 is coming from the Earth and humans, from different sources such as from automobiles, flatulation, the melting of ice of an earlier age where the CO2 levels were much higher, volcanic activity, and from the sea floor.
Some ice is melting, but other ice is refreezing on the opposite side, much like the real estate in Florida is decreasing because of the encroaching ocean, but some people in California are complaining because their beach front properties are no longer beach front (no cite here, find your own). From the point of view of someone who is standing on the ice or the continent it appears to be receeding, when in fact it has only been moving as it always has.
To a very minor part of the ecosystem, each individual change is viewed as a major change to humans. But as a whole, it is simply the pendulum swinging in the opposite direction while the Earth’s atmosphere tries to find its equilibrium.
What exactly is the effect of moisture in the atmosphere? I have heard arguments for both sides, that it raises/lowers temperatures.
The symptoms of global warming have be rehashed several times here, but what are the visible symptoms of an encroaching ice age (besides more ice)?
That’s a rather selective summary. What was pointed out was
(1) That there was little attempt to verify what credentials the people who signed the petition had. (And, at any rate, there is no evidence that very many of them had the sort of credentials that would be necessary to really be knowledgeable in this field.)
(2) That the petition was sent around with an accompanying paper that was printed up in a similar format to an NAS Proceedings paper when it was in fact not one and not even a paper that had or has ever seen the light of day in any refereed journal. This combined with the fact that it was circulated by Fred Seitz, a physicist who was long ago president of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) was worrisome enough to the NAS that they took the unusual step of issuing a statement disassociating themselves from it and noting that the conclusions in the paper were contrary to conclusions that had been reached by a recent study of theirs. Note also that this petition was sent around and received most of its signatures at a time several years ago when the media coverage of the climate change issue was such that scientists who didn’t follow it very closely could be duped by such a paper.
I don’t disagree that the theory of evolution has been around a lot longer and is on firmer footing with fewer unresolved issues than the theory of anthrogenic climate change. Nonetheless, the general tactics engaged in by those who are trying to distort the state of the current scientific understanding are remarkably, and often amusingly, similar and analogous.
Well, see, this is an example of how those who want to discredit climate change theory “cherry-pick” a few papers and play them up while ignoring hundreds of others that do not support their conclusions. The IPCC, on the other hand, (or the NAS) doesn’t have the luxury of doing such cherry-picking but must instead look at all the evidence.
Yes, there are a few reputable scientists, some of who have occasionally published in reputable journals, who are disputed certain aspects of the general consensus on climate change. As I have noted before, consensus does not mean unanimity.
It is worth noting, however, that even the author of this particular paper arguing that solar output cycles are more important than has been recognized is cautious in intepretting his results, noting that his results do not mean that industrial pollution has not been a significant factor and also noting that the trend over the last 24 years alone is not enough to cause notable climate change unless the rate were maintained for a century or more.
I’m not saying that this work is not interesting or important or good science, but its conclusions are limited and it has to be taken in the context of the entire body of peer-reviewed scientific work. As you yourself noted, science is not infallible and peer-reviewed papers sometimes turn out to be wrong. To take one paper out of the hundreds published and then to take its conclusions beyond where the author himself is confidently willing to take them is not to present a balanced view of the current state of the science.
1. Do you find that the environment matters less as you grow older, and less for people who don’t have children?
I confess I was more concerned about the environment on the first Earth Day in 1970 than I am now. The “Population Bomb” and all that. Now that I’m in my fifties, the state of the climate 50 years from now just doesn’t matter as much. Is this just me?
2. Is there enough Uranium? (Assuming the environmental problems are solved)
A decade or two ago I read that there simply isn’t enough uranium ore on the earth to supply a meaningful fraction of humanity’s energy needs. But since then I see the US military using depleted uranium on the battlefield. Couldn’t that depleted uranium be used in breeder reactors? Is this estimate still valid, or out of date?
Anthracite- I knwo that one of the products of burning wood is CO2, thus no matter where the wood comes from- CO2 will be released.
Sentient Meat- “permian mass extinction” :dubious: Oh give me a break. Paleotologists can’t even agree on how the Dinosaurs got wiped out, let alone what was the cause of the Permian extinction. Those are guesses. Educated guesss, yes, but still guesses.
Kyoto treaty- When everyone has to knuckle down and cut their emissions- inclduing both 1st AND 3rd world nations- then fine.
We have two great & workable sources of clean, CO2 free power now- nuclear and hydro-electric. Luddite nuts hate and despise nuclear, and “back to nature” nuts want all the dams torn down.
Jshore has the guts to cite Chernobyl. One accident in 50years. How many died? About as many that die every damn month through the burning of fossil fuels- and that even given the lowest range estimate for that and the very highest for how many MIGHt die from Chernobyl. Chernobyl was a fluke- a circumstancial happenstance of a stupid form of Government that has now been proven to simply not work.
America needs a LOT more Nuke plants- and laws that stop the “Luddites” too many delaying tactics. We need more dams, too. We have to get energy from somewhere- and solar & wind ain’t gonna cut it… yet. However, we also have to shut up selfish NIMBYs who scream that the windmills “will spoil their view”- well, when the coean rises up to flood your beachfront house- that will be a much smaller concern. Of course these maroons will then screm “why didn’t THEY do something”- when it is their fault.
Sure- we could painlessly cut some “greenhouse gasses”. Require that SUV’s have car-like gas milage - or at least that they figure into the quotas. (but then listen to the howls from the SUV drivers who think their penis will shrink if they can’t drive something big & gas- guzzling).
However, a treaty like “Kyoto” , which will handcuff American productivity now when we can’t afford it- while allowing the oh-so-precious “developing nations” to pollute unfettered isn’t right either.
The answers as I understand them.
Well, the elements CO2 has not necessarily existed in the form of CO2. If it is coal for example, the carbon has existed in the form of elemental carbon. If it is petroleum, it has existed in the form of hydrocarbons. But, you are right that the CO2 levels have fluctuated over the long term. So has the climate. The theory that increased CO2 would lead to warming is based on elementary theoretical considerations, supplemented by climate modeling predictions and the like. However, people have also looked at the correlations between the global climate and CO2 concentrations in the past (as best as each can be ascertained). I believe the general correlation is strong although there has been some controversy over which leads which. I am not sure what the present state on this is. Related to this, there is also some belief that there could be some positive feedbacks in the system. I.e., that more CO2 could cause warming which would in turn result in the release of more CO2 from the oceans and/or land (where there are considerable reservoirs of CO2).
The fact that there has been an unprecentedly (or nearly unprecedentedly) steep increase in CO2 concentrations in the last 150 years is well-known, as the graph I linked to earlier shows. There has also been general success at relating the level of increased CO2 to estimates of the amount that has been emitted by humans and released through land use changes and the like. There is also some isotope method by which they can detect directly some of the CO2 released from the burning of fossil fuels.
You’d have to look at the IPCC report to read more details here. Yes, I believe that there have been some places where ice has increased, but these are few compared to the other places. The general trend is that it has receded and this is quite well-documented now, I believe. I think a general sea level rise is also well-documented although the error bars on it are still fairly high.
I don’t quite understand what you are saying here. But, certainly it is true that the earth has gone through climate cycles before. This doesn’t mean, however, that it is a good idea to start adding forcings to this system at a very rapid rate and embark on a grand experiment to see what happens!
If we stopped releasing CO2 tomorrow, it is expected that over a certain time scale that I believe is hundreds to thousands of years, the levels will likely drop back down to near the pre-industrial levels. The problem with CO2 is that this timescale for equilibration is quite long on time scales of relevance to us. Thus, the talk is currently of where we might be able to stabilize the CO2 level at with various policies so that it doesn’t keep increasing.
Well, there are two questions here. One is why we aren’t worried about the direct addition of water to the atmosphere since it is also a potent heat-trapping gas. The main answer I think is that the timescale for equilibration is much shorter with water…We put it in and it quickly gets rained out. Another factor may be that the amount that humans are putting in is still small on the scale of the amount that goes in (although I think it is believed that humans affect climate on a local scale through this sort of thing). The problem with CO2, methane, and the other greenhouse gases that people worry about is that once released into the atmosphere, it takes a long time for the atmosphere to re-equililbrate even if the release ceases.
The second part of the question is how water will act as a feedback mechanism. In other words, as increased CO2 warms the climate, this will change the water cycle and this can then feedback on the warming. I think the general belief is that the sign of this feedback is positive, i.e., that it will lead toward further warming. However, there are a few scientists (like Richard Lindzen) trying to argue that the sign is not positive and is even negative. His claims have been strong enough to get published in peer-reviewed journals although I think it is currently a small minority view.
I don’t really understand this question or what you are getting at here.
Note that all of the above answers are based on my best understanding. And, as I noted, I am not a scientist in the field of climate change, or climate science at all, and thus my answers on these specific questions should be treated with the caution they deserve. By the way, I think there are some good answers to questions like these by some of the scientists interviewed for a Nova segment that are available online and should not be too hard to find via google. The IPCC report is, of course, also a good source of background on these sorts of things.
Note to DrDeth added in preview: It is true that burning wood releases CO2 although the trees absorb CO2 when it is growing so the whole issue of biomass energy depends critically on how sustainably we are using it. As for nuclear power, well, I’ll leave it to someone else to estimate the number of deaths due to Chernobyl; I agree that it might not be very large compared to fossil fuels although it might be larger than other alternatives. And, while you may blame that all on a “stupid form of government”, there have been some documented near-misses under our form of government. Like I said, I think that the nuclear issue is a subtle one and suffers from extremists on both sides distorting the issue. Finally, you state that Kyoto will handcuff American productivity without any evidence that this is so. And, we’ve already discussed the issue of fairness; as I noted, the industrialized world is responsible for most of the problem up to this point and it seems fair to me that we are the ones that need to start the process of reductions, which is what the climate change framework has us do through Kyoto. Of course, if we adopted some other measure of fairness, such as everyone gets the same emission cap per capita, that would be even harder on us, n’est pas? Finally, well, if you don’t like Kyoto then how about a serious climate change policy in its place? You yourself seemed to imply you’d favor raising CAFE standards. How about the McCain-Lieberman approach to reducing our greenhouse gas emissions? I find this complaining about the non-industrialized world to just be a convenient excuse to do nothing. Clearly, you must recognize that their opinion of fairness and ours will be different. I find it rather difficult to see how we are erring too far in their direction in the current compromise.
Yes. And then you grow the trees. To quote Neil from The Young Ones:
This process is about 96% carbon neutral (according to EPRI), which means that about 4% of the carbon does not get re-captured. For the life of me, I have trouble breaking out exactly why…but still, 96% carbon neutral is better than 0% carbon neutral. And that 4% gap could be managed.
In an amusing coincidence, I just discovered that there is a discussion of the Oregon petition in the latest issue of the weekly e-mail / web bulletin What’s New (http://www.aps.org/WN/) by Robert Park, who heads Public Affairs for the American Physical Society. (He is speaking in the larger context of a minority staff report released this week by the Democrats in Congress on this Administration’s misuse of science.)
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That’s more of a complaint (albeit legitimate one) than a true “debunking”.
Not neccessarily, as I’ll point out in a moment.
So, what about when the Harvard did its recent Meta-analysis of over 240 papers on climatology and came to the conclusion that IPCC was using severe methodolgical errors? The only reply to that so far (and I wish I had a link to the study) is to accuse the authors of being right-wingers. That was hardly fair. Now there are proper criticism of the meta-analysis, but there are also criticisms of the
But its hardly overwhelming to one side either! The problem I’m having is the idea that you’ve portrayed all people who doubt as being right-wingers and fools. That’s unfair and far rom the truth. I have lurked in a board with a very high level of scientific knowledge (but is not specificly a science board) and the general consensus is that anthro-GW has a lot of faults and explaining to do. We’re not talking about people in the pocket of oil barons here, let alone creation science types.
Call it what you will. As I noted above, Robert Park of APS called the whole thing “a dark episode in the annals of scientific discourse.” And, as I noted, NAS felt it necessary to disassociate themselves from the whole thing.
I have no idea what your conception of “debunking” is. Is nothing short of showing that they just manufactured names or something like that not bad enough for you?
I’m not familiar with this study unless it is the one that tries to determine a better estimate than IPCC’s 2.5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit. I thought in the end though that their estimate wasn’t that dramatically different.
I didn’t mean to imply that everyone in the world, or even intelligent people, who disagree with the consensus are right-wingers or fools. But, I do think that in many cases, they are misinformed by a lot of very purposeful misinformation that is out there. If you ask them why they don’t agree, they cite things like the Oregon Petition or Daly’s site, or whatever that show me that they really don’t know what the current state of the peer-reviewed science is on the subject.
And, I do think (as a matter of empirical fact more than anything else) that those scientists in the field who have really been out there arguing against the consensus generally do seem to have these connections to right-wing / anti-environmental organizations or the fossil fuel industry (coal in particular). I admit it is not based on a scientific check and perhaps they are just driven to these organizations after-the-fact rather than being sympathetic to them initially, but if I just run down the list of names that I know at least here in the U.S. (Willie Soon, Sallie Balliunas, Patrick Michaels, Fred Singer, Robert Balling, Richard Lindzen), they all seem to have such connections. This doesn’t mean they are bad scientists in all cases. (Lindzen is actually pretty well-published in the field, I believe, which is why he was included on the NAS panel on climate change in response to questions from the Bush Administration; my impression is that most of the others are not.)
[I am not including people like Richard Willson, mentioned in that article that you linked to, who have raised some legitimate questions but are cautious about what they say. And, I really don’t know enough to comment on the Harvard group that you refer to.]
Since this is more of an empirical observation than anything else, I am not wedded to it and would be happy to hear of scientists in the field who are otherwise not connected to right-wing causes or the fossil fuel industry and clearly and strongly disagree with the consensus view. I just can’t come up with any myself. I am sure there are probably a few around … They certainly seem to be less vocal though.
The Nova site is http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/warming/ I think the particular interviews I was thinking of (under “the debate”) were the ones with Richard Somerville, Stephen Schneider, and Tom Wigley.
By the way, just to prevent confusion, I didn’t mean to imply that there is this huge overlap between creation science types and deniers of global warming (although there is probably some overlap). When I say “right wing”, I mean more libertarian right than religious right. My impression is that the religious right wing organizations are not really that interested in the global warming issue; if pressed, they may allay themselves with their conservative breathren but it is a much bigger issue with groups like Cato, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, National Center for Policy Analysis, and so on.