This seems to be one of the great “gotchas” of the contrarian sources, but it only shows that it is that those contrarians do not know anything about probabilities.
How can you quantify how bad a cancer would be? It depends on when you quit smoking or how soon you get treatment.
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[snip]
Before getting to the point it has to said that this is a big contradiction, one has to look at all the past efforts of claiming that there is nothing or almost nothing happening and then contrarians claim that we are solving the problem.
If there is no problem, then there is no need to do any of the efforts you mention here.
But lets get to the main point, this is like a reverse version of that kiddie song where a girl claims that she can do better than the male kid. In this case the contrarian sources are telling us that they can do worse. While the efforts done so far are very good, they could be **much **better, and in this issue doing better is the key so the less that current and future generations will have to lose.
I suspect we all know the answer to that. What few of us probably realize is the enormous extent of the disinformation campaign being waged by the fossil fuel industry (and a great many allied industries) against climate science. Some of the sordid tactics of the tobacco industry against scientific evidence in past decades are as nothing compared to the war against reason being waged by the roughly $12 trillion global fossil fuel industry.
Last year New Scientist magazine ran a series of articles under the cover page theme “Unscientific America” lamenting the irrationality that prevails among the general public and their legislators on the subject of climate science. Just recently a paper in the journal Climatic Change made a systematic analysis of the “dark money” behind climate change denial. The unprecedented PR spin being brought to bear on climate discussions by the energy industry is orders of magnitude greater than anything seen before because far more is at stake for the industry.
The author estimates a minimum of $900 million a year in attributable funding for climate change denialism – most of it anonymous “dark money”. Institutions like “donor-directed foundations” form part of what is essentially a legal money-laundering scheme for energy companies and industrial interests to funnel millions to denialist front groups and fake astroturf organizations that make up, among other things, the vast majority of the denialism found in mainstream media and on the Internet.
The abstract can be found at the above link; the first few paragraphs of the paper begin to outline this remarkable phenomenon:
Indeed we do have ice core data showing relatively rapid (roughly 100K year) glaciation cycles which have been the signature cyclical climate behavior for more than a million years.
The “question” of whether CO2 emissions change this cycle can be regarded as follows. These cycles are associated with equally regular and very well bounded changes in atmospheric CO2, from a low of around 180 ppm at glacial maxima to a high of around 280 ppm – and never more than 300 ppm - at inter-glacial peaks. And though the cycles are initially triggered by orbital fluctuations, they are indisputably driven by the consequent CO2 changes and associated feedbacks.
Now with that in mind, we observe that present CO2 levels have reached 400 ppm. In just a few hundred years we have increased atmospheric CO2 to a level last seen long before anything resembling humanity existed on earth, a greater margin that the differential between the depths of an ice age and a warm inter-glacial. We are, climatically speaking, in entirely new, uncharted territory, and the effects are just beginning to be felt.
The “question” you cite has been well and truly answered.
What? No one tries to quantify how bad the cancers are before the fact. In smoking, they give projections of incidence rates. Something like “1 in 3 smokers will develop cancer over their lifetimes.” (*Not actual rate) When looking at costs, it’s, at most, a projection of 5-10 years out based on recent incidences as a guide. No one goes “Well, in 50 years time, cancer will cost $XX.”
Whether you survive the cancer, become a vegetable, or die depends not only on your health at time of detection, but also how early you detect it, how long you smoked, plus what kind of cigarettes are being smoked (Cig 1 with 5x the times of additives in it versus Cig 2 to illustrate what I mean). The actual outcome is heavily dependent on individual circumstances and isn’t proscribed.
I haven’t said there was no problem. I haven’t said that there was no effort needed. I said that I thought the proposed efforts of cap and trade are misguided at the least and oppressive at the worst and I have laid this out.
Why do you only hear “I agree with you 100%” and “I disagree with you 100%”?
So, I’m a contrarian because I have issues with the use of a tax scheme that will harm the poor worst of all and have argued that all of the cigarette tax, soda tax, and oil cost increases (both of tax and nontax) haven’t done anything to stem demand of those products in the long term?
About that, it is clear that all that money is not used for denial efforts, but it is clear that there is a lot of influence and doors that open in government thanks to all that money.
With apologies to Irving Berlin:
♫
Republicans - Anything you vote, I can disable. I can vote ugly, uglier than you.
D- No you can’t
R- Yes, I can.
D- No, you can’t
R - Yes, I caaaaaaaaaaaaan! ♪
That is the point, demanding specific values is only a stalling tactic coming all the way from the tobacco industry, you should know that most of the climate denial machine got their “science” and debating skills from what they did in those days, even using some of the same scientists BTW.
Your points to prop up Spencer show that that the idea was to minimize or make the problem go away.
Going back to fellows that are the mercenary scientists of today and defending their “no warming here” misleading charts does that.
The debate should be now about what to do, going back for reheated baloney is unnecessary or misleading, depending on the sources you use. Of course the point here is one I usually do: You can not expect the blind to lead the blind, groups that still to this day in discussions of this issue attempt to revise the history of how scientists got to the current agreement on what is going on can not be expected to come up with good solutions. (See what the deniers in congress are doing, bad enough that they tell us that we should do nothing or almost nothing and then their denial is telling them to stop any efforts that an agency can do to help)
No, you are a contrarian because you are wrong on even that.
That quote came from the link you provided. You were talking about a partial report. Why didn’t you clarify that to others?
Someday the full report will be released and if the IPCC decides to actually share it’s data with everyone (including those who might disagree with it) for verification of it’s methods and numbers, MAYBE the man-made-CO2-global-warming zealotry will prove fruitful. Or not.
Remembering that this is a Great Debate, I’m choosing to take a position opposed to yours. I sure don’t want you to take anything I say as personal insult. If it helps, I pay an extra 15% for the electricity to heat my home as to insure all of it comes from a wind farm. I also understand that my senator … the Honorable Ron Wyden … is something of a champion of the cause to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
I ask you to accept as scientific fact that the complete combustion of pure natural gas yields carbon dioxide (60% by mass) and water vapor (40% by mass), thus:
I say water vapor is the culprit, carbon dioxide plays only a secondary role at best, and that only to amplify the positive feedback mechanism provided by water vapor.
1] Carbon dioxide readily absorbs heat energy, but so does water vapor. Now I agree 400 ppm of carbon dioxide is alarming and deserves scientific study, but water vapor occurs in the atmosphere up to 50,000 ppm, 2 orders of magnitude greater.
2] Every 100K years during the Pleistocene epoch, carbon dioxide levels have shown a spike. I’m not aware of any proof about how this carbon dioxide got into the atmosphere back then, only man didn’t cause this to happen. I maintain that until we know how the natural cycle works, we cannot state with certainty that man is now interfering with it.
3] I’ve been listening real close these past few months. Climatologists rarely make absolute statements. They use words like “may be occurring”, “has increased probability”, “studies have inferred”. No one knows anything for sure, it’s just theories. Do we even know what started the ice age 30 million years ago?
I look forward to your statement of position and your rebuttal to mine. Yes, it has occurred to me that if humans off themselves, the wolves will prosper.
I never did this. I was asking for more information about a specific piece of data and you kept providing information about Spencer that I neither wanted nor cared about, yet read hoping to find reference to the data set that was presented.
Right. Except I offered a comprehensive plan that would move us forward without harming the world’s poor or adding undue burden to the economies of the world. So that we can actually solve our dependence on fossil fuels instead of allowing the activity to continue with a nod, knowing wink, and hand-up-the-ass of our easy-to-buy politicians.
How long would a carbon tax last in our current political climate if it jacked up energy costs by 20%? Congress wouldn’t listen to us, of course, but it would listen to the business Super PAC donations that come in from business to drop it. If we add constructive changes to the economy that aren’t draconian, we will likely not lose the path towards progress.
Yes, double to tripling the price of smokes WORLD WIDE would cause the poor people in poor countries to curb their habit simply because they couldn’t possibly afford them. But you are going from a situation where they are readily affordable to a situation where they aren’t affordable at all. That’s not a “tax.” A tax is a contribution to state revenue – not a tool designed to price something out of a market.
I will grant you, however, that if you deliberately price things above what people can possibly afford you can prevent them from getting it. Somewhat.
But the problem is that this proposed tax’s reduction in smoking comes almost entirely from the third world. I seriously doubt that black market smokes won’t jump in to take up the demand when the “official” stuff is desired and not available due to cost. Look at the US’s War on Drugs. Cocaine is illegal, and yet it’s still used. Same with Meth. And Marijuana. And this is in a first world country with enough resources to police these and fairly non-corrupt LEOs. What happens when Jimmy the Drug Lord tosses a stack of cash to the police in central Africa to “fall asleep”? Or outright kills anyone that stands in their way? The assumptions of this study are flawed and based on a fully cohesive first world control of access to tobacco.
Luckily for the first world, tobacco was one of the things that business tightly controlled before governments started in on regulation. It made it very easy to regulate. The entire logistics chain from field to mouth was very well controlled. In the third world, this is less secure (although the likes of Phillip Morris has been eagerly expanding into those markets for at least 50 years, probably more.)
Now, notice the drop in use rates since we started trying to curb consumption, here. Students smoked way more even with the taxes through the 90s. It was socially fashionable for them in that time frame, so getting access and paying for taxes wasn’t an issue for them. They were brought under control through many methods, one of which was social education and another was enforcement of the “Card everyone” campaigns at retailers that sell tobacco.
Back in the 50’s or 60’s, it was estimated that 42% of the population at large used cigarettes. Now, it’s in the range of 20-25% of adults in the US. And it’s been in that range for awhile. New York added a tax in 2010 or 2011 that did reduce consumption…in New York, but people are simply going across the border to other states where it’s cheaper.
Now look at this review, where it talks about social attitudes. The more educated you are, the less likely you are to smoke, by a striking margin. Additionally, marketing aimed at teenagers is showed as effective at getting them to smoke. So instead of taxing it to high heck, we should work on actually targeting the social source by providing education, and then finding a global way to require all tobacco sold to be raw leaf.
Taxes aren’t magic controllers of the populace. There are underlying reasons for everything we do, and that’s why taxes didn’t destroy the world when they were first introduced. If someone WANTS something, they will GET it. Soda and oil taxes don’t stop soda and oil consumption. Prohibition doesn’t stop drug consumption. Fixing the underlying social issues involved with these as well as educating people would actually drastically drop it.
The “globe” has been warming since the last ice age. Before that, the globe was in a decreasing temperature cycle. Before that, it was in an increasing temperature cycle. etc. etc. etc.
Do you believe that increasing and decreasing levels of CO2 drove the Earth into and out of it’s ice ages?
No, “there’s more water vapor” is not a new or unaddressed argument. No, “there was warming in the past without humans” is not a new or unaddressed argument (or, when you really look at it, even a coherent argument). No, “the language of science is intentionally vague” is not a new argument - it wasn’t new when lying creationists tried to make it back in the 80s, and it has always been a bad argument. Dude, come on. At least pretend to have a clue. You have an objection that seems intuitive? Spend 5 minutes looking it up. Chances are, if you found it intuitive, so did climatologists, and there’s a reason they don’t consider it a valid argument.
The reports recommending what to do will come later, as the certainty on who is responsible has increased it is not likely that the next reports about the recommended policies and related issues will be much different as the last ones that came after the one from 2007.
(1) The fact that there is a lot more water vapor than CO2 in the atmosphere, if anything, works against your argument. In a certain regime of concentrations (the regime that CO2 is in, although I am less sure about H2O), the dependence of radiative forcing on concentration is logarithmic, which means that you have to increase it by a certain fractional amount to cause a change. By your own calculation, the amount of water vapor we are emitting combusting fossil fuels is a much smaller fraction of the amount in the atmosphere than the amount of CO2 we are emitting relative to the amount in the atmosphere.
(2) Besides that, and more importantly, to understand the effect of the emissions it is necessary to look at both sources and sinks. And, if you do that, what you find is that we are not emitting enough water vapor to significantly change its concentration on a global scale but we are emitting enough CO2 to. In fact, water vapor concentration is closely linked to temperature, so the way we can change water vapor concentration is to increase the concentration of the long-live greenhouse gases like CO2 thus raising the temperature and causing water vapor to increase. This is the correct description of the relationship between the forcing caused by long-lived greenhouse gases and the feedback due to the fact that water vapor concentration is an increasing function of the temperature.
Of course we can. CO2 levels are higher now than they have been in at least the last 750,000 years (over which we have ice core records) and likely the last several million years. Do you think this is just some remarkable coincidence?
Is it a further remarkable coincidence that the increase in concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is what one would predict if about half our emissions were to segregate into the oceans and biosphere with the other half remaining in the atmosphere? Or, do you believe that the oceans and biosphere have decided to magically take up all our emissions and, independently, magically start to emit more to the atmosphere for some unknown reason but in a way that exactly mimics our emissions?
Nope, you insisted that I was attacking the person while you completely ignored the cites on why he was a failure on this. and then why his chart was skewy.
You then here ignore that I agree with that part, the point is that we can still do much better, we just need better politicians, and the will to work to make sure that we throw all those denier rascals in congress.
Of course then you talk about examples that show that indeed taxes reduced consumption like in New York, while not pointing why the studies I cited are supposed to be ignored.
Far from it, the report about the proposed tax on tobacco was there to point out that to get around it it will not be as easy as just jumping to other state. As for targeting propaganda, you are forgetting that the current Republicans in congress of the Tea party variety are making propaganda against even the non government efforts to make the change to less polluting sources of power a doable thing.
Not really…It warmed and then pretty much stabilized. If it had been warming at 0.6 C per century (as it did over the last ~100 years), it would have warmed some 72 C by now…and if it had been warming at 1.5 C per century (the rate over the past several decades), it would have warmed by ~180 C by now. In reality, the total warming since the last ice age is more like 5 or 6 C.
Our current “experiment” is somewhat unique in that we are in the position to rapidly re-introduce carbon that has been locked away for quite some time. The generally understood theory of the glacial-interglacial cycles that you speak of is that they are triggered by changes in the distribution of solar insolation (caused by changes in the Earth’s orbit around the sun and rotation about its axis) that cause the ice sheets to grow or shrink and, by processes that are not completely understood, cause changes in the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. Hence, in these cases, the changes in CO2 act as a feedback, triggered by other events.
From estimating the global forcings due to the changes in the earth’s albedo (due to ice sheet and vegetation changes) and changes in greenhouse gases, it is generally understood that CO2 was responsible for about 1/3 of the temperature change during these cycles, with the albedo changes responsible for most of the rest. However, it is also believed that CO2 played an important role in synchronizing the changes in the two hemispheres (since the insolation changes due to orbital changes are generally tradeoffs between one hemisphere and another).
These paleoclimate studies are also one of the independent lines of evidence that lead to the current understanding that a doubling of CO2 is a sufficient forcing to cause about 1.5-4.5 C rise in average global temperature.
I’m happy to provide the requested rebuttal. I’ll try to be brief. You are, incidentally, quite correct in stating that if humans off themselves, wolves will prosper. I hope that my selfless altruism here supports the purity of my motives.
On your numbered points…
Water vapor of course acts as a greenhouse gas, but the essential fact about WV is that the amount in the atmosphere is basically a function of temperature (per the Clausius-Clapeyron relation) – if you try to add more, it just precipitates out as rain. IOW, it’s a feedback and not a primary forcing. It’s the reason that it’s never shown as a GHG when compared with primary forcings due to CO2, CH4, etc. but the feedback must of course be considered by climate models.
(I understand that you correctly referred to water vapor as a feedback, but your implication seems to get the effect of amplification backwards – WV is the feedback and the amplifier; it is passive, while CO2 is the “temperature control knob”.)
Referencing CO2 “spikes” during the Pleistocene is the kind of argumentative fallacy that arises from mixing grossly different timescales. There were CO2 changes during the Pleistocene and Pliocene over multiple lengthy timeframes, as there have been throughout the earth’s history – all of them inferred from proxies with limited accuracy and coarse temporal resolution – and none of them relevant to contemporary events because, among other things, they occurred over periods of thousands or millions of years. These “peaks” of CO2 were associated with mostly irregular and sometimes rapid (~40 Ky) glaciation cycles until the mid-Pleistocene transition beginning about 1.2 million years ago when they settled into the fairly regular ~100 Ky cycles we see today.
What is truly relevant here is not so much the cursory examination of tectonic-scale trends over millions of years, but the relationship between these contemporary glaciation cycles and the well-bounded CO2 excursions, and the extraordinary 100+ ppm spike in CO2 we have caused in the few hundred years since industrialization, putting it well above any levels seen probably during the entire Pleistocene and possibly since the Pliocene as well.
And to address your point about “how this carbon dioxide got into the atmosphere back then, only man didn’t cause this to happen”, feedback cycles start to drive CO2 into the atmopshere from carbon sinks during warming cycles, however they are caused, while cooling cycles do the reverse. The biggest carbon sinks in the world are the oceans, which release CO2 when they warm and absorb it when they cool, so even small sustained temperature changes – hypothesized in the case of glaciation to be due to complex orbital fluctuations called Milankovic cycles – can trigger long-term significant temperature changes due to the CO2 feedbacks.
Now here’s the thing. These glaciation cycles have involved the exchange between atmosphere and carbon sinks of a relatively fixed amount of CO2, so that during life on this planet as we know it, it has varied as I said between about 180 ppm and 280 ppm with remarkably consistency, changing gradually over periods of thousands or tens of thousands of years (depending on whether it’s warming or cooling). What we’re now doing is taking a new source of carbon – fossil fuels – which has been safely sequestered for hundreds of millions of years – and returning it to the atmosphere for the first time since the Cretaceous at the most rapid rate that the planet has ever seen, putting it 100 ppm over natural cyclical maxima in a mere couple of hundred years.
If that’s not enough to scare the pants of you I don’t know what is. And arguments about how “a warmer climate might actually be beneficial” are totally moot when one realizes how violently and unpredictably the earth’s climate system reacts to extreme forcings. Yes, it might be nice in principle if the earth’s average temperature was a few degrees warmer, but not so nice if we’re all going to be dead from extreme weather, massive crop failures, and coastal flooding caused by trying to push the climate into such changes in a mere century or two.
