I am extremely skeptical of your claim.
Please show me proof that the vast majority of climate scientists and every and every national and significant international scientific organization are convinced that CO2 emissions, if unchecked, will have major negative consequences for humanity.
It wasn’t but you also believe that the IPCC has officially released it’s latest report in full and that the unreleased full report must be fully vetted. To each their own.
When did James Hansen become a “Republican scientist”? Are you referring to Hansen the environmental activist who has repeatedly been arrested for blocking trains and gates? He’s not exactly an “impartial” observer.
It will not be surprising to find that brazil84 avoids the evidence.
Sure, we use the method of successive approximation. If you want accuracy to 25 feet, you’d have to make that calculation for every 25 feet of shoreline, not just the outer fringe, but also the inner fringe, then average those numbers. No small task. Imagine for every foot, or every inch now. Alternately, we can derive a mathematical function to describe the shoreline shape and just plug in the numbers. As I understand the matter, fractal geometry looks to be the best shot at finding this function, but to date, this hasn’t produced any results.
I am hedging my statement in case I’m totally wrong.
Sure, keep saying that when others can see the evidence.
As **wolfpup **pointed out, my own do include the scientists, academics, in essence what it counts in this issue.
As usual you only show the typical problem with timelines, I remember seeing reports of Hansen being one in the past, and he was invited then to be part of the advisers to republicans as President Reagan, back when Republicans listened to the scientists.
Nowadays, like Kerry Emmanuel, they can not stomach what is going on and they go officially now as independents, AFAIK only Bickmore still keeps the faith that the extreme Republicans will eventually listen as he still remains one.
As for Hansen, this idea of claiming that his arrests subtract from what he claims is really silly, what it shows is that he is willing to be arrested for what he thinks we should not ignore.
Indeed. James Hansen is an example of the relentless vilification of climate scientists who have the misfortune of becoming known to the public and hence become targets of the great denialist spin machine. Hansen became known as one of the first to warn of the dangers of climate change before it became a major public policy issue and a political hot potato, and the fact that he’s also become an environmental activist makes it doubly convenient to vilify him as an example of the preposterous allegation that scientists are driven by a political agenda. That such allegations are made by, and on the behest of, Big Oil makes them supremely ironic.
The reality, of course, is the reverse: although most climate research scientists go about their work in non-political solitude, all are acutely aware of the implications of their discoveries and a few have been driven to some degree of activism, if only to the degree of testifying before Congress, to no avail. The late Hans Oeschger, the first to discover in ice core records evidence for climate tipping points, was deeply affected by this perspective on climate change for the rest of his life. Phil Jones, the director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, was so vilified when he found himself at the center of the so-called “climategate” affair that he was nearly driven to suicide.
Michael Mann has been relentlessly attacked for his work on paleoclimate reconstructions, because the resulting graphs provide dramatic visual evidence of the extraordinary rapidity of post-industrial temperature rise. The smears and accusations against those two alone resulted in multiple investigations being conducted; the fact that both Mann and Jones were fully exonerated by a total of four independent investigations means nothing to the denialists; the investigations are chalked up to an orchestrated conspiracy on both sides of the Atlantic, and the attacks continue. It’s all very sad.
You still seem to labor under the delusion that the IPCC just makes things up. As has been repeatedly said, their work is based on consensus assessments of existing peer-reviewed and duly cited scientific literature (thousands of papers) conducted by hundreds of participating authors and hundreds more independent reviewers. It seems to serve your purpose to ignore these facts.
The reality about the “next report” – that is, beyond the three major reports of the three working groups that constitute the Fifth Assessment – is that there probably won’t be one. The IPCC was formed primarily for the purpose of assessing the reality and the impact of human activities on post-industrial climate change and basically with the completion of the Fifth Assessment their work is done. The science continues to become more certain and more refined but at this point the evidence is more than enough to be actionable. It is likely that the future role of the IPCC will change to issuing more frequent and more specific, issue-targeted reports, with the Fifth Assessment remaining as the definitive baseline reference.
I am skeptical, too, but on different issues. I am skeptical that thousands of climate researchers around the world, many of whom are specifically engaged in paleoclimate temperature reconstructions, have somehow just never noticed that “the climate has always been changing.” I am skeptical that trite truisms about climate have any scientific value, and I am certainly skeptical that a list of standard denialist talking points such as you’ve presented is a valid challenge to 50 years of comprehensive climate research.
The talking point about prior “warm periods” is a favorite among denialists and it has as its primary attribute, like all such talking points, the fact that it’s wrong. The most important thing to know about the Medieval Warm Period is that it has absolutely no connection to what is happening today. It was due to internal variability with no change in external forcing as we have today from elevated CO2, and was neither global in extent nor was it as warm as today even in places where it occurred.
The MWP was localized warmth in the area of Europe, Greenland, and some other parts of the Northern Hemisphere, while other parts were exceptionally cold, and most of the Southern Hemisphere didn’t experience elevated temperatures at all. The Arctic did not experience anything remotely like the elevated temperatures and accelerated warming that is characteristic of externally-forced planetary warming. There’s some evidence that the localized warmth of the MWP was partly caused by decadal scale changes in ocean currents. The fact that global temperatures didn’t change significantly is crucial to understanding what the MWP was and wasn’t.
But trotting out the MWP at every opportunity serves the denialist agenda of “proving” that the earth’s global temperature can change at the drop of a hat for no apparent reason – in violation of the laws of physics – so that climate is apparently driven primarily by magic, and climate science knows nothing.
What do you, wolfpup, think we should do about this situation? What specific recommendations would you make to the US Congress?
The thing is that much smarter people than me have already drafted specific roadmaps to carbon mitigation strategies as well as to necessary adaptation strategies because we are already well past the point where climate change will significantly alter our ecosystem. But it’s almost funny to talk about sensible strategies in a political environment where – to pick a couple of examples – North Carolina has made it illegal for any state government agency to use scientific methods to estimate sea level rise, and the state of Virginia has gone one better and simply declared both “sea level rise” and “climate change” to be unacceptable “liberal code words” that must be expunged from official language. Both states appear to be indulging in the admirable but extremely ineffective “King Canute” strategy of giving orders to the sea, which the sea is generally disinclined to obey.
I suppose if you want my views in the most general terms, I’d say it would be a great start if the US and Canada showed some leadership by being ahead of European countries in carbon policies instead of lagging behind like denialist troglodytes. The second part of the strategy – to include third-world nations like China and India in comprehensive international treaties – is pretty hopeless unless we can lead by example. And thirdly, I believe we should be willing to motivate engagement in those treaties and enforce them through economic sanctions. In a word, most of the belching pollution coming out of China is to make cheap products for the western world. Don’t tell me that if China doesn’t wish to comply with emissions treaties, that this isn’t something that the western world could control with trade policies if it wanted to.
With regard to specifics, once I had by some miracle managed to hammer into the brains of Congress critters the fact that AGW was real, I would want them to understand the costs of inaction and then to familiarize themselves with some of what has been written on mitigation policies. I wish I could find a non-paywalled copy of the Socolow et al. paper on stabilization wedges online, but here is at least a presentation from a talk that Socolow gave. I’d make them read that. I’d make them read the comprehensive IPCC report on mitigation, some of the special reports like this one and this one, and the one onimpacts and vulnerabilities to stress the urgency.
I count eight wedgies already up and running. If I understand the principle, we’ve done enough to solve the problem. Gotta tell you, CCS looks expensive … not just capital costs, but the on-going expense. The money’s better spent on power plant regeneration, where the capital costs provide income. Virginia and Carolina aren’t going to stop an honest profit to be made.
The congressmen have read those reports, and remember half that material from the Carter administration.
None of that material is from the Carter administration. The science has come a long way since then.
As for Congressmen having read those reports, no, I’m certain that more than half of them have either (a) never seen them, and/or (b) instructed their staff to give them talking points to refute them. I’m thinking here of illustrious public servants like Joe Barton or James Inhofe. I think Inhofe fits all the criteria for being judged “clinically insane”. 
Thank you, wolfpup, for your very intelligent and informative remarks in this thread. It must be frustrating to deal with willful ignorance. (At some point, the psychology of self-deception becomes more interesting than the science of climate change. :smack: )
There is an online version of the 2004 Pacala-Socolow Science paper. Since it’s on a Princeton.edu website, I suppose any copyright violation is condoned.
The science is far from closed, but it’s been decades since I’ve seen any valid argument that would justify skepticism.
Here’s the abstract from a recent paleoclimatic study by Harvard and Oregon State climate scientists, published in Science in September, 2013:
A Reconstruction of Regional and Global Temperature for the Past 11,300 Years
Surface temperature reconstructions of the past 1500 years suggest that recent warming is unprecedented in that time. Here we provide a broader perspective by reconstructing regional and global temperature anomalies for the past 11,300 years from 73 globally distributed records. Early Holocene (10,000 to 5000 years ago) warmth is followed by ~0.7°C cooling through the middle to late Holocene (<5000 years ago), culminating in the coolest temperatures of the Holocene during the Little Ice Age, about 200 years ago. This cooling is largely associated with ~2°C change in the North Atlantic. Current global temperatures of the past decade have not yet exceeded peak interglacial values but are warmer than during ~75% of the Holocene temperature history. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change model projections for 2100 exceed the full distribution of Holocene temperature under all plausible greenhouse gas emission scenarios.
In a nutshell, here is their result:
This is a peer-reviewed study published in an internationally respected journal. The result mirrors the results of numerous other studies that have accumulated over three decades of diligent research by an entire planet of climate scientists. These scientists have meanwhile endured and responded to three decades of challenges and scrutiny from people who continuously accused them of being unwilling to entertain challenges and scrutiny. All this challenge and scrutiny has resulted in nothing but stronger evidence for AGW; but some are still not convinced.
So what to do? I’d suggest we convene an intergovernmental panel on climate change to comprehensively review the available research, but we already did that and it didn’t work. Turns out all that research was deemed to be suspect because it was conducted by climate scientists who had clearly become prejudiced by their own results.
OK, how about we convene an alternate Intergovernmental Panel of Conspiracy Cranks constituted of clear-eyed, independently-minded laypeople who have no clue about climate science? Such a body could be trusted not to allow mere scientific advancement to undermine their noble resistance to GW groupthink. Yeah, now we are making real progress…
So you are saying that the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that current global surface temperatures are significantly higher than they have been in 11,000 years?
Would you mind providing a precise definition for “AGW” as you have used that term?
Does it mean that mankind’s activities are likely to cause increases in global surface temperatures regardless of the cause and regardless of the severity of the increase?
Or does it mean something else to you?
Efficient buildings – This wedge is in place, and has been when the Carter administration implemented it. All buildings in the US built since are fully weatherized. Most older buildings have been retrofitted … and that was done for FREE. If you’re looking for any more carbon savings here, I afraid it’s not going to happen.
Reduced deforestation – I’m assuming you’re not suggesting throwing everyone off their lands east of the Mississippi River to reforest that land. I happen to live in a forested area and we’ve been replanting for almost 100 years. This wedge was put in place long before climate change was even noticed.
Wind power for coal power – This wedge in being implemented, and it’s at full speed. Wind farms are going up everyplace. Pfffft … all my electricity comes from the wind … if yours doesn’t, maybe you’ve got a local problem.
Efficient vehicles — Ever heard of a Chevy Volt?
I’m going with #2, #11, #13, and #15 as “started”, and that these will come to fruition without any severe government intervention. Now, all eight of these points were known and understood during the Carter Administration. Please tell me you knew that Jimmy Carter installed PV’s on the White House roof. I’m not going to accept you were to young to remember, only that you’re too old to remember.
I afraid you are completely wrong about what was known in the 1970s. [Shakes head] You have the same problem now as you did then, no scientific proof, no smoking gun. You have better statistics today, but statistics are not proof, they’re not even scientific evidence. The natural cause denialist Australopithecus are free to wear their partisan blinders and scream death and destruction all the day long. I agree it’s fun, but you’ve Big Oil pointing out that you do so for your own entertainment and that you can be safely ignored. However, if you want to convince people, you’re going to have to change your tone.
I count eight wedges, is the problem being solved?
Orbital perturbations are the sole agents for determining average atmospheric temperatures, carbon dioxide levels are only parametric to such functionality. It’s not a great theory, but it does comply with the known physical laws of the classical universe. It also works with the dozen or so other atmosphere we know of, and … it works for all the 4.7 billion years climate has been changing.
Anthropomorphic Global Warming - The imposition of human characteristics and emotions onto global warming.
I find your posts highly ironic, assuming you were being snarky.
Anthropogenic is the actual word. It means “human caused”.
Honestly, if we don’t concentrate on Waste-Free and instead concentrate on building reactors of the current generation designs inside of ground isolation barriers, we would be able to do it far cheaper than going to the relatively brand new and untested waste free engineering.
We could also use more of the low-output Thorium reactors so that if one happens to go tits up, we can easily clean it up. If a design flaw is found, it can be replaced more cheaply than having to decommission a current model nuclear facility.
As scientist Richard Alley worked for the fossil fuel industry I think you are ignoring that the deniers are the ones with no scientific proof.
Once again, no, yours is an attempt to dismiss that the cycles are already being taken into account, they were the drivers of past climate change (and that only up to a point) they are not enough to explain the current rise in temperature. What is worse is that the cycles do not work unless CO2 is taken into account as being an important factor of the warming and cooling in the past.
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/cycles.htm
As for the other atmospheres we know, no you don’t know how they work, nor you seem to know that you were misled once again by the unreliable sources you use.
So to you, “AGW” means any increase in global surface temperatures caused by mankind, regardless of the severity of the increase and regardless of the reason?