Well, what will be interesting is if 2012 is colder than, say, 1940, and if 2013 and 2014 and 2015 are also colder than 1940. Saying that 2012 isn’t the hottest year on record doesn’t really mean anything. But if there is a decade or two of temperatures dropping down to levels that occurred before the global rise in temperatures, sure, that’d be pretty significant, I think.
I’m saying we should do something based on past evidence, and that we should watch to see whether current predictions get falsified. This is, by an odd coincidence, the same approach I use in every other situation. You already know this, as I copy-and-pasted the recommended course of action for you in that other thread just this past week.
Again, therefore a useless thing to press on for the matter at hand, unless the effort is concentrating on obfuscating the matter for many readers.
How’s that? Again, the current falsifiable prediction gets disproven if the next seven years play out like the last fourteen; that’s not obfuscation, it’s clarification. As per the OP, the matter at hand included “the statement that the world has not been warming for 15 years”: I’d merely like to reply by explaining – emphasizing, even – that we need another seven years like the last fourteen before the lack of warming is relevant. How is that useless?
Well, sure, that much cooling would be significant. But – and correct me if I’m wrong, here – you’re thus saying that, when you predict “global warming,” you actually mean that “it may never again be as warm as it’s been for the last few years; it may even get cooler; I merely don’t predict that it’ll drop way down to, like, circa 1940 cold.” And if that modest prediction is all that’s being claimed, I’d merely like it spelled out.
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This graph shows the amount of carbon we’ve released into the atmosphere. That’s not a measurement made by scientists, it’s based on the amount of oil, coal and natural gas that we know we’ve dug up and burnt. It does not give a cumulative total, but you can see that the average over the past 100 years is somewhere around 3 to 4 billion tons per year. So that’s a total of about 350 billion tons. Now, that’s just the amount of carbon; when it’s burnt, each carbon atom binds with two oxygen atoms to form CO2. So the resulting CO2 weighs much more than the carbon; about 44 grams/mole compared to 12 for the carbon alone. So that’s about 1.3 trillion tons of CO2.
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Next question is, is that a lot? Wikipedia says the earth’s atmosphere adds up to about 5x10^18 kg. So the 1.3 trillion tons of CO2 would constitute 240 ppm (parts per million). That’s by weight though, and gas composition is usually described by volume; CO2 is a bit denser than air, so compensating for that, we get 160 ppm.
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What that means is, we’ve dug up and released enough CO2 into the atmosphere to raise the CO2 concentration by 160 ppm. It started out at about 280 ppm before the Industrial Age, so it could have gone up to 440 ppm. But the earth has things that absorb CO2, like the ocean. Which is why it’s only gone up to 385 ppm. Still, it’s a big increase.
OK I’m out of time right now, but the point I was trying to get to is: If we assume that the observed temperature rise is “natural” rather than caused by human activity, you would have to disregard a well-understood and well-documented change in the earth’s atmosphere that can explain the temperature rise, and instead insist that the temperature rise is instead caused by some other cause that we haven’t seen.
When one says that 2012 may be cooler than 2010, 1998, etc, one has to consider that while long-term warming is being driven by increasing CO2 levels (if not a bit more than observed, since cycles like solar activity has decreased over the past few decades), in the short term, ENSO (El Nino and La Nina) has a very significant influence on yearly temperatures (we are in a La Nina right now); 2011 was the warmest La Nina year on record (and that was with one of the strongest La Ninas on record); the next warmest such year was 2008, preceded by 1999, as shown here.
Note also that 1998 was far warmer than the years surrounding it, so it really sticks out, but 2005 and 2010 weren’t so exceptional because the years around them were much warmer. The only “evidence” that warming has slowed down in recent year is if you use a very short time period, but the noise prevents you from making meaningful conclusions (the tactic of using the most recent year and comparing it to the earliest year that was warmer, which is 1998, is also used).
Short of say, a nuclear war, it is virtually impossible for global temperature to drop that much in one year; to get an idea of what that implies, there was a prediction made last year that 2011 would be the coolest year since 1956 (never mind that 1964 was actually cooler). the warmest year in the 1940s was warmer, but that would still mean a much larger drop than at any other time.
Also, one must not confuse local weather with global climate; it has been pretty cold in places like Alaska this winter but there are places where it has been warm (e.g. where I live), or areas that have seen both extremes of heat and cold (there’s also the meme that the 1930s were the warmest decade on record, confusing U.S. temperatures with global temperatures).
You say it’s “a very short time period,” but you don’t then mention what a sufficiently long period would be; in your opinion, how many years cooler than (or equal to) the '10-'05-'98 mark would we need to see before we could meaningfully conclude that warming has slowed down or ceased?
As always it depends on the context and what everybody is getting from this current thread, it is clear most **are **getting confused by your insistence that this is important as many do get the implication that nothing should be done until 2017, you need to always clarify that indeed you are not implying that nothing should be done until then **as deniers do grab statements like “wait for the falsification” to mean “lets not do anything until then” and run away with it. **
If there is a remaining complaint against you is that you always seem to forget that deniers do use that incomplete point to mislead others.
But the point is that skeptics and deniers ARE getting their information out in the papers and magazines that the general public reads. (I don’t live in the UK, so I can’t differentiate the credibility of the different papers, though I did enjoy some of the thought-provoking articles on page three of The Sun) They come up with easily understood arguments that non-climate scientists can understand. Where’s the other side?
That’s just silly; whether we can’t falsify it until 2017 has absolutely nothing to do with whether nothing should be done until 2017. They’re completely unrelated. I’ve never seen a “denier” run away with a statement like the former to infer the latter; I can only recall seeing you do that.
It’s up in the air whether I “forget” that deniers use that point in such a way, or whether I’ve never actually seen a denier use that point in such a way. Who, other than you, has so drawn that conclusion?
If your point is that the deniers are lying about scientists, and the scientists are not lying about the deniers, then I agree.
The theory of AGW is trivially easy for anyone who’s been in a hot car in the summertime to understand. The evidence is far trickier to understand. For my money, that’s why we as a society choose to support scientists: the world is mighty tricky, and it makes sense to have specialists who understand specific aspects of that trickiness.
At this point, though, it’s like you’re asking to falsify the theory that cigarette smoking causes cancer. Sure, if suddenly lung cancer rates among smokers drop to levels equal to those among nonsmokers, that’ll put a pretty big question mark after the theory. But so what? That’s really unlikely to happen, and I don’t even see why we’d discuss it.
You say you treat this the same as you treat everything. How much time have you spent asking what people would accept for falsification of the theories that:
-HIV causes AIDS?
-nothing can travel faster than the speed of light?
-the earth has a system of plate tectonics?
-plants create sugars via photosynthesis?
-smoking tobacco causes lung cancer?
Already linked to.
But really, it is too hard to realize that there are indeed sources of information that should be dumped or at least to demand from them better information and not false equivalence?
The BBC at least has began to realize that climate change deniers do need to be put in the same column as anti-vaxers and creationists, you still have to give them some say in the matter, but it has to be contrasted with the overwhelming evidence that they are yahoos.
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/07/22/275400/bbc-false-balance-climate-change/
As for others, well so much for those that claim that mainstream media are not mostly supporting corporate positions by their glaring omission of this subject in recent days.
Well, as per the OP my particular hang-up is that I keep seeing experts on television and in the newspapers get asked whether the latest data suffices to falsify it, and I keep seeing responses like those in post #27: the recent cool temperatures are too short-term to count, the lack of warming hasn’t yet gone on for enough years – but never yet with a follow-up about how much longer the same would need to keep on keeping on for relevance.
Take those last few on your list there: it’s not that experts keep getting shown plants creating sugars in the absence of light and keep replying, “that’s mildly interesting, but I’d need to see this happen more times to be sure, and I won’t say how many more.” Nor do I see 'em getting asked – year after year after year for the better part of two decades – whether the latest studies showing no link between smoking and cancer suffice; that question doesn’t come up, since no such studies need to be explained away as insufficient.
By contrast, the speed of light thing – well, shucks, there was a bit of a kerfuffle about it this past year, and as I’d always figured the experts were perfectly willing to jettison their belief if a credible source clocked something moving fast enough: they put their cards on the table, spelled out exactly what they’d need to see to be sure, and otherwise acted as I would.
So show me someone who thinks they’ve got evidence against any of the items you mentioned – and then show me experts who shrug off the proffered stuff as insufficient without going on to spell out what would suffice – and then I’d ask for that follow-up. If we lived in a world where every year saw folks showing off faster-than-light travel, and every year saw 'em get greeted with “not enough; show me more; won’t say how much more” – well, then, yeah, I’d spend just as much time on that – or AIDS, or continents, or the rest – as I do on this.
But it’s only ever here that I see the bizarrely-vague I’d need more of what you’re showing me, but I won’t say how much more.
The Bad Astronomer demolishes the Mail article here:
Here’s a hint: The Daily Mail is a disgraceful rag.
The issue here is that what makes a convincing argument isn’t necessarily the same as what composes a logical argument. After all, this is the point of identifying logical falisies, because those are often arguments that can convince people but really shouldn’t. The problem is, climate science is something that takes a lot of specific understanding to really study, and like any such science, it only takes a little bit to confuse people who don’t really understand.
Imagine it’s like the stock market, and there’s a general rule that if you diversify and hold onto it long enough, it will increase in value. Well, if a particular diversification doesn’t do well or it stagnates for a period of time, someone not possessing specific knowledge may see that as specific evidence that that concept is wrong. And then you start having confirmation bias and PR all coming into effect.
The problem is, this is an issue that we need to engage the public in, but the public doesn’t have enough specific knowledge to really understand anything beyond the basics, so that lack of specific knowledge quickly finds apparent problems and things get out of hand because it’s the people who misunderstand for the very same reasons that are the well known opponents, and the science side generally has crappy PR and doesn’t as well understand why people don’t understand, so they can’t counter arguments based on emotion or ignorance or lack of perspective.
Overall, though, I think the largest problem is one of perspective. Though I do appreciate the science behind climate change, even if I don’t specifically have a thorough understanding, I don’t think it’s an argument that is going to convince the public that things need to change. To the general public, they hear about impact that is likely decades away and things like rising sea levels which don’t seem like much to worry about now. And it’s a difficult thing to play up to the point where people will feel enough panic to want to do something about it while they still can. Instead, the focus needs to change on more immediate impact. It affects energy prices, it affects jobs, it means we breath nasty air. I think that will be more effective at engaging the public.
As per this piece in yesterday’s Washington Post, the Obama administration apparently agrees with you.
Of course CO2 is a greenhouse gas. The questions that remain are does increased greenhouse gas lead to a increase in albedo such that the warming is offset by cooling? Are there other climate trends, such as a return to a Little Ice Age which are being offset by any such warming , leading to no net warming or cooling effect? Next- how much will the earth’s biosphere react to the extra C02 by absorbing it?
The CO2 fish tank is bunk science.
Mind you, I agree there’s little doubt there have been recent significant climate changes, and since humans are adding a lot of CO2, etc, it’s hard to believe we are not contributing in some way.