Global Warming progressing far faster than previously thought

[GIGObuster]

@Budget_Player_Cadet

I literally can conceive of no reason why you’d cite Dyson other than naive, “he’s a scientist, he must know what he’s talking about” fervor. Christ, is the barrel that empty? That sweet bribe money really is sinking in to all the scientists, isn’t it?

It is that empty; one of the points I like to make in discussions like this is that, regarding experts in the field, there are no easy pickings for the cherry pickers.

[BrainGlutton]

@FXMastermind

Complete nonsense, and easily shown to be false in the extreme. It’s exactly that sort of pseudo scientific rhetoric that makes all climate proclamations suspect, because seriously, if anyone is that deluded about climate, how can you believe them about anything?

Freeman Dyson: Climate Change Predictions Are “Absurd”

Don’t get the wrong idea, I don’t question physics or science, I question **your **claims.

Ah, Freeman Dyson!

Crankery

Dyson considers himself a non-denominational Christian and believes in non-overlapping magisteria. Some of the material he has written on metaphysics, though, is much less Christian than it is reminiscent of various theories of quantum consciousness, panentheism, panpsychism, and other sorts of New Agey science woo.

Dyson has succumbed to old age crank syndrome as well, becoming a global warming denier. However, he hasn’t done any actual criticizing of climate science besides dismissing the models as flawed and saying that if it is a real problem, we can easily cook up some super-tree to suck the carbon dioxide out of the air. Dyson’s support for deniers seems to be the result of wanting to stick it to the scientific man:

My objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much over the technical facts, about which I do not know much, but it’s rather against the way those people behave and the kind of intolerance to criticism that a lot of them have. I think that’s what upsets me.[1]

So… yeah, thanks for that.

[Aji_de_Gallina]

@wolfpup

You might want to consider the fact that the carbon cycle is a balance, and until industrialization has been absorbing as much as it’s been emitting, which is why CO2 levels were extremely stable for a thousand years before industrialization, and shot up like a skyrocket in modern times. Your bogus numbers rather overlook the fact that in this delicate balance of the carbon cycle, the atmospheric CO2 content has shot up by 37% over the pre-industrial level, putting it definitively at the highest level by far in at least 1.2 million years and more likely the highest level in the last 15 million. It’s at 400 ppm and has demonstrably never exceeded 300 ppm in all the ice age cycles since the MPT 1.2 million years ago.

You missed where I said

Heck, 4% may be enough to cause a lot of damage and disrupt all sorts of cycles

…didn’t ya?

What bogus numbers? 25 times? 30gT? 750gT? 4%? Unless bogus means “inconvenient for you”.

SO, it hasn’t been over 400ppm in a million years. It means it was over 400 a million years ago and no runaway climate disaster, no bleached oceans till of fish are dead, no methane released from tundra/taiga to increase temprs even further.
400ppm may be horrible for us, I don’t think so, but they may.

Playing with large numbers impresses only the mathematically illiterate

[Aji_de_Gallina]

Is there a rule in which you never show 0ppm in CO2 concentration charts?
It wouldn’t be because it exagerates the slope of what is shown, would it?

[Kimstu]

@Aji_de_Gallina

SO, it hasn’t been over 400ppm in a million years. It means it was over 400 a million years ago and no runaway climate disaster, no bleached oceans till of fish are dead, no methane released from tundra/taiga to increase temprs even further.

“Probably no runaway climate disaster” is not really pinning the needle on the good-news meter, though.

If that’s what passes for the bright side, ISTM that there is still plenty of reason to view the likely impacts of global warming with some concern.

[GIGObuster]

@Aji_de_Gallina

You missed where I said

…didn’t ya?

What bogus numbers? 25 times? 30gT? 750gT? 4%? Unless bogus means “inconvenient for you”.

SO, it hasn’t been over 400ppm in a million years. It means it was over 400 a million years ago and no runaway climate disaster, no bleached oceans till of fish are dead, no methane released from tundra/taiga to increase temprs even further.
400ppm may be horrible for us, I don’t think so, but they may.

Playing with large numbers impresses only the mathematically illiterate

Yeah, like the illiterate fellows at Scientific American. :rolleyes:

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2013/05/09/400-ppm-carbon-dioxide-in-the-atmosphere-reaches-prehistoric-levels/

The last time CO2 levels at Mauna Loa were this high, Homo sapiens did not live there. In fact, the last time CO2 levels are thought to have been this high was more than 2.5 million years ago, an era known as the Pliocene, when the Canadian Arctic boasted forests instead of icy wastes. The land bridge connecting North America and South America had recently formed. The globe’s temperature averaged about 3 degrees C warmer, and sea level lapped coasts 5 meters or more higher.
co2-levels-over-800000-years

The world will change again due to human activity and associated emissions of CO2, perhaps causing another set of coral reef extinctions like those found during the Pliocene, among other impacts. When Charles D. Keeling first started his measurements, CO2 made up some 317 ppm of the air we breathe and climate change was already a concern thanks to the work of John Tyndall, Svante Arrhenius and Guy Callendar.

[Kimstu]

@Aji_de_Gallina

Is there a rule in which you never show 0ppm in CO2 concentration charts?
It wouldn’t be because it exagerates the slope of what is shown, would it?

I’d guess that it’s more likely to be because the evolution of land plants has occurred entirely during periods when atmospheric CO2 levels were significantly greater than 100 ppm.

Environmental scenarios in which the atmosphere can’t support land-based plant life as we know it are not all that realistic for modeling a biosphere that includes human beings.

[Aji_de_Gallina]

@Kimstu

I’d guess that it’s more likely to be because the evolution of land plants has occurred entirely during periods when atmospheric CO2 levels were significantly greater than 100 ppm.

Environmental scenarios in which the atmosphere can’t support land-based plant life as we know it are not all that realistic for modeling a biosphere that includes human beings.

You always show 0 on the y-axis (when a 0 is possible) if you want the graph to be non-biased.

[wolfpup]

@Aji_de_Gallina

SO, it hasn’t been over 400ppm in a million years. It means it was over 400 a million years ago and no runaway climate disaster, no bleached oceans till of fish are dead, no methane released from tundra/taiga to increase temprs even further.
400ppm may be horrible for us, I don’t think so, but they may.

You are so completely missing the point. It’s like the denialist claim that CO2 was ten times higher than now in the distant past, so “like, what could be da harm”? The higher CO2 levels before the mid-Pleistocene transition were part of geologically long changes in the earth’s carbon sources and sinks that played out over millions of years.

Since the MPT 1.2 million years ago, the carbon cycle has been extraordinarily well bounded between 180 and 280-300 ppm. That 100 ppm differential that you like to refer to as “a mere 4%” has been responsible for the difference between ice ages and interglacials – for the difference between mile-thick ice-sheets over North America vs. temperate climates, palm trees and swimming pools. This narrow band of CO2 excursion is an enormously powerful differential, and represents the climate regime in which the current ecosystem formed and to which it is adapted, including that pesky species known as homo sapiens. For CO2 to suddenly shoot up to 400 – with no end in sight, in a time period of a few hundred years that is geologically less than a blink of an eye – is a physical shock to both the climate system and the biological ecosystem, and the consequent destabilization and the risks that arise from it are enormous.

[psikeyhackr]

@Aji_de_Gallina

Who was conducting an experiment? I mean, the phrase is nice for a rally full of ignorant schoolchildren, but no experiment in any shape of form.
In what way was it an experiment except in the most tortured of analogies?

There are other uncontrolled experiments.

Wi-Fi technology--an uncontrolled global experiment on the health of mankind...

Searching the Internet is so cool. Or is it awesome?

Comparing CO2 emissions to CO2 levels

psik

[FXMastermind]

@Budget_Player_Cadet

a random physicist with no credentials in climatology, no climate research, no published papers in the field,

OMG

As opposed to you, a random nobody who thinks they are smarter than Dyson.

Priceless.

[Kimstu]

@Aji_de_Gallina

You always show 0 on the y-axis (when a 0 is possible) if you want the graph to be non-biased.

You are quite mistaken. One should always mark the scale on the axis so that the reader isn’t fooled into assuming an axis starts at zero when it doesn’t. But there is no universal ironclad requirement to show the y-range starting from zero on every graph; it depends on the data.

For one thing, sometimes the lower part of the axis is just irrelevant. If, for example, land plants as we know them are unlikely to exist below CO2 concentrations of around 100-150 ppm, then concentrations below that minimum are irrelevant to climate conditions from the point of view of the human species as we know it.

[GIGObuster]

@FXMastermind

OMG

As opposed to you, a random nobody who thinks they are smarter than Dyson.

Priceless.

Well, then lets see what a Professor in Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago and another guy that has a PhD in Geological Sciences at UW and is the founding co-director of ISOLAB, a state-of-the art isotope geochemistry facility involving research ranging from climate and atmospheric chemistry to geobiology report about what Dyson is doing.

RealClimate: The Starship vs. Spaceship Earth

Dyson’s idea of what constitutes a “big problem” may be, well, just a bit different from what most of the rest of us might have in mind.

Brower’s conclusions sound right on the mark to us, but don’t fully explain Dyson. Perhaps Brower is being gentle, since he is an old friend, or perhaps he simply isn’t aware of it, but one issue he does not touch on in his article is is how deceptive (apparently deliberately) Dyson can be.

The problem is that Dyson says demonstrably wrong things about global warming, and doesn’t seem to care so long as they support his notion of human destiny. Brower reports that Dyson doesn’t consider himself an expert on climate change, has no interest in arguing the details with experts, and yet somehow knows that the experts don’t have any answers worth listening to. That doesn’t stop Dyson from making sweeping pronouncements, many of them so egregiously wrong that it would hardly have taken an expert to set him straight.

The examples of this are legion. In the essay “Heretical thoughts about science and society” (excerpted here) Dyson says that CO2 only acts to make cold places (like the arctic) warmer and doesn’t make hot places hotter, because only cold places are dry enough for CO2 to compete with water vapor opacity. But in jumping to this conclusion, he has neglected to take into account that even in the hot tropics, the air aloft is cold and dry, so CO2 nonetheless exerts a potent warming effect there. Dyson has fallen into the same saturation fallacy that bedeviled Ångström a century earlier.

Dyson espouses a generic disdain for climate models and climate modellers: ” Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models.” Like most of us, he has little confidence in the modelling of clouds. But with great ignorance of the nature of the modelling enterprise, he declares: “It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds” Actually, those of us who go to Antarctica to drill ice cores certainly put on winter clothes, and paleoclimatologists are out in the swamps and ocean muck all the time. And there are plenty of scientists flying around in the clouds, trying to gauge their effects. The mainstream estimate that the climate sensitivity is around 3°C for a doubling of CO2 does not simply comes from computer models. Study of the Last Glacial Maximum, the Pliocene and the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum all rule out the idea that there is a strongly stabilizing cloud feedback. Ahe fact that we cannot precisely quantify cloud feedbacks also means that there is a lot of risk, that cloud feedbacks could make a doubled-CO2 world much hotter, not much cooler. Dyson’s writings conveniently ignore this two-directional implication of uncertainty, and they they also ignore the implications of the long atmospheric lifetime of CO2, which means if we wait and see how hot it gets and find we don’t like it, there’s nothing much to be done (unless, of course, we can simply go somewhere else).

Finally, there is the familiar examples of Dyson attacking the style of the debate, rather than its substance. Reporting on written debate between Richard Lindzen and Stefan Rahmstorf, in the New York Review of Books New York Times book review, Dyson juxtaposes Lindzen’s claim that “observations suggest that the sensitivity of the real climate is much less than that found in computer models” with Stefan calling this “simply ludicrous”. Dyson gives the impression that rational arguments from skeptics are met with “open contempt” by the majority. But he fails to mention that Stefan showed in detail why Lindzen’s claim is wrong: Lindzen ignored ocean thermal inertia when comparing observed warming with the equilibrium climate sensitivity. Any physicist should be able to judge that Stefan is right and Lindzen is wrong on this point. He also failed to mention that Stefan used the word “ludicrous” only in a “personal postscript” to a completely sober scientific article, referring to Lindzen’s claims that a vast conspiracy of thousands of climatologists worldwide is misleading the public for personal gain. Dyson’s account of the Lindzen-Rahmstorf exchange neither fairly covers the substance of the argument, nor is it a fair portrayal of its style – Dyson seems to have twisted it as much as he could to score a political point.

Uh, it turns out that even Dyson would tell you that he is not expert and he is not active anymore in current research, in the end what he has there is just his opinion, that just like yours is not one that is aware of the progress that was made.

And now you know why I quote a lot, precisely to deal with pseudoscientists that think that are doing science when in reality they are only pushing ignorance and fake experts.

[Kimstu]

@FXMastermind

As opposed to you, a random nobody who thinks they are smarter than Dyson.

Being smart doesn’t automatically mean you have sufficient knowledge and expertise in a scientific field to second-guess the smart people who do have knowledge and expertise in that field.

As, indeed, Dyson himself is quite smart and aware enough to acknowledge:

@Freeman Dyson

My objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much over the technical facts, about which I do not know much […]

Successfully critiquing or refuting a mainstream scientific theory in a very technically complex discipline takes more than just smarts and common sense. It takes expert knowledge, which Dyson candidly admits he doesn’t have when it comes to climate science.

[BrainGlutton]

@FXMastermind

You know why every goddam topic about anything climate related turns into an argument about IF global warming is actually happening?

Do you know why?

(and that, like most everything else, is actually off topic)

Because haters gonna hate and deniers gonna deny.

[BrainGlutton]

@FXMastermind

OMG

As opposed to you, a random nobody who thinks they are smarter than Dyson.

Priceless.

Few people are smarter than Dyson, I’m sure; but he was never a climatologist, and does not even pretend to know much about the subject of global warming, and even geniuses are often wrong about things outside their field of expertise. See, e.g., Engineers and woo.

[Budget_Player_Cadet]

@FXMastermind

OMG

As opposed to you, a random nobody who thinks they are smarter than Dyson.

Priceless.

Specifically with regards to global warming? Yes, I do think I’m smarter than Dyson. Do you know why I think that? Because what he’s said on the subject amounts to a combination of admissions that he has no clue what he’s talking about, and claims which show that he has no idea what he’s talking about. And of course, he’s going against a massive consensus with nothing but his own admittedly uninformed opinion. So yeah, I do think, with regards to climate science, I am smarter than Dyson. I also think he’s considerably smarter than you. Come at me, bro.

[FXMastermind]

It doesn’t matter, it’s still a classic case of a nobody calling an actual respected scientist a “crank”, because he spoke his mind about the nonsense that is obvious to an intelligent and well educated physics scientist.

It’s one more reason the alarmists are considered a joke.

[BrainGlutton]

@FXMastermind

It doesn’t matter, it’s still a classic case of a nobody calling an actual respected scientist a “crank”, because he spoke his mind about the nonsense that is obvious to an intelligent and well educated physics scientist.

Physics is not climatology. And, again, Dyson does not even pretend to have any actual scientific reasons to reject global warming. If he had, wouldn’t he say so, if he’s going to speak out at all?

[FXMastermind]

OMG we have a doubling down.

I think the difference between me and most of the experts is that I think I have a much wider view of the whole subject. I was involved in climate studies seriously about 30 years ago. That’s how I got interested. There was an outfit called the Institute for Energy Analysis at Oak Ridge. I visited Oak Ridge many times, and worked with those people, and I thought they were excellent. And the beauty of it was that it was multi-disciplinary. There were experts not just on hydrodynamics of the atmosphere, which of course is important, but also experts on vegetation, on soil, on trees, and so it was sort of half biological and half physics.

Freeman Dyson Takes on the Climate Establishment

Because the alarmists can’t counter the logic, the science, they have to attack the source. Which is exactly what Dyson pointed out is so fucked up about climate scientists. The whole thing reeks.