Global warming v weather shift

Great Debates
81

In the condensed form you just discredited yourself already, I’m not an alarmist. You want it to be the case, but no.

The reality is that overall I continue to see people that constantly claim that the IPCC is alarmist and I already said that for predictions I go for what the scientific consensus (that is the IPPC) goes for.

Once again, you are trying to make somehow an issue that has to be won by putting down a bloke on the internet, put down the scientists (and now the economists that are taking a look at the cost issue) that are telling you that we should do more know rather than later at a higher cost, I’m not an alarmist because I do believe that humanity will continue after the bottleneck years, the only beef for me is that they will be unnecessarily harsher only because we are electing politicians that even deny that there is an issue.

Indeed, they are even worse than any of the posters here by many orders of magnitude, posters like you are not so bad, we just disagree on the levels of the effort that is needed.

82

If you believe what you’re saying here then I buy that an apologize. In the past in threads you have participated in I have seen you repost articles from alarmist websites and because of that I made an assumption that you were an alarmist.

I’ve not put down any scientists or economists. I’m just simply saying I think the IPCC was wrong in its prediction of when fossil fuels will become economical unviable. Most likely it was probably based on inaccurate and incomplete data, as the recent expansion in proven oil and gas reserves happened fairly recently.

I would not trust a climate change paper published by ExxonMobil for obvious reasons, but when they are talking about projections in oil and gas production and consumption I would trust their projections very much. Primarily because unlike the IPCC the persons preparing that report for XOM have to be right or the company loses money, and XOM’s expertise in that field is basically unquestioned.

I actually doubt we disagree about the level of effort needed. Where many people start to fight with me on global warming is there is “future as I’d like it to be” and “future as I imagine it will be.”

I think to some degree we’ll be able to control emissions in this country. I also think that as the natural population peaks in the 21st century and then actually declines we’ll see a decrease. I also believe eventually China will get its emissions under control, as will India.

However I believe that because of political and economic realities all of this will happen after a huge amount of carbon has been put into the atmosphere. I believe because of political shortsightedness there is a real limitation to how much we can achieve on that front.

For that reason I think, in addition to political advocacy we should genuinely put effort into research efforts at climate engineering and other new fields that will try to mitigate or blunt the impact of climate change. The moment I mention that I am hit with cries that I’m a crazed lunatic who doesn’t believe in global warming and is ascribing to hopeless technologies. I admit, for our short term (50-150 year) outlook there is probably only fairly minor advances we’ll make in climate engineering. But I think those fields could be very important long term and even minor advances in the science can make small impacts.

I do think eventually man will not burn much fossil fuels, but I believe that on basically every issue out there, be it government debt to the climate, politicians and voters are ultra shortsighted. Because of this I have little faith we’ll respond to this crisis in any meaningful way, so the focus should be on figuring out exactly what will happen over the next 200 years and making all plans to adapt society. The changes impact could be reduced if we were more proactive in our contingency plans.

83

The fact is that true alarmists like Lovelock have been dismissed even by me, and that is because the sources I use do refer to the science or are active scientists, there is however the fact that many right wing sources do repeat the canard that groups like the IPCC are alarmists.

Many scientists on the field do complain that the IPCC is too conservative, but I do think there is a good point on being one.

As I pointed before you are eons much better that the current leadership that we got in Washington, we have the biggest problem now as they are not at all like you, they even deny that working to prepare for the changes coming are needed at all, because, after all, god is up there and warming will not come as Senator Inhofe can tell you.

http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/senate/241097-inhofe-to-sanders-on-global-warming-god-is-still-up-there

84

Yes, and what if CO2 rose to the same level (or even not) with current conditions?

As for human life, maybe if we can relocate to the polar regions:

Claiming that life can still survive is meaningless since the whole “debate” is over humans and their civilization (although extinctions of other species, not all due to climate change, but that too, is also bad, unless you argue that humans are no different from algae).

FWIW, it isn’t just about humans, we are ALREADY seeing crop yields fall due to higher temperatures (of course, from theoretical yields since other factors influence yields, but it just makes it that much harder to keep up with demand):

(note - minimum temperatures are warming faster than maximum temperatures)

85

During the Pleistocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum there was generally complex life and megafauna, including mammals. There’s no reason to assume humans couldn’t live in that climate, because global temperature rises have (in the geologic record) warmed disproportionately the polar regions and not taken say, the land around the equator to 150 F or something.

86

The land does not need to increase in temperature that much, history has shown that slight changes are enough to topple entire civilizations, in the modern era I think we are better prepared, just that we are not enough and we are not getting any revenue to deal with the problems that an increase in temperature is giving us, just an increase of one degree has meant that we are getting more than 3 record high temperature incidents for every 1 record low.

That translates into more intense droughts.

The point here is that I do not see much a movement to even prepare for that kind of change. Who is paying for all this? Wait, that is not the right question, the question to ask is why aren’t the industries that are getting us there not paying anything at all, if not to curb emissions, at least to prepare for the changes?

And we are not in the Pleistocene-Eocene with no humans around, the cost for displacement and warfare (there is very good evidence to show that the Arab Spring revolts were originated by the bread riots caused by a shortage of wheat from the made worse by global warming drought in Russia and other Asian countries) is looking to be a big one.

Then we have the issue that while CO2 is rising, there would be a moving target on the “average” climate we would be getting.

On this I want to go to the land of imagination: Here I wish that all the CO2 we are very likely to still put in the atmosphere would be there already and all the lag of the effects and feedback would be instantaneous, that the oceans would rise hundreds of feet, and lets also pretend that the change has happened with no bad side effects. We could then had a new, more or less, reliable pattern of the seasons in places like Siberia and Canada with more space for crops, it is true that many other regions are bone dry, but most of the population will be allowed to move to the new temperate regions… :dubious:

Yeah, I would like a pony for that one, eventually there are very huge flies even in that optimistic ointment.

And that takes us back to the real world and to realize also that adding an element that will warm the atmosphere in growing quantities until they go bust means that the patterns that we will be getting will not be stable until we also make an effort of limiting our emissions, the previous stable weather that allowed human civilization to grow will not be there and while we are waiting for the new stable environment, I can think of several problems that are very likely to take place in the meantime.

87

To hypothesize that “things will continue doing what they are already doing” is to construct a model.

A model is just a certain set of assumptions about how physical processes work. Even the very simple assumption “Things will continue doing what they are already doing” is a form of model, because it implies that you’re accepting some particular set of assumptions about the workings of the carbon cycle.

(For example, even the elementary hypothesis “the sun will rise in the east tomorrow in the same way it’s always done before” implies an underlying model. It assumes that there are predictable physical forces which are stable over time governing the relative motions of the sun and earth, rather than, say, a stochastic process that just by random chance happened to generate a really long sequence of consecutive eastward risings, or perhaps a different physical process that was stable in the past but is liable to reverse itself at any moment.)

Climate models are not decisively tested against any competing hypothesis: rather, they are tested against actual climate data, once that data has been accumulated. (That’s why, as I noted, it’s impossible to test a current model against future data, since we don’t have any future data yet.)

Moreover, if you’re going to propose a model based on the hypothesis “things will continue doing what they are already doing”, you have to specify which “things” in particular you’re making that prediction about. You can’t currently have a realistic climate model with everything staying exactly the same: if one factor continues unchanged, it can still produce a change in another factor.

For example, are you predicting that humans will go on increasing atmospheric GHG concentrations exponentially, i.e., with a constant growth rate, as we’re currently doing? Or are you predicting that atmospheric GHG concentrations will stay the same as they currently are, meaning that the anthropogenic emissions would somehow disappear? Are you predicting that the absorption rates of natural carbon sinks will stay the same as they currently are? Or that the absolute quantity of carbon that they absorb annually will stay the same as it is at present? Are you predicting that current deforestation rates will continue unchanged, or rather that current land use patterns will continue unchanged (meaning that deforestation rates would drop to zero)?

Predicting that any one of these or a huge number of other climate factors “will continue doing what [it’s] already doing” automatically implies that one or more other factors will change. That’s why your model of naive extrapolation from past conditions to future conditions is too simplistic.

Nope, I’m not arguing that any particular prediction must be correct just because the IPCC supports it. I’m just pointing out the ways in which your over-simplistic model of “things will continue doing what they are already doing” fails to take into account a wide variety of potential effects that the IPCC has identified as possible.

In fact, let’s forget the authority of the source altogether here, and just look at the bare content of the claim and the objections. You are predicting that temperature increases will remain linear throughout the 21st century. I’m pointing out that increases in emission growth rates and/or changes in the carbon cycle could result in temperature increases being superlinear.

Do you have any scientific reason to reject the possibility of such changes? So far, you seem to be arguing merely along the lines of “That isn’t going to happen because it hasn’t happened previously and I’m choosing to assume that things will continue doing what they are already doing”.

That’s a pretty arbitrary assumption in the context of climate change. Do you have a better response?

88

I’m not making a prediction. I’m pointing out that models require exponential increases in greenhouse gases to make their predictions come true. If you are okay with the economic assumptions in the IPCC models and starving millions of people to death based on those assumptions, then we have nothing to discuss.

89

No evidence for that, but it sounds like the same assumption many right wingers make of the DDT case and assume that environmentalists kill millions.

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2005/02/17/ddt3/

In this case the point remains, the emission of greenhouse gases has not reduced and it will not until several more megatons of CO2 are released in the atmosphere. In that case not doing anything to even prepare for the changes is bound to cause starvation, and any deaths should be assigned to the lack of preparation that many contrarian think thanks continue to recommend to Republican leaders.

90

It is gigatons not megatons of greenhouse gases, but thanks for demonstrating your scientific ignorance again.

91

Just a typo, I did mean to say gigatons, (actually Firefox dictionary does not like gigatons and does recommend megatons, a reflexive correction ensued) so you just demonstrated that you have nothing useful to say but to recklessly accuse the experts of proposing mass murder.

92

Actually, you have. You said in your first post in this thread:

And when jshore challenged you to explain why you thought that was a plausible estimate of the temperature increase by the year 2100, you justified it as the continuation of a current linear warming trend:

In other words, you endorsed a prediction about temperature increase over the next century based on a model that merely extrapolated the future temperature values from recent ones.

Exponential increase in greenhouse gases IS what is currently happening, and has been happening in the recent past.

You yourself mentioned earlier the logarithmic relationship between GHG concentrations and temperature. That relationship means that as GHG emissions increase exponentially, temperatures go up linearly (as they have been doing over the recent period of anthropogenic emissions).

This misunderstanding of my basic point about physical modeling, combined with your apparent unwillingness to answer my questions about the details of your assumptions and your earlier confusion between “exponential” increases and “logarithmic” increases in GHGs, is giving the impression that you might not be entirely following the technical part of this debate.

Can you explain what you think the current behavior of GHG emissions rates is, and what you are deducing from it about probable temperature increases over the 21st century?

93

CO2 is not increasing exponentially. Do you even know what the word means?

94

Judith Curry had an interesting article today.

http://judithcurry.com/2012/08/27/apocalypse-not/

It is mostly a comment on Matt Ridley’s article in Wired

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/08/ff_apocalypsenot/all/

I’m actually a lukewarmer myself. I used to be a strong warmer until I figured out that the actual data doesn’t support their feedback.

95

Well, for starters she mentions that “the end of oil” announced in previous decades was also not accurate, meaning also that the idea that any peaks that could save us could also be inaccurate and then we could expect also more increases in emissions. Lets also remember that in reality most scientists predicted the warming observed in the 70’s and most of the media got it wrong, IIRC the end of oil and most of the famine thing are also remembered from what the popular press was saying, not the scientific one.

With her attempt at dismiss BEST Judith Curry has distanced even more from what even skeptics are finding.

Her opinions then are less reliable nowadays:

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2010/11/11/207018/judith-curry-climate-science/

96

Translation, he means that she is less ** politically** reliable. Romm is a hack that doesn’t care about science.

97

Nope, even the scientists already have her number:

The overall point is that it is ridiculous to claim that the IPCC is being alarmist, that is the implication of claiming that there is a lot of lukewarm scientists, IOW opposed to it, the reality is that with the conservative approach seen by the IPCC, the IPCC are **the **lukewarmers. And Judith Curry is just following the footsteps of scientists like Spencer.

The Wired piece is however sincere in the fact that many of the huge problems avoided were avoided thanks to regulations and technology progress, so regulation is also needed in this front so we will see indeed just a small change in the future.

98

BTW Romm is a Senior Fellow at American Progress and holds a Ph.D. in physics from MIT.

99

How is that? When one considers how much CO2 has risen since preindustrial times and the increase from the last Ice Age and the consequent ~6°C increase in global temperature then, one has to conclude that there were big feedbacks in play (and FWIW, CO2 lead temperature rise back then too, as new research has found). This is also valid for the current climate since there are still major ice sheets and extensive deposits of carbon in permafrost and methane hydrates (the oft-quoted 3°C per doubling of CO2 also doesn’t account for long-term feedbacks; Hansen concludes it is 6°C over long timescales, although only for a climate similar to today; a quadrupling of CO2 wouldn’t cause a 12°C increase). This is also supported by paleoclimate data, based on actual past climate conditions:

100

And he switched to politics before the ink was dry on his PhD. That he is working as a paid blogger for a political action group is not a recommendation. It is like I used a employee of the Heartland Institution as a reference.

Do you actually think that other people don’t know this.