Nice compilation, Kimstu! 
Once again, nothing specific to counter, much less know what is being claimed.
If you have a point, make it.
Yes, Esco’s confusion is indeed the same confusion inherent in your OP. Your OP asked “Has the world actually been cooling since 2002?”, and I summed up the responses to that back in post #24:
All the kerfuffle in this thread since then has come about because you are apparently still unable to understand that distinction.
Nice one indeed, and it is noticeable that FX still tries to pathetically claim that **Kimstu **did not show all that the data from St. Louis confirms that a comic is more correct than FX could be ever. (And FX is still wrong with his sun spot confusion, his denial of CO2 warming the earth, following conspiracy theories, etc, etc.)
On the contrary, you just proved that the climate central data, the graph he used for the comic, was wrong. Like I said, the graph was wrong, and the premise he used based on it is wrong.
And this is just for one station in St Louis. You actually only need one sub zero day to prove it in error, but you did much better than that.
False. That you say that about what I say, is a claim. Prove it.
Quote where I said what you claimed I say.
Or retract your claim.
Like this insipid xkcd sidetrack, the red herring may stink, but my dog won’t follow it.
It’s not the one station from St Louis we are debating, it is the comic and the data it was based on. This focus on sub zero days is a red herring, and it’s also wrong, which is ironic as hell.
Yes, and the alarmists and deniers alike aren’t forthright in what it doesn’t know. Deniers go “This view of data makes the whole thing shatter. SHATTER I SAY! You should give me money.” and alarmists go “The CO2 is causing warming, thus the world is DOOMED. You should give me money.”
Except it’s not just a “Ragtag” band of political activists, plus an Al Gore (how many activists is an Al Gore?). I know things like the corn ethanol subsidy don’t come up because they are sound environmental policy but because we have a huge agri interest that likes money. Crying about “climate change” helped them get that money. Many businesses will happily increase revenue in while chanting the same slogan of “climate change.” They don’t have to ever bother writing a press release and they can get some of that government-provided money. The larger the business, the more this happens.
Except that those studies are bullshit. Pure and simple. I read that “Americans Think The Sun Revolves Around the Earth” survey. It was done with 2,200 people. In Michigan. And that, somehow, represents all 300 million Americans? No.
Additionally, if you actually look for all of the conclusions in that survey you’d find that it also said “According to the survey, more than 90 percent of Americans think scientists are “helping to solve challenging problems” and are “dedicated people who work for the good of humanity.”” So, even if we fully accept that survey as “fact” it’s still saying that even if people don’t spend a lot of time on science learnding, they still trust that scientists are getting things right.
I also have never been able to find the sample metrics or question series for that survey. I would be very interested in if this is a bunch of college kids, mothers from the community, business leaders, whites, blacks, hispanics, or a good mix…at least as good a mix as you can get with 2,200 people.
But all of that generosity in giving those surveys the benefit of the doubt? It’s crap. Those surveys are useless and shouldn’t be used to say there is a “problem.”
I’ve read it.
First, what? There’s no money in the oil industry, now?
Second, why does his compensation package matter? I’ve long said that CEOs of any corporate get paid way to much, and this isn’t just oil execs.
As for XTO Energy: They sold it because they couldn’t make a profit on it. Exxon has done that several times. As for Exxon’s marketing chops, they were the worst, especially through the 90s. But they have all-but stopped giving money to deniers in recent years. In 2010, for instance, Exxon’s total “Denier” spending was it’s membership dues (only) in the API and some of it’s campaign contributions, totaling $100,000 or $200,000. But Exxon still isn’t playing both sides. Once they decided that it was business wise, politically expedient, or had an actual change of heart - they have stopped doing this PR funding.
What **Kimstu **said was that “The xkcd comic in question makes the point that the severity of minimum winter temperatures in St. Louis has been sharply decreasing in recent decades.” No word on needing one day below zero, the trend is there, but one can grant you a point for finding an issue with the numbers, you are still mistaken when claiming that the premise is wrong.
And then the problem continues by not acknowledge how wrong you were with the sun spot charts, CO2 not causing warming and many other errors.
The main difference remains, one side is dead wrong and the other mostly correct.
You should add up – even very roughly on the back of an envelope – (a) who stands to gain by continuing emissions at the present rate, and (b) who stands to gain by a significant curtailing of emissions. The short answer to (a) is “almost all of industry”, and (b) is “a tiny specialized niche industry”. Why do you think the US has done virtually nothing serious about carbon mitigation? Why do you think rejecting climate science is a clear prerequisite to being a candidate for anything in the business-friendly Republican party? Why do you think North Carolina and Virginia passed lunatic laws either decreeing how sea level must be measured and effectively commanding the sea not to rise, or outlawed the use of “liberal code words” like “sea level rise” and “climate change”?
BTW, the article about a quarter of Americans supposedly not knowing that the earth orbits the sun was put in for humor value – I have no idea if it’s accurate and it isn’t the point. There are many surveys of what the general population “believes” about climate change and it’s profoundly discouraging – they will disbelieve the most fundamental basics, and it’s no wonder, given the conditions I’ve described. Some times it’s a veritable self-parody – CEI some years ago put out ads that started with scenes like a little girl sniffing a flower and the message was “They call CO2 pollution – we call it life!”.
Also, my comment about “no money in oil” was intended as extreme sarcasm – sorry, just my idea of more humor. I’m aware that Exxon has vowed (after extreme criticism from the UK Royal Society and even a couple of members of Congress) to ease up on their denialist campaigning. This coincided with the corpulent Lee Raymond fading off into retirement, but given the vast sums of money supporting the denialist campaign and given the extreme difficulty of changing a corporate culture, I suspect (I have no hard evidence) that most of it just went underground into the realm of “dark money”.
They have the basic “CO2 equal warm!” correct. Upto and including everything else they can be as wrong as the most ardent denier.
For B - construction is not a “niche” industry, nor is it “tiny.” And neither is agribusiness.
This is a misconception. America has done a LOT to curtail emissions. We have:[ul]
[li]built natural gas plants, wind projects across the midwest, and have adopted subsidies to home owners to install electrical panels, in addition to solar farms and even a solar thermal farm. [/li][li]created emissions standards for the engines on our onroad fleets, marine fleets, and offroad use fleets that two of five phases of which have already gone into production. [/li][li]offered money to all sorts of businesses to punch a hole in their old engines and buy one of the new tiered engines to get the old heavy polluters out. [/li][li]offered cash for clunkers (which I’m not a fan of because it hurt the poor folk later on, but it was climate-sound to get older polluters off the road). [/li][li]offered subsidies to individuals and certain businesses when they buy an LEV, VLEV, or EV. [/li][li]required a transition to cleaner coal and scrubbers over the next 15 years and, while on hiatus because of some side issues, we will further reduce our coal’s CO2 footprint, and[/li][li]our government aggressively loaning money to any company with the word “Green” somewhere in it’s request for a loan, for good (Tesla) and bad (Solyndra).[/li][/ul]
And our emissions are dropping. (I like the emissions per capita line. 
)Even after the economical pickup started we are still operating way lower because all of this was put into place over the last 15+ years.
The stuff that we haven’t done are what amount to additional taxes without reason. For instance, Cap and Trade. I, simply, don’t support that. I think that we should mandate that every energy production facility adds the direct cost of mitigating the CO2 to their product instead of the cap and trade approach of “Let’s find something that raises prices juuuuust enough that people reduce emissions use, but not enough to send us into free fall.”
Why? Because I do think there is power in a diffuse control scheme. Local engineers tinker, and if they can manage to engineer a breakthrough that makes scrubbing CO2 cheaper at power station X, that company can sell energy cheaper and sell to capacity (if they aren’t already operating at it) or sell the technology to their benefit to other plants, lowering the cost to society as a whole. I always encourage competition and innovation over central bureaucracy when we have a goal in mind.
We also haven’t gone back to nuclear power, which, as I was describing to Gigo on one of these threads, is how Europe may meet it’s 2020 target. They were well into evaluating and replacing the old Soviet black tar belchers of power plants and installing nuclear when they signed onto Kyoto. They currently have something like 180 nuclear plants all over the EU.
I disagree. I have a hard time believing that any of those surveys are sound for, as a start, the reasons I laid out before. Beyond that, personal experience in the “anecdote” territory makes it a bad gut check.
I’ll be honest - I still don’t get the joke that accompanied the sarcasm. BUT, my social ineptitude aside:
As a publicly traded company, they can’t just give money out without it being trackable. At the very least, they’d have to make a statement to the IRS (at least for US-based groups) whenever they send a check that way. Now, the people may be all sorts of contributing, but that’s not the same, even if they were the ones puppeting Exxon into giving that money away.
ETA: As of January 2013, the EU has 185 nuclear facilities. You know, if we don’t build some of these, Europe’s going to be the only continent with Super Mutants.
Here is where you go off the rails, a lot of what you report next about what we are doing right was made with support from the ones that you claim to be as wrong as the most ardent denier.
On the other side we have groups like ALEC that are trying to stop progress like that.
Nonsense, just more sidetracking from the actual issue, the thing under discussion. Trends for winters in Toronto came up, because in reality the winters there have beem getting worse, and people know it. I showed how easy it is to know this. The xkcd comic was used, of course, to try and handwave the facts away. So we looked at the example city he chose, based on a climate central graphic he saw. Now look at St Louis on the GISS map
What they always show you, to say it’s warming, is something like this
It’s deceptive, and it’s just one more reason I am so skeptical. Even xkcd was fooled.
He used St Louis temperature, so look at the trends using the NCDC data
January
February
December
Sometimes it won’t link you to selected trends, but you can do that yourself. I encourage it.
It’s why I know xkcd is wrong. The data, it’s always the data.
See for yourself.
Then show me Toronto in the same way.
Which shows almost the exact same trend, colder winters. It’ facts, it’s not “my” claim, or a mystery at all.
Or warmer than it was 400 years ago. Or much colder than it was a thousand years ago. If you pick the start point, you can claim the “climate” now is warmer, colder, much warmer, or much colder. It’s meaningless in the real world. People live in the now, in the actual world. You can claim it’s much warmer now than it was in 1970, but nobody cares.
You can say it’s colder now than it was in 1934, but so what? When it comes to the winter, it’s now that matters to people who actually live in the real world.
It’s why the dismissal and insulting attitude, displayed in the xkcd comic, actually hurts the alarmists. Same for labeling everyone you disagree with. Same for trying to use the coldest start date to claim winters are warming fast. It’s lies, and it doesn’t hurt the skeptics. But it really fucks up the alarm and panic story.
There is an easy way to show, in a simple way, what the St Louis temperature trend has been like, in January. (or anytime else of course)
Because actual data, reality, the measurement of what was, always trumps rhetoric, there is no way to change what the data shows.
For good measure, the cooling days as well. (because it made me laugh when I saw it)
An engineer, scientists or even a motivated person can figure out exactly what the heating days says about the winters.
Meh, more cherry picks, as usual you fail to point at a single researcher from the sites you are cherry picking that support what you claim.
Bottom line, just on the 25 year trend you pointed out in your 3rd GISS map virtually everything else in America and Canada has gotten warmer. Again, only if we insisted that Saint Luis was the only important data point then we would be cherry picking, as I told you before I would not had made that point, but as you even refused to take the point about the few days below zero one one has to take that away and one has to insist:
**Kimstu **is more on the money than you will even dream of. And your errors continue to never be corrected by not acknowledge how wrong you were with the sun spot charts, CO2 not causing warming, thinking that scientists are into a conspiracy and many more.
The politics of it all is another story, possibly as complicated as science climate itself, more contentious than a disagreement over the impact of black carbon pollution, as pleasant as the mercury levels down wind from a Chinese coal stack, and as easy going as a stratospheric flight over the north pole. But it’s not the debate in this topic. It’s noise, it’s off topic, it’s a sidetrack that illustrates one of the big problems with actual scientific knowledge.
False dichotomy, even if every last person in charge was 100% convinced of disaster, and as soon as next year, the profit/loss issue of using fossil fuels, that isn’t the question. But the whole huge issue of “what can be done”, as well as “how quickly must it be done?”, and “how is it possible,” that isn’t this topic, or debate. There is still almost no agreement over an 11 year period of records about what is happening. much less the longer trends, and the science itself. Wanting to discuss what to do over a question, not even in the topic, isn’t having a debate. It’s claiming you won already and now you want to discuss what to do with your new found victory about an issue.
THAT ISN’T DEBATING THE TOPIC IN ANY WAY.
And even when the questions this topic is about are answered, it doesn’t mean the global warming problem is solved.
Hell fire, something as tiny and focused as the data for 13 years of January temperatures from one city in the US seems impossible to agree on, just as the winters in Toronto were handwaved away. Ignoring something, dismissing it, saying “you are wrong”, but offering no evidence, or rejecting any and all evidence that shows you are wrong, that isn’t a debate. Refusing to discuss the topic, and slapping walls of text over a completely different issue, that is avoiding the debate, and jamming up the topic with unrelated and political/economic issues, which in actuality are impossible to decide in a scientific way. That discussion will never be over.
So we have this seeming impossibility of any resolution about one city and the winter trend there, yet now you want to solve the biggest problem facing mankind of all? In this topic?
Are you fucking kidding me? Seriously? You want to be viewed as serious and profound, by starting up the same conversation going on in every other topic that is somehow weather related in any possible way? By doing that now? Here?
It shows a complete lack of honest debate. Go start a global warming debate topic, about what to do. It will probably run forever. Anyone interested in it probably would never read this topic at this point. I’m not kidding. The handful of masochist or dedicated intellects that are still reading and responding to walls of text here, and links to data, and complicated scientific exchanges about both,** you can’t imagine a worse topic for a political or social/economic debate to be going on in**.
Oh if only that were so. Did you notice the hard fought battle over Sy Louis? The xkcd comic? The blanket refusal by a few to even consider the planet has cooled in any way? You are optimistic in the extreme, and I admire you for it.
That is a terrible question. The real questions are much better, like why? How? How much? How quickly? And of course, when?
A lot of people will suffer terribly.
This has little to do with the facts of how much fossil fuel and carbon we are emitting. Is anyone here in denial about the CO2 problem? The amounts? The possible dangers?
No more than you can defend that global warming is evil for human.
If I missed your question, forgive me. These climate change discussions tend to be full of “white noise”, if you get my drift.
The sources of CO[sub]2[/sub] you list are not known to be cyclic, yet the evidence shows a profound cyclic structure. Now you want me to be concerned yet you cannot say why the CO[sub]2[/sub] is there in the first place nor how much it should be, right now. Even if man-kind has dumped 100 ppm in, why should I believe we’ll dump another 500 ppm in the next 3 generations?
Why did previous CO[sub]2[/sub] eventually sink away?
Not impossible at all, what every serious person will realize is that opinions like yours can be ignored as we go forward. Because we can all see that no expert from the scientific organizations you are cherry picking from has come forward to support you.
That and many many other evidence that shows that you only have gut feelings and no ideas that can be accepted by scientific organizations, academia, groups that put down pseudoscience for a living, and even nerdy comics that you love.
I’ve only denied that atmospheric CO[sub]2[/sub] is anything but a minor problem caused by burning fossil fuels … compared to sulfuric acid, soot, leaks, spills etc. Seriously, we’re dumping fuming carboxylic acid into our nation’s waterways TODAY … not a hundred years from now … but this very day !!!
Now if you think that’s fine, and you think coal mines are privileged to do so, then rag on about 2ºC. Now I can’t explain the science behind crude oil washing up on the Gulf Coast beaches, but everyone there says it was bad, real bad. How about fracking losing 10% of the methane into the atmosphere*? What about oil bubbling up in sleepy Arkansas residential neighborhoods?
But no … we’d rather fight among ourselves … while our enemy, Big Oil, gets stronger and stronger. April 22nd, Earth Day, use as little energy as you can, send a message.
- = I cannot confirm this statistic, saw it on SDMB, so it has to be true
EVERYONE,
this thread was intended to debate the science.
Everyone will drop the political discussions. Those wishing to discuss the politics may return to one of the dozens of other political threads to debate those points.
[ /Moderating ]