I didn’t realize that there was any dispute that “before this century is over billions of us will die”. But that doesn’t have anything to do with climate change.
Sorry about that, I guess I should had linked directly. In the post to Deltoid there was the link from James Lovelock reporting how climate change will be the reason for billions dying, he reports that the temperature will rise 8 degrees centigrade in temperate regions and 5 degrees in the tropics.
Really alarmist stuff that is not well supported.
Moving to GD from GQ.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
You still missed the point. GIGObuster criticized the WSJ post as “opinion” and offered “opinion” as counter-cites. That is why I made the comment I did.
Lindzen’s piece was for the lay press and not intended to “pass peer review.” He has published papers which did pass peer review and he is a legitimate scientist, so to speak.
The point I was making was that there is opinion out there among scientists that the science of AGW, with particular reference to the ability of current models to make accurate predictions, is not settled. I realize this is a minority opinion on this board, and in general am not inclined to try and change that opinion through this particular medium of a tedious one on one tit for tat exchange. I’d have a better chance of converting a devout Mormon to Islam, I suspect.
To your question about habitat destruction: I’ve posted elsewhere that unless we control the human population, worrying about habitat destruction from AGW is like worrying about the ocean eroding the cliff at the base of your house while it’s on fire. The fire is over-population, already way out of control. We could eliminate further warming tomorrow and we’ll still overrun the earth with current population projections…
Actually, the point you made was that there is that opinion out there among one scientist, not scientists plural. The reason Lindzen comes up so often in these discussions is because it’s really hard to find any other scientists who agree with him.
And last I saw, the current population projections had population stabilizing at a number not all that much greater than what it is now. Yes, over-population is a problem, but it’s one we’re well on our way to solving. So let’s start solving some other problems, too.
That depends on how you define “accurate” and “settled”. I don’t think there’s anybody on this board who would claim that the science about AGW has no serious uncertainties or that we can confidently pinpoint projected temperature rises even within a few degrees.
However, the notion that because AGW science still has uncertainties we must remain totally “agnostic” about all its aspects, even about such basic questions as whether the AGW hypothesis is likely to prove valid, probably is a minority opinion on this board. It is certainly a minority opinion among the posters on this board who appear to be best informed about climate science.
Probably. But that’s not so much because the people you’re arguing with are closed-minded as because your arguments are generally crap.
Oh, well, he is back to the Armchair Psychologist insults. I was not going to continue, but I see that this is now in Great Debates. BTW it is not just because of his posting in the WSJ that Lindzen is not considered a reliable source.
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2006/06/lindzen_in_wsj.php
As for your continuous insults, it is better to deal with them here:
At least my beer will stay cold 
Too many billions of humans consuming, consuming, consuming. Yet we continue to create even more humans, all of whom will create as many humans as they can support.
So many of our problems begin with our massive population. Too bad religion interferes with an honest discussion of the need to control our unchecked reproduction.
Of course this attention to overpopulation is a valid one, the only problem is that, as seen in this discussion, this point is used in an effort to discredit the push to control greenhouse gases.
Environmentalists already report that overpopulation also has to be taken into account, that does not magically prevent them from pointing that we should still do something about AGW.
http://www.sierraclub.org/population/factsheets/pop_and_globalwarming.asp
Since you bring up the Douglass paper, let’s discuss a little bit of the science behind it. What the Douglass paper purported to show is that the observed structure with height of the warming in the tropics was incompatible with model predictions. They did this by comparing the warming that had occurred with the standard error of the prediction made by many different models (some with multiple runs). [The “standard error” is essentially the standard deviation divided by the square root of number of model runs.]
To understand how boneheaded a mistake this is, it is useful to consider another experiment. Suppose, I toss a single die. Now suppose that I want to simulate this using a computer model. Since it is easy to do, I could very quickly run the simulation about 1 million times and determine that the mean value I got on tossing the die is something like 3.5000 +/- 0.0001 where the quoted uncertainty is the “standard error” in the mean. Using Douglass et al.'s logic, I would then conclude with essentially complete certainty that my model is incompatible with my experiment (because we all know very well that the die will come up with one of the integer values between 1 and 6 and any of these values are so far outside the quoted “uncertainty” range as to be astronomically improbable).
Of course, in Douglass et al., the number of model runs was not as dramatic…and there wasn’t this integer quantization that happens with dies that makes the absurdity of using the standard error like this quite so obvious. But, the basic problem is the same. (If you think that this problem only occurs when the average value doesn’t correspond to a possible value for an individual experiment, you can make the experiment be the tossing of two dies, in which case the mean value is to roll a 7. And, in fact, a 7 is the most likely value on a roll of two dies, but you will still get something else ~83.33% of the time.)
If I was in Douglass’s shoes…and had his determination to apparently not admit a mistake, I suppose I too might be trying to distract attention from the fact that my paper was an utter piece of crap by focusing instead on the private e-mails of scientists who were interested in publishing something to point out its obvious flaws.
It looks like a scientific magic trick.
Hanging around with climate scientists has not revealed ANY experiments since tyndall. I have read the full copies of tyndall’s original papers to see what he did.
Tim Casey got me started: http://tyndall1861.geologist-1011.mobi/
Tyndall’s papers here: Contributions to molecular physics in the domain of radiant heat : Tyndall, John, 1820-1893 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
As explained by Casey, Tyndall measured “failure of transmission”. Tyndall did not measure absorption or heating of the gas. The disposition of the energy “absorbed” was not elucidated. Some could be retained as heat, some will be reemitted in random directions. The relative contributions of these have not been demonstrated in any experiment I can find or that anyone I have asked can point me to.
I have gotten as far as figuring that about 3.4m thick of 100% CO2 is about the same amount as exists in the atmosphere from ground to top of troposphere. So an experiment could be done in a column of CO2 in the sun - eg a 3.4m length of plumbing pipe with a blackbody surface closing the bottom and a polyethylene membrane (IR transparent) at the top.
It is only a matter of time until someone with equipment to measure small temperature changes does an experiment like this…
I’m trying to recall if I’ve seen Chief Pedant in the pit yet.
Okay, I’ve got a genuine question (translation: bona fide ignorance here) about CO[sub]2[/sub] as a green house gas, that I’ve not seen even mentioned let alone discussed above in this thread nor anywhere else that I recall. (Maybe this doesn’t belong in this thread, which appears to be a debate-about-the-debate rather than a discussion of greenhouse gas facts.)
Just how much CO[sub]2[/sub] does it take to have a significant greenhouse effect, and why?
By all accounts I’ve ever seen, the air is about 78% N and 21% O, and just 1% everything else, and CO[sub]2[/sub] is just a small fraction of even that last 1%.
Now, speaking as a chemistry near-ignoramus, it just seems highly non-intuitive to me that such a small concentration of CO[sub]2[/sub] would have so much effect. Can somebody explain this?
First, this is a zombie thread.
Second, this a zombie trick.. 
The updated version of the experiment looking this time at the atmospheric layers was made by Plass in the old days of the 50’s. (Plass was looking for the background heat in the atmosphere to make better heat seeking missiles, this big piece of the AGW issue was found actually a serendipitous result of the cold war)
I’m sure you’ve seen those desktop toys where you have a globe or some other object suspended in air between two magnets. You might also be aware that if you take two regular magnets and try to accomplish the same thing, you’ll fail. The thing that you’re trying to levitate will always be pulled to the top or bottom magnet, instead of floating perfectly. The desktop toy has some gadgetry inside of it that rapidly changes the strength of the magnets to keep everything in alignment, even if there’s changes in air flow, an earthquake, or whatever else might happen to nudge the globe one direction.
But so just think, in a closed off room, no particular air flow, a constant temperature, a fixed position, no Earthquake, if you tried to keep a globe centered between two magnets, you wouldn’t be able to do it no longer how you tried unless you had complex gadgetry to solve for changes too subtle for you to detect. To you, the 0.001 mph wind in your room is unnoticeable, but to the system which you are looking at, it’s an irrecoverable disaster unless you include equally imperceptible nudges to correct the issue.
My point in all of this is that what seems big or small to you isn’t necessarily big or small. The planet we live on seems huge to you, and yet it’s infinitesimally tiny compared to the Sun, which is itself infinitesimally tiny compared to many other stars. Changing the temperature by a couple of degrees globally might seem like a massive change to you, but on a cosmic scale it’s barely noticeable. The thing being that life as we know it has evolved to fill a very narrow and fickle niche temperature gradient, so it’s significant to us and other lifeforms on the planet.
What do those projections say is the cause for the slowdown in the rate of population growth?
Darn it, missed the edit window, two posts up this was supposed to be there:
Plass was looking for the background heat in different layers of the atmosphere to make better heat seeking missiles, the experiments made by Plass gave us a big piece of the AGW puzzle that was found serendipitously thanks to the cold war!
What do you think “heat” is, anyway? You just said that some of the energy ends up as heat, while some of it ends up as heat.
As I understand it, it’s mostly due to industrialization of the Third World. Industrial countries have lower birthrates than undeveloped countries. Many first-world nations even have rates below the replacement level of 2.0. I’m not a sociologist, though.