I weep for Americans (Global warming poll).

[Two_Many_Cats]

@sqweels

So you’re saying that global warming is unlikely to lead to any significant flooding in coastal areas?

No, what I’m saying is that if there is, it won’t be because I refused to brush my teeth in filtered urine. Get off my back, you whackjob eco-snobs!

[BrainGlutton]

@Bricker

My shoot from the hip opinion has been to note that we’ve had ice ages before; presumably the woolly mammoths didn’t die out because of the primitive SUVs being used at the time.

I don’t think you fully appreciate the environmental impact of Flintstone flatulence.

[Dallas_Jones]

We are now 18 posts into a Pit thread about global warming, and all the posts have been very resonable so far. WTF?

From my point of view I agree that whatever can be done to reduce pollution is a good thing. Reasonable solutions to diversifying energy sources, good thing. But the average person does not realise how really BIG the Earth is and how small the effects produced by humans are.

The whole “We are killing the Planet” stuff is just overboard and I quit listening to people who say these things. This comes across to me as backdoor propaganda from the ancient hippies of the 60’s who are now in positions of power. All wanting to control the actions of others, so we conform to their idea of a world view.

Al Gore, and others are milking a huge, artificial industry of their own creation, for their own benefit. They aren’t changing their actions at all. You notice that it is always someone else who should cut back, not them. The whole concept of Carbon Credits where the rich can keep doing as they please if they just buy the credits, and the rest of us must pay for this by changing our behavour and paying taxes.

‘I will produce more carbon dioxide today, by flying aroung the country to promote my film and book, than you and your entire extended family could produce in their entire life times, that is how important this is!’

Wow, it’s just bullshit.

[Cat_Whisperer]

@Hampshire

Yeah, that’s kind of a turn off. Watching Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth he makes it seem like if we don’t act immediately we’re all dead in about 50 years. I think most people agree that there needs to be regulations kept in place and an “anything goes” attitude is a bad one but that the alarmist angle is a bit over the top.

A slight but significant correction - we probably won’t be dead in 50 years, but we may very well have pushed the planet’s atmosphere beyond the point of no return. That is not a good thing. Then we will need to get really creative with our scientific inventions, which doesn’t sound like it will be happening in the U.S. if you’re too busy teaching Intelligent Design in all your schools and studiously ignoring how well abstinence-only sex ed is working.

[intention]

@Richard_Parker

I’m not more scientifically literate than Bricker, but I can google and see what the climate scientists say in response. They say:

Link

Hey, you guys are always going on about what the peer reviewed literature says. Science Magazine says there has been no warming in the HadCRUT dataset. Not mentioned in the article is that there is also no warming shown in either the UAH or the RSS satellite datasets.

The GISS dataset, which is maintained by James Hansen and is “readjusted” regularly and always in the direction of greater warming shows … greater warming. Coincidence? You be the judge. I’m just telling you that Science Magazine says that there has been no global warming in the last decade.

[intention]

@heatmiserfl

I’m sorry if this sounds rude but intention left out the relevant part of that Science article. The very part where intention ends with (…) in the quote continues as such,

In other words, climate scientists were not particularly surprised because flat trends have been seen before and were able to simulate it. More importantly, they say that when the flat trend ends, there will be a larger jump in temperature as the larger global warming trend continues.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/326/5949/28-a

Say what? Did you read my post? I did mention that. I said:

They go on to explain that this cessation of warming occurs in some 2.7% of the ten year climate runs of a particular model, so there’s nothing unusual about it. Riiight … funny how 97.3% odds that the models are wrong is suddenly meaningless. But I digress.

And they do speculate that when the flat trend ends there will be a jump … you do understand that is speculation, and that we have absolutely no evidence that it will happen?

[Jackmannii]

@heatmiserfl

In other words, climate scientists were not particularly surprised because flat trends have been seen before and were able to simulate it. More importantly, they say that when the flat trend ends, there will be a larger jump in temperature as the larger global warming trend continues.

“Climate scientists” may not have been surprised*.

I on the other hand was rather stunned, after constant reiterations in recent years of evidence of continual warming, reports of ecological danger signs, new heat records and the like, to find that hey, there hasn’t actually been any global warming in the past freaking decade and that we might even see a period of cooling. Where the hell did that come from all of a sudden?

The world leaders who met at the United Nations to discuss climate change on Tuesday are faced with an intricate challenge: building momentum for an international climate treaty at a time when global temperatures have been relatively stable for a decade and may even drop in the next few years…The plateau in temperatures has been seized upon by skeptics as evidence that the threat of global warming is overblown."

As someone who believes in the consensus view that man’s activities are contributing to climate change and reasonable measures to limit some consequences of that are a good idea, I found this revelation of a decade-long halt in warming to be peculiar. It’s small wonder that large numbers of people who are less convinced of global warming, would get the idea that activists on this issue are being less than candid in their efforts to get us to act for our own good.

*This “lack of surprise” is reminiscent of what we hear from hurricane forecasters when their predictions run awry and they have to make substitute forecasts during the season to account for their inaccuracies - as with this year in the Atlantic basin, when tropical storms/hurricanes have been forming at their lowest level since the early '80s. “Well of course, it’s El Nino, we knew it all along.” Uh-huh.

I can understand some skepticism about climatologists’ power to accurately predict events decades into the future, when much shorter-term predictions are fraught with error.

[intention]

@sqweels

So you’re saying that global warming is unlikely to lead to any significant flooding in coastal areas?

Well, since despite many claims that CO2 driven warming will increase the rate of sea level rise, the satellite records show no such increase. In fact, the rate of rise has slowed in the last few years. See the data at University of Colorado sea level site.

So until the rate starts to rise, no, we won’t see anything unusual in the way of flooding.

[GIGObuster]

@heatmiserfl

I’m sorry if this sounds rude but intention left out the relevant part of that Science article. The very part where intention ends with (…) in the quote continues as such,

In other words, climate scientists were not particularly surprised because flat trends have been seen before and were able to simulate it. More importantly, they say that when the flat trend ends, there will be a larger jump in temperature as the larger global warming trend continues.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/326/5949/28-a

This being the pit, I have to say I lost any respect of **Intention **when he pulls howlers like that one. (I still can not forget when he tried to pass as a fact that there where no theories or theory guiding the global warming researchers)

At the level that he claims to have, at least being aware of why scientists are not surprised should be a given. **Intention **will remain a blogessor.

Recommended sites to check that are against the misleading and lying information out there are RealClimate(with real current climate scientists) and Deep Climate:

Vaclav Smil on climate change: “No global warming in past ten years”

Of course, the so-called “stop” or “pause” in global warming has been debunked time and time again, both here and elsewhere. For example, here is a chart of decadal increases for the three main surface global temperature series.

It can be clearly seen that global warming continued in 2000-9, relative to the previous decade. Decadal warming has ranged from from 0.17C (HadCRU) to 0.19C (NASA GISS).

At this point, Revkin tried to remind Smil that the so-called “pause” is simply a “wiggle” in the “curve”, although he stops short of saying outright that Smil is dead wrong. But Smil is having none of it. He then goes on to insist that a coming global pandemic, costing up to 60 million lives, is a much more pressing problem .

"Revkin: We’re so focused on the here and now, which is of course about that kind of wiggle in the curve. This is something I’ve characterized as a “slow drip” problem … and we’re always distracted by what’s happening now.

Smil: If you have this orthodox view, what I call the IPCC view… Now people are publishing these papers saying that it will be much worse than we anticipated. But we have been there before and maybe in five years  they’ll be saying it it will be a little better than we anticipated.

The point is that this is unfolding slowly. This is not going to be with us in full force — nobody claims it, even the orthodox people, in 2015…. But in between there are a great many things coming …. The pandemic is number one. Because we are overdue for a pandemic."

So why does Smil think that climate change is so overrated as a problem? Some clues come in this summary of his thinking from a review in American Scientist.

"Smil is blunt in his criticisms of the global-warming pessimists, saying that we simply don’t know enough about the complex interactions and feedbacks that may take place to be able to reliably quantify the likely consequences of the warming that is occurring. His estimate is that there will be a temperature increase of 2.5 degrees to 3 degrees Celsius over the next hundred years, a figure that is about at the midpoint of recent projections by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Apparently the industrialized nations in the Northern Hemisphere have the wealth and technical capabilities to handle this increase, but poor countries in the global South, which are already carrying an unmanageable load, will find it quite burdensome. (Smil’s usual concern with the interaction of variables is not in evidence in this case. Does he think that the multitudes who cannot cope will quietly disappear?) Although he stresses the difficulty of estimating future sea levels, he says that “a cautious conclusion” would be that they will rise about 15 centimeters by 2050—“clearly a noncatastrophic change.” He concludes surprisingly that the market impacts of a moderate warming will be “a trivial sum in all affluent countries” (which prorates to about $180 a year per capita), citing in support work by Yale economist William D. Nordhaus. (Other respected economists disagree.)"

So Smil appears to think that anthropogenic global warming of the scale aniticipted by the IPCC is real, but entirely manageable, at least for wealthy nations. I guess we’ll have to read the book to understand why he thinks the inevitable food shortages caused by massive deglaciation in the Himalayan watershed, for example, will not be disastrous for the nations of that region, not to mention having widespread repercussions. And at a time when most scientists think a 1 meter rise in sea level by 2100 is inevitable, his dismissal of the inexorable rise in sea level as a problem to be mitigated sooner rather than later is puzzling indeed.

Check also one of the best series of videos debunking the deniers:

greenman3610

“Birth of a Climate Crock” is the most recent entry, and the most on topic with this thread:

greenman3610

FOX is really full of lying sacks of crap.

[GIGObuster]

@intention

Well, since despite many claims that CO2 driven warming will increase the rate of sea level rise, the satellite records show no such increase. In fact, the rate of rise has slowed in the last few years. See the data at University of Colorado sea level site.

So until the rate starts to rise, no, we won’t see anything unusual in the way of flooding.

Well Mr. blogessor, the graph in the link shows the trend going up, I guess you forgot to check the cite.

(Oh, and if you are still stuck in the “not in the last ten years” stupid mode, please check why you are being silly before continuing pulling foolishness like that again.)

[Happy_Fun_Ball]

So, Intention, you are saying the earth has not warmed at all based upon that data? Are you really a denier? You really don’t believe the earth has warmed during the past century? What about all the other evidence? The changing growing season, the glaciers, the species migration? Is this all just a clever conspiracy by the world’s wildlife?

See, Intention, this is exactly why I made this a pit thread, so I can tell you to bite me. Slurp it up big guy. Take your random nitpicks to Great Debates and stay the fuck out of my rant. You take this one paper and say it invalidates all the history and science of the last 30 years. Well you are full of shit and you know it. The earth has warmed and you know it. The fact that it has not warmed appreciably over the last decade has nothing fucking to do with it. Do you really think this somehow cancels the proceeding 90 years? There are lots of reasons that may account for the last decade, including that global warming is a sham and we are going into another ice age soon. But let’s face it the science doesn’t back it up. It’s pretty fucking unlikely. But you go ahead and try to believe that all the other indicators are just a coincidence.

This rant is about the sad state of science with regards to the public in the US. It is about the anti-intellectualism sweeping the country because, in part, of people like you.

[Cat_Whisperer]

Yeah!

[Richard_Parker]

@intention

Hey, you guys are always going on about what the peer reviewed literature says.

Yeah, we’re silly like that.

@intention

I’m just telling you that Science Magazine says that there has been no global warming in the last decade.

You’re not just telling us that. You’re telling us that and asking us to conclude from that information that global warming is somehow in doubt because of it. (Which is a conclusion apparently rejected by the same peer-reviewed article.)

[intention]

@Richard_Parker

You’re not just telling us that. You’re telling us that and asking us to conclude from that information that global warming is somehow in doubt because of it. (Which is a conclusion apparently rejected by the same peer-reviewed article.)

Nope. I didn’t say that “global warming is somehow in doubt.” I said “the scientific evidence says that global warming has not been seen for a decade.” Conclude whatever you wish from that … but don’t blame me for what you might want to conclude.

[Bricker]

@Lightnin

Forest fires are natural, too. Does this mean that we can’t cause forest fires?

No, of course not.

But if I see a forest fire is happening, I cannot reliably conclude that it was started by human action.

[GIGObuster]

@intention

Nope. I didn’t say that “global warming is somehow in doubt.” I said “the scientific evidence says that global warming has not been seen for a decade.” Conclude whatever you wish from that … but don’t blame me for what you might want to conclude.

Well, it can be safely concluded that you only get your information from right wing “science” blogs.

What has global warming done since 1998?

What the science says…

The planet has continued to accumulate heat since 1998 - global warming is still happening. Nevertheless, surface temperatures show much internal variability due to heat exchange between the ocean and atmosphere. 1998 was an unusually hot year due to a strong El Nino.

[GIGObuster]

@Bricker

No, of course not.

But if I see a forest fire is happening, I cannot reliably conclude that it was started by human action.

It took a while, but scientists found that the evidence was convincing, human action is causing the current warming trend.

What the science says…

The CO2 that nature emits (from the ocean and vegetation) is balanced by natural absorptions (again by the ocean and vegetation). Therefore human emissions upset the natural balance, rising CO2 to levels not seen in at least 800,000 years. In fact, human emit 26 gigatonnes of CO2 per year while CO2 in the atmosphere is rising by only 15 gigatonnes per year - much of human CO2 emissions is being absorbed by natural sinks.

Incidentally, the lies coming from Hannity and Beck at Fox are designed specifically to keep people on the dark about what the researchers actually said regarding the “cooling trend”.

[Richard_Parker]

@intention

Nope. I didn’t say that “global warming is somehow in doubt.” I said “the scientific evidence says that global warming has not been seen for a decade.” Conclude whatever you wish from that … but don’t blame me for what you might want to conclude.

You posted the data to support your argument that Americans are correct to doubt global warming. Did you think no one would scroll up and see your first post?

[intention]

@L. G. Butts

So, Intention, you are saying the earth has not warmed at all based upon that data? Are you really a denier? You really don’t believe the earth has warmed during the past century? What about all the other evidence? The changing growing season, the glaciers, the species migration? Is this all just a clever conspiracy by the world’s wildlife?

See, Intention, this is exactly why I made this a pit thread, so I can tell you to bite me. Slurp it up big guy. Take your random nitpicks to Great Debates and stay the fuck out of my rant. You take this one paper and say it invalidates all the history and science of the last 30 years. Well you are full of shit and you know it. The earth has warmed and you know it. The fact that it has not warmed appreciably over the last decade has nothing fucking to do with it. Do you really think this somehow cancels the proceeding 90 years? There are lots of reasons that may account for the last decade, including that global warming is a sham and we are going into another ice age soon. But let’s face it the science doesn’t back it up. It’s pretty fucking unlikely. But you go ahead and try to believe that all the other indicators are just a coincidence.

This rant is about the sad state of science with regards to the public in the US. It is about the anti-intellectualism sweeping the country because, in part, of people like you.

The poll asked whether the globe “is warming”. Not whether it has been warming over the past 90 years. It was not a question about the “history and science of the last 30 years.” It was whether the earth is warming now.

And right now, it isn’t warming. It has warmed in the past. It was warming from 1910 to 1945, for example … but that wasn’t the question, was it? And it was cooling from 1945 to 1975 … but that wasn’t the question either, was it? And it was warming from the 1600’s until now, and was cooling from the 1400’s to the 1600’s … but hey, guess what … that wasn’t the question either. The clue, as everyone but you has grabbed hold of, is that the word “is” means the present tense, you know, as in “warming now”, not “warming then” …

If you are too dumb to notice what your own question is, that’s your problem. I made no claims that this shows anything beyond that the earth is not warming now, and that the models show this in only a few percent of the decadal simulations. The rest is just your sick fantasy. However, not all is lost. You certainly have proven your point about the sad state of science in your case, at least …

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

@intention

Well, since despite many claims that CO2 driven warming will increase the rate of sea level rise, the satellite records show no such increase. In fact, the rate of rise has slowed in the last few years. See the data at University of Colorado sea level site.

So until the rate starts to rise, no, we won’t see anything unusual in the way of flooding.

intention, I like you. I really do. You’re intelligent, you’re not afraid to challenge conventional wisdom, and you back up most of your assertions.

However, you didn’t just miss the boat on this one. You’re at the wrong port. Rising sea levels are a very bad thing, regardless of whether the rate of sea level rise is accelerating. Your link shows that sea levels are rising, and it doesn’t matter if they’re rising geometrically or exponentially.