I should mention that as you go further back into geologic history, you also have to deal with other confounding factors, such as the continents being in different places! In fact, I think it was only about 3 million years ago that a strait between the Atlantic and Pacific around Panama closed off and some scientists hypothesize that this alone could have had a dramatic effect on the climate by changing ocean circulations.
I appreciate the clarifications everyone has provided.
jshore, thanks for your information. I don’t read “industry specific” periodicals (I don’t have a subscription to Popular Climatologist) so I have to get my information from Scientific American. While Discover and Popular Science might be considered “mainstream” press, it is still a niche market. You don’t have PopSci coming into 100 million homes every night and you don’t see massive ad campaigns for Discover. Most people only know what is given to them and don’t go beyond it. If Brokaw says polar bears are drowning then, by God, it must be true. If Al Gore appears on Oprah and says that Antarctica is turning into a swimming pool then it’s got to be right! People are sheep and will go where they are led.
How many people remember the hysteria after Chernobyl? Everyone was positive the death rate would be astronomical and that tens of thousands would die from cancer and radiation poisoning. A UN study put the cancer deaths of those effected at 9000 (Greenpeace estimated 10 times that number but they included all of Europe instead of the immediately impacted people the way the UN study had).
If you ask people today, after the UN study, how many people died as a result of Chernobyl they will tell you thousands when actually only 56 have died as a direct result of the accident. The UN study was a blurb, a speck in the ocean of media. Same thing after Three Mile Island. And agar. And power lines. Hell, after 9/11 everyone stocked up on plastic sheets, duct tape, iodine pills and Cipro. Disaster sells and moderation is ignored.
I’m not some mouth breathing dolt who is stubbornly sticking to a conspiracy theory. I do believe that the planet is getting warmer and always have believed it. I also accept that mankind has influenced the increase.
I’m still not completely convinced that man’s industrial activities are the main culprits even if you include ranching and the resultant ruminant CO2 emissions. We only have had accurate data for some of the factors for a relatively short time (CO2 levels, ocean temperature, solar activity, albedo, etc.) and every couple decades we have switched from one fate to another, either baking to death or freezing. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t work on solutions but I don’t think we should put all of our eggs into one basket. Maybe one of those “crackpots” might be on to something and should not be dismissed out of hand. Everyone once knew that the Sun circled the Earth.
OK, let the ripping begin. I’ll check the Pit to see if this gets moved or if I am mentioned as some slope-browed, slack-jawed right wing corporate apologist with his head buried in the sand and a middle finger raised towards Al Gore.
erie774: Sure, the media has a tendency to sometimes play up potential disasters. This is no doubt true. However, there are also other tendencies: the media likes to play up controversy, sometimes even when there isn’t one…and they like to present balance by having an opposing viewpoint even when the subject does not have two equally credible sides. So, there are a lot of media tendencies that need to be considered.
I have also noticed that some people tend to focus on the media and others drumming up fear in one area while being oblivious to it in another. For example, Michael Crichton writes “State of Fear” about an environmental group literally manufacturing environmental threats. However, he could with much more justification used that title to describe a President who used fear of terrorism to get our nation to spend hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of American lives to attack another nation when that other nation did not pose any sort of realistic threat. Instead, I believe Crichton actually defends Bush on Iraq. Go figure!
At any rate, one does not have to rely on the media to determine what the scientific thinking on climate change is. As I linked to above, one has the joint statement by 11 national academies of science, one also has the IPCC reports, statements from the councils of professional organizations like the American Physical Society, and the American Geophysical Union, and so forth. And, yes, the scientific consensus can be wrong…but the fact that people often harken back to times of Galileo for an example (and, even then, where you had the Church majorly interfering with things) suggests that it doesn’t happen all that often. For every “crackpot” who turns out to be right, there are probably at least 1000 who turn out to be wrong.
And, I have never heard of a better alternative than using the current science to inform policy decisions. It seems worrisome that some people want to believe use science to inform policymaking when it provides support for their point-of-view but then demand larger and larger amounts of absolute certainty if the science is strongly pointing to something that goes against their prejudices. Since science is inductive by nature, there is never absolute proof; there is always some amount of uncertainty and people can always use that to defend against taking any action. If one demands complete unanimity, one will never do anything. One need only witness the ongoing debate about teaching evolution to realize how long people will hold out when their prejudices are strong!
And, when you say, “Maybe one of those ‘crackpots’ might be on to something and should not be dismissed out of hand,” I don’t disagree. But, the proper role that those people should be playing is the one of trying to build support for their ideas within the scientific community, e.g., by publishing research to bolster their ideas. It seems to me that it is generally a bad sign when these people try instead to bring their case directly to the people. It is often a sign that they know their arguments won’t hold water with their fellow scientists but know it is much easier to “snow” the public at large. (They also tend to totally skewer their own credibility because the temptation to say stupid things seems to get the best of them. For example, Richard Lindzen at MIT is apparently a serious climate scientist who, within the scientific literature, has come up with testable hypotheses to explain why the warming effects of CO2 may not be so great. However, it is hard to take him seriously when he writes op-ed pieces in the Wall Street Journal stating that the earth hasn’t been warming since 1998.)
By the way, the idea that there was ever any scientific consensus that there would be global cooling is a myth. It is a case where you could cite a few examples of poor reporting on the part of the media (with one Newsweek story in particular being a glaring example), although even there it appears to have been rather limited.
Thanks for your input, jshore! Now please help out over in this GQ thread, where I’m attempting to answer questions about the Little Ice Age and the urban heat island effect, and could use some more authoritative sources. 
Have you considered a third possibility? Namely, that the examples in the first case are more or less crackpot doomsday scenarios without serious scientific support, whereas anthropogenic climate change (ACC) is a scenario with serious scientific support?
In other words, maybe the reason you’re not seeing “a list of experts dismissing the claims” of ACC is because the overwhelming majority of experts agree with the claims?
Now, I’m not saying that there’s never any exaggeration or alarmism in media treatments of global warming. But the hypothesis as a whole, ISTM, is on quite a different level from claims that La Palma is going to collapse or an asteroid is going to hit a week from Tuesday. So I don’t see why you’d expect the media to round up scientists to debunk the whole premise.
I was listening to the radio this morning and there was a climatologist yakking about how the Arctic ice cap would be gone by 2040 - she kept saying according to our model.
It is peculiar how people can develop a computer program, which is really just a load of assumptions, and then use its predictions as if they were more than the sum of the assumptions.
I’ve said before, that the USA is probably not aware of what is going on in Europe. The general hysteria has been hijacked by government and special interest groups, it is being used as an excuse for taxation, building wind farms and they are even trading CO2 allowances. They are also talking about CO2 sequestration, like pumping it into mines or the sea bed.
Personally I think it is quite possible that we are in for global warming, it might be cyclical, perhaps mankind’s meagre efforts are contributing, but there is no way China, India and a good many others are going cease industrialization.
From my point of view, global warming is being used as a lever. The joke is that our UK government is planning massive house building on low lying land.
There is nothing wrong with using a model. That’s how science works. Models are how weather is predicted, planes designed and built, space programs run. Yes and evolution is a ‘theory’.
The fact is that the overwhelming scientific consensus supports wahat you are flailing against. And all the bolding in the world will not help low lying cities and countires being flooded as it kicks in, or prevent the enormous dislocations to economies and societies unless we start dealing with the problem.
Neither will making wild conspiracy theory accusations concerning taxation. Neither do you have any idea how India or China will respond.
In fact India is seriously engaged with Climate Change and Sustainable Development already. At least it’s a start.
And claiming that industrialisation and dealing with climate change are mutually exclusive is just sheer ignorance. That’s what developing technologies to reduce carbon emissions is all about. And running around screaming ‘it’s only a model, it’s only a model’ and wailing on about the evil govt using it to tax people just makes you seem like a rube.
@Tagos, you must be very trusting when it comes to models, personally I don’t trust the weather forecasts - and at least they are collecting observable data.
If we are in for a rise in sea levels then we ought to be planning for it, and the first stage is to calculate how high they will go. Ice that is floating on water will actually have zero effect on sea levels, so we need to be looking at ice that is on dry land. There is not that much of it - but even a 6’ rise would be annoying.
The people who are running around screaming are politicians and self appointed experts with an axe to grind - manufacturing an Enron style trading system is not going to make a jot of difference - it is like people selling war bonds in 1936 to prevent WWII.
I have faith in science. I have no faith whatsoever in your unsupported prejudices and paranoid conspiracy ranting. Now show me what inputs and assumptions that in your considered opinion render the model invalid.
Then also provide a cite for your belief floating ice won’t raise sea levels when people who actually study this stuff realise the bad positive feedback mechanisms that kick in without the reflective influence of the ice will accelerate the antarctic ice sheet melt and thus raise sea levels.
Do you actually know anything about climatology? Have you read extensively on the subject? Your know-nothing head in the sand attitude shouts ‘No’. As does your patently absurd beliefs about the arctic ice melt not being a problem.
Arctic ice melt threatens florida
Actic sea ice faces rapid melt
Greenland ice swells ocean rise
You did know the Greenland ice sheet was on land right? You do know that the arctic ice sheet is the northern driver for bringing the warm water up that stops us having an iceland climate?
Climate is a complex and chaotic system which is why it needs supercomputers to model it. It is why you can’t just make a simplistic (and wrong) statement that arctic ice floats so we needn’t worry.
And that’s why I don’t think you should be making unsupported hand-waving dismissive remarks combined with conspiracy theory tinfoil hattery in GD.
Let’s have some sound scientific cites to weigh in quality and number against the global consensus of climatologists.
And while we’re at it you can prove, in the same way UFO and Kennedy conspiracy theorists are asked to prove, the existence of these conspiracies. You can start by proving the UK govt is cynically using global warming to raise taxes and does not consider it a real threat at all.
If you want to rant about evil climate scientists and scheming govts without evidence the Pit or MPIMS are the venues.
I just wish people who know nothing about a subject wade in with their conspiracy theories and junk science in GD.
Actually, it’s that the warm, saltier (from evaporation) water from the tropics is drawn to the north where it loses its heat so it becomes denser than the rest of the far north’s water because it’s saltier. It then sinks, sucking more water from the south to replace it, while it gets sucked back south. This vast converyor belt is called “thermohaline circulation” and is, like you said, what keeps Great Britain from sharing the climates of other places near the Arctic Circle. Models (yes, REAL scientists create and rely on models, FDRE) show that fresh water from melting icebergs is lighter than salt water so it lays on top of the northern Gulf Stream like a cozy blanket, preventing the heat loss and tossing a spanner in the conveyor’'s works so the heat stays down south, warming the majority of the planet, and you and FDRE get to hone your mammoth-hunting skillz.
The answer is “No. Never. Not ever.”
This is why most people who rely primarily on “the media” for most of their information are confused, befuddled, uninformed, misguided, irrational, frightened, mistaken, desultory, suspicious, ignorant, depressed, fatuous, incapable of reasoned discourse, and inclined to severe overreaction verging toward hysteria.
Note: I do not consider the Straight Dope to be a part of “the media”, and therefore, of course, the denizens of these boards do not fall within the above-stated profile. Thankfully. But those folks out there in the world . . . whew.
Just to add one point of clarification to dropzone’s and tago’s excellent posts, this idea of a shutdown of the thermohaline circulation and what it might lead to is an active area of research and, as near as I can tell, in the last couple of years the views have shifted away somewhat from the extreme scenario whereby global warming leads to drastic cooling of northern Europe through shutdown of this circulation for two reasons:
(1) I believe it is now considered less likely that a complete shutdown will occur although a slowing is still considered a decent possibility.
(2) There are some recent arguments in the literature that the extent to which this circulation warms much of northern Europe has been overstated. For example, while it is true that there are areas at the same latitude as Britain that are much colder (e.g., in the central and eastern North America), the reason for this difference is not just these currents but also the fact that it lies to the east of a large ocean period and prevailing winds are westerly (for example, coastal British Columbia is also a fair bit milder than other places at this latitude) and also the way the Rocky Mountains influences the flow of the jet stream.
So, I think some of scientists now believe it is unlikely that global warming will lead to a dramatic cooling in northern Europe through this mechanism but that it might just lead to a slowdown of the current that would mitigate the warming for that one region to some degree. But, like I say, this is still a very active area of research. See here, here, and here.
Well Tagos, you are wrong about the Ice Cube Effect
- probably you have misspent your life - not watching ice melt in warm drinks.
Greenland could be a problem, somehow I find 21’ sea rise rather excessive, it is rather small compared with the surface of the Earth.
How about we do a deal ?
You buy $1 billion of Enron style carbon trading ‘Green Shield Stamps’ from me, and I’ll build a multi stage tidal hydro electric dam that can supply half of Northumbria without blinking (by blinking I mean inconsistent output).
He is not wrong about it. His point is that although such sea ice melting does not directly raise the sea levels, it does cause a positive feedback effect that creates more warming and thus will, among other things, cause more melting of land ice on Greenland which will then cause sea level rise. I think this was quite clear from one of the cites he quoted from:
Well, if you doubt this number, find a cite that says otherwise. I haven’t seen any controversy whatsoever regarding how much sea levels would rise if the Greenland land ice melted. I don’t think it is all that difficult a calculation to do. (People do argue about how much melting of that ice will occur and how quickly it will occur, but that is a different kettle of fish.)
Thanks for the links. My sources were a couple years old. However, I must admit a certain meanness of spirit disguised by scientific curiousity that allowed me to take pleasure in the possibility that I might live to see another ice age since it would be “way cool!”
Cite?
w.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686
nationalacademies.org/onpi/06072005.pdf
for example.
People in Bangladesh might find this more than excessive - most of the coastal plain is less than 10 meters above sea level. Cite.
What do you have against carbon trading anyway? Enron didn’t invent commodity markets. If we feel the need to reduce carbon emissions, do you think direct government limits for all companies is somehow better than trading?
Well they will just have to move inland.
I see, have you ever worked in or for the financial markets ?
I have, and I studied Economics at Uni and am not a rabid anti-Capitalist, but from what I’ve seen ‘the means become the ends’.
Yes, direct government limits are a pretty good idea, they are working with automobiles and they cleared up the London smog.
Grafting ‘rationing theory’ onto a situation where you want to get rid of a good rather than distribute it - strikes me as very dubious and open to abuse. Similarly fining people is open to abuse, but compelling people to spend the same sum as a fine, on physically sorting out the problem (or get closed down) seems rational to me.
The problem that I see is the introduction of an artificial market, new interesting taxes and penalties are not tackling the problem, they are just creating ‘opportunities’ for people to fleece the rest of us.