"It's cold, so there's no global warming." Do they KNOW that's false?

The BBQ Pit
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What I don’t know would fill volumes. I recognize that. One of those many things is if elevated CO2 levels in whatever degree they may be anthropogenically related, is a bad thing. How certain of that are you, Mr. Glutton? Has your brain in all it’s gluttony, injested enough information to make that determination? Or is excreting facetious judgments of other’s knowledge levels your specialty?

Does this phenomenon tragically portend the ruinous end to our planet as we know it? Just another another phase in an ongoing balancing act constantly evolving since the beginning of time? Something else? Insignificant?

Humans impact on the planet must be “bad” as evidenced by CO2 and temperature studies? :confused:

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What it must be is unprecedented – climate change at this speed just has not happened in Earth’s history before unless a comet or something was involved. That alone should raise red flags.

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Some of those questions are easy to answer, others not. I’ll take a stab at giving you the answers as I understand them (and note that IANA climate science researcher of any kind, just an interested observer with some math and science training at the graduate level. And while I’m offering disclaimers, please note that in writing my previous post I misread “380 ppm” as “330 ppm”; sorry about that. 380 is the more accurate number).

“Does this phenomenon tragically portend the ruinous end to our planet as we know it?” To the planet itself, absolutely not. AFAIK, there’s absolutely nothing about anthropogenic greenhouse gas increases that involves even the most minimal risk of actually destroying the Earth as a physical object. The Earth as a physical object is good for billions of years more, no matter how much of its sequestered carbon members of our species pump into its atmosphere.

To the “planet as we know it”? Well, that depends on what you mean by “as we know it”. If you mean “the climatic characteristics of our planet that have helped shape our complex human civilizations during the past 10000+ years of the Holocene interglacial period”, then AGW might significantly affect those characteristics, depending on how far it goes and how vulnerable the various climate characteristics prove to CO2 increase.

“Just another another phase in an ongoing balancing act constantly evolving since the beginning of time?” On the scale of millions of years of geologic time, sure, an anthropogenic increase in atmospheric CO2 even as large as 50% or so is certainly not the most drastic thing that ever happened to global climate, so in that sense AGW would count as “just another phase”.

In terms of human experience, though, especially historical human experience, a phenomenon like AGW is pretty much unprecedented. AFAIK, neither we nor any other species nor any climate process during the current interglacial period has even come close to altering the nature of our global atmosphere as much as we’re doing now. The current CO2 increase is definitely not part of the Holocene climate’s “ongoing balancing act”. (That doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s guaranteed to make our climate catastrophically unbalanced, just that it’s very different from the “evolving” of our climate as we are familiar with it in our post-Ice Age experience.)

“Humans impact on the planet must be “bad” as evidenced by CO2 and temperature studies?” “Bad” for what or whom? Certainly not bad for the actual physical existence of the Earth as a rocky planet in our solar system, as I said above; from that perspective, the presence, absence, or climatic environment of the human species is completely irrelevant.

Bad for the maintenance of the standard Holocene atmospheric composition? Absolutely: as I said above, anthropogenic emissions have already disrupted the chemical mix of the atmosphere beyond anything modern humans have ever known. Is that going to be bad for our familiar climate patterns and our economies? Looks that way, but we have a lot to learn yet about the details and the severity of the impacts.

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So the real implications lie somewhere between rock in the solar system and planet as we know it?

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Real implications for what?

If you want a specific answer about the projected impacts of anthropogenic global warming, you’re going to have to ask a specific question. Are you interested in long-term geological effects over millions of years? Possibility of AGW-induced orbital perturbations? Effect on next week’s weather? Probability of encountering insect-borne tropical diseases in temperate zones within the next decade? Effects on agriculture in monsoon regions over the next century? Projected sea level rise in 300 years?

Global climate is a hugely complex system and interacts with living species and other parts of the planet in a whole lot of complicated ways. You can’t just naively ask “will it be a bad thing if human CO2 emissions change the climate” and expect to get an answer that is simultaneously short, comprehensible and accurate.

So, could you try thinking about what specific information about projected impacts of climate change you want to know, and re-phrase your question to reflect that?

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With the exception of next week’s weather, those were all good questions whose truthful answers would go a long ways towards determining a point on the continuum between rock in space and planet as we know it, at which rational discussion of the topic might take place. None of the rest of them inspired any particular hysteria in me, personally.

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Nor should they inspire hysteria.

Some rational concern, perhaps. Some awareness that the effects of global climate change will occur, and many will be quite damaging indeed.

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Having just received my cheque form Exxon I will now present my points.
By the way, I have no doubt that the average tempreature of the earth is greater than 100 years ago.

  1. I disagree with “AGW therefore whatever seems nice”, mainly because it means more hunger and poverty than it is supposed to solve. As planet-wide problems go, AGW is incredibly much smaller and less importat than to access to clean water.

  2. The central case is based on ignorance, in that what its proponents say is that “we don’t know what could cause the warming trends except CO2”. Surprisingly, a very similar trend happened early in the 20th century.

  3. The importance of CO2 in regulating temperature simply doesn’t work backwards. If you try to get to 4°C by 2100 you need a sensitivity that would not “predict” recent past temperatures.

  4. The error bars are gigantic compared to what is measured.

  5. The ammount of fidgeting wih the raw data is astonishing. Of course all raw data needs adjustments, but almost all of the recent temperature increase (at least the numbers) seems to come from the adjustments. I’m not implying foul play, but simply that it is interesting.

  6. It is assumed that warmer means bad.

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The rest of your points are uninformed drivel, so I’d like to focus on point six.

Why exactly do you think a warmer world would be better? Do you live in Alaska? Why in particular do you think rising oceans are good?

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:rolleyes:

When glaciers recede and droughts are expected that means less access to clean water.

So you do know already how to debunk or why we should ignore the 10 Indicators of a Human Fingerprint on Climate Change? Or do you always like to pretend that it is not your ignorance that it is showing?

What error bars? The ones in the reconstructions of past temperature or current ones?

See the reply to the first one, while there could be beneficial effects, so far what I have seen from serious researchers is that taken all together the bad effects will overtake the good.

And I have to assume once again that you are going over the silly ignorance level to the willful ignorance one.

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No offense, but I think they’re overpaying you. Seriously, most of the points you raise here are not particularly impressive arguments. Oh well, one by one:

[QUOTE=Ají de Gallina]

By the way, I have no doubt that the average tempreature of the earth is greater than 100 years ago.

[/quote]

So far so good, then.

[QUOTE=Ají de Gallina]

  1. I disagree with “AGW therefore whatever seems nice”, mainly because it means more hunger and poverty than it is supposed to solve. As planet-wide problems go, AGW is incredibly much smaller and less importat than to access to clean water.

[/quote]

A. You’re right that “AGW therefore My Own Pet Policy Preferences” is not a valid line of reasoning. That’s true for any other environmental/social/political problem as well as AGW.
B. Arguments that AGW-amelioration policies are automatically going to be more damaging to humans than the effects of AGW itself are very suspect, especially when phrased so generally. Yeah, we shouldn’t immediately abandon all modern economic activity for the sake of reducing our carbon footprint, but neither should we be too credulous about anti-AGW fearmongering claiming, e.g., that any emissions reductions policies are tantamount to abandoning all modern economic activity.
C. AGW is not a separate issue from other environmental or economic challenges, including access to clean water. Changes in glacier melt, sea level rise, and regional climate patterns are directly linked to water accessibility.

[QUOTE=Ají de Gallina]

  1. The central case is based on ignorance, in that what its proponents say is that “we don’t know what could cause the warming trends except CO2”. Surprisingly, a very similar trend happened early in the 20th century.

[/quote]

No, the central case is not based on “we don’t know what could cause the warming trends except CO2”. It’s based on the combination of the following facts:
a) we understand how increasing CO2 physically causes warming,
b) we understand the long-term correlation between CO2 levels and temperature in past eras,
c) we know that CO2 levels have been drastically increasing due to human activity,
d) and also we have found no other physical mechanism to account for the observed warming besides anthropogenic CO2 increases.

That’s not an argument based on ignorance, any more than it’s basing the theory of gravitation on ignorance to acknowledge that we haven’t found any physical mechanism besides gravity that can explain our observations of falling objects and orbiting bodies.

[QUOTE=Ají de Gallina]

  1. The importance of CO2 in regulating temperature simply doesn’t work backwards. If you try to get to 4°C by 2100 you need a sensitivity that would not “predict” recent past temperatures.

[/quote]

I’m not quite sure what you’re saying here, and I’m not quite sure that you understand what you’re saying either. As both GIGObuster and Sam Stone have pointed out, current AGW climate models predict recent past temperatures quite well.

Starting with the basics: Climate sensitivity is usually defined as the change in average global temperature (in degrees centigrade) resulting from a doubling of the atmospheric CO2 concentration. The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report estimates climate sensitivity at somewhere between 2 to 4.5 degrees C, most probably around 3 degrees.

The IPCC currently predicts the increase in global mean temperature to fall somewhere between about 1.5 and 6 degrees C by 2100.

[QUOTE=Ají de Gallina]

  1. The error bars are gigantic compared to what is measured.

[/quote]

What specific measurements are you talking about?

[QUOTE=Ají de Gallina]

  1. The ammount of fidgeting wih the raw data is astonishing. Of course all raw data needs adjustments, but almost all of the recent temperature increase (at least the numbers) seems to come from the adjustments. I’m not implying foul play, but simply that it is interesting.

[/quote]

What specific data are you talking about?

[QUOTE=Ají de Gallina]

  1. It is assumed that warmer means bad.
    [/QUOTE]

No, it’s deduced from the specific changes to global climate associated with a significantly warmer atmosphere that significant warming will have some bad consequences. There will definitely be some positive changes as a result of rising global temperature as well, but they are predicted to be less significant and more local.

The warnings about negative consequences of AGW are based on predictions of specific bad things based on specific climate models, not on some unfounded “assumption” that warming in general is automatically bad.

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All your points are uniformed drivel. See how it works?

Your point is uniformed drivel.

Do you get paid by the link to skepticalsicence or those really scientific youtube pages?

  1. When are these droughts expected? After the rains in Brazil and Australia I imagine. Yeah, yeah, “short term!” you’re gonna scream. Any good long-term drought info you got?

  2. Let’s go to your 10 factors. It’s simply converting “There’s more CO2 and it causes warming” to 10 points.

  3. Really? 1.5 to 7°? Are those guys so uncertain? Agricultural poruduction has exploded at the time the earth has warmed the most. No causation implied or suggested. I simply discard even the posibility of the phrase “stabilizing CO2 levels” wthout meaning “we’re gonna let millions die”.

  4. On models. And AGW is cemented on models. Is there a model the mimics the temperatures in the last 40 years that would work without any modification for the previous 100?

  5. I didn’t mention CRU and specifically said that no foul-play was implied. It is simply that EVEN IF THE ADJUSTMENTS THE RIGHT THING TO DO inmost scientific studies like this it is of note that most of the NUMERICAL warming come not from the raw data but from the adjustments.

  6. By “various researchers” you mean “those links on skepticalscience.com” don’t you?

Agreed

Agree on the principle that reducing our carbon footprint is good and there are ways to do it without killing people.

Basically agreed but access to clean-water is today not linked to GW (mostly) but to corruption and chronic poverty. Of course, is temperatures increase a lot there will be places where acess will be more difficult. However, at present, directly spending money and afforts of access to clean water is much much more important than AGW (of course you can fight both).

But in the end it’s “d”.

Sorry, 1.5 to 6 is too much uncertainty.
Each doubling is less important than the previous ones.

One example
Actual measurements.
Adjusted data.
stuff like that.

The warnings about negative consequences of AGW are based on predictions of specific bad things based on specific climate models, not on some unfounded “assumption” that warming in general is automatically bad.
[/QUOTE]

I’m always wary of predicting human activity over several decades.

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The links point to the scientific papers you willful ignorant (and this is now a demonstrated certainty from your part, not a theory) Skeptical Science was just a place where the replies to many of the repeated to dead explanations where put together, the creator did so well that now scientists are contributing directly to the replies; in any case, others, not you, can check for the published scientific papers to read the evidence.

So, we just got more drivel from you, but lets check the most idiotic ones.

It is clear that you live in a cave as you missed the crop failures in Russia (heath wave) and the damage caused by flodding to food production in Pakistan and now Australia.

And no, the point here is not that the natural disasters are made worse by AGW, the point is that agricultural production has suffered a recent big blow and ignored by you. (Fortunately other regions can keep up, so for the time being the levels of production are not a problem, but there is concern.)

I could say that it is not that that you are bitching and moaning about skepticalscience, the reality is that you are bitching about the science.

:rolleyes:

You are really pathetic in demonstrating to all that you did not read the previous cite, indeed, you are a willful ignorant.

Again, I’m not the one showing what a pathetic ignorant you are in ignoring the linked cites and the referenced science papers.

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[QUOTE=Ají de Gallina]
Sorry, 1.5 to 6 is too much uncertainty.
Each doubling is less important than the previous ones.
[/QUOTE]

It has to be noticed that some of the few remaining skeptical scientists go for the low ranges, but as uncertainty goes both ways, most of those skeptics are losing respect among their peers.

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/40652.html

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The briefingroom.typepad is a denier site for starters, so we need to see the context of the graphs (This BTW was done before by you, posting images of graphs with no context so others could not see where the graphs came from and the context)

In the past, a lot of effort was made to discredit the adjustments, but as usual, it goes both ways also, I do remember reading that after a lot of hay was made regarding the American data by the deniers saying that only “the adjustments that showed warming were used” a review showed that most of the adjusted readings originally (unadjusted) showed more warming.

In any case, not a huge difference between the adjusted and unadjusted as these, on context, images show:

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I am very interested in hearing some more information on models. Sam Stone and others have mentioned them.

I submit that the test of a good climate model is twofold:

(1) Does it demonstrate accuracy with respect to past data?
(2) Does it accurately project future data?

Regarding point 1, models can easily be run thousands (millions) of times, and tweaked to achieve compliance with the past. Thus, the ability of a model to predict past data is really nothing more than a bare minimum from which to judge success.

GIGObuster cited How reliable are climate models? when asked about models. With due respect, this link does nothing beyond claim that past data has been replicated by models.

If we’re going to go with the bold, how about a little confirmation from the recent past?

Can anyone show an unadjusted model from 1980 that (a) retrospectively got 1890-1980 temps correct; and (b) prospectively got 1980-2010 temps correct?

Can anyone show an unadjusted model from 1990 that (a) retrospectively got 1890-1990 temps correct; and (b) prospectively got 1990-2010 temps correct?

I understand that events like the Mt. Pinatubo cooling cannot be predicted, and thus a 1980 model going forward won’t be perfect, for example. My impression (no cite) is that there have been a great many past models that have accurately “predicted” the past, but few or none that have done a good job of predicting temperatures going forward. I’d be greatly edified if anyone has any further info on this point.

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No, it’s all of them. The fact that we understand the physical mechanism by which atmospheric greenhouse gases cause warming is at least as important as the fact that we haven’t been able to find any other physical mechanism that can successfully explain the warming.

Are you trying to say that a range of 1.5 to 6 degrees is somehow too big? Why? For what? Although it’s certainly true that it would be preferable to have a more narrowly pinpointed estimate, do you imagine that just because the estimate isn’t as precise as you’d like then you’re justified in ignoring it altogether? Why?

And what on earth do you mean by “each doubling is less important than the previous ones”? Climate sensitivity is a measure of how much temperature changes if CO2 concentration doubles once.

What exactly are you objecting to in those two graphs? You seem to have just arbitrarily decided that you don’t like the data adjustment, but you don’t say why.

As we saw in one of GIGObuster’s earlier links, it’s perfectly routine to adjust temperature measurement data for local measurement biases, and there’s nothing fishy about it. What in particular is bothering you about it, and why?

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Of course, one can miss the "intermediate’ tab in the cite:

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You need to click on the blue “Intermediate” tab on that page to get fuller details (the page opens at the green “Basic” tab, which just gives a short summary).

The Intermediate version has a discussion of and links to evaluations of Hansen’s 1988 climate model predictions.
ETA: As GIGObuster points out.

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Great minds think alike, eh Kimstu? :wink:
*
The wink is because I do not consider myself a great mind, but after seeing how many argue themselves into ignoring science, I do have to wonder. :smiley:

Just remember folks, always check the sources, and I have to say to the “skeptics” that they should show some skepticism themselves and at least check if the [del]BS[/del] information coming from denier sites has good sources or the citations to show that the article creators are not misinterpreting the original reports.

Also, the mere fact that many contrarians loath to check a site like Skeptical Science is not a sign of fortitude, it is a sign of not even bothering to make a quick search to see if a point was answered already to death so as to avoid embarrassment. Otherwise you are not impressing anyone that has done even a little research. Although to me it is fun and educational to see how many gullible people continue to fall on their faces with so much gusto.