As a relatively disinterested observer (well, until I got sucked into this placard thing…) I don’t observe this.
I’m interested in human nature and why we believe things, and it is for this reason I am skeptical of AGW. What I’ve noticed as a fairly dispassionate observer of both camps is that it’s human nature to “jump on local phenomena,” and I find it equally frequent in both camps. Universal, actually. I’ll watch some special on TV that has a passing reference to AGW, for example, and the associated imagery will be some sort of tumbleweed blowing across a godforsaken desert landscape or something. I’ll see imagery of a drought but not imagery of a flood–on and on.
It’s just how we are wired to think. We see confirmations and we dismiss “anomalies.”
Confirmation bias is not limited to AGW deniers or supporters. I see it every day in folks from a dozen religions all confident that their God has just obviously manifested himself. I see it in the history of science, where the thinking masses clung to paradigms and gave them up only when there were too many epicycles to handle anymore. It’s obvious why we were wrong after our paradigms change, but until they do, it’s obvious to us why we are right and why our positions are obviously scientific, even with AGW.
The most laughable reason I see commonly touted for believing in AGW, for instance, is an argument that most reputable scientists also believe it (or something to that effect). But it’s in our nature–even as scientists–to believe what others in our peer group believe, and if I had a nickel for every time scientists were collectively wrong, I’d get my 401k back where it belongs.
Well, you see, I have experience with history. And the history shows that it is true, but not as you expect regarding AGW.
Most scientists were wrong at the beginning and in the middle of the past century.
AFAICR scientists assumed that many of the objections against AGW were valid. It took years of research to demonstrate to the many that CO2 concentrations were rising, that it was mostly Human CO2; and research also showed that no, the absorption of CO2 by nature was not enough to stop the issue. Then evidence of the greenhouse effect and the water vapor feedback with CO2 convinced most scientists that we have a problem.
It is the scientists who cling to out-dated theories (or those who refuse to believe the new ones) that are usually wrong. Has there ever been a new theory so widely accepted by scientists as AGW that was not the best theory at the time?
Christ. To read for comprehension you have to read in context.
In the last 50, 000 years CO2 levels have fluctuated regularly and rapidly from ~250ppm to some unknown upper level. Temperature levels have also fluctuated rapidly though unpredictably.
We have no idea what those upper levels are. Because of the well known smoothing effect ice core data lead a lot of people, yourself included, came to believe that CO2 levels and temperatures were comparably stable for millennia. Now that we have started to look at other proxy data, such as speleotherms, global dendrochronology and stomatal data we find that CO2 levels and temperatures were not stable, as you claim based on ice core reconstructions.
Rather what we find is that temperatures varied by as much at least a factor of 2 larger than indicated by empirical reconstructions and that they do not support the widely accepted concept of comparably stable CO2 concentrations in recent past millenia. CO2 spikes >300ppm may have been common in the past but not able to be resolved by ice core data.
I doubt that it has absolutely no effect. What I have yet to see is convincing evidence that it is significantly caused by humans. It has been well established that rises in global temperatures are always followed by a rise in CO2 levels. How close those correlations are temporally remains uncertain. However we do know that global temperatures have been rising for the past ~200 years. We would expect simply based on past performance that CO2 levels would have risen concomitant with the temperature rise. And that is precisely what we do see.
And this remains one of the chief causes of uncertainty of the whole AGW hypothesis. We have a theoretical basis by which increases in CO2 levels may cause an increase in temperature, but no observational evidence that it is so. And we also have sound observational evidence that rises in temperature lead to an increase in CO2 levels, but no solid theory as to why this occurs.
So we can’t say with any real certainty whether the rise in temperature is due to the increase in CO2 levels, or whether the rise in CO2 levels is due to the rise in temperature. I suspect that we both agree that it’s a little from column A and a little from column B. Most AGW patsies acknowledge that the increase in temperature must have lead to an increase in CO2 levels, as it has for every previous warming event. The only point where we really disagree is that you believe that the majority of the CO2 increase can not be attributed to temperature rise, and I remain unconvinced of that.
And yes, I’m familiar with the carbon isotope work that implicates human carbon, and I’m familiar with the carbon discrimination abilities of plants and various other problems that cast doubt on such conclusions. Once again, I remain unconvinced of the level of human contribution, and once again nobody can come up with an actual falsification test for the claim.
No, it wasn’t. I already quoted several recent publications which say precisely the opposite. The more analyses that are done using proxies that don’t produce a smoothing effect the more publications we are seeing stating clearly that, far from being in equilibrium in the longer term, simply do not support the concept of stable CO2 concentrations throughout the past 11,500 years.
The only way I could possibly agree it was in equilibrium is if you meant that CO2 concentrations fluctuated wildly between unknown upper and lower limits that may have been much higher or lower than anything seen in the last 200 years but ultimately constrained by the pure physics of the system.
If that’s; what you mean by “in equilibrium” then sure, I agree, but I don’t think that’s what you mean, is it?
Now I really don’t understand the question. What equilibrium are you actually referring to here, and in what system?
If you simply mean that for along time fossil fuels were a stable carbon pool, and humans turned that into a net source, then maybe you could describe that as a form of equilibrium. But in that case I’m not sure where you are going with it. Carbon cycles, it doesn’t matter what the sources are. And in most cycles an increase in sources is counterbalanced by an increase in sinks. For example as CO2 levels in the atmosphere, more becomes dissolved in the oceans. That means that a departure from a “natural equilibrium” in the form of one stable pool becoming a flux doesn’t automatically mean that the entire system loses equilibrium.
There is an unquantified amount of buffering within the system. Simplisitic arguments that “we’ve added carbon from a stable pool, so the whole system must be out of equilibrium” are simply not justifiable, and in fact provably incorrect.
Really? How does that work? Did the erroneous old ideas get handed down on stone tablets direct from God? Surely every single old idea had to once have been a new idea, didn’t it?
For example, the idea that black people are genetically inferior could only have been postulated by scientists *after *the discovery of heriditary, right? So that was a new idea that was wrong. The same with the orbiting electron or “plum pudding” models of atoms, the existence of the aether and so forth.
The idea that most new ideas are right and most old ideas are wrong makes absolutely no sense logically. I cant even see how such a situation could even arise. Every erroneous old idea had to have been adopted as an erroneous new idea at some point in time.
Sure, the idea that blacks are genetically inferior, the idea that disease was caused by humours and could be cured by bleeding, the idea that light was a wave propagated in an ether, the idea that stress caused ulcers. I could go on all day with examples of widely accepted theories that were opposed by small numbers of scientists.
But frankly I’m having a hard time seeing what “best theory at the time” has to do with anything. Science is supposed to be about eliminating erroneous theories, not accepting them just because it’s the “best theory we’ve got”.
:rolleyes:
Yeah, 'coz AGW patsies wouldn’t use a single photograph of a ”drowning” polar bear on an iceberg in summer to demonstrate global trends over century timescales? Right?
And they would never use say, a single hurricane as evidence of global warming trends. Right?
SentientMeat this claim is just ridiculous. Lots of people on both sides make unjustifiable use of local data, but by far the worst offenders are the AGW patsies. It’s almost impossible to find a news article that reports a localised environmental event that doesn’t invoke it as evidence of AGW. To claim that AGW skeptics are the first to jump on local phenomena when they are used to demonstrate global trends is simply ludicrous to anybody who actually watches TV news or reads newspapers.
We simply lack the data to make such predictions with enough accuracy to make it worthwhile.
This is what separates actual science from psuedo-science. Scientific predictions are based on actual data and they are zble to be assigned probability levels based on solid mathemetics. Contrast that to the IPCCs “predictions”
I’m a scientist. It’s not a case of being unwilling or willing. It’s case of lacking sufficient data to attribute causation to anything. Science is dependent on having the necessary data to distinguish between competing explanations, and we don’t have it. That’s why the IPCC “predictions’” confidence levels are not based on any statistical test, but rather pulled out of the air. Science doesn’t pull confidence levels for hypotheses out of the air. If you lack the data to test your hypothesis you don’t go around stating that it’s 90% likely based on a whim.
That’s the problem. Nobody knows what causes that increase in CO2levels that always follows global warming events. Nonetheless we know that it must come from somewhere.
Unfortunately this is the standard global warming patsy argument from ignorance. Just because nobody can prove it wrong you accept that it must be right.
Science can’t comment on what is wise. It can only comment on what is real.
The long arc of science is creating more accurate theories. Newtonian (i.e. “classical”) physics is the easy example; we know that Newtonian is wrong in many situations. Does that mean that classical physicists were wrong to accept it? Obviously the answer is no; at the time, once it was roundly accepted, Newtonian physics was the most accurate theory until the advent of Relativity and QM.
It’s not a question of whether AGW is absolutely right or wrong–there are surely aspects of AGW that are wrong that will be corrected in the future. To me the question is this: are the theories behind AGW currently the best explanation for the recent warming trend? Most scientists certainly think so.
Only where one theory is adopted over a previous one. Clearly this does not apply to AGW which is the first theory adopted.
In cases where science creates a theory to explain something previously totally unexplained its track record is very poor, especially where basic falsifiability is not or can not be applied, Freudian psychology being the textbook example, but the ether theory, Black inferiority and similar other examples are also numerous.
Where an existing entrenched theory is replaced by a later theory the latter is usually correct. Where a theory becomes entrenched simply because it’s “the best we’ve got and explains what we think we see” it is usually wrong.
Most scientists thought that the continents were fixed, that stress caused ulcers and that disease was caused by miasma and could be cured by bleeding. That’s why science doesn’t work by consensus.
An dthtais why in real science the question is never “how many agree with me”. The real questions are “How can I falsify this” and “What is the probability that the results of that falsification attempt have another explanation that I’m not seeing?”
Unfortunately for AGW the answer to those questions are “I can’t” and “I can never know”.
I have no idea why GIGObuster quoted me and then posted non sequitur links to some apparently random web pages from AGW patsies.
Totally mystifying. But not worth pursuing.
And really, just there one can see several examples (Yep, the theory was tested) were evidence would had buried the theory if it was a false one. People like Callendar would had remained in obscurity.
“I remain unconvinced of the level of human contribution”
The quote shows that the USGS and their scientists are convinced. Of course if you insist that they are “patsies” then I think that anyone reading the thread would conclude that you are not being serious at all.
Translation: I do not want to deal with cites from scientists.
I guess you think everybody else will ignore that you claim to be a scientist. And it seems that you are not taking back the howler of calling the USGS scientists “patsies”.
BTW, the author of The Discovery of Global Warming, Spencer Weart
A patsy is a person who is easily manipulated or victimized. History shows that many scientists had good evidence (for the day) that showed that AGW was not going to be an issue. They really had no patience (that tough crowd is not easy to manipulate!) for the early AGW proponents that had little evidence. But thanks to the cold war evidence was found that **started **to convince most scientists about the problem.
Nowadays even more evidence to support and confirm AWG is here.
If that is true, why is the CO2 concentration rising? If more was sequestered as more was added, the concentration would remain constant. We are, surely, depleting the sequestered stores at a much faster rate than new stores can form?
It is surely common sense that until we replace high-emission power stations, transport, construction methods and whatnot with low-emission counterparts, the emissions will either remain the same or increase, given China & India’s emission growth? (Of course, if high CO2 concentrations won’t have any significant consequences anyway, we needn’t bother.)
Even if we depleted sequestered stores at a much faster rate than was being sequestered? I simply don’t see what mechanism causes a level-off below 800 ppmv if carry on as we are, since all the natural sequestration mechanisms I know of simply don’t work fast enough: the number of trees is shrinking, not growing, for example. That leaves only phytoplankton - are you suggesting that they will start to convert massively more CO2 to make their coccoliths or something? (This would presumably require you to deny increased ocean acidity as well, yes?)
Just to be clear here - you believe that the Greenhouse Effect itself is largely nonexistent? That if we magically removed pretty much all the CO2 from the atmosphere, the temperature still wouldn’t change? (You do accept that CO2 absorbs infra-red wavelengths, right?)
Where do you think the Gigatons of hydrocarbons we burn every year go, exactly? Think - in the Carboniferous period, vast amounts of CO2 became locked into safely buried solid or liquid stores. Do you think we’ve only dug up and burned an insignificantly tiny percentage of these stores so far?
I mean that there was no natural mechanism whereby safely sequestered stores of carbon were released at a rate of Gigatons per year, for decades or centuries.
Then why is the CO2 concentration increasing at 1.7+ ppmv per year? When will these increased sinks kick in and level the graph out?
Thus making the ocean more acidic, and phytoplankton less efficient at converting CO2 into coccoliths, yes?
See OP, bottom line.
Well, tomato, tomahto. billfish asked about a local measurement, I said careful - deliberately misdirecting a debate away from global trends is a common Denier tactic. But yes, silly arguments based on local phenomena are forwarded by both sides.
But what I’m asking you, and intention to do, is convince me that it’s entirely possible that the graph won’t continue it’s upward trend until it reaches 600, 700, 800 ppmv or more, because I just cannot see what natural mechanism will deliver us from this given the Gigatons we demonstably add each year.
Because you know what? I want you to be right. I truly want to believe that either [ul]the CO2 concentration is rising almost entirely naturally, or
[li]some natural carbon-sequestering mechanism will kick in cause a level off of 500 ppmv or less, or [/li][li] 500+ ppmv concentrations won’t have significant consequences any old how.[/ul][/li]My current beliefs are that: [ul]
[li]CO2 absorbs infra-red wavelengths, such that a world without it would be much colder. [/li][li]We are currently releasing Gigatons of the stuff per year from stores that took millions of years to form in the first place. [/li][li]If the graph keeps its line, the concentration will have doubled in less than two centuries. [/ul][/li]I simply don’t understand how there can be no cause for concern, given the uncertainties. I wonder how I’ll ever explain myself to my grandchildren if hindsight shows that was something we could have done, but didn’t, because we wanted to believe everything would be OK.
We don’t know, but you’re starting to ask the important questions, and that’s good. There’s a lot we don’t know about the global climate and global carbon cycling. We don’t know where the gigatonnes of carbon that produced the CO2 peaks following every previous warming event came from. And we don’t know where those gigatonnes of carbon went to. And we don’t know where the gigatonnes of carbon that produce the several >300ppm CO2 peaks in the last millennium came from. And we don’t know where those gigatonnes of carbon went to.
Past atmospheric carbon fluxes have been comparable to the current one insofar as they involved short duration CO2 increases of 60ppm. This means there must have been comparable amounts of carbon added to the atmosphere, and comparable amounts removed within those short (century scale) durations. Yet at the same time you want to deny that any mechanism can exist that can remove gigatonnes of carbon from the atmosphere.
And that, my friend, makes no sense. We know the atmosphere can and does shuffle gigatonnes of carbon in century timescales. We don’t have a clue what the fluxes and pools actually are, but we know they must exist. To say that I should know where these fluxes are occurring now is simply shifting the burden of proof.
This seems like a red herring
If your hypothesis is correct then we have dug up precisely enough to raise CO2 levels ~50ppm within a century. This can’t be more than the amount needed to produce the ~60ppm changes seen in the past millennium. And we know that this amount of carbon can be removed from the atmosphere on a century timescale.
Whether this amount is 99% or 1% of geological carbon reserves irrelevant. A total red herring.
How do you know this. We know that gigatons per year were added to the atmosphere for decades or centuries because the atmospheric CO2 concentrations changed at rates of 60ppm per century. And we know that those concentrations were returned to ~300ppm within a century.
We have no idea where all that carbon came from, but it’s a pretty safe bet that it involved safely sequestered stores of carbon.
Why has the same thing happen numerous times in recent geological history, including several shifts, up to 60ppm, in the past millenium?
“All available records indicate a significant variability of atmospheric CO2 levels throughout the Holocene, showing repeated short-lived CO2 shifts of 20–40 ppmv, independently reproduced in the different studies… Moreover, available CO2 reconstructions covering the past millennium reveal a CO2 shift of approximately 30 ppmv …. The most recent reconstruction of a shift as high as 60 ppmv, shows a highly comparable temporal pattern”
van HOOF et al 2005 “Atmospheric CO2 during the 13th century AD: reconciliation of data from ice core measurements and stomatal frequency analysis” Tellus (2005), 57B
“Alternating CO2 maxima of 300–320 ppmv are present at A.D. 1000, A.D. 1300, and ca. A.D. 1700.” Kouwenberg et al “Atmospheric CO2 fluctuations during the last millennium reconstructed by stomatal frequency analysis of Tsuga heterophylla needles” Geology 2005, 33
We simply don’t know what drove these rapid shifts in atmospheric CO2 levels, except that they seem to be caused by an increase in temperature, or at least they followed increase sin temperature. We don’t know why increased sinks kicked in and levelled the graphs out, we don’t; even know what the sources and sinks were.
But that’s good science for you. We admit that there’s a lot we don’t know. We don’t; just go out and declare that something is doesn’t happen because we can’t explain it.
Are you denying that the oceans act as a buffer against atmospheric CO2 changes? Because that was the only contention I made, and I think I can declare that 100% of geologists agree with me.
Oh is that all.
My position, like most skeptics, is that we lack sufficient information to know what is going to happen because we have no working hypothesis that makes sensible predictions. So no, of course I won’t take the bet. It’s like asking me to bet on a horse race where I know nothing of the entrants or the track. It’s just a random chance bet. I’d be better off betting on a con toss.
No, you didn’t. You said that use of local phenomena to demonstrate global trends was used by skeptics. Nothing about careful or misdirection of debate. And you said it was it was used “jumped” on “first” (ie more eagerly) by skeptics.
But since you seem to conclude that is clearly not true, and that it is AGW patsies that jump on such tactics first we can leave it there.
Can you explain what natural mechanism delivered us from the Gigatons that were demonstrably added add each year to produce the century scale 30-60 ppm shifts seen in past centuries?
If not then I’m really not sure what I can do to convince you. Contrary to your claims in the OP that CO2 levels “stayed roughly constant at 280 ppmv for millennia, we know that isn’t true. It’s entirely an artifact of ice core smoothing. We know that in fact CO2 levels have always varied by >30ppm on century timescales. How much they varied we really don’t know because even the stomatal data start to flatten out at really high levels. Certainly higher than 320ppm I’ve seen spelotherm data suggesting peaks higher than 400ppm.
So what I’m asking you is what evidence I could collect that would convince you that this isn’t just another one of those short term CO2 increases? IOW what evidence could I show you to convince you it is entirely natural, just another CO2 spike caused by rapidly rising temperatures since the little ice age, the same as occurred after every other rapid temperature spike?
This is really the heart of the problem. You are already convinced that the event is totally unprecendented and caused by humanity, and thus will need some unprecendented mechanism to turn it around. I’m not convinced it isn’t as natural as the dozens of similar events in the last half million years. And because of that I’m assuming the same natural events will turn it around.
And I want me to be wrong. Because if I’m right we will have the gravest difficulties using science to guide public policy for the next generation, at least. And that will be a true disaster.
I don’t think anyone saying there’s no cause for concern. It’s a case of proportionality. There’s cause for concern when someone walks down your street. He could be a homicidal axe wielding maniac. The probability is non zero. That doesn’t justify running out and blowing his head off. Our response has to be proportional to the level of concern, and that level of concern should be based upon the evidence of risk, not on the level of alarm. If the risk is low you watch him to see if his future behaviour invokes more concern.
And that’s what I’m advocating here. Watch and collect evidence until we can quantify the risk to something better then “highly likely” based upon board consensus. I’m not dismissing the potential threat of AGW. It’s just that I’m reaching an age where I’ve seen these threats come and go so many times before in the form of overpopulation and male sterility and pesticide poisoning and new ice ages that I’m cautious.
How will you explain it to your grandchildren if hindsight shows that that man in the street was a homicidal axe wielding maniac and there was something you could have done, but didn’t, because we wanted to believe everything would be OK. D he then murders there mother.
Better run out and blow his head off right now, just to be sure, huh?
Needless to say you can’t live your life that way, and the “won’t somebody think of the children” trope is so lame that I can’t believe you invoked it. Being cautious sometimes leads us to miss an opportunity to act. An impulsive rush to commit irreversible acts without all the facts almost always leads to disaster. And if your children don’t understand that then you will have trouble explaining a lot of things to them.
But we do know where the Gigatons of carbon we burn every year go. Into the atmosphere.
But if it is a significant proportion of the carbon stores that had been sitting there for millions of years, and there is no quick way to recreate those stores, that would constitute a strong force off natural equilibrium, yes?
Because those self same stores were sitting there for us to find, and had been for hundreds of millions of years.
But the CO2 increase is leading not lagging now, is it not?
I would guess forest growth and phytoplankton shell-formation, for the most part. So henceforth, if huge new forests didn’t grow, or phytoplankton didn’t dramatically ramp up their performance in this respect, I would wonder where this other mysterious saviour you speak of was going to come from, and pray for it to hurry up since I do not share your confidence/faith in its Coming.
Rapid planet-wide fossil fuel-store formation would set my mind at rest nicely, thanks.
What?? You want the negative impacts predicted by AGW-accepters? That is quite despicable misanthropy, is it not?
But your fence-sitting position seems to be immoveable by evidence, since you can always explain record temperatures and CO2 concentrations by shrugging your shoulders and saying “Ah, but it might all be natural”. “Highly likely” is often as good as it gets in science, as you well know. I simply don’t see how you can’t consider it highly likely that human activities have contributed significantly, if not overwhelmingly, to the CO2 increase since the Industrial Revolution. Same Facts, Different Views?
If he’s made of straw, that’s probably a good idea.
And the irreversible acts AGW-accepters propose are … ? Surely, if temperatures and/or CO2 drop due to some natural Saviour, we can just return to belching out the Gigatons?
*Careful accounting of the amount of fossil fuel that has been extracted and combusted, and how much land clearing has occurred, shows that we have produced far more CO2 than now remains in the atmosphere. The roughly 500 billion metric tons of carbon we have produced is enough to have raised the atmospheric concentration of CO2 to nearly 500 ppm. *
Unless the accountants are so grossly mistaken as to be outight liars, the probability that human activities contribute little to the current CO2 concentration would appear to be nil.