Sorry, but I am going to have to call you on this: i.e., you know this how? A more logical conclusion in the absence of specific evidence to the contrary is that the bolded portion is the summary conclusion and the unbolded text gives more details. (I also don’t think the IPCC would have made any U.S.-specific conclusions although I certainly could be wrong.)
Well, whatever. I won’t sidetrack this into a debate on who to elect for President (although I will note that if you are upset about media propaganda here, you ought to be livid about the propaganda (and here) and downright false re-writings of history that they told us in the lead-up to the Iraq War). I am just happy that all of the candidates seem moderately committed to doing something about AGW, so frankly I will probably end up making my decision on who to vote for primarily on other issues.
That’s really interesting - when we last spoke a few months ago, I had the impression there was no evidence that would convince you the quoted statement was correct. Obviously I misjudged you, and I apologize for believing you were so inflexible.
Well, there’s the rub, isn’t it? What temperature change do you believe will cause significant harmful effects?
Catastrophe is in the eye of the beholder, of course. If a Missouri farmer experiences a 15% decrease in yield, that’s a catastrophe for him, but not necessarily for me. Pretty much everyone would agree that the events depicted in The Day After Tomorrow would be a catastrophe, but we can safely dismiss anyone who believes in that scenario as a loon.
I would, for example, feel fine saying that an atmospheric concentration of CO[sub]2[/sub] of 450 ppm and above is catastrophic. I still don’t think it’s a Hollywood disaster movie, but it does mean a lot of those Missouri farmers. Sure, lots of people will do fine (mostly the ones in wealthy northern countries,) but things will be pretty bad for lots of equatorial and developing countries.
I answered your question about what I would consider a catastrophe. What constitutes a catastrophe for you?
Thank you for changing the course of discussion. This I actually do find interesting.
It is your more emotional conclusion. My government agency experience, anecdotal evidence as it is, tells me otherwise.
Way to go jshore you lurched into another truth. I was beginning to wonder if you were going to get there. The media propaganda played a huge part in building public support for the US to enter Iraq based on a near term threat of WMD. Would it not be wise that we, you and I, prevent the media propaganda from swaying public opinion prematurely, on AGW, a threat that is 25 to 50 years in the future. BrainGlutton, is typical of the fearful public easily swayed by propaganda and quite willing to not look before leaping.
My brother works on the Mississippi barges. He came up the river today and I could see him in the pilot house from my home and he directed my attention to the contents of some of those barges he was pushing. They contained 30 pieces of 50 foot wind turbine blades destined for Northwest Missouri.
You saw my cite with your cite and then raised with the your same cite. Is typical of a liberal to steal from the pot to pay for raise in government programs…
So rather than show that the Washington Post article is not biased **distortion and propaganda **your only intelligent response is to call my post stupid.
Your OP is stupid and your posts are stupid and calling my post stupid is a stupid post on your part stupid.
Where did he say that? Certainly not in this thread. You wouldn’t happen to be dragging in issues from an unrelated weeks-old thread would you? Where he wasn’t even addressing you directly?
I also liked the use of direct quotations. Yes, someone’s words can be taken out of context … but at least they ARE someone’s words, not what you or I might say they had said.
For example:
And yes, some of them say things I disagree with. And some are likely cranks or single-issue fanatics. But there’s 400 people on the list, and even what I might call cranks have credentials of various kinds… throw out half of them and there’s still 200 left.
My point all along has been that there are a lot of heavyweight climate scientists out there saying that there are big problems with the AGW theory of impending climate doom, with the IPCC process, with … well, click on the link, read who the people are and what they say. There’s plenty for everyone.
I encourage anyone with the courage of their convictions to read it beginning to end, regardless of their beliefs. It represents the views of four hundred different people, with different specialties, different credentials, different occupations, and different ideas. Like I said, a good read.
I’m seeing the usual ratio of “geologist” and “retired” to the atmosphere scientists and climatologists there. And of those, some only seem to have problems with the C part of CAGW not the A or W parts.
Oh, and does the US not have the distinction other countries make between meteorologists and climatologists? Because an association of TV weathermen is hardly an authoritative cite.
But I’ll grant you there certainly are now at least a dozen cited climate scientists who deny AGW. Are you now going to finish the citation process by citing their relevant papers?
You can believe whatever you like, I don’t really care. What matters is the merits of the argument. Even the combined effect of people smoking cigarettes is likely to have a warming effect on the globe. The question is whether it’s significant; whether it’s big enough to have an impact; and what that impact will be.
Even Richard Lindzen agrees that CO2 can act as a greenhouse gas and that increased CO2 levels can warm the Earth. Where the warmers lose me is with their claim that such warming will cause the Earth’s climate to enter a positive feedback loop where increased warming will cause reactions that cause the Earth to warm even more, and so on.
I don’t know, but I do know this: temperatures apparently rose a degree or so over the last 100 to 150 years without significant harm. The total number of deaths per year due to extreme weather has dropped dramatically over that time. So I would say that another degree or two increase is unlikely to have a significant negative effect.
I would propose defining “significant negative effect” as an increase in weather-related deaths (due to flooding; cyclonic storms; etc.) of 10% or more. An isolated reduction in crop yields is not a catastrophe. A significant worldwide reduction in crop yields is.
I defined it above, although it’s not really relevant to my question.
See, you are apparently asking me what evidence would convince me that the CAGW hypothesis is correct. Are you defining “catastrophe” as an increase in CO2 levels to 450ppm or higher, no matter what the effects are on the Earth’s climate?
BrainGlutton and focusonz, you both need to ratchet back on the personal hostility. Stop attacking how the other poster writes and the inflammatory language and stick to rerfuting or advancing actual arguments and facts.
And when you try to game the system, go back and proofread your comments. I have parsed this three ways, (since the comma key at your 'puter seems to not work), and each of them result in the calling of another poster “stupid.”
Sorry for the hijack, but I’m sick to death of the RW bullshit about the “liberal media” we’ve been hearing for so long, and I’m not giving anyone a pass on that. There are two newspapers in D.C. One is a respectable, reliable, credible journalistic institution. The other is the The Washington Times.
My conclusion is simply the obvious way to read the report. Unless you have specific evidence to support your claim, it is simply fanciful hogwash. Even calling it “anecdotal evidence” is given it much more credit than it deserves.
The difference here is that I am not relying on what the media says but on what the scientists themselves are saying, for example this report, the IPCC report, or the joint statement [PDF file] by the National Academy of Sciences and its counterparts in other major nations. They are the ones who are saying that it is important to start acting now…AGW is not just a threat that is 25 to 50 years in the future, it is already a threat and becoming more of one as time goes on. Furthermore, there is lots of inertia in both the climate system (particularly due to the oceans) and in our societies…which means that it would be most wise and cost-effective to start making changes now so that we can do them gradually. We can’t dramatically cut our emissions by a large fraction overnight.
[The media response on AGW, by the way, is mixed. On the one hand, it is true that the media likes to report alarming things. On the other, it is also true that the media likes to report controversy…even when there is very little real controversy. I.e., it is only rather recently that many media outlets stopped writing articles in a way that gave equal time, or nearly equal time, to the tiny band of skeptics as they were giving to the overwhelming majority of scientists in the field.]
That’s great. And, if we put a realistic price on carbon dioxide emissions, rather than allowing everyone to use the atmosphere as a free sewer for greenhouse gases, then we will see even more of this. That is the way the market works.
And are “:rolleyes:” ,to me an emotional derogatory body language of disdain and dismissal, appropriate in GD?
" :rolleyes:" was designed to convey sarcasim - is stating the opposite of an intended meaning especially in order to sneeringly, slyly, jest or mock a person, situation or thing and I just don’t know what BrainGlutton was attempt to convey.
And should I take the apology:
as an apology to me of BrainGlutton attack how the other poster writes?
I am uncertain of just what BrainGlutton is apologizing for. Or is his apology meaningless because he is “sick to death” and should be excused and forgiven because of a disability.
I thank you in advance for your moderating comments!
I apologize to all those sharing the GD for my lack of restraint on my part (stupid) and any distress the exchange of personal hostility between me and BrainGlutton has caused.
Further, I empathize with BrainGlutton sickness as I observed that I was beginning to suffer the same affliction 20 years ago. I recovered thankfully by simply not watching CBS and Dan Rather and by critically assimilating everything coming out of the news media since then. I practiced my practice of not being a passive absorber but rather a critical assessor of information. See http://tlu.ecom.unimelb.edu.au/papers/203.Davies.HERDSA.PR.pdf
Well, I’m not sure what the “usual ratio” of retired folks is. I find 16 in the list of 400, that’s 4%.
I’m not sure what you have against geologists. Would you reject this one?
Seems like the IPCC thought he was good enough … guess he doesn’t pass the Dibble test, though. We also have:
As to why we have geologists commenting on climate …
Not sure what the problem is with meteorologists, or how you do it in “The Mother City”.
Finally, I’m not clear why I’m supposed to list all of the climate related papers by the 400 people on the list … I’ll leave that to you, since you seem to be interested in the question.
Man, intention, you are pulling out ever more desperate cites to make your point. That one is prepared by Mark Morano under the auspices of the “Senator from Exxon” James Inhofe. I believe on the DotEarth blog one time, Ray Pierrehumbert was going down the list of those scientists for Mark…but I can’t find it now. At any rate, I think we would have to throw out way, way more than half of them.
Take the one that you have chosen to quote, Dr. Madhav Khandekar, I suppose he is better than most in that he is a former meteorologist for Environment Canada who apparently did work on some things related to climate…e.g., El Nino…but he is now retired and affiliated with the “Friends of Science” and the “Natural Resources Stewardship Project”. If I try to see what he has published recently (last 10 years) related to climate, here is what I find. It looks like he has a few articles in the infamous Energy and Environment, a paper in “Pure and Applied Geophysics” which seems to be way down the list of geosciences journals in terms of impact factor, and a paper in a journal called “Natural Hazards” that I haven’t even been able to find out much about. (There’s also something in the journal “Weather” that seems to be a letter to the editor.)
If Dr. Khandekar is an example of one of the “heavyweights” whom you speak of (and, frankly, by the standards of that Inhofe list, he probably is), I would hate to imagine what the “lightweights” look like!
Here is a blog piece that explains what it means to be “an expert reviewer for the IPCC”:
This quote is pretty silly. A longer perspective is fine if you understand the difference between changes taking place over millions of years and those taking place over a century, but it can be a disadvantage if you don’t.
And, the reason why greenhouse theorist overlook “that the planet has never been this cool” is because it is not true. It was significantly colder fifteen thousand years ago during the last glacial period. Yes, on longer timescales, the last few million years have indeed been on the cool side, oscillating between glacial conditions and briefer interglacial like the one we are in now. However, even the claim that this general period is cooler than it has ever been before is not correct if the hypotheses of an snowball or slushball earth are correct.
And, yes, the earth has been considerably warmer in the past…but we are talking about times well before humans even existed. This fact is hardly comforting.
As for the present warming “arriving pretty much ‘on schedule’”, is he seriously trying to tell us that the century when we started significantly affecting greenhouse gas levels just happens to be the century that the climate system decided independently that it was bored of the last ~2 or 3 million years of glacial / interglacial oscillations and it was time to go to a warmer climate?!?
As for the claim that geologists are being ignored in looking at climate change, we have already seen the statement from the American Geophysical Union, but admittedly some geologists might argue that geophysicists are a different breed, so here is the statement from the Geological Society of America. The wording is a bit less direct concerning the causes of the current climate change than the statement from the AGU, for example, however, it still says:
Why are you so concerned? Pay attention to your own posts and do not worry about how others behave. (If you have a serious issue with a post, Report it or take it to The BBQ Pit; do not respond in a like manner.)
I would prefer to hope that I am Moderating impassioned adults who are capable of reining in their invective, not kids in the sandbox who have to argue who was wrong first while trying to get Mom to agree that they are innocent of any aggression.
My Moderating comments are as follows:
I do not care how or even whether you accept BrainGlutton’s apology. That is not within my scope of duties. You need to work that out between yourselves or you can ignore it. This is not the second grade where at the end of a fight the teacher makes everyone apologize. I suspect that BG was not apologizing to you and I further suspect that you already know that, which leads to
which is clearly intended as a personal insult in which you liken a poster’s political persuasion to a disease. Trying to sneak that in on a post directed to me is truly not a wise move on your part.
No one has been isssued a formal Warning because I am always more interested in getting folks to calm down and play nice than I am in handing out demerits. However, if provoked I will hand out whatever sanctions I feel are approporiate and I will count as offenses those disingenuous responses that carry further insults against another poster.
If you have need of further discussion, take it to the Pit (if you want to rant) or take it to ATMB if you want a further clarification of the Moderation of this thread.
No one who holds an opinion on that topic is liable to be persuaded to change their minds and certainly no one will change their minds if subjected to invective. A simple statement that “There is no ‘Liberal Media’” hyperlinked to one of the several score discussions we have had on the subject should be sufficient.
And we’ll become more arid yet, due to AGW. In a nutshell, our climate will probably become more like that of Baja California, and that of Northern California will be more like that down here, now. (Sorry, SF Dopers, it looks like the palm trees that were removed from the Embarcadero some years ago, because they reminded you of a certain other Californian city, will probably become commonplace. :D)