“Man-Made Global Warming”, I don't go to that church.

[DieHappy]

 

[HerbieHeadley]

Exactly! LOL DH

 

[HerbieHeadley]

 

[HerbieHeadley]

 

[HerbieHeadley]

 

[LUColt27]

Actually it does! The Christian fundamentalists are the main force behind the denial! Their reason being based on the commandment that God gave us this planet and animals to do with it as we wish and only God can destroy it!

Nobody is saying that Man alone is responsible for climate change. What scientists are saying is that Man's activities have exponentially increased the rate of change! We are responsible for the overwhelming increase in CO2 levels and there is a direct correlation between Global warming and CO2 levels.
This is high school stuff and it does not take rocket science to figure out that more CO2 in the atmosphere the higher the Global temperatures will be!

Now y'all go and have a nice day there

Actually, the entity responsible for driving climate change is that giant ball of hydrogen fusion that sits about 8 light-minutes away through space. Carbon dioxide, while being a greenhouse gas, is way down the list of potential greenhouse gases. Now, if you were to mention methane or water vapor, then you'd have a better argument, but seeing as how all three of those gases occur naturally (and according to scientists, have been in greater concentrations in periods of time where they say that humans couldn't possibly have been responsible for the higher concentrations) the fact that we're spewing a tiny fragment of these greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, whereas the world's plant population then proceeds to utilize said CO2 for food, thus growing up healthier and providing more food for other creatures, including us.

Sorry, but despite what Al Gore might have told you, carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, at least, not any more than regular oxygen is.

 

[LUColt27]

Post of the Week.

 

[Veritas]

"Please God, make Global Warming true!!!"

"I think I'm gonna puke! What will I do when people find out what a joke this all is?"

 

[Saving Hawaii]

And I don't know where to start. I guess with the fact Cap and Trade and the other schemes Goldman Sachs, other renting seeking corporations, Al Gore and his followers are pushing are not free market economics.

Neither Al Gore or Goldman Sachs are publishing peer-reviewed research in scientific journals. They're not collecting data, working on temperature records, designing sophisticated modeling devices, etc.

I think it's safe to say that Al Gore and Goldman Sachs have nothing to do with the scientific understanding of global warming. Bringing them into this discussion is a red herring.

 

[Saving Hawaii]

Odd question. The problem is not anyone having a position, the problem is their political agenda poisoned their science. We are facing the worst cause of Lysenkoism since...well...since Trofim Lysenko.

Lysenko's story is a truly ugly one, but it's nearly the opposite of the story you want it to be. The scientific community of Trofim's day scathingly tore apart his pseudo-scientific theories. If anything, the Soviet scientific community of that era could be said to have had a fairly strong consensus (give or take hacks like Lysenko) in favor of Mendelian genetics. However, Lysenko had formed a political alliance with the powers that be in Russia (who saw political gains out of promoting a "new" science).

It was problematic for Lysenko that the vast majority of his own colleagues saw straight through his ruse. They kept explaining how problematic and inadequate his theories were. Lysenko's political allies couldn't tolerate such scientific debate (more like dismantlement) of theories that they were using politically, so they dealt with it by sending a good deal of the scientific community to prisons. Quite a few scientists were executed. Nikolai Vavilov would die in prison.

If you want to make an analogy between Lysenkoism and anthropogenic global warming, I'd be happy to illustrate it.

Scientific Consensus: Mendelian Genetics ---> Anthropogenic Global Warming
Minority Viewpoint: Trofim Lysenko ---> Heartland Institute (got a better one?)

The Soviet political apparatus rejected Mendelian genetics in favor of Lysenko's pseudo-science because the former was "bourgeois". They chose to reject an overwhelming scientific consensus because it conflicted with their own political theories.

Can you guess who might be trying to reject an overwhelming scientific consensus today for similar reasons?

You probably shouldn't have brought Lysenko up. The analogy is all too apt, though I didn't intend to bring it up (for the same reasons that I don't call people Nazis, Fascists, or Communists). You made the grave though.

 

[Saving Hawaii]

The hoax has been exposed!
Somebody tell the polar ice caps to stop receding.
Quick!
PS: Tell the polar bears to stop dying.

 

[Phileas]

The charge was first made by the hoaxers against their critics

But now we see one of them admitted in an email he was stroking Siemens for money and didn't "need" any more articles in the media questioning "climate change".

The hoaxers were doing a reversal is the story. Charging others of doing exactly what they were up to. Its about hypocrisy, not an argument against their science. They destroyed their credibility regarding their science in their own words.

As someone who has been an avid student of meteorology and climatology for thirty-odd years, I have to say I never really bought into the whole anthropogenic global warming (AGW) hypothesis.

Yes, I do believe that a little of the warming we observed in the last part of the 20th century was caused by increased CO2. Before the issue of climate change became political, it was the consensus of most climatologists that a doubling of the CO2 concentration would produce warming of between one-half and one degree Celsius. This would translate into 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit of warming at the poles, and a couple tenths of a degree in the tropics. As one increases CO2 concentrations, the effect of each additional unit of CO2 diminishes. Thus, a quadrupling of CO2 would produce warming of 1 to 2 degrees Celsius, not 2 to 4.

This warming is significant, but not catastrophic. The Earth has in fact gone through much more pronounced warming and cooling on its own, with no help from humans. CO2 levels were around 275ppm at the dawn of the Industrial Age, and are now a little over 375. To double CO2, we would need levels around 550ppm.

In short, no crisis. So, in come the computer models. Big, scary models showing 3, 5, even 10 degrees Celsius warming or more. But what is this based on? The physics of carbon dioxide have been known for a century now. There have been no new revelations. So where does all this extra warming come from? If you read the fine print of the climate models, you'll see they rely on secondary effects of the warming releasing other chemicals and making other changes in a positive feedback loop.

I've always had a big problem with that assumption--that there are all these feedbacks just waiting to amplify any change in temperature. If the Earth's climate was truly a house of cards waiting for the slightest breeze to come knock everything out and turn the planet into an oven or freezer, we would not have a habitable Earth today! After all, in just the past several thousand years there have been warming--and cooling--cycles equal to if not greater in magnitude than what we are observing today. Why did the icecaps not melt and palm trees grow in Iceland during the Medieval Optimum? And for that matter, why didn't the Little Ice Age spiral out of control and plunge us into a real Ice Age?

The answer is that natural systems tend to damp out change, not amplify it. And there's more. If we observe this chart:

we see that CO2 is at least as much a lagging as leading indicator of temperature change. Look at how often CO2 changed after temperature did!

In short, I don't believe we have anything to fear from AGW. Really, there are plenty of other more pressing issues of environmental stewardship, like the deteriorating health of Earth's oceans, that should be gathering our attention.

Forgive me, I am a little confused at this post. At the start you seem to claim that doubling CO2 would result in warming of about 1 degree C. Yet you then follow that up with a graph which repeatedly shows warming of up to and over 4 degrees C with CO2 concentrations not even doubling by way of proof. You also seem to state that CO2 lags behind temperature change. As far as I can see from that graph I would agree with that statement for the cooling intervals, but in every stage of warming it appears that either CO2 rises prior to temperature (for example at 35,000 years) or is so close together as to be nearly inseparable. Also overall it appears that graph shows a pretty excellent corrolation between CO2 and temperature, which seeing as the CO2 line sky rockets at the far right hand side of the graph causes just a tiny weeny bit of concern.

The charge was first made by the hoaxers against their critics

But now we see one of them admitted in an email he was stroking Siemens for money and didn't "need" any more articles in the media questioning "climate change".

The hoaxers were doing a reversal is the story. Charging others of doing exactly what they were up to. Its about hypocrisy, not an argument against their science. They destroyed their credibility regarding their science in their own words

Honestly, if the government funds this research the response is "the results are invalid they are in pay of the socialist governments and will produce whatever data they want". If private finance funds this research the response is "the results are invalid they are in pay of the corrupt corporations and will produce whatever data they want". Where would you like the funding for science to come from? Do you think scientists should work part-time down the local shop to pay for research?

Honestly, I have massive respect for Saving Hawaii. You must have the patience of a saint to spend so much time answering gibbering cut and paste arguements so thoroughly only to have them roundly ignored. Thank goodness someone is though, misinformation just begats more misinformation, especially on the internet.

 

[Phileas]

As someone who has been an avid student of meteorology and climatology for thirty-odd years, I have to say I never really bought into the whole anthropogenic global warming (AGW) hypothesis.

Yes, I do believe that a little of the warming we observed in the last part of the 20th century was caused by increased CO2. Before the issue of climate change became political, it was the consensus of most climatologists that a doubling of the CO2 concentration would produce warming of between one-half and one degree Celsius. This would translate into 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit of warming at the poles, and a couple tenths of a degree in the tropics. As one increases CO2 concentrations, the effect of each additional unit of CO2 diminishes. Thus, a quadrupling of CO2 would produce warming of 1 to 2 degrees Celsius, not 2 to 4.

This warming is significant, but not catastrophic. The Earth has in fact gone through much more pronounced warming and cooling on its own, with no help from humans. CO2 levels were around 275ppm at the dawn of the Industrial Age, and are now a little over 375. To double CO2, we would need levels around 550ppm.

In short, no crisis. So, in come the computer models. Big, scary models showing 3, 5, even 10 degrees Celsius warming or more. But what is this based on? The physics of carbon dioxide have been known for a century now. There have been no new revelations. So where does all this extra warming come from? If you read the fine print of the climate models, you'll see they rely on secondary effects of the warming releasing other chemicals and making other changes in a positive feedback loop.

I've always had a big problem with that assumption--that there are all these feedbacks just waiting to amplify any change in temperature. If the Earth's climate was truly a house of cards waiting for the slightest breeze to come knock everything out and turn the planet into an oven or freezer, we would not have a habitable Earth today! After all, in just the past several thousand years there have been warming--and cooling--cycles equal to if not greater in magnitude than what we are observing today. Why did the icecaps not melt and palm trees grow in Iceland during the Medieval Optimum? And for that matter, why didn't the Little Ice Age spiral out of control and plunge us into a real Ice Age?

The answer is that natural systems tend to damp out change, not amplify it. And there's more. If we observe this chart:

we see that CO2 is at least as much a lagging as leading indicator of temperature change. Look at how often CO2 changed after temperature did!

In short, I don't believe we have anything to fear from AGW. Really, there are plenty of other more pressing issues of environmental stewardship, like the deteriorating health of Earth's oceans, that should be gathering our attention.

Forgive me, I am a little confused at this post. At the start you seem to claim that doubling CO2 would result in warming of about 1 degree C. Yet you then follow that up with a graph which repeatedly shows warming of up to and over 4 degrees C with CO2 concentrations not even doubling by way of proof. You also seem to state that CO2 lags behind temperature change. As far as I can see from that graph I would agree with that statement for the cooling intervals, but in every stage of warming it appears that either CO2 rises prior to temperature (for example at 35,000 years) or is so close together as to be nearly inseparable. Also overall it appears that graph shows a pretty excellent corrolation between CO2 and temperature, which seeing as the CO2 line sky rockets at the far right hand side of the graph causes just a tiny weeny bit of concern.

The charge was first made by the hoaxers against their critics

But now we see one of them admitted in an email he was stroking Siemens for money and didn't "need" any more articles in the media questioning "climate change".

The hoaxers were doing a reversal is the story. Charging others of doing exactly what they were up to. Its about hypocrisy, not an argument against their science. They destroyed their credibility regarding their science in their own words

Honestly, if the government funds this research the response is "the results are invalid they are in pay of the socialist governments and will produce whatever data they want". If private finance funds this research the response is "the results are invalid they are in pay of the corrupt corporations and will produce whatever data they want". Where would you like the funding for science to come from? Do you think scientists should work part-time down the local shop to pay for research?

Honestly, I have massive respect for Saving Hawaii. You must have the patience of a saint to spend so much time answering gibbering cut and paste arguements so thoroughly only to have them roundly ignored. Thank goodness someone is though, misinformation just begats more misinformation, especially on the internet.

 

[Phileas]

As someone who has been an avid student of meteorology and climatology for thirty-odd years, I have to say I never really bought into the whole anthropogenic global warming (AGW) hypothesis.

Yes, I do believe that a little of the warming we observed in the last part of the 20th century was caused by increased CO2. Before the issue of climate change became political, it was the consensus of most climatologists that a doubling of the CO2 concentration would produce warming of between one-half and one degree Celsius. This would translate into 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit of warming at the poles, and a couple tenths of a degree in the tropics. As one increases CO2 concentrations, the effect of each additional unit of CO2 diminishes. Thus, a quadrupling of CO2 would produce warming of 1 to 2 degrees Celsius, not 2 to 4.

This warming is significant, but not catastrophic. The Earth has in fact gone through much more pronounced warming and cooling on its own, with no help from humans. CO2 levels were around 275ppm at the dawn of the Industrial Age, and are now a little over 375. To double CO2, we would need levels around 550ppm.

In short, no crisis. So, in come the computer models. Big, scary models showing 3, 5, even 10 degrees Celsius warming or more. But what is this based on? The physics of carbon dioxide have been known for a century now. There have been no new revelations. So where does all this extra warming come from? If you read the fine print of the climate models, you'll see they rely on secondary effects of the warming releasing other chemicals and making other changes in a positive feedback loop.

I've always had a big problem with that assumption--that there are all these feedbacks just waiting to amplify any change in temperature. If the Earth's climate was truly a house of cards waiting for the slightest breeze to come knock everything out and turn the planet into an oven or freezer, we would not have a habitable Earth today! After all, in just the past several thousand years there have been warming--and cooling--cycles equal to if not greater in magnitude than what we are observing today. Why did the icecaps not melt and palm trees grow in Iceland during the Medieval Optimum? And for that matter, why didn't the Little Ice Age spiral out of control and plunge us into a real Ice Age?

The answer is that natural systems tend to damp out change, not amplify it. And there's more. If we observe this chart:
[Graph removed due to restrictions]

we see that CO2 is at least as much a lagging as leading indicator of temperature change. Look at how often CO2 changed after temperature did!

In short, I don't believe we have anything to fear from AGW. Really, there are plenty of other more pressing issues of environmental stewardship, like the deteriorating health of Earth's oceans, that should be gathering our attention.

Forgive me, I am a little confused at this post. At the start you seem to claim that doubling CO2 would result in warming of about 1 degree C. Yet you then follow that up with a graph which repeatedly shows warming of up to and over 4 degrees C with CO2 concentrations not even doubling by way of proof. You also seem to state that CO2 lags behind temperature change. As far as I can see from that graph I would agree with that statement for the cooling intervals, but in every stage of warming it appears that either CO2 rises prior to temperature (for example at 35,000 years) or is so close together as to be nearly inseparable. Also overall it appears that graph shows a pretty excellent corrolation between CO2 and temperature, which seeing as the CO2 line sky rockets at the far right hand side of the graph causes just a tiny weeny bit of concern.

The charge was first made by the hoaxers against their critics

But now we see one of them admitted in an email he was stroking Siemens for money and didn't "need" any more articles in the media questioning "climate change".

The hoaxers were doing a reversal is the story. Charging others of doing exactly what they were up to. Its about hypocrisy, not an argument against their science. They destroyed their credibility regarding their science in their own words

Honestly, if the government funds this research the response is "the results are invalid they are in pay of the socialist governments and will produce whatever data they want". If private finance funds this research the response is "the results are invalid they are in pay of the corrupt corporations and will produce whatever data they want". Where would you like the funding for science to come from? Do you think scientists should work part-time down the local shop to pay for research?

Honestly, I have massive respect for Saving Hawaii. You must have the patience of a saint to spend so much time answering gibbering cut and paste arguements so thoroughly only to have them roundly ignored. Thank goodness someone is though, misinformation just begats more misinformation, especially on the internet.

 

[Vylo]

The hoax has been exposed!
Somebody tell the polar ice caps to stop receding.
Quick!
PS: Tell the polar bears to stop dying.

Just a note: Everything I have read says their population is stable so far, just moving farther north.

 

[Saving Hawaii]

Just a note: Everything I have read says their population is stable so far, just moving farther north.

From what I hear, they declared war on us a few years back.

Foolish polar bears. (That's an American sub poking through the ice if you couldn't tell)

 

[TheNewWorldMan]

Forgive me, I am a little confused at this post. At the start you seem to claim that doubling CO2 would result in warming of about 1 degree C. Yet you then follow that up with a graph which repeatedly shows warming of up to and over 4 degrees C with CO2 concentrations not even doubling by way of proof. You also seem to state that CO2 lags behind temperature change. As far as I can see from that graph I would agree with that statement for the cooling intervals, but in every stage of warming it appears that either CO2 rises prior to temperature (for example at 35,000 years) or is so close together as to be nearly inseparable. Also overall it appears that graph shows a pretty excellent corrolation between CO2 and temperature, which seeing as the CO2 line sky rockets at the far right hand side of the graph causes just a tiny weeny bit of concern.

Most of the recent warming shown in the graph was caused by increased solar output.

Truth be told, if Peak Oil was coming in, say, 2040, I might then be somewhat concerned with AGW. We would have the potential to triple or even quadruple atmospheric CO2. While the resulting concentrations of CO2 would still be well within those observed at other times in Earth's history when we had a healthy, vibrant biosphere (with even more biomass than today, I might add!) we might then be looking at up to 2 degrees Celsius warming. Again, not a planet-killer or anything even in an adjacent order of magnitude, but it could upset a few applecarts...

However, oil production is peaking in the next couple years, if it hasn't already. This will rather quickly lead to a stabilization in CO2 output. There's much talk of a "hundred years of coal" and a "century of natural gas," but those are based on the most optimistic, top ten percentile estimates of reserves, and further assume ALL of the reserves will be extracted. More realistically, we're looking at Peak Gas and Peak Coal within the next two decades.

So the bottom line is that fossil fuel CO2 emissions are now about as high as they will ever get. Likely we'll see a gently-sloping downwards plateau for another decade or so, then a steady decline starting around 2020 to 2025. By 2040 or so, all fossil fuels will be in permanent decline, oil already being a $300/bbl rarity used in manufacturing rather than burning, where it is used at all.. Prices will soar, and CO2 emissions will plummet as human civilization either reverts to where it was in the 1800s, or develops new energy sources that don't involve combustion.

During the last half of this century, we'll see the biosphere rapidly begin to absorb the CO2 (which, after all, is plant food). The CO2 levels themselves should begin to decline around the middle of the century.

Crisis...averted.

 

[Saving Hawaii]

Most of the recent warming shown in the graph was caused by increased solar output.

The general thought among the scientific community is that even though increased solar irradiance has contributed to warming trends over the past couple centuries, it's an inadequate explanation of the actual warming that's been experienced. Here's a graph I pulled out of the Fourth Assessment Report (FAR) produced by the IPCC.

You'll notice that the "scientific understanding" in regards to solar irradiance is depicted as "low". Some of that is due to a number of recent research studies that have suggested that the effect of solar irradiance is less than was previously thought. That's part of the reason why the probable range given for solar irradiance mostly goes upwards.

Another graph that illustrates the disconnect in observed warming and solar irradiance is this one, which I pulled off of Wikipedia.

This graph is somewhat faulted by its early ending. This past decade is observed to be the hottest on record (1998, the hottest year on this graph has been surpassed, tied, and I expect will be beat again this year), despite solar irradiance peaking sometime around 1985. You can see the disconnect in the trend though, right?

I would suggest you take a look at the IPCC's FAR. It's an extremely lengthy document written by a ridiculous number of authors and contributors, but I don't think that there's even a remotely comparably summary of the state of climate science. Naturally there's been criticism on both sides (there are plenty of scientists who feel that the IPCC understates problems). I would note that there's a tendency for the climate models to underestimate the rate of observed changes.

"Research, conducted by the U.S.-based National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the University of Colorado's National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), demonstrates that the 18 models on which the IPCC has based its current recommendations could already be out of date -- and that the retreat of the ice could already be 30 years ahead of the IPCC's worst case scenario."

Source
​

Truth be told, if Peak Oil was coming in, say, 2040, I might then be somewhat concerned with AGW. We would have the potential to triple or even quadruple atmospheric CO2. While the resulting concentrations of CO2 would still be well within those observed at other times in Earth's history when we had a healthy, vibrant biosphere (with even more biomass than today, I might add!) we might then be looking at up to 2 degrees Celsius warming. Again, not a planet-killer or anything even in an adjacent order of magnitude, but it could upset a few applecarts...

I'll simply refer above for now as this response is longer than I really meant for it to be, but I think you seriously underestimate the importance of feedback systems in the climate. If you're interested in the actual observations and experimental evidence, I'd really suggest reading the FAR. It's not a bad read. Lengthy, but you can skim the summaries and get the idea.

However, oil production is peaking in the next couple years, if it hasn't already. This will rather quickly lead to a stabilization in CO2 output. There's much talk of a "hundred years of coal" and a "century of natural gas," but those are based on the most optimistic, top ten percentile estimates of reserves, and further assume ALL of the reserves will be extracted. More realistically, we're looking at Peak Gas and Peak Coal within the next two decades.

There's a graph you've posted many times here, mind if I post it again?

The trend on this graph is substantially different than the trend on a very similar graph, but the difference is the key.

(ignore the projection, it's irrelevant)

You'll notice that the two graphs have significantly different trends. They both are more or less accurate though. The key difference is "per capita". Let's provide a graph that has population and oil production on the same chart.

Notice how the spread changes? It's most likely that your graph and this one are understated even at that. In recent years with the explosive industrialization of countries like China and India, there is little doubt that increased demand for oil has far outpaced population growth.

If anything, your graph and my last one both underestimate the scope of our problem, that being the explosive growth of the amount of people who use oil. Countries like China and India are nowhere near the United States in the amount used per capita, but their sheer size is overwhelming. I suspect that change is one of the major reasons for the soaring price of gasoline.

So the bottom line is that fossil fuel CO2 emissions are now about as high as they will ever get. Likely we'll see a gently-sloping downwards plateau for another decade or so, then a steady decline starting around 2020 to 2025. By 2040 or so, all fossil fuels will be in permanent decline, oil already being a $300/bbl rarity used in manufacturing rather than burning, where it is used at all.. Prices will soar, and CO2 emissions will plummet as human civilization either reverts to where it was in the 1800s, or develops new energy sources that don't involve combustion.

Climate change and peak oil strike me as equally compelling reasons to get off of fossil fuels. The status quo simply isn't sustainable, and it doesn't do our posterity any good to pawn our problems off on them. In regards to peak oil, a poster here remarked that "You don't cross a bridge until you come to it." That belies the reality that you need to build the bridge before you intend to cross it. It would be a grave mistake to not make the transition to renewable energy sources until blackouts are the norm and gasoline is impossible to find. I fear though that, in respect to climate change, the risk is all to high that we burn the bridge before we even come to it.

 

[Voegelin]

Just in time for Obama's trip to Copenhagen:

Can You Believe It? Alleged Carbon Fraud in...Denmark

 

[Steve Petersen]

Fraud in the name of 'saving the planet.' Gee...who'd a thunk it?

Wait...Al Gore is set to make millions off carbon trading...hmmm.