TL vs. Climate Change (Denial) - Page 32

On February 06 2012 12:25 shuurai wrote:
Arctic sea ice extent has been lowest in 2007 and has not gotten less ever since. So, while it may make for a great talking point, we probably will not see the arctic ice free in 30 years. I'd be willing to wager.

The claim that millions of people depend on glaciers for water, all the while these glaciers are not supposed to melt, is downright hilarious! But yea, impressionable people make for good...impressions, I guess.

On February 06 2012 22:11 shuurai wrote:
This took me about 10:

http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/seaice/extent/AMSRE_Sea_Ice_Extent_L.png

So what do we have here? Conflicting data sets...

As for the second phrase, any scientist claiming glacier melt was a major factor in fresh water supply is bonkers. Mountain ranges such as the Himalayas and Andes force precipitation, which is fed by evaporation -- hardly a mechanism in danger of becoming defunct, even if it would warm substantially. I dare you to provide sources for any place on earth heavily reliant on glacier melt for fresh water.

On February 05 2012 21:22 kuriz wrote:
OP: more of a personal question really, but do you ever get sad on behalf of humanity when working with these things all day long? I mean in a way there are simply no happy ending to this. Are you positive about the future or does it look daaark?

On February 06 2012 07:19 Dbla08 wrote:
climate change is undeniable, its happening. but "global warming" was the biggest fucking farce in human history, al gore made billions off scaring people with an illogical 5th grade level powerpoint presentation.

Edit: also, if anyone truly believes that carbon-dioxide is the sole cause of climate change, they've either been horribly fooled or are horribly stupid. methane is almost 10x more dense than carbon dioxide, and its prevalence is growing much more rapidly than carbon dioxide. the industrial slaughter of cows/pigs etc, as well as the frozen tundra of russia releasing large quantities of methane contribute to climate change so much more than the carbon dioxide the biomass of earth produces, and consumes, the eco-system has a natural way of eliminating massive amounts of carbon dioxide. its called photosynthesis via chlorophyll, and every plant that's green does it. methane doesn't have such an out, it simply stays or is burned and broken down into CO/CO2 and some other trace chemicals etc.

On February 06 2012 12:25 shuurai wrote:
Arctic sea ice extent has been lowest in 2007 and has not gotten less ever since. So, while it may make for a great talking point, we probably will not see the arctic ice free in 30 years. I'd be willing to wager.

The claim that millions of people depend on glaciers for water, all the while these glaciers are not supposed to melt, is downright hilarious! But yea, impressionable people make for good...impressions, I guess.

On February 05 2012 17:32 AlphaWhale wrote:


You know trees and plants also absorb a lot of CO2, right? They bloom in Spring and absorb CO2, then shed in the winter and release it. Essentially breathing in and out once a year.

On February 06 2012 23:25 shuurai wrote:
It's glaringly obvious that a glacier is merely a water deposit, whereas precipitation of evaporated seawater is an actual source. 'Receiving' water supplies from glaciers would be having the cake and eating it, too.

Back to the sea ice. It's one thing to claim that current developments are only a short term deviation from a long term trend, it's another to offer substantiation beyond pure speculation. What evidence is there to suggest this "trend" has stopped altogether? Let me refer you to hadcrut3, an 'authoritative' global data set, ignoring the proven affinity of its creators for tweaking towards desired outcomes for now:

http://www.woodfortrees.org/data/hadcrut3vgl

As you can see, the so called 'global temperature anomaly' peaked in early 1998. Now, why would we expect to see more melting when temperatures are no longer rising?

1) Quite recently, several key institutions leading the charge have, without much fanfare, revised their forecasts into their very opposites. These include the Climatic Research Unit of East Anglia, of "Climategate" fame, as well as NASA and the UK's Met Office, which now admit that their data shows no warming trend in the past 15 years -- which, almost needless to say, flies straight in the face of their highly alarmist claims dating back to the turn of the millenium. That in essence leaves us with only one conclusion: Their models are nowhere near accurate, and should thus not be taken for gospel. Can you possibly dispute that?

2) There is ample evidence for historical periods of substantially more warmth in history (e.g. Medieval Warm Period, Holocene Optimum) , none of which have been caused by industrialization and none of which resulted in ecological disaster -- to the contrary, in fact. Knowing that vast changes have occurred quite naturally, and without disastrous results, what arguments are there to justify the current efforts to "fix" the climate?

3) Ice cores, providing us with the longest historical temperature records available, clearly indicate a larger cycle of about 100.000 years of which roughly 10.000 tend to be "interglacials", i.e. times in between ice ages (The underlying theory of which, "Milankovitch Cycles", now is being recognized by the likes of NASA et al btw...). What's more, the end of the current interglacial is just about overdue, making excessive future cooling a very likely -- and very hostile -- scenario, calling for its very own preparations in stark contrast to those for "global warming". If you discard this scenario, on what grounds?

On February 05 2012 23:13 Acasta wrote:
Hi dabbeljuh,

I believe in human-made climate change, and i think your research is very important, as understanding a problem and making everyone aware that there is one, is the first and most important step for solving it.
I'm making my B.Sc. in Geoscience right now, want to do my Master in Applied Geophysics (so may be working for the oil industry) and I'm very interested in any kind of energy related issue.

I would like your personal opinion on this:

The most important contributor to climate change is the burning of fossil fuels as energy-sources (oil, gas and coal); and while this affects the climate it also affects our society, lifestyle, and view of what humanity is capable (always expecting economic growth even though our energy sources are limited).
With the words of Nobel Laureate Richard Smalley: "Energy is the single most important challenge facing humanity today" and cheap energy is also a very big part of the solution for various other problems of humanity (Water, Food, Wars/Terrorism).

(see Lecture of Richard Smalley about Energy for more information)

Now that we have passed peak oil, energy is just going to get more expensive, and while we are currently not able to meet our energy demand with renewable energys (and dont unterstand me wrong; renewable energies have to be the solution and research should get more funded), we remain dependent on fossil fuels for at least the next 40 years.

So: Aren't the problems deriving from not having cheap energy (wars, financial crisis, a step backwards in solving the water and food problem) less important than the problems caused by fossil fuels (climate change, oil spills, environmental damage caused by oil sand)?

This is a very difficult question and i don't think that there is a perfect answer; (hard to quantify the problems and damage)
In my opinion the solution has to be a compromise between both, fossil fuels and environment (obviously regulating our energy demand will also be important); but fossil fuels are to important for the next 40 years to discard them in favor of climate change.
I would like your opinion (and the opinon of others) on that :-)

Thanks for reading :D

On February 06 2012 03:10 shuurai wrote:
Unless you are actually aiming for something afield of intellectually honest debate, labeling your opponents as "denialists" is certainly not the hallmark of a scientist.

With that out of the way, I'd like you to address a few points:

1) Quite recently, several key institutions leading the charge have, without much fanfare, revised their forecasts into their very opposites. These include the Climatic Research Unit of East Anglia, of "Climategate" fame, as well as NASA and the UK's Met Office, which now admit that their data shows no warming trend in the past 15 years -- which, almost needless to say, flies straight in the face of their highly alarmist claims dating back to the turn of the millenium. That in essence leaves us with only one conclusion: Their models are nowhere near accurate, and should thus not be taken for gospel. Can you possibly dispute that?
..

On February 06 2012 23:41 Acrofales wrote:
Of course you're right about glaciers being a mere repository and I don't know enough about run-off to give you a definitive answer, but it is clear that one of the following is happening:

1. Less precipitation is causing glaciers to grow slower in the winter.
2. Higher temperatures are causing glaciers to melt faster in the summer.
3. Both of the above.

Other than that I don't have much to say on the subject.

As for your hadcrut data, all I see is a list of numbers with them being almost exclusively negative before 1950 and almost exclusively positive after 1980. Other than that just by visual processing alone I can discern very little trends. I am unsure how you fare better. However, there are numerous scientific articles that I have linked to throughout this thread that state that you are unequivocally wrong on this account.

On February 06 2012 23:54 dabbeljuh wrote:
sorry I cannot adress all your points, becauseI am kind of busy and you seem to be very convinced that climate change science is a scam. I will still adress your point 1, because it might be misleading to more:

The evolution of global averaged temperature trends is a combination of signal and noise. Think about daily + yearly cycle as an easy noise, and the signal is the proven and measured warming trend of the 20th century. There is also longterm variation in the system, the ocean has cycles that are on the length scale of years to decades. A famous multiyear variation is the El Nino / La Nina oscillation. This means, that on top of a trend you have fluctuations that naturally increase / decrease the strength of the trend .

If you look at normal climate model output, they have periods like the 2000s with a slightly decreased trend all over the place. Its just natural variability.

I hope that helps a little bit

For all german readers: there is a nice webpage called klimafakten.de

The 'models' mostly consist of CO2 and an arbitrary forcing factor instead of considering the wider picture, which in itself makes any distinction between signal and noise uneducated guesswork. Have you ever looked at the model 'code' leaked from UEA?

I'd love to see the model that predicted what has occurred. All I can seem to find are prophecies of disaster which failed to manifest. Please provide me with a pointer to a model that got it right.

On February 06 2012 23:41 shuurai wrote:
Hi w,

I'd really appreciate it if you addressed my original points -- which were overshadowed by multiple tangents, unfortunately.

On February 07 2012 00:48 dabbeljuh wrote:
I am unclear where I managed to deserve your aggressive tone.

A remark: this thread was opened (by me) to enable people that are in doubt to ask questions. If you want to answer those questions, fine. If you want to raise new ones, even better. But please refrain from your "if you dont agree with me you are clueless) rethoric. science is a process, not an answer.

I have worked on creating GCM code, thank you very much, I dont have to look at leaked model code from other people. Or models incorporate flow solvers for atmosphere and ocean, a radiative model, cloud models, vegetation models, ocean biogeochemistry models and are probably the most complex tool of Earth System description that mankind has ever made up. They are far from perfect as is the case for any evolving science, so there are bugs. They are still the best guess anybody has ever brought forward as to how Earths complex system works.

I hope that you can access the papers, but here it goes "Model-based evidence of deep-ocean heat uptake during surface-temperature hiatus periods"

http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v1/n7/full/nclimate1229.html

Here we analyse twenty-first-century climate-model simulations that maintain a consistent radiative imbalance at the top-of-atmosphere of about 1 W m−2 as observed for the past decade. Eight decades with a slightly negative global mean surface-temperature trend show that the ocean above 300 m takes up significantly less heat whereas the ocean below 300 m takes up significantly more, compared with non-hiatus decades. The model provides a plausible depiction of processes in the climate system causing the hiatus periods, and indicates that a hiatus period is a relatively common climate phenomenon and may be linked to La Niña-like conditions.

and

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2009GL037810.shtml

Numerous websites, blogs and articles in the media have claimed that the climate is no longer warming, and is now cooling. Here we show that periods of no trend or even cooling of the globally averaged surface air temperature are found in the last 34 years of the observed record, and in climate model simulations of the 20th and 21st century forced with increasing greenhouse gases. We show that the climate over the 21st century can and likely will produce periods of a decade or two where the globally averaged surface air temperature shows no trend or even slight cooling in the presence of longer‐term warming.

@ klimafakten: ich kenne viele Mitglieder des wissenschaftlichen Beirats und weiss, dass sie ihre Arbeit ernst nehmen. der beauftragte Journalist leistet gute Arbeit. Es ist kein Journal fuer neue Wissenschaft sondern ein Portal fuer die Oeffentlichkeit, ich wuerde an deiner Stelle da auch wieder den Gang ein bisschen runterschalten ~

regards,