The Climate Change Thread

[Bruwheresmycar]

There are lots of ideas for tackling this problem. I've seen a few documentaries with ideas like the one you described. There is lots of talk about potential solutions, just not enough actual work being done. But at the end of the day the best solution is to slow down our pollution, not try and mask it. (you could mask it, but continuing to increase pollution levels at the same time would be stupid)

I am still dubious about the correlation thing. From those charts they look like it would be an extremely low correlation if any (maybe 0.2 or something) for each of the major drivers behind temperatures. In my mind, that seriously dicredits this idea.

It might not make sense to you, it doesn't make much sense to anyone who doesn't extensively understand the physics involved (me included). But the researchers around the world who do understand how the climate works historically/and today just follow the facts and publish what they find. It seems pretty clear to them that we are heading down the wrong track.

One part of climate science that really made me think was when I realized how much impact the greenhouse effect has on the climate. Without it, the earth would be a ball of ice. So you can kind of imagine how slightly adjusting it could impact the global climate system over relatively short periods of time. Of course the greenhouse effect is changing all the time, and it's just another factor in all the massive energy equations, but without something to cancel it's increase out the only way for temperature to go is up really.

 

[Inside Shoulder]

http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/history/La-Nina-2010-12.pdf

 

[wilful]

I've only just discovered this thread, I thought G&GR was all about rugby, didn't have any side boards.I'm both fairly passionate and extremely well informed about climate science, I'm not a climatologist but I am an ecologist that keeps up with the literature. I'm always happy to debate (politely and respectfully) and to help inform other people.

Now I am not going to read 44 pages of discussion, but I've skimmed a few and can I just say, as per my previous understanding, rugby fans are unequivocally amongst the most intelligent and thoughtful sports fans in the world? I have detected hardly a whiff of bullshit denialist claptrap and those zombie ideas that have been disproved a thousand times over.

Well done green and gold rugby!

 

[Bruwheresmycar]

 

[Schadenfreude]

Today I listened to Naomi Oreskes in Conversations with Richard Fidler:
http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2012/06/08/3521382.htm

Naomi Oreske's 2004 essayThe Scientific Consensus on Climate Change attracted huge media attention, and was cited by Al Gore inAn Inconvenient Truth.

It also gave Naomi her first experience of hate mail and abusive 'phone messages, telling her she was "a disgrace".
But for every piece of hate mail there were 10 letters of appreciation, many from scientists.
Naomi, together with Erik Conway, discovered that the distinguished scientists who obscured the truth about tobacco were the same men now casting doubt on the science of climate change.
Their book is called: Merchants of Doubt: how a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming, published by Bloomsbury.
interview first broadcast May 2011

More here:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/naomi-oreskes-consensus-on-global-warming.htm

 

[Runner]

China is building 500 new coal power staions. We probably have 20.

 

[Schadenfreude]

Apparently we can cool the earth by pumping sulphur dioxide into the high atmosphere... no worries.

 

[Bruwheresmycar]

If you don't want to do anything about this problem, that is fine, it's up to you and how you think society should operate.

However, it doesn't change the fact climate science is based on solid physics.

 

[Aussie D]

If you don't want to do anything about this problem, that is fine, it's up to you and how you think society should operate.

However, it doesn't change the fact climate science is based on solid physics.

Geez, here I was thinking it was based on computer modelling with the answer already known and the user changing the variables to ensure the correct anser is met... :fishing:

 

[Bruwheresmycar]

lol, but the sad part is that people actually think like that.

 

[Runner]

I am not a climate sceptic about climate change. The reasons may well not be all man. However, climate modellers use the same computer based models that are being used by Treasurery to say we are about to have a surplus is a concern. The last 7 budgets have been in the range of 80 to 100% incorrect.
So it could be much better or worse than the models show.

 

[Inside Shoulder]

I wouldn't blame the computers Runner : its Swans data entry thats the problem.
Garbage in garbage out

 

[wilful]

I am not a climate sceptic about climate change. The reasons may well not be all man. However, climate modellers use the same computer based models that are being used by Treasurery to say we are about to have a surplus is a concern. The last 7 budgets have been in the range of 80 to 100% incorrect.
So it could be much better or worse than the models show.

A) it's not all about the models, it actually quite a lot about evidence. Such as the fact that it's hotter than any time in the last 2000 years.
B) complain about the models, but have you got a spare planet to test hypotheses out?
c) global climate models have a pretty awesome predictive ability in fact.
D) if you're scared of models, don't fly a modern plane, they were all modelled before a single piece was made.

Have a read: http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-models-intermediate.htm

 

[Sully]

which budget in the last seven years was 100% incorrect?

 

[Bruwheresmycar]

An interesting documentary on the political effort against climate science. Most of these people are quite open and clear about their goals. And they literally don't see a significant difference between the science and politics.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/climate-of-doubt/

 

[Runner]

Read the next issue of Nature about Temperature and Climate change.

 

[matty_k]

Stumbled across this analysis of peer reviewed literature published between 1991 and 2012.

http://scienceprogress.org/2012/11/27479/

By my definition, 24 of the 13,950 articles, 0.17 percent or 1 in 581, clearly reject global warming or endorse a cause other than CO2 emissions for observed warming. The list of articles that reject global warming is here.

A few deniers have become well known from newspaper interviews, Congressional hearings, conferences of climate change critics, books, lectures, websites and the like. Their names are conspicuously rare among the authors of the rejecting articles. Like those authors, the prominent deniers must have no evidence that falsifies global warming.

 

[Bruwheresmycar]

Those sun spots must be at it again. (or natural variability, I forget whatever it is that is supposed to be the real cause)

Forty-seven glaciologists have arrived at a community consensus over all the data on what the past century's warming has done to the great ice sheets: a current annual loss of 344 billion tons of glacial ice, accounting for 20% of current sea level rise. Greenland's share—about 263 billion tons—is roughly what most researchers expected, but Antarctica's represents the first agreement on a rate that had ranged from a far larger loss to an actual gain. The new analysis, published on page 1183 of this week's issue of Science, also makes it clear that losses from Greenland and West Antarctica have been accelerating, showing that some ice sheets are disconcertingly sensitive to warming.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/338/6111/1138.summary

An international team of experts supported by NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) has combined data from multiple satellites and aircraft to produce the most comprehensive and accurate assessment to date of ice sheet losses in Greenland and Antarctica and their contributions to sea level rise.
In a landmark study published Thursday in the journal Science, 47 researchers from 26 laboratories report the combined rate of melting for the ice sheets covering Greenland and Antarctica has increased during the last 20 years.
Together, these ice sheets are losing more than three times as much ice each year (equivalent to sea level rise of 0.04 inches or 0.95 millimeters) as they were in the 1990s (equivalent to 0.01 inches or 0.27 millimeters).
About two-thirds of the loss is coming from Greenland, with the rest from Antarctica. This rate of ice sheet losses falls within the range reported in 2007 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Ice_Sheet_Loss_At_Both_Poles_Increasing_Study_Finds_999.html


Ice sheets? Meh, they come and go all the time.

 

[matty_k]

And now the permafrost is getting in on the action.

http://m.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/where-even-the-earth-is-melting-20121127-2a5tp.html

 

[wilful]

Four to six degrees by the end of the century: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-12-03/annual-report-shows-carbon-emissions-continue-to-grow/4403778