Global Climate Change (AGW)

[Beavah]

Yah, decided to spin off this thread before it hijacked da thread on da Biden Proposal.

 

In da parent thread, vol_scouter opined that all scientific journals are controlled by da liberal academic elite or some such. I suppose that means that therefore we should ignore scientific findings on global warming and actively repress any research on gun violence. I'm not sure why we shouldn't also believe in crystal healing and astrology, too, because those liberal academic elites and their Journals are repressing da truth in order to prop up their high-profit medical establishment and statistics wonks.

 

I'm just mystified. I think I read that last year, average temperature in da U.S. broke the previous record by a full degree Farenheit. Much of our midwestern farmland is experiencing somethin' rated worse than extreme drought. Da list of effects keeps piling up, and da evidence continues to accumulate into the thousands of studies, tracking everything from sea level rise to changes in animal migration patterns. Da emerging consensus is that it is now too late to save most of da coral reefs in the world.

 

I should not in my lifetime be able to "see" changes in climate, eh? Any more than I should be able to "see" geological processes. And yet, here I am, watching areas which used to have reliable snow get none; glaciers that I once climbed are now gone; forests that I hiked are now being consumed by parasites that used to die in the winter cold; reefs I once dived are now dead.

 

It's fine to say that da costs of responding to this challenge are too high, eh? Though I disagree, I acknowledge that one rational public policy position is that this is too big a problem to be able to address economically. We don't have enough control over offshore carbon emissions in da developing world. Our food supply relies on petroleum extraction for fertilizer to feed da planet.

 

What's no longer anything other than quackery is claimin' that this is all just a liberal plot. We conservatives believe in preserving our way of life intact for our grandchildren, eh? Not being deliberately ignorant in order to line our pockets in da present.

 

Yah, yah, we'll no doubt hear nonsense about "these are only theories" or "these are only computer models." Bunch of hogwash. Theories and models are how science is done, eh? Quantum mechanics is only a theory, but it doesn't stop us from building a semiconductor industry. Weather prediction is only a computer model, but it didn't stop us this fall from evacuating the New Jersey shore and spending millions of dollars pre-positioning emergency responders (and as a result, saving lives).

 

Da fields and forests and hills and lakes are where we do scouting, eh? We are the first to be affected when Philmont has no water and our kids are doin' Klondike in the mud and not the snow. Is it time, yet, to set aside partisanship and work together on this problem?

 

Beavah

 

[packsaddle]

Here are the texts from Vol_scouter and me from the other thread:

Vol_scouter wrote:

"Academia controls all of the so called 'reputable' journals and the media. They are left leaning to left wing. There is no opportunity for fair research or review of research. Anthropogenic Global Warming is the obvious example. No contrary opinion is allowed and then the left says 'see, there are no reputable journals to back on other interpretation'. There have been some 'studies' published in medical journals that were poor science and reached unsubstantiated conclusions that were lauded. Contrary views were treated derisively rather than with serious discussions. There is no opportunity for free and honest discourse in academia for anything that has to do with the left's view of the world."

 

I replied:

"Vol_scouter, are you aware of the Wall Street Journal article which describes the recent opinions of the AGW skeptic, Richard Muller? Have your familiarized yourself with his approach, his analysis, and his papers on this topic?"

 

And then Beavah spun this one. I will delete the other posts, mine and that of Vol_scouter, in order to try to keep that thread on topic. Thanks, Beavah.

[TAHAWK]

I am NOT a "climate change denier."  I believe in climate change.  As a gardener, I note the warmer - and longer - Winters in NE Ohio.  It plays hob with my vegetable garden with short growing seasons, and the less-severe Winters facilitate pine bark beetle damage to the extent that I have lost twenty-seven trees.  Its role in the diseases exterminating Oaks, Sugar Maples, Birches, and Hemlocks is not established.  

Where I sit was a mile deep in ice 15,000-17,000 years ago, and the oceans have risen 100 meters since - all before industrialization. 

99% of all species that ever were are extinct - most before the first primate. 

Greenland was so green it supported cattle-raising and grain crops - before it got too cold for either - all in the Middle Ages.  SUVs?

I also believe we need big changes or things will get worse.  We can always make it worse.  We have more people than the carrying capacity of Earth given current technology, space, and water.  When people are so desperate that they build houses on bamboo stilts out over the Bay of Bengal, we are running out of room.

None of this amounts to "drinking" the Green "Kool Aid," a program of spin, lies and obfuscation justified to its authors by the ends sought -- saving us from our own profligacy and reproductive drive, the latter scarcely mentioned any more since the "Zero Population Growth" program failed decades ago when World population was less than half of what it is now.

In their effort to scare us "straight," the Greens deprive conservation of much of its credibility.  Some recall the results of the "Reefer Madness" offensive, but most are too young.  Efforts to curtail marijuana use with exaggerated claims about the neurological effects of "Mary Jane " became regarded as a joke - literally joked about on main stream MSM programs such as Tonight.  And look where we are now - marijuana advertised on network television as a cool economic opportunity.  It's still a federal crime to grow and sell, but there is no political will to stop the spread of illegal  "legalization." 

And the entire field has become a political football, weaponized by some so intellectually vapid as to stun objective observers.  Close the fossil fuel industry?  No problem . Coal miners can become computer programmers, "for God's sake."  Software, after all, is so easy. 

FAILED DOOMSDAY PREDICTIONS

1. The U.S. may warm 6 degrees F from 1990 to 2020

 In 1990, The Washington Post reported in a front page story: "Carbon dioxide is the gas most responsible for predictions that Earth will warm on average by about 3 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2020."

WAPO further warned: "The United States, because it occupies a large continent in higher latitudes, could warm by as much as 6 degrees Fahrenheit."

Thirty years later, 2020 has finally arrived. The Earth has warmed approximately 1 degree Fahrenheit according to NASA. The United States also warmed roughly 1 degree. An inconvenient truth.

Elliott Negin, a spokesman for the Union of Concerned Scientists, which issued the 3/6 prediction declined to comment.

 

 

Generally, Geren "modeling" has been uniformly and substantially incorrect.

[mds3d]

Predictions are often wrong.  They are also often predicated on nothing changing from current environment (not the case over the last 30 years).   The news does all these things a disservice by always reporting on the extreme of whatever was said by the scientific community.  

Academia is rarely in agreement so well as it is on climate change, and that should tell you something.  

Richard Mueller might not be disingenuous but I think he is at least taking his stance in the way that will make him the most notable.   

[TAHAWK]

32 minutes ago, mds3d said:

Predictions are often wrong.  They are also often predicated on nothing changing from current environment (not the case over the last 30 years).   The news does all these things a disservice by always reporting on the extreme of whatever was said by the scientific community.  

Academia is rarely in agreement so well as it is on climate change, and that should tell you something.  

Richard Mueller might not be disingenuous but I think he is at least taking his stance in the way that will make him the most notable.   

Muller?  If so, he now is a convert to the Green position - if not 100%,  at least substantially.

Truth is not a matter of "consensus."  We don't vote on what's true.  A scientist tests a hypothesis.  In the real world, "scientific consensus" is like faith.  Heretics are attacked.  So those proposing that ulcers were primarily caused by bacteria or that stress causes disease were outvoted and hooted at by the orthodox  "scientific" community.  But they were right.  And the oceans rose 100 meters before individualization when the World population was 1/7 of what it is now.  Link That to the notion that Homo sap. is the only significant driver of climate change.  

2. Oil will effectively run out by 2020

" CNN [ that paragon of objectivity]  ran a headline in 2003 titled 'World oil and gas 'running out'.'

The New York Times [ once the 'newspaper of record'] reported in 1989 that 'untapped pools of domestic oil are finite and dwindling," and that 'William Stevens, the president of Exxon U.S.A., said ... by the year 2020 there would not be enough domestic oil left 'to keep me interested.'

But doomsayers underestimated American ingenuity, and the opposite happened. Both U.S. oil output and U.S. proven oil reserves are dramatically higher now than they were in 1989, thanks to technology allowing deeper oil to be discovered and extracted.

 New technology in natural gas ("'fracking') also allowed the U.S. to become an energy independent net oil exporter for the first time in 75 years in 2018.

 Reached by phone, Phillip Shabecoff, the former New York Times reporter who covered the disappearing oil in 1989, said that the Exxon CEO’s 2020 prediction was off."  

Do you think?

[David CO]

On 1/13/2013 at 1:12 PM, Beavah said:

And yet, here I am, watching areas which used to have reliable snow get none

Boy, I wish I got a little less snow.

I have never seen a scientific study which says what the ideal climate would be.  Would it be colder?  Would it be warmer?  They don't say.  They always want to talk about climate change, but they have no idea what the ideal climate would be.  Until we know what the ideal climate would look like, we can't say if climate change is good or bad.

[TAHAWK]

Depends on what really happens and, then, where you are.  Could Greenland be green again?  Wheat grown in Canada?

 

By 2020, "millions will die" from climate change 

Reuters newswire ran this headline in 1997: "'Millions will die' unless climate policies change."

The report said 8 million people would die by 2020, citing a prediction in the Lancet medical journal.

The mass death prediction was clearly way off.

“None of these predictions came true, and aren't even close to coming true,” said Roy Spencer, a climatologist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. “It's amazing that the public can continue to believe apocalyptic predictions despite a 95 percent decline in weather-related deaths in the last 100 years.”

Some modern studies claim to find mass deaths; the Daily Beast covered a “shock report” that “Climate Change Kills 400,000 a Year,” but Human Progress' Marian Tupy said such estimates are grossly inflated."

Edited January 2, 2020 by TAHAWK

[qwazse]

If you have a friend who re-posts a "NASA says ..." fear-mongering meme, be sure to reply with this link about what NASA actually says: https://climate.nasa.gov/

@TAHAWK and I have the dubious privilege of living on the boundary of the neutral change zone on the global climate map. There is a "tongue" of stable, if not somewhat cooler, seasonal temperatures over the years that covers the northeast US, in contrast to accelerating warming trends in the rest of the country. In other words, although not everybody has seen "worst case", the SW US has seen that 4+ degree hop ... it could be 6 degrees at some points. Thus as  @Beavah worried: We are the first to be affected when Philmont has no water ... Or rather, it half burns away.

[TAHAWK]

I quoted predictions.   I assume the Green Machine currently trims it's sails to match the present wind, but it still makes dire predictions. 

 

The issue for me is damage to the credibility of what I think of as "conservation" - rationally preserving finite resources against waste.  Keep making wildly inaccurate dire predictions, and even the unmistakable truth gets lost.  Neo-Luddites provide noise the profligate can and do use to drown out reasonable concerns.  Then we have the politicians like AOC demanding the outlawing of meat-eating, no more use of fossil-fuel, and, generally, TEOTWAWKI - all to gain power.   See, it is not enough for the Green Machine that one agrees there is climate change - even "global warming" - or agrees that we can make it worse - or better.  The Green Machine demands total obeisance to every aspect of their religion, even if it means ignoring science: "Sun energy output cycles are meaningless!"   👽

Edited January 2, 2020 by TAHAWK

[vol_scouter]

There is evidence in the fossil record indicating a much warmer climate in earlier eras that is not disputed in scientific circles. So a warming period could be a natural process or it could be due to anthropomorphic factors or it could be due to both. 

It is telling that all, including climatologists, say that they 'believe' in climate change (previously global warming until the CO2 levels continued to increase but the 'average temperature' did not). 

Who funds climate research? Governments. Do those governments fund research that could disprove AGW? No. Do journals accept contrarian views - in general, no.

The first world can keep the third world poor by depriving their citizens of energy by buying them off. 

On any given day, the temperature difference between Mt Everest and Death Valley is ~80° F (~44° C) or even worse if one considers temperatures averaging as low as -76° F in the Antarctic mountains would make the temperature range more than 140° F (~78° C). Considering such large differences in daily temperatures across the globe means that cleaning a daily global average temperature is not valid to the 10th let alone the 100th of a degree C - it is ridiculous. In a large lecture hall, we might talk about the temperature as if it is constant and the same throughout the room. However, simply walking from the floor to the back row demonstrates a temperature gradient as hot air raises. So even the tiny volume, compared to the ground atmosphere, of a large lecture hall does not have an easily definable temperature. One would need many probes throughout the room. Stating an average temperature of the earth is nonsensical.

Climate science is not a real science but is an observational science. Science is doing experiments while controlling certain variables but climate science is entirely observational. We cannot control any variable in the climate and observe how the climate changes. We can do that in models, but not experimentally. So it is not a classical science (neither is astronomy, cosmology, and others). So all climate work involves modeling and observing if the models fit the actual changes.

Modeling is only as good as the underlying equations. There are 23 major climate models - think about that, there is not one but 23 models who do not all agree. Like the hurricane models where there is considerable differences due to different models using different assumptions. The hurricane predictions are generated by taking a visual average. 

If models cannot predict near time events, they cannot correctly predict long term events. So when climate models fail to predict near term events, they are not valid.

Is there a connection between atmospheric CO2 and temperature? It is likely but it might not be as large an effect as thought. CO2 is about  0.04% of the atmosphere - it is a tiny part. The strongest greenhouse gas? H2O - water. It is very difficult to model H2O so most models do not account for it. Our climate is nearly entirely driven by the sun but sun variances are usually not taken into account.

Climate change is more of a religion and is not treated as a science by the scientific community. This is seen by the ridicule even to which the very best scientists are subjected. Science encourages questioning. The high energy physics community had theories other than the standard model and were a little sad that the Higgs boson was found. If climatology was a real science, then it would welcome questions, concerns, and alternate explanations.

In science, there does not need to be a consensus statement as the truth becomes obvious. Consensus statements have been notoriously wrong.

All that to say that models do not agree and the predictions are not valid to make policy. Should we heed the warnings? Probably a good idea. Should the US destroy its economy, decrease its standard of living while paying the second largest economy and largest polluter, China, as per the Paris accords - does not seem like a good idea to me.

vol_scouter

[ianwilkins]

On 1/2/2020 at 1:08 AM, TAHAWK said:

'untapped pools of domestic oil are finite and dwindling," - Exxon bloke

That first part cannot be anything but true at any time, as it seems unlikely that there is infinite domestic oil.

Maybe we'll all have hydrogen in our flying cars and hoverboards thanks to this clever lass and chums...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-50841104

 

[John-in-KC]

We have infinite quantities of solar, geothermal, and wind sources. 
 

We should use more of them and less carbon based fuels.  There are other uses for hydrocarbons. 

[walk in the woods]

17 hours ago, vol_scouter said:

Should the US destroy its economy, decrease its standard of living

Nope, and there's no need.  If humanity is actually facing an extinction level event then open Yucca Mountain, build nukes to replace the fossil fuel plants, radcon train the people from the ff plants for the nukes, and move along smartly with all those toxic Co (the next conflict mineral) battery powered cars!

[David CO]

52 minutes ago, John-in-KC said:

We have infinite quantities of solar, geothermal, and wind sources. 

There are far more carbon based energy sources on Earth than we could possibly ever use.  Most of it is not economically retrievable.  This may change as new technologies are developed.

 

 

[David CO]

15 minutes ago, walk in the woods said:

If humanity is actually facing an extinction level event 

We are.  God never intended for us to be here forever.