Global Warming. Fact or Fiction?

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Ruveyn, suppose you notice a drop in performance from your GM Cadillac, or whatever Americans like you drive. Say, that you fill up with fuel at the same place every week, and it comes to your attention that they've increased the proportion of ethanol in that fuel, and that coincides with the observed performance anomaly. What would you conclude? I'd suggest you'd seriously consider it a possibility that the fuel composition was responsible for the problem, not just because of the timing, but because there is a known mechanism that could explain the phenomenon. It wouldn't prove it -- afterall, there are many other factors that could act to give the same result. However, with time you could identify whether the increase in ethanol in the fuel was responsible. Similarly, with the global warming hypothesis there is a known mechanism: we are adding CO2 to the atmosphere in significant quantities, and that CO2 causes warming. The problem with the anthropogenic global warming argument is that people like you want absolute proof. You are never going to get absolute proof; even if the global average temperature increases by 5 degree in the next 50 years and sea levels rise by metres, that is not complete proof, because the climatic system with which we are part is not an internal combustion engine thats operation can be expained by relatively simple maths, physics and chemistry. Some will just say that that increase in temperature would have happened whether man was here or not. Fortunately, many people are able to operate with this kind of uncertainty and that is usually accomplished by balancing things like probabilty and risk to achieve some kind of direction. Do you have a problem with that approach?

Last edited by ascan on 05 Dec 2009, 5:06 am, edited 1 time in total.

That is a malformed argument.

Short term chaos can exist within long term order.

For example. The stormy ocean waves are seething and discordant, but they do not disrupt the regular tides.

In prior epochs CO2 increases followed warming, not caused it.

There are other factors which the Climatic Chicken Little movement has dismissed out of hand. For example cloud formation which is a consequence of cosmic ray bombardment. Then there are variations of tilt of the earth rotation axis and orbital variations. Then there is variations of solar energy output. Unless every last one of these factors is overwhelmingly eliminated as a cause of the current warming epoch, we cannot logically conclude that human CO2 production is the driving factor in the current warming epoch.

It is this lack of simple logic that makes me skeptical of the Climatic Chicken Little movement. That plus the fact that regulating production is a means for governments to acquire even more power than they have. Let me just say, I have open questions and doubts.

Underneath all this is the fact there is no climatic sciences qua science. We have a lot of models which are cooked up to fit what data we have in hand. Climate and weather are chaotic dynamic systems and the current mathematics are very poor at dealing with chaotic dynamics. The best we can do with turbulence, for example, is simulate it on a fast computer. But the results we get are a function of boundary conditions given. So there is no solid physics of climate and weather at this time. The best we can say is that if a climate theory violates some basic conservation law, it is wrong. But that in and of itself is not a theory, it is a constraint.

ruveyn

^^
in other words, climate and weather are two different things.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/a ... /5958/1394

^The sun is currently at solar minimum, and has been going down for the last decade; how do you explain the fact, then, that the planet keeps on getting hotter? Every quibble you just brought up has been answered very simply many, many times.

Last edited by LKL on 05 Dec 2009, 5:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Two major flaws in your observations.

1. The Arctic Circle has been ice-free in the past. When the planet enters a warming trend, it happens. Prove it is CO2 doing this and not a natural cycle repeating itself.

2. Antarctic ice is thicker than it has been in recent years...not consistent with "warming."

3. If the ice is naturally receding as we come out of an ice age, the global temperatures go up by a given rate. This is scientifically testable and confirmed. If the ice was receding by the application or retention of atmospheric heat, the air temperatures needed to force-melt ice at the current rate would kill most all life on the planet. Hence, we know the ice is receding naturally, not because of man.

4. Al Gore's own misrepresented data proves it is B.S. CO2 levels increase AFTER the temperatures go up, not BEFORE. The warming of the earth is increasing CO2 production, not the other way around.

what you are describing wrt ice is known as a positive feedback mechanism. It means that the effects of small increases in temperature are self-amplifying, not that the temperature isn't increasing.

wrt CO2 lag:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/ar ... p-and-co2/

for a quick example, the thawing of permafrost is releasing C02 in another feedback mechanism. There are many positive feedback mechanisms like this - an increase in forest fires due to hotter, dryer conditions is another - and it's one of the reasons climate scientists are in such a frothing panic over this. The fact that there's positive CO2 feedback does not mean that the climate is not warming, nor that anthropogenic CO2 was not the initiator. It just might mean that we're screwed beyond recovery, though.

We'll really be in deep s**t if the methane hydrates melt.

Planetary temperature increases have become minimal over the past 8 years. So where is the "hockey stick". Probably up CRU's arse.

By the way the planet got very warm during the medieval warm period without any help from humans.

ruveyn

Best summary of the hoax in layman's terms...

http://borepatch.blogspot.com/2009/12/s ... eptic.html

FYI, to anyone who has brought up "global cooling" being all the rage in the 1980s or whatever - It's not true. That is a meme that spread after Penn & Teller mentioned it, but in reality, the ratio of global cooling versus global warming was 1/5, respectively. Also, this so-called "scandal" is ridiculous, it's exactly on par with the birthers, and no doubt hilarity of the same proportions will ensue.

I've explained some of this to you recently, and that has been repeated by LKL above. The CO2 increase following warming is expected; but that doesn't preclude the possibility that in the anthropogenic warming scenario the initial CO2 increase from our activities initiates the warming. As for the remainder of the paragraph, and to paraphrase a previous post of mine, all of those things occur, and have been studied, and you have not got absolute proof that human CO2 production is the main cause of current warming. However, looking at all the evidence, even many of the skeptics would agree that it is probable that human CO2 production contributes to the phenomenon. As I said, there's a theoretical mechanism: it's not just about correlation. Moreover, there's a vast amount of palaeoclimatic evidence covering hundreds of millions of years that supports this.


As I've said, neither side's political wing represents their case well. If you study the relevant scientific literature there is a strong case to be made for anthropogenic warming. That literature should not be confused with the crap promulgated by the media, politicians or in various blogs.

I reject your "explanations" as flawed. Right now we have no "climate science". We have a lot of climate models where are very dependent on the data that happens to be collected at the moment. We do not understand systems of chaotic dynamics all that well.

What makes quantum theory and its cousins tractable is the principle of superposition and the underlying linearity of the processes.

There are two solutions to this dilemma.

1. We have to get smarter about dealing with chaotic and non-linear systems. (possible, but not easy).

2. We have to find a linear underlying system which adequately accounts for climate (not likely).

Write us when you have a solution to the Navier-Stokes equation in its full generality.

In the mean time I am very reluctant to impoverish myself on the basis of conclusions reached by politically corrupted junk science. If you want to live on chicken s**t and granola, by all means do it, but don't force me to do the same.

We should give up the Filthy Oil Habit, since too much of the oil and gas is in the hands of Muslims and Russians. We should pave over North America with fast breeder reactors and generate so much electricity we can finally have our much hyped "hydrogen economy". We can fill the niche economy in energy with solar conversion, wind power (which is a form of solar conversion), geothermal heat and hydro-electric (which is partially a form of solar conversion). The three prime energy sources currently in reach of technology are heat from atomic fission, heat and light from the sun and heat from inside the planet. We should tap these sources sooner than later, but we probably will not. We will wait until we are on death's doorstep and then have a crash-bang style Manhattan Project in energy.

ruveyn

Strange that, as a basic grasp of maths, physics and chemistry should tell you otherwise. There's no "junk science" to that one, ruveyn.




Of course, you are still living in the 1960s, and if it's not maths physics or chemistry it's a waste of time. Outside your timewarp biologists, meteorologists, geologists, and many more, including climatologists, have contributed significantly to understanding how our world functions, to the benefit of the US population in particular. And some of this has even been achieved using the Navier-Stokes equations despite the existence and smoothness problem. But just because you are now being told something you don't want to hear, we are supposed to ignore all that, and write it off as "junk science". Isn't that your position ruveyn?

This guy makes an interesting argument

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mF_anaVcCXg[/youtube]

He makes the point very well. It was what I was trying to convey earlier:

You should have had an option for man made global warming on your poll, global warming was indeed true, and will be again, next time the solar cycle comes around, the same solar cycle that effected the reported global warming on Mars.
Now though, we will see the winters getting colder again.
Of course the ruling Elite will still try and frighten you that the world will end unless we combat Global warming with a united One World Government http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... lenews_wsj
Yes, the Stanic dictatorship reported in Revelation 13, the New World Order, the same New World Order we need to combat the financial crisis, the same New World Order we need to combat Terrorism, the same New World Order we need to combat the forthcoming Alien invasion.
Does anybody else see a pattern here?