Climate Change VI - Warmists and their Demise

Arts & Sciences Science & Nature
241

[quote=“fred smith”][quote]Great.
Not only do you dress like my grandma, you talk like her too.

Holy cow I hate you so much.[/quote]

Why because even though your grandmother ain’t the boss of you, she still is? So, you hate me because “holy cow” I have this amazing ability to get Democrats and Socialists and Third Worldists to vote against urgent funding for climate change efforts even though I nor any of my cohorts control any levers of power? Yeah… must be hateful… must fill one with rage to see someone who has spouted off against the global warming hysterics for years and then… when he and his party are finally out of power… when the whole world is your oyster and you can finally do something about all these urgent matters… not only nothing but worse… a retraction on the lukewarm commitments to the even weaker commitments made earlier… God… Yes, I must be… because how else can we explain my amazing powers?[/quote]

Yeah, that’s what my grandma said.

Oh, and she wants her thong back by the weekend.

Freshly laundered, if you’d be so kind.

242

Did she? Did she REALLY?

Your grandma don’t wear no thong… that thong belongs to you, doesn’t it?

Funny, that talking shit the way you do, you would have some kind of a problem having more of it pressed up against you anywhere anyhow…

Put your grandma back on… at least she had some sense… but you already knew that, didn’t you? She probably needs to smack you around a bit more like the trifling little fool that you are…

243

C’mon Fred! Give him back his thong, will ya?

244

Sorry but what happened to the 50% CO2 that is not in the atmosphere? Was it not created? or did it disappear somewhere? in which case, do we need to cut emissions by only 50% of the recommended targets? and what is this about CO2 lasting not hundreds and thousands of years but only 10-15 years in the atmosphere? Surely, something wrong? Anyone want to take a stab at explaining the disappearing CO2? :roflmao: :roflmao: :roflmao:

Speaking of disappearances, has ANYONE seen Al Gore?

245

NASA scientists report that 9 of the 10 warmest years on record (since 1880) have occurred since 2000. From Reuters:

quote - [b]The global average temperature last year was the ninth-warmest in the modern meteorological record, continuing a trend linked to greenhouse gases that saw nine of the 10 hottest years occurring since the year 2000, NASA scientists said on Thursday.

A separate report from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said the average temperature for the United States in 2011 as the 23rd warmest year on record.

The global average surface temperature for 2011 was 0.92 degrees F (0.51 degrees C) warmer than the mid-20th century baseline temperature, researchers at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies said in a statement. The institute’s temperature record began in 1880.[/b]

The first 11 years of the new century were notably hotter than the middle and late 20th century, according to institute director James Hansen. The only year from the 20th century that was among the top 10 warmest years was 1998.

These high global temperatures come even with the cooling effects of a strong La Nina ocean temperature pattern and low solar activity for the past several years, said Hansen, who has long campaigned against human-spurred climate change.

[b]The NASA statement said the current higher temperatures are largely sustained by increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, especially carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is emitted by various human activities, from coal-fired power plants to fossil-fueled vehicles to human breath.

Current levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere exceed 390 parts per million, compared with 285 ppm in 1880 and 315 by 1960, NASA said.[/b]

Last year was also a year of record-breaking climate extremes in the United States, which contributed to 14 weather and climate disasters with economic impact of $1 billion or more each, according to NOAA . This number does not count a pre-Halloween snowstorm in the Northeast, which is still being analyzed.

NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center said the average 2011 temperature for 2011 for the contiguous United States was 53.8 degrees F, which is 1 degree above the 20th-century average. Average precipitation across the country was near normal, but this masks record-breaking extremes of drought and precipitation, the agency said.[/quote]

Honestly, what’s left to debate? There haven’t been any geological or astronomical events to explain the increase in greenhouse gases, nations continue to industrialize, and the planet is getting warmer. The causal relationship between industrial byproducts and global warming is obvious and shouldn’t be a matter of partisan bickering. Left, right, center, makes no difference. We have one planet, one viable environment in which we all live. If there is one major issue that should unite everybody and be completey non-political, this is it.

246

Nothing left to debate? Okay… who is going to pay what to achieve what at what cost and with what benefit?

Let me know when you get around to writing that Nobel Prize winning dissertation. :slight_smile:

247

Where is the goalpost now? Sorry, but these debates always end up with the anti-science folks moving the goalpost again and again.

First, it’s claimed that global warming isn’t happening, full stop. Some random quote from an article written by an engineer in the 1970s is used to back up the claim. Once the avalance of contradictory evidence is supplied, the goalpost is moved. The new claim is that global warming is happening, yes, but it’s not caused by greenhouse gases. Another avalance of evidence to the contrary later, the goalpost has moved to, OK, yes, global warming is both happening and is caused by greenhouse gases, but man’s contribution is minimal or non-existent. After this is debunked, the goalpoast is moved again. Now it’s recognized that global warming is happening, is caused by an increase in greenhouse gases, and that man is primarily responsible. But the goalpost is moved yet again. Now the questions are: what can be done, at what cost, and what benefit?

So, which goalpost are you on today? Because what can be done, at what cost, and at what benefit are valid questions and the start of a real conversation. But if you’ve regressed back to “global warming is a conspiracy theory”, I’m not going to waste my time.

248

Same as always Gaobaohan… same as always.

Global warming has been happening since the 1850s. It is perhaps 15 percent manmade.

There is no consensus other than some sort of warming is taking place but no agreement on on how much man is contributing and what other factors may be involved.

There are no ways to stop CO2 emissions and I am not sure that we should even try. Better to do as Bjorn Lomberg has suggested and focus on development because that provides countries with the money that they need to better adapt.

Efforts like Kyoto have failed and they will continue to fail. Why maintain the pretense that international action is of any use whatsoever.

Even worse, the political aspects are the most egregious because they involve the usual UN bureaucrats, recast communist leftist redistributionist characters. And the rest smell an opportunity for grants, money lots of MONEY like Al Gore and are in for the most basic of motives… the very greed that the global warming alarmist brigade is so quick to contemptuously target in the corporate class.

Talk… talk… talk… and what has been accomplished? and Kyoto AT BEST would postpone global warming by a negligible amount at a huge economic cost… and even then you understand that there were no guarantees of anything that could or even might be achieved.

Back to you… conspiracy? no. Stupidity… typical communist economic redistribution along the lines of Third Worldism, fighting neocolonialism, aid and assistance, and now new and improved climate change!!! Don’t forget your buy three get one free coupon.

249

More real science from potholer54:

250

Richard Muller from BEST is now completely on board:

nytimes.com/2012/07/30/opini … wanted=all

251

Yes there is. As Woodsy the Owl taught us when we were kids:

252

CO2 is not pollution.

95% or more of global CO2 is naturally produced. Man is responsible for 2%? 3%? and yet mostly responsible for global warming?

Yeah… give a hoot… vote for another UN bureaucracy and increased taxes which again (sing along with me cuz you all know the words) were to accomplish little to nothing under the best of circumstances under the Kyoto Treaty… So what are we discussing again?

253

[quote]Record-setting 2012 warmth largely confined to North America, western Europe
Most of the rest of the world has seen little change from 2011.

In March, high temperatures over two-thirds of the continental US set numerous records and made it the nation’s warmest March on record. April has been no slouch either, as high temperature records have continued to fall. But at the time of our last report, the services that track global temperatures hadn’t analyzed the global extent of the warmth. Now that the numbers for March and April are available, it’s clear that the rest of the globe generally hasn’t shared the US’s record heat.

Globally, the current period of warming began back in the 1970s. NASA’s GISTEMP tracks the current global temperature against a baseline established by the 1951-1980 average, and it hasn’t seen a calendar year below that average since 1976, or a month below it since 1994. The US climate has generally reflected that, with high temperature extremes dominating over the last several decades, as shown below.

That said, the US is a relatively small portion of the global land mass, and an even smaller portion of the planet’s total surface area. It’s entirely possible to have the US experiencing extreme temperatures without the planet as a whole really noticing. And that’s what has seemed to have happened this spring. [color=#FF0080]
Even as the US has experienced record-breaking extremes, the GISSTEMP index has seen global temperatures that were roughly equivalent to the ones we experienced last year, and well below those of 2010, the warmest year on record.
[/color]GISS also offers a mapping tool that lets you identify regional differences in temperature. You can select the time you want to examine and set the baseline to which you’re comparing it. By default, the baseline uses the 1951-1980 time period used by the GISSTEMP data. That’s not especially useful for comparing recent trends, though; as we noted above, compared to that baseline, the planet as a whole has been consistently warmer in recent years. If you choose this baseline, then the entire globe will look a bit hot.

To give a more relevant view of recent temperatures, we set the baseline to 1990-2005, during which time the current warming trend was in full swing. With that as a baseline, we asked the GISS system to show us how temperatures from this March stacked up around the globe. The results, shown at top, are pretty striking.

Climate models have consistently predicted that greenhouse warming would be disproportionately felt in polar regions, and those predictions have generally been borne out. So, if you ignore the poles, the remaining warming in March falls heavily in two regions: North America and Western Europe. In fact, the majority of the continent is buried under a color that indicates it is at least 8°C above the baseline average—GISS didn’t offer any colors for larger anomalies, or it might even look more dramatic. At the same time, however, the plot makes it clear that nothing especially out of the ordinary was going on for the rest of the planet.

Advance the time by a month, and you can see that North America has remained warm, although not quite to the same extreme. Meanwhile, the far west of Europe had cooled off, and the focus of heat had shifted well into Russia. But again, the rest of the globe was a mottled collection of temperatures much closer to the baseline average.

One of the ironies here is that, even though the global temperatures are fairly typical of the last decade, the unusual spring warmth might have an outsized effect on public opinion. People in the US seem to rely on their personal experience (along with the economy) when they formulate their opinion on climate change. In this case, the citizens of the US and Europe personally experienced unusual warmth, and were more likely to have been exposed to anecdotal reports in the mainstream media. So, even though [color=#4080FF]
nothing special happened globally
[/color], the year so far may be perceived as an indication of a warming planet.

This is almost the exact converse of what happened in 2010, the warmest year on record. In that year, high temperatures were focused in northern Canada, North Africa, and the Middle East. The US experienced decidedly average temperatures, while Europe was slightly cooler.[/quote]

arstechnica.com/science/2012/05/ … rn-europe/

254

[quote]
The global average surface temperature for 2011 was 0.92 degrees F (0.51 degrees C) warmer than the mid-20th century baseline temperature, researchers at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies said in a statement. The institute’s temperature record began in 1880.[/b][/quote]

I doubt that any institute for space studies existed in 1880 and don’t trust global temperature data gleaned from sources before the satellite era.

[quote]
Current levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere exceed 390 parts per million, compared with 285 ppm in 1880 and 315 by 1960, NASA said.[/b][/quote]

100ppm = .001%, so that’s an increase of .00105%, if you actually trust data from 1880. How did they measure atmospheric CO2 in 1880?

[quote]
Last year was also a year of record-breaking climate extremes in the United States, which contributed to 14 weather and climate disasters with economic impact of $1 billion or more each, according to NOAA . This number does not count a pre-Halloween snowstorm in the Northeast, which is still being analyzed.[/quote]

Extreme weather events such as typhoons, droughts, floods, etc., have always and will always occur. Even ice melting in summer does not constitute evidence of climate change.

I fully support reduction of pollution and sustainable living/development, but I don’t need spurious theories to support my beliefs or to scare the shit out of people.

255

If a consensus is defined as 100% agreement, that’s true. But 97-98% of the world’s active climate scientists support the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) tenets of Anthropogenic Climate Change (ACC). This figure is from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, which reviewed an extensive dataset of 1.372 climate researchers and their publications. The article also states that:

The world’s climate scientists don’t think the global warming of the last century is 15% caused by humans, they think it’s mostly caused by humans. That’s enough to act on, in my opinion.

This is basically what your argument comes down to. Let’s give up up. There’s nothing to be done. I’m having flashbacks to dealing with Taiwanese immigration bureaucrats. Mei banfa!

The response to global warming is straightforward: reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Efforts to date have been mostly unsuccessful because of the lack of political will, and the absence of collective sense of shared responsibility.

256

[quote=“Mucha Man”]Richard Muller from BEST is now completely on board:

nytimes.com/2012/07/30/opini … wanted=all[/quote]

It’s something we see over and over again. Scientists who are initially skeptical, whether of their own accord or because they were hired by industry, come around and become advocates of the mainstream AGW theory. But I’ve got the feeling that won’t impress the skeptics, who think the whole thing is a sham run by Communist grant-seeking leftist liars.

257

[quote=“fred smith”][quote]Record-setting 2012 warmth largely confined to North America, western Europe
Most of the rest of the world has seen little change from 2011.

In March, high temperatures over two-thirds of the continental US set numerous records and made it the nation’s warmest March on record. April has been no slouch either, as high temperature records have continued to fall. But at the time of our last report, the services that track global temperatures hadn’t analyzed the global extent of the warmth. Now that the numbers for March and April are available, it’s clear that the rest of the globe generally hasn’t shared the US’s record heat.

Globally, the current period of warming began back in the 1970s. NASA’s GISTEMP tracks the current global temperature against a baseline established by the 1951-1980 average, and it hasn’t seen a calendar year below that average since 1976, or a month below it since 1994. The US climate has generally reflected that, with high temperature extremes dominating over the last several decades, as shown below.

That said, the US is a relatively small portion of the global land mass, and an even smaller portion of the planet’s total surface area. It’s entirely possible to have the US experiencing extreme temperatures without the planet as a whole really noticing. And that’s what has seemed to have happened this spring. [color=#FF0080]
Even as the US has experienced record-breaking extremes, the GISSTEMP index has seen global temperatures that were roughly equivalent to the ones we experienced last year, and well below those of 2010, the warmest year on record.
[/color]GISS also offers a mapping tool that lets you identify regional differences in temperature. You can select the time you want to examine and set the baseline to which you’re comparing it. By default, the baseline uses the 1951-1980 time period used by the GISSTEMP data. That’s not especially useful for comparing recent trends, though; as we noted above, compared to that baseline, the planet as a whole has been consistently warmer in recent years. If you choose this baseline, then the entire globe will look a bit hot.

To give a more relevant view of recent temperatures, we set the baseline to 1990-2005, during which time the current warming trend was in full swing. With that as a baseline, we asked the GISS system to show us how temperatures from this March stacked up around the globe. The results, shown at top, are pretty striking.

Climate models have consistently predicted that greenhouse warming would be disproportionately felt in polar regions, and those predictions have generally been borne out. So, if you ignore the poles, the remaining warming in March falls heavily in two regions: North America and Western Europe. In fact, the majority of the continent is buried under a color that indicates it is at least 8°C above the baseline average—GISS didn’t offer any colors for larger anomalies, or it might even look more dramatic. At the same time, however, the plot makes it clear that nothing especially out of the ordinary was going on for the rest of the planet.

Advance the time by a month, and you can see that North America has remained warm, although not quite to the same extreme. Meanwhile, the far west of Europe had cooled off, and the focus of heat had shifted well into Russia. But again, the rest of the globe was a mottled collection of temperatures much closer to the baseline average.

One of the ironies here is that, even though the global temperatures are fairly typical of the last decade, the unusual spring warmth might have an outsized effect on public opinion. People in the US seem to rely on their personal experience (along with the economy) when they formulate their opinion on climate change. In this case, the citizens of the US and Europe personally experienced unusual warmth, and were more likely to have been exposed to anecdotal reports in the mainstream media. So, even though [color=#4080FF]
nothing special happened globally
[/color], the year so far may be perceived as an indication of a warming planet.

This is almost the exact converse of what happened in 2010, the warmest year on record. In that year, high temperatures were focused in northern Canada, North Africa, and the Middle East. The US experienced decidedly average temperatures, while Europe was slightly cooler.[/quote]

arstechnica.com/science/2012/05/ … rn-europe/[/quote]

If you ignore the poles LOL.
No Artic Ice, melting Antartic ice sheets… pah, let’s ignore 'em nobody lives there anyway.

258

[quote=“Charlie Phillips”][quote]
The global average surface temperature for 2011 was 0.92 degrees F (0.51 degrees C) warmer than the mid-20th century baseline temperature, researchers at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies said in a statement. The institute’s temperature record began in 1880.[/b][/quote]

I doubt that any institute for space studies existed in 1880 and don’t trust global temperature data gleaned from sources before the satellite era.

[quote]
Current levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere exceed 390 parts per million, compared with 285 ppm in 1880 and 315 by 1960, NASA said.[/b][/quote]

100ppm = .001%, so that’s an increase of .00105%, if you actually trust data from 1880. How did they measure atmospheric CO2 in 1880?

[quote]
Last year was also a year of record-breaking climate extremes in the United States, which contributed to 14 weather and climate disasters with economic impact of $1 billion or more each, according to NOAA . This number does not count a pre-Halloween snowstorm in the Northeast, which is still being analyzed.[/quote]

Extreme weather events such as typhoons, droughts, floods, etc., have always and will always occur. Even ice melting in summer does not constitute evidence of climate change.

I fully support reduction of pollution and sustainable living/development, but I don’t need spurious theories to support my beliefs or to scare the shit out of people.[/quote]

I trust the scientists to be able to predict the incubating propensities of different gases and to have performed a lot of lab experimentation on them. Models should be able to accurately predict the additional warming effect of varying volumes of CO2 in the atmosphere. It doesnt seem like a difficult ask, as opposed to the more complex downstream effects of global warming such as cloud cover or ocean circulation change or violent weather systems becoming more common.

They can also look back through the climate record for correlations of different CO2 concentrations against warm periods.

259

And yet the whole thing is extremely complicated from a scientific perspective. It will be very interesting to see where the 2014 report goes in terms of amended predictions, if any, and on what basis.

260

GBH:

so it is back to WE MUST ACT… Okay and do what exactly? ACT to SHOW that we CARE? If that is good enough for you then why bother discussing the “science?”

We have discussed the 97% to 98% of climate scientists who agree with the IPCC before. Must we open this again? I believe that the last discussion revealed a high number of political appointees on panels and they had no background whatsoever in climate anything. Ditto for many of those “polled.” And regardless, science is not about consensus or is it? I thought that science was about having the right answer. Is this now to be governed by group think? well, Galileo would be shocked… the new Catholic Church and its papery (deliberate reference to the many trees who have died to print communiques and bulletins and action items and agendas and …) have issued a diktat and we must now all agree?

As to how the other scientists are selected? past efforts have been heavily politicized.

As to the warming… it has happened with and without human effort. Yawn.

Finally, Bjorn Lomberg and others have shown how climate change is not even among the top 20 of development targets and concerns. He has also shown ably how more economic development leads to more money to deal with climate and environmental issues. The solution then is to grow our way out of the problem rather than cut development in a misguided effort that according to Kyoto would achieve nothing at all. So, your answer is that we should act at great expense to achieve nothing because we agree that there might be a problem? Okay… How’s that attitude and approach work out for you in your own personal life? :laughing: