A question about climate change/global warming.

Humanity reduced to a few survivors eking out a living in polar refuges. Most of life on Earth has been snuffed out, as temperatures rise higher than for hundreds of millions of years.

Mark Lynas

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Terry Rapson: We found something extraordinary... extraordinary and disturbing, that is. You remember saying in New Delhi about how melting of the polar ice can disrupt the North Atlantic current?

Jack Hall: Yes.

Terry Rapson: Well... I think it's happening.

Comments section to a WashPo article that refutes George Will

The range of stupidity displayed in these comments is nothing new:

ThisIsReality wrote:
What weasels these warmists are. This character is seriously trying to maintain that global cooling wasn't being loudly predicted in the 1970's? And the warmists have no, none, zip, doodah explanation for why the climate has cooled recently. Hah! The warmists are to the climate what Geithner is to the treasury.

devesh_f10 wrote:
Dear kenonwenu: You are right, increasing CO2 concentration in the atmosphere does make it absorb more heat. But did you know that despite all the hoopla, human activity accounts for less than 15% of the green house gases released into the atmosphere?
The rest is actually released naturally, as has been going on for millions of years.
Now one might argue that we are tipping the marginal balance of green-house gases, but really, it appears unlikely given the small share we add.

GaryEMasters wrote:
As a retired science librarian with an earned PhD, I take an expanded view and wonder if warming will be good or bad. Yes, we can make the Earth warmer. But few will ask if there is an ice age in our immediate future. If so, we may well want it warmer. If not, we may want to cool the Earth. But few debate that position and if it is brought up, one is called a "denier."

I do not deny we can make the climate warmer. I ask if it is good or bad.

LOL at GaryEMasters, if the whole thing wasn't so fucking frightening.

After reading Matt Taibbi's article about the global financial debacle, in which he makes the point that the vast VAST majority of the public is completely unable to even begin to understand the mechanisms that led to the crisis, I wonder if the same point can't be made about climate change. Math and science comprehension has declined in the U.S. over the last several decades, and as a result we're looking forward to a century where the "debate" often begins with addressing basic educational deficiencies.

• Unfamiliarity with statistical concepts

• No grasp on systems thinking

• No grasp on feedback loops

http://www.bbc.co.uk/leicester/content/images/2006/10/19/dmu_head_in_hands_315x420.jpghttp://www.bbc.co.uk/leicester/content/images/2006/10/19/dmu_head_in_hands_315x420.jpghttp://www.bbc.co.uk/leicester/content/images/2006/10/19/dmu_head_in_hands_315x420.jpg

If you're into scary scenarios, there was a great CBC radio documentary series by Gwynne Dyer about military scenario planning for climate change outcomes. Hint, don't worry about rising seas, worry about starving due to rainfall shifts:

http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/features/climate-wars/index.html

If you're into REALLY scary scenarios, consider one of the positive feedback mechanisms (seabed methane hydrate releases):

http://www.dcn.davis.ca.us/go/dorritie/

If you're into scary scenarios, there was a great CBC radio documentary series by Gwynne Dyer about military scenario planning for climate change outcomes. Hint, don't worry about rising seas, worry about starving due to rainfall shifts

Not to mention the fossil fuel reserves in the Arctic that are becoming available due to melting. The U.S., Russia, Canada and others are already sparring with each other for exploration/drilling rights. Can't WAIT to see how that works out.

the ukcp09 is out today
http://ukcp09.defra.gov.uk/

article on the beeb
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8107014.stm

for anyone interested

local Burger King franchise tells us what's what

http://www.memphisflyer.com/SingAllKinds/archives/2009/05/27/burger-king-calls-global-warming-baloney

Burge king calls globval warming baloney, immediately places said baloney between two buns and sells for $6

OMG the comments in that link.

WOW! That's great! I am going to stop by BK on my way home from work and buy me a big fat juicy burger to show my support!

About time some people recognize AGW for what it REALLY is!

Good for BK! The truth is slowly coming out. We need more of this

I have not eaten at a Burger King in almost 10 years (been on a health kick) - but I WILL CERTAINLY BUY ONE WHOPPER A DAY FOR THE NEXT MONTH just to show my support. Why is it that liberals can make some assanine statement and get praised for their stand but every time a conservative makes a statement he has to get crucified? Thanks for being bold and being AMERICAN, Burger King. By American, I mean you use your freedom of speech. Thanks! I almost thought they had succeeded in taking that one away from us! OK - gotta run now - going out to buy my Whopper!

yeah. this place is real fucked up. also, there are a number of trolls/ pale-conservatives that tend to hang out on the MemFlyer (primary alt-weekly) comments section making asses of themselves on the daily

paleo-conservatives.

but i bet they're pretty pale, too

About a year ago I did a proposal for these people; we wound up not doing the website but it will be pretty cool when it completely launches: http://www.climatecentral.org; they are a non-profit, scientific organization who will be posting non-politically biased, scientific information regarding climate change and global warming.

(and i didn't really mean "paleo-conservatives"; just your typical ignorant asses making a racket)

Is Monbiot getting a bit carried away?
It's no use pretending this isn't a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging. I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I'm dismayed and deeply shaken by them.

i couldn't tell whether or not he was just taking the absolute piss there.

hilariously over-done email though

Taking the piss surely?!?!?

i dunno, seems legit

Monbiot always gets carried away. The thrust of his argument is dead right though - a handful of highly dubious emails does not disprove the basic science.

This (selecting data consistent with preconceptions, misleading/obfuscatory conclusions, etc., etc.) goes on in science a lot more than we'd like to admit, and climate science is no better than any other are of science. In fact, it's probably worse because of the political dimension.

what the spluttering fuck...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/29/nick-griffin-bnp-copenhagen-summit

nice one, maybe they plan to humiliate him in front of the WORLD

"The anti-western intellectual cranks of the left suffered a collective breakdown when communism collapsed. Climate change is their new theology…"

This is exactly the narrative that Martin Durkin was pushing in The Great Global Warming Swindle.

Critics say Griffin addresses environmental issues when he believes he can use them to advance anti-immigration policies. His party claims that it would improve Britain's transport infrastructure and reduce carbon dioxide levels by reducing the number of immigrants in Britain using roads, cars, trains and buses.

You couldn't make this shit up.

i love that they use the egg-pelt photo of griffin in this story

lol @ the "leaked e-mail exchange".

responding to the op, i think the refusal to consider scientific evidence reflects the growing belief (on every side of whatever political divide you have in mind) that information is inherently political. it's not so much that these people are ignorant or apathetic, but rather that they see the validity of any supposedly factual claim - especially when it comes to complex gray areas like this - as a product not of available evidence, but of political implication.

not only leftist argument but "leftist information" is therefore automatically invalid. and i don't think this sort of politicized information analysis is solely an affliction of the right-minded. leftists and progressives can be equally hostile to information and ideas that seem to challenge their core beliefs, and just as likely to dismiss them as meaningless spin.

well, or at least nearly as likely. or somewhat likely... i admit that there is a deeply entrenched anti-intellectual/anti-academic/anti-scientific streak in american right-wing politics that doesn't find an easy analog on the left - maybe the oft-mentioned liberal hostility towards religion?

N!ck Gr!ff!n calls other people bullying, fraudulent cranks, film at 11

xp Yeah, it's Olver Wendell Holmes' "hydrostatic paradox of controversy":

"You know that, if you had a bent tube, one arm of which was of the size of a pipe-stem, and the other big enough to hold the ocean, water would stand at the same height in one as in the other. Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way. And the fools know it."

Just been to a great seminar on this topic and some interesting things came up.

1) The climate change science community has been worried about the paleoclimatelogical work has been suspect for some time. Even without the emails Mann and other have been doing some very dodgy work; misusing datasets, not publising their own data or deliberately obfuscating it.
2) CO2 data is beyond doubt as is the radiative forcing effect.
3) There is still considerable uncertainty about the effect of atmostpheric aerosols but not enough to change the need for a policy of massive CO2 reductions.
4) Mann and the CRU guys have done a massive disservice to the climate science community and just as theygave undue weight to any hockey sticks in their proxy data, this controversy is unfairly weighting the policy debate when there is still a real need for action.
5) Minesotans for climate change have a really amusing video but haven't realised the explosion in the mosquito population that they are rooting for.
6) 20 years of paleoclimatet data needs to be re-evaluated from the ground up.
7) People need to stop using the temperature hockey stick graph, right now.

The climate people and resource limits people are just beginning to talk.

The IPCC base case assumes unlimited fossil fuels through this century, whereas we're past peak conventional crude (2005), near peak liquids (2011 or so), and peak coal occurs in the first half of the century. The real unknown is the available natural gas resource, if gas bearing shales are exploited as they've just begun to be exploited in the U.S., there's a hell of a lot of methane to be produced.

As far as I know, the most credible C02 ultimate projections using resource constraints so far are those by David Rutledge of Caltech. He places peak atmospheric carbon in 2059-63 at 442-7 ppm, with simple radiative forcing temperature increase of 1.7 C by the early 22nd century. That is lower than any of the IPCC scenarios, but doesn't include positive runaway feedback (melting arctic ocean, lower albedo, permafrost outgassing). Also Rutledge (being a scientist rather than a E&P investor, doesn't seem to know about the gas shales.

One interesting fact made clear in the video lecture is that since the C02 will have a atmospheric residence time in hundreds of years, it doesn't matter for most of the milennium if we release it now or more slowly through 2200. The ultimate atmospheric C02 is about the same. So rather than make an allowance for additional CO2 emissions, it makes far more sense to simply place some fossil carbon entirely off-limits indefinitely. No cap-and-trade to enrich Goldman Sachs: instead halt new leases of Federal owned coal in Wyoming and Montana.

hello friends i would like to post in this thread to lol @ the saudis

lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVGGgncVq-4
"Please Help the World", film from the opening ceremony of the United Nations Climate Change Conference 2009 (COP15) in Copenhagen from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark. Shown on December 7, 2009 at COP15.

I've seen Rutledge speak and I like his methodology, but I think it is a little bit of a stretch to extend it to Carbon and when he was challenged on that pointand agreed that it was no excuse not to act (and that shale's becoming economic had not been factored in to his calculations).

One interesting thing that came up when he spoke is that china is very near peak coal and the conjecture is that their new found vigor wrt to COP15 comes from this resource constraint in particular.

lol @ the "leaked e-mail exchange".

responding to the op, i think the refusal to consider scientific evidence reflects the growing belief (on every side of whatever political divide you have in mind) that information is inherently political. it's not so much that these people are ignorant or apathetic, but rather that they see the validity of any supposedly factual claim - especially when it comes to complex gray areas like this - as a product not of available evidence, but of political implication.

not only leftist argument but "leftist information" is therefore automatically invalid. and i don't think this sort of politicized information analysis is solely an affliction of the right-minded. leftists and progressives can be equally hostile to information and ideas that seem to challenge their core beliefs, and just as likely to dismiss them as meaningless spin.

well, or at least nearly as likely. or somewhat likely... i admit that there is a deeply entrenched anti-intellectual/anti-academic/anti-scientific streak in american right-wing politics that doesn't find an easy analog on the left - maybe the oft-mentioned liberal hostility towards religion?

― a dimension that can only be accessed through self-immolation (contenderizer), Monday, November 30, 2009 9:54 AM (1 week ago) Bookmark

yeah... you probably need to read up on the history of the left, son.

(though more than on any other issue using "left"/"right" is retarded. the green party in britain is very conservative. they don't really bother to hide that for them this is a moral reckoning with sinful modernity.)

LOL @ "using left/right is retarded" followed by "the green party in britain is very conservative".

It's more of a class issue in the UK isn't it (if you really wanted to generalize)? Upper class twits like "Lord" Christopher Monkton and working class spokestwats like Garry Bushell versus the wishy-washy academics and media types in the middle.

At the risk of sounding unpopular, the government places the blame squarely on you, the voters.

The blame for what?

Your username for a start.

Okay. Thanks for the clarification.

Viscount Monckton calls young climate activists 'Hitler Youth'

LOL @ "using left/right is retarded" followed by "the green party in britain is very conservative".

― everything, Tuesday, December 8, 2009 1:14 AM (3 days ago) Bookmark

"conservative" seems to me to mean more than "right-wing", and the two obviously are not identical.

Yeah, I'm familiar with "conservative" being used to denote moderation or conventionality. All political parties are "conservative" in that way. So what's your point then?

good job CNN:

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/12/18/dc-snowstorm-chills-pelosis-global-warming-trip/

What a disaster this whole damn conference was.

who knew

I'm only posting to say: this thread is too exhausting to post on. I can't be alone on this one.

Here's the groundbreaking document that came out of Copenhagen this year: Copenhagen Accord

After yet another disappointing climate conference, it was nice that for once the United States wasn't the #1 villain - way to go China! I agree completely, agreeing to have your GHG emissions monitored would be a slap in the face, unconscionable!

I think the monitoring thing is kind of a secondary issue and focussing on that is a bit of a political dodge. The main thing is agreeing on the right level of cuts in carbon emissions that need to be made and then making these cuts in a fair way, and that's really something that the West should be leading on. This thing they've cooked up sounds like a huge backwards step from that POV.

The main thing is agreeing on the right level of cuts in carbon emissions that need to be made

Agreed on that, and China's stance was disappointing in that regard as well. Using carbon intensity as a measure is the definition of a "political dodge". Check out this WRI analysis. It's from 2007, but China was already signaling that they would aim for 40% reduction of carbon intensity by 2020, 80% by 2050.

...China’s GDP is projected to grow around 400% by 2020. So even with a 40% intensity cut, emissions in the absolute sense would increase by 250%. That growth would make China the biggest national emitter by far, and a daunting challenge for reducing GHG emissions.

Great...we may already be on the precipice of several tipping points, and even the most conservative use of the precautionary principle would overwhelmingly suggest that we make strong, immediate emission cuts, but here we have the biggest GHG emitter in the world agreeing to increase emissions by 250% over the next ten years.

Then there's this article highlighting the perverse incentives that result from using carbon intensity:

China’s target of reducing 40-45% by 2020 requires annual reductions of 4%, but since the target is based on GDP, the amount of emission reduction required changes as GDP changes: lower GDP requires higher reductions in emissions to achieve the same reduction in carbon intensity, which is hard to achieve because less growth means less new (and therefore more efficient) equipment in the system.