More on 'Climate Change'

[Elliot Kane]

Warming? Cooling? Who knows?

Everyone seems to have a theory, but do ANY of them fit the facts?

[Dark Phoenix Rising]

which facts?

[Elliot Kane]

Heh. Indeed! ;D

[twoheadedragon]

Hm... IF the World just kept on going as it is, "Waterworld" might be the not-so-happy ending. ;D

[Ubereil]

Well, IIRC the water's still disappearing in the so called third world. And the rain forests are definently disappearing.

In a way I wish things would slide down quicker so we would realize once and for all we need to get our act together.

Übereil

[ss]

Oct 14, 2009 16:55:30 GMT Ubereil said:

Well, IIRC the water's still disappearing in the so called third world. And the rain forests are definently disappearing.

In a way I wish things would slide down quicker so we would realize once and for all we need to get our act together.

Übereil

And believe Al Gore... ;D

[Ubereil]

It isn't just Al Gore saying that.

Übereil

[Elliot Kane]

Whatever climate change may or may not be happening, pollution and the destruction of the environment ARE problems we need to deal with.

I'm certainly not convinced by any of the climate change mavens. Too often they are trotted out to provide excuses for massive tax rises, which causes me to be very cynical about them. A lot of research grant money goes to the prevailing orthodoxy, too, which makes me more cynical still.

But it's still our planet. And we DO need to take better care of it. That much is certain.

[Glance A'Lot]

Who still remembers one of the fundamental studies published by the Club of Rome in the sixties - "Exponential growth in a finite world" (in short)

The issue, whether natural cycles or man made (and more likely than not it's a combination), is that we have more and more people living in a world that does not grow any bigger, or breeds resources by cell division.

We can become more efficient in many respects, and we haven't found all possibilities to exploit - but the world is finite. Somewhere/at some time we'll not be able to push the limit any further - on this globe.

We constantly try to 'beat' nature - maybe it's time to acknowledge defeat and start to work towards symbiosis. That could be a win-win situation...

...but it will entail accepting that the ways of the past are not a way into a future in comfort. We may have to reconsider golf lawns, backyard pools and the use of arable land for concrete motor ways and single unit housing.

Whatever the transition will be - it will be painful.

[Elliot Kane]

That makes a lot of sense, Glance, yes...

I suspect at some point we'll have to adopt the population control methods pioneered by China, too, and restrict the number of children each person can have,

[Terrordar]

In the world of today, there are bluntly too many people for a symbiotic relationship with the planet.

[ss]

www.dailytech.com/Temperature+Monitors+Report+Worldwide+Global+Cooling/article10866.htm

"Twelve-month long drop in world temperatures wipes out a century of warming

Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile -- the list goes on and on.
No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.

A compiled list of all the sources can be seen here. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large enough to wipe out most of the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year's time. For all four sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.

Scientists quoted in a past DailyTech article link the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases. The dramatic cooling seen in just 12 months time seems to bear that out. While the data doesn't itself disprove that carbon dioxide is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.

Let's hope those factors stop fast. Cold is more damaging than heat. The mean temperature of the planet is about 54 degrees. Humans -- and most of the crops and animals we depend on -- prefer a temperature closer to 70.


Historically, the warm periods such as the Medieval Climate Optimum were beneficial for civilization. Corresponding cooling events such as the Little Ice Age, though, were uniformly bad news.

Update 2/27: The graph for HadCRUT (above), as well as the linked graphs for RSS and UAH are generated month-to-month; the temperature declines span a full 12 months of data. The linked GISS graph was graphed for the months of January only, due to a limitation in the plotting program. Anthony Watts, who kindly provided the graphics, otherwise has no connection with the column. The views and comments are those of the author only."

[ss]

Here is another..

www.dailytech.com/Climate+Report+Downgrades+Ice+Loss+Media+Reports+Opposite/article13797.htm

Environmental reporting adheres to adage: "bad news sells better than good"


A new scientific report from the U.S. Climate Change Science Program has sharply reduced earlier estimates of global ice loss. The CCSP, which coordinates the efforts of 13 different federal climate agencies, has released updated figures estimating combined ice loss from Antarctica and Greenland at 48 cubic miles per year, a figure the Washington Post dolefully reports as "accelerated" ice loss.

But is it?

In 2006, a widely-reported study estimated ice loss from Greenland alone to be over 57 cubic miles per year. Another the same year reported Antarctic ice loss of 36 cubic miles -- a combined annual total of over 93 cubic miles. The new estimate, however, is only about half as high. In most rational circles, this would be cause for celebration.

Not for the Washington Post, however. Ignoring earlier estimates, it casts the figure in a threatening light by noting it's twice the amount of ice locked in the Alps. It fails to mention, though, that those 48 cubic miles, when spread out over the planet's 139 million square miles of ocean, works out to a sea level rise of only 2.1 inches per century. For you metric types, that's about half a millimeter a year. Even factoring in an additional increase for thermal expansion, the value is far too small for concern.

Glossing over all this, the Washington Post instead reports a potential rise of four feet by the year 2100. The figure is based on the assumption of unforeseen positive feedback effects which might accelerate ice loss, despite the fact that no evidence exists that this is happening, and even the report's own authors considered such a scenario "unlikely".

When one considers sea level has been rising for the last 18,000 years, at an average of about 25 inches a century, one sees even less cause for alarm. The rate of increase has actually slowed in past 4,000 years; before this, it often rose by as much as several meters per century.

The Post article also fails to point out the report doesn't include data for 2008, a colder year in which sea ice increased sharply, and preliminary estimates indicate that land-based ice sheets may have as well.

Some positive notes in the report are that "no clear evidence" for global-warming induced hydrologic changes (drought or floods) are being seen in the US, and that catastrophic events such as a shutdown of sea ocean currents ("thermohaline circulatory shutdown" ) or dramatic releases of methane (the "clathrate gun" hypothesis) seem increasingly unlikely.

To be fair to the Washington Post, 48 cubic miles/year is indeed larger than some estimates from the 1990s. But those figures were arrived at before the launch of advanced systems such as NASA's GRACE satellite. It's unclear how much of the difference in estimates is due simply to today's more accurate monitoring.

The report also indicates that current IPCC modeling doesn't accurately capture lubrication effects that may increase ice thinning and loss. However, a model prediction is not the same thing as actual measurements and observations.

The new figures obviously don't prove whether or not CO2 is warming the planet. However, they do strongly indicate that sea level rise isn't something that we -- or even our great-grandchildren -- need to worry about.


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[Dark Phoenix Rising]

And the cooling that people are talking about coincides with a solar minimum. However given that this is the deepest minimum ever seen. The cooling effect isn't that strong.

So as I've been saying for ages, it's not that we are the cause of global warming/cooling, it's that we are having an effect, and there is no way for us to know what that effect is going to have on the climate.

[Elliot Kane]

And even less so when so many climate change scientists have been caught out lately suppressing information they don't like and 'spinning' the stuff they do to make it look more important than it is...

[kilgoretrout]

Turns out climate numbers amplified to scare us :

UK astrophysicist Piers Corbyn, of the long range solar forecast group Weather Action, declared that the ClimateGate revelations have rendered man-made global warming fears “false.”

“The case is blown to smithereens and this whole theory should be destroyed and discarded and Copenhagen conference should be closed,” Corbyn said in a contentious on air television exchange with an environmental activist with Russia’s WWF. The live TV debate with Corbyn appeared on Moscow’s RT TV on November 25, 2009. The RT TV’s segment was titled “Heating Cheating.” See Full Video of Debate here.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=anHuOAXIl0M

“The world is cooling and has been cooling for 7 years and the leading scientists, so-called ’scientists’ have been trying to hide that evidence,” Corbyn said in reference to hacked emails showing top UN IPCC scientists apparently conspiring to manipulate temperature data and exclude scientific studies from peer-review that they did not agree with.

“We should end this anti-scientific nonsense now,” Corbyn said.

“The data, real data, over the last one thousand, ten thousand or million years, shows there is no relationship between carbon dioxide and world temperatures or climate extremes. Now we can see that actually the people in charge of data have been fiddling it, and they have been hiding the real decline in world temperatures in an attempt to keep their so called moral high ground,” Corbyn told host Bill Dod and Aleksey Kokorin, the Climate Program Coordinator for WWF in Russia.

The upcoming UN global warming summit in Copenhagen is a “complete waste of time,” according to Corbyn.



‘A scandal’

“The Copenhagen jamboree is a scandal and it must be stopped,” he added.

“There is a gigantic bandwagon run by governments who want to control world energy supplies and hold back development in the third world. This thing they are doing now is just the same as they are doing in the banking crisis, it is creating a whole bubble of false values,” Corbyn explained.

Corbyn said the ClimateGate revelations further revealed that man-made climate fears are not scientifically valid.

“Their claims are false, I repeat, they are false, and this theory they’ve got is like the titanic and it will crash. I would suggest that honest green campaigners who want to preserve biodiversity should get off this [man-made global warming] bandwagon before it sinks,” Corbyn explained.

“Carbon dioxide levels are driven by temps, not the other way around. There have been big peaks in CO2 in past…carbon dioxide is actually a good thing for the world,” Corbyn explained. “More CO2 makes plants and animals more efficient,” he added.

[ss]

As I have repeatedly said for YEARS....

It is not Science that I am scared of, it is the SCIENTIST that you have to watch...

[Elliot Kane]

And those who believe Science cannot ever be in error and must always be infallible, ss, yes...

[Flix]

I'm wondering why people choose to oppose/support climate change no matter what the data says. Political agendas maybe?

It has been my understanding that liberals tended to support climate change because science supported it, and conservatives opposed it not because of any conflicting information or because they fail to grasp science, but just on the basis that it was part of a liberal agenda. It's not like conservatives were privy to some data that showed that there was no build-up of greenhouse gasses and that the Earth was in fact cooling. Yet, they opposed any theories of climate change from the very beginning. Why?

To hear that "scientists" suppress climate change data and distort info to further some agenda is very disheartening indeed.

[Ubereil]

My brother was more or less forced to do some dodgy statistics things to amplify his data when he did his C-paper in Psycology. Because if he hadn't done it the result wouldn't have beem significant enough... My brother's attitude was "this is cheating" by the way.

Another problem is that only pepole who discover a deviation gets published. All the other guys who noticed nothing at all never gets noticed.

Übereil