However, i do totally reject the CAGW elitists practiced argument against what they call deniers who they claim cannot possibly have the mental faculties to understand the "consensus science". I, along with the majority of the public and an emergent majority of scientists, understand quite well the utter b.s. underpinning this science which is indistiguishable from a cultish religion.
...You guys do the math and the inevitable shredding and ridicule.
no need to... if you could back up your opinion with some quantitative tests of your hypotheses we might have a decent scientific debate... but this whole area has been worked over. Nothing you have proposed has a large enough effect to increase the observed temperatures.
You can hide behind your lack of knowledge of science and math, but your ignorance is an excuse to maintain a strong opinion, unsupported by facts that are inaccessible to you because of that ignorance.
You cannot wish away the consequences of our energy generation as exhaust CO2 because the acceptance of that science would compel us to find ways to reduce those exhausts... and it is a fear that you harbor that somehow the changes would be worse, in some way. Better to just deny that it is happening.
There is nothing I could write, no set of papers that I could present, no ever-so-patient description of the science I could give that would change your opinion.
You know Ed, if you decide to retire from science, you would make a damn good commissioner of the I.R.S. if your cherished carbon taxes are ever levied. Come to think about it that would be a great placement for the soon be displaced climate scientists. Now what would you guys do with the loot?How would you distribute it to achieve social justice. As far as everything i mentioned being discussed and dismissed upthread, i wouldn't know of the truth of that.When you dismiss all of the most improbable whatever is left, however probable, must have an element of truth. Anyway your guy"s cherished models are diverging from reality and losing credibility, so perhaps it is time to look elsewhere no matter how smart they thought their modeling to be. A presidential term only last four years,
sentorial term 6, congressional term 2. The pendulum swings, usually from one extreme to another. The carbon money is uncle Ben funny and i wouldn't go counting it just yet.
As far as everything i mentioned being discussed and dismissed upthread, i wouldn't know of the truth of that.When you dismiss all of the most improbable whatever is left, however probable, must have an element of truth. Anyway your guy"s cherished models are diverging from reality and losing credibility,
Oh come on Rick this is getting pretty comical! Whatever is left, however probable, must have an element of truth? You sound like Donald Rumsfeld explaining the value of his WMD intelligence.
And then you have the cheek to say "our guys" are the ones losing credibility?
I want to know your rationale - considering your self confessed inability to qualify the science - how and why do you weight the opinions of the contrarians over those of the consensus? There has to be a logical reason to throw all the institutional opinion away. What is it?
these are the possible catagories:
1) their science is wrong - you can't judge this so don't even try.
2) They are corrupted by money - ok now we're talking. Show us the money
3) They are corrupted by political ideology - NWO2 has much you tube evidence to support this idea. How about you Rick? anything other than vague speculations by Sarah Palin and Alex Jones?
We know where Chuff stands on this stuff. He makes no bones of his disdain for weak kneed trader joe clients and the likelyhood that it is where the scientists shop. Is Trader Joes in on this world wide get rich / communize scheme?
Remember - if you can't judge the science it must be something else you are judging
All of the above and your original appraisal of intuition, Bruce. My function here is to provide a thorn to the side of the consensus juggernaut. If i slow these guys down one day or one minute, great. If all other concerned citizens did likewise we could have a return to rational sensibility or as close to it as the human condition allows. Your a very funny guy Bruce-i'm beginning to think that is a common canuck trait since all from your neck of the woods that i've met seems to be so.
But I would not agree that you addressed my question. What evidence do you have that an entire global institution of scientific inquiry is corrupted by anything other than bad coffee and sushi?
You could be on to something Bruce-the psychoactive effects of mild food poisoning from their common diet. As good of an explanation of generational insanity as any other.Over and out.
rick has rehashed old criticisms that have been looked at before.
The one "new" paper he pushed was woeful, poor writing, poor research, questionable methods and confusing conclusions.
It is not surprising that rick has given up on pursuing the science, he has realized that science doesn't support his opinions and therefore he rejects it. rick's approach to this are best framed In the words and thoughts of Karl Rove:
"...reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
(from Ron Suskind, (2004-10-17). "Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush". The New York Times Magazine. ISSN 0028-7822)
The way the world "works" is open to interpretation, but in the end you are put up to a test of your understanding, you pursue the scientific method to gain that understanding. The conclusions may run counter to your intuition, to common sense, and to history and tradition... but, in the end, that is what the world does, it couldn't care less about what we believe.
rick has his faith, and I'm sure he's quite comfortable with it, and defends it against anything that would upset it... he's dead set against any change. Things are changing though, whether he wants to admit that or not.
Yes things are forever changing Ed. Contrary to what you say, im quite comfortable with that as long as there is progress towards a better future.What i can't stand, nor should anyone trying to make their way in difficult living conditions of this modern world, is regression to the past through taxation that serves no purpose other than to enslave the majority of the populace in order to increase the power of the elites running the various governments with various agendas all dependent on limiting the power of the people.
We've gone through the science and the side you seem to support has failed to make an irrefutable argument with testable predictions that matches real world observations. We talked of ideology , your side seeming to worship a return to pre-industrial times where the imagined world works just fine minus the energy, mobility, mass production of food, etc etc. that makes our now 7 billion population barely sustainable. Won't work Ed without radical population reduction-and who will decide? Or will it just fall disproportionately on the disadvantaged?
Now we are on to the political. With the "consensus science" collapsing, the worlds populace rejecting the ideology through their "ignorance and indifference", it leaves your side with the sole option of political imposition of the policies against the will of the people.You guys have been heartened lately with the dear leaders luke warm endorsement of the policies and his stated intention of imposition by royal decree. We'll just have to see how well that flies, won't we?
The sad part about this is that their is a solution palatable to all at hand. That is embracing the usage of the huge quantities of natural gas underlying huge portions of the landmass, going ahead with construction of the latest generation of nuclear power plants, ending the corporate and special interest subsidies particularly in the energy sector,institute a progressive consumption tax with higher rates on costly luxury goods, then taking all the savings and reducing income taxes while investing exponentially more in R&D on technologies for alternative energy that is as viable, or more so, as our fossil fuel powered economy. Because of competing rigid ideologies and political gamesmanship these sensible solutions are currently not at hand. I guess it takes a national/international emergency such as a widespread war to achieve a common focus.
That statement attributed to Rove is absolutely correct. A large segment of the population think precisely that, no matter where they are on the totem pole. He is also right that the rest of us, limited as we are by the constraints of reality, are relegated to an endless position of "judicious study" or more accurately endless bafflement or worse yet a hopelessly naive belief that such people can be swayed by reasonable debate or anything but absolute certainty of evidence.
Among the most significant characteristics of the Authoritarian personality is loyalty. This cannot be stressed enough and explains just about everything they do or think. Loyalty is valued to the extent that it is not based on any reality based foundation of legitimacy, rather the certainty or avoidance of ambiguity it provides. Any system of governance ( like science) which does not actively reject ambiguity at all costs raises all the red flags of visceral cognitive dissonance that guys like Rick Sumner like to call "Intuition". Rick wouldn't know intuition if it snuck up and bit him on the balls.
Far more useful - in fact, absolutely necessary in terms of maintaining mental stability - is a slavish loyalty to a simple hierarchy of order, like Chuffs infatuation with loincloths and tribalism. Its a great fall back position and conveniently safe as one which we will not likely have to put to the test, unlike our kids. It allows the adherent to avoid all that ferocious mental uncertainty and ambiguity involved in engineering out way out of the huge engineering project which by any understanding of reality we are fully committed to.
But I say the hell with those guys. They are a lost cause. The problem is how their little song and dance is so deeply entrenched in the American (and Canadian) mythology, which we all dig but most of us can't separate the wheat from the chaff. The problem is not that the mythology exists - mythology is just an extension of our values. It is the irrational overindulgence that is the problem. I mean get a load of this video. American Frontiersman magazine glorifies everything that hardly has any relevance to modern America, yet owes its entire existence to digital publishing and the miracle of a global distribution network. If the reality of such an ambiguity can be understood and contextualized then no problem. Nothing wrong with a little fantasy role playing eh? But if you really start believing this stuff.....
Well I'll give you this - you did take the time to reply. But I asked for some equations. If you can show me the mass balance/heat transfer/etc equations that support your hypothesis then I can take you seriously.
Since you admittedly claim you're not a climate scientist then perhaps you should take the time to fill in the easily explained details. When scientists converse the language we usually use is math (sure a chemist depending on discipline may often use chemical equations which are a bit different, etc..). It seems like you really don't have an true enough understanding or background of what you're talking about to explain it properly and until you can do that why should I take you seriously? Believe it or not - I'm not trying to be a dick here (unusual for those that know me ;) but you really need to work out those details before otherwise anyone with a science background is going to look at you like a crank.
If you've got an undergraduate science background you could go off and spend some time reading the literature (real literature with equations and such). While reading it, you'll need to fill in the details. Make sure you get what those equations mean physically (graph em, is the data stationary, whats that Fourier Transform telling you, etc). Maybe then you can easily explain it with the correct language that is accepted.
The burden is on you to make the presentation as climate change is accepted by the overwhelming majority of scientists so unless you want to sound like a crank go you've got some work to do.
Regardless I think you can agree that your word choice of "easily explainable" was incorrect.
Well, I see that Rick read up on Milankovitch Cycles. What you need to learn next is how water vapor will affect climate.
First, you need to start reading up on how water vapor, methane, and CO2 currently control climate. After just the basics, you should then look at the rock record to learn as much as possible about past climate events. Geology is a broad topic, but since oil and gas is found in sedimentary rocks, billions and billions of dollars have been spent learning about the history of the planet. I can help a little, and point you towards some books. Sort of an online geology degree, but without the math and physics.
I will try to take the time to post about the empirical evidence that geologists use to determine paleoclimate, including temperature, gas content, etc. The history of the Earth is incredibly interesting. I live a half mile from the University of Oklahoma, and their geology library is huge. It is far bigger than the town library. Geology is such a massive topic that most of us become specialists in some small discipline. Mine is late Paleozoic rocks.
The easiest hothouse event to understand is the late Mesozoic event. It was caused by high CO2, and there is a lot of evidence to support it. You had dinosaurs and ferns living close to the poles. From this information, you will learn that the planet's climate is very sensitive to certain inputs.
I also recommend that you do a little basic googling on the topic of punctuated equilibrium.
My best guess, from what I know about previous events, is that we are already screwed. 200 years from now, the planet will have changed a lot.
This isn't really a species extinction problem. Canada might be a great place to live.
The real problem is that people are not altruists. We are incapable of foregoing a period of prosperity in order to protect the species 200 years from now.
A relevant read here is "Under a Green Sky" by Peter Ward. Ward is a Palentologist who's done a lot of work on the fossil record related to extinction events. He recounts studies done to find a palentological smoking gun in the fossil record showing that the KT extinction was sudden, supporting the bolide impact explanation for the KT event. He then contrasts this with the fossil record related to other events where extinction was not sudden. In the years following the acceptance of the bolide hypothesis for the KT event, much work was done searching for evidence of impacts associated with other extinction events. But Ward's work suggests that the at the KT event was unusual and that bolide impact doesn't account for other major extinctions. He gives particular attention to the Permo-Triassic event, and proposes that this event (and others)were triggered by CO2 outgassed by volcanic erruptions, which warms the atmosphere and oceans, resulting in lower O2 solubility and H2S accumulating in the oceans to the point where it becomes toxic to marine life. His take home point -- CO2 increase initiated the chain reaction, and the origin of the CO2 (volcanic or anthropogenic) doesn't matter, and maybe we are provoking a similar event.
It's a good popular science read, both for the science content and the insights into how professional science is conducted. He gives a great description of the misery of doing field work in the continuous cold and rain of the Aleutians that should disabuse any aspiring geologists of the notion that geologic field work is idyllic stroll.
It's been a cold stormy season on the Arctic Ocean, but in the part two days clouds have cleared to show a bit of what's underneath. Sea ice extent numbers are still higher than the lowest recent years, but that "extent" counts a lot of slush where there used to be thicker ice. Here's one view fairly near the North Pole, today.
That's a satellite view, each pixel about 250 meters. With ice this broken up and thin, what happens over the rest of the summer depends a lot on the weather, more than used to be the case.
Base thanks for the suggestions. As far as the positive feedback loops, primarily atmospheric water vapor, they have so far failed to materialize. The expected heat is missing and there is a desperate search on to find it- they are even looking under rocks in the deep ocean, all to no avail so far. The hothouse events you mention were probably initiated by large scale basaltic eruptions which pumped enough CO2 into the atmosphere ( on the order of several thousand parts per million) to really trap infrared radiation and trigger the positive feedbacks, including large scale methane releases and increases in atmospheric vapor. In your research see if you can find unambiguous evidence of elevated CO2, in just the hundreds of parts per million, leading to temperature increase rather than lagging it. It is interesting that the flora and fauna ( dinosaurs by the billions)seemed to thrive in this hothouse event, planet wide, till the asteroid impact 55 million years ago and the huge volcanic eruption event in India millenia later. Were they killed by the one two punch causing a nuclear winter like period of extreme cold? Too bad your leaning to the AGW side, you'd make a formidable ally. Anyway, not much is happening in this ongoing war till the release of more info on the Cern CLOUD experiment and release of AR5. I am getting too busy to argue with you guys and their are few minds open to change. Unless something comes up i will take a vacation from this. If any of you guys are pissed, remember you have DR. F to blame for my appearance here about post 7500. He took the liberty of transferring my post from another of his threads to here. Otherwise i would never have engaged.
rick stakes out a huge claim here... but once again he's really just in denial. He sees the science of climate change as a challenge to his personal liberties, and a threat to the welfare of humans around the globe. The implications of the research would require us to act in a much more intentional and responsible manner, a manner that would curtail our current profligate energy habits.
So it is no surprise that he would align with those who would advocate a "do nothing" policy and attack the body of knowledge that would compel change. He is not measured in his characterization of my position on this matter, and the polarization of the politics seeks to divide and thus prevent any action.
The problem is a difficult one to solve, but once again, the science provides us with the best predictions of the outcome of any action we would propose to take, including the "do nothing" inaction that rick offers. The science is imperfect, but evolves to less imperfect as we understand more. The urgency to find a policy is suggested by that science. The difficulty in forming a policy has to balance both an imperfect science, and the economic implications of action. It is not an easy balancing act.
However, we haven't moved much beyond the political rhetoric of special interests who still find attacking the underlying premise, the climate science, as the most effective way to infuse paralysis in the body politic, thus accomplishing the goal of "do nothing."
While conservation policies make total common sense, they have always been less than seriously considered. Consider the automotive industries denials that efficient engines could be designed and sold for so many years, only to find a today so many models with a tremendous fuel use efficiencies. One wonders why this couldn't have happened earlier.
There is probably a limit to just how efficient we can make energy generation and use.
The above plot shows that electricity generation is roughly 32% efficient, which is probably at the thermodynamic limit, at least for chemical reaction based generation (which represents 70% of the generation). Transportation is still only 25% efficient, so perhaps room to grow, but not much.
Assuming that we do not choose to alter our fuel use by reducing our use, the question becomes how to reduce the deleterious effect of that use on the climate. There are a number of possible alternatives, and probably there is innovation waiting to happen, but the fact of the matter is that no one has the answer.
Pricing the source of the CO2 emissions to include the current and future costs of those deleterious effects alters the energy production market in just the way you'd want to provide incentive to use alternative energy fuels, but also find ways of using the fossil fuels so that they do not result in the CO2 emissions. The European's are experimenting with cap-and-trade, there is a strong push by many in the US to use a carbon tax, and China and India are playing a waiting game, though pursuing various technologies that have reduced CO2 emissions. If the US and European markets impose CO2 emission related tariffs on Indian and Chinese goods and services, those two countries would respond. However, it is an open field in terms of just how to address the international policies required to maintain the health of the "commons" which in this case is the atmosphere.
And this is the crux of the problem, that we are now required to find some global response to CO2 emissions, the atmosphere knows no boundaries. Just as the formation of the federal administration of the EPA resolved the differences in state environmental policies, so some international "authority" will have to be established to resolve the differences among the various national players in global environmental policy.
I don't personally advocate any one approach to this over another, and there are obviously very strong political opinions regarding just what is acceptable and what is not. But what I have tried to do in this thread is to show that the climate science is a reliable guide to what is happening and what is going to happen.
The relevance of the science is obvious, it is why it has attracted such attention both positive and negative. The identification of the source of the climate change observed over the last century as the by product of human energy production activity provides a very specific focus on what we need to do. Our understanding on how to incentivize innovation through market forces suggests a methodology for formulating policy. Predicting the set of innovative technologies that will meet the challenges is uncertain, but that is what entrepreneurs do.
"Do nothing" will not solve these problems, let's get on with the process of finding beneficial solutions.
I don't personally advocate any one approach to this over another, and there are obviously very strong political opinions regarding just what is acceptable and what is not. But what I have tried to do in this thread is to show that the climate science is a reliable guide to what is happening and what is going to happen.
^^^
There it is. Ed and Chilo, and others, speak to the science. Ed you've done an amazing job. My own attitude, and I use that word specifically, has changed as a direct result of your persistent patience. I used to think that as long as India and China refused to play, and global trade continues present trends, efforts here in the US to curtail CO2 would be insufficient. Actually I still think that. What's changed is my attitude toward the effort. Science is not policy and sadly policy often ignores science. Whaddaya gonna do?
Well I see what Ed and Chiloe are doing and I admire it. I compare that to fly fishing.
DMT
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