Climate change and the point of no return

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The table clearly shows the Bible Belt and Appalachia having no or little warming.

This is unquestionable Truth that the warming is due to God’s displeasure with liberals, muslins, and godless Kenyan-style communism.

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George Carlin was right and I’ll admit it. I want to protect the planet so that I’m not someday inconvenienced.

The people in power have screwed every aspect of the rest of our lives. I do not take Carlin’s position that this what we deserve because these “leaders” do not reflect the real aspirations and hopes of people. These “leaders” need to take a permanent back seat. They f’ed everything up.

The math will out. The people of this planet are going to have to become geoengineers if we are going to preserve the multitude species.

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It’s the leaders fault Americans are buying enormous gas guzzling tanks and using them to idle in traffic during rush hour? With no one on board except the driver?

Everyone carries blame for this. It’s a problem generated by humans as a society. We’re past the point of assigning blame and should instead be working on a solution (or at the very least, limiting the damage).

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It’s being reported elsewhere that the the report blames a 15-year lull in warming on the deep sea. This will in the long run probably turn out to be the report’s most salient point.

Those who tend to follow the climate models more than the astrophysical and cosmological models are probably not aware that there is a long tradition in those latter (more speculative) scientific disciplines of attributing unexpected observations which deviate from conventional models to phenomena that is either hypothetical or difficult to observe. In astro- and solar physics, when an anomaly is actually acknowledged, there is a tendency amongst researchers to point to magnetic fields as the culprit. Many times, enigmatic observations which cannot be properly explained are oftentimes ignored or shelved for a future date.

For instance, the Milky Way is apparently a very large galaxy, and should be expected to exhibit gravitational lensing at its core. But, we’ve had many years to observe it by now, and we see no evidence for any lensing there …

http://www.extinctionshift.com/SignificantFindings08.htm

To be clear, had lensing been observed, the match would have been widely reported in scientific press releases, and it would have been heralded as further evidence of lensing. But, since it wasn’t a match, we don’t see the typical flurry of reports, and the failure to observe the lensing is generally ignored as having much meaning.

I know that people are very concerned about interference in science from corporations, but that shouldn’t be an invitation to simply ignore the deeper philosophical issues associated with the ad hoc modeling approach.

Not exactly, but it is their fault that viable alternatives (even those that currently exist) have not been allowed and encouraged to take the place of must gas guzzlers. Yes, ordinary first-world citizens are to blame for consuming as much as they do, but not for the lack of widely available and promoted alternatives.

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Maybe partly? I though this blog post from Zingularity was a fair point; ordinary Americans are a part of why we are in this mess, but they have been deliberately misled on this issue by special interests who are very good at it. We should be working on a solution, but it doesn’t hurt to keep in mind who those interests are, because people need to learn to stop listening to them.

Which is of course only natural, since most things in cosmology are hard to observe - but disingenuous to bring up here, because we are talking about climatology, and the warming in the oceans has been observed. It seems that since your “philosophical concerns” were discussed here, you still haven’t bothered to look into where climatologists actually get their ideas, in which case I don’t imagine there is much point in having the same discussion.

Edit: for some notes on what this ostensible lull was a misrepresentation of, and on warming observed in the oceans, skeptical science has a reasonable summary.

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but, fox news told me global warming is a hoax.

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What 15 year lull in the warming?

Are you talking about the bogus talking point that “warming has not happened since 1998”? 1998 was WAY above the baseline and every year since has also been above the baseline but lower than 1998. That’s consistent warming with one incidence of unusually high warmth, not a 15-year lull.

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In their defense, the leaders won’t be around when the stuff hits the fan, but they will get nice donations for their excellent decision making skills… Of course, several of their vacation homes will be under water, but that is for the grand-kids to worry about. WIIFM wins!

They happen to have a convenient short-term trend that they can exploit… One can do that with the entire temperature record by picking convenient points:
Climate Graphics by Skeptical Science

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From the report: Natural forces only models -vs- natural+man

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The point of no return was actually passed around 14,000 years ago when the glaciers started melting (this time). The subsequent glacial meltwater has raised the sea levels about 350 feet since then, creating the Chesapeake Bay, closing the Bering Sea land bridge and moving North America’s Atlantic beached inland from the edges of the now-submerged continental shelves. We’re in an interglacial warming period.

I’m sure that kind of thinking makes you, you know, “Comfortable.”

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You seem unaware that the idea that the extra heat was in the deep ocean came about AFTER they found the extra heat in the deep ocean. Unlike cosmology, in climate science we can directly measure the extra heat being reradiated back at us, in real time. Though the system is too complicated for a symbolic solution, the basic physics involved in this system, unlike in astrophysics, is all very well known, and demonstrated to provide accurate predictions in all the cases we’ve been able to test it in. The fact that you’re making this comparison between the physics involved in this case and theoretical astrophysics shows that you haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about, so give it a fucking rest.

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So by your reasoning “the point of no return” predates the invention of agriculture?

It seems a little weird to me to worry about preserving the ice age conditions under which human beings struggled at subsistence rather than preserving the modern conditions under which humans flourish but different strokes I guess

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Are you trying to insinuate that the past 15 years, which show a slow down of the rate of increase of surface air temperatures, is analogous to a speculative ad hoc computer modeling problem which ignores the true meaning of the results?

Because that would not be true at all, since the surface air absorbs only about two per cent of the increased heat generated by greenhouse gases, while the oceans hold many times more. The extra heat missing from surface air temperature expectations has been found in deeper ocean levels - so there is nothing being ignored, shelved, ad hoc or unexplained here.

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I guess that the silver lining is that I probably don’t need to invest in a retirement home in the tropics…

Climate change: how hot will it get in my lifetime? - interactive | Environment | theguardian.com

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Or, you could decide that this claim seems astonishing, do a Bing search to expand your knowledge, and come across an article that discusses (with facts and measurements!) that Sagitarius A is far enough away that detecting lensing is just beyond our current optical limits. Additionally, it looks like we’ve seen something indicating a shift in brightness as it approaches what we postulate to be a black hole, and which could be lensing. We’ll soon know for sure!
http://iopscience.iop.org/0004-637X/696/1/701/fulltext/apj_696_1_701.text.html

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