I completely accept that climate change is happening and, in this case (as opposed to the innumerable times it has happened during the long history of this planet), it is being exacerbated dramatically by the human race. However, I also believe in human ingenuity, creativity, and yes, science, so I have complete faith that humanity will take care of the problem. The answer is not austerity, living within “limits”, or in any way changing the way human beings interact with (or consume, or radically alter) their environment. That only leads to non-living, or as Nietzsche phrased it, saying NO to life. We must let go of nostalgic notions of nature and accept the future: We’ll invent new technologies that will solve all of these problems without having to change our lifestyles or stop doing the things that we like to do and must do. Otherwise, we live counter to our own wills, which cannot be suppressed and will eventually erupt in ever more sinister forms.
British media have attributed the new work to acclaimed British street artist Banksy.
British media attribute any interesting graffiti to Banksy, even if it looks nothing like the rest of his ouvre. He’s the Richard Cheese of guerilla murals.
What do you mean, “that’s not the important thing about this article”?
I think you misunderstood my post then. First of all, I’m not skeptical of thermodynamics. Being skeptical of the way complex issues are oversimplified in the media is not the same as being skeptical of natural phenomena. Secondly, I don’t agree that current state of the art thermodynamics can explain climate change perfectly. Thirdly, saying that being skeptical of X equals begin skeptical of Y is not a very constructive way of debating.
1st of all, you seem to be putting a lot of words in my mouth. Secondly I believe YOUR ignorant opinions could have grave consequences for the human race. You should change yours.
I mean “ignorant” not as an insult, btw. Everyone is ignorant in this case because there is so much we don’t know. Rather than admit that, talk frankly about how little of an understanding we have of our climate and how dangerous that lack of knowledge could be and ask for more research money to better understand things and post everything online for ‘the bazaar’ to work on it together, the climatologists embraced computer modelling and told us since the 1970s that “yes… the previous computer model didn’t predict real results but THIS TIME they are sure we have it right and if we don’t do what we’re told then we’re all doomed”. Except they fight tooth and nail to keep their data and weighting and methods unpublished, insist that we take their ‘consesus’ as a replacement for experimental replication, and then try to “hide the decline” when their models don’t match what the world really does.
Why don’t we admit some obvious things instead? 1. Climate is a complex, chaotic system. We don’t have a ‘control Earth’ to do experiments on. So producing useful theories and models that make accurate predictions is going to be very hard and we should be cautious about claiming we have done so until predictions can model historic shifts and track with continuing temperature changes for a long time. 2. Climate has historically varied a lot more than we’d probably like and it would be nice if we didn’t have to worry about either too hot or too cold conditions in the future. 3. Trying to keep the climate within the bounds we’d like by doing a poor job of controlling one variable that our current uncertain climate models think is an important factor but is also hard to control at all and impossible to make quick adjustments to if we turn out to be wrong or something unexpected happens is a crappy way to achieve item. Humbling ourselves before mother gaia and making sincere and pious sacrifices to her is even worse. 4. We should find items that: 1) affect our climate in as simple, easy-to-understand ways as possible, 2) we can exert some control over with measures affordable to our current global GDP and don’t require everyone wearing hairshirts and mouthing platitutdes to the earth, 3) that we can make relatively quick adjustments to in either direction in case the climate gets out of our ideal zone either way or our geoengineering has unintended side-effects.
Wasting our time pretending our understanding is better than it is, and wasting our money on hairshirt, crony-enriching, feel-good sacrifices to the nature gods instead of confronting the issue with a clear head and engineering a global thermostat… that is what could potentially bite us in the collective @$$. Oh, but you think you’re the one not being political while you mouth all the correct in-group signals.
- You seem to confuse the map for the territory. You should be writing “I know of no…” before the “natural forcings that point to warming. 2. I am familiar with Milankovitch cycles. I still know of no comprehensive theory on what causes the onset and end of interglacial periods. If you know of one, please send me the reference. 3. You write: " Global temps, in fact, should be cooling right now. Anthropocentric forcings explain current observed positive changes in the energy of global climate.” You seem to be unaware of the fact that we ARE cooling right now. And have been all of this century so far. So you say theory says we should be cooling. Data says we are cooling. Maybe you should publish.
Someone else take over here. The level of delusion here is too disturbing.
I am saying that concentration of greenhouse gasses are not increasing global temperature. Because global temperature is not increasing. It is decreasing right now.
Of course Thermodynamics isn’t a communist plot. It is a demonic plot. Just ask Maxwell. WTF does that have to do with anything? That’s like saying because I don’t buy someone’s pet theory on why MAS370 crashed I must not believe in gravity. OH… wait, I forgot that distraction non-sequitur is another one of those great truth finding tools of nonscience.
You realize, btw, that the atmosphere is very complex and the “CO2 = greenhouse gasses = warmer” is the kids-are-brought-by-the-stork version, right? You’d be better off to say that we know that airline flights cause increases in cloud cover, cloud cover increases albedo, increased albedo reflects sunlight, less sunlight means lower temperatures. That would still be grossly simplified and way out of proportion to observed effects but at least that would have the virtue of matching current temperature trends.
Fine, I’ll try for your sake.
None of this is true. You should look at what scientists actually write. The talk about consensus has to do with setting public policy, which should be based upon what most experts actually agree on; but there’s a lot of work into figuring out how climate actually works, not just whether it is changing but the details, and the things you imagine are fought to be kept unpublished are for the most part available.
And the models do agree with real world if you consider the error bars on them. Which are reasonably broad - like you say, climate is a complex system, something scientists who study climate understand even better than you. But it’s not to the point you imagine, where the existence of global warming is part of that uncertainty.
It would be nice, but it’s not true. First, most of the historical changes people point to aren’t actually comparable to global warming; for instance, the little ice age was a local effect rather than a global one. Second, it’s not the degree to which climate varies but how fast it happens that determines whether people and ecosystems can adapt.
Historically, when it does change fast, there have been problems. It really looks like we’re seeing some of the same now - in the sense that climate scientists have predicted things like droughts will be more common, and there just happens to be an unusual amount of them right now.
As a matter of fact, I am unaware of this, seeing as how every single analysis I’ve seen shows the opposite, except by cherry-picking between extreme years. Do you care to provide any reference for this unusual claim, or is it just going to be this again?
Decreasing the percentage of radiation that escapes into space increases the total thermal energy in the system, unless you also decrease the amount of radiation that comes in. You can ask how much energy and where it manifests itself, but the effect itself is basic thermodynamics.
Kids being brought by the stork isn’t a simplification, it’s a falsehood. That trapping infrared increases temperatures is more like saying the planets go around the sun because they’re attracted to it; it leaves out all sorts of details, but the principle isn’t wrong. It’s a false comparison.
Have you ever seen any explanation of the climate, or any attempt to model the effects of increased carbon dioxide, that doesn’t end up with AGW? It’s not like there isn’t funding available for AGW deniers, so where are their alternative results? Can you offer any answer to the questions at the end of this link?
Because so far I’ve never seen any. Calling the people who have worked on this problem cultists, non-scientists, and all the other slanders you’ve invented for them is just projection. They’ve worked to understand both climate and the uncertainty in it, they have error bars on their results, and their critics for the most part have nothing except manufactured doubt.
Science welcomes you to disagree with authorities once you understand what their results are based on. But you shouldn’t assume they’re all so stupid or biased they won’t notice obvious mistakes, and doing so here just shows you as understanding much less than they do.
But somehow, no matter how little trust “skeptics” put in all the work we’ve done understanding the atmosphere, they all seem to be sure the only way to manage carbon dioxide emissions is to ruin the economy and go back to pre-industrial technology. You don’t need detailed modeling and observations to put your faith in that sort of projection, you can just assume it as a given.
But you didn’t even notice the irony in accusing other people of putting words in your mouth and then talking about “feel-good sacrifices to the nature gods”, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised this irony was lost on you.
It would be nice, but it’s not true. First, most of the historical changes people point to aren’t actually comparable to global warming; for instance, the little ice age was a local effect rather than a global one. Second, it’s not the degree to which climate varies but how fast it happens that determines whether people and ecosystems can adapt.
Well you are correct that we should be worried about how fast changes can happen. But you are completely incorrect about temperature variation. The little ice age was practically yesterday. I was referring to the range of temperatures in geologic time. We are in an ice age and based on my understanding of climate likely to remain so as long as flow into the Artic Ocean is restricted by the locations of Eurasia and North America and the continent of Antarctica sits… well, in the Antarctic. Thankfully we are in a nice long warm interglacial period and it would be nice to keep it that way. Which is why, even though I agree with Dr. Hansen about the desirability of switching from fossil fuel to advanced nuclear power, I don’t think the solution to maintaining a nice climate is to count on being able to do it through CO2 reduction, especially when you consider 1. how slowly that would work relative to your admitted concern about rapidity of change onset and 2. the mass of greenhouse gasses dissolved in the oceans and how a change in that (perhaps due to temperature driven solubility changes) could easily overwhelm our abilities to alter greenhouse gasses through regulating industrial CO2 emissions and lastly 3. WTF are we going to do when we need to push the global temperature the other way to stave of reglaciation? Burn down the rain forests? When our current interglacial ends I don’t want to stand around on a giant ice sheet saying “at least we stopped global warming so we’re not all under water now.” I want to be able to control in both directions, and with relatively fast response time.
As a matter of fact, I am unaware of this, seeing as how every single analysis I’ve seen shows the opposite, except by cherry-picking between extreme years. Do you care to provide any reference for this unusual claim, or is it just going to be this again?
Cute. Again, pick a longer time scale.
Can you offer any answer to the questions at the end of this link?
I assume you mean Prof. Dutch’s diatribe. Funny, I didn’t actually see any questions at the end of his rant. He just made fun of the medical community for having higher standards of science than him (strange) by saying he doesn’t need high standards because he is trustworthy and they aren’t. And an admonition for ‘deniers’ to stop talking about conspiracy theories (but apparently not subtle insinuations of drug company conspiracies). And lastly that if we deniers know so much we should prove him wrong by…getting published in a scientific journal, as other forms of evidence don’t count. That is exactly the way Einstein responded to 100 Authors Against Einstein… oh no wait. It is the OPPOSITE of the way, isn’t it?
Because so far I’ve never seen any. Calling the people who have worked on this problem cultists, non-scientists, and all the other slanders you’ve invented for them is just projection
I’m not calling people who seriously work on the problem cultists. I’m calling YOU one. Because you put out so much effort to defend work you don’t understand and tear down anyone who tries to look at it from anything other than the popular point of view… Not because you did it yourself… or studied it in detail and understand it and are convinced on it’s merits… but because that is how people like you signal that you are in the correct group and I am not.
all the work we’ve done understanding the atmosphere
Oh wait, I’m sorry. I didn’t know you actually studied this stuff first hand and produced original work. Or do you have a very smart mouse in your pocket?
Science welcomes you to disagree with authorities once you understand what their results are based on. But you shouldn’t assume they’re all so stupid or biased they won’t notice obvious mistakes, and doing so here just shows you as understanding much less than they do
And how is that not exactly what you are doing above?
Actually, yes it is still “appeal to authority”.
Yes, that sort of continent configuration has kept us in an icehouse period as compared with the hothouse period of the Cretaceous, but there is a lot of room for variation on top of that. The difference between a glacial period and an interglacial period is substantial. So there can be enough change based on other things.
And looking at for instance the Vostok cores, it appears like the very fastest changes in this period are barely at the rate of what we’re expecting and starting to see now. Not to mention that we didn’t have agriculture-based civilizations trying to live through the others; indeed, we only know that people were able to survive them, not how much damage they might have done to sedentary communities.
So I don’t see any reason why these old changes pertain to how much we should worry about the current rapid change, and what it is expected to do and in some cases already doing. So it’s a red herring. And as far as the next glacial period goes, if it is anything like the last one the change will be so much slower than what we’re doing now that forestalling it would be trivial in comparison, especially since we now know how to warm the planet.
As far as more reliably controlling climate goes, I agree, it would be very nice to be able to do. If you actually thought it was so complex that you won’t even trust the one control we do understand now, though, I have no idea why you’d put faith in our ability to use better ones any time soon.
…that graph you included shows a shorter time scale. And when Watt does show a longer time scale, he does exactly what my chart showed: cherry-pick a single decrease within an over-all increase, with no effort to show it isn’t the result of picking extreme years - a sort of disingenuity that is routine for him, by the way.
And if you actually look at the longer time scale like you just suggested, without cutting it up, you would notice the trend over the whole century is an increase. The only way you get any cooling is if you’re willing to move back to a shorter time scale, in which case you notice the escalator after 1970. So no, the over-all cooling you’re describing does not even follow from your own source.
I did (not quite sure why the link wasn’t working) and while I suppose there weren’t questions per se, he does give some tasks that could be expected of actual global warming skeptics. The reason we trust Einstein, you know, is that he had a pretty developed model, and it turned out to give good results.
But who’s analogous to him in this case? Like I said, I’ve never seen anyone try to explain the climate, or model the effects of increased carbon dioxide, that didn’t end up with AGW. Has there been any alternative? Bueller?
Yeah, your claim that this is all about group politics is just more unsubstantiated words in other people’s mouths, and possibly more projection at that.
Because I’m defending work because I do understand it, if only in part. Not enough to duplicate in full, to be sure, but enough to see what principles it is based on, and see how little criticisms of it actually manage to address. And I’m happy to tear down people, not when they disagree with the popular point of view, but when they dismiss it based on disingenuous arguments.
I don’t need a mouse when I have the actual literature to look at; I don’t need to do all the work first hand when I can tell that only one theory has anything to substantiate it. Like I said, I would happily look at a competing model, but nobody has offered any. Instead I get cherry-picked trendlines with no reason for their limits, and I understand more than enough to know why those deserve my contempt.
I do the same thing with evolution, even though I don’t quite understand all the genetics and population statistics involved. But were you really just talking about ME? The reference to cults was that the “global warming cultists don’t want to publish all their data”; you expect me to believe that’s not supposed to refer to researchers? You could at least be honest about what you’re saying.
So… Fox news then?
If you are skeptical of the assertion that increasing the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere will increase the equilibrium surface temperature, you are skeptical of thermodynamics. We can, in fact, look at the spectra of the sky from earth’s surface, the sun from earth orbit, and the earth from earth orbit, and look at how much extra energy we’re getting, and in what frequency bands, in real time, and it corroborates theoretical predictions.
It can’t, and it doesn’t have to. Explaining it approximately is far better than nothing, especially when we can put error bars on the approximation.
Third: The problem here is that you’re talking about politics, not science, with an issue that fundamentally comes down to science, which is not a very constructive way of debating. This “debate” really belongs in scientific journals, and anything you could say other than addressing the PHYSICAL evidence in terms of physics (which you still haven’t done) is completely irrelevant to the actual debate. I can’t tell if you’re deliberately muddying the waters of simply haven’t the foggiest clue how science works.
Instead of saying something vague like: “Secondly, I don’t agree that current state of the art thermodynamics can explain climate change perfectly.” which is true but completely irrelevant, try suggesting SPECIFIC things you think are wrong with our current understanding of the issue in terms of physics, and calculations showing QUANTITATIVELY how those would impact our error bars. If you can’t do that, you have nothing to add to the actual debate that grownups are having about the issue. The burden here is really on you, because I can’t teach you the years worth of math and physics you need to understand the underlying issues post on the internet.
So, please be specific here. You’re once again being so vague I can’t but think it’s deliberate. Are you saying that increasing atmospheric CO@ concentration WONT increase the equilibrium surface temperature? If so, how would you square that with the standard derivation of the greenhouse effect from statistical physics and the spectral data confirming it. (EG we can see the extra energy at the surface in real time by examining the relevant spectra, even though the mean surface temperature doesn’t necessarily respond immediately, due to heat sinks and other things.) Please be SPECIFIC about how you square this with thermodynamics, rather than spouting more vague bullshit.
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Why don’t you get a global temperature dataset off of NOAA s website (they’ve got all kinds of stuff there) and show us YOUR best fit of the data, mentioning all assumptions you put into it. There are plenty of free, open source tools out there, such as the scientific python stack, with which this would be trivial. Instead of spouting (likely deliberately) vague bullshit, why don’t you put some numbers where your mouth is. The numbers I’m going with are ones in any peer-reviewed article on the subject, because it would be just as ridiculous for me to argue with an atmospheric physicist about her specialty as is would be for her to argue with me about semiconductor device physics. Of course, neither of those would be remotely as ridiculous as you sitting there arguing about thermodynamics with silly platitudes, and steadfastly refusing to be specific (numbers, equations, how are you setting up the problem) about what your misgivings are about our current understanding of the greenhouse effect in terms of statistical thermodynamics.
Honestly, I’m quite pessimistic at this point. To put it simply, the fundamental problem is capitalism, and there’s no effective challenge to it.
If anyone is aware of a comprehensive and developed plan for mitigating climate change either in the US or on a global scale I would greatly appreciate it if you could pm me. It seems like there are a great deal of people that are focusing on aspects of the problem but not on an overall implementation plan. I have read the IPCC5 report and hopefully look forward to the summaries in October.
The best explanation I have seen is the Cosmos episode 12 which you can watch here: http://www.cosmosontv.com/watch/270803523723
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Inventing new technology or solving these problems will inevitably mean changes to our lifestyle. The obsolescence of the horse led to immense social changes, you know. So will the obsolescence of coal fired power.
The problem is that people want to hide their heads under the sand and pretend that it’s not a problem. That’s unacceptable.
I don’t think that with our current political setup, and all the differences between different places, it’s even possible to have a comprehensive plan. Whatever we do will have a large component of organic, chaotic changes to it.
Except it doesn’t. My point is that you’re oversimplifying. If you argue that having the slightest doubts about what we are being told about GW is denying thermodynamics (what is your obsession with that subject anyway?) then you’re missing the point. More CO2 also means more plant life. And what do plants do? Right, they convert CO2. So how does your thermodynamic model cope with this exactly?
How did it do in predicting the ice record in the Antarctic? How does it cope with albedo effects? Why did it not predict that while CO2 emissions have been rising enormously, we experienced global cooling these last 15 years?
I’m not trying to muddy any waters, just pointing out that we shouldn’t blindly follow the herd. I gave you the polar bear example: it’s a really nice quick news bite: polar bears cannibalize because of global warming, but the truth is just more complicated and the evidence is not compelling. It’s being dumbed down, and that’s were my issue is. And while I don’t have a PhD in climatology or thermodynamics, I do have a PhD in another field, so I would say my knowledge of the scientific method is adequate. Pro tip: science is not perfect (look up publication bias and try to apply it to this debate).
Ignoring your condescending tone, the burden of proof is really not on me. If I claim time travel is possible and if I say that if you disagree you disagree with quantum mechanics, the burden of proof is also not on you, I would assume. Again, I’m not denying climate change (though apparently you really want me to), I’m just saying it is a really complex process and scientists, politicians, media and angry commenters on the internet alike should not succumb to populism and oversimplify.
Just FYI, you’re allowed to use the word “shitty” on bOINGbOING. Even when you’re trolling hard.
