OK, I'm convinced! Climate Change IS a hoax!

But you won't will you?

 

Mojo, I'll not claim higher powers here. Whether Chogan2 does so or not is his or her business.

Instead, I'd ask you to take a look at the US National Academy of Sciences and American Physical Sciences position papers on this issue. There are about 20 other national and international societies that have published similar; ain't no trouble to google them up.

Then, pick one and give it a good deep reading. Use your considerable mental powers to show why they are wrong. Ideally without reference to afinity websites, but heck, it's your show. Call in any authorities in which you have complete confidence.

Bolstered by that success, take on the others. Yeah I know they are several, but their evidences as presented show considerable overlap. Your zeal can carry you on.

But why? Anyone here might ask, and I'll answer it if I may. We are a reasonable, thoughtful and more-or-less logical bunch who feel drawn to this Prius affinity website. We can be convinced by any argument based on evidence and good reasoning.

If I did not think it so, I would not pay so much attention to what gets posted here on environmental subjects. You may think the same. or you may not. But if not, why in Heaven's name would you expend all this effort?

Reasonable, REASONED public discourse is not such a bad thing. It might help and (like chicken soup) it can't hurt.

Anyway, back to air temperature trends, have you any thoughts on the Menne et al 2010? Or was it 2009? Surely mentioned here before, and the best we have to work with until the Berkeley "BEST" group speaks up.

 

Here are a couple of maps using the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI). Don't let the colors fool you. Pay attention to the map keys. On both maps, values of -4 and below represent severe drought. The first map is the current state of the US as of June of this year. The second map is the median prediction for the end of the century, published by the (one of the?) US leading expert(s) on drought.

Again, pay attention to the keys. These are both maps of the PDSI. They had to expand the range of the PDSI for the second map because predictions exceed the range observed now.

Just to get oriented, extreme drought is -4. That's where you get substantial reports of crop losses. The dust bowl occurred around -7. The first map goes down to -4. The second map goes to -20. The first map is short-term conditions. The second is average conditions for the decade.

Some people think this is all just an elaborate hoax, or a bunch of so-called scientists who have deluded themselves. I don't. I think about what a value of -4 is doing to Texas agriculture right now, and try to imagine what -20 would look like on the same scale. I have concluded that if this research is anywhere close to ballpark (and it's in the same ballpark as the earlier studies on the same topic, and it's consistent with what happened at the holocene thermal maximum), hey, that's plenty good enough information for placing my bets.

First time I saw that second map I was skeptical. Changes like that occur on geological time scale, not over the cource of a human lifetime. Then I had one of those head-slap moments. We've just taken what would typically be 10,000 years worth of atmospheric C02 increase, and compressed that into the last 100 years. And, boing, the climate is now going to respond in an equally rapid manner, compressing changes that would have taken 10,000 years into the next century. It's really pretty simple and straightforward, the only barrier to my understanding is that I expect the earth to be fairly stable. I think I've learned that that need no longer be true on this type of time scale. The right way to think of this is that changes like that used to occur over a geological time scale. No reason to expect that to continue.

But I don't have to convince anybody about anything. Make your bets as you see fit.

 

Ouch! lol

 

Do we know what CO2 production was 10k years ago?

 

I'll take a chance that you actually want to know. In a nutshell, without references or pictures:

Recent ice ages have lasted about 110,000 years. The warming phase typically takes about 10,000 years. Antarctic ice core data provide a clean record of the increase in C02 over that period. Over the most recent warming, C02 went from about 180ppm to about 280ppm, in about 10,000 years. Or 100 ppm in 10,000 years. The source of the C02 was the change in solubility in the ocean as the oceans slowly warmed. (Same underlying physics that increases the odds of a soda can spewing when you open it warm as opposed to cold.) For the warming period of the ice ages, increased atmospheric C02 was a feedback, for the warming that occurred due to known, period changes in the eccentricity of the earth's orbit and the earth's tilt. (In fact, as an aside, it does not appear possible to explain the depths of the ice ages without that feedback -- changes in earth orbit alone account for only about half the temperature change thought to have occurred.) That slow, small feedback continues to occur today, as the oceans continue to warm, but in the current context -- our having increased atmospheric C02 substantially -- it manifests itself in the form of a slightly slower absorbtion of C02 in the ocean that would otherwise occur of the oceans were not warming.

Clear enough? The pace of climate change over the past few ice ages reflects naturally-occurring increases in atmospheric C02, at a typical speed of 100 ppm per 10,000 years during the warming periods. About half the warming (and cooling) over the ice ages is attributable to that C02 increase (in the sense that if it didn't occur, you would have seen about half as much temperature change from warmest to coldest portion of the ice age.)

We've changed the game by raising atmospheric C02 by about 100 ppm in the last 100 years. Now, you can't directly extrapolate anything from that simple number. The effects are logarithmic, not linear (so the effects scale as 280/180 for the ice age, versus 380/280 for the current period), And only about half the warm-up from the ice age was driven by C02 changes. And there is a lag of several decades for the earth to "catch up" to the forcing (because the actual energy imbalance is quite small, estimated currently at maybe 3 watts per square meter with all feedbacks, compared to sunshine entering the top of the atmosphere at about 1400 watts per square meter, and it takes a long time to heat up that much mass), so we haven't yet seen the ultimate effects of the first 100 ppm increase.

But the upshot is yeah, we know what C02 production was for the past 10,000 years. We have a record in the antarctic ice. Production in the sense of increase in atmospheric C02. And we know what it has been recently. And we've increased atmospheric C02 as much in the last 100 years as Mother Nature did over the preceding 10,000. C02 isn't the only only thing that drives climate, but it's absolutely positively one of the big ones. We keep doing this, you should absolutely positively expect to see big changes, and you should expect to see them occur cartoonishly fast compared what we have observed in the past.

 

I reckon Deepwater Horizon was a hoax too, you can do all that with cgi these days.

 

Unless you posses omnipotent powers that I am unaware of. In which case I would demand proof of, and apologize after gaining such proof.

Religion: Doesn't need proof, and no science or reason can ever be proof enough.
Climate Change: Requires proof, and no science or reason can ever be proof enough.

I think I see a pattern of the dismissal of science and reason. The spaghetti monster would be proud.

 

FACT:

Our climate changes each and every day.

 

Our weather changes daily; climate changes over longer time periods.

Climate change is a long-term problem; once the change is significant enough to convince the doubters, it will be too late to ameliorate.

I am sure that the unconvinced will not have their minds changed by anything I or anyone else posts here.

 

Correct, it requires faith :doh: Trying to mix the two?

 

There is weather, climate variability, and climate change. Its the weather that changes every day, the variability that displays things like AMO and ENSO droughts and floods, and change is what we should look to for over longer periods of time (30 years) to eliminate the first two.

Does the current drought prove climate change? There is a climate variability factor here. The droughts in Texas and Somalia are the worst in my lifetime, but were worse in the 1950s. If it was that proof of climate change, we would expect that we could not so easily find earlier periods that had lower temperature and co2 levels and "more severe" weather. Its really hot and dry here this year. I would hate for someone when the drought ends, point to this to pretend to prove GW doesn't exist.

But there is little doubt hat sea surface temperatures air temperatures are rising. Again you need to look at averaged temperatures not single years. The rain fall patterns are also changing, and we can expect this to continue to change. Some of these precipitation patterns would naturally change, but there is evidence that the warming seas contribute to them.

Mojo, I'm not sure why you are on a car site trying to learn about climate change. Its not a very good place. If you have a local university, please talk to some professors. Watts up and prius chat don't really give you a good picture.

 

If you don't know the difference between the elementary definitions of climate and weather then I do not think you are qualified to debate.

 

Um, when has lack of qualification ever prevented anyone from commenting about anything on this or any other forum?

 

Good point. I tend to talk of of my rear quite often but to be fair I am a smart a$$.

 

Finally I collected the Hanson et al 1989 paper mentioned in #6 of this thread. That's Kirby Hanson, not the (more famous) James Hansen. They used NCDC (48 state) surface-station records from 1895 through 1987. They found no significant temperature trends for this time period as a whole. I attach the key graph.

The methods section is quite brief, so we can't really tell how the data were used. Averaging all points within each year is one possibility.

More recently, as has been discussed here, Matthew Menne et al 2010 look at trends from 1980 through 2008, and found significant increases. As these two studies examine different time periods (though with some overlap), it is difficult to compare them.

But if a feller wanted to examine the data again, visit the NCDC website. It looks to me that if you download station-by-station, it is free. One might begin by choosing stations based on citing criteria from the surfacestations.org website. Or email Menne and ask him what stations he used.

Then we'd know, eh? With transparency of methods and all that good stuff. What has been the temperature trend (if any) over this 1.6% of the Earth's surface.

More than 1.6% if you include Alaska, but maybe not many thermometers there in the olden days. Also might not be a good strategy for a sceptic to include AK, what with the permafrost starting to melt and so forth.

But heck, if you're interested, just grab the data and go. Either that or wait for the Berkely temp. analysis. When is that supposed to produce some output, anyway?

 

Climate change is a political tool used by the policital tools. Hoax.

 

Climate change is real. Politics is a hoax.