It's been a bad week for Believers

Wow, what a drastic change of events... if the atheist here are believing God is real, I guess I can believe global warming, er climate change, er whatever it is, is real. Wait a second, it is real. What are we arguing about?

 

What? Spidey accepts climate change? But...but....that would mean accepting evidence, and logic....

 

I think spidey always accepted the evidence, but not some of the claims

 

Everest, you mean Qomolangma? (as they say in China)

Anyway, to belabor a point, climate change is real enough from many lines of 'paleo' evidence and modern observations. It only gets contentious in the following ways:

How much (now) is anthropogenic?
What can we do to change it?
What would be the net cost and benefits of the doing?

Burning fossil fuels is the biggest money proposition we have now. Plain and simple. So the contentiousness will not go away. I believe that we'll stay on the current path until some event occurs, that is much more convincing than the ongoing extremes in temperature and water cycling.

Perhaps involving Greenland or the West Antarctic ice sheet. Along the lines of a Crichton novel, but without the intrigue of environmental extremists. Because when I hear about that, or 'hoax' or 'they're just in it for the money' or 'new world order', all I really hear is

Don't DON'T DON'T look at the evidence.

 

BTW, Shakun was one of the co-authors on the Schmittner et al.

10.1126/science.1203513

That I mentioned earlier in the 'good news' category. That because it presented a lower estimate for climate CO2 sensitivity. Please bear that in mind before dismissing Shakun's latest as all hoaxy and stuff.

 

As a republican, it took a decade of denial and staring the obvious in the face, but Spidey has accepted that the world is warming. It is the A in AGW he is still in denial about.

 

And then when the world is done warming, it will start cooling and the cycle will continue. Like it has for billions of years. Despite us.

 

^that is very true,, but it also ignores the reality that humans are a speeding up the the process, dramatically.

Icarus

 

^^and is silent as to the number and lifestyle of humans at that time...

 

The post reminded me of George Carlin's Hippy-Dippy Weatherman, reincarnated as the Hippy-Dippy Climate Scientist.

 

MassP, you are so right. We 'do the burn' and run up CO2 to one or multiple thousands ppm. In 10^5 or 10^6 years, mineral weathering/marine carbonate burial will knock that back down. When it gets back down to about 250 ppm, the following Milankovich cycle will send the earth into its next glaciation. I would not at all doubt that scenario.

But much more of interest is how the climate will treat us in the shorter term than that of (obvious, certain) geological dominance. Please remember that we are many, heavily interlinked, and not all rich. The undeniable long-term geological controls will prevail, but in human terms they are SLOW!

Frankly I cannot see how the current human enterprise could do well in anything approaching the climate of the PETM. Surely we will 'smell the coffee' long before that, but the matter at hand is whether we will do so at a time when the costs of preserving conditions we like are within our ability to pay them.

On the other hand, if CO2 does not absorb infrared energy and so heat the air and (mostly) the oceans to a great extent, doing the burn is an excellent choice! I consider resolving that question, to everyone's satisfaction, to be a most important matter. Now, we are spending 1 billion $usd per year (or maybe 3) on that. Small compared to elective cosmetic surgery or several other things I might mention.

But if you're sure it ain't so, or if you'd rather not know, I'm cool with that. Just as happy to talk about your Prius.

 

Why would you call Lovelock the 'godfather' of global warming?
Perhaps father of the Gaia theory would be more appropriate?
I wouldn't put much weight behind his early statement on GW just as I wouldn't on his more recent ones.

More information at James Lovelock - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Lovelock has been a great source of stimulating ideas, such as Gaia. He has also been a leading scientist/engineer, having designed the first GC/MS to fly to Mars. The first quote above (science iterating twards truth) also resonates very deeply for me.

I would have no interest in 'dumping on' the man, or in assuming that his every assessment is pure truth. Truth is what we are all iterating towards. He is now strongly supporting fracking (for the UK at least), yet I would presume that he remains open to evidence and might revise that in the future. It depends on how he views the accumulating evidence, pro and con.

In other recent news, you can read a paper just out in Science by Melles et al. They looked at lake sediment cores from N. Russia and found paleo proxy evidence that several interglacials in the past 2 million years have been warmer than present. Neither the Milankovich forcing nor infrared absorptive gases seem to explain this, so they are considering large changes in ocean circulation. It sounds sensible to me, given that ocean weight (therefore heat storage) is some 1000x larger than the atmosphere.

This, in part, is what makes climate modeling/projections so hard to do. On 100 thousand year time scales, the ocean seems to be able to do whatever it wants. On 10-year time scales, you have the ENSO and PDO and AMO sloshing about, and making the (continually increasing) thermal forcing of IR gases look like a series of ups and downs for the (air) thermometers.

Through all of that, the climate modelers seem confident that they can predict usefully on 100-year time scales. The in-between, in other words. This confidence may be well placed, but for sure they have not convinced everybody. The biosphere and cryosphere seem to be telling the same story on 100-year time scales. Son, there it is. You can be convinced or not.

I just wish that we could view all this as iterating towards the truth, as Lovelock does. 'Believers and deniers' do not seem to me to be useful positions for the way forward.

 

When I first read the thread title, "... for Believers", I remembered a local article about Dr. John Christie. He had served as a missionary in Africa and in the local paper said efforts to limit or stop global warming would impact the poor in Africa worse than the warming. More recently, he had this to say to Congress:

One thing I know about engineering and hard science, we deal with facts and data so people can make informed decisions. We are not robots, we do have personal beliefs and ethics. But when it looks like personal beliefs, 'making energy more expensive, and thus have a negative impact on the economy' are part of their claim . . . it calls into question their ability to deal with objective reality . . . one that independent observers also see.

So when someone 'projects belief' on others it suggests objectivity, a search for reality, is not part of their being. Rather it is a symptom that this is not a dialog but a 'Spanish Inquistion' where the inquisitors are seeking heretics, witches, and warlocks . . . to burn at the stake. From the title of this thread, the heretics are those who find merit in CO[2] induced, global warming. And the only purpose is to draw attention away from empirical data.

Bob Wilson

 

Other than Lovelock is not the "godfather" of anything, he didn't lower a boom and there's no hysteria, just 20 years of solid climate science. So other than the hysterical headline writer getting all his facts wrong....there was that.

For the 20 years of science on global warming due to man made atmospheric changes you can get the facts and science here.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

 

I would like to nominate Svantes Arrhenius (1903 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry) as the Godfather of global warming. I have a copy of his 1898 paper where he discusses this. I am thinking his Nobel prize speech in 1903 was all about his concern about CO2 induced global warming.

According to Wikipedia (and I am not sure I agree with all of this):

I thought he was not the first person to say it, and I thought he was certainly concerned about possible negative consequences. I have to go back and read my papers of his.

 

Curious, I don't really care 'who' has any particular position as much as the data they cite. If it is credible and reproducible by independent observers, it moves up in respect. If it is incredible and not reproducible, it moves down. For example, the satellite microwave measurements: UAH satellite temperature dataset - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

What happened is a number of factor were found that led to the UAH data showing less warming. One of which was:

Source: Satellite temperature measurements - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Understand that any good scientist or engineer will admit a problem and Dr. John Christie did after various papers corrected the satellite data. This is how science and engineering works . . . not a 'belief' or 'personality' but putting everyone's egos below that of the facts and data. But that is not true for someone who chooses 'belief' over empiricism. Worse, like the inquisitors of old, they seek to root out heresy instead of doing what Galileo asked:

Source: Galileo affair - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The only 'believer' is the skeptic who lacking facts and data chooses to throw out personalities. The least effective argument to those who live in the fact based, empirical world.

Bob Wilson