Does the controversy surrounding climate change bother you?

There are exceptions to every rule. In agrarian societies many children allowed farmers to do more work using chldren, and reap a bigger harvest potentially. The trouble came in times of bad harvests,, more mouths to feed meant less for at least some.

 

Mostly good stuff here. Usually the trolls shit everywhere and the stink drives me out. Apologies in advance for the digressions.

Regarding the dinosaurs - the most widely-held model is a catastrophic impact 65M years ago that caused the death of most dinosaurs (excepting some birds that have evolved into our current avian assemblage) and a whole bunch of other unrelated species - let's say 90%+ in round numbers. The rest of the dinosaurs lived the kind of lives and deaths that contemporaneous animals live, some eat; some get eaten, some live short brutal lives (maybe including starvation); others live a long time, have many offspring and die from age-related problems. Dinosaurs were the dominant terrestrial vertebrates for 135 million years, from the beginning of the Jurassic (about 200 million years ago) until the end of the Cretaceous (65.5 million years ago). Most did NOT starve to death. more:Dinosaur - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Also, having 7M+ people the planet also has the effect of increasing the number of highly-educated problem-solvers that drive technology. Don't get me wrong - I think people are a plague on the planet, but more brains leads to more solutions to global problems. I am cautiously optimistic.

I had to respond - the Tapatalk notification on my phone was going nuts
Schlem

 

I'm a supporter of sustainable actions rather than total inaction. However, the one constant of population growth has consistently been the impressive transition to much smaller families that occur with a change to a meaningful standard of living. Meaningful being decent reduction of infant mortality (e.g. malaria prevention), removal of oppression of women (access to school), and a life free of warlords determining a villages fate. So while a direct application of child management seems to be easily imagined, the direct reality of changing the planets population may actually be by more efforts helping each other rather than trying to manage reproduction via master plans.

 

Inexactitude is not the same thing as a flaw. All models are approximations. A fatal flaw in a model is generally an incorrect assumption. Digitization limits don't count.

Your statement that something needs to be done is premised on the idea that anthropogenic global warming exists and is due to CO2 emissions. That understanding is based solely on computer models. Therefore the correctness of the models is not only germaine, but central to the discussion.

 

Sometimes I'm unsuccessful trying to respond to multiple posters with one response. That's the case here. That was an honest question and not an implied motive to anyone. Sometimes the answers I not what I expect, hence the reason for asking some questions that are rather skewed. Other times direct questions are needed to figure out what thought process is occurring for some posts. In no case is there anything other than exchanges of viewpoints desired on my end.

The population of many (not all) modern societies is slightly negative or very close to zero. Why? Can it be replicated in other populations? So far the answer is that education, freedom from oppression, and taking good care of children apparently change the culture to have fewer children so they can have a better future. That seems like a gift we should make full use of.

 

Science has always been a liberal conspiracy, always will be.

 

Does uncontrolled dumping of CO2 exist? Can you name one area where dumping all of our industrial waste products into the environment had no effect? What is the limit on how high the CO2 levels can go before there is ANY measurable effect on climate? (We have a lot of buried carbon yet to burn)

Did CFC dumping have any effect on the Ozone Layer? Why do cars have emissions controls? Why do we have water treatment plants?

I can obviously go on all day long. What should be clear is that most folks know the answer to all the questions about all the pollutants other than CO2. For some reason, CO2 is considered by many to be perfectly balanced even if we burn up every last drop of oil and nugget of coal into the atmosphere? I think it is worth the effort to find out the real answer.

 

Way back Corwyn @46
I would completely agree that human populations probably rose 'as high as they could' in the hunting and gathering times. That they rose again after settled agriculture. Looks like they were still increasing (not yet carrying capacity) when we moved to 'phase 3' and began to get vastly more energy from fossil carbon than we had previously been from burning trees and spinning waterwheels and rendering whale blubber (all of those energy forms being derived from proximal solar inputs).

But now in fossil-fuel era, it seems impossible to apply the classical ecological notion of carrying capacity. That was based on any species' population coming into equilibrium with the rate of its local supply of resources. (Do the experiment well and you get a logistic curve, which includes phases that look very much like positive and negative exponentials).

But a wider perspective must be used to describe human population dynamics now. Fueled by fossil C, we can mine the minerals, mine the surface waters, and mine the aquifers. No other species (excepting diseases) could stand in our way. There is a fundamental decision to be made: continue on this path which heads in the direction of 'take everything'?

The entire field of 'ecosystem services' developed as an attempt to define what we could take, given that we still fail to realize benefits to us that accrue from what we don't take. As I've said before the ecosystem services that seem most directly connected to climate (change) are the persistent sinking of half the fossil CO2 emitted, terrestrial and marine.

It is certainly possible that we can continue to take and burn for more decades, and not grow ourselves to a level where ecosystem services fail us. I do not believe that we understand the earth system well enough to say it will go south in a particular decade.

Surely you can find voices that we are already over the cliff, and others that we can continue to innovate (and take and burn) endlessly into the future. Both such views may resonate more with others than they do for me.

Ol' stuck in the middle here. It is already clear that we are changing things (some of them massively). Fresh water supply is about maxed, and it is inconvenient (to say the least!) that agriculture and fossil-C burning compete so strongly for water. Move the rain around (via climate change in ways that Aigou Dai suggests we have already begun to do) and both of those enterprises are located in the wrong places. This seems an extremely serious matter! I could list others, or you could look for other moderate voices suggesting that there are are others.

Back to the OP, climate change is part of earth system science, but not the whole thing. Climate change is controversial because responding to it strongly would require us to make big reductions in fossil-C consumption rates. You ask the world's largest industry to 'knock it off' and among the (polite) responses you will get is 'that's controversial'. I hope that we don't have to say knock it off, because they are not really interested and will tell you that the survival and progress of the Earth's 7B+ depend on fossil C.

I argued above that this is a true statement. But also, that it is an incomplete statement. We depend on those other (unmonetized) services as well, and the more and richer we all are, the more we will depend on ecosystem services.

If you believe in an infinitude of ecosystem services, I doubt that I could dissuade you by typing words here Your better choice would be to read a lot of publications related to the topic. PC participants appear to have more pressing matters in their lives

Or, save yourselves some time. Support the most rapid possible expansion of energy conservation measures that present negative costs. Seems obvious and non-controversial. Support programs and further research on increasing the sequestration of excess CO2 being added now to the atmosphere. Now, these have some costs, and it has been published how many petagrams per year we could store if CO2 emissions were valued at $10, $20, $30 per ton and so forth. Boils down to governmental policies, so back you are at controversy.

Here we have also touched on population control and (briefly) on food waste and food distribution technology. These are important matters as well. But the point is, we are headed somewhere. No species on earth has ever done anything like it before. Dinosaurs ruled the joint from about -220 million to -65 million years, but they did it differently. They just ate plants and each other. We eat EVERYTHING (even rocks!).

 

The same methodology that I used after buying a "controversial" Prius which is the same methodology I have used through out my life:

• Seek empirical data
• Do your own work
• Make a model
• Perform the experiment
• Share the results for review
• <repeat>

Bob Wilson

 

Thanks for bringing it back home Bob. But we both know that Prius is just a little thing and there are bigger ones on the table here. Shall we smarty-pants tell everybody else what to do? I'm agin it.

 

No, it's not. CO2 emissions are correlated with actual release of CO2 into the atmosphere that we can compute from tracking the amount of fossil fuels we burn. There is a very close match. No computer model needed there. That CO2 absorbs radiation in the infrared range can be, and has been determined empirically in the lab. No need for computer model there. So we are left with wondering what that increased energy in the atmosphere is going to do. It can't do nothing, the laws of physics prohibit that (no computer model needed). If we want to know the exact consequences that is where we need computer models. But driving a car with blacked-out windows at an ever accelerating pace in unknown terrain, and complaining that the guy trying scrape a bit of paint off and see what's ahead is getting an imperfect picture and should be ignored, a while pushing harder on the accelerator, can't really be considered the path of wisdom. And complaining about the cost of paint scrapers is just lunacy.

Thus we can see another indicator of deniers. If one is petitioning for LESS science on what one sees as an important question, one is in the camp of deniers.

 

just think if every adult in china and india bought a prius. Gas prices would soar, ghg would drastically increase.

There is a major problem with running the experiment of no reduction in growth of ghg world wide, then deciding on results. We only have one earth and no reset button. When the first people in the Americas hunted most of the big animals to extinction, there was no way to bring back the giant sloth, etc. Well maybe if we have some dna preserved and a cloning machine. hmm.

We can seek the best empirical data. Most don't have the tools to do their own work, but we can crowd source this.

 

Climate/CO2 wise, the issue of 'how fast we need to do it and what happens if we don't'? has been re-addressed by Davis et al., Environmental Research Letters
doi:10.1088/1748-9326/8/1/011001

I got my copy from the authors, but it is 'open access' so y'all should be able to use the front door.

This is an update of Pacala and Socolow's 2004 'wedges' in Science. The current authors use mainstream predictions for climate/CO2, and remind us that not much has happened (it terms of toning it down) in the previous 8 years. So, there are now more wedges.

Do a lot, a little, or nothing. Wait for other govts to take action first, or lead. Affinity websites stand ready to offer solutions, including inaction and full-on decarbonization. Select your favorite, but please, base that on something.

 

There's a big difference between having no effect - all interactions have some effect - and having a disastrous effect.

Excellent question - the answer is that I have no idea - that might be a good point to research, I have repeatedly suggested it.

Possibly. Measurements were not taken over a long enough period to be certain. That is aside from the point that it is irrelevant to this discussion.

First answer would be politics. Secondly, again, it is irrelevant. The issue of whether air quality within small areas can be adversely effected is not what we are discussing. Nor is there any doubt that it is possible for toxic effluents to have deleterious effects on health. The current discussion is whether human release of CO2 is causing a climatic disaster.

To have clean water. [see above comments about toxicity] If you are talking about industrial waste treatment, nobody questions that heavy metals, organic halogen compounds, etc. are really nasty for biological systems - and what does that have to do with the current discussion? If you are talking about civic waste treatment, the primary reason for having them is to reduce the spread of disease organisms rather than the removal of toxic compounds. I will admit that Lake Erie is far prettier now than it was in the 1970s. Interestingly, though, that probably has more to do with the spread of the zebra mussel than legal requirements - but, once again, that is a different story an has nothing to do with CO2.

I have no objection to finding out answers. I have a problem with people who want to spend trillions of dollars before we know what we are doing. Do you remember what the discussion was that lead to the government passing diesel particulate regulations? It was that the release of small particulates by power plants and diesel engines was going to cause an ice age. Mind you, it turns out that reducing particulates is a good thing - I am just amused that the reasons given for doing so were so totally wrong. But it was based on computer models... and that was my point. Current computer models on climate are all fatally flawed. All of them are using the same, incorrect, value for the insulative effect of CO2. This value was not available when the models were developed - and funded - but it has since been measured by scientists at MIT. Unfortunately, when you plug the correct value into the models - anthropogenic global warming disappears.
Then there are the problems with how the data has been manipulated, oops, I mean corrected, to fit the predictions rather than the other way around.

Finally, I would make the point that, like particulates, there are scientifically sound reasons why reducing CO2 emissions might be a good idea, but the science and the real issues are lost in the fud raised by people with preconceived notions, agendas having nothing to do with the issue under discussion, politics and money.

 

So why don't the computer models use the value found in the lab? They are still using a value that was an estimate and turns out to be around 6 times the measured value. And thus we see another indicator of warmists... (That is irony based on your comment below.) I think it would be more useful to discuss the issues rather than attempt an ad hominum argument based on unfounded assumptions.

If you want exact consequences you cannot use computer models. Models, by their very nature are inexact. This misunderstanding about models is why six Italian seismologists are in prison right now.

 

Where did you get the impression that they don't?

Cite?

If you want completely wild guesses, you use anything else. There is NO exact method for determining climate. Which is why we use models. They are orders of magnitude better than anything else. If you personally know of anyway to improve those models (or a substitute for them), and PROVE your case, you are doing the world and your cause a great disservice by not making it public. You could earn MILLIONS.

 

While not precisely the point I'm trying to make, a paper that is illustrative of the problems is Remote Sens. 2011, 3, 1603-1613; doi:10.3390/rs3081603

Nonsense. There are a number of known ways to improve the models - they're not being used, nor do I expect them to be for at least another 10 years.

 

I don't remember that, or don't even know if it is true, but lets go with it.

Agree absolutely that spending money not knowing what we are doing is bad. The cap and trade legislation proposed by the house seemed to be fairly cheap, but looks like it would have been ineffective to reduce ghg emissions. It mainly would have transferred money from the american people to certain corporations to do things they may have done otherwise, or perhaps to do questionable things like build more nuclear power plants.

We do have alternatives to that though. You must agree that pushing out loads of NOx, SO2, mercury and particulates are unhealthy. Natural gas looks much less risky than coal. Government regulation to remove grandfathering and tighten air quality controls would speed closing of the most polluting plants, and ensure that new coal plants are much cleaner and less unhealthy than the old ones we are running now. The switch to natural gas is reducing unhealthy pollution at a low cost and at the same time reduce ghg. Similarly too much natural gas use may push up its price in the future, building renewables like wind reduces that risk. This requires only the small subsidy already in the law, and local utility regulators allowing customers the choice of wind. In the next decade solar may become much less expensive and further reduce natural gas use.

On the reducing oil use the costs are much higher, although the cost of using as much as we are is quite risky. This involves the cafe standards and encouragement for plug-in development already in place. Movement may be too slow though, and an oil tax maybe necessary.

I don't know of any computer models that showed global cooling, but that must have been a very bad model indeed. Since my cousin is involved in one of the MIT models, I'm sure he would have told me about AGW disapearing, and he has not. If you point me to that article, I'm sure I can help you out on what is wrong.

The physics is pretty straightforward on AGW. There is a warming proportional to the log of ghg concentration. The factor is argued about because of feedback but is generally agreed to be between 2-4.5 degrees C for a doubling of concentration. The latest paper I read said 2.2, the IPCC uses 3, which means you may have read that the AGW component was smaller than IPCC suggested at their last publishing, but it still is within the range they talked about.

 

Nonsense. If you knew of any way to improve those models you would be consulting for large oil companies making a fortune.

 

And how does one find out whether there is minimal effect or disastrous effect before it happens? As far as I know having a wide variety of models and continually comparing their performance is one very good approach. Examining historical evidence for similar cycles and conditions is another (e.g. ice cores).

You claim that there are fatal flaws in ALL the models showing climate effects due to faulty assumption(s). One big problem I have. What is the criteria for deciding if the fault is fatal or not? Whenever it's due to anyone's claim then alarms should go off. This needs to be handled as science. The criteria should be disciplined scientific investigation, not individual claims, not group claims, not institutional claims. What is the real science (not handwaving descriptions) for this "fatal flaw". Do you understand it or are you depending on someone else to defend it for you?

Same response, how does one research it? I'm back to the same point above. How would a model checking for an effect be any different than a model determining the magnitude range of the effect?

Measurements of what? It has been proven completely that CFCs degrade Ozone at a significant rate. What more is needed? If basic chemistry proof is not enough, what is? Or is the measurement of high UV intensity on the environment the measurement you are talking about? I'll agree that subjecting huge ecosystems of animals and plants to extended high UV exposure expected with massive Ozone depletions has not been done. Is that actually needed? I can just as easily shift to an Acid Rain example if "measurable effects" is the hangup.

Also - Why would it not be relevant to the discussion? ALL our pollution problem start with unconstrained dumping waste products till the resulting problems became greater than the benefit of dumping, sometimes vastly greater.

"The answer is politics.....but car emissions are toxic." Huh? (Your answer seems to reverse cause and effect yet I know that is not what you intended.) I see it as relevant simply because as cars were promoted, nobody really bothered with the toxic emissions issue until it was clogging lungs. Now it is completely understood why we have emissions controls. Politics came after the clogged lungs.

Is our unconstrained dumping of CO2 based on proof that there is no effect or insufficient proof of effect? That is exactly the issue. Do we always have to wait for sufficient damage to accumulate before acting?

Hopefully, you can see why this example has everything to do with how we handle pollution....let's wait till sufficient damage has occurred to spur us to action. I would just add that the solutions to all of the above were far, far easier to implement than all opponents claimed.....and by a rather wide margin.

The big picture theme is denial of any "significant" adverse effects of pollution seem to be rather consistent in nearly everything we dumped in an unconstrained manner. Between the start of the dumping and the application of dumping constraints, there was a "it's not that big of a problem", soon augmented with "it will cost us way too much" finally followed up with "why didn't we start earlier?" Guess where we are on the unconstrained dumping of our primary combustion product.

(Humor here) Sydney Bremmer had a recent quote about resistance to change in science. "Often there is great resistance to the new wave, but as Max Planck pointed out, it succeeds because the opponents grow old and die. The process is then repeated: The radicals become liberals, the liberals become conservatives, the conservatives become reactionaries, and the reactionaries disappear." Maybe I should wait this out as he advises, but since I don't want to become a reactionary, I'll continue to express my viewpoint.

I also have a problem with panic responses to an issue that requires a lot of coordination, planning, and education. Especially an issue that can inflict severe economic destruction if run by politicians only concerned with political agendas. Science is (and should be) quite separate from policy. However, both are fully manipulated by both sides with economic agendas. Unlike this thread, we probably have lots of points of agreement on those topics. By the way, I was in elementary school when the return of the Ice Ages was covered. That was speculation based on pure periodicity of ice age cycles. Stating that it was the group consensus of the (extremely small) contingent of climate scientist at the time is really misleading....but makes for a great talking point.

Now your "fatal flaw" of CO2 having insulative effects different from every model is just not true. That is one of the fantastic advantages of correlating earth climate history with CO2 levels over the planets history. That correlation is solid, so ignoring that large volume of independent results for one investigator's claimed result is not science, it is ignoring science for a desired result. This is not a claim that models are perfect. It is a claim that the models are useful tools, not misleading tools.....and they are always compared to the latest knowledge for validation and improvement.

Again, agreement on agendas. There are a lot of actors (including some scientists) who cannot resist becoming the "spokesman" on what the future holds. Note that it's the most extreme "spokesmen" that get the most attention. That's a different thread.

In the meantime, the frantic search for the silver bullet showing all modern climate models have fatal flaws will pushed by many. This hope driven by the knowledge that all the unconstrained dumping of all CO2 was not a problem when the dumping started, so why should it become one.