Arguments about climate change

To clarify; "Annex I Parties" = all the countries which have signed up to Kyoto, and 63.7% is the amount of emissions for which those countries are responsible as a percentage of all emissions globally?

If so, that is very good news indeed.

evercloserunion wrote:

To clarify; "Annex I Parties" = all the countries which have signed up to Kyoto, and 63.7% is the amount of emissions for which those countries are responsible as a percentage of all emissions globally?

If so, that is very good news indeed.

Annex I are the industrialised countries which have to cut their emissions, so yes. There are very few countries not in Kyoto now:

Monbiot's latest, in the Guardian yesterday, and here, with references, is pretty shocking.

The Guardian gave it the headline:
"The planet is now so vandalised that only total energy renewal can save us"

It is great to know that ye are still worried about warming. At the start of the Summer I was told on this site that the hurricane season was going to be horrible. Well it was the calmest ever. It was minus 7 degrees here the other night so if ye see any warming send it this way.

I posted above about an unexpected increase in methane. This, from the Monbiot article linked by Soubresauts, provides a possible explanation:

Quote :

Just a year ago the Intergovernmental Panel warned that the Arctic’s “late-summer sea ice is projected to disappear almost completely towards the end of the 21st century … in some models.”(3) But, as the new report by the Public Interest Research Centre (PIRC) shows, climate scientists are now predicting the end of late-summer sea ice within three to seven years. The trajectory of current melting plummets through the graphs like a meteorite falling to earth.

Forget the sodding polar bears: this is about all of us. As the ice disappears, the region becomes darker, which means that it absorbs more heat. A recent paper published in Geophysical Research Letters shows that the extra warming caused by disappearing sea ice penetrates 1500km inland, covering almost the entire region of continuous permafrost(4). Arctic permafrost contains twice as much carbon as the entire global atmosphere(5). It remains safe for as long as the ground stays frozen. But the melting has begun. Methane gushers are now gassing out of some places with such force that they keep the water open in Arctic lakes, through the winter(6).

The effects of melting permafrost are not incorporated into any global climate models. Runaway warming in the Arctic alone could flip the entire planet into a new climatic state. The Middle Climate could collapse faster and sooner than the grimmest forecasts proposed.

The article warrants reading in full. It could be that the current world recession might give us one last chance to avoid species collapse.

youngdan wrote:

It is great to know that ye are still worried about warming. At the start of the Summer I was told on this site that the hurricane season was going to be horrible. Well it was the calmest ever. It was minus 7 degrees here the other night so if ye see any warming send it this way.

Sure, you don't think it's real. We know, we know. Most of those countries are on target, and still nobody has had to pay a penny in "climate change taxes", or accept any restrictions on their civil liberties on its account - which differs hugely from either the "war on drugs" or the "war on terror"...you may need to rethink your conspiracy theories.

Also, for heaven's sake learn the difference between weather and climate, and why it is that an overall warming of the planet does not mean that you and everyone else will have warmer weather every day.

When I am told that the globe is warming then I expect tempertures to actually rise. Well I am waiting. As with the hurricane season, now we will see if the winter is milder than usual.

This guy who was named new OMB boss Orszag believes this warming stuff so I have no doubt the taxes are coming.

I said last year that the middle class are going to be wiped out and it looks like I am right. You will continue with your cheering for globalism even as Ireland is going down the drain.

We will see how things turn out here but there is no hope for Ireland as the people back there believe that the sea is going to rise hundreds of feet. I am waiting for that as well

youngdan wrote:

When I am told that the globe is warming then I expect tempertures to actually rise. Well I am waiting. As with the hurricane season, now we will see if the winter is milder than usual.

This guy who was named new OMB boss Orszag believes this warming stuff so I have no doubt the taxes are coming.

I said last year that the middle class are going to be wiped out and it looks like I am right. You will continue with your cheering for globalism even as Ireland is going down the drain.

We will see how things turn out here but there is no hope for Ireland as the people back there believe that the sea is going to rise hundreds of feet. I am waiting for that as well

Youngdan, last time we met on a thread like this I posted a pile of graphs and statistics that showed that warming has been going on for decades. One of the reasons Ireland had this toxic boom was that taxation was too low and people had too much disposable income and bad services. The rise in methane levels is not a good sign.

youngdan wrote:

When I am told that the globe is warming then I expect tempertures to actually rise. Well I am waiting. As with the hurricane season, now we will see if the winter is milder than usual.

This guy who was named new OMB boss Orszag believes this warming stuff so I have no doubt the taxes are coming.

I said last year that the middle class are going to be wiped out and it looks like I am right. You will continue with your cheering for globalism even as Ireland is going down the drain.

We will see how things turn out here but there is no hope for Ireland as the people back there believe that the sea is going to rise hundreds of feet. I am waiting for that as well

It is true that the cartoon version of "global warming" that you picture is not what's happening, if that's any comfort to you.

It's the "tipping point" theory ibis, is it ? The crystallisation of ice happens very quickly apparently and this might happen in the case of climate change - it is argued.

There must be some models as to how that might happen though and plenty of indicators that we should be looking at/for.

How soon would we know that this recession was affecting CO2 in the atmosphere though ? How often do they measure it ? Or are we looking at ocean temperature data or what ?

It is great comfort indeed. When I am scraping the ice off the windshield I will be thinking of ye.

BTW, Johnfas, those are beuutifull photos of the snow in England. When were they taken, last February I presume

youngdan wrote:

When I am scraping the ice off the windshield I will be thinking of ye.

It's time you took a vacation, Youngdan. You have a long weekend. Make it longer. Go to Africa. And keep your eyes open...

If I were to believe the tin foil people then Africa is coming to me.

Just checked outside, the ground is still frozen but I will keep my eyes open and if I see the thermometer rising I will let ye know.

Auditor #9 wrote:

It's the "tipping point" theory ibis, is it ? The crystallisation of ice happens very quickly apparently and this might happen in the case of climate change - it is argued.

It's more that it's a very large and very complex system. Our models of it, while not perfect, make it obvious that pumping more heat into the system doesn't simply warm the whole thing like it was a homogeneous piece of jelly. The Earth is a heat engine, and the heat of both sunlight and tectonism/radioactive decay is expressed through the circulation of the atmosphere and oceans, driving the evaporation of water and its precipitation.

If you add energy in the form of heat to the climate system, it doesn't simply get warmer, it also gets faster and more erratic - more extreme weather events, unusual heatwaves, unusual cold spells, drought, flood. Each bit of the global climate has multiple possible stable states, as does the climate overall. Adding energy allows the climate to flip between states more readily.

This is the normal state of climate:



It oscillates somewhat, because it's a system that incorporates its own feedback, and so it wobbles around a bit. In fact, if we were to look closely, we'd see that there's a number of micro-states it can be in - El Nino, La Nina, etc. Still, it's stuck in a particular wobbly loop.

Now, if we add energy to that system:



The wobble in the system grows - the uncertainty of what the system will do in response to its immediately previous state if you like. In the diagram, you can see that the climate now flips back and forth between two major patterns. So the system is now in a much bigger, and much more wobbly loop.

You can think of it as hitting a hoop to keep it spinning. It spins with a certain amount of wobble. Hit it harder, and the wobble increases.

Clearly, if we continued forcing the system even harder, it could flip over one of the two big peaks into a totally different climatic system altogether. The peaks (they're tipping points, in fact) are asymmetric, though - if we went over to Alternate Climate B, we'd have a hard time getting back again.

This is why youngdan's folksy cleverness about the weather being cold so completely misses the point. He still thinks it should all just get warmer, and that's not what climatic forcing does.

Auditor #9 wrote:

There must be some models as to how that might happen though and plenty of indicators that we should be looking at/for.

Yes, but unfortunately we're mostly finding out how bad things are just as they get bad.

Auditor #9 wrote:

How soon would we know that this recession was affecting CO2 in the atmosphere though ? How often do they measure it ? Or are we looking at ocean temperature data or what ?

It's continually monitored, both as atmospheric concentrations, and as output from polluting industries. The basics are pretty simple, though - if it takes X tons of CO2 to make Y tons of product, and factories are making half as much Y as a year ago, we can safely say there's less emissions.

Jesus Christ man, both myself and my rabbit are after getting hypnotised watching that red ball.

Has it gone from global warming to global wobbling

youngdan wrote:

Jesus Christ man, both myself and my rabbit are after getting hypnotised watching that red ball.

Has it gone from global warming to global wobbling

That's why it's called climate change.

Sorry about the red ball, though...!

If you are correct then we should see some changes soon as you clearly expect armageddan. All I have seen is stories about polar bears sweating their balls off as the ice melts. Good riddance to those pesky bastards anyway because they would ate ya alive. Then I pick up a newspaper and learn that we we are infested with these big white teddies and that there is more ice than ever for them to play in. This article is just from 2 days ago

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/11/23/do2310b.xml

youngdan wrote:

Jesus Christ man, both myself and my rabbit are after getting hypnotised watching that red ball.

Has it gone from global warming to global wobbling

For all his folksy cleverness does he have a point ? The 'analogy' you are using is just that - an analogy which is a bit of a problem for modelling climate with computer software is it not ? I'm picturing a spinning object like a sphere that is symmetric but put a little tilt in it and it spins out in a very different way - like pottery. Is that a fair or adequate analogy for something as complex as the global climate system though ?

Assuming it is, what really gets me is that there must be testable and verifiable predictions coming out of those models and theories but as you say we seem to be getting the phenomena as they occur. Now, maybe we don't want to find out what will happen if the level of CO2 reaches 600 ppm or more but we should be able to predict phenomena on the way down too as the level of CO2 drops with the recession. As you've said before, the problem is not the change but the rapidity and suitabliity of the change. There could be havoc on the way down if the theory is correct about CO2 levels in the atmosphere - couldn't there ?

youngdan wrote:

If you are correct then we should see some changes soon as you clearly expect armageddan. All I have seen is stories about polar bears sweating their balls off as the ice melts. Good riddance to those pesky bastards anyway because they would ate ya alive. Then I pick up a newspaper and learn that we we are infested with these big white teddies and that there is more ice than ever for them to play in. This article is just from 2 days ago

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/11/23/do2310b.xml

And also from the Telegraph.

Quote :

For all his folksy cleverness does he have a point ? The 'analogy' you are using is just that - an analogy which is a bit of a problem for modelling climate with computer software is it not ? I'm picturing a spinning object like a sphere that is symmetric but put a little tilt in it and it spins out in a very different way - like pottery. Is that a fair or adequate analogy for something as complex as the global climate system though ?

It's an analogy purely for explanation...real climate models are extremely sophisticated.

Quote :

Assuming it is, what really gets me is that there must be testable and verifiable predictions coming out of those models and theories but as you say we seem to be getting the phenomena as they occur. Now, maybe we don't want to find out what will happen if the level of CO2 reaches 600 ppm or more but we should be able to predict phenomena on the way down too as the level of CO2 drops with the recession. As you've said before, the problem is not the change but the rapidity and suitabliity of the change. There could be havoc on the way down if the theory is correct about CO2 levels in the atmosphere - couldn't there ?

We are able to predict the changes, and they are in line with expectations. What we have not put into the models are the "tipping points" , which is what I was referring to.

It's not so much that any particular climate is necessarily dreadful - all that Day After Tomorrow stuff is exactly the cinematic guff it appears to be. The problem is the instability. You can't plan agriculture for a country when you have no idea what the climate will be in the medium term. You build up a position as a beef and dairy exporter, say, and then the climate changes - our agriculture is based on a cool wet climate with mild winters. Freezing winters or hot dry summers would be a problem for us - beef farming could become marginal rather than entirely suited, and the farmers would have to go over to something else. Unfortunately, that might be something that our soils are entirely unsuited for - or simply something that our farmers have no experience of. And so on - transport systems, sewage disposal, our drains, roads, houses, trains, farms, are all suited for our current climate. We could cope with a slow natural change to something else, but not with rapid and unpredictable swings.

Instabilities in agriculture obviously feed into the rest of the world economy, which is where the doomsday scenarios come in...

It is only a matter of time till you decide that climate change is bringing in a new ice age.

If global warming is such a crisis then when exactly is it going to get warm.

We have had numerous ice ages and nobody is asking what caused them. Maybe it was methane from buffalos. Cactus is worried about methane. Why do you think they decided to call the planet Uranus by that name.

It would not surprise me if Al Gore said that warming is not happening due to the recession that is a few months old.

So the models predict very broad changes such as more precipitation in the North Atlantic or somthing like that ? I'd love to know how accurate those models are because the system is so complex and there are so many variables and all, that just getting some unknown not included can surely make it all go wrong.

Now I'd say there are tolerances for any variable which might not be 100% accurate but wouldn't necessarily mean it's wrong either. How reliable can these tolerances be though as compared to natural effects ?

Say if the model predicts 1000mm rainfall at 500 ppm CO2 and 1500 mm at 600 then how do we know it's not atrributed to natural causes ? Also, there must be some climate effects coming out of the sudden reduction in CO2 that is happening now - wouldn't this be a real test of a climate model now ?

youngdan wrote:

It is only a matter of time till you decide that climate change is bringing in a new ice age.

If global warming is such a crisis then when exactly is it going to get warm.

We have had numerous ice ages and nobody is asking what caused them.

Well, no, they have been extensively studied, obviously. And sure, that's theoretically an option, because one of the stable climates is an ice age climate. However, it's not really a possibility - instead, we appear to have interrupted the natural trend towards another ice age - we're actually in an interglacial.

youngdan wrote:

Maybe it was methane from buffalos. Cactus is worried about methane. Why do you think they decided to call the planet Uranus by that name.

Now you're just being farcetious.

youngdan wrote:

It would not surprise me if Al Gore said that warming is not happening due to the recession that is a few months old.

And who would care? Al Gore didn't invent this one either.

Auditor #9 wrote:

So the models predict very broad changes such as more precipitation in the North Atlantic or somthing like that ? I'd love to know how accurate those models are because the system is so complex and there are so many variables and all, that just getting some unknown not included can surely make it all go wrong.

At any given time, there are hundreds or thousands of climate models being run, with different assumptions, different variables included or excluded, different starting conditions. The climate predictions that show up in the IPCC reports or the press are aggregates of hundreds of runs of hundreds of models. So what we actually have is a broad central area of probable predictions - the ones that show up in model after model, and outliers getting increasingly less agreed on. The predictions that are used in planning are the ones that are broadly agreed on by all the models. So the individual models may predict very detailed effects, but the aggregate of all the models blurs things. That's not to say there may be one model that's 100% accurate, but we don't know which one it is.

The reason, in turn, for all the climate change research is to identify which variables are important, which causes, which effects. However, even if they're uncertain, they can be built into speculative models.

Auditor #9 wrote:

Now I'd say there are tolerances for any variable which might not be 100% accurate but wouldn't necessarily mean it's wrong either. How reliable can these tolerances be though as compared to natural effects ? Say if the model predicts 1000mm rainfall at 500 ppm CO2 and 1500 mm at 600 then how do we know it's not atrributed to natural causes ?

It's all natural causes! However, see above - the aggregation of models irons out the effects of specific variables, and only what shows up in the majority of models gets used.

Auditor #9 wrote:

Also, there must be some climate effects coming out of the sudden reduction in CO2 that is happening now - wouldn't this be a real test of a climate model now ?

There's no reduction in CO2 happening - there's a reduction in the rate of increase.

ibis wrote:

Auditor #9 wrote:

Also, there must be some climate effects coming out of the sudden reduction in CO2 that is happening now - wouldn't this be a real test of a climate model now ?

There's no reduction in CO2 happening - there's a reduction in the rate of increase.

Sorry yes that's what I meant. The level that's an equilibrium for us should be what - 350 ppm or something ? And now it's approaching 550 ppm... ?

If CO2 were to be reducing then we'd have to kill off all the plant and animal life and more first no ? Are there notable effects of a slowdown in the rate of increase that you know of though ?

Nobody wants to know poor Al anymore because a bigger phoney than he, never existed until Obama. You say he is not a scientist but you ignore the fact that James Hansen is his scientific brain. According to this article Hansen will be part of the administration and Gore could be climate czar. The fact that Gore is making millions will be ignored.

We will see if Obama can sucker the Amerians with this warming. He has said that he will destroy the coal industry. Of course nobody with mention the number of coal stations opening in China.

Ya, people will believe anything even as they starve

http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/6531