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Global Warming

Started by Biggus Dickus, January 24, 2016, 05:47:43 AM

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Biggus Dickus

Parts of the US are getting hit with a massive blizzard right now, and the one consistent statement I've heard more than once today while discussing the storm with some conservative acquaintances is more or less the following:

"Well so much for global warming huh?"


It really goes something like this:

*SNOWS*
Conservative Friend: *leans in*
ME: Don't
F: *leans closer*
ME: Please
F: So...
ME: I'm begging you!
F: SO MUCH FOR GLOBAL WARMING HUH?




I wanted to say something in reply to them, you know how weather is what we see every day, how it explains changes in the atmosphere over short periods of time and is highly unpredictable such as sudden thunderstorm or blizzard.

And that climate on the other hand, describes the behavior of the atmosphere over long periods of time.

So even if it's snowing that doesn't mean our atmosphere isn't warming.

But what's the point, they won't listen, they have it in their minds that global warming is some liberal plot to destroy the church, take away their guns and supports gay marriage.

"Some people just need a high-five. In the face. With a chair."

Sandra Craft

I usually point out that I ate a sandwich today, and so did millions of other people, therefore hunger is a hoax.
Sandy

  

"Life is short, and it is up to you to make it sweet."  Sarah Louise Delany

Crow

Global warming can easily lead to colder regions. One of the hypothesis is that the northern and southern climates will actually get colder and it will get warmer near the equator. As those closer to the poles are heated by ocean currents and as the ice caps melt it introduces fresh water changing the constancy of ocean water and effects the currents. However this would happen much later on into a proposed climate model and there are many others.

Snow is caused by where the wind comes from, in the Northern hemesphere if the winds are northern you are going to get cold air if they are southern you are going to get warmer air. So far in the UK we have primarily had southern winds and has been very mild this winter except for a day or two when northern winds have creeped in.When Jonas hits the UK this week it is predicted to be more fucking rain due to its interaction with tropical winds.
Retired member.


OldGit

An ancient aunt of mine used to blame all bad weather on "the atomic in the air".  There would appear to be a real correlation here, yet everyone ignores it.  The Pastafarian theory linking global warming to the decline in the number of traditional pirates is, I think, also worth closer scientific investigation.

Davin

If I were a research person or bored enough, I'd conduct a search to see how many days a year that people say something stupid like, "so much for global warming." I'd like to see if the days per year that is said trends down or up.
Always question all authorities because the authority you don't question is the most dangerous... except me, never question me.

chimp3

I read a book called "The Whole Story of Climate" by E. Kirtsten Peters {an actual geologist, not a politician}. She outlines climate change in a way that neither the left or right politicians can. In short , geologists have found the last 500,000 years have been 100,000 year cycles of temperate peaks and then ice ages. Up ,down . We should be well on the way to another ice age. The last one had glaciers to the Kentucky border. Interestingly our decline to another ice age was stalled 5000 years ago by what many geologists believe was the advent of agriculture. As if our farming practices were creating the conditions necessary to keep farming. The graph shows a plateau in temperatures since then. Then 50 years ago the temperature spiked to a level not seen in 500,000 years and shows no sign of declining. She also states huge coal fires as a source of warming that can be extinguished right now with current technology. I was amazed at how numerous and huge some of these fires are. Some are visible from space. Here is link to her website" http://climatewholestory.com/climate-questions-and-answers/#graphic
I doubt it!

OldGit

I remember back in the sixties and seventies when all the experts were predicting doom due to global cooling.  They had all the evidence and they were quite sure - just like now.

I fear that the collapse of our modern civilisation will be brought about by several factors.  Possibly climate change will play a significant part, but it's not what's killing us just now.

Crow

Quote from: OldGit on March 02, 2016, 04:27:42 PM
I remember back in the sixties and seventies when all the experts were predicting doom due to global cooling.  They had all the evidence and they were quite sure - just like now.

I fear that the collapse of our modern civilisation will be brought about by several factors.  Possibly climate change will play a significant part, but it's not what's killing us just now.

Aye they would be the symptoms of diseases in part derived from affluence. i.e. diabetes, heart and lung diseases, strokes, certain types of cancers, etc. Idiocy such as drivers and people with weapons, etc.

Nothing will bring down modern civilisation in its current form it will just change into something different. Like it has always done. As Davin said in another thread sometimes people need to be beaten down to the extreme to make them realise they are the true ones with power. We assume this modern society is worth saving, it is not and just one form of society that will exist in the blip that is humanities existence. There is nothing to fear. Nothing to worry about.
Retired member.

jumbojak

Quote from: OldGit on March 02, 2016, 04:27:42 PM
I remember back in the sixties and seventies when all the experts were predicting doom due to global cooling.  They had all the evidence and they were quite sure - just like now.

That's not even close to being correct. It's a common argument against global warming today, but that doesn't mean there was anything approaching consensus regarding a cooling trend. The scientists who were, couchedly, making that prediction were basing their estimates on aerosol emissions and largely underestimated the impact of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses on global temperature.

The sixties were in fact the era when global warming finally started gaining widespread acceptance whereas before detractors had argued based on seriously flawed assumptions and poorly conducted experiments that CO2 couldn't possibly drive the global climate system.

Yes, there were media articles - like the often quoted Newsweek piece - that claimed we were in for an ice age, but the reporting was very poor just as it often is today. Those articles didn't dig very deeply and overlooked or ignored what scientists were actually saying in scientific publications.

"Amazing what chimney sweeping can teach us, no? Keep your fire hot and
your flue clean."  - Ecurb Noselrub

"I'd be incensed by your impudence were I not so impressed by your memory." - Siz

Recusant

Generally I agree with what jumbojak said.

According to a study of peer-reviewed papers on climate trends from the mid 60s through the 70s [PDF], while there were 7 papers published between 1965 and 1979 that predicted global cooling, there were 42 that predicted global warming, with the driving factor being increased CO2 in the atmosphere.

I too remember the "Coming Ice Age" thing that was in the media in the 70s, and remember during that period reading an evocative science fiction story about a small family surviving in a post-ice-age-apocalypse world, but it was media hype more than scientists that drove that narrative. Climate science has moved forward considerably since the 70s, and though the media have played a big part in bringing the world's attention to anthropogenic climate change, there is also a very strong scientific consensus regarding the issue.
"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration — courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth."
— H. L. Mencken


Bluenose

#11
I'm a skeptic by nature.  I considered the 70s cooling claims to be little more than media hype at the time, I was too young to have had any formed opinion during the 60s.

As for global warming I think that one issue is that the issue of the warming itself is too often conflated with anthropogenic warming.  From what I have been able to see, that there is warming seems well supported by the data, but the amount of warming actually experienced seems much less than the models seem to have predicted.  More on this later.  Whether the warming is human induced is less clear.  One of the problems is that many of the people put forward as "experts" in the field are often nothing of the sort.  For example, in Australia two of the most prominent people in the field have been Professor Ross Garnaut who was commissioned by the previous federal government to write a report on climate change and the other is Professor Tim Flannery former head of the Climate Commission, now the Climate Council, after it lost government funding.  Both of these gentlemen are highly qualified to talk in their respective fields,  Garnaut is an economist and his views on the likely effects of various warming scenarios on the economy are entirely reasonable.  Similalry for Flannery, a mammalogist and palaeontologist and quite well qualified to discuss the likely effects of warming on bio systems.

What neither of these gentlemen are qualified to express an opinion on, however, is the cause of the observed warming: in that area they are laymen.  This is a major problem that those who are concerned about warming need to address.  Many of the most outspoken people WRT global warming are not any more qualified to discuss the causes of it than any other reasonably well educated lay person.  There are precious few scientists who actually are properly qualified, such as atmospheric physicists.  Whatever their views on the matter may be, they are drowned out by the clamouring hoards.  It is a form of group think, no one wants to be seen as being out of step with what they see as the consensus of their contemporaries.  It's just easier to investigate, for example and in completely good faith, how global warming might effect some aspect or other of the natural world and produce completely valid results, but just take the issue of the cause of the warming as a given.  After all, how can, for example, a scientists working on some small freshwater fish in the Murray Darling Basin possibly asses the validity of anthropogenic warminig, but he can with authority talk about the effects of warming, whatever its cause.

I do not subscibe to the theory that there is some sort of conspiracy amongst the scientific community.  I know far too many scientists to fall for that one.  I do know, however, that scientists are subject to political pressure, both within their field and from outside (as in from politicians).  In my work on freshwater fish I have run into some quite nasty little cliques of people (scientists) who for ideological reasons actively work against conservation efferts that would for exampke result in widespread reintroduction of threatened native fish because they are being proposed by anglers and include the option of eventual limited consumptive access to the resource.  They prefer to have a much smaller populations in far more limited locations with an aim of somehow unwinding 200 years of European activity in this country.  It's insane.  They're actually working against their own stated aims.  I don't think they're being malicious, just majorly misguided and blinded by their ideology.  So I am not entirely sure that there are not pockets of people like these scientists amongst the climate science community.

Even if they are right, that the warming is anthropogenic, it is obvious that the levels of CO2 are not going to come down anytime soon.  We need to be doing far more about learning to adapt to the change rather than doing the King Canute thing.  The frantic way that many global warming eperts effectively shout down resonable objections causes me concern.  (Mind you, a large proportion of the objections are unreasonable, it's just that ALL objections arer treated the same way.)  Statement like "the science is settled" worry me a great deal.  Science is never settled.  Refusing to even consider that you may be wrong is a typical human characteristic, but one which scientists are supposed to be actively on the look out for and avoiding.

Which brings me to models.  I have had a fair amount of involvement in using population models in the management of freshwater fish re-introductions.  What became apparent to me was that the models actually only reflected the assumptions that were put into them.  They were being treated by the government fisheries managers as the last word in scientifically predicting likely outcomes.  As methods of capturing people's knowledge, or at least their opinions, these models work extremely well.  What they do not do is discover anything new.  A little reflection on this should make this seem obvious, but again it is a case of the scientists involved acting outside their areas of expertise.  They may be very knowledgeable about fish, but they are not mathematicians and so tend to believe what the model tells them as a sort of Deux ex machina, without realising that the model is simply reflecting back at them what they told the model.  They were convinced the model is right because, funnily enough, it agreed with them.  As science and human knowledge overall becomes more complex it is becoming more and more difficult for people to be accross a number of different disciplines. We are becoming a race of specialists with narrower specialties all the time.  Maybe we need "specialist" generalists to help us put it all together.

As for climate change, I am concerned that we are taking the wrong path.  That may well turn out to bite us on the behind.
+++ Divide by cucumber error: please reinstall universe and reboot.  +++

GNU Terry Pratchett


Crow

Quote from: Bluenose on March 03, 2016, 06:49:43 AM
As for climate change, I am concerned that we are taking the wrong path.  That may well turn out to bite us on the behind.

There was a model put together that if the planet populations stopped all use of electronics, manufacturing process, and transport whilst everything was recycled global warming would still continue at the same trajectory as already outlined as they aren't the primary causes. I don't have the time to find the study at the moment, will come back to it later unless someone is impatient and finds it them self. The study was on why is the focus by nations on petrol and energy consumption to reduce CO2 figures when they aren't the primary factors and highlighted it using multiple different climate models.
Retired member.