An inconvenient truth

[furryfrog]

OK guys, let's try a COMPLETELY different approach... please, bear with me. Let's assume the following:
a. Man has had little/no impact on climate change
b. Climate change is just a natural part of the Earth's climate cycle (I actually believe this to some extent)

OK, now do "most" of you agree that if you melt ice, you get water?

Question: Even if global climate change is "normal", do you want Louisville, Kentucky to be a coastal city? (not picking on any one city) If water level goes up, low lying land will be under water.

There are many "scientists" going with option B, until there is more evidence. Lots of scientists go with A it seems, They also make more money going with option A. I'm not going to claim which option is objectively correct, lol.My personal opinion is option B though.

I live on the coast and was worried about rising sea levels for years. I was taught in school that sea levels would rise 20 feet by the year 2010.
Going at it the other way, food for thought. There are scientists predicting a mini ice age soon. This concerns me more than "warming" because there is evidence that it can onset rapidly, food production and crop losses could occur, and people would wish they had more natural gas/ coal fired greenhouses. In Canada our growing season is much shorter than that of our southern neighbors.

 

[Jcharger]

I am surprised by the 20 foot by 2010, but am guessing this was related to someone misreading the question that existed when we were in school which was whether the ice caps (on Greenland and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet) could collapse. Collapsing would mean slide off the continents by processes such as ice streams. When I was in school we went through an exercise to map out coastlines with contributions from the various ice sheets and then were asked to discuss how what policy we might consider for two scenarios. One scenario had the ice sheets melting without collapse which would take hundreds if not thousands of years. The other had collapse and an arbitrary timeline of 100 years was chosen. I have no idea how realistic that last one was. My guess is you got someone who took he latter model and made the 20 foot prediction.

There are bigger issues with climate change than us simply adapting. Food production can be strongly impacted. Water as well. It stresses the system. The impact is societal stress. My opinion is that we want to know as much as possible about it (on a global level). The IPCC has very well trained scientists who speak for the community. They are not trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes. The data are available and alternative possibilities considered. That is the nature of science. The evidence leads.

And I do not deny that things like the end of the little ice age resulted in natural retreat of glaciers, just that evidence suggests change now and that it is due to our activities.

 

[furryfrog]

I am surprised by the 20 foot by 2010, but am guessing this was related to someone misreading the question that existed when we were in school which was whether the ice caps (on Greenland and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet) could collapse. Collapsing would mean slide off the continents by processes such as ice streams. When I was in school we went through an exercise to map out coastlines with contributions from the various ice sheets and then were asked to discuss how what policy we might consider for two scenarios. One scenario had the ice sheets melting without collapse which would take hundreds if not thousands of years. The other had collapse and an arbitrary timeline of 100 years was chosen. I have no idea how realistic that last one was. My guess is you got someone who took he latter model and made the 20 foot prediction.

There are bigger issues with climate change than us simply adapting. Food production can be strongly impacted. Water as well. It stresses the system. The impact is societal stress. My opinion is that we want to know as much as possible about it (on a global level). The IPCC has very well trained scientists who speak for the community. They are not trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes. The data are available and alternative possibilities considered. That is the nature of science. The evidence leads.

And I do not deny that things like the end of the little ice age resulted in natural retreat of glaciers, just that evidence suggests change now and that it is due to our activities.

Interesting about the depth of your studies on the ice shelf in school. Your probably a bit younger than I. My recollection of what I was told in school about the prediction was based on the melting of glaciers and ice caps, fear mongering I guess, train the little kids to be scared. Perhaps it was an article a teacher read or something, we were taught to be passionate environmentalist in my school, what they did not teach us about were psychopaths and character disturbed personalities.
I love the environment, up here in canada were being taxed for carbon based on a hypothesis, and we have all these other environmental issues being ignored, like old toxic mine sites, untreated sewage ect. Also our economy up here is being badly hurt by all these "religious" environmentalists.
I'm not saying your global warmest opinion is wrong, but the IPCC is very fraudulent and full of holes. There are lots of scientists on both sides of the isle not affiliated with the IPCC. Dont take what the IPCC says as gods truth, and fall into the group think trap. Many credible scientists left the IPCC years ago in disgust, but the IPCC still leaves the names on the roster and won't take them off. Judith Curry herself said she fell into the group think trap.

 

[Jcharger]

By the way, I don't doubt that you were taught the fact about sea level rise. Fear mongering in school, like that does no one any good.

I think there are still credible scientists left with the IPCC, but its purpose has changing to focus more on policy. For the science, a key issue is that hypotheses and data need to be described in terms of accurate confidence levels, the probability that some conclusion is valid. This lets people make informed decisions using that information. Cheers.

 

[69hemibeep]

Largest money grab the world has ever seen. Should we trash the earth? No. Al Gore said years ago the ice caps would be gone by now and all the models being used today and in the past are loaded with tweeked numbers.

 

[Richard Cranium]

I am surprised by the 20 foot by 2010, but am guessing this was related to someone misreading the question that existed when we were in school which was whether the ice caps (on Greenland and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet) could collapse. Collapsing would mean slide off the continents by processes such as ice streams. When I was in school we went through an exercise to map out coastlines with contributions from the various ice sheets and then were asked to discuss how what policy we might consider for two scenarios. One scenario had the ice sheets melting without collapse which would take hundreds if not thousands of years. The other had collapse and an arbitrary timeline of 100 years was chosen. I have no idea how realistic that last one was. My guess is you got someone who took he latter model and made the 20 foot prediction.

There are bigger issues with climate change than us simply adapting. Food production can be strongly impacted. Water as well. It stresses the system. The impact is societal stress. My opinion is that we want to know as much as possible about it (on a global level). The IPCC has very well trained scientists who speak for the community. They are not trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes. The data are available and alternative possibilities considered. That is the nature of science. The evidence leads.

And I do not deny that things like the end of the little ice age resulted in natural retreat of glaciers, just that evidence suggests change now and that it is due to our activities.

If you were taught climate change in school, I suspect that you are younger than me. When I was in school in the 60's & 70's climate change was not taught, however, when i was in grammar school, the news was filled with stories that pollution was going to be so bad that the sky would turn dark. In the 1970's, we were told of the coming of another ice age.

When that didn't happen, the next scare was acid raid...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/larryb...arming-hysteria-is-pouring-down/#1c7b205053fc

When that didn't happen, the next scare was the hole in the ozone layer, which was going to fry everything on earth and humans would all die of cancer.....

https://www.heritage.org/environment/commentary/ozone-the-hole-truth

And when that didn't happen, everyone moved on to "global warming". Remember images of starving polar bears and polar bears falling into the water because there was no more ice?

Oceans were going to rise, "extreme weather events" were going to get worse, the coastlines were going to be underwater & it was nothing but doom and gloom. But then a funny thing happened, the apocalypse didn't happen and it was discovered that some of these scientists were fudging their data. Remember "climategate" from the last decade?

"In November 2009, over 1,000 private emails between climate change scientists were stolen and published online. The uproar that followed briefly shook the public's faith in global warming science, and prompted investigations that debunked sceptics' allegations that the mails showed the planet wasn't warming."

Once that controversy died down, "global warming" morphed into "climate change" where every extreme weather event was blamed on man ruining the environment. Of course the only way to stop all this is by imposing taxes and lots of regulations which which cost more money.

Check out all this doom and gloom.....



http://wafflesatnoon.com/good-morning-america-2008-predictions-for-2015/

We've even been told that we were going to run out of oil in 2011 and that didn't happen.



What I look at are the major players in all of this who I call climate pimps. These very wealthy people live extravagant lifestyles and their yearly carbon footprints are larger in in one year than many of us put together. Their "environmental sins" are discounted because they more than we do. They offset their extravagances by buying/trading carbon credits, so that's ok.....for them. One former presidential candidate who is one of the biggest proponents of climate change recently spent 300 grand on private jets, but that's ok because he cares.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/39054/not-so-green-bernie-sanders-spent-300000-one-month-joseph-curl

"Carbon offsets" make it ok with him, but do you know what a carbon offset is? I certainly don't, but it sounds lucrative. Maybe I should start up my own business and call it "Honest Richard's Carbon Credit Company".

Back to numbers being fudged, it appears that it's still happening today, but you don't see that being reported on by major news organizations. Why is that?

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ea...data-is-the-biggest-science-scandal-ever.html

https://science.house.gov/news/pres...nfirms-colleagues-manipulated-climate-records

Facts have been documented that through the centuries, several ancient civilizations have come and gone due to climate change which cannot be blamed by humans....

https://climate.nasa.gov/news/1010/climate-change-and-the-rise-and-fall-of-civilizations/

https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/c...t-civilizations-were-destroyed-climate-change

Some are quick to blame the recent fires in California on climate change, when in reality, CA has droughts all the time & it could very well be that these fires were caused by man. However, It's a fact that there are more trees today than there were 150 years ago and more trees mean that there are more dead trees, which are just kindling for wildfires. More logging is needed and firebreaks must be created to prevent future fires. I don't mean to turn this political, but bad political decisions do have consequences. You also have these rabid environmentalists would rather see thousands of homes go up in flames than to cut a single tree down....

https://www.ijpr.org/post/politifac...ildfire-legislation-and-criticism-it#stream/0

The bottom line is that I do believe that man contributes "issues" in the environment, but not to the extent that these climate pimps and climate alarmists claim. The sun and Mother nature have a far greater role on our weather than man does. While man does rely heavily on gas and oil today, no one knows what future technology will be invented in 50, 100, 150 years from now that will replace oil and gas. I've seen a lot of climate BS in my 59 years and one thing that all of these dire predictions have in common is that none of them have come true. This is why I am skeptical.

 

[PurpleBeeper]

That post was not in response to you purple. Corbett looks at many issues, that are "popular" He doesn't think the earth is flat by the way. The documentary about WW1 is very interesting also.
So as a scientist, what do you think of the "data" The IPCC uses ( and Al Gore) to come to their conclusion? Ok, so you are trying to discredit the presenter instead of his presentation, what about Dr judith Curry herself on Fox news, A climatologist who gave up her tenure because of this issue?

Are air, wind & solar energy companies funding studies to promote their products? YES Are oil, coil & natural gas companies funding projects to promote their products? YES

 

[PurpleBeeper]

That post was not in response to you purple. Corbett looks at many issues, that are "popular" He doesn't think the earth is flat by the way. The documentary about WW1 is very interesting also.
So as a scientist, what do you think of the "data" The IPCC uses ( and Al Gore) to come to their conclusion? Ok, so you are trying to discredit the presenter instead of his presentation, what about Dr judith Curry herself on Fox news, A climatologist who gave up her tenure because of this issue?



Here is ABC news quickly mentioning climategate. Are you still comfortable putting your faith, money, and the fate of your family into the IPCC?

1. Curry says "maybe" humans are causing global warming & it appears that the other scientists she works with are convinced.
2. The ABC report says that one student's paper was wrong, but the climate change science as a whole is accurate.

Are wind, solar & electric car companies funding research to sell their products? YES
Are gas, oil & coal companies funding research to sell their products? YES

 

[Jcharger]

You are right about the 70's and ideas of cooling. The late 70's and early 80's were cold. That science was valid, but thinking changed as more data and models were brought into play. And yes the biggest players are the Sun and mother nature.

The air pollution issue are also one of the examples of something where changes (and regulations as much as we hate that idea) made a difference. I have heard people say that if you went outside in the late 50's in a white shirt you would have soot on it, and I heard my dad say he had to wipe soot off the windowsills in the late 60's I have not experienced that as an adult.

Acid rain and Ozone are also issues where regulations resulted in reversal and recovery. I posted a like a page or so back to the NADP website that shows how that changed. https://nadp.slh.wisc.edu/maplib/ani/Hplus_ani.pdf or https://nadp.slh.wisc.edu/maplib/ani/pH_ani.pdf These also show bulseye's on them (some of low pH) that are related to various agricultural and industrial activities.

The global warming/climate change terminology debate was also public (and political). The issues remain.

Thus, while I fully agree that the science and ideas are never complete, they are using the best data and methods we have. I think scientists do a good job sticking to evidence and developing solid and testable hypotheses. So I am sticking with listening to the scientific consensus. I'll still think about what I hear, but I listen and most of what I hear makes sense. Some carries pretty hefty implications.

There will be surprises and wrong turns, but the approach is designed to be self correcting and to focus on obtaining the answer that is supported by observations.

 

[BeatersRus]

it would be very foolish to say that humans dont affect the planet.
from literal floating seas of garbage to the radiation we let loose,its all our fault.
and while i agree that the Earth itself will of course repair itself,will we humans still be around?

this quote is from the Matrix,yet it seems highly accurate.

Agent Smith: I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet.

 

[Richard Cranium]

Acid rain and Ozone are also issues where regulations resulted in reversal and recovery. I posted a like a page or so back to the NADP website that shows how that changed. https://nadp.slh.wisc.edu/maplib/ani/Hplus_ani.pdf or https://nadp.slh.wisc.edu/maplib/ani/pH_ani.pdf These also show bulseye's on them (some of low pH) that are related to various agricultural and industrial activities.

You didn't read the articles I posted above....

Remember the big “acid rain” scare during the 1970s and 1980s attributing damage to lakes and forests to emissions from Midwestern utilities? If so, did you ever hear the results of a more than half-billion-dollar, 10-year-long national Acid Precipitation Assessment Program study that was initiated in 1980 to research the matter?

Probably not.

As it turned out, those widespread fears proved to be largely unfounded, since only one species of tree at a high elevation suffered any notable effect, and acidity in lakes was traced to natural causes. The investigating scientists reported that they had “turned up no smoking gun; that the problem is far more complicated than it been thought; that other factors combine to harm trees; and that sorting out the cause-and-effect was difficult and in some cases impossible.”


https://www.forbes.com/sites/larryb...arming-hysteria-is-pouring-down/#e46f1e253fc6


"As far as ozone depletion is concerned, the thinning of the ozone layer that occurred throughout the 1980s apparently stopped in the early 1990s, too soon to credit the Montreal Protocol."

https://www.heritage.org/environment/commentary/ozone-the-hole-truth


So, whose science is actually correct?

 

[Brandy]

yes, the early 1980's was cold. I happened to be up on top of Hill 880 in the Taunus Mountains around Frankfurt, West Germany during that time, in the middle of winter. The ice was 3 1/2" thick on the vertical faces of the buildings and had to chopped away every day around doors. The locals said they had never seen it that bad in their lifetimes. The power cables and other hanging lines had to be deiced daily to keep them from snapping. I remember having to actually wear those puffy white Arctic survival outfits for extreme cold areas. The summers never did get really hot, more like early fall weather all summer long with little rain.

 

[Jcharger]

I still think the consensus scientific view is correct over those authors.

I see a role for SO2 oxidation (and other oxidation) in acid rain and measurements of rainwater and surface water pH have changed. So have measurements of other products. This is all on links like the ones I posted from the national atmospheric deposition program (above).

I also see a role for regulating CFCs and the efficacy of the Montreal Protocol. The ozone story is complicated with a long-lived catalyst in the atmosphere. The recovery is consistent with the chemistry and current understanding. True, there are time lags as a result of the long lifetime of catalytic compounds in the atmosphere. There also is a striking change in the data that is available. An image from the British Antarctic Survey is below. Take a look and decide whether there is a signal or not.

I am not an ozone chemist or an acid rain chemist, but I have followed the issues.

Natural factors at play also generates natural noise in signals that can mask the effects of remediation efforts on short timeframes. On longer timeframes and with more data the picture becomes clearer.

I still stand by my assertion that the data for a change in climate is overwhelming and a very strong case can be made for human influence and that changes in our behavior has resulted in some of the very improvements that people have called upon to claim long ago fear mongering is bunk. It was fear mongering, which is not good. It produced a result, which might have been good or bad. Time seems to have shown that the results produced made the problem and fear mongering of those times go away.

 

[Richard Cranium]

I am not a scientist, but what I have seen in my lifetime is predictions of doom & gloom that never materialize, climate scientists, many of whom are funded by those who seek a certain agenda, that have been wrong & some that fudge numbers to show a certain outcome.

I certainly do believe that we should take care of our environment, but there's an awful lot of money being made in the name climate change and there are those in government who want the power to control "the little people" more (through taxation & regulation) than they already do. Government gains power through taxation & the more they regulate and tax, the more power they have.

 

[Jcharger]

These are different issues and things to some extent that I can identify with.

You are right that doom and gloom might work to get agendas through, but it makes people fed up when done for the wrong reasons. I also won't argue that money doesn't corrupt. But in the end, I'll stick with the scientific enterprise for the little people's interests over lawyers, politicians, and big company businessmen. Nobody and nothing is entirely perfect. We choose what we think it best, either for us or for people in general. Cheers.

 

[Joske2]

Lets put some numbers on it.
Take my little country, Belgium. A country that was invented so England an Germany had some place to fight their wars

In 2016, according to Government figures, we did, with our 5.7 million cars that are registered, 84.300.000.000km .
Now, since they are government figures, and we know what that means, lets divide that in half, thats 42.150.000.000km, divided by 365 is
115.479.452km per day.
Average CO2 emission in 2018 for the new cars is 115gr/km, lets divide that in half also, 57,5 gr/km

That means that total CO2 emission per day is 6.640.068.493gr. or roughly 6.640.068mil. tons per day, for 5.7million cars.

In 2015 there where an estimated 947.080.000mil. passenger cars and 325.190.000mil commercial vehicles in use.

Thats a lot of C02, but the scientists here can maybe better explain if that is something to worry about, or if the industrie, air and sea travel account for even more?

Food for thought.

Feel free to correct me if i miscalculated something.

 

[Jcharger]

This is over my head. The calculations look right. A shot in the dark as an added question. A quick check on Wikipedia suggests the L/km/passenger is not all that different for car and plane. This makes me wonder if the difference in CO2 for flying might be because planes go a long way.

I have no clue about industry or other sources, but also know those are point sources and might be captured somehow. Does anyone know?

 

[PurpleBeeper]

I think the point is, we have no actual idea of what is going on with our planet. Whatever is the cause of the i e caps melting and the temperature swings makes some people feel helpless and want to start pointing fingers. Realisticly, we don't know how Earth's orbit around the sun has changed, how the sun itself has changed, or even how Earth's wobble has changed over time.

In the meantime, someone's using this thing called climate change to cause mass histeria and to make a buck off of it.

Very possible.....and others are trying to calm the mass hysteria so they can make a buck off of it too. What would you do if you owned a coal mine with soft (aka "dirty") coal and wanted to sell it?

 

[ws23jrt]

 

[Slap Stick]

Barring relativity & change of reality due solely to observation, you devise an experiment to test the validity of hypothesis "x", such are varying "x" and observing changes, if any of "y".
In this case, it would be measurements of thermal conductivity vs. transparency of carbon dioxide, methane, etc. Since we don't have a laboratory large enough to test the entire Earth at once, we have to draw conclusions based upon smaller experiments.

OK, now your turn....and no cheating off of google.

That was a lot of gobbledygook.
It would have been so much easier to say you eliminate the cause, X, and then perform an observed study.
What's that, you say? Take Man out of the equation?
That's right. If Man is thought to be causing climate change, to prove it you must remove Man and then observe the outcome.
Uh....how ya gonna do that? That's why I said it cannot be proven.
And don't say computer models prove it. They don't. They are computer programs written by....Man...assuming global warming is the outcome. Its not an observed experiment. Its more theory based on an outcome.