I used to want to be an environmental scientist!

Anyway, I am not denying that global warming is a fact, but whether or not the reasons we are given for it are true, and humans have such a large impact on the climate.

Isn't Mars experiencing global warming at the same time/rate as Earth? Aren't sunspots disappearing and scientists are now worried we are headed for an ice age?

muso wrote on Nov 28^th, 2008 at 10:34pm:


Muso, with respect, re-read your post with my substitutions.




Easel,

I can tell you as a practising Muslim that there is only one side to this as far as Islam is concerned. You just need a very basic grounding in Islam to understand that fact.

I've already explained that if you go through my posts. I'm just telling the truth here.

Hopefully there is somebody else on this board who understands enough to confirm what I'm saying. 

Some of the few Christians/Jews who take a contrarian stance actually know the truth, and they know that perfectly well. I suspect that some of the people who post on internet forums know the truth of the matter too. To deliberately hide the truth is dishonest.

Ibn Warraq is one of the very few Muslims who take that stance. His koranic theory was disproven and discredited a long time ago, and he hasn't published anything in acadeic journals since then. He has an axe to grind.

Even Sheik Hilali, although not a professional academic, is actually right on the money most of the time. The fact that he's a mufti is not very helpful, although there is now broad support from both sides of the shia/sunni divide.

http://www.nationalpost.com/most_popular/story.html?id=164002
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Funnily enough this letter is in line with my thoughts on the subject and the need to concentrate on adaptation...  and has been for many years.  Since the first cooling scare campaign in fact.  but hey...  i'm not an Environmental Scientist...  what would I know right...  

Soren,

THe last thing I want to do is argue from a point of view of faith, and I'm not trying to get anybody to take it on faith that something is true.

The scientific approach is totally different from religious faith.

I'm just trying to explain that I do know what I'm talking about here, and if you take time to stop and actually read my posts, it will become apparent that I am telling the truth. What I am not asking anyone to do is to take it on faith.

Now the real intent of the likes of Jennifer Marohasy and Bob Carter is to create confusion in the public arena. They are not climate scientists and they have never conducted any climate research. You don't see them participating in scientific discourse with scientists to try and convince them otherwise, because they know that it's a lost cause. Their audience is the voting public.

For one reason or another they have decided to take that stance. Maybe some of them truly believe what they are saying, but I doubt it.

It is possible to demonstrate using basic science that 1. the increases in CO2 and other GHG's in the last 50 years or so are largely anthropogenic and that increasing GHG's lead to increased temperature.

You can even look up Global Warming Potentials for different Greenhouse gases over different timescales, and you can look up radiative forcing equations for various Greenhouse gases in scientific reference texts. How do you suppose these equations were derived? faith?

Grendel wrote on Nov 29^th, 2008 at 1:04am:


It's called natural variability. To see the trend you have to smooth out the natural variability by taking 5 year means.

There is variation in just about every process.

Let's do a mental experiment. Take a bucket with 1000 white beads in it. Add ten red beads. Mix them around and take a scoop of beads. Record the number of red beads you get in the scoop. Replace the beads. Add another 10 beads, mix them around and take another random scoop. Repeat the process.

OK, would you expect that the number would go up neatly every time? I don't think so.

That's a very simple example that illustrates variability. With the natural climate there are all kinds of effects that might affect global temperatures in the short term. These contribute to natural variability.

However if you keep adding  greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, we can easily predict that the temperature is gradually going to increase, and most probably the energy in storm systems is going to increase. Energy is conserved. If you increase the inputs, it has to go somewhere. The heat from the sun drives our weather. If you increase the proportion of that heat that is absorbed by the Earth's troposphere, or change the Earth's energy balance, there will be consequences.  

Check the global CO2 figures. This time last year it was around 385 µmoles per mole of air. This year it has increased to 387. We're adding about 2 every year. Back in the 70's we were increasing by about 1 per year. If we increase even at the current rate, then by 2030, the level of atmospheric CO2 will have increased to about 430ppm.

The eight years of the 21st century have seen a doubling of the rate at which we are adding CO2 to the atmosphere compared to the first 8 years of the 90's. That has been mostly attributed to increased fossil fuel burning, cement production and burning of tropical forest (eg Indonesia)

muso, fd, men and women of Australia,


Falsifiability - what would make you think that the idea of human-caused global warming is incorrect?

Considering that we do not understand all the elements and variables that make up the climate and do not even know what roles each of the vaguely understood elements play in the whole. How many things make up and affect the climate? What is the comparative weight of each? After billions spent in climate tresearch, does anyone know?

Also, how do we know that merely reducing CO2 emissions will halt or reverse warming? Isn't that too simplistic considering the large number of known unknowns and unknown number of unknowns that shape the climate?

At the leveel of detail - is it important where the measurements indicating warming are taken? A weather station, establlished 50 years ago at the edge of a town then may well be an inner city location by now. Urban areas are warmer by a couple of degrees. Could at least some of the data measure urbanisation rather tthan global climate change?


Clean air, energy effciency - I am all for those. But I am against making human society turn on the central command of a single imperative no more definitive than, say, the final triumph of the working class (ie marxism) or that Allah wants an Ummah.
Yes, it's good to treat employees well, both as employees and as human beings. This does not mean that they should be in charge. Yes, it's good to have freedom of concience and religion but again, you don't want them to be in charge. So it is good to be mindful of the envirionment, to keep it clean and humming along but it takes a kook to want Bob Brown, Tim Flannery and Clive hamilton (or Al Gore) to be in charge. (I say this assuming that you have not crossed that particular line already*)i



* Wink if you are still on this side of that line.

Soren wrote on Nov 29^th, 2008 at 8:39am:


If you could somehow attribute the recent dramatic increase in atmospheric greenhouse gases to some other factor, then we could demonstrate that it is false.


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We're talking about very broad effects here. The analogy is that of  needing to understand the complex workings of the human brain to predict whether we'll get drunk or not if we drink a bottle of Scotch.

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The relationship between atmospheric CO2 concentration and radiative forcing is basic and well established. The temperature varies as the natural log of the CO2 concentration. It's not linear (a good job too or we'd be fried by now). Energy is conserved. It's not a question of halting or reducing warming. The best we can hope for now is to avoid the more catastrophic effects of Global Warming. Can we save the GBR? Probably not. Can we save billions of people from starving to death by the end of the century? - Probably.

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The Urban Heat Island effect is well known and accounted for. Do you really think it was somehow unknown?  

Here's an article from Real Climate that explains this better than I could:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/07/no-man-is-an-urban-heat-is...

muso wrote on Nov 29^th, 2008 at 9:00am:


The picture, muso, the picture .....