perceptions_now wrote on Feb 10^th, 2011 at 4:08pm:


You're very welcome. So now you know that anthropogenic climate change is a hoax, as were the moon landings, that the CIA shot J F Kennedy, that MI5 killed Princess Diana, and ... Oh yeah - the Ancient Greek civilization was an elaborate hoax.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/historians-admit-to-inventing-ancient-greeks,18...

Quote:


Oh the scandal! - They'll have to call it Greekgate.

Sorry Axle, I pressed modify by accident instead of quote, but didn't change anything in your post once I realised what I had done.

The original paper doesn't claim to "challenge the notion that human emissions are responsible for global warming". That's the work of the same idiot journalist who brought you the Gulf of Mexico nonsense (Terrence Aym).

Here's the link:

http://geology.geoscienceworld.org/cgi/content/abstract/37/1/71

It's based on the premise that Galactic Cosmic rays can control Low Latitude precipitations and that geomagnetic flux variations can somehow modulate the effects of such cosmic rays. The GCR-climate theory (Svensmark et al) was discredited a couple of years ago by a separate study by Damon and Laut which showed no correlation, and that there were no clear trends in galactic cosmic ray variation anyway.

Besides that, Svensmark himself made no claim that all climate variation was due to cosmic rays. It turns out that it's a very minor influence if any, and therefore any perturbation of this effect will be a minor effect on a minor effect. The jury is out as to whether there is any measurable influence at all.

- Except when it comes to our journalist friend from the Salem News.

muso wrote on Feb 11^th, 2011 at 9:56am:


Yes, I understand where you are coming from!

However, and whilst I am a science supporter in general, science is not always correct.

David Suzuki said, in a seminar I attended in Perth some time back, that science is often 30-40 years behind.

He was referring to things such as DDT & Thalidomide, at the time, but it can also apply to other issues, such as eggs were bad for us, at one time and on the idiot box (TV) this morning, there is now a suggestion that Diet soft drinks cause an increased chance of strokes.

That said, whilst science may trail by 30-40 years on some issues, there are some posters on here, other boards & the general Public, who trail reality & science by 100 years + and that is not restricted purely to science issues!

It seems however, that Politicians & TPTB, are more interested in maintaining the status quo, than encouraging people to think for themselves.

For example, the 3 R's are a good start in schools, as is science, but what about Ethics, Philosophy, the Seven Deadly Sins, are they not equally or more important, IF humanity is to survive & "grow" into the future?

I seem to have wandered off topic?

Thanks, Muso. I saw that article in my meanderings around the net. I thought I'd see whether it would fly with someone in the know.

muso wrote on Feb 11^th, 2011 at 12:51pm:



1) Now that is a hard question!
What's water?

2) Can I suggest Very, Very Rare! In fact, if they were steaks, they would still be walking around the paddock!

3) Some people become well balanced, without trying all that much, it seems almost built in or hard wired!
But, with most people, it has to be developed and that is not happening!

4) Yes, you are correct, give the man a cigar?
On the other hand, Essexly speakly, maybe you would be better of with a nice glass of cold water?

ThripD wrote on Feb 15^th, 2011 at 9:16pm:


Thanks for your encouragement.

It's very easy to jump on an article as being total nonsense, and it makes me angry when people are obviously trying to pull a fast one by exploiting the fact that most people don't have a very good grasp of basic science.  So the natural reaction from a person familiar with the field is to over-react and use four letter words, jump up and down a lot etc  

However that's exactly what these pundits want you to do, so that they can then claim that you're offended at the  "sacrilege" or something like that when in fact that the outrage is from people lying through their teeth and laughing at your attempts to debunk their lies while attempting to retain some modicum of composure.  

by Judith Curry

On Lucia Liljegren’s Blackboard (commonly categorized as a “lukewarmer” site), Zeke has a post titled “Agreeing.”    Zeke’s motivation for this is:

My personal pet peeve in the climate debate is how much time is wasted on arguments that are largely spurious, while more substantive and interesting subjects receive short shrift. While I’m sure a number of folks will disagree with me on what is spurious vs. substantive, I think it would be useful to outline which parts of the debate I feel are relatively certain, are somewhat uncertain, and quite uncertain.

I attempted something similar on an earlier thread “What we know with confidence,”  which was based on the conclusions of the IPCC FAR, which have been out there long enough to have stood the test of time (or not).  I also attempted to put to rest debate about whether or not the greenhouse effect exists, on the Slaying the Sky Dragon threads.

Zeke puts forth a list that is pretty consistent with the IPCC AR4, and he doesn’t get much push back from the comments (which are well worth reading).  A very different response from the earlier confidence thread here.

So lets try this again, with Zeke’s statements, and i will append my own comments, as a spring board for discussion.

Zeke’s assessment
What is extremely likely [>95% probability]

  1. The greenhouse effect is real, albeit poorly named. While reams of comments have been written on this subject (witness the whole Sky Dragon debacle over at Judy’s blog, or Science of Doom’s heroic efforts to explain every facet of the issue), I’d hope that readers here won’t argue with this one. JC: OK
  2. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. JC: OK
  3. Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations are increasing. Folks like Beck notwithstanding, there is no serious challenge to Keeling’s measurements, especially as they have been verified by hundreds of additional methods in the subsequent decades. JC: OK
  4. Anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide are increasing. We have reasonably good data on the consumption of carbon-heavy fossil fuels over the past few centuries. JC: OK
  5. The majority of the increase in carbon dioxide concentrations since pre-industrial times is due to anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide. This is confirmed both by the isotopic signature of the carbon and the fact that concentrations rise proportionate to emissions. JC: OK

What I think is very likely [>90% probability]

  1. A doubling of carbon dioxide, holding everything else equal, would lead to a global average surface temperature increase of about 1 C. This follows from a basic derivation of forcing from changes to absorption bands, though it is complicated by the inherent difficulty of defining what exactly a no-feedback system is. JC:  I have a problem with the way this is formulated, but agree that more CO2 will warm the surface.
  2. Stocks of atmospheric carbon have a relatively long lifetime. While any individual molecule of atmospheric carbon remains in the atmosphere for only a few years on average, the growth limitations of sinks means that the stock will not decline quickly should emissions stop increasing. As a corollary, arguments that 95 percent of annual CO2 emissions are natural rather miss the point. JC comment:  the lifetime of CO2 in the atmosphere is debated, so as a qualitative statement this is ok.
  3. Water vapor primarily acts as a feedback rather than a forcing in the climate system due to its short atmospheric residence time and the limitation to absolute humidity at a given temperature for saturated air. Science of Doomcovers this rather well. Pointing out that water vapor is Earth’s dominant greenhouse gas does not minimize the climate’s sensitivity to carbon dioxide. JC: OK
  4. As a corollary to 3., a warmer world will have an atmosphere with more water vapor. This will tend to enhance the greenhouse effect, though the situation is complicated by the difficulty in both projecting changes in cloud formation and determining the radiative forcing effect of clouds. JC: the coupled water vapor and cloud feedbacks are uncertain, doesnt belong in very likely IMO.
  5. Direct solar forcing has played a relatively minor role in the last four decades, as TSI has been flat-to-modestly-decreasing during that period. JC:  this is still being debated, in terms of calibrations of the satellites, etc.  I would bump this down to likely.

This is an extract from The Science of Climate Change — Questions and Answers, published by the Australian Academy of Science and distributed to members of parliament, every local government authority in Australia and every Australian high school, in August 2010.

Climate change is a change in the average pattern of weather over a long period of time Climate is a statistical description of weather conditions and their variations, including both averages and extremes. Climate change refers to a change in these conditions that persists for an extended period, typically decades or longer.

Weather variables such as temperature and rainfall fluctuate naturally (see Box 1). These changes in weather from day to day, between
seasons, and from one year to the next, do not represent climate changes. The period for estimating climate is usually 30 years or more,
long enough to sample a full range of weather.

Climate can be defined for a particular place or region, usually on the basis of local rainfall patterns or seasonal temperature
variations. Climate can also be defined for the entire Earth. For global climate, a key variable is the average surface temperature.



Sustained and truly global changes in average temperature require some global heating or cooling influence such as variations in heat output by the Sun, changes to the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, changes in cloudiness, changes to the extent of ice on Earth’s surface, or changes in greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.

Identifying climate change that is truly global in extent requires simultaneous observations from a network of locations around the world (see Question 3). Such a network of instrumental observations has only been available since the second half of the 19th century. Climate changes that occurred before this time can be identified by reconstructing records from climate-sensitive indicators like ocean sediments, ice-cores,
tree rings and coral reefs.

Greenhouse gases play an important role in determining climate and causing climate change Greenhouse gases include water vapour, carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, nitrous oxide and some industrial gases such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). These gases act like an insulating blanket, keeping the Earth’s surface warmer than it would be if they were not present in the atmosphere.

Except for water vapour, the atmospheric concentrations of all of these gases are being directly influenced by human activities (see Question
4). Once released into the atmosphere, many of these gases remain there for a long time: in particular, a significant fraction of CO2 emissions remains in the climate system for hundreds to thousands of years.



Water vapour is an important greenhouse gas but it is not like the greenhouse gases affected directly by human activities. Its concentration in the atmosphere is controlled by the climate itself, rather than by human activities.

Water vapour therefore reacts to, and amplifies, climate change caused by other factors (see Box 2 and Figure 1.1). The effects of changing greenhouse gas levels on climate can be distinguished from the effects of other factors such as changes to the Sun’s radiation. These different causes lead to different patterns or “fingerprints” in the resulting climate changes, which assist in identifying the cause of observed changes.

For example, increases in solar radiation would be expected to warm both the upper and lower parts of the atmosphere and result in days warming more than nights. On the other hand, increases in greenhouse gases would be expected to result in a cooling, not a warming, in the stratosphere (the layer of the atmosphere above 15 km elevation), and cause nights to warm more than days. The observed patterns of change
more nearly match those expected from increasing greenhouse gases.



There are close connections between global temperature, atmospheric water vapour, the extent of polar ice caps and levels of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere. When one of these is disturbed, the others react through processes that amplify the original disturbance until
a new, different climate equilibrium is reached.

In the glacial cycles over the past million years, the disturbance came from fluctuations in the Earth’s orbit around the Sun (grey box in upper diagram). This caused temperatures to change (green box), in turn inducing rapid changes in water vapour (left blue box), and much slower
changes in ice caps (right blue box) and greenhouse gas levels (orange box), which together amplified the temperature change.

In modern climate change, the disturbance comes from human-induced changes in atmospheric CO2 and other greenhouse gas levels (grey box in lower diagram). In both cases, the disturbance is amplified by similar reinforcing processes.

Link -
http://www.crikey.com.au/2011/03/04/the-australian-academy-of-science-what-is-cl...
=============================
The full report & further details are available at -
http://www.science.org.au/policy/climatechange.html