The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science

EdFred said:
... So maybe I should make the claim that rising temps and CO2 will cause explosions of life and we should do everything we can to raise them both??
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Depends on how you prioritize property values versus plant biodiversity, I guess.
This page. Those charts do NOT show CO2 levels being significantly higher....in fact is appears that 325k years ago CO2 looks to be higher than today. At least close enough that I can not agree with your significantly higher claim.
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I guess you're talking about this chart:
ice_core_graph_vostok.gif

If you looked at this chart you might come away thinking that current CO2 levels are about 280 ppm or so, which wouldn't be much higher than historic highs.

But the problem is that a pixel on that chart has to represent CO2 levels over a range of about 1000 years, so it doesn't have the resolution to depict current CO2 concentration levels, which have risen dramatically in the past 150 years.

Below I've attached a chart that shows recent CO2 measurements. Compare these numbers, e.g. 390 parts per million, to the numbers shown on the chart above:

co2_trend_mlo.png

-harry
 
Really? At Mauna Loa???

Weak sauce. Why don't you just produce a temperature graph for Al Aziziyah to show how hot the earth is too?

You aren't helping your cause when it's known that volcanic areas kick out CO2 and Mauna Loa is due for an eruption. So the higher concentrations of CO2 are expected there and rising concentrations aren't out of line considering a volcanic event is due.
 
Palmpilot said:
Depends on what you mean by "should." As far as I can see, the universe doesn't care whether we continue to exist or not, so from that point of view, there is no temperature that the earth "should" have. From the point of view of human beings, on the other hand, we need to know if we are doing things that are likely to cause the global average temperature to change faster than we can cope with.
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OK - so the Earth's temp changes, but it would be good to know how much we contribute. I agree, there. But how to measure? Ice ages can come on fast:

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/abrupt/data4.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas

And warm up fast, too. The Younger Dryas warmed back to pre-glacial conditions in about a decade.

It's interesting that realclimate.org tries to make a distinction between "modern day global warming" and natural "millennial-scale climate changes"

>>
Unlike changes in global temperature (such as modern day global warming) which can be understood as a result of perturbations to the planetary energy balance, the millennial-scale climate changes during the last glaciation are viewed primarily from the lens of internal dynamics, including ice retreat and re-organizations of ocean circulation. They are not dominated by changes in global mean temperature but rather changes in temperature distribution, explained by changes in oceanic or atmospheric heat transport.
<<

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/07/revisiting-the-younger-dryas/

The above quote seems to imply that ice ages are "changes in temperature distribution" - or that some parts of the earth get colder and some get warmer, but the average stays the same. Then it it says that modern-day global warming is "a result of perturbations to the planetary energy balance".

So, again - what should the temperature of the earth be?

Is it is getting warmer over the entire surface? Or getting warmer in some regions, and colder in other regions?
 
EdFred said:
Really? At Mauna Loa???

Weak sauce. Why don't you just produce a temperature graph for Al Aziziyah to show how hot the earth is too?

You aren't helping your cause when it's known that volcanic areas kick out CO2 and Mauna Loa is due for an eruption. So the higher concentrations of CO2 are expected there and rising concentrations aren't out of line considering a volcanic event is due.
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+1 looking at one location and coming up with any sort of conclusion is pretty insane. I bet I can find another location that tells the opposite story.
 
There is a lot of hysteria, paranoia, and partisanship caught up in the whole controversy.

In my, admittedly non-scientific opinion, humankind has produced an 'artificial' amount of CO2, as well as other pollutants like SO2, NOx, PM5, PM10, and the like into the environment. Pittsburgh in the late 1960s was still blanketed by noontime twilight. London fogs, anyone, in the late 1800s until the 1960s? Take a look at the pollution plume from China now. All of those are artificial, in the sense that man has had an active role in their generation, as opposed to natural stuff like volcanoes and rotting plants. And belching cows. And sheep semen, I suppose.:dunno::rolleyes:

I think it is pretty hard to refute that man, through action, has affected the environment. Look at, say, the Amazon rain forest. Dinosaurs didn't clearcut forests. We do.

So what? Well, IMHO, yes, humankind has contributed in a meaningful way to the heating of the planet. Enough to influence the enormous inertia of Earth's natural processes? Yes, a bit. What will the effects be? NFC. That's above my pay grade. I look at it from an economic viewpoint -- is it worth it to bankrupt every major economy and keep every third world country in a state of undevelopment forever? (I exaggerate, but some of the more extreme MMGW folks might opt for that). No. Should reasonable measures, like limiting the burning of dirty coal from Indiana, and encouraging green roofs, be taken? Absolutely.
 
BTW, this is kinda heading in a spin zone direction.....:wink2:
 
flyersfan31 said:
There is a lot of hysteria, paranoia, and partisanship caught up in the whole controversy.

In my, admittedly non-scientific opinion, humankind has produced an 'artificial' amount of CO2, as well as other pollutants like SO2, NOx, PM5, PM10, and the like into the environment. Pittsburgh in the late 1960s was still blanketed by noontime twilight. London fogs, anyone, in the late 1800s until the 1960s? Take a look at the pollution plume from China now. All of those are artificial, in the sense that man has had an active role in their generation, as opposed to natural stuff like volcanoes and rotting plants. And belching cows. And sheep semen, I suppose.:dunno::rolleyes:

I think it is pretty hard to refute that man, through action, has affected the environment. Look at, say, the Amazon rain forest. Dinosaurs didn't clearcut forests. We do.

So what? Well, IMHO, yes, humankind has contributed in a meaningful way to the heating of the planet. Enough to influence the enormous inertia of Earth's natural processes? Yes, a bit. What will the effects be? NFC. That's above my pay grade. I look at it from an economic viewpoint -- is it worth it to bankrupt every major economy and keep every third world country in a state of undevelopment forever? (I exaggerate, but some of the more extreme MMGW folks might opt for that). No. Should reasonable measures, like limiting the burning of dirty coal from Indiana, and encouraging green roofs, be taken? Absolutely.
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That is pretty much the way I feel about it too. In addition, I think many of our current environmental regulations have helped quite a bit. I can remember when I was a kid in the "good old days" many of the rivers and lakes, especially in the east, were more polluted, and so was the air. Nowadays loggers and those in the extraction industries need to reclaim the land to a much greater extent than they did before. Granted this takes money but to me it's worth it. Obviously it's possible to go overboard so there needs to be a balance.
 
EdFred said:
Really? At Mauna Loa???
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Okay, how about Key Biscayne? A lot of volcano activity there?

KEY_01D0_plot_residuals.png


Antarctica?

PSA_01D0_plot_residuals.png


Portugal?

AZR_01D0_plot_residuals.png


You can finds lots more here:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/carbontracker/documentation_obs.html#ct_doc

CO2 distributes itself fairly evenly throughout the atmosphere. CO2 concentration is measured at many points around the globe and the measurements are consistent with each other.
You aren't helping your cause when it's known that volcanic areas kick out CO2 and Mauna Loa is due for an eruption...
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I hope I have helped my cause by addressing your concern.
-harry
 
Matthew said:
... Is it is getting warmer over the entire surface? Or getting warmer in some regions, and colder in other regions?
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It's getting warmer in some regions and colder in others, but overall, on average, it's getting warmer globally. In other words, there are more places getting warmer, and/or by more, than are getting colder.

This chart shows average temps today as compared to average temps over the 50s, 60s, and 70s:

GHCN_GISS_HR2SST_1200km_Anom03_2011_2011_1951_1980.gif


The blue parts are cooler, the red parts are warmer. The South Pole is cooling, the North Pole is warming. Again, though, if you average these together, you get overall warming.
-harry
 
ebetancourt said:
... Scientific consensus throughout history has a smell to it:
Galileo confined...
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I'm confused by your list because you seem to be claiming to provide a list of failings of "scientific consensus", but none of the items on your list are worthy of the term. In fact, they are all quite the opposite, namely the stubborn application of "I just know I'm right" in the absence of any applied observation or experimentation.

Galileo wasn't confined by "scientific consensus", he was confined by the Pope for heresy. Galileo's science conflicted with the church's doctrine, and the church had the upper hand. The pope didn't use "scientific consensus" to form his position.

It takes more than "most people think this" to be scientific consensus.

Where people tend to fall down on this is by thinking that science is a body of beliefs held by practitioners (probably why many try to claim that science is just like religion). It isn't, it's a process. We sometimes call the conclusions drawn from that process "science" as well, but it's not about what we know, it's about how we determined that.

The Earth wasn't determined to be the center of the universe via this process.
The earth was flat
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The ancient greeks applied a scientific process to this problem and determined not only that it was round but came up with a pretty accurate estimate of its circumference.

The belief that it was flat wasn't based on a scientific process, it was based on the same kind of process by which many of us have come to conclusions on MMGW, namely hunches, political preferences, and apparently "experience". There's a reason why people needed to come up with a better way of figuring stuff out.
-harry
 
roncachamp said:
Yes, what we don't know is are humans a cause of climate variation at all.
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I turned up the heat in my living room tonight. I am the cause of micro-climate change!

I'm just practicing for the world-wide unveiling of my evil natural-gas forced air furnace. Muhahaha!

(My point being: Define "climate".)
 
Telemakhos said:
Science might have been impartial and academic at one time, but that time is long gone.
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When was that?

If Galileo had been fully impartial and academic he would have been beheaded by the True Believers in power.

Nothing's changed. Different religion(s), same old tactics.
 
Cap'n Jack said:
That site is as bad as the ones that claim there is no global warming, or global warming is not man-made. No references to the sources.
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That's not true at all. For example, the articles on the current front page cite the following sources, among others:

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/173/3992/138.short

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/greeninc/Howarth2011.pdf

http://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/worldshalegas/

http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi?id=sh05500b

http://www.unep.org/dewa/Portals/67/pdf/Black_Carbon.pdf

http://www.nature.com/news/2011/250311/full/news.2011.184.html

http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/136646

http://hol.sagepub.com/content/early/2011/02/07/0959683610387172.abstract

http://hol.sagepub.com/content/early/2010/12/24/0959683610386983

http://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc...61f4daadf6454396f45805ff776efd54&searchtype=a

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7263/abs/nature08393.html

http://www.esajournals.org/doi/abs/10.2307/1941811

http://hol.sagepub.com/content/early/2011/01/26/0959683610386982.abstract

http://hol.sagepub.com/content/early/2011/03/12/0959683611400200.abstract

Most of those are links to abstracts of scientific papers. Other pages have similar links to source material, and I've never seen that density of citations to scientific papers on the contrarian sites I've visited, so I'm more than a little baffled as to how you can square your statement above with the facts.
 
Matthew said:
So, again - what should the temperature of the earth be?
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There is no such thing as a temperature that the earth should be. (IMO, of course.) I thought I made that clear in my previous post.
 
jesse said:
+1 looking at one location and coming up with any sort of conclusion is pretty insane.
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Are you saying that the Mauna Loa data have not been confirmed by measurements elsewhere?

I bet I can find another location that tells the opposite story.
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I don't think hunches are persuasive in any scientific discipline. Instead of betting, how about looking into the matter and finding out how much CO2 concentrations vary around the globe?
 
Palmpilot said:
Are you saying that the Mauna Loa data have not been confirmed by measurements elsewhere?



I don't think hunches are persuasive in any scientific discipline. Instead of betting, how about looking into the matter and finding out how much CO2 concentrations vary around the globe?
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I could, but I don't care that much, so I'm not going to be bother. There are plenty of respectable scientists on both sides of the debate. Problem is that most of the "climate" politics out there really have little to do with the actual climate or the science. It's just politics.
 
jesse said:
I could, but I don't care that much, so I'm not going to be bother.
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Supporting our opinions with facts can be a lot of work.

There are plenty of respectable scientists on both sides of the debate.
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I don't think the number of scientists on each side is definitive, but since you brought it up, people who have looked into this have found that there are a lot more respectable scientists on one side of the issue than the other.

http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf

http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/survey_faq.html

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=1184

Problem is that most of the "climate" politics out there really have little to do with the actual climate or the science. It's just politics.
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I believe it's sad but true that most people choose their positions on this issue based on their political leanings.
 
Okay, a bit off of topic here. In my opinion, part of the problem with scientists trying to explain anything to the average person is that they are too intelligent to communicate effectively. I recall reading that something like 15 point IQ seperation can cause serious communication problems.

Carry on....:thumbsup:
 
kevin7500 said:
Okay, a bit off of topic here. In my opinion, part of the problem with scientists trying to explain anything to the average person is that they are too intelligent to communicate effectively. I recall reading that something like 15 point IQ seperation can cause serious communication problems.

Carry on....:thumbsup:
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what?
 
Palmpilot said:
Depends on what you mean by "should." As far as I can see, the universe doesn't care whether we continue to exist or not, so from that point of view, there is no temperature that the earth "should" have. From the point of view of human beings, on the other hand, we need to know if we are doing things that are likely to cause the global average temperature to change faster than we can cope with.
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Palmpilot said:
There is no such thing as a temperature that the earth should be. (IMO, of course.) I thought I made that clear in my previous post.
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Yes, you did. My paraphrase - the temp is what it is, we need to know if whatever we are doing is affecting the rate of change.

But, to do that, we need to know what the undisturbed rate of change would be. And that can change drastically, without human intervention, even faster during ice-ages than what we've seen since the industrial revolution.

There have been cold years:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age

And warm years:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period

Those are local observations, not global, so we don't know the global effect back then. There were point observations, but to extrapolate that into a global temp is a bit of a stretch.

So the temps can swing - even without the tons of CO2 and other things we dump into the atmosphere. But how much do they swing? And how quickly can those changes naturally occur? And how do we know how much, without knowing what the control limits are? Is our contribution to a warming trend negligible or not?

We are chasing something that has a large standard deviation. That doesn't mean there isn't AGW, but to me, it means we still have a lot of thinking to do before we commit our economy to something that we probably can't control anyway (China, India, and everybody else aren't going to stop developing).
 
I suspect mans rapid burning of of fossil fuels is contributing to the heat rise the planet is currently demonstrating... The degree of that contribution to the natural cycle of heating and cooling is beyond my ken - and to speculate therefore becomes an matter of emotion and beliefs, on which I will pass...
I also suspect/know that the planet has been much warmer and also much colder at various times in eons past - long before some hairy savages began burning faggots inside of caves for heat, or burning hydrocarbons to attain powered flight...
What I really know (scientifically) as that since we are measuring a rising geo temperature we are dealing with an event that has already occurred.. To change that event will require time travel ...
Given what I understand of physics, that is unlikely, so we can stop spitting at each other over events past that are past and unchangeable...

What we can debate is what we do for the future...
Energy consumption, and therefore heat production, is flat in the developed industrial countries... (actually it is declining slightly and rising hydrocarbon prices will depress it further)
Energy consumption, and the ensuing heat production, is rising rapidly in the undeveloped and less developed countries...
So, to make AL Gore and his cronies fantastically rich by buying and selling 'their' Carbon Credits in the industrialized countries accomplishes zero as far as changing energy consumption in the developed countries - though it makes a great deal of difference in Al's, et. al., standard of living...
The only practicable way to reduce the burning of fossil fuels is to deny 3/5 of the population of the world the right to improve their standard of living through further industrialization...
I suspect they will resist - to the death...

denny-o
 
Okay, but we all agree that crude oil is a result of a natural hydro-carbon process and is not actually a fossil fuel, right? :fcross:
 
Palmpilot said:
That's not true at all. For example, the articles on the current front page cite the following sources, among others:

<SNIP>
Most of those are links to abstracts of scientific papers. Other pages have similar links to source material, and I've never seen that density of citations to scientific papers on the contrarian sites I've visited, so I'm more than a little baffled as to how you can square your statement above with the facts.
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Thanks - found them myself. Like I said, the site can be improved. I found them by scrolling down- they are on the right side below a lot of other stuff.

Glancing through some of the articles, they do list their citations too. A little different than I'm used to, in some cases, but they are there.

About squaring my statement with the facts, I simply wasn't used to the layout of this site and didn't find the information I wanted. You pointed out where it was located & it works.

I agree with you- the contrarian sites don't list any data sources or citations in the ones I've looked at.
 
Because fossils are rock(like) and crude oil...well....isn't.
 
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