Global Warming?

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Here’s an article that makes sense of the climate change in the antarctic,

livescience.com/40125-climate-change-affecting-arctic-antarctic-differently.html

I used to be a financial adviser - for 12 years.

We could see the credit meltdown coming but the markets continued to rise. And then 2008 happened and the markets crashed.

And while some markets rise others fall, and even after the meltdown there have been markets that continued to rise - eg., China. But we all know the debt crisis has still not reached it’s climax. It’s coming and with it a global meltdown of unprecedented scale. , but people are still making profits on their stocks.

Like the stock market it is much trickier to know exactly which way the climate is going to go in the short term, and much easier to predict over the long term.

For instance analysts were predicting a sell-off yesterday as the US govt fought over the debt ceiling, but the markets were up in the morning. They sold off today after an agreement had been reached. Totally contrary to commonsense.

However, come January/February the same problems are going to return, and in the meantime a Chinese rating group has downrated the US credit rating to A-.

It’s called trends and short term deviations from the mean.

Just like this:

(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)

On any given day you are not sure which way the market is going to jump, and over the short term it can look like the market is moving away from the trend, especially if you go from a historic peak to a trough, yet over time the trend asserts itself.

It’s the same with the climate.
 
To be honest, I think all this discussion about global warming or climate change wastes a lot of time and energy. Shouldn’t we rather focus on maintaining a healthy environment and beautiful planet, which God has gifted us with? I believe if arguments for looking after the environment, reducing pollution levels, and so on, were focused on beauty rather than disaster, we would achieve more.
 
jonathan_hili said:
To be honest, I think all this discussion about global warming or climate change wastes a lot of time and energy. Shouldn’t we rather focus on maintaining a healthy environment and beautiful planet, which God has gifted us with? I believe if arguments for looking after the environment, reducing pollution levels, and so on, were focused on beauty rather than disaster, we would achieve more.
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You’ve got a good point there.

There’s a debate about the effects of the Alberta Oil Sands… but you can’t call them beautiful.

 
jonathan_hili said:
To be honest, I think all this discussion about global warming or climate change wastes a lot of time and energy. Shouldn’t we rather focus on maintaining a healthy environment and beautiful planet, which God has gifted us with? I believe if arguments for looking after the environment, reducing pollution levels, and so on, were focused on beauty rather than disaster, we would achieve more.
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Well it comes to trade offs with economics, jobs, energy and that is where people have different opinions. Some are willing to forego some beauty for some oil or coal or jobs to extract them

But I am with you. I love the beautiful earth and hate to see it ravished even when it is I who benefit through lower utility costs.
 
Ender said:
Neither, the discussion was actually about sea ice extent.

Ender
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I thought I had deleted this post but apparently … not.

The original claim was that the ice at the poles was melting. I challenged that claim and pointed out that the sea ice extent at the south pole was (slowly) increasing. My objection was challenged with the assertion that the ice over the land mass in the Antarctic was decreasing, therefore the original claim was valid and for proof of this counter claim, this article was cited.

The ball is now back in my court, and I can cite this other article to support my original allegation that the ice in Antarctica is not melting. I leave it up to the readers to decide which of these two articles seems more scientifically supportable (and point out that the second article directly challenges the claim made by the first.)

I think two things can be taken from this exchange. The first is that the casual claim that “ice” in the Antarctic is melting has insufficient basis in fact to be asserted. It may well be that it is simply too difficult to measure with any accuracy but that hardly justifies making an assertion about something that is unknown.

The second take-away is to note how aggressively even small, throw away claims are defended. The simplest defense would have been to acknowledge the original assertion to have been mere careless imprecision, but who cares?, the issue is really what’s happening in the Arctic. That’s not the approach taken either by posters on this thread or by the pro-AGW blogosphere where sites like Skeptical Science have gone to great lengths to support the same assertion that ice at the South Pole is melting. I think this is what was behind the NY Times article. They’ve got to keep putting fingers in their dike because it keeps springing more leaks all the time.

Ender
 
Ender said:
What I object to is the ease with which the proposed mechanism for global warming is ignored.
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…What exactly?
Ender said:
Additional energy must appear first in the atmosphere; that is the base assumption for everything. If the atmosphere is not warming then, assuming the theory is valid, heat must be being transferred from the atmosphere at the same rate it is being absorbed. Melting ice is an endothermic reaction, that is it absorbs heat which is a possible explanation for where the missing energy is. On the other hand if heat is being removed at the poles that makes it a little more difficult to understand why the (North) pole is warming.
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Probably because how fast ice melts depends more on water temperature then on air temperature, as most of the Arctic ice is underwater. So in addition to air->ice heat transfer you also have transfer along the air->water->ice route. Add ocean currents to the equation and you see why the place where the energy sinks does not have to be the same place where it’s extracted from the atmosphere. For example, Europe is being warmed by heat absorbed into the ocean in the Gulf of Mexico and transported to Europe by the Gulf Stream.
Ender said:
The claim was that the “polar regions” (plural) were losing ice. “My case” is proven by the fact that the South Pole is gaining ice.
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It’s technically true, but doesn’t matter much for the argument. It’s the global ice volume that counts as far as energy balance is concerned. That’s going down. Fast.
 
jonathan_hili said:
Gosh, they are pretty hideous.

Peter Kreeft made a good point in one of his talks. He said there must be something wrong with humanity since we like to go on holiday in unspoiled places but we are content to live in spoiled places.
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The (apparent) strip mining of tar sands is, indeed, ugly. However, it is remarkable how quickly and well land can be restored. I have seen the results of restoration of former coal strip mines, and they can be impressive.

But I’ll add that there are few “unspoiled” places on earth, including those we think of as “unspoiled”. There is hardly a square inch that hasn’t been altered by man at some time or other, irrevocably or extremely long term for the most part. If by no other means, humans have altered environments by altering the flora and fauna there. In the U.S., we now have all kinds of European and Asian plants and animals, whose effect on the land is different from that of native species, for better or for worse.

If nothing else, we no longer have the migrations of millions of bison which, themselves, altered the landscape; sometime destructively, sometimes to good effect. One of the things that really struck me was an account of how much of government land in the west has been desertified by the ABSENCE of large crowds of hoofed animals. The government has long thought the desertification could be reversed by excluding them, and seems to believe it still.

Even the Amazon Basin, which we all think of as “unspoiled” was altered thousands of years ago. Nobody today has any idea what it looked like before human intervention.
 
The North Pole has not been ice free in summer for eons, while the Antarctic loses its ice in summer. So now that it seems the Arctic will also be losing its ice in summer that really does tip the scale.
 
Ender said:
The point was to address your assertion that “there’s no other mechanism for transferring heat out into space.” That claim is incorrect.
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And your alternative mechanism is…?
Ender said:
The models were presented as accurate with a 95% confidence level. Given that even supporters of the theory now acknowledge the models “diverged from reality” why would we think they will do better in the future than they did in the past?
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There are two issues here.

The first one is that “95% confidence” in science is a technical term and it does not actually mean that the model is right 95% of the time – although that’s what is reported by clueless journalists. This is actually a shortcut for saying that, depending on the noise present in the (name removed by moderator)ut data, values output by the model follow a normal distribution, and 95% of them is in the given range. It’s not a measurement of the correctness of the model, it’s a measure of model’s robustness to the noise in the data.

Let me give you an example. You have an archer who, at an indoor shooting range, hits the mark 95% of time. So you can say that he hits the mark with 95% confidence – and it’s technically true. Problem is, that if he goes outside, his accuracy will drop dramatically. Why? Wind! The dude was training indoors.

Which is sort of what happened here. The modellers have missed something about air/water/ice interactions. In their defense, it’s obvious that whatever effect which started operating after 1998 was not operating earlier, so it was not empirically known.

The second issue is that models are not the global warming theory. Models are predicitive tools, and given the number of interactions in the Earth system, they are insanely complicated. However, the FINAL equilibrium temperature of Earth can be calculated from the radiative transfer (including clouds & albedo) – because the vacuum of space prohibits any other form of heat transfer in and out of Earth. That’s orders of magnitude easier to do than develping dynamic models and much less prone for errors.

So the dynamics of ice melting only affects HOW you get to the final equilibrium temperature, not what the final temperature will be. In other words, whether the final temperature will be reached in 2400 or 2500.

Faulty models do not falsify the theory behind global warming.

Although I DO agree that there seems to be too much reliance on the models in the policymaking circles.
 
The debate over MMGW is just that. It’s a debate. And as with any debate, this debater can quote this source saying one thing and the other can quote that source saying the opposite.

Arctic ice is not decreasing, but increasing according to this source. telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/10294082/Global-warming-No-actually-were-cooling-claim-scientists.html

Undoubtedly, somebody can find some source that both critiques that source and presents some countervailing argument. Back and forth, endlessly.

Of interest, the 2011 reduction in Arctic sea ice might have nothing to do with Global Warming at all, but a temporary shift in the Gulf Stream current. (It shifted northward and a bit westward, possibly due to undersea topographical changes. whoi.edu/news-release/GulfStream

There are very seriously vested interests in the debate, and they generate a lot of studies and statistics and positions and opinions. To date, the Obama government, which wants to make utility bills “skyrocket” for ideological reasons, has spent some $100 billion on touting MMGW and supporting “alternative energies”. Billionaires like Soros, Gates, and Buffett have invested some $200 billion in them. (also a lot in fossil fuels. Good to hedge one’s bets) Interestingly, none of them live as if they believe in MMGW in the slightest degree. But then, as Fitzgerald observed “The very rich are different from you and me…”

So it grinds on, with MMGW proponents coming up with ever more novel explanations of why the contrary evidence is wrong, mistaken, malevolent, and on and on.

At least high school debaters have only so much time in which to convince, lest they fly up their own fundamental apertures coming up with ever newer reasons why the last argument was fallacious.

Will the world end in 2050 or at whatever date the MMGW proponents now say we’ll all die? Nobody, including them, knows at all.

In the meantime, however, Obama and his cadres want to artificially raise the price of utilities, transportation and manufacture…not everywhere, because everywhere is beyond their power…just here in the U.S.

And because he and his people obviously don’t believe in it themselves, why should we?
 
I’m not even clicking the link, I’m just going to say that GLOBAL WARMING IS NONSENSE!!!

Scientists (AS A WHOLE) are not sure what is causing the increase in temperature
OR EVEN IF IT’S HAPPENING AT ALL! It wasn’t too long ago when people were in
agreement that we were heading into an ice age, but it didn’t happen, did it? Oops,
but it’s okay, this is what Science is all about, “we gather more data, we advance
our ideas and theories,” but we “must remember that we’re still gathering infor*‒
mation…WE’RE NOT - SURRE - YEEEET!!!*” (Quoting Penn Jillette).

Anyway, for the past 4.5 Billion Years (Not 6,000), the Earth has seen it’s natural cycles
of hot and cold, even to the extreme, so even if it is happening, it is not our fault, and we
shouldn’t be panicking on “HOW TO STOP IT”, rather we should plan ahead on what we
are going to do to cope with this new situation (IF IT’S EVEN HAPPENING!).

I love the idea of taking care of the Earth,
but that shouldn’t lead us to hysterical &
nonsensical acts without seriously look*‒*
ing at the data and avoid jumping to con-
clusions as the radical environmentalists
have done and are still doing.
 
Ender said:
The second take-away is to note how aggressively even small, throw away claims are defended. The simplest defense would have been to acknowledge the original assertion to have been mere careless imprecision, but who cares?, the issue is really what’s happening in the Arctic…
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The reason these small claims are defended is that they are used by deniers to cast doubt on the whole theory. (And I use the term “denier” not as a pejorative. After all, if global warming is false, it is a good thing to be a denier.)
 
LeafByNiggle said:
The reason these small claims are defended is that they are used by deniers to cast doubt on the whole theory. (And I use the term “denier” not as a pejorative. After all, if global warming is false, it is a good thing to be a denier.)
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Why not call “deniers” skeptics then? It’s less provocative and I think more accurate.
 
Ender said:
The ball is now back in my court, and I can cite this other article to support my original allegation that the ice in Antarctica is not melting.
Ender
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I guess I am missing something because what I read in “this other articel” is:

Estimates of recent changes in Antarctic land ice range from** losing** 100 Gt/year to over 300 Gt/year. Because 360 Gt/year represents an annual sea level rise of 1 mm/year, recent estimates indicate a contribution of between 0.27 mm/year and 0.83 mm/year coming from Antarctica. There is of course uncertainty in the estimations methods but multiple different types of measurement techniques (explained here) all show the same thing, Antarctica is losing land ice as a whole, and these **losses are accelerating **quickly.
 
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