Damn this is funny. Just a few pictures for your viewing enjoyment.
Richard Tol has the best take:
"There has been a strong and statistically significant upward trend in climate-change-related public-relations disasters"
Happy New Year, by the way!
Wednesday, January 1, 2014
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In Summer, sea ice breaks up into ice floes, which can be driven by unfavourable winds, in this case strong southerlies, trapping any ship, whose captain is foolish enough to venture into broken sea ice with no escape route available.
ReplyDeleteWhatever...
It's -17° C this morning! Sometimes I hope AGW wouldn't be a hoax.
ReplyDeleteHear, hear!
DeleteI was all for Ontario Oranges and Quebec Grapefruit.
Total let down.
Back to apples, plums, grapes, and strawberries.
Aren't the self-proclaimed "reality-based community" (i.e. leftists) the most amazingly clueless people in reality? Perhaps, it's that since they've focused so much of their vast intelligence (just ask them!) upon trying to aquire power over others' lives that they just don't have anything left to devote to even seeing the reality right under thir noses.
ReplyDeleteI reminded of an incident earlier this year when AGW activists were snowed out of their Tar Sands protests in Alberta.
ReplyDeleteLate last year***
DeleteNailed by the new year already!!!
Scientific expedition, business junket--what's the difference?
ReplyDeleteBen
In this case, none.
DeleteJQ
I know that this is an exercise in futility, but I'll try just once more.
ReplyDeleteThe climate has changed in the past, many times in fact, ranging from 'hothouses' to 'iceboxes'. The climate will change in the future too.
Climate changes in response to changes in response to changes in the levels of greenhouse gases, insolation (the amount of solar energy reaching the Earth) and Earth's albedo (the amount of the Sun's energy reflected and not absorbed).
Insolation varies mainly in response to changes in the Earth's orbit and tilt - the Milankovich cycles.
Greenhouse gases trap outgoing heat and keep the Earth warmer than it would otherwise be. Increasing greenhouse gases will cause increased retention of heat and hence warming.
What is happening today is no different to what has happened in the past. The Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum 55 million years ago was due to a pulse of methane (eventually converted into similar amounts of CO2 as is being produced today by burning fossil fuels) into the atmosphere from oceanic deposits of methane ice, resulting in a global warming of 7 degrees Celsius over 25,000 years.
It takes considerable time for warming to overcome the natural inertia of the Earth's oceans due to its enormous heat capacity.
What is happening today is exactly the same as what has happened in the past. It's nothing special.
Over the long term, the Earth's climate is remarkably stable, because of the slow negative feedbacks. Atmospheric CO2 levels increase, global temperatures increase, rainfall increases, the rain becomes slightly more acidic, there's more weathering of exposed rocks, increasing runoff of calcium carbonate (reducing atmospheric CO2 levels), eventually deposited in the oceans as limestone, which becomes trapped in the Earth's mantle by tectonic plate subduction.
Human induced warming is slow, due to the inertia provided by the Earth's oceans, and it will eventually go away, in thousands and tens of thousands of years. No problems. Life on Earth will continue as it has in the past and will in the future.
The only problem is that whenever there's significant climate change, there's a pulse of extinction. Each of the layers in the geological strata is a pulse of extinction due to an episode of climate change.
From a practical point of view, all our agriculture is dependent on having today's climate - not a future warmer one. Farmers rely on past experience to know when to plant and which crops to plant for their location. A slowly changing climate with gradually increasing temperatures and varying rainfall means that their local knowledge becomes increasingly useless.
One of the risks is increasing famines, compounded by the fact that the Green Revolution was dependent on having cheap and abundant energy (fertilisers and pesticides are produced from fossil fuels - which is a finite resource, and becoming increasingly expensive as demand for it increases and the difficulty in recovering it increases).
'Climate' isn't the same as 'weather'. It might be cold in America today - but it is Winter after all. Northerly Arctic winds can bring a lot of 'cold' very quickly.
Without greenhouse gases, the average global temperature should be minus 18 degrees Celsius (and that's an average, including the tropics) instead of 15 degrees Celsius.
So Bachfiend, let's find a way to falsify this theory. If everything proves global warming then it is unfalsifiable. Tell me what I should be on the look out for. What would be evidence against the theory?
DeleteJQ
JQ,
DeleteWell, for a start you need to know what the theory states. People who go on about the global warming 'pause' as disproving AGW don't know what they're talking about.
The lower atmosphere isn't everything. The oceans contain 400 times as much heat as the atmosphere.
To disprove AGW you'd have to do a very careful heat balance study. Measure the heat flowing into the Earth and the heat flowing out - including the atmosphere, the oceans, the cryosphere (ice and snow) and the land surface.
AGW would be falsified if the heat balance is zero or negative (net heat loss) despite increasing CO2 levels.
Claiming that it's disproved because heat is being retained preferentially in the oceans, it's cold this Winter or ships can be entrapped by disintegrating sea ice is just silly.
I'm glad you put pause in quote marks. To say that there is a pause assumes that it will resume at a later time. It may do that but we haven't seen it yet. From a scientific perspective, there is no pause. It's a stop.
Delete>>To disprove AGW you'd have to do a very careful heat balance study. Measure the heat flowing into the Earth and the heat flowing out - including the atmosphere, the oceans, the cryosphere (ice and snow) and the land surface.<<
So no one has ever done this study? How then do we know that global warming is real? All I want is a test that will show me if it's real or not. You provided one that hasn't been done yet but assure me that you know what the result would be.
You take it on faith but I won't. Sorry.
>>AGW would be falsified if the heat balance is zero or negative (net heat loss) despite increasing CO2 levels.<<
Why aren't we doing this? It occurs to me that the falsification test you just provided is one that has never been done, would be incredibly hard to do, and certainly one that I cannot do. There' a method to your madness. You have provided an impossible standard. I can never prove that the theory is false.
One problem though is that the burden of proof is on you. Come back when you've conducted this heat balance survey. Show me the results.
Also, read the climategate emails. It might amuse you to read your favorite experts discussing how to marginalize critics and manipulate data.
JQ
JQ,
DeleteThe heat balance study has been done. The added heat is going into the oceans. And into the cryosphere with the melting of the ice caps. Sea ice area isn't the same thing as sea ice volume, which continues to decrease.
JQ,
DeleteAlso, from a scientific prospective, the global warming 'pause' is neither a 'pause' nor a 'stop'. It's not scientific to cherrypick your data set. The oceans warm the atmosphere, not vice versa. Starting a data series in 1998, a strong El Niño year (which has the effect of dumping heat from the oceans into the atmosphere and warming the atmosphere) and finishing it in 2012, a moderate La Niña year (which has the opposite effect, causing more heat to be retained in the oceans and resulting in a cooler atmosphere) is just dishonest.
No one picked the year 1998, it's simply the year that the trend changed. You want us to pretend that this never happened.
DeleteWhere is this heat balance study? Why did you tell me that scientists would have to conduct one if one has already been done?
I don't believe for a moment that we have acurate thermometer readings from a geographically dispersed area of the deep ocean, considering the fact that we don't have such readings even for the surface. Furthermore, we have nothing to compare them to. We don't have similar readings from twenty, fifty, or a hundred years to compare them to.
This is just junk science and you're throwing up a bullshit screen, hoping that if you're bombastic enough no one will question you.
When are you going to read the climategate emails?
JQ
i'd also like to know what global warming's testable hypothesis is. it would be nice to know why skepticism is treated as a character flaw in the field of global warming, when in fact it is a necessary element of all science. can you explain that to me, bachfiend? why is questioning such a problem for your cultish movement?
Deletenaidoo
JQ,
DeleteNo, I haven't read the Climategate emails. Have you? You'd have to read all of them in context to make sense of them. I didn't take any notice of the CRU before the so-called scandal, so why should I take any notice of it afterwards?
1998 was chosen as the start of the data series because it was an abnormally warm year due to a strong el Niño year, which has the effect of adding a degree to global temperatures. Why not start with the eruption of Mount Pinatubo? The cooling induced by that was also the start of a change in the trend.
The ability to measure ocean temperatures accurately at depth has only arisen recently, so it's provisional, like all science. We do know that the oceans are continuing to warm, the cryosphere continues to melt. If you look at global atmospheric temperatures over the longer term, not just 15 years, global temperatures are continuing to rise, with several pauses similar to the recent one.
The reason why there are pauses is because average insolation is 250 Watts per square metre. The warming effect of doubling CO2 levels from preindustrial levels is 2.6 Watts per square metre - a much smaller quantity able to be swamped from time to time by heat coming (or rather not coming) from the oceans or cooling due to volcanic eruptions or increased use of dirty coal in electricity generation increasing atmospheric aerosols.
Naidoo,
AGW is based on the well known and well understood physical properties of greenhouse gases. Climate has changed in the past. It will change in the future. What is happening today is nothing special.
Climate science is established science since the 19th century when it was realized that the Earth had at least 4 or 5 major glaciations explaining the otherwise inexplicable moraines scattered across Europe and North America.
The testable hypothesis is that increasing greenhouse gases will increase the heat content of the Earth, including the atmosphere, the oceans, the cryosphere and the ground, not just the atmosphere alone.
Measuring the various components is still in its infancy. We haven't had the satellites or the oceanic temperature buoys for long, but the data indicates that the Earth continues to warm.
Skepticism is naturally part of science. But skepticism doesn't include cherry picking your data sets or confusing sea ice area with sea ice volume.