Should you believe in climate change?
 

"This is very hard for scientists to understand. The scientific evidence that humanity is having an effect on the climate is overwhelming and increasing every year. Yet public perception of this is confused."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environmen...-believe-in-it

You don't have to believe in the ocean, but if you jump in it, you're going to get wet.

I believe for every drop of rain that falls...

what foot said.

An extremist talk show host recently interviewed an MBA who counts raindrops. By reporting those counts on his spread sheets, he proved global cooling is now happening.

You too can count rain drops to prove scientists are wrong. As Costello said, "What do they know."

:lol:

Or as Kim Basinger once infamously said: Neil Simon? What does he know about comedy?"

Or you can just walk between the raindrops.

This is one of the things I find most shocking.
I expect that in 50-100 years plus, those deriding the facts of climate change will look at ridiculous as the opponents of Darwin.

Oh, wait.
There are nutjobs out there who don't accept evolution to the extent they will not allow it to be taught to children. Still, at least they never qualify medically, due to their inability to grasp facts.

Oh, wait.

Sigh.

I'm sorry, I've devoted my time to believing in Unicorns, Dragons, and Fairies. Don't have room for Climate Change.

Really? I think the dragons are mostly to blame.

It is amazing that the evidence for climate change and mans impact on the climate is overwhelming, yet there seems to be people who can argue the fact. I work with lots of guys who are staunch republicans and will argue that climate change is on a natural curve and mans impact is minimal.

I have a new project for myself though, I want to find out how many tons of waste products are put into the atmosphere by man made stuff, autos, planes, factories, homes etc...and put that into terms of how many volcanoes would have to erupt per week to match that output per week.

For electrical generation in the US, you can start with EPA's eGrid.

Of course, that's a limited sub-set of all the man-made emissions from all sources, and from around the world.

A good article on the combined effect of climate change and peak oil.

I tried doing this myself a few years ago and posted the results here in the Cellar.

I believe it now, but the political argument was being forcefully made well before the evidence was in by folks with a preference for command economies. That is what caused the perception that it wasn't good science and what needs to be overcome now.

I think part of the problem is that they initially used the term global warming, instead of climate change.

good point HLJ.

IMO, if you don't believe in climate change, you are a moron.

But even if you don't, even a moron has to know that the use of fossil fuels and chemicals in plastics, etc. as well as garbage and waste disposal is not GOOD for the planet.

Please to define good for the planet.

Being in orbit around the sun, clearing the neighborhood of hoodlum asteroids wearing hoodies, sufficient mass to keep it fairly round, not acting like Pluto.

Those are all things that are good for planets.



Planets. Ask for them by name.

Bright aurora borealis and hoodies [tails] on comets,
Size to shape ratios and planetary status,
Celestial objects that are called by their names,
These are a few of my favorite things. ;)

Never doubted it was happening, just couldn't get good answers to, so what?
One side said it didn't matter, while the other side said the sky was falling. I knew neither was true, but I still don't know how far, how fast, what are the consequences, and can we do anything about it.
I know if all the polar bears die, that's a shame but it won't affect me very much. However, if the glaciers are gone that supply a quarter of the world's population with fresh water, that might.

I think the thing to worry about is not the big critters, but the small ones. You know the old food bacteria saying, "Life begins at 40?" as in 40 degrees? Notice how it isn't 39 degrees or 41 degrees?

At certain temps life is kept in check, a quarter of a degree and the scales are tipped in favor of exponential growth. Just ask any home brewer.

It's the things we aren't aware of that we should be concerned with. Fuck the polar bears, per se.

Too many wacko political types were preaching for self serving power purposes.

Meanwhile, those who actually know this stuff have been saying the same all along. The problem is created by man. We do not yet have all details. We do not know how severe this problem may become. But we do know what is created today may generate consequences twenty, fifty, or 100 years from now.

Does the ozone problem still exist? Of course. But its consequences are slowly being solved. So political hypsters are no longer perverting those facts, creating confusion, or making denials. They cannot obtain power by hyping spin and lies about ozone depletion.

Is mankind changing the climate? Of course. Confirmed consequences will not be known for decades. Maybe minor. Maybe not. But those consequences will be significant.

For example, to deal with is known, NYC is already making infrastructure plans. Because cities must plan and do now for what is needed 20 or more years later.

Unanswered questions remain how severe its consequences will be. We explore all worst case scenarios to define an answer somewhere inside those extremes. Unfortunately wacko political types must hype those extremes into hate, fear, and confusion. Rather than learn why those extremes are defined.

We know the problem exists. Finding numbers to quantify the problem is the unknown part. Meanwhile those with self serving agendas, little education, and a need for power are the 'sides' that too many entertain (hear) rather than learn the science.

Problem with such a subject is that it is so charged politically. My own opinion would probably make an ecologist go up in flames but here it goes :

We're not the cause of global warming.
Most probably it is a phase our planet goes through.
We're just accelerating it.

You'll remark that I do not deny the climate is changing. Yet, a lot of people would think so.

Sure, we should do something to at least minimize our impact in this. But we're going at it without thinking clearly.

All of us have to change our manner of thinking. And you can not make it happens by issueing laws.

I don't know the situation in other countries but, here in France, wind power is all the rage. Since Brittany is a windy place, there are wind farms projects nearly everywhere. Personally, I don't have a thing against wind farms if the project is about producing energy not making a political coup.

Did I mention that Brittany is windy? It is windy enough that for nearly a quarter of the year we have winds in excess of 55 mph... the cut-out speed of a Nordex N80/2500 a typical windmill model.

Solar power is still in its infancy. In France, it was sustainable because you could receive state subsidies.

Hydro power? While our potential for huge dams is probably at full capacity, we could use microhydro to generate power. Around home, I know of at least 15 former watermills that could be equipped. Systems are well known, low maintenance and have relatively low installation costs... but when you try to come up with a project, the ecologists begin crying for the fish. Most of these places have been mills for decades, if not centuries, so the river ecosystem is running OK.

They want us to make use of public transportation. Again, no problem to do that, at least on my part. I even tried it recently when I took a 3 months job in Brest. Train station : a 5 mn walk from home. First morning train : 6:52. Second and Last morning train 7:52. No angst there.

Transit Time by train : over 45 mn (station to station) (add 15 mn walking)
Transit time by car : a little less than 30 mn (door to door) (no walking)
Last evening train : 17:24 (I worked from 8:30 to 18:00)

And it is not going to change.



Sorry for my rants but it had to get out... and don't get me started on our farmers.

What about your farmers??

And if that acceleration is significant enough in itself, it makes sense to slow it down. I know that I will die eventually, but I would certainly like to put it off.

A lot of the fish we now eat is now poisoned. Logically, one would think that if most of the earth's surface is water, that it would take a lot to pollute the ocean.

But in reality, that amount is still finite. Even at 332.5 million cubic miles, we're talking about an 860 mile globe of water if it was removed from the surface. It doesn't take as much pollution to affect something like that over decades, especially as technology advances and with it increasing pollution and more exotic toxins.

So the earth is big, but the surface of the earth really isn't compared to the mass of the planet. And affecting what is essentially a skin extending up a few miles into the air and a few miles into the ocean is not that difficult. We already do this on a small scale with cities covered in asphalt and concrete that trap heat, something that is being looked at and corrected in some places.

In the last decade we have given up a lot of money and some freedom to keep us safe from the possibility of a terrorist attack that might kill hundreds or even thousands. How much effort should we put into dealing with the possibility of a global problem that can kill millions?

Very nearly correct, IMHO. Let me change a few things ...

We're not the cause of global warming.
Most probably it is a phase our planet goes through.
We're just accelerating it.


Climate has been unstable for around five million years, due to either the Panamanian land bridge separating the Pacific and Indian Oceans, the Himalayas being thrust up preventing the monsoons from reaching into North Asia, or both. Since then we've been swinging between glacial and inter-glacial ages.

Our activities - including what we put into the atmosphere, and widespread changes of land use and cover - will change climate in ways it would not otherwise have changed.

Now for my climate heretic moment ...
If we did not alter the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, ti is nearly certain that sometime in the next couple of tens of thousands of years, the Earth would return to glacial conditions. For human purposes, that would be bad.
[/heretic]

But if we overdo the greenhouse gases, we over-warm the planet, and push through a whole bunch of other changes, most notably shifting weather patterns and sea level rise. Given that our whole infrastructure is set up for things as they are today, significant change to climate is also bad for human interests.

[handwringer] ... but I also think that climate change won't really start to bite us on the arse for 50 to 100 years, and serious sea level rise will take several times longer, and we'll have screwed ourselves up with simple resource depletion (soil, water, fish, forests) and pollution long before then, so although I believe we are fooling with the climate, we have more urgent things to worry about. [/HW]

So, how about that celebrity gossip and sporting scandal, eh?

I don't know about that. We're seeing stronger storms, more tornadoes, loss of snow pack causing drought, more insects and insect borne disease.

Some of these might be cyclical, related to El Nino or other recurring patterns, but some may be man made. I'm personally not happy with an almost year round allergy season.

True, but I consider those irritants on the level of a mosquito-bite.

By "bite us on the arse" I was thinking of catastrophic flooding that forces the permanent evacuation of tens of millions of people from places like Shanghai, Dhaka, New York, and London, or permanent shifting of rainfall areas forcing he abandonment of huge tracts of farmland, leading to famines that kill huge numbers. Real arse-biting stuff.

But relax, that's at least 50 years in the future! :D

*shrug* Been warming since 1830 and no cities abandoned for it yet.

I almost put this into a thread for it's lyrical writing, but it is really
a technical piece about climate change and mankind's effect on the planet.

The long quote below struck my emotional strings.

NY Times
8/17/13

Gorgeous Glimpses of Calamity
<snip>
There’s a dispassionate quality to the view from on high.
On Aug. 2, 2005, the circuitous trajectory of Messenger, a NASA spacecraft,
brought it boomeranging back toward Earth on its way to explore Mercury.
Its steady stream of data offered a rare chance to watch our world grow larger in space,
as a visitor from another star system might first see it.

Initially, Earth was simply a pearl of milky white and ultramarine blue,
with the white — clouds, ice and snow — being other forms of life-giving water.
Eventually, hues of tawny gold appeared; more than a third of the visible land area, it seemed, was desert.
Only later, when the planet filled half the picture plane, did a hint of emerald emerge between the clouds.
A verdant, compelling green. The color of photosynthesis.

After this first direct evidence of life on Earth, and with the spacecraft
still a quarter of the distance to the Moon, another hue emerged.
Above the lush equatorial belt of South America, lower in altitude and distinct from the clouds,
it was a nebulous, smoky, profoundly unsettling gray-blue.

Could this be from fires, perhaps willfully set?
Could this first hint of intelligent life on Earth signify a species evidently busy creating still more desert?
<snip>
And this was the view from some 65,000 miles away.
Far closer in, NASA maintains a small fleet of Earth-observing satellites.
Unfortunately, their visual record makes it even clearer that something is going badly wrong in the garden.

Across the world, tremendous wildfires can be seen raging during the searing summers of the new millennium.
As the oceans warm, vast equatorial hurricanes have smashed North America.
In Canada, the Northwest Passage has twice become clear of ice during the last decade.

And the smog is no longer localized.
A gunmetal exhalation of coal and fuel smoke blankets China almost daily,
extending out across the sea toward the Korean Peninsula,
Japan and beyond.
We are tracking glaciers retreating, and immense polar icebergs calving into rising waters.
Gargantuan sandstorms extend out from expanding deserts, sometimes traversing the breadth of the Atlantic.
<snip>

There are several still images from space and a few videos in the article.
Here is just one of the embedded videos:
June 2013: Dense clouds of smoke from fires set on the Indonesian island of Sumatra choked neighboring Singapore.

This 6' 1" Governor seems to think he can keep his head above water by censuring Florida's vocabulary.

Ravaged by climate change, Florida reportedly bans term ‘climate change’
Washington Post - errence McCoy - 3/9/15

What utter bull shite. Is there such a thing a perpetual motion?....Well, I'm not a scientist, so I don't think I can really answer such a question.....Oh, my fucking God I hate politicians. Problem is that the American people who elect these clowns are so fickle that he has to lie to keep his job and get re-elected. So, basically we are all just lying to ourselves to make money. At least the majority of the minority who vote.

Yes I believe in change. Last week was below freezing for a few days. Now about 70 and rain. Next week who knows?

True words.

Can the people of NY sell you a hurricane called Sandy? Consider it a fire sale.

You have just described Scottish normal weather, we can get the 4 seasons in an hour here :eek:

I love how some folks will point to one thing and be like, "This sure doesn't seem like global warming to me!" with some asinine self-righteous chuckle.

As someone that is a big fan of science (and also has a Master of Science degree), the amount of anti-science craziness that goes on these days scares the crap out of me.

That's OK. It's those craziness genes that keep the gene pool strong.

Climate science literacy unrelated to public acceptance of human-caused global warming

The headline is backed up by a scientific study, operated by a top university, and published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

So now, if you believe that the people who do not believe as you do are uneducated in science, uninformed, stupid, or just plain crazy, you are... a science denier.

Well, it argues against "uneducated in science", "uninformed", and "stupid", at least.

But knowing all the science and still denying what the scientists overwhelmingly say? Is that better or worse than simply being uninformed?

What do the scientists overwhelmingly say?

ETA that's three part question

What do they say?

Who are the scientists?

What is overwhelmingly?

That's all wrong. Let me figure out the right question.

Does "climate change" = "climate warming" ?

Is the overall global climate: warming, cooling, or staying the same ?

Are the activities of mankind: contributing, causing, or having no effect ?

It's all in how you ask "the" question.

Roughly speaking, I believe in AGW.

I hate hate hate unscientific statements about AGW. Hate.

I hear them mostly from those who believe in it.

After an hour of trying, and three deleted novellas, I can't formulate the question. I guess I don't really want to. Enjoy yourselves.

It's rather unfair to be pissy about people making mistakes, considering there's a lot of misinformation about how to calculate and when you must use Actual gold Weight.

Oh wait, do you mean Anthropogenic Global Warming?
If you're going to rise to the four hate per sentence level of passion on this, that must mean you're pretty good at detecting unscientific statements. Do your judge them on whether or not the speaker understands the basic thread of what they are trying to express in lay language?

Or do you use the monocled Professor approach, that they better be able to express, in proper scientific jargon, the exact results which have been reviewed and approved by the International Brotherhood of Unstained Executive Lab Coats?

There's nothing I like better than a good self-righteous dressing down of people who are wrong, but I find the world has gotten so complicated it's awfully hard for me to determine whether they're wrong or not. How did the black and white world get polluted with all these shades of grey?

The scientists have produced a shitload of knowledge in my lifetime, as well as stuff like a zillion chemical compounds I'd rather not think about. They'd make a "breakthrough", popular science would completely distort what it is and how it will affect the whole human race. These came so fast and proved to be only semi reliable, so if it didn't affect work, I'll just wait for the flying cars.
But it nagged me, half the time it's new knowledge, but the other half they'd say, "up until now scientists thought", or "this disproves what science have believed". Yesterday this was solid scientific fact, plan space shots, plan my health care, get four hate per sentence irate on it... today, fugetaboutit.

Whoopee! We're all gonna die.

Presumably because you recognize that scientists overwhelmingly say it is happening? You're not a climate scientist yourself, so you have to defer to the experts.The phrase "what the scientists overwhelmingly say" may not be worded with mathematical precision, but no matter how many subquestions you divide it into, you know what it means, and you know that "what the scientists overwhelmingly say" is that AGW is real.

No I don't. Convince me.

Ok.

Who do you trust as a reliable source of information on this subject?

Of what? You already believe AGW is real. Did you come by that belief independently of scientists warning us of it?

Convince me that "what the scientists overwhelmingly say" is that AGW is real. I am not yet convinced of that.

Maybe this will help?



http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/2/024024/article




ABSTRACT:
We analyze the evolution of the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, examining 11 944 climate abstracts from 1991–2011 matching the topics 'global climate change' or 'global warming'. We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming. Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. In a second phase of this study, we invited authors to rate their own papers. Compared to abstract ratings, a smaller percentage of self-rated papers expressed no position on AGW (35.5%). Among self-rated papers expressing a position on AGW, 97.2% endorsed the consensus. For both abstract ratings and authors' self-ratings, the percentage of endorsements among papers expressing a position on AGW marginally increased over time. Our analysis indicates that the number of papers rejecting the consensus on AGW is a vanishingly small proportion of the published research.

Who paid for those? just curious if there was a financial incentive for their conclusions.

Well done, I was expecting either that, or the 2004 Science editorial. This is a stronger piece IMO.

What do you think of the major criticisms of this study?

It's a literature review, no money required.

for the abstracts or for the review? or both?

Plus, see the wiki page of counterexamples. First, it's a short list, though of course, it is undoubtedly incomplete. Second, it contains multiple references to what the scientific consensus is that they are objecting to, including especially another wiki page specifically listing a large number of statements of consensus on the subject. That page includes this statement:

Of course, that revised statement is somewhat equivocal, but they had been the last holdout (as a group; there are individuals, as mentioned in the first link) who been explicitly denying AGW.

Oh, of the abstracts 1991-2011, those were mostly paid for. The review is free. But given the scope of all academia I really doubt that who paid for the studies is important. If we're talking about one study that's one thing, this is a review of many many studies and the money is mostly from academia I'd expect.

If we want to be careful, Wikipedia is out, right? We should agree on that.

My line of question was because I wondered if many of the abstracts were paid for by a small number of "entities" As you were.

The pages I linked were lists of non-Wikipedia references.