Thread: Climate Change Info from an IPCC Scientist

Originally Posted by 59caddy

sounds about as good as anything else the left wing would come up with(endangering someones life by proposing some unattainable bet without thinking of the possible consequences)

You're doing so well. You've almost got the whole thing in your mouth. Now swallow, swallow, SWALLOW!

Originally Posted by Wildtim

The thing I love is how you aren't allowed to quote anything from a right wing think tank as authoritative but you are allowed to quote university studies which are the most liberal think tanks out there.

You've got the cart before the horse here a little. We were talking about agendas. Generally speaking a think tank's agenda is to promote ideas that make them money. An educational institution's agenda is to educate. Their view is informed and supported hundreds of times more than the think tank talking points are and by more credible science and scientists as well. That it may be labeled 'liberal' post hoc is inconsequential to the originators as it actually is to all of us as well. It is the truth. I can understand how that, 'liberal' and 'correct' going together like that, must stick in your craw, but perhaps you should consider what your (possibly anti liberal) agenda might be and adjust your thinking based on the facts. No I'm not suggesting that you simply adopt a pro liberal view, but an honest investigation regardless of political bent.

But I'm sure you'll keep working on getting that cow down with TexasBob and 59caddy. I've watched this clown show before and I know how it ends.

*begs apology if his words seem harsh, but as Lau Tsu wisely observed, "Truthful words are not beautiful, beautiful words are not truthful"*

Originally Posted by xman

But I'm sure you'll keep working on getting that cow down with TexasBob and 59caddy. I've watched this clown show before and I know how it ends.

I'll eat the cow. You can have the crow. Almost dinnertime!

I wish we had this discussion ten years ago so I could now be saying "I told you so!"

Originally Posted by xman

You're doing so well. You've almost got the whole thing in your mouth. Now swallow, swallow, SWALLOW!


You've got the cart before the horse here a little. We were talking about agendas. Generally speaking a think tank's agenda is to promote ideas that make them money. An educational institution's agenda is to educate. Their view is informed and supported hundreds of times more than the think tank talking points are and by more credible science and scientists as well. That it may be labeled 'liberal' post hoc is inconsequential to the originators as it actually is to all of us as well. It is the truth. I can understand how that, 'liberal' and 'correct' going together like that, must stick in your craw, but perhaps you should consider what your (possibly anti liberal) agenda might be and adjust your thinking based on the facts. No I'm not suggesting that you simply adopt a pro liberal view, but an honest investigation regardless of political bent.

But I'm sure you'll keep working on getting that cow down with TexasBob and 59caddy. I've watched this clown show before and I know how it ends.

*begs apology if his words seem harsh, but as Lau Tsu wisely observed, "Truthful words are not beautiful, beautiful words are not truthful"*

where is the TRUTH? i am still waiting...where is the proof???..still waiting...all i see is computer "models" and "theories" anybody can make a "model" or have a "theory...where is the evidence? quit the mud slinging and show real proof...
IT'S ALL ABOUT THE MONEY......
you say you know how this ends, well tell the truth and it would end...but the left just keep spewing forth lies and more lies....

When I say "you", it is not directed at anyone here. I read only the first post and wanted to address it. What I saw in the first post was not written by the OP, so I indirectly address the people who dreamed up these arguments.
Edit: Now that I have read a few of the posts above mine, let me steal this line and add it here:

*begs apology if his words seem harsh, but as Lau Tsu wisely observed, "Truthful words are not beautiful, beautiful words are not truthful"*

Originally Posted by TexasBob

• Carbon dioxide concentration has been continually rising for nearly 100 years. It continues to rise, but carbon dioxide concentrations at present are near the lowest in geologic history. Gotta be kidding me.
• The greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide logarithmically declines with increasing concentration. True. At present levels, any additional carbon dioxide can have very little effect. Again, kidding, right?
• During the last 100 years, temperature has both risen and fallen, including the present cooling. All the changes in temperature of the last 100 years are in normal historic ranges, both in absolute value and, most importantly, rate of change. The rate of change right now is not in any way in a normal historic range.
• Voluminous historic records demonstrate the Medieval Climate Optimum (MCO) was real and that the “hockey stick” graphic that attempted to deny that fact was at best bad science. The MCO was considerably warmer than the end of the 20th century.
• Polar bears have survived and thrived over periods of extreme cold and extreme warmth over hundreds of thousands of years - extremes far in excess of modern temperature changes. There are more factors involved than just this. You need to look at how they're actually doing now (instead of guesses), look at genetic diversity, population size, etc. to see if they can, as a species, withstand a severe change. Not really relevant to whether global warming is anthropogenic or not though.
• The 2009 minimum Arctic ice extent was significantly larger than the previous two years. The 2009 Antarctic maximum ice extent was significantly above the 30-year average. There are only 30 years of records. Again, kidding? 30 years of records? Have you heard of paleoclimate? If we only had 30 years of records about any of this stuff, we couldn't say a damn thing.

It's kinda hilarious and sad at the same time. Basically every single one of these is false. And all you need to do is read any real climate research. Research that's out there to expand knowledge, not to prove any point. The IPCC is actually doing that type of research. 97% of published climatologists believe that global warming is mostly caused by anthropogenic emissions. Only about 50% of the public does. People who think these climatologists are making money off of this are pretty misled. There's no cabal of climatologists making billions off of global warming. This would be like claiming there's a cabal of astronomers at NASA making money off of telling you that the sun is at the center of the solar system. If you pay enough, you could pay a some "astronomers" to say that I'm sure, but that doesn't make NASA any less credible in my book.
CO2 levels are at their lowest? What kind of data are these people using? Are polar bears doing fine? Clearly, not. Is the overall ice coverage of the Earth increasing? Can the CO2 absorption band be saturated? Sure can. Are we close to that? You're dreaming. We're not even close in ppm concentrations of CO2 (and you should be happy about that).

And then you need to take into account El Nino and La Nina and the impact of those two phenomenon on climate, GHG concentrations, sea level, etc. But none of the pseudo-scientists will discuss that stuff, cause it's too complicated for brainwashing.

And the email scandal is a joke too. Who gives a damn if a climatologist called someone stupid or a pain in the ass? Don't global warming skeptics think that hippies are a pain in the ass? We're all human. That stuff's completely irrelevant though. You need to look at the data. If there's an issue with that, then you have a right to make a scientific argument. People need to stop acting like pre-teen drama queens and get over BS and look at the actual science. You wanna criticize a scientist, criticize his data, not whether he's a nice guy. It would also be nice to give context to the emails instead of selecting three sentences. That's like using the bible to tell women to not wear their hair in a top-knot (I'm sure some of you know that story) by selecting a certain series of 4 words.

This is simple crisis mentality. And we've seen these BS tricks before. It happened with the ozone hole. The CFC producing/using industries fought tooth and nail, defamed scientists, spread pseudo-science, paid off scientists to lie. Then the industries found an alternative to CFC's and they were all for helping to put an end to ozone depletion. That's what we see with global warming, but the issue is that global warming is much more long term and people are notoriously bad at thinking like adults (that is, in a long term manner). We're not gonna see the equivalent of yearly increases in cancer rates, so nobody's gonna flip out and demand a change.
It's pretty pathetic how many times we've been through things like this. We see a huge problem arising. Some nuts who have an interest in denying it spend tons of money and repeat the same false messages telling people it's all a hoax a billion times till people believe it. The disaster hits and people flip out and then try to clean up the mess.

The simplest way to understand this issue in my opinion is the following:

1. Is the greenhouse effect real? Yes. Natural greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere have played a key role in making the Earth warmer and more habitable. Greenhouse gases include CO2, water vapor (yup), and many other gases that re-radiate infrared radiation leaving the Earth. They re-radiate it in all directions (that's the overall effect), so some of it hits the Earth and warms the planet. This is natural.
2. Are humans emitting more CO2 than is being absorbed? Yes. All the legitimate climate research points to this. Again, you can doubt it, but that is the equivalent of doubting that the two hemispheres of our brain are connected by the corpus callosum.
As the concentration of CO2 goes up, the amount of re-radiation per unit of CO2 added gets less. Diminishing returns. That's because at some point, there's no more radiation of the specific wavelength that CO2 can absorb and re-radiate. Are we close? No. I don't remember the specific numbers, but gladly, we're not nearly close.
3. If greenhouse gases are responsible for warming the Earth, and if we are indeed releasing more CO2 than can be absorbed and are not near saturation, how is it possible to argue that humans are not responsible to some extent for global warming? All the science in the field points to these premises being true, so the conclusion is valid as well. Now you can argue about the data and have "climatologists" who don't research this and publish in the field try to doubt this, but what does their word really mean? They're not the ones actually researching the facts. They just got a degree in the subject.
You could also argue that though we are having an impact, it's minuscule and negligible. Again this is false. We can calculate how much of an impact each Gt of CO2 has in terms of radiative forcing (in simpler terms, how much it'll heat up the Earth). If we do, the research again points to the conclusion that human emissions are not only real, but also play a significant role.

Don't believe what I say or what anyone else just says though. Look up the actual research and what people doing research report as their DATA. Not just opinions. Anyone with a degree can make a claim and people who don't know better are bound to believe them, but you should avoid that. Look for research. Not the save the polar bear sites. But not the skeptic sites either. Just try to find the research (is that the thousandth time I've said that). It's not hard, there are a ton of journal databases around. I've never been to a single website that is pro or anti global warming, and I expect people who argue with me to use sources that are above that crap as well. The IPCC is also available. But if you think that the IPCC is some hoax or evil cabal, then I really don't know what else to tell you. You look at guys who don't even research the field, who are funded by the oil industry to say specific messages and think they're honest. Then you look at guys who are just scientists. Making money off of being scientists, NOT off of the specific results they find, and think they're dishonest? That's some weird non-logic right there.

HEIRKB,
you rather long post just makes my point again...you reference legitimate climate science..ok, what is legitimate and what is not....you also have a lot of "ifs" and so forth in your argument. again i read and do not see specific proof, just "theory" and "models"...who is telling the truth?...again i say follow the money.

ALL RIGHT YOU GUYS. JUST SHUT UP !! AND DISH OUT THE MONEY !!! That means everybody (including X and BJ, and the rest of you stingy suckers). Don't you realize that all these guys and gals who got together in Copenhagen have very opulent lifestyles that they need us to maintain for them? So pay the pipers boys and girls!!


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Originally Posted by 59caddy

as far as the left ignoring facts, please read the following:
Technology Review: Global Warming Bombshell

this being published by MIT....

OH, and this goes along with the above article:
U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works

Perhaps you might have missed this article, which totally blows out of the water your first reference. From RealClimate: Myth vs. Fact Regarding the "Hockey Stick"

MYTH #4: Errors in the "Hockey Stick" undermine the conclusion that late 20th century hemispheric warmth is anomalous.

This statement embraces at least two distinct falsehoods. The first falsehood holds that the “Hockey Stick” is the result of one analysis or the analysis of one group of researchers (i.e., that of Mann et al, 1998 and Mann et al, 1999). However, as discussed in the response to Myth #1 above, the basic conclusions of Mann et al (1998,1999) are affirmed in multiple independent studies. Thus, even if there were errors in the Mann et al (1998) reconstruction, numerous other studies independently support the conclusion of anomalous late 20th century hemispheric-scale warmth.
The second falsehood holds that there are errors in the Mann et al (1998, 1999) analyses, and that these putative errors compromise the “hockey stick” shape of hemispheric surface temperature reconstructions. Such claims seem to be based in part on the misunderstanding or misrepresentation by some individuals of a corrigendum that was published by Mann and colleagues in Nature. This corrigendum simply corrected the descriptions of supplementary information that accompanied the Mann et al article detailing precisely what data were used. As clearly stated in the corrigendum, these corrections have no influence at all on the actual analysis or any of the results shown in Mann et al (1998). Claims that the corrigendum reflects any errors at all in the Mann et al (1998) reconstruction are entirely false.
False claims of the existence of errors in the Mann et al (1998) reconstruction can also be traced to spurious allegations made by two individuals, McIntyre and McKitrick (McIntyre works in the mining industry, while McKitrick is an economist). The false claims were first made in an article (McIntyre and McKitrick, 2003) published in a non-scientific (social science) journal “Energy and Environment” and later, in a separate “Communications Arising” comment that was rejected by Nature based on negative appraisals by reviewers and editor [as a side note, we find it peculiar that the authors have argued elsewhere that their submission was rejected due to 'lack of space'. Nature makes their policy on such submissions quite clear: "The Brief Communications editor will decide how to proceed on the basis of whether the central conclusion of the earlier paper is brought into question; of the length of time since the original publication; and of whether a comment or exchange of views is likely to seem of interest to nonspecialist readers. Because Nature receives so many comments, those that do not meet these criteria are referred to the specialist literature." Since Nature chose to send the comment out for review in the first place, the "time since the original publication" was clearly not deemed a problematic factor. One is logically left to conclude that the grounds for rejection were the deficiencies in the authors' arguments explicitly noted by the reviewers]. The rejected criticism has nonetheless been posted on the internet by the authors, and promoted in certain other non-peer-reviewed venues (see this nice discussion by science journalist David Appell of a scurrilous parroting of their claims by Richard Muller in an on-line opinion piece).
The claims of McIntyre and McKitrick, which hold that the “Hockey-Stick” shape of the MBH98 reconstruction is an artifact of the use of series with infilled data and the convention by which certain networks of proxy data were represented in a Principal Components Analysis (“PCA”), are readily seen to be false , as detailed in a response by Mann and colleagues to their rejected Nature criticism demonstrating that (1) the Mann et al (1998) reconstruction is robust with respect to the elimination of any data that were infilled in the original analysis, (2) the main features of the Mann et al (1998) reconstruction are entirely insensitive to whether or not proxy data networks are represented by PCA, (3) the putative ‘correction’ by McIntyre and McKitrick, which argues for anomalous 15th century warmth (in contradiction to all other known reconstructions), is an artifact of the censoring by the authors of key proxy data in the original Mann et al (1998) dataset, and finally, (4) Unlike the original Mann et al (1998) reconstruction, the so-called ‘correction’ by McIntyre and McKitrick fails statistical verification exercises, rendering it statistically meaningless and unworthy of discussion in the legitimate scientific literature.
The claims of McIntyre and McKitrick have now been further discredited in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, in a paper to appear in the American Meteorological Society journal, “Journal of Climate” by Rutherford and colleagues (2004) [and by yet another paper by an independent set of authors that is currently "under review" and thus cannot yet be cited--more on this soon!]. Rutherford et al (2004) demonstrate nearly identical results to those of MBH98, using the same proxy dataset as Mann et al (1998) but addressing the issues of infilled/missing data raised by Mcintyre and McKitrick, and using an alternative climate field reconstruction (CFR) methodology that does not represent any proxy data networks by PCA at all.


As far as your reference to Claude Allegre is concerned, you are basically correct. He does not believe AGW has been demonstrated to explain global warming observations. He also had denied that asbestos is harmful, and has made some rather bizarre statments concerning that very controversial theory of...gravity. From wikipedia:
Asbestos

In 1996, Allègre opposed the removing of carcinogenic asbestos from the Jussieu university campus in Paris, describing it as harmless and dismissing concerns about it as a form of "psychosis created by leftists".^[4] The campus' asbestos is deemed to have killed 22 people and caused serious health problems in 130 others.^[5]
[edit] Gravity

In 1999, the Canard enchaîné, and subsequently several other media, published Allègre's claim, initially stated during a radio interview, that, if one drops a pétanque ball and a tennis ball at the same time from a tower, they will reach the ground at the same time. Allègre claimed that there was a popular misconception to the contrary, and that schoolchildren should be made to understand that two objects always fall at the same speed. The Canard responded that this was true only in a vacuum, and not in all cases as Allègre had said. The latter responded in turn, maintaining his initial statement. Georges Charpak, Nobel prize for Physics, intervened to explain that Allègre was wrong; the latter maintained his statement yet again.^{[6] [7]}



Do you fact check ANYTHING before you post???

Originally Posted by ControlFreak1

ALL RIGHT YOU GUYS. JUST SHUT UP !! AND DISH OUT THE MONEY !!! That means everybody (including X and BJ, and the rest of you stingy suckers). Don't you realize that all these guys and gals who got together in Copenhagen have very opulent lifestyles that they need us to maintain for them? So pay the pipers boys and girls!!


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As usual, what a thoughtful post...nice discussion of the facts...most enlightening...

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