The New York Times reports some astonishing news of a changing climate:
Sea ice around Antarctica has seen unusual winter expansions recently, and this week is near a record high.(it's the very bottom of a story that is mainly about the shrinking of Arctic ice). So how do scientists explain all of this?
scientists acknowledged that both poles were extraordinarily complicated systems of ice, water and land, and that the mix of human and natural influences was not easy to clarify.Silly me. I thought the science of climate change was settled.
The increasing ice in the Antarctic is really old news the GW zealots didn't pick up on till now.
And does this mean I don't have to drink my pee anymore ala Alicia Silverstoned?
Posted by: swatter on September 21, 2007 03:06 PMAll I can say is we desperately need more Global Warming around here.
Posted by: Gored! on September 21, 2007 03:28 PMAll I can say is we desperately need more Global Warming around here.
Posted by: Gored! on September 21, 2007 03:28 PMNo serious scientist ever said it was "settled", as in fully understood, any more than, say, gravity is fully understood. However, there is a strong scientific consensus that human actions are playing a large role in long-term climate change.
Not understanding the difference between those is not "silly". It's either really dumb, or, more likely since I know Stefan isn't dumb, a smart person assuming his readers are really dumb.
Posted by: Bruce on September 21, 2007 03:36 PMEat More Beef
Posted by: Danny on September 21, 2007 03:42 PMNot a good comparison, Bruce. It is understood. It's called the law of gravity for a reason. Not theory. And certainly not speculation.
Man-made global warming will reveal itself to be a hoax ... or at least as much of a trumped-up scare as Y2K was.
Posted by: jimg on September 21, 2007 04:14 PMThe empirical science on climate is mixed. The models project potential future's based on a very limited understanding of how the real world works.
Tomorrow's climate is as much of an unknown to the AGW crowd as it is to rest of us. The difference is that the AGW crowd is willing to accept as true certain articles of faith.
A real scientist is a natural skeptic who would not suspend their disbelief in what cannot be demonstrated. The precautionary principle is the AGW way of forcing some scientist to tow the line.
Scientists who accept the status quo have no incentive to find answers to nature's mysteries. Did Einstein or Tesla accept the settled science of their peers?
Too much of today's science falls into the realm of speculation rather than discovery. And not very rigirous speculation at that. The recent outing of NASA's James Hansen Y2K errors are an excellent example of the sloppyness that passes for "peer reviewed" science in climatology.
So what should we do? If you are a thinking person, you might want to wait until the AGW crowd actually produce some basic research results that support their underlying hypotheses.
This is something they have failed utterly to do during the last 15 to 20 years while their theories have gained political currency. All we keep getting are more and models based on the same hypotheses producing more and more papers about what might happen if they are right.
If their theories were right we should have a lot more evidence of it by now. And we certainly wouldn't be seeing the record cold temperatures in the Soutern Hemisphere and sea ice extent in Antarctica.
And you AGW types, if you wish to seriously debate the issues, try using logic and facts instead of the usual emotion and attacks.
The actual facts dispute your claim of consensus. In fact, 32% of published papers on climate change between 1993 and 2003 explicitly support the anthropogenic climate change model.
The VAST majority are either neutral or opposed to the AGW model.
I'd call 32% a LONG way from a consensus. Unless you happen to believe all that you're fed by the Left and those who benefit from the whole AGW "crisis" (Al Gore, and your carbon credit selling friends, I'm looking your way...)
Scientific hypotheses are proven or disproven by controlled experiments. To date, there have been ZERO controlled experiments proving or disproving the hypothesis that currently occurring global warming is caused primarily by human activity, as opposed to the counter hypotheses that
(1) currently occurring global warming is the natural result of our being at the conclusion of a 1,500 or 10,000 year post-ice age warming cycle or
(2) that global warming is an artifact of
inaccurate temperature gathering over a very short period of time (probes located in (unnaturally warm) cities for, at most, slightly more than a human life span) or
(3) that it is a result of faulty data normalization (averaging "normal" world temps over only 50 years for the baseline to which to compare annual readings for the so called "temperature anomaly") or
(4) that currently occurring global warming is caused by a cyclical lack of world cloud cover caused by a centuries long cyclical variation in the sun's magnetic field, which in turn causes the diversion of sub-atomic particles from distant galaxies away from Earth that otherwise would form the nuclei in the atmosphere around which condensate water vapor molecules form to make clouds, or
(5) that currently occurring global warming is due to cyclical changes in the energy output of the sun combined with a myriad of other climatological factors on earth.
All of the counter-hypotheses listed that include current global warming could, and likely would, result in increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere as increased temperatures cause an increase in oceanic outgassing (both due to rising temperatures and to more exposed ocean surface in the antarctic and arctic due to melting of the ice cap and receding glaciers - but not the melting of the ice sheets on Antarctica and Greenland, which is not happening) and to increased plant respiration.
That is, increased CO2 in the atmosphere is equally likely to be an effect of global heating as it is likely to be a cause. No controlled experiments have been conducted to discern cause from effect.
Computer modeling is a powerful tool for generating hypotheses, but no credible scientist would substitute a computer model, regardless of its sophistication, for a controlled experiment. But the most zealous advocates of human behavioral changes to fight "Human Caused" Global Warming are not scientists - they are politicians and political columnists. And the public and the popular media is woefully ignorant of the scientific method in general, and of climatology and glaciology, and of the skills needed for independent critical thinking.
By the way, I have been told, and I invite any reader to verify, that there are, in fact, controlled experiments under way at the world's largest particle accelerator at the CERN facility in Europe that are designed to probe the validity of hypothesis number (4) above.
Posted by: srogers on September 21, 2007 05:01 PMWrong. There is no scientific meaning for the word "law". In science, it's commonly called Newton's Theory of Universal Gravitation. The word "theory" has a meaning in science that is quite different from its meaning in everyday usage (something that confuses the evolution deniers).
Anyway, there are many things we understand, and many things we don't understand, about all sorts of subjects -- gravity, evolution, cancer, climate, etc. The fact that we don't understand everything about a subject is often used by fringe non-scientists to claim we don't understand anything about that subject, but the logical flaw in that line of argument is obvious. With respect to global climate, there's certainly debate over the extent of climate change and many of the mechanisms. But I don't think there's serious scientific debate over the fact that human actions are the biggest cause of the change that has occurred recently and will occur over the next century.
Posted by: Bruce on September 21, 2007 05:06 PMObtaining data (temperature measurements), and displaying it in a pretty chart after reduction by a computer program, and then drawing conclusions from the chart, is NOT an experiment. Yet that is all that Mr. Hansen from the Goddard Institute ever did. His data cannot be used as "proof" of anything, but it can be used as the basis for propaganda . . . .
Posted by: srogers on September 21, 2007 05:23 PMI guess you never heard of:
Or a few thousand others... The phrase Scientific Law is readily accepted and used in everyday scientific work. By a few million engineers, scientists, and researchers every day. To put forth otherwise is pretty disingenuous...
Just like claiming there's a consensus on global warming...
Posted by: Edmonds Dan on September 21, 2007 07:12 PMBruce, you should seriously think again. There is a lot of "serious scientific debate" over this issue. Here is just one recent discussion of this issue by Dr. S. Fred Singer. He is a "serious scientist". Here is a portion of his resume:
S. Fred Singer is professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, a distinguished research professor at George Mason University, and president of the Science and Environmental Policy Project. He performed his undergraduate studies at Ohio State University and earned his Ph.D. in Physics from Princeton University. He was the founding dean of the School of Environmental and Planetary Sciences at the University of Miami, the founding director of the U.S. National Weather Satellite Service, and served for five years as vice chairman of the U.S. National Advisory Committee on Oceans and Atmosphere.
Here is another by Dr. Richard Lindzen. Here is a portion of his resume--Another "serious scientist":
Richard S. Lindzen has been the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1983. He is the author of over 200 books and papers in the scientific literature. He was a lead author on chapter 7 (on physical processes) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Third Assessment Report (2001).
Posted by: Bill H on September 21, 2007 08:18 PMAlso for Bruce - Maybe you can answer this question for me: With all of the radical temperature fluctuations through the ages, which climate is the best? At one point they were growing wine grapes in Britain. At one point glaciers covered our (North America) northern tier. At both of these extremes mankind got along quite well as did animal kind. So, what makes this climate so important that it must be preserved at all costs? What makes the climate we have now the right one?
UUMMMM. Question does not compute. Logic interupt. Pause for answer. Must consult Gore.
Posted by: Bruce? on September 21, 2007 09:04 PMFair question. Certainly many parts of the world would seem to benefit from warmer, cooler, wetter, or dryer climates.
I think the answer is that the world -- people, other animals, plants, and everything else -- are used to this climate. "Used to" is relative, of course, as climate is always changing. But it usually changes relatively slowly. When a sudden change is made to such a complex system, many more very big changes are likely to follow. So many big, sudden changes happen too quickly for many species to adapt. And while our big human brains would enable us to cope with some climate changes, we would have more difficulty coping with major changes to the environment such as the atmosphere or farming conditions.
An example of a sudden change is the meteor that probably eliminated the dinosaurs. Man-made climate change, while not quite that sudden, is almost as sudden in a geological context.
Comments welcome.
Posted by: Bruce on September 22, 2007 12:22 AMPlease provide the results of just one experiment that shows that the global climate is "suddenly" changing. (Don't just barf up a chart of manipulated temperature data, like everyone else does. Taking data is only the first step in scientific work - you must then conduct experiments to discover true causal relationship between the trends shown by the data and the natural system under study).
Please explain why the force behind the diversification of species (genetic "pressure" due to a changing environment) is OK in all contexts except when it is (unlikely in this case) caused by human activity.
Please provide the results of just one experiment that shows any catastrophic result of a global temperature increase of even 5 degrees (and disprove that the temperature has been that warm in the past).
Please explain, in detail, how (step by step) a global temperature rise of even 5 degrees will cause the ice sheets of Antarctica, Greenland, Alaska, and other mountainous arctic regions to melt.
Posted by: srogers on September 22, 2007 07:37 AMOh, please. You're comparing a one-time, cataclysmic event that wiped out up to 70 percent of life on the planet to the natural warming cycle of the last 10,000+ years? Just stop.
If you want to talk 'geological context', we are simply one, good-sized volcanic eruption away from begging for global warming. Geological context. Snort.
Posted by: jimg on September 22, 2007 08:37 AMI'm the Bruce who is the Libertarian, and though I believe the world is warming, I do not believe that anthropogenic CO2 is a major cause of this warming.
Bruce@Cornell.edu, might you consider using an initial (Bruce B?) so as to better distinguish yourself from me in this forum? I'm sure you would not enjoy being confused with a laissez-faire, free market, capitalist, global warming denier like me! :)
Posted by: Bruce Guthrie on September 22, 2007 09:09 AMAbsolutely not. I'm comparing that one-time cataclysmic event with the human-caused warming cycle of the last few (and next several) decades.
Posted by: BruceB on September 22, 2007 01:11 PMThere have been many ice ages in the past, and in between, the poles have been much warmer than they are now. The winter freezing of the arctic ocean surface has failed to extend as far as it does now in the past, and the summer melting has extended farther north. Do you think that we live in a time when all the forces that cause this climatic variation are no longer at work? Why do you, BruceB, think that the world's variety of climates will or should remain as they are, or change at a rate that you think is "normal," or at a rate that life on earth is "used to?" (written as I stifle an urge to laugh out loud . .)
Oh, and BruceB, my four requests at #21 remain unaddressed. Why, oh why?
Posted by: srogers on September 22, 2007 01:56 PMThe scientists are doing the same thing that Dr. Farris in Atlas Shrugged had done: they see that all they have to do to get funding is to sell out, to fudge a bit on the truth, to lend their reputation to the thugs in government.
AGW gets lots of funding. The government can use AGW chicken little hysteria to justify tax increases, campaign contributions, etc. Many scientists still believe in it, but there are some who don't believe in it, but play along for the funding.
Atlas Shrugged is such a great book. I hear there is a movie coming out, and Angelina Jolie is going to play Dagney Taggert!!! I hope it comes out soon.
The world needs to hear Rand's message that the entrepreneurs and the inventors are the true heroes of society, that honesty, integrity, reason and passion make a better world, and that these things are best promoted by liberty and free markets. :)
That's why I'm a Libertarian!
Posted by: Bruce Guthrie on September 22, 2007 06:37 PMGo to YouTube.com and do a search on
"The Great Global Warming Swindle."
Watch the video, and see if you don't come to question the idea that global warming is caused primarily by human activity.
There is a lot of misinformation out there. The people believe that global warming is anthropogenic. It takes guts to go against this status quo, but Stefan is right. It is most likely natural, and will not be nearly so devastating in it's effects as the left is saying.
A long time ago, someone had to tell people that the earth is round. He was probably stoned to death, but he was right.
Stefan's market for this blog is skeptical, and more discerning than you give them credit for.
I would agree with you if Stefan were running for office, though...
Posted by: Bruce Guthrie on September 22, 2007 06:47 PMOr is he?
Posted by: Edmonds Dan on September 22, 2007 08:52 PMEdmonds Dan, thanks for the link to the article about Hansen--VERY interesting, and not too surprising! They certainly made the right connection--politics rather than science.
Posted by: Bill H on September 23, 2007 09:06 AMRapeseed biofuel 'produces more greenhouse gas than oil or petrol'
Lets start by contrasting the polar ice cap with the continental ice fields. The draft of the polar ice cap (the part of the ice below water) ranges from 9 to 15 feet. The average height above water is about 6 feet. The extent of the ice cap is vast, two or three times the size of Greenland, and it is much larger in the winter when the Arctic Ocean freezes all the way to the continents that lie to the south. Each arctic summer, a mass of floating ice equal to about half of Canada melts, and each arctic winter it freezes again. The floating ice cap is so thin, in comparison to the depth of the ocean on which it floats, that if it melted entirely, the net rise in global ocean levels would be measured in fractions of an inch. (Remember, about a third of it melts each year, without effect on ocean levels). This would be insignificant, a change dwarfed by daily tides.
On the other hand, Contintental ice fields (Greenland, Antarctica, and many smaller fields in North America (some, like the Harding Ice Field, near my hometown of Anchorage, Alaska)) are thousands of feet thick, on average. The thickest parts of the Greenland ice field are about 14,000 feet thick, and the average thickness is about 5000 feet. These ice fields are dynamic. The central regions of the fields are at elevations that are near or far below freezing temperatures year round. Each year dozens of feet of snow falls in these areas, compacting the snow layers that have accumulated below into ice. This process is how glaciers are formed. The weight of the ice causes the peripheral areas of the field to flow down the valleys of the continental land masses (glaciers are literally rivers of ice) until they reach either an inland area where temperatures cause the glacier face to melt, or they reach the sea, where, depending on the latitude, they either calve off chunks of ice known as icebergs, or they form floating ice shelves.
Glacial core samples show that the Earth has been warming at a very slow rate for about 1500 years (since the last cooling period known as the "Little Ice Age"). This warming has caused glaciers, whose sources are the dynamic freezing zones described above, to recede. This is because the rate of calving of icebergs (or ice chunks on land) has exceeded the rate of flow from the center areas of the ice fields. This process could be seen in southcentral Alaska. When I moved there in 1967, the face of the Columbia Glacier in Prince William Sound was an attraction for tourists who would pay to watch chunks of ice the size of buildings split off the face and splash into the sea. No longer - the glacial face has retreated to land, and the land absorbs more heat than the sea water, so the retreat is now a little faster, and will be until equilibrium is reached when the face moves up in elevation to cooler air.
And there is the key fact. There is a natural, linear thermal gradient in the lower atmosphere which extends up to the tropopause (the beginning of the stratosphere: about 30,000 feet in the arctic regions). In this part of the atmosphere, the average temperature drops about 2 degrees C (on a "standard" day). That's why even if the atmosphere heats up even 5 degrees C, far more than the flawed computer models predict, the average temperatures at the elevations where the continental ice fields form will still be cold enough for the annual snow falls that compact into glaciers, and the faces of the glaciers will have receded to elevations where the temperature is such that the calving rate equals the rate of glacial flow.
So, unless the average global surface temperature increases by a truly significant amount (and by that I mean something like 15 or 20 degrees C - enough to increase the prevailing temperatures at 15,000 to 20,000 feet to above freezing so that rain rather than snow falls in the winter at polar latitudes), the cannot ice sheets cannot melt. It is impossible.
Posted by: srogers on September 23, 2007 03:01 PMTaking your post's data and mine, we have:
Artic = 3X area of Greenland
Greenland = 200X thicker than Artic
Total ice in Greenland is ~67X that of Artic
I guess one could actually reason that if current patterns hold, in about 400 years Greenland would have added enough ice to completely offset the entire Artic, meaning that sea levels will FALL.
The fact that the Artic may completely disappear is meaningless. Ocean levels won't change, and in fact it would be a BOON to "carbon release" as a year-round Northwest Passage would greatly reduce shipping times, distances and hence consumption of oil.
Posted by: Edmonds Dan on September 23, 2007 05:13 PMBTW, water is one of few compounds, and perhaps the only naturally occurring compound, which has a solid form less dense than its liquid form. If you freeze almost anything else and then drop pieces of the frozen compound into the liquid compound, the frozen pieces sink. That's due to the hydrogen bonds that form ice into its characteristic expanded crystalline structure, whereas the molecules of other frozen compounds pack closely together into denser crystals or aggregates. Very cool. Thanks again for the reminder.
Posted by: srogers on September 24, 2007 09:55 AMSo basically, the folks telling us that #1 .5 degree C change over 40 years is a "rapid change", but #2 when .15 of that change disappears under a small amount of scrutiny (it was a mathematical error), that it's "insignificant".
Speaking of .15 degree of temperature change, that's a great reminder that GISS has revised the warmest year on history back to 1934... I noticed the world didn't end back then (when we reached the warmest temperature ever in recorded history), wonder why? And why did it cool after 1934, despite an increase in manmade CO2.... hmmmmm?
Sorry, but you can't have it both ways...
Posted by: thecomputerguy on September 24, 2007 02:59 PMTo be more clear (ref the GISS FAQ page for more info): the numbers plotted by GISS that show a rise in "temperature" are the result of a normalization procedure in which a computer program takes temperatures recorded in a small area for a year, averages them, and then compares these against the average temperature for that area over time. With results derived this way for all stations in a region, or a continent, or the world, you can theoretically plot the "temperature anomaly," that is, how warm it is for any one year compared to how warm it "should" be.
Mr. Hansen chose to use the average temperature over the previous 50 years as his baseline for how warm it "should' be. Which explains why his analysis is meaningless, why he could use basically the same algorithm to predict catastrophic global cooling 35 years ago (even inventing an explanation - too much dust in the air!), and why scientific experiments, and not just observations, are required to actually determine causation rather than form a basis for speculation.
One could use Hansen's raw data (if one could get it) and gin up a different normalization method to produce a completely different temperature trend. That is, the result is subject to manipulation, much like calculating short term stock performance from the graph of the Dow Jones stock index: you can show an increase or a decrease in stock prices over time simply by choosing the dates for which you record your initial and final prices.
Consider this: if the highest temperature anomaly in the US was in 1934, and the normalization baseline is the average US temperature over 50 years, then the baseline temperature will be artificially lower, and the positive temperature anomalies artificially higher, for every year after 1984 just because the normalization baseline will not include a known temperature peak.
I question the entire method of comparing temperature readings against a made up "norm." As others have pointed out, what is normal? How far back should we go to figure it out? 100 years? 1,000 years? 10,000 years? 50 years is a ridiculously short period, yet Hansen only has data going back 120 years at most (many recording stations have been on line for much, much less time) and so rather than admit that he has incomplete and useless data, he has made up an analysis method to make the best use of what data he has. To me, that's a blatant corruption of the scientific process.
Posted by: srogers on September 24, 2007 04:22 PMMerely holding a popular vote to settle a scientific issue is pointless. Even saying 43% of people with technical degrees say there is significant human caused global warming versus 35% who say there isn't while the rest are uncertain does not mean there is a mandate to make major economic change simply because there is a plurality of one opinion.
Climactic change is slow. Taking time to see if rising temperature is significant, and if it is a net detriment or net benefit before making changes not needed for other reasons is wise. Energy policy changes should be done for reasons of price and national security, not speculative ones.
Posted by: KW64 on September 24, 2007 05:28 PM