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Author Topic:   An inconvenient truth.... or lie?
ZenMonkey
Member (Idle past 4510 days)
Posts: 428
From: Portland, OR USA
Joined: 09-25-2009


Message 7 of 191 (538272)
12-05-2009 2:41 AM
Reply to: Message 6 by Coyote
12-05-2009 12:24 AM


Re: Global warming is real!
While a much longer post would be required to go into the facts of global climate change, let me just point one thing out. Global warming (and not much of it) can melt large chunks of the Greenland ice mass (already happening) and that flood of colder water would then change the course of the warm water currents from the equator to the North Atlantic (inevitably) and thus drop the temperature of the entire North Atlantic sufficiently to kick Europe into a deep freeze (not a good thing). Just one likely scenario.
I tend to think that the folks at Woods Hole know that they're talking about.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 6 by Coyote, posted 12-05-2009 12:24 AM Coyote has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 17 by Coyote, posted 12-05-2009 10:35 AM ZenMonkey has replied

  
ZenMonkey
Member (Idle past 4510 days)
Posts: 428
From: Portland, OR USA
Joined: 09-25-2009


Message 19 of 191 (538306)
12-05-2009 12:53 PM
Reply to: Message 17 by Coyote
12-05-2009 10:35 AM


Re: Global warming is real!
And what would the effects of an ice age, even a moderate one, on Europe today? How many more people are living there today than there were in the Middle Ages? Are they ready to see much of their agricultural base buried under snow for most of the year? Can they all just move south somewhere? You're an anthropologist; what do you think the ripple effects on the world's demographics would be?
Look, I think that we both agree that the advent of an ice age anywhere on this planet would be a Bad Thing. The question is how much of the climate change we're seeing is anthropogenic. The evidence I've seen strongly supports a correlation between the increase in human production of greenhouse gasses and the unmistakable rise in global temperature. Does the following graph look like a correlation between industrialization and a rise in CO2 levels? And does it look like it's following the same historical cycles that you're talking about?
(source: EPA)
For me, the big question is: who profits? Who's got the money? Who has a vested interest in maintaining our current dependence on carbon-based fuels? Is there really some secret power base of underfunded scientists, solar farmers and windmill owners who are out to dominate the global marketplace and rule the world?
As mentioned, even if the human factor in the current climate shifts turns out to be insignificant, what do we lose by moving away from fossil fuels? So far as I can tell, we lose a dependence on a limited resource that is already in decline, we lose economic dependence on foreign countries not all of whom have warm and loving feelings toward the US, we lose a major source of additional environmental pollutants, and we lose a golden opportunity to be in the lead in developing and advancing alternative fuel resources, with all the attendant econimic benefits.
Coyote, I totally respect you and find pretty much everything you say here at this forum to be spot on, but I'm sorry; I can't see any downside at all in a determined effort to get away as quickly as is socially and technologically possible from carbon-based fuels.

This message is a reply to:
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ZenMonkey
Member (Idle past 4510 days)
Posts: 428
From: Portland, OR USA
Joined: 09-25-2009


Message 23 of 191 (538314)
12-05-2009 2:41 PM
Reply to: Message 21 by slevesque
12-05-2009 2:08 PM


Re: Global warming is real!
slevesque writes:
I think we can all agree that the 'Hockey stick' graphs aren't really reliable in the light of these leaks ...
No, not at all. The "hoax" exposed by the supposed leaked emails is nothing of the sort, and the "outrage" coming out of the usual media suspects is manufactured and deceptive piffle, meant only to rile up the masses. I recommend this video for a more rational perspective. (Of course, I'm also a sucker for people explaining things in calm British accents.)

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ZenMonkey
Member (Idle past 4510 days)
Posts: 428
From: Portland, OR USA
Joined: 09-25-2009


Message 27 of 191 (538338)
12-05-2009 8:28 PM
Reply to: Message 26 by Buzsaw
12-05-2009 7:15 PM


RE: Malicious Emails
Fine, Buz. Now please go look up the emails themselves, not what someone else is saying about them. There is a difference. What do the emails themselves say, and in what context?
Oh, and it wouldn't hurt to view the video I linked to at Message 23.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 26 by Buzsaw, posted 12-05-2009 7:15 PM Buzsaw has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 29 by Buzsaw, posted 12-05-2009 10:56 PM ZenMonkey has not replied

  
ZenMonkey
Member (Idle past 4510 days)
Posts: 428
From: Portland, OR USA
Joined: 09-25-2009


Message 38 of 191 (538362)
12-06-2009 1:55 AM
Reply to: Message 35 by Buzsaw
12-06-2009 1:32 AM


Re: More Emails
Buz, that's a link to a blog. Present the evidence and tell us what you think it means or withdraw the claim of fraud. Period.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 35 by Buzsaw, posted 12-06-2009 1:32 AM Buzsaw has not replied

  
ZenMonkey
Member (Idle past 4510 days)
Posts: 428
From: Portland, OR USA
Joined: 09-25-2009


Message 78 of 191 (538524)
12-07-2009 5:32 PM
Reply to: Message 71 by petrophysics1
12-07-2009 3:06 PM


Re: BUZSAW 2, OPPOSITION 0
There's a big difference between demographic conditions back in the Middle Ages (or pretty much any time period before the Industrial Age) and today.
Say you have a 1 to 3 meter rise in sea level during the Medieval Warm Period, which lasted from about 800 CE to 1300 CE. At that time the world population was all of 300 to 400 million people. The effects would be noticable, but not devestating, as there were just not that many people or large cities or infrastructure. The world would adapt, and in fact did adapt.
Now project the effects of even just a half-meter rise in sea level to today. Approximately 10,000 square miles of land end up underwater in the United States alone. The costs of protecting just the major coastal cities would be in the billions. And let's not forget the loss of more aquifers to the accompanying rise in salinity even miles inland.
So arguing that the world has had warm periods before and so we shouldn't worrying about it today are a bit disingenuous. Europe also used to be buried under miles of glaciers, back 20,000 years ago. Doesn't mean that it wouldn't be a problem today.
Anyway, this is somewhat off the topic of the claims that the "secret emails" reveal a vast cover-up and that GCC is just a hoax. The data is out there. (It took me very little effort just to pull up the EPA report I used as a reference on the consequences of rising sea levels.) There's tons of it. And it pretty much points in the same direction. I think it's the denialists who are the hysterical ones.
Edited by ZenMonkey, : spelling and clarity

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ZenMonkey
Member (Idle past 4510 days)
Posts: 428
From: Portland, OR USA
Joined: 09-25-2009


Message 95 of 191 (538632)
12-08-2009 11:36 AM
Reply to: Message 87 by Jumped Up Chimpanzee
12-08-2009 6:18 AM


Oh, really?
Jumped Up Chimpanzee writes:
I don't think it should be difficult to put together a simple document that any intelligent person could understand that would explain how the data is gathered, how reliable it is, and what the indications are.
Uh huh. And how successful has it been trying to explain evolution in simple documents that any intelligent person could understand?

This message is a reply to:
 Message 87 by Jumped Up Chimpanzee, posted 12-08-2009 6:18 AM Jumped Up Chimpanzee has replied

Replies to this message:
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ZenMonkey
Member (Idle past 4510 days)
Posts: 428
From: Portland, OR USA
Joined: 09-25-2009


Message 142 of 191 (539161)
12-13-2009 12:11 PM
Reply to: Message 141 by Buzsaw
12-13-2009 12:27 AM


Re: Climate change man-caused?
Buz, quoting someone who left a comment regarding a news story is not evidence, nor is it what anyone has been repeatedly asking for. Please produce the actual emails that you believe are the most indicative of deliberate fraud, including the relevant context, and explain why you think that they are so damning.
By the way, the Times Online article that you linked raises some interesting points. The claim in the article - and I'll take it at face value - is that the CRU has destroyed a significant amount of raw data upon which they have based their findings, keeping only their adjusted, compiled figures.
SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.
It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.
And further on:
In a statement on its website, the CRU said: We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.
And a bit more:
Jones was not in charge of the CRU when the data were thrown away in the 1980s, a time when climate change was seen as a less pressing issue.
I ask the following:
How much more raw data than what the CRU go rid of is still perfectly available for anyone to examine? The article made it sound like this is a significant share of what's been gathered over the decades. Is that true, or is this only a slice out of a much bigger pie?
Likewise, I note that this data had to have been taken from before sometime in the 1980's. Is it possible that a great deal more data has been recorded over the last 30 years? Where did the data in question come from? What was its quality? Are we talking stacks of notebooks in which generations of New England lighthouse keepers wrote down the daily temperature? All of the ice core readings taken up to that date? What?
Since I'm not a scientist myself, I'll ask those here who are: is tossing out old raw data like this after it's been compiled a common practice, or has the CRU been egregiously negligent? Past generations of scientists and scholars have sometimes been less than careful with items of not insignificant value. (I'm reminded of the story of the fate of the last preserved dodo specimen, tossed on a bonfire when a curator decided that it was looking too dusty and shabby to be on display.)
And as a side note, I see that what the CRU still has in buckets is the data that has been
adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected.
In other words, it appears that just maybe scientists do actually know how to take into account things like the different places in which weather sensors have been placed and therefore adjust accordingly, exactly what you seem to be accusing them of not doing. I ask - as some have done here before - why is it that creationists and climate change deniers alike seem to think that scientists are complete idiots in the very fields in which they are experts?

This message is a reply to:
 Message 141 by Buzsaw, posted 12-13-2009 12:27 AM Buzsaw has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 143 by Taz, posted 12-13-2009 2:10 PM ZenMonkey has replied
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ZenMonkey
Member (Idle past 4510 days)
Posts: 428
From: Portland, OR USA
Joined: 09-25-2009


Message 145 of 191 (539200)
12-13-2009 5:17 PM
Reply to: Message 143 by Taz
12-13-2009 2:10 PM


Smarter than the experts.
I once read that part of the appeal of conspiracy theories is that it allows someone to think that they really know the truth about something without actually having to do the work of learning something about it.

This message is a reply to:
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ZenMonkey
Member (Idle past 4510 days)
Posts: 428
From: Portland, OR USA
Joined: 09-25-2009


Message 153 of 191 (539308)
12-14-2009 9:52 PM
Reply to: Message 152 by penstemo
12-14-2009 8:35 PM


Re: Resident confused scientists?
penstemo writes:
There are too many variables that haven't been taken into account in the computer climate models for them to accurately describe what is going on.
I have a simple question. How do you know this?

This message is a reply to:
 Message 152 by penstemo, posted 12-14-2009 8:35 PM penstemo has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 154 by penstemo, posted 12-14-2009 10:33 PM ZenMonkey has replied

  
ZenMonkey
Member (Idle past 4510 days)
Posts: 428
From: Portland, OR USA
Joined: 09-25-2009


(1)
Message 157 of 191 (539344)
12-15-2009 9:38 AM
Reply to: Message 154 by penstemo
12-14-2009 10:33 PM


Re: Resident confused scientists?
penstemo writes:
The energy output of the sun (solar radiation) is known to be variable. I don't believe that has been taken into account in the computer models.
No, it's only one of the most basic parameters in any climate model. I'm sure that no-one bothers to pay very much attention to it.
penstemo writes:
Cloud cover is another variable that hasn't been taken into account.
Oh, and cloud cover! You're a genius! It would never have occurred to anyone to study that. I'm sure that clouds aren't a part of anybody's climate model. Those stupid scientists, always overlooking the obvious.
Wait, let's go back to Wikipedia
quote:
All modern AGCMs include parameterizations for:
convection, land surface processes, albedo and hydrology, cloud cover
Huh, whaddya know? Maybe you're mistaking the word "variable" for something that means "we don't know anything at all about this."

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ZenMonkey
Member (Idle past 4510 days)
Posts: 428
From: Portland, OR USA
Joined: 09-25-2009


(1)
Message 167 of 191 (540070)
12-22-2009 12:02 AM
Reply to: Message 166 by Buzsaw
12-21-2009 9:09 PM


Re: Resident confused scientists?
Buz, do you even read your own links? If you actually did, you'd see that the pictures of temperature sensors that you've been going on about have all been from - as far as I can tell - just two facilities. That's two facilities out of the 54 in California alone, out of 1221 in just the US, from just NOAA alone. The source of those pictures is the US Historical Climate Neworks. At least part of USHCN's job appears to be surveying NOAA surface stations. If you'll look for more than 10 seconds, you'll see that those highlighted stations were being specifially cited as examples of known placement problems, as documented by the responsible organizations themselves. In other words, the people who work with this data know which stations have problems, and they actually can assess by how much they're off. What your're citing isn't evidence of willful deceit or negligent data gathering; this is a case of error correction.
Wow, who would have thought that climatologists would think to check the reliablity of their data?
So what you're looking at are problems from a handful of weather stations, which are only gathering data regarding one particular phenomenon - land surface temperature. This says absolutely nothing about all the temperature data coming from all the other sources in the world, nor about temperature data taken at, for example, the ocean surface or at various altitudes above the earth's surface. For that matter, surface temperature is only one factor in the vast array of other evidence that supports AGW, such as CO2 levels, emmission levels, changes in sea level, enviromental shifts, etc.
And by the way, didn't you just say:
quote:
The debate is not so much about climate change. I'm not aware of any significant denying of climate change. The deniers perse are skeptical of imminent danger of anthropogenic CO2.
So a handful of known potential errors in some temperature readings supports your case against AGW how exactly, when apparently you aren't contesting the validity of temperature data anyway?
Edited by ZenMonkey, : Spelling ang tpyso.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 166 by Buzsaw, posted 12-21-2009 9:09 PM Buzsaw has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 169 by Dr Jack, posted 12-22-2009 5:52 AM ZenMonkey has replied

  
ZenMonkey
Member (Idle past 4510 days)
Posts: 428
From: Portland, OR USA
Joined: 09-25-2009


Message 172 of 191 (540144)
12-22-2009 1:09 PM
Reply to: Message 169 by Dr Jack
12-22-2009 5:52 AM


Re: Resident confused scientists?
Mr Jack writes:
Your link does not support that statement
Agreed, I seem to have not fully understood the tangle of acronyms and organizational activites. However, the NOAA document you're linked to actually strengthens my case rather than weakening it.
quote:
Q. Over the years, stations move in location for a variety of reasons and the local environment changes. If the local environment around the station changes could this cause a bias in the temperature record? Can that bias be adjusted out of the record?
A. A great deal of work has gone into efforts to account for a wide variety of biases in the climate record, both in NOAA and at sister agencies around the world. Since the 1980s, scientists at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center have been at the forefront of this effort developing techniques to detect and quantify biases in station time series. When a bias associated with any change is detected, it is removed so that the time series is homogeneous with respect to its current instrumentation and exposure. The latest peer-reviewed paper which provides an overview the sources of bias and their removal (Menne et al., 2009 in press), including urbanization and nonstandard exposures. They evaluated urban bias and found that once the data were fully adjusted the most urban stations had about the same trend as the remaining more rural stations. [Emphasis mine.]
Also:
quote:
Q. What can we say about poor station exposure and its impact on national temperature trends?
A. Surfacestations.org has examined about 70% of the 1221 stations in NOAA’s Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) (Watts, 2009). According to their web site of early June 2009, they classified 70 USHCN version 2 stations as good or best (class 1 or 2). The criteria used to make that classification is based on NOAA’s Climate Reference Network Site Handbook so the criteria are clear. But, as many different individuals participated in the site evaluations, with varying levels of expertise, the degree of standardization and reproducibility of this process is unknown. However, at the present time this is the only large scale site evaluation information
available so we conducted a preliminary analysis. Two national time series were made using the same homogeneity adjusted data set and the same gridding and area averaging technique used by NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center for its Page 3 of 4 annual climate monitoring. One analysis was for the full USHCN version 2 data set. The other used only USHCN version 2 data from the 70 stations that surfacestations.org classified as good or best. We would expect some differences simply due to the different area covered: the 70 stations only covered 43% of the country with no stations in, for example, New Mexico, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee or North Carolina. Yet the two time series, shown below as both annual data and smooth data, are remarkably similar. Clearly there is no indication from this analysis that poor station exposure has imparted a bias in the U.S. temperature trends. [Emphasis mine.]
And lastly:
quote:
Q. Is there any question that surface temperatures in the United States have been rising rapidly during the last 50 years?
A. None at all. Even if NOAA did not have weather observing stations across the length and breadth of the United States the impacts of the warming are unmistakable. For example, lake and river ice is melting earlier in the spring and forming later in the fall. Plants are blooming earlier in the spring. Mountain glaciers are melting. Coastal temperatures are rising. And a multitude of species of birds, fish, mammals and plants are extending their ranges northward and, in
mountainous areas, upward as well.
So NOAA appears to on top of things, and the volunteers from surfacestations.org have in fact not uncovered some huge mistake or even conspiricy in surface temperature data. Moreover, my original points still stand:
1) The problems appear to be noted and adjusted for.
2) They affect only a subset of all the data input.
3) Even if this data were completely unreliable and discarded, there is an overflowing amount of other data that supports the case that global temperatures are rising.
4) Buz wasn't even contesting the fact that global temperatures are rising anyway, so how does this help his case, exactly?
Edited by ZenMonkey, : Got name of website wrong.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 169 by Dr Jack, posted 12-22-2009 5:52 AM Dr Jack has seen this message but not replied

  
ZenMonkey
Member (Idle past 4510 days)
Posts: 428
From: Portland, OR USA
Joined: 09-25-2009


Message 174 of 191 (540150)
12-22-2009 1:41 PM
Reply to: Message 171 by Buzsaw
12-22-2009 12:23 PM


Re: Resident confused scientists?
Buzsaw writes:
Perhaps the complexity of it all allows for a significant amount of leeway so as to follow the money, the planet's prestigious peer pressure and the global agenda. The disclaimer comes in the admission of the difficulty in data determinations.
Are you suggesting that because the science is hard it must be part of some vast global conspiricy under which all those green activist billionaires are going to take over the planet?
By way of reply:

This message is a reply to:
 Message 171 by Buzsaw, posted 12-22-2009 12:23 PM Buzsaw has replied

Replies to this message:
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