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Is Climate Change Just A Lot Of Hot Air?

bcglorf says...

@newtboy

#1 and #2, fine, if you won't go there to read it's now pasted in full for you:
Arctic tundra soils serve as potentially important but poorly understood sinks of atmospheric methane (CH4), a powerful greenhouse gas1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Numerical simulations project a net increase in methane consumption in soils in high northern latitudes as a consequence of warming in the past few decades3, 6. Advances have been made in quantifying hotspots of methane emissions in Arctic wetlands7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, but the drivers, magnitude, timing and location of methane consumption rates in High Arctic ecosystems are unclear. Here, we present measurements of rates of methane consumption in different vegetation types within the Zackenberg Valley in northeast Greenland over a full growing season. Field measurements show methane uptake in all non-water-saturated landforms studied, with seasonal averages of − 8.3 ± 3.7 μmol CH4 m−2 h−1 in dry tundra and − 3.1 ± 1.6 μmol CH4 m−2 h−1 in moist tundra. The fluxes were sensitive to temperature, with methane uptake increasing with increasing temperatures. We extrapolate our measurements and published measurements from wetlands with the help of remote-sensing land-cover classification using nine Landsat scenes. We conclude that the ice-free area of northeast Greenland acts as a net sink of atmospheric methane, and suggest that this sink will probably be enhanced under future warmer climatic conditions.

#3, regardless of if it make's sense to you, and regardless of if it means a 10C warming by 2100, the IPCC scientists collaborative summary says it anyways. If you want to claim otherwise it's you opposing the science to make things seem worse than they are, not me.

#4, To tell them those things would sound like this. The IPCC current best estimates from climate models project 2100 to be 1.5C warmer than 2000. This has already resulted in 2000 being 0.8C warmer than 1900. Summer arctic sea ice extent has retreating significantly is the biggest current impact. By 2100 it is deemed extremely unlikely that the Greenland and Antarctic iccesheets will have meaningfully reduced and there is medium confidence that the warming will actually expand Antarctic ice cover owing to increased precipitation from the region. That's the results and expectations to be passed on from the 5th report from an international collaboration of scientists. Whether that fits your world view or not doesn't matter to the scientific evidence those views are founded on and supported by.

You said the ocean's may be unfishable in 20 years, and the best support you came up with was a news article quote claiming that by 2040 most of the Arctic would be too acidic for Shell forming fish. Cherry picked by the news article that also earlier noted that was dependent on CO2 concentrations exceeding 1000ppm in 2100, and even that some forms of plankton under study actually faired better in higher acidity in some case. In a news article that also noted that the uneven distribution of acidity makes predicting the effects very challenging. If news articles count as evidence I then want to claim we'll have working fusion power to convert to in 5 years time from Lockheed Martin. I'll agree with your news post on one count, the world they talk about, where CO2 emissions continue accelerating year on year, even by 2100, is bad. It's also a bit hard to fathom with electric cars just around the corner, and if not solar and wind, fusion sometime before then too, that we'll still be using anywhere near today's emissions let alone still accelerating our use.

by 2025 it's estimated that 2/3 of people worldwide will live in a water shortage.
And you link to a blog, and a blog that provides exactly zero references to any scientific sources for the claim. Better yet, even the blog does NOT claim that the access to water will be limited because of climate change, the blog even mentions multiple times how other forms of pollution are destroying huge amounts of fresh water(again with zero attributions).

Here's the IPCC best estimates for 2100 impacts regionally:
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Chapter14_FINAL.pdf

You'll find it's a largely mixed bag if you can be bothered to read what the actual scientists are predicting. Just bare in mind they regularly note that climate models still have a lot of challenges with accurate regional estimates. I guess your blogger isn't hindered by such problems though. If you don't want to bother I'll summarize for you and note they observe a mixed bag of increased precipitation in some regions, notably monsoons generally increasing, and other areas lowering, but it's all no higher than at medium confidences. But hey, why should uncertainty about 2100 prevent us from panicking today about more than half the world losing their drinking water in 10 years. I'll make you a deal, in ten years we can come back to this thread and see whether or not climate change has cause 2/3 of the world to lose their drinking water already or not. I'm pretty confident on this one.

Northern India/Southern China is nearly 100% dependent on glacial melt water, glaciers that have lost 50% in the last decade
Lost 50% since 2005? That'd be scary, oh wait, you heard that from the same blog you say? I've got a hunch maybe they aren't being straight with you...
Here are a pair of links I found in google scholar to scientific articles on the Himalaya's glaciers:
http://cires1.colorado.edu/~braup/himalaya/Science13Nov2009.pdf
I you can't be bothered to read:
Claims reported in the popular press that Siachin has shrunk as much as 50% are simply wrong, says Riana, whose report notes that the glacier has "not shown any remarkable retreat in the last 50 years" Which looks likely that your blogger found a popular press piece about that single glacier and then went off as though it were fact, and across the entire mountain range .

http://indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/files/glaciers%20and%20climate.pdf
Here's another article noting that since 1962 Himalayan glacier reduction is actually about 21%.

If you go back and read the IPCC links I gave earlier you can also find many of the regional rivers and glaciers in India/East China are very dependent on monsoons and will persist as long as monsoons do. Which the IPCC additionally notes are expected to, on the whole, actually increase through 2100 warming.

I've stated before up thread that things are warming and we are the major contribution, but merely differed from your position be also observing the best evidence science has for predictions isn't catastrophic. That is compounded by high uncertainties, notably that TOA energy levels are still not able to be predicted well. The good news there is the latest IPCC estimated temps exceed the observed trends of both temperature and TOA imbalance, so there's reason for optimism. That's obviously not license for recklessly carrying on our merry way, as I've noted a couple times already about roads away from emissions that we are going to adopt one way or another long before 2100.

Is Climate Change Just A Lot Of Hot Air?

bcglorf says...

0.8 degree increase in 100 years. We've come from the 1915 and WW1 days when cars and planes where futuristic dreams, and not dying from tetanus or basic infections was a major concern. Today 100 years later we are thriving by comparison, in spite of the 0.8 degree increased temperature. IPCC best estimates for 2100 are about 1.5 degree increase, so another hundred years and increase that is about twice as bad. Of course, it's twice as bad as what we saw the last 100 yeas and not only survived, but thrived under. It's a problem to be sure, but it's also no catastrophe either. Switching to electric cars within 20 years will reduce emissions alot and is likely inevitable no matter what. Adopting non-emitting power is possible today if people accept nuclear as France did years ago, and would be a good idea if we could only sell environmentalists on the idea. Barring that we are waiting another 20-40 years for alternatives like solar, wind and hopefully Fusion to undercut the costs of running on coal. That said, without any special moral or government mandate we should be cutting our CO2 emissions radically long before 2100 of our own accord.

Bottom line, don't panic, it's a manageable problem and we got this. In the last 100 years we've come from not having cars or planes or space craft or computers or modern medicine to taking all those things entirely for granted. It's really hard to say that 100 years from now our descendants will be crying for their inability to cope.

Climate Change - Veritasium

bcglorf says...

Kudos, I'd just like to really highlight two of the good points you make.

First, Tesla motors is huge. When I said electric cars, I didn't mention them by name but was thinking specifically of them. They have proven that electric cars are the future and are coming quickly.

The second is as Tyson pointed out, the most important metric is energy coming into the planet compared to energy going out. Temperatures fluctuate to many other variables. Particularly if the oceans are absorbing or releasing energy, temperatures as we experience them will shift on that and muddy the perception of what's actually happening to the overall planet's energy balance and long term change. In the late 80's we started measuring the energy in and out of the atmosphere with satellites. There was an observed increase between late 80's and late 90's in the energy imbalance. That means not only was more energy coming in than going out over that time, but the excess staying in was getting higher. With increasing CO2 emissions, that is exactly what we expect. An increased overall greenhouse effect should see the energy imbalance growing quite steadily as the effect gets stronger and stronger. Now, the IPCC's fifth assessment report has the the longer term data from those same and new satellites. The data shows that since 2001 there is strong agreement that the data shows NO TREND. That doesn't mean the energy in the planet hasn't been increasing. It means the rate of extra energy coming in hasn't gone up or down statistically since 2001. It means the overall greenhouse effect has been entirely stagnant for a little more than the last decade. Things are warming, but no faster than they were ten years ago.

I hope that's not to technical, but it paints a non-catastrophic picture. It also gives a superb metric to measure climate models against going forward. The models universally are projected on a steadily accelerating greenhouse effect as CO2 emissions rise. If the measured results of the last decade continue to not reflect that much longer, we have more reassessing to do. As noted in the IPCC, the effect of water vapor and clouds to increasing temperature is poorly modelled right now. If we are lucky the uncertainty of the sign on it as feedback is resolved to find it is a negative feedback. Meaning, as things warm, more clouds appear and reflect more energy back out. As things cool, less clouds appear and more energy comes in. And yeah, that's my own hope, and it is not the majority opinion within the scientific community as represented by the IPCC. They do acknowledge it as a possibility, but a less likely one. That said, the models they base that opinion on do not match the satellite energy measurements, and that one uncertainty would explain it rather well. My fingers are still crossed. More reasons for my optimism is the IPCC projections through 2100. If you look close, the actual temperature plotted against the projections has the actual following the very coolest of projections so far. Again, that lends hope that something like water vapor is either working for us, or not as badly against us as is currently modelled.

MilkmanDan said:

I used to be a pretty strong "doubter", if not a denier. I made a gradual shift away from that, but one strong instance of shift was when Neil Degrasse Tyson presented it as a (relatively) simple physics problem in his new Cosmos series. Before we started burning fossil fuels, x% of the sun's energy was reflected back into space. Now, with a higher concentration of CO2, x is a smaller number. That energy has to go somewhere, and at least some of that is going to be heat energy.

Still, I don't think that anything on the level of "average individual citizen/household of an industrial country" is really where anything needs to happen. Yes, collectively, normal people in their daily lives contribute to Climate Change. But the vast majority of us, even as a collective single unit, contribute less than industrial / government / infrastructure sources.

Fossil fuels have been a great source of energy that has massively contributed to global advances in the past century. BUT, although we didn't know it in the beginning, they have this associated cost/downside. Fossil fuels also have a weakness in that they are not by any means inexhaustible, and costs rise as that becomes more and more obvious. In turn, that tends to favor the status quo in terms of the hierarchy of industrial nations versus developing or 3rd world countries -- we've already got the money and infrastructure in place to use fossil fuels, developing countries can't afford the costs.

All of this makes me think that 2 things need to happen:
A) Governments need to encourage the development of energy sources etc. that move us away from using fossil fuels. Tax breaks to Tesla Motors, tax incentives to buyers of solar cells for their homes, etc. etc.
B) If scientists/pundits/whoever really want people to stop using fossil fuels (or just cut down), they need to develop realistic alternatives. I'll bring up Tesla Motors again for deserving huge kudos in this area. Americans (and in general citizens of developed countries) have certain expectations about how a car should perform. Electric cars have traditionally been greatly inferior to a car burning fossil fuels in terms of living up to those expectations, but Tesla threw all that out the window and made a car that car people actually like to drive. It isn't just "vaguely functional if you really want to brag about how green you are", it is actually competitive with or superior to a gas-engine car for most users/consumers (some caveats for people who need to drive long distances in a single day).

We need to get more companies / inventors / whoever developing superior, functional alternatives to fossil fuel technologies. We need governments to encourage and enable those developments, NOT to cave to lobbyist pressure from big oil etc. and do the opposite. Prices will start high (like Tesla), but if you really are making a superior product, economy of scale will eventually kick in and normalize that out.

Outside of the consumer level, the same thing goes for actual power production. Even if we did nothing (which I would certainly not advocate), eventually scarcity and increased difficulty in obtaining fossil fuels (kinda sad that the past 2 decades of pointless wars 95% driven by oil haven't taught us this lesson yet, but there it is) will make the more "green" alternatives (solar, wind, tidal, nuclear, whatever) more economically practical. That tipping point will be when we see the real change begin.

NASA: 130 Years of Global Warming in 30 seconds

bcglorf says...

Why the double standard with climate change?

Surely you don't consider those the same thing?

Toxicity is pretty simple. You run a test feeding creatures cyanide, and they always die if you give them enough.

By comparison, climate change involves interdependent processes that span virtually every branch of known science. I work in an academic environment and have seen what frequently comes out of inter-disciplinary studies. It comes out with stuff like the first link I gave above. Some climate guys who aren't very good with math go ahead and use a misapply a statistical method. That misuse is KNOWN and EXPECTED to give a falsely zero-biased result in the situation the climatologists misapplied. The climatologists then unknowingly went ahead and declared the zero-biased results they received as unique and important evidence that past climate change had little variance from zero. The reality, as evidenced in the article I linked, shows that the truth of the matter is that much better statistical methods exist for the application, and when they were applied by the climatologists, low and behold the historic variation leapt up, so much so as to make the last 100 years no longer look anything like the anomaly they did before.

With climate change there are a million variations and possibilities. The most important question to answer is just how imminent and severe are the effects we are facing. The most straight forward test is the one that Mann et al wowed the IPCC and the world with, showing that the temperature change over the last 100 years was unlike anything in the last 2 thousand. It turns out though that in truth, Mann's original results were an artifact not of human emissions, but of human error in math. Mann's new results show that the earth has been as warm as today multiple times over the last 2k years, and that in that time temperature has previously dropped just as fast as it rose in the last hundred.


As to what to do with unknowns, it still depends on the assumptions you come in with. What percentage do you want to lower emissions by? How much of a difference will that make to future temperature? What is the cost of lowering emissions by that much? What are the costs of dealing the increased temperature instead?

It's not a simply problem with some easy logical answer that is independent of those questions. What's worse, is now those questions not only span scientific fields, but they bleed over into economics and political science as well.

Your assessment before marks the cost of lowering CO2 emissions as moderate and the costs of not lowering them as potential huge. If the cost of lowering CO2 emissions is to be kept moderate, it means not lowering them by very much or not lowering them very quickly. Either way, it means if the effects of CO2 are drastic, we are STILL going to have to adapt significantly in addition to the money spent on reducing emissions. It sounds to me like just a variation on my own suggestion to be honest. A modest investment in battery and nuclear infrastructure, and adapt accordingly with the impacts that doesn't cover or accommodate. The most dire and immediate adaptations are ones that need to be made anyways, so I again don't see the risk as severe as others claim. It's not as though New Orleans was all peachy and good until things got warmer. A city on the coast below sea level, or islands a few feet above sea level could use a lot of dollars spent on adaptation even if we lowered emissions to the point of lowering sea levels by a foot.

Creepy chemicals on your food

notarobot says...

@DrewNumberTwo:

She's not making it up. She's just not citing sources.

Five minutes of internet searching found me this:

"ACUTE TOXICITY

Chlorpropham is moderately toxic by ingestion (2). It may cause irritation of the eyes or skin (2). Symptoms of poisoning in laboratory animals have included listlessness, incoordination, nose bleeds, protruding eyes, bloody tears, difficulty in breathing, prostration, inability to urinate, high fevers, and death. Autopsies of animals have shown inflammation of the stomach and intestinal lining, congestion of the brain, lungs and other organs, and degenerative changes in the kidneys and liver (2)"

Breakdown of Chemical in Soil and Groundwater

Chlorpropham has some potential to contaminate groundwater because it is highly soluble in water and it has only a moderate tendency to adsorb to soil particles (3, 5). Chlorpropham adsorbs strongly to organic matter, so it is unlikely to leach through soils high in organic matter. Chlorpropham does not readily adsorb to montmorillonite or kaolinite clays (4).
Chlorpropham is subject to degradation by soil microbes. Photodegradation and volatilization do not readily occur. Increasing temperatures above 35 degrees C and increasing soil moisture capacity may increase volatilization (4). Soil half-lives from 35 days (3) to 65 days at 15 degrees C or 30 days at 29 degrees C (4) have been reported. Degradation rates are affected by microbial activity and soil moisture levels (4)."


/Pesticide Management Education Program.

Science and Global Warming

NetRunner says...

I'm about halfway though it, right where they give their "verdict" on their first question of "is the world getting any warmer".

Basically, everything they showed was a litany of cherry picked data points.

I was particularly disappointed when they started citing news reports in 2008 about how there might've been an increase in ice cover that year from 2007. 2007 was the warmest year in the entire historical record since they started directly measuring temperatures and keeping records.

They kinda give away their problem when they showed the level of solar radiation on top of the last century's temperature record and said the "correlation was high". Well, yeah, but if you look at that picture carefully, you notice that the temperatures start getting above it more and more often the longer you go forward.

Why? Because there's more CO2 in the air, so I'll see now what they say about CO2.

Oh my. I guess I'm not sure what the argument they tried to present really was. Some things they said:

  • There's a really small amount of CO2 in the atmosphere
  • Most of the CO2 in the atmosphere comes from natural sources
  • CO2 makes plants grow more
  • Nobody's ever proven that CO2 has ever increased temperatures (no supporting evidence or refutation of people who've claimed to have proven this, just the naked assertion)
  • The only reason why anyone thinks global warming is real is because of a "dubious" computer program (no info given on why it's dubious, or what might be wrong with said program)

This doesn't disprove CO2's effect as a greenhouse gas. It suggests that maybe the Gaia hypothesis is right, and that plant growth will react to the increased CO2 and absorb it all to maintain it at present levels, but uh, we have data showing a sharp increase since the industrial revolution, and that would seem to disprove the idea that increased plant growth will keep CO2 in check.

Also, part of the global warming hypothesis is about deforestation -- it's not just that we're digging up fossilized hydrocarbons and releasing them into the atmosphere, it's that at the same time we're destroying the forests that would scrub excess CO2 from the atmosphere, which will destabilize the equilibrium even more than burning oil and coal would by themselves.

@Psychologic, in answer to your first question, here are the equations relating to the greenhouse effect. Those don't cover real-world situations, since it's assuming 100% IR opacity of the atmosphere, and it's not 100% in the real atmosphere.

Water vapor and clouds actually have two effects, one it increases the IR opacity of the atmosphere (warmer), but it also increases the albedo of the atmosphere (cooler).

I don't know what the measured/approximated values are that they plug in, but that's where the real climate science debate is right now, i.e. how much CO2 is too much? When will methane trapped under the ocean and under ice get released, knocking us permanently off equilibrium?

That's where the real debates are these days. Otherwise, it's like dft said, the only reason there isn't total consensus is because of a propaganda campaign perpetrated by oil and coal companies, and it gets repeated by people who have fantasies about punching hippies.

Rachel Maddow Interviews Bill Nye On Climate Change

cybrbeast says...

>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:
What you can do is take two tubes fill one with normal air and fill the other with CO2 enriched air, from co2 in soda or something. Make sure the temperatures in both tubes are equal. Close the tubes and shine two identical lights in both tubes. Put an accurate thermometer in both and look at the temperatures. The tube with CO2 will warm more.
As an analyst I would describe this as an extremely flawed experiment. Here is a better one...
You will need at least four different air containers. Container one should have 245ppm of C02 (which represents C02 around 1840). Container two should contain 387ppm of C02 - representing today's current C02 percentage. Container three should contain pure C02. Container four should contain zero C02. All four containers should be completely sealed so no air can enter or escape. They should also be prepared in locations that cannot introduce excess pollutants. IE don't prepare it in a workshop, or a lab, or near an air vent, or some other source that could introduce foreign material. Ideally the containers would be prepared in a vaccuum chamber, and the requisite gasses would be introduced in pure form (nitrogen, oxygen, c02, et al). Each container would have a temperature sensor proven to be accurate to one one-hundredth of a degree affixed in identical locations within the container (ideally, centrally located both vertically & horizontally). Each container would then be placed in a completely seperate dark chamber with one single light source (purchased from the same lot & randomly matched by chamber). Of course you'd select a light source as close to sunlight as possible. They make bulbs like that. Then you record temperatures in all four containers continually for a sufficient longitudinal period. Give it a week perhaps, and take temperature readings every hour.
Such a study would determine the ratio of difference between 245ppm and 387ppm of C02 within a specified volume of air. ANOVA testing could determine whether the difference was in any way significant. I suspect the difference between the 245 and 387 containers would be statistically negligible. C02 can contribute to increased temperatures, to be sure. But the difference between 245 and 387 ppm in a system as large and dynamic as our atmosphere is unlikely to be of any significance.


OMG, I was just making an example of a simple tabletop experiment demonstrating the basic physics of the different emissivities of different gasses.

Rachel Maddow Interviews Bill Nye On Climate Change

Winstonfield_Pennypacker says...

What you can do is take two tubes fill one with normal air and fill the other with CO2 enriched air, from co2 in soda or something. Make sure the temperatures in both tubes are equal. Close the tubes and shine two identical lights in both tubes. Put an accurate thermometer in both and look at the temperatures. The tube with CO2 will warm more.

As an analyst I would describe this as an extremely flawed experiment. Here is a better one...

You will need at least four different air containers. Container one should have 245ppm of C02 (which represents C02 around 1840). Container two should contain 387ppm of C02 - representing today's current C02 percentage. Container three should contain pure C02. Container four should contain zero C02. All four containers should be completely sealed so no air can enter or escape. They should also be prepared in locations that cannot introduce excess pollutants. IE don't prepare it in a workshop, or a lab, or near an air vent, or some other source that could introduce foreign material. Ideally the containers would be prepared in a vaccuum chamber, and the requisite gasses would be introduced in pure form (nitrogen, oxygen, c02, et al). Each container would have a temperature sensor proven to be accurate to one one-hundredth of a degree affixed in identical locations within the container (ideally, centrally located both vertically & horizontally). Each container would then be placed in a completely seperate dark chamber with one single light source (purchased from the same lot & randomly matched by chamber). Of course you'd select a light source as close to sunlight as possible. They make bulbs like that. Then you record temperatures in all four containers continually for a sufficient longitudinal period. Give it a week perhaps, and take temperature readings every hour.

Such a study would determine the ratio of difference between 245ppm and 387ppm of C02 within a specified volume of air. ANOVA testing could determine whether the difference was in any way significant. I suspect the difference between the 245 and 387 containers would be statistically negligible. C02 can contribute to increased temperatures, to be sure. But the difference between 245 and 387 ppm in a system as large and dynamic as our atmosphere is unlikely to be of any significance.

The Decade long Conversation to nowhere (Nature Talk Post)

Lurch says...

I posted it the last time this came up in sift talk and its still relevant. So, here is the copy paste to save me the re-write:

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23411799-7583,00.html

"Duffy asked Marohasy: "Is the Earth stillwarming?"

She replied: "No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you'd expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years."

Duffy: "Is this a matter of any controversy?"

Marohasy: "Actually, no. The head of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has actually acknowledged it. He talks about the apparent plateau in temperatures so far this century. So he recognises that in this century, over the past eight years, temperatures have plateaued ... This is not what you'd expect, as I said, because if carbon dioxide is driving temperature then you'd expect that, given carbon dioxide levels have been continuing to increase, temperatures should be going up ... So (it's) very unexpected, not something that's being discussed. It should be being discussed, though, because it's very significant."

I think the ultimate point of this article is that the scientific debate is not over. Conclusions have been reached that are not supported by data being collected over the past few years. This includes not only the general hold on rising temperatures, but the record increase in sea ice levels in Antarctica. My favorite part is the end:

"Well-meaning intellectual movements, from communism to post-structuralism, have a poor history of absorbing inconvenient fact or challenges to fundamental precepts. We should not ignore or suppress good indicators on the environment, though they have become extremely rare now. It is tempting to the layman to embrace with enthusiasm the latest bleak scenario because it fits the darkness of our soul, the prevailing cultural pessimism. The imagination, as Wallace Stevens once said, is always at the end of an era. But we should be asking, or expecting others to ask, for the provenance of the data, the assumptions fed into the computer model, the response of the peer review community, and so on. Pessimism is intellectually delicious, even thrilling, but the matter before us is too serious for mere self-pleasuring. It would be self-defeating if the environmental movement degenerated into a religion of gloomy faith. (Faith, ungrounded certainty, is no virtue.)

"Fighting" climate change makes you *feel* good because you're taking action with good intentions. Working towards cleaner industry and a generally more environmentally friendly society is a great goal. Throwing trillions of dollars at something that scientists do not even agree is a real problem is just a poor idea. Costs are fine, if you can prove you are actually going to fix something. Don't forget that regulation is a business. Apply the same skepticism to handing them trillions of dollars that you do to anything else. It's almost become fashionable to be environmentally conscious today with the government regulating us damn near into oblivion. You can't drill for oil here, you can't build power plants here, you have protected habitats springing up all the time, initiatives to change all light bulbs to the mercury filled energy savers are in place, and the list goes on. Basically, the planet's weather and climate systems are incredibly complex, and the data/support from the scientific community is just falling away from global warming. What I think will be even funnier is when we reach the point where the doomsday prediction deadlines have faded into history, there will still be people preaching environmental doom just over the horizon, and the failed predictions will be explained as being narrowly avoided by whatever feel-good eviro fad we're currently into. Of course by then we'll most likely be fearing death by another ice age if the historic trends keep up.

Here is a final bit for you from the Royal Society's talk on the future of science and the distaste for global warming junk science.

http://www.videosift.com/video/Future-of-science-talk-at-the-Royal-Society
(1 minute mark)

Let's Talk Global Warming (Nature Talk Post)

Lurch says...

From the article I posted above:
"Duffy asked Marohasy: "Is the Earth stillwarming?"

She replied: "No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you'd expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years."

Duffy: "Is this a matter of any controversy?"

Marohasy: "Actually, no. The head of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has actually acknowledged it. He talks about the apparent plateau in temperatures so far this century. So he recognises that in this century, over the past eight years, temperatures have plateaued ... This is not what you'd expect, as I said, because if carbon dioxide is driving temperature then you'd expect that, given carbon dioxide levels have been continuing to increase, temperatures should be going up ... So (it's) very unexpected, not something that's being discussed. It should be being discussed, though, because it's very significant."

I think the ultimate point of this article is that the scientific debate is not over. Conclusions have been reached that are not supported by data being collected over the past few years. This includes not only the general hold on rising temperatures, but the record increase in sea ice levels in Antarctica. My favorite part is the end:

"Well-meaning intellectual movements, from communism to post-structuralism, have a poor history of absorbing inconvenient fact or challenges to fundamental precepts. We should not ignore or suppress good indicators on the environment, though they have become extremely rare now. It is tempting to the layman to embrace with enthusiasm the latest bleak scenario because it fits the darkness of our soul, the prevailing cultural pessimism. The imagination, as Wallace Stevens once said, is always at the end of an era. But we should be asking, or expecting others to ask, for the provenance of the data, the assumptions fed into the computer model, the response of the peer review community, and so on. Pessimism is intellectually delicious, even thrilling, but the matter before us is too serious for mere self-pleasuring. It would be self-defeating if the environmental movement degenerated into a religion of gloomy faith. (Faith, ungrounded certainty, is no virtue.)"

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