The KGB Oracle Forums General Public Discussion (SPECIAL ACCESS) KGB Political Debate Central Climate change!

Water absorbes CO2. That's what makes fizzy drinks work. Also, the ice cores have the same atmospheric concentrations as ambiantly sampled air. A nifty thing about the CO2 in the ice cores is that CO2 from combustion is a different isotope than naturally oocuring CO2. Predictablly, the increase in the CO2 is of the combustive variety. I don't know what .007% is referring to.

If any boob can make a chart that accuratly predicted the tempreture increase in the last 15 years, I'll eat my hat.

An excerpt of the caption for Arkh graph: " Towards the left-hand side of the graph the sun gradually approaches modern levels of solar output, while vegetation spreads, removing large amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere. The last 200 million years includes periods of extreme warmth, and sea levels so high that 200 metre-deep shallow seas formed on continental land masses"


Of course the secrets of planetary science will be locked away in a Geocities website. I did do due diligence, however. Most of the articles are either presentations to, or cite heavily things like "Heartland Conference on Climate Change." I tend to prefer my science of the peer-reviewed variety.


Significant figures and no comment interviewees.

I can kinda see the "debate" on evolution: God said we were made from dirt, not monkeys. I really don't understand why climate change denial is such an article of faith.

Its a matter of not understanding the system. Most of the climate stuff mistakes correlation for causation. Climate system is extraordinarily complex, and not very understood. 20 years ago people thought we were inducing a new Ice Age. Climate science is still in its infancy. Its not that I know what the effects of humans on climate are, I just do not think anyone else does either.

The issue became politicized, and once that happens studies and research tend to seek correlation to justify a policy as opposed to pure objective study.

Plus, even if humans are causing climate change - getting govt involved is simply lengthening the time it takes to develop other energy. The rest of the world , particularly the developing world could care less about the Green sensibilities of left wing US hipsters.

The only way to redress the climate issue, is to develop tech that genuinely creates more BTUs/$ that digging oil out of the ground. If the Govt artificially raises the costs involved for doing that, thinking to make alternative energy more competitive - all that happens is the Chinese and Indians and Brazilians who do not engage in such practices economically destroy us.

Govt financing of such alternative energy initiatives - while in theory workable - have in reality proven to be simple exercises in cronyism. As a practical matter, throwing taxpayer dollars at the problem is just flushing cash down the drain. The political environment fostered by those wishing to get a piece of the Govt dole simply hinders normal energy production, and crowds out non politically connected researchers who might be onto something viable ,to no good purpose.

The sooner people realize that if "carbon" is a problem, that the only workable solution is to make non carbon energy genuinely more productive than carbon energy.. the sooner it will happen. Switching to energy that gives us an actual competitive advantage in BTU/$ over the rest of the world will prompt the rest of the world to also adopt non carbon energy. Otherwise, us ~300M folks in the US can go back to waterwheels and horse-drawn turbines and in the long run it wont make a whit of difference to a planet with several billion people ramping up their coal and oil usage.

Derid,
I applaud you using correlation =/= causation. You'll find this principal to be very effective in combating silly conspiracy theories. But in this particular case, causation has been proven many times over. CO2 has been proven to cause warming in the theoretical, historical, experimental, and, most recently, the observational. There's no denying we create an enormous amount of CO2. This is not contingent on previously debunk theories. Further, researchers are so far removed from policy ( I should know) that there's little incentive for them to push nebulous conclusions.

Developing countries care more about global warming because natural disasters are more likely to be catastrophic there. China is second only to Germany in green energy research.

First, accepting global warming does not necessitate "green" energy policy - see freakonomics. Secondly, if we know carbon emissions create a known quantity of economic damage - we have decent models now - we can sub-divide by tonnage and figure the true cost of carbon energy to society. We does this to many pollutants already. I don't understand why a pollutant that effects the health and livihood of everyone would be excempt from this.

TurkeyJ: everything you say in your first paragraph is right.
The thing which is discussed are the feedbacks: are they positive or negatives? We don't know all of them, we don't have a full grasp of their effects.
Hence why all the 90' models failed to predict the last 15 years of temperature trends.

Another thing which subject to discussion are the temperature sets quality: the major ones are using ground stations and not satellites. And those stations are often badly placed.

Then, about natural disasters: no relation has been found. Better: higher temperatures may mean more water in some desertic lands due to more evaporation.

Researchers may be far away from policy (an I doubt, see who attends all those climate conferences) but when money is granted to study climate change, you get more chances to get some when you can link whatever you're studying with climate change. Little by little this creates a big change in the available litterature.

Even if the worst happened would it cost more to adapt or to try to mitigate it?

First off water absorbs everything.
Your soda water is formed by 70psi co2 forced into water, it doesn't just say hey water mind if I join you, its more like hey water you want to know what prison rape feels like.

I would assume co2 gets into water the same way o2 gets in, very slowly buy way of agitation.

Secondly this list of who says only humans are causing global warming? I don't know who they are so I will not live or die by a random list of "scientist".

There are Nobel Prize scientist who say humans are the least cause of global warming and you would say they are wrong because the hot chick on the local new is considered a scientist says he is wrong.

The fact that we think we can take some ice cores and tell everyone what happened 100k years ago is arrogant.
Did the ice cap layers build up layer by layer for 100k years without melting? Its not like a tree ring they don't go away when it gets hot.

The "scientist" also say the Earth was covered by ice at one point and another it all melted and most of the land was underwater. All this without humans.

You do realize that you're advocating making breathing a regulated behavior right?


From Jet's link, 390parts/million up from 320parts/million. So, (390-320)/1,000,000 = .00007
.00007*100 = .007%

And I'll eat mine if any of the climate experts can do the same. Not a single one of the THOUSANDS of them have been even close to accurate, and you'd think throwing that many darts at the wall you'd eventually get lucky. These are the same people who said we'd run out of oil, gold, aluminum, zinc, etc. by the end of the 1990's and that the population growth would cause world wide famine by the early 80's.

Now, am I naive enough to think that the climate doesn't change? Of course not, but I also don't think the extent of man's contribution, if any, can currently be quantified. Until it can, scientifically not politically, I'll stick to my belief that the vast majority of the warming done on this planet is due to changes in that great big nuclear reactor in the sky.

Derid is exactly right about the politicization of this issue. The desire to appease the talking heads drives the results.

Well, researchers are not immune from funding or ideology.

Sure, China is investing some in alternative energy... but they are also building carbon power plants at breakneck speed.

I do not think any current models regarding "cost to society" could possibly be relevant. For myriad reasons. I would be curious to see some though, it would be fun picking them apart if nothing else.

You are right about "Conspiracy Theories" not being provable. I still maintain my general theme that the official line of the Court Historian is often also false, and the label "Conspiracy Theory" is also quite often misused and abused. People have a tendency to assume they know more than they actually do, and they also have an ingrained tendency to conform to peer pressure. Its hard to articulate points in this area and have them be understood though. So many false continuums and rhetorical baggage is implanted in the perspective of most observers that you have to somehow get people to sit still long enough to explain multiple discrete chains of consequence to even get people to understand what you are actually *trying to say.

http://climateaudit.org/2013/03/02/mikes-agu-trick/
Mann, always here when you need to beat some data.

Yes, but all of them? When skepticism would secure easy grant money?

If you are going after questionable motivation angle, you have to realize that there major money to be made in climate change skepticism, the only reason a bunch of scientific community is not chasing that grant money is because they realize that doing so would lead to guaranteed rebuttal.

That is, there is no way to interpret existing data according to scientific principles that would undermine current interpretation of climate change.

The tendency is to overstate and inflate. Lots of money to be had in the jumping to conclusions, and over asserting them.