Droughts Linked To Global Warming 535
Layzej writes "Two new papers indicate that we are likely already seeing some of the predicted impacts of global warming. The first used Monte Carlo simulations to analyze how many new record events you expect to see in a time series with a trend. They applied the technique to the unprecedented Russian heat wave of July 2010, which killed 700 people and contributed to soaring wheat prices. According to the analysis, there's an 80 percent chance that climate change was responsible. The authors have described their methods and how they improved on previous studies. The second group studied wintertime droughts in the Mediterranean region. They found that 'the magnitude and frequency of the drying that has occurred is too great to be explained by natural variability alone. This is not encouraging news for a region that already experiences water stress, because it implies natural variability alone is unlikely to return the region's climate to normal.'"
Doughnuts? (Score:4, Funny)
I first read that as "Doughnuts Linked to Global Warming".
Stands to reason I suppose.
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Yes... there's a hole in the confection zone.
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Does that mean the great herds of Bison on the American prairies was just a figment of Buffalo Bills imagination?
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Animals releasing methane don't have anything to do with global warming, since that's already part of the carbon cycle. Fossil fuels are the issue.
They surely do. They would only be a natural part of the carbon cycle if they existed in sustainable numbers. Unfortunately there is an increasing amount of livestock being bred to satiate the market for animal products, both in the west and the rapidly expanding markets in the east. In the east, it is increasingly seen as being desirable to copy western patterns of consumption and this includes adopting a western style diet high in animal products. The by-product is both increased methane production and th
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This kind of crap wrecks /. The quoted post was a perfect /.-ism - confident, pretentious, uneducated and wrong. Pointing out the faults takes the fun out of it.
Please stop; unacknowledged stupidity has a certain elegance.
Re:Doughnuts? (Score:4, Funny)
you're just trying to bagel the question.
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you're just trying to bagel the question.
And you're just trying to keep it all under lox & cream-cheese!
It's a conspiracy.
A delicious, tasty conspiracy!
The worst, most insidious kind!
Fiends!!
Sincerely,
Rosie McDonald
We're not there yet... (Score:5, Insightful)
(And turnabout is fair play. If ten or twenty years from now the temperature hasn't gone up any more and the weird weather events go away without us taking any action about it i'll be willing to stand up and say i was wrong. In fact i'd be quite happy to have that event come about.)
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No, paper was invented long before Global Warming became an issue...
Re:We're not there yet... (Score:5, Informative)
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http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/10/climate-skeptics-perform-independent-analysis-finally-convinced-earth-is-getting-warmer.ars
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To be fair just because something has been "known" in the 1930s that's not an indicator of how true it is. I don't doubt the result but I doubt the validity of this particular argument.
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Funny enough the fact that there has to be a green house effect was discovered in the 19th century by our all time favourite Fourier and also later more accurately by Arrhenius.
Here are a few links:
http://www.globalwarmingart.com/images/1/18/Arrhenius.pdf [globalwarmingart.com]
http://geologist-1011.mobi/ [geologist-1011.mobi]
So yes with the information from many disciplines we could have decided in the 1930s to not grow to 7 billion people and stay at 2 billion but who would have wanted this.
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Muller is not a skeptic
Didn't take them long to throw Muller under the bus after he came up with the wrong results using Koch brother's money.
Re:We're not there yet... (Score:5, Insightful)
The unusual weather events we've been seeing around the world the last year aren't proof that global climate change is real... at least not yet. Weather != Climate
That is the opposite of the conclusion reached by these two papers. The papers found that the events in these regions are more likely with the current warming, and would not likely have occurred if it were not for the recent warming.
If ten or twenty years from now the temperature hasn't gone up any more and the weird weather events go away without us taking any action about it i'll be willing to stand up and say i was wrong.
You should expect to see another record year in two or three years (barring a super volcano). Waiting for 10 or 20 years before you reconsider your position is extreme in my opinion. On a somewhat related note, one of the interesting findings of the first paper is that we should expect fewer record years from temperature series that show greater natural variability. For instance, the UAH series exaggerates El Nino/La Nina events relative to other series, so we should expect fewer record years from that series, even though the trend is the same.
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So in
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So in short there's pretty overwhelming evidence in favor of climate change causing problems in the future, there's only some evidence from some people so far that it's a problem right now.
Good point. Don't hang your hat on one study or another. Waiting for a consensus before jumping to conclusions is prudent. I agree wholeheartedly.
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I've seen other scientists saying that it's too early to judge individual weather events in relation to climate change yet
The problem is you can't pin a particular weather event to a global climate trend with 100% certainty, it's the same problem as pinning a tumour to a particular cigarette, it's a statistical increase/decrease in the chance of weather event X happening, say a one in 500yr flood changing to once a decade. What's more concrete is that your insurance company have been factoring risks from AGW into your premiums for the past decade or so.
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The second you say "consensus" you prove to everyone that you don't understand the first thing about science.
Actually it proves the author of such an opining is the ignoramus, "consensus" is just another name for what used to be called "The republic of science", it's the difference between "a scientist says" and "science says".
eg: A scientist says he has discovered how to get free energy from perpetual motion, science says he's mistaken.
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Warmer temperatures cause greater evaporation and greater precipitation
Yes. The greater evaporation is what causes the droughts. This is exactly consistent with the predictions.
This is something that is literally impossible to know today, so how do they claim to know it?
I suspect the answer may be hidden in the paper.
Re:We're not there yet... (Score:5, Insightful)
these papers don't prove anything
Proofs are for mathematicians. You can't make a "proof" that we aren't living in some Matrix-style virtual world, where the climate is controlled by The Architect. What scientists can do, however, is to establish the most likely hypothesis to explain some observed data, and provide error bars for acceptance of said hypothesis. And that's pretty important.
Warmer temperatures cause greater evaporation and greater precipitation. Period.... anybody who is predicting more droughts, on average, due to warmer temperatures is -- ahem -- all wet.
Not really, because as you point out changes are regional in scope. That means that it is possible for some regions to get hotter, some colder, some wetter, some drier. If the regions that already have a large rainfall get a lot more rain (enough to significantly increase the global average), and regions that are on the drought boundary get slightly less rain, then the number of droughts will increase, even though the global average rainfall has also increased. I'm not saying that is what will or won't happen, but logically the two outcomes of "greater global rainfall" and "increased drought" are not mutually exclusive.
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When that does happen, i wonder if any of the deniers will actually step forward and admit they were wrong? Every time i see a denier post on Slashdot that seems to come from someone who sincerely believes what they're saying i'm tempted to write their name down and ask them about it when that time comes, but i'm far too lazy to actually follow through on that.
I like to be helpful, so I'll sum up the answer you'll receive when that happens:
"Well, excuse me. How could I possibly have heard all of the evidence when I just happened to be sticking my fingers in my ears and going, 'LA LA LA LA,' the whole time, Mr. Know-it-all?"
Re:We're not there yet... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Turning Siberia and Canada into fertile temperature zones will take centuries. Most of that area has poor soil that takes time to become better soil. Deserts will remain deserts although the may move some. Greenland has never been ice free in human history. Back when CO2 and global temperatures were higher the Sun was also cooler. The Sun has warmed about 25% in the last 3 billion years. Yes, we'll have to adapt but it may not be easy and will be quite expensive.
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However, that doesn't mean that I don't recycle and do everything I can to reduce my environmental impact. Personally I think if less time and energy were spent trying
Re:We're not there yet... (Score:5, Insightful)
As for the first part, at which point do you feel the argument that the change is related to our activities breaks down? It's easy to find numbers on exactly how much oil, coal and natural gas is burned every year and calculate the resultant change in carbon dioxide concentrations in the air. I've done the math myself, and it's surprising how big an impact we have. It's been a while since i did that but at the current rate presuming no other changes it's a surprisingly short period of time before we'd make the atmosphere actually lethal. (Some thousands of years i think? Though it could be tens of thousands or just centuries, i'd have to look up the math. In any event surprisingly quick on geologic scales.)
Of course according to current models we'd see severe changes to the climate long before that point. So where do you disagree? Do you feel that the carbon dioxide is being pulled out of the atmosphere at a _much_ greater rate than it was before we started pumping it into the atmosphere? If so, where do you think it's all going? Or do you feel that the models claiming that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas are wrong? Or do you feel that some other factor is balancing the effect of the increased carbon dioxide? Or is there something else i'm not considering that you think is important?
I would argue that given we have a mathematically proven effect on the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere it's kind of silly to argue that we can't do anything about the climate. And i would _not_ argue that the current temperature is perfect for the planet, but i think that it's pretty likely the current temperature, or at least the current climate, is close to perfect for us right now. After all, we've spent a long time adapting ourselves to the current situation. It's possible that another situation might be better for us overall, but adapting to that new situation over the period of a couple decades would probably be very painful. Maybe if northern Canada and Russia turn into ideal farmland while the Europe and the Midwest in the US turn into dustbowls the total _potential_ food harvest will increase, but how many people will starve (and how many wars will be fought?) before that new potential is realized?
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Oh how I wish I had mod points. This is exactly how I feel. I recognize the Earth is getting warmer, and I know CO2 concentrations can cause warming effects, but I am by no means convinced that there is a causation link between the two, or that most (obviously not all) of the people preaching AGW aren't doing it because they benefit from "green" research and development, which is more often than not (and unfortunately) a rip-off.
Of course we should move away from oil as fast as possible: but there are a do
Re:We're not there yet... (Score:4, Insightful)
I am by no means convinced that there is a causation link between the two, or that most (obviously not all) of the people preaching AGW aren't doing it because they benefit from "green" research and development, which is more often than not (and unfortunately) a rip-off.
I think it bears reminding everyone, again, that the 6 of the top 10 companies in the world by revenue are oil and gas producers [wikipedia.org], and the total revenue of the fossil fuel-based energy companies is in the multiple trillions of dollars, a scale comparable to the US federal budget. This is at least two orders of magnitude more money than the DOE's annual budget (more than a third of which is spent on nuclear security, not "green" research), and more than three orders of magnitude more than the federal government wasted on Solyndra. So even if most of the people claiming that AGW is real are doing it for the money (which is bullshit - academic scientists don't make very much, at least not compared to oil and gas company scientists), it's not exactly a level playing field.
Re:We're not there yet... (Score:5, Interesting)
Few "academics" are on the payroll of oil companies.
Any academic in an even slightly related field that is prepared to speak, research or publish material that denies AGW can be on the payroll of Big Oil. They are more than happy to pay for it. There aren't many that do so because most scientists aren't charlatans. Most scientists are actually interested in the truth.
Re:We're not there yet... (Score:4)
There aren't many that do so because most scientists aren't charlatans. Most scientists are actually interested in the truth.
It's actually kind of depressing how these arguments unfold. One of the hallmarks of pseudoscience is the chorus of claims that mainstream academics (and funding agencies) are biased against whatever theory is being pushed. The fact that nearly the entire scientific community rejects these theories is taken to be self-evident proof of groupthink, a conspiracy of silence*, or pure profiteering. In some fields, many of the loudest complaints come from people who've never actually done much research themselves, probably because actual science is far too demoralizing for someone who relies on faith to guide their beliefs. Very few creationists have ever worked in a biology lab, for instance - but they weasel out of this by claiming that of course the entire community is biased against them anyway, so what's the point?
(* The creationists are big fans of this; it is very common to see creationist blogs etc. hinting about tenured biology professors who know the truth, but are afraid to publish their evidence - or reveal their names, naturally - for fear that Richard Dawkins will have them rubbed out, or something equally dire. And I'm certain that in 50 years, we'll be hearing the same goddamn thing.)
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On the contrary; tobacco-caused lung cancer, if it exists, is an economic question. If it has to be "tackled", it has to, in any rational plan, be industry that has to "tackle" it, since if it exists, it is industry that is causing it.
Because that approach worked well with tobacco right? While there are exceptions when they are still run by idealistic founders, for the most part the legal and organizational framework for publicly owned corporations causes them to behave like greedy psychopaths. "Industry"
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Re:We're not there yet... (Score:5, Insightful)
The current temperatures are not the perfect ones for the planet. The planet doesn't care. The current temperatures are perfect for us and the food crops and animals we have based our civilization around.
Re:We're not there yet... (Score:5, Insightful)
The guy who is primarily responsible for the spread of claims of weather extremes [colorado.edu] has been caught in his lies.
There isn't just "one guy" who says this. There have been hundreds of papers showing links between weather extremes and global warming. To be fair, weather extremes aren't always bad either... if the "extreme" is that a major rainstorm passes over Texas right now, that's better. The problem is that (as was stated above), we've built most of our society around assuming the climate that existed before global warming. If this changes drastically, a lot of people are going to die before we settle back into whatever the new normal is climate-wise. It's not that global warming is bad per se, just that it's bad if it occurs too quickly for humanity and the ecosystem to respond.
Oh, and then there's the fact that increased CO2 is turning the oceans acidic. That gets much less news, but is potentially much more destructive from a world-wide perspective. And there's no possible way you can say that isn't associated with CO2 levels in the atmosphere. And all you have to be able to do to know that's anthropogenic is how to count.
There's other reasons too (Score:2)
Good old self-serving greed is one. That is no small part of why I work to conserve. Use less, have more, more usually being money. I'm a big fan of LED bulbs for that reason. Ya they cost more up front but they use way less energy and you have to replace them literally like once every decade or two. In the long run, I spend less money which means I have more money.
Same even with small things like turning off lights in rooms I'm not in, having a remote controlled power strip on my home theater setup (Home D
Re:We're not there yet... (Score:4, Informative)
I'm just not convinced that 1) humans are making a measurable effect on the climate
You can believe whatever you want, but at least admit that your approach is completely unscientific. Here's how science works:
We have a model (increase of CO2) that explains the observed temperature increase and is accepted by the vast majority of climatologists and scientists in general. If you want to propose a new model that discounts CO2 levels as driving the observed temperature increase, then you have to explain not only where the temperature increase is coming from, but also your model needs to fit the observed data better than the existing one. You also have to explain why the observed increase in CO2 - a known greenhouse gas - isn't causing the expected increase in temperature that it should be causing. Waving your hands in the air and saying "I just don't believe it" is not an option.
As for your other points, they have been refuted many times over:
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Write my name down.
1. The primary reason for global warming is historical - the earth cycles between glacial and interglacial periods.
2. I don't believe that mankind has accelerated that warming much, if any.
3. I am 100% convinced that all the current efforts to combat global warming are merely schemes to line people's pockets, ie, Al Gore and his "carbon credits".
You're right - turnabout is fair play. Ten or twenty years from now, the temperature WILL have gone up. The weird weather events WILL NOT go aw
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Critics have questioned the 100 year period. (Score:4, Informative)
Don't matter. (Score:3, Insightful)
By then it'll almost certainly be too late to do anything, either to prepare or attempt to moderate the changes. But I have no doubt that when that time comes, the denalists will pretend they are innocent and will continue to defend the handful of corporate interests that manipulated them. Remember how long the tobacco-sponsored lies about how smoking doesn't cause cancer kept up?
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Until free trade orthodoxy is derailed, doing anything about global warming will merely mean a transfer of wealth from the West to the East with little to show for it. Jack up the price of carbon in the US and Europe and more economic activity will flee to India and the Middle Kingdom wreathed in smog. It'll be no use appealing to them. If the Indian farmer has to choose between catastrophic flooding maybe drowning him in twenty years or having to certainly drink weed killer tomorrow because the engine of g
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You include that "region depopulating" bit, as if it were a "bad thing". Have you noticed that the earth is overpopulated?
"If they would rather die,'' said Scrooge, `"they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population." ;)
What I can't understand... (Score:4, Insightful)
is how the Earth's temperature has remained essentially static (with a slight downward trend) for the last 12 years. That's from figures that everyone agrees.
If the temperature is static/slightly decreasing while the CO2 levels keep rising, then the CO2 hypothesis CAN'T be right. You can do clever stats as much as you like - the fact remains that the theory and model predictions say that the temperature should be increasing rapidly - and it just isn't. That really is the elephant in the room...
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It's because we are measuring a very tiny part of a large system. E.g, we are not measuring the temperature of the oceans (a bit, but not a lot). The heat contents of the oceans are pretty massive, so there is some potential for heat to move around and mess with the data. That is why it is usually 30-year means that are used.
Also note that 12-years is cherry-picking: 1998 was an exceptionally hot year, and not a good basis to gauge other years against. Check out the graph [wikipedia.org], if you please --- no one could c
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CO2 is the money making scapegoat. We aren't going to see dramatic changes going from .03% to .04% concentration. But, it is a gas produced in a seemingly large, quantifiable amount. The Earth is slowly heating at the moment, no doubt, but CO2 isn't bogeyman it's made out to be. Where is the hockeystick graph for Mars, which has CO2 concentrations far beyond anything achievable on Earth?
Re:What I can't understand... (Score:4, Insightful)
Where is the hockeystick graph for Mars, which has CO2 concentrations far beyond anything achievable on Earth?
Mars has about 0.0048 of the atmosphere that Earth has (by mass). Most of it is CO2, but there ain't much of it.
Re:What I can't understand... (Score:5, Insightful)
What I can't understand is how the Earth's temperature has remained essentially static (with a slight downward trend) for the last 12 years.
Because they haven't. Here are all the major temperature reconstructions. All agree that the last 12 years showed warming. http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/offset:-0.074/mean:12/from:1999/plot/hadcrut3vgl/mean:12/from:1999/plot/uah/offset:0.225/mean:12/from:1999/plot/rss/offset:0.14/mean:12/from:1999 [woodfortrees.org]
Seriously, how can you imagine that there has been a slight downward trend when 2010 was the hottest year on record?
Cap-n-trade will fail; it will make things worse (Score:3)
So, what is the best solution? Have nations tax ALL goods (local and imported) based on the CO2 that comes from the nation where the final assembly and the primary sub-components (depending on size of item, much even want several of the largest sub-components). Ideally, we would tax based on CO2 emissions from a nation on a per sq km basis. With that approach, it forces ALL major nations to lower their emissions, while nearly all 3rd world nations are all ready at low levels. However, with this approach, it will reward those nations that actually take the initiative to drop their emissions, while punishing those that choose to ignore it. That includes the nation that invokes the tax itself.
America is to launch OCO2 in 2012. It measures CO2 emissions. Rather than playing guessing games, this would simply measure CO2 into a nation's border, as well as CO2 OUT of the nation. That approach would allow us to find exactly how much CO2 a nation generates and not worry about the source. That is up to the nation to solve. They may wish to kill coal plants. Or they may elect to kill cars. etc. However, this approach combined with per sq km basis, allows a nation to decide if the issue is a business issue or a ppl issue and then adjust accordingly. However cap-n-trade and combined with per capita is about the worst idea going. It is already failing in EU. They are losing businesses to China who will continue to cheat all the way through this.
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And I seriously doubt that China was anything to do with AGW other than generating it faster.
So what they are saying is (Score:2, Insightful)
They need money for levies to hold water back, not money for Carbon Tax to be paid to the UN's banksters
We can fix the planet now..(sarcasm) (Score:2)
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-10/29/rossi-success [wired.co.uk]
interesting video about the subject by CBS
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OabYImeDSc [youtube.com]
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I strongly disagree (Score:3, Insightful)
If it were true, then I'd have to change my lifestyle and I don't want to, therefore global warming is a scam.
(!A)GW (Score:4, Insightful)
It doesn't.
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It was predicted years ago that my anti-ninja rock will keep ninjas from killing me. Every confirmation that ninjas haven't killed me without providing any other plausible explanation for the lack of me dying is more evidence to confirm this hypothesis.
What this says is that lack of explanation is not confirmation of hypothesis.
Re:(!A)GW (Score:4, Funny)
Is your anti-ninja rock for sale, per chance?
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Most people insure their house against very rare occurrences.
It is called risk management.
The truth is that the political right will embrace energy ind
Normal (Score:2)
"natural variability alone is unlikely to return the region's climate to normal"
Where "normal" is defined as "what it was 10 years ago". I wonder if the descendants of Ice Age megafauna are wondering when the climate will return to their normal.
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Where "normal" is defined as "what it was 10 years ago". I wonder if the descendants of Ice Age megafauna are wondering when the climate will return to their normal.
Nope. They're dead. Guess why?
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Stop with the hot air about trying to push the less threatening term "climate change" - you're contributing to global warming.
Re:It's called "climate change" NOT "global warmin (Score:5, Interesting)
It's called "climate change" NOT "global warming".
It's called both. It is anthropogenic (human-caused) emissions of CO2 causing global warming of mean land, sea, and lower atmosphere temperatures which is causing global climate change.
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A few dishonest conservative nutcases call it "global redistribution scam", but potato, potahto.
FTFY.
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I am sure that the current +0.6-0.8K degrees really makes a huge difference whether it will snow in October ;)
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STATE COLLEGE, Pa. (AP) — An unusually early and powerful nor'easter along the East Coast began dumping several inches of wet, heavy snow Saturday that weighed down or toppled leafy trees and power lines and combined with high winds to knock out power to hundreds of thousands.
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How do you explain all the green leaves still on the trees on October 30. When we moved here 18 years ago, the leaves were turned and generally falling off.
All the long-term-average indicators I know of point to a warmer climate. Short-term indicators are not so meaningful.
That's part of what this study in TFA is about -- we can't point to any single weird event and say "that's global warming!!!!" but we can start to look at sequences of events, and get a handle on how likely that collection of events wou
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I'll get back to you on that. Hold your breath until then. Don't worry about the "need for air", that's just a liberal conspiracy. If you start feeling lightheaded, take a toke from a CO machine. Michelle Bachmann said it's perfectly harmless to breathe and she's not a liberal.
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droughts? Global Warming! cold weather? Global Warming! average temperature dropping? Global Warming!
While phrased facetiously and fairly modded down for it... the AC has a point. There are a hell of a lot of things that are blamed on global warming... and it's very easy for laymen to point that out and very easy for other laymen to say "well a global trend in warming can cause strange, unpredictable results in this chaotic weather system". I say stop BLAMING things on global warming. Droughts are the result of climate change, because they're a change in climate. Global warming, global cooling, global stay
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Re:of course they are. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you increase the concentration of CO2 in a mixture of gases like the atmosphere with infrared radiation passing through it it will warm up by capturing more of that IR. That's simple physics. Human burning of fossil fuels has put more than twice as much CO2 into the atmosphere as it takes to raise the level from 280 ppmv in 1830 to 390 ppmv in 2011. You're going to need some pretty extraordinary evidence to show the increase in CO2 is not the primary cause of global warming and humans are not the primary cause of the increase in CO2. Good luck with that.
Re:Falsifiable (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Falsifiable (Score:4, Interesting)
I thought the whole idea of the scientific method was that the method was above and beyond whether any individual scientist was right or wrong either by good luck or good management. If Phil Jones puts being right above the rough and tumble of surviving criticism, he's not doing what I recognize as science. My version of science does not limit criticism to authorized lab coats.
Richard Mueller, doing science, out in the open under scrutiny from all comers, came up with the same answer, and did the entire debate a huge favour. If Jones turns out to be as brilliant as Srinivasa Ramanujan (and as lacking in mainstream convention), I might cut him more slack. Hardy nearly had a coronary demanding proofs from Ramanujan that he couldn't supply in the form Hardy desired. Nevertheless, Ramanujan risked everything to join Hardy in collaboration to bridge the divide.
What was Jones' excuse? He's hardly the first scientist faced with the prospect that nearly 100% of his peers (to say nothing of the gadfly rabble) are mainly motivated by the finding of fault. He should have a brief conversation with Daniel Shechtman about the reality of his chosen profession.
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Re:Falsifiable (Score:5, Informative)
So in fact, the Mueller report is not even remotely evidence of, or confirmation for, AGW.
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First off, they would not reveal all the sources of their data. Some of it was public, true, but some of it was arranged via private business arrangement with international sources, not all of which they would name. And they would not release those data, precisely because of their claim that the sources wanted confidentiality.
The sources were governments who wanted money, not confidentiality. You don't need to use the exact same weather stations to replicate the results. Roy Spencer didn't even use weather stations for UAH. He used satellite data. The BEST team didn't go to CRU for data, they went to the sources (and likely payed). NASA didn't go to CRU for the data, they went to the sources. Hobbyist gathered publicly available data. All performed an independent analysis and came up with the same answer. The fact that t
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You misunderstand what he means (probably deliberately, but I'm not ruling out ignorance - I'm erring on the side of you being intelligent enough to be able to understand what he means).
What he's talking about is specific special interests out to call his methods and data into question rather than the science and theory that is involved. This is not the same as "the theory not being falsifiable" - the main aim of the denailists has been to question the competence of anyone who disagrees with them - for exam
Get your head out of the propaganda trough (Score:5, Interesting)
According to a survey, 90% of scientists from the relevant fields and 90% of all scientists ascribe to anthropogenic climate change. That is what we call a "scientific consensus", and you don't get a consensus that strong without an awful lot of data to back it up. I know, I know, the good pro-science guys at FOX News and on the Rush Limbaugh show and from the rightist think tanks keep saying this is "bad science", but let's take a look at the "science" the rightists use to make their arguments, shall we?
The most prominent, most cited, and most published climate change skeptic scientist is one Ross McKitrick, who is either an amazingly sloppy scientist, or someone deliberately engaging in fraud in order to promote a purely ideological view. I'll let you read for yourself: http://crookedtimber.org/2004/08/25/mckitrick-mucks-it-up/ [crookedtimber.org].
This guy who either literally doesn't know a degree from a radian or is deliberately doing bad science in order to deceive people is the best of the bunch. The others are even worse. It is on the basis of work by men of this caliber that you conclude that 90% of the scientists on the planet, representing people from every conceivable walk of life, economic status, nationality, set of political views, etc. is part of a vast international conspiracy to... what? Make American rightists feel bad? I was never entirely clear on what this vast, incomprehensibly complex conspiracy is actually supposed to do.
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Scientific_method [wikipedia.org]
Falsifiability [wikipedia.org]
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Sorry, I don't get where this "flasify" myth comes from on /.
How exactly do you falsify the "Darwin Theory of Evolution" or how do you falsify the "Laws of Gravity"?
The scientific way is to find "prove" ... or to design experiments to support your thesis ... at least that is how we do it here.
If you find a way "to falsify" a theory, the theory is already gone and no longer valid. In other words, all existing theories o
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Sorry, I don't get where this "flasify" myth comes from on /. ... If you find a way "to falsify" a theory, the theory is already gone and no longer valid. In other words, all existing theories on which we base our current science, may it be physics, chemistry, biology or thermo dynamics ... are not falsified (and not falsifiable).
The "myth" comes from the scientific method. You're supposed to construct your hypothesis such that it is falsifiable. ie "if the experiment results are X, then the theory doesn't hold water" to do the process of falsifying, you need the experimental data.
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And what about Richard Muller's study? It didn't use Phil Jones' data.
Your exclamation points speak more eloquently than your words. They tell us everything we need to know about how carefully you have considered your position.
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This only shows the consequences of an earth that heats up. It does not show that man is responsible for the earth heating up or that man has any control over it.
True enough. There are other papers that show the causality. The response to those papers will undoubtedly be "This only shows that man is responsible. It does not show that there are any negative consequences to a warming world"
Re:And? (Score:5, Insightful)
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This only shows the consequences of an earth that heats up. It does not show that man is responsible for the earth heating up or that man has any control over it.
Because something as simple as AGW needs a /single/ paper that encapsulates the entire phenomena in no more than an abstract, so that it can fit between two commercials. Would you believe it then?
Nahhhh =0
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I think, before you promote algae, that you should do a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation of how many square miles of algae you would need to expose to sunlight. I once did the BOTE on corn ethanol [wordpress.com] -- if we converted our entire corn crop to ethanol, it would cover 21% of our gasoline consumption. You think you can scale up algae to 5x our national corn crop?
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