Captain Bligh's Logbooks To Yield Climate Bounty 232
Pickens writes "The BBC reports that researchers are digitizing the captains' logs from the voyages of Charles Darwin on HMS Beagle, Captain Cook from HMS Discovery, Captain Bligh from The Bounty, and 300 other 18th and 19th century ships' logbooks to provide historical climate records for modern-day climate researchers who will use the meteorological data to build up a picture of weather patterns in the world at the beginning of the industrial era. The researchers are cross-referencing the data with historical records for crop failures, droughts and storms and will compare it with data for the modern era in order to predict similar events in the future. 'The observations from the logbooks on wind force and weather are astonishingly good and often better than modern logbooks,' says Climatologist Dr. Dennis Wheeler from the University of Sunderland. 'Of course the sailors had to be conscientious. The thought that you could hit a reef was a great incentive to get your observations absolutely right!' The logbooks will be online next year at the UK's National Archives."
We'll only read about it if they support AGW (Score:2, Insightful)
If the logbooks don't support human-induced climate change, the media will ignore them.
Don't you DARE call it "science" when skepticism is met with derision.
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I am sure Fox news would gladly pick up on it.
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You can't keep calling it skepticism when faced with a continual stream of evidence, that's called denial.
Re:We'll only read about it if they support AGW (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't keep calling it skepticism when faced with a continual stream of evidence, that's called denial.
You can't keep calling it skepticism when faced with a continual stream of carefully selected evidence, that's called denial.
There, fixed that for ya!
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All the evidence, carefully selected and taken as a whole, shows that human activity has increased the global surface temperatures of the earth.
Why is that strange to consider?
You think we're ghosts or something who can't affect the world around us?
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All scientific evidence is carefully selected. There is a very high level of scrutiny and honesty in science, unseen in most other walks of life.
Re:We'll only read about it if they support AGW (Score:5, Informative)
For the last decade there has been no global warming, at all, while producing more CO2 than ever.
1. 10 years of noisy data is not significant enough to reverse the significance of the warming trend over the entire instrumental record. 2. The last decade as shown a warming trend of 0.11C/decade [realclimate.org].
Scientifically, this _necessarily_ throws global warming into serious doubt.
So long as science relies on whacky stuff like statistics, no it doesn't.
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Something is fishy there. What source is putting 2005 at a higher temperature than 1998?
Re:We'll only read about it if they support AGW (Score:4, Insightful)
What source is putting 2005 at a higher temperature than 1998?
When you read the article linked to you will see that the issue here is not whether two selected years are hotter and colder than each other (eg. 1850 vs 2005), it's whether the decadal trend is rising, steady or falling. Do you already understand why even if the trend over the last decade were falling (it wasn't) that would not necessarily be significant when viewed against all of the data from the instrumental, a fortiori the extra-instrumental, record?
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Dear AC,
As far as I know, since the American Association of Petroleum Geologists changed their mind, there have been no scientific organizations of any importance who reject human influence on climate change.
In a recent study Doran & Zimerman concluded that there really isn't even any debate about the authenticity of global warming among those who understand long term climate processes... Practically everyone agrees that it happens. Take a look: http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf [uic.edu]
So...
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It looks like there might be an organization of "skeptics with mod points" who reject anthropogenic climate change.
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And who's we, exactly?
You know we the sane rational people, whose view of reality is informed by Western Science, as in "unlike those ancient authors, we now know that the Earth is not flat." Oh, sorry you don't know sane? Well you can fix that easily: take you science from authoritative sources such as the ISI peer-reviewed literature, or the IPCC, rather swallowing the BS fed to you by some denialist blog. Oh, you actually prefer being hoodwinked by pseudo-science and running with paranoid conspiracy theories of UN world government ... well your choice.
Here's a tip. Wanna save the world? Reduce the population. Start with yourself by making out with a loaded shotgun.
Better still, why don't you make out? That way we'll reduce the population and increase the mean IQ all that the same time!
Well, obviously you can't be bothered to study history since there was never a time when a significant number of those who were literate thought that the earth was flat.
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If you've got an open mind, see what David Suzuki [davidsuzuki.org] has to say on the subject.
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There was plenty of skepticism about evolution (or at least, Darwinian evolution) when the theory first appeared. But it's been vetted for 150 years now, and with modern forensics, DNA sequencing, and even the observation of speciation events, there's really no credible evidence disproving the central tenets of Darwinian evolution. Though there have been some huge advancements in our understanding of it. For instance, while IANAEB, it is my understanding that evolutionary biologists no longer view evolution
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For instance, while IANAEB, it is my understanding that evolutionary biologists no longer view evolution as a straight-line sequence from simpler animals to more complex ones, like Darwin did.
Darwin certainly didn't view evolution as a straight line, he viewed it much like modern evolutionary biologists (you only have to look at his diagrams to see that!). The straight line (or ladder) stuff was mostly later (mis)interpretation, mostly by lay-people, but also some scientists.
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All branches are dead ends eventually.
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Nearly every civilization has fallen, which usually meant the death of > 99% of it's people.
Easter Island, Inca's, Maya's, (and there were several others in that region), Lots of Chinese civilizations, Buddhists, Persians, Babylon, Mamluks, Ottoman (the various "muslim" (though mostly less than 10% actual muslims) civlizations), ... all have perished and taken a huge death toll in their last few years.
But we can derive a lot of hope. Western, Christian civilization now continuously exists for over 1500 y
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No.
While it is true that many civilizations have "fallen", in almost no cases were those falls accompanies by loss of 99% of the people of those civilizations.
Note also that your definitions of "civilization" are largely arbitrary, and designed to support your conclusion. Lumping the various European civilizations together into one "Western Christian civilization" is misleading, at the least.
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Most of the cogent skeptics out there seem to be skeptical of either AGW, not GW itself, or are merely skeptical that we should do anything to stop it, arguing that it's a net boon to mankind for the climate to be a bit warmer. But yeah, anyone who argues that the climate isn't warming on average at this point can be safely ignored.
In before the global warming discussion (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure that this is going to devolve (pun intended) into a discussion about global warming (an argument often put against global warming is that we just don't have enough data to prove it exists). Regardless to how people feel about said subject, I hope you guys focus on how cool it is that we're preserving old information from paper-rot.
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Re:In before the global warming discussion (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, some evidence of hurricane patterns [wikipedia.org] is from Spanish records of ships in the Caribbean from 1500 to 1600.
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Re:In before the global warming discussion (Score:4, Insightful)
The thing is, those logs have already survived decades on a medium that requires no special equipment to read. How many records have we lost over the past 40 years simply because of changing hardware and file formats? In that time we've gone from delay line/ferrite core memory to 2TB hard drives. To say nothing of thousands of different file formats.
Call it a digital dark age. Will someone be able to read this post in 50 years?
Re:In before the global warming discussion (Score:4, Insightful)
How many have been changed to fit an agenda? On paper those are difficult to modify but how long after they are in digital form will they be massaged to promote someones religious beliefs?
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The work in climate engineering (or whatever it's called) is good too. We shouldn't assume that the Earth will always be habitable by humans without us needing to fight for it. None o
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Even if humans aren't causing global climate change, cleaning up the air is a GOOD THING for our own health.
Reducing pollution is definitely a good thing for our health. However, concentrating on CO2 has lead to boneheaded legislation and subsidies that result in increased pollution.
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cleaning up the air is a GOOD THING for our own health. .
The problem is that the argument is not over "cleaning up the air", it is over whether CO2 represents something that needs to be cleaned up. While most people agree that reducing the amount of pollutants we put into the air is a good thing, not everyone agrees that CO2 is a pollutant.
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No.
While it is true that most any kind of work will do, not all kinds of work will do. Useless work is, well, useless.
If any kind of work will do to make our economy function, then paying people to dig holes in their front yards every morning and fill them in every afternoon could make us all millionaires.
All other things being equal (and they seldom are), doin
Not old enough (Score:3, Funny)
We need transcripts of the logbooks of 16th century pirates and merchants, to accurately measure the temperature when pirates abounded.
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Yes, and it would be really helpful if those pirates kept detailed records of atmospheric CO2 concentrations as well.
Re:Not old enough (Score:5, Funny)
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I prefer beer that uses N2.
CO2 is 400ppm (Score:2)
(I know, you want me at your next party...)
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We can't. For He has destroyed the logbooks with his Noodly Appendage.
(I can't believe nobody else got the reference!)
-dZ.
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I can't believe that nobody got the COTFSM reference. Slashdot, I am disappoint.
Day 322 - Shore leave. (Score:3, Funny)
"Bounty" (Score:2)
it's all about the snowfall (Score:5, Funny)
There's little hope that the log books had accurate temperature readings, but the climate change could be inferred from things like snow depths on fiji. In fact I'm pretty sure the average snowfall on fiji has remained pretty constant in the last couple centuries, potentially refuting this whole global warming thing.
Sheldon
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Bazinga!
Is that yiddish for "whoosh!"
A small glitch in the weather readings (Score:2)
Captain Bligh's log for April 28, 1789 contains only this scrawled entry:
"I'll see them all hanging from the highest yardarm in the British Fleet!"
Even modern data isn't accurate (Score:5, Insightful)
I hit a reference to this in the Analog magazine I'm currently reading:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/surfacestationsreport_spring09.pdf [wordpress.com]
Entitled "Is the U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable?" it reviews the accuracy of the current US surface temperature measurement network and finds it woefully lacking for the sort of analysis that results in things like 0.7 degree changes over decades.
As a quick summary, there are the following issues with the temperature measurement methodology:
1. The measuring statements are often either surrounded by asphalt or in the air path of air conditioning exhaust or other hot air.
2. Data points are often not collected, and the missing points are created by interpolation.
3. Exterior finish specification changed from whitewash to latex paint, and that change has a significant impact on measurement results.
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answers here:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/07/no-man-is-an-urban-heat-island/ [realclimate.org]
Re:Even modern data isn't accurate (Score:5, Informative)
Modern data IS accurate. The report you linked to is not. You are going to LOVE this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_0-gX7aUKk [youtube.com]
That weather station location study discussed in the video you linked to attracted the attention of NOAA who wrote a reply:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/about/response-v2.pdf [noaa.gov]
Those white boxes which make up the old style weather stations that Anthony Watts (the guy who did the video you linked to) is investigating are called "Stevenson screens".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenson_screen [wikipedia.org]
They form the oldest weather network in the US. They have been replaced with much newer units. The stevenson screen setups don't even have anemometers.
But the data from those stations are only a very small fraction of all of the weather measurements taking place on earth. Satellites have been used extensively:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_temperature_measurements [wikipedia.org]
As have radiosondes attached to weather balloons:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiosonde [wikipedia.org]
as well as many other natural indications.
Quoted from the above linked video:
> In order to test the validity of Mr. Watts' accusations,
> the NOAA scientists made a comparison of
> temperature trends, using Mr. Watts' data. Two graphs
> were plotted using the same technique. One analysis
> was for the full data set of 1221 US weather stations.
> The other used only the 70 stations that Mr. Watts and
> his volunteers classified as "good" or "best". If climate
> denier theories are correct, the temperatures at the
> optimally sited stations should be markedly different
> from the data as a whole. In fact, the curves show
> virtually no difference. That's right. Even using the
> cherry-picked stations listed in Watts' publication, the
> data -- according to leading scientists at NOAA --
> shows no evidence of distortion.
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If climate denier theories are correct...
What the heck is a climate denier? THERE IS NO CLIMATE. ITS ALL IN YOUR MIND
Actually, that statement right there already tells me that the article has an agenda.
filtered for quality too (Score:5, Funny)
The thought that you could hit a reef was a great incentive to get your observations absolutely right
And filters out the data of the people who got it wrong!
Limited use (Score:4, Funny)
Day 176: No breadfruit.
Day 177: Breadfruit.
Day 178: No breadfruit.
Captain Bligh's powers of observation ... (Score:2)
... left something to be desired as far as the morale of his crew was concerned.
The Odyssy of Odysseus (Score:3, Interesting)
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Hmmm, my analysis of The Odyssy (written in the 9th century BC), suggests that the climate in the Mediteranean was pretty much the same as today while sea levels have gone down dramatically in some areas and up in others.
Quite aside from the fact that you really need to start using a spell-checker, it would be kind of hard for the Odyssey to be written a century or two before the invention of the Greek alphabet.
(I probably wouldn't have even picked on this if your joke had been funny.)
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it would be kind of hard for the Odyssey to be written a century or two before the invention of the modern Greek alphabet.
Fixed that for you. The Greeks wrote in Linear B prior the the Greek Dark Age. Admittedly, in 900 BC they weren't writing anything that we know of, although it's possible that oral versions of stories that resulted in the Homeric poems have their origins in that time, much as the stories of King Arthur have their origins centuries before Mallory et al.
Now all that's required is for som
Quality of data ... (Score:2, Interesting)
Some of the old data can be of great quality - so these exercises can be highly useful.
A couple of decades ago, I worked - as a student intern - at British institution. A question came in on wave heights in the North Sea ... a firm was wondering about engineering tolerances for oil rigs and such. I had to go to the data: much from the last few decades was already computerized and I did a quite stats analysis - and was surprised at how many BIG waves were observed. This would be very costly to the rig builde
Forget the logs... (Score:2)
Dr.Wheeler (Score:2)
Darwin ? (Score:2)
Bligh was a genius (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Bligh was a genius (Score:5, Insightful)
He was probably not much worse than the average captain of the time and nowhere near the league of George Vancouver when it
comes to being a heavy-handed hardass. But genius or not, he was no saint, never really learned to balance power and personality - witness his
time as Governor of New South Wales - and obviously didn't learn enough from Captain Cook about leading men.
Re:Bligh was a genius (Score:5, Interesting)
All rational research points out that he was no worse than the average captain. There are multiple reasons we remember him as being evil, but all stem from the fact that Fletcher Christian's family was reasonably well off, and was able to pull off one heckuva PR campaign against him. Bring that through to modern times when people used that telling to create movies, and the idea of Bligh as a despot is cemented.
In addition to all (save one) of the mutineers being killed violently by their brethren, let us also remember the 250 years of child rape perpetrated on Pitcairn Island.
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Actually all the evidence points to Bligh being the very opposite of a despot. Check out the number of floggings on the voyage. (pretty much none, in an era where weekly floggings were the norm.) He was not in fact a harsh disciplinarian, and neither was Cook, who was his mentor. Of course the type of voyage they were doing was not routine, and so the crews were not the usual scum of the earth. I think the problems was that Cook had the strength of character and leadership to cope with any problems, while B
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Perhaps, but his overall career points towards the type of man to inspire mutinies. He even managed to get the Australians to rebel [wikipedia.org] during his stint as governor. You don't have to flay people alive to get them to rebel, but you generally do have to be a fairly incompetent leader.
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Right, it must have been genetic - those freaks of nature who developed the mutineer gene and the closely-linked child-rape gene.
Good thing they mutineed and fled otherwise, their nasty deviant genes might have contaminated the upper crust who only suffered from the benign flogging gene, press-ganging gene and last and of course least, the colonize-the-bloody-heathen-wogs gene.
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I agree that the Christian Family were reasonably well off and more than that, Bligh managed not only to inspire his men to munity against his command of the Bounty, he also caused the colony he was sent to govern to rise up in armed rebellion [wikipedia.org]. The real question is not whether Bligh was despotic or not, it's why the British authorities saw fit to appoint a man, who had proven himself a singuarly ungifted commander
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Go read a book. (Preferably one written without the Christian family's tract being the sole primary source) Seeing Mel Gibson as Christian, while I'm sure it gave you a stiffy, is not an accurate portrayal.
Go spend a little time in Tahiti and tell me you wouldn't like to go native.
As far as the rebellion, your own link provides plenty of information indicating that success on the part of Bligh was nearly impossible given how many factors were stacked against him.
Did Bligh have Aspergers? (Score:2)
Go read a book.
I read quite a few actually, but there's one book I'd particularly like to read, namely the one you are citing to establish your claim that the Pitcairn Islands have seen 250 years of continuous child rape. Or was that merely defamatory? (And yes I'm familiar with the more recent events).
Seeing Mel Gibson as Christian, while I'm sure it gave you a stiffy, is not an accurate portrayal.
What do you base this certainty on? I'm sorry, I don't share your homo-erotic attraction to Mel Gibson.
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Interesting question you pose. An original thought, or something you picked up elsewhere?
This is the book that recites the modern events [amazon.com]. It's clear from a reading that sexual abuse has been an issue on Pitcairn for far longer than Steve Christian and his father have been around.250 years may be a slight exaggeration, but 100 years is supported by at least one account from the turn of the last century (referenced in the book).
Now, on the the question of governorship: how does an inability to govern an islan
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Interesting question you pose. An original thought, or something you picked up elsewhere?
I'm not sure which particular question you are referring to, but since almost all my thoughts are interesting, chances are it was original. ;)
This is the book that recites the modern events. It's clear from a reading that sexual abuse has been an issue on Pitcairn for far longer than Steve Christian and his father have been around.250 years may be a slight exaggeration, but 100 years is supported by at least one acco
Re:Bligh was a genius (Score:5, Insightful)
(Slightly under half of) the sailors were inspired to mutiny by Tahitian pussy, or lack there of after five months of it. Bligh was too nice in letting them live ashore with the Tahitians, having relations with them, and not flogging them enough.
The Rum Rebellion happened because he tried to remove the advantageous position some people in the Sydney colony had. This position would be called a monopoly nowadays.
So, maybe not a genius, but he tried to do the right thing(tm).
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Whatever else Hussein was, he managed to maintain a semblance of order in a rather fragmented society. When the US leaves Iraq, you can expect a Shiite led government to align itself a lot closer to Iran than Hussein and his crew would ever have permitted. The results aren't in yet. Yeah, Sadman was really a savage despot, with an arm's length list of crimes against his name, but he helped to balance power in the Mideast. Bush tipped the scales, and it's anyone's guess how they will balance in the futur
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At least he was the very antithesis to an islamic-fundamentalist ruler. In fact he was an pan-arab dictator running on a socialist and nationalist platform, and a fundamentalist cleric was considered an enemy to the state like any other person who was propagating a rule different to the baathist one of Saddam Hussein.
(Recommended reading: Anything about the Baath movement, baath beeing arab and meaning renaissance, a movement founded by secular arab intellectuals to replace Islam as the common factor of the
Re:Bligh was a genius (Score:5, Informative)
"Captain" Bligh of the Bounty was a lieutenant. Young and still a bit green as a commander.
Bligh and _2/3rds_ of the crew were placed into a small dingy and set adrift. Having only a compass and sextant he went 6700km and nailed the nearest British outpost Timor. Only one man died on route.
Further wikipedia concisely notes:
"The Bounty's log shows that Bligh resorted to punishments relatively sparingly. He scolded when other captains would have whipped and whipped when other captains would have hanged. He was an educated man, deeply interested in science, convinced that good diet and sanitation were necessary for the welfare of his crew. He took a great interest in his crew's exercise, was very careful about the quality of their food, and insisted upon the Bounty being kept very clean."
Re:Global climate change is true! (Score:5, Insightful)
Hopefully these logs will provide support for global climate change but if not it could be argued that reporting techniques of the time were crude.</quote>
I like this train of thought. You can't lose. "Hey, if this supports our theory, then it can be hailed as definitive proof. If it conflicts with our theory, well, they were wrong, and it'll be easy to discredit."
Shhh! (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, three thousand years ago, the Sahara was a savannah and not the desert it is today. But we all know that's just the product of oil companies' propaganda.
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I like how a less than one degree of change over the past 200 years is clearly not normal. What's even more interesting is that pro-global warming charts only go back 200 years or so (some go back 500 years). And not say...back past 10,000 years ago. Which was the end of the last ice age. Of which there have been many.
I'm not going to
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They do acknowledge that; have extremely elaborate physical and statistical models for it; and do the best they can with data from a huge number of sources. That you believe otherwise about these things, almost invalidates anything you have to say. I mean, you're not even saying that they're wrong; you seem really to be saying that they haven't even thought of fitting a model like f(x)=c*sin(a*x)+b*x.
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Yep. It was a lot warmer back in the days before all that carbon we're releasing got sequested underground as oil and coal.
Unfortunately all the ecosystems and species adapted for those conditions aren't really around anymore - they eventually got replaced by ones better adapted to cooler conditions.
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Regardless of which side you are on, how about just doing the right things to keep our air clean and our forests/etc intact for the sake of conversation itself? We don't need the threat of global warming (the earth has been through much worse, and our entire history on this planet is a blink of an eye to it) to make our own quality of life while we are here better.
Blah.
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OK, wise guy, what caused the Early Medieval Warm?
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how do you know the CO2 rise is man made in the first place, and not oh say from the oceans which are the largest stores of CO2?
By isotope analysis of atmospheric CO2. The isotope ratios for carbon from fossil fuels are distinct from those of carbon in CO2 outgassed from the oceans. By looking at the (changing) isotope ratios of atmospheric CO2 it is possible to track the relative origins of the increasing amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere. It turns out the increase is due to humans burning fossil fuels.
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how do you know the CO2 rise is man made in the first place, and not oh say from the oceans which are the largest stores of CO2?
IIRC it's from the ratio of carbon isotopes. The ratio found in oil being different from the ratio in CO2 produced by living things.
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Small correction: I should have said fossil fuel instead of just oil.
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Yawn:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/11/english-vineyards-again/ [realclimate.org]
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This is a classic anti-fact. What you say is completely factually correct, but a naive reading of it would lead one to conclude a total falsehood, namely that grapes were only grown in England long ago by the Romans because the climate was hot at that time. This is demonstrably false. In fact, wine has been grown in england since the time of the Romans [english-wine.com]. In fact, from that every same link
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So many urban myths quoted in a single paragraph, that's probably a new record ...
The Romans in England grew wine grapes
The Romans tried growing wine in England, but they failed, producing very poor quality wine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_from_the_United_Kingdom#Roman_to_19th_Century [wikipedia.org]
England's wine industry is currently thriving due to global warming.
the Vikings had dairy farms in Greenland. Vinland was in Labrador.
There has been cattle in Greenland for decades. New Scentist has a good article on this myth:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11644-climate-myths-it-was-warmer-during-the-mediev
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I think you got the wrong end of the stick there; they weren't claiming such data doesn't exist. They were pointing out that "pro-climate change people" tend to use graphs that only show the last few hundred years, because when you look at graphs that go back a significant period of time the current warming trend suddenly stops looking abnormal and alarming.
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Non-anthropomorphic causes of warming do not satisfactoryly explain the current warming tend.
I have this sudden image of a giant cloudy figure in the shape of a man stalking across the countryside, smashing villages with its mighty fists. "Oh no! Here comes the dread monster Pollu! Who will save us now?" But fear not! Gojira to the rescue! He will put this horrific fiend that walks like a man back in its place.
For crying out loud. This is a most dysturbing tend. I'm normally on the (relatively) green side of arguments (except when it comes to obvious things like nuclear power). But with friends lik
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Even if that were true, anthropomorphic greenhouse gas emissions would exacerbate any non-anthropomorphic warming effect. It would be like claiming that the thermostat in your house is slowly increasing the temperature in your room so therefore there's no harm in raising the thermostat further.
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It would be like claiming that the thermostat in your house is slowly increasing the temperature in your room so therefore there's no harm in raising the thermostat further.
But I don't see any harm in that. I may actually like a 1 degree annual average increase. Possibly improve my comfort, and possibly save me some money if spaced correctly (when considering the air conditioning). Thanks for the idea.
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Have any of these climatologists considered climate change is a natural cycle of the planet?
Why... no! No they haven't! Thank you for bringing that to their attention.
How astute of you to see what none of the several thousand PhDs working the subject for the last few decades have noticed. I'm sure they'll get to work on your brilliant insight right away.
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Of course they considered it, the ice records to which you refer were constructed by climatologists. I mean... it was their idea.
The evidence doesn't show that, it shows temperature increases out pacing co2 but the co2 increases first according to ice cores. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/63/Co2-temperature-plot.svg [wikimedia.org]
Calling it a psuedoscience is just name calling.
A super volcano has a massive cooling effect, they throw up a ton, many tons of sediment
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Do you seriously think that hasn't been considered? Seriously? Do you seriously think that climatologists all over the world are so mind-numbingly stupid that that hasn't occurred to anyone? Yes, that has been addressed, time and again. We are *worsening* and *accelerating* the warming. No one has said that climate never ever changed until humans screwed stuff up. The only way you can ask that question is
Re:Shock Horror - the climate changes! (Score:4, Insightful)
No, they're all thick as posts. So dumb, several types of rocks have more intelligence. They are so woefully short of understanding their instruments, they regularly burn down their labs. They have so little knowledge of the animals they study, they leave out saucers of milk for the lions. Heck, most of the vulcanologists think the red oozy stuff is badly made jello!
And they thank you for pointing out that you, a mere Slashdot reader, have managed to understand more about global climate change in five minutes of careful study (six, if you include the fox news commercials) then they've learned in ten years of careful data collection and vigorous debate. Wow! What a champ you are!
Re: (Score:2)
Oddly enough yes. You haven't trumped the entire field of meteorological sciences, sorry.
Historically rapid temperature changes (in geological times) have coincided with significant events or more specifically extinction level events such as a super volcano or asteroid impact. The temperature of this planet does not vary rapidly in the space of 200 years on its own. a heating or cooling event occuring naturally
Re: (Score:2)
Yawn!
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/04/the-lag-between-temp-and-co2/ [realclimate.org]