India Ditches UN Climate Change Group 403
Several readers have told us that the Indian Government is moving to establish its own group to address the science of climate change since it "cannot rely" on the official United Nations panel. "The move is a severe blow to the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) following the revelation parts of its 3000 page 2007 report on climate science was not subjected to peer review. A primary claim of the report was the Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035, but the claim was not repeated in any peer-reviewed studies and rebuffed by scientists. India's environment minister Jairam Ramesh announced that the Indian government will established a separate National Institute of Himalayan Glaciology to monitor climate change in the region. 'There is a fine line between climate science and climate evangelism,' Ramesh said. 'I am for climate science.'"
Inaccurate (Score:5, Informative)
It doesn't appear as though India is pulling out of the IPCC at all. They are just sending a representative (or "minder" depending on how you look at it).
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/site/Story/82542/India/India's+IPCC+'tracker'+soon.html [intoday.in]
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/PM-expresses-confidence-in-IPCCs-work-lauds-Pachauris-leadership/articleshow/5540596.cms [indiatimes.com]
Before poeple freak out, her is a couple of points (Score:5, Informative)
1) Publishing is usually the beginning of peer review. SO finding a discrepency isn't uncommon
2) The person who made that statement was an Indian Scientist. SO the irony of thise story is rich.
3) is doesn't invalidate the peer reviewed papers, or the overall conclusion.
Here is a good write up:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527434.300-debate-heats-up-over-ipcc-melting-glaciers-claim.html [newscientist.com]
Be sure to follow the read more link.
Yes, yes, most people want some sort of black and white answer. There isn't one, and if you are truly interested you will
read about this is reputable journal. That way you have a chance to see all the facts that lead up to this.
Re:A couple errors in a 3,000 page document (Score:2, Informative)
I take it that you're dropping the ridiculous notion that a couple errors in a 3,000 page document written by hundreds of people somehow means that the whole thing is invalid?
preaching something that doesn't exist and then claiming that science supports what you preach is "climate evangelism".
Yeah. I mean, only ~97% [uic.edu] of the world's publishing climate scientists believe in it. Who cares about those who actually do the research and keep up on all of the (very extensive) literature? It's all a socialist conspiracy anyway.
In case anyone's curious how different mountain glaciers are changing, here's a nice graph [wri.org].
Re:Sounds like a coal industry shill (Score:2, Informative)
Sounds like you don't know shit about this issue.
Get some inforamtion.
A) It has nothing to do with whether or not there is global warming. Only a specif effect of it. Learn the difference.
B) The Indian paper claiming the glaciers aren't melting faster then expecting is not peer reviewed.
C) Know the shouldn't have quoted New scientist as a source for the science part of the paper...and they didn't.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18363-debate-heats-up-over-ipcc-melting-glaciers-claim.html [newscientist.com]
Re: Questioning climate change and Modded Down (Score:2, Informative)
Wow, that was fast - already modded down.
Well that basically reiterates my point.
Ron
Re:It's shitty science, Rei. (Score:1, Informative)
no self-respecting scientist
Unfortunately, for you, there is a particularly large number of "Scots" in the meteorological sciences. The IPCC papers represent them and their work. Again, the vast majority of climatologists support the idea that (a) climate is warming overall and (b) we're partly to blame. And they have for decades.
It doesn't matter what percentage of scientists "believe" a certain idea.
It matters even less that you think you know better than them.
Re:It's shitty science, Rei. (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, we've studied the Sun intently. Is that supposed to mean that we have a complete understanding of its effect on the climate? Really?
Yes. Read the papers (if you need a starting point, you can find them all referenced in AR4, Ch.02). All of the sun's impacts but one (upper-atmospheric GCR shielding's role in cloud seeding) are very easily measured and straightforward on Earth, with the massive variety of different datasets matching each other. GCR provided the only degree of uncertainty to constraining the influences of the sun, and has since been much better constrained. Even the difference between peak and minimum output doesn't provide anywhere even in the same ballpark as much forcing as CO2.
After all, even most of the die-hard warming advocates admit that they can't explain the current cooling trend in their models.
Who the heck are you listening to? First off, there is no cooling trend [realclimate.org]. There is a small (25%) decrease in how rapidly it's risen due to stratospheric water vapor [sciencemag.org], a decadal-scale factor.
Seriously, stop listening to people who don't know what the f*** they're talking about.
Re:Good! The UN is nothing but a scam. (Score:4, Informative)
If you mean swine flu, it DID become a pandemic. It was a lot less virulent than originally thought, but it's pandemic because of its spread. If you're going to bash WHO, at least do it for the right reasons.
Re:A couple errors in a 3,000 page document (Score:4, Informative)
Exactly. And the whole argument they're making ignores the fact that the IPCC isn't strictly limited to peer-reviewed papers. I'll quote:
"Peer reviewed and internationally available scientific technical and socio-economic literature, manuscripts made available for IPCC review and selected non peer-reviewed literature produced by other relevant institutions including industry".
Yes, the overwhelming majority of what gets cited is peer-reviewed, and anyone who looks through the references can confirm that. In the most important technical report (IMHO), Ch. 2, there's not a single WWF reference out of the many hundreds -- it's all things like Nature, Science, etc. But the IPCC is explicitly allowed to use governmental, NGO, and industry reports where there are no peer-reviewed references available. Not that you'll ever hear Watts complaining about the IPCC's use of industry reports, mind you, but that's a different story.
For example of what they're like, one of the WWF reports they cite is used to reference the following:
"The rapidly expanding tourism industry is driving much of the transformation of natural coastal areas, paving the way for resorts, marinas and golf courses"
And then:
"Recently, dredging for a massive port expansion has resulted in the destruction of more mangroves and the free ecosystem services they provided"
How many peer-reviewed reports do you think there are on tourism's effects on golf courses in Latin America? It's not like they're making a claim, "The first principles forcing for XXX is YYY" or whatnot. What they're citing is news and general knowledge from the region. Hell, if someone *tried* to fund a study on whether a port expansion in a mangrove swamp destroyed mangroves, the same people criticizing this would call it pork!
Re:Inconclusiveness (Score:2, Informative)
Men have died with electrical burns on their body before natural (lightning strikes). Ergo, there's nothing suspicious about the woman with the electrical wire and her dead husband. It must have been a lightning strike. See the logical fallacy?
It rained 1" in my swimming pool last night. But, if I go down to the local pool, there's 5' more water in it than there was yesterday. Obviously, it was the rain alone that did it there as well. See the logical fallacy?
Re:It's shitty science, Rei. (Score:5, Informative)
So why the decrease when the CO2 keeps increasing year after year?
I swear, it's like a whack-a-mole game sometimes.
No, it hasn't. [realclimate.org]
Want to know how badly the people you've been listening to have been misleading you? Take a look at a temperature graph [wikimedia.org]. To get that "decrease" in temperature, they have to:
1) Cherry-pick the hottest year they can as the starting point (1998 -- one of the most intense El Nino events on record) and use that as a starting point. See the huge one-year spike in 1998? That's what they're picking as their starting point.
2) Pick a lower subsequent year and use that as an end point (often 2008, a La Nina year)
3) Pick the one (of three) major global temperature datasets that makes 1998 hotter than 2005.
4) Ignore the actual way you create a trend line (you don't just look at the start and end points -- you also include a weighted average of the intermediary points.
If you skip any one of those things, you get the opposite result. Let me explicit: anyone who pushes that point who's not just passing along something they heard from someone else is deliberately trying to hoodwink you.
In case you're curious about El Nino/La Nina: El Nino involves the weakening of the Walker Circulation, an equatorial atmospheric wind pattern. This slows the upwelling of deep, cold water in the Pacific. So the equatorial Pacific in an El Nino year has a big splotch of warm water across it, which heats the atmosphere more than usual. In a La Nina year, the Walker Circulation increases, leading to a big splotch of cold water across the equatorial Pacific, cooling the atmosphere.
Re:Sounds like a coal industry shill (Score:5, Informative)
Have you noticed that all of the complaints are from IPCC WGII and WGIII? Not like you know the difference, so let me explain. WGI is about the science of climate change. WGII is about impacts, while WGIII is about how to avert it.
In all of its reports, the IPCC is explicitly [www.ipcc.ch] not limited to peer-reviewed materials. They can use, and I quote:
"Peer reviewed and internationally available scientific technical and socio-economic literature, manuscripts made available for IPCC review and selected non peer-reviewed literature produced by other relevant institutions including industry".
(I bolded the last part because you'll never see the deniers complaining about that, so I thought it deserved particular emphasis!). They can quote peer-reviewed material, governmental material, NGO material, and industry studies. The reason for this is because not everything on the planet is peer-reviewed. Peer-review is for science.
WG1 is almost entirely peer-reviewed. It's about science, so that's what you do. WGII is mostly about "news". While a good chunk of what it mentions is peer reviewed, it does include a number of non-peer-reviewed reports. The same goes with WGIII (which has more of a focus on policy and industry).
Most of the IPCC review effort, likewise, goes into WG1. WGII and WGIII review is much less emphasized. But the real key is that if you find something wrong with WGII or WGIII, you're not attacking the science of climate change, because those reports aren't about science. The science is in WGI. And if you find a non-peer-reviewed report anywhere in the IPCC, it is *not* violating its guidelines. WG1 just avoids them.
Sadly, some of the people who know better (Watts, I'm looking at you) love to spread misconceptions about all of this.
Re:Sounds like a coal industry shill (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Sounds like a coal industry shill (Score:5, Informative)
Which is ludicrous in the context of CO2, since we can measure isotopic ratio changes (indicating the change in old carbon versus fresh carbon) and have good accounting for human inputs to the system versus sources and sinks.
Regardless of what you think about climate change, you should reject this particular bad science. The isotopic ratio does not mean what is claimed.
Here is a thought experiment for you: You have a bathtub. The drain is open, the faucet is on. You also have a drip tube putting red colored water into the tub. (This is a vaguely "to scale" stand in for the CO2 in the atmosphere. Large sinks, large sources, tiny human influence.)
You then find that the bathtub is turning red. In fact, almost none of the red dye seems to go down the drain at all! Now consider what that means - does it mean that the drip tube is causing any level changes seen in the water? Obviously, it can't. If all else was equal, you'd expect the drip tube to be diluted by the ratio between the drip tube and the faucet.
The only explanation is that the drip tube's dye must not be absorbed. And, in fact, this has been shown to be true. The carbon isotopes being measured have extremely different properties when is comes to atmospheric scrubbing. So the trace isotopes in the "buried" CO2 are not absorbed, and build up in the atmosphere. Unfortunately, that says nothing about the causes of the overall level change.
I will now be modded down because I disclosed a mistake in one of the arguments commonly used in climate change debates, thus confirming the underlying issues in politicizing science.
Re:Sounds like a coal industry shill (Score:5, Informative)
Everything apart from absolute wilderness is near a pub in Australia.
Re:Sounds like a coal industry shill (Score:4, Informative)
oh right so the linked article which shows that they used a geography students dissertation and an anecdotal story from a climbing magazine is a nonsense? it's been in many papers, on the BBC news and also on a few other programs too
It is not based on a student's dissertation, it is based on a comment made by the leading Indian glaciologist Syed Hasnain to an author for the New Scientist [newscientist.com] in 1999.
Get your facts straight.
Falcon
Re:Good! The UN is nothing but a scam. (Score:4, Informative)
"In general, the UN is nothing but a scam. It has no accountability"
Er, you mean apart from to every country in the world, bar the only 2 that aren't?
"and due to how it panders to politicians and their whims"
Well yeah, that's generally the idea- an organisation that allows politicians from every country world wide to work together and find solutions that suit everyone, rather than people just going off on conflicting unilateral tangents. Who do you think the UN is supposed to pander to? some grand dictator? or the people? Oh wait, the people are represented by politicians... If your concern is that politicians in your country don't serve the people, then focus on that, because that's a national problem for your country, if your nations population aren't happy with their leadership then they must seek to replace it.
"Frankly, people are fed up with these supranational organizations that do nothing but cause problems."
Yeah, the fucking bastards, damn the International Civil Aviation Organization for ensuring aircraft can communicate in the countries they travel between and don't collide, curse the International Maritime Organization for allowing the same benefits to ships and assisting navigation at sea, screw the Universal Postal Union for ensuring that post can be sent between countries and reach it's destination okay and fuck the International Telecommunication Union for assigning things like country codes so that people in different countries don't have different numbers making international phone systems incompatible.
Wait what's that? You didn't realise it does these things, or simply chose to conveniently ignore them?
I'm first to criticise some UN departments, particularly the likes of the WHO, but tarring the whole of the UN with the same old brush is shows a stunning display of ignorance. The UN has a massive remit, and you don't hear about large parts of it precisely because it does do those things that don't make it into the news so damn well- it runs important global systems and standards transparently enough that people don't even notice it's doing the job just fine. The UN provides a massive benefit to the world despite it's flaws.
I sincerely believe the UN needs major overhauls in some areas- WIPO, WTO, WHO certainly (the head of the WHO, Chan, needs to be sacked ASAP for her incompetence over swine flu), but the idea of getting rid of the UN as a whole including the above departments and the likes of UNESCO is really dumb. Sure you could say disband the UN and continue to run these organisations separately, but that's really just wasteful- why have countries require separate signups to the likes of the postal, aviation, telecomms, maritime and so forth when they need to be part of them all anyway and they work just fine under the UN?
Clearly the UN isn't a scam and is a fundamental organisation for an increasingly connected world, the real solution is to simply fix the UN, rather than shoot it down altogether. Hold up departments that work as examples of how it should be done, and reform those that don't work, sacking he people responsible for such failings.
Re:Before poeple freak out, her is a couple of poi (Score:5, Informative)
NOAA has several gigs of data publically available via FTP, and some open format like csv. No, I'm not going to again link to them. Want to peer review that? Go for it. Or, since you're so sure that all the data is garbage, feel free to go up to any industry threatened by carbon caps and taxes, and propose them a research program that will demonstrate once and for all (ONCE AND FOR ALL!!) that there is no global climate change. Should be a cinch, right? Imagine: you'll be rich, you'll be famous, you'll be the savior of humanity!
Or, you can bitch on slashdot. Your call.
Re:Sounds like a coal industry shill (Score:3, Informative)
well let me inform you, it's the Climate Research Unit..... they pretty much supply ALL the data for global warming enthusiasts world wide.
due to a hefty data breach a massive amount of emails and even some entries made by the poor coder who was commenting how the numbers didn't add up and things were all balls
also the were many many many emails between "respected" climate researchers" which showed them chatting about how they "played the numbers" and 2used tricks" to make up for the fact the global temperatures haven't been going their way and thus they played the numbers, used selected numbers from selected stations and ignored others then conspired.. YEAH they actually did, to perpetuate the falsehood of their finding... heads rolled and resignations came..
a quick google of CRU would have helped [google.co.uk]
and BTW i live in Scotland, where we have oil BUT we are also pretty much the European leader in renewables and very very high up there in the world stakes
also changing from global warming to climate change is a cop out.
more and more evidence is coming forward that shows a SHIT load of people are blowing smoke out their asses about the human cause of "global warming" and an awful lot more people are profiteering by the spreading of utter FUD about it too.
and the global warming hero Al fucking gore.. the rankest of all the hypocrites... spreading FUD AND a major shareholder in Occidental Petrolium [thenation.com] and also making a fortune from the carbon con. ther are some facts about gore that may surprise you [riehlworldview.com]
br. always odd how when the smell of bullshit is often along the same path as the smell of hypocrisy and money
Re:Sounds like a coal industry shill (Score:1, Informative)
The *direct* result of CO2 warming is only about 10% of observed warming
The *direct* result [ucar.edu] of CO2 is a +1.66 +- 0.17 W/m^2 forcing "solely due to increases in atmospheric CO2". The total forcing from human-added GHGs is +2.63 +- 0.26.
Let's run down the forcings from other human influences and from feedback effects. Stratospheric ozone forcing is -0.05 +- 0.10 W/m^2. Tropospheric ozone forcing is +0.35 (-0.1,+0.3). Stratospheric water vapor from CH4 is +0.07 +- 0.05. Total direct aerosol is -0.50 +- 0.40. Direct sulphate aerosol is -0.40 +- 0.20. Direct fossil fuel aerosol (organic carbon) is -0.05 +- 0.05. Direct biomass burning aerosol is 0.03 +- 0.12. Direct nitrate aerosol is -0.10 +- 0.10. Direct mineral dust aerosol is -0.10 +- 0.20. Cloud albedo effect is -0.70 (-1.1, +0.4). Surface albedo (land use) is -0.20 +- 0.20. Surface albedo (carbon black on snow) is 0.10 +- 0.10. Persistent linear contrails is 0.01 (-0.007, +0.02). Solar irradiance is 0.12 (-0.06, +0.18).
The biggest non-GHG factor by far is cloud albedo, and unfortunately, it's not well constrained because cloud modelling is a very difficult process. We get better at it each year, including since the AR4 reports, but there's still a good ways to go. So we'll go with the AR4 number, -0.70 (-1.1, +0.4) W/m^2. However, GHGs are by far the largest factor, and of those, CO2 is the largest.
What's the point of all this? Let's just sum up: Your "10% of observed warming" number is garbage.
Indian PM backs UN climate panel (Score:1, Informative)
Well this news seems at odds with what the Indian premier is saying Feb 5th
http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Indian_PM_backs_UN_climate_panel_999.html
" "Let me reassert that India has full confidence in the IPCC process and its leadership and will support it in every way," said Singh. "
Re:Sounds like a coal industry shill (Score:3, Informative)
http://surfacestations.org
Notice the surface station setting well inside the heat island of the waste water treatment plant.
To keep that beer cold, they need to use a heat exchanger. Many of the stations are located at the exhaust of that heat exchanger...so, yes, the cold beer will in fact cause the surface station to read hot.
The warmist are raising alarms over a few degrees warming over decades, and your dismissing an immediate heating affect of several degrees.
Himalaya Gate proof how low "Sceptics" will go (Score:2, Informative)
Re:All those numbers, and you got it wrong anyway. (Score:2, Informative)
No. Water vapor is the largest greenhouse gas factor by a large margin.
True as far as net GHG effects go (over double that of CO2). But irrelevant in terms of forcing, because water vapor has an extremely short atmospheric residency. Water vapor, hence, can only act as feedback, not forcing. And the numbers above list the net climate response from human activities, including feedbacks. Water vapor *is* included, as I showed you.
It completely swamps any possible CO2 contribution because, unlike CO2, which remains generally stable regardless of atmospheric temperature change (that's most of the basis for the claim that CO2 will incur warming, in fact), the evaporative cooling process accelerates enormously when the atmosphere warms.
That's a naive approach. Water vapor has both positive and negative feedbacks. It's a GHG, but it also creates clouds, which raise the planet's albedo, thus providing cooling. Whether you're talking about tropospheric or stratospheric water vapor plays a huge role, and thus transport models need to come into play. This is not a science for naive approaches to be taken. That's why we have peer-reviewed papers -- something you've clearly never read.
The real question here, especially after the scandals of the tweaked data
There was no tweaked data.
the lockout of contrary input
There is no lockout of contrary input. If you can pass peer review, you can get published. If peers find major flaws in your work, that means you have major flaws in your work.
the use of glacial statistics that were entirely false
1) Oooh, one place in a 3,000 page report wherein two digits were reversed! Heavens to betsy!
2) That was in WG2. WG2 is not about the science. WG1 is about the science (in particular, Ch. 02 is the primary document on forcings). WG2 is more of a news report, and isn't nearly as heavily reviewed.
the unforgivable falsification of the "hockey stick"
Oh, get over it. First off, it wasn't "falsification". There was no made-up data. If you're going on about the "hide the decline" thing, that just marks you as completely ignorant on the subject. The original paper that that dendrochronology line came from *explicitly stated* that the data was invalid after that point. And what idiot would trust dendrochronology data over thermometer data?
Second, there were three major reviews of Mann's paper. Two were largely supportive, one was largely critical. In your world, that means "unforgivable falsification".
Third, there have been a number of climate reconstructions since then, using different methods -- both refined dendrochronology reconstructions and borehole reconstructions (boreholes being much less opaque than dendrochronology climate reconstructions). They all follow the same general curve.
Fourth, Mann's paper is over a decade old. So get over it.
Fifth, historic climate reconstructions are a single line out of dozens related to global warming. ... the real question is: Can we call AGW good, established science?
97% of actively publishing climate scientists say yes. Random posters on slashdot who've never read a peer-reviewed paper on the subject to save their life say no. Hmm, who to believe, who to believe...
But the answer to that is a resounding no. We have this stall in temperature rise
There is no stall in temperature rise. God, you people are like a whack-a-mole game sometimes. For the 1,827th time:
1) To come up with this "stall", you have to cherry-pick a starting point of 1998, which was one of the strongest El Nino events on record. El Nino means that the Walker circulation weakens, meaning less upwelling of cold water in the East Pacific, meaning that you have a swath of hot water across the equatorial pacific, warming the atmosphere). There is a massive, widely recognized (even by deniers) correlation between El Nino events an
Re:Sounds like a coal industry shill (Score:1, Informative)
Your thought experiment is slightly backwards as the difference is that fossil fuel combustion products contains less C13 than the atmosphere. So therefore it would be analogous to a bath already filled with red dye at 1% and the drips we are adding have less than 1% red dye.
That does not invalidate your thought experiment, but what if we approximately knew the volume of our drips, their dye concentration, the size of the bath and what the concentration has been over the last few thousand years? We can estimate our consumption of fossil fuels quite well and therefore its C13 to C12 ratio. We know the mass of the atmosphere and its composition. We can use proxy measurements from (dare I mention it) tree rings to get the historic C12 to C13 ratio.
This evidence points to a source of carbon which is rich in C12, depleted in C13 and which is only recently started to increase, round about 1850.
The carbon isotopes being measured have extremely different properties when is comes to atmospheric scrubbing. So the trace isotopes in the "buried" CO2 are not absorbed, and build up in the atmosphere.
This is wrong for two reasons, we are emitting less C13 than the concentration of the atmosphere so fossil fuel carbon dioxide should be preferentially taken up by plants as they prefer the lighter isotope. Also the chemical difference between C12 and C13 is tiny and there is about a ~2% preference for plant life to take C12.
I will now be modded down because I disclosed a mistake in one of the arguments commonly used in climate change debates, thus confirming the underlying issues in politicizing science.
Well the mistake is your thought experiment did not contain enough information to calculate the number of drips and you lied slightly to make it sound as if the drips would not go down the drain because it is different than the bath water. In fact if you had the data for your bath that we have for the atmosphere it would be possible to get an idea in the change in the amount of water entering the bath.