Arctic Ice Cap Rebounds From 2012 — But Does That Matter? 400
bricko writes "There has been a 60 per cent increase in the amount of ocean covered with ice compared to this time last year, the equivalent of almost a million square miles. In a rebound from 2012's record low an unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretches from the Canadian islands to Russia's northern shores, days before the annual re-freeze is even set to begin. The Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific has remained blocked by pack-ice all year, forcing some ships to change their routes. A leaked report to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) seen by the Mail on Sunday, has led some scientists to claim that the world is heading for a period of cooling that will not end until the middle of this century." "Some scientsts" in this case do not include Dana Nuccitelli, who blogs cogently in reaction at The Guardian that the 60 percent increase observed in Arctic ice is "technically true, [but] also largely irrelevant." He has no kind words for the analysis in the Daily Mail (and similar report in The Telegraph), and writes "In short, this year's higher sea ice extent is merely due to the fact that last year's minimum extent was record-shattering, and the weather was not as optimal for sea ice loss this summer. However, the long-term trend is one of rapid Arctic sea ice decline, and research has shown this is mostly due to human-caused global warming." If you want to keep track of the ice yourself, Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis offers frequent updates.
I can see Al Gore now.... (Score:4, Funny)
Out there on some Canadian glacier with a bon fire and fans trying to get them to melt again.
Re:I can see Al Gore now.... (Score:5, Funny)
I doubt it....He's too busy chasing ManBearPig.
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It only "matters" when they melt.
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Don't know if anyone else noticed this, but here in the Eastern United States, every time Al gives a major speech on global warming, sorry, climate change, sorry, climate chaos, we're in for extremely cold weather.
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Al Gore is the village idiot, we're just enjoyng him. A real retard is anyone who idolizes him as a "green" person, as his house pulls the power of over twenty normal family's, and he travels by private jet. what a fucking hypocrite, and what a bunch of retards who think he is the climate messiah. let me clue you in, he gets laws passed to influence markets and he profits from them.
Basic Statistics Deception (Score:4, Insightful)
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It's business as usual in AGW-land. Yet another unforseen event? No worries, blame it on CO2 and add another complexity layer on the model.
I expect their models to start matching reality at about the same time as global climate control becomes reality.
Hopefully they will stop predicting catastrophes all the time by then.
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Thus proving that "science" is just a set of unproven theories based on speculative models with assumed constants and extrapolated approximations.
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Re:Basic Statistics Deception (Score:5, Interesting)
You'd do better to learn from the master:
Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit
http://www.xenu.net/archive/baloney_detection.html [xenu.net]
Re:Basic Statistics Deception (Score:5, Informative)
It's kind of silly to lay cap and trade on Al Gore's doorstep. Cap and Trade is the 'business-friendly' version of carbon regulation - i.e. the only kind of regulation that stands a chance of passing in today's lobbyist-owned government. I'm sure Gore would tell you a carbon tax would be a more efficient way to reduce consumption - even a revenue neutral one (that distributes the proceeds back to the public). But try proposing a tax as a solution to anything (and calling it a tax). Recipe for gridlock. Anyway, we have gridlock regardless, and cap and trade isn't gonna happen - so why are you railing on about it?
Re:Basic Statistics Deception (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Basic Statistics Deception (Score:5, Insightful)
Carbon taxes will do nothing in the face of exponential population growth.
Which is why you want to be educating women, as that seems to be the most effective mechanism for reducing population growth rates.
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Most major pension funds are invested in Exxon and others in the fossil fuel industry. That's the money of auto workers, healthcare workers, aerospace workers, teachers, other unions, etc. Regular people.
Re:Basic Statistics Deception (Score:5, Interesting)
the laws of physics care not what Al Gore thinks or does.
it does not matter if it is Al Gore, JP Morgan & Co., or Colonel Fucking Sanders who points it out: internalising the market externalities around the burning of fossil fuels is the single greatest tool we have to do something about this before it is too late.
we know pretty much how many barrels oil, gas, and coal we sell (and so extract and burn) each year. We know quite well how many molecules of CO2 that will release. We know, pretty much, since the mid-1800s (starting with Fourier) what effect that CO2 will have on our atmosphere. We monitor it both in amount and radioisotope and it matches expectations pretty much spot on.
arguing over the minute details or the character of the messenger is both totally irrelevant and short sighted, not to mention intellectually dishonest.
A cap and trade marked based solution worked beautifully for SO2, there's absolutely no reason it wouldn't work for other pollutants as well, beyond intentional and sociopathic sabotage that is.
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internalising the market externalities around the burning of fossil fuels is the single greatest tool we have to do something about this before it is too late
Actually no, the single greatest tool against climate change is Managed Intensive Rotational Grazing [wikipedia.org] to reverse desertification and sequester CO2 in grassland soil. [youtube.com] Proponents claim if all US beef were produced this way, it would sequester all the CO2 emitted since the industrial revolution in ten years.
[posting as AC to preserve mod points]
Re:Basic Statistics Deception (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, methane is a "worse" GHG than CO2, but it dissipates much faster. Also, less methane "gets away" with proper grazing. The farts do, of course, but there's a lot more contained in the dung, and this mostly gets processed by the soil biota. Before Europeans arrived in America, there were half-again as many bison on the plains than our current population of domesticated cattle, so clearly the planet can handle the "load" (pardon the pun, couldn't resist).
Allan Savory (from the above-linked TED Talk) addresses this issue in some of his talks -- don't remember if he does in this one. Here's the Wikipedia page on him. [wikipedia.org]
Another author to look at on this issue is Joel Salatin [wikipedia.org] who uses rotational grazing on his farm in Virginia. His take on the methane issue is quoted in the Wikipedia article:
"Wetlands emit some 95 percent of all methane in the world; herbivores are insignificant enough to not even merit consideration. Anyone who really wants to stop methane needs to start draining wetlands. Quick, or we'll all perish."
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the laws of physics care not what Al Gore thinks or does.
it does not matter if it is Al Gore, JP Morgan & Co., or Colonel Fucking Sanders who points it out: internalising the market externalities around the burning of fossil fuels is the single greatest tool we have to do something about this before it is too late.
The problem with your argument is that, while what politicians do is irrelevant to *science*, coming up with a solution to the physical problem is part of a *political* process, where we can of course discuss whether Al Gore, JP Morgan & Co, etc are working in the our (the unprivileged) interests.
For example, to take things to an extreme as an illustration, science tells us that if we kill everyone on Earth, the warming will be stopped. Shall we do that? Going down the ever slippery slope, we could ask
Re:Basic Statistics Deception (Score:5, Insightful)
As an environmentalist (she worked as an environmentalist involved in carbon trading) explained to me, it doesn't matter if CO2 doesn't turn out to be a problem, because by cutting CO2 you force a reduction in production, and a reduction in consumption. Then she added with emphasis, "it's about reducing greed."
You just have to look at the "solutions" people are proposing to see their worldview and political outlook. If the science didn't support their worldview, they'd look for some other way to justify it. A worldview (and we all have one) is self-justifying, self-validating, it-looks-like-a-duck-because-i'm-obsessed-with-ducks.
Note the environmentalists who hold up signs saying "we come armed only with peer reviewed science" (UK's anti-airport groups) but they don't hold up those signs when they protest against GM. Their worldview comes first. Gee there's no evidence that GM is bad? Well we'll protest against it anyway because we know better.
Unfortunately they seem to have a worldview which operates at a lower level of complexity (huuumans baaaad) and so the money-wheelers-and-dealers and corporate types who actually have to work and excel and network and create results (even if only made up results) run rings around the environmentalists, not by defeating their aims, but by exploiting them. Oh carbon trading, what a great made-up-money paper thing, fantastic. Oh windfarms, great let's soak up all that subsidy for our big landowners, etc. "Every wind farm is a gas plant" they say at their corporate conferences. Many activist environmentalists are too stupid and lacking in skills to find good answers to environmental problems (and to be fair they are very hard problems), and instead have this "new-age" culture of oh how lovely if we all went back to pre-industrial levels where we can all live in a small village and sing songs around the fire. Which kinda ignores that in pre-industrial times, you needed many to be in slavery just to provide the "cheap energy" -- today, oil and gas is our "slave power", which is why we can live daily, as if with the energy of hundreds of slaves at our disposal.
So excuse the wild rant, but that's just to illustrate (not prove) a point, that you can put the science aside and say, ok, what if we're facing AGW, what's the solution? And then the "solution" will be a function of people's worldview. Many answers are from pre-modern world views, maybe new-romantic, maybe Marxist, and especially from people who can't count. Oh if we all made a small change... yeah it would all add up to a SMALL change. Try living without electricity, see if you can handle that change.
The rest are power and money drives. Real solutions are basically coming just from the gradual improvements in technology and systems, improvements which have been going on for hundreds of years anyway.
I honestly think they should go live in Third World countries for at least 10 years, and see what the majority of the world is like, and what problems they are facing. Live like the locals do, not just drive around in your SUV lecturing people on how they should live. Heck even my grandmother never had a fridge. I mean the arrogance is astounding, if not, you know, also kinda cute for its naivety.
Anyway this is just a rant, nothing real to see here, move on. Have a nice day.
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The problems I have with the climate change movement in general (ignoring Al Gore types) is a few things:
- Empirical Science isn't a democracy. The majority consensus doesn't dictate the right answer, and I'm tired of the AGW movement trying to paint it that way. Somebody once created a pamphlet called 100 Authors Against Einstein, where they wanted to gather enough opinions to discredit Einstein. Einstein simply said "If I were wrong, one would be enough."
- Patrick Moore left greenpeace (which he helped cr
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Your entire post is basically "but what if they're WRONG!?", to which the answer is... We'd have reduced pollution dramatically, we'd have pushed cleaner, less dangerous,
Re:Basic Statistics Deception (Score:4, Insightful)
- Empirical Science isn't a democracy. [...] Somebody once created a pamphlet called 100 Authors Against Einstein, where they wanted to gather enough opinions to discredit Einstein. Einstein simply said "If I were wrong, one would be enough."
And they all failed to prove Einstein wrong, in the same way everyone who has tried to prove the climate models (fundamentally) wrong have failed. For anyone who isn't a physicist, don't you agree that it is relevant to note that the vast majority of physicists agree that Einstein's theories of relativity are correct?
- Patrick Moore left greenpeace (which he helped create) because it bothered him that the entire movement was basically hijacked by socialists. [...]
Then don't listen to Greenpeace! It doesn't matter what they say, listen to what climate scientists say. Forget about Greenpeace.
[...] This means we could have periods just like the ones we are in now where there's a sudden heat spike, followed by cooling, and what we're seeing now may even be something that happens all the time. [...]
For what reason would there be? If that were the case you suddenly have two new problems to find explanations for: 1) There would have to be a mechanism that can cause sudden spikes in the Earth's energy exchange at a planetary scale, other than greenhouse gases; and 2) You need to find a reason why the current increase in greenhouse gases, which should have exactly that (heating) effect based on pretty basic physics, for some reason doesn't.
- Besides all of that, we already have well known periods where the earth was so much hotter than it is now and had a CO2 PPM ten times what we have now, and very large scale life thrived pretty damn well. In fact, quite possibly the "greenest" period in history:[...]
Apart from the somewhat dubious claim that it was the "greenest" period in history, then yes, there has been periods with much higher CO2, and consequently a much warmer climate (despite a weaker solar radiation back then). Nobody, who knows what they are talking about, is claiming that a hotter climate precludes life -- that isn't the issue. The issues are that:
1) Many current organisms will not be able to adapt that quickly to a climate change, meaning we will lose much biodiversity for some millions of years until new species have developed. This isn't a problem for "life" itself, but a loss for humanity.
2) Human societies will take a pretty big hit in adapting to a hotter world. For one thing, during such warmer periods as you refer to, the sea level was 50 to 70 meters higher than it is today. We are of course not talking about any such increases in the near term, and we could probably adapt to even such extreme changes without going extinct if we had to, but the cost of for example moving portions of coastal cities (to name one of a long range of potential consequences) just so we can continue to use oil for a few decades longer than we otherwise would have (since it runs out anyway), is completely disproportionate. There are other energy sources.
By the way, I find it somewhat interesting that you say we have "well known periods where the earth was so much hotter", talking about periods hundreds of millions of years ago, a few sentences after you declare your distrust for historical temperature records because "we weren't actually there to measure it proper thousands or millions of years ago". Which way do you want to have it?
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Oh, is that why the lead author of the IPCC report explicitly said that their models don't match reality over the last 20 years?
Care to provide a source for that? What did he say, exactly?
Reality has proven the models wrong.
Again, according to what data? Something you read on a blog, or can you point to actual measurements (and please without cherry-picking endpoints -- that way you can manufacture any trend)?
Oh, I don't know, maybe the sun?
The sun is accounted for! We can measure the solar irradiation, and it hasn't increased recently. The sun has been in the models all the time, and it needs to be to for them to match measured data, for obvious reasons. What kind of idiots do you take climatologis
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Painting roofs and outer walls white would have a negligible effect on the global climate. It's a great idea if you live relatively close to the equator because it'll save you a lot on air conditioning and if everyone in the neighborhood does it your neighborhood will be a bit cooler. This will become more important as heat waves become hotter because of climate change. But again, negligible effect on the global climate.
There are cars that get 40 mpg, but people prefer to take out improvements in efficiency
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Re:Basic Statistics Deception (Score:5, Insightful)
More like business as usual for the deniers. 60% up from 75% down is still way down, let's do the math:
Start with 1. 1-0.75 = 0.25. 0.25*1.6 = 0.4. So, even after the rebound we're still 60% down.
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Hey NOBODY talked about an increase: the summary, wait, the page title, talks about a rebound.
The problem is that credible scientists should anticipate it, or have an explanation for it... it doesn't matter, climate change debate is a diversion, the problem is human caused pollution.
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So I guess you're still undecided on that whole American independence thing? Still wondering where your pet dinosaur went?
What unforseen event? (Score:5, Informative)
80% of climate scientists who were asked last year expected more ice this year than 2013. So this is hardly an unforseen event. The blog link mentioned in the summary [theguardian.com] explains why, but I'll repeat it since you didn't read it.
Arctic ice volume has a falling long-term trends, but on top of that there are short-term year-by-year changes. You effectively have a long-term signal with short-term noise on it. As you can see from this figure [nsidc.org], the trend is about -0.065 million square kilometers per year, while the year-to-year variations are 0.5-1 million square kilometers. Hence, on a short timescale you can basically only see the yearly random variations. If you suddenly see a large jump, it is much more likely to be a short-term change than a long term one, and several years of observations are needed to see if the long-term behavior has changed or not.
The point now is that if you happen to get a particularly low value of the random yearly variations one year, you are likely to get a larger value the next year. Much like if you roll a die and get a 1, you are likely to get a larger value the next time you roll, simply because there are more values (2,3,4,5,6) that are larger than 1 than those that aren't (1). In general, extreme values are unlikely, and the chance of getting several of them in a row is much lower than getting one of them followed by less extreme values. This is called regression toward the mean [wikipedia.org].
So to summarize, this was expected, and predicted, and no models will have to be changed based on this observation.
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The trouble is this explanation may well be correct, but when we hit a minimum ice level like last year it's ZOMG TEH GLOBAL WARMIN! But when it's not something that supports AGW then it's just weather.
Can't have it both ways
Re:What unforseen event? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes we can.
2007 was an exceptional year for ice melt, a 1 in 1000 event. In a stable climate we wouldn't expect to see that record beaten for ages.
But just six years later we saw that record broken. That tells us that either there is a trend in ice extent (there is) or, alternatively, variability is increasing (also generally not a good thing as most living things need a fairly stable environment to survive) or both.
Even after the exceptional rebound this year, we're still one SD below the long term trend line. Things are not looking good in the arctic at all.
Re:What unforseen event? (Score:4, Interesting)
2007 was an exceptional year for ice melt, a 1 in 1000 event.
Or it could have been a 1 in 100 event and we hadn't paid attention before. Observation bias is an ugly thing.
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A meteor strike is an exceptional event as well. This will in no way prevent three meteorites from bombarding the same location in successive years. You are mishandling statistics.
Re:Citation needed. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Citation needed. (Score:4, Interesting)
Climate models have long said that as we trend towards very bad extremes (high temperature, low sea ice and melting glaciers) that you WILL see wild intra-value swings with higher frequency of those swings happening.
Adding a single event into a pile of extreme weather/climate conditions makes sense. But to say "Aha! See the ice went way up this year, so how does that fit into your theory?" is silly. It fits nicely with the wild swings mentioned above. If the theory holds true then you'll see record lows yet again in a year or two. Followed by possible another year of "60% ice growth ZOMG AGW isn't real!" but again -- it fits the pattern.
This isn't to say that every extreme weather event fits like a glove into this mold. It's just to say that when you get extremely unusual weather events of colossal size every year (like we've been seeing) and wild statistical swings in any one direction, then it gets easier to explain.
BUT -- and this is size 600 font "but" -- you have to watch the trend lines over the years to understand where things are headed. The recent (i.e. 100 year) trend lines are all headed to very bad places. Even worse -- the only surprise in the trend lines has been how quickly they're happening.
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It's business as usual in AGW-land. Yet another unforseen event? No worries, blame it on CO2 and add another complexity layer on the model.
I expect their models to start matching reality at about the same time as global climate control becomes reality.
Hopefully they will stop predicting catastrophes all the time by then.
A temporary bounce back after an extremely rapid decline can hardly be called unexpected. Regression to the mean.
Which climate model predicted catastrophes all the time? None that I've heard of.
Follow the link http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/ [nsidc.org] and scroll down to the chart that shows month of August ice extent 1979 to 2013. That really puts it into perspective. Also notice how they've made things look better than they are (not worse as conspiracy theorists would expect) by fitting a line instead of say a se
I'll start taking AGW seriously (Score:2)
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Hey, careful. This is Slashdot. When it comes to AGW, stating the obvious truth can get you lots of negative mod points.
Or it can get you lots of upmods from all the Bold Individualistic Un-PC Rebels Speaking Truth To Power just like you.
Like religious fundamentalists, denialists pretending they're a persecuted minority are simultaneously pathetic and hilarious.
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Oh, please. This experiment is performed over and over again on Slashdot, on every story on the subject, and the results are plain to see. Most AC posts go unnoticed because they're AC, but for those that don't, there are plenty of responses giving links to easily accessible information on the actual science involved ... along with lots of upmods for the person making the original post, and responses talking about "warmism" and the huge piles of money allegedly being made by the AGW conspiracy and "hah ha
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You know that's only five years longer than the current halt and drop of temperatures and yet the AGW movement derides anyone bringing that up, right?
Re:Basic Statistics Deception (Score:5, Funny)
The temperature just dropped 3 degrees in 20 minutes, if it kept dropping at that rate, by the end of the week it would be below absolute zero
Quick, PANIC !!!
(Don't worry, it will be 0K )
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Re:Basic Statistics Deception (Score:4, Funny)
There's the stealth snowmobiles, but you never see them out there.
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There's the stealth snowmobiles, but you never see them out there.
My God! He's right [foxnews.com]
(Looks nervously northward)
One data point? (Score:5, Informative)
Looking at a single year doesn't tell us much about the trend. Here is some real data.
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2000/09/Figure31.png
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Oblig. xkcd: extrapolation [xkcd.com]
Re:One data point? (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, you're right. Here's a load of data points showing that the Antarctic Sea Ice Area is well above the long term average and has been growing slowly for at least 15 years.
http://sunshinehours.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/antarctic_sea_ice_extent_zoomed_2013_day_45_1981-2010.png [wordpress.com]
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/image1.png [wordpress.com]
Perhaps sea ice extent oscillates between the North and South Poles
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Perhaps you could put some meat on your hypothesis that sea ice extent oscillates between the poles. But in reality there is little or no connection between the two. The situations are quite different, the Arctic being an ocean surrounded by land whereas the Antarctic is a continent surrounded by ocean.
There are some explanations for the increase in Antarctic sea ice. One part of it is that the winds that circle Antarctica have strengthened, possibly related to the ozone hole over the continent. This t
climate error #113, aborting. (Score:5, Informative)
Perhaps sea ice extent oscillates between the North and South Poles
Yes, it's also been noted that the frequency of that (rough) oscillation seems to be synchronised with the seasons, weird huh?
Seriously, the ice at the two poles behaves in totally different ways. Just pause for a second and think about the geography, Antarctica is a land surrounded by deep oceans and a strong circumpolar ocean current, the Artic is a (relatively) shallow sea surrounded by land. Melting at the south pole INCREASES* the extent of the Antarctic sea ice.
This is because in Antarctica the majority of the sea ice comes from glacial outflows, this ice breaks up with the mechanical action of the waves and floats away as icebergs. Whatever bergs (or ships) that are still close to the coast in autumn become part of that years sea ice. The mouths of these glaciers are enormous and create permanent ice shelves that are several hundred feet thick.
These ice shelves are the best indicators that the warming trend is impacting Antarctica [wikipedia.org], we are seeing Antarctic ice shelves that have existed for at least 4kys breaking up disappearing at the rate of roughly one a year for over a decade now.
OTOH Greenland and the Antarctic peninsula have a lot in common and are both effected by something called Polar Amplification [wikipedia.org], a phenomena predicted by the much maligned climate models BEFORE it was observed in the data. There are a whole bunch of such phenomena that were predicted by models and subsequently observed in the real world, "stratospheric cooling" is another well known example.
In other words sea ice extent is basically meaningless without some context, What you really want to know for the Artic is sea ice volume. I've been following the subject for over 30yrs and the best estimates of volume that I have seen use data gleaned from cold war sonar maps that were declassified sometime in the last decade. According to those figures Artic sea ice volume is now less than 1/5th of what it was when I was born (1959).
Some (perhaps unwelcome) advise, forget about climate science for now and spend a year or two working on your technical research skills, the best way I know of doing that is to skip church (or some other overrated social club), and spend the time browsing WP and "double checking" the theories and assumptions you hold most dearly. Science is intelligently designed to evolve towards the ideal of "truth" (google "the relativity of wrong" and read it, I can't be bothered to link it). Not only that but for the last couple of centuries the rate of these changes has been increasing over time, Meaning that the older you get the faster it changes, and the more neural archives you will need to update (a personal "theory" that I use to explain my "senior" moments).
I jumped on the quote above because I first heard it in the mid-90's, I'll concede that on the surface it sounds plausible as it did to me when I first heard it. However as with most of the anti-science "talking points" pushed by a minority group within the FF industry via extremely effective (but surprisingly cheap) professional lobbyists, the theorised "oscillation" soon melts under a skeptical eye. This is why "deniers" don't normally give an alternative explanation. let alone one that stands up to rigor of broader peer-review process. I strongly suggest you use a reputable source [skepticalscience.com] to check out the next climate meme before you infect others with it. As stated in the title your particular meme is #113.
Re:One data point? (Score:4, Informative)
Random graphs from random blogs proves your point how?
More data with sources from Government labs and such [wattsupwiththat.com]. Arctic ice levels are within historical 30 year norms, and antarctic ice is above historical 30 year norms.
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Yeah, looking at a few years doesn't tell us much about the trend. Here is some REAL data:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/Vostok_Petit_data.svg
So basically 2012 was an outlier (Score:5, Informative)
And makes this year look good in comparison but the overall trend is still downwards.
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You're both right, in a way. You're right that the definition of "outlier" is a data point that's outside a band around the trend line. However, I believe a WHOOSH is in order. He's suggesting that the data we don't have (for other years) might make the higher data points the outliers, not the 2012 result.
Personally, I doubt that though.
Time scale (Score:5, Insightful)
Pointing at year-to-year variations in order to prove or disprove a phenomenon that has a time-scale of decades is stupid, no matter which side of the argument you're on. This is like saying you don't believe winter will be cold, because the weather is actually warmer today than it was last week.
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I have been watching the thermometer since midnight, which has been steadily declining. If this trend keeps up, it may snow in Florida by Saturday, and we should look for temperatures to fall to -450 oF by Thanksgiving. Please, please take precautions now. Buy some warm clothes. Add extra insulation to your home, and buy a furnace if you don't already have one!
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Except that year-to-year variations are REGULARLY trotted out as "proof" of AGW when they appear to benefit that argument.
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I think you're touching on an important point re the objectivity of science.
James Hansen departed being a 'scientist' and became a 'scientifically-literate advocate' ages ago.
'Analysis' (Score:4, Funny)
You won't find an analysis in Daily Mail. Use some other word.
visualizations to put these numbers in context (Score:5, Insightful)
To put this in some context, have a look at Jim Pettit's "spiral" graphs and consider that the grey zone in the NSIDC plots linked from the summary are still two standard deviations from the norm, and this year we're almost touching that (if that doesn't mean much to you now would be a good time to brush up on your statistics). So compared to last year we've gone from holy shit batshit insane outlier to just plain old holy shit.
https://sites.google.com/site/pettitclimategraphs/sea-ice-volume [google.com]
To anyone about to complain that the number of samples is too short, 1) these measurements start when humanity invented the satellites to measure it - can't change that, and 2) we have deep Greenland ice cores for a pretty good idea of what was going on before.
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> 1) these measurements start when humanity invented the satellites to measure it - can't change that,
Exactly. This means that the data is bad and you can't change that. Period.
The absence of a possibility to improve upon the quality of data is NOT a redeeming quality, if you want to find out the truth about something. It is only a redeeming quality if you want to do politics.
Re:visualizations to put these numbers in context (Score:4, Interesting)
are you so obtuse that you can't see what's happening here?
http://iwantsomeproof.com/extimg/siv_september_average_polar_graph.png [iwantsomeproof.com]
or are you purposefully keeping your head in the sand until this all blows over?
If nothing else, I hope we can agree that the outlook for polar bear cubs born today is pretty fucking grim.
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Nah, it's no big deal, the grown up polar bears are dying faster than they can breed, so no cubs to worry about.
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are you so obtuse that you can't see what's happening here?
Not at all. A similar thing happened with satellites and the ozone hole over the Antarctic. We don't know if that hole has always been there or not either.
If nothing else, I hope we can agree that the outlook for polar bear cubs born today is pretty fucking grim.
If we're going to do something dumb, we might as well do it for the polar bear cubs.
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the uncanny valley of 1.5 sigma weak-sauce science (Score:5, Interesting)
By the prudent norms of science, this is an excellent first approximation. For the first hundred years, the satellite data will support at most modest convictions. Our accumulated climate record will really hit its stride two centuries from now. And actually, from nearly every perspective of human progress, this represents a tremendous leap over what was known previously. Why should the earth's climate prove easier to decode than Mendel's peas? We finally found the actual genes and we're still pretty sketchy about how they really work. Complicated little buggers they are.
That said, the satellite data isn't actually bad, it just falls way short of historical norms of scientific prudence. We're stuck wandering around in the uncanny valley between one sigma and five sigma.
This doesn't mean society can't choose to draw a tentative, intermediate conclusion and act on that basis. However, the consequences of human political resolve are even murkier than the climate science itself, and the scientists can't help up sort this out, unless they have a giant boner for N=1. We have no control planet. Any choice we made can only be compared to counterfactual outcomes grounded in a proto-science itself still slowly gaining clearance from the null hypothesis on its major claim and with error bars a mile wide on the magnitude and immediacy and severity of the presumed effect.
I think we should be paying plenty of attention to the impacts of climate variability whether or not the cause is anthropogenic. Let's just not put the knee-jerk "all change is bad" types in charge who once decided that forests should never burn. Blockading change is change, too. One of the consequences of embarking upon a global economy is that you soon reach the situation where there's no such thing as somebody else's problem, whether the root cause is anthropogenic or not.
I have severe reservations about whether it's a good idea to instigate novel political initiatives on a global scale (e.g. abandonment of the hydrocarbon economy) against a back-drop of alarmist proto-facts. Much of the time our best, well-cured, time-proven facts barely suffice to move the political dial in any coordinated way. That's going to radically change over the twenty years? I highly doubt it. Of course, change has to begin somewhere, however bleak the early returns.
I was reading about some dude yesterday knowingly infected with HIV who had sex with 300 partners, none of whom he informed, and many he lied to. The ultimate self-gratifying scumbag. But what if he only worried he had HIV and never got himself tested? Would he still be a scumbag? Yes, I think so. Even if his worry is only 1.5 sigma? Yes, I think so.
But if Exxon has only 1.5 sigma belief that carbon emissions could prove disastrous, it's business as usual. "We didn't know!" Not with scientific certainty, anyway, which is unfortunately true. Any certainty worth having is late to the party. This is, however, entirely the wrong standard of prudence and concern. While 1.5 sigma is merely a proto-fact, not yet conclusively proven, it nevertheless demands proper consideration. Facthood in the moment is way too high a standard (and harlot to corporate convenience).
In retrospect, we will know the difference. Just as we do now about the impact of CFCs on the ozone layer. Whatever doubt remained about this in 1970 is now totally busted. We could confiscate their profits in retrospect. That would make them think twice about not knowing in the first place. I understand that it's bad form to suddenly shout "New rule!" so we could instead begin by suggesting that existing companies take out insurance against future confiscation of profit derived from embarking upon unproven, potentially destructive lines of business—as soberly judged by a future generation with a vastly superior knowledge base (subject to the same hor
Re: (Score:2)
This doesn't mean society can't choose to draw a tentative, intermediate conclusion and act on that basis.
But it doesn't provide a reason to do so.
But if Exxon has only 1.5 sigma belief that carbon emissions could prove disastrous, it's business as usual.
What 1.5 sigma belief? What is Exxon's responsibility supposed to be here? And Exxon is scooping renewable energy funding as well.
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> That said, the satellite data isn't actually bad, it just falls way short of historical norms of scientific prudence.
That is WHY it is actually bad. Scientific prudence is no joke, but results from hard-earned experience of heads hitting desks at significant velocities, when it turned out that "scientific discoveries" of confident scientists turned out to be figments of illusion and statistical artifacts.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Arctic is shrinking and Antarctic is growing. Global mean appears flat to me.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.ice.area.withtrend.jpg/ [uiuc.edu]
I thought we were going to all be killed by global warming hurricanes? Or is that off topic?
Re:visualizations to put these numbers in context (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't it curious that *most* of the discussions on arctic ice coverage were solely about extent until recently? Now when ice area is increasing, the discussion switches critically to volume of ice.
The regular amount of goalpost-shifting by "global warming" - sorry, "climate change" - alarmists is frenetic.
confirms what I already knew (Score:5, Funny)
Dana Nuccitelli works for an oil and gas company (Score:2, Insightful)
Why should we listen to fossil-fuel sponsored shills like Nuccitelli?
Or
Why does the above question only matter when a person questions AGW?
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Because it means there's high potential for conflict of interest. If however they're defending the theory of AGW then there's clearly no conflict of interest is there?
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If however they're defending the theory of AGW then there's clearly no conflict of interest is there?
Most of the 'fossil-fuel companies' are actually energy companies now, and will happily sell you solar panels, wind generators, and so on, and be the first in the queue for government subsidies on these things. There's a conflict of interest when they make claims in both directions, the difference is that in one case they are making the same claims as people with less of a conflict.
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Sure, I wasn't commenting on the company and question though, the GGP was talking about people who work for fossil fuel companies.
I agree that anyone working for a solar panel firm similarly has a conflict of interest in defending the theory of AGW, but to date they've been strangely absent from the debate - presumably because they're way smaller in size and so don't have the money to pay the shills like the classic oil/gas companies do (and those with fingers in both pots probably simply give not a shit).
Pic says it all (Score:2)
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2000/09/Figure31.png [nsidc.org]
Or see third chart on left if that link dies:
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/ [nsidc.org]
Re: (Score:2)
And as your picture shows the august 2013 Arctic sea ice extent may be 60% higher than 2012 but it's still lower than any year before 2007. As the AC below posts it's a regression to the mean. Wake me up if 2014 and 2015 are higher still.
Re:When did reality ever matter to climate change? (Score:5, Insightful)
For all they care, the ice cap could return to the extent of 1980 wthin a couple of years and all they'd say would be:
See, an extreme weather event! This proves climate change is true!
No. Climate is the mean value of a long series of datapoints observed over a long period of time.
Any one datapoint can vary up to several standard deviations from the mean, without affecting whether climate change is occuring or not.
Climate is by definition the long term pattern.
Climate change is a change in the long term pattern as time progresses. Therefore: no observation of a single datapoint is capable of saying much at all about the climate.
Observing a massive loss of ice or massive increase in ice one year is neither capable of proving, and also not capable of disproving climate change.
Furthermore; we know that climate change naturally occurs --- that is, there are natural cycles such as Milankovitch cycles; precession of earth's orbit, variation of Earth's tilt naturally effect climate over long periods of time.
There may be numerous things that contribute to natural climate changes.
The whole global warming argument; is there is some non-natural, or human created factors perturbing the natural climate changes that have and are occuring; because some correlation might have been observed with rising temperatures over time, and human development: measured from ice core samples.
This is already highly speculative; even relying on long-term data, that human activity has significantly accelerated or altered the natural climate change.
The trouble is: we don't fully understand what the natural change is, therefore: what mechanism allows us to measure how much humans supposedly affected it?
If it's so hard to show climate change based on long term data, then it's nigh impossible to infer ANYTHING from datapoints about what happened during 1 year.... there's no reason 2013 is a magic year where you can take an observation capable of showing that climate change isn't happening; it's simply not true that you can observe what happens in 2013, and infer from that any fact about climate change.
One, two, three, even 4 or 5 years in isolation does not establish a new climate pattern.
We're talking about 100-year trends here.
Re:When did reality ever matter to climate change? (Score:5, Insightful)
But the loss of sea-ice is at most measured over the last 30 years. So therefore by your statements, the apparent loss of Arctic sea ice cannot be proven to be related to climate change, whether natural or not.
Re:When did reality ever matter to climate change? (Score:4, Insightful)
> No. Climate is the mean value of a long series of datapoints observed over a long period of time.
Oh. Would you care to point me to the hoards of level headed climate activists who say this about Hurricane Katrina or Sandy? I seem to have missed them. For what you say implies that they should be out there on the streets, shouting at the top of their lungs that hurricane activity is a mean value in a long series of datapoints observed over a long time and that "Any one datapoint can vary up to several standard deviations from the mean, without affecting whether climate change is occuring or not."
> Furthermore; we know that climate change naturally occurs --- that is, there are natural cycles such as Milankovitch cycles; precession of earth's orbit, variation of Earth's tilt naturally effect climate over long periods of time. There may be numerous things that contribute to natural climate changes.
Of course, there have never been variations over the course of 100 years. Such as the last 100 years. The climate has always been stable and people have always been able to easily adapt to anything nature threw at them, because it happened over a much longer time frame. Archeology begs to differ.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_civilization [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorset_culture [wikipedia.org]
> The whole global warming argument; is there is some non-natural, or human created factors perturbing the natural climate changes that have and are occuring; because some correlation might have been observed with rising temperatures over time, and human development: measured from ice core samples.
Well no. The whole global warming argument, as put forward by the IPCC and the rest of the climate change community, is that human created factors far outstrip any natural causes. In fact the IPCC argues that there is a strong natural tendency of climate cooling at work.
If we assume that CO2 was the sole cause of warming in the last 130 years and nothing else was going on, this would imply that a doubling of CO2 would cause a rise of 1.6K. Temperatures rose by 0.8K while CO2 rose by 42% (Which is one half of 100% in a logarithmic relationship. If CO2 concentrations rise by another 42% you have more than doubled the concentration). The climate models of the IPCC claim that a doubling of CO2 will result in a rise between 2 and 4.5K, with the most likely value being 3K.
Taking this at face value, this means that the IPCC claims that there is a natural process at work that would have cooled the world by about 0.6 ... 1.2K in last 130 years, if it wasn't for CO2 emissions, which counteracted this trend. Then again, all climate models and predicitons the IPCC put forth failed to predict the stagnating temperatures of the last 15 years.
If climate models are incapable of predicting short term developments, then certainly the predictions in the IPCC reports should have as many scenarios predicting that global temperatures cool down over the next 10 years as there should have been scenarios showing a rising trend over the next 10 years. None of the former exist. If the claim that climate models can't predict short term changes is true, then climate scientists certainly don't act as if they believe this claim. Because in this case, they should have had many scenarios included in the first, second and third IPCC assessment report predicting a stagnation or decline in temperatures in the first decades after their respective release.
Whatever those "scientists" in the inter GOVERNMENTAL panel on climate change claim (for those are politicians or people who act as politicians, certainly not as scientists), has been in bad faith. They use their claims of uncertainty to hide their mistakes and to defend inflated claims of the capacity of CO2 to cause global warming.
Re:When did reality ever matter to climate change? (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh. Would you care to point me to the hoards of level headed climate activists who say this about Hurricane Katrina or Sandy?
You're misunderstanding how science works and what the claims were. You make a prediction (e.g. pumping loads of extra energy into a chaotic system will cause more extreme weather) and you then look at the new data to see what it does to your hypothesis. Each data point will do one of three things:
The scientists you are referring to are saying that they have more data points in the first category when these events happen. They don't conclusively prove their hypotheses (but then, that never happens in science), but they do lend it some extra weight.
If we assume that CO2 was the sole cause of warming in the last 130 years and nothing else was going on
No one is claiming this. There's a reason why these models take very large compute clusters to run: they have a huge number of variables and input data from a very large number of experimental inputs.
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>> If we assume that CO2 was the sole cause of warming in the last 130 years and nothing else was going on
> No one is claiming this. There's a reason why these models take very large compute clusters to run: they have a huge number of variables and input data from a very large number of experimental inputs.
You do not seem to realize that this assumption was entirely in favor of the hypothesis that CO2 causes global warming.
If it is true, as you say (and I also assume), that CO2 was not the sole cau
Re:When did reality ever matter to climate change? (Score:5, Insightful)
If that is all you can muster, the argument must have been a good one.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You're an idiot. The human-made factor in the current climate change is a measurable, empirical fact. The only to explain it away is to come up with a different mechanism, and explain why it would overwhelm the effect of human-contributed CO2 concentration increases.
For those who are interested, this is the chain of causality:
Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)
Ah, this reminds me of the dicussion about evolution. One side has a scientific model - or actually a heap of scientific models based on the same idea - they keep tweaking and rejecting all the time but no matter what weird creature shows up evolution can be tweaked to fit. While the other side has picked a story and is sticking with it and because it's been literally unchanged for the last 2000 years that "proves" it's the right answer while the other side is constantly fudging their numbers to make it loo
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It does remind me of the EARLY phase of the discussion of evolution.
Do you remember those days? When people pushed policians to immediately impose drastic measures on the population to prevent genetic decline? Do you remember that this was an undeniable fact shared by a broad scientific consensus?
Do you remember Eugenics?
Re: (Score:2)
Or that the term "holism" was coined by Jan Smuts.
See, if everything has a natural holarchical order (wholes made of parts) then it became obvious that the European Colonials had to take their natural place at the top of the stack, in South Africa, and Apartheid became justified.
Preparation of sentiment against next IPCC report (Score:4, Insightful)
Give me a break.
This whole Slashdot discussion today, based on a Daily Mail article, seems to be mental preparation of the public so that they're properly revved up for global warming denialism,
before the next IPCC report gets published in a few weeks [climatechange2013.org].
So that on 2013-09-27, Joe Public will say to Jane Public: "but it's all rubbish; wasn't that in the newspaper a few weeks ago?".
Climate Change is Reality (Score:2)
The debate is complicated by the media's lack of reporters with any level of sci
Put there for you denialist. (Score:2)
You sir are ignorant.
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The failure of global warming proved climate change, and the failure of climate change proves climate disruption.
It is always worse than we thought.
Re:When did reality ever matter to climate change? (Score:4, Insightful)
How about this guy:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Asbeck [wikipedia.org]
And the austere little hut he calls his home:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Remagen,_Schloss_Marienfels.jpg [wikimedia.org]
You may now proceed to delude yourself into thinking that Germans would have spend over $500bn on "renewable" energy (that will be a large heap of trash after 20years, when state-mandated funding runs out), if it hadn't been for the frantic claims of climate disaster that saturated media for the last decades. And that noboby benefits at all from any of this. Least of all farmers who managed to convince the public that food should be burned as "bio"-ethanol and "bio"-diesel, while at the same time being cheered and applauded.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: "technically true, [but] also largely irreleva (Score:4, Informative)
no, it really is largely irrelevant. here are the numbers up to and including last week:
http://iwantsomeproof.com/extimg/siv_annual_polar_graph.png [iwantsomeproof.com]
Re: (Score:2)