Our Lazy Solar Dynamo — Hello Dalton Minimum? 571
tetrahedrassface writes "Solar maximum is supposed to be occurring, and everything from satellite communications to your toaster or radio could be affected. The only problem is that this just isn't happening, and NASA continues to revise downward the original prediction. In fact, the new forecast for Solar Cycle 24 is a lot smaller, and is now pegged at almost 40% of what was previously predicted. Recently, two scientists at the National Solar Observatory have followed the lead of a prominent Russian scientist, who almost five years ago forecast a dearth of sunspots and the subsequent cooling of Earth for the next several cycles. With Britain currently experiencing the coldest winter in over 300 years, and no new sunspots for the last week, are we heading for a Dalton Minimum, or worse still, yet another Maunder?"
Far-north global warming is still accelerating ... (Score:2, Informative)
Fans of data---as opposed to ideology-driven cherry-picking and quibbling---can verify (via daily satellite updates!) that far-north global warming is still accelerating. The relevant site is Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis.
Heck, Hudson Bay in Canada *still* hasn't frozen over ... that *never* happens.
Re:Far-north global warming is still accelerating (Score:4, Insightful)
Fans of data---as opposed to ideology-driven cherry-picking and quibbling---can verify (via daily satellite updates!) that far-north global warming is still accelerating. The relevant site is Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis
Most people strongly tend to cherry-pick and then draw conclusions from it - yet when it involves an above-average hot summer almost no one concerned about global warming complains because it lines up with their ideology. Well, sauce for the goose... you better hope the Russian is wrong.
It is dumb to draw conclusions based on one winter on one relatively tiny section of the globe. Plus local influences and normal variability often drown out the longer-term signal. Up here in the Pacific Northwest, our mid-to-late winter and (especially) spring weather are strongly influenced by the ENSO ("El Niño"). So far we've been having a colder than normal couple of months, and everyone's blaming the current La Niña - but it's probably not a significant factor given the time of year. Nor is it likely the dearth of sunspots - we just happen to be having a cooler-than-normal late fall and early winter. It happens. If February onward are cooler and wetter than normal, then we can talk.
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For what it's worth, I've found that nearly all discussion forms have somebody who both (a) understand and accept the scientific evidence that global climate change is real and caused by humans, and (b) will refute those who believe the same thing but cite anecdotal evidence to the contrary.
That is, when somebody says, "Hey, it's hot, it must be the global warming", there will always be somebody who says, "Look, I appreciate you being on the right side of the argument, but you're using the same invalid reas
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That is where this comes in handy, or any of the other linking long term graphs.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ice_Age_Temperature.png [wikimedia.org]
Its been getting colder for a long time now!
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Five_Myr_Climate_Change.png [wikimedia.org]
A real long time.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:65_Myr_Climate_Change.png [wikimedia.org]
Long term perspective for those who want it.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Phanerozoic_Climate_Change.png [wikimedia.org]
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Here you go:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/17/russian_data_cherrypicked_says_sceptic/ [theregister.co.uk]
I have read the paper itself. It is extremely well written with excellent statistical analysis and so far there has been NO answer from the so called "not another old university in cambridge" which did most of the analysis quoted and re-quoted in AGW papers.
Lies (Score:3, Funny)
The globe is warming!
;-)
I mean cooling.
I mean "climate changing".
(clings to the Book of Al Gore and whimpers)
Re:Lies (Score:5, Insightful)
Please learn the fact that "the climate" is as far outside of your ability to predict and thoroughly understand as is your apparent grasp on a sense of humor.
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That needs to be revoked anyway. There are certain places where only an incandescent will work, where the light AND heat are needed. Pump houses are one example. Now I have to hook up a small heater once bulbs are no longer available, which are likely only available in larger wattages. Animal homes is another example.
I wonder if that is to include the incandescent IR lamps as well?
Re:Lies (Score:4, Informative)
BTW fluorescent bulbs DO make heat... just not as much. So if you had a farm or something where you need heat, you could swap-out the 100 watt incandescent with a 100 watt CFL (equivalent to 400w incandescent) and get the same amount of heat. Or just use a tiny heater.
I'm pretty sure that a fluorescent that uses 100w will still generate significantly less heat because the newer electronic ballast design is so efficient. We manufacture with the newer style fluorescent ballasts with will ignite 3 to 6 100w lamps, and they get about 5 degrees F over ambient is all. We have devices that use 13 amps worth of these ballasts @ 120v (actual draw, not rated draw), and cool the whole enclosed system with a single 6 inch fan. Fulham makes them, they are the Workhorse series. I actually did an extensive lab test on the thermal output of them and privately published it on these using F71T12HO lamps, and now Fulham uses the results (without my permission....) to sell their stuff. It is a trip to grab a ballast that is powering 3x 100w lamps in your hand after it has been on for an hour, and have it be barely warm at all. Even the lamps themselves are significantly cooler. (In case you are a nerd, these ballasts output at over 100k hertz, whereas older electronics run at 20k hertz, and chokes run at 60hz, same as input.)
I would imagine that newer fluorescents, particularly the kind that are made for enclosures, use similar technology. The original CFLs, maybe not, but the newer more efficient ballasts actually cost less to make now so they are more likely to be used in the future.
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>>> have never run into a case where the bulbs did not provide enough light to get around within a second of being turned on.
Well "yay" for you. :-) I've got two types of CFLs. One type flickers for 2 seconds before turning-on at full brightness, which is not bad. I can wait two seconds. The second type appears to be the most common in stores right now. It starts as a dim orange glow, then gradually changes to a yellowish light, and finally achieves full "hot white" appearance. This process
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just to inform, Philips is definitely a Dutch company.
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>>>>>Enclosed fixtures (the heat kills compact fluorescents) Upside-down fixtures (ditto)
>>
>>Nonsense
Translation: "You are lying c64_love." - Well contrary to what you believe CFLs are *not* perfect. They have flaws. I've SEEN the CFLs die within 6-9 months when used in my upside-down kitchen and bathroom lights. That is no longer than a standard bulb lives! And when I open them up, yes, they died from heat (the caps are swelled and leaking). But since you think I'm "full o
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You're an idiot... A device that uses 100 watts of electrictricity will put out 100 watts of heat. End of story. No exceptions.
Light bulbs aren't being banned for being inefficient HEATERS, that wouldn't make any sense. They're being banned because they are inefficient light sources. They use lots of pwer and give off lots of heat for the small amount of light they give off.
Conservation of energy applies. Where would you say that 100 watts of electricity is going to, if it's not being turned into heat
Britain/Northern Europe is Ocean regulated. (Score:4, Informative)
Britain/Northern Europe does not owe its climate status to spot heating. Britain is usually warmer than it should be given its northern position due to the gulf stream. The oceans serve as blocks to cold air from up north coming south. There are incredible global circulation systems which see warm air rise in the mid-latitudes tot he upper atmosphere then cool and return to the ground at the poles. This is the cause of the cold winds that come down from the north. These winds find it easier to come south over land, which cools more easily than water which retains heat better, has its own top/bottom circulation as well as global circulation. Normally the warm currents keep the cold air away.
Global Warming means global warming. The oceans make 3/4 of the surface area to 4' cooling of the land is easily offset by 2' warming of the ocean. 4 * 1/4 = 1 is less than 2 * 3/4 = 1.5. Do not take any specific location changes to mean global stuff.
What global warming does mean is more intense weather systems. Do not go jumping onto local cooling/warming like Europes/US east coast and claim it is getting colder. You need to look at the whole globe. Not just the areas man is in.
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The whole globe doesn't matter -> what matters are local conditions and specific distributions. Nobody has ever been killed because the average cyclonic activity for a year was up by 2%. Plenty of people get killed by specific storms, even when average cyclonic activity for a year was down.
Now, you may believe that an increase in average global temperature is going to specifically cause more damaging weather events where humans are -> but that's a belief system, not a fact. Put more succinctly, eve
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Do not take any specific location changes to mean global stuff.
And yet how many stories of individual glaciers and polar bears do climate changers nod their heads to?
Re:Britain/Northern Europe is Ocean regulated. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, you should be somewhat wary of trusting Wikipedia on AGW - if you think there's heated debate on the issue at Slashdot that's nothing compared to the editor wars there.
Anyway, on CO2 Science you'll find enough "local" MWP/LIA papers for a nice global integration.
http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/mwpp.php [co2science.org]
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Well there you go, the article was actually pretty good - except for the tiny part that was quoted here by the GP which severely misrepresents the state of science.
Not surprisingly, that quote is from the IPCC.
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I'll try!
"In northern Europe, snow cover will decrease" - IPCC 2007 [very high confidence]
I failed :(
Guess I picked the wrong decade to.... (Score:4, Insightful)
give up burning oil.
I see the Al Gore haters are out. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Speaking as a scientist... What science?
Climate change occurs over decades and e.g. temperature changes per year are fractions of a degree.
Show me a model which can accurately predict climate over a couple of decades with 0.1 degree
precision for all available weather stations and we would have an informed discussion.
Science is all about predictive power. Right now all climate predictions and warnings and the like are
made by a bunch of charlatans extrapolating wildly, both climate change advocates and denier
Re:I see the Al Gore haters are out. (Score:4, Insightful)
Speaking as a scientist... What science?
Climate change occurs over decades and e.g. temperature changes per year are fractions of a degree.
Show me a model which can accurately predict climate over a couple of decades with 0.1 degree
precision for all available weather stations and we would have an informed discussion.
Wow, what an arbitrary and divorced from reality idea for testing climate science. Why 0.1 degree precision? Why every single station? There are obviously a number of complex variables to be considered (like, for instance the subject of fluxuations in solar output). Here's a quick science lesson for you. To be legitimate science, something just has to be predictive of future findings. That means if climate scientists make a much simpler prediction, "the average temperature at all stations will be higher for a given year than it was 20 years ago with some statistical probability (say 9 times out of 10)" then that's a valid scientific hypothesis. If future results mesh with that prediction, then you have to give some credence to what they are saying.
What kind of science do you study anyways? Political Science? HA!
Re:I see the Al Gore haters are out. (Score:4, Insightful)
Speaking as a scientist... What science?
You're not a scientist if your asking this question. There's a metric assload of peer-reviewed articles, data, and research. Climatology is fairly cross-disciplined in the sciences.
Show me a model which can accurately predict climate over a couple of decades with 0.1 degree
precision for all available weather stations and we would have an informed discussion.
Again, you're not a scientist. Or if you are, you're being disingenuous. You're not going to get that kind of accuracy in climatology. You're going to get a probability distribution, just like when modeling any other chaotic or quasi-chaotic system. I don't here you dismissing quantum mechanics because you can't exactly predict where a particle may be.
Right now all climate predictions and warnings and the like are made by a bunch of charlatans extrapolating wildly, both climate change advocates and deniers alike.
Bullshit. Scientists have been predicting temperature increases for decades. With the advent of more powerful computers, they are now beginning to get to the point where they can look into regional effects. This ranges anywhere from the effects of increased troposphere thickness in tropical regions to the effects of increased sea surface temperatures. You can read the research papers for other predictions if you like.
We do need more climate research but it will not produce believable results for decades if not centuries
and we need to be OK with that because the grand vision is a comprehensive model of all processes
on the planet and their interrelation and impact
Again, you demonstrate that you don't know what you are talking about. We already have comprehensive models that take into account everything from soil moisture to chemical transport and breakdown in the atmosphere. You will NEVER have an exact model. There will ALWAYS be error bars. And if you read the IPCC report they make this very clear.
You can create a simple 0 dimension energy balance climate model that can calculate a good estimate of the global temperature average. You can even make it have a tweak-able parameter for adding and removing the influence of CO2. And this is the simplest, dumbest climate model you can make.
Forecasting the global average temperature is relatively easy and can be done with decent accuracy. However, that doesn't tell you much. Where the bulk of the research is going now is refining HOW that temperature increase will affect regions of the globe. That's a harder question to answer and requires something significantly more complex than a simple 0 dimension model.
Instead of being an ignorant troll you could download and run a climate model yourself. Or better yet, since you apparently think there is a global climate science conspiracy, get a couple of books on climatology and related subjects and write your own model. If you can show that increased CO2 has no impact on climate, you could win a Nobel.
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Does that make him
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My point is that Al Gore has very little to do with any actual climate research. You went on a rant there about Al Gore as if he is the end-all-be-all authority on climate science. I understand that you dislike Al Gore. What do
Re:I see the Al Gore haters are out. (Score:4, Informative)
So none of those three "investigations" can be honestly called independent, and while I am not necessarily claiming bias, motive for bias is extremely clear.
The only investigations that can be said to have been conducted independently were:
(1) An inquiry by the House of Commons, which stated that while accepted practices may not have been grossly violated, "... those practices have to change." [emphasis mine] That is hardly a ringing endorsement. In particular, Hadley Centre and CRU were scolded for lack of openness, and for playing irresponsibly loose with statistics.
(2) The United States Senate commissioned an investigation into the methods used by Michael Mann and CRU, commonly known as the Wegman Report. Contrary to the "warmist" claims, the Wegman Report was peer-reviewed, by six independent statisticians. All of them agreed with Wegman, who concluded that the math used by Mann, Hadley Centre, and CRU "does not support their conclusions."
So: nice try, but no points. The facts are not on your side.
Re:I see the Al Gore haters are out. (Score:4, Informative)
What temperature slump ?
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.lrg.gif [nasa.gov]
Ignoring the exceptional peak in 1998, every year after 1999 has been exceptionally warm, with 2010 about to break a new record.
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Agreed, he's using data. The issue is what data.
Contrary to public opinion, that's not temperature data. That's someone's opinion of what temperatures were/should've been. And they keep getting changed
http://climateaudit.org/2010/12/26/nasa-giss-adjusting-the-adjustments/ [climateaudit.org]
No Sunspots = Starvation... (Score:5, Interesting)
There were nearly no sunspots for 2 years, 2007-9 and that easily confirms we will have real hard couple of winters a bit later down the road. And then a remission of sunspots AGAIN just recently makes it look like we are "bouncing down" the activity curve, typical of a "cycle".
Every time (since Galileo's time 1600) when we have had a minimal or near zero sunspot activity, there have been colder winters, freezing and storms. Hence we have about 400 years of well documented sunspot activity with weather records to verify what happened.
It is amazing to me that out "news anchors", meaning writers in the "mainstream media" are so ill-educated that they can not do simple reading up on what the effects are of minimal sunspot activity.
Instead "news anchors" and writers in the media spout political lines (Al Gore and global warming crowd), instead of pointing out specific facts and what those measureable facts mean short term (cold weather a year or so later) and what it could mean longer term.
The last time I spoke with a person who ran the solar observations from the radio telescopes in the Mojave Desert, he noted they still were not able to predict longer term events as mentioned (Maunder or Dalton type events).
Why are these events hugely important? I don't hear the news researcher/writers mentioning this. Sweden, Denmark and France lost 10% of their population to starvation/freezing in the Maunder minimum and Finland lost about 30%. That is the equivalent of losses in a major world war or WORSE.
Re:No Sunspots = Starvation... (Score:5, Insightful)
Enjoy your SUVs, you bastards. (Score:4, Funny)
Global climate != Local weather (Score:5, Insightful)
With Britain currently experiencing the coldest winter in over 300 years, and no new sunspots for the last week, are we heading for a Dalton Minimum
Why yes, it makes perfect sense to conclude things about decadal-scale global climate trends based on a month's data from 0.05% of the Earth's surface area!
For a global view of the temperature anomaly (vs. a 1951-1980 base period), see this GISS surface temperature analysis [nasa.gov] (that's for November; December data not available yet). So yes, there's a -1 deg C anomaly in Britain, counterbalanced by huge +4 to +10 deg C anomalies across northern Asia and the Arctic.
For a look at the longer-term trends, try this map [nasa.gov] of annual average temperatures for the past ten years vs. the same base period. Guess what? It's getting warmer, despite declining solar activity [solen.info].
The GISS map generator [nasa.gov] is a great tool for exploring these variations.
Re:Global climate != Local weather (Score:4, Interesting)
If the comparison period is changed each year to include the last year (ie 1880-2009 this year, 1880-2010 next year, which is what I think you are proposing) then you will get a mix between the values and the derivative of the values. This is useless as it is impossible to separate the data.
Derivatives are useful, but to get them you would compare this year to a fixed-length period that moves (ie compare to 1880-2008, then 1881-2009 next year, etc).
Both would help a lot by averaging together a fixed set of years around the current one to smooth the data. As these graphs are presented the noise makes it possible for anybody to make all kinds of wild arguments both for and against global warming since there are exceptional hot and cold spots.
I suspect a longer fixed period would not make denialists happy. Moving the start back would then start to include colder years before 1940, thus making the warming today look worse. If you moved the end up to the present day it would reduce the apparent amount of warming, but then maps of older years would show they were much cooler than the present day average.
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I wasn't making any claims.
You wrote that "the whole United States and Russia are also having exceptionally cold winters". That could reasonably be construed as a "claim".
It's just the grandparent was disingenuous to claim that Britain was the only place in the world experiencing a cold winter...
I did not claim that. The summary cherry-picked this year's British winter as evidence of global cooling, which I criticized. Nowhere did I say that Britain is the "only place in the world experiencing a cold winter", since that would have been a falsehood.
... when it is the whole of Europe, Russia, and most of the United States at least.
Well, the map that I linked to [nasa.gov] in my original post contradicts that claim. It appears that November was cold i
Colaninno Minimum (Score:3)
Re:So what? (Score:5, Informative)
How much do you enjoy having enough food to eat?
Re:So what? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:So what? (Score:5, Funny)
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Also, if we are sufficiently lucky, the Scandanavian "Black Metal Belt" should move some degrees southward, allowing gene flows between that popul
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Wheatgrass juice tastes like nothing.
No, it tastes like grass juice.
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Re:So what? (Score:5, Interesting)
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower; excerpt from The Chance for Peace
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That would be so true, if you know money was a use once resource, but you know it doesn't vanish into thin air once it is used.
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"This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
It's not just about money, but opportunity costs as well. People have to spend time designing, building, and dropping bombs that could be spent doing other things.
People also use resources to build aircraft carriers and bombs, and some of those resources are lost. And some resources are destroyed when those bombs are dropped.
Re:So what? Off Topic (Score:3)
Eisenhower... a real Republican.
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Re:In before the Global Warming crowd... (Score:5, Insightful)
CO2 also acidifies the oceans. Global warming isn't the only result of pumping billions of tons of green house gases into the atmosphere.
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Re:In before the Global Warming crowd... (Score:5, Insightful)
The great barrier reef is already experiencing the effects of acidification. Parts of the reef near the northern most tip of Australia which used to have every colour of the rainbow 10 years ago when we went diving there are now barren white plains of dead coral and very few fish.
Re:In before the Global Warming crowd... (Score:5, Insightful)
A gradual change can be tolerated. Drastic changes not so much. Let me put this in an analogy that is reasonably easy to understand: You can walk down a flight of stairs from the top of a fairly tall building just fine but jumping off the top floor, falling and then making a splat on the ground isn't so safe. It isn't so much the height that is dangerous, it's the sudden stop after the fall that kills.
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If you're from the UK, a comparison with Vince Cable, who predicted 8 of the last 3 recessions
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And what do they show? A slight 20th century warming? A warming since the LIA. The LIA itself? The MWP, the Roman Optimum? Going back further, with the Greenland and Vostok cores, do they show current temperatures or trends to b
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It's already affecting it. Now as to killing it all...some life is more affected by it than others. Jellyfish are pretty hardened against it. Oysters don't like it at all. And coral reefs are dissolving (though that's partially due to warming, and partially due to other pollution, as well as the CO2 levels).
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No, you get multiple areas of local cooling. A more thorough treatment might reveal that although multiple areas cool down, more areas may be warmer, and significantly more warmer than the other areas are cooler.
Hey, look at that...someone already did this for us [noaa.gov]. Some places got cooler (UK and Australia among them), lots of places got warmer.
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No, the plural of anecdote is not data.
According to NASA November 2010 was the warmest November on record [nasa.gov]
From the link - The cold anomaly in Northern Europe in November has continued and strengthened in the first half of December. Combined with the unusual cold winter of 2009-2010 in Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes, this regional cold spell has cause
Re:In before the Global Warming crowd... (Score:5, Informative)
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There were many other stories around the Internet about it, I'm not sure how you missed it.
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Ocean acidification. Solar cycles don't change chemical fact. CO2 + H2O H2CO3 H+(aq) + HCO3-(aq) In other words, as the ocean absorbs more CO2, it becomes more acidic. Combined with the observed isotopic shift in C13/C12 ratios caused by anthropomorphic CO2 sources and it's case closed.
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You're completely ass-backwards. It's the isotopic ratios which prove that the increased CO2 is anthropogenic as our emissions differ from known natural sources.
Here's the music: the sun's output is weaker than expected and yet 2010 looks like one of the hottest years on record. What is this solar minimum proving again?
Re:No problem! (Score:5, Funny)
Yep. And I'll trade-in my 80 MPG hybrid for a gas-guzzling Porsche (shaped like a penis)* that gets a mere 15 mpg. And move to a home 100 miles from my job.
*
*Buffy reference
Re:No problem! (Score:4, Insightful)
My 1995 Porsche 911 gets about 28 MPG on the highway if I keep it at under 80 MPH - yeah I know its not 80 MPG but its better than 15 MPG and its a heck of a lot more fun than a Prius or a some other econobox
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Just some helpful comparison info, based on an average annual mileage of 12,000 miles (based on US DOT figures):
15mpg = 800 gallons per year
28mpg = 428.5 gallons per year
50mpg = 240 gallons per year
80mpg = 150 gallons per year
The differences between them are large, but the diminishing returns are clear as you go to higher mpg. Twice the mpg gets you half the savings of the previous doubling of mpg. Going from 15mpg to 28mpg saves you almost 372 gallons per year. Going from 28 to 80, however, only saves a
Re:No problem! (Score:5, Funny)
Hale and Pace sketch [youtube.com]
Re:No problem! (Score:4, Insightful)
Then in a few years when our surprise extension runs out, the Greenhouse will be nice and thick for the return to the typical solar cycle, frying us, too late to ever fix or minimize.
Any excuse to ignore the threat should be taken - damn the consequences just a little later.
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The one from the 70's that said we were going to freeze? 'Global Warming' from the late 90's where we were going to cook. Or the recently changed to 'Global Climate Change' so that it can cover any change at all.
I think you're remembering it wrong. In the 70's scientists started to worry about the rise in CO2 levels (CO2 was known to be a greenhouse gas since the 19th century.) The pioneering studies were published in that decade.
By the 80's there was also evidence of a temperature rise (theory, prediction, data, confirmation! Science! It works bitches!) Scientists began holding regular multi-disciplinary conferences on the topic, and even the non-science media started to pick up on the "Global Warming" message.
Rig
Re:No problem! (Score:5, Insightful)
Science recently has done a good job of identifying how loose and fast our brains can be with facts. This is how a president like Bush can massively expand the federal government with nary a whisper from Republicans that howl at the first sign of a democrat doing the same thing. Same holds true for a president like Clinton that screwed the unions with NAFTA and got a response from Democrats that I would venture was much different than they would have given a Republican president.
The very instant that something becomes emotionally important to us, beliefs included, the less interested we are in the truth to the extent that it actually affects what information we perceive on a conscious level. It gets filtered out before it gets that far. As an example, years ago NOAA or GISS proclaimed a month to be the "hottest ever". Problem was, due to a technical glitch, they just repeated the numbers from the month before. Viewed skeptically, would it even be possible for the numbers to be EXACTLY the same 2 months running? Unlikely. But it was not the "believers" that discovered this error, it was the "skeptics" or "deniers" if you wish.
In ANY scientific endeavor or theory, it will ALWAYS be the skeptics that have a better chance of seeing the error. Does the above example mean that ALL NOAA data is wrong, or even that their underlying theory is wrong? Of course not. But if you always accept their data and decry the "skeptics" you may end up with more in common with that villager than you would care to admit.
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To answer your first question, it's because it isn't really science; it's more like Astrology. The second question is easier to answer: wherever there are leftist activists - i.e. `post-normal' scientists who simultaneously decide which temperature stations to delete from their analysis and also
Re:No problem! (Score:4, Insightful)
Firstly, because the hypothesis is unprovable (we don't have multiple Earth's to experiment with) and secondly the hypothesis is unfalsifiable, in a strict scientific sense. We're now asked to believe that warming causes cooling. The models that we were told predicted the future centuries ahead, didn't predict harsh winters. They do now of course, because there are so many parameters to twiddle with you can pretty much come up with any projection you like (it's called confirmation bias).
James Hansen. The guy who called coal trains "death trains" and regularly pickets against the opening of power stations (not in China of course, in the US and UK). He's in control of GISS and is responsible for the ridiculous smoothing algorithms they use to smudge temperature across thousands of miles with a couple of temperature stations. He's also the guy who started this whole scare with his evidence to the senate in the 1980's.
I agree it will win out eventually. Who was it who said that science progresses one funeral at a time? That's how paradigms get overturned. The question is whether or not this happens before we end up with pointless political fixes, based on implausible chains of inference (as Lindzen pointed out) and a rolling back of the industrial age.
The point here is that two scientists can argue about Dark Matter, or Dark Energy, or Dark Shikari, and nobody is going to raise my taxes and tell me I can't drive a car to work any more. Political activism and Physics are separate, except when you get into the Nuclear weapons arena. But even there, the hypothesis that nuclear bombs are bad is not particularly controversial.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas, but we aren't living in a greenhouse. The Earth radiates energy into space. Lindzen thinks sensitivity is of the order of less than 1K, i.e. barely perceptible. The catastrophists (political activists) think it's anything from 4K to 16K. None of them know enough about the climate system to make any predictions, but they publish press releases of their model outputs as if they do. Without AGW, most of them wouldn't have careers.
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And if it doesn't (which it doesn't at present), you continue on as before, making new claims about your existing thesis that won't be tested for another three decades. All the while, you continue to rake in grant money for your graduate students.
Yes, it's "weather" when it's cooling and "climate" when it's warming. You have both bases cover
Re:No problem! (Score:4, Interesting)
If you’re referring to hockey-sticks and the paleo-climatological record often used as “proof” of current exceptionality, of course I do. If you’re referring to the instrumental record, not so much (Hansen is clearly an outlier at present). I’m not disputing that it warmed by a small amount during the 20th century and has been warming since the end of the LIA. I don’t dispute that climate changes. The reconstructions I’ve seen show that current temperatures and trends are well within the bounds of natural variation (I’m especially thinking about the GISP2 Greenland and Vostok ice cores). There the debate should end. The rest is a hypothesis upon which you can have absolutely zero confidence, because historically temperature and CO2 haven’t correlated well and they don’t at present (again, PDO and solar activity are a stronger correlation). But still, you continue on with the paradigm. Why?
The model is programmed to predict a long-term trend of increasing temperature. I wouldn’t expect it to be “wrong” on that count. But let us take, for example, an economic model. You program it such that it has an inherent “bull market” bias. You make predictions. The predictions show an increase in stock prices. The market is going up anyway. They’re together in lock-step. Everyone thinks you’re a genius. As soon as the downturn comes, you look like a ****ing idiot. And so it goes with climate models. They are right until they start to diverge from reality and then they’re wrong, but as they’re continually being fiddled with, the projections of catastrophe are pushed further away into the future. What value do they have? None whatsoever as far as I can see.
Clearly the polar ice caps aren’t ice-free today and, if the models of 5 years ago are correct, they will be ice-free by 2013 (in the summer). What do you think? 2 years to go.
Yes and the volume of work and literature on the dietary causes of peptic ulcers was enormous. It was all bollocks of course, because someone came along with a microscope and found a little H. pylori.
Of course it will. The debate is about how much. I suspect it’s a few tenths of a degree.
My mistake. I’m slightly dyslexic, so sometimes misread words. The point I’m making here is that this whole debate is over what the world will look like in 100 years time (or 200). Run your climate model backwards, with current forcings as they are understood and your best approximation of the current state, and tell me what the climate looked like 100 years ago, or 200, or 1,000. You can’t. The reason you can’t is because you don’t know the forcings with enough accuracy, you’re ignorant of the feedbacks, and you don’t have sufficient understanding of the interactions of the system as a whole. As an example, your model will probably hind-cast a decrease in hurricane activity, say, 30 years ago, because it’s programmed a priori
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You need to view the science in the context of evidence based policy. This issue is only half about science; the other half is about politics.
Oh sure, they can come up with whatever they l
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He was arrested for helping to blockade a coal-fired power station, amongst other criminal acts that nobody seems to give a flying **** about. If you think that as a scientist he's capable of being an impartial gate-keeper of the dat
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Just went looking. I was wrong. He didn't "create" the term, and it was a Bush Jr advisor, not Reagan/BushSr. I got my eras wrong too.
The name you want, though, is Frank Luntz.
Re:No problem! (Score:4, Interesting)
The hell you do. Do you personally redo experiments that prove the effectiveness of medical procedures? Your faith vs. empiricism dichotomy is false. Nobody personally verifies every single thing they're told.
Re:No problem! (Score:5, Insightful)
There's nothing blind in seeing, comprehending and accepting overwhelming evidence gathered over 30+ years by renown scientists all over the globe. In fact, blindness would be to deny all of this by throwing pseudo-philosophical arguments into the mix.
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Your overwhelming evidence is continuing to be shown riddled with conformational bias and systemic errors, the renowned scientists a self-referential good-ol' boys network. Even the honest researchers have had to relied on the tainted data for their research which calls their conclusions into question through no fault of their own.
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Especially "expansion of government power" alarmists who interfere with our organized collective action ("government") to deal with the threat of climate change.
Alarmists who voted for Bush twice as he actually expanded government power beyond any reasonable limit - while failing to protect us from climate change.
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Re:No problem! (Score:5, Informative)
No, I'm alarmed by actual damage done by Bush but denied by you Republicans. You're alarmed by imaginary scandals cooked up by you Republicans.
The difference is that I'm alarmed by facts, but you're alarmed by Republicans telling you non-Republicans are alarmists. You're buried in layers of nightmare.
Re:No problem! (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/the-global-cooling-myth/ [realclimate.org]
Lets pull out two real important facts that are used to bash this global cooling myth from that link.
That the global data from the 1940s-70's was new, and not accurate enough to be trusted.
That extrapolating a 50 year trend was not a good idea.
Same two issues are still alive and well today for global warming.
Man made or not, the climate has lived though a lot worse then we currently are in, do we want to push our luck before we know one way or another? my vote, hell no, we could be the 1c that dose push it over the edge, but all the global warming ppl need to get on the historical graphs that look past the current mini ice age and educate ppl that the current warming trend may be lasting longer and peeking longer then it should.
We have the 2nd coldest peek for temp. in the last 500k years, but one of the longest running.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ice_Age_Temperature.png [wikimedia.org]
Its been pretty cold for the last 3 million years.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Five_Myr_Climate_Change.png [wikimedia.org]
Or 50 million
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:65_Myr_Climate_Change.png [wikimedia.org]
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Are you arguing that there was never any concern about a near-future ice age back in the '70s? If you are, then you may wish to re-examine your facts as it was there, in full scare-force as the warming scare has been ongoing for the past decade. While I was in elementary school (3rd or 4th grade in the early '70s) we were shown a series of films that portended the coming ice age and that where I live right now would be under a glacier in 40 years or so time, i.e. right now (there is only a dusting of snow
Re:No problem! (Score:5, Insightful)
I haven't been using my fireplace nearly enough lately.
Won't help that much - the carbon sequestered in those logs went in 30-40 years ago. You need to liberate some fossil carbon to get serious, but even at that you're a rounding error (sorry to say).
Perhaps there's a reason it's called "the current ice age"? Cripes, people seem to keep forgetting we're still coming out of the last ice age cycle.
"Oh, the Earth warmed a bit in the past century."
"Yeah - what else were you expecting?"
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BTW, the Little Ice Age appears to be more of a Northern Hemisphere thing, so the Maunder minimum was not likely the largest contributor.
As your link says, the variations appear to be driven by atmospheric circulation differences, but if the Northern Hemisphere was colder and the Southern Hemisphere temperatures stayed about the same, then globally there was less heat energy. If there were a heat spike in the Southern Hemisphere, then we might speculate that the heat was constant globally and merely the d
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When has dumping a chemical into our biosphere such that it reaches many times the natural level been a good thing?
Please give one example. I can site many, many cases where it was a bad.
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When has dumping a chemical into our biosphere such that it reaches many times the natural level been a good thing?
Please give one example. I can site many, many cases where it was a bad.
Well, The Great Oxygen Catastrophe [wikipedia.org] comes to mind.
It was a very good thing for all of us oxygen breathing lifeforms...
(Not such a good thing for lots of Earth's anaerobic life; It "was likely the largest extinction event in Earth's history" for them.)
Not to worry: Life as a whole is far more resilient than any one strain of life, including that of our human race.
Re:The things that must never be said... (Score:5, Insightful)
While you are correct about the religious-like fanaticism, the problem is that some people cite one of these facts and act as though it debunks every bit of science out there. There are occassions here on Slashdot where someone cites a 100-page page-reviewed scientific article on the effect of CO2, and someone else counters with "but the model could be wrong!" and acts like the combined work of 5000 scientists was suddenly silenced by their off-hand remark.
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True but then you have the flip side. When we had two years of bad bad hurricanes you had the true believers saying that it was proof of global warming.
Then we had none. Now we have some extra cold winters and I have heard people saying that is proof of global warming.
I am all for cutting CO2 because the risks of not doing it seem to out way the risks of doing it. But I believe that climate is a very complex subject and we are still learning.
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IPCC is complied works by half a dozen people, not all of which are scientists.
Yeah, everything that IPCC has ever produced or referenced has been personally created by these half a dozen people.
The works are cherry picked and later found to be full of errors.
Right, the latest report was found to contain something like three errors on relatively minor issues in the less comprehensively scientific chapters, all of which duly received a title of "-gate" from the sensationalist media and teh b(l)ogosphere.
Most studies out there arent about the effects of CO2 on global temperatures (some are) but most are about the potential effects if such warming occured. Or dirivative works on different subjects with GW splashed in for funding.
Unwillingness to learn about the subject, rather than reproduce popular rhetoric you agree with: check
Unwillingness to use proper spelling: check
This constant claim that 5000 scientists are working in unison and all agree on the same exact data and subject is ludicrous and a lie.
Nic
Re:The things that must never be said... (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Yeah, obviously the Sun is a big driver. And if you keep it's heat in more effectively, that would be an issue.
2) "full greenhouse effect" is obtained on Venus. With a nearly pure CO2 atmosphere. It would appear to be hotter there. Much more so than its closer distance to the Sun would suggest.
3) It's very possible the Earth has been "cooling since 2007", and it makes no difference to a larger trend than the fact that Canada has been cooling since August. The temperature would be this wiggly line on the graph, see, and though there are down-wiggles, they are fewer / smaller than the up-wiggles over the longer term. If it were warmer on Sept 23-27th that it was on September 3-9, would you conclude winter was not coming?
4) There's no chance of current computer models being "correct", the question is whether they are a close enough approximation to be useful for making social policy. The computer models of some 20 years ago were considerably more accurate about today's climate than random chance alone would suggest. That gives them scientific credibility and are the reason that climate researchers have increasingly come to believe them.
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Right. Thanks for the link to the objective science site where paragraph 1 of the home page speaks of "rabid warmist claims"; I'm sure they'll be putting Nature out of the peer-reviewed paper business soon.
To you and the guy below who wrote "PV = nRT", well, yes, if you rapidly compress a gas, it will heat up. Then it will radiate that heat away until it is back to the temperature of its environment. Otherwise, diver's compressed air tanks would be permanently, naturally hot all the time,, forever.
Altho
Re:The things that must never be said... (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you considered the possibility that at least some of these claims are not heretical, but simply false; and that the angry reaction from climatologists derives not from any religious fervor but from the frustration of having to refute them time and time again in the face of someone who thinks some reading online gives them expertise equal to years of academic study?
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Who modded this liar up? (Score:4, Interesting)
1) The sun is the biggest driver of the Earth's Climate
This is like saying the Earth is the biggest driver of the Earth's climate. It's an essentially meaningless statement.
2) There is already more than enough CO2 for a 'full' greenhouse effect so more will not make it 'worse.'
You are simply lying with this one. A 'full' greenhouse effect would mean that 100% of heat is retained. That's impossible, but you can look at worlds where heat retention is in the 99% range, such as Venus.
3) The Earth has been cooling since 2007.
Bull [noaa.gov] shit [noaa.gov]. Even if it was true, climate is not weather, the same way macroeconomics is not family household planning. Climate change is measured across decades, not years.
4) Current computer models of the Earth's long-term climate are not necessarily correct.
This is irrelevant to historical analysis, which shows a clear warming trend across decades. But unlike yourself, scientists do endeavor to be honest, and refine their model as new data is available. Most excess heat is getting dumped into the oceans.
There are others, of course, but you get the idea. Never say any of the above in the presence of believers.
Because you'll get called out for being the liar that you are.
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..none of said freaks are out selling their houses that they won't need after 2012, either.
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Re:Solar activity-volcanism association? (Score:4, Informative)
There's some research on correlation between solar minima and increased volcanic and tectonic activity.
Here's one paper: http://www.agu.org/journals/ABS/1989/JB094iB12p17371.shtml [agu.org]