Observed Atmospheric CO2 Hits 400 Parts Per Million 367
symbolset writes "Over the past month a number of individual observations of CO2 at the Mauna Loa Observatory have exceeded 400 parts per million. The daily average observation has crept above 399 ppm, and as annually the peak is typically in mid-May it seems likely the daily observation will break the 400 ppm milestone within a few days. This measure of potent greenhouse gas in the atmosphere should spark renewed discussion about the use of fossil fuels. For the past few decades the annual peak becomes the annual average two or three years later, and the annual minimum after two or three years more."
Yawn (Score:4, Insightful)
No it won't. It's not like politicians and the public have been just sitting on the sidelines, waiting util a value about 400 PPM was observed. I don't believe the public really doubts that atmospheric CO2 is increasing, and so a wonky measure of it is pretty irrelevant to public sentiment.
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Re:Yawn (Score:5, Informative)
Presumably you're referring to "scientists." Also, I've repeatedly said:
Since climate is an average over ~20 years [dumbscientist.com] ... climate is only meaningful when discussing averages over ~20 years [dumbscientist.com]. ... I've repeatedly stressed that we need ~20 years [dumbscientist.com] to average out weather noise. ... professional climatologists usually smooth data and model output using ~20 year [dumbscientist.com] averages. ... It's also important to remember that a ~20 year [dumbscientist.com] timespan is necessary to obtain statistically significant [archive.org] temperature trends...
In fact, I've repeatedly told you that ~20 years are needed:
As I've explained, climate is the global average over ~20 years. [Dumb Scientist to Jane Q. Public, 2010-02-16] [slashdot.org]
This graph shows why scientists prefer trends calculated over at least ~20 years. [Dumb Scientist to Jane Q. Public, 2013-01-21] [dumbscientist.com]
I've even gone into more detail, showing you a paper that says at least 17 years are required:
Of course, you ignored me just like you previously ignored riverat1:
And 10 years has what to do with climate trends? Not much. A recent paper by Santer et. al. calculated the signal (climate) to noise (weather/natural variation) ratio for climate trends. For 10 years the S/N ratio is less than 1. They found it takes 17 years to be sure the signal is greater than the noise. [riverat1 to Jane Q. Public, 2011-11-19] [slashdot.org]
For global temperatures, Santer et al. 2011 [agu.org] shows that one needs to average over ~17 years of data to obtain statistically significant climate trends. Here's another explanation [archive.org] by Tamino. Also, the Skeptical Science trend calculator [skepticalscience.com] helps visualize statistical significance. [Dumb Scientist, 2012-08-15] [slashdot.org]
Perhaps your ode to conspiracy theories [slashdot.org] distracted you, but I also linked to another method of calculating significance which is even more conservative:
Also, Bart [bartonpaullevenson.com]
Single Data Point (Score:3)
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"One cold year says nothing about the trend in the Earth's climate."
No... but a 17-year failure to warm probably does [theaustralian.com.au].
That's from the IPCC itself. (And you should see the draft of their upcoming assessment report! It puts the lie to a lot of former claims about AGW.)
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One season of locally cold weather is a simple fluctuation. You need to consider all the data.
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/01/08/16413805-noaa-2012-was-warmest-year-ever-for-us-second-most-extreme?lite [nbcnews.com]
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THats partly because of idiots who last year said "See? Global warming" when we had abnormally warm weather.
You make your bed, you lie in it.
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THats partly because of idiots who last year said "See? Global warming" when we had abnormally warm weather.
It was not climate scientists saying such silly things last year, it was media and ordinary folks. Somehow the climate science prediction that local variability will increase in many places gets ignored, often by people trying to discredit the warming, sometimes by people just not wanting to understand.
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The IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report suggests that the Earth will warm rapidly in the 21st century. However, this is not being borne out by observations.
No-one disputes that the earth's atmosphere is warming - this has been going on for some time now. What is disputed is the contribution that human activity makes to the degree/acceleration/rapidity of warming. The original models had man's contribution to an increase in warming as minimal at best. Then the IPCC re-jigged the models to take into account
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THats partly because of idiots who last year said "See? Global warming" when we had abnormally warm weather.
There are idiots that say that. And there are idiots that look at a cold year and say "See there's no such thing as Global Warming". Idiots say stupid things. News at 11.
Climate scientists on the other hand have consistently said it's only once you get to periods exceeding 30 years that weather variability gives way to climate.
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"The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more, suggesting that an observed absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate." [noaa.gov]
"In order to separate human-caused global warming from the "noise" of purely natural climate fluctuations, temperature records must be at least 17 years long, according to climate scientists." [llnl.gov]
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Did you have a point to make other than not realising the difference between actual measured climate (real world, single time line, unrepeatable), and models - (run them over and over again.)?
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Yes.
Warmer global temperatures have caused a massive loss in arctic ice. Warm water extends farther north this year than it ever has before. The high pressure stationary air masses that form over this water extend into the North Pacific and North Atlantic. In years past, the jet stream (the west to east moving flow of cold air around the poles) would have encountered colder, low pressure air over ice and moved on through. Instead it encounters the high pressure warm air in the north pacific, gets squeezed u
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So, do you get annoyed when you do the same thing as those people saying "it's hot! Must be global warming!" or "it's cold! So mu
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That's the point. Warming changed the flow of the jet stream, and it will happen again next year and again and again. The cold spring this year (and the cold spring we'll get next year) was due to a changed climate and is not just a weather event.
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Weather is what it is out right now. Feel free to dig through graphs of past temperature records, and you can satisfy yourself that no day of the year will have the same temperature, humidity, rainfall, or anything graph on two successive years. Climate is the time-averaged expectation value and ignores anything on shorter than several year scales at the very least.
It's not even that simple, as there are many characteristic timescales involved in the climate, not jus
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This needs paper and pencil, but it's an easy explanation (even if imperfect).
If you draw a graph of temperature vs time, you will see a wave pattern emerge over a few years. Global warming implies that there is more energy in the atmosphere, so the amplitude of the wave will increase. This means summers get hotter and winters get colder.
The scientific debate is about how much of an amplitude change will result, and what the consequences of that will be (we don't know this yet).
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"Can someone offer a short and simple explanation for why abnormally cold weather doesn't mean "global warming is a myth"?"
No.
Then you probably shouldn't be entering into the discussion at all as you don't know the basics. Global warming refers to climate. "Abnormally cold weather" is weather. They are completely different things.
Weather happens at a particular place at a particular time. Climate is an average of weather over a large geographical area over a long period of time. Typically 30 years.
The two are as different as instantaneous speed of a car, and the average speed of a car over it's entire lifetime.
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Weather happens at a particular place at a particular time. Climate is an average of weather over a large geographical area over a long period of time. Typically 30 years.
Ah yes, the typical 30 year period. Where in most places there weren't even measurements in place. And the said averages, were made by guesstimates from nearby areas. Never mind that when this part of the world(North America) was being settled, that the winters were so severe on the east coast that people were freezing to death, and many believed that this was the land where "winter never ended." Or that a few hundred years prior to that, it was so warm in the same areas that it caused massive populatio
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Are you really trying to argue against scientific data with third hand anecdotes?
30 years is so small a period of time, that pissing up wind would be a better indicator of when it was going to rain next.
A 30 year average gets you a reasonable measure of climate. Climate TRENDS are of course measured over much longer.
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Are you really trying to argue against scientific data with third hand anecdotes?
Third hand huh? I guess that's why it's considered historical fact.
A 30 year average gets you a reasonable measure of climate. Climate TRENDS are of course measured over much longer.
No it doesn't, and if you want to look at that data. You'll see that we've been in a cooling trend for the last 10 years. 30 years isn't reasonable, not even close. It would be the same as saying, the last 10 years are the sum total of human history. Climate trends themselves are uniquely flawed in their own right.
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It's not clear whether you think the usual 30 year minimum for reference to climate rather than weather is too long or too short. It reads like you are arguing both.
I'd suggest climate scientists know rather better than you do either way. That at least is not up for debate, especially not by amateurs.
Re:Yawn (Score:4, Insightful)
And we never will. No amount of evidence can prove something you don't want to believe, especially if the cost of believing it comes right now while the cost of not believing it comes later. So as long as fossil fuels remain cost-effective, no amount of evidence can ever prove that they do harm - evidence only becomes sufficient after we've switched to something else.
Add the tendency of people to think of arguments in terms of victory or defeat, and it makes one wonder if humanity is really suited for a technological civilization where decisions have farther reaching consequences than the pecking order of the pack. Hunter-gatherers can afford this level of self-delusional bullshit since they can just pick up and leave if they screw up bad enough, but we can't.
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Tell me, do you go into court and challenge eyewitnesses because they couldn't have seen a thing on a planet that's always half dark?
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This isn't a discussion, it's contradiction.
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Contradiction is down the hall....
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I don't believe the public really doubts that atmospheric CO2 is increasing, and so a wonky measure of it is pretty irrelevant to public sentiment.
I have my doubts about both these assertions.
The persuasion game works like state lottery commissions claim their games work: you can't win if you don't play. In the Internet age it's impossible to drive a stake through the heart of a crackpot theory; people assemble into self-reinforcing communities which preserve and spread fringe ideas until they're no longer so fringe. Take scientific racism; it was a museum-piece article of crankery when I went to school in the 80s, but all those sloppy, half-baked pa
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Wait a minute, is there something I've been missing out on here? Should you take atmospheric tests for CO2 from just one spot, a volcanic spot? Or should it be taken and averaged over several points on the planet?
I admit to not knowing much about this, but isn't it akin to taking readings from the exhaust of a semi-truck, rather than a good random sample of traffic? Or even taking a Semi-truck reading in New Jersey to apply to Montana?
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Weather patterns [noaa.gov] combined with the jet stream [wikipedia.org] keep the atmosphere well-mixed and fairly homogeneous, especially at high altitude. That's why the recording station is on Mauna Loa [wikipedia.org]:
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lmost as if the warming hasn't come from a persistent gas who's concentration continues to rise even as production falls, but by a transitory gas that is forced into higher concentrations by continuous industrial output, but which falls quickly with falling production and actually works as a significant greenhouse gas. You know, water vapor. The other product of combustion.
That's just amazingly stupid. Industrial production does not force water vapour into "higher concentrations" because there's a natural process called precipitation, or more commonly rain, that takes it out of the atmosphere after a few days. On the other hand, average water vapour content is actually tied to average global temperatures and thus is a global warming feedback mechanism. Which means, specifically, that it amplifies the warming effect of other greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide.
It is OCEAN ACIDIFICATION that will destroy us all, not balmy temperatures and poorly defined "increases in violent weather".
If you think
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Water vapour is the main greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. And with a lot of it laying around loose on the surface, it quite rapidly responds to changes of temperature - downwards as well as upwards - with a time constant of just a few years. The corresponding removal process for CO2 has a time constant up in the tens of thousands of years. As has been seen in the
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skepticalscience.com is completely unreliable source, they make non-trivial edits to posts after comments have began, they edit user comments and delete user comments without reference.
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Here is another source [forbes.com] showing global warming slowing down and even reversing some cases!
I am a former Alaskan. Tell that to the Alaskans where May first 60 degree days hit and leaves start appearing on the trees [blogspot.com] when it just hit 4 a night or two ago and the snow hasn't even melted yet?
Before you say climate != weather, check this graph out? For 13 years straight it has persistently getting colder. [dailymail.co.uk] The UK is getting colder every year as well. The climate of the world did get warmer starting in the 1970s but
Re: Yawn (Score:4, Insightful)
DAILY MAIL ALERT!
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And its extremely worrying as it fits the model to a tee. Golf Stream is powered by osmosis, which requires glaciers not to melt too much so that fresh water from them doesn't weaken the osmotic reaction. Glaciers melt as environment heats up. Every year they melt and re-freeze. But they melt more and more and re-freeze less and less.
The really bad outcome of this scenario would be near-stoppage or full stoppage of Golf Stream, which would push tundra line several hundreds of kilometers south across entire
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golf_Stream [wikipedia.org]
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To specify on original post, the name in many languages ranges from "Golf" to americanized "Gulf".
For example, finnish wikipedia: https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golf-virta [wikipedia.org]
(virta translates as "stream" in english).
Re: Yawn (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not weighing in on this "debate", but the temperatures in the UK are artificially warm because of the ocean currents. Compare the UK to other regions of similar latitude to demonstrate this. If those ocean currents are disrupted by larger climate changes, expect to see the UK and most of western Europe get much colder overall, even though the global temperatures may be higher.
Being coastal and bounded on the west by an ocean, I wouldn't be surprised if Alaska is in the same situation.
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The thing is called Climate Sensitivity, what it means is how much will the Earth's average temperature increase for each doubling of the CO2, and that number is looking like it's somewhere between 1.8 and 2.4, 2 seems most likely. We're at 400 ppm CO2, to add 2 degree's we'd need to get our CO2 up to 800 ppm, 4 degrees needs 1600 ppm and 6 degrees needs 3200 ppm CO2; I'm not sure that the effect of anthropgenic CO2 is strong enough right now to be visible in the background of natural variation.
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I'd have to agree. Whether or not human-derived climate change is going to turn us into Venus is going to depend a lot on how much it takes to overcome the processes that have come about to regulate CO2 over time.
Thus, even if we were pumping eventually fatal amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere at this time, there is probably a natural buffer which can partially, or even totally reverse the harmful effects, as long as their capacity is not exceeded. If it does not overcome the buffer, then we will not have
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Fantastic. They say a picture paints a thousand words. This animated GIF is all that needs to be said on this topic. I may just cut'n'paste it in future to save time.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics/Escalator_2012_500.gif
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The future is now.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics/Escalator_2012_500.gif [skepticalscience.com]
Re: Yawn (Score:4, Interesting)
From your linked PDF - "The agreement of the reconstruction of the temperature history using only the six strongest components of the spectrum, with M6, shows that the present climate dynamics is dominated by periodic processes. This does NOT rule out a warming by anthropogenic inuences such as an increase of
atmospheric CO2(bolding and emphasis mine)
All the records examined in this paper were in a time period where GHG levels were significantly lower than at present and the dominant climate forcings would have been natural ones such as insolation, and volcanic eruptions.
Our use of fossil fuels have complicated the issue by adding significantly large amounts of both warming and cooling agents into the mix. But a net positive heat balance cannot simply be handwaved away into a "periodic oscillation". The heat has to go somewhere and wherever that may be, it will have an impact.
Whether or not the impact is significant and long-term is a longer discussion.
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Nobody rational disputes that anthropogenic C02 will have a primary warming effect.
In exactly the same fashion that nobody rational disputes that anthropogenic H20 will raise the ocean level when I spit into it.
That the magnitude of this effect is concerning -- or even observable! -- any more in the first case than the second, that is unproven and looking less likely all the time as evidence accumulates that the solely positive feedbacks that IPCC-selected models assume are just not in accord with reality.
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You mean that [CO2] had increased from 0.0025% to 0.0035% ? (Actually, I think that you've slipped a decimal point - 1ppm = 0.0001%, so you're out by a factor of 10. Not that it's your significant mistake.)
On the same basis of comparison, average global temperatures have increased from about 283K to 284.5K over the same interval, a relative increase of *0.005300353.
"Apples and oranges", as my maths teacher used to say. If you're going to compare two things, mak
Re: Yawn (Score:5, Insightful)
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So you're saying World War II stopped, and even reversed, global warming for decades? Great, now we know what he have to do to save the planet. Bomb it into submission again.
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Oh wow, good thing you notice! Those scientists are going to be so embarrassed when we tell them they missed that!
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Out of Curiosity.... (Score:2)
It's not clear to me exactly how much time they propose it will take to get there though. On their web site are some generic words about installing solar panels and stopping fossil fuel subsidies, which I think anybody is generally for. But I don't see anything about how much time they expect this to
Re:Out of Curiosity.... (Score:5, Interesting)
You can't make predictions when a human factor is involved. If we were all controlled by a hivemind and made CO2 decrease our highest priority, stopping CO2 production could be done in 20 years (there's enough nuclear power to sustain our needs, and we have electric vehicles - technologically it's already possible). After that, the oceans would absorb the excess CO2 and bring it below 300ppm in about 300 years (according to a study I sadly can't find now). So absent some miracle like fusion reactors even in a best case scenario it would take at least 150 years to get below 350.
But the most important thing is the human factor which depends on our decisions, and can make that time much much longer.
Sure about 150 years? (Score:2)
I'm not sure, but might some of the geoengineering approaches to removing carbon from the atmosphere considerably accelerate your estimate? Like for example, iron-fertilizing the oceans to create massive plankton blooms that, hopefully, remove carbon faster?
Not that I'm sure that the proposed geogengineering approaches are GOOD IDEAS, I'm just wondering if reducing CO2 could be done quicker.
--PM
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To be honest I doubt we can engineer a carbon sink that could rival the capacity of the oceans. Most of the plankton from the blooms, for example, gets devoured by marine wildlife fairly quickly, so it only removes carbon temporarily. To be able to sequestrate a reasonable amount of CO2 we would have to use up energy in the order of magnitude of the energy gained from fossil fuels. Stuff like reforestration could help, but that's also a slow process.
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Re:Out of Curiosity.... (Score:4, Interesting)
I think it's one of the hypocracies of the AGW alarmists that every technology that can help us avoid their worst fears is roundly decried as worse than the global warming itself. The Three Gorges Dam in China was continuously railed against,
as it would cause massive ecological damage, which has in fact been the case. It's even been fingered in heavy seismic activity which has occurred since.
Logically though, anyone who thinks the world would be significantly better off with a lower population should take matters into their own hands and remove themselves from it.
You really don't want people who think the world needs population reducation to take matters into their own hands.
Re:Out of Curiosity.... (Score:4, Funny)
Yes but zombies give off methane as they ferment, which is worse than carbon dioxide!
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Call me a denier for asking a question (Score:2)
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Somebody isn't giving you the current science on this topic.
The early to the beginning of the late Ordovician was very hot, and had the highest sea levels of the Paleozoic due to those high levels of CO2 from vulcanism.
In the late Ordovician vulcanism subsided and the earth cooled due to the drop in CO2 to the point where there was an ice age and mass extinction events.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/CO2-levels-during-the-late-Ordovician.html [skepticalscience.com]
Seems Odd To Me (Score:2, Insightful)
Why would you take this measurement in such close proximity to one of the most active volcanoes on the planet?
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You bring up a good point [archive.org].
The MLO [noaa.gov] is located 34KM WNW from and well above the summit of Kilauea. The primary volcanic emissions plume from Kilauea is driven by trade winds which blow mostly from the NE, and because of the topography of the Big Island most of that plume will bypass the observatory. However, there has to be some effect from it; the question is how much?
FWIW, I live on the Kona [wikipedia.org] side of the Big Island and get to enjoy the effects of Kilauea's vog [wikipedia.org] (volcanic smog) more than would like.
Re:Seems Odd To Me (Score:5, Informative)
The Muana Loa observatory measures only at night, when air is descending from far up high. That air has come from across the Pacific Ocean, far from any specific CO2 sources.
At night, the volcanic gasses are trapped in a thin layer near the ground by a temperature inversion. The observatory measures the air at several towers at different altitudes and also closer to the volcano so as to get a comparative reading.
You can read more in this report [ornl.gov].
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Sorry, the "only at night" was from another source.
Here you go [wattsupwiththat.com].
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Depending on context, the original question did seem like it might have been worded to misdirect readers into a particular answer. But context is really hard to read in a response if you don't personally know the writer (and sometimes even if you do) so maybe it was intended innocently.
Re:Seems Odd To Me (Score:4, Insightful)
They have a problem with you asking questions likely because they view it as an assault on their religion. I am not a climate scientist and I leave the debate to them but, as an observer, it is amazing how many people have turned this into their belief system. It is amazing how many people have decided that they understand the science and are qualified to opine on it. It is amazing how many people have come to identify so strongly with a theory that they froth at the mouth even when someone poses a legitimate question. And, worse, it is amazing how many have managed to confuse the difference between political science and climate science.
When I observe people responding it often includes something akin to, "You're not a climate scientist. There is a consensus so leave it to them. The data is infallible."
Then they go on to opine on what the various countries need to do. I'm inclined to point out that, "They're not the political scientists, there's a consensus, leave it to them. The data is irrelevant in political science." (Politicians are pretty dumb, that is my opinion and I'm sticking with it.)
Anyhow, I truly don't hold much of an opinion (one way or the other) concerning AGW though I see no reason why we shouldn't clean up our atmosphere. As such, an agnostic if you will, I don't tend to join in on the debate (though I do wonder, from time to time, about the validity of placing theoretical fixes on theoretical problems and using a lot of guesstimated and massaged data to reach conclusions) very often because I dislike the aggression when people are so passionate about their belief systems. I suppose I don't have anything to debate with either side actually, I simply don't know and am not a climate scientist. Just observing them, however, leaves a "sour taste in my mouth" type of feeling. It's as if some of them are rabid religious fanatics. One can't have a reasoned debate or change the opinions of people like that and that is a waste of time.
From the other side, I'd also offer, you have people on the denialist's side who truly are religious and lay claims down such as it is just the Sun, the Earth will take care of itself (which is true in the long run but not in the manner that they're expecting I imagine), and things like that which don't do much more than muddy the waters further. They also seem to want to tie it into their political views as well and, really, science doesn't care what your political affiliations are - it just is. So, no, they're not really helping. Sometimes I see skeptics who appear to have valid reasons for their skepticism, I've seen reports of various underhanded deals, and have seen the responses and found them lacking but that may be because I'm not a climate scientist and I'm not understanding them. But I mostly see nuts in the denialist camp and that's not very helpful for the science either I suspect.
Either way, I'll be dead and gone before it does much to change life around these parts. I don't know, I don't care to take the time to understand it either, and I have no plans on changing my life further (I'm pretty "green" by default) for this. It is sad to see science bastardized like this though, it is unfortunate that the people screaming the loudest (for either side of the debate) are given the most exposure. The lack of restraint by all involved has made me think that destruction of the human race may be the best thing after all.
Re:Seems Odd To Me (Score:5, Insightful)
Sometimes, trying to remain undecided just isn't an option. At least, not a morally acceptable one. In this case, whatever we do or don't do will have a profound impact on the lives of billions of people. So how do you respond? Well, there are a few options:
1. "This is a really important issue, so I'm going to study the science involved. That'll take a lot of work, but this issue is so important I have a responsibility to do it."
2. "I don't have time to study the science involved and really understand it. Therefore, I'll accept the judgement of the people who do study it [wikipedia.org]."
3. "I don't have the time or interest to study this issue and form an educated opinion, but I don't really want to accept anyone else's opinions either. Therefore I'll just use this as an opportunity to look down on people [xkcd.com] on both sides of the issue."
I submit that what you are doing is basically #3. I also submit that in this case, that's a morally reprehensible way to respond.
Also note my signature quote, which is remarkably appropriate to this topic.
Re:Seems Odd To Me (Score:4, Insightful)
OK, without studying the science, you can use other heuristics to guess at the credibility of the people involved.
On one hand, you have people saying "We didn't know this for sure until late last century, here are our methodologies, here are several different lines of evidence and how similar their results are, here are our error bars".
On the other hand, you have people saying
o Global warming is not happening
o The global warming that is not happening is being caused by natural sources.
o The global warming that is not happening that is racing ahead because of unstoppable natural forces ended in 1997.
o The global warming that ended in 1997 is still going on because of carbon dioxide from volcanos.
o The carbon dioxide levels, which are going up because of volcanic activity, are not really going up.
Then read a book like _The Climate Coverup_ and find out which side publishes arguments because they test well in focus groups.
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I'm not smart enough to make much headway against various arguments one way or another, hard enough trying to make a bit of sense from various condensed data; all I know for sure is that I find it freaky that amount of carbon dioxide in air has nigh doubled since I was a lad.
Re:Seems Odd To Me (Score:4, Informative)
Now THAT is something I'd never considered!
But others have, it's an old canard, yes it's a factor for that site (the oldest continuous monitoring site), but nobody is relying on just that site, we are at ~400ppm global average across all sites. CO2 concentration varies by ~5ppm in sync with the northern seasons (deciduous trees are responsible) so there is some "wiggle room" in the numbers.
Linear Growth? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why does rate of increase seem constant. I mean, if it's influenced by human activity (of which I have no doubt), then shouldn't it track closely to the fluctuations in the global economy. Specifically, shouldn't there be a dip or flat corresponding to the Great Recession periods of '08/'09?
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There was a small dip in '09 in CO2 emissions but we have quickly recovered from it. Mind you, this is CO2 concentration, not production, so it's the log of the integral of production (that's why it's linear).
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Yup. The rate of increase dropped a bit in 2009, that was it.
400 posts per million (Score:2)
That seems a fair, though perhaps somewhat generous, estimate for the ratio of signal to noise here. "News for nerds" has become just another giant Red vs. Blue flamefest. Might as well just turn my attention to my wife's cat pictures on FB.
From 3 to 4 parts per 10,000 (Score:2, Interesting)
Bringing the numbers closer to human-scale, a 300 parts per million is the same as 3 parts per 10,000. Similarly 400 is 4 parts per 10,000. So basically, we've gone from 3 molecules per 10,000 to 4 molecules of CO2 per 10,000 molecules of air.
In the same period, plankton levels have declined over 1% per year since the late 1970's [nature.com]. John Martin at MBARI [mbari.org] postulated that the decline was due to a decline of dissolved iron in the oceans. He's quoted as saying "Give me a tanker full of iron and I'll give yo
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Oh no it hasn't (Score:3)
That's not true, the observations are wrong. And anyway it's not important. And even if was, we're not responsible. Peddling these myths is exactly what I'd expect from leftist, reality-based terrorists
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extinction_event [wikipedia.org]
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The problem is with your understanding of the problem and the implications. Scientists have never said that there are no periods of global warming in the past. They have never said that the Earth will blow up if global warming occurs. The current problem is that we are experiencing global warming now and we are most likely the cause. The second part is that the warming trend may be faster than flora and fauna to adapt. Climate change in the past has occurred at a much slower rate. In the past as it wi
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So-called experts like Hansen very much talk about "extinction level events" and Venus-like conditions. They are either lying or incompetent.
Extinction level event !=instant global explosion. Someone has been watching too many movies. The problem is that climate change is occurring faster the ecosystems can adapt. This is the extinction that is being described. Even then it is not the extinction of all life. It is the extinction of life as we know it as the animals and plants we depend upon go extinct. It may be our extinction.
If it's not harmful, what's the problem?
Um, what? These are five effects of climate change on the ocean [conservation.org] alone. Or are you going to argue that a rise in
Re: Hydrogen Sulfide (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Hydrogen Sulfide (Score:5, Insightful)
Once again I am saddened by The depths to which the Slashdot community has fallen. This used to be a technology site. Technology that could not happen without extremely advanced science.
As long as I've been here, it's been a technophile site for advertisting consumer electronics.
This isn't a matter of science being wrong, it is a matter of society not being allowed to trust a very small subset of scientists because they threaten a very profitable economic paradigm.
You've hit the nail on the head. The Slashdot community as a whole touts the virtues of science, unless it's the kind of science that discovers the uncomfortable reality about capitalism and unlimited economic growth. Then they go apeshit and cover their ears as if it makes the evidence go away.
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h [nextbigfuture.com]
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Your anger comes only from your not thinking this problem through to the end. I can't really guarantee that you won't feel less angry afterward though.
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That "danger point" is completely reliant upon the value of the so-called "climate sensitivity" factor, our understanding of which changes each year as we increase our knowledge of the climate system.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_sensitivity [wikipedia.org]
There have been numerous studies lately (post IPCC AR4) pointing to a low climate sensitivity factor, which would change the value of "the danger point" upwards from 350 ppm as well (450 ppm IIRC, but that's from memory based on the below mean).
http://www.cato.org [cato.org]
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To the degree that CO2 levels and climate are causative or correlated, we're still colder now, or at least still cold enough, that significant ice has accumulated on Antarctica since human civilization has bloomed. It's up to 3 miles of ice there in some places, and at the same time as that fresh water is being locked up there, it's going missing from areas like the Sahara and Middle East which are desertifying. Some of the coastlines that humans charted in the mid-millennium (probably the Chinese) are no
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Kind of a non sequitur there. The 3 miles of ice started accumulating around 34 million years ago, long before human civilization existed.