Research 'kills off' climate sceptic argument by showing average temperature across the continent has risen over the last 50 years
Sounds like it's getting more difficult to get the actual numbers to agree with the global warming faith. Let me guess, the next periods of measure will go from 50 years to 75 years and then to 100 years to keep the faith alive? When somebody predicts the end times, and the rapture doesn't happen, they better come up with a new date quickly or else they'll lose all the followers.
Posted by JFixx at March 22, 2009 07:37 PMChristina, Euz here doesn't hold math too highly when dealing with global warming. Some scientist at U of Wisc Milwaukee released a study recently not holding to any man made causes and Euz went off on it dismissing it as some non scientist math guy working with things over his head. The whole field of modeling has to do with math.
And then on another thread Euz is stating the Nature journal article is not peer reviewed and not worthy of attention. I suggested you would have read it and now I see you have. He said, "It will turn out that the paper was not peer reviewed and that the authors have made a theoretical error that no other physicist will endorse." Nice to see you're not indicating any errors. He must be uninformed or misunderstanding of it's nature. It's also nice to read your last paragraph. Missing things within these models surely raises questions on their outcome. Does this mean global warming has paused as many are saying these days? And why has 24 not begun yet since 23 ended a year ago?
Posted by peter at March 22, 2009 08:13 PM"an enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in mystery"
Keep spinning.....
Regards,
Bagley
Posted by Just Me at March 22, 2009 08:25 PMChristina, welcome to the world of right wing deniers.. no amount of rational, scientific research or findings are safe from their spin or propaganda. Thank you for providing information contradicting the attempt to bring back the Dark Ages...
Posted by headxray at March 22, 2009 09:09 PMChristina, thanks for the extensive work.
I can remember back in the mid 1970s when there were two theories: one that global cooling could be caused by human activity and a similar one that global warming could be caused by human activity. The mechanisms were different for each theory but both theories were compelling. Global cooling, of course, wasn't wrong; the effect was simply overestimated and adjusted downward as more was understood. In the meantime, the numbers for global warming became more obvious, the mechanisms better understood as well and both suggested increasing danger. Global cooling fell by the wayside as nuclear winter, after further analysis, turned out to be closer to nuclear autumn (at least that was case the last time I saw a flurry of articles on the subject). It was global warming that made so many of us go: what are the latest numbers? What's the CO2 count? What are the ice cores showing? What's happening under the ice sheets? And what are these other global warming mechanisms?
I know people who saw the Alaskan ice glaciers twenty-five years ago and I know people who have seen them recently. The changes have been so dramatic that the two groups of people almost can't have the same conversation since they paint such a different picture.
Year after year, for those of us not invested in either theory, or even invested in the possibility that humans could have such an enormous impact on the the environment, the reality of global warming and its connection to human activity has become more obvious and more alarming.
I don't mind good honest disagreement on global warming, and there is a certain amount of it, but of course there is very little of that compared to the nonsense of the usual nay-sayers who are invested in ideological tripe. They're usually easy to spot. They point to the same studies funded by oil companies or right-wing think tanks. If that doesn't get them somewhere, they shift their ground and hunt up some right wing depositary of gibberish and toss their snow flakes to obscure the discussion. And if that doesn't work, ad hominem attacks start (okay, some scientists resort to such nonsense but if they're the real thing, they do eventually start delivering the goods). It's the same routine over and over. I got my taste of them late in 2002 when they tried to peddle the idea that the aluminum tubes were part of an Iraq nuclear weapons programs. The same methods, the same nonsense.
Christina, it is a pleasure to read someone who does know what she's talking about. And thanks for the many links!
Posted by Craig at March 22, 2009 09:55 PMChristina, welcome to the world of left wing global warming crusaders.. no amount of rational, scientific research or findings are safe from their spin or propaganda. - headxray
Fixed it for you.
Posted by JFixx at March 22, 2009 10:03 PMThey point to the same studies funded by oil companies or right-wing think tanks. If that doesn't get them somewhere, they shift their ground and hunt up some right wing depositary of gibberish and toss their snow flakes to obscure the discussion. - Craig
You have a problem with science, Craig?
59 scientists around the world have officially added their names to the much-publicized U.S. Senate Minority Report that denounces claims about man-made global warming. This pushes the tally of skeptical scientists to well over 700.
According to a new report, the 700-plus scientists are “now more than 13 times the number of U.N. scientists who authored the media-hyped IPCC 2007 Summary for Policymakers.” Many of the scientists are “affiliated with prestigious institutions” including NASA, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Defense Department, Princeton University, as well as countless others.
http://aftermathnews.wordpress.com/2009/03/23/more-than-700-scientists-discredit-man-made-global-warming-fears/
Posted by JFixx at March 22, 2009 10:22 PMI can remember back in the mid 1970s when there were two theories: one that global cooling could be caused by human activity and a similar one that global warming could be caused by human activity
Funny thing, memory. Global warming was dominant in the scientific literature in the 70's. The American Meteorological Society provides a nice review here.
Missing things within these models surely raises questions on their outcome.
We call it uncertainty and you will find the topic thoroughly discussed in the literature. The basic physics is understood, where the problems lie are in details, either due to limited resolution in the models or missing feedbacks. Progress is being made on both fronts all the time. For example, atmospheric physicists are not wrong about the radiative effect of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere but there are likely problems yet to be fixed in the details of cloud droplet processes. This is one reason why the IPCC model intercomparisons are important. Different climate modeling groups often handle details differently and thus the models produce a range of outcomes (different warming time series, different sea ice forecasts, etc. over the next 100 years). That suite of results are compared to observation and among each other and progress is made. There is uncertainty in the magnitude and timing of global warming but not in the sign.
doesn't hold math too highly
Many students in my classes have some trepidation about mathematics. I guess people come to Geology more for the field work than for the differential equations. But the calculus is a language like any other, a way to write about the physical world in which we live. I find it a bit sad that so many people give up in the midst of the grammar lessons, never to experience the conversation of it.
Posted by Christina at March 23, 2009 01:15 AM"an enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in mystery"
Keep spinning.....
There is nothing to spin. Sorry you didn't like the title, I thought it was funny.
Posted by Christina at March 23, 2009 01:17 AMChristina, I have no doubt you're right that global warming dominated the research literature of the 1970s. In reality, however, neither global cooling nor global warming was much in the general literature of the day.
I trace my memory of both theories to places like Scientific American, Time magazine and other venues (some of this is easy to look up). What I particularly remember, sometime in the late 70s or early 80s was a particularly good article, maybe in Scientific American, explaining why global warming was winning out over any theories of global cooling. I wish I still had that article because it was the one that opened my eyes to global warming. I suspect theories of global cooling would have died out even sooner had it not be for the nuclear winter angle.
Global warming in the public consciousness, however did not really take off until the 1980s. But that's social history, not science. Obviously experts in global warming can trace global warming theory back to the 19th century.
Yes, I'm aware of George Will's buffoonery. And yes, he makes up a lot out of whole cloth. But my only point is that some of us came to global warming without having a stake in the argument.
Posted by Craig at March 23, 2009 02:26 AMHave you read the study by Dr. Anastasios Tsonis Christina?
"Scientists at the university used a math application known as synchronized chaos and applied it to climate data taken over the past 100 years.
...
"But if we don't understand what is natural, I don't think we can say much about what the humans are doing. So our interest is to understand -- first the natural variability of climate -- and then take it from there. So we were very excited when we realized a lot of changes in the past century from warmer to cooler and then back to warmer were all natural," Tsonis said." WISN
The creationist spin on climate science is truly depressing. What should depress folks like peter is the realization that, by adopting a deliberate strategy of lies and distortion, they are ensuring that wingnuts have nothing to say in designing solutions - because they are completely discredited.
You're talking to a scientist JFixx, and I've seen every one of your lying talking points quite a few times. My position on climate change has gone from "plausible but uncertain" to "definitely occurring, and more rapidly than initially predicted" based on the data and the progress in the modelling. We understand the feedback much better, we can constrain or rule out important sources (like the Sun), and the various ways of measuring temperature have converged. This is where the actual science is.
The denialist camp is debating whether CO2 absorbs IR light and desperate grasping onto noise spikes in the data. It's exactly like creationism vs. evolution.
Posted by Marc at March 23, 2009 05:22 AMGreat post, Prof Christina, many thanks. Marc, thanks for your comments on the past threads.
So we have here more painstaking work by climate scientists at the very edges of the Earth which confirm (again) the very substantial warming taking place all over the globe.
Not a surprise, but no amount of work by actual climate scientists will persuade wingnut shit-eaters like peter putz and JFool. It's all a game to them, their goal is to "defeat" the hateds lib'ruls, and science is the last thing they care about, or understand. And JFool may not even be literate, as he seems not to understand English.
peter pinhead, the point is WHO is "doing" the math, not the use of math, you cretin. Mathematicians are not earth scientists, no matter how much mathematical "chaos theory" they know. And climate scientists, like all earth scientists, can use "math" to advance their understanding of the data, duh.
And no, peter, the two German physicists paper that professional shit-eater JFool referenced in Mary's prior thread wasn't published in Nature. So you're wrong again, as always. A servile life of dimwitted error devoted to the corrupt "conservative" cause, a meaningless GOoP-coffee spill wiper, an idiotic cog in the seized-up conservative shit machine. What a worthless life.
Posted by euzoius at March 23, 2009 07:06 AMMore on Eric Steig's work here:
antarctic heartburn
But my only point is that some of us came to global warming without having a stake in the argument.
I have no idea what is meant by this. "Had a stake in the argument?" All of us living on the planet have a stake in understanding climate and climate change. If you mean to imply that scientists accept hypotheses as supported before the data are in, I see no evidence of this in my peers (or in myself but I might be biased on that count).
Uh, Christina, you questioned my memory and I explained, politely I thought, that my memory is fine, thank you. You wrote an excellent article. I enjoyed it. So, let's leave it at that.
Posted by Craig at March 23, 2009 02:28 PMThis is where global warming is going to take us...
"JONATHON PORRITT, one of Gordon Brown’s leading green advisers, is to warn that Britain must drastically reduce its population if it is to build a sustainable society.
Porritt’s call will come at this week’s annual conference of the Optimum Population Trust (OPT), of which he is patron.
The trust will release research suggesting UK population must be cut to 30m if the country wants to feed itself sustainably.
Porritt said: “Population growth, plus economic growth, is putting the world under terrible pressure.
“Each person in Britain has far more impact on the environment than those in developing countries so cutting our population is one way to reduce that impact.”" Timesonline
...
"Many experts believe that, since Europeans and Americans have such a lopsided impact on the environment, the world would benefit more from reducing their populations than by making cuts in developing countries.
This is part of the thinking behind the OPT’s call for Britain to cut population to 30m — roughly what it was in late Victorian times.
Britain’s population is expected to grow from 61m now to 71m by 2031. Some politicians support a reduction.
Phil Woolas, the immigration minister, said: “You can’t have sustainability with an increase in population.”"
So who gets to choose who lives? Euz, Mary, Marc, who? Seems they want the 1800's again.
Posted by peter at March 23, 2009 08:35 PMyour criminal hero W was pretty efficient at genocide and picking who to kill petey boy..just saying...
Posted by headxray at March 23, 2009 09:42 PMSorry to be late, but this is really a great article, Christina. Very well written, very informative and truly educational.
Thank you for sharing it with us.
Posted by Mary at March 24, 2009 01:56 AMSo who gets to choose who lives?
Damn, one of these days I want to visit planet Simple (actually how about just calling it "Planet Up-or-Down Vote) CPP.
Posted by Simp at March 24, 2009 02:02 PM