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#76
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While not a social scientist, I spent many years in criminal justice management where data and the analysis of such became more and more refined. My use of that data was critical but awfully difficult to communicate to others. Again, my skepticism comes from too many years working with people who were paid, in effect, to have a particular outcome notwithstanding the data. That I hasten to add, was true on all sides of a given issue. I think one of my problems is that it appears the data analysis is actually very limited, in terms of earth time. What I mean is that there seems to be some pretty good stuff recently, (for the sake of argument, 10,000 years). But beyond that, the analysis becomes very, very weak. My brain says well when you are missing such a huge piece of the picture, then one needs to become very careful. I guess what I am missing is the confidence in the analysis of the proxy data which apparently shows changes associated with human history (industrial revolution). Is that for instance, simply correlation? Are there other possible explanations aside from human activity? Fascinating stuff I say. But, please, I need fish selection help, really. I also wonder if natural events, volcanic activity for example, of which were are not aware have contributed to the temp history?
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#77
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Greenbean, thanks for the replying, am learning much. As a simple mind, let me pose the following:
Assume we have single temp measuring device that is able to accurately record temps for 2 million years. This device is located in my back yard, meeting the accepted standards for measuring temps and so forth. Assume the device records the temp every hour and stores the data so we can retrieve it and play with it whenever we want. IE, the hypothetical temp gauge, perfect in every respect. Am I wrong is saying that such a device and method could provide us with accurate temp readings and we could then model the future based on the huge amount of data we have collected? If so, what things would be interesting to look for in the record? |
#78
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I think it's important to point out that the proxies are simply measurements. You can tell past trends with them, but you can't use them singly to forecast. When combined they can be useful to understand how factors influence each other and to predict whether a trend is likely to continue, but they don't factor in feedbacks. Modeling is a separate discipline that does use proxies, but really relies more on physics. Without the proxies you could still in theory make models, but you would only have about 200 years worth of data to verify them against. So with enough data but no models or with models but no proxy data you could still make good predictions, but when you combine the two you can refine those predictions. It's also important to point out that when real world data is used to create models, the same data can't be used to verify them. Quote:
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Correlation only shows relationships, never causes. We can show that there is a correlation between atmospheric CO2 and temperature, but either one can be a cause for the other. The confidence in the causation comes from estimates of anthropogenic greenhouse production combined with physics, which ultimately give rise to the models, which are then in turn confirmed by observational data. Basically it's a result of the intertwining and agreement of various pieces of evidence, any one of which could be taken away and not cause the collapse of the theory.
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Lanikai, kahakai nani, aloha no au ia 'oe. A hui hou kakou. Last edited by greenbean36191; 12/27/2007 at 01:49 PM. |
#79
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Thanks greenbean for all you have written, very, very helpful. I could go on and on with questions, but you have been grateful enough. I must see about finding a course or something to provide me with an opportunity to learn much more. I used to present to governmental agencies, legislative committees, public groups, etc.......... One of the greatest tools I found was "simple is best." That is, if one can reduce a complex subject to simple terms, then you may find success in getting the message out. Is there a document, web site, or whatever, that takes the evidence about the human contribution to warming and effectively sums it up in some understandable detail? Is the UN report(s) worth finding and reading for example? Again, thanks.
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#80
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IMO the IPCC reports are very long, boring, and can get too technical at times. I've read large parts of them and wouldn't recommend it.
I'm a fan of www.realclimate.org, which covers most of the major new developments in the science, but realize it's written by "mainstream" scientists so it doesn't really represent the side of the "skeptics" except to refute them. At times they get too technical too. Like I mentioned earlier, The Two Mile Time Machine is definitely worth a read. Alley keeps things really simple and has a fun writing style as scientists go. The book also stays very neutral. It's a great intro to paleoclimatology and modeling. I would NOT recommend An Inconvenient Truth. I'll try to come up with a better list tonight, but that's all I can think of right now. I'm visiting the family and don't have anything good saved to my favorites on this computer.
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Lanikai, kahakai nani, aloha no au ia 'oe. A hui hou kakou. |
#81
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Thats bull.... C02 what is causing the earth to heat up is 98% from volcanoes... The other 2% is from us... The earth has a cycle I believe... This is what prob happened years before us... Its a recurrent event, most of everything what happened in the past is going to happen again intel the sun burns out in 10 million years or whenever that is...
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-Brandon |
#82
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The Sand People are easily startled, but they will soon be back, and in greater numbers. All statements have been peer reviewed. |
#83
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Ok, I was lazy last night and didn't spend a whole lot of time trying to find other sites I liked, but here are a few I thought of.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/ncdc.html http://aquarium.ucsd.edu/climate/ Quote:
Beyond estimates based on activity levels and measured rates of output different sources of CO2 leave characteristic isotopic fingerprints that let us track where it came from. The recent changes in the ratios of C12/C13/C14 point to fossil fuels as a major and increasing source of atmospheric carbon.
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Lanikai, kahakai nani, aloha no au ia 'oe. A hui hou kakou. |
#84
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Bill "LOL, well I have no brain apparently. " - dc (Debi) |
#85
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...and usually has more of a cooling effect than warming.
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Lanikai, kahakai nani, aloha no au ia 'oe. A hui hou kakou. |
#86
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Greenbean, please indulge me just one more time, lol. Am I correct in assuming that carbon dioxide is the great evil? That is, man has been producing it at a so-called alarming rate and that it, along with other lessor gases, causes the blanket effect and aids in the increased warming. Am I also correct that carbon dioxide is present in the atmosphere at a level of less than 1 percent, with variations to that number for any number of different reasons, but still less that a percent? If that is the case, am I correct in thinking that the physics is so far over my head that I could never understand how something that small as a part of such a large system could be so allegedly devastating? Is the interaction of carbon dioxide to all of the other variables involved so powerful? I could easily understand if the amount of carbon dio. was like 50 percent, and we had increases taking it up to 60 or higher, like it becomes even visually understanding to someone like myself. But to say that we had a 30 percent increase in some that is less than one percent of something doesn't seem very powerful.
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#87
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Yep, CO2 is a trace gas in the atmosphere and not even the most abundant greenhouse gas (which is water vapor). It actually only makes up about .04% of the atmosphere. However, it's very efficient at trapping heat and accounts for as much as 1/4 of the greenhouse effect. We are causing increases in other gases like methane, but they make up even smaller proportions of the atmosphere and are less efficient at trapping heat.
To grasp how such a small constituent of the atmosphere can be so disproportionally important to the system you don't really even need to worry about the physics. Just think of your reef tank. Calcium makes up about the same percentage of seawater that CO2 makes up in the atmosphere. Imagine if you were to increase or decrease your calcium by 35%. Your alkalinity would go nuts, your pH would probably swing, and your corals, snails, and any other life that used Ca would be very unhappy if not dead. If we were talking about the ocean you would expect to see the same problems, plus some very important components of the plankton would be killed off, which would decrease fish populations and in turn even affect terrestrial animals including birds and people. The same sort of thing can happen with the climate. There are all sorts of feedbacks built in that can magnify small changes. As a result, a small increase in CO2 can indirectly cause much more warming than the heat it can trap alone. As a very cartoonish example, when you heat the planet with CO2 you also increase the amount of water vapor. Some of that forms clouds and helps cool things off, but being a greenhouse gas it also traps heat. The small warming due to H2O+CO2 can cause melting of permafrost which releases more CO2 and methane. It also causes ice to melt, exposing the darker land or ocean underneath, which absorbs heat rather than reflecting it like the ice did.
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Lanikai, kahakai nani, aloha no au ia 'oe. A hui hou kakou. |
#88
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How much has the earth warmed over the last 100 years? Worst case is about .7 degrees F. How much has the earth warmed since 1998? The temperature has gone down by .14 degrees F. At the same time C02 has skyrocketed according to alarmists.
Quite a solid corrrelation isn't it? Can anyone tell me what level of confidence, if any, is required on these climate models? |
#89
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The Sand People are easily startled, but they will soon be back, and in greater numbers. All statements have been peer reviewed. |
#90
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Wow what science?
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#91
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What?
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The Sand People are easily startled, but they will soon be back, and in greater numbers. All statements have been peer reviewed. |
#92
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Wow, we're going in circles.
Sam, I'm sure you won't trust any numbers I give you, so do me a huge favor and plot out a trend line for the global temp anomaly for the years 1986-2006 and one for 1999-2006. Since you're intent on starting with 1998, go ahead and do a 5-year running average starting with 1998 too. Once you've applied the statistics tell me what the recent trend is again.
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Lanikai, kahakai nani, aloha no au ia 'oe. A hui hou kakou. Last edited by greenbean36191; 12/30/2007 at 04:52 PM. |
#93
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How does correlation prove causation?
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#94
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The Sand People are easily startled, but they will soon be back, and in greater numbers. All statements have been peer reviewed. |
#95
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Talk about a straw man. I don't think anyone but you ever said anything about correlation at all, much less that it proves causation.
Over 100 years ago it was predicted based on the quantifiable physics of greenhouse gases that there should be a relationship between atmospheric CO2 and global temp. We also know from estimated carbon budgets and observations that we've significantly changed the CO2 concentrations, so we should expect to see warming. Now it's obvious in the observational temp records that the predictions held true. The fact that we can reproduce the observed trends using physics based models suggest that we have a pretty good grasp on the causes and the physics behind them. There is a pretty strong correlation between CO2 and temp. It's not a perfect correlation, but when you use real-world data you never get a perfect correlation even for simple relationships (which CO2/ temp isn't). It would be a huge surprise if you did get a perfect correlation between CO2 and temp given that CO2 is only one of many forcings that affects temp. In any event the correlation between the two can never been used as a scientific argument that CO2 causes warming because we know that increased CO2 can also be an effect of warming.
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Lanikai, kahakai nani, aloha no au ia 'oe. A hui hou kakou. |
#96
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And just for grins and giggles I plotted out the trends for you. I did it with the CRUTEM3 (land) and HadCRUT3 (land and sea) temp anomaly observational data. Using both datasets I got an increasing trend from 1986-1997, from 1999-2006, and across the whole interval from 1986-2006. In fact, slope of the trend line after 1998 was more than from 1986-1997 (so a faster rate of increase). The only way I was able to get a decreasing trend line starting with 1998 was to stop at 2002 and even then the decrease was extremely small.
Here are the graphs for the HadCRUT3 data. This one shows the trend line for 1986-2006. The red line is a 5 year running average. This one shows the trendline from 1999-2006. With 1998 included the slope changes to 0.008 (still positive). I also used the same data and plotted it out against atmospheric CO2 measurements from Mauna Loa for 1986-2003. You get an R-squared of 0.63. That means that changes in which of the two you assign as the independent variable (which would be CO2 based on the physics) could explain as much as 63% of the variability in dependent variable during that period. For 1999-2003 it's 0.81 (or 81%).
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Lanikai, kahakai nani, aloha no au ia 'oe. A hui hou kakou. |
#97
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New Peer-Reviewed Scientific Studies Chill Global Warming Fears
Posted By Marc Morano – Marc_Morano@EPW.Senate.Gov – 4:44 PM ET Washington DC – An abundance of new peer-reviewed studies, analyses, and data error discoveries in the last several months has prompted scientists to declare that fear of catastrophic man-made global warming “bites the dust” and the scientific underpinnings for alarm may be “falling apart.” The latest study to cast doubt on climate fears finds that even a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide would not have the previously predicted dire impacts on global temperatures. This new study is not unique, as a host of recent peer-reviewed studies have cast a chill on global warming fears. “Anthropogenic (man-made) global warming bites the dust,” declared astronomer Dr. Ian Wilson after reviewing the new study which has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Geophysical Research. Another scientist said the peer-reviewed study overturned “in one fell swoop” the climate fears promoted by the UN and former Vice President Al Gore. The study entitled “Heat Capacity, Time Constant, and Sensitivity of Earth’s Climate System,” was authored by Brookhaven National Lab scientist Stephen Schwartz. (LINK) “Effectively, this (new study) means that the global economy will spend trillions of dollars trying to avoid a warming of ~ 1.0 K by 2100 A.D.” Dr. Wilson wrote in a note to the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee on August 19, 2007. Wilson, a former operations astronomer at the Hubble Space Telescope Institute in Baltimore MD, was referring to the trillions of dollars that would be spent under such international global warming treaties like the Kyoto Protocol. “Previously, I have indicated that the widely accepted values for temperature increase associated with a doubling of CO2 were far too high i.e. 2 – 4.5 Kelvin. This new peer-reviewed paper claims a value of 1.1 +/- 0.5 K increase for a doubling of CO2,” he added. Climate fears reduced to ‘children’s games’ Other scientists are echoing Wilson’s analysis. Former Harvard physicist Dr. Lubos Motl said the new study has reduced proponents of man-made climate fears to “playing the children’s game to scare each other.” “Recall that most of the 1.1 degree - about 0.7 degrees - has already occurred since the beginning of the industrial era. This fact itself is an indication that the climate sensitivity is unlikely to be much greater than 1 Celsius degree: the effect of most of the doubling has already been made and it led to 0.7 K of warming,” Motl wrote in an August 17, 2007 blog post. (LINK) “By the end of the (CO2) doubling i.e. 560 ppm (parts per million) expected slightly before (the year) 2100 -- assuming a business-as-usual continued growth of CO2 that has been linear for some time -- Schwartz and others would expect 0.4 C of extra warming only - a typical fluctuation that occurs within four months and certainly nothing that the politicians should pay attention to,” Motl explained. “As far as I can say, all the people who end up with 2 or even 3 Celsius degrees for the climate sensitivity are just playing the children's game to scare each other, as [MIT climate scientist] Richard Lindzen says, by making artificial biased assumptions about positive feedbacks. There is no reasonable, balanced, and self-consistent work that would lead to such a relatively high sensitivity,” Motl concluded. Overturning IPCC consensus ‘in one fell swoop’ The new study was also touted as “overturning the UN IPCC 'consensus’ in one fell swoop” by the American Enterprise Institute’s (AEI) Joel Schwartz in an August 17, 2007 blog post. (LINK) “New research from Stephen Schwartz of Brookhaven National Lab concludes that the Earth’s climate is only about one-third as sensitive to carbon dioxide as the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) assumes,” wrote AEI’s Schwartz, who hold a master’s degree in planetary science from the California Institute of Technology. The study’s “result is 63% lower than the IPCC’s estimate of 3 degrees C for a doubling of CO2 (2.0–4.5 degrees C, 2SD range). Right now we’re about 41% above the estimated pre-industrial CO2 level of 270 ppm. At the current rate of increase of about 0.55% per year, CO2 will double around 2070. Based on Schwartz’s results, we should expect about a 0.6 degrees C additional increase in temperature between now and 2070 due to this additional CO2. That doesn’t seem particularly alarming,” AEI’s Schwartz explained. “In other words, there’s hardly any additional warming ‘in the pipeline’ from previous greenhouse gas emissions. This is in contrast to the IPCC, which predicts that the Earth’s average temperature will rise an additional 0.6 degrees C during the 21st Century even if greenhouse gas concentrations stopped increasing,” he added. “Along with dozens of other studies in the scientific literature, [this] new study belies Al Gore’s claim that there is no legitimate scholarly alternative to climate catastrophism. Indeed, if Schwartz’s results are correct, that alone would be enough to overturn in one fell swoop the IPCC’s scientific ‘consensus’, the environmentalists’ climate hysteria, and the political pretext for the energy-restriction policies that have become so popular with the world’s environmental regulators, elected officials, and corporations. The question is, will anyone in the mainstream media notice?” AEI’s Schwartz concluded. UK officially admits: Global warming has stopped! Recent scientific studies may make 2007 go down in history as the "tipping point" of man-made global warming fears. A progression of peer-reviewed studies have been published which serve to debunk the United Nations, former Vice President Al Gore, and the media engineered “consensus” on climate change. Paleoclimate scientist Bob Carter, who has testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works (LINK), noted in a June 18, 2007 essay that global warming has stopped. “The accepted global average temperature statistics used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that no ground-based warming has occurred since 1998. Oddly, this eight-year-long temperature stasis has occurred despite an increase over the same period of 15 parts per million (or 4 per cent) in atmospheric CO2. Second, lower atmosphere satellite-based temperature measurements, if corrected for non-greenhouse influences such as El Nino events and large volcanic eruptions, show little if any global warming since 1979, a period over which atmospheric CO2 has increased by 55 ppm (17 %),” (LINK) In August 2007, the UK Met Office was finally forced to concede the obvious: global warming has stopped. (LINK) The UK Met Office acknowledged the flat lining of global temperatures, but in an apparent attempt to keep stoking man-made climate alarm, the Met Office is now promoting more unproven dire computer model projections of the future. They now claim climate computer models predict “global warming will begin in earnest in 2009” because greenhouse emissions will then overtake natural climate variability. Southern Hemisphere is COOLING UN scientist Dr. Madhav L. Khandekar, a retired Environment Canada scientist and an expert IPCC reviewer in 2007, explained on August 6, 2007 that the Southern Hemisphere is cooling. “In the Southern Hemisphere, the land-area mean temperature has slowly but surely declined in the last few years. The city of Buenos Aires in Argentina received several centimeters of snowfall in early July, and the last time it snowed in Buenos Aires was in 1918! Most of Australia experienced one of its coldest months of June this year. Several other locations in the Southern Hemisphere have experienced lower temperatures in the last few years. Further, the sea surface temperatures over world oceans are slowly declining since mid-1998, according to a recent world-wide analysis of ocean surface temperatures," Dr. Khandekar explained. (LINK) |
#98
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Interesting website I found in Business Week. I'm sure it's biased a bit but it has some interesting points. I still think coal is the biggest problem, not oil.
http://www.architecture2030.org/home.html http://www.architecture2030.org/curr...stop_coal.html http://www.architecture2030.org/curr...al_impact.html
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One's standard of living is definitively determined by the size of their reef. - me We live with each other, not for ourselves - Protect our planet |
#99
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Sam, that sort of blog post really scares me because a lot of people find them convincing. For such a long post, there's not a single logically valid claim made. I think the fact that this sort of argument is convincing to the general public really says a lot about the state of scientific literacy. I really don't know where to start in pointing out the errors.
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Furthermore, science is all about replication. A single paper saying that everyone else missed something does not mean that everyone else was wrong. It simply means that the new information needs to be investigated more to confirm who is right. Beyond the fact that the rules of science haven't changed, it should raise a red flag when every paper that differs from the IPCC report (even if the differences are statistically insignificant) is touted as the one what will overturn everything. On to the actual content: The thing that really irks me the most about these blog posts is the blatant misrepresentation of what the authors state and what can be concluded from that. This "revolutionary" paper by Schwartz is a great example of the disconnect between what the author says and what bloggers say. The paper makes no claim that the IPCC data is wrong or that the data produced is better. It's simply an experiment to see if a simpler climate modeling process can be used to get similar results. It's extremely ironic that skeptics are constantly complaining that existing models are too simple in how they model clouds and ocean currents, yet they cite this paper which treats the entire planet, land, sea, and sky, as if they have homogeneous properties and assumes a linear relationship between CO2 and temp. This method also can't reproduce real world data like more complex models can, which suggest that it's far from accurate. The author also even states that the upper edge of the predicted range would result in catastrophic warming, which is contrary to the bloggers' statements that it predicts insignificant warming. Quote:
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Lanikai, kahakai nani, aloha no au ia 'oe. A hui hou kakou. |
#100
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Poor Polar Bears.
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