Poor countries cutting more emissions than the rich

[WoodDragon]

I enjoy demonstrating what a goose you are...over and over again.....

Hutch, Hutch, Hutch...

Projecting, much?

All you are "demonstrating" is that you are scientifically ignorant.

Oh, and that you couldn't acknowledge a scientific correction if your life depended upon it.

It takes 2 seconds to find rambling graphs that dispute anything....

Sure, Hutch, but nothing that you find is correct. And nothing that I post has been demonstrated by you to be incorrect.

That's the whole point.

PS, I'm a scientist.

Was that a threat, a warning or a boast? ... [blah, blah, blah.]

None of the above, so you can put your apparent paranoia back into its box.

It was simply to point out that I have the professional background to immediately spot your crap, when you yourself obviously can't.

If you took that as being anything more than the supply of relevant information, that's for you to take up with your therapist. It's definitely not my problem. And I'm certainly not the one who makes threats here, Hutch...

Are you really that rattled by people with some real understanding of a particular subject, Hutch, if it means that they can demonstrate your own lack of understanding?

Now, on the matter of understanding, it's also obvious that you couldn't spot your "soldier's" bunkum. Let's investigate...

CO2 in Perspective [sic]:

Take a 200 litre (44 gallon) drum to represent the entire volume of the Earth’s atmosphere.

Volume of total atmosphere 200 litres

Volume of water vapour 67 litres

Volume of total carbon dioxide 72 ml

Volume of human carbon dioxide 2.4 ml (half a teaspoon)

Volume of additional human carbon dioxide per year 0.012 ml

This is equal to the volume of one peppercorn.

Volume of Australian extra human carbon dioxide per year 0.00017 ml

This is equal to the volume of one grain of sugar.

One grain of sugar in the volume of a 200 litre drum!

Right, let's start with water.

"Soldier"-boy is wrong to say that there is 67 liters of water in every 200 litres of atmosphere - that's 33% of the atmosphere. A quick check will confirm that 0.4% of the atmosphere is water, which would be 0.8 litre in 200 litres. The only thing that remotely explains "Soldier"-boy's over-estimation by 84 times is that he thinks that 33% relative humidity is the same as being 33% filled with water.

Um, no.

Now, let's look at CO₂. SB is not correct when he says that the current atmospheric composition is 72 ml in 200 litres - it is actually 78.8 ml per 200 litres (394 ppm). And further, the "human carbon dioxide" volume is (394-280)/394 x 78.8 ml = 28.9% x 78.8 ml = 22.8 ml. Not 2.4 ml. That's 9.5 times more than SB says. Yes, an order of magnitude more... Bugger, huh?

And to put the human contribution in context, the current atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is (394-280)/280 = 40.7% greater than the pre-Industrial Revolution concentration.

But let's go back to the 78.8 ml carbon dioxide in the 200 litres of atmosphere...

Each year since 2000 humans have been adding approximately 2/394 = ~0.5% more CO₂ to the atmosphere. In our 78.8 ml of CO₂ that works out to an extra 0.4 ml - annually... which is not the 0.012 ml that SB claims. In fact, it's 33.7 times more...

The peppercorns and grains of sugar aren't really worth commenting about, after that clarification. Eh?

So, your "soldier" source must have lost a few fingers and toes in combat, because his arithmetic capacities (and probably his research abilities) are shot to pieces.

But let's forget all of "soldiers's" mistakes for a moment. Let's instead imagine the current CO₂ portion of the atmosphere as being represented by that mythic 200 litres. Humans are annually adding another 1.03 litres to that volume - perhaps that gives you a bit more context. And if you have any clue at all about compound interest, you'd quickly see how that results in the fact that humans have raised atmospheric CO₂ concentration by more than 40% since the middle of the 18th century.

And a bit more context...

Ozone makes up 0.00006% of the atmosphere, and yet it manages to absorb most of the UV radiation from coming in from the sun. Given that the current atmospheric concentration of atmospheric CO2 is 394 ppm, there is 657 times more CO₂ in the atmosphere than there is ozone. It is crazy to argue that CO2 has no planetary-affecting infrared radiation absorbing capacity, and to simultaneously accept that ozone can absorb most of the UV, and at a concentration 657 times lower than that of CO₂.

Put another way, "if all of the ozone were compressed to the pressure of the air at sea level, it would be only 3 millimeters thick". And this layer absorbs most of the incoming UV radiation which would otherwise sterilise much of the planet. To compare, the current concentration of CO₂ would form a layer 1.971 metres thick at a sea level atmospheric pressure, in an equivalently-pressured homogeneous atmosphere of 5 kilometres thick.

And compare further, to the pre-Industrial Revolution concentration of atmospheric CO₂ of 280 ppm, which would have formed a layer 1.169 metres thick. This amount of CO₂ warms the planet by 3 degrees celcius, and every doubling of this amount warms it by a further 3 degrees. Consider that during the last ice age the planet was about 6 degrees C colder, and during the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum, the world was about 6 C warmer. Neither climate is conducive to human civilisation and society as we know it, and these numbers demonstrate how narrow a mean global temperature range we rely upon for our survival. They also demonstrate how much we are tweaking the climate knob, and how the magnitude of our emissions is very much on the order that can and will profoundly affect the temperature of the planet.

You might not be able to conceptualise it, Hutch, but this is the simple truth. The amount of CO₂ that humans are putting into the atmosphere will profoundly affect the biosphere, through its effect on global temperature. It's plain physics.

And roaring on the heels of temperature change is the problem of ocean acidification, another consequence of increased CO₂, and plain chemistry, but that's fodder for another thread.

[Edit: to include text]

Edited June 13, 2011 by WoodDragon

[Halcyon Daze]

Hey this is really good, WoodDragon, thanks for digging out all these facts and figures. I find your replies very informative.

Shame you have to put up with so much abuse from those screaming caged monkeys who can only hurl shit around.

May I ask, do you see a moral/ ethical responsibility in using your role in science to speak-out about climate issues?

I pretty much do. The way I see it, if I won't get off my ass and do something about it, I can't expect anyone else to. -I'm the one with the background in science!

If I had a background in say engineering, I'd probably be speaking out about dodgy building constructions or something like that.

It just happens that science is currently faced with the biggest threat ever facing humanity lol.

I guess I didn't know what I was really getting myself into all those years ago.

[Slybacon]

^^^^ Takes two to tango, sometimes more. If you ask me you look like just as much of an idiot, pretending that your debate is really saving the planet. To me it just seems like a way to justify your own emotion. I can't see how coming down on hutch so hard is furthering your commitment to the environment. If he is really so far from the truth than why do you even dignify him with an answer. You must not trust peoples ability to sort through the truth and the lies, as tho your righteousness places you above the rest of us.

Maybe it would be best to try and connect with such people without resorting to scientific insults. You may be suprised to learn that people you label as deniers or skeptics want to see us all change to be self sustaining, they just dont see climate change as the best catylist for such action.

There are many issues facing humanity today, and the priority each indivdial places on such issues may not be appropriate for your own destiny, but I think we all need to respect each other and understand that we are all on the same team here.......

[WoodDragon]

If you ask me you look like just as much of an idiot, pretending that your debate is really saving the planet.

Bacon, I'm not pretending.

That's exactly what this is all about - saving the planet for the generations of human society yet to comes, and for the biodiversity that we have today.

I don't give a rat's arse for politics, or for taxes or other aspects of economics, or for fame or glory as Hutch thinks. I'm anonymous here, so no glory could come my way, anyway. I'd much rather be dealing with the other ecological problems that humans are inflicting on the planet, but without humanity doing something about its warming of the planet, all of the other problems are moot.

To me it just seems like a way to justify your own emotion.

Bacon, you must be joking.

I am a pragmatist, and I want to see the biodiversity that I have spent a life-time studying and understanding, survive for the benefit of future human generations. My involvement in the matter stems from my scientific understanding, and not from a fatal attraction to fluffy puppies.

Having said that, I have a strong vested interest in the emotional side, because I have little kids who will have to live in the world that we leave behind. To answer HD's question, yes, there is a strong moral and ethical imperative here, both for human interest and for the interest of the species that have no voice.

Ironically, the real emotionalism in this debate is more likely seated in Hutch's approach. These are not my words, but they encapsulate a lot of the psycology underpinning denialism:

1) Denial is usually motivated by a desire to suppress the emotional response arising from a frightening or disturbing environmental occurrence and the necessity of taking responsibility for one's own actions, or the actions of others with whom the subject has a strong emotional attachment as being the cause for such an occurrence, or for the need of responding sensibly to the threat represented by the occurrence.

2) The initial response is to intellectualize or rationalize away the occurrence, with the pretense that it either does not exist, or that if it does exist, it isn't threatening, or else that it isn't one's own responsibility to face the threat.

3) When confronted by others that the subject is rationalizing away a very real environmental threat, it is common for one in denial to project his own suppressed emotional response upon those confronting him and claim that those confronting him are engaging in personal abuse. A behavior known as DARVO: Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender.

There's been a lot of the above displayed here and elsewhere, by the deniers of climate science.

I can't see how coming down on hutch so hard is furthering your commitment to the environment.

It's not furthering my commitment to the environment - my commitment is already at 11 on the dial.

Perhaps you mean 'furthering benefit to the environment'. In that case you should know already that I am not interested in changing Hutch's mind - I know full-well that it's impossible to change ideological recalcitrance, especially where it is based on an extreme display of the Dunning-Kruger effect. My interest is to show to third party lurkers here that Hutch cannot support or sustain his claims that anthropogenic global warming is a conspiracy by fraudulent and/or incompetent scientists. And look back over this thread and the global 'cooling' thread. Hutch has never been able to give a piece of scientific refutation that contradicts the huge body of professional, expert work. Oh, he comes up with lots of tabloid and/or conspiracy site stuff, but that's like relying on the Woman's Day for scientific advice.

Note especially how he has not touched with a barge pole the fact that Watts' own SurfaceStations project eventually proved that Watts' claims about the US temperature record was wrong, and that it took him several years to do so after the scientific community had already worked it out. Why? Because he did not understand:

1) the scientists had already worked out which weather stations could be used for climate study, with what caveats

2) the scientists had already determined what degree of sampling was required for optimum power vs effort - Watt's did even understand this basic statistical fact and thought that the last few dozen sites would change the influence of the hundreds that had been 'collected' before.

Heck, even Richard Muller, Hutch's apparent scientific saviour, understood the significance of power analysis and called - in Congress - the results of his work with 2% of the data in. And it did exactly the same thing that Watt's work eventually did - it proved the professional climatologists were right all along, and that Watts' and Muller's theory of incompetence and/or fraud were wrong.

But no comment from Hutch about this...

If Hutch can't understand, after months of gentle and then not-so-gentle indication, that he is barking up the wrong tree, then he can't expect to be treated with kid gloves.

Hutch will never change his mind; not if I was nice to him, nor if I was hard on him, nor if the planet's vegetation was scorched from its surface overnight. But to the extent that his pseudoscientific nonsense might sway other people who read it, I am quite happy to make it known in no uncertain terms that science shows Hutch to be completely wrong.

Maybe it would be best to try and connect with such people without resorting to scientific insults.

The insults aren't scientific - it's the data that's scientific. And 'nice' was tried by the scientific community for about twenty years, and all that brought was the ability of transnational fossil fuel companies (and associated vested interests) to spread crap without any significant opposition.

It's too late now to keep on being nice, and it's probably too late now for any seriously effective action to be taken. But any action is better than none, and as long as the Hutches of the world are standing in the way, they're building on their culpability for the consequences, and they're compromising my kids' future and that of billions of other people who want a livable planet.

There's no time left for nice, especially for people who think that they know better than the experts.

You may be suprised to learn that people you label as deniers or skeptics want to see us all change to be self sustaining, they just dont see climate change as the best catylist for such action.

It's not about whether they "see climate change as the best catylist for such action". People can't pick and choose the phenomena that are affecting the planet. The simple fact is that climate change is real, it's happening, and falling for the logical fallacy of wishful thinking is not going to change that one iota. That's what denialism's about, and it's why it will fail, every time.

The problem is that wishful thinker's can't perceive the truth because they:

1) don't have they education and/or experience,

2) don't see the data or the empirical evidence around the world,

3) can't think on scales of time and/or space required to formulate a working understanding,

4) are blinkered by their subjective beliefs,

and/or

5) don't understand that they don't understand (Dunning-Kruger)

The issue is not about "seeing climate change as the best catylist for such action". The issue is that climate change is happening, whether we like it or not, and that it must be addressed if we want to leave a habitable world for our descendants.

There are many issues facing humanity today, and the priority each indivdial places on such issues may not be appropriate for your own destiny, but I think we all need to respect each other and understand that we are all on the same team here.......

Bacon, anthropogenic global warming is a part of everyone's destiny, whether they like it or not, if they are not already in their old age. And for some people it will still affect them, even if they already are advancing into their old age.

It cannot be avoided, and it will be worse the longer than we dither and pretend that it's not happening.

Different people might have different priorities for action, but unfortunately this does not preclude taking action on warming. And the simple fact is that the planet's people as a whole need to take action, each to their share, and playing a game of policy chicken because someone doesn't want to go first, or to admit to the fundamental fact of the matter, is simply stupid.

I would prefer that saying so didn't have to upset people, but if it's a choice between the hard truth and the feelings of wilting petals who don't understand that we're damaging the planet, I'll choose hard truth every day.

Edited June 14, 2011 by WoodDragon

[Slybacon]

Thanks for the reply,

Although I think you missed the point. For every person like Hutch who apposes the idea of AGW there are countless more with a similar feeling on the whole topic. You cannot fight this fire with fire.

Now you seem like a very intelligent and articulate gentleman, why is so hard to find a positive button to press that will facilitate change without carrying on with all the righteous scientific hippy crap. It just seems so beyond you to get so insulting and lower yourself to such crap. I mean if somethings not working why continue. Why not try and find a better way of bringing about this change. I know you just feel like making Hutch look bad, but this seems childish.... We are all adults and make our own assumptions regarding Hutch's material with out your sarcastic, condesending tone in your posts, and it seems even worse when you start to gang up with a pose. Can't you offer your side of the story without having to make a point of how idiotic the otherside is. Kinda gives the impression that "if you listen to this wanker you must be dumb", pretty crappy way to make your point.

. Please find something that you can both learn from each other, as the division on SAB gives me a Bad vibe, cause I know if were all meeting face to face it would be fine.

[Slybacon]

The problem is that wishful thinker's can't perceive the truth because they:

1) don't have they education and/or experience.........................

 

You don't understand how to fix the "problem"..... You agree with the idea of a Tax, but you have said that this isn't your level of speciality and it is the job of the economist to figure this out. Now if we are all seperate parts of the same machine, what area of education is the HEAD?

The thing is WD, Nobody knows how to fix this potential issue, or if it can even be prevented at all.

[Halcyon Daze]

Nobody knows how to fix this potential issue, or if it can even be prevented at all.

 

I know how to fix the problem. I've just come back from our Natural Resource Management meeting and we've organized a climate change workshop with guest speaker to inform and educate farmers and members of the community about the issues of a changing climate.

You're most welcome to attend and find out what you can do and how you can prepare for it. Nothing hippie about it.

[Slybacon]

What will you be informing them to do?

I would hope at the very least you are suggesting the following and not, vote yes for a carbon tax-

Grow Hemp

Farm Solar

Trade Local

Avoid GM

[Halcyon Daze]

I won't be doing any informing, that's for our speakers. I'm just helping link people with those in the know. I can't imagine it will get political either.

Personally I don't trust the carbon tax that much because I think it's too weak, but I'd rather do something than nothing.

I totally agree with your points though and yeah, definitely 'Power to the People'! At the risk of sounding granola lol.

I think most of us probably have more in common than we realize sometimes.

[Slybacon]

Solar event that may have caused last ice age happening again?

New data released Tuesday at the annual meeting of the solar physics division of the American Astronomical Society in Las Cruces, New Mexico, may suggest that we are headed towards a solar event that hasn't happened in hundreds of years.

The new findings came from studies that found a missing jet stream in the solar interior, fading sunspots on the sun's visible surface, and changes in the corona and near the poles - all of which point towards declining solar activity at a time when our closest star should be showing signs of increasing activity.

There are some scientists at the conference believe that the current findings from the studies mean that we are at the beginning of a Maunder Minimum, a decades long period of low solar activity.

The last time such an event occurred was between 1645 to 1715. That solar event is thought to have caused the Little Ice Age that struck Europe and North America. Temperatures in those regions dropped by 1.8 to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit(1-1.5 degrees Celsius)

According to Frank Hill, the associate director of the National Solar Observatory's Solar Synoptic Network, "This is highly unusual and unexpected".

Normally the sun goes through an eleven-year cycle of high and low activity. Scientists had predicted that the Sun, which should be beginning its 25th cycle, would reach a solar maximum in the year 2013, but new findings are beginning to contradict that prediction.

The new studies showed that there was currently no indication that the 25th cycle had started yet. In addition, the previous cycle (cycle 24) had been noted by scientists as being a very dormant cycle, consisting of little activity.

The new findings also follow last week's unusual solar eruption that is being highly talked about in the astronomy community. The event was unusual in the way the solar flare erupted and then fell back to the surface rather than being ejected into space. However, there is no known connection between the studies and last week's event.

In 2001, NASA released a study on the previous Maunder Minimum called "Solar forcing of regional climate change during the Maunder Minimum," which noted that although the solar event may have caused the Little Ice Age, there is probably little worry that it will greatly affect our global climate today. One of the report's authors Drew Shindell added, "The biggest catalyst for climate change today are greenhouse gases."

Astronomers will be watching the sun carefully over the next couple of years looking for any changes. If it turns out that we are entering a Maunder Minimum it could greatly change scientists' understanding of our closest star.

[Slybacon]

THE NSW government has called on Julia Gillard to immediately dump incentives for households that install rooftop solar panels, saying federal Labor's green scheme is too expensive.

Despite Climate Change Minister Greg Combet having scaled back subsidies in the scheme to quell anger over rocketing electricity prices, the NSW pricing watchdog yesterday confirmed that the federal government's renewable energy target - which requires 20 per cent of electricity to be produced from renewable energy sources by 2020 - would be responsible for six percentage points of a 17 per cent increase in power bills from July 1.

NSW Energy Minister Chris Hartcher seized on the price hike to demand that Canberra's "very costly" renewable energy schemes be dismantled.

"The Prime Minister may look good when she makes the announcement, but at the end of the day someone has to pay, and it's the electricity customers of NSW who are paying," Mr Hartcher said yesterday.

"We are appealing to the federal government to bring to an end the very costly renewable energy programs it has, and not to proceed with the carbon tax, which will simply send electricity prices spiralling even more than they are today."

The NSW move comes just days after the Productivity Commission found that renewable schemes were wasting money and holding back deeper cuts to greenhouse emissions.

The push threatens to escalate tensions between the state and federal governments over the cost of green schemes ahead of the start of the Prime Minister's planned carbon tax.

The NSW Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal urged all governments nationwide to investigate their green schemes to ensure whether these were cost-effective and not at odds with any national scheme.

Mr Combet's office said last night that "generous" state and territory policies had been a key contributing factor to electricity price increases.

"The government believes a carbon price is the cheapest, fairest and most effective way of cutting carbon pollution," the spokesman said. "The states and territories should be mindful of this when implementing their complementary policy agendas."

IPART chairman Rod Sims said the federal government should immediately dump its solar credits multiplier, which created an inflated number of renewable energy certificates and this was passed on to all consumers in higher prices.

The certificates are given to households that install small panel systems, but retailers are required to buy them.

Mr Combet's office said the government had already reduced the multiplier "to balance the need to support households taking action on climate change with easing the impact on electricity prices".

The federal opposition seized on yesterday's finding to accuse the government of being untrustworthy on the impacts of the carbon tax.

It pointed to comments by former climate change minister Penny Wong in August 2009 in which she said that modelling the government had done in relation to the RET suggested it would be responsible for an increase in electricity prices of about 4 per cent between 2010 and 2020.

Coalition environment spokesman Greg Hunt said it appeared there was a massive blowout in the cost of the RET.

"How can they ever expect you to trust them on the carbon tax, which will have an additional and dramatically greater effect than the RET," Mr Hunt said.

IPART said it was recent changes to the RET that had increased prices by six percentage points.

The government split the RET into two - creating two separate market for large-scale renewable projects and small-scale projects - but IPART found this move had proved costly.

Mr Combet has recently said he will reduce the solar credits multiplier more rapidly so that it falls from its current factor of five to a factor of three on July 1. It will then fall by one point each year until it expires in 2013.

Deejay Parker, national marketing manager with solar panel installer Solar Harness, said yesterday that removing extra renewable energy credits for solar systems would destroy the market. But he said the federal government's plans to reduce the solar credit multiplier of free certificates from five to three by July 1 would jeopardise his business, anyway. "It probably wasn't an ideal system in the first place; they created a false economy," he said.

The O'Farrell government, meanwhile, has agreed to fund the costs of the NSW solar bonus scheme, which IPART concluded had spared consumers further price rises of several percentage points.

Mr Sims said he welcomed the federal and state moves to provide relief from continuing increases in electricity prices. "But we continue to recommend a number of further changes to government policy because we believe there is more that can and should be done to ensure that customers are not paying more than necessary and to protect vulnerable customers," Mr Sims said.

He called for electricity retailers to be forced to redistribute financial gains they make from the NSW government's solar bonus scheme back to the government. This immediately angered electricity retailers, who warned that the move could make customers with solar panel "no-go zones" for smaller energy suppliers.

The O'Farrell government has come under fire for backflipping on its plan to cut its tariff paid to householders who generate surplus electricity using rooftop panels from 60c to 40c a kilowatt hour.

IPART also echoed warnings by climate change adviser Ross Garnaut and energy users that problems with the regulation of electricity networks could be driving up costs and needed review.

After yesterday's decision, the average household in NSW will be slugged an extra $216 and $316 a year on their power bill from July 1, while a typical small business will pay between $307 and $528 more annually.

Further rise of between 2 per cent and 10 per cent are expected from July next year, even if no price is put on carbon.

Additional reporting: Nicolas Perpitch

 

[qualia]

according to recent polls (and i take news ltd polls with fistfulls of salt), ~40% of australians don't believe in AGW. seems the voice of opposition is slowly winning.

[WoodDragon]

Solar event that may have caused last ice age happening again?

The short answer is very definitely "no".

The long answer is explained here, at What if the Sun Got Stuck?, which completely pulls the question to pieces, number by number, fact by fact.

If the site is too daunting for some, the medium-sized answer can be condensed into two paragraphs from the site:

The Earth absorbs ~235 W/m², of solar energy, averaged over the Earth’s surface. So climate forcing due to change from solar minimum to solar maximum is about 1/4 W/m². If equilibrium climate sensitivity is 3°C for doubled CO2 (3/4°C per W/m²), the expected equilibrium response to this solar forcing is ~0.2°C. However, because of the ocean’s thermal inertia less than half of the equilibrium response would be expected for a cyclic forcing with ~11 year period. Thus the expected global-mean transient response to the solar cycle is less than or approximately 0.1°C.

[snip]

Thus if the sun remains “out”, i.e., stuck for a long period in the current solar minimum, it can offset only about 7 years of CO2 increase. The human-made greenhouse gas climate forcing is now relentlessly, monotonically, increasing at a rate that overwhelms variability of natural climate forcings. Unforced variability of global temperature is great, as shown in Figure 4, but the global temperature trend on decadal and longer time scales is now determined by the larger human-made climate forcing. Speculation that we may have entered a solar-driven long-term cooling trend must be dismissed as a pipe-dream.

Note, this is 7 years maximum delay of the greenhouse gas-induced warming. That is, the sun would have to stay quiet for centuries in order for the whole contemporary warming event to be delayed by seven years in its overall trajectory. The minute that the sun starts a normal warming cycle again (and the best money is on the inevitability that it will), even those seven years of delay will be lost.

I strongly recommend the whole article, because it gives a lot of other pertinent information.

And, just quietly, the sunspot cycle is already starting on its next active cycle, as a quick look at the Marshall Space Flight Center's web site will show the interested enquirer:

So the whole 'cooling' thing is a moot point...

Edited June 15, 2011 by WoodDragon

[WoodDragon]

Luminosity is probably the best indicator of solar ouput.

Sadly for those who think that the sun is responsible for global warming (or, alternatively, that it is about to drop us into a glacial maximum), the sun's luminosity for the last few decades has been remarkably constant, and is not correlated with the concurrent planetary temperature rise.

[WoodDragon]

I know that I linked to this video in the global "cooling" thread, but I can't be shagged trying to find it. However, it's been updated with some simple-to-understand graphs and a lot of relevant links to other stuff, so have a look as Peter Sinclair puts the whole global cooling thing into accessible context.

[WoodDragon]

 

Off-topic, but an important video for those who might not understand how climate change denialism, and other scientific sillinesses, are being perpetrated.

[hutch]

other scientific sillinesses, are being perpetrated.

 

I'm back....found this interesting and supports WoodDragons quote

A blunder of staggering proportions by the IPCC

Steve McIntyre has uncovered a blunder on the part of Pachauri and the IPCC that is causing waves of doubt and calls for retooling on both sides of the debate. In a nutshell, the IPCC made yet another inflated claim that:

 

…80 percent of the world's energy supply could be met by renewables by mid-century…

Unfortunately, it has been revealed that this claim is similar to the Himalayan glacier melt by 2035 fiasco, with nothing independent to back it up. Worse, it isn't the opinion of the IPCCper se, but rather that of Greenpeace. It gets worse.

It is totally unacceptable that IPCC should have had a Greenpeace employee as a Lead Author of the critical Chapter 10, that the Greenpeace employee, as an IPCC Lead Author, should (like Michael Mann and Keith Briffa in comparable situations) have been responsible for assessing his own work and that, with such inadequate and non-independent 'due diligence', IPCC should have featured the Greenpeace scenario in its press release on renewables.

Everyone in IPCC WG3 should be terminated and, if the institution is to continue, it should be re-structured from scratch.

 

http://wattsupwithth...pcc/#more-41729

I'm for scrapping anything that comes out of this corrupt organisation...These people are being proven to be alarmist criminals with agenda's...seems to be one scientific silliness after the other...

[hutch]

How in hell can "the science be settled".....

Smoke from the 2009 Victoria bushfires travelled high into the stratosphere and circled the Earth for more than three months, a new study has found.

The finding challenges the notion that only volcanic particles are capable of passing into the upper layers of the atmosphere, and could have implications for climate modelling.

 

http://www.abc.net.a...ce&topic=enviro

Every time they think they know it all they don't.....just another little flaw in their modelling..

Edited June 16, 2011 by hutch

[Slybacon]

Whats wrong is, how scientists interpret the data as facts, not maybe's.....

[WoodDragon]

A blunder of staggering proportions by the IPCC

[snip]

I'm for scrapping anything that comes out of this corrupt organisation...These people are being proven to be alarmist criminals with agenda's...seems to be one scientific silliness after the other...

[snip]

Every time they think they know it all they don't.....just another little flaw in their modelling..

Hutch.

You're demonstrating several things here.

1) You don't read stuff that has been previously provided for your enlightenment

The glacier meme has been explained to you before on a number of occasions. The professional science had it right (2350) and a journalist known for his recent tendency for hysterical beat-ups got it wrong. The scientific body of AR4 has it right: it was a beaurocrat writing one paragraph of the summary who propagated Pearce's error, and from there it went viral.

Your quoting of the comment that there is "nothing independent to back it up" misses two points - that the professional science didn't say what Watts is rabbitting on about, and that the actual claims of the professionals are backed up by material in the professional literature that no-one has yet demonstrated to be incorrect.

2) You don't understand how scientific models are created, or how they're used and reported

If you read the article you'd find that the researchers acknowledge that such stratospheric intrusion has been reported previously. As a result, the current understanding of the magnitude and frequency of stratospheric particle intrusion will be included in models. All that the Melbourne study will do is tweak some of the model parameters.

And the result will be very slight. If you actually read the paper you'll discover that the smoke had a stratospheric half-life of around 20 days. Further, figure 7 shows that the smoke was essentially gone in less than two and a half months.

Compare this to the atmospheric life-time of CO₂, as depicted in Solomon et al 2009. Look at Figure 1 if you can't actually read the rest of the paper. As a consequence of human emissions CO₂ will remain elevated not for months, or for years, or for decades even, but for centuries. Even without modelling is should be apparent that the rare occurrences of stratospheric break-through of smoke, having the short half-lives that they do, will have no appreciable impact on global warming. If there are going to be sufficient extreme bushfires in the future that this trend changes, then the scorched earth that would necessitate such a stratospheric pollution would be a far greater problem to humanity than any transient cooling benefit that might result.

More generally, it's a mistake to think that scientists do not understand the limitations of their models, or that they do not continually work to refine them. They do, as another of Solomon's publications indicates. The thing that you have to understand as a non scientifically-educated/trained/experienced lay person, Hutch, is that the 'low hanging fruit' of model parameters - the most obvious and most influencial factors - are nearly always incorporated in the initial versions, and hence subsequent refinements become evermore subtle in their effects.

There are notable excepts, and the estimation of sea level is one of these. In this case, until recently is was difficult for glaciologists and geophysicists to be sure how the land-based ice sheets would melt in the 21st century, and so the contribution of land ice was explicitly omitted from the calculations of sea level rise. As a result, the IPCC estimates are conservative - that is, they under-estimate the amount of rise that will occur - and the relevant parts of AR4 specifically note that this is the case.

3) You don't understand what the IPCC does, or what scientific work it utilises, or how it actually collates and presents the scientific understanding

It's nonsensical to claim that the IPCC is corrupt and that its conclusions are scientifically incorrect. If there is any problem with the IPCC it is that member countries like the Gulf oil producers and the USA have fought to have many of the inferences of the work 'calmed down'. Yes, if there is anything wrong with the process of summation it is that countries with vested interests have the capacity to have only the most impossibly irrefutable science included which, as the sea level rise example above shows, means that its conclusions for future climatic changes are almost certainly conservative under-estimates. I think that this point bears expansion: the material that is put into the IPCC reports is stuff that even the most recalitrantly denialist of governments can't disagree with - for lay people to think that they are better able to smell fraud and conspiracy than even the most rabidly pro-fossil fuel governments, is just plain ludicrous.

Given the enormous output of the IPCC's scientific bodies, the errors that remain in the reports are remarkably infrequent, and surprisingly small in consequence. If you dispute this, please provide a list of IPCC errors and indicate how each one changes the actual import of the overall science.

Frankly, if the IPCC was a corporate body its QA processes would be some of the best in the business world.

On the matter of McIntyre and his refutation of the IPCC, please give me a direct link to the claims to which you are referring. And remember that I've already told you that McIntyre is a scientifically-discreditted player in matters related to global warming... I'm curious to know what due diligence you undertook to check his claims.

To finish up, Hutch, your ongoing avoidance of Watts' and Muller's disproofs of their own claims is duly noted.

Perhaps it really is all nothing more than a game to you, but if so it's a purile and childish one, because the science is as correct as it can be given current human knowledge, and the implications are serious. If you get your jollies trying to obfuscate the public discussion of the matter of global warming, that speaks volumes about the sort of person that you are.

And if you really are just an ignorant lay person who has been fooled by the propaganda of the vested interests in this, you would really do well to watch this video by a professional science journalist, who explains how the wool is being pulled over people's eyes.

But thanks for your time mate. You're doing me a huge favour here. Any impartial person reading this thread only needs to compare your posts to mine and decide for themselves whether it's science or denialism that has a grasp of what's going on. You'll probably think that saying so is me being "arrogant", but it's got nothing to do with me, or what I think about myself - it's a matter of who has the facts behind them.

I'd put my facts against your factoids any day.

[Edit: text]

Edited June 17, 2011 by WoodDragon

[WoodDragon]

Whats wrong is, how scientists interpret the data as facts, not maybe's.....

Bacon, if scientists were interpreting their data incorrectly, it would be rapidly put into the scientific literature. Scientists aren't in the profession for money, but they are there to find the best answers to scientific questions. There is no conspiracy to silence dissenters - quite frankly, every scientist in the world would be gagging to publish if they could find a hint that the last century and a half of physics and chemistry, as they relate to climatology, are wrong. Even the Manns and the Jones of the world - because it would bring more scientific kudos than anything else.

On the matter of "maybe's", that's why scientific work is predicated with statistical analysis. If you really want to know what science says about anything, you need to go to the primary literature where the assumptions of a model are listed, where the parameters of an experiment are documented, where the constraints of interpretation are given, and where the statistical uncertainties are enumerated.

Yes, there will be mistakes in some work. These are picked up either in the peer-review process, or by subsequent testing by other researchers. This is how scientific understanding is refined. What's telling is that in spite of all of the blather by denialists of global warming, none of it stands the scrutiny of scientific checking.

The score really is scientists 1: denialists 0.

[Slybacon]

The score really is scientists 1: denialists 0.

 

So your saying there is only two options..... Your either with us, or against us?

[hutch]

But thanks for your time mate. You're doing me a huge favour here. Any impartial person reading this thread only needs to compare your posts to mine and decide for themselves whether it's science or denialism that has a grasp of what's going on. You'll probably think that saying so is me being "arrogant", but it's got nothing to do with me, or what I think about myself - it's a matter of who has the facts behind them.

I'd put my facts against your factoids any day.

[Edit: text]

 

And the rest of them just may think "what an arrogant, condescending, know it all twit" And in the not too distant future I predict they will be saying "boy was that fucking WoodDragon preaching crap".....so I'll just keep popping them up for you if you don't mind....

[Slybacon]

http://www.lavoisier.com.au/articles/greenhouse-science/climate-change/mcclintock-proofnotco2-2009.pdf

[Slybacon]

Deep-Sea Volcanoes Don't Just Produce Lava Flows, They Also Explode

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/...10328151734.htm

ScienceDaily (Mar. 28, 2011) — Between 75 and 80 per cent of all volcanic activity on Earth takes place at deep-sea, mid-ocean ridges. Most of these volcanoes produce effusive lava flows rather than explosive eruptions, both because the levels of magmatic gas (which fuel the explosions and are made up of a variety of components, including, most importantly CO2) tend to be low, and because the volcanoes are under a lot of pressure from the surrounding water.

Over about the last 10 years however, geologists have nevertheless speculated, based on the presence of volcanic ash in certain sites, that explosive eruptions can also occur in deep-sea volcanoes.

But no one has been able to prove it until now.

By using an ion microprobe, Christoph Helo, a PhD student in McGill's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, has now discovered very high concentrations of CO2 in droplets of magma trapped within crystals recovered from volcanic ash deposits on Axial Volcano on the Juan de Fuca Ridge, off the coast of Oregon.

These entrapped droplets represent the state of the magma prior to eruption. As a result, Helo and fellow researchers from McGill, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, have been able to prove that explosive eruptions can indeed occur in deep-sea volcanoes. Their work also shows that the release of CO2 from the deeper mantle to Earth's atmosphere, at least in certain parts of mid-ocean ridges, is much higher than had previously been imagined.

Given that mid-ocean ridges constitute the largest volcanic system on Earth, this discovery has important implications for the global carbon cycle which have yet to be explored.

This research was funded by: R.H.Tomlinson, GEOTOP, and J.W. McConnell Memorial Fellowships; the David and Lucille Packard Foundation; and the Natural Sciences and Research Council of Canada (NSERC).