Topic: Climate change is real (Read 1785 times)

I haven't had time to finish doing this but here are my first impressions. They are all consistent with the IPCC reports. In general,

1) The earth has warmed about .6 K over the last 100 years. There are multiple lines of evidence in agreement on this. When a scientific body says there is incontrovertible evidence for global warming, this is what they are referring to. Nothing more.

2) There is a very strong correlation to CO2 emissions. In the past CO2 emissions have lagged temp increases, but there are good reasons to believe that pumping it into the atmosphere can also cause warming. The majority of people publishing in the field agree that this has at least contributed to the observed warming. This is what there is scientific consensus about.

3) There are numerous models that predict a rise of 2 K over the next century dependent on various CO2 emission scenarios. This is where it gets tricky. There are no good models for whether cloud feedback will be positive or negative and the models can't really be verified by the data available (time frame too short). However, this does not mean the models are useless or uninformative. I am currently in the process of looking into this, but it takes time.

4) No model predicts a runaway greenhouse effect or anything that will wipe out humanity due to the warming. It is more that a rise of over 2K in a century will force humans to adapt to changed weather patterns, disruptions in the food supply, coastal flooding, etc. I haven't given a good look at the reasoning behind this yet.

5) There is historical evidence of climate change both more abrupt and of greater magnitude than anything the models predict. See Dansgaard-Oeschger event . So such an occurrence would not be unprecedented.

6) There may be pal-review and publication bias effects influences here. The peer review system is not perfect and never completely based on merit, and this is a highly politicized field. This isn't a problem limited to climate research, from personal experience I can talk about the alcohol research field. The funding agencies want alcohol=bad for health, so it is much easier to get funded if this is your hypothesis rather than alcohol=good for health. For example drunk drivers may have better outcomes after head injuries due to car accidents than non drunk. Possibly because the alcohol reduces inflammation and swelling. If I wanted to study this i would still write a grant that predicted a deleterious effect of alcohol. There is a poster here (natchwind I think), who does paleoclimatology, and he didn't feel his particular subfield was very corrupted.

7) Honestly without actually going through the funding and publication process myself it is probably impossible to form a legitimate opinion on the social aspects though. That is why I think focusing on these points is pretty unproductive. You go down the rabbit hole of "who to trust" which is ironically the very problem science was developed to solve.

That is a contradiction in terms.

The Vatican has a consensus as well.

Maybe most scientists treat the subject as they should, but that work doesn't translate well to the outside.  Look at the topic name for this thread.  So you're right, I haven't studied in detail all the technical data available on the issue, however that wasn't really what my post was about anyway.

Perhaps within the scientific community they are objectively assessing the threat and not impartial or swayed by grants and government/media pressure.  Outside that community the topical discussions regarding climate change are a joke.

Quite frankly I haven't spent the time to pore over all the data and research because I'm not that concerned or scared and I don't trust the validity of all the hyperbole surrounding the issue.  It sounds like you've looked into more closely than I have, can you give me your impression?  Will this wipe us out?  If so in what timeframe?  Force a period of uncomfortable transition to alternate technologies?  Or be barely noticed by the average man on the street?

I will check out the IPCC reports out of curiosity though.

Read the IPCC reports, they are freely available. This will require time and effort on your part. If you haven't done this I don't see how you could have such a strong opinion. The scientists are discussing the sources of uncertainty, etc... don't believe what you read in the news. Personally, I still suspect bias, but amongst scientists it is much more subtle than what you describe so I suspect you have not actually read and understood the science.

Every Century, every decade, every year people think everything is coming to an end.  You see it over and over again and most don't seem intelligent enough to question it after failed prophecy after failed prophecy time and again.  I'll never understand why doomsday is such an attractive thing for people to foolishly believe in.

The question or debate shouldn't be whether we are changing our environment as that is entirely irrelevant.  It should be attempting to determine the most precise effects we are having on ourselves in this case through the environment.  The weather man can't always predict the weather more than a couple days out and I'm supposed to believe the climate change scientists have models that take all variables for the entire planet and beyond taken into account and projected accurately decades into the future?  I'd be a bigger believer if the scientists actually followed their own methods in this case and were a bit more skeptical about the whole thing.

If I go piss in the ocean it is irrefutable fact that I am changing or polluting it.  I assume much sea life couldn't survive in urine.  Now I can go around claiming the end is near because I'm ruining the ocean.  When some people question I can point to the absolute fact of the matter and scoff at them.  This is about how valuable it is claim that climate change "exists".

People can't even figure out the important parts to discuss or argue about so why even bother trying.  We may be changing our climate and we may be doing it in a way that might harm us in the future but I haven't heard anything that has convinced me that we know exactly how we are changing things nor what the specific damage will be.  Until we get some real science behind that I'll sit on the sidelines for this one and continue to watch it be wielded as a political weapon more than anything else.

If you like Michael Crichton books, "State of Fear" was an entertaining read.  It's fiction but has an interesting plot line where the Global Warming tag line pops up after the fall of the Berlin Wall to be used as a weapon of fear on the populace to make them more easily controlled.  I'm not sure that's entirely fiction to be honest.

Really, honestly, it's a win-win for black metal enthusiasts like me.   

Right but if someone proposes the idea that we will destroy ourselves before the transhuman singularity can occur you will still need to address this possibility.

/thread

Whether "man-made climate change" is "real" or not is actually a moot point.  "Saving the environment" is to me essentially moving backwards and that is the stuff of hippies ... :::shudder... hippies:::

Forward-thinking includes EXTREME forward-thinking... beyond humanity.  Humanity does not need to be made extinct (like the hippies would likely believe) ... it just needs to be made BETTER, to ADAPT to the environment it finds itself in.  Is that not evolution??

The answer to this "conundrum" is simple to me -- we must change ourselves.  Transhumanism.  We may make humans extinct... but we may in the process create something far superior.  Wouldn't it be nice to not need to breathe?

I would just go examine the IPCC reports for yourself. The arguments about which tribal leader to believe are not productive.

Here's a good read:
http://www.examiner.com/environmental-policy-in-national/global-warming-s-stephen-schneider-the-light-that-failed

Gee, and why is it that people that get paid to research global warming and research that end up finding that there's global warming? And if you don't agree, you don't get published or cited by the cliques that do believe, and so you become an unpublished skeptic. Awesome. You sure did convince me of the error of my ways, Arepo.

Meh, it's just at this point I understand what a waste of time they are.  I've spent many a day's time in front of my computer without producing anything of value.  Sure, I got some nice neurotransmitters, and it insulated my young mind from the harsh realities of our world.  But, there as so much better things I could have spent my time doing, like learning or programming.

wow.

None of them are out of a job if it "isn't real". Scientists measured the stats and did the analysis. The analysis was that we were causing harm. You're saying they should only be paid if they answered a certain way, which is ridiculous (except maybe in the US).

You're right in that the Earth won't care...Humans however probably won't take your suicide alternative.

sigh... arepo, I bet you didn't even read the Schneider paper. It is like 3 pages long.



This is a technical paper, each of these terms has a specific meaning:
1) most published
2) climate researchers
3) think
4) humans are causing
5) global warming

As an experiment, guess what they mean then go read the paper to see how much they match up with the technical definitions. There are a whole bunch of threads about this in politics, I would suggest moving this there.

how many of them are out of the job if global warming isn't real?

(i don't care if its man made or not, we don't need to fix it IMO, the world has existed through worse things then a few parasitic humans)

it's funny how you STILL haven't mentioned scientific consensus. you should probably stop spewing things you think you know and do some research; that was what the first not-so-subtle hint was for.



this is what scientific consensus looks like.

"97–98% of the most published climate researchers think humans are causing global warming.[35] Another study found 97.4% of publishing climatologists and just under 90% of all earth scientists think significant man made global warming is occurring.[36]"

[35]^ Anderegg, William R L; James W. Prall, Jacob Harold, and Stephen H. Schneider (2010). "Expert credibility in climate change". PNAS. Retrieved 22 August 2011.
[36]^ Doran consensus article 2009

What's wrong with video games? Are you one of these? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMgyMh01DbA

I read this and instantly pictured a MUCH better world. We're in a cultural black hole that texts will refer to as the dim-ages... Not quite collapsed, but  close enough to make note of it.

History will see our era as the lost era.  Imagine where we would be without video games and reality tv.