Global Warming Debunker Debunked 676
Earlier this month we ran an article linking Christopher Monckton's attempt to discredit global warming. The submitter asked plaintively, "Can anyone out there go through this piece and tell me why it might be wrong?" George Monbiot has now done so. From the article: "This is a dazzling debunking of climate change science. It is also wildly wrong... In keeping with most of the articles about climate change in [the Sunday Telegraph], it is a mixture of cherry-picking, downright misrepresentation, and pseudo-scientific gibberish. But it has the virtue of being incomprehensible to anyone who is not an atmospheric physicist... As for James Hansen, he did not tell the US Congress that temperatures would rise by 0.3C by the end of the past century. He presented three possible scenarios to the US Senate — high, medium, and low. Both the high and low scenarios, he explained, were unlikely to materialise. The middle one was 'the most plausible.' As it happens, the middle scenario was almost exactly right. He did not claim, under any scenario, that sea levels would rise by several feet by 2000." And on the political front, the only major ally for Pres. Bush's stand on global warming, Australia's Prime Minister John Howard, is now willing to look at carbon trading.
NASA GISS GCM on your laptop (Score:5, Informative)
The EdGCM [columbia.edu] project provides this free GCM wrapped in a GUI. If you want to add CO2 or turn down the sun or whatever, you may now do so with some checkboxes and sliders.
Re:Slashdot position (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Global Hubris (Score:4, Informative)
CO2 provides the most climate forcing due to its chemical properties and relative bulk in the atmosphere. To forestall the atmospheric H2O canard - H2O is a more powerful GHG, but it only maintains the current temperature. It is not a forcing agent because it cycles too fast. H2O cycles in 14 days. CO2 cycles in ~150 years.
The comment about rain scrubbing is utterly nonsensical. It shows no time component and is irrelevant because rain doesn't fall evenly over every square meter of the planet.
The Bush position (Score:5, Informative)
"I recognise the surface of the earth is warmer and that an increase in greenhouse gases caused by humans is contributing to the problem," he said during a visit to Denmark en route to Gleneagles.
Monckton was debunked at Real Climate (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Global Hubris (Score:5, Informative)
Both. One of the reasons we need computer models. Especially since warmer climates speed up some processes that *absorb* CO2 as well as speeding up processes that release CO2.
CO2's causal role is simple phsyics. The numbers on feedback have been hard to pin down. But there's not any question that *other things being equal* more CO2 means a warmer planet on average.
>Humans are unlikely to be the cause:
We are, indeed, responsible for only a small percentage of the CO2 in the atmosphere. The amount that was there before we started is responsible for keeping the oceans from freezing. A small change to that large an effect is worth thinking about.
Re:Slashdot position (Score:2, Informative)
Please, do your research before making yourself look uninformed. This is a serious debate that requires knowing all the facts.
Re:He's pretty fascist in his outlook (Score:2, Informative)
It wasn't that long ago that Bush was claiming that he knew for certin that Iraq had WMD (based on secret evidence that the people could not be allowed to see) and that people should be properly obedient and do what he wanted without question and attack Iraq. Just the sort of thing one expects from an American anti-intellectual.
Re:Global Hubris (Score:5, Informative)
[ http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/siple.htm [ornl.gov] ]
>>
An atmospheric CO2 record for the past 200 years was obtained from the
Siple Station ice core.
[...]
Neftel et al. (1985) concluded that the atmospheric CO2 concentration
ca. 1750 was 280±5 parts per million by volume (ppmv) and that it
increased by 22.5% to 345 ppmv in 1984 essentially because of human
factors.
>>
[ http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/sio-mlo.htm [ornl.gov] ]
>>
The Mauna Loa record shows a 19.4% increase in the mean annual
concentration, from 315.98 parts per million by volume (ppmv) of dry
air in 1959 to 377.38 ppmv in 2004.
>>
Why primary sources matter (Score:5, Informative)
Well, there's what Hansen said, and there's what got reported. The meta-debunker went back to primary sources and found:
Re:Who cares about the CAUSE for Global warming (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Global Hubris (Score:3, Informative)
And your figure for rain scrubbing of 800kg/m2? Utter bullshit, on two counts -- 1) CO2 is simply not that soluble in H20 at atmospheric pressures. 2) That CO2 that does get "scrubbed" finds its way back into the air. It's not a one-way reaction, it's a global equilibrium.
When we add carbon into the cycle, we add atmospheric CO2. Plain and simple. The question is at what point the extra carbon disrupts our welfare to a degree that is unacceptable -- and the answer is based upon the magnitude of the effects and our tolerance for the effects. We're constantly learning more about the magnitude of the change, but our tolerance to change will be in debate as long as humans exist.
Re:Global Hubris (Score:3, Informative)
What causes the higher carbon dioxide pressure in warm beer than in cold beer is the fact that gasses generally dissolve more poorly in warm liquids than in cold ones. (I think they covered that in the chemistry course I had my third year of high school.) Since a great deal of carbon dioxide is dissolved in the oceans, the ocean's surface temperature will affect the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Re:Georges Moonbat. Great choice there. (Score:3, Informative)
With regards to Mars, the following pages (among many others) contain info about the exact makeup of the Mars atmosphere:
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2003AGUFM.P42A0425K [harvard.edu]
http://www.earthsci.unimelb.edu.au/mars/Carbon_Di
http://www.solarviews.com/eng/mars.htm [solarviews.com]
This would suggest that such measurements have been made.
I'm pretty sure this is true for Venus as well.
Re:Slashdot position (Score:3, Informative)
Pointing out one, or ten, dissenters from the consensus does not prove the consensus doesn't exist.
Re:Georges Moonbat. Great choice there. (Score:3, Informative)
Man is causing the increase in atmospheric CO2 concentrations. I don't know of any alternative hypotheses that come close to fitting the data. There are large carbon natural fluxes and we've tipped the balance.
OK, climate sensitivity is something worth talking about. I'll bet you my house the sensitivity is closer to 5 degrees than
So, to recap:
Increased CO2 concentrations: Our fault. I'll bet my wife and 1st born.
Increased CO2 concentration leads to higher temperatures: Yup. I'll throw in kids 2 and 3.
Climate sensitivity to 3x CO2 is Y degrees: There's pretty good science here, but there's room to haggle. I'll throw in my two cars and road bike that we need to be worried.
Impact of the sun: Obviously a factor, but if there's a smoking gun tying temperature to solar output this century, I sure haven't seen it. Here's a RealClimate article [realclimate.org] on the subject.
Ocean acidification: Definitely happening; this is basic chemistry. Severity of impact not well known, but think "Alka Seltzer'
Re:I really don't understand how people ... (Score:5, Informative)
1) This is why people prefer global climate change rather than global warming, because it gives people who read only headlines the wrong idea. What that article refers to is thermohaline inversion and the stopping of the Atlantic conveyor belt, which is responsible for a good chunk of the nice coastal temperatures in Europe. For more details, and just because I can, I'll point you to alink [nationalgeographic.com] that is in the same article you just quoted.
2) The Clean Air act is supposedly responsible for this nice little event. As for whether this would be able to affect the global climate in the level that we're seeing it, I'll refer you to this link.
3) Nice little effort at cherry-picking your events. For an actual event, you can go to Greenland and see how their farming efforts are a little easier now. However, the bad events far outweigh any positives we've gotten so far, primarily because it takes time to profit from change. Until we learn to take advantage of what Global Climate Change can do for us, we'll have seniors dying in droves from heat waves, pipelines and houses buckling due to vanishing permafrost and crops dying in areas that are getting too hot for comfort.
4) Since this is the same exact point as in 2) (complete with link to article that has the same quote), I'll refer you to the link I posted there. Besides, that article is a complete light weight when it comes to determining how much more light has reached the earth, its causes (which, btw, include reduced albedo, which is a side-effect of Global Climate Change) or its impact on what we're seeing.
Try again.
Re:Georges Moonbat. Great choice there. (Score:3, Informative)
Throughout history, CO2 levels have always lagged behind temperature increases. Even RealClimate admits it http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=13 [realclimate.org].
A major component of this is that climbing temperatures release large amounts of CO2 locked in the permafrosts. http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/discoveries/
So there, in two links, are strong evidence that CO2 change could be a result of temperature change and not vice-versa.
Now I await the flames... let me guess the order:
Like I said, I've done this before.
cause and effect. (Score:3, Informative)
This isn't good enough.
If you want to assert a non-human-generated cause you can't just imagine something random might be out there. You need mechanisms and observable facts. Saying "there might be something else" is true, and facile, and has been explored heavily for decades.
If we had climate scientists 10,000 years ago with modern scientific understanding and observations we'd also be able to attribute climate change then to specific causal factors.
Answer is that no explanation which excludes major human-induced greenhouse warming is compatible with known physics and current observations.
Obviously there is a natural cycle of some sort relating to astrophysical parameters, and there are other effects in geological time due to volcanism. But the Earth has not magically changed its axis and violated angular momentum since the advent of industrial civilization, nor has global volcanism simultaneously gone haywire. Those are measured facts.
As to the "circumstantiality" of the proof: direct measurements of infrared emissions from the upper atmosphere (the causal source of the greenhouse effect) have been taken for decades by aircraft, balloons and satellites, simultaneously with samples of the chemical composition of such atmosphere. The result is that the increase in IR flux has been observed and correlates exactly with the significant change in atmospheric composition (due to human activity) and known laboratory-verified facts about the scattering cross sections of molecules. This is the forcing term from the greenhouse effect, and it has changed on human timescale.
It is really impossible by the laws of physics for the climate not to change as a consequence.
And this is but one small piece of the evidence.
Beware Howard's repentance (Score:5, Informative)
John Howard has been using his absolute majority in both Houses to force all sorts of ideologically motivated laws through, regardless of how they may change Australian Culture. He seems to be intent on making us a new state of the USA. He is the person responsible for ensuring that the USA is not alone in its' Kyoto stance. He is responsible for a "Free Trade" agreement which is dismantling our fair-use provisions under copyright, is introducing DMCA legislation, is changing our patents office to be in line with the US model, is diluting our PBS (the Government sponsored sale of pharmaceuticals, all of which must happen before 2010, yet the USA is under no obligations under this agreement until 2022.
He is responsible for setting up concentration camps for refugees (more precisely, for illegal immigrants who are requesting refugee status). Most of these camps are in the back of beyond. There are children who have liven for most of their lives behind the razor wire, and there is a horrific incidence of mental illness associated with this detention in sub-human conditions.
Now that public opinion can be shown to be swinging against the US Republican approach to the Middle East and "The War on Terror" he's simply waving an extremely large, colourful and exciting flag (climate change acceptance) to distract people from his complete failure to interface with the Democrats. The news is now that the Democrats are going to demand a US inquiry into the AWB scandal (The AWB, run by Howard's mates, was busted paying hundreds of millions of dollars to Saddam Hussein to get around the trade sanctions, abusing the UN "Oil for Food" program).
I, along with many other informed Australians, do not believe there is any change of heart in Howard's new "Climate friendly" position. It's all just an attempt at distraction from the real issues.
Re:Global Hubris (Score:3, Informative)
The oceans are not saturated with CO2, buddy. The oceans were roughly at equilibrium with the atmosphere before atmospheric CO2 increased. The driving force is into the ocean. People actually measure this stuff. Find me valid research that shows a global (not regional- global) net flux of CO2 from the ocean to the atmosphere and I'll buy you beer for a year.
Here's a decent page [nasa.gov] at NASA:
Evidence for solar output as a driver for current warming is weak (but at least plausible). Please stop the idle speculation; there is a rich body of knowledge here.
I did write my M.S. thesis on oceanic carbonate chemistry, so you'll have to do better than 'If water gets warmer, it absorbs less CO2.'. Yes, solubility decreases with temperature, but that's a completely irrelevant factoid.
Re:Georges Moonbat. Great choice there. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Repair (Score:4, Informative)
The report can be found here [hm-treasury.gov.uk]
Parent's linked article is bogus [Re: Slashdot pos (Score:3, Informative)
LOL! This is too good. To refute claims of scientific consensus, you refer us to an article on NEWSMAX.com. "Well it depends on what you mean by 'consensus'". Just like the meaning of "is"? Or is this different?
Do you people modding this guy up know what NEWSMAX is? It is an online conservative news re-publishing magazine.
When I clicked through the ad on the right said "Conservative T-shirts" picturing a T-shirt reading "Hippies Smell". God, this has scientific, scholarly research written all over it!
There were an additional 11 ads lined up along the left column. And a further 6 ads on the bottom of the page.
The linked article is actually an article from csnnews.com (it says so at the top of the article).
CSNNews.com claims:
"Study after study by the Media Research Center, the parent organization of CNSNews.com, clearly demonstrate a liberal bias in many news outlets "
And further:
"The Cybercast News Service was launched on June 16, 1998 as a news source for individuals, news organizations and broadcasters who put a higher premium on balance than spin and seek news that's ignored or under-reported as a result of media bias by omission."
LOL. The Slashdot mods are being duped by the online equivalent of FOX "News".
Re:I really don't understand how people ... (Score:2, Informative)
The individual who raised that question has obviously never heard of dendochronology [muohio.edu] nor paleoclimatology [wikipedia.org]. Science is about elucidating reality to the nimrods....
Re:Moo (Score:3, Informative)
I will give you a hand in the link department. You will find all the myths you quoted debunked here [realclimate.org]. Also you will find the novelist Crichton is in a state of confusion [realclimate.org] over most things scientific. Lastly the predictions quoted in the origial article and credited to Hannsen are bald faced lies, if you want an accurate prediction that has come true (so far) go back and study at the "most likely" extrapolations of the original "hockey stick" graph by Mann (published in the early 80's and widely available on the net).
Re:Moo (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, I know, the system in question is the government grant system. If your research doesn't support the party line on the issue of the day, then you don't get funding. Thousands of scientists worldwide who doubt the hockey stick theory have been unable to get funding from their respective governments.
So you're implying I'm a kook, because I don't want the world to be taken over by a world government? Most members of the UN are dictatorships where the rights to free speech, a free press, to own firearms, and a fair trial are unheard of. Most members are autocratic kleptocracies where the rulers live like kings (or literally are kings) at the expense of the people. And I'm a kook, because I don't want people like that being able to force policy on me? Apparently people who love freedom are a rare breed.