Ok, I see what your gripe is. Yeh, by "plateau" I didn't mean tens of thousands of years of relatively flat temperatures. Just that we should be maxed out about now.
And what makes you it's "maxed out"? Just visually looking (you have to look at the raw numbers to get an exact amount), the trough to peak time for the previous cycles exceeds the current trough to current time. My TARDIS is broken. Is yours working?
It is not an assumption, rather what a truckload of research has been pointing to. But if you prefer let's say it's dark and it looks like it might be a gun, but you're not sure. The analogy is still fine.
I'm tired of people saying there's "a truckload of research". Cite references. You can't have an intelligent discussion without knowing what the basis of the opinion is. Back to your anaogy, I presume you are saying that CO2 is a gun. I know guns can easily kill. Show me a reference where it says were are going to release enough CO2 to be toxic. The dark example I agree is much better.
That's pretty much the same thing as saying the gun isn't loaded. Or that it might actually be pointed at your foot and not your head. Put that in if you like. The analogy still works.
If only works if you are trying to get me to react without thinking. Let's change your analogy to this: You are in a dark room and you have the gun, and you see something coming towards you. Do you shoot? Much harder to answer, isn't it?
However you are making a false dichotomy: solve the climate problem or help the poor. Any action we are able to take now on climate will help improve our options in the future should the dangerous effects of AGW prove to be true. And furthermore, significantly rising sea levels and changing weather will probably have a much greater adverse effect on the poor and disadvantaged than anyone else. So not doing anything to stop GW may also end up being equivalent to hurting the poor.
You have not examined the effect of the politics from the issue much, have you? We've already seen limiting of cheaper, combustion generators to push more limited solar ones (yes, it's renewable, the it doesn't work at night and is far more costly). If you want an egregious ( unrelated to AGW ) example (but same 'logic'), the EU obstructed US GM (genetically modified) corn to Somalia under famine conditions. If the EU cared that much, they should have just offered to grind it up into cornmeal. Another one would be the effect of banning DDT and malaria. Millions of lives were needlessly lost. The poor will be the ones who will mostly suffer.
So you're advocating ignoring a known threat just because there might be other unknown threats? That just seems silly.
No. I'm saying (for example) if soot is what is causing a bulk of the glacial melting you are worried about, you should concentrate on soot.
I totally agree with you there. You'll note that I made no suggestions about what policy actions to take. I merely said we need to take the threat seriously. But I believe there is much we can do without sending global economies to the brink of disaster. As the science evolves we must be prepared to react. But doing nothing now is a poor choice. We at least need to invest heavily in green energy, so that we'll have something reliable we can switch to.
The sane non-AGW sites say exactly that. You don't need AGW to argue that it's a bad thing to send B$s to unstable parts of the world. You don't need cap-and-trade to push economical light technology or better insulation. AGW is just a distraction.
Oh, ok, you mean ignoring feedbacks. Yeh, 1 deg C is probably about right for that. But that's not a very interesting number.
Precisely. That's why scare tactics need to be used.
The important thing is with all the feedbacks. You should really read Hansen's book Storms of My Grandchildren. Or if you're really hard core I think it's also in his paper "Target CO2" that I linked to before. There he walks through an argument for deriving climate sensitivity using nothing but the paleo-climate data we have. The result of that was I think about 2 degrees C, maybe 3. I've not seen any refutations of the soundness of this argument. If you know of any I'd like to know about it. The point is it corroborates the mean prediction of the models using a completely different method, based solely on inference from historical evidence. It does not rely on knowing how the climate works in any detail at all.
The fundamental problem I have with that logic is that it makes an assumption that the gas level is the main cause the temperature rise in the first place. Let's modify your argument a little to show why you have to be skeptical. Let's replace CO2 with a much stronger GHG - H2O. If there was a way to graph water vapor vs temperature at certain sites, you will probably see a BETTER correlation than CO2 (or do we not believe in relative humidity?). Does this mean you are scientifically sound in projecting increases in water level to temperature over the long term?
Yep, you're right. It wasn't. That isn't the point. The point is that if GHGs can raise temperatures then they could push us up to Eemian-level temps. If you don't believe GHGs have the potential to raise temperatures, then we're going to go around in a circle on this one.
"have the potential" means nothing in a scientific context. An meteor has the potential to crash on your head. Does this mean you should bury yourself in a buncker? We are back to the cost/benefit analysis again.
I don't think there's a need to make a distinction when we're talking about a period of a few thousand years. My understanding is that ocean temps and atmospheric temps reach equilibrium on the scale of hundreds of years.
This is my opinion - I don't think it's useful in comparing local trends with very long term data. Too many factors change to make useful comparisons. However, historical data, like models, might be used to get some insight into what is currently going on. You can't say just because A caused B in the past in a complex system, that A will cause B in the future with any degree of certainty. But you can say that it's worthwhile to look at A and B.
Sure ok. The net gain is the only thing that really matters in the end. That's what I thought we were talking about.
I thought we were talking about the science. The net can only be gotten after the fact, so not certain what you are trying to get at here.
That's your prerogative. Personally, I find that rather small list of mistakes encouraging given the intense amount of scrutiny the document is getting. Wake me up if you get to the point where a significant fraction of the thousands of pages in the document is proven wrong, and not just a smattering not-so-consequential statements.
Let's take this to a different, less emotional arena. Let's say we have a DNA lab, and it has been shown to get requests mixed up, have very sloppy record keeping, and has workers with prejudice against insert-an-ethnic-here. How much confidence am I supposed to give a result of this particular lab about DNA evidence of an insert-your-ethnic defendant? Arguing that DNA science is flawed is not required to question the result. Your argument is that since DNA science is sound, the results are valid. I don't think I'm unreasonable in thinking otherwise in this particular circumstance.
I'll refer you to the Hansen book and paper once again here as one argument I'm aware of that is relatively straightforward and doesn't rely on computer models.
I'm always amazed in how much certainty people give to things. You are talking about a time period two orders of magnitude older than the vostok ice core record. If you think that is more significant than sunspot count or land clearing, well, you're welcome to your opinion.
Well, unfortunately the analog to that "single flight" in this case is sitting and waiting to see what happens to our planet.
or focus on more pressing issues (poverty, real human effect on the environment (clear cutting, strip mining...).
We won't get another chance if it turns out that whoops! those AGW guys were right after all. So your analogy is flawed because the planet is not something that we can practically run controlled experiments on.
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The "next ice age" guys were silenced when the world got warmer (which, Jim Hansen apparently was one). If the sunspot people are right (so far, it's looking pretty good), we should be going into a cold cycle. Luckily(?) we had relatively high sunpot numbers in the last 30 years, and well as near century lows so its effect should more pronounced to make quantifying its effect much easier.
In fact your analogy is a pretty frightening one. I believe there were many test flights prior to the Bell X-1 that disintegrated when they broke the sound barrier, before engineers learned the trick to withstanding the supersonic-shock.
Frightening in which way? Human history is filled with mistaken beliefs about science causing death (look at the history of X-rays). I was looking for a single event example to refute your statement.
But ok, yeh, I agree evidence sound enough to invalidate a critical assumption is "all that is required" to invalidate a theory. The problem is anti-AGW folks haven't come up with it yet. The problem is that in a science where you can't do controlled experiments on the system in question it's damn hard to come up with "sound enough" evidence. The evidence against is at least as uncertain as the evidence for.
Time-out. You are are now using a religious argument - "Just because you can't disprove what I believe, my belief must true." Science doesn't work that way. "The debate is over" is hardly a phrase one would use if the amount of for/against evidence is anywhere near each other. As for not being able to do controlled experiments, that's just a cop out. At minimum, you can improve the accuracy of your monitoring equipment, make certain that your other evidence isn't influenced by other factors, and do a reasonble job of quantifying the error. That is how science is done.
But even if true, it still leaves a significant fraction of the problem as human-caused
First, it's not clear there even IS a problem. Please stop saying it as if that is a certainty. If we get into your TARDIS, go back into the dust bowl years, you can make the same AGW argument as today. Fast forward 80 years. Your CO2 levels is as predicted. Temperatures have gone up as you predicted. Was it a problem?
(or at least with no better explanation than AGW).
This is not science. Besides, one should always be VERY cautious about initial theories as they are usually far off the mark. This is just an observation, but is far more wise than believing as fact the first theory that comes along.
And it doesn't even really rule out AGW as the cause for increased water vapor. Obvious feedback mechanism would be: CO2 heats us up, causing greater ocean evaporation, giving higher water vapor concentrations. The finding doesn't close the book on AGW by any means. But just the same it is not a finding to ignore. Follow-up work is certainly needed.
a) your explanation just ignores that water vapor is a much better GHG than CO2. b) I never said "it closes any book". However, as the number of other causes goes up, obviously, the CO2 contribution (and significance) goes down.
Well beyond sea-level rises, there are the potential problems with mass extinctions of species we depend on.
Human development and how it is done are far more a problem than CO2 will ever be.
In terms of const-benefit, significantly rising shorelines (like the few meters they were in the Eemian) would probably cost us more than just trillions to deal with. But that's a guess. I don't know what the actual cost would be of moving every person and city who lives within 1m of sea-level. If you know any figures, I'd be interested to know.
One could probably try, but not sure if that is productive. Parts of the Netherlands are under sea level - they didn't move. Even if AGW is proven to be completely false, that doesn't mean that water levels won't rise. If it rises, it rises. We will just have to cope.
BTW, combining your next comment to this one:
So, why isn't the converse just as valid?
I forgot to address this adequately. The converse is not logically valid from a risk management perspective. Say an automobile manufacturer discovers that 5% of its accelerator pedals are affected by some potentially fatal defect, and you own one of their cars. That implies that the overwhelming odds (95%) are that your car is not among those affected. Do you think most people would say "That's ok, Manufacturer, you don't need to do a recall, we know that each of us is not very likely to have this problem"?
Ok. I'll bite. Let's use your example. In this case, Floormats = CO2. So, you panic and make hasty recall, swap out floormats and patch the accellerator. Did that recall fix the problem? So, in your rush to address the problem, you a) destroyed the company's repuation b) cost $$$ in needless repairs c) put people at risk by saying you solved a problem that you really haven't. Swift. I have a phrase that I have to recite way too often: "Fix the problem, not the symptom"
Human beings are very poor at predicting in the long term. One can speculate all you want. I'm not sure that's too productive. I prefer to think about more pressing issues than what the temperature will be in 2100, like looking at the graph of fresh water vs population, and the energy use vs population. But each person makes his own priorities.....
The other peculiar thing here is that regardless of whether you believe in GW, getting ourselves weaned off oil is a good thing that would have benefits of its own.
100% in agreement.
