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nigelj at 05:08 AM on 2 January 2019Global warming ‘hiatus’ is the climate change myth that refuses to die
I think there is a huge intersection between the climate issue and politics, and some level of intersection with religion as well. We cannot escape this, and ignoring it doesn't make sense to me.
Yes politics and religion can become divisive shouty subjects. Generally discouraged at dinner parties! But this is an analytical website and Im a bit wary of putting any subject out of bounds because where would you stop?.
We just dont want politics and religion getting out of control and dominating all discussion and becoming shouty. Isn't that the key thing?
I suggest maybe keep such discussion on appropriate threads, so articles that refer to political issues, or the weekly news roundup thread which is general. And keep discussion on it restrained, and not finger pointing. Discussion above was restrained.
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Doug_C at 20:09 PM on 1 January 2019Global warming ‘hiatus’ is the climate change myth that refuses to die
Sunspot @42
The internet has been around for decades and was used by academics long before it went universal in the early 1990s with the introduction of the WWW.
Internet History Timeline: ARPANET to the World Wide Web
When it comes to science there are guidelines that date back centuries and allow an exchange of empirical evidence and agreed means to test it and place it in a meaningful context. You seem to be creating obstacles where none really exist.
The line is clear, if you lack the data and what you have doesn't fit in with already very well established theories then the burden of proof is on your shoulders, not someone else's. That's what scientific skepticism means, an open mind in an informed context always testing new data in the context of what we have already assimilated into the overall body of evidence.
The is no "problem" with the science of fossil fuels forced global warming and associated climate change. We don't need to understand how humans feel about it and what their beliefs are to understand the physical dimnersions of global warming. We just need data and a consistent structure to place it in.
And we have that going back centuries all consistent with the theory of global warming and the real world evidence we are seeing as it unfolds.
In your last paragraph you are entering into almost entirely hypothesis not theory. Geostatic rebound takes place over thousands of years, North America is still in the process of rebound from the melting of the massive ice sheets over 10,000 years ago.
There are other much more immediate concerns with global warming and climate change and it is important to place all these factors into a context based on the best evidence in the clearest context.
Which is why it is essential to leave politics and religion out of this discussion. These are based far more on internal subjective reality than objective testable data.
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Sunspot at 18:35 PM on 1 January 2019Global warming ‘hiatus’ is the climate change myth that refuses to die
Ok one more:
I don't have a complaint with this site or the way comments are moderated. The problem is a combination of the nature of the internet and how humans are interacting with it. This is a new form of communication we are trying to cope with. On sites with few rules - Yahoo Comments, for example - it's frequently just ridiculous, with people putting up all sorts of garbage. So some form of moderation is needed. I heartily agree.
Of course the problem becomes where to "draw the line". The problem with a subject like Global Warming, and any other big existential subject. is that it is intimately connected with all forms of human thought and activity. I find it impossible to have an honest discussion about human reactions to anything scientific without discussing the role of religion in society. And I can't have an honest discussion about Global Warming without discussing the science presented at the Arctic Blogspot. But this site has been dismissed here I assume because of a few "predictions" that haven't panned out.
But carry on. I'll be reading. I won't stir up any more "controversy". When the Arctic belches up a huge gasball of methane from a massive glacial rebound earthquake and the resulting tsunami washes over half of the cities in the Northern Hemisphere, it will be a big surprise to most. Or maybe that won't happen and it will just get hotter - EXPONENTIALLY - until it is too hot to grow food anymore. But I do know the heat can't be linear. Not with over 70 feedbacks adding to it. But this site doesn't yet acknowledge that reality. And if you don't understand the role of Global Warming feedbacks on our atmosphere, then you simply don't understand Global Warming.
Moderator Response:[DB] Off-topic snipped.
[PS] Let me try to explain. SkepticalScience is setup to respond to climate misinformation by reporting what the science says instead. It is organized into topics, and someone interested say the Global warming "hiatus" can explore that topic, preferably without encountering a lot of offtopic comments. If you want to comment about AGW, find the appropriate topic and comment there. All topics are live - the community uses the "Recent comments" menu item to see where new comments are made.
Climate politics and religion can be discussed on this site here for instance.
If you cant find an appropriate topic, the Weekly digest is a place for more general discussion.
People interested in discussing science and religion are hardly going to look at SkpSci as an appropriate forum. When a discussion veers totally offtopic, it is best to find a more appropriate forum (on or off this site), make a comment there and then post a link on this comment thread to where interested parties can continue the discussion. The Search function and the "arguments" item in the menu are good resources for finding appropriate topics on this site.
The comments policy is not optional and not up for discussion. Can I ask all commentators to please stick to topic.
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Doug_C at 16:57 PM on 1 January 2019Global warming ‘hiatus’ is the climate change myth that refuses to die
Sunspot @38
It was a great book and Carl Sagan was making an appeal to reason, not belief and emotion.
@39
In my long experience in discussing science and empirical evidence based topics on anonymous formats such as this, the moment that religion and politics are introduced a rational discussion ends.
People stop sharing their common views and start defending their personal belief systems.
Skeptical Science has been such an important resource on this most important of issues because of the guidelines that allow rational facts based discussion. Not primal chest beating with the "win" going to the most aggressive and persistent, not the best informed and coherent.
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ancient_nerd at 14:12 PM on 1 January 2019CO2 increase is natural, not human-caused
Eclectic
Thank-you. It has been a few years. I was confusing the area and volume formulas.
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Eclectic at 13:26 PM on 1 January 2019CO2 increase is natural, not human-caused
@26
Area wrong. Should be pi times 4 , not pi times 4/3 .
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One Planet Only Forever at 12:38 PM on 1 January 2019Greta Thunberg's TEDx talk
Nick Palmer @16,
I agree with the ability of increasing the cost of a harmful activity to terminate it. But it is important to understand that this is not just a matter of competing alternatives. And the objective is not reducing the harmful activity. The objective is rapidly terminating the activity to reduce the harm done.
The harmful ultimately unsustainable burning of fossil fuels has to be terminated, but not just be 'replaced'. Part of the problem is the increasing energy demand, and other resource consumption, of 'supposedly more advanced people'.
Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals requires more than a conversion of energy sources from harmful non-renewables to renewables. Every energy system and its consumption/use requires other resources/materials. To achieve the SDGs the more advanced people need to require less energy for their pursuit of profit or lifestyle and use less resources, with all of the non-renewable resources they use being fully recycled. And the more advanced also need to help all others develop to be more like them.
Getting a reduction of energy use (or reduction of any resource use) by the wealthiest is not accomplished by pricing the harm done by an activity. The richest can choose to afford it. The correction requires the richest to not want to do it. Pricing also does not get the richest to help others.
A rebate of the collected fee would sort of discourage the richest, but it would not develop the requirement for the richest to truly act as leaders to a better future for humanity.
A related problem is the way that Pricing Carbon has already become a game to be gamed.
People have evaluated their perceptions of the future costs of climate change (incorrectly discounting the future costs to make them appear to be smaller). And they use those evaluations to argue what the Carbon Price should be (or even claim that there should be no effort made to tweak the free market).
That game is simply incorrect. What is required is for the Carbon Price to be as high as is needed to terminate the activity.
And the game has been gamed even more by already more fortunate, and supposedly more advanced, people who tried to incorrectly develop economic activity since the 1980s when it was undeniable that the burning of fossil fuels had to be terminated, not prolonged or expanded.
So now we face the reality that Greta has bluntly pointed out. The failure of leaders in business and politics to responsibly respond to the understanding that the burning of fossil fuels needs to be rapidly curtailed has developed a more harmful required correction to limit the harm done to future generations. Popularity and profitability of an understandably harmful activity is no excuse for allowing it to continue. Continued failure to choose to personally suffer the pain of the required correction will result in painful future consequences.
Greta's observations put today's current leaders on notice that they may be the ones to suffer consequences in the near future (she was speaking to political leaders, but the same message applies to business leaders). And the young Green New Deal people in the USA are pointing out something very similar.
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ancient_nerd at 09:59 AM on 1 January 2019CO2 increase is natural, not human-caused
I'm having a little trouble getting some math to come out right. CO2 concentration is rising by 2 ppmv/year. The net flux is given as 15 gigatons/year.
For the surface area of the earth I take a radius of 6.4e6 meters to get an area of 171e12 m2. I convert 14.7 lb/in2 atmospheric pressure at sea level to a metric value of 10.35e3 kg/m2 or 10.35 ton/m2. When I multiply those together, it comes out to 1.771e15 tons for the total weight of the atmosphere. One ppm of that would weigh 1.771e9 tons or 1.771 gigatons.
The atmosphere is primarily molecular nitrogen. Each molecule has a weight of 28. The weight for CO2 is 44. This brings the weight of one ppm by volume up to 2.78 gigatons. The increase of concentration given in the article, 2ppmv/year would represent a weight of 5.56 gigatons. This is low by a factor of almost three from the value of 15 given in the article.
What am I missing?
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Daniel Bailey at 09:21 AM on 1 January 2019Volcanoes emit more CO2 than humans
One can also look at the ice core CO2 data and isolate the rate of change per unit time, as a method to isolate slug inputs to the atmosphere from carbon reservoirs.
Here's a personal try:
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ancient_nerd at 07:15 AM on 1 January 2019Volcanoes emit more CO2 than humans
michael sweet@299
so, the Santa Barbare study does put the end of the glacial about 10,000 years after the eruption. If there was any change in CO2 levels, it would be a tiny blip that may or may not barely stick out of the noise.
I am not sure if I can link to a specific yahoo comment of mine, but here is a paste from this article Anak Krakatau Volcano Erupts in Indonesia.
Measurements from ice core samples show no significant change in CO2 levels after either the Krakatoa or the Tambora eruptions. Volcanoes do inject sulfur into the stratosphere that cools the climate for a few years until it drops out. CO2 has a much longer lifetime in the atmosphere. It takes geological processes thousands of years to stabilize carbon levels.
I could now add to that something like:
There was a massive eruption at Yellowstone 630,000 years ago. It caused massive destruction as it left ash deposits up to 600 feet thick over much of North America. If there was a change in CO2 levels from that, it is barely visible, if at all, in the ice cores.
Thank-you
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michael sweet at 05:09 AM on 1 January 2019Volcanoes emit more CO2 than humans
Ancient Nerd:
In fact I did read the graph incorrectly.
The increase in CO2 is still about 10,000 years after the eruption date.
Reading more background information, I found several articles (BBC Forbes GOOGLE search) that mentioned volcanic winters caused by supervolcanoes but none that mentioned CO2 effects. Several mentioned the Santa Barbara study referenced up thread. The Forbes article suggested that the supervolcano might have delayed the interglacial that was beginning around that time.
I see no supporting information for the idea that CO2 from the volcano caused an increasse in global temperatures.
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nigelj at 05:00 AM on 1 January 2019Global warming ‘hiatus’ is the climate change myth that refuses to die
Sunspot @39, thanks for the tip on the book. I admire Sagen as well. But come on you know religion is getting off topic, especially on an article about the Pause. I hope you comment further on other matters.
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Sunspot at 23:22 PM on 31 December 2018Global warming ‘hiatus’ is the climate change myth that refuses to die
Clearly your commenting rules, and, frankly, your views of Global Warming are too restrictive for me. I won't attempt to comment on this site anymore.
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Sunspot at 19:21 PM on 31 December 2018Global warming ‘hiatus’ is the climate change myth that refuses to die
Just one more quick point - for the best discussion I know of on the perspective of the non-believer, you can't beat Sagan's "Demon-Haunted World". It was the last book he wrote, his last message to humanity. He sent James Randi an early draft, and when the final version was published Randi noted that much of the language had been strengthened even more. During the final edit, at least, Sagan knew he was dying. He had things he needed to explain to us. For want of a better word, this book is my "bible". If I was going to start a humanistic "religion", I think I'd call it "Saganism". Carl would be appalled, lol...
Moderator Response:[PS] While I heartily admire Sagan's book too, enough please of offtopic comments.
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Doug_C at 17:45 PM on 31 December 20182018 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming Digest #52
nigelj @3
Also large stands of timber that can be utilized for lumber and other products. Unfortunately much of that will be destroyed by pine bettle infestations that are no longer controlled by very cold Canadian winters that no longer exist.
And the tar sands themselves contain large amounts of thorium and uranium, Alberta would be far better off investing in Gen IV molten salt reactors in the slow and fast spectrum which would provide centuries of energy at current demand from the tar sands alone.
It's not the lack of options that prevents real change in Alberta, it is the total lack of willingness of private and public sector policymakers who lack any independence from the oil and gas sector.
Rachel Notley only got elected to office after decades of Conservative rule because of how arrogant they had become. It was revealed that billions of dollars in royalties had been lost due to Conservative government mismanagement over years in Alberta.
Royalty Miscalculation Cost Alberta Billions, Expert Says
And as a response to this huge boondoggle the Conservative running for Premier told the people of Alberta that they should blame themselves for this loss.
Prentice says Albertans must 'look in the mirror' for the province's financial crunch
The way the oil and gas sector perpetually screws Albertans which will eventually leave the entire province broke and likely a wasteland you'd think there would be a revolution there. But the opposite is happening, people getting behind the oil and gas lobby like it offers some kind of salvation.
Totally irrational.
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scaddenp at 16:58 PM on 31 December 2018Volcanoes emit more CO2 than humans
The Gerlach 2010 calculation still stands. The amount of CO2 an eruption can produce is constrained by the solubility of CO2 in magma. This is a hard limit.
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scaddenp at 16:54 PM on 31 December 2018Models are unreliable
AFT - based on a comment izen in this discussion, I believe this has been attempted but it is anything but straightforward because of changes to compilers, hardware and the state of the data files. There is more about the veracity of the model in this article here and perhaps further comments about Hansen 1988 belong there. In short, the model produces a climate sensitivity that is on the high side compared to modern models for a variety of interesting reasons. However, the article also points out a number of ways in which the model has been misrepresented by deniers. Continued work on reproducing the model is unlikely to help with those who determined to deceive.
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nigelj at 16:25 PM on 31 December 20182018 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming Digest #52
Alberta appear to rely on fossil fuel exports, but they have vast metals based mineral wealth, mostly unexploited, so its not as if they have to rely on fossil fuels. I would have more sympathy for countries whos only natural resource is fossil fuels.
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nigelj at 16:13 PM on 31 December 2018Greta Thunberg's TEDx talk
Something relevant: The book Dark Money, on the influence of money from people like the Koch brothers in the politics of climate change. This is 20 pages from the book.
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Doug_C at 15:45 PM on 31 December 20182018 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming Digest #52
Alberta is an oil and gas company store, even if it wasn't for climate change the cost to Albertans from this one sector is massive.
Albertans are already responsible for billions of dollars in costs for abandoned oil wells.
Albertans may face $8B bill for orphan wells unless rules change, lawyer says
And the overall cost of cleaning up the oil and gas sector there is in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
Cleaning up Alberta’s oilpatch could cost $260 billion, internal documents warn
But that pales to the potential costs of catastrophic climate change which have already been massive.
In 2013 Alberta experienced record floods in the south that claimed lives and cost and estimate $5 billion.
An April, 2016 heat wave and drought in north central Alberta created the perfect conditions for May firestorms that burned down Fort McMurray and cost an estimated $9 billion.
There is no prosperity from oil and gas in Alberta even before we look at climate change who's costs are already becoming incredible. And yet far too many Albertans demand the worst not best course to take rallying for more pipelines to keep the bitumen flowing and some threatening the life of the new Premier who seemed poised to challenge the death grip oil and gas has on Alberta.
Pro-pipeline rally draws 1,000 attendees in Alberta town of about 6,600
A wake-up call': Documents detail litany of threats against Premier Rachel Notley
The fact that Rachel Notley is doing nothing to address this existential issue may be down to the violence threatened against her by those who clearly lack any sense of responsibilty and collective interests.
Energy or social policy as expressed now in Alberta at the highest level has no place in a sane or civil society.
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ancient_nerd at 15:43 PM on 31 December 2018Volcanoes emit more CO2 than humans
michael@295
Maybe you should look at the graph again. 650k years ago, the CO2 is at 200 ppm. 35,000 years later, at 615k, the CO2 has increased to 240 ppm. That is a big increase at 625k.
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ancient_nerd at 15:08 PM on 31 December 2018Volcanoes emit more CO2 than humans
I am not denying the science. I am just wondering if what we have here is really conclusive. Thank-you for taking the time for a curious amateur.
So that big rise from 200 to 240 ppm really is at 620 or 625. Is the time calibration really so good that we can be sure the Yellowstone eruption happened earlier? It seems possible that the little wiggle we might expect is getting blasted away by a much bigger signal.
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Doug_C at 13:34 PM on 31 December 2018Greta Thunberg's TEDx talk
I seriously doubt we are getting out of this death spiral by tweaking a political and economic system that is inseparable from its almost total fossil fuels base.
Greta is bang on, we've been talking for decades about change and touting "green" technology and practices and yet emissions are still going up and many places like Canada are still demanding at an institutional level that fossil fuel exploitation be the main driver of economics and society for decades more.
We need a paradigm shift that is very hard to achieve because most vested interests still lie firmly in the fossil fuels sector. We get "leaders" like the Canadian PM who went to Paris in 2015 and played the game of claiming to respect the evidence and wanting real change. Who then a few months later went to Houston Texas to an oil and gas symposium and was given an award by the industry for openly stating that Canada under his policy control would in fact not leave the bulk of 173 billion barrels of oil sands bitumen in the ground.
These two things are not compatible at all and have not been for decades. And yet we all do sit back and allow politicians and business leaders get away with what is essentially the greatest fraud in history, which itself is well documented.
No one profits if we crash the planet and yet that is exactly where we are headed. What will the oceans be like in just few decades without almost any coral reef systems and that is just the tip of this issue.
I think nigelj is accurate in saying that most people are simply not built to assimilate the threat that is unfolding on a decadal scale and are able to go with the flow which is still dominated by the amount of money that is used by one sector to both buy political power and distort public perception so that many are deeply confused about what to believe.
Australia is an excellent example of this, most people there understand that climate change is real and driven by human activity. But almost half think scientists are evenly divided on the evidence and likely outcome of this. When almost all peer-reviewed science is clear about the nature of this threat and its likely outcome if not mitgated and now.
The psychology of climate change denial
It is the same political and economic games that have been played for decades that enable what I truly do see as a fraud in the interests of just a few to enrich themselves no matter the truly frightening impacts we all face already nevermind what is coming in just a few years.
Think of everyone you have ever known including you gone and no generations of people to carry on our culture, history and the wealth that is in our genes.
That is what we do now face without radical change and right now, not 30 years from which is in fact what will happen if we allow the same fraud to play out that has been going on for that long at least.
There is already a very real revolution underway as we are collectively acting to turn what is the only planet we know can sustain this kind of biosphere into one that will only be able to support a fraction of the species here now.
And yet we are collectively being controlled so only a few rebel against this devastating change. People in Alberta hold rallies to demand more and more pipelines are built and people in BC are jailed for protesting this mindless process of "progress" at any cost with no thought to externalized costs which are heading towards everything.
Maybe Greta is right and most of the rest of us are truly the irrational ones.
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nigelj at 13:07 PM on 31 December 20182018 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #52
Regarding the Democrats Green New Deal, their huge, somewhat jaw dropping infrastructure plan to combat climate change. The idea appears to be essentially for the reserve bank to create credit to finance construction of a clean electricity grid, and fund incentives for various projects, somewhat akin to the New Deal of the 1930's.
The public would obviously be sympathetic because it doesn't involve taxes or levies. That is a significant plus in the scheme.
I have to confess I'm personally attracted to such things in principle, but I have a big internal sceptic as well. The thing is the risk of inflation. The New Deal of the 1930's worked because the economy was deflating, so printing money was never going to be an issue. The situation is different now in that the economy is not really deflating, and so theres a risk such massive credit creation could be inflationary, and if it emerged the federal reserve would be forced to push up interest rates quite significantly.
I'm not ruling the scheme out, just raising an issue that would need some analysis.
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David Kirtley at 12:37 PM on 31 December 2018Climate Carbon Bookkeeping
Dan @4:
1) "had to be...", "I'm sorry it's just too conveniently flat". Perhaps your expectations are unrealistic. Consider that human yearly emissions of CO2 are roughly 100 times greater than the avg. total of yearly volcanic emissions. Volcanic activity would have to increase over 100 times to be comparable to human emissions, which "only" move CO2 up about 2 ppm per year. There just aren't any natural sources which move fast enough to increase or decrease the amount of atmospheric CO2. What the "flat" levels of CO2 over most of the last millennium tell us is that the sources and sinks of CO2 into and out of the atmosphere were mostly in balance.
2) If you click on the source link below the graph you will see this graph:
This shows the CO2 reading for each sample taken from three ice cores on Law Dome in Antarctica. The data in this graph is used to form the smoothed curve in the graph you are asking about. Note that the most recent readings are right in line with the direct atmospheric readings we have of the recent spike in CO2, as in the Keeling Curve. More info on Law Dome, Data.
Unfortunately, there aren't ice cores from "multiple locations around the globe". Thick sheets of ice only form in certain areas so we have to do with what we can get. We have many cores from Greenland and Antarctica and some from alpine glacier regions. The cores from Greenland can't be used for CO2 measurements because of high levels of contamination. So we have to do with the Antarctic cores. Here is a map of those:
I'm not sure if there are any other cores besides the Law Dome cores which give CO2 readings over the last millennium which we can compare. But the Law Dome cores alone are "adequate proof" of atmospheric CO2 concentrations simply because they track the known concentrations measured by the Keeling Curve. The Law Dome cores may be only one "tool" for measuring CO2, but we know the tool works.
3) Indeed, we have cores that reach back 800,000 years into the past. (And some even further, past the 1 million years mark.) (Now I see that michael sweet has also answered your questions!) I'll just point out that over this 800,000 year period CO2 rose and fell naturally by about ~100 ppm as we went from ice ages to warm interglacial periods, and back again.
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michael sweet at 11:53 AM on 31 December 2018Climate Carbon Bookkeeping
Dan Joppich,
Just yesterday I posted this graph which shows CO2 variations going back over 800,000 years.
Most posters at this site follow the comments link at the top of the page so they can see everything that is posted as it comes on.
To answer your other questions
1) We do not see spikes because volcanos and fires in Indonesia produce too little CO2 to be detected. Massive CO2 emissions like present time fossil fuels are required. (Although farmers have caused CO2 to increase for the past 8,000 years).
2) Obviously there was data from many cores collected to produce this graph. Follow the link on the graph in the OP to find out how the graph was made. Thousands of cores have been drilled.
3) The data I linked is from the core that goes furthest back in time (a single core). Data back to at least 400,000 years can be cross-checked with other cores but Dome C is believed to have the oldest ice on the planet so the best you could do to check the oldest data would be to drill another core at the same location. For cores going back only 1000 years even relatively small glaciers would go back that far.
Data beyond 800,000 years is available from other sources. These sources are not as accurate as ice cores.
4) Here is the correlation for the past 400,000 years.
source As you can see, temperature and CO2 concentration correlate very closely. There is no need for statistical analysis.
":Skeptics" provide a number of hare-brained excuses for the increase besides fossil fuel burning. They have all been shown to be incorrect. It is also not the sun. See the arguments in the upper left if you have questions.
Natural changes in CO2 concentrations are very slow. Current changes in CO2 are faster than any known for at least 50 million years (and probably much longer, perhaps the fastest ever in the history of the Earth). Looking at only 1000 years they are usually fairly flat, even during periods of glacial change. Note that the greatest change in the 800,000 year graph is only about 80 ppm in 10,000 years. The recent graph in the OP shows about 200 ppm in 200 years, approximately two orders of magnitude faster than any natural change. The Mauna Loa record shows 100 ppm change since 1960 or 58 years.
CO2 change is not localized. While CO2 is often higher in cities, scientists measure CO2 in remote locations so that only global chnges are measured. Your opinion is incorrect.
Read more background material before you challenge established science.
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michael sweet at 11:06 AM on 31 December 2018Volcanoes emit more CO2 than humans
Ancient Nerd,
I know the graph reads earlier on the left. There is a very large drop in CO2 at about 625ky. The bottom of the graph is lower CO2. There is no significant increase of CO2 anywhere near 630. Look at the graph again.
The dates are well established. You must cite a reference if you wish to challenge accepted science. There were 13 eruptions in the southern hemisphere in the last 200,000 years to date the ice. It appears that you are just making things up to suit your preconceived notions.
This data shows that CO2 from the Yellowstone volcano did not affect world wide CO2 concentrations.
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WayneK at 10:00 AM on 31 December 20182018 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming Digest #51
2nd try at doing the link correctly: <a href="https://issuu.com/unipcc/docs/syr_ar5_final_full_wcover/24"> 2014 Synthesis, pp 7-8</a>
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One Planet Only Forever at 09:51 AM on 31 December 20182018 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming Digest #52
Regarding the Editorial of the Week: "Opinion: Our house is on fire, and many Albertans want more lighters".
In addition to the obvious points made in the article about natural disaster consequences of climate change impacting Alberta, the fresh water supply from glaciers immediately west of Alberta is also threatened. This CBC News item is one of many on a recent report. "80% of mountain glaciers in Alberta, B.C. and Yukon will disappear within 50 years: report".
As a long time resident of Alberta I can confirm that the authors of the Opinion piece are correct about the potential level of dislike they may face for presenting this understanding.
In Alberta, politicians who support LGBTQ rights have received death threats. Exposing the way that climate science has proven the unacceptability of the way people try to get rich or enjoy their life is even more threatening in Alberta than standing up for the acceptance of, and fair and decent treatment of, LGBTQ people.
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WayneK at 09:49 AM on 31 December 20182018 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming Digest #51
I think I succeeded in creating a direct link to pages in a report (bear with me since this is my first try to link properly): <a href="https://issuu.com/unipcc/docs/syr_ar5_final_full_wcover/24"> 2014 Synthesis, pp 7-8</a>
Click on "full screen" in the lower right, then use the zoom bar in the same area to enlarge the view as needed. To link to another page, click on "share" in the upper right and copy the link that comes up.
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nigelj at 08:51 AM on 31 December 2018Global warming ‘hiatus’ is the climate change myth that refuses to die
OPOF @36
Yes. Neoliberalism is problematic I think. It is clearly funamentally embedded in the climate problem, so not off topic I hope.
I don't know that neoliberalism is a religion, but its adherents sure can be dogmatic. It's a belief system, or prescriptive system, and is not science. It says that the economy will work best if we do a,b, and c and I think that the evidence now says neoliberalism is not a fully resolved system.
Normally neoliberalism is defined as promoting free trade, open immigration, largest private sector possible, austerity, deregulation, flat taxes and minimising influence of trade unions. Neoliberals believe inequality doesn't matter. But definitions differ and that is half the problem.
The real world evidence suggests free trade (which I like) optimises outputs globally but is very harsh on blue collar workers in western countries, something the neoliberals did not forsee. So much for the theory. But you can mitigate all this with some income redistribution.
Completely open immigration is nuts. There have to be some limitations.
Inequality does matter and even the neoliberal IMF now admits this.
The evidence suggests financial deregulation hasn't worked very well. Liberal economists do not actually oppose environmental, health and safety regulations. It's polticians who falsely promote this as "good economics". Liberal economics does not mean go to the extreme and deregulate everything, it just means avoid arbitrary regulations and those that protect special interests.
The evidence suggests privatisation works well for manufacturing but is problematic for key resources like healthcare and the water supply.
I could go on. You get the picture. So how do we rate neoliberalism? Maybe 5 / 10?
We should get sustainable development goals front and centre of any economic ideology.
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AFT17170 at 07:38 AM on 31 December 2018Models are unreliable
As I've stated in other posts, I am a non-scientist layman. I've gone through thousands of comments on this site and several articles on RealClimate. I just got done reading the article and comments over there on "30 years after Hansen’s testimony" here
Based on everything I've read so far, this is what I've internalized (please correct me as needed) — all climate models are obviously dependent upon the assumed inputs of both man-driven forcings and natural forcings, which the models use in physics-based simulations of the resulting outputs. Such models do not pretend to have intradecadal accuracy, rather the target is skill in projecting 30 year trends. Hansen was obviously required to guess those forcings, which he incorporated into 3 different scenarios. His man-driven forcings included not only CO2, but also N2O, CH4 and CFC. His CO2 forcings, in retrospect, were "pretty close" for Scenario B but he overshot on the others because humans actually tackled those other emissions. Gavin at RealClimate took a stab at adjusting Hansen's Scenario B and concluded that the adjusted results indicated a quite skillful model.
So my (perhaps dumb) question is — why not re-run the actual models with the actual man-made forcings that happened in those 3 decades, to see exactly how close the projections got for Scenario B? It seems like they might be "pretty darn close" and bolster the cause?
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Dan Joppich at 07:20 AM on 31 December 2018Climate Carbon Bookkeeping
Hard to believe that in all that I missed an obvious question -
4. If you superimposed a graph of global temperature data over the same period on top of this CO2 data, why don't they track? And related, does this graph prove that CO2 and global average temperatures are not related?
Moderator Response:[JH] Global temperature and CO2 do indeed correlate...
Source: Greenhouse Gas Concentrations, Climate Central, Nov 20, 2018
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One Planet Only Forever at 07:15 AM on 31 December 2018Global warming ‘hiatus’ is the climate change myth that refuses to die
My comment @35 is a little unfair to NeoLiberalism.
NeoLiberalism could help develop sustainable improvements for humanity:
- if absolutely everyone is dedicated to honestly improving their awareness and understanding and applying that learning to altruistically help sustainably improve the future for all of humanity.
- if everyone is willing to quickly correct incorrect harmful developments no matter how popular or profitable they may have become.
But of course everyone being unswervingly Altruistic is a Fantasyland - which makes the dream of Good Results being developed by NeoLiberalism a Fantasy.
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Dan Joppich at 07:11 AM on 31 December 2018Climate Carbon Bookkeeping
I'm not a scientist but I am an accountant and I look at and prepare a lot of graphs. My focus is not so much on the article as a whole (because it's way over my head) but on the graph included that is based on ice core samples. So, as I tell my college age children, always think of three questions the author or journalist didn't ask. Here are mine:
1. The graph is virtually flat for much of the thousand years. It seems to me that there had to be a few naturally occuring events that would create even a small blip (i.e. a major volcanic event even under the oceans or maybe unusually massive fires in Indonesia). Why don't we see a spike somewhere? I'm sorry it's just too conveniently flat.
2. I would like to think that the authors of the graph compared graphs from core samples in multiple locations around the globe and found that they all showed the same results. How many locations are necessary to confirm the results and how many did they use from what sources? If the answer is that there was only one, I would think that scientific skepticism would say that it's a pretty graph but not good science the same way that my auditor skepticism would not accept such a result as adequate proof.
3. In geological time this graph represents a blink of the eye. The core samples had to provide samples that go back many thousands of years. What would the graph show if it went back 5,000 years? 10,000 years?
Again, I'm not a scientist, but has anybody come up with an alternate explantion for the jump over the last couple centuries. After all, from 1800 to 1900 there were very few people on the earth to the point that no matter how many fires they made or, later in the 1800's, trains that spewed carbon and soot. Certainly not enough to explain the early rise. And even where that occurred it was localized (New York, London, etc.) and would not have caused Antarctic changes on this level, in my opinion.
Maybe the graph flatlines for extended periods for some other reason. I'll leave the answer to smarter people than me but this site is called "Skeptical Science", not "I got the answer I was looking for so I can move on Science". I'm not saying that there isn't more CO2 now, I'm just looking at the flat line and wondering why?
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ancient_nerd at 07:08 AM on 31 December 2018Volcanoes emit more CO2 than humans
michael sweet@290
The time scale on this chart seems to run backward from what we would expect intuitively. The left edge is the present, the right edge is 800k years ago. So, that large step around 625 or so is an increase in CO2 levels and temperature right about the time of the eruption.
As David pointed out earlier in post 287, there is no ash layer to provide accurate correlation since these cores come from antarctica in the southern hemisphere and the eruption was in the northern hemisphere. So we do not really know the exact timing.
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One Planet Only Forever at 07:04 AM on 31 December 2018Global warming ‘hiatus’ is the climate change myth that refuses to die
A further follow-on to my comment @31 about Flat-Earthers.
I have yet to encounter a Flat-Earther. But I expect a Flat-Earther to be far more likely to understand and accept climate science and the required corrections of developed human activity that it has exposed than a NeoLiberal.
NeoLiberalism is a far more harmful Religiously believed made-up human faith system.
And NeoLiberals Uniting with Religious Law adherents (the United Right likes of the GOP and similar groups in other nations), are potentially the most serious threat to the future of humanity that humanity has ever developed (even a more serious threat than nuclear weapons).
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Jonbo69 at 06:53 AM on 31 December 2018Explainer: Why some US Democrats want a ‘Green New Deal’ to tackle climate change
"Some Democrats want to focus more on searching for bipartisan solutions that can be passed by the current Congress, rather than gambling on a hypothetical future Democratic takeover of both congress and the presidency."
Exactly how would that work when the other side doesn't accept there is a problem that requires a solution? To me this is just the corporate democrats beholden to their donors in the fossil fuel industry trying to delay and avoid real action - making them just as culpable as the GOP.
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Evan at 05:58 AM on 31 December 2018Global warming ‘hiatus’ is the climate change myth that refuses to die
I like the discussions here (including those about religion), because everybody here is trying to discern the truth, and not just hold on to a self-interested view point. It is an honest discussion from honest truth seekers.
Moderator Response:[PS] However, at this point the discussion is very far from the topic of this article. Interesting as discussions of religion are, this is not the forum for them. Commentary and particularly studies on religion with respect to climate denialism could be discussed on an appropriate topic - not this one.
If you want a more appropriate forum, this search seems to offer plenty of alternatives. No more here please.
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nigelj at 05:35 AM on 31 December 2018Global warming ‘hiatus’ is the climate change myth that refuses to die
Sunspot @32, I have to be honest I do identify pretty closely with your views there. For me there is a singular lack of evidence for some form of religious creation, and the stories events, and miracles in the bible and there are many contradictions, and I cannot seem to get passed that, although I hear what Evan is saying.
I'm reduced to believing that if god exists such an entity takes an imaginable form of a power, not a creator as such, and our only hope of understanding such a thing would be science itself.
However there is evidence of a god gene that programmes us to at least believe in a god (doesn't mean god exists). Religion was a unifying influence in the past I think by placing faith in a higher power. For me we should be taking the best ethical teachings of religions of all types and distilling them into something really good and logical.
Discussion above is good because its non aggressive. I think its also important to remain open minded, and I cannot be 100% sure of my own beliefs, but I'm ok with them at this stage.
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WayneK at 05:07 AM on 31 December 20182018 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming Digest #51
MA Rodger@30,
1) I've seen that page before when I was trying to figure out how to link to pages inside my own PDF's. Couldn't get it to work. In any case, you have to have an online PDF to link to, which we don't have (as far as I know).
2) Your link doesn't take you to a page online. It's a download link for the whole Introduction.
I'm still working on this and will post again if I find something helpful. I've found one report displayed online in .php, which is a start, but still there's no way to link to a particular page.
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nigelj at 04:56 AM on 31 December 2018Greta Thunberg's TEDx talk
The climate problem is a classic tragedy of the commons problem, just on a grand scale. Lets not complicate it beyond this. Everything OPOF says is true but is a subset of the essential problem.
Such problems happen in freemarket economies and even centrally planned economies. Markets are very clumsy and slow at fixing such problems if they fix them at all, so solutions have to be imposed on market participants by participants agreeing on an appropriate solution. You can call this tweaking the market if you want.
Solutions can involve court actions (costly and only the lawyers really win), government regulations, cap and trade schemes, taxes, or government infrastructure projects. All these leave markets free to make decisions so free markets are preserved, with the exception of government infrastructure projects are more of an imposition.
The difficulty with the climate problem has clearly been identifying the best solution. The next difficulty is people who dont believe in any solution, other than court action (and even that only reluctantly).
Nick palmers idea sounds ok. Cap and trade and carbon taxes hit manufacturers with dirty products dont they? The problem is mostly political, how to convince libertarians and conservatives to get on board. The $64,000 question.
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Sunspot at 04:40 AM on 31 December 2018Global warming ‘hiatus’ is the climate change myth that refuses to die
Interesting discussion. But, for me, religion is totally devoid of evidence. I understand that many people have had personal experiences that lead them to religious beliefs, but are any of these experiences objectively verifiable? I think about the commonality of near-death experiences, but is this something more than a dying brain trying to make sense of the situation? I need a scientific examination of religion, but I don't think such a thing is possible. Beliefs are simply not available for objective examination. I guess this means to some that belief is just somehow special, but to my way of thinking it simply makes belief irrelevant.
Maybe the world would be a better place if we all agreed on the same set of religious beliefs. But what I see is that differing religious beliefs just establish a chasm between people that can seldom be breached, there are no objective facts to agree on. And now we are faced with seemingly intelligent people who somehow dismiss science altogether, which is of course ridiculous unless you live in a cave. What I see is people replacing evidence with belief. It simply doesn't work. Science is what built our civilization. Dismissing science can destroy it.
If we had a few worlds to experiment with, I'd like to try one without any form of religion, or "spirituality", at all. Just the facts. People working together to make life better for us all. Not just for those who agree with a particular view of some invisible man in the sky who watches everything we do (Carlin).
I absolutely agree that there should be freedon of religion. Believe whatever you want. But I want freedom FROM religion. Because that is true freedom, to choose to believe or not. Religion is getting too involved in how we run our society, and there are too many who would force their views on others. I do take "The Handmaid's Tale" seriously.
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One Planet Only Forever at 03:02 AM on 31 December 2018Global warming ‘hiatus’ is the climate change myth that refuses to die
A fun follow-on about Flat-Earthers. A Flat-Earher may actually be very supportive of correcting the harmful developed burning of fossil fuels. The shape of the planet does not affect the understanding of the link between the massive burning of fossil fuels and harmful climate change impacts.
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Evan at 02:55 AM on 31 December 2018Global warming ‘hiatus’ is the climate change myth that refuses to die
OPOF, I think there is more common ground in our views than different.
"An Inconvenient Truth" is a brilliant title for the following reason. If AGW is not occurring, then the people being afflicted by AGW are being afflicted by an act of god over which we have no control, and all that we are required to do is to pray for them and to send some money to help. If, however, people accept AGW as originating from our lifestyle, then instead of just praying for these afflicted people (an activity that can co-exist with an otherwise wasteful western existence), we have the inconvenient reality that we need to change our lifestyle. I think this is at the heart of the Christian resistance to accepting AGW, as much as it is about not wanting to be under a set of UN-mandated policies (whether or not it would come to that).
By the way, for those reading, I am not selling myself as a theologian nor as a philosopher. But this dialogue does help me understand how others view the problem and helps develop talking points. I don't mean to be argumentative, and I do appreciate all of the great comments.
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One Planet Only Forever at 02:38 AM on 31 December 2018Global warming ‘hiatus’ is the climate change myth that refuses to die
Evan @27 and 28,
You appear to be unnecessarily conflating Religion with Spirituality. I separate the two for very Good Helpful Altruistic Reason. I have presented some of them in my earlier comments.
People can be harmfully Religious about things that have nothing to do with Spirituality. And people can be Helpfully Religious related to Spirituality.
People can also abuse the potential human desire to be part of a Tribe and become harmful Religious followers of a set of unjustified beliefs.
The real focus needs to be understanding that the most important actions for anyone are to help by improving awareness and understanding and applying that improved correct learning to actually sustainably develop a better future for humanity, achieve and improve the Sustainabel Development Goals, especially the Climate Action Goal.
That focus identifies the harmful people in politics, businesses, and religions. It also divides/polarizes the actions of people in politics, business and religion into helpful and harmful people.
That division/polarization is important. It is critical to improve the awareness and understanding of who needs to be corrected. And it helps understand that the socioeconomic-political system that people develop their beliefs in may be what needs to be corrected to reduce the number of harmful people that get developed.
And the major motivation I see for resistance to accepting climate science is a powerful self-interest to keep undeserved developed perceptions of prosperity and superiority relative to others. Easily amplified by misleading marketing, that drives resistance to global efforts to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.
System corrections are undeniably required. The systems have continued to develop inequities leaving many people destitute and starving even though the total perceived wealth of humanity has grown far faster than the total population.
Those Religiously defended systems need to be significantly corrected regardless of their power and regional tribal popularity and profitability. And the most harmful people (in politics, business and religions) need to be the focus for most urgent correction.
Raising awareness that way, identifying the harmful who need correction, should reduce the popular support for the most harmful people.
p.s. Another way to say it is that any beliefs that are not harmful to efforts to achieve and improve on the SDGs are benign or helpful and do not require a focus on correction. As an example, Flat-earthers can be left alone if they do not want to use that belief to excuse a harmful action. And they can be helpful even if they maintain that now understood to be incorrect belief.
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michael sweet at 00:28 AM on 31 December 2018Volcanoes emit more CO2 than humans
MARodger,
You cite an interesting paper. It appears to me that volcanic dust and gas caused a winter effect. This is known from recent eruptions. Apparently the effect was longer than might be expected from a volcano.
In any case, the cooling effect is not caused by CO2 release. I think Ancient Nerd was asking if the volcano could have contributed to an increase in global temperatures from release of CO2. It appears to me that an increase in temperature from the CO2 did not occur. The amount of CO2 released was not measurable in the ice record. This demonstrates that release of CO2 from volcanoes, even extraordinarily large ones, does not affect climate.
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MA Rodger at 00:19 AM on 31 December 2018Volcanoes emit more CO2 than humans
michael sweet @290,
I see there was a paper presented a couple of years ago attributing the Yellowstone events of 630ky bp with dropping SSTs by 3ºCa couple of times for "at least ~80 yrs" which is longer than expected for a volcanic event (they speculate that feedbacks lengthened it) but it is not very long on a graph of 800ky of climate (about a tenth the width of a pixel in your diagrm).
There is media reports of the paper on-line but they don't say much more than the paper's abstract. The full text is available but on request.
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michael sweet at 00:17 AM on 31 December 2018Sea level rise due to floating ice?
I realized that the figure I copied does not make much sense without the caption. Here it is:
Fig. 1. Sea-level change in response to the collapse of the
WAIS computed by using (A) a standard sea-level theory (5),
which assumes a nonrotating Earth, no marine-based ice, and
shorelines that remain fixed to the present-day geometry with
time, as well as (B) a prediction based on a theory (6) that
overcomes these limitations. Both predictions are normalized by
the EEV associated with the ice collapse. In (B), the total volume
of the WAIS is used in the calculation, whereas in (A) only an
amount of ice with a volume that matches the EEV is removed
(because the latter cannot take into account the inundation of
marine-based sectors). (C) The difference between predictions
generated by using the two sea-level theories [(B) minus (A)].B is the part of the figure that relates to this discussion. source
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michael sweet at 23:55 PM on 30 December 2018Volcanoes emit more CO2 than humans
Ancient Nerd: Sorry I mispelled your handle.
The source of the graph was Beretier et al linked by David Kirtley above.
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