Climate Change and Copenhagen

[cooran]

Hello all,

US to regulate greenhouse gas emissions
The US government has declared that greenhouse gases threaten human health.
The move could allow the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to order cuts in emissions without the approval of Congress.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8400323.stm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

metta
Chris

[poto]

Yep - that's part of the possible scenarios of Climate Change.

A scarier, colder vision of the climate change future
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/a-scarier ... -ahz4.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

metta
Chris

Yeah, I agree that cold is potentially far more dangerous than warming. However, I don't think that human emissions are driving any change in climate. The climate isn't static and is always changing. The sun is the primary driver of global temps. While land use changes and population densities among other factors have had a measurable impact on local climate and ecological systems, this is a far cry from global climate Thermageddon. I find the scaremongering absurd and offensive.

These carbon tax schemes and the power that flows from them will lead to war, poverty and greater suffering for many beings.

[fig tree]

Yeah, I agree that cold is potentially far more dangerous than warming. However, I don't think that human emissions are driving any change in climate.

This is the one position that we can be completely sure is not true. We're putting tens of gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. Some of it is absorbed (some of it is causing damage by lowering the pH of the oceans for example) while much of it remains there. We can measure pretty well how much remains. Checking the composition of the CO2 by isotopes indicates that the added CO2 is produced by our burning fossil fuels, not some natural source secretly churning it out. CO2 does not magically cease to absorb infrared light when we put it into the atmosphere just because it's inconvenient that it does.

It's unreasonable to suppose that this activity would fail to warm the atmosphere unless it had some other effect that compensated. For instance, the one skeptic at M.I.T. always used to argue that the atmosphere could get dried out by this process in such a way as to compensate (since water vapor is also a greenhouse gas). Other skeptics have been known to say that maybe we'd get increased cloud cover instead, and that this would compensate (by reflecting the light). None of these notions have panned out. Not only have they not panned out, all the evidence is in favor of there being more of a positive feedback loop (espcially by warming causing there to be more water vapor in the atmosphere, amplifying the warming) than a negative one. Additional positive feedback loops are proving to be stronger than originally expected.

But even more fundamentally, even if one of these "skeptical" notions were correct, it wouldn't mean that we were not "driving" a change in the climate; it would just mean that we were changing it in a different way than by warming. More cloud cover, a drier stratosphere... these are changes too. Nobody has provided a reasonable scenario on which putting tens of gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year could be doing just nothing, nor can they.

The climate isn't static and is always changing. The sun is the primary driver of global temps.

People have been measuring the changes in solar output, and gathering evidence about its past changes. The Planck institute produced a paper on this. The past 60 years or so have had higher solar output than there had been before, helping to explain why the 1940s were as warm as they were (comparatively). The past 30 years or so have had even a bit more. The sun also changes in output during the solar cycle (as the number of sunspots rises and falls). But the last few solar cycles have not seen much change in the output of the Sun. It has essentially nothing to do with the recent observed changes in global average temperature. The recent changes also stand out relative to most of the changes that have occurred for a long time.

The people behind the misinformation campaign about these issues are very fond of trying to get people to think of warming as a question of some temperature data (which they might try to cast doubts on) going in search of an explanation. That way, the hapless layperson who is their victim can be led to suppose that attention paid to one explanation (the effect of CO2) is due to bias leading researchers not to take other explanations seriously enough. "It's so complex! How can we be sure which explanation is correct?"

But this ignores what we know of physics. CO2 due to its physical properties changes the radiation balance in the atmosphere. That this is likely to produce warming was predicted around a century ago, and now we see the prediction coming true. For this not to result in warming, there would have to be a compensating other effect produced by CO2. For decades people have looked for such a thing.

Now, suppose hypothetically that no warming were occurring. Then this would require some explanation, some cause for the trapped heat to be released some other way, or for the energy not to be arriving in the first place. Unless one found a connection between CO2 and this (hypothetical) other mechanism, the safest conclusion would be that we had both warming due to the CO2 and cooling due to some other mechanism that were canceling each other out. To some extent, the warming has been canceled out by aerosol-caused cooling.

Suppose hypothetically that some auxiliary cause for warming were found. That also would not be sufficient reason to imagine that CO2 was having zero effect. As it happens, however, despite a lot of hunting (and some wishful thinking) no such alternative explanation has serious evidence behind it. Yet you have no trouble digging up sources that pretend that there is... because so many of those sources are based on lies.

While land use changes and population densities among other factors have had a measurable impact on local climate and ecological systems, this is a far cry from global climate Thermageddon. I find the scaremongering absurd and offensive.

There are sources of propaganda on the American political right that seem to be extremely keen on producing caricatures of what their opponents are saying, and they describe objective climate scientists as if they were as you say, people who try to scare us by forecasting "thermageddon". Try looking at what people are actually saying, however, not what one end of the political spectrum is portraying them as saying. What you see is people who believe there is a problem, and want to enlist others of us in helping to solve the problem. If anything, there is a tendency for them to try to put an upbeat spin on all of it, by implying that just a few "green" changes in habits will suffice to solve the problem. The fact that they are not cheerfully forecasting that everything will be fine without our doing anything at all is because they are avoiding lying, in spite of some nice monetary incentives that have been put in front of them to do so.

Probably you can find some shrill people engaging in scaremongering, but you can also find such people on the other side. Who is claiming that we will be ruined economically if we put a tax on carbon emissions? Who sees it as the first step toward tyranny? Almost all the manipulation is coming from that side.

The lying that certain of the (best informed, especially) self-proclaimed skeptics have been engaging in is what is absurd and offensive. Having been refuted on a point, there remain sources who just keep repeating the same claim as long as it continues to sway the public. All of their own vices (being motivated by greed and politics, being willing to distort the data, trying to stifle the opposition, playing on emotions) they attribute to the other side. Mainly, though, it's just unfortunate that so many people have been misled by them.

These carbon tax schemes and the power that flows from them will lead to war, poverty and greater suffering for many beings.

The original sources of this kind of thinking (not to suggest you are like this yourself, mind you), for the most part have no interest in serious third world economic development; not in the first world yielding up any of its advantages in international trade to the third world, in our paying them any more for their resources (such as oil) that we consume; or in our spending more than about 0.1% of our GDP on helping them out. They also tend to support the U.S. being the country that produces half the world's armaments and supplies them around the world, including to oppressive regimes that they think are "pro-U.S.", especially if they're good oil-exporters. That the revenue gets controlled by a little oligarchy is just fine as well. If islands and coastal areas are getting inundated, well, they say this is not our fault, so we should not do much to help.

Now, however, they want to claim that one of the best ways to encourage peace and prosperity for those poor, is for us to burn fossil fuels in an unrestrained way. This is all supposed to be good for the world, because if we (especially executives and share-holders in oil companies) become richer (able to consume ever more consumer luxury items) that economic growth is supposed to trickle down to the third world... someday.

Don't let them fool you. If you would be half as skeptical of them as you are of climatologists, I bet it'd do the trick.

Fig Tree

[Dan74]

Thank you for a great post, fig tree. I have reposted it at ZFI http://zenforuminternational.org/viewto ... 799#p44799. I hope you don't mind.

_/|\_

[pink_trike]

Our premodern ancestors speak of those times when the "seasons become two" - extreme hot and extreme cold.

[Rui Sousa]

This Climategate stuff is really giving me serious doubts about the whole subject.

It worries me greatly that two of the main sources (NASA-GISS and CRU) for land temperature measurements, the very evidence that the earth's temperature is rising, have so poor software doing the calculations of temperature trends. Here is just one article were the a bit of the CRU source code is examined: http://cubeantics.com/2009/12/the-proof ... l-them-to/. I believe this will be meaningful to anyone with a minor understanding of programming.

I am a software development project manager, and I if one of my programmers presented me source code as the one I saw on NASA and CRU, I would fire him, or send him back to school to have programming lessons. Also I would "kick his brain" for one or two hours to make him realize the importance of writing good quality code, and how software development has evolved in the past 3 decades !!! (they don't even use databases, they only use text files to handle data as complex and sensitive as this)

A subject as serious as manmade climatic changes deserves better software, yet decisions are being made based on the bad software that there is...

[poto]

This Climategate stuff is really giving me serious doubts about the whole subject.

It worries me greatly that two of the main sources (NASA-GISS and CRU) for land temperature measurements, the very evidence that the earth's temperature is rising, have so poor software doing the calculations of temperature trends. Here is just one article were the a bit of the CRU source code is examined: http://cubeantics.com/2009/12/the-proof ... l-them-to/. I believe this will be meaningful to anyone with a minor understanding of programming.

I am a software development project manager, and I if one of my programmers presented me source code as the one I saw on NASA and CRU, I would fire him, or send him back to school to have programming lessons. Also I would "kick his brain" for one or two hours to make him realize the importance of writing good quality code, and how software development has evolved in the past 3 decades !!! (they don't even use databases, they only use text files to handle data as complex and sensitive as this)

A subject as serious as manmade climatic changes deserves better software, yet decisions are being made based on the bad software that there is...

Thank you for posting that.

It's great to see people with a knowledge of coding seriously looking at this. I've read through the CRU code and comments and if that programmer was working for me I would have fired him too. There were several times where my jaw literally dropped open reading through it. It worries me too that policies are being made based on this stuff.

It also saddens me that so many people are so attached to their ideology that they refuse to even consider these things. I used to believe in global warming, but a few years ago I started researching global warming for a blog I was working on. When I started digging deeper and actually looking at the science behind it, I changed my mind. I actually abandoned the blog I was working on because of that. It was a humbling experience for me, and made me rethink a lot of other things.

[Lampang]

There are no scientific bodies of international standing which deny the reality of anthropogenic climate change. The last - for fairly obvious reasons - to give up their absurd attachment to denialism was the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. So, a rag-tag collection of blogs (almost all of which are written by people with no specialist knowledge and without reference to research) has either (a) discovered an astonishing range of honestly made mistakes which hundreds of thousands of scientists, thousands of corporations and NGOs, hundreds of scientific organisations, and the governments of almost all the world have mysteriously failed to notice, (b) uncovered a plot of such fiendish complexity that every other piece of tin-foil lunacy is by comparison kindergarten stuff (just coordinating the fabrication and reproduction of millions of fake data points would be a task of insane difficulty), or (c) got it wrong. I don't know why but (c) looks like the most attractive of those choices.

In case anyone's unsure about what's at stake, this is the summary from the Copenhagen Diagnosis, essentially an interim IPCC report:

The most significant recent climate change findings are:

Surging greenhouse gas emissions: Global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels in 2008 were 40% higher than those in 1990. Even if global emission rates are stabilized at present –day levels, just 20 more years of emissions would give a 25% probability that warming exceeds 2oC, even with zero emissions after 2030. Every year of delayed action increase the chances of exceeding 2oC warming.

Recent global temperatures demonstrate human-based warming: Over the past 25 years temperatures have increased at a rate of 0.190C per decade, in every good agreement with predictions based on greenhouse gas increases. Even over the past ten years, despite a decrease in solar forcing, the trend continues to be one of warming. Natural, short- term fluctuations are occurring as usual but there have been no significant changes in the underlying warming trend.

Acceleration of melting of ice-sheets, glaciers and ice-caps: A wide array of satellite and ice measurements now demonstrate beyond doubt that both the Greenland and Antarctic ice-sheets are losing mass at an increasing rate. Melting of glaciers and ice-caps in other parts of the world has also accelerated since 1990.

Rapid Arctic sea-ice decline: Summer-time melting of Arctic sea-ice has accelerated far beyond the expectations of climate models. The area of summertime sea-ice during 2007-2009 was about 40% less than the average prediction from IPCC AR4 climate models.

Current sea-level rise underestimates: Satellites show great global average sea-level rise (3.4 mm/yr over the past 15 years) to be 80% above past IPCC predictions. This acceleration in sea-level rise is consistent with a doubling in contribution from melting of glaciers, ice caps and the Greenland and West-Antarctic ice-sheets.

Sea-level prediction revised: By 2100, global sea-level is likely to rise at least twice as much as projected by Working Group 1 of the IPCC AR4, for unmitigated emissions it may well exceed 1 meter. The upper limit has been estimated as – 2 meters sea-level rise by 2100. Sea-level will continue to rise for centuries after global temperature have been stabilized and several meters of sea level rise must be expected over the next few centuries.

Delay in action risks irreversible damage: Several vulnerable elements in the climate system (e.g. continental ice-sheets. Amazon rainforest, West African monsoon and others) could be pushed towards abrupt or irreversible change if warming continues in a business-as-usual way throughout this century. The risk of transgressing critical thresholds (“tipping points”) increase strongly with ongoing climate change. Thus waiting for higher levels of scientific certainty could mean that some tipping points will be crossed before they are recognized.

The turning point must come soon: If global warming is to be limited to a maximum of 2oC above pre-industrial values, global emissions need to peak between 2015 and 2020 and then decline rapidly. To stabilize climate, a decarbonized global society – with near-zero emissions of CO2 and other long-lived greenhouse gases – need to be reached well within this century. More specifically, the average annual per-capita emissions will have to shrink to well under 1 metric ton CO2 by 2050. This is 80-90% below the per-capita emissions in developed nations in 2000.

The full report (the veracity of which is wholly untouched by the CRU emails) can be downloaded from http://www.copenhagendiagnosis.org/default.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

As an aside, I live in Thailand. We face awful consequences as a result of climate change, amongst which are the disruption of the Asian monsoon, inundation of low-lying land (Bangkok is wholly unviable with a 1m rise in sea-level), and the drying of the Maekong. In addition to this the likely spread of disease, heat stress of crops and the simple fact that it will just be too hot to live here all add to a very direct threat to the lives of millions of people who have done virtually nothing to create this problem; per capita emissions in Thailand are about a fifth of US per capita emissions but I live in a rural area, where emissions are significantly lower and if we go back thirty or fourty years, my neighbours' emissions were probably pretty much unmeasurable. What's more, Thailand doesn't have the wealth which western nations do so managing these problems is going to be near enough impossible...so, when I see fools like Alex Jones or Rush Limburgh claim that it's all a scam - when we can see it happening in front of our eyes - just so they can keep NASCAR running and the AC on and annual holidays in the Bahamas and a daily Big Mac...well, I feel a fury which is probably unhealthy but which is definitely justified.

[Dan74]

It also saddens me that so many people are so attached to their ideology that they refuse to even consider these things. I used to believe in global warming, but a few years ago I started researching global warming for a blog I was working on. When I started digging deeper and actually looking at the science behind it, I changed my mind. I actually abandoned the blog I was working on because of that. It was a humbling experience for me, and made me rethink a lot of other things.

Perhaps you could post the reasons that led you to change your mind? Or address the points made by fig tree above?

It might be more educational than just saying "i don't believe it."

_/|\_

[poto]

It also saddens me that so many people are so attached to their ideology that they refuse to even consider these things. I used to believe in global warming, but a few years ago I started researching global warming for a blog I was working on. When I started digging deeper and actually looking at the science behind it, I changed my mind. I actually abandoned the blog I was working on because of that. It was a humbling experience for me, and made me rethink a lot of other things.

Perhaps you could post the reasons that led you to change your mind? Or address the points made by fig tree above?

It might be more educational than just saying "i don't believe it."

_/|\_

Sorry, I have a full work-load at the moment, and I can't always spend an hour or 2 responding to lengthy posts that will require me to source things. I am not intentionally ignoring Fig Tree's post, I just don't have enough time to give an adequate response to that long of a post right now. It's also tiresome for me to keep going over many of the same things again and again. I posted a number of things in the other climate change thread, some of which may be relevant to what Fig Tree posted.

As to exactly what made me change my mind. The blog I was writing at the time was about Antarctica. When I decided to make a detailed post about the warming in the Antarctic, I started researching it first. During the course of my research I could not find any notable warming above any natural variation. There appeared to have been some warming on the Antarctic peninsula, but the entire interior had been cooling and ice thickness had actually been growing continent-wide. The peninsula is a separate climate system from the rest of the continent, and it's also only a small fraction of Antarctica itself. The glacial advances and retreats on the peninsula are cyclical, and nothing that I found seemed to be outside of the natural cycle. In fact, I found some reports of glacial retreat on the peninsula that were being misrepresented as a continent-wide phenomenon, when the continent-wide trend was the opposite. This didn't sit well with me, and raised some questions in my mind about what else might have been misrepresented. After that, I started looking beyond Antarctica and further into climatology, which eventually led me to change my mind about man-made global warming.

[cooran]

Hello all,

Green odyssey takes cyclist to Copenhagen

Mr Nguyen cycled through 22 countries on his way to Copenhagen.

An Australian cyclist who has spent 16 months cycling from Brisbane to the UN climate talks in Copenhagen says the journey has given him a host of accounts of how global warming is changing lives for the worse.

Kim Nguyen, 28, says he first realised the severity of climate change talking to farmers in East Timor.

"They were telling me that during the last three years they had not been able to grow enough food to eat and survive because the rains that usually came at a certain time of the year were not coming," he said.

"And then when they did come they came in a deluge and there were floods."

On a worn map of the world that he used throughout his 18,000-kilometre trek, Mr Nguyen's finger traces the 22 countries he covered on his journey.

His trip covered East Timor, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, China, Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey, then eastern and central Europe before finally reaching Denmark.

"The bike started falling apart after 6,000 kilometres so I still had 12,000 kilometres to go," he said.

"I fixed things by myself but I travelled really long distances with poor components that I eventually only could fix when I arrived in Europe."

Mr Nguyen said he usually biked 100 kilometres a day three days in a row, then took a day off before hopping on the saddle again.

He came up with the idea for his adventure 18 months ago after a friend told him about the UN climate conference.

After seeing first-hand severe flooding in south-east Asia, the spreading of the Gobi desert in Mongolia and dried up riverbeds in north-eastern China, his observations of the planet's woes pushed him to transform his adventure from a one-man affair into a joint action.

"It came out of my thoughts when I had been cycling for quite some time, thinking, actually one guy on a bike isn't much of a big deal," he said.

"Even if he's coming to Copenhagen how is that going to achieve anything."

So in each big city where he stopped, he decided to contact the local branches of environmental groups Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, his sponsor, to help create a network of people who followed his journey and collected his testimony of climate change around the world.

News of his adventure began to spread, and he found himself making friends on the road near the end of his trip.

When he arrived in Copenhagen on Sunday, some 60 cyclists followed him into the city centre.
[.............................] - AFP
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009 ... 766600.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

metta
Chris

[pink_trike]

I'm also no longer entirely convinced that the warming we're experiencing is primarily human-caused. And I'm old enough to know that when there are politicians, scientific researchers, international relations, and business interests as central players then we are basically looking at something akin to Alice in Wonderland where appearances mean nothing and truth is always very far from evident and remains undisclosed to the masses.

About 7 years ago I began research for a book that required an examination of premodern civilizations and their oral/folk/mythic records. One of the first things that really jumped out at me was that they were obsessed with climate, and that climate drove their lives. In our modern world of push button climate-controlled environments we forget how primary (even visceral) the relationship humans have with climate really is. In an effort to better understand the premodern's relationship with climate and its emphasis in their meticulous records that frequently matched on opposite sides of the globe, I began researching the part of the geological record and ice core samplings that reflect climate patterns over the last 100,000 years - and I was really surprised by what I learned.

- Periods of climate extremes ranging from decades to 1500 years and longer are not rare. In fact, extreme variations are the norm when looked at with some distance.

- The warming predictions that have been driving the "global warming" debate...a 3-6 degree F warming over this century, are quite mild when compared to warming periods found in the geological record and in ice core samplings which show repeated warming periods, some as high as 27 degree fahrenheit within the previous approx. 10,000 years (a nano-blink of the eye in global time). Interestingly, our premodern ancestors throughout the Americas record a time within the last 10,000 years when it become so hot that rivers and streams evaporated away killing most of life except those that lived deep under the soil and in underground caves (where some humans survived). And, in what is now Turkey there are well-preserved underground cities that are now dated to at least approx 10,000 BCE that extend down 18 stories below the surface of the earth, connected by miles of tunnels, that would have housed up to 200,000 people - complete with extensive stables and ventilation systems (young archeology described these as a defense against warring neighbor countries, an explanation that falls apart with even the slightest critical examination and that is generally no longer accepted within the field). These underground networked cities with thousands of "apartments" maintain an even cool temperature even in the hottest days of summer.

- The geological record also shows regular periods of extreme drought, and extreme rain. The human genetic record preserves evidence of a monumental die-off of the human race that corresponds with a severe (from our perspective) drought that reduced the human population to several thousand survivors in Africa around 70,000 BCE (another nano-blink of global time). Premodern First People in the Americas matter-of-factly record a witnessed time when raindrops as large as human heads inundated the land for a long period of time, driving living beings up to mountain tops to survive - while the geological records shows countless layers of repeated massive flooding all over the globe periodically throughout the previous 10,000 years.

- Premodern traditions on opposite sides of the globe speak of those times when the seasons are reduced to just two - harsh cold and harsh heat. And other extended periods of times when climate is wildly chaotic and unpredictable.

- It's recently been discovered that Earth's climate is affected by the climate of other planets (no, you probably didn't read about this in the daily news - but if you read science journals or visit other than "pop" science sites you may have). Oddly, I haven't seen any mention of this in the ongoing discussion regarding "global warming"

- There's much debate among climate physicists regarding what is causing Mars, Jupiter, Pluto, Triton, Venus, and other worlds in our solar system to also warm. I find it interesting that our premodern ancestors spoke of those times when the solar system travels in succession through hot, cold, wet, windy, and dust/gravel periods as it travels through its galactic orbit. It follows to reason (at least to me) that the galaxy would also have climate zones that would affect Earth's climate.

In light of these things, I've started to look differently at the "global warming" debate. Certainly our premodern ancestors didn't cause all of those previous extreme warming periods and the other countless climate extremes and periods of climate chaos. There's no doubt that modern human civilization has devastated the ecosystem and messed with the fragile balance between land, oceans, and atmosphere - but in light of what the geological record, ice core samples, genetic record, astrophysics, and premodern records reveal - I too am becoming more skeptical of the idea that humans are the primary cause of "global warming" ("global chaos" is a more precise way to describe the climate situation) on Planet Earth. My guess is that "we don't have a clue" is a better answer, and that the debate likely masks special interests related to funding streams, profit streams, strategic international relations, and manipulation of voting blocs to preserve and advance entrenched power...a part of the debate that the common masses aren't privy to.

[BlackBird]

200,000 person underground cities in Turkey - 10,000BCE?

I'm not doubting you PT, but do you have a link there?

[pink_trike]

Hi Jack,

Way past my bedtime, so I grabbed this from google.

http://www.cappadociaturkey.net/undergroundcities.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

If I find time, I'll dig out some info from my library.

If you research it further online, keep in mind that all archeology dates have been challenged during the last decade, and that the earliest evidence of civilization by strict anthropological criteria now stands at 85,000 BCE. Most non-scholar articles online don't reflect current knowledge. These are extraordinary times...even as young as you are, much of what you were taught in school is out of date. Education can't keep up with the information age.

[cooran]

Interesting post PT.

Could you give links to most of the statements you made? ....like to look further into it.

metta
Chris