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jshell 333 posts |
Aug 11, 2010, 19:10
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Honestly that just reads like you've picked up on everything the IPCC have said as an absolute given. You may not understand this, but there are many, many people who are aggrieved that the IPCC has excluded all contrary veiws and opinions from anyone, even experts in their field, that contradict what is said in the IPCC reports. The IPCC has made deliberate exclusions of people, information and science. It has been caught with it's pants down circumventing the PEER REVIEW process. The climategate emails gave everyone a taste of it. The HARRYREADME.txt shows exactly why the models are a pile of crap. Search it on google and marvel at how a senior analyst tears the model, one of only 4 to pieces. It is easy to find that IPCC criticism and the qualifications of the authors. Here is just one, and here's his CV: http://www.climatechangefacts.info/DrJohnEverett.htm He has worked with NOAA and the IPCC, being highly recognised for his work. Here's his website, it contains nothing but criticism for the IPCC's stance and the co-called 'science' of AGW. http://www.climatechangefacts.info/ClimateChangeDocuments/Position_On_%20Climate_Change.html I think he, as many, many other eminent scientists should be heard. Don't you? The IPCC don't. Here's a cutting from his site: "CO2 as a greenhouse gas: There is physical evidence that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, able to trap heat. There is also physical evidence that this ability has a logarithmic function and that we are already at the cusp of saturation. There is no physical evidence that more CO2 will, or can, influence further warming. Only models are able to produce a temperature rise with CO2" Can you, in all honesty, disprove this? Is he a fringe loony looking for attention? Can you disprove this paper that also shows CO2 saturation: http://www.nov55.com/ntyg.html
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jshell 333 posts |
Aug 11, 2010, 19:13
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carlyclub wrote: Hmm, doesn't that site have some sort of alleged connection to the Greening Earth Society (Western Fuels Association)? And hasn't it taken money from Exxon Mobil? I don't know, but to complain about influence on one side, but not the other is dishonest. I know that oil co's are spending $millions and $millions on co2 sequestration and transport amongst other technologies. Far, far more than they may give to activists.
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handofdave 3515 posts |
Aug 11, 2010, 21:37
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jshell, who do YOU think, honestly, has more to gain, AND more to spend, to see their way made done, than the people already profiting from the status quo? This idea that there are nefarious forces trying to undermine fossil fuel interests to advance clean energy are a bit disingenuous to say the least. Follow the money.
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jshell 333 posts |
Edited Aug 12, 2010, 10:16
Aug 12, 2010, 10:16
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handofdave wrote: jshell, who do YOU think, honestly, has more to gain, AND more to spend, to see their way made done, than the people already profiting from the status quo? This idea that there are nefarious forces trying to undermine fossil fuel interests to advance clean energy are a bit disingenuous to say the least. Follow the money. Look, at the end of the day I don't know. I do know when I smell bullshit though. This whole thing is fucked up. Look at Merrick's last post. 2 of the things he mentions are: - Peer review - IPCC little 'mistakes'. Well, here's a nice artice covers both of those, and some of the scare stories: The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claims that all of its reports and predictions are based on strictly peer-reviewed scientific papers. Well, not exactly. Recent investigations have shown that many IPCC reports were based on everything from magazine articles, telephone conversations, and propaganda from radical environmental groups. Mountain Ice In its most recent report (the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report, aka 4AR), the IPCC stated that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa was being caused by global warming, citing two papers as the source of the information. However, one of the sources quoted was a feature article published in a popular magazine for climbers which was based on anecdotal evidence from mountaineers about the changes they were witnessing on the mountainsides around them. The other was a dissertation written by a geography student, studying for the equivalent of a master’s degree, at the University of Berne in Switzerland that quoted interviews with mountain guides in the Alps. See story in London Telegraph: http://tinyurl.com/y8ku7pm Himalayan glaciers The IPCC claim that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 was based on an unverified magazine article and the IPCC knew it. Nevertheless, the IPCC let the statement stand for purely political purposes. The claim that Himalayan glaciers are set to disappear by 2035 rests on two 1999 magazine interviews with glaciologist Syed Hasnain, which were then recycled without any further investigation in a 2005 report by the environmental campaign group World Wildlife Fund. This fact was brought to the attention of the IPCC before they published their 2007 report, but the IPCC let the statement stand. The original article was based on a short telephone interview with scientist Syed Hasnain, then based in Delhi, who has since said his views were “speculation”. The lead author of the IPCC chapter said, “We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.” This alone shows that the IPCC is a political body rather than a scientific one. http://tinyurl.com/ydqa255 Amazon The IPCC also made false predictions on the Amazon rain forests, referenced to a non peer-reviewed paper produced by an advocacy group working with the World Wildlife Fund. This time though, the claim made is not even supported by the report and seems to be a complete fabrication. See story at http://tinyurl.com/yc3c8xt Floods and Hurricanes The IPCC report wrongly linked global warming to an increase in the number and severity of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods. The claims were based on an unpublished report that had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny – and ignored warnings from scientific advisers that the evidence supporting the link was too weak. The report’s own authors later withdrew the claim because they felt the evidence was not strong enough. The IPCC’s 2007 report contained a separate section that warned the world had “suffered rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather-related events since the 1970s”. This claim was touted by Obama last fall: “More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent.” http://tinyurl.com/yzef9en Coral Degradation In Chapter 6 of 4AR, the IPCC claims that coral degradation is caused by global warming. The source for this claim is promotional literature by Greenpeace. The IPCC also based reports on solar and wind power on Greenpeace documents. See report: http://tinyurl.com/yk9mqhz Implications for US climate policy: The EPA based its carbon dioxide endangerment finding on the IPCC. The EPA is supposed to vet the peer-review process from outside sources of information, something it did not do, so the EPA did not comply with the law. See ClimateAudit analysis: http://tinyurl.com/yg78qof
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handofdave 3515 posts |
Aug 12, 2010, 11:28
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... and industry doesn't EVER fudge their data..? Why are you ignoring their pseudoscience and blatantly paid-for results? Again, who stands to gain the most from GW denying? Big oil, big coal, who's profits dwarf the budgets of the groups warning us about C02 levels.
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Merrick 2148 posts |
Edited Aug 13, 2010, 12:21
Aug 13, 2010, 12:15
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jshell wrote: Honestly that just reads like you've picked up on everything the IPCC have said as an absolute given. As we've established, I'm no climatologist. So I am reliant on those who are. and when almost everyone with relevant extertise in a wide range of fields, oceanographers to meteorologists to food biologists, is saying the same thing and the evidence against what they say unravels easily, I'm inclined to listen. jshell wrote: It has been caught with it's pants down circumventing the PEER REVIEW process. The climategate emails gave everyone a taste of it. Your talent for overstatement rolls onward. That wasn't the IPCC. It was one scientist saying they'd get a paper excluded. Which they then made sure was included. jshell wrote: Here's a cutting from his site: "CO2 as a greenhouse gas: There is physical evidence that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, able to trap heat. There is also physical evidence that this ability has a logarithmic function and that we are already at the cusp of saturation. There is no physical evidence that more CO2 will, or can, influence further warming. Only models are able to produce a temperature rise with CO2" Oh good grief, can you not see the holes in what he says? Of course only models can show what happens when we put higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. Not having a spare earth in a laboratory to test on, it's all models. His next sentence says - "plants grow faster when warm, as do most cold-blooded animals. We can think all we want that CO2 is evil, but in reality plants are starved for it after millions of years of converting it into coal and oil." The implications he's giving are laughable. The implication is that because plants need CO2 therefore it cannot be a problem no matter what the concentrations, and that the plants will just grow faster for it. Certainly, forests are growing faster with higher CO2 concentrations, and oceans are absorbing more and more CO2. These capacities are not infinite, and there will come a point when their ability to absorb so much of what we emit tails off. Then the effects of atmospheric CO2 will intensify. Then we get forests becoming carbon sources rather than sinks. Meanwhile, the oceans are acitifying, and much more of that will prevent the ability of shell-life to form shells properly, hacking great length out of the food chain. jshell wrote: Is he a fringe loony looking for attention? My guess; yes. jshell wrote: Can you disprove this paper that also shows CO2 saturation: http://www.nov55.com/ntyg.html It involves technical stuff I don't know about. However, I have to wonder why you take the unreviewed perspective of a mushroom and yeast biologist so seriously, yet discount the hundreds of papers - real papers, published and reviewed by those with expertise in the field. Again, I wonder why you ignore the thousands of peer-reviewed papers that support the established view on climate change. This is the thing that I find most tedious about arguing this subject with deniers like yourself. The repetition of their unsubtantiated position even after refutations, and when asked questions the habit of going 'look over there!' at something else. Your reply basically ignored my post. You made a number of assertions and I challenged them. Can you respond to these? Firstly: Do you agree that we are warming faster than at any time for many millennia, that the global average temperature is higher than at any point for many millennia, and that this rise is exactly in line with what we'd expect given the consensus about the effect of greenhouse gases and the addition of them to the atmosphere, mostly from burning fossil fuels. Secondly: Do you agree that there is a vast swathe of reliable science out there - stuff that's been peer-reviewed, subjected to the scrutiny of those whose work reinforces or challenges it - and it all points one way. Thousands of published papers. Show me one that says anthropogenic climate change isn't happening. Just one. Thirdly: Do you agree that we can readily distinguish CO2, which is why you can buy it in canisters, and why we're able to give readings of its presence down to a single part per million. Fourthly: Do you agree that we're already seeing changes, such as rainfall patterns changing in eastern Africa or flood frequency increasing in Bangladesh, that are exactly in line with what was predicted. fifthly: How do you propose we 'adapt' to crop failures across the globe and drastic falls in food prioduction? Sixthly: Where have the IPCC tried to cover over and remove from the records the fact of the Medieval Warming period? Seventhly: Where's the peer-reviewed papers that say MWP was warmer than today? Eighthly: Are you really saying that less polar ice - replacing vast areas of white area with dark - won't affect the earth's reflective ability? Ninthly: Are you really saying that heating permafrost peat bogs won't - as is already being observed - make them melt then dry? And that drying won't make them decay, releasing their carbon? (Again, ditto, with a lump of peat). Tenthly: Do you understand that, of the wide range of temperatures that the earth can survive under, humans can only prosper in a very small part of the spectrum? Are you happy if 'achieving equilibrium' means mass extinctions such as at the end of the Permian period?
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Merrick 2148 posts |
Edited Aug 25, 2010, 11:06
Aug 13, 2010, 12:49
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So let me get this straight: the IPCC reports cannot be trusted because a tiny proportion of the science used was not peer-reviewed. However, the entirely non-peer-reviewed science that contests climate change is sound. jshell wrote: Look at Merrick's last post. What I actually said was "there have been numerous mistakes, which is not unlikely in documents thousands of pages long that, in turn, rely on thousands of inputs. The difference between the IPCC and the denialists is that the IPCC acknowledge mistakes and correct them. This is common in scientific endeavour". The IPCC collates data from thousands of scientists. Because of the need to achieve consensus, its findings are often diluted. Then the governments it represents have to sign off on it, which gets a whole load more taken out. The last IPCC report had the line “North America is expected to experience locally severe economic damage, plus substantial ecosystem, social and cultural disruption from climate change related events” removed. Why is it that deniers think governments want to exaggerate the threats to themselves and pretend to be greater failures than they are? The issue is not whethere there are unreliable sources used by the IPCC, but how many, whether they get admitted and excised, and what happens to the perspective when they unreliable sources are removed. Much of the science remains intact. Indeed, on some of the examples you give, it is far worse. The story you link to about Amazonian dieback was picked up by the Sunday Times. Dr Simon Lewis, a Royal Society Research Fellow and forest ecologist from the University of Leeds, forced a full retraction of the story. http://www.leeds.ac.uk/news/article/839/leading_scientist_forces_climate_article_apology_and_retraction Papers published earlier (Cox et al 'Amazonian forest dieback under climate-carbon cycle projections for the 21st century' and Fu and Li 'The influence of the land surface on the transition from dry to wet season in Amazonia', both 2004) predict far worse than the WWF report. Both were used and cited by the same IPCC report. http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch7s7-references.html This in no way justifies the use of non-peer reviewed work. However, you need to separate a discrediting of one reference from discrediting the conclusions of a report using many thousands of creditable references.
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pooley 501 posts |
Aug 14, 2010, 18:44
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Ok new rule. You two can't comment on thus anymore unless you have something new to say!!
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sanshee 1080 posts |
Aug 16, 2010, 16:50
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pooley wrote: Ok new rule. You two can't comment on thus anymore unless you have something new to say!! Do you know that there's a 'ticking timebomb' re 'mammoth poop'? 'Tis true, according to David Shuckman, and other highly respected, less 'sexy' enviro-bods. If all the permafrost melts that is. :-/ x
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grufty jim 1978 posts |
Edited Aug 16, 2010, 23:26
Aug 16, 2010, 23:21
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jshell wrote: I'm rambling now. Well, if you can have a ramble, then so can I...... jshell wrote: Yup, still suspicious. You should be too. It all depends on what you believe, I suppose. Let me explain a bit where I'm coming from... I don't think we'll get very far by citing research at one another. As you've pointed out, neither of us are climate scientists. If provided with one paper that says CO2 is a greenhouse gas and another that says it isn't; we're probably not qualified to work out which is valid. Normally this wouldn't be an issue. Most scientific debates never even leave the laboratory, because they have no implications for how the public should behave. But the debate about Climate Change is different. *If* human activity is resulting in a significant rise in average global temperatures, then I'm sure we can agree that this merits consideration at the very least. Trouble is; the science is relatively inaccessible which makes consideration of the problem difficult. Don't get me wrong; I've studied science and have an engineering background, so personally I'm quite sure that if I dedicated a couple of years to studying climatology and reading widely across the current literature in the subject that I'd be able to arrive at an informed position. I don't have that time. I'm researching a subject I find far more interesting and, as it happens, more important*. So I'll have to leave climatology to the climatologists. What I will say, however, is that -- just from what I can tell -- of the papers published on the subject, the vast majority appear to support the notion that CO2 produced by human activity is responsible, in part, for an increase in average global temperatures. I'm not suggesting that the majority opinion is automatically correct (given my fringe views on a large number of subjects, that would be a particularly self-defeating position), just that when -- as in this case -- we are forced to rely upon the opinion of "experts", it makes sense to accept the position of the majority until we discover a compelling reason to do otherwise. And frankly, nothing I've read so far has provided a compelling reason. You have alluded to vested interests on more than one occasion, but this seems like a spectacular red-herring to me. Those in power would like nothing more than definitive proof that human industrial activity is not altering the global climate in potentially destructive ways. And when I say "those in power", I'm speaking both of the capitalist owners of industry and the political elite. The former stand to lose a huge amount if AGW is accepted as reality by the public, the latter rely upon the former for much of their support and also stand to lose a great deal of popular support if circumstances force them to impose a reduction in public consumption patterns (the end result of reducing industrial activity). Incidentally, despite the results of opinion polls suggesting that the public has already accepted AGW as a reality, our complete failure to alter our behaviour shows that to be a lie. People may have accepted it intellectually, and may claim to be concerned about it, but collectively we aren't doing anything significant to deal with it. This is why I'm so amazed at people (just read the comments on a random George Monbiot article over at The Guardian if you've not encountered them) who bandy terms like "eco-fascist" or "Climate Change Nazi" about. Fascism (and by extension Nazism) are far more to do with the imposition of power than they are about any particular ideology. And those seeking to reduce CO2 emissions have sod-all power. The vested interests are all on the other side. The fossil fuels industry and everything that depends upon it are more powerful than any government, let alone some toothless intergovernmental panel of scientists making recommendations. Ultimately though, when we lack the evidence of our senses and are forced to rely upon the testimony of strangers (as is the case with Climate Change) then the conclusions we arrive at usually have as much to do with our preconceived ideas and existing beliefs as they do with the evidence we are presented. I've spent a huge chunk of my adult life researching issues surrounding sustainability; first from the perspective of an engineer studying peak oil and latterly from the perspective of a psychoanalyst studying ecological systems. Everything I've read points to one conclusion: that we, as a species, are wreaking havoc on the ecology of which we are part. A combination of fossil fuels and advanced technology has produced a collective psychosis at the heart of modern culture; one which is primed for self-destruction. And this is irrespective of whether AGW is a reality or not. So when a group of scientists tell me that human CO2 emissions are damaging the ecosystem in ways beyond the obvious, then I am inclined to believe them. Partly because they seem authoritative (I've personally spoken to a climatologist at my university and I'm convinced he honestly believes the AGW position), but mostly because it fits in with my existing knowledge of what we are doing to this planet (and be in no doubt, we are systematically destroying our ecology, AGW or no AGW). In the same way, while I don't know you as a person, your natural inclination to disbelieve AGW theory says as much about your pre-existing mindset than it does about the theory itself. This, obviously, makes it far more difficult to convince a person of the validity of the theory (or vice versa). It's not just a case of trying to get someone to accept a few facts, but can actually involve them re-evaluating some deeply held assumptions about the world; assumptions which may well be unconscious. This is why dealing with sustainability issues should be regarded as much as psychotherapeutic processes as engineering problems. ----------------------- * I tend to get rather irate with environmentalists who claim that "Climate Change is the most important issue we face" because the statement implies a failure to grasp the salient fact that Climate Change is a subset of a far greater issue -- the inherent unsustainability of our civilisation. If tomorrow it was proven beyond a doubt that AGW was not happening, it would be one less thing to worry about, certainly, but it wouldn't suddenly make our society sustainable. Indeed, it might actually have the effect of loosening the very few, albeit mostly cosmetic, restraints on industry that have come about as a result of AGW concerns.
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