It's all over but for the sweating?

[Arragonis]

And the people in Neil's list, are they all "climate scientists" with "a track record of serious work in climate related fields" ?

[NeilBlanchard]

Scientists know how the scientific process works, and they respect the conclusions from other fields of study. Climate science is multidisciplinary and as such, there is a LOT of peer review. All of the scientists I listed know enough about science to know that the rest of climate science is right because the parts of it they know about are right.

And like evolution, you cannot make it go away by ignoring it. All the overlap between different fields of study mean that if one is wrong, then they are all wrong. So like evolution, if you want to argue that it isn't correct, you'll have to convince the other scientists that they are also all wrong.

The facts are out there, and if you want to ignore them, that is your loss. If you have a better theory that fits the data, take that up with the climate scientists. There is no part of the science as I understand it - that doesn't fit the world that I see. The data continues to accumulate, and it will affect you and all the rest of us whether or not we accept what the scientists are telling us.

Tell me Arragonis, what will it take to convince you? If all the Arctic ice melts in the summer, will that convince you? If the ocean level continues to rise, will that convince you? If the ocean gets even more acidic, will that convince you? If high temperature records are set at a 5:1 ratio to low temperature records, will that convince you? How much of the tundra has to melt to convince you?

[Arragonis]

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

Scientists know how the scientific process works, and they respect the conclusions from other fields of study.

Your list included a few non-scientists too but thanks - Dyson (a physicist) is, based on your post, entitled to question what climate science "tells us" - as are others on both sides.

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

Climate science is multidisciplinary and as such, there is a LOT of peer review.

Lets say I write a paper on improving car aero using "Air tabs" (see the Unicorn Corral) and you are asked to "Peer Review" it - just what exactly would you understand this to mean ? What would you do ?

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

Tell me Arragonis, what will it take to convince you?...arctic ice

Well as I'm a friendly soul I'm willing to make a bet just now - for fun.

I will wager a bottle of Wolf Blas (white or red, you choose) that the sea ice will not disappear this year (maybe we need to define exactly what that means - like the defintion of a "White Christmas" in the UK) - at any point from Jan1st 2013 to Jan1st 2014.

If you win the bottle will be in your hands by the end of Jan 2014 and I will post the win here.

If I win, you promise to read a book I might choose from Amazon (you buy it though ) and post back some thoughts (I've given up Wine...).

Deal ? Its a win-win.

As for the rest I stated my position earlier, and also about the use of the "Denier" description - please guys lets keep it friendly even in reference to others.

Originally Posted by ME!

My issue is with the way the word was first used, which you haven't really addressed. There are alternatives available which don't have such a link, but again your choice which may speak volumes about you, or say nothing at all.

As for AGW - nope that isn't contended. If a person came on (as has happened in previous versions of this debate) and said there was no such thing as AGW and it was a big conspiracy, I would be arguing with them too.

In fact let's have a summary, just for fun :

Has the climate changed. Yep.

Has the world temperature increased. Yep. 0.8 DegC in the 20th century as far as we know. There are issues with the record and adjustments but it is the best we have. Making a global temp is an awesome undertaking, the people involved deserve all the support they need, but they also need to be more open - IMHO.

Does CO2 affect climate ? Yep. Maybe in ways we don't even know yet because we focus on others.

Does man create more CO2 ? Yep. That stuff about "volcanos making ore CO2 than us" is a nonsense smokescreen of rubbish.

Do man's other activities affect the climate ? Yep - we have cleared trees to make farmland, dammed or changed the courses of major rivers even connected seas together. We have even removed mountains to make mines for things we can only make into jewelry or store in bank vaults - how mad is that ?

When mankind moves into a wilderness it never improves it.

Has man's creation of CO2 contributed to warming ? Probably, it won't have reduced it any. But then again how much given it has been warmer and colder before ?

So what is being "denied" ? Well it is the missing C in front of AGW - "Catastrophic", or even the sometimes used D for "Dangerous". So lets go with those questions :


Are today's temperatures unusual ? Maybe, we don't know. History suggests not - at least on a questionable local level (MWP / LIA). More open science please.

Has CO2 been higher ? Yep.

Has CO2 been lower ? Yep.

Does CO2 drive temperature ? Maybe. "Basic physics" says yes but evidence suggests only maybe. It also suggests strongly that CO2 follows temp. Needs more open research IMHO.

But what about the 20th Century Rise ? Well it could be CO2 from the Industrial Revolution or it could be warming from the end of the LIA or it could be a combination of both.

But what about the "Pause ?" Well you tell me ? Scientists said when the pause started in 1997 that 16 years would be the limit before the models would be invalid. They chose the start and the parameters, so are the models now invalid ?

But the really killer bit is here. Lets do a thought experiment that James Hansen is right and the world is doomed (albeit his models say no and even he has admitted there is a pause) so...

Originally Posted by ME!

OK so what to do ? Thats the nub of the gist here.

Following the precautionary principle seems obvious, but that has a huge opportunity cost.

In the short term we will run our economies into the ground trying to cut CO2 which won't happen anyway - did anyone notice Kyoto is now dead and Carbon Credits are worth less than the ink used to make them ?

In the medium to long term we will ensure that those in the developing world will not advance because we won't let them have cheap energy - that means kids like some of us here have in our own homes - becoming sick and possibly losing their lives to simple, treatable conditions we take for granted. So your kids are going to live, theirs are less likely to. They will continue to have more of them and if some of them live they will need more land to support themselves, which reduces land for wildlife etc.

On the other hand we could focus on learning what is happening and going to happen, and mitigate for it. We could potentially save millions of lives, billions of £s / $s, reduce our impact on nature and stabilise the population.

In any case mitigation may work, prevention (by the original post here) is not going to.

So take your choice folks - cut CO2 and feel good about it and ignore those "others who will probably die, including kids" or decide to do something else.

It is your choice really.

This is really the key point - what is your choice ? What do we do ?

[NeilBlanchard]

We have changed energy sources several times in the past. We went from wood (after clear-cutting huge areas!) to coal, and then to whale oil, then to petroleum and gas. Each time things have gotten better economically.

Changing to renewables is required for two very strong reasons, and by eliminating the huge health costs of burning coal and oil, we will save a lot of money, and create many new jobs. We won't have to ever transition to another energy source after renewables. If we survive this long, we'll have to find another planet to move to in a billion years or so, when our sun moves into it's helium stage.

The two reasons we have to change over to renewables is that oil and coal are finite and they'll run out in a 100-150 years anyway (at our current use at least) - and climate change. Carbon dioxide is an insulator, and more of it means more heat is retained - that's physics.

All the people on my list are scientists - I believe they are mostly. if not all PhD's. Besides, 97% of all climate scientists agree that climate change this time around is caused largely by us humans burning fossil fuels.

We know that the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is carbon 12 isotope. That means it cannot be volcanoes (which would be carbon 13) and it is not burning of plants (which would be more carbon 14). And the level of oxygen is down, which is because of the combustion. This is direct physical evidence that shows that burning fossil fuels is the cause of the increase of carbon dioxide in the air. Period.

It cannot be explained any other way. Next question?

[freebeard]

What is the meaning of the number 42?

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

And like evolution, you cannot make it go away by ignoring it. All the overlap between different fields of study mean that if one is wrong, then they are all wrong. So like evolution, if you want to argue that it isn't correct, you'll have to convince the other scientists that they are also all wrong.

I question this. While I agree that, as Bucky said, Universe operates on synergistic, inter-accommodative principles; I don't think Science is that monolithic. Witness the lack of accommodation between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. Astronomers are having to admit there is weather on the Sun and in Interplanetary space. The other disciplines will all jostle around to reach some new equilibrium, not fail completely.

[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by Arragonis

Your list included a few non-scientists too but thanks - Dyson (a physicist) is, based on your post, entitled to question what climate science "tells us" - as are others on both sides.

Unfortunately some scientists are as subject to wishful thinking as anyone else, especially in fields outside their specialty. Now if Dyson (or anyone else) has bothered to work through the physics of AGW, and found some glaring error that everyone else has missed, then it would be nice if he would tell us about it. But no, his reaction is just the same as the others in the denialist (accurate, descriptive term there :-)) camp. To paraphrase, "I don't want it to happen, therefore it can't possibly happen."

Now let's think a bit about the rationale for his diamond-fruiting trees as a solution to excess CO2. Can we do genetic engineering at that level? Is it even physically possible to create diamonds without extreme heat & pressure? If you replace a significant part of the plant life with inedible diamond-producing trees, what do we (and the rest of the biosphere) eat?

Lets say I write a paper on improving car aero using "Air tabs" (see the Unicorn Corral) and you are asked to "Peer Review" it - just what exactly would you understand this to mean ? What would you do ?

Well, if I had a car and some "air tabs", I could - in the spirit of experimental science - do some A-B-A testing to see if they worked. Or if I had a good CFD program, I could do a simulation, and compare the results of the simulation to the real-world testing...

Which brings up another interesting question: if computer simulations are a useful, and widely used, predictive tool in every field from subatomic physics to the evolution of galaxies, why do our "skeptic" friends claim they fail in the case of climate? And only in the case of climate, as they are obviously not afraid to ride in cars and airplanes designed with computer simulations, or use computers that were designed with computer simulations, or...?

[freebeard]

I stumbled upon this quote:

It's kind of the engineer's point of view that politics is a parasitic energy and you kind of shunt it to the side—if you can. -- Eric Dollard

...and it reminded me of this thread. I don't think the problem is with the science so much as the [politics/money].

jamesqf -- it's kind of like when fire would collapse steel-framed skyscrapers on one day of one year, but never before or after.

[Arragonis]

Originally Posted by jamesqf

Well, if I had a car and some "air tabs", I could - in the spirit of experimental science - do some A-B-A testing to see if they worked. Or if I had a good CFD program, I could do a simulation, and compare the results of the simulation to the real-world testing...

Well if I wrote the original paper then I would do that as part of the presentation. However peer review does not require others to do the same, they just basically give the paper a quick read to make sure there aren't any major mistakes (like they say Magnets also contributed) but they don't recreate the experiment or confirm the conclusions.

Papers which are fully peer reviewed get published, and later get retracted. See here.

Retraction Watch | Tracking retractions as a window into the scientific process

Also Peer Review is a recent thing - Einstien's major papers were not peer reviewed at all - they were presented and scientists worked on the conclusions of the paper for many years - some were proved (or at least more evidence presented), some not.

So stating that Peer Review is some kind of "gold standard" is obvious woo.

[Arragonis]

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

...

It cannot be explained any other way. Next question?

Energy - yep, every time we move to a newer and more intense one we get an economic benefit. Isn't there a clue there maybe about how the world works ?

Scientists - no, quite a few are not PhDs and even not scientists - Attenborough for one has a BSc - so do I. And none are "climate scientists" so by James' definition they are not worthy to pronouce on this. IMHO they are worthy to comment on their own areas and this and I agree with a few of them.

Oil and Gas - well if we get fracking elsewhere outside the US (how are your gas bills doing ?) then we can possibly heat and power ourselves for maybe another 3-500 years on current estimates. We don't just use oil for fuel though.

Like to take my bet ?

In the meantime maybe we can get renewables to work. But to make them work you need other stuff like steel / aluminium works which cannot be powered by them at the moment - I posted this several pages ago...

So maybe we should look at other sources - nuclear, thorium, who knows in the meantime. But governments don't, they just waste tax money on windmills.

And even then shouldn't renewables be allowed to develop "naturally" instead of "artificially" as they are just now ? If they are so efficient then they wouldn't need 10-20% of my energy bill to pay for them, they also wouldn't have pushed the common user's energy bill to the point where the choice is "heat or eat".

At the same time in terms of climate we have :
- Little or no sea level rise
- No atmospheric temp rise (since 1997)
- No overall sea temp rise
- No increase in rainfall (since 1700)
- No increase in drought (since 1700)
- The "greening of the planet"
- Enough food for all, if only everyone could access it

And we have
- People without clean water
- People without enough to eat, including kids
- A first world which doesn't seem to care because we focus on this CO2 stuff.

And at the end you ignored my key question so I'll restate it - your kids vs. their's - which ones are more deserving of resources, make a choice.

[freebeard]

Originally Posted by jamesqf

Now let's think a bit about the rationale for his diamond-fruiting trees as a solution to excess CO2. Can we do genetic engineering at that level? Is it even physically possible to create diamonds without extreme heat & pressure? If you replace a significant part of the plant life with inedible diamond-producing trees, what do we (and the rest of the biosphere) eat?

Maybe instead of diamonds, the trees could grow something more useful—like carbon nano-tubes. Or spaghetti.

Originally Posted by Arragonis

And at the end you ignored my key question so I'll restate it - your kids vs. their's - which ones are more deserving of resources, make a choice.

Which post was that in? Did I miss it? If it's a general question; I'd have to know which side *your* children stand on to answer.

If I seem grumpy it's because I think people should live in (bio-mimicing, hoemostatic) plastic bubbles that don't need ongoing energy input. Then 'heat or eat' is moot. In fact the plastic bubble could feed you, too. Witness the Oak Gall.