How Global Warming Really Works

[haurni]

Increased CO2 level in the atmosphere doesn't increase the temperature evenly in all climate zones - it kinda evens out the differences. So the effect would be most prevalent in the colder areas and less felt in places that are warm already. The net effect could thus easily be better conditions for life... apart from the fact that plants and crops love CO2 and will grow a lot better.

You are correct in that the equator will warm less than the poles, though both will increase in temperature. And yes, CO2 is good for plant life. But other things will change as well, and rapid change in biological variables (on timescales necessary for plants and animals to migrate and/or adapt) will cause a lot of upset before things settle down in a few thousand years or so. Plants (including crops) and animals are adapted to particular ecological niches (habitats) and tend to become extinct when those habitats disappear or shift faster than they can spread.

 

[Sean Renaud]

You are correct in that the equator will warm less than the poles, though both will increase in temperature. And yes, CO2 is good for plant life. But other things will change as well, and rapid change in biological variables (on timescales necessary for plants and animals to migrate and/or adapt) will cause a lot of upset before things settle down in a few thousand years or so. Plants (including crops) and animals are adapted to particular ecological niches (habitats) and tend to become extinct when those habitats disappear or shift faster than they can spread.

And the ones that were most highly adapted, the top of the food chain, are the ones who are hit the hardest as a rule. Obviously it's not always true but the reason why mass extinctions always result in new animals on the top is because the old ones didn't make it.

 

[StrangeLife]

You are correct in that the equator will warm less than the poles, though both will increase in temperature. And yes, CO2 is good for plant life. But other things will change as well, and rapid change in biological variables (on timescales necessary for plants and animals to migrate and/or adapt) will cause a lot of upset before things settle down in a few thousand years or so. Plants (including crops) and animals are adapted to particular ecological niches (habitats) and tend to become extinct when those habitats disappear or shift faster than they can spread.

But generally "warm" is good for plants as well as animals.The biodiversity of the tropics outnumbers the arctic and even the temperate regions by several orders of magnitude. Sure, we might lose some species specialized for cold weather but in return others will become more prolific.

And once again do not discount the human factor - something the dinos didn't have. We don't wait for plants "to spread". We find one that's suitable for the area in question and fly it there on a plane. Hell, we can even custom make organisms if needed. And imagine what we can do in a century?

 

[StrangeLife]

And the ones that were most highly adapted, the top of the food chain, are the ones who are hit the hardest as a rule. Obviously it's not always true but the reason why mass extinctions always result in new animals on the top is because the old ones didn't make it.

We aren't "just another animal" Sean. There has never before been anything like us when it comes to using tools. We are the most resilient higher life form that ever existed bar none.

 

[KingOrfeo]

We aren't "just another animal" Sean. There has never before been anything like us when it comes to using tools. We are the most resilient higher life form that ever existed bar none.

Indeed we are.

Resilient != immortal.

 

[Sean Renaud]

We aren't "just another animal" Sean. There has never before been anything like us when it comes to using tools. We are the most resilient higher life form that ever existed bar none.

Cockroaches, Tardigrades, crocodiles, sharks, jellyfish all off the top of my head would all beg to differ. But join the LJ club of thinking that way.

What you'd say if you actually knew what you were talking about is we are the most adaptable by virtue of the fact that we adapt the environment to us not the other way around.

However when we are talking about global warming we aren't talking about a human extinction level event. I highly doubt that anything shy of shy of a planet killer is taking us out. But modern life is based on keeping 7 billion people (AND GROWING) alive. If we choose to stop growing the population or it just sort of happens as in Europe and upper class America fine. But if the inability to grow (For simplicity sake fishing, farming animals, and providing drinkable water are all categorized under grow and food, is that k?) enough food to maintain that, it's a fuck up. On that subject if the increase/decrease shifting of where waters are and our increased need for power generation for that food increases that would qualify to me as a fuck up.

We can quibble over degree and not all of this is global warming related. I've read some pretty fucking dire reports on the state of our ocean fisheries for example that have little if anything to do with global warming and everything to do with overfishing and not understanding what we were doing a century ago when we were wiping out top predators. I think if we start having mass food riots because it's taking us time to relocated all these foodstuffs that's a problem.

And as I already stated, I'm AMERICAN. A USA that can't grow as much food as it is now, and a Canada and Mexico that suddenly can is not a win FOR ME. And that's kinda what matters.

 

[phrodeau]

I've heard that passenger pigeons were delicious. Far better than any chicken or pheasant, plentiful, cheap and easy to prepare. But oh well, humans fucked that up for me, and I'll never get the chance to have that experience.

Climate change means multiplying that by a few thousand, and adding on the threats of extreme weather events and an encroaching and increasingly lifeless ocean.

 

[StrangeLife]

Cockroaches, Tardigrades, crocodiles, sharks, jellyfish all off the top of my head would all beg to differ. But join the LJ club of thinking that way.

What you'd say if you actually knew what you were talking about is we are the most adaptable by virtue of the fact that we adapt the environment to us not the other way around.

However way you put it - we can overcome pretty much anything through the use of tools. Crocodiles and sharks may be old lifeforms but we could make both extinct in a short time simply by stopping to protect them. Cockroaches, Tardigrades and jellyfish would require a targeted effort, but if we had a compelling reason to do it, they would soon feel the dodo snapping at their feet.

So when I hear people say "even the mighty dinosaurs became extinct by some phenomenon, so what chance do the puny humans have?" I can only smile. We are unique as far as animals goes. We're not just another dominant species - we are the dominant specie.As KingOrfeo says, not immortal (yet), but damn hard to get rid of.

However when we are talking about global warming we aren't talking about a human extinction level event. I highly doubt that anything shy of shy of a planet killer is taking us out. But modern life is based on keeping 7 billion people (AND GROWING) alive. If we choose to stop growing the population or it just sort of happens as in Europe and upper class America fine. But if the inability to grow (For simplicity sake fishing, farming animals, and providing drinkable water are all categorized under grow and food, is that k?) enough food to maintain that, it's a fuck up. On that subject if the increase/decrease shifting of where waters are and our increased need for power generation for that food increases that would qualify to me as a fuck up.

We can quibble over degree and not all of this is global warming related. I've read some pretty fucking dire reports on the state of our ocean fisheries for example that have little if anything to do with global warming and everything to do with overfishing and not understanding what we were doing a century ago when we were wiping out top predators. I think if we start having mass food riots because it's taking us time to relocated all these foodstuffs that's a problem.

And as I already stated, I'm AMERICAN. A USA that can't grow as much food as it is now, and a Canada and Mexico that suddenly can is not a win FOR ME. And that's kinda what matters.

I agree - our reproduction rate is a far bigger problem than the so-called global warming.

 

[StrangeLife]

I've heard that passenger pigeons were delicious. Far better than any chicken or pheasant, plentiful, cheap and easy to prepare. But oh well, humans fucked that up for me, and I'll never get the chance to have that experience.

Climate change means multiplying that by a few thousand, and adding on the threats of extreme weather events and an encroaching and increasingly lifeless ocean.

It all comes down to food, eh? Don't worry - we will soon be able to synthesize the meat of any animal we have the genetic code for. Meaning that it's only a question of time before you will be able to get a Mac Mammoth in your local drive-through.

 

[Ishmael]

Considering the difference between the Triassic and the Jurassic is an arbitrary line drawn by a mass extinction event. A comet hitting the earth would have caused almost immediate climate change, not gradual. . .excuse me if I assume you really don't know much about what your talking.

CO2 isn't poisonous to humans? Even though you can get CO2 poisoning? And die from it?

Keeping the right PPM is kinda important.

Yes, CO2 toxicity can occur. Mild symptoms might start expressing themselves at 1.5% concentration. That's 15,000 ppm. We are currently at 399, call it 400, ppm concentration. We have quite a ways to go.

Ishmael

 

[StrangeLife]

Yes, CO2 toxicity can occur. Mild symptoms might start expressing themselves at 1.5% concentration. That's 15,000 ppm. We are currently at 399, call it 400, ppm concentration. We have quite a ways to go.

Ishmael

And too add to this, even the jurassic atmosphere never exceeded 4000 ppm as far as we know. And the oxygen content was also higher than it is today, as was the atmospheric pressure. It should be great for both plants and animals.

When people die from CO2 exposure it's mostly because of oxygen displacement. CO2 is heavier than breathable air so if you let out a lot of CO2 in a closed room, the air will slowly become unbreathable from the floor up. People have died that way in freezers that use dry ice (Pat Cornwell used this method in one of her Scarpetta novels) and in rooms with too many CO2 fire extinguishers.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

The winter of 2013-14 bears a striking resemblance to that of 1815-16, and there is every reason to believe that what follows will repeat the pattern of earlier periods of extreme cold. The consequences will not be pleasant. As some have begun to realize, periods of extreme cold are far more destructive than periods of warming.

My prediction of a “year without summer” is based partly on the record of 1816 and other years of increased volcanic activity. Like 1815, 2013 saw significant volcanic activity, with major eruptions in Indonesia, Alaska, Italy, Argentina, and Japan. It was inevitable that this "particularly eventful year" of volcanic activity would be followed by a cold winter, just as it is inevitable that more cold will follow.

This prediction is backed up by the National Weather Bureau and other sources that predict an extended period of cold in the northeast and upper Midwest. This cold may have consequences for farm production since it would likely disrupt planting in the crucial corn- and wheat-growing regions.

The effects of a poor harvest would be higher prices for nearly all foods – not just for Americans, but for consumers in the global marketplace. And while affluent consumers in developed countries can accommodate higher prices, however painful that may be, the world’s poor cannot. For billions of human beings, even a slight increase in grain prices results in hunger. And along with hunger comes social unrest – the sort of unrest that helped trigger Egypt’s Arab Spring uprising in 2011.

Jeffry Folks

http://americanthinker.com/2014/04/2014_the_year_without_summer.html

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

As of late, the most consistent violators of Godwin’s Law have come from environmentalists. Michael Godwin, a contributing editor of the libertarian “Reason” magazine since 1994, coined a principle in 1990 that has become known as Godwin’s Law. This law states that if a political discussion goes on for any length of time, particularly on the internet, it will invariably wind up in the dead end of a Nazi argument. In other words, the Hitler card is thrown on the table like a veritable ace in the hole to stop the discussion since Nazism cannot be justified. When such comparisons are made, this is almost always done very poorly because too many of these analogies are metaphorically applied to political situations that are remote from the actual history of National Socialism.

Over the last several years, many greens have been overly anxious to paint global warming skeptics as “deniers.” Such language is Holocaust-connotative, and it is cavalierly used to suggest that skepticism toward global warming and/or climate change is on a par with “right wing” extremists or anti-Semites or Neo-Nazis who deny the historicity of the Holocaust. Al Gore himself has often used the analogy, even going so far to suggest that a modern political war against human induced CO2 has to be conducted just as aggressively as World War II was waged against Nazi Germany. Al Jazeera, which purchased Gore’s green television channel in order to branch out into American cable TV, does regular reporting on global warming deniers even though they themselves have often been accused of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial themselves. Such widespread usage has become so popular that even our current president’s political agenda website, Organizing for Action, has a special page devoted to calling out climate change “deniers” from both the House and Senate in hopes of demonizing such politicians as unscientific dangerous extremists.

The bitter irony of such metaphorical green analogies that routinely break Godwin’s Law is these false comparisons are historically betrayed by National Socialism’s status as the greenest regime on the face of the planet in 1935. Even the father of deep ecology, Aldo Leopold, who later gave to America the madness of environmental existentialism by promoting the anti-intellectual concept, “think like a mountain,” visited the Third Reich the same year. While critical of some of Germany’s longstanding conservation policies over game management, overall, Leopold was complimentary toward National Socialism’s commitment to green ideology and practices. He noted the Germans were actually doing something about environmental problems rather than just talk about them like the Americans did.

Upon returning home to America, Leopold became obsessed with wilderness preservation precisely because he was shocked to discover Germany had none left. Along the same lines, he also dragged home the “Never Cry Wolf” cult that is now plaguing many parts of western cattle ranges with the return of the big bad wolf. Nazi Germany was actually the first country in the world to protect wolves. While this was largely ceremonial since all the wolves had been already eradicated from Germany, Hitler himself loved wolves. He liked to be called “Uncle Wolf” as a term of endearment, and his favorite tune he often whistled was, “Who is afraid of the big bad wolf?”

In 1933, the Nazis passed the most progressive animal rights law known at the time. In 1934, they passed a green hunting law that was internationally praised in many circles. That same year, the Nazis began a sustainable forestry initiative called Dauerwald, which means “eternal forest.” In 1935, the Nazis passed the Reich Nature Protection Act, which laid the groundwork for green social engineering schemes over private property and construction activities with many land use regulations, conservation advisors, and environmental effects reports. Closely connected, the Nazis also began emphasizing environmental engineering, stormwater management, spatial planning theories, and sustainable development.

Throughout the 1930’s, Heinrich Himmler’s dreaded SS was trying to implement a radical “back to the land” movement to rejuvenate the blood and soil of Germany. They did this by removing people out of the dirty cities allegedly run by Jewish international capital and then place them in camps across the countryside to work on farms so they could become hearty and healthy by getting closer to nature -- all the while helping to serve the agricultural needs of the nation. SS leaders like Heinrich Himmler and Walther Darre believed the “back to the land” movement would rejuvenate the biological health of the nation.

By 1940, this “back to the land” movement started to become mixed up with organic farming, but which had to be shelved in Germany proper because of the war effort. Himmler, however, had plans to bring green farming ideas and practices to places like Poland, Ukraine, and Byelorussia once the eastern territories had been conquered. More to the point, Nazi Germany’s environmental plans were to be extended throughout Poland, Ukraine, Byelorussia, and western Russia once the SS took firm control of their newly conquered lebensraum or living space by cleansing the landscape of unwanted and excess populations of Jews, Poles and Slavs. Hitler once confided to Albert Speer, the Third Reich’s green architect, that Germany will eventually convert the eastern territories into “a flourishing park landscape of extraordinary beauty.” Hitler and Himmler also had grandiose plans to re-afforest Ukraine and cover its landscape with windmills for the sake of renewable energy.

Incredibly, in April of 1930, Dr. Hans Frank, Hitler’s attorney who later became the Governor General of Poland, publicly attacked the Jews for their ritual kosher slaughter practices before a rabid animal rights convention in Munich. After a medical expert spoke at the conference, Frank stood up and gave a tirade against the evil inhumanity of such Jewish practices upon which a resolution was adopted that stated, “The time will come for the salvation of animals from the perverse persecution of retarded sub-humans.” Lest some think this has no bearing on the Holocaust itself, Jewish kosher ritual slaughter is specifically targeted as the most heinous crime of the Jews being placed at the climax of the infamous Nazi documentary film “The Eternal Jew,” produced in 1940.

That same year, Frank also spoke of the liquidation of the Poles along environmentalist lines as well, “If I had to put up a poster for every seven Poles shot, the forests in Poland would not be sufficient to manufacture the paper.” By 1943, Auschwitz had become a brutal euthanasia camp of incredible proportions where human medical experimentation replaced animal experimentation and all the belongings of victims, mostly Jewish, were not only stolen and confiscated, but recycled as well.

With such gleanings from the green Nazi historical record, it is time for the modern greens to stop the madness of comparing climate skeptics to Holocaust deniers. Not only are such greens breaking Godwin’s Law, but they are placing themselves in an increasingly impossible position. Their very own history flatly contradicts their rhetoric in a shocking turnabout.

Mark Musser, American Thinker

And remember, the hard-core Evangelists believe, and I mean REALLY believe, in GlowBall Warning...

 

[trysail]

For what it's worth, I have two decades of experience as a research scientist in experimental psychology and neuroscience and as a biostatistician. My knowledge of risk management specifically is only rudimentary, but I do have a decent knowledge of statistics and probability.

In the article you cite from 'Climate Etc.' the question being discussed is whether or not uncertainty about the exact parameters of the risk function justifies action or inaction. The 'climate change denier' says either that, a) because we don't know the nature of the probability distribution function, we shouldn't waste resources on something that may not happen, or b) even if climate change occurs there is not likely to be any significant negative outcome so we don't need to be concerned about it. The 'climate change supporter', on the other hand, says that, while we may not be able to quantify the exact risks, there is a 'reasonable' probability, based on evidence, that bad things could happen. If this is granted, then a risk assessment approach indicates that a catastrophic risk, even with a low probability, should be addressed. This is why programs exist to search for near-Earth asteroids (which you will doubtless consider a waste of money), and why insurance companies continue to offer their products.

For something like climate change that is incremental, the longer one waits, the greater the cost to intervene (if indeed such a thing is possible [e.g. geoengineering], which is also debatable). This is not to say that we should immediately divert the entire global GDP to arresting climate change, but the sooner efforts are made, the less likely it is that the bad things, if they happen, will be really bad. On the positive side, investing in clean technologies is likely to reduce waste and a dependence on foreign and/or strategic resources, reduce the health costs associated with pollution, and improve energy efficiency. To me there is enough evidence that there are significant risks (non-zero probability of occurrence and potentially high cost of outcome) and so we should take action, but it also makes sense to take action in ways that will benefit us even if the negatives don't materialize. I consider this 'behaving prudently' rather than 'stupidly'.

...Unverified hypotheses about fat tail events are NOT what we KNOW. Presenting this as knowledge rather than speculation, and unduly focusing on it for policy decisions, is alarmist.

My biggest concern is that by unduly (and almost exclusively) focusing on AGW that we are making a type 1 error: a possibility that has not been articulated might come true. These possibilities (e.g. abrupt climate change) are associated with natural climate variability, and possibly its interaction with AGW.

Pretending that all this can be characterized by a fat tail derived from estimates of climate sensitivity is highly misleading...

-Judith A. Curry, Ph.D.
Professor & Chair, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
Georgia Institute of Technology
Ph.D., Geophysical Sciences, University of Chicago, 1982
NASA Advisory Council Earth Science Subcommittee
Fellow, American Meteorological Society
Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science
Fellow, American Geophysical Union​

​

 

[haurni]

But generally "warm" is good for plants as well as animals.The biodiversity of the tropics outnumbers the arctic and even the temperate regions by several orders of magnitude. Sure, we might lose some species specialized for cold weather but in return others will become more prolific.

And once again do not discount the human factor - something the dinos didn't have. We don't wait for plants "to spread". We find one that's suitable for the area in question and fly it there on a plane. Hell, we can even custom make organisms if needed. And imagine what we can do in a century?

Everything you say is true - as far as it goes. But you're missing the point.

The biodiversity of the tropical ecosystem is massive, but the organisms that live there (or anywhere, for that matter) are highly adapted to very particular conditions of soil, light, rainfall and the presence of specific microbes, insects, birds, bats and even some animals. When you vary those conditions - which you will if global warming is real - then you risk changing those conditions to something that is outside the ability of those organisms to tolerate. That results in massive extinction. For example, heating of the Pacific Ocean leads to a decrease in cold water currents moving north from Antarctica along the coast of South America, which adversely impacts fish populations there. At the same time, it changes both rainfall and temperature patterns over the Amazon basin. Combine the latter with an overall increase in temperature of a couple of degrees and you risk losing a significant portion of the rainforest to drought and fires. Shifting the rainforest from being a net carbon sink to a carbon source while simultaneously cutting 20% of the planet's oxygen production by a substantial amount is not a smart move.

As to your second point, yes, we can spread plants. But, as I noted above, there's this thing called an 'ecosystem', which is a collection of many different organisms that work together to maintain a particular balance of conditions. When you start to remove species from this system, it becomes more unstable and more vulnerable to shocks. Many crops require certain insects to pollinate them (e.g. bees, which are thought to be in danger) and if you remove those insects, or move the plants away from regions where those insects live, you are pretty much dooming the crop to failure.

Finally, I'm not holding my breath for technological fixes like cultured meat or soy protein on a large scale. Maybe we can subsist on Soylent Green, but I don't look forward to it.

Unverified hypotheses about fat tail events are NOT what we KNOW. Presenting this as knowledge rather than speculation, and unduly focusing on it for policy decisions, is alarmist.

My biggest concern is that by unduly (and almost exclusively) focusing on AGW that we are making a type 1 error: a possibility that has not been articulated might come true. These possibilities (e.g. abrupt climate change) are associated with natural climate variability, and possibly its interaction with AGW.

This is the "we don't know for sure so let's not act" defence of the climate change denier. Of course we don't know - that's the problem! If we knew, we wouldn't be having (this much of) an argument. The point is that evidence is piling up, from increasingly sophisticated modeling studies and experimental tests on how plants and other organisms respond to changes in conditions, to suggest that the probability of negative outcomes due to global warming is significantly different from zero. The exact nature of the changes and the time frame are what's under debate.

I'm not concerned about Type I error, which would be an incorrect rejection of the null hypotheses - i.e. deciding that climate change will have significant negative impacts when in fact it won't (a false alarm). As I suggested previously:

On the positive side, investing in clean technologies is likely to reduce waste and a dependence on foreign and/or strategic resources, reduce the health costs associated with pollution, and improve energy efficiency. To me [...] it also makes sense to take action in ways that will benefit us even if the negatives don't materialize. I consider this 'behaving prudently' rather than 'stupidly'.

That "a possibility that has not been articulated might come true" is not a Type I error, but more properly a Type II (incorrect acceptance of the null hypothesis), and is of great concern. This would be falsely concluding that nothing is happening (aka a miss). If something is indeed occurring that holds out the possibility of significant negative outcomes, making a Type II error leads us to being unprepared for those outcomes if they in fact occur. Again, from a risk management perspective, low probability events with high potential costs (like asteroid impacts or global warming) should deserve some attention. If the time frame is long, you can put in relatively small amounts of effort that will have significant cumulative effects - like contributing to an unemployment insurance plan. If you never have to use it, great. If you do, it's there for you when you need it. If you never put any money aside when you had the chance, then you're well and truly fucked.

 

[trysail]

This is the "we don't know for sure so let's not act" defence of the climate change denier. Of course we don't know - that's the problem! If we knew, we wouldn't be having (this much of) an argument. The point is that evidence is piling up, from increasingly sophisticated modeling studies and experimental tests on how plants and other organisms respond to changes in conditions, to suggest that the probability of negative outcomes due to global warming is significantly different from zero. The exact nature of the changes and the time frame are what's under debate.

I'm not concerned about Type I error, which would be an incorrect rejection of the null hypotheses - i.e. deciding that climate change will have significant negative impacts when in fact it won't (a false alarm). As I suggested previously:


That "a possibility that has not been articulated might come true" is not a Type I error, but more properly a Type II (incorrect acceptance of the null hypothesis), and is of great concern. This would be falsely concluding that nothing is happening (aka a miss). If something is indeed occurring that holds out the possibility of significant negative outcomes, making a Type II error leads us to being unprepared for those outcomes if they in fact occur. Again, from a risk management perspective, low probability events with high potential costs (like asteroid impacts or global warming) should deserve some attention. If the time frame is long, you can put in relatively small amounts of effort that will have significant cumulative effects - like contributing to an unemployment insurance plan. If you never have to use it, great. If you do, it's there for you when you need it. If you never put any money aside when you had the chance, then you're well and truly fucked.

Anxiety disorders are expensive. An education in physics and empiricism is much less costly.

RSS-MSU Global Temperature Anomaly


http://www.climate4you.com/images/MSU%20RSS%20GlobalMonthlyTempSince1979%20With37monthRunningAverage.gif

__________________


Hadley Centre Central England Temperature (HadCET) dataset (the CET dataset is the longest instrumental record of temperature in the world— 1772-2014)

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/graphs/HadCET_graph_ylybars_uptodate.gif

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/


_______________
Temperatures from University of Alabama-Huntsville (NASA)

http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_February_2014_v5.png

http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_February_2014_v5.png

_______________
Temperatures from Goddard Institute for Space Studies, NASA

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/Fig.C.gif

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/Fig.C.gif


_______________
Global Land and Sea Temperatures from Hadley Centre, Climate Research Unit, UK Meteorology Office, University of East Anglia

http://www.woodfortrees.org/graph/hadcrut3gl/from:1995/normalise

http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1995/normalise


_______________
Global Land and Sea Temperatures from Hadley Centre, Climate Research Unit, UK Meteorology Office, University of East Anglia
CO2 from Earth Sciences Research Laboratory (Mauna Loa) NASA


http://www.woodfortrees.org/graph/hadcrut3gl/from:1995/normalise/plot/esrl-co2/from:1995/normalise

http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1995/normalise/plot/esrl-co2/from:1995/normalise


_______________
The upper panel shows the air temperature at the summit of the Greenland Ice Sheet, reconstructed by Alley (2000) from GISP2 ice core data. The time scale shows years before modern time. The rapid temperature rise to the left indicate the final part of the even more pronounced temperature increase following the last ice age. The temperature scale at the right hand side of the upper panel suggests a very approximate comparison with the global average temperature (see comment below). The GISP2 record ends around 1855, and the two graphs therefore ends here. There has since been an temperature increase to about the same level as during the Medieval Warm Period and to about 395 ppm for CO2. The small reddish bar in the lower right indicate the extension of the longest global temperature record (since 1850), based on meteorological observations (HadCRUT3). The lower panel shows the past atmospheric CO2 content, as found from the EPICA Dome C Ice Core in the Antarctic (Monnin et al. 2004). The Dome C atmospheric CO2 record ends in the year 1777.



http://www.climate4you.com/images/GISP2%20TemperatureSince10700%20BP%20with%20CO2%20from%20EPICA%20DomeC.gif

http://www.climate4you.com/images/GISP2 TemperatureSince10700 BP with CO2 from EPICA DomeC.gif
http://www.climate4you.com/

​

 

[phrodeau]

It all comes down to food, eh? Don't worry - we will soon be able to synthesize the meat of any animal we have the genetic code for. Meaning that it's only a question of time before you will be able to get a Mac Mammoth in your local drive-through.

What kind of crap do you believe in? You think synthetic meat will be plentiful and affordable?

The size of your mind becomes clearer with every post.

 

[phrodeau]

Now you're talking bullshit. Professor Ranga Myneni of Boston University, Department of Earth & Environment, is highly qualified, for example, to make the claim. And it's not only deserts that are being affected. I suggest you take an hour or so to watch this video lecture by Professor Myneni in order to further your understanding of what is actually occurring on the planet:

https://ecocast.adobeconnect.com/_a...?launcher=false&fcsContent=true&pbMode=normal

Knowledge is a valuable thing. Pursue it.

He said nothing about deserts. By "greening" he refers only to the lengthening of the growing season. He said as much in the q&a session.

 

[toubab]

He said nothing about deserts. By "greening" he refers only to the lengthening of the growing season. He said as much in the q&a session.

You need to watch the whole thing. And pay attention.

 

[Sean Renaud]

No, you need to apply common sense. 17% more green earth would be massive an unignorable.

 

[trysail]

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.ice.area.withtrend.jpg

Source: National Snow and Ice Data Center
ht tp://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.ice.area.withtrend.jpg


http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/monckton3.png

 

[phrodeau]

Give it a break. Your graphs are discredited and redundant.

 

[haurni]

The particular proxy you use will give different results. Below is one from the IPCC Climate Change 2013 report that shows a number of different ones on the same axes. There's about a 1 C temperature rise since the Little Ice Age in the period 1400-1800 (0.6 C since 1850-1900), which I don't think anybody disputes, and it has certainly been as warm in the past as it is now.

(I've left the figures as links since they're so damn big).

http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/figures/WGI_AR5_Fig5-7.jpg

Figure 5.7. Reconstructed (a) Northern Hemisphere and (b) Southern Hemisphere, and (c) global annual temperatures during the last 2000 years. Individual reconstructions (see Appendix 5.A.1 for further information about each one) are shown as indicated in the legends, grouped by colour according to their spatial representation (red: land-only all latitudes; orange: land-only extratropical latitudes; light blue: land and sea extra-tropical latitudes; dark blue: land and sea all latitudes) and instrumental temperatures shown in black (Hadley Centre/ Climatic Research Unit (CRU) gridded surface temperature-4 data set (HadCRUT4) land and sea, and CRU Gridded Dataset of Global Historical Near-Surface Air TEMperature Anomalies Over Land version 4 (CRUTEM4) land-only; Morice et al., 2012). All series represent anomalies (°C) from the 1881-1980 mean (horizontal dashed line) and have been smoothed with a filter that reduces variations on time scales less than about 50 years.
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Our knowledge of the history of global CO2 levels on long time scales is even poorer, but here's a graph for you.

http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/figures/WGI_AR5_Fig5-2.jpg

Figure 5.2. (Bottom) Concentration of atmospheric CO2 for the last 65 Ma is reconstructed from marine and terrestrial proxies (Cerling, 1992; Freeman and Hayes, 1992; Koch et al., 1992; Stott, 1992; van der Burgh et al., 1993; Sinha and Stott, 1994; Kürschner, 1996; McElwain, 1998; Ekart et al., 1999; Pagani et al., 1999a, 1999b, 2005a, 2005b, 2010, 2011; Kürschner et al., 2001, 2008; Royer et al., 2001a, 2001b; Beerling et al., 2002, 2009; Beerling and Royer, 2002; Nordt et al., 2002; Greenwood et al., 2003; Royer, 2003; Lowenstein and Demicco, 2006; Fletcher et al., 2008; Pearson et al., 2009; Retallack, 2009b, 2009a; Tripati et al., 2009; Seki et al., 2010; Smith et al., 2010; Bartoli et al., 2011; Doria et al., 2011; Foster et al., 2012). Individual proxy methods are colour-coded (see also Table A5.1). The light blue shading is a 1-standard deviation uncertainty band constructed using block bootstrap resampling (Mudelsee et al., 2012) for a kernel regression through all the data points with a bandwidth of 8 Myr prior to 30 Ma, and 1 Myr from 30 Ma to present. Most of the data points for CO2 proxies are based on duplicate and multiple analyses. The red box labelled MPWP represents the mid-Pliocene Warm Period (3.3 to 3.0 Ma; Table 5.1).​

Yes, CO2 has also been higher in the past than it is now, but not for the last 20,000 years. A lot has changed since then.

The main issue behind global warming is the cumulative effect of anthropogenic CO2 combined with normal global cycles. Estimates of contributions by the various components are shown below.

http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/figures/WGI_AR5_FigFAQ5.1-1.jpg

Figure 5.1. Global surface temperature anomalies from 1870 to 2010, and the natural (solar, volcanic, and internal) and anthropogenic factors that influence them. (a) Global surface temperature record (1870-2010) relative to the average global surface temperature for 1961-1990 (black line). A model of global surface temperature change (a: red line) produced using the sum of the impacts on temperature of natural (b, c, d) and anthropogenic factors (e).(b) Estimated temperature response to solar forcing. (c) Estimated temperature response to volcanic eruptions. (d) Estimated temperature variability due to internal variability, here related to the El Niño-Southern Oscillation. (e) Estimated temperature response to anthropogenic forcing, consisting of a warming component from greenhouse gases, and a cooling component from most aerosols.​

The human component is known. The solar component is more or less predictable. Others are not. Despite cooling due to volcanic events and a decrease in solar insolation, temperatures are rising in parallel with the anthropogenic contribution.

So the best guess, based on incomplete knowledge of past history and imperfect models, is that if we stop injecting CO2 into the atmosphere immediately, we still get at least a 0.5 - 1.0 C rise above current temperatures, which are already the highest they've been for the past 2000 years. Given that nobody's going to do anything substantial in the near term, we can probably look forward to larger increases. At this point we start getting out of the range we've been in for the last few millenia, and even within that time period we've seen civilizations destroyed by environmental changes or combined with social stressors. And no, these results aren't definitive, but they do represent the opinion(s) of many scientists the world over, and it's really all that we have to go on at this point. Given that we are moving toward a consensus here, ignoring it seems foolish.

http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/figures/WGI_AR5_Fig12-5.jpg

Figure 12.5. Time series of global annual mean surface air temperature anomalies (relative to 1986-2005) from CMIP5 concentration-driven experiments. Projections are shown for each RCP for the multi-model mean (solid lines) and the 5 to 95% range (±1.64 standard deviation) across the distribution of individual models (shading). Discontinuities at 2100 are due to different numbers of models performing the extension runs beyond the 21st century and have no physical meaning. Only one ensemble member is used from each model and numbers in the figure indicate the number of different models contributing to the different time periods. No ranges are given for the RCP6.0 projections beyond 2100 as only two models are available.​

 

[trysail]

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/...nst-alarmist-climate-science/#comment-1619632

H.L. Mencken... quotes:


The business of a man of science in this world is not to speculate and dogmatize, but to demonstrate. To be sure, he sometimes needs the aid of hypothesis, but hypothesis, at best, is only a pragmatic stop-gap, made use of transiently because all the necessary facts are not yet known. The appearance of a new one in contempt of it destroys it instantly. At its most plausible and useful it simply represents an attempt to push common sense an inch or two over the borders of the known. At its worst it is only idle speculation, and no more respectable than the soaring of metaphysicians.

Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.

Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops. Why is the so-called science of sociology, as ardent young college professors expound it, such an imbecility? Why is a large part of economics? Why does politics always elude the classifiers and theorizers? Why do fashions in metaphysics change almost as often as fashions in women’s hats? Simply because the unknowable casts its black shadows across all these fields—simply because the professors attempt to label and pigeon-hole phenomena that are as elusive and intangible as the way of a man with a maid.

[It is a delusion] that a moron run through a university and decorated with a Ph.D. will cease thereby to be a moron …

Nature abhors a moron.

A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.

The professor must be an obscurantist or he is nothing; he has a special and unmatchable talent for dullness, his central aim is not to expose the truth clearly, but to exhibit his profundity, his esotericity – in brief to stagger sophomores and other professors.

Platitude [aka settled science]: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.

Of a piece with the absurd pedagogical demand for so-called constructive criticism is the doctrine that an iconoclast is a hollow and evil fellow unless he can prove his case. Why, indeed, should he prove it? Is he judge, jury, prosecuting officer, hangman?

Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed. In whole departments of human inquiry it seems to me quite unlikely that the truth ever will be discovered.

The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.

The cynics are right nine times out of ten.

-rogerknights
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/...nst-alarmist-climate-science/#comment-1619632

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[haurni]

H.L. Mencken... quotes:

Whut?

You post some graphs (made, no doubt, by scientists) and I post some more graphs (not disputing yours, but amplifying on the issue) and then you reply that science is bullshit?

At its most plausible and useful [science] simply represents an attempt to push common sense an inch or two over the borders of the known. At its worst it is only idle speculation, and no more respectable than the soaring of metaphysicians.

Dark matter, quantum tunnelling and the neural mechanisms of memory formation are 'common sense'?

Of a piece with the absurd pedagogical demand for so-called constructive criticism is the doctrine that an iconoclast is a hollow and evil fellow unless he can prove his case. Why, indeed, should he prove it? Is he judge, jury, prosecuting officer, hangman?

The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.

In science, as in law, the burden of proof is on the person who proposes that such and such is true. The role of the objector is to point out how the proponent's hypothesis does not better explain the facts than what is already understood. Simply ridiculing a hypothesis, however, is never a substitute for constructive criticism (something that many of the people on these forums clearly fail to understand). "Nyah nyah your idea sucks" is not a valid rebuttal, but an error in logic that betrays an inability to think and speak clearly.