The Annual Global Warming Flame Thread

[bipolarbear1968]

The US is rapidly headed to becoming carbon neutral, but not as we become more enlightened and learn to conserve and use alternative energies. We will become carbon neutral as we become stuck in neutral. We have regulated and taxed ourselves into a corner. We can't manufactor, we can't use our existing natural resourses, we can't compete globaly. It is only a matter of time before all the money runs out. Then we will be in neutral, but by golly we will not be polluting. Our kids will be begging for foriegn aid from who knows who, probably a polluter.

[sgreger1]

My gut feeling (non-scientific) is that things are going to be cooling off in the mid-term future (i.e., next 10-20 years).

Tim

I think so too. We are experiencing a bit of a warming trend, but to me that just means a cooling trend is right around the corner. Just because it got hotter in the last 100 years or something doesn't mean it will continue on that trend forever. But it may continue for a long time as far as humans are concerned. Either way, i'll be dead before any of it happens. We had to deal with over-foresting by older cultures, we've had to deal with dwindling supplies of airable land because our ancestors over-used it, and now our grandchildren will just have to adapt to this when the time comes. Technology will be better then and they will find a way around it, that is how it has always happened. If it got drastically warmer and half of the animals on planet earth died, we would still find a way to survive through it, just maybe not with cable tv.

[ratcheer]

My gut feeling (non-scientific) is that things are going to be cooling off in the mid-term future (i.e., next 10-20 years).

Tim

[sgreger1]

Climate study showing 2.4 degree temperature increase over 10 years was seriously flawed; only 0.2 degrees should be expected.

So I guess another paper got through which made the crazy claim that the earth's temp would rise by 2.4 over the next 10 years, peer-reviewers didn't catch it at first. Turns out that only a .2 degree increase is predicted for the next 10 years so they had to retract it. The best quote from the article is:
"The author of the study was told by several of us about this error but she said it was too late to change it.", so they published it anyways...


I am all for this type of article - not because I think global warming complete nonesense, but because it's fundamental to science to change theories if conflicting evidence arises.


The issue is that over the past ten years climate science systematically exaggerated a lot of other estimations - see for instance sea level rise, where IPCC also received a lot of criticism. Some say that such undue alarmism had the good intention of raising awareness about global warming, others are not so indulgent and say that it was just a propaganda machine for getting more funding. Whatever the cause is, in the end of the day what it did was harm the credibility of global warming in the eyes of the public, as polls in the US and now even in Europe are showing.


That is simply the truth. They have hidden, obfuscated and been knowingly inaccurate. The UEA emails show it, the water levels story (known faulty sensor in HK harbour being the sole source) and so on and on. The failure to publish raw data (rather than summaries) due to 'commercial concerns' and 'intellectual property', the fact that predictive algorithms can't be seen unless you are on a funded team, the fact that plant-life got coded into the predictive models only last year and the fact there's an army of hard scientists saying 'this is not hard science' all give me pause.
It may all be true, but it's been presented in a very shitty way if it is.


I think the issue is that climate science is not a hard science in the sense there can be no repeatable experiments with initial conditions. Its an empirical science that needs to rely on models and computer simulations. Models by their very nature are imperfect and quite a few iterations (and frankly, computing power) is needed to make it accurate.

The conclusions about directions where the climate will move will always be the interesting output from these models. Exact predictions on where the average temperature will move will always be inaccurate simply because its a game of incomplete data, (i.e., you have no idea if the solar output will get worse or a series of volcanos will erupt, etc.)




Global warming campaigners want to promote what is called positive liberty: forcefully reduce fossil fuel consumption to liberate ourselves from our own internal constraints. The idea is that the lucky few - the vanguard - knows what's best for society. History is full of positive liberty schemes: Jacobins in France (probably the originals), communist revolution in Russia, Kmehr Rouge in Cambodia, Mao Zedong in China, ... . There are two main problems with positive liberty:

1) a ideal is promoted about the perfect citizens: believes in and accepts the central dogmas, believes and accepts the plans for society and the economy that are presented, is willing to forgive any mistakes that are made along the way. Everybody in society is then expected to live up to that ideal.
2) positive liberty has to lead to tyranny: there will always be large groups in society that resent and resist the positive liberty ideals. Many people do not want to be told - or worse - which choices they should make. All positive liberty experiments in history have led to tyranny: the reign of terror in France, the cultural revolution in China, USSR and of course the call by the Kmehr Rouge for Combodian intellectuals to return home only to be butchered at the airport.

Global warming has a long long way to go before it too becomes a historical positive liberty experiment although structures are being built. In the meanwhile it's understandable people don't feel at ease when voicing dissent.





Another thing to remember is you cannot base everything you believe on one study. The climate change theories are based on patterns in data seen over decades of work where each bit of research built upon other research. Unless you're well read in this domain, you cannot just read a couple of paper abstracts and trump what experts are concluding. Therefore I will not play my usual "Ha! They lied again so obviously all AGW science is fake!" argument today.




But whether you think climate issues are a big deal, or you believe it's all a hoax, you could all help put it all to rest by checking into things like climateprediction.net via BOINC. not only can you help with this climate stuff, but a bunch of other huge scientific problems as well. it works by using distributed computing, which in itself is really cool. so, stand back, and try science. if BOINC isn't your thing, check out distributed.net or Prime95.