Global Warmists -- Read ( Climategate )

[CDF]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems Max's core objection, not particularly, articulately expressed, is to the claim that the earth's climate system is dominated by positive feedback processes such that they amplify the "direct" warming effect of so-called greenhouse gases to the point of catastrophe.

Glibly speaking, the typical skeptic's counterargument is that negative feedback mechanisms dominate natural processes and that climate experts are underselling or ignoring them when making forecasts, but that assertion seems rather "biocentric" in some sense. Why would we expect that the climate of earth, which is not a living entity, must maintain a kind of homeostasis?

[Max™]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems Max's core objection, not particularly, articulately expressed, is to the claim that the earth's climate system is dominated by positive feedback processes such that they amplify the "direct" warming effect of so-called greenhouse gases to the point of catastrophe.

Oh, no, that is just a generally silly statement.

Examples in climate include:

• A warmer atmosphere will, due to increased evaporation and decreased condensation, contain more water vapour which is a greenhouse gas so it will warm the atmosphere further.
• A warmer atmosphere will melt ice and this changes the albedo which further warms the atmosphere.
• A colder climate will cause ice caps and glaciers to grow changing the albedo which further cools the atmosphere.
• Methane hydrates can be unstable such that a warming ocean could release methane which is a greenhouse gas.

On earth the gain is usually expected to be less than one stopping the system from suffering runaway effects. While there could be periods of time such as the exit from an ice age where the gain is greater than one, it hasn't been much greater than one nor lasted long enough for the oceans to boil away to create a situation like on Venus.




The situation on Earth is very different from that which existed on Venus, as any terrestrial runaway effect is not irreversible on geological timescales. Potential runaway greenhouse effects on Earth may involve the carbon cycle, but unlike Venus will not involve boiling of the oceans. Earth's climate has swung repeatedly between warm periods and ice ages during its history. In the current climate the gain of the positive feedback effect from evaporating water is well below that which is required to boil away the oceans.[8] Climate scientist John Houghton has written that "[there] is no possibility of [Venus's] runaway greenhouse conditions occurring on the Earth".

Runaway climate change is a situation in which the climate system passes a tipping point, after which internal positive feedback effects cause the climate to continue changing without further external forcings. The runaway climate change continues until it is overpowered by negative feedback effects which cause the climate system to restabilise at a new state.

Glibly speaking, the typical skeptic's counterargument is that negative feedback mechanisms dominate natural processes and that climate experts are underselling or ignoring them when making forecasts, but that assertion seems rather "biocentric" in some sense. Why would we expect that the climate of earth, which is not a living entity, must maintain a kind of homeostasis?

Obviously I know it won't be in homeostasis, that is completely ridiculous.

The AGW argument seems at first glance to be assuming we would be in a homeostatic human ideal environment if we weren't pumping out Co2... but that's absurd, they can't REALLY think that, right?


No, all that aside, my issue can be summed up with a simple request.

Go find some of the raw data they used for these climate models, and show how they used it to obtain their results. You don't have to actually run the models, just find where they "show their work", as my algebra teacher bitched at me about.

[eunhye]

Global Walarmists are crazy yo! lolol
Which leads to my next point, overpopulation. Overpopulation isn't "going to happen", it has happened. The earth is overpopulated with humans, and it only gets moreso every year. We need a pandemic to hit and wipe out at least 70% of the world's human population. This, in turn, would reduce the strain on the land because we'd need less food. Needing less food would reduce the number of livestock raised, which would reduce the Earth's animal population more. Reducing our population is the most obvious solution to many of the problems we face today. You don't have to deal with the consequences of overpopulation (poisoning the oceans, greenhouse gas levels, etc) if you aren't overpopulated.

Too funny. Keep it up, son.

[CDF]

Actually, your buddy Warren Meyer is the one arguing that natural processes are dominated by negative feedback mechanisms (the opposite offending the "intuition" of natural scientists, as he puts it), also alleging increasing evidence that negative feedbacks are dominant in climate (a natural process), which kind of presupposes there is some steady state for climate (after accounting for things like solar activity).

The AGW argument seems at first glance to be assuming we would be in a homeostatic human ideal environment if we weren't pumping out Co2... but that's absurd, they can't REALLY think that, right?

[Heavencloud]

Too funny. Keep it up, son.

You're stupid. Do you really think the earth can support upwards of 7 billion people? What do you think will happen when the poor start making advances towards a better lifestyle? The only reason it's "working" right now is because 80% of the world lives in poverty. If the population continues to grow, and countries like China and India continue to advance economically, our finite resources WILL run out. And it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when.

I'm not saying we need a pandemic, but sadly, it would help the survival of the human species as a whole.

[eunhye]

I didn't disagree with you. You're looking at it from a pragmatic standpoint. China has been even cutting their population down due to the 2 person per family rule. Since the 80s?

[SwampdonkeyPLD]

I'm just curious, is there any aspect of our lives that liberals think the government shouldn't be able to control? If procreation can be controlled then what can't be?

[Kuya]

It seems that island nations are taking this stuff very seriously:

If I were to guess which group of people currently living on the planet cared least about the ClimateGate hacked e-mail controversy, I'd bet on the citizens of the Alliance of Small Island States. Members of the Alliance --- a group of about 45 islands and other low-lying nations -- take rising sea levels a bit more seriously than your average think tank funded by Exxon. Their very existence is threatened, and they are making a stink about it at the climate change talks in Copenhagen.

A study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences contends that global sea levels may rise almost two meters by the end of this century, faster than predicted by the International Panel on Climate Change. Tuvalu, a South Pacific nation where the highest point is only 4.5 meters above sea level, is especially desperate to stay afloat. On Wednesday, the country submitted a new, improved tougher version of the Kyoto Protocol -- the so-called Copenhagen Protocol. Tuvalu wants Copenhagen attendees to commit to holding the rise in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius -- instead of the 2 degrees commitment currently supported by the "major economies."

Tuvalu is fighting an uphill battle. As the Guardian's John Vidal explains, keeping the lid on rising temperatures to 1.5 degrees will be extraordinarily expensive and difficult.

But Wednesday's news, as emphasized by Angel Hsu and Christopher Kieran, who are tracking China's participation in the Copenhagen talks for Yale University, represents an entirely new axis of conflict. For the first time, developing nations aren't speaking with the same voice on climate change. China and India have no intention whatsoever of supporting the Tuvalu proposal.

Tuvalu's position is backed by the small island states (AOSIS) and some African nations and up to this point, all members of the Group of 77, the now 130-country block of developing nations. China's reaction to the Tuvalian proposal marks for the first time a significant rift between China and the G77....

China and India believe that their aspirations for economic growth would be crushed by any kind of crash effort to cut emissions. Tuvalu and the other low-lying nations believe they will be swamped into non-existence, period. Unfortunately, it's no contest. Getting a binding agreement out of Copenhagen will be a Herculean task, but even if achieved, will undoubtedly not include the targets necessary to save global coastlines. Tuvalu is doomed.

If climate change is indeed being quickend or made more poignant, then it is quite a dilema these nations have.

[Max™]

Actually, your buddy Warren Meyer is the one arguing that natural processes are dominated by negative feedback mechanisms (the opposite offending the "intuition" of natural scientists, as he puts it), also alleging increasing evidence that negative feedbacks are dominant in climate (a natural process), which kind of presupposes there is some steady state for climate (after accounting for things like solar activity).

Not sure who Warren Meyer is... it's vaguely familiar, is that the guy who writes that climate skeptic blog?


Since a negative feedback process is one which tends to reduce itself, or thin itself out... well, natural systems tend to disperse and seek an equilibrium state, don't they?

Did I wind up in a different Universe when I woke up this morning?


You know if the sun wasn't heating the Earth constantly, it would rapidly cool til it balanced itself out with the vacuum, right?


I'm not saying homeostasis meaning the current temperatures, I mean a truly stable state, like... being extremely cold.

[Cadsuane]

I'm just curious, is there any aspect of our lives that liberals think the government shouldn't be able to control? If procreation can be controlled then what can't be?

That sounds like bourgeois nationalism to me. Commissars are coming for you boy.

[Max™]

Don't look around, Der Kommisars in town, oh oh!

[Solefald]

http://www29.a2hosting.com/%7Ealaddin/test/forcings.png

where are the models that show how natural processes have produced the observed warming in the last 40 years? oh that's right, they DON'T EXIST, because no skeptic has outlined any mechanisms by which mother nature can warm the planet to the levels we have seen under existing conditions.

[CDF]

Not sure who Warren Meyer is... it's vaguely familiar, is that the guy who writes that climate skeptic blog?


Since a negative feedback process is one which tends to reduce itself, or thin itself out... well, natural systems tend to disperse and seek an equilibrium state, don't they?

Did I wind up in a different Universe when I woke up this morning?


You know if the sun wasn't heating the Earth constantly, it would rapidly cool til it balanced itself out with the vacuum, right?


I'm not saying homeostasis meaning the current temperatures, I mean a truly stable state, like... being extremely cold.

Yes, that's the guy. Kind of like creationist whack jobs who accept microevolution (lest they be regarded completely stupid) but reject macroevolution due to the greater cognitive dissonance with religious/teleological views, this guy apparently accepts the consensus that the effect of man-made greenhouse gases "alone" will raise global temperature by ~1 C by the end of the century but doesn't accept the idea of feed-foward processes amplifying that effect (link).

Personally, I think talking about positive/negative feedback with respect to climate is a bit of a conceit as any "real" steady state would be incidental, merely a consequence of physical reality. Negative feedback doesn't necessarily mean tending toward equilibrium, and steady state is not equilibrium. Then again, he seems to have a principled argument to make rather than alleging data shenanigans, while throwing a bunch of images at laypeople without any coherent argument other than "they don't know science," as though this is supposed to be persuasive.

As for hand-wringing about curbing emissions hampering economic prosperity (not that this will ever be politically feasible), apparently it is too hard to imagine, much less acknowledge negative externalities such as sea level rise leading to population displacement, adverse effects on regional crop yields, negative epidemiological consequences (dying from high temperature, vector-borne infections), all of which hamper economic prosperity. Let's all focus on the positive externalities like milder New England winters (pussies).

[Xno Kappa]

I just want to put this out there - can anyone make a valid and reasonable argument as to why we should keep putting chemicals which are harmful to living things into our air and water?

To make sure Saudi Arabia's nut-sacks never go dry.

[Tristam]

It seems that island nations are taking this stuff very seriously:





If climate change is indeed being quickend or made more poignant, then it is quite a dilema these nations have.

That's a good point made all the more relevant recently, the past week an article in Science came out that did temperature reconstructions, CO2 measurements, ocean levels and pH for the past 20 million years. If we were to somehow stabilize our current atmospheric CO2 content at the current level, we'd be somewhere around the CO2 levels for the milocene(sp?), during which the seas were 20-40 meters higher, and the global average temp was 3-6 degrees higher. It's still not entirely understood historically whether CO2 was a feedback or trigger for past climate change (probably some of both), but it's certainly a trigger at the moment.

Also, I'm unaware of a single model that makes any predictions past 2100, the uncertainties get much larger the further out they go. Still though, the temperature models are just a piece of the evidence for AGW.

[Max™]

Regarding the models being unable to produce the warming without Co2 effects, think about what is being said there really quickly.

They were unable to produce results without using a specific assumption, they specifically admit that they were unable to even think of anything else that it could have been, leaving only the anthropogenic greenhouse gases.

Does this sound like evidence of something being proven about the rest of the world, or about the scientists and their models? Does it not bug you that they don't seem to list other explanations they pursued, that they don't list any other reasons their models might have broken? That the actual effect in the models is the positive feedback they apply to the man-made Co2 increases?

Just sayin, something is going on, but I can't fairly call it science.

Yes, that's the guy. Kind of like creationist whack jobs who accept microevolution (lest they be regarded completely stupid) but reject macroevolution due to the greater cognitive dissonance with religious/teleological views, this guy apparently accepts the consensus that the effect of man-made greenhouse gases "alone" will raise global temperature by ~1 C by the end of the century but doesn't accept the idea of feed-foward processes amplifying that effect (link).

Well, let's see why he might think Positive Feedback isn't the best explanation.

The key feature of positive feedback is that small disturbances are amplified. When positive feedback is present, there is some causal loop where a small change creates an effect that causes an even bigger change -- like a ball rolling down an increasingly steep hill.
When a change in a variable occurs in a system which exhibits positive feedback, the system responds by changing that variable even more in the same direction.

Spoiler: show

The end result of a positive feedback is often amplifying and "explosive," i.e. a small perturbation results in big changes. Indeed, chemical- and nuclear fission-based explosives offer an excellent physical demonstration of positive feedback. Bombarding a single atom of Uranium 235 with a neutron causes it to emit on average slightly over two neutrons, which (if losses do not overcome this) can hit two or more atoms, which in turn can hit four or more atoms, etc. The number of atoms involved increases exponentially and very soon the entire mass of uranium is involved.
Formally, a system in equilibrium in which there is positive feedback to any change from its current state is said to be in an unstable equilibrium. The magnitude of the forces which act to move such a system away from its set point are an increasing function of the "distance" from the set point.
In the real world, positive feedback loops are always controlled eventually by negative feedback of some sort; a microphone will break or a beaker will crack or a nuclear accident will result in meltdown. This outcome need not be so dramatic, however. A variety of negative feedback loops in the same system can modulate the effect. Embedded in a system of positive and negative feedback loops, positive feedback does not necessarily imply a runaway process. Combined with other processes, it may just have an amplifying effect.

Spoiler: show

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...use_Effect.svg

"
Real Climate ranks by their contribution to the greenhouse effect:[12]

• water vapor, which contributes 36–70%
• carbon dioxide, which contributes 9–26%
• methane, which contributes 4–9%
• ozone, which contributes 3–7%

The major non-gas contributor to the Earth's greenhouse effect, clouds, also absorb and emit infrared radiation and thus have an effect on radiative properties of the atmosphere.[13]"




Cloud Feedback:

Spoiler: show

"Warming is expected to change the distribution and type of clouds. Seen from below, clouds emit infrared radiation back to the surface, and so exert a warming effect; seen from above, clouds reflect sunlight and emit infrared radiation to space, and so exert a cooling effect. Whether the net effect is warming or cooling depends on details such as the type and altitude of the cloud. These details were poorly observed before the advent of satellite data and are difficult to represent in climate models."

Water Vapor:

Spoiler: show

"If the atmosphere is warmed, the saturation vapor pressure increases, and the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere will tend to increase. Since water vapor is a greenhouse gas, the increase in water vapor content makes the atmosphere warm further; this warming causes the atmosphere to hold still more water vapor (a positive feedback), and so on until other processes stop the feedback loop. The result is a much larger greenhouse effect than that due to CO2 alone. Although this feedback process causes an increase in the absolute moisture content of the air, the relative humidity stays nearly constant or even decreases slightly because the air is warmer."

Climate Models:

Spoiler: show

"All modern climate models are in fact combinations of models for different parts of the Earth. These include an atmospheric model for air movement, temperature, clouds, and other atmospheric properties; an ocean model that predicts temperature, salt content, and circulation of ocean waters; models for ice cover on land and sea; and a model of heat and moisture transfer from soil and vegetation to the atmosphere. Some models also include treatments of chemical and biological processes.[56] Warming due to increasing levels of greenhouse gases is not an assumption of the models; rather, it is an end result from the interaction of greenhouse gases with radiative transfer and other physical processes in the models.[57] Although much of the variation in model outcomes depends on the greenhouse gas emissions used as inputs, the temperature effect of a specific greenhouse gas concentration (climate sensitivity) varies depending on the model used. The representation of clouds is one of the main sources of uncertainty in present-generation models.


Models are also used to help investigate the causes of recent climate change by comparing the observed changes to those that the models project from various natural and human-derived causes. Although these models do not unambiguously attribute the warming that occurred from approximately 1910 to 1945 to either natural variation or human effects, they do indicate that the warming since 1970 is dominated by man-made greenhouse gas emissions"

Personally, I think talking about positive/negative feedback with respect to climate is a bit of a conceit as any "real" steady state would be incidental, merely a consequence of physical reality. Negative feedback doesn't necessarily mean tending toward equilibrium, and steady state is not equilibrium. Then again, he seems to have a principled argument to make rather than alleging data shenanigans, while throwing a bunch of images at laypeople without any coherent argument other than "they don't know science," as though this is supposed to be persuasive.

"Positive feedbacks do not have to lead to a runaway effect, as the gain is not always sufficient. With radiation from a planet increasing in proportion to the fourth power of temperature, in accordance with the Stefan-Boltzmann law, the positive feedback effect has to be very strong to cause a runaway effect (see gain). An increase in temperature from greenhouse gases leading to increased water vapor which is a greenhouse gas causing further warming is a positive feedback. This is not a runaway effect on earth[5]. Positive feedback effects are common and always exist (e.g ice-albedo feedback) while runaway effects are much rarer and cannot be operating at all times."

That is competing with the Negative Feedback of radiative losses into space, among others. There is obviously some positive feedback because the Earth maintains a fairly steady global temperature even on it's night side.

These feedback types are not what they apparently used to model the global warming effects, I've been unable to find exactly what they used for this. Apparently they may have thrown it away along with much of the other data that dweebs like myself are complaining about, as reproducibility is an important part of science.

You can convince yourself of anything if you try, scientific methods allow you to eliminate nearly all of the self-delusions, while letting others help check that you are not missing something.

It isn't perfect, but I'd prefer to use it for obtaining knowledge instead of letting people arbitrarily tell me what they think is knowledge and accepting it at face value. I have an inability to believe anything, so stuff like these AGW methods REALLY makes the little cogs in my head grind and squeal... and lemme tell ya, the hamster in there is getting pissed at this point.

[Beckwin]

I'm just curious, is there any aspect of our lives that liberals think the government shouldn't be able to control? If procreation can be controlled then what can't be?

how fucking dare a conservative talk about procreation/reproductive control. honestly, are you retarded?

I just want to put this out there - can anyone make a valid and reasonable argument as to why we should keep putting chemicals which are harmful to living things into our air and water?

the market says we should. the market is all-knowing.

[SwampdonkeyPLD]

I just want to put this out there - can anyone make a valid and reasonable argument as to why we should keep putting chemicals which are harmful to living things into our air and water?

Yea somebody answer this. I want to hear the argument as to why we continue to have the right to breathe.

And Beckwin are you fucking retarded? Conservatives only care about procreation when people aren't ready for it. I.e. they're going to have to leach off the rest of us.

[Kuya]

And who gets to decide who's ready for it? The State?

[SwampdonkeyPLD]

And who gets to decide who's ready for it? The State?

I edited to be more clear. Of course only the parents get to decide if their ready. Your fucking stupid if think I believe the state should have anything to do with it.