tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-89095181524747290732024-03-21T12:27:59.122-04:00The World of Air Above us: Climate Reality, and ChangeUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger19125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8909518152474729073.post-55315173067987938112015-01-07T05:54:00.002-05:002015-01-10T09:39:25.624-05:00The Pattern of Climate Change Skepticism Runs Amok, and Is Self Reinforcing on Popular Blogs and Ideological News Related Sites<div class="tr_bq">
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The comment below is a summary late in a long series, in response to <a href="http://judithcurry.com/2015/01/03/week-in-review-31/">this posted thread by Judith Curry</a>. Curry is a climate change "skeptic" who is well known because she is one of the very few with some semi related academic credentials, and whose blog is wildly popular.<br />
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Climate change advocates seem to rarely go to Curry's site (and even less to site's that are far more contemptuous) and bother to comment there, because of a belief that it does no good. But this only helps such popular but heavily skewed sites such as Curry's become even more self reinforcing echo chambers, and doesn't help introduce other fellow people to more information. <br />
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Most skeptics won't change their mind, but some people do and can learn. And given an out can start to see things differently over time, particularly when given an out, and not simply castigated for being a skeptic and called a "liar" or "greedy bastard" or not entitled to their view, however erroneous they might be. (Or one might think them to be.)<br />
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But many also don't go because it is extremely unpleasant. On a site like <a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/">Watt's Up With That</a>, for instance, almost any one making valid points that go against the in "knowledge" that climate change is all but a hoax, will almost always get all sorts of nasty comments in response, nearly everything written picked apart and then often wildly misrepresented out of context later (often over and over), and be subjected to a great number of insults.<br />
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It is also easier for that to happen since almost no one goes to these sites except those that self select to have their views reinforced. Therein forgetting that it's an echo chamber. Or from the perspective of many visitors, perhaps not caring since it's among the few places that don't represent the "ignorant misled hordes being duped by the money grubbing climate scientists and people that want to make money off of climate change." (As opposed to fossil fuels or excessive reliance upon them, and notwithstanding the idea that if the call is for investment in and change - another thing many climate change skeptics seem to greatly fear - over to better practices, technologies and uses, it will involve an investment and expenditure and return just like any other part of GDP.)<br />
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<a href="http://judithcurry.com/2015/01/03/week-in-review-31/#comment-660693">Here is where this particular section of the thread starts, with this comment</a>.<br />
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It's in response to, and quotes from, a comment suggesting that because there are carbon sinks (forests, oceans, etc) and because enormous amounts of carbon are emitted naturally (ignoring the relevant fact that carbon is an enormous cycle and what matters is the balance of that cycle and sudden additions to that balance).....<br />
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.....our observed changes in atmospheric carbon aren't so much due to the fact that<i> man has suddenly taken tens of millions of years worth of carbon that was slowly sequestered from the air through decaying plant matter carbon that didn't emit back into the atmosphere and slowly built up over time (forming fossil fuels) and is releasing them back into the atmosphere in what is essentially a geologic instant (nor lessening sinks by chopping down forests, starting w the middle ages).....</i><br />
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..... - but because, well, carbon has just sort of naturally gone way up, beyond the levels of the past millions of years; and suddenly skyrocketed upward beyond the known boundaries of nearly the past million years, somewhat on its own.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEdvZ_GjkQY4hwU08wsIbzXToLsXJFQNTo8_cOp49-rVNXh1KfwTZ1L-kavBTe9qqnIL_B6cWu9x-1fSBNSqWfeqs2qnd8FaD7KlKdrfCOYRka9MlKfk5DwJrj8LL-KC0hp7-v9KVbtTmF/s1600/ice+core+CO2+record.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEdvZ_GjkQY4hwU08wsIbzXToLsXJFQNTo8_cOp49-rVNXh1KfwTZ1L-kavBTe9qqnIL_B6cWu9x-1fSBNSqWfeqs2qnd8FaD7KlKdrfCOYRka9MlKfk5DwJrj8LL-KC0hp7-v9KVbtTmF/s1600/ice+core+CO2+record.jpg" height="180" width="320" /></a></div>
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But in fairness it should be noted that the idea of space aliens coming down between 2 and 5 a.m. PST every evening and adding a little extra carbon to the atmosphere, is left out as another plausible explanation. <br />
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It's not so much that we shouldn't always be open to other explanations for everything and anything: It's that the basic logic - that natural emissions are enormous so the "smaller" additions of mankind don't matter - mischaracterizes the basic relevance of sudden exogenous additions to an otherwise essentially closed system; and the more basic fact that what matters is that it's a biological cycle, not a big pit (or hole in the sky ) that we and or mother nature toss things into, and that nothing comes out of.<br />
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So ultimately, after many comments (again, you can see <a href="http://judithcurry.com/2015/01/03/week-in-review-31/#comment-660693">this part</a> of the thread, and read up to it, or the <a href="http://judithcurry.com/2015/01/03/week-in-review-31/">original post by Curry and</a> the entire thread), this: (Also directly linked to <a href="http://judithcurry.com/2015/01/03/week-in-review-31/#comment-661609">here</a>.)<br />
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Remember, it's a comment, not a scholarly article, or even a post. This format had no edit function, and no delete, so as with most comments, it's a draft, written in casual format, and w/o much opportunity for review.<br />
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<blockquote>
@dalyplanet<br />
Once again the same pattern. You tried to point out one error, which turned out to be a (big) error by you, as well as quite a manipulation of readers here, and what the article said. Then you repeated it later and ignored all points in response.</blockquote>
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So now you go to dismissing with the phrase "based on incorrect understanding." As opposed to your understanding, which is clearly better than the world's leading climate scientists who study this issue. </blockquote>
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Who by the way don't have much issue with my article's relevant points or conclusions.<br />
Although if after 15 responses that have done nothing but perpetuate your entrenched zealotry on this issue as well as manipulate readers, you actually have a valid point that shows a fundamental mistake - and does not wildly mislead readers (again) - please share.</blockquote>
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I have no hesitation correcting things, updating, and integrating more information when relevant.</blockquote>
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But I don't think you can. What I think, and what I expect, is just as I have said before, is more of the exact same pattern.</blockquote>
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It's what you need to do to perpetuate your illusion, reinforced by incredibly insular self reinforcing and highly selective echo chambers such as this site and a few others, that a geologically radical change (defined as on the order of millions of years now) to the long term heat "capturing" property of the atmosphere, won't significantly impact the climate of the planet on which that atmosphere sits.</blockquote>
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Which is essentially all my article helps to illustrate, and which you are unwilling to even consider, because like most skeptics you have already reached a "conclusion" and everything is now done, and everything "interpreted" (or dismissed) to reinforce that conclusion.</blockquote>
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So you dismiss it, and ludicrously dismiss as "made up physics" that climate would be significantly impacted by a huge increase in the earth's net energy retention. (Which net energy increase has to happen, and is demonstrably happening - and so far as we know would only be offset by less water vapor, which, along with changing precipitation patterns and a bigger capacity for a warmer atmosphere to hold what water vapor there is in it for longer periods of time, would be a bad thing since it would heavily amplify drought - already one of the biggest potential problem areas of this.) </blockquote>
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This pattern of practicing the opposite of science, and using select science, under the guise of "science" to simply support a predetermined conclusion, desire or belief (usually led by non science related ideology, such as excessive macroeconomic or government response fears, or a bias against basic ideas of environmental externalities, fealty to fossil fuels, etc) is what the WUWT site is to a tee. (As well as every single one of your comments.)</blockquote>
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And fits in as almost a caricature, with commenters almost frothing at their disdain for climate scientists and all of us "fools" without the "in the know insider" more brilliant science knowledge and understanding that they posses - almost none of it publishable in major vetted science publications, nevertheless, because it is arrived at by wildly cherry picking, misrepresenting, misinterpreting, miscontructing, and confusing every little angle of science itself and unknown, with climate change refutation.</blockquote>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8909518152474729073.post-54733233351511990652014-10-09T17:41:00.003-04:002015-03-04T06:23:02.872-05:00The Crux of the Climate Change Issue and Misinformation QuandaryA while back, University of Alabama at Huntsville Scientist Roy Spencer, <a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/07/roy-spencer-exhibit-that-climate-change_26.html">who has a history of the same kind of errors always going in the same direction</a>, managed to get a study published under an implicit theory that "clouds drive climate," rather than also serve as a response to it.<br />
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The study was <a href="http://news.sciencemag.org/2011/09/journal-editor-resigns-over-contrarian-climate-paper">sufficiently flawed</a> that the editor of the science journal involved ("Remote Sensing") took responsibility for its publication, and <a href="http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/3/9/2002">chose to resign over it</a>; citing the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14768574">degree and type of the error, which went outside the normal curve</a> of "mistake" in the highly professional and well vetted world of academic journal publishing. He also, however, blamed not only himself, but the scientists involved in the paper, which itself was not only comprised of "fundamental error" and "false claims," but which was written as if the scientific arguments or views with which the authors tried to take issue, did not even exist.<br />
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By both trapping earth surface radiated thermal radiation on the one hand, but increasing the earth atmosphere albedo (and thus reflecting more solar radiation directly back into the upper atmosphere and space) on the other, clouds of course play an enormous role in weather.<br />
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And while clouds also help shape a large part of climate over time, they form as a result of underlying climatic conditions. Unlike long lived atmospheric greenhouse gas levels, ice sheet and permafrost conditions, incoming solar radiation, and ocean heat concentrations, clouds are extremely ephemeral, and ever changing on an exceedingly short basis.<br />
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Thus, the idea that clouds, formed by evaporation and atmospheric water vapor (which serves as a very important but extremely short lived and changing greenhouse gas) don't reflect a response to the fundamentals that drive climate, but serve as a key driver of climate, is far fetched. <br />
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Seemingly far fetched arguments are fine - even needed - in science: they check conventional thinking and sometimes lead to great breakthroughs, and often better understanding. But the most critical focus when presenting a potentially far-fetched argument, is of course foremost to assess the arguments against it, and help illustrate where and why they are in error. Spencer, and his colleague William Braswell, rather astoundingly, simply ignored all the "arguments" that went counter to the rather strange claims they made.<br />
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This is not just bad science. It is, fundamentally, almost anti-science. <br />
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There is a lot of pseudo science on the issue of climate change, widely, repeatedly, and passionately promulgated around the world - and in the U.K., the U.S., and Australia in particular - that often terribly misconstrues the issue:<br />
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Consider the wildly popular notion of claiming that Climate Change is not real or major, since "antarctic sea ice extent has been growing," despite the far more relevant fact, usually completely ignored, that <i>total</i> polar ice - arctic sea ice, antarctic sea ice, northern polar land ice sheet mass, and southern polar ice sheet mass, has been greatly diminishing; and diminishing at an <i>accelerating</i> rate. (The arctic sea ice extent is also more relevant than the antarctic extent because the arctic is open water, and historically has had a solid ice cover through the summer months - which is starting to change - while the Antarctic is land. And so antarctic sea ice - a little further away from the pole - has largely disappeared traditionally during the summer months. So unlike in the north, a complete disappearance wouldn't comprise nearly as radical of a change. And it is more relevant since the rate of change - diminishment - in the arctic, has been massive in comparison with the rate of change - augmentation - in the antarctic region.)<br />
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To pick out one of the four areas of polar ice melt to argue one way, when all four, far more relevantly, illustrate the exact opposite, would be considered remarkable in any other area of scientific inquiry; yet passes for routine, and acceptable, when it comes to Climate Change Naysaying. ("CCN")<br />
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While Climate Change Naysayers have falsely turned the issue of ice melt into a refutation of Climate Change, the issue of ice melt is actually the opposite, and very relevant:<br />
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<a href="http://www.awi.de/en/news/press_releases/detail/item/has_the_puzzle_of_rapid_climate_change_in_the_last_ice_age_been_solved_new_report_published_in_natu/?cHash=635de17b35da64748ea6ab945c0b299c">Even small changes</a> in ice sheet mass can have large climate consequences. Additionally, the increase in antarctic ice sea ice extent masks key <a href="http://www.the-cryosphere.net/6/871/2012/tc-6-871-2012.pdf">regional shifts</a>, and is slowly increasing due to <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/06/06/climate-change-is-getting-worse-so-why-is-antarcticas-ice-sheet-expanding/">major changes in the Southern Annular Mode</a> (<a href="http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/history/ln-2010-12/SAM-what.shtml">"SAM" winds</a>), pushing the new ice northward and allowing new formation, and also likely due to <a href="http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v6/n5/full/ngeo1767.html">increased glacial melt insulation</a>. More importantly, the rate of loss of arctic sea ice- which in some regard is again a more important indicator since the north pole is mainly open water while the south pole is a continent (Antarctica) is about <i>10 fold</i> (~1000%) faster than the rate of antarctic increase. And that rate of decline of arctic sea ice itself <a href="http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/">is profound</a>, and, <a href="http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/WorldOfChange/sea_ice.php"><b>accelerating</b></a>.<br />
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The massive ice sheets at both ends of the earth stabilize our climate, and have kept us in the moderately temperate to occasionally frigid (i.e, "encroaching glaciation") range of the Ice Age period we are currently in, and have been in for over a million or more years. (Note that our alteration of the long term greenhouse gas concentrations now extends back at least several million years, to a time period pre-dating the current ice age with its massive ice sheet structures at both ends of the planet.) <b>And these ice sheets are also now melting: And melting at an <a href="http://climate.nasa.gov/news/242/">accelerating</a><span id="goog_1597156403"></span><span id="goog_1597156404"></span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/"></a> rate, <a href="http://www.rtcc.org/2014/04/14/greenland-ice-melt-accelerating-say-scientists/">at both</a> ends <a href="http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2012-376&cid=release_2012-376">of the earth</a></b>.<br />
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To thus claim that the earth is not warming - as is now routinely done, and which even forms a good portion of Climate Change denialism, "skepticism" and confusion - during a short term geological period of consistently high (and even on a shorter term basis, still very moderately increasing <i><b>after</b></i> a very high shorter term increase in the 90s from the decade before) is both preposterous and extraordinarily misleading, as the earth is still accumulating heat - which is what matters - and at an accelerating pace.<br />
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Energy going into melting ice sheets will not be reflected in geologically short term ambient air temperatures. Yet we over focus on current air temperature as if this defines Climate Change, when right now, ambient air temperature is the least important aspect of a problem that ultimately reflects the changing (increasing) net energy balance of the earth.<br />
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And much of this accumulating energy is going into melting these ice sheets; melting permafrost regions (within which are over a trillion tons of carbon - almost double the amount of total carbon in the atmosphere right now - <a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/04/09/melting_permafrost_switches_to_nasty_highgear_methane_release/">much of which will be released</a> <a href="http://www.reportingclimatescience.com/news-stories/article/permafrost-cooling-increases-global-warming-says-research.html">in the</a> far more atmospheric heat energy absorption and re radiation intensive CH4, or <a href="http://nsidc.org/cryosphere/frozenground/methane.html">methane, form</a>, and ultimately <a href="http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/03/140321164854.htm">a positive feedback loop</a>); and, most notably of all, heating the world ocean - and <i>doing so at a </i><a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6158/617.short" style="font-style: italic;">geologically massive</a><i>, and, </i><a href="http://www.weather.com/news/science/environment/where-global-warming-going-ocean-20140205%20" style="font-style: italic;">accelerating</a><i>, rate</i>.<br />
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In fact, <a href="https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BwdvoC9AeWjUeEV1cnZ6QURVaEE/edit">according to the World Meteorological Organization's annual 2013 report</a> (emphasis added):<br />
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<b><i>About 93 per cent of the excess heat trapped in the Earth system between 1971 and 2010 was taken up by the ocean</i></b>. </blockquote>
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From around 1980 to 2000, the ocean gained about 50 zettajoules [10 to the 21st power] of heat. Between 2000 and 2013, [the ocean gained] about <b><i>three times</i></b> that amount</blockquote>
Part of the ignorance on this issue - which is not just lack of knowledge, but incorrect knowledge and conclusion constantly, and often aggressively promulgated to the world and media - is fed mainly by non scientists, or scientists in other fields than those directly connected to climate change, who have either been misled on the issue themselves (further reinforced by a massive number of wildly popular, highly insular, and self reinforcing anti Climate Change websites and even media outlets); or - though often quick to project the argument of "belief" outward onto others - by ideological belief or scientifically irrelevant conflation of the actual science of the issue, with concern and presumption over possible political and economic ramifications and assumptions of it.<br />
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And part of it has been fed by a few, if rare, actual climate related practicing scientists, such as in the case of the far too disproportionately influential Roy Spencer, among a few others - such as, for example, <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=John_R._Christy">Jo</a><a href="http://sciblogs.co.nz/hot-topic/tag/john-christy/">hn</a> <a href="http://www.skepticalscience.com/christy-once-again-misinforms-congress.html">Ch</a><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2014/feb/21/nazis-climate-contrarian-credibility-gap">ris</a><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2013/sep/16/climate-change-contrarians-5-stages-denial">ty</a>, who, ironically, is also at the very same University of Alabama at Huntsville as Spencer.<br />
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Spencer (as well as Christy and the small handful of others), is far too disproportionately influential in part because he is one of the very few actual practicing climate scientists who takes a dim view of the idea that radical long term atmospheric heat energy re absorption will significantly alter future climate; and in large part it is because of the massive use, constant exposure, and promulgation of any possible seemingly credible argument or arguer in support of Climate Change Naysaying.<br />
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But Spencer's strange cloud argument was not novel, nor creatively expressive of the flaws in current understanding, nor an improvement upon or even contribution to it; but instead, consisted of hype and base misrepresentation masquerading as science.<br />
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Notably, although tens of thousands of such "papers" have been "published" by anti Climate Change organizations and lobbying groups, very few if any have been been published by vetted scientific journals that actually undermine the basic theory of Climate Change itself.<br />
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Naturally, Climate Change Naysayers have a theory for this as well - as when one wants or needs to have a belief, self-plausible appearing theories are infinite. Hence it's a "conspiracy," that all of the "Climate Change" refuting "studies don't get published in any of the fully vetted and highly professional and rigorous scientific journals - even though the basic process of science relies upon contention, questioning and constant re-examination, and there is far more interest, and likely even fame, in scientifically (not rhetorically) showing our massive and still ongoing alteration of the long term nature of our atmosphere to not be a big deal future climate wise. So such studies, if valid, or at least reasonable and not based upon basic misconstruction or misinformation, would be welcome, and a big deal.<br />
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There is just no solid argument for it because the only thing keeping Climate Change from being so slam dunk clear that it would be more patently obvious to the non scientific, is that it is in the future, it scans a broad range of time, and it covers a broad range of general responses which due to the very nature of climate itself can't realistically be broken down into concise pathways of short term precisely predictable and in advance measurable (until, somewhat, after the fact) change, as opposed to broader and longer time frame scale change. <br />
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And of course there is massive desire to believe that we are not affecting the environment, so that we "don't have to" change; don't have to shift what are probably long term counter productive agricultural practices for a whole host of reasons; don't have to have rigorous and open minded economic conversations about just what really defines economic progress and freedom long term, what measures it, and what really contributes to it; and perhaps most of all, don't have to to actively rather than passively switch off of fossil fuels upon which we have grown so "comfortable." (With former President George Bush even going so far to call our reliance upon oil an "addiction" in his 2006 National State of the Union Address) or infringe upon what some see as a basic, inviolate, "God given" right - namely, very cheap fossil fuel energy. <br />
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For despite the hype to the contrary, the cherry picking of select data, the constant conflation of the normal process of scientific correction, adjustment and learning with refutation of Climate Change itself, and the constant assertion that a failure to be able to precisely predict that actual short term geological path of Climate Change itself means that the issue of major climatic shifts is therefore not valid, the basic Climate Change theory - contrary to what is often so loquaciously if misleading expressed - is fairly straightforward, if imprecise:<br />
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Greenhouse gases absorb and re radiate mid to long wave thermal radiation (surface heat emission, whereas incoming, and immediately re reflected solar radiation, is mainly in short wave form), that would otherwise continue to radiate upward into the upper atmosphere and space. And a radical shift in their concentrations to levels not seen on earth in millions of years will likely be masked for quite some time upon a "relatively" stable climate system; but, as the underlying conditions of that stability - earth albedo, ocean energy, ice sheet presence, permafrost coverage, and the ongoing increased (and still massively increasing) thermal absorption and re radiation itself, in conjunction with the increasingly changed underlying conditions - all change, will ultimately and invariably have to fundamentally alter that system.<br />
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Roy Spencer is not trying to figure out the nature of this change, what contributes to it, and what we can learn about it; but, along with a large portion of the world and in particular online and lobbying community, <a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/07/roy-spencer-exhibit-that-climate-change_26.html">is instead trying to refute it, and for very specific reasons</a>. And his wacky, and widely repudiated "contrarian" study that not only misrepresented his findings but oddly also even failed to address the substance of the very theories he was attempting to repudiate - in, lo and behold, the direction of concluding that Climate Change is "much less significant" - was no coincidental happenstance simply arrived at through objective analyses of the relevant science, facts, and data. It was <a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/07/roy-spencer-exhibit-that-climate-change_26.html">in fact instead very purposeful</a>, and part of a broader pattern that has nevertheless <a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/">conditioned itself to believe</a> it is really simply following the "better" science.<br />
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Part of the problem isn't just the constant perpetuation and amplification of misinformation and issue misconstruction itself by interested, misinformation, conspiracy theory, or ideological led groups (along with often facilitatingly poor explication, and a lot of presumptive "conclusions" over what an average individual should somehow know in a veritable sea of misinformation on the issue by some groups concerned with the issue or even the massive misrepresentation on it) - but a good portion of the media itself. This includes, among others "talks a good game" but misinformation radical Glenn Beck's provocative online "magazine" Blaze; Forbes; and the widely misnamed "Fox News." (It is misnamed not because of the fairly ironic "Fox" title, but because it should be Fox Advocacy, as it is really advocacy couched as news - something, when recipients believe they are getting actual "fair and balanced," to use Fox's constantly iterated term, "news and analysis," which is far more effective than outright advocacy at influencing belief.)<br />
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Let's take an example, tying it into the Spencer paper so flawed, that, questionable action or not, the editor of the publishing paper resigned over it. <br />
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So how did Fox News handle this story? A <a href="https://www.blogger.com/mistake%20OR%20retraction%20OR%20editor%20OR%20resigned%20%22roy%20spencer%22%20site:foxnews.com">search</a> of all Fox Roy Spencer related articles made no substantive mention of any error, retraction or correction.<br />
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Yet here, in marked contrast, is the very first sentence of Fox's online <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/07/29/data-cooling-on-global-warming/">story</a> about the study itself.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Has a central tenant of global warming just collapsed?</i></blockquote>
Famous comedian and satirist Jon Stewart was one of the first to categorize the extensive use of Fox' News question marks <a href="http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/8ov5kh/the-question-mark">as a form of veiled advocacy; that is, opinion, often extreme opinion, pushed across as if it were investigative analysis</a>.<br />
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The study covered a period of about 10 years - from 2000 - 20009. Given the enormous range of climate variability itself, let alone one expected to shift (and one that is starting to show such signs, "oddly" coincidental or not), and as the climate is expected to shift over time, the heightened expectation of increased weather and overall variability, and unpredictability, ten years is a remarkably short period to draw contrary conclusions from.<br />
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Making the assertion that Climate Change is much less relevant than previously thought, based upon ten years of temperature of "random" cloud cover, misses what the Climate Change issue really is. Far more problematically, yet for reasons again never illuminated, it also relied upon the wild presumption that cloud cover, even though an ongoing ephemeral phenomenon, is largely irrelevant to the process of anthropogenic or atmospheric heat re radiating molecular driven climate change, and yet itself an initial driver of climate rather than at least in part a resultant conditional phenomenon, or in part, "result," of it.<br />
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Again, this goes against the entire body of scientific knowledge on the subject. Which itself is fine if there is a coherent reason offered as to why; but more potently, the argument makes little sense, and again, <a href="file:///C:/Users/b/Downloads/remotesensing-03-01603.pdf">there is no coherent reason (or any reason) offered</a> as to why.<br />
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Climate change, as noted in this previous <a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/07/roy-spencer-exhibit-that-climate-change_26.html">link</a>, more accurately refers to "<b>the long term geologic history of earth, and the recent rapid additions to the long lived concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, <a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/07/whats-really-problem-and-how-bad-and.html">to levels</a> not collectively seen in at least several million years; and the expected, if somewhat uncertain, range of likely and even severe changes to longer term climate in response</b>."<br />
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The issue or "theory" sits somewhere between the "theory" of gravity and a strong hypothesis, based upon basic earth physics; our long standing geologic record; the earth's tendency to somewhat easily shift and change climatically as it is; and the geologically radical, outstandingly rapid, and still ongoing change upward in the atmospheric level of long lived greenhouse gases.<br />
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And the scientific theory is that this change is likely to bring about a lagging, possibly jagged, almost certainly non linear, increasingly volatile, and short term unpredictable (and long term unpredictable in terms of being exact or precise) shift or series of shifts in our climate: With our long term climate overall, ultimately shifting over to a new, stable stases, <i>well after</i> current atmospheric concentrations of long lived greenhouse gases, from a geologic perspective, have stabilized. (Right now, from a geologic perspective, far from stabilizing, they are essentially shooting straight up.)<br />
<br />
Models try to capture this as best as they are able, and invariably get caught up in the problems of trying to pinpoint with accurate precision, what future climate is not only going to be, but exactly when it will be as well, <i>and</i> along what exact path it will follow as well.<br />
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This would be a difficult if not near impossible task with respect to just basic climate alone. It is even more so when the atmospheric concentrations of long term heat trapping gases have shot up to geologically radical levels - leading to far more re radiated atmospheric heat, and over time, the increase in energy build up of the earth itself: Something - with respect to warming ice sheets, increasing net ice melt, <a href="http://www.livescience.com/37359-nasa-carve-thawing-permafrost-gas.html">increasing permafrost</a> subsurface temperatures, and <a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/07/heat-around-and-below.html">ocean</a> <a href="http://www.weather.com/news/science/environment/where-global-warming-going-ocean-20140205">temperatures</a> - also, again, correspondingly observed.<br />
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Yet the inability to exactly pinpoint both the precise degree of average ambient rise or just change, as well as the precise almost geologically meaningless path on a nearly year to year or decade to decade basis, has been widely mistaken for the efficacy, vitality or sensibility of the "Climate Change" phenomenon itself, and again, also aggressively and repeatedly promulgated as another false repudiation, or refutation, of it.<br />
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Yet regarding that Fox story - of which a google search provided not a one follow up correction, even after the Spencer study, prompting a major headline proclaiming the Climate Change theory itself to have been all but undermined, was largely repudiated and shown to be hogwash, including even by the publishing Journal itself, <i style="font-weight: bold;">here </i>are the second and third sentences :<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Climate change forecasts have for years predicted that carbon dioxide would trap heat on Earth, and increases in the gas would lead to a planetwide rise in temperatures, with devastating consequences for the environment.But long-term data from NASA satellites seems to contradict the predictions dramatically, according to a new study.</i></blockquote>
Yes, according to a study - albeit subsequently left out by Fox - so fundamentally flawed, by an author who has a systematic pattern of always making mistakes in the same direction, and apparently<a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/07/roy-spencer-exhibit-that-climate-change_26.html"> strong non science oriented reasons for doing so</a>, that the two year editor of the journal resigned over it. Not over pressure, but over the egregiousness of the mistake and "most likely problematic" <i>falsity</i> of the claims, <a href="http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/3/9/2002">according to</a> the editor himself.<br />
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Yet nevertheless, without ever a subsequent correction to be found, here are the fifth and sixth sentences of the Fox article:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"<i>The satellite observations suggest there is much more energy lost to space during and after warming than the climate models show,” [Spencer] said. The planet isn't heating up, in other words.</i></blockquote>
Except, it is:<br />
<br />
Net <a href="http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v4/n4/full/nclimate2161.html">ice melt</a> is <a href="http://www.wunderground.com/climate/greenland.asp">increasing</a>. Glaciers and ice sheets <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-07-07/giant-antarctic-ice-shelves-could-melt-faster-than-expected/5579678">are warming and melting</a> not just in the arctic, but the antarctic as well. And again, at an <a href="http://climate.nasa.gov/news/242/">accelerating rate</a>. Subsurface temperatures in <a href="http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/earth20130610.html#.VDlO-_ldWlc">permafrost</a> regions, which cover over a fifth of the globe, <a href="http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/permafrost.html">are increasing</a> (even faster in some areas than the ambient surface air temperature above them). And the oceans, which cover almost three quarters of the globe, are gaining warmth at a rate that is many times, and according to one scientific study, 15 times (or fifteen hundred percent) <a href="http://www.voanews.com/content/oceans-are-buffers-for-climate-change/1781090.html">faster</a> than at any time in the past ten thousand years.<br />
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And, less important than the above changes, but still notably, overall temperatures over time - as in climate, the longer term, not shorter term, trend matters - are increasing, in a way that is <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6124/1198.abstract">already geologically unusual</a>, with almost all of the 20 warmest years on record in the past 25 years alone, and, astonishingly, 13 of the 14 warmest years ever on record - even with the oceans still warming <i>when they should have cooled to keep the air so consistently warm if the globe itself wasn't still warming</i> - <a href="http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20140121/">all occurring in the past 14 years</a>. And, though somewhat minor, but simply augmenting the general trend a little more, according to the National Climatic Data Center, the "meteorological" summer (June, July, and August) <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-19/the-earth-baked-in-record-fashion-this-summer.html">was the hottest on record</a>. (It was the <a href="http://www.climatecentral.org/news/nasa-globe-warmest-august-18031">fourth hottest</a> according to NASA), and 2014 is on track to possibly become the new hottest year ever. <br />
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But Fox, before ending up the piece with one of the more tame quotes on the matter (and on Spencer) by Texas A & M atmospheric scientist Andrew Dessler, calling it "incorrect," further honed its powerful and completely unsubstantiated underlying "Climate Changes is not really real" message veiled as news, by publishing what not only dances near the edge of pure fiction, but crosses firmly over the line into it:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>James Taylor, a senior fellow for environment policy at conservative think-tank The Heartland Institute, wrote at Forbes that the meaning of the new research is clear -- and it compromises what he called a "central premise of alarmist global warming theory."</i></blockquote>
Yes, Taylor - a paid advocate for the Heartland Institute, itself designed and funded specifically for the purpose of repudiating the concept of Climate Change - did write that. And Forbes, another near constant (but not always) Climate Change misinformation media source, did publish it.<br />
<br />
Yet most scientists (although suddenly the word scientist, in an overt attempt at wildly spun advocacy - the opposite of news reporting, almost by definition - means "alarmist," not scientist, in every single of the many pieces that Forbes has "published" by Taylor), note that Spencer is not really practicing science here; that the paper got some of the most basic things backward; that Spencer has a scientific history of being repeatedly wrong, and always in the same direction; and that while it is nice to model, Climate Change refers to the long term general expected effect over time from what has been a multi million year geologic change in a matter of a mere few hundred years, much of which has occurred in the past 50 or so years alone. <i><b>Not models</b></i>.<br />
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But for Fox, one of the leading sources of "news" in America and the leading and, according to studies, not just the most watched, but the "most trusted," of the very few national cable news channels, it was not actual climate scientists, <b>but James Taylor - </b>a lawyer who took science classes in college, and a paid advocate <i>who works for a center specifically designed for the purpose of refuting Climate Change</i>, - who is the <u>science expert</u> that Fox nevertheless elected to quote in terms of the article, and achieve <a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/07/a-panel-of-national-experts-who-know.html">Fox's seeming</a> aims: namely, to undermine and refute the idea of Climate Change and, it seems, any real understanding of the issue that doesn't align with its extreme (if common in the Internet and its extremely self selecting and self reinforcing) and highly misinformed view that Climate Change does not pose a significant threat of major, non linear, climatic shifting, with major to massive consequences for the specific world in which we evolved, and built up our civilization upon.<br />
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And so the powerful beat of misinformation continues to reverberate through the land, and alter the informational landscape upon which a democracy, for good analysis, assessment, and decision making, relies.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8909518152474729073.post-25545720366562230792014-08-17T21:40:00.003-04:002014-08-19T17:19:04.447-04:00But Such a Humble Creature Such as Ourselves Could not Possibly affect the Earth, Right?<br />
From <a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/08/17/moore-tour-needs-some-backers/#more-114545">WUWT, 8-17</a> (emphasis added):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Those opinion leaders that Patrick meets with will realise, as Patrick has done himself, that <b>virtually all climate change is natural and that mankind’s contribution is minimal</b>; they will then be able to convey this to the public</i>.</blockquote>
For how could man affect climate? Climate is energy. <a href="http://climate.nasa.gov/causes/">Greenhouse gases</a> absorb <a href="http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/energy-and-environment/climate-change---the-science/">and re radiate energy (heat)</a> that would otherwise waft up into the upper atmosphere and space, thereby slowing increasing the energy balance of the earth.<br />
<br />
Except for one thing: Man can't really affect the climate. Nor <a href="http://science.howstuffworks.com/moon-landing-hoax.htm">put people on the moon</a>. Send <a href="http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mer/#.U_FSrvldUpo">Rovers to Mars</a>. Spacecraft to Saturn, <a href="http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/juno/main/#.U_FS2vldUpo">Jupiter</a>, and beyond. <a href="http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/06/120605102807.htm">Split Atoms</a>, create bombs<a href="http://gizmodo.com/5899569/how-many-nukes-would-it-take-to-blow-up-the-entire-planet"> capable of</a> in tandem destroying the earth many times over, explore the depths of the oceans <a href="http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/03/120325-james-cameron-mariana-trench-challenger-deep-deepest-science-sub/">miles below</a> the surface, freeze matter to a near motionless state of near (<a href="http://www.livescience.com/25959-atoms-colder-than-absolute-zero.html">or past?</a>) 0 degrees kelvin, or <a href="http://www.nature.com/nphoton/journal/v5/n11/fig_tab/nphoton.2011.167_F6.html">probe the insides</a> of atoms. (Other cool stuff, and <a href="http://www.universetoday.com/18847/life-of-the-sun/">pictures, here.</a>)<br />
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We can't do that.<br />
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You see, our affect is "minimal." Sure, greenhouses make life on earth as we know it possible, and keep the earth around 55-60 degrees on average, instead of zero. Teeming with life, rather than a near lifeless frozen ball of rock hurtling through space. Raise those long term greenhouse gas up to levels <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/11/science/earth/carbon-dioxide-level-passes-long-feared-milestone.html?pagewanted=all">probably</a> not <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-10/hawaii-carbon-dioxide-measurement-for-may-9-passed-400-ppm.html">seen on earth</a> in millions of years? Some <a href="http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/">seven billion plus</a> people, collectively affecting the very atmosphere that traps and re radiates thermal radiation, ultimately driving climate on earth?<br />
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No big deal, for "virtually all climate change is natural, and mankind's contribution is minimal." <a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/08/heres-thought-refutation-of-scientific.html">Based upon</a> very little.<br />
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That scientists strongly say otherwise?<br />
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A matter to likewise simply be dismissed: Science <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Merchants-Doubt-Handful-Scientists-Obscured/dp/1608193942">re directed by non scientists' superior knowledge</a>, and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Hockey-Stick-Climate-Wars/dp/023115254X">scientists, attacked</a>, and turned into "science scandals of the century." <br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8909518152474729073.post-31684901838100343042014-08-17T18:28:00.004-04:002014-08-17T18:59:27.959-04:00Here's a Thought - Refutation of a Scientific Consensus is not just "I Disagree"<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>If you want to put up alternative theories you have to find some kind of credible evidence to support them … if you can’t do that you tend to resort to name-calling, calling global warming things like a religion or a cult or some kind of conspiracy</i>.</blockquote>
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Australia's "Chief Scientist," Ian Chubb. (Via <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/aug/17/australias-chief-scientist-tells-pms-business-adviser-to-stick-to-economics?commentpage=1">The Guardian</a>)</div>
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He has a point, doesn't he? (Chubb was responding to Tony Abbott business adviser Maurice Newman advising <a href="http://climatesolutionsandanalysis.wordpress.com/2014/08/08/deep-into-the-abyss-of-climate-change-and-a-case-of-australian-media-coverage/">Australia</a> and the world on Friday of the "perils" of "<a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/08/arctic-ice-snow-cover-has-gone-down.html">ignoring nature's warnings</a>" or global cooling for which we are "<a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/08/what-if.html">ill prepared</a>.")<br />
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Yet it's what's repeatedly missed <a href="http://judithcurry.com/">on Climate Change refutation</a>. (Though <b><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2014/aug/07/facts-can-convince-some-conservatives-about-global-warming#comment-39199441">maybe something else</a></b> <i>besides</i> true scientific analysis is driving climate change refutation):</div>
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Calling AGW a cult or religion <i>isn't</i> a reason why a radical increase to long term greenhouse gases - <a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/07/whats-really-problem-and-how-bad-and.html"><b>to levels not seen on earth in millions of years</b></a> - would <i>not</i> lead to a similar major shift in climate. Particularly given that climate is ultimately a longer term response to energy changes: And a major increase in atmospheric thermal absorption and re radiation, constitutes a major change in long term energy. </div>
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One of the major Climate Change refutation sites is run by a well known college science professor, Judith Curry, who always seems to write posts strongly slanted towards refuting climate science; although <i>without</i> basic analysis as to why basic climate science, on the issue of AGW - as opposed to the ongoing process of scientific correction and adjustment itself - is wrong. </div>
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My <a href="http://judithcurry.com/2014/08/06/importance-of-intellectual-and-political-diversity-in-science/#comment-615976">question for Judith Curry</a> - among <a href="http://judithcurry.com/2014/07/27/the-97-feud/#comment-612039">others</a> -, has <i>still</i> gone unanswered:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
...Since it is so important for the diversity of scientific thought - ...and <a href="http://www.skepticalscience.com/">despite the clamor for diversity and challenge, [the fact that] this leading site, for laying out the myriad errors of climate c</a><a href="http://www.skepticalscience.com/">hange skepticism arguments</a>, is nevertheless, among many similar ones, decried, denigrated, and dismissed as unworthy and worse – what, exactly, is the “contrarian” position?</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Let’s discuss it, as a viable... theory for the idea that the climate<i> </i>[<i>nevertheless won’t</i> significantly shift, as a result of our ongoing accumulation of increased atmospheric re radiation of energy capacity in response to geologically radical changes to our atmosphere’s long lived greenhouse gas concentrations <i>to levels not seen on earth in at least several million years, and still rising fas</i>t].... </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>But first, please, tell me what it is</b>.</blockquote>
Notice, again, <a href="http://judithcurry.com/2014/08/06/importance-of-intellectual-and-political-diversity-in-science/#comment-615976">no one answered</a> what it was.<br />
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In part because CC refutation is not about saying why, based upon geophysics, the earth, for some odds reason, won't shift - or why it doesn't face a large threat of shifting. <i>It is </i>about taking the ongoing process of science itself, and using selected mistakes, corrections, adjustments downward, cherry picked, and often even misrepresented parts itself, as false refutation for the separate underlying theory itself. <br />
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That's not skepticism. It's self reinforcing, selective goal oriented refutation itself - something very different from rigorous objective scientific examination, while serving the purpose of convincing itself it is not.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8909518152474729073.post-50022679121803945932014-08-17T01:31:00.000-04:002014-11-11T01:14:16.505-05:00Just How Much of a Stretch is some Climate Change Denialism?On Friday, Tony Abbot business adviser Maurice Newman published a piece in The Australian, warning that politicians were ignoring "nature's signs" of a major global cooling, "at our peril."<br />
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The Op-ed was <a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/were-illprepared-if-the-iceman-cometh/story-e6frg6zo-1227023489894">craftily written</a>. The problem was, it made things up, or grossly misrepresented them. And it appears that all the major assertions that it relies upon are false or misleading.<br />
<br />
Even the scientist specifically relied upon for Newman's major newspaper published assertion, <i>had this to say specifically </i><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/planet-oz/2014/aug/15/fact-check-how-maurice-newman-misrepresents-science-to-claim-future-global-cooling">about Newman's claim</a> (that the current threat is global cooling due not to climate change, but to the fact that solar radiation - and not a massive increase in the very gases that absorb and re radiate hear - has been driving <a href="http://climate.nasa.gov/interactives/warming_world">increasing warming</a>):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>[It] is, frankly, ludicrous</i>.</blockquote>
Scientists who tend to understate, are not in the habit of calling things ludicrous.<br />
<br />
But Newman in his piece had relied upon "<i>leading British climate scientist Mike Lockwood</i>," for his claim that it has been solar radiation (despite solar radiation actually <a href="http://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-global-warming.htm">decreasing the last few decades)</a> and not a geologically radical multi million year increase to long term atmospheric greenhouse gas levels that was driving climate trends.<br />
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Lockwood not only disagreed - startling enough for a scientist whose work is used as a predominant part of a major op-eds argument - he rightly labeled it ludicrous.<br />
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But then, Climate Change refutation, rather than mere skepticism, is sometimes <a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/08/what-if.html">somewhat akin to</a> a religion, convincing itself that it is science. Even often by projecting <a href="http://judithcurry.com/2014/08/06/importance-of-intellectual-and-political-diversity-in-science/#comment-615976">everything that disagrees with it</a>, <a href="http://judithcurry.com/2014/08/04/is-the-road-to-scientific-hell-paved-with-good-moral-intentions/#comment-614916">as religion, no matter how</a> ridiculously. (Notice also <a href="http://judithcurry.com/2014/08/06/importance-of-intellectual-and-political-diversity-in-science/#comment-615976">the question here</a> was simply never answered.) It tends to reinforce itself, as <a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/">like minds all take the ongoing process</a> of scientific discovery itself - mistake, correction, debate, adjustment - for refutation of the underlying theory it seeks to refute. <br />
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The earth might cool. Who knows for sure. But the point is that the best, and overwhelming, assessment of science is that major (past) increases in greenhouse gases have been driving changes recently, pose a major threat of significant future change (on both overall patterns, and likely overall ambient heat upward), and the earth has been warming as well, significantly, even <a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/08/arctic-ice-snow-cover-has-gone-down.html">without taking into account the ocean and other signs</a> which greatly amplify the picture. <br />
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Science aside, the greenhouse affect is major; and the theory that a geologically radical long term shift upward in these very same gases would not have a significant impact upon climate, would probably need some (let alone considerable) basis. But again, there has bee none, other than to argue with signs of corroboration of the basic CC theory, as refutation of climate change itself.<br />
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And a claim by a non scientist, relying upon scientists for the contrary notion - that Greenhouse gases don't matter, and so misconstruing the few scientists "relied upon" in the process so excessively that one is prompted to call the claims "ludicrous," is yet another exercise in trying to refute, by any means possible, for the sake of, refuting. Which is quite different from skepticism. It may be earnest, self sealing (and massive misinformation reinforcing) belief, but it is still very different from skepticism.<br />
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For example, on the super popular but climate change refutation site "<a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/08/wattsup-with-using-us-data-to-refute.html">Watt's Up With That</a>," skeptical science author, textbook on climate science author, and book author John Cook is repeatedly called "a liar," and the site he founded repeatedly dismissed. It has to be for climate change refutation to continue it's approach not of skepticism, but of simply refuting climate change science, or anything that supports it:<br />
<br />
For on <a href="http://www.skepticalscience.com/">Skeptical Science's home page</a>, near the very top, it aptly, and it seems very correctly, points out:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Scientific skepticism is healthy. Scientists should always challenge themselves to improve their understanding. Yet this isn't what happens with climate change denial. Skeptics vigorously criticize any evidence that supports man-made global warming and yet embrace any argument, op-ed, blog or study that purports to refute global warming.</blockquote>
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One could consider that there might be something to this, as well as the many points by multiple scientists and others, suggesting how a lot of climate change refutation is based upon a basic misconstruction of the issue, and a more objective analysis of what the issue itself is and is not; but that would get in the way of Climate Change refutation.</div>
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So John Cook, for example, among many others, is called a liar. And <a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/17/to-john-cook-it-isnt-hate-its-pity-pity-for-having-such-a-weak-argument-you-are-forced-to-fabricate-in-epic-proportions/">often</a> <a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/12/18/skeptical-sciences-john-cook-making-up/">by bizarre</a> <a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/07/29/quote-of-the-week-the-lie-big-law-or-why-cant-john-cook-cant-tell-the-truth/">means and very thin</a> standards, which if similarly applied to climate change refuters, would yield the same type of results, and far, far more of them, and often, far stronger. Yet this allows John Cook, Skepticalscience, most climate scientists (Michael Mann, for instance), many others and the legitimate points to put the discussion back on the track of a rigorous, skeptical, rather than end result driven frame, to simply be disregarded - along with all points that refute climate change refutation, all points that support the basic theory of CC, and the idea that refutation is based upon "scientific analysis," to be adhered to. </div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8909518152474729073.post-21902046513095513932014-08-16T17:14:00.001-04:002014-08-18T13:48:21.088-04:00Another One of Nature's Signs - of Cooling? <br />
<b>A new study,</b> published in this month's Journal of Geophysical Research, concludes that arctic sea ice snow cover has gone down dramatically since the 1950s - by about a third in the Western Hemisphere, and by about half, near Alaska.<br />
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The study is <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014JC009985/abstract">here</a>. Read more <a href="http://www.nasa.gov/jpl/news/snow-cover-arctic-sea-ice-thinned-20140815/index.html#.U--6v_ldUpo">here</a> and <a href="http://phys.org/news/2014-08-thinned-arctic-sea-ice.html">here</a>.<br />
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Thankfully,<a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/08/what-if.html"> the earth is going to cool, according to</a> the business (interestingly, not "science") adviser to Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott yesterday. So this pattern, along with <a href="http://climate.nasa.gov/news/242/">increasing antarctic land ice sheet melt</a>, increasing arctic ice sea ice loss, increasing arctic ice sheet melt, increasing <a href="http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/permafrost.html">permafrost temperatures</a>, ocean temperature <a href="http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/images/indicators/ocean-heat-content.gif">increases</a>, at an <a href="https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BwdvoC9AeWjUeEV1cnZ6QURVaEE/edit">exceedingly rapid rate</a>, and a long term and fairly <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6124/1198.abstract">significant</a> rapid <a href="http://climate.nasa.gov/interactives/warming_world">upward trend in ambient atmospheric temperatures</a>, should reverse itself, and we'll be facing a global cooling which - according to the Australian Business Adviser - politicians are ignoring the signs "from nature" on, at "their, and our, peril" (<a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/08/what-if.html">see update</a>).<br />
<br />
<i>Not</i> ignoring the signs of an increasing future shift in climate as one would expect to follow from an <a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/07/whats-really-problem-and-how-bad-and.html">increase in long term atmospheric "heat trapping" greenhouse gases to levels</a> not seen on earth in millions of years, and, as we've seen, the signs are starting to increasingly corroborate.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8909518152474729073.post-57141703516173249062014-08-14T18:33:00.001-04:002014-08-20T19:48:55.395-04:00What if?<b>(2x updated below; 8-15-14, 8-18-14)</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
What if aliens from another planet invaded us in 2017, and we're not sufficiently prepared? <i>(See</i> first update below.)<br />
<br />
More reasonably, what if scientists are right, and <a href="http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~showman/greenhouse.html">increases to long term "heat trapping" atmospheric greenhouse concentrations</a> to levels not seen on earth in at least several million years, leads to severe future climate shifting in response?<br />
<br />
Somewhere in between these two "what if" questions, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbot's chief business adviser, Maurice Newman, in a piece in the Australian last Thursday (8-14), asked both "what if" the recent warming of earth is due to an increase in solar radiation, <i>and</i> we face a massive risk of major cooling. He also answered, claiming we face just such a threat, for which, he asserted, the world and its people, are ill prepared, and that politicians are ignoring "<b><a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/were-illprepared-if-the-iceman-cometh/story-e6frg6zo-1227023489894#">nature's signs</a></b>," of, at "<b><a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/were-illprepared-if-the-iceman-cometh/story-e6frg6zo-1227023489894#">their, and our, peril</a></b>."<br />
<br />
So, two things, among many others, we are ill prepared for: Global cooling, and alien invasion.<br />
<br />
Global cooling could occur. And the sun <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24512-solar-activity-heads-for-lowest-low-in-four-centuries.html#.U-0zKPldUpo">could be going into</a> a lower solar activity phase. But it's hard to prepare for major cooling when all the science suggests the opposite; that the impact of atmospheric greenhouse gas changes dwarfs any impact of changes in solar radiation; and that if an extremely unusual and significantly long drop in solar radiation were to occur, <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24512-solar-activity-heads-for-lowest-low-in-four-centuries.html#.U-0zKPldUpo">it would be a good thing not a bad thing</a>, to help partially offset the increasing impact of already geologically radical increases in long term atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations.<br />
<br />
And it's also hard to prepare for when the basic fact that Newman bases his claim on, <a href="http://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-global-warming.htm">is incorrect</a> - <a href="http://climate.nasa.gov/causes/">solar radiation has slightly gone down the past few decades</a>, and yet the globe, also contrary to Newman's claims, has not cooled. At all:<br />
<br />
<i><a href="http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20140121/">13 of the 14 warmest years in modern history</a> have all occurred in the last 14 years</i>. The 2000s was the <a href="http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2010/jan/HQ_10-017_Warmest_temps.html">hottest decade on record</a>. Permafrost (land, not air) <a href="http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/permafrost.html">temperatures have increased</a> even more, as not just the air, but the earth, is heating. Polar ice sheets are indisputably <a href="http://www.rtcc.org/2014/04/14/greenland-ice-melt-accelerating-say-scientists/">melting, and there is</a> strong evidence <a href="http://climate.nasa.gov/news/242/">that it is also melting at a faster rate</a>, with additional risk of <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-07-07/giant-antarctic-ice-shelves-could-melt-faster-than-expected/5579678">further positive reinforcement from</a> warmer water encroachment (<a href="http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2014/s4041192.htm">video here</a>). And, while with such record setting ambient air temperatures the world ocean should have cooled a little (by giving off more heat energy then they took in, to in turn keep air temperatures higher than the norm on average - <i><a href="http://www.weather.com/news/science/environment/where-global-warming-going-ocean-20140205">the oceans have instead continued to warm</a></i>, even, <a href="https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BwdvoC9AeWjUeEV1cnZ6QURVaEE/edit">at an accelerating rate</a>. All this, during a phase of now low solar activity.<br />
<br />
And, of course, all this aside from also ignoring the fact that greenhouse gases absorb and re radiate thermal energy that would otherwise waft into the upper atmosphere and beyond, thus "insulating" the earth, and over time, warming it - and that the increases to the levels of these gases, in a geologic sense, has already been massive. Which Newman also doesn't "agree" with. Or accept.<br />
<br />
Which seems a little like religion, veiled as skeptical science.<br />
<br />
Yet speaking of religion, Newman considers sensible measures to slow down our rapid <i>continued increases</i> to our atmosphere's long term greenhouse gas concentrations, akin to<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>"<a href="http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/climate-change-measures-like-primitive-civilisations-offering-up-sacrifices-to-appease-the-gods-says-maurice-newman-20140814-3do0v.html"><i>Primitive civilisations offering up sacrifices to appease the gods</i></a>."</b></blockquote>
Or, it could be that radically changing the long term nature of our atmosphere to a level ultimately incompatible with the general climate we have come to know and love (and more importantly, rely on), and then continuing to add to and amplify the same at geologically breakneck speed - all while proclaiming and believing we're not really changing anything until there is the proof of it having thus been wildly changed, after the fact - is the sacrifice to appease the Gods.<br />
<br />
The Gods, of fossil fuels. Based upon a belief system that our own destinies, industry, societal development, economy and growth is dependent upon purposefully engaging in practices that directly<br />
harm our world - even though we have alternatives, and the ability to greatly learn and expand those alternatives - because for the moment, and <a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/07/by-far-easiest-simplest-most-efficient.html">without true competition that evens the business playing field between practices which cause great external harm, and those that do not</a> - those more harmful practices, "<i>cost less</i>."<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Update. 8-15-2014</b>: Jason Box, a climatologist with <a href="https://sites.google.com/site/jboxgreenland/publications">over 70 outside reviewed publications</a> germane to the topic of climate change, believes, as do many scientists who study the issue, that the threat of increasingly positive reinforcing climate change due to carbon release in the form of methane from melting ice and warming sea bed floors, is potentially extreme. <br />
<br />
It's an "interesting" contrast; the professional climatologist who is super knowledgeable about the issue <a href="http://www.meltfactor.org/blog/?p=1329">illustrating a widespread scientific concern about erupting methane</a> <i>heavily reinforcing an increasingly radical (and warming) climate change process</i>, on the one hand, and a non scientist business adviser to the Australian President, who thinks, or claims, we are ignoring the risk of global cooling, "at our peril," based upon the anti science idea that it's always just the sun alone that drives everything. (Although his belief seems more centered on simply ignoring - or finding ways to dismiss or even reverse - the entire issue of greenhouse gas level increases.)<br />
<br />
Climate Change in theory, short term anyway, could produce almost anything climate wise: And a movie starting Dennis Quaid entitled "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After_Tomorrow">The Day After Tomorrow</a>" does dramatize (and fast forwards) massive glaciation - due not to a drop in solar radiation, which relative to our massive increase in greenhouse gases is wildly more far fetched, but to an abrupt climate change from sudden massive melt and a radical change in Atlantic currents suddenly bringing massively cooler temperatures far south.<br />
<br />
How would that compare to the more mythical alien invasion idea, tossed about above to suggest that sounding an alarm bell about being "ill prepared" for global cooling under the current set of facts, was somewhere in between a pseudo reasonable speculation, and concern of ill prepareded-ness for "alien invasions"?<br />
<br />
We could "in theory" prepare for major cooling if we knew it might happen. On the other hand, we probably couldn't for an alien invasion. (One might also surmise, other huge impediments aside, that if a civilization became advanced enough to leap galaxies, it might also be well past the need to "conquer" and "destroy," unless, of course, as Hayden Planetarium Director Neil deGrasse Tyson has wondered, there is some off chance they would simply view us in the same way we view, say, earthworms, and that higher evolution for massive intergalactic space travel wouldn't lead to treating advanced earthworms who are part of their own ecosystem, more respectfully.) And we don't prepare because the odds seem beyond ludicrous.<br />
<br />
A serious freeze might have higher odds than something so ridiculous, but it would also likely not be anywhere as bad as an "alien invasion."And "The Day After Tomorrow" notwithstanding (again, based upon Climate Change - a massively unusual shift in something directly affecting the net energy balance of the earth, <i>not</i> solar radiation), it would come with some degree of warning.<br />
<br />
Taking all that into account or not, and ironically enough given the opening rhetorical question of this post about alien invasions, Professor Matthew England's <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2725451/PMs-business-adviser-reckons-forget-Global-Warming-start-worrying-climate-COOLING.html">response</a> upon hearing of Newman's claims, <i>actually was</i>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Saying we aren't prepared for global cooling is like saying we aren't prepared for an alien invasion.</b></blockquote>
Yet it was the non science oriented Australian Prime Minister business adviser who in his Australian piece op ed article claiming we are "ill prepared" for global cooling as a way to "cool" off concern over increasing radical atmospheric change, who claimed - and somewhat ironically given the level of climate change "refutation" in the U.S. Congress, for example - that politicians have "made science a religion."<br />
<br />
In other words, the idea of assessing our world as best as we are able - what science is - and assessing sensible strategy in response, is suddenly "religion." Logic that equally applied, would perhaps render all strategic assessment based upon objective, empirical data and basic science or observational analysis (which is in essence almost all risk assessment the world over),"religion." <br />
<br />
But perhaps, again, what has really been turned into something more akin with religion, is coming up with ways to try and refute the basic idea of anthropogenic climate change, by any means or argument possible. Including now, clinging to the mirror image alarmism of "not being prepared for cooling"; which, in his far fetched piece, Newman warns we ignore the signs "from nature" of, at our peril.(Presumably, Newman's not referring to the signs of increasing natural methane releases that have Box and so many others seemingly far more rightly concerned, but other "signs" which he doesn't actually reveal.)<br />
<br />
<i>Not signs of a warming world</i>, which Newman, by this clever reversal into cooling "worry" tries to offset; but signs of cooling, <i>because the sun might hit an unusual low spot in solar radiation</i>. (As <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24512-solar-activity-heads-for-lowest-low-in-four-centuries.html#.U-6Cx_ldUpp">noted here</a>, which is assessed as less likely than not; but again if it did, that would be great, because it would offset the process of climate change at least a little.)<br />
<br />
The irony of this admonition of not heeding the signs of nature, at our peril, given all the signs, both subtle, and not so subtle, of increasing future climate change - likely toward more and not less volatility, and more overall heat, not less - probably couldn't have been better delivered in a work of satiric fiction. Yet it was delivered in The Australian as a very serious op-ed, by a business adviser to a major prime minister. <br />
<br />
Of a country, and continent, no less, that <a href="http://climatesolutionsandanalysis.wordpress.com/2014/08/08/deep-into-the-abyss-of-climate-change-and-a-case-of-australian-media-coverage/">just happens to be getting ransacked by increasing climate changes, drought, and heat</a>.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Update 8-18-2-14:</b> Newman so severely misinterpreted the relevant basic science, that the very scientist Newman relied heavily upon for his Op-ed claim that the sun, not our activities and changes to the atmosphere, have been driving all climate responses - <a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/08/just-how-much-of-stretch-is-some.html">actually called such a claim</a> "scientifically ludicrous," <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/planet-oz/2014/aug/15/fact-check-how-maurice-newman-misrepresents-science-to-claim-future-global-cooling">among a litany of mistakes and mis-characterizations</a> with respect to almost all scientific assertions made in - again - the very much non satirical, but certainly ironic, piece.<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8909518152474729073.post-61362995591404659022014-08-03T05:40:00.000-04:002014-08-08T06:43:05.051-04:00Watts Up With Using U.S. Data, to Seemingly Refute GLOBAL Temperature Claim<br />
According to the "Watts Up With That" <a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/">home page</a>, it is "<i>the world's most viewed site on global warming and climate change</i>."<br />
<br />
But yet Watts Up with <a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/07/31/extremes-of-temperature-decreasing-in-the-us/#more-113774">questioning global temperature extremes, then immediately assessing U.S. extremes instead</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>According to the <a href="http://www.northeastern.edu/news/2014/07/climate-change-research-goes-to-the-extremes/">Northeastern University</a> press release, using climate models and reanalysis datasets, the authors found that</i>:</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
While global temperature is indeed increasing, so too is the variability in temperature extremes. For instance, while each year’s average hottest and coldest temperatures will likely rise, those averages will also tend to fall within a wider range of potential high and low temperate extremes than are currently being observed.</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>But is there any evidence that this has been happening? We can check what’s been happening in the US, by using the US Climate Extremes Index, produced by NOAA</i>.</blockquote>
<div>
It's perhaps inadvertent, but there's a major sleight of hand here: "<i>Is there any evidence that this has been happening?</i>" - with "this" being an increase in extreme temperatures <b>around the entire </b>earth - leads immediately to checking the contiguous U.S., which represents about <b>one-fiftieth </b>of the earth. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
We could check what is happening in the U.S., and even do so in an article initially focusing on a claim regarding global temperature extremes. A non misleading way to do that would be "global extremes may be increasing, but in the much smaller surface of the contiguous U.S., it looks like they have not been."</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
This article, instead, overtly questioned whether temperature extremes have been increasing globally, and then seemed to "check" it by looking at temperature extremes data for a very small patch on that the globe that represents 1/50th of so of its surface.<br />
<br />
The article also noted (emphasis added):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Of course, the US only accounts for 2% of the Earth’s surface... <b>but it seems a sensible place to start</b>. </i></blockquote>
But 2% of the earth's surface is <b><i>not</i></b> a sensible place to start. When questioning a claim that the globe has experienced an increase in extreme temperatures, a sensible place to start, and finish, is on global temperatures. Not 1/50th of the globe. Yet this article started with that 1/50th, and stayed with it until the end.<br />
<br />
<div>
Did any commenters happen to catch this? No, apparently. Many did jump all over the Climate Change is all but a hoax bandwagon, however. For instance: </div>
</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
--"<i>See, your mistake here is you used the real data. To get the right answer your supposed to use a model.</i>"</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
--"<i>Someone should have presented this at Kodra’s dissertation defense</i>." <span style="font-size: x-small;">[Note, the original Northeastern dissertation paper that projected future temperature extremes, in part due to a record of globally - not U.S. - increasing extremes, was in part authored by Evan Kodra as part of his 2014 dissertation.]</span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
--"<i>May I remind you of the first rule of climate ‘science’ , where the models and reality differ in value it is reality which is in error. So you see no problem here</i>"</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
--"<i>I would love to comment, but I legally can’t; because The Nature conservancy persuaded me into signing into a gag easement……… so I lost my right to voice my opinion</i>."</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
--"<i>This is a good example of how easily empirical data clobbers the vaporous theories of the global warmers.</i>"<span style="font-size: x-small;"> [Note: It's particularly easy to clobber a claim when something entirely different than the claim itself is being clobbered.]</span><br />
<br />
--"<i>I am so sick of the Climate Conjecturologists.</i><br />
<i>“While global temperature is indeed increasing”? Not really.</i><br />
<i>“So too is the variability in temperature extremes”? Apparently not.</i><br />
<i>“Each year’s average hottest and coldest temperatures will likely rise”?</i><br />
<i>“Will likely rise”? When? After a lengthy hiatus? Or likely not?</i><br />
<i>“Those averages will also tend to fall within a wider range than are currently being observed”?</i><br />
<i>“Tend to”? What the heck is that supposed to mean? Either they will or they won’t."</i><span style="font-size: x-small;">[Note, in some ways this is one of the better comments. It's earnest, and, aside from a few flagrant mistakes, captures the heart of why, along with of course a huge desire, there is so much misinformation supporting the idea that Climate Change is not a big deal, and why it is so easy to give <a href="http://judithcurry.com/2014/07/30/lomborgs-senate-testimony/#comments">such zealous attention to</a> furthering that notion. And that is that the issue is not simple, it is not already "proven" in advance, there is an enormous lag (<a href="http://judithcurry.com/2014/07/29/politicizing-the-ipcc-report/#comment-614068">the most critical yet most misunderstood point</a>), it is confusing, and that it imprecisely represents a range of outcomes, all of which are what happen when we conduct an enormous super long term global experiment of geologically radical proportion on the only earth globe we know: so there is no "control variable" earth, and nowhere near the advance precision both in climatic response, and in our ability to precisely outline in advance the direct path of any change, that Climate Change refuters or minimalists <a href="http://judithcurry.com/2014/07/29/politicizing-the-ipcc-report/#comment-614068">have come to expect</a>.]</span></blockquote>
<br />
<div>
Here's another recent example, that goes through a lot of highfalutin and seemingly relevant (<a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/07/15/what-an-engineer-finds-extraordinary-about-climate/">but largely misconfigured and not relevant</a>) science analysis, and then, suddenly, and <i>stunningly</i>, concludes that the large recent increases in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide levels we've been measuring?<br />
<br />
The same increases to levels not seen in at least <a href="http://phys.org/news/2013-05-carbon-dioxide-atmosphere-historic-high.html">two million years</a>...the same increases, to now just over 400 parts per million, from the high 200s just a few hundred years ago, when from fairly precise ice core data we know that levels never exceeded the high 200s parts per million over the past <i>eight hundred thousand years</i>, the same levels that geologically have, "out of the blue" suddenly, after seemingly millions of years, just shot straight up, coincident with massive deforestation and, via fuel combustion, the rapid release into the atmosphere of carbon that had been slowly sequestered over many millions of years of non fully decomposed plant matter?<br />
<br />
A one in ten thousand or one in one hundred thousand or so, and otherwise <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/11/science/earth/carbon-dioxide-level-passes-long-feared-milestone.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0">wildly inexplicable</a> (notwithstanding a rather <a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/07/15/what-an-engineer-finds-extraordinary-about-climate/">wildly inexplicable</a> argument) and sheer coincidence between the sudden, massive net additions we've made, and the sudden rise after nearly a million years, and likely several million?<br />
<br />
More, even: For the conclusion was,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>How can it be made clearer that CO2 is currently rising and varying for natural cause?</i></blockquote>
Not just that sudden, massive, multi million year CO2 increases essentially have little or nothing to do with the sudden, massive, decrease in world sinks of CO2 (deforestation), and sudden creation of long (fossil fuel) dormant emissions, but, "<i>how could it be made clearer.</i>"<br />
<br />
Anything - from the "world's most viewed site on global warming and climate change," the site that also according to its <a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/">home page</a>, of which Johnathan Moseley from The American Thinker asserts, "changed the world and is one of the most influential resources on global warming" - to refute man affected Climate Change, rather than objectively, consider it. And anything to not believe it.<br />
<br />
How could it be made any clearer. <br />
<br /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8909518152474729073.post-78818077918928358772014-07-30T19:01:00.001-04:002014-10-09T17:54:10.562-04:00On Climate Change, Does Fox News Serve as an Actual News Soucre, or as a Source of Climate Change Refutation Veiled as NewsThis piece has been substantially augmented, and is now found <a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-crux-of-climate-change-issue-and.html">here</a>.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8909518152474729073.post-14869859155766796082014-07-26T09:18:00.001-04:002014-07-31T11:11:03.597-04:00Roy Spencer, an Exhibit that Climate Change Refuters Might Heavily Question, and the Real Climate Change DiscussionRoy Spencer is not a scientist. He plays one on T.V. And, less satirically, in the News.<br />
<br />
In the real world, Scientist Roy Spencer has a repeated history of errors. Yet his errors are not random, as would be expected if someone were merely trying to study an issue and figure out what is, or what might, be going on.<br />
<br />
Instead, every single one of Spencer's known errors has followed the pattern of always serving to make a weaker case for the phenomenon casually, if a little simplistically, referred to as Climate Change. <br />
<br />
Statistically, this is mildly remarkable. Yet, as it turns out, <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2011/07/29/282584/climate-scienists-debunk-latest-bunk-by-denier-roy-spencer/">it's not a coincidence</a>.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>I would wager that my job has helped save our economy from the economic ravages of out-of-control environmental extremism. </i></blockquote>
It's okay to have whatever view one wants on environmental issues. But not to use that view to always manufacture results to fit a pre-determined pattern: so much so that other scientists stop paying attention to Spencer as a scientist.<br />
<br />
Kevin Trenberth, a leading atmospheric scientist with the <a href="http://ncar.ucar.edu/">National Center for Atmospheric Research</a> (<a href="http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/07/29/282584/climate-scienists-debunk-latest-bunk-by-denier-roy-spencer/">via email to</a> <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/issue/">Climateprogress</a>):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>I have read the paper. I can not believe it got published. Maybe it got through because it is not in a journal that deals with atmospheric science much?</i></blockquote>
Andrew Dessler, professor of <a href="http://atmo.tamu.edu/">atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University</a> (emphasis added):<br />
<div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: black;"><i><a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-research-examines-role-of-clouds-in-climate-change/">You would think</a>, </i><b><i>if you have a scientific history of being wrong on so many issues, you would have a little bit of humility before claiming you've overturned scientific evidence yet again</i>.</b></span></blockquote>
<div>
Dessler also suggested (<a href="http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/07/29/282584/climate-scienists-debunk-latest-bunk-by-denier-roy-spencer/">via email to</a> <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/issue/">Climateprogress</a>)</div>
<div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Spencer’s “paper is not really intended for other scientists, since they do not take him seriously anymore (he’s been wrong too many times).”</i></blockquote>
Yet the media, does. And to a fairly high, degree, unfortunately. Such as, for instance, <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/">Yahoo News</a>, a major source of public news and information, which also unfortunately published <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/nasa-data-blow-gaping-hold-global-warming-alarmism-192334971.html">an enormously headlined article</a> (penned by an <a href="http://www.prwatch.org/news/2014/05/12485/heartland-institute-climate-change-denier-james-taylor-pwnd-tv">anti Climate Change ideologue</a> no less), that was then relied upon by countless other news related sites as well as advocacy organizations, based on a study so flawed that <a href="http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/3/9/2002">the editor of the journal who published it apologized and resigned due to the level of mistake involved for a peer reviewed journal</a>.<br />
<br />
Media wise, where was the story about the mistakes?<br />
<br />
As pointed out in a <a href="http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/07/misdiagnosis-of-surface-temperature-feedback/comment-page-1/#comment-211768">comment</a> to <a href="http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/07/misdiagnosis-of-surface-temperature-feedback/">Real Climate's</a> refutation of the piece itself:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Despite your superb dissection, the paper was wildly successful. And it has nothing to do with its scientific worth. This was another PR assault masquerading as a serious science paper. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It garnered terrific publicity in Fox, Forbes and other Murdoch outlets. It further stoked the emotional embers of confusion and doubt in the public. Politicians and climate policy wonks can wield and wave this one.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
People are getting assaulted by heat waves, droughts and floods. It succeeded wonderfully in distracting attention and feeding the hunger for pseudo validation of magical thinking. Some will fiercely refuse to accept anthropogenic climate change – no matter what the evidence or science.</blockquote>
Yet Yahoo news, and Forbes, <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/nasa-data-blow-gaping-hold-global-warming-alarmism-192334971.html">ran a story with a huge gaping hole headline, that even somehow manages to refer to climate scientists not as scientists, but as "alarmists"</a> (multiple times even, in a piece that, with numerous other errors, looks more like a caricature of reporting than actual reporting, but was published as "actual" reporting), based on a scientific study so flawed that the editor of the journal who published it apologized and resigned due to the level of mistake involved.<br />
<br />
Spencer's theory in the paper, and in support of the sensationalist national news headline it seemed designed to foment, was kind of a wacky one: Clouds drive warming, rather than serve as a response to it.<br />
<br />
To contend that something that is short lived and always changing nevertheless drives climate, and that the far more long term, stable, and direct influences upon it (long term ocean temperatures, which have been consistently rising, a change in solar radiation, or a change in the long term atmospheric absorption and re radiation of heat) would not drive climate, seems backward. <br />
<br />
While at the same time, the paper itself was a somewhat circular attempt to explain away recent warm ambient temperatures as coincidental to the longer term trend of more than 100 years now, and thus having little to do with the increased retention of radiated heat by the atmosphere. This interpretation was reached even though any such cloud cover response would reflect shorter term cloud patterns that may or may not be affected by the broader climate direction, rather than vice-versa, as Spencer postulated, yet with no real scientific basis or explanation. <br />
<br />
Unfortunately, it received large attention in terms of (misleadingly) poking holes in basic climate change understanding, and very little attention in terms of the far more relevant story here: It was a highly erroneous paper - one which was "<a href="http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/3/9/2002"><b>most likely problematic in both" "fundamental error" and "false claims</b></a>," that nevertheless lead to much headline and news confusion, and public mis-perception on the issue, that followed a similar pattern from the same author that nevertheless continues to make big time news.<br />
<br />
There was also frustration about this among some scientists. NASA scientist <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/climate-change-debunked-not-fast-234403696.html">Gavin Schmidt</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>If you want to do a story then write one pointing to the ridiculousness of people jumping onto every random press release as if well-established science gets dismissed on a dime," Schmidt said. "Climate sensitivity is not constrained by the last two decades of imperfect satellite data, but rather the paleoclimate record</i>.</blockquote>
That is, really, the story, as there seems to be some confusion in the media over what Climate Change refers to as well. It more accurately refers to the long term geologic history of earth, and the recent rapid additions to the long lived concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, <a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/07/whats-really-problem-and-how-bad-and.html">to levels</a> not collectively seen in at least several million years; and the expected, if somewhat uncertain, range of likely and even severe changes to longer term climate in response.<br />
<br />
But, theory aside, what about the fundamental mistakes in Spencer's paper and its grand claims, and the continued pattern of one sided mistakes that always seem to try and discredit climate science? (Which, again, mistake wise is fine; but the pattern of mistakes always in the same direction, is not.) <br />
<br />
Why the mistakes? Possibly because Spencer <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2014/feb/21/nazis-climate-contrarian-credibility-gap">views himself more</a>...<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Like a legislator, supported by the taxpayer, to protect the interests of the taxpayer and to minimize the role of government.</i> </blockquote>
The unfortunate thing for informed public discussion and information on this issue is that he is <i>not</i> a legislator. He is a scientist. Yet apparently acting like a legislator by constantly coming up with formulations designed specifically to achieve a predetermined policy role. This is near the opposite of science.<br />
<br />
As is this:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Like the Nazis, they advocate the supreme authority of the state (fascism), which in turn supports their scientific research to support their cause (in the 1930s, it was superiority of the white race).</blockquote>
<span style="color: black;"><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2014/feb/21/nazis-climate-contrarian-credibility-gap">Re-quoted in the Guardian</a>, Spencer wrote the quote above in a blog piece that was letting of steam at being labeled a climate change "denier," yet also in an update to the same piece frighteningly claimed that redress of climate change will "kill far more people than the Nazi's ever did": an odious comparison, one based on wild speculation that seems to have no basis in anything, nor (but trivially in comparison) much faith in long term macroeconomics or ourselves as people. (As if our ability to be industrious and thrive and work and grow is based not on our ability to be industrious and thrive and work and grow, but only on cheap oil.)</span><br />
<br />
It is also a claim that, even as exaggeration, juxtaposed next to the still uncertain but far less wildly speculated threats that increasing melt and warming poses, would be humorous if it wasn't really anything but, funny. And it also may be a statement for the ages, as future generations, wondering why we continued compounding any long term climate affect of an already somewhat radically long term atmospheric change, rather than seek to mitigate and ameliorate, can look back, and groan in disbelief. <br />
<br />
In somewhat of an inherent contradiction, not to mention further irony, Spencer also labels others who are "sure" (aka, they <i>believe</i>) that our radical alteration of the atmosphere presents a significant <i>risk</i> of fairly severe future climatic shifts, as being "extreme." Thus also labeling the majority to great majority of professional climate scientists or atmospheric physicists who have professionally studied the issue, not as "wrong," but as "extreme," which is almost to castigate the practice of science itself, or nearly everyone practicing it.<br />
<br />
This is particularly ill thought out, given that most who are assessing these risks aren't completely sure of anything in terms of specific affect, which is the whole point here - and what has been clung to, in order to disparage any concern, as well as most general climate science, in the first place. Yet on the other hand, the inability to perfectly model almost the exact path that climate alteration takes, over a geologically super short term, is repeatedly if mistakenly used to <i>then discredit the basic idea that the idea of a risk of such alteration even exists in the first place</i>. When the two are separate concepts. The basis for the risk is the geologic record along with multi million year and still rising atmospheric alterations, further corroborated by geologically short term (i.e,the past 100 years or so), if not fully probative, observation. Models are an attempt to further quantify and predict something which, the shorter the term, the more unpredictable.<br />
<br />
Scientists, not thinking of the context of misunderstanding that they are furthering, then nevertheless frequently utter such absent minded statements that in affect amount to, "Gosh, I''m frustrated, I wonder why we can't model this perfectly in advance."<br />
<br />
Here's why: Because it's climate. It's over a long period of time. And knowing the precise parameters of any long term shift, or change to what was already a largely random system to begin with, and upon what exact pace, path and pattern those parameters may change - when again some of that pattern is subject to natural climate variability no matter what, as well as probably even more variability inherent over the geologic short term in responding to the massive external forcing which our atmospheric alteration represents - is probably next to impossible, save by luck, until after such time as it has happened. <br />
<br />
It doesn't mean that over time we can't get closer, as we get more and more data and more understanding. But climate models' inability to predict <i>exactly</i> 1) <i>how much</i> change 2) <i>per X unit of time</i>, has been repeatedly mistaken as an inability to then predict the far more important, general response or even likely response. On which, climate models have been repeatedly spot on. In other words, we and models can (generally) predict what type of effect and over what general range, but not exactly the effect, and not over the exact range. And models have repeatedly done the former, while shooting, of course, for the latter. <br />
<br />
Yet in contrast with the assessment of risk that includes a range of uncertainty, Spencer's "non extreme" view is founded upon the fairly "sure" idea that something of multi million year potential - in terms of the basic change in the atmospheric absorption and re radiation of heat that over time would build up heat in our oceans and permafrost and ice sheets - nevertheless represents no real risk of altering the climate in a way that would be ho hum for the earth, but potentially enormous for us. Thus, in a bit of a flip flop, extremists are those who think this poses significant risk. Non extremist "pragmatists," are those that somehow know it somehow, likely does not. <br />
<br />
Such an analysis essentially castigates any view that assesses "risk," of anything, under any scenario, as extreme, and in essence undermines, or completely misconstrues the entire concept of "risk" to begin with, rendering it a non factor. That is, there is either known certainty. Or the condition, the threat, the need or sensible argument for response, doesn't exist. "Risk," in essence, no longer exists.<br />
<br />
On this same general sort of reasoning also hinges the climate change "skepticism" idea that current changes in our temperature, which reflect non unprecedented but, statistically, far out of the ordinary <a href="https://www.blogger.com/NOAA%20100+%20year%20chart%20http://climate.nasa.gov/interactives/warming_world">century long term upward trending changes</a> in ambient global temperatures, <i><b>are not</b></i> caused by what is often called "AGW," <b>simply because it is "possible" that they are not</b>. <br />
<br />
But it is far more likely that they <i>are</i>. Thus the fact they "could" otherwise have occurred on their own, is not evidence that Climate Change is not real. If anything, the fact that earth has responded in the general pattern - and one that over at least the last several millennium, even though it is likely still early in this process, somewhat stands out - is evidence that what we would expect to start to have an affect (increasing atmospheric re radiation of heat on a scale not seen for a very long time here on earth), is in fact starting to have such affect.<br />
<br />
Yet labeling current changes, "natural" as non climate expert George Will, for example, <a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/07/a-panel-of-national-experts-who-know.html">does here</a>, simply because it is possible, although extremely unlikely, that the current change would have simply happened in this direction and to this degree over a century plus of time on its own, doesn't make a lot of sense. It does not serve as evidence (let alone refute, as it is often used) for the idea that our atmospheric alteration is not already starting to somewhat impact the climate. It is just evidence for the idea that the earth "might have" moved this way on its own anyway; even though odds wise, the chances are extremely low, while the chances that increasing atmospheric re-radiation would not over time simultaneously have an increasingly significant effect, lower still.<br />
<br />
Spencer also questions the very idea of a large climate science majority. For instance, back in May of this year, he co-authored <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303480304579578462813553136">a piece</a> in the <a href="http://online.wsj.com/home-page">WSJ</a> arguing there really is no predominant consensus; one that, not surprisingly, <a href="http://www.salon.com/2014/05/28/wsjs_shameful_climate_denial_the_scientific_consensus_is_not_a_myth/">is misleading</a>. Spencer's coauthor on the piece? Joe Bast, who founded and <a href="http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110727/full/475440a.html">heads an institute to discredit</a> climate science. Bast, who is not publishing scientific papers - unlike Spencer, who is - but yet also views his role as that of a legislator, seems, like Spencer, to also be driven not by the science of the matter, but of the speculated societal or governmental response to the science. Which, also, is not science, but wholly separate from it. Yet which is serving to further misinformation on the science, or serve toward a biased analysis of it. For instance:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: black;"><a href="http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110727/full/475440a.html">Bast says</a> it is only natural that a libertarian like him would decide to question the scientific foundation for climate change. Getting serious about global warming means implementing government regulation, going after industry, raising taxes, interfering in markets — all anathema to a conservative agenda.</span></blockquote>
All that is well and good. But attacking climate science in anyway possible, as a means to an end, rather than as part of that science itself, is leading to a lot of confusion and misunderstanding on the part of the public. And on the part of those seeking to discredit science - particularly in the highly polarized, and polarizing, self reinforcing, insular world of the Internet, where in groups with almost the same perspective, alternative ideas or perspectives not only get drowned out, but spurned; often derisively.<br />
<br />
But what of this fear of redress, that prompts Spencer, in frustrated moments, to ridiculously assert that his critics want simply to support the Supreme Authority of the State (which this blog argues <a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/07/fascism.html">heavily against, even protecting</a> the right to purposefully misinform on an issue that many Climate Scientists and policy advocates will do great future harm to mankind simply to protect a short term interest in profits).<br />
<br />
What of the idea of redress - is it radical, or as Henry Paulson, former Treasury Secretary Under George W. Bush specifically writes- <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/22/opinion/sunday/lessons-for-climate-change-in-the-2008-recession.html?_r=0"><i>radical not to?</i></a><br />
<br />
What of the idea of redress itself, or merely the consideration of what the best approaches might be? The very thing that prompts Joseph Bast, a self described former hippie who wanted to "live off the land" (the continuity being that Bast is still radical, albeit in a different direction), to try and discredit climate science in the first place. And that Roy Spencer, playing scientist not just on T.V., but in real life, joins him on. <br />
<br />
By labeling views, even if in frustration, that he disagrees with as "Nazism," Spencer of course relegates all perspectives that anybody might have on any issue that would involve our government, "Nazism." Anything the government does, thus - again the excess, and counterproductive seeming hysteria of this extreme term aside - could be so similarly termed. And everybody who exists, who ever had an opinion (unless that opinion was one of sheer anarchy, or no government at all), so similarly termed. <br />
<br />
But what of the more general role of the government, which is invariably playing a role in the debate. What is reasonable?<br />
<br />
Is it reasonable to want to protect our society, and our people and our kids from something they can not otherwise avoid, and maybe they should have some sort of right or option to be able to avoid - pollution - or in this case our society and our future generations from the potentially society and world damaging affect of what would be, to us, a radical climate shift to hotter, far more volatile, and intense, weather with increasingly rising oceans, until a new stases is reached?<br />
<br />
The EPA was started under non Nazi Richard Nixon. Protection of the earth used to be a basic Republican Party tenet, and as the Republican Party started moving to the right, it somehow got lost in a sea of anti-government rhetoric.<br />
<br />
Yet government is nothing but us, managing our affairs in the world, that we share and interact upon. What it does or should do is a matter of some debate with widely varying opinions depending on subject, and specific contexts. But in terms of having some form of government, as opposed to absolutely no rule or law, and thus pure anarchy, what basic purposes should government serve? What can not be addressed through even the most idealistic of anarchistic intentions?<br />
<br />
Possibly these three, maybe a couple more. But these three are all by definition collective, and unavoidably so: National Defense. Justice. And the protection of that which we both must share, and can not avoid sharing. Namely, our environment. Once thought of as "limitless," this is a newer addition. And because of this, it is often mistakenly confused with the notion of "big government."<br />
<br />
But big government is not that which we must collectively solve and or protect - harm to the very air we breathe, or possible radical threats to our very long term climate itself through inadvertent yet geologically intense alteration to the long lived nature of our blanketing atmosphere. Big government is how we choose to respond to the few, true, real collective challenges that we do face; most sensibly assessed, through honest, responsive examination, analysis, study, discussion and debate. Just as with every other issue and policy choice we face.<br />
<br />
This blog for instance, as one main idea, has argued for sensible climate change redress, and in <a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/07/by-far-easiest-simplest-most-efficient.html">what is suggested here</a>, in the least intrusive way possible. Former Bush Administration Treasury Secretary Paulson <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/22/opinion/sunday/lessons-for-climate-change-in-the-2008-recession.html?_r=0">advocates a reasonably similar view</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The solution can be a fundamentally conservative one that will empower the marketplace to find the most efficient response. </blockquote>
Others may call for for intrusive action, such as allocations or certain prohibitions; which if no action is taken, ironically, will almost inevitably occur after a period of particularly bad weather or very bad short term climate, and people really start to get concerned or worse over it. It's also a view to address what most climate scientists who professionally study the issue call a possible to probable enormous future - and at that point largely irreversible, and ongoing, problem.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: black;"><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/22/opinion/sunday/lessons-for-climate-change-in-the-2008-recession.html?_r=0">Paulson</a>:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Those who claim the science is unsettled or action is too costly are simply trying to ignore the problem. ... The nature of a crisis is its unpredictability....waiting for more information before acting — is actually taking a very radical risk. </blockquote>
The problem is that the only way to know what the total affect of this problem is, will be after the fact. If (when) larger and larger amounts of ice start to melt - a pattern that is already slowly starting - the earth's albedo decreases, and more and more solar radiation is not reflected harmlessly back out to space, but heats the earth even more, giving off even more thermal radiation (when the earth does become cooler than the air), the process will be self reinforcing, and probably unstoppable, until a new relatively stable "stases" is reached. One that will almost undoubtedly be far different from the very narrow range are used to. This is called belief. But it's also based upon, as Gavin Schmidt <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/climate-change-debunked-not-fast-234403696.html">puts it</a>, the Paleoclimate record, and our additions to the atmosphere, that don't get turned off and on as molecules, but, there, in the atmosphere, act as they are bound by physics and chemistry, to do.<br />
<br />
<div>
The idea or assertion that it nevertheless won't, often accompanied by great derision of the "belief" in climate change, and asserted as based upon science (essentially meaning the absence of full proof before an event occurs) is also a belief, and perhaps a more basic one. (Further entangled, or even created by, the otherwise wholly separate issue of concerns over its redress.)<br />
<br />
As Lindsay Abrams, writing in the detailed article in Salon linked above, <a href="http://www.salon.com/2014/05/28/wsjs_shameful_climate_denial_the_scientific_consensus_is_not_a_myth/">puts it</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Many of the effects of climate change are already being felt; the more serious effects, however, are still a way’s off. There is no one consensus on just how soon they’ll occur, and how bad they’ll be, because science, not being in the business of making prophecies, is not able to say with absolute certainty just what’s going to happen in the future. What science can do, however, is identify patterns that may lead to future risks, and then help us understand just how urgently we need to be thinking about mitigating those risks</blockquote>
Scientist Spencer, however views this very same view so well articulated by Abrams, as "extremist," of being "sure," when it is instead identifying a range, and general possibility of risk based upon radical atmospheric change and long term geologic history. (And, though it doesn't "prove" anything, some further corroboration in the fact that the Climate is generally changing, in the direction predicted, and, if not uniquely, somewhat unusually so in terms of recent geologic history.) </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Yet Spencer himself is nevertheless sure that while it's really not so certain what will happen, he is pretty certain that rapidly changing the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gas molecules to levels not seen on earth in several million years (and still rapidly rising) through fairly specific, identifiable, and changeable patterns, will nevertheless not unduly affect our "Goldilocks" climate. And that those that don't agree with this assessment - the great majority of those who have professionally studied the issue, are "extremists." <br />
<br />
Possibly another reason for this, as referenced in the Guardian, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2014/feb/21/nazis-climate-contrarian-credibility-gap">is that</a> (emphasis added):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Spencer is also on the advisory board of the Cornwall Alliance, a group with 'An Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming' claiming that "<b>Earth</b> and its ecosystems—created by God's intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence —are robust, resilient, <b>self-regulating, and self-correcting</b>, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory." The declaration also has a section on<b> "What We Deny</b>," and Spencer recently wrote in The Christian Post,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
...we <b>deny "that most [current climate change] is human-caused, and that it is a threat to future generations</b> that must be addressed by the global community." Spencer </blockquote>
</blockquote>
There is nothing <i>nothing for the earth to correct, </i>let alone to support the view that the earth is "self regulating." Or even that the term, applied to a ball of rock moving through space, has any meaning, since there is nothing to "self regulate."<br />
<br />
Lifeforms, and even ecosystems, however, would self regulate (and we might self regulate by, having identified the inadvertent and likely counter productive changes we were making, address them), and in terms of ecological systems, this would reflect an adjustment in response to a change in the total net energy input to the earth's surface over time - both from solar radiation, a fixed variable, and from atmospheric re radiation via long lived greenhouse gas molecules - the same molecules that in very small number are responsible for making the earth about 59 to 60 degrees F (or K) warmer than it would be in their absence, and which have now suddenly, and, from a geologic perspective, radically, risen to total collective levels not seen on earth in <i>at least</i> several million years; since, in fact, a time when there was far less total ice coverage, and our oceans were 30 to 60 feet higher. <br />
<br />
And even if the earth were "self regulating," there would be nothing to support the view that it would "self regulate" in a way that happens to favor man's own interests. Other, than, well, faith. Calling those that don't agree with that such names, seems the very antithesis of science, as well as, of reasoned consideration. What scientists are supposed to do, and what the scientific process consists of.<br />
<br />
Yet Spencer's influence is profound.<br />
<br />
This is due to several reasons, one of which fundamentally contradicts his and Bast's proclamation in the Wall Street Journal this past May (yet echoed throughout the blogosphere both well before and since) that there really is not real strong consensus. There's not really a narrowly defined consensus. How bad is the risk? How likely? Is there anything we can do to change it? How compounding might it be to continue to add? <br />
<br />
Where there is a strong consensus is on the idea that our radical alteration of the atmosphere is likely already significantly impacting our climate right now, presenting a significant to high risk of doing so on the order of at least several degrees Celsius, which would likely bring about radical, fundamental change to our basic earth systems, and to the climate upon which we have generally, come to rely. Or, more simply, that we're affecting the climate right now in a significant way, and that it's likely to get worse, perhaps much worse.<br />
<br />
But why was it Spencer, of all people, and out of all the scientists who now professionally study climate science, who helped pen such a piece that there's no real consensus?<br />
<br />
The reason cuts directly against Spencer's main point in that piece itself. And that is, while there are some practicing scientists on the issue who share some degree of skepticism on it, they are far and few between. That is, there just aren't that many scientists, out of the many who professionally study climate science, who legitimately dispute the general consensus.<br />
<br />
That doesn't mean questions on the issue are over, but they've only just begun, We're just mired down in the wrong, and counter productive, debate, still asking the wrong ones. </div>
</div>
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8909518152474729073.post-76172763638823081982014-07-18T02:30:00.000-04:002014-07-18T02:30:01.673-04:00Fascism? <br />
"If the Intent is good, it's not Fascism."<br />
<br />
The above statement is not true, as, unfortunately, Fascism ultimately doesn't have to have anything to do with intent, and much of it's formation, often, doesn't.<br />
<br />
And while a University Professor's recent well intentioned idea <a href="http://theconversation.com/is-misinformation-about-the-climate-criminally-negligent-23111">smacked of fascism</a> (and would be a critical step toward it if ever implemented), the running of his idea in an online news magazine, in the name of opinion, is only furthering contemplation of it's potential acceptability.<br />
<br />
It's not.<br />
<br />
The level of misinformation on Climate Change is rampant. Most of it is probably believed by those engaging in it. To dismiss this (or to cynically believe otherwise) is not only a big mistake when it comes to effective communication and knowledge on the issue, it also leads, out of frustration, to radical proposals - even if here just by one Professor, published in <a href="http://theconversation.com/uk">The Conversation</a>: Good title for a learned online information source, very poorly chosen opinion piece, and to whatever extent considered plausibly reasonable, extraordinarily poor opinion.<br />
<br />
One that is pedestrian, perhaps, but chilling.<br />
<br />
There is no right and wrong when it comes to the concept of misinformation. Opinions, and even the assertion of questionable or even wrong facts, and constant "spin" or rhetoric, on issues of the day, can not be separated out into neat little piles of speech, and non speech. Such actions pervade most conversations, most representations, most advocacy, many assertions on most websites, in most books, in most media presentations.<br />
<br />
There is no cutoff line. Or anything even approximating one, nor any ultimate authority on determining it. (One of the biggest problem with criminalizing "false" information on a select topic, even a potentially devastating one.) Nor is intent - exactly how genuine the belief - relevant to the basic right to advocate a position.<br />
<br />
Thus the idea of criminalizing "Climate Change" misinformation, no matter how well intended the idea, is exactly the same as a Fascist regime criminalizing perspectives that it does't want to hear, or have its people hear. That is a key part of what Fascism is. And that, under a reasonably written article dripping with frustration regarding industry group backed misinformation on this critical global topic, is exactly what was just proposed by a professor, and published in The Conversation.<br />
<br />
Industries, and the people who work for them and run them, are part of the world. They live in it. Their kids live in it. Their grand kids will. If they want to discourage Climate Change action because the mistakenly think this is the way to continue their same industry business model, that is as American (and democratic) as Apple Pie (even if, today, it might be of the organic apple, more naturally sweetened, kind).<br />
<br />
The redress is to effectively show that this is being done. To grab back the framing on an opinion where the facts support those who would argue against industry backed opposition to climate change - and the huge set of the populace that, along with misplaced economic fear, is thus driven toward misconception on the issue as well. And paint, show, a pattern of misinformed and self reinforcing belief, where the arguments and "facts" and assessment of their relevancy, is being slotted to fit into a pre-determined belief, rather than the other way around.<br />
<br />
And to not dismiss the relevancy of the beliefs and arguments of others, as if the enormous amount of misinformation wasn't fundamental to and completely changing the nature of the relevant world "debate" and conversation on this topic, or that it isn't that very same "debate" and conversation that ultimately determines our responses.<br />
<br />
Similarly, not concluding that the only relevant debates on how to respond <i>to Climate Change</i> (rather than Climate Change misinformation) are the ones held by those who already know or think Climate Change is "a really big issue," when right now, those don't matter anywhere near as much as the "debate" and conversation the whole country, and the whole world, is having. What can be done, what information and how it is relayed by news sources, and what people then know or believe which in turn shapes this even more, is all driven by world information, or lack thereof. <br />
<br />
Confusing the debates of "those who know" with the relevant, and as a result, highly misinformed "debate" and assessment of the world, is probably the most fundamental mistake that can be made. And it seem to be made a lot. As is attributing misinformation to ill motives, and dismissing it, or rarely focusing on open communication designed to reach people and allow for consideration, not just seen clever or score points (even on a more mundane level, to "rate this," or "buzz up" or "like," or "unlike") with those in a group adhering to the same general view, which leads to more and more polarizing, non illuminative communication, and more and more presumption; which in turn gets heavily in the way of good communication, so necessary on the issue of Climate Change. <br />
<br />
That is, there is an almost automatic, widely presumed, and yet ill thought out idea that almost all Climate Change misinformation is driven by a desire to deceive. But if those "in the know," didn't so categorically dismiss the concerns of so many, which, well founded or not, they have a right to believe, they wouldn't be adding to the very same polarization, and excessive mischaracterization, that enables industries to be able to perpetuate toward what to them, if mistakenly, seem productive ends, rather than what would otherwise, or could (and need be) shown, toward counter productive ends all around, facing adaptive change in processes and in response spending a fortune to fight the idea through misinformation and rhetoric (which becomes a losing business strategy when it is no longer seen as worth the cost), and an appearance of public manipulation as well as lack of knowledge on the issue on the company or industry's part. <br />
<br />
And, somewhat similarly, there is also a very widespread and again sometimes almost automatic presumption that if anybody doesn't know the "true" facts on Climate Change, it is their fault, and can't be changed. This flies in the face of the very frustration that would lead a professor, and even if (one hopes) with reservations, The Conversation, to publish, an absurd (and chilling) piece calling for the criminalization of severe Climate Change misinformation in the first place. <br />
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Consider:<br />
<span style="color: #990000;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #073763;">There is a person considered to be one of the front runners for the U.S. Presidential Nomination of the Republican Party in 2016, who knows less correct information on the issue of Climate Change than a very well informed, well... person of "significantly less age."</span><br />
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This is the state of (mis)information on this topic. <i> </i><br />
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In part it is due to all the misinformation out there, and the fears and uncertainties that drive it. But it is also due to the fact that many people, and in particular many of the more outspoken advocates on climate change, not only do not agree with the sentence just above in blue, they believe it to be naive, and far fetched, "given the facts."<br />
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And believe that Texas Governor Rick Perry's stance on Climate Change, and that of many other people who have been given, or self selected for, the information that they have, in a veritable sea of rhetoric, misunderstanding, accusation and misinformation on Climate Change is because Rick Perry doesn't care, or thinks the future of the world should be ruined. (Much like much of the "Far Right" and some others honestly believe that many advocates for Climate Change really want a world dominating U.N.; want to weaken the economy; want to have the government further control our lives; or want to just "protect" nature to the exclusion of any human values, or that these two sets (even now when we may literally, if slowly, be near permanently flooding the very lands we live upon and need), always have to be mutually exclusive. <br />
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Or believe, or even say, things about Rick Perry's intelligence which - in the context of what is needed to be able to learn the important basics of this issue sufficiently to not be able to say the things Perry says with a straight face - are insulting and inaccurate.<br />
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I posted <a href="http://www.skepticalscience.com/rupert-murdoch-doesnt-understand-climate-basics.html#105467">a comment</a> at Skepticalscience yesterday. It's not a great comment, but there is an important point found therein. <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>I don't think that most people know the basics of Climate Change</i>. </blockquote>
Meaning why past and present anthropomorphic activities are significantly affecting the longer term climate of the world in which we live, in a way that is highly likely to be extremely counterproductive. (Aka, somewhat destructive, from our perspective.)<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>I saw a few comments on here that implied [or said] it was inexcusable</i>.</blockquote>
That sentiment seems to be widespread. But to say or believe it [not knowing the key facts - not conclusions - but facts and why they are key] is inexcusable, is to say or believe that being human, is inexcusable. <br />
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Humans are going to collective believe some compilation of the information presented, and how presented. That seems like it is the way it has always been, and it is probably the way it will always be. It also seems almost a little unrealistic to expect otherwise on this issue right now, given all the misinformation out there, all the hype and misleading rhetoric, the potential complex aspects of the issue and ease to confuse uncertainties with lack of knowledge or even "mistake," and science misunderstanding in general.(That's part of the problem though, the importance of that in shaping other people's perspectives,and thus the legitimacy of their perspectives, even if egregiously wrong, is inadvertently dismissed.)<br />
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It's also not a rationale for criminalizing some of that misinformation, simply because it is leading to ignorance, ignorance on what is a very important topic. In fact, nothing is.<br />
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Future rampant Climate Change affects toward the more negative end of the reasonability scale - incredible and previously even hard to imagine intense precipitation periods and droughts, super warm global ambient temperatures, incredible windstorms, wide scale devastation, ocean rises that are ho hum from the perspective of the globe, but monumental, catastrophic, to us, etc. - <i>is still not</i>. <br /><br />
When it starts making companies look bad to convey information which is blatantly misrepresented and manipulative, they won't do it. To accomplish that requires understanding why there is so much misinformation in the first place.<br />
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Because of deceit is not an answer, because deceit exposed and made into a bigger issue than the deceit in the first place is harmful, not helpful to the deceiving party' credibility and cause.<br />
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Because of misinformation is not an answer. It's a free world. Information can be conveyed just as easily as misinformation, and carries with it the sometimes helpful advantage of being correct, and the far more important advantage of having the facts support it. It needs to be made more effectively.<br />
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Those concerned need to do a far better job of conveying this information effectively.<br />
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And far less (in fact, not at all) at even inkling of ideas, that smack of Fascism.<br />
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How to do that is a difficult task, but a couple of clues are suggested above. Namely, to consider the idea that the immediate disparagement of all who would deny climate change (not disparaging their ideas, but their genuineness), and failure to recognize any genuineness of motive therein, and instead routinely assert its opposite as a reason for such misinformation and the expressed adherence to (or belief in) such misinformation, are only further entrenching passionately held or desired beliefs, or deepening what were just simple inclinations in the first place.<br />
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It is also consistent with failing to show, rather than simply stating, or concluding.<br />
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Saying things like "everybody knows climate change is a problem," is not helping to show, but it is helping to support (even if not intentionally) the idea that this is something that should "just be taken for granted," rather than rigorously assessed, and the ranges, affects and probability scenarios given serious intense ever ongoing examination.<br />
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And it's completely lacking in credibility with those who don't yet. Yet which is exactly who needs to be reached for far better and more accurate assessment of this issue, which in turn is required for a more intelligent response to it as the issue and response is ultimately going to be driven by the population at large, and the overall quality of the information that population is receiving. (Presuming the opposite of this, that those who "don't know" even if it includes a good portion of Congress in the U.S.,don't matter, and that it doesn't determine the very nature of the general perception upon which we invariably base our responses (or lack thereof), is also a critical mistake.)<br />
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These are themes on what underlying tendencies have gotten in the way of far more effective communication, or, even more importantly, what has possibly badly skewed what is then viewed as effective communication. (Often such communication is solely judged by how those who already agree receive it, which is the least relevant aspect.) <br />
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Regardless, better information, not conclusion - and a lot of it - and more effective communication is needed.<br />
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Otherwise, that "ongoing examination" is almost wholly going to be while looking in a rear view mirror, because we (the human race) will never have done much that is <a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/07/by-far-easiest-simplest-most-efficient.html">truly effective</a> about this, and then we (or our kids and their kids) will get to see it all laid out, in full dimensional world wide, detail.<br />
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The same "worry" ironically, prompting such a however, unusual, published call to government information control, which is Fascism. <br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8909518152474729073.post-37631320613657912932014-07-17T18:40:00.003-04:002014-07-21T04:25:24.504-04:00The Climate Issue in a Nutshelll<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Here's the issue in a nutshell.</div>
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A change in net energy of a geologically relevant magnitude is going to have geologically relevant (meaning, seemingly massive, strange, or radical, from our very limited perspective) affect. Particularly since the earth right now is (or has been) <i>relatively</i> stabilized by the presence of massive amounts of ice and permafrost, and a very high surface albedo. <br />
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In fact, back when total atmospheric greenhouse molecules (most constituents of the atmosphere, which are not the atomic gases (02, N2, Ar) that make up most of the atmosphere, are greenhouse gases) and which are most non noble gas molecules in the air by the way) were as high as they have just reached, oceans, ultimately, were a couple to several dozen meters higher.<br />
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It could be a coincidence, but it's probably not. There is a LOT of permafrost, which isn't all that far away, temperature change wise, from melting.(Some of it is slowly starting to.) And the tundra underneath this white layer has a far lower albedo, which would mean far less visible light - which is largely not absorbed by greenhouse gases - would be reflected back off the surface of the earth rather than absorbed as retained heat energy. (Which would then be subsequently emitted as thermal radiation, which with its far higher and broader wavelength than the very narrow range that solar radiation consists of, is absorbed by greenhouse gases, and re radiated.) Melting snow, though it still has a very high albedo relative to open tundra (or even forest), also has a significantly lower albedo than frozen snow.<br />
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All of the "permament" sea ice in the northern and southern latitudes, which if course is not permanent at all, also has an exceedingly high albedo. Open ocean water, which is what it turns into when that ice melts (or, rather, overall average ice coverage declines) has an extremely low albedo,and instead of reflecting back most of the sun's heat, absorbs most of it, instead. A radical difference.<br />
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In addition, there also happens to be about a trillion tons of carbon buried in the permafrost, about twice the total amount currently in the atmosphere (which itself, again, not taking into account the further exacerbating heightened atmospheric levels of a few other key greenhouse gases, most notably methane, is higher than it has been in at least two million years). Not all of it would of course be a net addition to the atmosphere, but only reflect an adjustment to the overall carbon cycle - like all net additions - leaving a lot of excess in the atmosphere. But it would be a remarkable contribution. <br />
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More significantly even, much of that carbon would be released in the form of CH4 or methane. Which is several hundred times more effective at trapping and re radiating heat as methane than is CO2. (Which is what over several years methane starts to break down into. You'll also often hear how methane is "24" times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide, or "100 times" or something such. Most of the time, when correctly written, this will also reflect a time period. This is because methane breaks down into carbon dioxide, but not all "at once and on a set schedule." So the overall re-radiating affect comes from a combination of the gas as both methane and carbon dioxide, which, the longer the time period, the more skewed toward carbon dioxide's lower heat trapping response, and thus the lower the overall potential in relation to carbon dioxide.) <br />
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In terms of really radical changes to albedo and most of the permafrost trapped carbon, it may take a little while - large ice systems are pretty stable. But as a matter of basic physics (further corroborated by what the world was like the last time levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases were this high) they will change. How much, minor or major, depends on what we can't know or control - and that is simply whatever the precise range of this wild whole earth experiment will be. And far more relevantly, on what we can - how much we continue to add or not add to the atmosphere, or even ameliorate.<br />
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A shift in total otherwise outgoing but instead re radiated heat energy - even if over the last few hundred, or even the last several thousand years it is not directly off of the lowest levels of the past several million years - that is nevertheless greater than the earth has seen in several million years (back to a point when the oceans ultimately were some 30 to 60 some feet higher, meaningless in earth terms, very meaningful to us), <b>is a geologically monumental event</b> from the perspective of the geological conditions that have existed on earth over the past few million years. (Namely, our perspective). And the most basic thing being overlooked. <br />
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GG gases do absorb and then re radiate ("trap") heat. It's not an option for them. That heat energy has to go somewhere. Heat doesn't just "disappear," unless it goes into outer space. And the whole reason why more gg gases (in an atmosphere still only consists of a very small fraction of them) is relevant - the same reason why the earth is not a frozen ball to begin with - is that these gg gases reduce the amount of heat energy lost back to outer space.<br />
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It may seem hidden for a while, as the changes at first seem minor, and then as those ("minor") changes (a fraction less ambient sea ice, a tiny decrease in frozen permafrost), slowly drive a little more - which would otherwise be near meaningless. But here those changes are being combined with the fact that the earth, due to multi million year high levels of long lived atmospheric gases coincident to our enormous if inadvertent dumping of them into the atmosphere, is now also trapping and re radiating much more thermal radiation (given off by the earth's surface) than it has in millions of years: Slightly warming the atmosphere, and adding to the buildup of energy (<a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/07/heat-around-and-below.html">most easily notable in oceans</a>, in which just slight temperature variations represent an enormous shift in energy), at the same time, furthering the changing process from a more (long term) stabilized high ice coverage very low ocean high albedo to a different, higher earth net solar radiation retaining stases. <br />
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It is <i>not </i>a shift from less heat to more heat being trapped in an atmosphere which then as a result will add to temperature a little bit, as the constant and incorrect conflation of current conditions to the current level of the problem, suggest, and which most people on some level seen to still intuitively believe.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8909518152474729073.post-31744078991557498552014-07-17T03:00:00.000-04:002015-01-09T00:40:06.891-05:00The Easiest, Simplest, Most Efficient, Least Intrusive, Least Governmentally involved, Almost Entirely Market Driven Solution to Mitigating and Ultimately Ending Further Extreme Additions to our Radically Changing Atmosphere<br />
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The best solution to Climate Change replaces processes which have a high additive impact upon atmospheric greenhouse gas levels, with those that have a low, neutral, or even negative impact. And it lets the market determine this.<br />
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Thus many advocate carbon credits, and things of that sort. But that creates a large unnecessary trading market, with additional (and completely unnecessary) secondary costs. It also is a bit more cumbersome to sensibly structure. It is not nearly as complete.<br />
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And it is also somewhat intrusive, though widely seen as the opposite. In other words, it assumes an inherent right to "pollute" in addition to what has already been polluted. And thus is a hidden tax, in the form of lost revenue that has to be made up somewhere else, and essentially forces the public, and each individual, to grant to manufacturers and others some set level of right to pollute or, in this case "damage" (really, just affect, which is not damaging at all, but is just damaging to us because we and the systems and species we rely on evolved under the current climate.) This is a burden on all individuals, and also not efficient.<br />
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It has more costs than what is advocated below, though some don't seem as real because they are hidden. But they are just as real, more burdensome, more expensive, and somewhat (though perhaps not enormously) less efficient.<br />
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It's not a terrible approach. It's just not anywhere near the best. The best maximizes all goods, and minimizes all bads (or bad/neutrals, since some people have differing opinions on certain basics of government), and individual rights. <br />
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The Best is Simple. It is Easy. (Though obviously many secondary questions in order to implement it in the best way possible will need to be answered.)<br />
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It is <b><i>by far</i></b> the fairest all around, taking everybody's interest into account: individuals (along with the idea of individual liberty and responsibility and ability to make their own, within reason, adjustment decisions), and companies - <i>all</i> companies across the board, including ones that don't yet exist because their existence has been inhibited by a lack of real market need (or motivation) and unfair and extremely high, if hidden, subsidization, to many competing businesses and processes,and one's struggling or not getting nearly enough market share or profit for reinvestment, for the same reasons..<br />
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It not only captures the brilliance and entrepreneur spirit of the marketplace, it <i>maximizes</i> motivation <i>while also maximizing efficiency</i>.<br />
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It also fosters general independence, and energy independence.<br />
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It absolutely minimizes real government involvement, and limits most decisions to the secondary questions to be answered to most effectively, broadly, and sensibly implement it. (Which are also public policy questions, and not really pure government decisions.)<br />
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It is <i>by far the lowest cost</i> (<a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/">though it's questionable if in the long run any change to what we produce, and thus to how our GDP is composed - particularly if its to address, mitigate, or solve a problem - is actually a cost</a>), <i>for by far the greatest level of improvement.</i><br />
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It is revenue neutral while at the same time allowing for both affected business and individual transitional assistance, as well as assistance for the heavily disadvantaged.<br />
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And it is, to simply levy a user fee on the energy sources and processes that contribute heavily to the problem (and higher fees for higher contributions or additions, lower fees for lower additions), and thereby put them on a much more even playing field with all the energy sources and processes which don't. Energy sources and processes, which, right now, <i>critically</i>, are being wildly inhibited and unfairly prejudiced because none of their enormous benefit (or in this case lack of such extensive harm, which is the same thing, since we are transitioning away from overriding harm), is integrated into the pricing structure. So, in in affect, all the wrong processes are receiving enormous, if hidden subsidies, in comparison. And the entire system is not only super counterproductive and counter productive habit reinforcing; but from this perspective - which simply takes more relevant information into account - it is super inefficient as well.<br />
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It should not be an immediate enormous user fee dump. (And user fees - or taxes, or whatever the few inevitable opponents to any idea that puts costs in front our noses, instead of hides them, so we and businesses can make better decisions, prefer calling it - would have to be high to work.This isn't a minor issues, and the changes will reshape us into the modern era in a far more productive way.) But one phased in for transitional industry and individual adjustment, with, the market, at all levels, working its magic. Or,more importantly, allowed to.<br />
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With revenue raised to be used for offsetting transitional assistance - short term heavily affected business and individuals, including workers transitioning, as well as the heavily poor, who will still be a big part of the solution in having major economic incentive (and thus benefit!) to make the most effective behavior changes along with everybody else, but receive some transitional supplemental help; as well as lastly, for a credit (sort of the other end of the user fee spectrum) for any processes or energy sources somehow net negative in contributory affect. This in turn will prompt the most brilliant and important innovation and businesses of all, and work to not only cease adding to the harm, but work to offset some of the ongoing additions to atmospheric levels that, of course, for a while will inevitably continue, though will lessen far more rapidly than under any other plan, and again, at a fraction of the overall imposition, cost, and disproportionate "choosing" type of inequity. And of course, with the negative user fee in contrast to the highest end user fees, these processes that convey the highest level of benefit - the ones we want- will have the highest level of incentive for selection, by consumers and business alike.<br />
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It won't solve the "Climate Change" problem. It's already probably going to be <a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-confusion-of-water.html">a big deal</a>. But it will keep it from being a much bigger deal. Which we are otherwise on a very serious, extremely fast (it's not the time frame of the lagging and non linearly increasing changes that matter, but the additions), track toward, and more.<br />
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And, with the world leader (that's the U.S.), and long time, big time, world leading contributor to the problem, showing the way, <i>and leading</i>, it will be easy to get the world to follow suit (or use their own form of this or a similar structure that fits in with their political systems). And will provide a way to minimize any seeming costs to still developing countries (both on wealthy countries' and the poor countries' ends).<br />
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Despite what "economists" like <a href="http://www.lomborg-errors.dk/">Bjorn Lomborg</a> and some others may incorrectly argue, the only real cost will be short term economic transitional shifts. There is otherwise no cost. The user fees are an illusory cost, because they are being simultaneously used to convey an equal benefit, while simultaneously providing heavy mitigation, an enormous, additional, net benefit.<br />
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One that by not sensibly acting, we are giving up. (It is, in those silly economic terms, thus "costing" us not to act. And, given the likely potential, and with each addition far more radically increasing harm (each addition makes underlying yet enormously critical stabilizing system condition like ocean clathrates, permafrost carbon, sea ice, ice caps, etc increasingly likely to destabilize or more completely destabilize), it is a huge <i>unrecoverable</i> cost, every hour of every day. Accumulating in units. And, <a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/07/whats-really-problem-and-how-bad-and.html">due to the basic nature of the issue</a>, increasing in level of harm, per unit.) Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8909518152474729073.post-79979030705884214962014-07-16T06:10:00.000-04:002014-07-20T02:07:04.101-04:00Why "Climate Change" is the Wrong Name for the Radical Atmospheric Change the World has Seen, Atmospheric Problem Denialism, and a Little Attempted Economic Vision, <div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
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In terms of furthering good information and constructive understanding on the issue, calling Climate Change by it's current moniker. "Climate Change," is a mistake.<br />
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I don't know what it should be called. But calling the issue of long term radical atmospheric change that we now face by its current climate tied sounding name, tends to confuse, lead to mis-focus upon, and mis-construction of the actual issue.<br />
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Climate change is the affect. Or <i>one of</i> the affects. The phrase also tends to get us all to focus on the result, not the problem; to often mistake the result for the problem; and, far worse, to confuse any relevant measurement of the problem (atmospheric change), with measurements of the result (past and present observation). </div>
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Since there is a large lag between cause - the problem to be addressed - and affect (that, in turn we won't have much real option on in terms of mitigation and certainly prevention if the underlying problem is not addressed), this confusion between the underlying problem, and its problematic affect, is extremely counter productive in terms of generating even remotely accurate, let alone good, assessments of the situation. </div>
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Good assessment is nevertheless required to strategically know what to do. Or, to know, as some advocate, to <i>do nothing</i>. Yet, oddly, atmospherically knowledgeable, non partisan-ally charged scientists, barely sit in the otherwise enormous do nothing group, In fact, only an <i>extremely</i> low percentage of all atmospherically knowledgeable, non partisan-ally charged scientists, are in the do nothing group. </div>
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When it comes to such "do nothing" (or do little) advocacy oriented scientists, or people who aren't scientists but speak out on the issue and afforded far more international attention than relevant scientists - every site, paper and book by those that this blog author has read - and it's been a lot - are largely filled with misconceptions over the issue, and evince a very poor understanding of it. (That would cover several thousand posts, but it's being worked on.)<br />
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Going against most knowledgeable scientists on a subject is a fine thing when one person or a small band of people go against the great majority, and necessary for good science. Not so great when that is all the ammunition that a far larger and generally non scientific, or pseudo scientific group (who then dismiss the great majority of scientists) needs, and, more importantly, the one person or small band repeatedly gets the most relevant things wrong, more generally misconstrues the basic issue itself, or shows incomplete or incorrect understanding of it. Which is exactly what the case has been on Climate Change. Here's a couple examples, and in fact what has served as most of the driver behind the "expert" anti climate change issue support.</div>
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<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2014/feb/21/nazis-climate-contrarian-credibility-gap">Roy Spencer</a>, (along with John <a href="http://www.skepticalscience.com/examining-christys-skepticism.html">Christy</a>, Spencer's Alabama colleague who largely mirrors him) a former NASA scientist, with some knowledge of science, is a <a href="http://www.southernstudies.org/2011/09/climate-science-contrarian-roy-spencers-oil-industry-ties.html">classic</a> <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2011/07/29/282584/climate-scienists-debunk-latest-bunk-by-denier-roy-spencer/">example</a>, and <a href="http://climatecrocks.com/2011/09/07/bad-week-for-roy-wrong-way-spencer/">his</a> <a href="http://www.dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroom/2011/09/spencer-faulty-science">work</a> will be examined later, because it has been so <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2014/feb/21/nazis-climate-contrarian-credibility-gap">disproportionately influential</a> on public opinion, yet is <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2011/07/29/282584/climate-scienists-debunk-latest-bunk-by-denier-roy-spencer/">so filled</a> <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20080911233928/http://tamino.wordpress.com/2008/07/28/spencers-folly/">with</a> basic misconceptions, as to be more misinforming than informing. </div>
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Or <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2010/02/28/205559/foreign-policys-guide-to-climate-skeptics-includes-roger-pielke-jr-meanwhile-andy-revkin-campaigns-for-him-to-be-an-ipcc-author/">Roger Pielke</a> Jr. (The linked piece is full of relevant information, but seems unnecessarily mean spirited, and may make almost anyone not automatically inclined to agree with all of the points of the post, to dismiss it and further dismiss valid climate science information therein, and furthers a polarization that is unnecessary and self defeating. I am linking to it here because of the information contained therein, and in the hope that J.R. (or someone) at Climate Progress, an otherwise incredibly knowledgeable expert with an exceptionally researched climate blog, sees this link and considers the point that overt and seemingly heavy handed mocking just further entrenches everybody's position -, when this shouldn't be a "position" issue - and doesn't really help open up knowledge and understanding; which is what this issue needs, and what Climate Progress ultimately works so hard for.)<br />
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Pielke, though not really a true scientist, has managed to establish himself as an expert on the topic, and also gets much of the most important basic information wrong. <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2010/02/28/205559/foreign-policys-guide-to-climate-skeptics-includes-roger-pielke-jr-meanwhile-andy-revkin-campaigns-for-him-to-be-an-ipcc-author/">Pielke has</a> often misrepresented the assertions and positions of those he disagrees with, or even the basic facts. From what I've read of Pielke's stuff, I believe it is all in good faith: good faith meaning he believes what he does, and finds interpretations - including of arguments and facts that show him to often be mistaken - to support that belief. As is common, it's really just a question of degree. I'll post further on this. </div>
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Or <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lindzen">Richard Lindzen</a>, the most qualified of the general group, an M.I.T. lifelong contrarian who probably enjoyed all the attention of perhaps being close to the one person in the United States with an advanced understanding of the relevant physics and atmospheric issues, who thinks that Climate Change is not a major issue.</div>
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Lindzen is an atmospheric physicist who has done a lot of good work. Not on climate alteration, however. <a href="http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/1520-0477%282001%29082%3C0417%3ADTEHAA%3E2.3.CO%3B2">His last major basic idea</a>, to continue to be contrary on an issue that he has a <a href="http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-scientists-take-on-Richard-Lindzen.html">history of</a> being wrong on, but seems to enjoy (or more aptly, seems to enjoy being a contrarian on a largely scientifically agreed upon issue, one - because of his uniquely semi anti climate change stand among actually knowledgeable people - with huge non scientific, pseudo scientific, monied, and political backing), is that cloud cover - or in fact the lack of it, which allows for much more sunlight to reach the earth (warming) but much more thermal radiation to escape (cooling) - cancels out any warming from increased gases. At best, this "cloud cover opening up iris" theory (think iris of an eye opening) is a haphazard guess, at worst it is a somewhat idiotic theory. (It's since been largely discredited - and data since has tended to repudiate it as well. The issue of water vapor and clouds <a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-confusion-of-water.html">is well discussed here</a>.) (Lindzen also creatively argued that cigarette smoking doesn't cause lung cancer.) </div>
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And <a href="http://www.desmogblog.com/bjorn-lomborg">this</a> alleged multinational leader on the topic, who contradicts himself all over, but does sometimes say Climate Change is a real issue (yay for that) that needs to be tackled (though by tackling, he doesn't really mean do anything about, because of somewhat ridiculous "offsetting benefits," being as a warming climate lessens total deaths from the cold, offsetting its harm, and the like - as he suggested in an extremely ill informed and sophomoric, but "nice sounding" 2005 TED talk - as well as the fact that unique among investments, creating processes and technologies and substitute products are in fact real lost "costs" and not really investments or a part of growth that we should count as value).<br />
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He was named as one of TIME's 100 most influential people in the world. <a href="http://www.lomborg-errors.dk/">And</a> <a href="http://www.businessspectator.com.au/article/2012/3/23/smart-energy/bjorn-lomborg-and-australian-wrong-again">also</a> <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/planet-oz/2013/dec/06/bjorn-lomborg-climate-change-poor-countries-need-fossil-fuels">has</a> <a href="http://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2011/05/a-critical-review-of-bjorn-lomborgs-cool-it/">almost</a> <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2014/04/17/are-electric-cars-any-good-lomborg-says-no-but-hes-wrong/">no</a> real sense of what the climate change issue is. (Though I disagree that <a href="http://www.lomborg-errors.dk/">his errors</a>, just as with most, <a href="http://www.lomborg-errors.dk/deliberate.htm">are deliberate</a>, rather than instead a result of having a directionally tailored strong belief drive factual study, and the slotting in of selectively chosen and often incorrect facts or even interpretations, to reinforce that strong belief. But it <a href="http://www.lomborg-errors.dk/Hiddenagenda.htm">could be</a> oil industry influence, or ultimately, almost the same thing - a fealty to mistaken and outdated, conceptually simplistic, and outdated if still very much mistakenly in vogue, economic assumptions.)<br />
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And he is a supposed God of strategic economics. Yet suffers under the common illusion that all short term material value or gain is equally valuable over the long term - and thus that simply adjusting over to processes that don't help undermine our world in the process of building (or bettering) it, are somehow awful for mankind, rather than actually economically beneficial in the long run, <i>in terms of what economic value ultimately is supposed to represent</i>: Utility, improvement, or gain.<br />
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Funny, Bjorn Lomborg - the guy who is so influential on economics and climate change - is pedestrian on economics and has no vision, and basically knows very little about the actual science of Climate Change on which he frequently writes and speaks. (Though <a href="http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/09/if-the-uncertai.html">he does cite</a> all kinds of meaningless guesses on a tangible "dollar" scale, regarding what various costs of Climate Change will be. Which is far more misinforming than saying "<i><b>I don't know, nor can anyone really, here is my idea of range, here is why, but a lot of this stuff can't be measured in constant dollars, since it might affect some things more fundamental and absolute than mere widget based economic short term utility measurements ultimately determined by well meaning yet sometimes irrational consumers</b></i>.")<br />
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Lomborg's main economic push, is the entrenchment of old school, outdated economic thinking. According to this common view, by implication, as GDP rises, so does total happiness. Consistently. Making us, for example, something in neighborhood of "10 times happier" today than we were when our GDP was 10 times lower. Which, it essentially has to do as GDP rises, if real material value stays constant over time, and value represents utility, and that value increases in unchanging, real terms over extensive periods of time. And which, in turn, for any of this TIME magazine top world 100 champion's gospel like accepted and otherwise widely assumed as fact economic pronouncements on climate strategy to not be missing the bigger picture, value has then do as well.<br />
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Progress in terms of making more and better things is great. And it has nothing to do with the fact that as humans <b>we do</b> somewhat accommodate to or get used to many secondarily material or tangible things over time regardless of the fact that progress is great. We grow, producing is growing. Even making improvements that may seem like improvements at the time, but really aren't (like Facebook is key to our existence. How are we to know when we don't know? That is what the progress of growth, and economic growth, and change in response to what we've learned, is.<br />
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But making more of and slightly better products this year (though far behind ten years from now, and light years ahead of twenty years ago) is not some kind of absolute. Yet according to these sweeping one dimensional time scale frozen tangible measurement economic valuations that call every change, every adjustment, ever benefit, every improvement, every short term dollar cost on improved energy or agriculture versus yet a bigger T.V. screen a real cost and "harm," is based upon the mistaken idea that we <b>really don't </b>ever adjust or accommodate at all. And as a result, again mistakenly, value stays constant and absolute over time as well.<br />
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That is the presumption being made when investment "costs" or shifts to substitute goods and processes that may (or may not) slow down a little material gain are considered true costs, and used as arguments to not address, over the short term, what we are doing that causes far more harm, and, is long term: ongoing, and cumulative (even amplifying) if we don't address it.<br />
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Climate change opposition in large part arises due to fear over a large negative long term impact upon our ability to grow and prosper (have a thriving and growing economy over time.) This is reasonable, and natural to think. But it is also misplaced.<br />
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When it comes to some membership in the very small percentage club of scientists who think Climate Change is not robustly significant, part of it may still be due to all the misinformation on the topic, and the drive and bonus for being contrarian here. That is, there is <b><i>far</i></b> higher funding <i><b>and radically</b></i> fewer qualified people chasing that same far greater funding. This is wildly ironic, but apparently unseen: for one of the many arguments used to discredit climate science and climate scientists anyway possible - not to purposefully discredit, but to find a way to retain one's own beliefs legitimately in one's own mind - is that climate scientists are the ones driven by money. (But no one else apparently is. Unless one doesn't like, or doesn't want to like, their ideas; than anyone is. Or driven by recognition, or to be a "saint," as Mother Teresa so selfishly sought. While, less extreme, but still illogically, Al Gore becomes a selfish but non believing promoter of the green technologies he invests in - even though his environmental passion predates his investments - and <i>not</i> someone who, perhaps less wickedly, instead of investing in what he does not believe, simply, more logically, chose to invest in what he does..., etc.. ultimately reducing all to tautological self belief reinforcing rhetoric, unseen by those so engaged in it.<br />
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For there's always another way out. Another "door." Another way to wrangle it. (See the first <a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/07/a-panel-of-national-experts-who-know.html?showComment=1405447354823#c8809804854305799677">comment</a> to my last post, dismissing it all as good expert political commentary, and the writer of the last post (me) a political idiot who will never be invited on such a panel, even though the posted video contained largely substantive discussion of a substantive issue, by a panel and host remarkably ill informed on the topic issue, and what they mainly discussed; which is exactly what the post was about.)</div>
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Also, for a far wider audience, taking the contrarian position and writing something scholarly sounding (whether it is or is not actually scholarly is not as important as whether it sounds scholarly, and for the author, perhaps to believe that it is, to be able to actually concoct the words), there is the ability to get almost anything, so long as it sounds nice, immediately published: Interestingly however, almost never, in real science Journals, which have a strong peer review vetting process. And which, while reviewers are human and subject to biases like everybody else, also have a transcendent interest in something upon which science depends and fosters: well articulated and scientifically credible theory, presumption and study challenging research and ideas. <i>Not</i> credible seeming to a lay public, websites, news stations, or editorial boards, but to knowledgeable scientists on the issue. (But the wrangle a way out "door" on this one is to allege that Climate Scientists want to silence "critics.." No, they want information, rather than misinformation, to shape our assessment of the situation.But if one is driven by belief, it is not seen as misinformation, but, rather, the "information," "the light" that only reinforces (but in fact allows) the retention of those beliefs.)</div>
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Yet, perhaps most notable of all, a remarkably disproportionate amount of this same contrarian angling is even highlighted in the press. The same press which needs to appear "balanced," and so feels if the argument is between the earth being flat and being, essentially, round, it must present "both sides" in order to be non-biased - and so present as the "reasonable middle ground, the idea that the earth is a very narrow, long obelisk - rather than simply illuminate on the issue, including facts in dispute, and on various perspectives based logically upon relevant facts or reasonable suppositions, not falsities, tautologies, or misinformation. </div>
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This is the same press that rarely substantively lays out to the public exactly what the problem is and why it is a major problem, yet is still consistently being accused of being "biased" in favor of Climate Change advocacy by opponents of it. Perhaps if the press simply laid out the main critical underlying facts, and in particular if proponents of advocacy did the same, opposition, or at least some, would do what ideally we all want to do - namely, pursue what is real, and why it is so. And maybe handle a problem - a challenge - that is really all of ours, and our future's - a lot better. Which doesn't so much depend upon whether we build 4 widgets today, or 6. But does depend on how we shape our future. </div>
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It's not that I'm trying to defend "conventional wisdom." In fact, some of what you'll read in here goes against conventional wisdom. Or even, more relevantly, since the issue is a science one (what to do is, on the other hand, a strategic one), that I'm trying to defend the silly "97% scientific consensus." Much conventional wisdom is wrong. (But take note that a lot is also right.)</div>
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Science is a little different. Of course its pursuit, or assertion, produces mistakes. But science is by definition the pursuit of objective, physical truth, however flawed And the mistakes of convention tend to be the exception rather than the norm. Particularly when they go against the entire basis of an argument. (Say, like the silliness, which never made sense, of castigating eggs, rather than at least just low density lipo-protein, and, as we later learned, but yet still modern medical tests rarely reflect, the small particle size lipo-proteins, etc. And even that was a portion of a general theory, not it's whole. Medicine may, however, be a poor example.) </div>
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Climate change, despite all the rhetoric and "belief" on the topic (when, despite accusations fast and furious all around, belief not only has nothing to do with the issue, but is near the very opposite of it), is not quite at the level of "the theory of gravity"; but it is pretty close. The basics are known. The fact of our "likely" major affect, however ill defined both "likely" and "major affect," is, known. </div>
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The Climate Change issue is also extraordinarily politically and even ideologically tinged, and driven. Though for the most part, the idea that "green types" are ideologically driven to believe it is a bit far-fetched, or certainly overdone. That is, human nature moves each of us in slightly different general patterns of perception, no doubt; but most people don't want more government annoyance and rules or higher gas prices just for the sake of more rules and annoyance, etc. </div>
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Whereas on the flip side, though seemingly unrecognized by such practitioners, the ideological drive, is huge. It is driven by many things. Often mis-perception of the issue. A lot of misinformation. And often furthered, or at least very often not helped, ironically, by those trying to advocate for it: by dismissing the concerns or perceptions of others; by taking it for granted everybody knows what they know, or "should" know; or that everybody knows the same thing - as if the world of disbelief out there, directly and radically altering the nature of both our national and global discussion on the issue, as well as response, didn't even exist; and also by a lack of focus on explicating what the issue actually is - which again few people know - and which, again, is then further exacerbated by over reliance upon "climate change" as the description of the problem.</div>
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But this one sided if largely consciously unrecognized tendency, or self reinforcing need, is most often driven - or "fueled" (so to speak) - by largely misplaced long term economic fear. It is. ultimately, a largely misplaced fear in that changing how we produce only changes the nature of GDP; which already is abstract and reflects plenty of things that are less than optimal or even counter productive as it is. (Think "health care," juxtaposed over the trillions, not billions, trillions we spend on it each year, for instance, and many many many billions on many (not all) pharmaceuticals, which yet do more harm than good, and, worse, also cover up root causes or real health improvement solutions.) Sensible redress of highly counterproductive and ultimately destructive energy patterns doesn't necessarily lessen GDt (it is just as likely to increase it long term). It certainly doesn't destroy it. And the implicit idea <i>that we need to slowly harm our world</i> in order to "produce," is ultimately inane</div>
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Yet with all of that, <i>97% of scientists still </i>assert that the problem is a very real one. And an even significantly higher percentage of advanced scientists with some intimate knowledge of the issue, do. And most of those say it's pretty major. Ignoring that is pretty foolish.</div>
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The other interesting fact here, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/22/opinion/sunday/lessons-for-climate-change-in-the-2008-recession.html">recently suggested</a> along with several other good points in the NY Times by Henry Paulson, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury under George W. Bush, is that effective action doesn't require 100% certainty. It requires a knowledge of probability that in combination with the harm (technically, multiplied by the harm, with perhaps extra value added in for really harmful scenarios that a person would be willing to do more to avoid (hence the idea of "insurance")), justifies action.</div>
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The real threats here are so monumental that even just a (mistaken) belief in a reasonable chance of them justifies sensible action. This is not, however advocacy for the idea that action is sensible on climate change by comparing the average range of harm with the act of amelioration. (Response is sensible because it is extremely unlikely that the net energy balance of the earth can be radically altered without some sort of attendant radical alteration in climate - which is ultimately driven by energy. And because of a few slightly more complex reasons why it is problematic to radically, and suddenly (geologically) shift over to a climate very different from the one we and the species we rely upon evolved under, and in which the world we live in was shaped - in many ways, literally - and why conditions on earth right now are very specifically far more apt to change extra radically in response to radical net energy changes, than not quite so radically - though with either outcome ultimately being huge to mankind.) </div>
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It is to point out that opposition has been so entrenched, so intent upon the belief that climate change is a hoax, a bunch of hooey, or insignificant, that even common sense strategy that we would otherwise all generally largely agree on (debating the ranges and approaches) somehow gets falsely turned into "nervous climate change alarmism," yet not "nervous economic alarmism" - in that multiple degree ambient temperature increases, and the ocean's non linear rising, is okay (IPCC projections only take into account rise from thermal expansion, but ignore ice melt, which is also illogical); whereas changing the nature of our GDP over to more productive, and in many cases also far less polluting processes, is not. <br />
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And the issue gets very poorly assessed, with mountains, Grand Canyons' full, of misinformation and concocted wrangling around and irrelevant dismissal of the most basic facts, and flooding the Internet, most media outlets, and politicians offices. Often righteously believed, which the pro Climate Change crowd's near constant, somewhat contemptuous, and often wildly incorrect dismissal of it all as all simply big oil company and (random Joe Citizen) purposeful lies, only worsens, rather than helps. </div>
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That entrenchment flies in the face not of 97%, but of basic facts. Underlying radical atmospheric, geologic time, and molecular absorption facts that calling the issue "Climate Change" only further obfuscates, and falsely, moves the issue away from, and further toward an issue of "climate observation." </div>
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Observation is great, particularly in science, which ultimately emanates from it. But the problem here is already observed and incontrovertible. </div>
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It is that the net energy balance of the earth is
radically shifting. </div>
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It is doing this because of a simple fact, that
seems to often get overlooked, yet largely defines the issue: The level of long term greenhouse gases in our atmosphere - the same molecules that in very small relative number alone are responsible for the earth not being a frozen ball of rock - <a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/07/whats-really-problem-and-how-bad-and.html">have collectively risen to levels</a> not seen on earth in at least a few million years, and that are still rising rapidly, directly (and sometimes even precisely) attributable to specific, anthropomorphic, practices and usages. </div>
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These gases trap heat (thermal radiation) originally received in largely short wave form (what we think of as sunlight, the limited visible spectrum and a little bit consisting of just slightly shorter wavelengths, and slightly longer), as that heat, initially absorbed, later rises in longer wavelength forms off the earth's surface up through the atmosphere. If it's not trapped, it escapes back to outer space. If it is trapped, much of it is retained by the earth/atmosphere system. The more that is trapped, the more heat that is retained.<br />
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This is not what causes a huge rise in temperatures. This causes a little warming of the atmosphere. What will cause a huge rise in temperatures is the increasing net energy balance of the earth. Which is also incontrovertible. (Though all over the Internet, equations and overly big worded sentences are thrown out by non experts in this field, who nevertheless win awards by conservative news sites to show that energy is not increasing (or greenhouse gas levels don't matter) with such inanities as "the earth has to be in balance" (followed by five pages of misapplied equations and gobbledygook), "so you can see that net energy is not rising, because the energy in has to equal the energy out!" Or some such. When it doesn't. The energy in has to equal energy out, plus or minus energy retained.<br />
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In theory the earth is always in "radiative balance." In reality it's not. Cloud cover, which constantly changes, is a significant contributor to the total reflectivity of the earth. And the higher the reflectivity, the more solar radiation (sunlight plus what we don't see that is close in wavelength to sunlight, some UV and a little lower wavelength infrared red) simply gets reflected back out to space, where with its narrow wavelength window, tends to be too large for electronic atmospheric molecular absorption, and too small for vibrational atmospheric molecular absorption (the main type of absorption that causes atmospheric greenhouses to trap and re radiate thermal radiation emitted from the earth's surface).<br />
The process of extra emitting (when the earth - which is 70% ocean - is warm relative to the atmosphere, think of a bathtub warming a cold bathroom), or less emitting.<br />
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But if extra or lessened emissions don't keep a constant radiative balance, net energy will be lost or gained, through a longer term heating or cooling of the earth. (Oceans, surface, and ice and snow, which can warm but not melt, soften, partly melt, or melt.) What we've seen is some of the increased trapped heat not immediately re emitted, or not then re emitted yet again when some of that is trapped and ultimately contributes more warmth back to the surface, through either lessening or negating emission (the air is warmer than the surface or less cool relative to the surface than it would otherwise be), and slowly start to change the temperature of the earth.<br />
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With more greenhouse gases in the air, more emitted heat is trapped, more energy is retained. If it is a big difference (and the overwhelming thought is that a change on the order of several million years is pretty big), that retained heat won't only just mildly heat the atmosphere but will start to significantly impact the otherwise reasonably stable systems that shape and create earth's long time climate given the level of incoming sunlight (which we can't change),and trapped atmospheric heat (which we can). Most of which, given where the earth is in its long term geologic cycle (snow and ice formation and so forth) relative to the level of atmospheric greenhouse gases and what similar levels have entailed in the past (much less snow and ice formation) when warmed, can and at some point inevitably will produce a whole host of significant changes toward more even more warming, until a new stases or overall balance is reached.<br />
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We're already starting to see early signs of such changes, and there is a big lag between the cause and affect here. Additionally, and, most significantly- since it's the thing we can control - we are adding, rapidly, to total long term heat trapping gas levels. The more we add, the more increasingly compounding is the effect upon basic stabilizing structures such as ice caps, permafrost, and oceans.<br />
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All of this, however scantily laid out, is pretty basic, though it can be amplified or affected by water vapor and clouds (as briefly referenced above in discussion on Richard Lindzen, and <a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-confusion-of-water.html">addressed here</a> and <a href="http://www.skepticalscience.com/water-vapor-greenhouse-gas.htm">elsewhere</a>).<br />
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Yet <a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/">almost everything is written under the sun</a> (no punt intended) to come up with ways to discredit this idea. But the basic idea is the basic physics of the planet. And it doesn't change just because we don't understand or don't want to understand the geologic concept of time or what this means in terms of lags and cause and effect, or the unambiguously non linear nature of this problem (or the basic reasons why it is non linear - though starting with slowly and then not so slowly melting surface ice along with an <a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/07/heat-around-and-below.html">increasingly warming</a> ocean, which over the long run drives climate, along with the increased (and yet still increasing) level of heat trapping molecules in the air, gives a good beginning indication...)</div>
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This, save for an occasional (or even less than an occasional) repeatedly wrong Richard Lindzen, is why nearly every serious non politically ideological scientist with intimate or deep knowledge of this issue recognizes the same basic problem, though through what ranges and with what precisely pinpointed results are of course debated, and uncertain. And why many are pulling their hair out over the level of discourse on this topic, where there is an endless sea of highfalutin prose with all sorts of twists, turns, and proclamations in high spirited and often largely worded language, with sneaky conclusionary sentences that make no sense:<br />
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<a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/skepticism-toward-the-ske/#comment-01AF0249-0371-CD0F-39AB18A7FCE517BD">Here's a classic example</a> among literally millions, where, in this one, "<i>CO2 has nothing to do with it, because there's excess CO2 in the air</i>." That is, levels don't matter! Just "enough" or more than enough to keep the earth a comfy 59 degrees on average, not the 0 degrees it would be without it, and perfect for mankind the last few million, as if we ourselves had orchestrated it from above, and notwithstanding the four billion years of geologic history, and basic physics, that contradict it. That is, there is no more heat to be trapped. Every last drop of it coming off the surface is already being trapped and re-radiated by the few CO2 and sundry other non noble gases in the air as it is. Oh, wait, that's Venus. Where it's like 800 degrees. <br />
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Yet again, <a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/skepticism-toward-the-ske/#comment-01AF0249-0371-CD0F-39AB18A7FCE517BD">consider the eloquence and advanced theorizing</a> that led to a simply made up conclusion that has little to nothing to do with the arguments stated. And <a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/07/15/what-an-engineer-finds-extraordinary-about-climate/#more-112938">here's a similar, but slightly harder to discern example</a> (and it's (<a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/07/15/what-an-engineer-finds-extraordinary-about-climate/#comment-1686147">poor but exasperated) counter</a>, then a <a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/07/15/what-an-engineer-finds-extraordinary-about-climate/#comment-1686165">response to that</a> citing an "oh help" comment as proof, that, even though posted by yet another climate skeptic, was actually saying "<a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/07/15/what-an-engineer-finds-extraordinary-about-climate/#comment-1686108">oh help</a>" to the <a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/07/15/what-an-engineer-finds-extraordinary-about-climate/">original post</a>) Yet so fervently believed! And so on it goes. That has been the ideological nature of this issue, and the biggest impediment on it to truth, and ultimately good assessment. Assessment which is necessary for the best and most sensible response -whatever that may be - in keeping with our own long term interest in the world on which we live, and depend, and upon which our children, and grandchildren, will too.<br />
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">(Edited and slightly revised on 7/19/14)</span></i></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8909518152474729073.post-67780146710960112662014-07-14T21:42:00.002-04:002014-10-22T16:06:37.543-04:00A Panel of National Experts Who Know Nothing About the Subject<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
(Updated below, 7-25-14) </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Regarding the issue of Climate Change, Fox host Chris Wallace, February (16), 2014: "And we're back now with <b>the panel</b>."</span><br />
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Here's the funny thing about news today, or perhaps it's mainly a Fox thing: This panel, to discuss Climate Change, <i>consisted of people who know nothing about Climate Change</i>. </span><br />
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Many people like to turn to Fox - it is after all the most watched national news station in America (And there's only a few such stations to begin with, so this matters.) </span><br />
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But are viewers getting anything that is actually helping them to understand the issue better, <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/02/16/3297871/fox-news-discusses-climate-change-insanity-ensues/">or are they getting the opposite</a>? Or something that leaves out critical facts, misrepresents many other facts, and is continually advocating through subtle suggestion and framing - that, as a result, only reinforces beliefs created on incomplete information, or further misunderstanding of the basic issue. </span><br />
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Could this be part of why very few people, including the national panel of news experts on this show, even know <a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/07/whats-really-problem-and-how-bad-and.html">what the real issue</a> on Climate Change is?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
<i>"</i>Well, the President's [Climate Change is a problem] case may be a bit hard to make when the Eastern half of the country is in the midst of a brutal winter," said Host Chris Wallace, before returning to his panel. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
The "Eastern half of the country" represents barely 1% of the globe. Climate Change refers to the entire globe, and a (significant) global change in overall averages, and possibly even in levels of variation (increasing it), as well. Climate is the general pattern of weather, <i>over many years</i>. Weather itself, is always all over the place.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
In any regard, as temperatures and weather normally vary widely from day to day, season to season, year to year, and place to place (a phenomenon which, if anything, "Climate Change,"is likely to exacerbate, at least for a while), temperatures last winter in the Western half of Kazakhstan, or the Eastern half of the United States, etc., are irrelevant to determining what "<a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-confusion-of-water.html">Climate Change</a>" is.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
It is understandable that people confuse temporary, provincial, weather with long term global climate trends.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
But is this national news host overseeing a panel on one of the biggest topics of the past several decades here doing exactly the same? Or just encouraging it in others, by referencing the wildly mistaken idea. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
Since an apt description of the Fox Channel is probably that it<i> always</i> shapes things to get in suggestion, it probably doesn't matter. But given the unusually poor grasp of the issue exhibited on Fox - let alone for a news station, let alone, again, for a national news station, and <i>let alone yet again for a leading </i>national news station) - it is probably at least some of the former. That is, Wallace doesn't understand the basics of the issue, either. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
Or the fact that Climate Change (vaguely) refers to both the cause, and more specifically to this likely long term (and increasing ) <i>overall</i> global warming trend result, over decades. Not this winter's, or even the last few winters' weather, in his or some viewer's neck of the woods. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
But then - with a panel of experts who know less than nothing on the subject, as most of what they say on it that has substantive relevance is wrong or highly misleading - <i>how could he</i>?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
Here's the discussion that took place this last winter:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><span style="line-height: 100%;"><br />I</span></i></span><i>gnorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes what is wrong</i>. -Thomas Jefferson<br />
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Having a panel on Climate Change who know nothing on the issue, but assert things - incorrect things - as if they do, is much worse than simply having ignorant panelists.<br />
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Jefferson also had another quote, among many, somewhat applicable here: <br />
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<i> I was bold in the pursuit of knowledge, never fearing to follow truth and reason to whatever results they led</i>.<br />
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This idea could be rearranged to capture today's Foxy approach, on the Climate Change issue: <br />
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"<i>We were bold in pursuit of supporting what we wanted as facts, never fearing to follow whatever advocation was necessary to adhere to them, and equally bold in our pursuit of ways to dismiss whatever real facts, or even good logic, happened by accident to occasionally come our way</i>." Such as <a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/07/whats-really-problem-and-how-bad-and.html">what the issue is really about</a>, and <a href="http://www.skepticalscience.com/">what the basic facts are</a>.<br />
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<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>Update: 7-25-14</b>: There is a comment below suggesting that the author of this piece is "deliberately missing the point," in that it was a discussion of the politics of the issue. </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">It is hard to believe that this commenter actually watched the clip. But from the comment below and a reference to one of the guests, it appears they had. In which case, anything that is filled with uninformed "information" that discusses the substance of an issue with political overtones (as most issues do), as is done in large part in the clip above, can then be dismissed as "politics." </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">So if a news show discusses politics, by having uninformed guests speak out about a substantive topic on which they mislead viewers, it is, according to this commenter, "political experts [who] spoke expertly on the topic." Another way to look at it (see comment below); show a clip of the President talking about a substantive topic, then talk about that substantive topic, misinform or mislead, but, nevertheless, according to this incredibly illogical argument, it is "deliberately missing the point" to in fact point out all of the misinformation on the topic, because it was all "politics." <br /><br />The comment also serves as an example of the very point that ended the original portion of this piece. That is, "We were bold in pursuit of supporting what we wanted as facts, never fearing to follow whatever advocation was necessary to adhere to them, and equally bold in our pursuit of ways to dismiss whatever real facts, or even good logic, happened by accident to occasionally come our way." <br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Here, the illogical advocation that, hey, they were just talking politics, "my guess is that you are not that knowledgeable about politics and won't be invited to be a panelist." (Certainly not on Fox.) And were "deliberately missing the point" (</span>that misinformation and illogical analysis is no longer relevant, because <span style="font-family: inherit;">all this has political ramifications and they discussed those too, and, also, they are "experts" on politics, and not, presumably, the issues they are nevertheless directly informing their audience on, as if they are.) </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The guests also discussed the issue itself, even predominantly, in the clip above. Most of what they represented, and the point of the piece above, was misleading, or, though more subjectively, ill thought out. (Additionally, discussing the issue, which they largely did, is not simply discussing the political potency of it. Panelists uttering substantive assessments that mislead or misinform on the issue is not discussing the political potency, so much as trying to shape it.) </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />The Host talks about how Obama will have a hard time making his case with all the cold in the East, but doesn't simultaneously note that global climate, which is decades globally, is not regional weather; and that confusing the two greatly confuses the issue. Confusion which he was contributing to. <br /><br />George Will doesn't know anything about the science of the issue. But he was giving his ponderous view of the science of the issue, and stated as gospel (See above clip.) <br /><br />Charles Lane probably doesn't know anything about the economics of the issue or the science, but he was giving his economic/science amalgamation: It's a "rich man's issue." Because, unfortunately, America is a poor country, and if we only weren't several dozen times poorer than we were 100 years ago, maybe we could "afford" it. (Which is also based on the mis-perception that addressing climate change doesn't also add to GDP, but, unlike any other expenditure in our economy, all of which, in total, go toward comprising GDP, is uniquely a true cost that won't also contribute to GDP.) <br /><br />Except we aren't several dozen times poorer than we were 100 years ago, we are many, many times wealthier; yet still too poor apparently to yet consider the "Rich man's issue" of not fundamentally altering the world in which we live, in a way that is highly counterproductive to our own long term interests, and in particular to the poor, who will suffer the most from climate change, and particularly in poor countries and countries that already have trouble getting enough food, which expected increased drought will only greatly worsen. <br /><br />By Lane's argument, we can never address any harm or practices that may be doing us much more harm than good, and thus, improve, our world, and our economy in the long run. Because not radically altering the atmosphere in a way that is likely to greatly change climate, is a "rich man's issue." Collective atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases have already risen to levels not seen on earth in millions of years. Much of this just in the last few hundred years, and much of that in the last fifty. These are the gases that absorb and re radiate heat that is emitted off the earth's surface, and that are responsible, in already small number, for keeping the globe from essentially being a large ball of ice. Yet not continuing to contribute to this problem, or taking sensible steps to mitigate contribution and perhaps ultimately level it off or ameliorate it a little bit to the extent we can, is suddenly a "rich man's" problem. Not all of ours. Yet it seems that the rich, ironically, are most behind efforts to minimize the perceived threat from climate change.<br /> <br />Lane's subsequent expression was an opinion, but one that seems ill conceived, and largely tautological. Essentially, "if we didn't have economic problems" (his words), we could address something that was harming our interests more than helping them (my words.) Aside from a rare period in the 90s due to some sensible fiscal and monetary policy, taxation overall, budget control and a large technological boom, when have have we not had economic problems? And even then, many people argued we did. That aside, it still makes no sense to not address something that is harming our interests more than helping them (particularly one that is a compounding problem, as this one is), unless Lane's argument is that not trying to mitigate Climate Change helps us more. Which then has nothing to do with it being a "Rich Man's issue," but would be an entirely different argument. <br /><br />Kirsten Powers doesn't get what climate (versus weather) is, or even what long term charts do. They are shown as smooth curves. An upward trend over time does not mean that, if each moment or year or set of years on a chart is plotted out, there are not flat or even downward areas. Thus her statement that it can't be called "Global Warming" because the earth stopped warming, isn't really correct. So far, statistically and climatically, the earth is in a warming trend. And even a slightly accelerating one so far. The last several years, still far above the recent historical mean, may be a small part of a much bigger (future) trend that starts to establish something much different. (No more warming, etc.), but on their own all that matters is the entire picture we have since modern record keeping began, and which includes these same most recent years. That picture is trending upward. And since climate is the pattern of weather over very long periods of time, that is by far the most relevant. Particularly when it comes to something which is a long term issue. Several years are not. And, particularly when they continue the pattern set in the 90s of extremely warm weather, when most of the ten hottest years since record keeping began were recorded, several of which have now been supplanted even by several of the years in the 2000s. <br /><br />More importantly, the term Global Warming has little to do with why it was changed.. Climate change will likely (continue to) be a longer term warming trend. But the issue is more accurately about the fact that it will change, maybe with a lot more volatility, and the change will not be from "year to year," but the longer term,and trail, or lag, behind it's cause, for very specific reasons. And Frank Luntz, perhaps the most influential pollster in America, and brilliant with framing, apparently advocated to the political Right, that at the time was more generally opposed to concern over the issue, to call it "Climate Change" because it sounds less scary than "Global Warming." The issue was also repeatedly called Climate Change (which does more accurately reflect the issue, though geologically radical atmospheric alteration does more accurately, but it's long) even in papers on the topic as far back as the 70s. <br /><br />Powers' assessment after that, that what Obama is doing is overtly political, IS discussing politics, or it could be a way to dig at the issue more, and ignore the substance or the science of the issue the President was just speaking on, but which was just incorrectly rebutted by someone (George Will), who knows nothing about the science. Thus simply furthering Will's bad science, rather than adding different information. Also, Obama's move could really be just "political"; but then what, by a President is not political, or to be labeled? If he knows the science, or has advisors who do, he's probably concerned about the issue (presidents can have real concerns), and is also expressing it. <br /><br />Powers, in discussing carbon reduction (which is science and policy, not politics) next states "whether you believe in Climate Change or not." Maybe this is inadvertent, but this is not a "believe in it or not believe in it" issue. The framing further discredits the basic, incontrovertible, science of the issue, and what climate change - regardless of the extent of its affects on a system that we have no control variable to isolate out for - really is. That's not political either, as almost nothing has been.<br /><br />Again, Wallace introduced it with the statement that the President will have a hard time making his case because it is cold in the East. IF there is any truth to that - since the weather pattern in a season (or even ten seasons over as small a fraction of the globe as the East half of the U.S. is all but meaningless to establishing long term global climate) - it is ONLY because of the furtherance of this very same mistake, namely, conflating weather, local weather weather, and weather patterns, with global climate, as Wallace engages in here, an thus only furthers, thus further confusing the issue, and leading to less, not more, informed discussion and understanding on it. <br /><br />Wallace also said "The President said that Climate Change accounts for everything from drought, to flood."It's not clear from the audible portion if the president also technically said that, though he probably implied that the extra wacky nature of the weather is due to what we call "Climate Change." It's kind of a silly statement either way. Climate is what it is. Now that's changed, because we've radically increased the atmospheric concentration of long lived greenhouse gases that trap emitted thermal radiation and prevent some of it from thus escaping into space. Thus it doesn't directly "cause" anything, but factors into everything. So the question Wallace then asks, "George, do you buy it," also misleads on the basic issue. <br /><br />That is, there is nothing to buy, unless one goes into the semantic assessment of "affects," etc. (This is also, again, as with most of this discussion tubed above, substantive discussion;, not an assessment of the politics of it. Otherwise everything w/ political implications or interest could be misinformed on, and just dismissed as a "discussion of the politics." And the basic idea of accuracy or even basic knowledge - what news, and ultimately the information that shapes our world, depends on – is when convenient to an argument, rendered meaningless.)<br /><br />George's answer was then, in turn, somewhat ridiculous. The climate always changes, so even though it is incontrovertible <a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/07/whats-really-problem-and-how-bad-and.html">that gg levels are far higher</a>... and that they do trap more emitted thermal radiation, leading to a net increase in the earth's energy balance, in Will's (non science) world, this affect is (preposterously) somehow not affecting what is ultimately driven by energy - our long term global climate. <br /><br />Will also said the debate is raging (not over), and, in that anthropomorphic sources are unduly affecting our long term climate, Obama is losing it. Even if, unsound as this is based on the facts, man is not unduly affecting climate, and a few actual scientists who are expert in this area really still argue it, in the real scientific community, the debate is over. (It's not in the politically charged atmosphere of Internet free for alls, and in politics.) And most real scientists, not ideologues, are pulling their hair out over it, because they can't understand why the country is not getting it. (Perhaps because it is never explained well?) Will is either incorrect again, or a little disingenuous; and this is again not a take on politics, but on the substance of the issue.<br /><br />Simply because it is a news shows that has "panelists" talking about an issue that has political ramifications, and shows a clip of the president making a reference to that issue, doesn't mean the issue of the panelists actual knowledge on the topic, as well as the accuracy, or representative (misleading, or manipulative) nature of what they state, isn't an issue - and the point of this original piece. Particularly since this panel was poorly informed on the issue, and engaged in a discussion on it, which would only further misunderstanding and misinformation on the topic.</span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8909518152474729073.post-66910544614514586132014-07-13T23:34:00.002-04:002014-08-18T17:13:53.001-04:00The Confusion of Water(<b>Update 8-18-14:</b> A <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/07/23/1409659111.abstract">recent study</a> published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science concluded that water vapor, unfortunately, likely serves as a positive warming feedback - see update below.)<br />
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The second post on this site - the very <a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/07/confusion-in-air-above.html">first</a> being a few sentences, and revolving around a key question - looked at one of the most critical aspects of the "Climate Change" issue. (The word "Climate Change" is in quotes because it is not a good description of the real problem, but refers to one key ultimate affect of it, and <a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/07/whats-really-problem-and-how-bad-and.html">confuses the issue</a>.)<br />
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That aspect is the simple and almost always overlooked, or only trivially reported fact, that oceans ultimately drive climate; and <a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/07/heat-around-and-below.html">our oceans are getting warmer</a>.<br />
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This is because the level of so called greenhouse, or heat trapping, molecules in the atmosphere, is increasing. Greenhouse molecules <a href="http://www.nc-climate.ncsu.edu/edu/k12/.greenhouseeffect">capture and absorb</a> infrared red radiation, and release it back outward in all directions. Most of the molecules in the air, predominantly the nitrogen and oxygen which make up <i>almost</i> our entire atmosphere, don't do this.<br />
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If our atmosphere was <i>all</i> nitrogen and oxygen, almost all heat given back off the earth's surface <a href="http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/virtualmuseum/climatechange1/02_1.shtml">would instead escape back into space</a> rather than being, at least in part, captured and re radiated. (With some of it being re radiated back downward.) And, as a result, the earth would essentially be a large ball of frozen rock and mainly ice, and about <a href="http://ase.tufts.edu/cosmos/view_chapter.asp?id=21&page=1">0 degrees Fahrenheit on average</a>, rather than the 59 or 60 degrees average (though rising) that it is; and life as we know it would not exist. <br />
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The ocean is constantly giving off heat or absorbing it. Just run a warm bath in a cold bathroom, or a freezing bath in a very hot bathroom, shut the door, and then come back in later to get a feel on a micro scale for this affect. An average, standard bathtub filled to the overflow valve contains <a href="http://www.ehow.com/info_12141718_capacity-average-bathtub.html">about</a> 45 gallons, or under one third of one cubic yard of water. The world's oceans contain about <a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/07/heat-around-and-below.html">1,750,000,000,000,000,000 cubic yards</a> of water.<br />
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Since the world is also much larger than a bathroom (but much smaller in land surface size in comparison to ocean surface size, so imagine a bathroom where most of it is the bathtub, and the closed door experiment affect becomes greater still), the process is also far far slower, and far far more stable. Hence why over time, given the normal amount of sunlight emitted towards earth by the sun, oceans ultimately drive climate.<br />
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And, as <a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/07/heat-around-and-below.html">the link</a> above helps show, as more radiated heat is re-radiated by increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, warming the molecules all around rather than simply passing unfettered straight back out to space, our oceans are, slowly, getting warmer. And, very slowly, our climate, is starting to change, as a result.<br />
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But what about water in the air above? This is an issue that can be very confusing. And it is often incorrectly, if genuinely, used to postulate scientific misconceptions about the issue of radical long term atmospheric change.<br />
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The main idea, and it is very convincing sounding, is that by far and away the most important greenhouse gas is water vapor.<br />
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This is true if by "important," one means at any one single point in time, rather than over time. This is because at any one single point in time, water vapor, is responsible for more heat trapping re-radiation than any other greenhouse gas. (In fact, it is believed to be responsible for <a href="http://www.windows2universe.org/earth/climate/greenhouse_effect_gases.html">more than</a> all of the others combined.)<br />
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And it is because, over time, water vapor, which forms as a result of weather, and ultimately, what shapes weather - our climate - is a response or affect of what we still call "Climate Change," rather than a driver of it. <br />
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So the often heard assertion that "Climate Change greenhouse gases don't really matter that much because water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas," is meaningless. And, even if inadvertently, pretty misleading as well. And certainly, highly incorrect<br />
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Long lived atmospheric greenhouse gases, over days, years, and centuries, re radiate heat that would otherwise be lost to space. And more of them in the atmosphere means more heat is re radiated rather than lost straight back to space. This has a number of key affects that drive things that ultimately become part of climate, or that in turn drive climate directly. <br />
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One of them is the evaporation of water from earth's surface and retention of that water, as water vapor and water droplets, in the atmosphere. The warmer the ambient air temperature the more water water it is capable of holding.<br />
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So, since more water vapor can be both created, and retained by the atmosphere at any period in time (and with increased average heat, there is increased energy) - we would think but can't be sure that over time this would lead to more "violent" or "intense" storms and precipitation events. (Violent and intense from our perspective, that is). And more precipitation volatility, or at least change from the present patterns, since the air is capable of receiving and holding more water, it may hold it longer, and or release more, and every combination thereof.<br />
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Another, related possibility and expected likelihood is of course just on average more water vapor overall. Since there is so much water vapor to begin with - and due to this large amount, it is such an important greenhouse component at any one point in time - this would lead to a fairly positive, or self reinforcing, feedback loop: One where increased overall atmospheric water vapor would then over time contribute even further to the atmospheric heat re radiation that is driving it in the first place. <br />
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To what affect this would take place, if any (or even to what it affect it is already starting to, if any), is unclear. Water vapor also increases the total albedo, or reflectivity, of the earth; which up in the air reflects more heat directly back out into space without it penetrating the atmosphere down to the surface.<br />
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In other words, cloud cover blocks the sun. So it is a little cooler. But, particularly if you are away from the city, notice the general difference between day and night time temperatures when the night is clear and the milky way visible, versus when it is dark and completely starless (water vapor enhanced). It is much warmer in the second instance, and far less heat (or energy) is escaping the earth/atmosphere system.<br />
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Sometimes on very cloudy days, that persist into full over night coverage, the temperature in the evening barely goes down from what it was in the day. All of the heat that is being giving off by the surface of the earth (land and water) and the objects on it, is having a hard time escaping through the atmosphere due to the greenhouse affect of all of that water vapor; so much of it gets re radiated back downward, and surface temperatures feel much warmer.<br />
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During a cloudy <i>day</i> this same heat trapping phenomenon that takes place at night is taking place under cloud cover as well, but some of the initial sunlight is being blocked, up in the atmosphere as well. <br />
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What the net overall affect of more long lived greenhouse gases, upon total average water vapor, and then that water vapor's net affect on weather, and over time, climate, is or will be is unclear. Clouds block some sunlight, but the same water vapor traps back a lot of the heat being thermally radiated off of the earth's land and sea masses, particularly at night. <br />
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What is completely clear, is that this key, if multi directional, aspect of the very short lived greenhouse molecule, has nothing to do with the issue of changing long lived lived atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, and does not drive or cause climate change, but is a reflection of it. One that would further enhance any affect by more greenhouse molecule trapping, and diminish it due to increased atmospheric albedo, or reflection.<br />
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Separately, the increased volatility likely to arise by an overall increase in atmospheric and earth/atmosphere energy over time along with the increased capacity of the atmosphere to evaporate, and absorb, larger amounts of water, is, from our perspective, a bad thing. This is because our land and river structures, and the plants on which we rely, evolved under certain general patterns. If the patterns were different, our river beds and pathways would be different,and able to accomdate those patterns without massive upheaval to current river beds, flood plains vegetation, etc.<br />
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So as precipitation patterns quickly change relative to geologic time, there is more run off and flooding, more water lost during large downpours, by root systems not designed for such intensity followed by periods of paucity, and possibly - though this seems to stand to reason from increased overall energy, it is less clear - higher intensity (for example wind, and wind like events) and thus more powerful and damaging, storm like events. <br />
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And it is probably not coincidental that many of the record rainfall and flooding events occurring over the past half century to century to more (depending on where) going back to the beginning of decent record keeping, have been somewhat concentrated, and, very loosely, increasing so, in ourmuch more recent time period, rather than being, say, evenly scattered throughout it, as a whole. <br />
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This is likely to continue, and greatly exacerbate: probably, in combination with overall changes in average ambient heat levels, to the point of "stunning" people. Many of whom then later are probably going to blame it on acts of God (which, in one sense, everything is anyway, but if we have free will, it is also acts from us, with God just giving us the tools and, we hope, pointing direction), or, ironically and genuinely, say, "wo, non one knew it would be like this," or "wow, no one saw this coming."<br />
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Of course some of them, our kids - maybe their kids - will also say, and quite appropriately, "WTF." Meaning, "How did this happen when the basics of the issue were incontrovertible, or quite easily predictable?"<br />
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What seems somewhat likely, but really <i>isn't</i> as predictable, is whether there will be somewhat of an additional compounding affect from increased average water vapor. Perhaps small, but who knows. Less likely is the diminishing affect first casually predicted years ago based on the simple observation that "water vapor is also cloud or cloud like cover, and this cools the earth." Since it will be heating the earth at the same time. Albeit clearly not as much during the day, but, at night exclusively; reigning in surface land and water cooling, and over time, net energy dissipation back out to space. <br />
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The real experiment, with no controls, and a big lag between cause and affect, is not what will generally happen as time goes forward - change the physical energy balance of the earth to a geologically radical degree, and things will radically change - but what will happen exactly. And happen, in conjunction with all the other, though far more subtler, slower, and often orders of magnitude less significant, random ongoing events of micro geologic time, and their shape upo the climate.<br />
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In other words, if we had 15 earths total - ours and 14 sister earths with identical conditions as ours, but for the radical change in long lived atmospheric greenhouse gases, what would happen over the next several hundred years, on the other 14?<br />
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That difference we will never know. What we will know is the ultimate affect on ours, with the radical changes being imparted. Right now, the essence of what that will be is the affect upon several processes, and systems, of increased atmospheric thermal re radiation back all around instead of allowing it to pass directly through back to space. <br />
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One of the more interesting, though less comfortably predictable aspects, is the affect of future water vapor, upon this process. Given that this is, after all, <i>water</i>, it might be appropriate to say that the overall amplifying or diminishing affect might well wind up being (hopefully), <i>a wash</i>. Or even even split between conflicting affects. (My hunch is it won't,. Since while both processes are going on during the day - even if in daylight hours the edge seems to go to the cooling affect, only one of the processes, the further greenhouse impact - and since at any one time water vapor makes up the majority of the atmospheric greenhouse affect, it is a large one - is going on at night.) <br />
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What is key to understand though is that the power of either such affect, is only relevant to the degree water vapor is influenced in the first place; and thus overall temperature, for example, changes. Thus it can only affect this process a fraction, at most. (thought it could be a big fraction.) And since we know it has two significant, if not perfectly counter balancing, affects that work in opposite directions, the overall ultimate net affect, can <i>only</i> be a fraction of this.<br />
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Though, notice that a lot of science sites I think <a href="http://www.windows2universe.org/earth/climate/warming_clouds_albedo_feedback.html">incorrectly postulate</a> ideas such as "possible runaway greenhouse affect," or a possible cooling period as a result of an extremely large increase in net long lived atmospheric green house gases due to the increase of water vapor: both of which are fairly far fetched - and particularly the latter one - for the reasons just given.<br />
<br />
They both look far too much at one affect in isolation. But particularly the latter, which is heavily off base, as it doesn't seem to correctly take into account that it is only the increase in heat which would drive more water vapor in the first place; so any net cooling affect would not be increasing that heat in the first place. Or seem to legitimately account for the first affect of this same "cooling" cloud cover, which is that it simultaneously increases heat re radiation.<br />
<br />
Thus the speculation that the total net affect of increased water vapor might be a slight dampening of total retained heat if water vapor did not also increase the earth's total collective albedo, is reasonable, if only speculation. But the idea that it would have an offsetting affect sufficient to cause net cooling in total as a result, is scientifically illogical.<br />
<br />
(The idea that climate change could somehow produce radical cooling for a while, however, and further throwing anti climate change proponents into a tizzy of confusion that comes out as anti climate change accusation, may not be entirely illogical, and for completely different reasons, but is probably unlikely. But the idea that it would produce net cooling over the long run, is also, though not as bad as the structurally problematic "increased cloud cover from ambient warming will really cause ambient cooling" tautology, also somewhat scientifically far fetched. Earth's climate is ultimately driven by energy. Heat is energy. Increase that in the long run, by amounts that are geologically significant, and though ocean currents could change to produce strange shorter term affects or even massive ice build up, in the long run, more energy means more heat.)<br />
<br />
While the net affect of increased water vapor might be positive (that is, it reinforces what is causing it in the first place, or increased heat re radiation leading to a greater earth atmosphere energy balance leading to higher overall temperatures), the fact that at at least <i>could </i>be slightly dampening, is good, since, for very specific reasons, almost all affects of a radical heat retention change to the atmosphere are self reinforcing. (For example, frozen ice melts under warmer conditions, and the surface shifts from a very high albedo, to one of the lowest on earth - open water, or one that is still very low - tundra; melting polar ice fails to keep the northern waters as cool as they would be (in turn leading to more melting) which then fails to cool the ocean's streams as they pass through, thus dropping down and cooling (or in this case, not) the mid and lower latitudes; melting permafrost releases enormous quantities of carbon in the form of carbon dioxide, and methane, which further increase the amount of heat energy that is absorbed and re radiated outward and thus prevented from escaping into space, leading to even more melting, until a new stases, or point of "relative" stability, is reached; etc.)<br />
<br />
In short, water vapor is a really interesting part of this equation. And a problematic one when it comes to the separate issue of increased energy, and thus precipitation pattern and intensity variability. But, since it's a result rather than a cause, and as a result then in turn has both ameliorating and exacerbating affects, it's probably not the key one. Polar ice caps, sea ice, and the related, but also separate, issue of total earth surface albedo, and ocean changes, all of which are not partially self canceling, but self reinforcing, are dominant. And why the overall "Climate Change" issue is not remotely about "change the air a small amount, and it warms up a small amount."<br />
<br />
That change in the air may seem a small amount to us. But it's a huge amount in geologic terms. And in geologic terms, the stabilizing conditions as they presently exist - polar ice, sea ice, permafrost, and retained ocean energy (heat) - with such increased inputs of energy, would have no reason in physics, to stay in the general range of conditions in which they presently exist, and under which we evolved. And physics, ultimately, is the only thing drives this issue.<br />
<br />
Not - despite all the ''hot air" coming out - shouting, rhetoric, belief, perception, earth's desires, misinformation, or politics. All of this can, and, in a profound ways, does have an impact, because it impacts how we respond (or not respond) to this challenge. And since it is us causing this change to our world, how we respond to alter or offset what is causing it, or don't, will, ultimately, shape our future.<br />
<br />
But it has nothing to do with what is going on in the first place, in order to then assess to what degree, and how to, respond. That, shouting aside, is pure physics. And it doesn't change, with good arguments, or simple expectations that the earth "can not" change so radically, because most of the time, "things don't change so radically," and that (even if for good evolutionary reasons) we have an evolved expectation of relative "sameness" built in to our perceptions.<br />
<br />
Because, number one, it's only radical to us. And number two - and the fundamental point that is repeatedly being missed about the "Climate Change" issue - is that the change that has occurred, and that is still occurring, at very fast speed, to the long term heat trapping composition of our atmosphere, geologically speaking, and in relation to what we evolved under (again, in relation to us), <i>is</i>, <i>radical.</i><br />
<br />
<b>Update 8-18-14:</b> A study <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/07/23/1409659111.abstract">published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science</a> concluded that water vapor is a positive warming feedback:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
We use a set of coordinated model experiments to confirm that the satellite-observed increase in upper-tropospheric water vapor over the last three decades is primarily attributable to human activities. <b>This attribution has significant implications for climate sciences because it corroborates the presence of the largest positive feedback in the climate system</b>.</blockquote>
<br />
Although, as a later article on this site points out, <a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/07/roy-spencer-exhibit-that-climate-change_26.html">at least one scientist argued - even getting a paper published before the editor resigned</a> due to the level of mistake - that even though water vapor, ephemeral and always changing, <a href="http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/energy-and-environment/climate-change---the-science/">is clearly a feedback, or result, not a forcing agent</a>, or driver, of longer term climate, it was nevertheless a driver of the more basic changes we've observed and not an altering or reinforcing response, to them. (This, although greatly simplified, is somewhat like arguing that later symptoms/vitality in response to eating spoiled/excellent food earlier, was the driver of feeling ill/energetic, rather than a response to it. It also seems like far more than an otherwise somewhat "remarkable coincidence" that t his same scientist, also <a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/07/roy-spencer-exhibit-that-climate-change_26.html">just happens to be a well known and rare skeptic of the idea of AGW significance</a>.)<br />
<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8909518152474729073.post-74389083521075487352014-07-13T06:30:00.001-04:002014-08-17T21:23:50.854-04:00What's Really the Problem<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Climate change, when it comes to our our global dilemma referred to as "Climate Change," isn't the real issue. It is, ultimately, an effect. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
Nor, by suggesting that "climate is changing" (which it does throughout geologic history) does it capture why it is a problem. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
A far bigger problem with this phrase is it directly ties the problem, and our sense of it, to what we see in the climate around us. And, while climate scientists are always telling us to be concerned about the future, it invariably ties our sense of how "bad," or "major," the problem is, to the climate we are experiencing now. The rest is all "conjecture," or seems like it.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
So what is the real problem?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
Long lived atmospheric greenhouse gas levels are increasing. Everyone knows that, right? But that's not the problem either. The problem is almost never reported, and, probably as a result, is also not very widely known. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
This is odd, on an issue that much of the world seems to have a very strong, often passionate, opinion on. (Whatever that opinion may be. And if you've made it to this blog/information site - or even if you haven't - you know those opinions vary. Greatly.) </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
It is also extremely problematic. For everyone. Because acting (or not acting) on bad or critically incomplete information, leads to the wrong kind of action (or non action), as well as the wrong kinds of discussions, arguments, and considerations to begin with.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
The problem can be captured in a single sentence. But let's build up to it, with the basic reasons why that single sentence, almost never uttered or heard, is such a big issue. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
Higher concentrations of long lived atmospheric greenhouse gases prevent more heat from escaping earth's atmosphere. More retained atmospheric heat, even if a minute amount, impacts several major direct earth systems which are heat energy responsive. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />Most of these play a huge role in or otherwise drive climate: Such as <a href="https://www.esr.org/outreach/glossary/albedo.html">snow cover</a>, and what, along with ice, sand, water, deforestation, etc. it greatly affects, namely, <a href="http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Observing_the_Earth/Reflecting_on_Earth_s_albedo">earth's surface</a> <a href="http://www.climatedata.info/Forcing/Forcing/albedo.html">albedo</a>, or measure of reflectivity; ice caps; sea ice; <a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/07/heat-around-and-below.html">oceans</a>; and <a href="http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/climatescience/climatesciencenarratives/what-is-the-greenhouse-effect.html">atmospheric heat re-radiation</a> - the initial driver of these affects - which when large enough is exacerbated or self reinforcing by extra melting, which in turn releases more trapped carbon dioxide and methane, two major greenhouse gases, which in turn of course creates more atmospheric heat re-radiation, causing more melting, etc; and of course - though secondary to any impact large enough to make fundamental changes in any of the basic drivers of or major influences upon climate - there is the increased average retained heat in the atmosphere itself.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
(Atmospheric <a href="http://www.skepticalscience.com/earth-albedo-effect.htm">albedo</a>, which is really just part of the earth's total albedo, or reflectivity, of course plays a large role also. But due to cloud formation and dissipation - a result of climate and not a driver of it - it is always changing. <a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-confusion-of-water.html">It also represents a generally positive - but still somewhat unclear - increased warming feedback loop</a>: More cloud cover increases overall albedo and reflects back or diffuses more sunlight before it even his the earth. But the water vapor it is comprised of, due to high concentrations levels, acts as a very potent greenhouse gas. <a href="http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-confusion-of-water.html">Both during the day, when the increased cloud cover is also simultaneously having a sunlight blocking, and cooling affect. And at night, when it is not</a>.) </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
Note that painting the roof of your house white versus brown has the same type of impact. The white has a higher albedo, or reflectivity, so more heat is immediately reflected off instead of absorbed. And some of that goes into space, so there is an infinitesimally small (diminishing) impact upon total retained heat by our earth atmosphere system. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
Climate is in fact ultimately a reflection of the energy input from the sun, which shifts a little but otherwise is <i>usually</i> within moderate ranges of output (which, though over a period of hundreds of millions of years, is <a href="http://www.universetoday.com/18847/life-of-the-sun/">very slowly increasing</a>), and all of these things on earth, such as white roofs, tree cover, macadam, open water, ice, snow, tree cover, open fields, etc., that affect how much of that received sun energy is retained. (Making idiotic by this alone the initial question as to whether man kind was affecting the climate - though it has been repeatedly asked anyway.) </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
And which, before man came along and became moderately modern - <a href="http://www.livescience.com/21378-global-warming-preindustrial-revolution.html">chopping down a lot of forest</a> and leading to a lessening of the major land sink for atmospheric carbon, and starting it all off - was, at least in comparison to our current best expectation, in shorter chunks of time at least, relatively stable. (At least, absent the occasional wild dust spewing and atmospheric blocking <a href="http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/130212--chicxulub-asteroid-dinosaurs-volcano-mass-extinction-environment-science/">volcanic eruption</a>, large meteor <a href="http://www.sci-news.com/othersciences/geophysics/article00980.html">or asteroid</a> impact (which ostensibly led to such major climate changes that it ultimately helped wipe out the dinosaurs, in of the great mass extinctions in earth history), or change in some other pattern that led to a large shift in greenhouse gas concentrations, or ice buildup.) </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
It is, pertaining to these things, of course a question of degree. (No pun intended.) </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">And that degree, of late, and not just in modern terms, but more critically, in far broader, "geologic" terms, </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">has been huge</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
We're not particularly good with scope. Numbers scope. (Quick, visualize a pile of a million pebbles. Now visualize a trillion. Was your second pile really a million times larger than the first pile? What did it look like in comparison to the first?) Or, more generally, science scope.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
But the scope of change in greenhouse gas levels - the same gases that are responsible for the earth <a href="http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Greenhouse_effect.html">not</a> having an average temperature of below zero - have not, unlike say the shifting of color of your house or building's roof, been infinitesimally small, nor even minor; but, geologically speaking, they have already been radical. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />That is, <b>atmospheric concentrations of</b> the<b> long lived greenhouse gases</b> that ultimately determine how much of the heat reaching the earth and re emitted gets re radiated back to the rest of the atmosphere and back downward, rather than out into space, <b>have now reached levels not collectively seen on earth in several millions years</b>. That, as stated in bold, is the problem. That, is the issue. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
More importantly even, from our perspective anyway, the change <i>has been super fast</i>. And while the levels of one of these long lasting greenhouse gases - the major one, CO2 - was fairly high (in part due to where it happened to be under the generally far slower, undulating fluctuations over the minor eons, and in some part due to all the deforestation over Europe that had already occurred), all of this multi-million year change has occurred over a time span that represents well less than one one-thousandth of it: A couple hundred years; and much of that change, in the last half century alone. A half century equals <i>50</i> years. Several million equals <i>(X)X,000,000</i> years. <i>Big,</i> difference. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
That, is what the problem is. Along with, when it comes to being reasonably able to do anything about it, the fact that we are still adding to the level of these changes - making them ever more radical still - at still breakneck speeds.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
Carbon Dioxide, the main (and most commonly known) Greenhouse gas, <b>has already alone hit levels <a href="http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2013/05/130510-earth-co2-milestone-400-ppm/">probably not seen</a> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/11/science/earth/carbon-dioxide-level-passes-long-feared-milestone.html?pagewanted=all">on earth in three million years</a></b>.) <a href="http://www.rtcc.org/2012/10/04/nitrous-oxide-and-methane-the-forgotten-gases-in-the-forests-and-climate-change-debate/">nitrous oxide</a>, <a href="http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2013/06/mean-methane-levels-reach-1800-ppb.html">methane</a>, and a far more sparse but still powerful long term greenhouse gas type, <a href="http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/mguidry/Unnamed_Site_2/Chapter%202/Chapter2D.html">chlorofluorocarbons</a> and <a href="http://www.enviropedia.org.uk/Global_Warming/HCFCs.php">hydrochlorofluorocarbons</a> (both completely man-made and thus unprecedented), have also spiked, adding greatly to the overall collective effect.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
For instance, here's a chart of atmospheric methane levels, going back almost a million years, which shows that the range was relatively small over the entire period, and then in geologic terms it has suddenly gone straight up (<a href="http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/science/indicators/ghg/ghg-concentrations.html">EPA</a>).</span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/images/indicator_downloads/ghg-concentrations-download2-2014.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" src="http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/images/indicator_downloads/ghg-concentrations-download2-2014.png" height="237" width="320" /></span></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 15.680000305175781px; text-align: justify;">It's essentially the same pattern, although not as radically, for nitrous oxides, again, going back nearly a million years (</span><a href="http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/science/indicators/ghg/ghg-concentrations.html" style="-webkit-transition: color 0.3s; background-color: white; color: #009eb8; display: inline; line-height: 15.680000305175781px; outline: none; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; transition: color 0.3s;">EPA</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 15.680000305175781px; text-align: justify;">)</span></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/images/indicator_downloads/ghg-concentrations-download3-2014.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" src="http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/images/indicator_downloads/ghg-concentrations-download3-2014.png" height="237" width="320" /></span></a></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
Notice the very tail end of both geologic historic charts (the ones on the left) - they both go straight up. And the by far more radical of the two - methane - also happens to be the more important of the two, second only in importance to carbon dioxide. And, though relatively short lived (it breaks down into carbon dioxide though), methane is gaining in importance on carbon dioxide, as more and more carbon, <a href="https://nsidc.org/cryosphere/frozenground/methane.html">trapped beneath</a> long <a href="http://www.wunderground.com/resources/climate/melting_permafrost.asp?MR=1">frozen but now slowly melting</a> surface ice and snow, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jul/24/arctic-thawing-permafrost-climate-change">is released</a> in the form of methane. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
We don't have as precise readings on these levels beyond about 800,000 years, but while from deposit sink records methane levels have fluctuated highly well back in the geologic past, these are on the order of many million year fluctuations, and there has been nothing to indicate that methane levels (or nitrous oxides) have approached today's levels in a few to several or more million years. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
But the more important point is that the main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, is at levels, and still fast rising, now likely <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-10/hawaii-carbon-dioxide-measurement-for-may-9-passed-400-ppm.html">not seen in three million years</a>, (Though <a href="http://phys.org/news/2013-05-carbon-dioxide-atmosphere-historic-high.html">estimates vary from</a> between two million, to ten million, years.) And it is unlikely that the collective affect of the other, lesser, but still important greenhouse gases (including the man made ones that of course didn't even exist) was even as high back then as it is today; meaning that the total collective level of long lived greenhouse gas concentrations in terms of their net heat re radiating affect, or atmospheric long lived heat trapping gas quotient, is probably higher than it has been at any point in the last several million years on earth. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
As Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-10/hawaii-carbon-dioxide-measurement-for-may-9-passed-400-ppm.html">reported in Bloomberg Ne</a><a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-10/hawaii-carbon-dioxide-measurement-for-may-9-passed-400-ppm.html">ws</a>, puts it, "<i>We
are in the process of creating a prehistoric climate that humans have
no evolutionary experience of</i>." </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />This is key – conditions were very different the last time the atmosphere had this
much re-radiation intensity, and in particular were very different – and
the REAL problem here - from the conditions under which we, and the
species, we relied upon, evolved (and spread out over <a href="http://www.universetoday.com/25756/surface-area-of-the-earth/">land</a> <a href="http://www.universetoday.com/25756/surface-area-of-the-earth/">above sea level</a>, upon). </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
Ward goes on to point out, that three million
years ago, "<i>temperatures were 2 to 3 degrees Celsius higher than
pre-industrial times, the polar ice caps were much smaller, and sea
levels were about 20 meters (66 feet) higher than today</i>."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
Or at least 30 feet. They're both, however, bad. For us, anyway, and at least some of the species that currently share the planet with us. Not for the planet as a whole. (Which couldn't care less one way or another. It's a planet. Not a life form.) </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />If this, or at least some effect toward this
end, is the likely result, you may wonder why we have not seen it. A powerful hint is
found in those seemingly mundane charts just above. It is also found
in a chart of Carbon Dioxide levels going back over the same 800,000
year level. Key in on the very last part:</span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://nas-sites.org/americasclimatechoices/files/2012/10/Figure-14.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" src="http://nas-sites.org/americasclimatechoices/files/2012/10/Figure-14.png" height="316" width="320" /></span></a></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The very end of this <a href="http://nas-sites.org/americasclimatechoices/files/2012/10/Figure-14.png">chart</a> above (replicated <a href="http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/history.html">here at NOAA</a>, which also frames it next to the last 200 years, which gives a better view of the last few centuries) - representing the beginning of the industrial age, or <a href="http://nas-sites.org/americasclimatechoices/files/2012/10/Figure-14.png">the late 1700s</a> - essentially goes <i>straight up</i>. As did the end of both of the others above.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
On a geological scale, all these changes are all but immediate. The idea that we would see whatever result is going to occur within years of its cause, is based upon a naturally very man-centric sense of geologic and physical time; which might view 50 years as very long, whereas in geologic terms, it's next to nothing. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
The affect of increased trapped heat is not immediate in terms of our perception, because there are multiple relatively stable stases conditions on earth - such as, in terms of our climate - the oceans, ice caps, and total <a href="http://www.nc-climate.ncsu.edu/edu/k12/.albedo">surface albedo</a>, mentioned above. All of which, increased re radiated ("trapped" heat in the atmosphere), over time, starts to alter. Slowly at first, then, more quickly, as the longer term climate stabilizing affects start to lessen as a result.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
We are already starting to see the first signs of both patterns. Both the affect, and its beginning acceleration. Such as in the melting of<a href="http://nsidc.org/icelights/crash-course/arctic-sea-ice/"> Arctic ice</a><span style="color: black;">, </span><span style="color: black;"><a href="http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/oceans-continue-to-warm-especially-the-deeps/">ocean warming</a></span><span style="color: black;">, and slight, but also seemingly increasing, softening and melting of the </span><span style="color: black;"><a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/04/09/melting_permafrost_switches_to_nasty_highgear_methane_release/">Northern permafrost</a></span><span style="color: black;">. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
The issue is not "if," as it is often portrayed. But "when," and "how much," almost none of which can be prevented, other than possibly through massive atmospheric remediation. (Such as playing Frankenstein with the skies even more radically than we already have, albeit on purpose this time; and something we might one day have, and very likely will, to some degree try to resort to.)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
The major problem now is that we are still adding to this, and rapidly. And for the same reasons briefly gone over above, each unit of increase will increase the problem by increasingly larger amounts. That is, more trapped atmospheric heat will only further lessen the earth's long term surface albedo, further reflecting less heat energy, and absorbing more of it directly into the surface, etc.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
It's not a perfect equation, in fact no one knows the equation, or possibly can. But from the basic geophysics of the issue, it is, most definitely a compounding if not moderately exponential problem. Hence, continuing to add more to it now = really bad idea.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8909518152474729073.post-17187015377924470542014-07-12T04:11:00.001-04:002014-07-12T04:34:55.376-04:00Heat Around and Below<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: #073763; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This
is a good place to start with what the "Climate Change" issue really is about -- and
something rarely mentioned. The source, along with the
Sun, and Oxygen in the air, of all life: Water. The beautiful color blue. Blue, that in temperature ranges, represents not the coldest end of the spectrum we often associate it with, but the hottest.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: #073763; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #073763; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And while the water around us is by no means hot, it is getting warmer. Consistently, getting warmer. </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
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<span style="color: #073763; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Here's a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (</span><a href="http://www.noaa.gov/" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">NOAA</a><span style="color: #073763; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">) chart of the world's ocean heat content, from the National Climatic Data Center (</span><a href="http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">NCDC</a><span style="color: #073763; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">), that helps illustrate this (direct <a href="http://here%27s%20a%20national%20oceanic%20and%20atmospheric%20administration%20%28noaa%29%20chart%2C%20from%20the%20national%20climatic%20data%20center%20%28ncdc%29%2C%20%20that%20helps%20illustrate%20this%20rise./">link</a>):</span></div>
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<a href="http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/images/indicators/ocean-heat-content.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><img border="0" src="http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/images/indicators/ocean-heat-content.gif" height="228" width="320" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="color: #073763; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">One key thing to remember: Large bodies of water are extremely stable temperature wise. Huge bodies of water, even more so. The world ocean, comprised of the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Southern (or Antarctic),and Arctic oceans, and many seas, is a huge body of water; <a href="http://www.orma.com/ocean/what-are-the-5-oceans/">covering about</a> 71% of the earth's surface (right now), and <a href="http://water.usgs.gov/edu/gallery/global-water-volume.html">comprising over</a> 1.3 billion cubic kilometers of water. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #073763; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Just one single cubic kilometer is about 1.3 cubic billion (1,300,000,000) yards (or over 10,000,000,000 cubic feet). And there are <a href="http://water.usgs.gov/edu/gallery/global-water-volume.html">a little over</a> 1.3 BILLION of these (which would be about 1,750,000,000,000,000,000 cubic yards, total), <a href="http://water.usgs.gov/edu/gallery/global-water-volume.html">representing about</a> 96.5% of all of the water on earth and in the air above us. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #073763; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It's a lot of water. And this water is what both stabilizes, and ultimately drives, climate on earth. And for the past half of a century, it has not only been slowly rising in temperature, but slowly increasing, in its rate of rise, as well. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #073763; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Far more relevant to the problem that we refer to as Climate Change, often thought of as a temperature problem, notice that heat is measured in <a href="http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/306617/joule">Joules</a>, a measurement of energy. Heat is energy. And that increase in the Ocean's heat, shown in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chart posted above, represents an increase in the ocean's, and our world's, total retained net energy. This is a big part of what the Climate Change issue really is: A Radical Atmospheric Change (in our atmosphere's heat re radiation quotient) leading to an increasing energy retention, and an increasing net energy balance, here on our planet. And one increasingly out of line with what the earth has seen over the past several hundred thousand, to several million years.</span><span style="color: #073763; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span></div>
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<span style="color: #073763; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Not "Climate." </span></div>
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<span style="color: #073763; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Ultimately, energy, and the oceans, drive climate. And we would expect to see climate, from our our perspective, to radically shift as a result. And - while many ideologically driven sites and even books and some scientifically misinformed politicians strive for all kinds of ways to argue (as if it ultimately really mattered) that the "coincidental" increases in overall ambient global climate temperatures is due to "other" factors (just <a href="https://www.google.com/">Google</a> it, there's no point in linking to examples of ideology masquerading as science, found in abundance on the Internet and even sometimes in speeches on the floors of Congress), </span><span style="color: #073763; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">despite a rise in precisely what would, as a matter of physics, drive such an increase in climate over time</span><span style="color: #073763; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> - we are in fact, </span><a href="http://climate.nasa.gov/interactives/warming_world" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>gently now at first, starting to see just such a rise</b></a><span style="color: #073763; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #073763; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Along with several other, far more consequential, and alarming, further "corroborative" or oddly "coincidental" signs, which we'll cover here in numerous interesting posts to come. </span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8909518152474729073.post-58050338525225326712014-07-12T03:13:00.000-04:002014-07-12T03:16:34.891-04:00Confusion in the Air Above<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Why is there so much confusion and misinformation on the issue we call Climate Change?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Addressing that question, will help us better address the issue itself. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Climate Change is the result. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Change in the air above us; radical, long term change; change, on the order of millions of years, is the problem. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">When we understand what the problem is, even amidst all the zealous advocacy out there and select assertion as fact dumping dominating the Internet (and several politician's speeches) on this issue, we can have a much better local, national, and international discussion about the problem; and about what the affects of the problem might be. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Until we do that, we can't. Or, at least, we certainly, aren't.</span><br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0