The Glade 4.0

It must be easy to get a consensus when you have the clout to blacklist people so they're no longer considered "peer review published scientists"...


Bah. The Smithsonian Institute? Bunch of corporate hacks. And Harvard? Talk about fringe right!

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

So what do you guys think is going on with regards to HIGCC research and policy? Do you think it's all bunk, foisted on the public as a massive fraud to justify research budgets and greater government control of the economy? Do you think it's probably real to some extent, but exaggerated by a combination of intentional hype and unintentional bias? Do you think the science is just too unclear to at this point to know either way? Or what?

I view the whole debacle is a poorly framed argument.

If the question was not about global warming (which requires peer-reviewed scientific data that cannot be verified due to the climate-cycle span) but instead was framed as:

• Do you want energy independence?
• Want a cheaper way to get from point A to point B?
• Want clean air and water for yourself and your kids?

Then you would be hard pressed to find anyone who would say No to any of the above and the conversation would move into what is a reasonable cost for the above?

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It's easier to get a consensus when you only require one person's word on the subject.

http://news.suite101.com/article.cfm/ne ... rt-a253855

I'd have picked a more mainstream publication for the reference, but the media seems to be ignoring the story. Probably rightfully so - it is a minor issue, but still...

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In time, this too shall pass.

"Do you think the science is just too unclear to at this point to know either way?"

Far too corrupted by people who ignore data in order to support their conclusions, have disdain for the scientific method, are addicted to a belief, addicted to funding, addicted to an agenda of control - to get any decent results.

At least in most governmental or international organizations. I believe most professors at this point couldn't even teach to students without comitting to some degree of bias which horribly devalues any near future studies.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Just so we are clear, is is your contention that humans are incapable of affecting global climate change? Or simply that our contribution pales in comparison to other trends?

I think that human influenced global climate change is pretty much bunk. All the "warming" from anthropogenic sources doesn't come close to that which the Earth produces on its own.

I don't think that humans account for anything more than 5% of GCC, and that's being generous.

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Holy shitsnacks!

And what's your view of the studies and scientists who say otherwise, Mus? Are they deliberate frauds, unintentionally biased, or what?

I think that there is a core group, probably authentically identified, for the most part, by an unbiased perusal of the Climategate emails, who are deliberate frauds originally out to make a reputation and secure funding, and now heavily invested in their own credibility and funding.

I think that there is a much broader pool of unintentional bias colored by these original researchers and the environmental movement, whose confirmation bias has lead them to do further studies based on the manipulated data sets, contributing further confirmation bias via their lack of rigor in reviewing the original data and methods, and the lack of effort made to confirm conclusions, observations, and trends with new, comprehensive data sets. In other words, a bunch of people who are committing very bad science with good intentions.

And a big ol' lump of hubris and egotism involved all around, imagining that they have anywhere near the capability to model these things with any kind of accuracy based on what is, cosmically speaking (since we're dealing with near-cosmic level systems), a tiny dataset, let alone doing so with imprecise and untested sampling methods. There's so little we understand about the Earth and our planetary equilibrium; pretty much the only thing we do know is that, as any weatherman will tell you, it's preposterously complex and has innumerable variables. To believe we have the capability to even begin to assess the elasticity of the equilibrium our planet has created (and thus its resilience in maintaining an equilibrium state in the face of human-originating pressures on some of the variables) is beyond absurd.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

I tend to sway towards what Kaffis posted, with a heavy dose of the following positions..

Were there dramatic climatic shifts prior to the industrial revolution, much less the existence of homo sapiens? Yes.

Did those previous shifts greatly surpass what is currently hypothesized as the outcome of HIGW? Yes, and greatly so.

Are there currently, on going natural events that are related to past shifts in global climate? Yes, such as solar activity, tectonic shift, volcanism, etc.

Does the evidence that what is currently being "witnessed" point solely and conclusively to HIGW? No. There does appear to evidence of localized effects, such as heat island, but the data collected to support global claims is unsubstantiated and prone to bad data entries (see tons of evidence regarding temperature gauges and locations), and the fact those that claim to be able to make predictions thus far haven't made any accurately.

We can prove and even replicate the effects on a small scale. Why is it so incomprehensible that those effects apply on the large scale?

No one is suggesting that the climate has not been affected by other forces (Solar activity, meteor/comet strike, nearby supernova, volcanic activity, etc)

The believers in HIGCC are suggesting that human influence adds another disruptive factor, and unlike those other factors our influence continues to increase instead of being a rare event, its an increasing factor.

I also think that people are of the mindset of "Well the climate changes, its natural, therefor we shouldn't stand in its way."

Of course most those events involved mass extinctions, major shifts in the landscape and in some cases, could be described as nothing less than apocalyptic. Even on a lesser scale, damage to economies, habitable spaces, etc are not anything to be desired and should in fact be combated vociferously.

Its been a while since I took thermodynamics, but someone check me on the basics here......



Lets look at this strictly from a thermodynamics perspective. Energy really only leaves Earth in 3 ways.
1) Reflected
2) Emitted (black body infared)
3) Mechanical

We're going to discount 3 for these purposes.

For the moment, lets assume that the Earth's ability to radiate energy away is a typical blackbody scenario. (For the moment I'm going to dismiss greenhouse effects)

The earth's plant life has been absorbing energy for billions of years. That gets stored and eventually converted to fossil fuels (exactly why they're a fuel source, they're molecules evolutionary selected as chemical potential energy that can be converted from solar energy using photosynthesis.


I'm just going to make up some numbers here, just to show that the math works.

Lets say on a virgin Earth, plant life absorbs 10% of the Sun's energy and stores it chemically long term. The remainder reaches an equilibrium where Earth maintains a constant temperature. Part is reflected away into space, part is absorbed by emitted back into space as blackbody infrared.

That 10% that was being stored accumulates and is converted to fossil fuels which have been accumulating for billions of years, slowly powering up.

Now we reach a point where we're consuming those fossil fuels (ie, releasing energy back into the system.) at the same time we're decreasing the planets ability to store energy. (Destruction of plant life means we're no longer charging the fossil fuel battery) So we're adding heat back into the system at the same time we're effectively increasing the total amount of energy that is not converted to chemical potential energy.


I=Incoming Solar Energy
A=Energy absorbed by plant life and converted to potential energy
B=Black Body radiation Earth 'releases'
R=Reflected Solar Energy
G=Energy burned in the form of fossil fuels

Lets assume I= Constant (Yes, we know it varies, we're breaking this down to a simple scenario)

For the system to be in something approaching thermal stasis, I-A=B+R
In this scenario Earth continues to Accumulate potential energy in the form of A, but otherwise is able to remain constant.

However as we start to burn fuels, we introduce a new term, at the same time we decrease A.

Since I we're holding constant, B is actually a factor of the temperature of the planet, R remains relatively fixed, and we're adding G the equation then becomes unbalanced. If B actually scaled directly this might actually work but it doesn't.

I-A < B+R+G -- net result is the average temperature increases.


This is just pure thermodynamics. There are many other effects to consider. (Increased greenhouse activity lowering the Earths ability to radiate energy away for one)

And what happened last time it was warm and there was an abundance of CO2? Oh, right, the planet was overrun with enormous swathes of plant life, enough that it could support giant lizards. So your assumption that human fossil fuel burning is the only factor affecting A in your little thermodynamic triumph seems pretty bunk.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

That's the point, right there.

Computer models do the same thing - "make up some numbers", and that's the basis of the majority of information presented as supporting evidence for climate change. The lack of accuracy in the historic data, the extrapolation of temperature proxies by cherry picking the sources, the terrible deterioration of existing temperature collecting sites, and the immaturity of satellite information all compromise the integrity of the computer model.

There's not enough science and too much politics in the topic these days.

When the ozone layer was discovered and fluorocarbons determined to be the cause, there was a ban and alternative solutions were used, there wasn't a "tax" or wealth redistribution scam.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?ti ... oal_plants



So, nuclear power would seem to be an obvious solution, right? Then why isn't it pursued ... why isn't this advertised as a solution, or at least a really good start? Six hundred large coal-burning power plants account for nearly all coal usage, so why are folks talking about using taxes to buy carbon offsets instead of investing in nuclear power plants to replace coal burning ones? Why is buying credits from other countries even on the table?

Politics is my guess. Progressive agendas. Of course, that's just a guess, but when the answer to that simple question is so hard to come by, the idea that the answer of how the hard ones are now "consensus" begs all sorts of questions.

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In time, this too shall pass.

"Accidental conspiracy" which is what I go with for basically every major "hoax" pulled on "the people" that involves oligarchic centers of power, learning, or control.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

Because Mythbusters proves sometimes that not all effects scale properly.

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Holy shitsnacks!

Cap and trade, offsets, etc. were actually Republican and industry concepts proposed as market-friendly alternatives to the traditional command-and-control regulations (i.e. bans) that progressives favored. The Right won that argument, and then shifted the goalposts to start painting cap-and-trade as a liberal conspiracy to raise taxes.

This is easily the most idiotic statement anyone has made in a while.
A) I already pointed out about 3 posts back this exact fact, but such statements more often apply when you shift scale from quantum mechanics to classical mechanics.
B) Check your logic. Just because things SOMETIMES don't scale, does NOT mean they Never scale, or even that they don't ALMOST ALWAYS scale

Uhm. Not even close to what I suggested. In the scenario I'm positing. In fact in my scenario A is only dependent on the amount of plant life, not the amount of CO2. Nice try though.

Actually most environmental movements have embraced a move to nuclear power these days. And I'm not advocating any particular system of taxes as a solution. In fact I think our solutions will be found in science. (Hydrogen power, nuclear, solar, wind) and I think in the end the real solution will be space based solar generators/reflectors at the L1 point until we are better able to control our profile.

It's a damn shame that folks can be talked into doing something stupid, but that doesn't detract from the fact that it's stupid.

When the progressives start talking seriously about going with nuclear alternatives and stop the talk about wealth redistribution, then I will be more inclined to believe it may be a serious problem, but carbon offsets and such aren't a solution to reducing co2. And, without offering real solutions, I'm not convinced folks think there's a real problem.

There may or may not be cause for concern, but all I'm seeing out of this is politics as usual. Damn shame, really. I hope it's not serious.

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In time, this too shall pass.

And my point is that plant life will increase in CO2 rich environments, which your "fuel burning reduces A" argument neglects to acknowledge.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

And my point is that plant life will increase in CO2 rich environments, which your "fuel burning reduces A" argument neglects to acknowledge.[/quote]
Where will this plant life pop-up? From what I've seen the last 4000+ years of human activity have steadily deforested the planet.

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... You're not serious are you?

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It wouldn't be, if the small scale you claim that is being replicated, or the composite models of all those small scale experiments, actually returned a result that matched what was expected from the individual small scale. That has not yet happened, further reinforcing the idea that there is simply not enough information about such a complex system.


Yet you just ignored those factors in your "made up to prove to the math" example, when some climatologists consider those exceptionally important, yet can't agree on the effects (solar forcing, cloud feedback loops, etc).


We agree on the creating a disrupting factor. I believe I have always stated on these boards when ask that I think there is some influence. I just have always questioned the degree of that influence, the egotistical determination that we can influence a much larger trend in any meaningful way, and most importantly, the effectiveness of what is being proposed considering they can't get models to predict what is actually occurring. If they can't even get that right, why am I supposed to trust their predictions on the solution would work?


And just to reiterate the point, there is a relatively heated (sorry for pun) debate on exactly the feedback mechanism related to green house cases and reflective ability of clouds in that feedback loop. You have made the assumption that one factor forcing is more or less important than the opposing forcing from another, when that hasn't been conclusively proven yet.

Over 4,000 years, probably, since we don't have any records of forest levels then, but I would think it safe to say there were more trees. Over the last 100 years, you'd be surprised.

Of course, you have also limited your "plant" life to a trees, while ignoring much larger CO2 absorbing engines. Plus, there is the fact that a mature forest is net 0 when it comes to removing CO2 from the atmosphere.