The Most Extra New Super Global Warming Thread

[bkelly]

Originally Posted by Lucky Shot

I don't blame you for hanging your hat on the just released IPCC predictions as there are no way to figure out if the predictions are worth their weight in spit. There are no results to measure against the predictions.

Many components of the long term models are given shorter time scale problems and tested individually. The IPCC goes into some detail about testing models in the IPCC's FAR.

Originally Posted by Luck Shot

Specifically, looking at the models used to predict the antarctic and arctic oceans they noted that only some of the models deal with aerosols whereas some of the models they leaned on do not. Aren't Aerosols an important piece to the climate puzzle?

I believe all of the models in the IPCC's FAR consider aersolols. The IPCC's Climate Models and their Evaluation document that I linked above says:

Climate simulations including atmospheric aerosols with chemical transport have greatly improved since the TAR. Simulated global aerosol distributions are better compared with observations, especially satellite data (e.g., Advanced Very High Resolution Radar (AVHRR), Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), Multi-angle Imaging Spectroradiometer (MISR), Polarization and Directionality of the Earth’s Reflectance (POLDER), Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS)), the ground-based network (Aerosol Robotic Network; AERONET) and many measurement campaigns (e.g., Chin et al., 2002; Takemura et al., 2002).

Originally Posted by Luck Shot

By the time we begin to have any results to begin to hold these predictions accountable, you'll have moved your hat to a new prediction.

I agree with you here. In fact, I think your two points before have merit as well. (Actually your points above were after. I rearranged the order of your quotes for clarity.) Sure, we've tested some of the components of models but we can't test the model as a whole until we get ten or twenty years down the road. We also include aerosols in these model runs but there are many other factors and details for climate forecasting that are omitted like accurate predictions of volcanoes or El Nino.

So, these models are quite imperfect and may be wrong. What do you suggest we do?

bkelly

[Lucky Shot]

Originally Posted by bkelly

Then I return to my statement that you're pushing a specific conclusion. Labeling the other side as "Chicken Little stories" with the full message in mind is emotionally selling your side.

If it is my belief that what we are seeing is advocates taking advantage of natural storms and cycles and overexaggerating them with doom and gloom with their predictions of tidal waves of water, I feel free to label them alarmists.

LuckyShot, you're dancing around the debate. In this last paragraph you stated:

1) The wind doesn't explain all the polar melting we've seen
2) The numbers I provided only covered half the years in question
3) What melting the wind has caused is significant
4) We need numbers on seasonal melt to understand wind melting
5) The wind caused indirect melting that my numbers don't take into account

While any of these may be true they are complex notions requiring some tough searching yet I don't believe any of them are your actual position in this discussion. If I show any one of the above points to be wrong or irrelevant, you'll quickly abandon it but maintain your side of the argument because you don't really care if wind actually causes indirect melting or not. You only present these ideas because they support your actual position which I believe to be:

The melting of the arctic ice is not evidence for global warming and can be explained by natural variability and an unusual arctic wind.

I'm willing to debate this idea with you if you like but I won't let you jump from argument to argument before some agreement is reached. That only clouds and confuses the issues and we have an abundance of that in global warming discussions already.

Interested or are you confident in position?



You're inferring way too much from this article. Nowhere does it talk about "20-30cm thicker", "generally thicker overall" or "the majority of spots they measured were thicker".

I am not saying your article shows the ice was thinner. I do not believe one can pull scientific data from a story in the mass media. As far as I know the ice in the Davis Strait and Beaufort Sea may be thicker than last year, but this article doesn't say.

I'll revisit this at a later time. The reason for this response was the overly simplified question asking me if 40% of the ice melt was due to ice being shipped out through the fram straits, what caused the other 60%, warming? Warming is overly vague and in context of the argument understood to be Anthropogenic Global Warming when I believe that this was caused by natural phenomina (Summer, El Nino, greater damage from winds then explained in the abstract, Unusual Weather but not climate, etc...) as opposed to CO2 Radiative Forcing.

I didn't say I stood by the IPCC's models. I said I stood by their forecast for Antarctica made in the TAR.

And we haven't been discussing climate models. I brought up the IPCC's Antarctica prediction was to counter your implication that a growing Antarctica was contrary to what was predicted with global warming. It isn't and now you're again dancing around the subject by jumping to a different argument.

But I do think some of your points about models are interesting so I'll respond to them in a different post. If you want to talk more about models, you can respond there.

bkelly

Please explain this further. I am under the impression that the climate models would be used to create their forecast. If this is the case, please explain why you would believe the forecast and not the models used to generate the forecast.

Lucky Shot

[bkelly]

Originally Posted by GhostintheShell

We cannot make accurate predictions about glacial retreat or advance because we don't have enough data and not nearly enough accurate historical data. You can argue an increased rate of retreat due to MMGW....but you run into the same problem of lack of data.

Really? Then have a look at this:



This is a smoothed estimation of the lengths of 169 glacier tongues over the past 300 years using length records. The zero line is each area's value in 1950. Details of this study can be found here.

Would you not agree that this chart is enough to suggest that glaciers around the world are melting?

And would also you not agree that whatever the cause, it seemed to start around 1850?

Originally Posted by GhostintheShell

Is it a catastrophe that a village in nepal has to be abandoned or moved once in 1000 years because the water source dried up? Hasn't this migration occurred almost everywhere else in the world throughout history? People move to new locations with adequate resources when their current resources run out.

I appreciate your candor. I think solutions are hard to find without people being honest about their point of view.

I do have a question. Suppose anthropogenic global warming is proven as fact and it is also proven that the emmissions from Canada are responsible for some of the warming that caused the need for this village to move. In such a scenario, should the people of Canada pay these people of Nepal some sort of compensation for the inconvience of moving?

And before you say, "No, because they were going to have to move at some point anyway" consider how well such an argument would be received in a Canadian court of law. Suppose I crash into your parked car, wrecking it but then argue I owe you nothing because you were eventually going to have to scrap the car anyway.

bkelly

[GhostintheShell]

I don't think the graph you posted really tells us much of anything reliable.

Although I had my numbers of measured glaciers underestimated at ~60, but the population in your graph is in reality 169. Interesting that the number since I read up on the subject maybe one year ago has risen magically to 169. Maybe they located more data in other areas of the world?

I'm also not sure what glaciers in particular were studied as the graph only states geographic area not specific glaciers, as well most data has been collected on glaciers in cold and often high altitude locations. How about the glaciers that exist between the tropic of capricorn and cancer? This has been a known problem with glacier studies, most of the good data is in the alps, in Norway etc. One of the troubles with generalized glacier size data is that each glacier has such unique influences of local temperature and altitude.

The population and the time period of the graph are still far too short as well. 169 glaciers measured since according to your graph 1700. There are hundreds of thousands of known glaciers that have probably been shrinking on and off for 10,000 years. I still state that they had little or no way to measure glacial retreat prior to much more modern technology being invented. Land surveying wasn't exactly up to par in the 1800's. Think also about estimation of thickness, not simple length and width.



Regarding the Canada question, I would support an appropriate amount of aid to those people. That aid should be proportionate to the amount of Canada's contribution to the (proven) level of anthropogenic global warming and its direct affects on the country in question. I think its also important that they also have to mitigate and reduce their own damages as well. If they fail to take action to protect property or persons from harm when that harm is easily foreseeable and avoidable I'm not going to feel quite so responsible.

[bkelly]

Originally Posted by Lucky Shot

The reason for this response was the overly simplified question asking me if 40% of the ice melt was due to ice being shipped out through the fram straits, what caused the other 60%, warming?

Not quite. I asked for your thoughts regarding one scientist who attributes 40% for the recent melting to wind (a position you support) attributes the other 60% to warming (a position you reject). What do you think now that you know one of the scientists at the lab that supports your wind argument also contradicts your position that the arctic is not melting due to warming?

Warming is overly vague and in context of the argument understood to be Anthropogenic Global Warming when I believe that this was caused by natural phenomina (Summer, El Nino, greater damage from winds then explained in the abstract, Unusual Weather but not climate, etc...) as opposed to CO2 Radiative Forcing.

I do not equate arctic warming and anthropogenic global warming. Ron Kwok said 60% of the melting could be explained by "the recent warmer winters and summers". He does not connect this warming and MMGW.

And by the way, "summer" is not a natural phenomena to explain this melting becuase we're not talking about seasonal ice. The research I've seen coming from NASA's JPL specifically looks at multiyear ice in the acrtic - in other words, what's left over at the peak of summer.

Originally Posted by Lucky Shot

Please explain this further. I am under the impression that the climate models would be used to create their forecast.

Certainly models are used for their forecast but as well as current observations and some plain old common sense. If you warm an area 1 degree that's already twenty degrees below freezing, you're going to get more ice because nothing melts and precipitation increases.

bkelly

[bkelly]

Originally Posted by GhostintheShell

I don't think the graph you posted really tells us much of anything reliable.

I believe you, but to your assertion that the graph shows nothing reliable- bull-patties!

Originally Posted by GhostintheShell

Although I had my numbers of measured glaciers underestimated at ~60, but the population in your graph is in reality 169. Interesting that the number since I read up on the subject maybe one year ago has risen magically to 169. Maybe they located more data in other areas of the world?

I find it funny that after you assert that we have data on about 60 glaciers and I produce a scientific article using data from 169 that you assume that we're the ones who "magically" create data.

Your 60 guesstimate is wrong. Just take a trip to the World Glacier Monitoring Service and download the data for surveys done on 127 glaciers in 2004-2005. If you don't need estimates of glacial mass balance, then the National Snow and Ice Data Canter has set up World Glacier Inventory which can give you information on 100,000 more.

Originally Posted by GhostintheShell

I'm also not sure what glaciers in particular were studied as the graph only states geographic area not specific glaciers, as well most data has been collected on glaciers in cold and often high altitude locations. How about the glaciers that exist between the tropic of capricorn and cancer? This has been a known problem with glacier studies, most of the good data is in the alps, in Norway etc. One of the troubles with generalized glacier size data is that each glacier has such unique influences of local temperature and altitude.

Which is why I included a link to the study, so you could answer such questions for yourself. You can find the full report here but you may have to sign up to see it. Let me quote one section of relevance:

The core of the data set comes from the files of the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Z" rich (15). Records were then included from glaciers in Patagonia (16), southern Greenland (17), Iceland (18), and Jan Mayen (19).

The World Glacier Monitoring Service include glaciers in Ecuador, Kenya and Peru (tropical glaciers) as well as plenty in the Alps and Norway. This is the "good data".

Originally Posted by GhostintheShell

The population and the time period of the graph are still far too short as well.

Glaciers are sensitive to temperature change and a 1 degree rise in temperature is enough to melt a vertical meter of ice. 150 years is enough time for a glacier to melt away, never mind about reaching a definitive conclusion that it is melting.

Originally Posted by GhostintheShell

There are hundreds of thousands of known glaciers that have probably been shrinking on and off for 10,000 years.

Right and since we don't have data on all of them we create a sample set of what we have and start extrapolating. Statistics can then give us an idea of the sampling error from our predictions based on the subset.

This study was actually a historical temperature recreation using glacier lengths. The theory ties a general shrinking of glaciers to a global temperature increase. Here are two graphs from the author's conclusions:



(A) Temperature reconstruction for various regions. The black curve shows an estimated global mean value, obtained by giving weights of 0.5 to the Southern Hemisphere (SH), 0.1 to Northwest America, 0.15 to the Atlantic sector, 0.1 to the Alps, and 0.15 to Asia. (B) Best estimate of the global mean temperature obtained by combining the weighted global mean temperature from 1834 with the stacked temperature record before 1834. The band indicates the estimated standard deviation.

So graph B in the image above shows temperature estimates and the standard deviation. With normally distributed data, the standard deviation boundaries contain 68.27% of the expected values. A graph of a normal distribution looks like a bell curve with the predicted value running through the peak and standard deviation boundaries crossing about halfway up each side of the bell.

For graph B, imagine the vertical lines are a top view of a bell curves with the peak of each curve meeting the bold line and the sides of the bell crossing the standard deviation boundaries. Each bell curve would be slightly offset from the one before it and as you move left, the bells become taller and skinnier because the standard deviation shrinks. If viewed from the side of the Y-axis, this would look like a mountain range with many peaks obscuring the ones behind it.

A difference between two bell curves in a sample set is statistically significant when you can discern the two separate peaks. In the graph above the difference between 1900 and 1905 are probably not statistically significant as the two together will look like a slightly fatter, single peak. 1900 and 1910 might be significant. However, 1900 and 1950 are obviously significant as they would obviously be two individual bell curves.

So if we were looking at melting differences caused by of a few hundredths of a degree then you might be right. However, we're not and 169 is a large enough sample to show melting trends due to tenth of a degree changes.

Originally Posted by GhostintheShell

I still state that they had little or no way to measure glacial retreat prior to much more modern technology being invented.

Why? Couldn't they say, "Today the glacier is 120 steps from my door where it was 100 last year." Such a measurement has a low number of significant figures but it's still valid and can measure significant changes.

Land surveying wasn't exactly up to par in the 1800's. Think also about estimation of thickness, not simple length and width.

We don't have volume measures for all these glaciers going back to 1700 but that's no reason to dismiss the data. The length of a glacier's tongue has a high correlation to a glacier's volume and knowing the former gives us an estimate of the latter.

Don't believe me? All right, let's compare the graph of temperature reconstructions made with tree rings and ice cores that I posted for Lucky Shot with the temperature reconstruction using glacial tongue estimates above (Graph a).



Looks like a very good match. The glacial records even match the temperature dips the reconstructions found around 1850, 1900 and 1950.

So let's go back to your original statement and recap:

Originally Posted by GhostintheShell

I don't think the graph you posted really tells us much of anything reliable.

1) We have much more glacier data than you believe.
2) The graph includes glaciers from areas you wanted to see.
3) Glaciers can melt to nothing in half the time period given.
4) The 169 glacier sample shows statistically significant changes.
5) A strong correlation to external temperature numbers shows these to be reasonable estimates.

GhostintheShell, with all this, how can you possibly assert that the graph contains no reliable data?

Originally Posted by GhostintheShell

Regarding the Canada question, I would support an appropriate amount of aid to those people.

Thank you for your answer.

bkelly

[Bamboo]

One of the funniest videos on the topic I have seen

Will Ferrell as George Bush on Global Warming

[ScratchMonkey]

Anyone heard of the non-skeptical heretics?

http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/pr...ome_to_th.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/01/sc...01climate.html

http://www.terrapass.com/blog/posts/denialists-stak

[GhostintheShell]

Haha, I wondered how everyone would eventually find some common ground.

The polarization was too strong, the "alarmists" needed a way to step back from their position to save face, and the "deniers" needed a way to step up their position to save face.

I can see a lot of "revisionist history" in the making.....

[GlobalWarmin]

Climate Change Is Not Caused By Cosmic Rays, According To New Research
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0403083932.htm

[GhostintheShell]

^^^This link is for you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Belief_perseverance

[GlobalWarmin]

Originally Posted by GhostintheShell

^^^This link is for you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Belief_perseverance

Okay...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science

[GlobalWarmin]

Carbon Dioxide Emission Reduction Assumptions Overly Optimistic, Study Says
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0402131140.htm

Reducing global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) over the coming century will be more challenging than society has been led to believe, according to a new research commentary appearing April 3 in Nature.

"According to the IPCC report, the majority of the emission reductions required to stabilize CO2 concentrations are assumed to occur automatically," says Pielke. "Not only is this reduction unlikely to happen under current policies, but we are moving in the opposite direction right now. We believe these kinds of assumptions in the analysis blind us to reality and could potentially distort our ability to develop effective policies."

"In the end, our message should be viewed optimistically rather than pessimistically," Pielke notes, "because it is only with a clear-eyed view of the mitigation challenge that we can ever hope to adopt effective policies. We hope that our analysis is one step toward such a clear-eyed view."

[bkelly]

Anyone else see the Time magazine article on studies showing biofuels to be a contributor to global warming?

bkelly

[GhostintheShell]

Biofuels are also responsible for the economically driven food shortages in the second and third world right now as well. When oil companies are buying up all the corn and soybeans who's going to feed the people when the prices have doubled and tripled for the main staples?

Corn prices hit records 13 times this year...
http://lfpress.ca/perl-bin/publish.c...715&s=shopping

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6319093.stm

Also, who is going to feed us when pork, beef and chicken prices have doubled? I guess in the future only the rich will be able to afford decent food.

Thanks again to the environmental movement!...now I know where the saying "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" came from.