I was going to write a long comment pointing out all the factual errors in
your response, but then I thought this was more appropriate:
http://xkcd.com/386/
But then, I thought
that wouldn't help anyone, and would be disrespectful, so I thought I
would respond in detail.
At 405 seconds, there is a
chart of the effects of a 4 Centigrade increase. One bullet point is "drought
over 40% of inhabited land". Here is an article in Nat ure titled: "Little
change in global drought over the past 60 years". In short, previous estimates
of global drought used a simple model that often gives an over estimate of the
amount of drought.
Yes, one new paper. An interesting one, if
it proves to be correct. I understand there has already been serious doubt expressed as to that point, by other
drought researchers. ("They normalized away the recent drying" is one choice
quote.)
At 660 seconds, an increase of 12 Centigrade causes
places that were 80 Fahrenheit to become 170 Fahrenheit. An increase of 12
Centigrade is an increase of about 21 Fahrenheit, so I can see 80 Fahrenheit
going to 101 Fahrenheit. Where does this 170 Fahrenheit come
from?
It comes from the changing distribution in temperature
extremes. A 12C increase in average temperature doesn't cause a
corresponding increase in the max - it actually causes the max to go up much
faster (I'm not entirely sure why, something to do with soil moisture, humidity,
and similar factors, I think). You might find some answers in this section of
the now 5-year-old IPCC AR4 report here
a>. I'm sure there's more & better research on the topic available, if you
do a little digging.
You can measure the amount of light that
gets absorbed by CO2 and CH4. These are green house
gasses.
Agree 100%. It's mind-boggling that some people still
dispute this, but then some people (some of the same people) still
dispute that smoking is bad for your health...
Intense
radiation in the upper atmosphere converts some nitrogen into carbon 14, which
is radioactive. The amount of carbon 14 in the atmosphere is constant - the
decay rate matches the rate at which it is produced.
Carbon 14 trapped in
ice decays, but is not replaced. The ratio of carbon 12 to carbon 14 tells you
how long CO2 has been trapped in ice.
You can go somewhere cold, take
samples of ice, measure the amount of CO2 and the time when the CO2 was trapped.
You will find a rapid increase in the amount of CO2 that correlates with sales
of coal.
A nice succinct summary - there are other
indicators, too, like the fact that atmospheric oxygen levels are decreasing in
proportion to the CO2 increase (suggesting it's from burning carbon, not CO2
outgassing from volcanos), the C-12 / C-13 ratios indicate the carbon is from
fossilised plant material, and that the amount of extra CO2 in the atmosphere is
considerably less (about 50% less) than humans are known to have emitted
by burning fossil fuels.
The IPCC has a hockey stick graph of
global temperature against time. Flat with a sharp rise in recent decades. You
can go to the IPCC and ask for the raw data and the algorithms used to make that
graph. You can go home with a bunch of excuses: "the data is copyright, you have
to buy a license", "the algorithms are secret" and so on.
I'm
not allowed to give out the raw data I base my reports on at work, due to
similar license agreements. They're not uncommon in the professional world, get
over it.
As for the algorithms being secret - if you define 'secret' as
'published in publicly available scientific journals', I guess you might be
considered correct on that point...
Some determined guy got a
load of funding from the anti-global warming crew, and repeated the work with
publically available data and an open source method. The result was a hockey
stick graph I have some confidence in.
Ah, Richard Muller and
the BEST crowd.
If by 'confidence in', you mean 'exactly the same as all
the previous ones, within the margins of error', then I'll go with
that.
The only thing BEST added to the field was a slightly better
way of processing large amounts of inhomogeneous data to get one
internally-consistent record. They also dredged up some data to push the start
date back a little. Other than that, it's nothing that hasn't been known at
least 14 years or so, ever since the original hockey stick graph was
published.
They didn't even successfully persuade the anti-global warming
crew that funded them - that crowd dismissed their findings as garbage as soon
as it came out that BEST backed up all the previous research on the
topic.
Climate models are secret, so you cannot download one and
run it on a cloud youself. Every month I see another article showing that
current climate models have a new flaw.
cough Garbage!
cough (I would have used stronger language there if Groklaw's
comments policy permitted ;-).
Exhibit A: Source code for NASA
GISS Model E (as used to produce data for IPCC AR4).
Exhibit B: EdGCM that you can run on your PC at home
with little effort.
Exhibit C: Community Earth System Model from
NCAR.
Exhibit D: The distributed-computing based ClimatePrediction.net which runs the Unified model.
That's
just what I dug up in two minutes of googling...
A decade ago,
the future perils of global warming were not certain, but the recommendation was
to do something anyway as a precaution. I have no problem with that either back
then or now. Somehow in the last few years the dangers of global warning have
been portrayed as a certainty, but I do not know what evidence led to this
certainty.
Actually, if you go and read papers from as far back
as the early 80s, the future perils were pretty scary even back then. As our
knowledge of the climate system has improved over the past 30-odd years, so our
knowledge of the likely outcomes of global warming has improved.
And no
scientist will talk in terms of 'certainty', but rather 'probability'. Our
knowledge of the probability of adverse outcomes has increased immensely. So
has the actual probability of these outcomes occurring, thanks to 30-odd years
of delaying tactics by the fossil-fuel industry (who not only took a leaf out of
the tobacco industry's book, they hired the same guys to do
it).
There may well be utterly convincing evidence of an
impending global warming disaster - hidden amongst a pile of alarmist
exaggeration and references to outdated scientific papers.
How
do you define 'alarmist exaggeration', when the best science available is
telling you the future looks pretty bleak if we don't stop burning fossil
fuels?
I'd also suggest you look further than The Register for
your climate science news. I stopped reading their climate articles a year or
two back, because I found them almost uniformly misleading and inaccurate, with
a distinct anti-global warming slant (this is compared to reading the actual
papers they're reporting on). Almost as bad as The
Australian newspaper over here.
Anyway, that took me over half
an hour to put together, hope someone appreciates it! [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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