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To point 1, what would falsify the theory that humans are causing global warming and this is a bad thing. I've heard "weather isn't climate" a million times wh

To point 1, what would falsify the theory that humans are causing global warming and this is a bad thing. I've heard "weather isn't climate" a million times when there are snow storms, how is increasing ice mass not a mark against the theory of AGW?

thaumasiotes 11y ago
> what would falsify the theory that humans are causing global warming and this is a bad thing (emphasis original) Who cares? Once you've asked whether something is bad, why on earth would it matter whether humans are causing it? It matters to the environmentalist movement, because it is a tenet of that movement that the same change is good if not metaphysically related to humans but bad if it is. That's not a viewpoint I'd endorse, though.
- ja30278 11y ago
  Because if we aren't causing it, then there's very little reason to make vast changes to our way of life in hopes of preventing it.
  - thaumasiotes 11y ago
    Sort of like how there's very little reason for Holland to try to prevent the ocean from coming in?
  - yongjik 11y ago
    Using solar panels to take hot shower instead of burning gas does not constitute "making vast changes to our way of life".
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - npunt 11y ago
    The argument you propose could be described as a fairness fallacy - I didn't do something bad, so bad things won't happen to me. Sometimes its worth preventing things we didn't cause, if they will nonetheless impact us in significant ways. An asteroid barreling toward earth would hardly be caused by us, but if we didn't try to prevent it, we'd share fate with dinosaurs.
    - thaumasiotes 11y ago
      To be fair, we have ways that the dinosaurs didn't have of mitigating the results.
  - gnaritas 11y ago
    Bad logic. Whether we caused it or not is irrelevant, if it's going to harm us, and we can do something about it, we should regardless of the cause.
    - jessaustin 11y ago
      The idea that we can do something about it, i.e. by decreasing the use of fossil fuels, is based entirely on the idea that we caused it, i.e. by burning lots of fossil fuels. If we didn't cause it, the whole edifice crumbles.
      - gnaritas 11y ago
        > The idea that we can do something about it, i.e. by decreasing the use of fossil fuels, is based entirely on the idea that we caused it That's a misconception you're holding onto. Those working on mitigating carbon in the atmosphere don't' care what the source of the carbon is. Whether we caused it or not simply doesn't matter. > If we didn't cause it, the whole edifice crumbles. The attempts to stop a calamity are worthwhile regardless of the original source of the calamity. Engineering the environment does not depend on whether we think we accidentally engineered it before.
  - socialist_coder 11y ago
    Well, personally I like having clean air and water, and the idea of not giving a completely barren Earth to my offspring. Even if climate change is not caused by humans, the things we would do to try and stop it are good things we should be doing anyways.
ovis 11y ago
I'm not sure how it could be considered a "mark against [...] AGW". One thing to keep in mind is that temperatures in East Antarctica are nearly always below freezing, so rising temperatures don't have much of an effect at first on mass loss[0]. From the article, the ice accumulation seems to be from increased snowfall during the Holocene. How this will ultimately be affected by warming isn't clear, but for now it seems somewhat orthogonal to AGW. [0] Instead, most mass loss from Antarctica appears to be at the margins and driven by ocean processes.
yongjik 11y ago
> what would falsify the theory that humans are causing global warming and this is a bad thing. For example, (1) A novel physical mechanism is discovered that increases the surface temperature of the Earth without any relation to greenhouse gases. Moreover, the mechanism has such a characteristic that it was steadily increasing in the past fifty years or so, roughly matching mankind's CO2 emission by pure coincidence. (I.e., "mankind is fucked, the universe decided to kill us off" scenario.) (2) Average global temperature starts to drop unexpectedly, and continues to drop for a decade or more (so that we can rule out yearly statistical noise), despite the increased level of CO2. (3) A new natural source of CO2 is discovered, and it is determined that the atmospheric increase of CO2 so far was actually due to this natural source. At the same time, a new independent natural sink of CO2 is discovered, and it is also determined that all the CO2 mankind has been generating was actually consumed by this sink. Even more unexpectedly, this big CO2 producer/consumer pair, while being pretty much in lockstep until 2015, is shown to diverge starting 2015, which refutes the whole point of "Mankind is responsible for increased CO2" argument. (This actually sounds like a variation of (1), but still.) (4) Fish stocks and marine ecosystem unexpectedly starts to rebound across the ocean, thanks to increased photosynthesis by marine microorganisms. Upon further research, this is found to be linked with increased CO2 level. (This will at least partially falsify "this is a bad thing" part.) I know, these are tough scenarios, but falsifying established science is hard. Falsifying it in a way that disproves its original successful predictions is even harder: it almost never happens. (Even after General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, if Newtonian mechanics had predicted a railway to be dangerously curved, it would still remain dangerous in exactly the same way.)
- pdonis 11y ago
  > Average global temperature starts to drop unexpectedly, and continues to drop for a decade or more (so that we can rule out yearly statistical noise), despite the increased level of CO2. No, it doesn't have to drop. It just has to not rise. Which is exactly what has been happening for close to two decades now. Furthermore, the level of CO2 has not just increased--it has increased by close to the "business as usual" scenario in the models--i.e., the worst case scenario, which the models predicted would show significant temperature rise that has not happened. In other words, the models have already been falsified. > falsifying established science is hard. Climate science is not "established science" in the way that GR or QM is. Falsifying GR or QM within their established domains of validity would be extremely hard, yes--but that's because their established domains of validity are nailed down by mountains of evidence from controlled experiments that matches the theoretical predictions to ten or more decimal places. Climate science is not even close--not even within orders of magnitude--to that kind of accuracy. In fact, we should not expect climate science to be anywhere close to GR and QM in accuracy, because it's still a fairly new science, its domain is very complex, and it's not possible to do controlled experiments in most of the domain. We can't re-start the Earth's climate of fifty years ago with slightly different initial conditions and see how it performs. None of this, in itself, disqualifies climate science as a science, or means that climate scientists are not doing important work. But it does mean that climate science simply cannot make the kinds of claims that GR or QM make about what is going to happen if we do or don't do particular things. The honest thing for climate scientists to do would be to admit that.
T-A 11y ago
Going through the three letters in AGW: Anthropogenic: "there's more snow falling in Antarctica than ice melting" says nothing about humans being responsible one way or the other. Global: more snow falling in Antarctica says nothing about overall global conditions, e.g. average surface temperature. Changes in circulation patterns can cool one spot and warm another. Warming: more snow falling in Antarctica does not, by itself, even say anything about temperatures in Antarctica. It's not like raising the average there (-49C) by a few degrees would turn snow into rain. It could however increase the likelihood of precipitation.
- thatcat 11y ago
  >It could however increase the likelihood of precipitation. Right - because warming increases mass of water vapor that air can hold. Which there is plenty of in the ocean, so then all the slightly warmer air melting the exterior ice allows the air to pick up moisture. Then as the air moves over the interior, temperatures drop and snow falls leading to the accumulation of snow mass that has been observed.
- Asbostos 11y ago
  When ice sheets were recently found to be melting and breaking off faster than before, most of the media was relating it to global climate change. You don't get to have your cake and eat it too. If you don't consider this as evidence against AGW then you also can't consider other isolated local phenomenon as evidence for it. I'm sure scientists know this, but the media and general pundits don't.
  - yongjik 11y ago
    You can have your cake and eat it, when you have one cake at the edge of the antarctic continent (where ice meets liquid seawater) and another cake in the middle of the continent (where you could increase temperature by 30C and not melt anything at all). I fail to see how "part of Antarctica sees increased snowfall due to raising temperature" is an evidence against AGW. At best, its an evidence against cartoon-version strawman AGW where every corner of the world warms up by an equal amount and every ice in the world starts to slowly melt away at the same pace.
dogma1138 11y ago
Global warming =! man made climate change. Climate change is the more broader and comprehensive view of man's impact on the current climate and it goes far beyond greenhouse gases and the common causes of global warming. Greenland for example which is one of the current largest contributors to the rise of sea level is melting not only due to warmer sea and air temperatures but as latest studies show due to changes in the albedo mainly due to (black) carbon deposits in the ice. The change in the albedo of glaciers in some areas was not considered until fairly recently to be the major contributor and catalyst to them melting, and this also affects land glaciers which were previously considered more resilient to sea temperature changes and could even serve to mitigate or dampen the affect. Climate change also deals with other issues such as massive deforestation, salinity and acidity changes in water which affect gas absorption which can lead to thermal and molecular expansion, as well as many other things. The climate is complicated and the fact that moisture from the air is deposited on land based ice in Antarctica doesn't change the fact that man made climate change is a real fact, heck pretty much all climate change models actually predicted that land ice thickness would increase when sea ice is lost at increasing rates as the increased moisture of the air would increase precipitation, and precipitation over Antarctica isn't a good thing it means that the air is getting considerably warmer because cold air has almost no capacity for water vapor[0]. This of course also that droughts would increase in places that we actually need them because air is getting warmer and the global jet streams whisk it away and before when the air would normally get colder and lose it's water vapor capacity and condense which would make it rain over land and most importantly populated areas we see now more precipitation in places like Antarctica and worse the oceans. http://web.gccaz.edu/~lnewman/gph111/topic_units/Labs_all/Water%20Vapor%20Capacity%20of%20Air.pdf http://web.gccaz.edu/~lnewman/gph111/topic_units/Labs_all/Wa... This issue is way too complicated which is probably one of it's biggest issues because people who like to dig their heads into the sand like to use simple anecdotes to disproof something which sadly we know too little about to understand, but enough to know that we should be quite afraid of.
EdwardDiego 11y ago
A warmer gas can hold more water vapour. If it's started snowing more in Antarctica (a reasonable assumption if the continental ice mass is increasing), that doesn't contradict a slightly warmer global climate at all.
skybrian 11y ago
This new finding raises questions about the accuracy of predictions about sea level changes, not the entire theory. Sea level rise is one of the results of global warming, not a cause. We have independent measurements showing that average temperatures are going up even if the predictions about sea level rise need to be adjusted. Furthermore, there are independent measurements of sea level changes showing how much it's rising per year, even if we don't know where it's coming from. The real consequences of this finding are explained in the article: "The good news is that Antarctica is not currently contributing to sea level rise, but is taking 0.23 millimeters per year away," Zwally said. "But this is also bad news. If the 0.27 millimeters per year of sea level rise attributed to Antarctica in the IPCC report is not really coming from Antarctica, there must be some other contribution to sea level rise that is not accounted for."
- socialist_coder 11y ago
  Yeah, that last quote is pretty scary. I wish the article had talked about some of the other possibilities that could account for the sea level rise (if it's not Antarctica).
neffy 11y ago
I always hesitate to point this out, because I'm firmly in the 'we are stewards of this earth and we need to be a lot more responsible about that' camp - which the denialists are anything but. But essentially what you're looking for, at least for the 'this is a bad thing' part is chart 1-5: http://muller.lbl.gov/pages/IceAgeBook/history_of_climate.html http://muller.lbl.gov/pages/IceAgeBook/history_of_climate.ht... i.e. AGW might be a not entirely bad thing, from the northern hemisphere's limited point of view at least, were it to be sufficiently finely calibrated to maintain the interglacial period indefinitely.(I suppose if the many worlds interpretation is correct, there's got to be at least one earth that gets lucky.) However be aware, there is also a theory floating around that it might in fact trigger the next ice age, if it shuts down the global conveyor belt currents, in particular the gulf stream. http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2004/05mar_arctic/ http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2004/05... And that, as much as anything, is why it's called climate change, rather than global warming these days.
archgoon 11y ago
> how is increasing ice mass not a mark against the theory of AGW? This is explained in the article. The article explains that there are two competing processes affecting the total amount of ice in Antarctica. One is the process of formation of ice mass from snowfall, the rate of which has been steady for the past 10,000 years (this study has now measured it at 200 billion tons per year). This affects the total amount of ice across Eastern Antarctica and the interior. Unfortunately, this process has not _increased_ either. The second process is the thinning of the glaciers. The rate of _this_ process has increased since 1992-2008 by 65 billion tons. As the article points out, if this continues, than Antarctica will begin to see a mass decrease. I'm not entirely sure how this can be interpreted as a point against AGW, or what it has to do with the anthropogenic part at all, nor do I see how it can seen as evidence against simple GW (regardless of cause), as the melting process is still increasing. At best, it can be seen as evidence that things haven't gotten out of hand yet. Now, if the Antartic snow growth was accelerating, then we could start arguing that we don't need to worry about CO2 increases, as the planet will just compensate any shift with some (unknown) homeostatic counter process. However, as it stands, this report provides no evidence for that.

thaumasiotes 11y ago

> what would falsify the theory that humans are causing global warming and this is a bad thing (emphasis original) Who cares? Once you've asked whether something is bad, why on earth would it matter whether humans are causing it? It matters to the environmentalist movement, because it is a tenet of that movement that the same change is good if not metaphysically related to humans but bad if it is. That's not a viewpoint I'd endorse, though.

ja30278 11y ago
Because if we aren't causing it, then there's very little reason to make vast changes to our way of life in hopes of preventing it.
- thaumasiotes 11y ago
  Sort of like how there's very little reason for Holland to try to prevent the ocean from coming in?
- yongjik 11y ago
  Using solar panels to take hot shower instead of burning gas does not constitute "making vast changes to our way of life".
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- npunt 11y ago
  The argument you propose could be described as a fairness fallacy - I didn't do something bad, so bad things won't happen to me. Sometimes its worth preventing things we didn't cause, if they will nonetheless impact us in significant ways. An asteroid barreling toward earth would hardly be caused by us, but if we didn't try to prevent it, we'd share fate with dinosaurs.
  - thaumasiotes 11y ago
    To be fair, we have ways that the dinosaurs didn't have of mitigating the results.
- gnaritas 11y ago
  Bad logic. Whether we caused it or not is irrelevant, if it's going to harm us, and we can do something about it, we should regardless of the cause.
  - jessaustin 11y ago
    The idea that we can do something about it, i.e. by decreasing the use of fossil fuels, is based entirely on the idea that we caused it, i.e. by burning lots of fossil fuels. If we didn't cause it, the whole edifice crumbles.
    - gnaritas 11y ago
      > The idea that we can do something about it, i.e. by decreasing the use of fossil fuels, is based entirely on the idea that we caused it That's a misconception you're holding onto. Those working on mitigating carbon in the atmosphere don't' care what the source of the carbon is. Whether we caused it or not simply doesn't matter. > If we didn't cause it, the whole edifice crumbles. The attempts to stop a calamity are worthwhile regardless of the original source of the calamity. Engineering the environment does not depend on whether we think we accidentally engineered it before.
- socialist_coder 11y ago
  Well, personally I like having clean air and water, and the idea of not giving a completely barren Earth to my offspring. Even if climate change is not caused by humans, the things we would do to try and stop it are good things we should be doing anyways.

ovis 11y ago

I'm not sure how it could be considered a "mark against [...] AGW". One thing to keep in mind is that temperatures in East Antarctica are nearly always below freezing, so rising temperatures don't have much of an effect at first on mass loss[0]. From the article, the ice accumulation seems to be from increased snowfall during the Holocene. How this will ultimately be affected by warming isn't clear, but for now it seems somewhat orthogonal to AGW. [0] Instead, most mass loss from Antarctica appears to be at the margins and driven by ocean processes.

yongjik 11y ago

> what would falsify the theory that humans are causing global warming and this is a bad thing. For example, (1) A novel physical mechanism is discovered that increases the surface temperature of the Earth without any relation to greenhouse gases. Moreover, the mechanism has such a characteristic that it was steadily increasing in the past fifty years or so, roughly matching mankind's CO2 emission by pure coincidence. (I.e., "mankind is fucked, the universe decided to kill us off" scenario.) (2) Average global temperature starts to drop unexpectedly, and continues to drop for a decade or more (so that we can rule out yearly statistical noise), despite the increased level of CO2. (3) A new natural source of CO2 is discovered, and it is determined that the atmospheric increase of CO2 so far was actually due to this natural source. At the same time, a new independent natural sink of CO2 is discovered, and it is also determined that all the CO2 mankind has been generating was actually consumed by this sink. Even more unexpectedly, this big CO2 producer/consumer pair, while being pretty much in lockstep until 2015, is shown to diverge starting 2015, which refutes the whole point of "Mankind is responsible for increased CO2" argument. (This actually sounds like a variation of (1), but still.) (4) Fish stocks and marine ecosystem unexpectedly starts to rebound across the ocean, thanks to increased photosynthesis by marine microorganisms. Upon further research, this is found to be linked with increased CO2 level. (This will at least partially falsify "this is a bad thing" part.) I know, these are tough scenarios, but falsifying established science is hard. Falsifying it in a way that disproves its original successful predictions is even harder: it almost never happens. (Even after General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, if Newtonian mechanics had predicted a railway to be dangerously curved, it would still remain dangerous in exactly the same way.)

pdonis 11y ago
> Average global temperature starts to drop unexpectedly, and continues to drop for a decade or more (so that we can rule out yearly statistical noise), despite the increased level of CO2. No, it doesn't have to drop. It just has to not rise. Which is exactly what has been happening for close to two decades now. Furthermore, the level of CO2 has not just increased--it has increased by close to the "business as usual" scenario in the models--i.e., the worst case scenario, which the models predicted would show significant temperature rise that has not happened. In other words, the models have already been falsified. > falsifying established science is hard. Climate science is not "established science" in the way that GR or QM is. Falsifying GR or QM within their established domains of validity would be extremely hard, yes--but that's because their established domains of validity are nailed down by mountains of evidence from controlled experiments that matches the theoretical predictions to ten or more decimal places. Climate science is not even close--not even within orders of magnitude--to that kind of accuracy. In fact, we should not expect climate science to be anywhere close to GR and QM in accuracy, because it's still a fairly new science, its domain is very complex, and it's not possible to do controlled experiments in most of the domain. We can't re-start the Earth's climate of fifty years ago with slightly different initial conditions and see how it performs. None of this, in itself, disqualifies climate science as a science, or means that climate scientists are not doing important work. But it does mean that climate science simply cannot make the kinds of claims that GR or QM make about what is going to happen if we do or don't do particular things. The honest thing for climate scientists to do would be to admit that.

T-A 11y ago

Going through the three letters in AGW: Anthropogenic: "there's more snow falling in Antarctica than ice melting" says nothing about humans being responsible one way or the other. Global: more snow falling in Antarctica says nothing about overall global conditions, e.g. average surface temperature. Changes in circulation patterns can cool one spot and warm another. Warming: more snow falling in Antarctica does not, by itself, even say anything about temperatures in Antarctica. It's not like raising the average there (-49C) by a few degrees would turn snow into rain. It could however increase the likelihood of precipitation.

thatcat 11y ago
>It could however increase the likelihood of precipitation. Right - because warming increases mass of water vapor that air can hold. Which there is plenty of in the ocean, so then all the slightly warmer air melting the exterior ice allows the air to pick up moisture. Then as the air moves over the interior, temperatures drop and snow falls leading to the accumulation of snow mass that has been observed.
Asbostos 11y ago
When ice sheets were recently found to be melting and breaking off faster than before, most of the media was relating it to global climate change. You don't get to have your cake and eat it too. If you don't consider this as evidence against AGW then you also can't consider other isolated local phenomenon as evidence for it. I'm sure scientists know this, but the media and general pundits don't.
- yongjik 11y ago
  You can have your cake and eat it, when you have one cake at the edge of the antarctic continent (where ice meets liquid seawater) and another cake in the middle of the continent (where you could increase temperature by 30C and not melt anything at all). I fail to see how "part of Antarctica sees increased snowfall due to raising temperature" is an evidence against AGW. At best, its an evidence against cartoon-version strawman AGW where every corner of the world warms up by an equal amount and every ice in the world starts to slowly melt away at the same pace.

dogma1138 11y ago

Global warming =! man made climate change. Climate change is the more broader and comprehensive view of man's impact on the current climate and it goes far beyond greenhouse gases and the common causes of global warming. Greenland for example which is one of the current largest contributors to the rise of sea level is melting not only due to warmer sea and air temperatures but as latest studies show due to changes in the albedo mainly due to (black) carbon deposits in the ice. The change in the albedo of glaciers in some areas was not considered until fairly recently to be the major contributor and catalyst to them melting, and this also affects land glaciers which were previously considered more resilient to sea temperature changes and could even serve to mitigate or dampen the affect. Climate change also deals with other issues such as massive deforestation, salinity and acidity changes in water which affect gas absorption which can lead to thermal and molecular expansion, as well as many other things. The climate is complicated and the fact that moisture from the air is deposited on land based ice in Antarctica doesn't change the fact that man made climate change is a real fact, heck pretty much all climate change models actually predicted that land ice thickness would increase when sea ice is lost at increasing rates as the increased moisture of the air would increase precipitation, and precipitation over Antarctica isn't a good thing it means that the air is getting considerably warmer because cold air has almost no capacity for water vapor[0]. This of course also that droughts would increase in places that we actually need them because air is getting warmer and the global jet streams whisk it away and before when the air would normally get colder and lose it's water vapor capacity and condense which would make it rain over land and most importantly populated areas we see now more precipitation in places like Antarctica and worse the oceans. http://web.gccaz.edu/~lnewman/gph111/topic_units/Labs_all/Water%20Vapor%20Capacity%20of%20Air.pdf http://web.gccaz.edu/~lnewman/gph111/topic_units/Labs_all/Wa... This issue is way too complicated which is probably one of it's biggest issues because people who like to dig their heads into the sand like to use simple anecdotes to disproof something which sadly we know too little about to understand, but enough to know that we should be quite afraid of.

EdwardDiego 11y ago

A warmer gas can hold more water vapour. If it's started snowing more in Antarctica (a reasonable assumption if the continental ice mass is increasing), that doesn't contradict a slightly warmer global climate at all.

skybrian 11y ago

This new finding raises questions about the accuracy of predictions about sea level changes, not the entire theory. Sea level rise is one of the results of global warming, not a cause. We have independent measurements showing that average temperatures are going up even if the predictions about sea level rise need to be adjusted. Furthermore, there are independent measurements of sea level changes showing how much it's rising per year, even if we don't know where it's coming from. The real consequences of this finding are explained in the article: "The good news is that Antarctica is not currently contributing to sea level rise, but is taking 0.23 millimeters per year away," Zwally said. "But this is also bad news. If the 0.27 millimeters per year of sea level rise attributed to Antarctica in the IPCC report is not really coming from Antarctica, there must be some other contribution to sea level rise that is not accounted for."

socialist_coder 11y ago
Yeah, that last quote is pretty scary. I wish the article had talked about some of the other possibilities that could account for the sea level rise (if it's not Antarctica).

neffy 11y ago

I always hesitate to point this out, because I'm firmly in the 'we are stewards of this earth and we need to be a lot more responsible about that' camp - which the denialists are anything but. But essentially what you're looking for, at least for the 'this is a bad thing' part is chart 1-5: http://muller.lbl.gov/pages/IceAgeBook/history_of_climate.html http://muller.lbl.gov/pages/IceAgeBook/history_of_climate.ht... i.e. AGW might be a not entirely bad thing, from the northern hemisphere's limited point of view at least, were it to be sufficiently finely calibrated to maintain the interglacial period indefinitely.(I suppose if the many worlds interpretation is correct, there's got to be at least one earth that gets lucky.) However be aware, there is also a theory floating around that it might in fact trigger the next ice age, if it shuts down the global conveyor belt currents, in particular the gulf stream. http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2004/05mar_arctic/ http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2004/05... And that, as much as anything, is why it's called climate change, rather than global warming these days.

archgoon 11y ago

> how is increasing ice mass not a mark against the theory of AGW? This is explained in the article. The article explains that there are two competing processes affecting the total amount of ice in Antarctica. One is the process of formation of ice mass from snowfall, the rate of which has been steady for the past 10,000 years (this study has now measured it at 200 billion tons per year). This affects the total amount of ice across Eastern Antarctica and the interior. Unfortunately, this process has not _increased_ either. The second process is the thinning of the glaciers. The rate of _this_ process has increased since 1992-2008 by 65 billion tons. As the article points out, if this continues, than Antarctica will begin to see a mass decrease. I'm not entirely sure how this can be interpreted as a point against AGW, or what it has to do with the anthropogenic part at all, nor do I see how it can seen as evidence against simple GW (regardless of cause), as the melting process is still increasing. At best, it can be seen as evidence that things haven't gotten out of hand yet. Now, if the Antartic snow growth was accelerating, then we could start arguing that we don't need to worry about CO2 increases, as the planet will just compensate any shift with some (unknown) homeostatic counter process. However, as it stands, this report provides no evidence for that.