13 ms·

Why natural cycles only play small role in rate of global warming

79 points by okket 7y ago

Bucephalus355 7y ago
This was an interesting article and the author has strong data. I would want to know about the Younger Dryas [1] period though. This is a warming period about 12,000 years ago when some of the most devastating geological events we know of happen. This includes the outburst floods of glaciers holding back bodies of water larger than Lake Erie (Lake Agassiz [2] for example) and a temperature differential in Greenland of 27 degrees Fahrenheit cooler compared to today. Human being play a huge role in climate change, but I don’t want to also write off the absolute enormous shifts than can occur naturally. We need to take those just as seriously for our own security. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas [2] https://www.dmr.nd.gov/ndgs/ndnotes/agassiz/ https://www.dmr.nd.gov/ndgs/ndnotes/agassiz/
- GorgeRonde 7y ago
  It was almost certainly caused by one or multiple comet fragment impacts. Sources: https://scholar.google.fr/scholar?as_ylo=2018&q=hiawatha+crater&hl=fr&as_sdt=0,5 https://scholar.google.fr/scholar?as_ylo=2018&q=hiawatha+cra...
  - lenticular 7y ago
    No, speaking as a former glaciologist, that's not likely to be true. The parent poster is correct. Younger Dryas featured multiple advances and retreats, which is inconsistent with an impact. Multiple impact over many centuries just isn't that statistically likely, and we would see better evidence of it. Instead, the most probably cause is freshwater pulses coming out of the melting Laurentide ice sheet changing circulation in the Atlantic. This is actually quite well supported. Younger Dryas was also confined to the parts of the northern hemisphere, mainly in higher latitudes. A large enough impact to significantly alter climate would see the resulting particulates globally mix in the atmosphere, resulting in more uniform cooling. Instead, the fact that it was confined to parts of the northern hemisphere also supports the freshwater pulse hypothesis, since it is only a change in the transport of heat from the tropics to the pole, not a change in total heat. The fact that freshwater pulses from the Laurentide ice sheet caused so much cooling is actually a concern with climate change. It's possible that it could happen again with melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet, at least a weakened version of it (the Laurentide Ice Sheet dwarfed the GIS).
    - pmayrgundter 7y ago
      A report was published in Nature in spring of this year showing multiple lines of evidence for impact-related effects in the YDB layer in southern Chile: "In the most extensive investigation south of the equator, we report on a ~12,800-year-old sequence at Pilauco, Chile (~40°S), that exhibits peak YD boundary concentrations of platinum, gold, high-temperature iron- and chromium-rich spherules, and native iron particles rarely found in nature. A major peak in charcoal abundance marks an intense biomass-burning episode, synchronous with dramatic changes in vegetation, including a high-disturbance regime, seasonality in precipitation, and warmer conditions. This is anti-phased with northern-hemispheric cooling at the YD onset, whose rapidity suggests atmospheric linkage. The sudden disappearance of megafaunal remains and dung fungi in the YDB layer at Pilauco correlates with megafaunal extinctions across the Americas. The Pilauco record appears consistent with YDB impact evidence found at sites on four continents." https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-38089-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-38089-y
      - lenticular 7y ago
        That just means that there was an impact at around the same time. There's been numerous impacts like this that have been claimed to be the cause of Younger Dryas in the past. However, just because there was an impact doesn't mean it had anything to do with YD. The Atlantic meridional overturning current shutdown from a freshwater pulse is much more parsimonious, and is exactly what we would expect from the physics of the Laurentide melt going into the Atlantic. Impacts still don't explain the multiple advance and retreats during the Laurentide, but it is obvious why that would occur with the AMOC shutdown explanation: Melting causes the AMOC to shut down, causing nothern hemisphere cooling. The cooling reduces melting, inducing the AMOC to start back up, increasing melting once again.
        pmayrgundter 7y ago
        I accept part of what you're saying, which I believe is that the Laurentide melt was probably happening anyways, with the associated effects on the AMOC. Glacial oscillation are their own cycle, clearly. But the YD impact scenario hardly seems irrelevant to the YD. I'm curious what other impacts you're aware of that you deem irrelevant. The best candidate I'm aware of for the YD impact would possibly/probably be related to the Hiawatha crater [1], which is 31km after likely boring through a km or so of ice. This puts it amongst the largest impacts on Earth, e.g. since back to the Chesapeake/Siberian impact around 35mya, (if not beyond after the ice impact is taken into account, e.g. to Chicxulub) [2]. It's not solidly dated yet, but according to the authors the evidence at the site is consistent with an impact during the Pleistocene, and they even say it may still be hot, despite being packed in ice! If we're talking about the same event, with evidence across 24-53 sites on 4 continents that includes continent-wide fires, impact winter and floral and megafaunal extinction, then I'd be hard-pressed to see how this doesn't have to do with the main climate change event of that period; that's the definition of what makes the YD significant: the drastic floral changes (e.g. of Dryas octopetala) at the boundary. The impact seems a more likely candidate cause for the abrupt global changes. Or put another way, I think the question is back to you of how changes in the AMOC during the YD somehow caused the characteristic extinctions and charcoal residue observed in southern Chile at the YDB. The contemporaneous, global inferno and impact winter going seems too much to chalk up to coincidence. That's where I see the parsimony breakdown for a simple Laurentide melting/AMOC change being responsible for the YDB. [1] https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/11/eaar8173 https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/11/eaar8173 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_impact_craters_on_Earth#Larger_craters_(1_Ma_to_10_Ma) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_impact_craters_on_Eart...
Roark66 7y ago
The headline of this post is bullshit. The author of the article doesn't prove "natural cycles" play small role. He claims that the data he analyses points to the conclusion one specific 60-70 year old cycle of oceanic origin has far less impact on climate than commonly accepted. He talks about one mechanism, there are plenty of other natural mechanisms that affect the climate in various ways. Quoting the article: >This means that ocean cycles on timescales of 60-70 years are unlikely to be a factor in the observed evolution of global temperatures since 1850. Instead, external factors, such as periods of strong volcanic activity and the release of aerosol particles (air pollution), have caused temperatures to fluctuate.
- ocschwar 7y ago
  There are other cycles, most of which are right now in a cooling phase, and yet we are warming. So those cycles (i.e. Milankovich cycles) can be written off already
  - lowken10 7y ago
    We are still coming out of an ice age. So you comment is false.
  - Jill_the_Pill 7y ago
    Or, rather than written off, treated as mitigating factors.
  - User23 7y ago
    Plate tectonics are another huge factor. When Pangea existed there was just one ocean to distribute heat and no polar continent for glaciers to form on and increase the Earth’s albedo. That meant a much warmer planet. The Quaternary glaciation is still ongoing because of those tectonic factors. Another fun fact is that the warmest period in human existence was the Holocene maximum about 8000 years ago[1]. Geology is a fascinating field and thankfully lets us look at climate through a lens that isn’t intensely politicized. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_climatic_optimum#/media/File%3AHolocene_Temperature_Variations.png https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_climatic_optimum#/m...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
apo 7y ago
The first graph ("External factors explain nearly all global temperature change") shows what appears to be temperature precisions of less than 0.1 degree C, yet reports no error bars. How is it that a graph like this is even acceptable, given the importance of the conclusions? How does this study account for the inevitably poorer precision and accuracy of measurements made over 100 years ago? How are systematic errors (differences in measuring procedure, differences in time of day precision, etc.) accounted for? A paper from Cowton/Way is available, but it appears to focus on filling in gaps from lack of data at the poles: https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/qj.2297 https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/qj.22... Where is the readily-accessible explanation for how the underlying dataset accounts for so many unknown factors?
- microcolonel 7y ago
  When there is effectively a religious commitment to the assertions you're making, why worry about justifying them?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- mikekij 7y ago
  I'm so glad to see you bring this up. In my graduate physics training, I was taught to be extremely cautious about statistical significance, error propagation, and error bars. I remain skeptical of our conclusions about AGW, not because I have a political view on the subject, but because I'm skeptical that our temperature measurements from 120 years ago have a precision of less than 1 degree C. But I (sincerely) assume that the climate scientists working in this space have compensated for this lack of precision in their conclusions. Right?
  - llamataboot 7y ago
    nah, pretty sure you're the first person to think of that one!
  - 7y ago
briantakita 7y ago
This article's claims fail the smell test. Ultimately we don't know what we don't know & simplistic overarching models are probably missing key components, many of which are non-linear. 200 years is a tiny window when it comes to cosmological time. The methodology of measurement & extrapolation of data also needs public scrutiny. Interpretations of geological events are ridden with conjecture to fit an overarching narrative. Here's what we have evidence of. Earth receives the majority of it's energy from the Sun. The Sun has significant fluctuations. Earth is affected not only by infrared & visible EM, but also by higher frequencies of EM. Earth is also affected by magnetism from the Sun. Earth's Magnetosphere is affected by the Heliosphere. A weaker Magnetosphere means less protection from Cosmic Rays, Coronal Holes, CMEs, & other space weather. Cosmic Rays perturbs water, seeds clouds, induces volcanic eruptions & earthquakes. Volcanic ash & cloud cover increase albedo, which cools the earth. The "year without a summer" in 1816 (~200 years ago), was caused by the Mt. Tambora eruption. The Carrington Event happened in 1859.
- briantakita 7y ago
  The climate is changing. The climate is being driven by the sun. Always has & always will. The climate is changing on other planets in the Solar system, being driven by the sun, just like Earth. This whole "anthropocentric carbon climate change" scheme is a scam to funnel money away from real science & useful tech to special centralization interests that take away freedom of most people in the world. The people behind this scheme are a blight on humanity & should be arrested for fraud. The scale of their operations are orders of magnitude larger & more dangerous than Bernie Madoff.
- dwaltrip 7y ago
  It's not the sun: https://climate.nasa.gov/faq/14/is-the-sun-causing-global-warming/ https://climate.nasa.gov/faq/14/is-the-sun-causing-global-wa...
  - briantakita 7y ago
    Except that model does not have accurate predictive qualities nor does it account for the other planets in the solar system going through climate change. What about Earth before humans? Here is a model that accurately predicts that solar cycle 24 would be weaker than cycle 23. Only 2 of 150 submitted models got that right. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Valentina_Zharkova/publication/266799418_Prediction_of_Solar_Activity_from_Solar_Background_Magnetic_Field_Variations_in_Cycles_21-23/links/559fbc8c08ae3dbcbe86d891/Prediction-of-Solar-Activity-from-Solar-Background-Magnetic-Field-Variations-in-Cycles-21-23.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Valentina_Zharkova/publ... Another thing to consider as that a weakening Heliosphere & weakening Magnetosphere means Earth is more exposed to cosmic radiation. Cosmic radiation seeds clouds, excites water, drives earthquakes & volcanic eruptions. We may have an initial period of warming due to water being excited by cosmic radiation (similar to a microwave oven), but once enough volcanoes erupt, albedo will increase to offset the warming & cause cooling, as demonstrated by the Mt. Tambora eruption in 1816.
yeahitslikethat 7y ago
Why do we continue to debate climate change focusing on centuries old data when the carbon cycle takes hundreds of millions of years? Any data we've collected amounts to less than a rounding error.
f00_ 7y ago
Have been reading the late and great David MacKay's Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air lately (completely free on withouthotair.com) https://www.withouthotair.com/c1/page_5.shtml https://www.withouthotair.com/c1/page_5.shtml >The climate-change motivation is argued in three steps: one: human fossil- fuel burning causes carbon dioxide concentrations to rise; two: carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas; three: increasing the greenhouse effect in- creases average global temperatures (and has many other effects). >Fossil fuel burning increases CO2 concentrations signiﬁcantly. But does it matter? “Carbon is nature!”, the oilspinners remind us, “Carbon is life!” If CO2 had no harmful effects, then indeed carbon emissions would not matter. >However, carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. Not the strongest greenhouse gas, but a signiﬁcant one nonetheless. Put more of it in the atmosphere, and it does what greenhouse gases do: it absorbs infrared radiation (heat) heading out from the earth and reemits it in a random di- rection; the effect of this random redirection of the atmospheric heat trafﬁc is to impede the ﬂow of heat from the planet, just like a quilt. So carbon dioxide has a warming effect. This fact is based not on complex historical records of global temperatures but on the simple physical properties of CO2 molecules. Greenhouse gases are a quilt, and CO2 is one layer of the quilt. > One last thing about the climate-change motivation: while a range of human activities cause greenhouse-gas emissions, the biggest cause by far is energy use. Some people justify not doing anything about their energy use by excuses such as “methane from burping cows causes more warming than jet travel.” Yes, agricultural by-products contributed one eighth of greenhouse-gas emissions in the year 2000. But energy-use contributed three quarters (ﬁgure 1.9). The climate change problem is principally an energy problem. Watched Merchants of Doubt recently, point that stuck with me most is that people against global warming are motivated by libertarianism, and anti-communism. lots of the contrarian scientists worked during the cold war. Will be checking out the book version soon I don't think you even need the climate change motivation to get behind moving off fossil fuels (supply chain security is another huge one, I find climate change deniers often also in the peak oil camp). The way David MacKay presents the numbers allows people to come up with realistic plans to move off fossil fuels on their own instead of reciting someone else's dogma Teasing out cause and effect is difficult especially with something that we can't perform randomized experiments on. I'd like to read more about counterfactuals and causal analysis of climate change Judea Pearl has a great little bit about this in The Book of Why >Until recently, climate scientists have found it very difficult and awkward to answer questions like “Did global warming cause this storm [or this heat wave, or this drought]?” The conventional answer has been that individual weather events cannot be attributed to global climate change. Yet this answer seems rather evasive and may even contribute to public indifference about climate change. > Counterfactual analysis allows climate scientists to make much more precise and definite statements than before. It requires, however, a slight addition to our everyday vocabulary. It will be helpful to distinguish three different kinds of causation: necessary causation, sufficient causation, and necessary-and-sufficient causation. > Using these words, a climate scientist can say, “There is a 90 percent probability that man-made climate change was a necessary cause of this heat wave,” or “There is an 80 percent probability that climate change will be sufficient to produce a heat wave this strong at least once every 50 years.” The first sentence has to do with attribution: Who was responsible for the unusual heat? The second has to do with policy. It says that we had better prepare for such heat waves because they are likely to occur sooner or later. Either of these statements is more informative than shrugging our shoulders and saying nothing about the causes of individual weather events > Climate scientists can get counterfactuals very easily from their computer models: just enter in a new number for the carbon dioxide concentration and let the program run. and one of my favorite quotes from MacKay: > Please don't get me wrong: I'm not trying to be pro-nuclear or anti-wind. I'm just pro-arithmetic

79 points by okket 7y ago

This was an interesting article and the author has strong data. I would want to know about the Younger Dryas [1] period though. This is a warming period about 12,000 years ago when some of the most devastating geological events we know of happen. This includes the outburst floods of glaciers holding back bodies of water larger than Lake Erie (Lake Agassiz [2] for example) and a temperature differential in Greenland of 27 degrees Fahrenheit cooler compared to today. Human being play a huge role in climate change, but I don’t want to also write off the absolute enormous shifts than can occur naturally. We need to take those just as seriously for our own security. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas [2] https://www.dmr.nd.gov/ndgs/ndnotes/agassiz/ https://www.dmr.nd.gov/ndgs/ndnotes/agassiz/

GorgeRonde 7y ago
It was almost certainly caused by one or multiple comet fragment impacts. Sources: https://scholar.google.fr/scholar?as_ylo=2018&q=hiawatha+crater&hl=fr&as_sdt=0,5 https://scholar.google.fr/scholar?as_ylo=2018&q=hiawatha+cra...
- lenticular 7y ago
  No, speaking as a former glaciologist, that's not likely to be true. The parent poster is correct. Younger Dryas featured multiple advances and retreats, which is inconsistent with an impact. Multiple impact over many centuries just isn't that statistically likely, and we would see better evidence of it. Instead, the most probably cause is freshwater pulses coming out of the melting Laurentide ice sheet changing circulation in the Atlantic. This is actually quite well supported. Younger Dryas was also confined to the parts of the northern hemisphere, mainly in higher latitudes. A large enough impact to significantly alter climate would see the resulting particulates globally mix in the atmosphere, resulting in more uniform cooling. Instead, the fact that it was confined to parts of the northern hemisphere also supports the freshwater pulse hypothesis, since it is only a change in the transport of heat from the tropics to the pole, not a change in total heat. The fact that freshwater pulses from the Laurentide ice sheet caused so much cooling is actually a concern with climate change. It's possible that it could happen again with melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet, at least a weakened version of it (the Laurentide Ice Sheet dwarfed the GIS).
  - pmayrgundter 7y ago
    A report was published in Nature in spring of this year showing multiple lines of evidence for impact-related effects in the YDB layer in southern Chile: "In the most extensive investigation south of the equator, we report on a ~12,800-year-old sequence at Pilauco, Chile (~40°S), that exhibits peak YD boundary concentrations of platinum, gold, high-temperature iron- and chromium-rich spherules, and native iron particles rarely found in nature. A major peak in charcoal abundance marks an intense biomass-burning episode, synchronous with dramatic changes in vegetation, including a high-disturbance regime, seasonality in precipitation, and warmer conditions. This is anti-phased with northern-hemispheric cooling at the YD onset, whose rapidity suggests atmospheric linkage. The sudden disappearance of megafaunal remains and dung fungi in the YDB layer at Pilauco correlates with megafaunal extinctions across the Americas. The Pilauco record appears consistent with YDB impact evidence found at sites on four continents." https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-38089-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-38089-y
    - lenticular 7y ago
      That just means that there was an impact at around the same time. There's been numerous impacts like this that have been claimed to be the cause of Younger Dryas in the past. However, just because there was an impact doesn't mean it had anything to do with YD. The Atlantic meridional overturning current shutdown from a freshwater pulse is much more parsimonious, and is exactly what we would expect from the physics of the Laurentide melt going into the Atlantic. Impacts still don't explain the multiple advance and retreats during the Laurentide, but it is obvious why that would occur with the AMOC shutdown explanation: Melting causes the AMOC to shut down, causing nothern hemisphere cooling. The cooling reduces melting, inducing the AMOC to start back up, increasing melting once again.
      - pmayrgundter 7y ago
        I accept part of what you're saying, which I believe is that the Laurentide melt was probably happening anyways, with the associated effects on the AMOC. Glacial oscillation are their own cycle, clearly. But the YD impact scenario hardly seems irrelevant to the YD. I'm curious what other impacts you're aware of that you deem irrelevant. The best candidate I'm aware of for the YD impact would possibly/probably be related to the Hiawatha crater [1], which is 31km after likely boring through a km or so of ice. This puts it amongst the largest impacts on Earth, e.g. since back to the Chesapeake/Siberian impact around 35mya, (if not beyond after the ice impact is taken into account, e.g. to Chicxulub) [2]. It's not solidly dated yet, but according to the authors the evidence at the site is consistent with an impact during the Pleistocene, and they even say it may still be hot, despite being packed in ice! If we're talking about the same event, with evidence across 24-53 sites on 4 continents that includes continent-wide fires, impact winter and floral and megafaunal extinction, then I'd be hard-pressed to see how this doesn't have to do with the main climate change event of that period; that's the definition of what makes the YD significant: the drastic floral changes (e.g. of Dryas octopetala) at the boundary. The impact seems a more likely candidate cause for the abrupt global changes. Or put another way, I think the question is back to you of how changes in the AMOC during the YD somehow caused the characteristic extinctions and charcoal residue observed in southern Chile at the YDB. The contemporaneous, global inferno and impact winter going seems too much to chalk up to coincidence. That's where I see the parsimony breakdown for a simple Laurentide melting/AMOC change being responsible for the YDB. [1] https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/11/eaar8173 https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/11/eaar8173 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_impact_craters_on_Earth#Larger_craters_(1_Ma_to_10_Ma) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_impact_craters_on_Eart...

Roark66 7y ago

The headline of this post is bullshit. The author of the article doesn't prove "natural cycles" play small role. He claims that the data he analyses points to the conclusion one specific 60-70 year old cycle of oceanic origin has far less impact on climate than commonly accepted. He talks about one mechanism, there are plenty of other natural mechanisms that affect the climate in various ways. Quoting the article: >This means that ocean cycles on timescales of 60-70 years are unlikely to be a factor in the observed evolution of global temperatures since 1850. Instead, external factors, such as periods of strong volcanic activity and the release of aerosol particles (air pollution), have caused temperatures to fluctuate.

ocschwar 7y ago
There are other cycles, most of which are right now in a cooling phase, and yet we are warming. So those cycles (i.e. Milankovich cycles) can be written off already
- lowken10 7y ago
  We are still coming out of an ice age. So you comment is false.
- Jill_the_Pill 7y ago
  Or, rather than written off, treated as mitigating factors.
- User23 7y ago
  Plate tectonics are another huge factor. When Pangea existed there was just one ocean to distribute heat and no polar continent for glaciers to form on and increase the Earth’s albedo. That meant a much warmer planet. The Quaternary glaciation is still ongoing because of those tectonic factors. Another fun fact is that the warmest period in human existence was the Holocene maximum about 8000 years ago[1]. Geology is a fascinating field and thankfully lets us look at climate through a lens that isn’t intensely politicized. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_climatic_optimum#/media/File%3AHolocene_Temperature_Variations.png https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_climatic_optimum#/m...

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

apo 7y ago

The first graph ("External factors explain nearly all global temperature change") shows what appears to be temperature precisions of less than 0.1 degree C, yet reports no error bars. How is it that a graph like this is even acceptable, given the importance of the conclusions? How does this study account for the inevitably poorer precision and accuracy of measurements made over 100 years ago? How are systematic errors (differences in measuring procedure, differences in time of day precision, etc.) accounted for? A paper from Cowton/Way is available, but it appears to focus on filling in gaps from lack of data at the poles: https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/qj.2297 https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/qj.22... Where is the readily-accessible explanation for how the underlying dataset accounts for so many unknown factors?

microcolonel 7y ago
When there is effectively a religious commitment to the assertions you're making, why worry about justifying them?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
mikekij 7y ago
I'm so glad to see you bring this up. In my graduate physics training, I was taught to be extremely cautious about statistical significance, error propagation, and error bars. I remain skeptical of our conclusions about AGW, not because I have a political view on the subject, but because I'm skeptical that our temperature measurements from 120 years ago have a precision of less than 1 degree C. But I (sincerely) assume that the climate scientists working in this space have compensated for this lack of precision in their conclusions. Right?
- llamataboot 7y ago
  nah, pretty sure you're the first person to think of that one!
- 7y ago

briantakita 7y ago

This article's claims fail the smell test. Ultimately we don't know what we don't know & simplistic overarching models are probably missing key components, many of which are non-linear. 200 years is a tiny window when it comes to cosmological time. The methodology of measurement & extrapolation of data also needs public scrutiny. Interpretations of geological events are ridden with conjecture to fit an overarching narrative. Here's what we have evidence of. Earth receives the majority of it's energy from the Sun. The Sun has significant fluctuations. Earth is affected not only by infrared & visible EM, but also by higher frequencies of EM. Earth is also affected by magnetism from the Sun. Earth's Magnetosphere is affected by the Heliosphere. A weaker Magnetosphere means less protection from Cosmic Rays, Coronal Holes, CMEs, & other space weather. Cosmic Rays perturbs water, seeds clouds, induces volcanic eruptions & earthquakes. Volcanic ash & cloud cover increase albedo, which cools the earth. The "year without a summer" in 1816 (~200 years ago), was caused by the Mt. Tambora eruption. The Carrington Event happened in 1859.

briantakita 7y ago
The climate is changing. The climate is being driven by the sun. Always has & always will. The climate is changing on other planets in the Solar system, being driven by the sun, just like Earth. This whole "anthropocentric carbon climate change" scheme is a scam to funnel money away from real science & useful tech to special centralization interests that take away freedom of most people in the world. The people behind this scheme are a blight on humanity & should be arrested for fraud. The scale of their operations are orders of magnitude larger & more dangerous than Bernie Madoff.
dwaltrip 7y ago
It's not the sun: https://climate.nasa.gov/faq/14/is-the-sun-causing-global-warming/ https://climate.nasa.gov/faq/14/is-the-sun-causing-global-wa...
- briantakita 7y ago
  Except that model does not have accurate predictive qualities nor does it account for the other planets in the solar system going through climate change. What about Earth before humans? Here is a model that accurately predicts that solar cycle 24 would be weaker than cycle 23. Only 2 of 150 submitted models got that right. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Valentina_Zharkova/publication/266799418_Prediction_of_Solar_Activity_from_Solar_Background_Magnetic_Field_Variations_in_Cycles_21-23/links/559fbc8c08ae3dbcbe86d891/Prediction-of-Solar-Activity-from-Solar-Background-Magnetic-Field-Variations-in-Cycles-21-23.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Valentina_Zharkova/publ... Another thing to consider as that a weakening Heliosphere & weakening Magnetosphere means Earth is more exposed to cosmic radiation. Cosmic radiation seeds clouds, excites water, drives earthquakes & volcanic eruptions. We may have an initial period of warming due to water being excited by cosmic radiation (similar to a microwave oven), but once enough volcanoes erupt, albedo will increase to offset the warming & cause cooling, as demonstrated by the Mt. Tambora eruption in 1816.

yeahitslikethat 7y ago

Why do we continue to debate climate change focusing on centuries old data when the carbon cycle takes hundreds of millions of years? Any data we've collected amounts to less than a rounding error.

f00_ 7y ago

Have been reading the late and great David MacKay's Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air lately (completely free on withouthotair.com) https://www.withouthotair.com/c1/page_5.shtml https://www.withouthotair.com/c1/page_5.shtml >The climate-change motivation is argued in three steps: one: human fossil- fuel burning causes carbon dioxide concentrations to rise; two: carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas; three: increasing the greenhouse effect in- creases average global temperatures (and has many other effects). >Fossil fuel burning increases CO2 concentrations signiﬁcantly. But does it matter? “Carbon is nature!”, the oilspinners remind us, “Carbon is life!” If CO2 had no harmful effects, then indeed carbon emissions would not matter. >However, carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. Not the strongest greenhouse gas, but a signiﬁcant one nonetheless. Put more of it in the atmosphere, and it does what greenhouse gases do: it absorbs infrared radiation (heat) heading out from the earth and reemits it in a random di- rection; the effect of this random redirection of the atmospheric heat trafﬁc is to impede the ﬂow of heat from the planet, just like a quilt. So carbon dioxide has a warming effect. This fact is based not on complex historical records of global temperatures but on the simple physical properties of CO2 molecules. Greenhouse gases are a quilt, and CO2 is one layer of the quilt. > One last thing about the climate-change motivation: while a range of human activities cause greenhouse-gas emissions, the biggest cause by far is energy use. Some people justify not doing anything about their energy use by excuses such as “methane from burping cows causes more warming than jet travel.” Yes, agricultural by-products contributed one eighth of greenhouse-gas emissions in the year 2000. But energy-use contributed three quarters (ﬁgure 1.9). The climate change problem is principally an energy problem. Watched Merchants of Doubt recently, point that stuck with me most is that people against global warming are motivated by libertarianism, and anti-communism. lots of the contrarian scientists worked during the cold war. Will be checking out the book version soon I don't think you even need the climate change motivation to get behind moving off fossil fuels (supply chain security is another huge one, I find climate change deniers often also in the peak oil camp). The way David MacKay presents the numbers allows people to come up with realistic plans to move off fossil fuels on their own instead of reciting someone else's dogma Teasing out cause and effect is difficult especially with something that we can't perform randomized experiments on. I'd like to read more about counterfactuals and causal analysis of climate change Judea Pearl has a great little bit about this in The Book of Why >Until recently, climate scientists have found it very difficult and awkward to answer questions like “Did global warming cause this storm [or this heat wave, or this drought]?” The conventional answer has been that individual weather events cannot be attributed to global climate change. Yet this answer seems rather evasive and may even contribute to public indifference about climate change. > Counterfactual analysis allows climate scientists to make much more precise and definite statements than before. It requires, however, a slight addition to our everyday vocabulary. It will be helpful to distinguish three different kinds of causation: necessary causation, sufficient causation, and necessary-and-sufficient causation. > Using these words, a climate scientist can say, “There is a 90 percent probability that man-made climate change was a necessary cause of this heat wave,” or “There is an 80 percent probability that climate change will be sufficient to produce a heat wave this strong at least once every 50 years.” The first sentence has to do with attribution: Who was responsible for the unusual heat? The second has to do with policy. It says that we had better prepare for such heat waves because they are likely to occur sooner or later. Either of these statements is more informative than shrugging our shoulders and saying nothing about the causes of individual weather events > Climate scientists can get counterfactuals very easily from their computer models: just enter in a new number for the carbon dioxide concentration and let the program run. and one of my favorite quotes from MacKay: > Please don't get me wrong: I'm not trying to be pro-nuclear or anti-wind. I'm just pro-arithmetic