4 ms·

Five things you should know about climate change

19 points by soundsop 17y ago

mnemonicsloth 17y ago
Apparently, you aren't supposed to know that IPCC's climate change reports are based on raw data that was lost some time in the 1980s. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6936328.ece http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article693... This article makes no mention of that fact. You are supposed to know that the overwhelming consensus of scientists blah, blah, blah. How the author can gauge the scientific consensus and find it unchanged, less than a day after this information was released, is quite beyond me. I'd be willing to bet that the overwhelming consensus of scientists today is that climate research needs an open audit, right now, to see which of its conclusions are based on tainted data and which aren't. Until such an audit is conducted, no one knows what we know.
- bumblebird 17y ago
  >> "no one knows what we know" One thing I don't really particularly understand is what value the knowledge would be. We already know we should use less energy, be more efficient, use cleaner energy. You can't really argue against those. Anyone who thinks we should continue burning coal/oil/etc forever isn't thinking straight. But what is the aim of climate research? Just say it reported "We'll all explode in 10 years". What are the chances we'd be able to all group together and change the climate ourselves? What if it went wrong? Doesn't seem wise to me. Obviously I can see some uses - eg if it's expected to be a lot hotter for the next 10 years, then we can plan for that etc. But the amount of money being poured into the research seems a bit over the top for the likely return.
  - DougWebb 17y ago
    >> "We already know we should use less energy, be more efficient, use cleaner energy. You can't really argue against those. Anyone who thinks we should continue burning coal/oil/etc forever isn't thinking straight." If these things were free or at least cheaper than what we're currently doing, we'd already be doing them. The problem is that they're expensive: using less energy means a lower standard of living for most people, being more efficient means spending more initially and hoping for long-term savings, and getting cleaner energy requires massive infrastructure investment today for cleaner energy years from now. Achieving these goals requires huge investments at a time when no one has the money to invest. We need to know that the investment will be worthwhile, and the AGW-proponents approach of hiding/losing data, making grand "trust us" pronouncements, and ridiculing and suppressing skeptical debate is counter-productive. In my opinion, we need to be building lots and lots of nuclear power plants using modern safe designs and including breeders so we can keep processing the fuel until there's no usable energy (or waste radiation) left in it. That will give us plenty of clean energy which will help us to deal with whatever climate change occurs, without having to sacrifice our standards of living. And, if it turns out that the climate doesn't change that much, or it's a completely natural change, we won't have wasted our investment; the nuclear power plants are worth having anyway. All that extra low-cost power brings other benefits too, like lowering the cost of manufacturing efficient cars, homes and products, and making electric vehicles truly viable (and not just fueled by coal/oil/gas at-a-distance).
- Joeboy 17y ago
  > Apparently, you aren't supposed to know that IPCC's climate change reports are based on raw data that was lost some time in the 1980s. I honestly don't know to what extent, if any, any of the IPCC's reports rely that data, but strongly suspect saying they're 'based on' it is a significant overstatement of the case.
  - mnemonicsloth 17y ago
    Published research in any scientific field relies on citations of citations of citations. The data lost dates back to the 1970s, so it's not obvious what relies on it and what doesn't. I don't think the field of climate science is going to vanish in a puff of logic, the way some of its politicized critics are clearly hoping. But I do think that we ought to wait for a thorough, open audit, rather than assuming that climate science should continue as before with no changes.
  - patio11 17y ago
    To satisfy your curiosity I went looking for you. It didn't take long. Chapter One. Figure One. It is the top graph. http://www.ipcc.ch/graphics/syr/fig1-1.jpg http://www.ipcc.ch/graphics/syr/fig1-1.jpg This is cited as WGI FAQ 3.1 in the text, which if you look here: http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/FAQ/wg1_faq-3.1.html http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/FAQ/wg1_faq-3.1.html is footnoted as 1) from the HadCRUT3 data set. HadCRUT3 is (to the best of my understanding) what the dog didn't eat. (You can download it here: http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/ http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/ )
    - Joeboy 17y ago
      Thanks for that. However, the inclusion of this graph still doesn't demonstrate that the report is 'based on' the missing raw data. There are plenty of other datasets they could have chosen that would have shown the same thing.
      - mnemonicsloth 17y ago
        How do you know? Can you provide links to some? Remember that the key is to establish the provenance of the data, perhaps by documenting the circumstances under which it was collected and the people who did the work, rather than just to proffer up a set of numbers.
- Gupie 17y ago
  It's the UEA's data that has been lost not the IPCC's. UEA == University of East Anglia, IPCC == Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
  - mnemonicsloth 17y ago
    The IPCC does not carry out its own research. See the second paragraph here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergovernmental_Panel_on_Climate_Change http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergovernmental_Panel_on_Clim... The primary source of data used in the IPCC's reports was the data from the UEA/CRU: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Jones_%28climatologist%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Jones_%28climatologist%29 As I said above, the extent to which the unverifiable data compromise the IPCC's reports is something that should be determined ASAP.
    - Gupie 17y ago
      The second link does say that the UEA work "figured prominently in the IPCC TAR SPM" report. It would be an exaggeration just going by the link to claim that the UEA data was "the primary source of data used in the IPCC's reports". There are numerous records of temperature data: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_temperature_record http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_temperature_record, so suspect the truth is out there.
Daniel_Newby 17y ago
There is no such thing as a greenhouse gas. Greenhouses build up heat because the glass prevents convection. If you made a car with windows transparent to infrared light, a toddler locked inside would still bake to death on a summer day. If water and CO2 were actually greenhouse gases, it would be almost as hot outdoors on a humid day as inside a sealed greenhouse. It is vastly cooler outdoors because parcels of the air rise as they become hot, transporting heat towards outer space much faster than radiation can. As the surface becomes hotter, natural convection speeds up, transporting heat somewhat faster. In all the dispute over AGW, I have not seen a single discussion of the relationship between surface temperature and convective heat transport. Until I see solid data from detailed meteorological micro-simulations, I will continue to treat the AGW hypotheses as unproven. Show us the steepness of your surface temperature-convective heat power curves!
SamAtt 17y ago
I remain someone who is in the middle about Climate Change because I don't feel I've studied all the factors enough to form a definitive opinion. But one of the thing that always pushes me towards the skeptics side is the fact that advocates (like this author) seem to simply ignore the skeptic's points. Take his first point where he says "All things being equal, adding greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere will warm it". Look how many times he uses the word "simple" in that section to indicate it is just beyond dispute that more CO2 will make the world dramatically hotter. The problem is that very point is one of the largest points of dispute. Skeptics point to evidence that light absorption follows a logarithmic curve as the substance absorbing the light increases. Meaning if the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is already high enough to absorb most of the infrared radiation we wouldn't see a dramatic increase by adding more CO2. Now you can obviously debate that point and that's where the debate over Global Warming should come in but the fact that this author chooses to skip it completely and present "CO2 = linear heating of the climate" as a given tells me where his bias is. Since the rest of the article is based on his first point being absolute it comes across as ineffective to me.
- fhars 17y ago
  That argument is wrong. Adding more C02 into an already IR-opaque atmosphere wouldn't change the amount of IR radiation finally emitted into space (so much is true, but irrelevant), but it still would move the surfaces of the same greenhouse warming (currently ca. 35°C at the surface) into higher parts of the atmosphere, thereby raising air and ground temperatures (which is the relevant point). People who dispute this just dispute their own understanding of thermodynamics.
  - SamAtt 17y ago
    See, this is what I'm talking about. We don't know anything you just said for a fact. We simply don't. Because for us to know that, or for it even to be an issue of Thermodynamics, we'd have to know FOR A FACT how the CO2 is influencing our atmosphere. Which we don't know. Again, I'm not saying you're wrong. But your treatment of theory as fact is exactly the issue I was pointing out in my post above. (For the record I don't think what you're presenting is consistent with Global Warming as we understand it. What you present in your comment could cause a slight warming but the reality is heat is still coming from the sun and if the atmosphere is already IR opaque than the heat trapped inside our atmosphere is limited by that meaning the Global catastrophe that is predicted doesn't really gel. It goes back to the blanket example, no matter how many blankets you put over yourself they can only trap the heat that's already there not create new heat)

19 points by soundsop 17y ago

Apparently, you aren't supposed to know that IPCC's climate change reports are based on raw data that was lost some time in the 1980s. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6936328.ece http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article693... This article makes no mention of that fact. You are supposed to know that the overwhelming consensus of scientists blah, blah, blah. How the author can gauge the scientific consensus and find it unchanged, less than a day after this information was released, is quite beyond me. I'd be willing to bet that the overwhelming consensus of scientists today is that climate research needs an open audit, right now, to see which of its conclusions are based on tainted data and which aren't. Until such an audit is conducted, no one knows what we know.

bumblebird 17y ago
>> "no one knows what we know" One thing I don't really particularly understand is what value the knowledge would be. We already know we should use less energy, be more efficient, use cleaner energy. You can't really argue against those. Anyone who thinks we should continue burning coal/oil/etc forever isn't thinking straight. But what is the aim of climate research? Just say it reported "We'll all explode in 10 years". What are the chances we'd be able to all group together and change the climate ourselves? What if it went wrong? Doesn't seem wise to me. Obviously I can see some uses - eg if it's expected to be a lot hotter for the next 10 years, then we can plan for that etc. But the amount of money being poured into the research seems a bit over the top for the likely return.
- DougWebb 17y ago
  >> "We already know we should use less energy, be more efficient, use cleaner energy. You can't really argue against those. Anyone who thinks we should continue burning coal/oil/etc forever isn't thinking straight." If these things were free or at least cheaper than what we're currently doing, we'd already be doing them. The problem is that they're expensive: using less energy means a lower standard of living for most people, being more efficient means spending more initially and hoping for long-term savings, and getting cleaner energy requires massive infrastructure investment today for cleaner energy years from now. Achieving these goals requires huge investments at a time when no one has the money to invest. We need to know that the investment will be worthwhile, and the AGW-proponents approach of hiding/losing data, making grand "trust us" pronouncements, and ridiculing and suppressing skeptical debate is counter-productive. In my opinion, we need to be building lots and lots of nuclear power plants using modern safe designs and including breeders so we can keep processing the fuel until there's no usable energy (or waste radiation) left in it. That will give us plenty of clean energy which will help us to deal with whatever climate change occurs, without having to sacrifice our standards of living. And, if it turns out that the climate doesn't change that much, or it's a completely natural change, we won't have wasted our investment; the nuclear power plants are worth having anyway. All that extra low-cost power brings other benefits too, like lowering the cost of manufacturing efficient cars, homes and products, and making electric vehicles truly viable (and not just fueled by coal/oil/gas at-a-distance).
Joeboy 17y ago
> Apparently, you aren't supposed to know that IPCC's climate change reports are based on raw data that was lost some time in the 1980s. I honestly don't know to what extent, if any, any of the IPCC's reports rely that data, but strongly suspect saying they're 'based on' it is a significant overstatement of the case.
- mnemonicsloth 17y ago
  Published research in any scientific field relies on citations of citations of citations. The data lost dates back to the 1970s, so it's not obvious what relies on it and what doesn't. I don't think the field of climate science is going to vanish in a puff of logic, the way some of its politicized critics are clearly hoping. But I do think that we ought to wait for a thorough, open audit, rather than assuming that climate science should continue as before with no changes.
- patio11 17y ago
  To satisfy your curiosity I went looking for you. It didn't take long. Chapter One. Figure One. It is the top graph. http://www.ipcc.ch/graphics/syr/fig1-1.jpg http://www.ipcc.ch/graphics/syr/fig1-1.jpg This is cited as WGI FAQ 3.1 in the text, which if you look here: http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/FAQ/wg1_faq-3.1.html http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/FAQ/wg1_faq-3.1.html is footnoted as 1) from the HadCRUT3 data set. HadCRUT3 is (to the best of my understanding) what the dog didn't eat. (You can download it here: http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/ http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/ )
  - Joeboy 17y ago
    Thanks for that. However, the inclusion of this graph still doesn't demonstrate that the report is 'based on' the missing raw data. There are plenty of other datasets they could have chosen that would have shown the same thing.
    - mnemonicsloth 17y ago
      How do you know? Can you provide links to some? Remember that the key is to establish the provenance of the data, perhaps by documenting the circumstances under which it was collected and the people who did the work, rather than just to proffer up a set of numbers.
Gupie 17y ago
It's the UEA's data that has been lost not the IPCC's. UEA == University of East Anglia, IPCC == Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
- mnemonicsloth 17y ago
  The IPCC does not carry out its own research. See the second paragraph here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergovernmental_Panel_on_Climate_Change http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergovernmental_Panel_on_Clim... The primary source of data used in the IPCC's reports was the data from the UEA/CRU: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Jones_%28climatologist%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Jones_%28climatologist%29 As I said above, the extent to which the unverifiable data compromise the IPCC's reports is something that should be determined ASAP.
  - Gupie 17y ago
    The second link does say that the UEA work "figured prominently in the IPCC TAR SPM" report. It would be an exaggeration just going by the link to claim that the UEA data was "the primary source of data used in the IPCC's reports". There are numerous records of temperature data: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_temperature_record http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_temperature_record, so suspect the truth is out there.

Daniel_Newby 17y ago

There is no such thing as a greenhouse gas. Greenhouses build up heat because the glass prevents convection. If you made a car with windows transparent to infrared light, a toddler locked inside would still bake to death on a summer day. If water and CO2 were actually greenhouse gases, it would be almost as hot outdoors on a humid day as inside a sealed greenhouse. It is vastly cooler outdoors because parcels of the air rise as they become hot, transporting heat towards outer space much faster than radiation can. As the surface becomes hotter, natural convection speeds up, transporting heat somewhat faster. In all the dispute over AGW, I have not seen a single discussion of the relationship between surface temperature and convective heat transport. Until I see solid data from detailed meteorological micro-simulations, I will continue to treat the AGW hypotheses as unproven. Show us the steepness of your surface temperature-convective heat power curves!

SamAtt 17y ago

I remain someone who is in the middle about Climate Change because I don't feel I've studied all the factors enough to form a definitive opinion. But one of the thing that always pushes me towards the skeptics side is the fact that advocates (like this author) seem to simply ignore the skeptic's points. Take his first point where he says "All things being equal, adding greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere will warm it". Look how many times he uses the word "simple" in that section to indicate it is just beyond dispute that more CO2 will make the world dramatically hotter. The problem is that very point is one of the largest points of dispute. Skeptics point to evidence that light absorption follows a logarithmic curve as the substance absorbing the light increases. Meaning if the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is already high enough to absorb most of the infrared radiation we wouldn't see a dramatic increase by adding more CO2. Now you can obviously debate that point and that's where the debate over Global Warming should come in but the fact that this author chooses to skip it completely and present "CO2 = linear heating of the climate" as a given tells me where his bias is. Since the rest of the article is based on his first point being absolute it comes across as ineffective to me.

fhars 17y ago
That argument is wrong. Adding more C02 into an already IR-opaque atmosphere wouldn't change the amount of IR radiation finally emitted into space (so much is true, but irrelevant), but it still would move the surfaces of the same greenhouse warming (currently ca. 35°C at the surface) into higher parts of the atmosphere, thereby raising air and ground temperatures (which is the relevant point). People who dispute this just dispute their own understanding of thermodynamics.
- SamAtt 17y ago
  See, this is what I'm talking about. We don't know anything you just said for a fact. We simply don't. Because for us to know that, or for it even to be an issue of Thermodynamics, we'd have to know FOR A FACT how the CO2 is influencing our atmosphere. Which we don't know. Again, I'm not saying you're wrong. But your treatment of theory as fact is exactly the issue I was pointing out in my post above. (For the record I don't think what you're presenting is consistent with Global Warming as we understand it. What you present in your comment could cause a slight warming but the reality is heat is still coming from the sun and if the atmosphere is already IR opaque than the heat trapped inside our atmosphere is limited by that meaning the Global catastrophe that is predicted doesn't really gel. It goes back to the blanket example, no matter how many blankets you put over yourself they can only trap the heat that's already there not create new heat)