Global Warming/Climate Change/Global Weirding?

[swake]

This scientist who worked at the DOE during Obama's first term also highlights the unsettled science of climate change and points out climatological  computer models are as much art as science and rely on supposition and estimation because the complex interactions of earth's environment is not fully understood nor agreed upon by scientists.  Hell, even most people who reject anthropogenic global warming agree the climate changes over time.  It always has.  The causes and solutions are hardly settled.

This is the crux of my skepticism with the global warming issue: policy initiatives seem to drive the scientific narrative when it's apparent we know far less about climate change than politicians and pundits want us to believe. 

Growing polar ice and a relative flattening of warming trends over the last 16 years, especially seem to have scientists at odds.

No matter your bent on climate change, the article is a very good read.

http://online.wsj.com/articles/climate-science-is-not-settled-1411143565

What he is arguing is the impact of the change.

from your own quote:

The crucial scientific question for policy isn't whether the climate is changing. That is a settled matter: The climate has always changed and always will. Geological and historical records show the occurrence of major climate shifts, sometimes over only a few decades. We know, for instance, that during the 20th century the Earth's global average surface temperature rose 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit.

Nor is the crucial question whether humans are influencing the climate. That is no hoax: There is little doubt in the scientific community that continually growing amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, due largely to carbon-dioxide emissions from the conventional use of fossil fuels, are influencing the climate. There is also little doubt that the carbon dioxide will persist in the atmosphere for several centuries. The impact today of human activity appears to be comparable to the intrinsic, natural variability of the climate system itself.

Also, from his article:

The science is urgent, since we could be caught flat-footed if our understanding does not improve more rapidly than the climate itself changes.

A transparent rigor would also be a welcome development, especially given the momentous political and policy decisions at stake. That could be supported by regular, independent, "red team" reviews to stress-test and challenge the projections by focusing on their deficiencies and uncertainties; that would certainly be the best practice of the scientific method. But because the natural climate changes over decades, it will take many years to get the data needed to confidently isolate and quantify the effects of human influences.

Policy makers and the public may wish for the comfort of certainty in their climate science. But I fear that rigidly promulgating the idea that climate science is "settled" (or is a "hoax") demeans and chills the scientific enterprise, retarding its progress in these important matters. Uncertainty is a prime mover and motivator of science and must be faced head-on. It should not be confined to hushed sidebar conversations at academic conferences.

Society's choices in the years ahead will necessarily be based on uncertain knowledge of future climates. That uncertainty need not be an excuse for inaction. There is well-justified prudence in accelerating the development of low-emissions technologies and in cost-effective energy-efficiency measures.

He's arguing for more study and more science and flexibility, not denying global warming as is very far from calling for doing nothing like most on the right.

[swake]

The arguments you are finding are over what models of future outcomes are most correct and what actions we should take to improve our outcomes.

There is NO dispute that the climate is changing, that we are contributing to that change in a very negative fashion and that we have to take action.

[Conan71]

You both fail to grasp the context of my message from the two articles posted.  Both sources cited believe climate change is quite real.  However, both agree the science is far from settled in terms of cause, remediation, and projection of future temperatures and ramifications.  One even touches on the subject of the increase in polar ice as well as flattening of the warming curve over the last 16 years.

POINT: Climate change science is far from "settled" and climate change models are far from absolute.  The scientific community is in disagreement as to solutions to climate change or even if it can be manipulated.

[Breadburner]

What do the Persimmon seeds say......

[swake]

You both fail to grasp the context of my message from the two articles posted.  Both sources cited believe climate change is quite real.  However, both agree the science is far from settled in terms of cause, remediation, and projection of future temperatures and ramifications.  One even touches on the subject of the increase in polar ice as well as flattening of the warming curve over the last 16 years.

POINT: Climate change science is far from "settled" and climate change models are far from absolute.  The scientific community is in disagreement as to solutions to climate change or even if it can be manipulated.

So your plan of action would be?

[Conan71]

So your plan of action would be?

My plan of action would be to stop using the issue for political benefit.  Indeed, many people are relying on political dogma as to what an appropriate solution is.

We need to see more unilateral agreement in the scientific community as to an appropriate plan of action.  That, in itself, appears to be in doubt amongst climate scientists.  There is much still unknown about how the planet deals with climate variations.

[patric]

We need to see more unilateral agreement in the scientific community as to an appropriate plan of action. 

Even though that position doesnt immediately lay down a specific course, it's leaps and bounds ahead of "its a hoax."

[swake]

My plan of action would be to stop using the issue for political benefit.  Indeed, many people are relying on political dogma as to what an appropriate solution is.

We need to see more unilateral agreement in the scientific community as to an appropriate plan of action.  That, in itself, appears to be in doubt amongst climate scientists.  There is much still unknown about how the planet deals with climate variations.

So do nothing?

The articles you are posting in no way are advocating doing nothing. The right mocks the very idea of doing anything and disputes that there is any such thing as global warming while there is no scientific debate that we are heating the earth and there is no arguing that this isn't bad. This shouldn't be political and the only reason it is political is because the energy industry is making it so. Your answer of doing nothing IS the position the energy industry is backing. Our own congressman wants to ban the government from even studying climate change.

You will nearly always be able to find points of disagreement in the science, that's just how science works, but that is no reason to do nothing. The arguments being made in your articles are over what modeling to use, not on if global warming is real, or bad. The argument over the impact ranges from really bad to cataclysmic. The rest of the arguments are what to do about it. There is NO valid argument for doing nothing in the scientific community.

[Conan71]

So do nothing?

The articles you are posting in no way are advocating doing nothing. The right mocks the very idea of doing anything and disputes that there is any such thing as global warming while there is no scientific debate that we are heating the earth and there is no arguing that this isn't bad. This shouldn't be political and the only reason it is political is because the energy industry is making it so. Your answer of doing nothing IS the position the energy industry is backing. Our own congressman wants to ban the government from even studying climate change.

You will nearly always be able to find points of disagreement in the science, that's just how science works, but that is no reason to do nothing. The arguments being made in your articles are over what modeling to use, not on if global warming is real, or bad. The argument over the impact ranges from really bad to cataclysmic. The rest of the arguments are what to do about it. There is NO valid argument for doing nothing in the scientific community.

M'kay.  Let's forget Al Gore and other's contribution to politicizing it and lay the blame soley on energy companies.  That's not revisionist nor anything even close.  For what it's worth, every major oil company does have a division which works on alternative energy solutions.

Dr. Unger's article makes an interesting case that what was once thought of as a great solution to global warming abatement with reforestation may actually make it worse.  There are far more examples posited by geoscientists over the years from white roofs to shooting massive amounts of human cremains into space to reflect solar radiation which has drawn plenty of doubt and criticism from others in the scientific community.

Science is not static, understanding of science is constantly evolving.  The more we think we know, the more we find we need to learn.

Rushing to a conclusion leads to unintended consequences.  Here's a gem from the late 1990's on automotive catalytic converter's contribution to global warming to illustrate the point:

E.P.A. Says Catalytic Converter Is Growing Cause of Global Warming

E.P.A. Says Catalytic Converter Is
Growing Cause of Global Warming
By Matthew L. Wald
Copyright 1998 The New York Times
May 29, 1998

----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------

WASHINGTON -- The catalytic converter, an invention that has sharply
reduced smog from cars, has now become a significant and growing
cause of global warming, according to the Environmental Protection
Agency.

Hailed as a miracle by Detroit automakers even today, catalytic
converters have been reducing smog for 20 years. The converters break
down compounds of nitrogen and oxygen from car exhaust that can
combine with hydrocarbons, also from cars, and be cooked by sunlight
into smog.

But researchers have suspected for years that the converters
sometimes rearrange the nitrogen-oxygen compounds to form nitrous
oxide, known as laughing gas. And nitrous oxide is a potent
greenhouse gas, more than 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide,
the most common of the gases, that is warming the atmosphere,
according to experts.

This spring, the EPA published a study estimating that nitrous oxide
now comprises about 7.2 percent of the gases that cause global
warming. Cars and trucks, most fitted with catalytic converters,
produce nearly half of that nitrous oxide, the study said. (Other
sources of nitrous oxide include everything from nitrogen-based
fertilizer to manure from farm animals.)

The EPA study also showed that nitrous oxide is one of a few gases
for which emissions are increasing rapidly. Collectively known as
greenhouse gases, they trap heat in the earth's atmosphere.

The increase in nitrous oxide, the study notes, stems from the growth
in the number of miles traveled by cars that have catalytic
converters. And the problem has worsened as improvements in catalytic
converters, changes that have eliminated more of the nitrogen-oxygen
compounds that cause smog, have conversely produced more nitrous
oxide.

Wylie J. Barbour, an EPA official who worked on the recently
published inventory, said that the problem created by the converter
is classic. "You've got people trying to solve one problem, and as is
not uncommon, they've created another."

Nitrous oxide, or N2O, is not regulated because the Clean Air Act was
written in 1970 to control smog, not global warming. And no
regulations exist to control gases that are believed to cause global
warming.

The United States and the other industrialized nations agreed in
Kyoto, Japan, last December to lower emissions of greenhouse gases to
5 percent below 1990 levels, over the next 10 to 15 years, but the
agreement has not been approved by the Senate, and no implementing
rules have been written.

"This hadn't really been on people's radar screen until climate
change started becoming an issue," said one EPA official involved in
reducing pollution from cars, who asked not to be identified by name.

The EPA has not proposed a solution at this point, and is seeking
public comment on its study. Auto industry experts say they could
solve the problem by tinkering with the catalytic converter, but some
environmentalists suggest that the growing production of nitrous
oxide is yet another reason to move away from gasoline-powered cars.
The EPA's study estimated that nitrous oxide may represent about one-
sixth of the global warming effect that results from gasoline use.

"It's like, clean is not green," said Sheila Lynch, executive
director of the Northeast Alternative Vehicle Coalition, a public-
private partnership that encourages non-traditional power sources.

Another expert, Christopher S. Weaver, an engineering consultant who
wrote a study on the subject for the environmental agency, said, "We
haven't cared enough to establish standards."

Precisely how much nitrous oxide the converters produce remains an
issue. A report used by the EPA in preparing its greenhouse gas
study, calculated that a car with a fuel economy of about 19 miles a
gallon would produce .27 grams of nitrous oxide per mile. That
represents an amount that is about one-third the limit of emissions
for nitrogen oxide, the chemicals causing smog.

Steven H. Cadle, a research scientist at General Motors, said, "it's
a huge number." In contrast, an older car without a catalytic
converter produces much larger amounts of nitrogen oxides, but only
about a tenth as much nitrous oxide, the greenhouse gas.

The EPA calculated that production of nitrous oxide from vehicles
rose by nearly 50 percent between 1990 and 1996 as older cars without
converters have neared extinction. Using a standard unit of measure
for global warming gases, millions of metric tons of carbon
equivalent, nitrous oxide emissions rose to 54.7 million tons from
36.7 million during those years, the study said.

The contradictory impact of the converter has not been lost on
environmental officials or industry experts, who continue to debate
not only the extent of the growing problem as well as how to reduce
the emissions in future years.

Ned Sullivan, the head of the Maine Department of Environmental
Protection, said the converter problem requires a "comprehensive"
response. "This specific issue fits into a broader context that our
regulatory system has tended to deal with pollutants on an
individual, rather than a comprehensive, basis," he said.

He and others favor moving away from today's typical car design, a
big gasoline engine driving the wheels, to electric cars. Maine would
like electric cars. Another solution is hybrid cars, which use small,
efficient engines running on gasoline to help turn the wheels and to
charge batteries for electric motors that also run the wheels. Those
have much higher fuel economy, and thus lower greenhouse gas
emissions.

Car industry experts, however, favor less drastic changes. They
propose cutting nitrous oxide production by adjusting catalytic
converters in future models. They suspect that the gas is produced
when the converter is warming up, and believe the converters could be
redesigned to reach optimum temperature faster. That would also help
them destroy other pollutants better.

Weaver said that measurements on more kinds of cars and light trucks
would be needed to be certain about the size of the problem. But
Weaver said, "It is quite clear that you produce nitrous oxide in a
catalyst, in some circumstances."

At the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental group, an
expert on transportation pollution, Roland Hwang, said, "We can't be
pushing forward trying to reduce smog while making the global warming
problem worse; we can't have programs that undercut each other." He
said this was evidence that the transportation system would have to
use something besides gasoline.

Cadle, of General Motors would not go that far. But, he said, "You
have to be holistic and try and look at everything, which is
obviously difficult."

So let me get this straight. According to the EPA we're still gonna cook to death, but we'll die laughing thanks to their meddling.

I have no problem with reducing emissions where practical.  For a variety of reasons, less emissions is a good thing.

I'm a global warming skeptic, yet my behavior aligns better with reducing emissions than others I hear banging the global warming drum.  My wife and I frequently walk to dinner if it's within a mile or two of home.  Sometimes I commute to work by bike.  We frequently run errands, go visit friends on our bikes, or plan a day around biking to the market, doing something downtown, and eating.  We have a semi-pedestrian lifestyle.  Do we do it because we think we're saving the environment?  No.  We do it because we enjoy it and it's a healthy lifestyle.  If it is better for the environment, bonus.

What frosts me is people who lecture about how everyone else needs to do something about it yet make no contribution themselves to lowering emissions.

[heironymouspasparagus]

You both fail to grasp the context of my message from the two articles posted.  Both sources cited believe climate change is quite real.  However, both agree the science is far from settled in terms of cause, remediation, and projection of future temperatures and ramifications.  One even touches on the subject of the increase in polar ice as well as flattening of the warming curve over the last 16 years.

POINT: Climate change science is far from "unsettled" and climate change models are far from absolute.  The scientific community is in disagreement as to solutions to climate change or even if it can be manipulated.

The polar ice has not been increasing for 16 years as the structure of your statement is trying to imply....conflate!  It has increased for 2 years, will see about the final results for this year.

And fixed the other problem for you....

As for "solutions" - there are none that we will ever take, let alone making small steps in the right direction....just as fixing the rain forests is a small piece in the effort, so to is the reduction of burning stuff to generate CO2.  Enough small pieces may slow the process enough to mitigate whatever may be the worst effects.  NO ONE is saying that is the whole solution, except when the RWRE tries to put those words in other peoples mouths to advance their economic scare tactics.

If, as a society, we really wanted to 'solve' a vast multitude of ills we are faced with, there would be an effort or "push" to fusion power production of the magnitude  we saw with previous BHAG's* during our glory days.  Things like the Manhattan Project, and the effort to go to the moon.  But that would create such a broad and sweeping change to our economy and society in general, and there are insufficient 'visionaries' in a position to advance that effort, such that it will never happen in my lifetime.

*BHAG = Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals

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

[Conan71]

The polar ice has not been increasing for 16 years as the structure of your statement is trying to imply....conflate!  It has increased for 2 years, will see about the final results for this year.

And fixed the other problem for you....

As for "solutions" - there are none that we will ever take, let alone making small steps in the right direction....just as fixing the rain forests is a small piece in the effort, so to is the reduction of burning stuff to generate CO2.  Enough small pieces may slow the process enough to mitigate whatever may be the worst effects.  NO ONE is saying that is the whole solution, except when the RWRE tries to put those words in other peoples mouths to advance their economic scare tactics.

If, as a society, we really wanted to 'solve' a vast multitude of ills we are faced with, there would be an effort or "push" to fusion power production of the magnitude  we saw with previous BHAG's* during our glory days.  Things like the Manhattan Project, and the effort to go to the moon.  But that would create such a broad and sweeping change to our economy and society in general, and there are insufficient 'visionaries' in a position to advance that effort, such that it will never happen in my lifetime.

*BHAG = Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals

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

No, I was not implying polar ice has increased for 16 years.  I neglected to add it's increased the past two years and the temp rise has flattened over the last 16. 

So, are you in disagreement from "the script" that reduced CO2 emissions would help alleviate climate weirding or not?  Take a ritalin and try again 

[heironymouspasparagus]

No, I was not implying polar ice has increased for 16 years.  I neglected to add it's increased the past two years and the temp rise has flattened over the last 16. 

So, are you in disagreement from "the script" that reduced CO2 emissions would help alleviate climate weirding or not?  Take a ritalin and try again 

No, not in disagreement with it - not in agreement either.  It is ambiguous and difficult to predict any type of exact result EXCEPT that we are seeing increased volatility - known fact.  And since CO2 IS absolutely at a very dramatically different "operating point" (double) than at any time in almost half a million years - it would be a reasonable observation that volatility will continue to increase and is based somehow on that change in operating point.  A conservative, thoughtful approach would be to look at the numbers we do have - rising average global temperatures and skyrocketing CO2 levels, and consider stopping or slowing the one we KNOW for a fact that we not only have control of, but have been manipulating for a couple hundred years in a big way - release of CO2 into the atmosphere.

Take a pause in the action and watch for a while to see what changes, or doesn't change, next!  Make a scientific experiment, if you will.  And the best way to do that would be to get fusion power in place, and stop the majority of carbon release - whether said destruction is by burning or cut/slash destruction of living biomass.  Probably a 30 to 50 year process....with a society and business structure that is on a 30, 60, 90 day timetable.  Does not bode well for us!


I don't believe in "Chicken Little" - but what is readily observable by anyone with more than a cabbage-head should be of at least some serious concern and give pause to our "business as usual" approach.

[swake]

I'm a global warming skeptic

But why? Nothing you have posted, in fact nothing that anyone has posted that isn't falsehood filled crap funded by Koch, Exxon and big energy argues against global warming at all. There isn't a single shred of fact based argument that has been made that argues global warming is somehow wrong or a hoax. So why are you still a skeptic? What fact based, science based argument can you still make?

Your position is an emotional one, and it's been paid for millions of dollars in marketing and propaganda, it has no basis in science or evidence or facts.

[Red Arrow]

So your plan of action would be?

Yours appears to be do anything, even if it's wrong.

[Red Arrow]

Despite your protestations, the science of global warming, climate change, climate anomaly, etc. is far from "settled".  There's a school of thought that reforestation actually increases levels of V.O.C.'s thought to be contributors to global warming.

From that bastion of conservatism, NYT:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/20/opinion/to-save-the-planet-dont-plant-trees.html?_r=0

Dr. Unger is assistant professor of atmospheric chemistry at Yale
http://environment.yale.edu/unger-group/nyt-op-ed/

Dr. Unger must have lost her research grant.