OT. Global WHAT?

[petaluma]

Eloise, you may take comfort in the fact that what Paul considers "clear thinking" tends to come from places like web sites bankrolled by the oil billionaire Koch Brothers.

 

Jud, the brothers Koch are planning to spend nearly 900 million on influencing the 2016 elections at all levels. Nearly a billion US can throw up a lot of road blocks on trying to do anything regarding climate change. One other thing I don't get is David Koch is one of the primary sponsors of Nova on PBS.......If that doesn't make for interesting discussions on conflicts of interest I don't know what does.

[petaluma]

Not if the warm places have no water. Think for a second about how much of your diet consists of stuff grown in California.

 

Exactly. In the last 150 years of agriculture in the Central Valley irrigation based farming has managed in some parts of the southern valley to exhaust the aquifer that took millions of years to lay down. So what do we do, in the last election passed an initiative that is going to spend billions on water infrastructure, a majority of which is going to go to building dams...When at the same time climate models show extended drought conditions. How F*****g screwed up is that? We have 3 needs: People, Farming, Ecosystem. The only way California is going to survive on the water that is and will be available would be to have spent the money on desalination technology to supply the major metropolitan areas and allow the Sierra runoff to be utilized by farming and the ecosystem (Delta).

 

A great book to understand water policy in the west and California in particular is "The Cadillac Desert" by Marc Reisner. It paints a pretty bleak picture. As an example when the Colorado River basin runoff was divided among the basin states no water was allocated to Mexico. So they added Mexico and used the two wettest years of the 20th century, 1921 and 1922?, as the benchmark. Normally the Colorado flows at about 11 million acre feet a year, less now, but those two years the river was running at nearly 17 million, so we just kept building and building and using and using because we thought we had nearly an infinite supply. And LA actually took some of Arizona's allocation which Phoenix had to fight to get back when they started growing.

 

So like everything that humans become involved with it has turned on us. And if the climate models do pan out you can pretty much turn the lights out on California staying the major food producing region on the planet......

[sdolezalek]

1) You're making an assumption that 'WE' are the dominant mechanism creating climate change. This has not been established.

 

2) Don't understand why you're having difficult understanding my position.........The time to focus on measures of change as the primary solution has passed. Focus on things that will matter such as farming, irrigation, infrastructure adaptations and community relocations. These are the primary,most RESPONSIBLE efforts that we can undertake.

 

3) But you would rather us focus on alternative fuels, reduced consumption and green methods instead? Good luck with that, OK?

 

Responses:

 

1) If you define "established" as 100% conclusive, irrefutable proof, yes you are correct. If, as I stated in an earlier thread, you act on an 80/20 basis to protect yourself against unfavorable events that are much more likely than not to occur, then you would act otherwise.

 

2) The time to take primary measures is never over until our fate is sealed. I fully agree with ALSO taking the adaptive actions you suggest, but my disagreement with you was over the suggestion that we can keep doing what got us into this situation because adaptation alone will solve our problem. I strongly disagree with that.

 

3) You might note that in just the last month both Google and Apple have announced that they have now purchased enough wind and solar power to power all of their global operations (no that isn't 100% every hour, every day; it is an annualized average that still requires them to rely on the grid when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining). But when two of the biggest and most profitable companies on the planet do this because it makes financial sense, I'm willing to bet that a lot of other Boards of Directors around the world over the next six months will be asking "and why aren't we doing that?" I remember that in 1985 IBM said something along the lines of "who cares about these personal computers, they will never amount to more than a few percentage points of global computing." That is the nature of change -- we tend to live our lives based upon historical truths and any change that grows exponentially - like PC's, cell phones, flat screen televisions and yes, solar panels, is difficult for us to mentally deal with.

[Jud]

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/us/ties-to-corporate-cash-for-climate-change-researcher-Wei-Hock-Soon.html?ref=science&_r=0

 

Please read the entire article, it's quite instructive.

 

Edit: An enlightening excerpt -

 

The documents show that Dr. Soon, in correspondence with his corporate funders, described many of his scientific papers as “deliverables” that he completed in exchange for their money. He used the same term to describe testimony he prepared for Congress.

[Jabs1542]

Clearly there is a COI issue but it is also quite possible that he truly believes in his research. No where was he acused of proposals deriving a false conclusion for the sake of payment. I see this is being very similar to an expert witness.

 

Generally speaking. Is pollution bad? Of course. Are greenhouse and carbon emissions bad? Of course. However the entire scientific community is not is agreement as to the ultimate course of action to remedy our current climate situation. Could be carbon emissions, could be deforestation, could be solar flares, etc. fact is they can't agree anymore than any of us can agree on subjective vs objective audiophile philosophies.

 

i get nervous when politicians get involved and start revering people's concepts that they don't understand themselves. Like I said before, I have seen how the beast needs to be fed and there is almost always money or power behind any political decisions. It's very rare that people in power will concede to a better idea if that idea contradicts the things that benefit them. And that's how this is going to get fixed in the US.

[Jud]

Clearly there is a COI issue but it is also quite possible that he truly believes in his research. No where was he acused of proposals deriving a false conclusion for the sake of payment.

 

I agree he believes in his research. Did you read this portion of the article?

 

Though often described on conservative news programs as a “Harvard astrophysicist,” Dr. Soon is not an astrophysicist and has never been employed by Harvard. He is a part-time employee of the Smithsonian Institution with a doctoral degree in aerospace engineering. He has received little federal research money over the past decade and is thus responsible for bringing in his own funds, including his salary.

 

 

Though he has little formal training in climatology, Dr. Soon has for years published papers trying to show that variations in the sun’s energy can explain most recent global warming. His thesis is that human activity has played a relatively small role in causing climate change.

 

 

Many experts in the field say that Dr. Soon uses out-of-date data, publishes spurious correlations between solar output and climate indicators, and does not take account of the evidence implicating emissions from human behavior in climate change.

 

 

Gavin A. Schmidt, head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, a NASA division that studies climate change, said that the sun had probably accounted for no more than 10 percent of recent global warming and that greenhouse gases produced by human activity explained most of it.

 

 

“The science that Willie Soon does is almost pointless,” Dr. Schmidt said.

 

I see this is being very similar to an expert witness.

 

Again agreed. I have prepared expert witnesses for testimony and have cross-examined them (at times with regard to highly technical subjects). Taking the above excerpt into account, Dr. Soon strikes me as a familiar species of expert. He is willing to go outside his actual area of expertise to declare a strong point of view. Those whom this point of view favors are then very pleased to have "a scientist" (often described as you can see as a "Harvard astrophysicist," but he has never worked as an astrophysicist or for Harvard, and in fact his degree is in aerospace engineering) repeatedly provide it in papers and testimony.

 

Dr. Soon seems if anything a little too enthusiastic about publishing papers with his point of view, neglecting to declare his potential conflict of interest in violation of the rules of several of the journals that published him.

 

Generally speaking. Is pollution bad? Of course. Are greenhouse and carbon emissions bad? Of course. However the entire scientific community is not is agreement as to the ultimate course of action to remedy our current climate situation. Could be carbon emissions, could be deforestation, could be solar flares, etc. fact is they can't agree anymore than any of us can agree on subjective vs objective audiophile philosophies.

 

That's not quite accurate. Dr. Schmidt's quote above very accurately reflects the scientific consensus that solar activity is a minor player in climate change. Emissions from burning of carbon and deforestation are both human activities that result in increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and thus are solidly within the scientific consensus that the vast majority of current climate change is "anthropogenic," i.e., caused by humans, primarily through increasing CO2 levels. (Deforestation results in increased CO2 in two ways - it's often done by burning; and it leaves less vegetation to "breathe in" CO2 and "breathe out" oxygen.) So there isn't scientific disagreement regarding whether deforestation and carbon emissions cause climate change, since they're in fact two aspects of the same thing.

[Jim Sylva]

A great book to understand water policy in the west and California in particular is "The Cadillac Desert" by Marc Reisner.

+1

The Cadillac Desert is an amazing book. The intricate details of this extremely complex history are weaved together with a clarity that I consider to be phenomenal. This is a fascinating and depressing story.

[firedog]

The Dr. Soon article reminds us of a typical tactic of the "deny" camp: get scientists who aren't in the field of climate science and get them to "deny". Then you can claim that there isn't scientific consensus on the subject.

[Jabs1542]

Dr. Soon seems if anything a little too enthusiastic about publishing papers with his point of view, neglecting to declare his potential conflict of interest in violation of the rules of several of the journals that published him.

 

Surprised he's not an objectivist here on CA

 

That's not quite accurate. Dr. Schmidt's quote above very accurately reflects the scientific consensus that solar activity is a minor player in climate change. Emissions from burning of carbon and deforestation are both human activities that result in increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and thus are solidly within the scientific consensus that the vast majority of current climate change is "anthropogenic," i.e., caused by humans, primarily through increasing CO2 levels. (Deforestation results in increased CO2 in two ways - it's often done by burning; and it leaves less vegetation to "breathe in" CO2 and "breathe out" oxygen.) So there isn't scientific disagreement regarding whether deforestation and carbon emissions cause climate change, since they're in fact two aspects of the same thing.

 

Yes, I didn't quite mean it that way. What I was referring to are the arguments among the scientific community regarding which effect is most severe and should be focused on.

[Paul R]

Wow - so lets put a little more reason into this conversation. Here is what virtually everyone can agree on, and what is commonly called "the consensus."

Start with that, then please tell me how that leads to taking "any action!" and how one concludes that "any action at all is better than none!" when such has been proven time and time again in human history to be false. And usually more harmful than waiting to get the facts and take targeted, economically feasible, action?

 

 

Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities.

 

• W. R. L. Anderegg, “Expert Credibility in Climate Change,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Vol. 107 No. 27, 12107-12109 (21 June 2010); DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1003187107.
  P. T. Doran & M. K. Zimmerman, "Examining the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change," Eos Transactions American Geophysical Union Vol. 90 Issue 3 (2009), 22; DOI: 10.1029/2009EO030002.
  N. Oreskes, “Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change,” Science Vol. 306 no. 5702, p. 1686 (3 December 2004); DOI: 10.1126/science.1103618.
  

[firedog]

Paul, part of the consensus you quote is that "human activities" include burning hydrocarbons. If the action taken in reaction to climate chang is gradually reducing the use of carbon based fuels to the level of 25-30 ago, please give us one credible reason to think that would be harmful.

 

So far all you've said is that you somehow consider that very mild bit of action to be potentially catastrophically harmful. Please let us know how reducing the use of dirty fuel (not eliminating it) is a catastrophe waiting to happen.

 

Wow - so lets put a little more reason into this conversation. Here is what virtually everyone can agree on, and what is commonly called "the consensus."

Start with that, then please tell me how that leads to taking "any action!" and how one concludes that "any action at all is better than none!" when such has been proven time and time again in human history to be false. And usually more harmful than waiting to get the facts and take targeted, economically feasible, action?

[Paul R]

Paul, part of the consensus you quote is that "human activities" include burning hydrocarbons. If the action taken in reaction to climate chang is gradually reducing the use of carbon based fuels to the level of 25-30 ago, please give us one credible reason to think that would be harmful.

 

So far all you've said is that you somehow consider that very mild bit of action to be potentially catastrophically harmful. Please let us know how reducing the use of dirty fuel (not eliminating it) is a catastrophe waiting to happen.

 

You are changing the question I asked Firedog - I don't disagree with lowering the carbon emissions, I simply disagree that doing so is "the" solution. And the reason why I disagree is because there isn't enough research that has been done, so far as I can tell, to give accurate predictions.

 

To wit: It is *trivially* easy to find hundreds and hundreds of failed predictions on the web. Where are the successful ones? I searched for about 10 mins and could not find an easily verified list of successful AGW predictions. (From the net of course.)

 

It is not so easy to find vindicated predictions, though it is beyond easy to find newspaper articles declaring predictions from 1980 or so have been "eerily accurate." Accuracy that doesn't seem all that accurate to me, and finding the details on what exactly was so eerily accurate is more difficult. Every one I chased down ended in "just about" or "close to" or the most popular "didn't predict 13 years of much slower warming, due to local variations like El Nino.

 

There probably is a lot of truth in there somewhere. Almost a dead certainty actually. But the missed predictions are still far more prevelant than the accurate ones.

 

-Paul

 

Here for example, is a short sample of "failed" predictions:

 

1. “Due to global warming, the coming winters in the local regions will become milder.”

Stefan Rahmstorf, Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research, University of Potsdam, February 8, 2006

****

2. “Milder winters, drier summers: Climate study shows a need to adapt in Saxony Anhalt.”

Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Press Release, January 10, 2010.

****

3. “More heat waves, no snow in the winter… Climate models… over 20 times more precise than the UN IPCC global models. In no other country do we have more precise calculations of climate consequences. They should form the basis for political planning… Temperatures in the wintertime will rise the most… there will be less cold air coming to Central Europe from the east…In the Alps winters will be 2°C warmer already between 2021 and 2050.”

Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, September 2, 2008.

****

4. “The new Germany will be characterized by dry-hot summers and warm-wet winters.”

Wilhelm Gerstengarbe and Peter Werner, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), March 2, 2007

****

5. “Clear climate trends are seen from the computer simulations. Foremost the winter months will be warmer all over Germany. Depending of CO2 emissions, temperatures will rise by up to 4°C, in the Alps by up to 5°C.”

Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, 7 Dec 2009.

****

6. “In summer under certain conditions the scientists reckon with a complete melting of the Arctic sea ice. For Europe we expect an increase in drier and warmer summers. Winters on the other hand will be warmer and wetter.”

Erich Roeckner, Max Planck Institute, Hamburg, 29 Sept 2005.

****

7. “The more than ‘unusually ‘warm January weather is yet ‘another extreme event’, ‘a harbinger of the winters that are ahead of us’. … The global temperature will ‘increase every year by 0.2°C’”

Michael Müller, Socialist, State Secretary in the Federal Ministry of Environment,

Die Zeit, 15 Jan 2007

****

 

[Jud]

Paul, part of the consensus you quote is that "human activities" include burning hydrocarbons. If the action taken in reaction to climate chang is gradually reducing the use of carbon based fuels to the level of 25-30 ago, please give us one credible reason to think that would be harmful.

 

So far all you've said is that you somehow consider that very mild bit of action to be potentially catastrophically harmful. Please let us know how reducing the use of dirty fuel (not eliminating it) is a catastrophe waiting to happen.

 

A large segment of the Texas economy (especially that of its largest city and the 4th largest city in the USA, Houston) depends on the oil and natural gas industry. The Texas media frequently carry concerns about the impact various national policy choices might have on the state's economy. It's therefore not surprising that these concerns are evidenced in people exposed to those media day in and day out.

 

I lived in Oklahoma, also a state whose economy is bound up with the oil and gas industry, in the early 1980s when the price of oil went from $60 to $12 a barrel in a relatively short time. The economic impact was very real and very harsh. While gradual implementation of energy conservation measures and alternative energy sources may act more slowly this time, there will still very likely be a substantial economic impact (unless, or perhaps even if, Texas makes a big push into the alternative energy market, which it is actually well set up to do).

[Jud]

You are changing the question I asked Firedog - I don't disagree with lowering the carbon emissions, I simply disagree that doing so is "the" solution. And the reason why I disagree is because there isn't enough research that has been done, so far as I can tell, to give accurate predictions.

 

To wit: It is *trivially* easy to find hundreds and hundreds of failed predictions on the web. Where are the successful ones? I searched for about 10 mins and could not find an easily verified list of successful AGW predictions. (From the net of course.)

 

It is not so easy to find vindicated predictions, though it is beyond easy to find newspaper articles declaring predictions from 1980 or so have been "eerily accurate." Accuracy that doesn't seem all that accurate to me, and finding the details on what exactly was so eerily accurate is more difficult. Every one I chased down ended in "just about" or "close to" or the most popular "didn't predict 13 years of much slower warming, due to local variations like El Nino.

 

There probably is a lo of truth in there somewhere. But the missed predictions are far more prevelant than the accurate ones.

 

-Paul

 

Here for example, is a short sample of "failed" predictions:

 

 

 

How are those predictions "failed," in particular the last one regarding average annual global temperature increase?

[Paul R]

A large segment of the Texas economy (especially that of its largest city and the 4th largest city in the USA, Houston) depends on the oil and natural gas industry. The Texas media frequently carry concerns about the impact various national policy choices might have on the state's economy. It's therefore not surprising that these concerns are evidenced in people exposed to those media day in and day out.

 

I lived in Oklahoma, also a state whose economy is bound up with the oil and gas industry, in the early 1980s when the price of oil went from $60 to $12 a barrel in a relatively short time. The economic impact was very real and very harsh. While gradual implementation of energy conservation measures and alternative energy sources may act more slowly this time, there will still very likely be a substantial economic impact (unless, or perhaps even if, Texas makes a big push into the alternative energy market, which it is actually well set up to do).

 

That is true, more or less. One reason we moved here from PA was economic. I don't think Texas are automatically negative towards AGW, they just want answers as to - when I loose my job, what jobs are going to replace it? Where is my personal income going to come from, and will it be enough to support my family well?

 

The economic impacts of all these changes cannot be ignored, and absolutely must be addressed.

 

-Paul

[Paul R]

How are those predictions "failed," in particular the last one regarding average annual global temperature increase?

 

Has the global temperature increased by 1.6C since 2007?

 

-Paul