Earth day

Great photo of the inlet, I love the lift bridge just inland of this.
Duluth is one of my favorite cities. I visit now and then and always have a great time. A day trip on the North Shore Scenic Railroad is a perfect way to spend the afternoon. I suggest the beer tasting train! I always have to climb Enger Tower and wonder if a very young Bob Zimmerman did so long ago.
Beautiful city.
Cheers!

Dave look it up for yourself ... we have already told you over and over that they are... you apparently dont believe us so go to a primary source read one of the studies that you are constantly casting aspertions upon and find out what they are and arent controlling for and then decide if you have a real reason to doubt thier conclusions.

Dave, you aren't making any sense.

Look at the figures and read some of the things you've written. Look at how whoever make those figures and all the other stuff you've posted has cleverly provided you the double-think so that you use the very fact that it is warming to deny that it is. It boggles the mind.

When are you going to wake up? Are you looking at the things you post?

I can't continue in this conversation when you insist that the sky is orange. I've wasted wayyyy too much time on this thread and it is past time to stop throwing good money after bad.

Someday I'd love for you to share a lengthy post describing your climate science expertise, including how you know that natural cycles are left out of the climate models. Did you hear it from one of your buddies in your climate science PhD program, or did you recently review a Nature paper that left it out and the editor decided to publish it anyway?

So far the only thing you've managed to demonstrate is the amount of self delusion you can bring to bear in order to maintain your world view. For that I certainly give you credit, though I cannot give you respect.

When you get all whipped up by the administration's announcement for new limits on coal emissions next week keep me out of it. It is officially summer. I intend to spend my spare time for the next few months in open-topped cars and boats and lovin' every minute of it.

Go John, Jamin, yes shame on us. Not much of a holiday weekend for me. I put in my 44 hours at the full time job last week. did some shopping for the side business Friday night. worked 9 hours Saturday, 7 hours Sunday, and back for 4 hours at the full time job today. the boat has been out. it is running well, but needs the electrical cleaned again. all the gauges are goofy temp is high (cylindrical warming?), oil pressure high, volts low. I picked up some dialectic grease for this run through, hopefully it will last a little longer before corroding. raining tonight.

First of all, shame on you (us?) for not being out on your boat.

Second, are you saying that it is part of the "cycle" to increase each time? E.g. the "cycle" from 1820-1880 was cooler than the one from 1880-1940, etc.?

You see the Earth continuing to do what it was doing? So that means that it has been getting warmer with each cycle and will continue to do so long into the future naturally? I don't think it takes much to see that it should have been very very cold not too many cycles ago and soon it will be very very warm.

As I understand "cycles" the 1940-2000 temperatures should be the same as the 1880-1940 temperatures. The fact that they are no is due to the fact that there is extra CO2 in the atmosphere. Am I missing something here?

Wait, I think you are saying that you expect to see an acceleration because there is more and more CO2 in the atmosphere all the time? And that perhaps the cycle should be wiped out entirely? Am I reading you correctly? This is not sarcasm, I am just trying to understand what you are thinking.

J

OverMyHead wrote: Notice that the two cycles are nearly identical, but one is supposedly natural, and the other needed anthropomorphic CO2 to occur.

Signal vs. Noise: a Primer

Signal = effect of the driver you care about

Noise = effects of other drivers

Climate Change Signal = warmer temperatures in general

Climate Oscillation "Noise" = regular temperature changes over many years

Climate Change Signal + Climate Oscillation "Noise" = regular temperature changes over many years that continue to get warmer and warmer.

I don't understand why you think "one is supposedly natural, and the other needed anthropomorphic CO2 to occur." The natural cycles don't need the CO2 to occur, nor does the CO2-caused heating need the cycles to occur.

As I said before you can clearly see that the "cycle" on the right is warmer than the "cycle" on the left. The observed pattern is a combination of both, not support for one and repudiation of the other.

Now as to my "prediction" of a 30 year cooling period, it is really not a prediction so much as I expect the earth to keep doing what it has been doing before. I also predict that the sun will rise tomorrow morning and this summer will be followed by a fall, a winter and then a spring again(there, in the future you wont be able to say my predictions are always wrong). Knowing the earths habits does not make these predictions seem especially prescient. The Earth has a well known 62 year average global temperature cycle, that can be split in half to a 31 year average cooling period and a 31 year average warming period.
we are currently just passed the top of a warming cycle meaning if the earth follows its usual habits we will cool for the next thirty or so years.

The thirty year cycles have been selectively used and ignored by global climate change alarmists. One common use is to cite the average yearly temperature rise during the last century of .74 degrees. On the surface an even century sounds like a good random period to make an observation from, but knowing that a complete cycle would be about 124 years this would tell a thinking person that using a 100 year period would leave us comparing the cycles at different stages. Specifically 1900 was conveniently near the low point in a cycle and the temp peaked in 1998. If you go back to a fair comparison point of the previous peek in 1880, the peek to peek global temp rise is only .4 degrees in 120 years, but I never hear that.

From what I have read the alarmists chose not to use the 60 year cycle in all the climate change models. This ( and a few other problems) is why we see Al Gores hockey stick graph rather than a saw toothed incline graph. The question is why did they not include the 60 year cycle. Certainly anyone studying the climate would be well aware of the cycle. Was this omission an attempt at simplification, or was it a marketing decision fearing that if they admitted the planet would cool again they would screw up a good crisis? I don't know the reason but I see this as not only collusion amongst the model designers but a major tactical mistake. By not including the 60 year cycle the model cannot reflect real world results. This is the exact same problem global coloring ran into in the late 70's. One would think the environmentalists would have learned from that little blunder. This time when the warming stopped in 1998 they were again backed into a corner, and had to change the name from global warming to global climate change and come up with climate change being on hiatus (the global scientist equivalent to "my dog ate my homework"). Had they put the cycle into their models they now could be saying that the world should have started cooling in 2000 but 15 years into the cycle it has not! (How could I argue against this?) They also could have avoided the global warming name change and kept the crisis going for at least another 60 years, and if that did not pan out they could claim an aberrant cycle and maybe go out 120 years.

I hate to give you guys new operating ideas, but I am guessing someone will figure out this marketing tactic, and when they start using it at least I will have this thread to point out that the dumb floor guy on the boat web site figured it out years before the brilliant scientists did.

This is also interesting, here is a graph of the last two cycles superimposed on each other




Notice that the two cycles are nearly identical, but one is supposedly natural, and the other needed anthropomorphic CO2 to occur.

Here is your link Dave

The inconvenient truth about climate change and Obama’s policies

How does china burning coal dirtier than us move jobs over there, or how does us not burning coal over here kill jobs? Our all of the above energy strategy seems to be working just fine as well, as long as we keep our eyes on the power companies so they don't shut down a few plants to create a fake shortage to run up the rates, or shut down a few refineries for maintainance at the same time right before a travel weekend. But that was just good clean fun, free market at its finest, nothing the government should ever interfere with. I just cant figure out how removing the scrubbers from the smoke stacks on the coal plants is going to unleash any growth, unless you are talking about all the medical jobs that will be needed to take care of the increased illnesses across the country, or those guys that put existing houses up on stilts to avoid flooding.

If you don't like how we do things in america please feel free to move to china and enjoy their fresh air and all that freedom and low taxes they got going on over there, must be why they have so many people trying to get over thier borders every day trying to seek the chinese dream.

Nice propaganda guys, throw out a news story as a distraction but the fact is china is pursuing an all the the above energy strategy (like Obama talks about, but they really do it), this may cause some percentage of use changes, but not backing off of coal at all, they are in fact increasing its use. China having far lower regulations and taxes than the US has unleashed its industry and is experiencing growth rates in the mid 7% compared to The US measly 2.8 percent growth, so china is looking for all the energy they can find to support their growth. Even without new coal standards we burn it much cleaner here than in China, since we are all one big world wouldn't it be better policy to burn it at our current standard here than to send the jobs to china and have them burn it in a far dirtier manner? It would also allow us to grow, and lower unemployment. Win win!







Projected energy growth in China by energy source, based on IEA's Reference Scenario which estimates future trends based on existing government policies

OverMyHead wrote: And yes the Chinese are winning because they have been exempted from the global warming solutions. They will continue to build coal fired power plants providing cheap energy for manufacturing while we handicap our industry with more expensive options, pushing more jobs offshore, and thus ruining America.

note that the Chinese have just signed a big deal for natural gas with the Russians because they are living with the pollution from coal and smart enough to know they need to move to cleaner tech.   They win in american markets when products stay the same long enough for them to copy existing designs. Regulations calling for increased efficiency always favor innovation and reward those with the best solutions.   Nothing more american than that.   You still want to race them to the bottom with the cheapest and dirtiest being the winner... its a race with no winner it destroys the earth and favors cheap labor and lack of innovation.    

Of course the reality is the Chinese are not sticking the heads under the coal sl*g and denying climate change... unlike my over propagandized friends here.

JoeinNY wrote:    and now the amateur scientist believes we are entering a 30 year cooling cycle. That would be great if he had ever been right before..

Joe, Do you know the significance of 30 years, 31 actually on average?
Hint, it is not in the global warming models.

And yes the Chinese are winning because they have been exempted from the global warming solutions. They will continue to build coal fired power plants providing cheap energy for manufacturing while we handicap our industry with more expensive options, pushing more jobs offshore, and thus ruining America.

Yes, that was a poor choice of words, haha. I blame muscle memory.

As I've said before science, especially environmental science is by its very nature uncertain. So in that context when I say "to the best of science's knowledge" I mean that this is where all the evidence points.

That stands in stark contrast to much of the rhetoric on this thread. Often it isn't, "I'm pretty sure" or "Based on what I know"; it is "This is how it is" which would be fine if it were objectively true. But most if not all of the statements that are so sure of themselves are in fact very obviously false and it would take only a modicum of investigation and logic to discern that. I have a bunch of people telling me on this very thread that environmental scientists are not agreed on climate change. I happen to be an environmental scientist and I in fact would know better the answer to this question and when I tell people they are wrong they have the gall to tell me that in fact I am wrong because of something that they read on some website. As if that somehow trumps first hand experience.

All I'm really asking for is some humility from people who should know enough to know that they don't know it all.

And Dave, I think you've done an increasingly good job hearing me and others out so I thank you for that and don't take this barb as directed to you (at the moment anyway ;)

As for the cost:benefit ratio I completely agree, but of course I believe that the benefits of doing something to try to slow climate change are greater than the cost, including of being wrong. You obviously believe differently, and that is understandable. You are correct that models, and the IPCC for that matter, does not know exactly what will happen to the climate in the future. We have some pretty good ideas, each of them with varying levels of confidence, but we don't know for sure. This doesn't mean I think the models are "wrong" or a load of crap, just that this is a complicated problem and all models are abstractions in the first place so it is natural that they would disagree. It is worth emphasizing once again that all models predict significant future climate warming/change, as does everything we have directly observed up to this point.

Given that the IPCC is 95+% sure of its findings that means that there is ~5% chance that if we spent your figure of 30 billion to try to stop this thing we would lose all of that money, plus whatever other greater damage has been done. That is a risk.

Chemo comes with risks too. You can die from it, and even if you live your quality of life is definitely going to suffer and it may not even work. In this case I'd liken climate change to a cancer. We've got a good shot of slowing the metastasis but it isn't going to be painless and there is no guarantee that it will work. But 95 out of 100 of the doctors we've spoken to think the diagnosis is rather poor so it is probably time to consider some kind of treatment.

But as you say, maybe the treatment isn't worth it. That is possible (though I most sincerely doubt it), and frankly that lies out of my area of expertise. It is a question for economists, business folk, and politicians. I don't know how many of those we have on this site but now would be a good time for them to chime in (or if they are wise, unlike us, do no such thing).

Jamin, If I am right, and we are heading into a 30 year cooling cycle, what is the recourse to collect the money that was fraudulently confiscated in the name of global climate change? We recently saw Obama chuckling about shovel ready projects that were not so shovel ready. we invested billions with almost no return, and we cant get that back. If 20 years from now Obama is chuckling saying I guess that climate change was not as changy as we thought, How do we get our billions back? Everything we are doing now on climate change is based on alarmist models that are not representative of real world observations. If we are going to take action, it has to be done on a cost vs benefit basis. To figure out the costs we need a model that is proven to be predictive of real world temperatures, we have not had that and we will not know if we do today until we run them for another 15 Years. Taking action now is a crap shoot at best. Why not wait at least until science can prove itself to really understand what is coming in the future. I am tired of everything being a crisis, and we have to pass it, pass it now. That is a great way to make really poor decisions.

Hansel wrote: But we only have one Earth and one atmosphere and we best get it as right as we can. What is the worst thing that can happen from playing it safe with greenhouse gases? What is the worse thing that can happen from playing fast and loose with greenhouse gases?

Jamin,You are right, we only have one earth, but we also only have one US economy also. the worst thing that can happen by "Playing it safe" which I will interpret as following the UN'S climate recommendations. What can and will happen is the US will fall further behind in competitiveness globally while countries like china are exempted from the increased energy costs and will continue to fire up a new coal fired power plant each week to provide cheap energy for their ever growing percentage of the world economy.

The worst thing that can happen by playing fast and loose? I could be wrong and have to listen to you, Joe, and worse yet AL Gore gloat.

The government and most environmentalists have no finical burden to assume with adopting the solutions. Right or wrong on climate change they get their way and have little to loose. I might be willing to go along with the solutions if they took on the risks and costs they are imparting on business and individuals. If the government was required to reimburse business and individuals for all the increase costs if the climate science does not pan out, say by ending social programs until the costs were reimbursed, would you feel comfortable assuming that kind of a risk on that population? There needs to be cost vs benefit analysis done on the cons and pros of reasonable scenarios, not worst case scenarios predicted by models that have been shown to be unreliable.


By the way I served you guys up a big air ball when I grouped myself with Galileo, Even as I typed I was fully expecting to get the Lloyd Bentsen treatment ( I know of Galileo, Ive studied Galileo, your no Galileo), I was very dissapointed.