Earth day

Dave, the "Time" cover with the penguin is a hoax. This is the actual cover (from 2007). You can read about the hoax here. Indeed this piece by Greg Laden covers your other two covers as well. They are both related to the cost of energy in the 1970s, not "global cooling."



I looked into the other two myself as well. Here is the Big Chill intro paragraph and here is the Cooling of America intro paragraph. Judge for yourself.

I'm not even going to touch the issue, other than to laugh at it, that you think a Time Magazine cover has anything to do with the scientific consensus. You should know better than that!

Climate change is real. Accept it, move on, and live/change your life accordingly. Burying your head in the sand isn't make this any easy for you or anybody else. Maybe this graph should hit home for you.



From here.

Riley wrote: Anyone stocking up on incandescent light bulbs?

"Grandpa Bruce, tell us again that story about the round light bulbs with the wire in the middle from back when you were a kid."

OverMyHead wrote: CFL were all the push, they are full of mercury, slow to start , don't work outside in the cold, and only marginally more efficient than the incandescent.

Dave, I respect your views but you get the facts mixed up. Marginally more efficient? They use about 25% of the power of a similar output incandescent. I'd view that as more than "marginally". Yes they are flawed, but the energy savings is real.

Its just that others are not, they are dictating my choices for me at a cost to my family budget my and career opportunities.

What cost is breathing the VOC solvents to your family and humanity at large?
I propose that you and your family are safer with the regulations.

JPASS wrote: Just found this thread today. Great read with some interesting points.

Awesome!

I'm with you on LED's, haven't started using them at my house yet but at work have converted outside lighting with excellent results. I'm still using CFL's in the house, have found that GE bulbs have good light spectrum (some brands/types are awful). I know you say you can't use them outside, but I'm in a similar climate in NH and my outside light post and garage lights are CFL's, they take a few minutes to get bright but have lasted for years. So, you chose to replace 15% of your bulbs with CFL's, I replaced 80%, nobody in my family is complaining about light quality. I'll move on to LED's shortly to get away from the mercury among other reasons.

Hansel wrote: From here.

Jamin. That graph conveniently starts from the 70's cooling cycle. I would be curious to see it going back the 30's

Some good GW articles to read

here

and

here

I am probably going to sound like a pompous a$$hole throughout this post, but I hope that you can forgive me that because it is surely unintentional. There is not a CCFan with whom I have any animosity and wouldn't love to break bread with. And more importantly, wouldn't want to go for a boat ride with. In any case, here we go...

Dave, JP, and anybody else reading this. It is clear from conversations going back years now that as long as there remains some hope of poking any hole in the climate change argument you choose to believe that it is isn't “proven” and thus we shouldn't do anything about it, now or perhaps ever. I and others have written extensively on the scientific evidence, the climatological mechanisms, the and nature of a scientific consensus. The statements of deniers use the same lines of attack repeatedly; “it is just a theory”, “it is an agenda/political”, “it isn't happening”. “it might be happening, but how can it be our fault”, “it could even be good for us”, “it is the sun”, etc.

JP, most recently you posted two links that you must view as supporting your view climate change is not real and/or our fault. I read both of them. I don't know how the second one helps your case, but the first critiques a published scientific paper that tried to put a number on the scientific consensus. I read the post and the original paper, and while it isn't perfect I don't see that it as that deeply flawed.

What is the scientific consensus?

But let us assume for a moment that is it baloney. Other people have tried to answer the same question and the numbers from at least five other studies published since 2007 in peer-reviewed journals all come to the same conclusion; the degree of the consensus of climate scientists that climate change is real and caused by man is somewhere between 80-95+%. From a Wikipedia article on the subject this number seems to have grown considerably from the 1990s until today, probably because the evidence continues to mount and no challenge to the basic tenets of man-made climate change has been able to debunk it. It seems that there is a growing consensus on the consensus.



Wikipedia's breakdown of papers on the scientific climate consensus

An important point about academic science that I have brought up before, is that it is “adversarial.” Science in the “ivory tower”, for all the good and the bad, is essentially a marketplace of ideas where data is the currency and ideas are the capital. To publish a peer-reviewed paper you need to get some data, analyze it, write it all up in a document, and send it to a journal. At the journal the paper is sent to 1-3 other scientists who are specialists in the field who critically examine it for flaws. If the paper gets the OK it then gets published. At that point the criticisms only intensify because now everybody can read what was written and evaluate for themselves if they buy the story or not.

Because of the many hoops and gatekeepers science is actually rather conservative, but it obviously isn't so conservative that it cannot or does not change. Ironically, science gets a bad rap because of this feature that is a perceived bug; science is uncertain at best, and flawed at the worst, and that ideas are here today gone tomorrow. The body of scientific knowledge, and especially the very big ideas like climate change or evolution, are constantly under attack by alternative viewpoints. Yet they remain. A scientist who can discover a new field or take down old one is the equivalent of a billionaire in the idea marketplace. The simplest explanation for why the big ideas are the big ideas is that they stand up to the test.

What about the sun?

When folks on this board deny climate change, it often isn't clear if they are denying that temperatures are changing over time and/or if they are denying that is man's fault. To get into the fault thing requires more than a few simple graphs. It is a matter of the physical properties of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, the specifics of ancient climate and the drivers of natural historical climate change, and the complexities of the global climate system. That is way way more than I am qualified to talk about. What I can say is that because we know about sun cycles, volcanoes, and particulate pollution these effects can be quantified. For example, in a paper published by Crowley in 2000 looking at climate from the past 1000 years the sun, volcanoes, etc. account for 40-60% of pre-1850 temperature variations, but they cannot account for the warming of the late 20th Century. Here is a nice figure from the most recent (2013) IPCC summary than breaks down the impact of various human caused and natural changes in the Earth's climate, including the water vapor, jet contrails, and other reflective/shading aerosols. From this you can also see that the solar cycles are currently contributing to the temperature regime we are experiencing, but that its contribution is minor compared to man-made greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide.



The IPCC's take on various causes of changes to Earth's average temperature

Is Minneapolis getting warmer?

After Dave (OMH) asked for more data on the number of nights that fell below -10F, I thought a bit and realized that though I've seen many climate figures over the years I've never really made one myself. So I set out to find some publicly available (and presumably un-fudged data though I guess we can never be sure of that, or anything if you are willing to take your disbelief that far) temperature data and see if I could get some pretty pictures. I used Dave's Minneapolis as my starting point, and with a little bit of digging found daily temperature and precipitation data for every day in Minneapolis from the early 1870s until today. I collected all of it, put it in a spreadsheet, ran it through some simple visualization and analysis code and came up with the following. If you want to reproduce these yourself or modify them for data from your location of choosing I'd be happy to help.



You can see that the average highs and lows are getting are both steadily increasing. The statistical confidence of this statement ranges from 1 in over 300 for the highs to 1 in over 10,000 for the lows. Minneapolis has warmed greatly without a shadow of a doubt. This is only one example of a well-documented global pattern.

What is the historical context of this warming?

It is very hard to appreciate in the graph above because the rate of change appears slow on this time scale, but the fact that this pattern is strongly observable at all in only 140 years is stunning. If you put temperature data in a historical context, say 10,00 years or so, it looks something more like this, which was adapted from a paper published last year by Shaun Marcott and colleagues.



A reconsruction of global temperature from 73 historical proxies (adapted from Marcott et al. 2013)

This image should give you some pause because it illustrates what is really going on. What plausible explanation other than the industrialization of the globe can account for this? From this graph you can see that while it is warm now, the planet has been similarly warm even since the last ice age. That the absolute temperature alone is high not the crux of the matter. The rate of change is so steep, it is more than a little scary. Especially considering that our entire civilization is based on the relatively moderate climate of the last 500 years or so and by the end of this century we are projected to be above any climate regime experienced on this planet in over 10,000 years.

Final Words

From the doubters there is always the line that “These people don't know what they're talking about, certainly not enough to give us any good reason to have to change.” I'm not even trying to get you on board with the idea that we should change or how. My goal is only to present information that may cause you to reconsider your approach to the evidence.

There is never going to be 100% certainty about anything. This isn't a debate with a winner. There is no political argument I am making here. I know full well that it is unlikely, if not impossible, to change many of your minds. But I am compelled to present an honest, reasonable scientific perspective based on published primary literature and publicly available data as I can.

Be skeptical of what you believe, at least as much as you are skeptical of what you are told. What you choose to do with your hopefully slightly altered world view is now up to you, and the topic of another conversation.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading. I am looking forward to the short-term warm up this summer and meeting some of you out on the ice-free water : )

Cheers Everybody!

Jamin

I propose that it's turtles all the way down.

Hi Dave,

Nobody said that there is a 1:1 relationship between the carbon burned in a particular year and the temperature of that or the immediately following year. The global climate system is massive and complex.

While the graph includes the data from the late 1800s, that doesn't mean that things were "warming" then (though they may have been, hard to say without more data). The figure only shows that it was colder in the 1870s than it is today, and nothing of the relationship of the 1870s to previous years. Indeed if this record went back farther I would expect them to look more like Mann's, which was based on a record 1000 years long instead of the 140 from the Twin Cities. Thus, there is no reason they would look similar. The figure based on Marcott et al. 2013 is the state of the science at the moment, and would also lead me to believe that warming really took off from the beginning of the 20th Century, again setting the late 1800s as a baseline rather than part of the warming.

Yes, I was waiting for your "heat island" to come into play. I have not corrected for that, I can only say that the measurements were made in downtown Minneapolis, later St. Paul, and for a number of decades now has been made at the airport. What I can assure you is that measurements far away from any urban heat island show the same trend, so while it may play a role, it is minor from what we can tell. It could be a part of these figures though, I cannot rule it out or determine the strength of the effect. I can assure you that any paper published on these data would have to do so however, so don't equate my amateurish figures with those that make it into the scientific literature.

Hi JP, thanks for the message.

OK, I thought that article was trying to get at the ocean as a heat sink, but it didn't say so explicitly (that I saw anyway). Currently (no pun intended) it is believed that the warming of the ocean accounts for the relatively stable temperatures of the last decade or so. I think many would agree that there is much to learn about the particulars.

I think our point of contention is the weight of the evidence. I do not believe that "for every article or paper you post that supports your claims, there are just as many refuting it." I also believe that I can find evidence of this but that you are likely to dismiss that as well. Still, I will see what I can dig up.

As I mentioned in my post above, the scientific process is a messy one. Constantly changing and correcting itself as more data becomes available. The science of climate change is ongoing. New papers are published all the time on the subject so you would expect things to evolve over time. Perhaps that uncertainty is enough to give you pause, and on some level I can't blame you for not "getting on board" on a result. For me though it is enough, and I have tried to be as skeptical as I can.

Thanks for reading my stuff, I do appreciate it. Have a great day!

JPASS wrote:    but you also need to understand that for every article or paper you post that supports your claims, there are just as many refuting it.

Here I thought know-nothingism died out back in the 1860s'

Even your own link, to an article with an agenda doesn’t support this statement… they try to make a case that it isn’t a ratio of studies 20 to 1 but they certainly are not claiming anything close to parity. Once one takes into account the quality of the studies and their source well the gap quickly becomes much wider.   It is a time honored practice to take one non-central statement (in this case the 95% of scientists statement) work to disprove it with a few logical leaps and then discredit the entire side of argument in another logical leap.

Nothing in this world is certain but at this point the consensus of climate scientists is a 95% confidence level that man’s activities are causing climate change.    That is not the same point addressed by your link- but it is the central point.

As for the oceans side – of course we are storing a whole lot of energy in large bodies of water, lakes, oceans etc – that’s one of the scarier aspects of the problem – water dampens the temperature rise – but the energy is still there, the water feeds energy back into storms, through currents, etc. Certainly it makes the models more complicated but there is nothing about it that in anyway way casts doubts about the overall premise of man made activities contributing to climate change.   

Dave, you can accept that putting a bunch of people in the MSP area causes a heat island but can’t stomach that man’s activities can cause climate change?

Now that the ocean has been included in the discussion, you global warming skeptics may want to investigate acidification. Life, and the chemestry needed to support it are very fragile. I truly believe we have already had "last call"

Riley wrote: Man, you Progressives are so pessimistic. John, when you look around you, do you think the environment is cleaner or dirtier than when you were growing up? Not from reading in a book, but how the environment is where you actually live. Both Massachusetts and Maine are far cleaner now than they were in the 60's. There's no comparison. I don't doubt that man has had an effect on the environment, but it seems overblown to promote an agenda.

The inside of an autoclave is also very clean, but I wouldn't want to call it home.

I'm afraid Chris Rea was right.

The long arm of these "progressives" (root word progress) is amazingly far reaching. They have somehow convinced researchers in London, Russia, China, Brazil, and in most every country around the world to further their agenda of progress.
Worldwide progressive climate research agenda
As far as your intellectual investment in scientific research, obviously you're not a gawlfer.
What's with that spam filter?

quinner wrote: You guys are scaring me, does this mean it's going to be harder to keep my Beer cold???

Possibly our only hope for the future is the "cool" you contribute to climate when you're out on the dance floor!