@TMTisFree

Studies on ice are flooding:

Quote:

Our results imply that the recent rates of mass loss in Greenland's outlet glaciers are transient and should not be extrapolated into the future.

Large-scale changes in Greenland outlet glacier dynamics triggered at the terminus

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TMTisFree

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Quote:

Fascinating! Thanks for the quote. How and why USA and its leadership still survive with so much contradictions is interesting.

It's not hard to understand. Here we allow all views. The insane, the obscure, the logical, illogical, the left, the right, the middle, the high, the low, the economincal and the exstravagant.... We set fair rules for all and then we let the best of the bunch win. Well that's how it supposed to work anyway. The world's not perfect though is it.

When there are successful attempts to "shut up and shut out" opposing views, you will see the society decline. Some days it feels like that's exactly what's happening over here.

Plaz

@Plaz

I understand allowing all views. But educating young generations with pseudo or even non scientific established facts (like the one I quoted here) is rather disturbing.

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TMTisFree

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@TMTisFree

this is interesting as well...
The earth's magnetic field impacts climate: Danish study

The earth's climate has been significantly affected by the planet's magnetic field, according to a Danish study published Monday that could challenge the notion that human emissions are responsible for global warming.

Link to news item

this would also link to Solar studies right?

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@Interesting

I read it tuesday: here is the full paper.

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@TMTisFree

Quote:

I understand allowing all views. But educating young generations with pseudo or even non scientific established facts (like the one I quoted is rather disturbing.

It's not so much that we're educating the masses with this info, the info is available to educate yourself. Often people decide what the like then "educate" themselves on their chosen side of the topic.

Personally I educate myself on all sides of the topic then decide where to stand. But every one is different and they are all allowed to live breed here.

As for your link, this is nothing new. "Strange and wonderful" proposals are put forth everyday. The good ones make it, the bad ones are improved or tossed out. Once in a while a bad one sneaks through, but it only a matter of time before it's caught and rectified. What always makes the headlines are the proposals. What is or isn't actually implemented is normally a different story.

I'll use a quote of the same document to make a point....
" disallowing State Board of Education, district boards of education, and certain administrators from prohibiting teachers from helping students understand certain information about scientific theories"

This sounds good to me.
Do you also notice the key words here? "Scientific" .... "THEORIES"

It's eliminating prejudice against scientific topics and stating what we all know over and over and over, that much of our science is actually ....gasp!! ....a theory.

What's wrong with prohibiting the School Board from using censorship? I would find it more disturbing that the School would be allowed to "outlaw" the ability of a teacher and student to discuss any subject. So there is good and bad. It will be filtered to the best possible conclusion as always.

I IMAGINE that what you find disturbing is what you IMAGINE they might mean by it all.

Plaz

@Plaz

Quote:

I would find it more disturbing that the School would be allowed to "outlaw" the ability of a teacher and student to discuss any subject. So there is good and bad. It will be filtered to the best possible conclusion as always.

The problem is when the teacher presents GW as "Fact", when it's a theory. This gets further reinforced when most of the news media has bought it into the theory.

your thoughts?

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@Plaz

Quote:

that much of our science is actually ....gasp!! ....a theory

It depends what one means by theory. If you mean the common use of theory which is more akin to hypothesis then no your statement is wrong. If you mean scientific theory which is the best rational explanation for the observed facts then yes you're right.

@Interesting

Quote:

The earth's climate has been significantly affected by the planet's magnetic field, according to a Danish study published Monday that could challenge the notion that human emissions are responsible for global warming.

I read in here some over simplification. AFAIK no pro-GW scientist denies that other factors, besides CO2, have a factor on the environment. I think the question is what factors contribute what amount of influence to the observed warming.

The end of the article you posted indicates that the Danish study scienists agree that CO2 plays an important role in GW. Your statement here makes it sounds like they are rejecting CO2.

@BrianK

Quote:

BrianK wrote: @Interesting Quote: The earth's climate has been significantly affected by the planet's magnetic field, according to a Danish study published Monday that could challenge the notion that human emissions are responsible for global warming. I read in here some over simplification. AFAIK no pro-GW scientist denies that other factors, besides CO2, have a factor on the environment. I think the question is what factors contribute what amount of influence to the observed warming. ...

And annother question is which of the factors that contribute to global warming can be manipulated by mankind to successfully attenuate the consequences of GW and which not, I'd say.

The main contributor to GW is water vapor - and there's currently no way to reduce athmospheric water vapor significantly that I knew of.

But mankind could successfully reduce CO2 emissions, for example.

And mankind could successfully generate electrity in an orbit while hindering the eqivalent amount of sunshine warming up the athmosphere at the same time - in addition to the heat we generate and release to the athmosphere by using that amount of energy anyway.

Electricity generated that way can be used to build up an hydrogen economy to have efficiant and regenerative fuel for being mobile where electricity fails (airplanes e.g.).

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@BrianK

Quote:

I think the question is what factors contribute what amount of influence to the observed warming.

I fully agree with that.
Climate sensibility to these (yet un)known factors is not measured, not even understood. An other example:
Quote:

Evidence is presented that the recent worldwide land warming has occurred largely in response to a worldwide warming of the oceans rather than as a direct response to increasing greenhouse gases (GHGs) over land.

Compo, G.P. and P.D. Sardeshmukh. 2008. Oceanic influences on recent continental warming. Climate Dynamics, DOI 10.1007/s00382-008-0448-9.

That why building policies upon these uncertainties is plainly unjustified. In this respect, the invoked `precaution principle` will be an opportune justification when one will have to explain the wasted money which might have been used to fight the real pollutants.

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TMTisFree

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@TMTisFree

Quote:

TMTisFree wrote: @BrianK ... That's why building policies upon these uncertainties is plainly unjustified. In this respect, the invoked `precaution principle` will be an opportune justification when one will have to explain the wasted money which might have been used to fight the real pollutants. ...

Hmmmm - if I pick up your thought and think it through - the biggest waste of money in the first place was starting to pollute without thinking about the consequences.

So to say the attitude to start a mass production by hook or by crook and to make money from it, while repaireng the damage done with that behaviour/paying for it is left to the public, if at all.

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@TMTisFree

Quote:

Evidence is presented that the recent worldwide land warming has occurred largely in response to a worldwide warming of the oceans rather than as a direct response to increasing greenhouse gases (GHGs) over land.

It need not be said that 1 paper can't decides the whole of this. That's not the way science works. As it is new others have to verify their findings and build the experiments that help prove or disprove this is coorelation is really causation. This paper at best says we need to consider oceans more closely.

A item the paper doesn't talk about is what is warming the oceans. Assuming their observed coorelation can be shown to be causation the next question will be what is causing the oceans to warm. Certainly links to atmosphereic conditions will be researched. Could be that CO2 warms the oceans and oceans warms the land so not as direct of a relationship as we understood. But, there still could be a relationship there too.

All good questions.


Quote:

In this respect, the invoked `precaution principle'

Great idea! When I go camping the rule is bring everything out you brought in. I have a 2nd rule that says if you can clean up some of other people's messes then even better. Perhaps industries should go by your rule here and return land, air, water to the condition it was prior to it's use. Then we wouldn't even have to question what harm we'd done.

Last edited by BrianK on 19-Jan-2009 at 05:47 PM.

@BrianK

Quote:

It need not be said that 1 paper can't decides the whole of this.

Of course, that's why I wrote:Quote:

An other example:

I choose it to exemplify that there are big holes in the climate science, and that additional research is really needed before jumping to any conclusion and wasting any money (particularly when it is not yours).

Quote:

As it is new others have to verify their findings and build the experiments that help prove or disprove this is coorelation is really causation. This paper at best says we need to consider oceans more closely.

This is the very pb of AGW: the correlation between anthropogenic CO² rise and warming is poor at best, and the causation is not proven at all.

Influences of oceans, sun and Earth itself are to be studied harder before trying to understand a complex chaotic system as climate. No need to say that the models used by IPCC to simulate the climate are simplistic and more and more proven wrong.

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TMTisFree

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@TMTisFree

Quote:

No need to say that the models used by IPCC to simulate the climate are simplistic and more and more proven wrong.

No doubt they are. For example snow and ice loss observations are more agressivethan the 18 IPCC models predicts. The IPCC models are too conservative by this evidence. Being too conservative means the effects will be sooner and likely larger than the IPCC is letting on.

Last edited by BrianK on 19-Jan-2009 at 07:28 PM.

@BrianK

Below is recent example of a paper that documents the inability of the IPCC models to skillfully predict climate:
Quote:

Geographically distributed predictions of future climate, obtained through climate models, are widely used in hydrology and many other disciplines, typically without assessing their reliability. Here we compare the output of various models to temperature and precipitation observations from eight stations with long (over 100 years) records from around the globe. The results show that models perform poorly, even at a climatic (30-year) scale. Thus local model projections cannot be credible, whereas a common argument that models can perform better at larger spatial scales is unsupported.

Koutsoyiannis, D., A. Efstratiadis, N. Mamassis, and A. Christofides, 2008: On the credibility of climate predictions, Hydrological Sciences Journal, 53 (4), 671-684.

Even more, one of the IPCC lead authors, Kevin Trenberth writes:
Quote:

None of the models used by IPCC are initialized to the observed state and none of the climate states in the models correspond even remotely to the current observed climate. In particular, the state of the oceans, sea ice, and soil moisture has no relationship to the observed state at any recent time in any of the IPCC models. There is neither an El Niño sequence nor any Pacific Decadal Oscillation that replicates the recent past; yet these are critical modes of variability that affect Pacific rim countries and beyond. The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, that may depend on the thermohaline circulation and thus ocean currents in the Atlantic, is not set up to match today’s state, but it is a critical component of the Atlantic hurricanes and it undoubtedly affects forecasts for the next decade from Brazil to Europe. Moreover, the starting climate state in several of the models may depart significantly from the real climate owing to model errors. ….the science is not done because we do not have reliable or regional predictions of climate.

From http://blogs.nature.com/climatefeedback/.

He sums the problem quite well.

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TMTisFree

Last edited by TMTisFree on 20-Jan-2009 at 07:21 PM.

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@TMTisFree

Another one for you. Senior UN member talks about the Antartic Ice Shelf melting and how the models fail to account for the changes due to the sheets warming and continuing to push up water levels. LINK

@BrianK

Data do not clearly show a trend in ice area:


Full picture


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@olegil

Quote:

olegil wrote: @olegil Btw, I'm not saying I guarantee that the numbers there haven't been measured right next to a heating vent or something, but automatically assuming all numbers that show increase in temperature MUST be due to bad placement of sensors is a bit strange.

Here (PDF) and here (PDF) are 2 interesting demonstrations about the effects of urbanization on temperature.
Quote:

the findings of the more than half a dozen peer reviewed papers in this PDF that the lack of adequate UHI and local land use change adjustment could account for up to 50% of the warming since 1900.

Urban heat island effect was already pointed out years ago (here in 2005 for example), but still no changes in proper data adjustments:
Quote:

Given these undeniable facts, it is presumptuous in the extreme to believe that the global surface air temperature record of the last two decades of the 20th century -- when world population rose over 35% -- has been adequately adjusted for tiny-town and large-city heat island effects. We can probably safely assume, however, that the true warming was significantly less than has been claimed by essentially all assessments of the phenomenon conducted to date.

The picture below shows the temperature adjustment for UHI by NOAA where the adjusted temperature are conveniently greater than the raw one's!


Moreover, the following picture shows the discrepancies between 2 US temperature networks (NOAA and NASA): the difference in trend accounts for more than 50% of the 0.6°C rise of temperature in century commonly agreed:

Source

Additional infos:
Divergence Between GISS and UAH since 1980,
GISS Divergence with satellite temperatures since the start of 2003

Building models while being unable to input temperature data properly is a strange way to do science but a convenient one to build policies.

UHI = Urban Heat Island

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TMTisFree

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@TMTisFree

The problem with these temperature measurements is that they only cover 100 years (a bit longer sometimes).

The Greenland for example was "discovered" over 1000 years ago by the Vikings, who named it Greenland, since it had mild climate with trees and herbaceous plants growing and livestock being farmed.
(According to Wikipedia).

Then the "little Ice Age" came, a cold period that lasted 400 years, and Greenland wasn't so green anymore.

Anyway, for a longer scale temperature comparison, take a look at this at Wikipedia, it estimates 2000 years, and this one amazing 12000 years.

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