> The results end up overhyped, overblown, and for soundbites like press releases and Nature papers. This just misinforms people.
I understand the scientist's desire for rigour, but ...
Most people won't bother reading the article at all. If it's up-voted or liked enough, the title is the truth. We all do it. We all accept a sentence as truth if we trust the source enough, without checking the facts.
It's impossible to check all the facts all the time.
But the WaPo article isn't about the truth. It's about beliefs. The party line.
The belief that 'I, through my sinful actions am causing the ocean to slow down'.
Ridiculous, but that is what most people will get from reading that headline.
And maybe it's not that bad.
It doesn't matter what the truth is, it matters what you believe the truth to be.
It's a matter of degree. Pissing in the ocean changes the PH, however the question would be, to what degree? The question isn't if humans impact climate, it's how much do they impact the climate. The answer to that is far from 'settled science.'
I'm sure there are aspects of it are not settled, but that is not the same as not knowing anything. We can not predict accurately if it will rain 10 days from now, but we still know it rains every now and then.
There are deserts on earth that have been created by humans (Iceland for example, and the "Karst", victims to wooden ship building), and large lakes that are almost gone because of human actions.
It also seems obvious that humans pollute water bodies around us to a degree that makes swimming in them or drinking from it impossible, to take up your pissing example.
What about 7 billion people pissing in the sea? Of course the implications of that are not compltely predictable. But it is not just a matter of academic interest but an engineering/managment problem. How do we interact with the environment in an optimal way?
It doesn't matter what the truth is, it matters what you believe the truth to be.
The truth doesn't matter, nor does what you believe. The only thing that actually matters is how you act. You could happily say that there's only a 0.0001% chance that humanity is affecting climate change, but if that's enough to get you to stop doing things that might harm the planet just in case then that's brilliant.
The most important thing to remember with climate change is that there's no downside to being less wasteful.
Before banning something because it may have a 0.0001% chance of being bad for the Earth's climate, you should be sure that it doesn't have a 0.0002% chance of being good for the Earth's climate.
That's why you need science and proof to try to know the truth, or at least do the best effort. If you don't care about the truth you can use Tarot cards or Ouija tables, that are cheaper and least wasteful than a bunch of Ph.D. that just want to put buoys and launch satellites to measure everything.
That's a very naive worldview. I'll skip the first part of what you said and focus on this though:
>The most important thing to remember with climate change is that there's no downside to being less wasteful.
It doesn't matter if you shower less or use the AC less or use an electric car, all that pales in comparison to you not existing in the first place. So the easiest way to solve the entire issue is not having more children. I feel like this is such a big choice with huge downsides for most people that it doesn't even get talked about that often.
Actually the average western/US CO2 footprint is so big, that it's very doable to fit yourself and a child in after you cut down on luxuries. Of course "use AC less" and "use electric cars" are not the kinds of changes that will get you there. More like no meat, no car, no flights, no grid powered AC etc.
Offsetting your baby's lifetime CO2 footprint is actually very affordable even with the average US figure. For a more hands on alternative you could strive to raise them to a line of work that would cause them to have a net negative climate footprint.
But yes, have a good hard think about these things when considering getting children.
One decent flight is more than pretty much everything else combined, people forget this far too much. Most of the people that try to offset their footprint are the same damn people that feel the need to fly around the world every couple of years.
“America’s lifestyle expectations are far too high and need to be adjusted so we have less things and a smaller, better existence,” Greene said in an interview today at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “We need to reinvent our whole system of life.”
This was said by "Greene, who flew his wife, children and two nannies on a private jet plane to Davos for the week".
OK, he not only made a speech but also had a dinner with Tony Blair so it wasn't just for that speech.
Reddit post, reposted here without comment or endorsement:
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[–]horvybaby 1515 points 11 hours ago*x3
Okay, so let's get a few things correct: because perhaps Nature is behind a paywall for some people. Rahmstorf et. al. show a decrease in THC/MOC variability for the period 1970-1990, which we have then partially recovered from. The title of the Nature article is inflammatory, but the Washington Post article is significantly more so.
We do not know nearly enough about THC variability to make millenial scale arguments. We only recently actually made a measurement system that can calculate the overturning (the RAPID array).
Rahmstorf and others had some issues with THC shutdown in the 90's when previous studies, which at one point suggested a shutdown in THC or meridional overturning, turned out to be incorrect because of an aliasing from a sampling error: they just happened to be measuring at points in the seasonal cycle that were spaced in such a way so as to show a decrease when there was none. This led to our modern understanding of inter-annual variability in the THC, so it all worked out well.
The nature paper takes pains to note that the RAPID array is just 11 years old and so we can't say anything from the results. But this proxy data must be referenced to something, and the only reasonable measurement apparatus to use is RAPID. It isn't.
Using proxy data to infer something about the overturning, while reasonable, doesn't give great coherence towards present understanding of complicated, long-timescale events like the heating of the deep ocean. Furthermore, even at theirs strongest the conclusions absolutely do not support the WaPo headline.
This is the sort of things that makes climate scientists like myself furious. The results end up overhyped, overblown, and for soundbites like press releases and Nature papers. This just misinforms people. Unless I hear from RAPID that the MOC/THC is reducing, I'm not trusting the authors. Just because climate change is a hot-button issue, and we want ways to convince people about its impacts, doesn't mean MOC/THC shutoffs can be pulled out of nowhere.
edit: Just want to mention: this doesn't say anything about the method of analysis. The method seems to be well done and scientific and careful, given the data at hand. The issue is rather the paper title and subsequent inflation in popular media, which is silly.
According to the National Climatic Data Center, the world just saw its warmest winter ever…except for in one spot in the north Atlantic ocean (the deepest blue color above), which set a record for cold. Which is not good. (NCDC)
These new NOAA data got me quite worried because they indicate that this partial recovery that we describe in the paper was only temporary, and the circulation is on the way down again
Honest question: is such a small data point (a couple of months) for something relatively slow (climate change) really something to worry about? Suppose I call it an outlier (which I can't because I cannot look into the future), wouldn't that be equally wrong?
If am assuming Mr. Rahmstorf is qualified enough to understand the data. And with this part "So far, the study finds, we’re looking at a circulation that’s about 15 to 20 percent weaker. That may not sound like much, but the paper suggests a weakening this strong has not happened at any time since the year 900. Moreover, this is already more weakening than scientifically expected — and could be the beginning of a further slowdown that could have great consequences" I believe there is certainly a need to worry about.
What's interesting is that beyond that "record coldest" spot in the Northern Atlantic, there are still "record warmest" places in the Arctic Ocean, north of Europe. If the temperature in those places was supposed to be dependent on the warm current from Caribbean, how come they were warmer than usual after the current slowed down?
I've never been fully convinced of anthropomorphic climate change. There's just too much politics involved for me to be convinced of such relatively recent studies.
That said, I'll convert all of my energy sources to PV cells tomorrow if someone gives me a way to do it without mortgaging the next ten years of my life.
Rather than looking at the politics perhaps you could look at the science?
What would it take to convince you? Seriously - if nothing can then we have departed from rational debate, but if there is evidence that would sway you then it would be great to identify it.
Not speaking specifically to this issue, but I've lost a lot of my trust in science after reading a great deal of literature in psychology and paying attention to how funding impacts results. To reference XKCD, if I really wanted to and had enough funds, I could produce findings that a given candy causes acne. And if the opposition side is too politically unpopular to have comparable funding (to say nothing of the funds to distribute the results to society in general) then they could do little to counter me.
Science on the tv and radio works this way (also, sadly Science as a career as well) but Science proper doesn't. You could do a study that showed candy causing acne, but if I falsified your hypothesis with a single cheap study showing that I fed the candy to another group of people and saw no effect (double blind etc), and other people reproduced that - then Science would move on (chewing the sweeties and spot free!) The trouble is that nothing like enough of this behaviour (checking, falsifying) goes on - because it doesn't make a career.
If all scientists were apolitical and resisted any outside influence it wouldn't be much of a problem. But reality is that many aren't and it takes a lot of effort to identify who is and who isn't.
>The trouble is that nothing like enough of this behaviour (checking, falsifying) goes on - because it doesn't make a career.
Yeah, but if you were to speak specifically to this issue, the exact opposite is the case. If someone could poke a scientific hole in the AGW theory, they'd be set for life. Maybe they're all too risk-averse and want to stick with their guaranteed poverty-level postdoc wage?
I have a number of questions that I've never been able to find satisfactory answers to, and if I got them I could be convinced.
But first, let me say, that this may well be moot. I think solar energy is the way to go. I think the sooner human beings stop burning things they find in the ground for energy, the better. I'll happily give my vote or my money to an elegant solution to make this happen.
Next, my nutshell understanding of global warming:
Temperature and carbon-based greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are closely correlated. For as far back as we can measure (many millennia when using ice cores), atmospheric temperate has been stable along with CO2 concentrations (about 280ppm). Sometime in mid 18th century, CO2 concentrations started to uptick, which caused a rise in temperatures, which in turn caused a rise in CO2 concentrations, compounding continuously to present day levels (1.5 degree temperature increase, ~400 ppm CO2 concentrations). The best explanation for the shift in the balance of the carbon cycle is the additional gases that humans add by burning fossil fuels, cutting down forests, and making concrete.
My questions:
1. Every carbon-temperature hockey stick chart I've seen starts in 1750, when humans were a negligible atmospheric carbon source. Even today, human beings are a minor source of carbon-based gases in the fast carbon cycle. While I can certainly accept that it would only take a minor addition to throw the whole system out of balance, the timing seems strange to me. How do we know that humans are responsible for the initial rise in CO2 concentrations above 280ppm that started 250 years ago when emissions paled in comparison to what they are today?
2. I've seen lots of charts that correlate greenhouse gas concentrations with temperature, but the charts I've seen (like this one: http://bit.ly/18UFLMA) that correlate greenhouse gas concentrations and emissions don't seem to correlate as strongly until the blade of the hockey stick, and even then the correlation usually flips, with the proportion of human emissions surpassing the proportion of CO2 concentrations. If humans are directly responsible for present day greenhouse gas concentrations, shouldn't emissions and CO2 concentrations more closely correlate? It seems like greenhouse gas concentrations don't meaningfully rise until temperature meaningfully rises first as a result of increased greenhouse gas concentrations.
3. Water vapor is a much more abundant greenhouse gas than any gases emitted by human activity. While I understand that other greenhouse gases simply have a higher capacity for trapping heat, what I don't understand is how significantly humans could impact the greenhouse effect when they don't substantially alter the most quantitatively significant greenhouse gas.
4. The most convincing argument for anthropomorphic climate change, to me, is the lack of a viable alternative. Solar forcing seems to be the best alternative offered. Do the climate models used to support anthropomorphic climate change account for variability in solar output? Is there variability in solar output? How is this measured?
I am sorry for not addressing all of your points, but I was staring at the graph in #2 and wanted to complain about how useless it is.
First, there is the small annoyance that the one number is in parts-per-million and the other in million metric tons; why not convert the atmospheric concentration of CO2 to the corresponding number of metric tons in the atmosphere?
But worse, it is comparing the annual CO2 emissions with the atmospheric concentrations! Assuming any relationship between them at all, we expect the emissions to be the derivative of the atmospheric concentration! Any correlation between the total amount of carbon and its rate of change is purely coincidence. The derivative of a quadratic function is a linear function, and while they correlate quite poorly, they are very strongly related.
The important question isn't whether emissions are correlated with the atmospheric concentration but to what extent the emissions explain the change in atmospheric concentration. We know how much carbon dioxide we've put out over the last N years, call it X. We know how much more carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere now than N years ago, call it Y. Is X > Y? If so, bingo, bango, bongo, we're responsible for the change. If X < Y, then we can't be completely responsible.
Can you please give me the link to your "Every carbon-temperature hockey stick chart I've seen" which "starts in 1750"? We actually know the concentration in the last 400 thousand years and it was never so high during that time as it is now:
For as far back as we can measure (many millennia when using ice cores), atmospheric temperate has been stable along with CO2 concentrations (about 280ppm)
Then you agree that we actually know the CO2 concentrations in last 400000 years and that they are now extraordinary high?
I'd still like to see that "every carbon-temperature hockey stick chart I've seen starts in 1750." We agreed that we know CO2 for much longer. Regarding the temperature, I know this one:
Which starts at 1880 not at 1750, and it just shows that it's mostly (note: it's not straight sometimes over some decade it's different) getting warmer during the last 100 years which certainly matches with most of humanity's use of fossil fuels.
But I don't think your response answers my question. The middle 18th century seems to be the beginning of a natural shift in CO2 concentrations, according to figure 1 here:
In that figure, we see that CO2 levels naturally move between 200ppm and 300ppm over hundreds of thousands of years. Which now leads me to another question:
Have human beings exacerbated what was a naturally occurring rise in CO2 concentrations? If so, will the natural causes that reduced CO2 concentrations from 300ppm overcome that exacerbation?
Your first link doesn't have any graph with 1750, your second, which is same as the third, also. The figure 1 in the pdf is specifically "Figure 1. U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions by Gas, 1990–2012" So I still don't see any graph since 1750. You probably wanted to paste something else?
Humans have burned so much of C that CO2 concentration is alarmingly high, all the "natural" events during the last 400000 years simply didn't produce that much as fast as we do now, so we also can't expect anything to magically save us now. The oceans do get something that doesn't end in the air, but that's it. It happened before, it won't get better easy, that's what happened some 50 million years ago:
"Model simulations of peak carbon addition to the ocean–atmosphere system during the PETM give a probable range of 0.3–1.7 Pg C yr−1, which is much slower than the currently observed rate of carbon emissions.[60]"
"Recovery: The δ13C record records a duration of around 120,000[22] to 170,000[1][61] years, slightly faster than the residence time of carbon in the modern atmosphere (100,000 to 200,000 years). A feedback system[62] would explain this slightly more rapid recovery time."
There will be the way back, but in the scale of 100 thousand years. And now the increase happens much, much, faster than even that event 50 million years ago.
As you see, 1750 is not a relevant point at all (just as 1250 and 1500 aren't, it's just that the increments of 250 years are printed): the concentration values are something like 283 ppm around the year 1300, 286 around the year 1850. It's obvious that it really started (visibly more than what was around year 1300) with our higher use of coal in the 19th century (and oil in 20th). Before that it's effectively an oscillation (an order of a percent or two), after that it already reached the levels never seen during the last 600 thousand years - like 30% more since 1850 but also since at least 400000 years ago.
3: When it comes to greenhouse gases, increased amounts are effective to a certain concentration, at which point they absorb or reflect everything in the wavelengths that correspond to that gas. The wavelengths for water is saturated.
That doesn't jibe very well with the IPCC's claim that increased CO2 levels will then increase the water vapor - thereby amplifying the global warming effect.
I don't know the answers to your questions. I do know they are natural questions and that it appears you are not an expert in these matters. Thus it is almost surely the case the experts have thought about these questions and have answers. What makes you think the experts in this area have their beliefs and knowledge skewed by politics? Do you believe this for other areas of science?
I'm old enough to remember the denial phase of global warming. It was largely conservatives in the U.S. who considered this a liberal plot. Progress has been made because now the debate is shifting toward whether or not humans are responsible.
It is too fantastic to believe that climate science is a liberal plot or a plot of any other ideology.
Thus it is almost surely the case the experts have thought about these questions and have answers.
A great example is nutritional science. It was widely accepted that a diet high in fat was bad for you. If you had stood up and said "I disagree, fat is good for you!" you'd be regarded as a kook.
Look at where we are now with regards to nutrition and fat.
I used the phrase "almost surely" because there are occasional counterexamples. It is hardly normative that in an area of science where 95%+ of the scientists believe something and have that belief backed by evidence that they are wrong. It does happen.
It is also true that natural questions are generally natural to the people who study that area. Thus it's something that they've thought of. It is highly improbable that an amateur is going to ask a question or make a point that hasn't at least been thought about by the experts in that area.
When tobacco was under attack the companies paid for scientists and doctors to spread misleading information; they paid for FUD.
Those same scientists are now employed by oil and energy companies and they are using the same tactics.
The only reason there's "politics" involved is because one side is deliberately spreading lies about the entirety of the science, even the bits that we are sure about.
Climate change is a really big deal. When we've had scientific movements of this magnitude, the face of the movement has always been a scientist (think Copernicus, Darwin, or Einstein).
The face of climate change is jointly Al Gore and the IPCC, which was formed from the environmental portions of the UN.
If the face of climate change was a scientist, I'd be more apt to believe it, and so would millions of other people of a conservative political bent.
An Inconvenient Truth is the seminal work on climate change meant to inform the general population, and a substantial bit of the movie is spent on the 2000 presidential election controversy.
Why in the world would anyone think that Republicans and political conservatives would just readily accept the information put forth by liberal politicians, merited or not?
And if I'm actively looking for the truth, how can I find it? I can't spend my lifetime doing my own research, taking my own measurements, experimenting and publishing papers to find out on my own. It's hard to find any material for lay people that don't have some environmental activist telling me I'm an idiot for no believing all the science Al Gore has already presented me.
Honestly, if human beings end up going extinct because we destroyed our atmosphere with fossil fuels, it'll be as much the gross mismanagement of the politics by environmental liberals that's to blame as every American eating burgers and driving SUVs.
The only reason? Don't you think it is a possibility that this is all an attempt to artificially raise costs? With increased efficiency of production, one might expect the cost of energy to decrease, but unfortunately we will need to raise them because 'climate change'. Looks like you will need to keep working your 9-5 in order to fund your way of life. Someone (not me) might say this looks like business as usual.
Even in the smoking realm there was politics. Because there are no adults in a room to make judgement calls anymore, you need to place your claim on zero or nothing.
The smoking industry could not admit there might be the slightest possibility of a link, otherwise they would have a BPA-plastic situation on their hands; the public goes into hysteria over a possible link. The lie had to be maintained in order to preserve the company. The government lied with their statistics in their attribution of risk correlations, look at how serious second hand smoke is treated as a serious concern and that was used to move the public against the cigarette companies; citing that smokers heavily affect asthma sufferers. However, the number of asthma sufferers climbed as the number of smokers declined [1], suggesting, statistically, that smoking was good overall for society. Then the government turns around and uses the smokescreen, good one Agustus, to levy a tax on the cigarettes themselves, enabling a ridiculous tax on the poor to maintain their habit. Now as smokers transition away in numbers to the less taxed and insanely less-taxed e-cigarettes, there is a push to do the same horror statistics as cigarettes; witness the e-cigarette test that used a highly modified tube to show the possibility of formaldehyde developing [2].
This being said, I have no doubt that smoking increases lung cancer and other risks. The problem is the environment in which the sides of an argument push their agendas.
The politics are very real when a politician can easily overcome political hurdles to give out pork projects that would otherwise be tied up in regulatory hell. Solyndra gets built, politicians photo-op, donors get paid back, fails. Solar farms are fast-tracked through regulatory processes and impact the environment at magnitudes larger than oil [4]. Politicians recognize this, fund projects that create the article's headline and then use the issue to push an agenda which gets money to donors who in turn give it back to them next time they run a campaign.
BIGGEST EXAMPLE of the lengths politicians will go to [5]:
Senator Timothy Wirth: We called the Weather Bureau and found out what historically was the hottest day of the summer. Well, it was June 6th or June 9th or whatever it was. So we scheduled the hearing that day, and bingo, it was the hottest day on record in Washington, or close to it.
DEBORAH AMOS: Did you also alter the temperature in the hearing room that day?
Senator Timothy Wirth: What we did is that we went in the night before and opened all the windows, I will admit, right, so that the air conditioning wasn’t working inside the room. And so when the- when the hearing occurred, there was not only bliss, which is television cameras and double figures, but it was really hot.
This is nothing like tobacco and the amount of money spent on research to support AGW absolutely dwarfs the amount of money that the energy companies spends.
Here's a simple question: for the ground based sensors used in a significant portion of land based temperature readings, what happens if you just simply forgot to mow the grass for a couple of weeks. Or, in general, just don't mow it short enough?
Answer: you'll get readings 2-5F too high, especially at night.
The biggest issue is that the land based sensor data we rely on is kind of junk and is constantly being tweaked and changed, and the satellite based data is only marginally better.
A colleague of mine in Sacramento has installed solar power and expects to recover the investment in 6 years. If you're serious about using solar it seems like something that's achievable without mortgaging your life.
I like to think of these and other effects from global warming as the planet's system of healing. The warmer the climate gets, the more ways it tries to heals, and the more damage happens as a result.
If I were to apply that theory here, how is this "slow-down" part of that process?
The planet isn't an organism with an immune system reacting to infections. It's a ball of rock that "couldn't care less" if there are beings living on it. The systems that exist on the surface of the planet are just physical processes reacting to other physical processes. Nothing more. Ocean currents aren't changing as part of a process of "healing" they are changing because they are governed by the laws of physics.
That is quite arrogant of a claim that it is "just a ball of rock." The planet has methods of reversal built in. My reference to the word "healing" is its ability to reverse and go back to conditions that are normal.
If you want reference, look up global dimming, and look up the problems global dimming is causing. Also, take into account the different reactions that global warming is causing. You can see "healing" elements when you notice that the ocean takes in more CO2 as the planet gets warmer. Ice caps also take in CO2. if you look at weather exteremities like freezing and hot days, snow and rain and drought, and hurricanes, you notice that greenhouse gases do react to this. On hot days, infrared energy is sent back to space. On snow, rain, and freezing days, CO2 settles. The more you look, the more you see that the planet reacts to bring things back to normal. more plants, more bacteria, more life. These processes are also part of physics. But just because the planet heals does not mean we ignore climate change. The "healing" is just as detrimental.
> That is quite arrogant of a claim that it is "just a ball of rock."
Arrogant how? The planet is quite literally a "ball of rock" hurtling through space that happens to have a bunch of other stuff on its surface.
> My reference to the word "healing" is its ability to reverse and go back to conditions that are normal.
This is just a reference to a system that tends towards a particular equilibrium. There is nothing "healing" about it. Also, considering the timescales involved, we don't even know if the systems involved on Earth's surface even tend toward any sort of equilibrium. It may just oscillate on a very large period.
> The more you look, the more you see that the planet reacts to bring things back to normal. more plants, more bacteria, more life.
What is "normal" though? It certainly wasn't "normal" during Earth's period of volcanism.
The bacteria weren't attempting to seed life or "heal" the Earth by producing oxygen. It was a by-product, that by coincidence other organisms were able to develop to use.
