A sincere hope

[jimmy]

[Steve James]

Forget scientists, ask any local weatherman.

But the weathermen can only refer back within their own lifetime, not even a fraction of the earths

True, which is why the specialists in the field of climate, with records derived from various sources (including core samples) going back generations, centuries, thousands and hundreds of thousands of years, are indeed the best qualified to make statements and draw conclusions.

My point was that your local meteorologist believes in climate change, not that weather is climate. Weather scientists and climate scientists agree, but everyone comes in daily contact with weather people.

[Trick]

Maybe a global one child policy should be implemented...or maybe something else is on the agenda, we could all go Amish...maybe

Well, maybe. But there are many many options that can be effective without going all Pol-Pot. In this sense, your musing here is a bit like saying: I seriously need to lose weight? Sure, I guess that means I'm only allowed to eat five hazelnuts a day and drink only tap water? --- No, that's not what anyone envisages. But yes, you'll need to modify your diet a lot and do more sport.

in swedish news these days there is a lot talk that swedes should change their diet..lesser to no meat is a main agument as a must to save the planet from becoming a giant sauna.......But then wouldnt the be an cow/pig/sheep/horse/ass/gnu overpopulation...already now cows farting are also the blame for the eventual near catastrophy that await us....and if we go all veggies with legumes for an almost full worthy protein sourse, we to will fart more........i mean can we really save us/the planet, it looks hopeless for sure

[Steve James]

It's not just the release of methane and Co2. One could argue that there was far more wildlife before humans. The difference is that we have been removing our capacity to store carbon emissions much faster than we are creating them. The Earth is a self-contained system that has a balance reached over thousands of years.

Plowing over prairies (which most Americans today might never see, and probably part of the bee crisis) to grow corn to feed cows might be causing more damage than the cows ever could. I can only speculate, but I'd bet there were herds of bison that approached the numbers of domesticated cattle. Of course, there were no automobiles.

Cutting down forests is probably worse than burning them down. Life will recover relatively quickly. In fact, fires often offer opportunities. However, if we worried about Co2, let's just everyone plant a few trees. We can figure out how to maintain a balance in the ecosystem, if not the climate. We don't need to open up more land for foresting, especially if we're set on making things out of plastic and non-biodegradable materials. Warming oceans and evaporating glaciers release even more carbon. Dumping our garbage into and on them won't help.

I don't think it's a choice between absolute disaster fr the human race and slightly warmer summers. However, if I know what the worst case scenario is, at least I can prepare. It's why people favor having firearms, right? Better to do something about climate change and not need it, than ... Or, think of it as a type of Pascal's wager; i.e., he believed in God because it was better to be safe than sorry when it came to getting into heaven. If he was wrong, he loses almost nothing.

[Giles]

in swedish news these days there is a lot talk that swedes should change their diet..lesser to no meat is a main agument as a must to save the planet from becoming a giant sauna.......But then wouldnt the be an cow/pig/sheep/horse/ass/gnu overpopulation...already now cows farting are also the blame for the eventual near catastrophy that await us....and if we go all veggies with legumes for an almost full worthy protein sourse, we to will fart more........i mean can we really save us/the planet, it looks hopeless for sure

Come on, Trick, you're just being silly now. But I guess you know that...

[Giles]

@ Steve
I think you're making plenty of good general points. I would sometimes draw slightly different conclusions but I can pretty much go with you. One point about the burning of forests: In some ecosystems fire, either naturally caused or man-made (e.g. in Australia) is part of the (by now) natural process. Eucalyptus trees for instance are even evolved to deal with and benefit from fire, as are some Mediterranean pine trees. But as far as I understand, this is NOT the case in the tropical rain forests, such as those in the Amazon and in Indonesia, which are currently suffering massively from man-made fires. Normally these are so moist and humid that no large-scale fires can break and out burn for long, or on such a massive scale as we are seeing now, and certainly not year after year. However, previous forest clearance allows the soil to dry out increasingly in the tropical sun, because grazing land for cows and fields for crops to feed these animals means only a fraction of the former moisture is retained. And the lack of trees then starts to bring down rainfall averages (due to reduced transpiration) and so the area as a whole gets drier, which starts to facilitate more fires and so on in a vicious circle. A full tropical forest, in its biodiversity and in its ability to hold and enrich the soil and to keep generating humidity and thus rain,and of course to sequester CO2, takes many years to grow back. And if it doesn't get this chance, because then it gets burned or chopped again, and the rainfall starts to reduce, then a tipping point is reached where it will never come back. And these forests are sometimes, also by scientists, referred to as 'the lungs of the planet'.

[Steve James]

I agree, Giles. I'm just cynical. I think that the Earth will regain a balance, regardless of human activity. We're on a closed system terrarium scrambling through space. The problem is that that balance may make the planet less habitable for human beings.

[Trick]

in swedish news these days there is a lot talk that swedes should change their diet..lesser to no meat is a main agument as a must to save the planet from becoming a giant sauna.......But then wouldnt the be an cow/pig/sheep/horse/ass/gnu overpopulation...already now cows farting are also the blame for the eventual near catastrophy that await us....and if we go all veggies with legumes for an almost full worthy protein sourse, we to will fart more........i mean can we really save us/the planet, it looks hopeless for sure

Come on, Trick, you're just being silly now. But I guess you know that...

silly me...

[Michael]

Giles, thanks for a detailed response. I did read it all

I agree about certainty. With my question, I was also getting at resolution or focus. For example, on the opposite side of global climate change, on the micro side of weather, if you go extremely small, can you predict a gust of wind? Since this is one of the shortest time durations of weather, less than one second, and the smallest geographical area, about 100,000 cubic meters, such a tiny event should contain fewer variables than the climate of the world for 100 years. Does this mean that a failure or inability to predict a gust of wind means that predicting systems with more variables is less reliable? Because of levels of focus and their relevance to understanding weather and climate systems and patterns, this argument is almost completely pointless.

On the topic of focus, how relevant is it to the climate question that weather prediction for a city has an accuracy graph that diminishes rapidly after only several days? Maybe this kind of relevance has to be measured against specificity requirements for local weather and global climate, where the former is more specific and the latter is more generalized over time, area, and effect, much like making plans for flying a kite in the park next Saturday compared to calendars for planting seasons: the former is much more time and place specific, whereas the latter is more general.

Within the scope of certainty, specificity, and focus there should be some predictability in order to demonstrate knowledge of the system that could be used to extrapolate human influence. There is no such predictability.

With such a level of unpredictability, the certainty factor becomes dominant when it comes to problem solving, which is why the conversation has become influenced, temporarily, by 16 year olds whose mental problems are related to the anxiety of the uncertainty.

Here's a five minute video on the basic unpredictability of the climate. You can also read the transcript in about a minute. <download pdf>

Predicting climate temperatures isn't science – it's science fiction. Emeritus Professor of Physics at Princeton University Will Happer explains.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZN2jt2cCU4

[Giles]

Thanks for posting this, Michael. I too have viewed it to the end, considered it and did a little more research.
I don’t doubt that he has done good science in his own field. But actually the way he argues in this video illustrates almost exactly what I wrote about how some (!) scientists who work in ‘exact’ fields, where results can be measured and reproduced with 100% certainty, feel or sometimes say that any science concerning larger, more complex and to some extent ‘chaotic’ systems isn’t really science at all. Certainly when it moves beyond recording what has happened in the past and ventures to predict what might or very probably will happen in the future. By the same argument, meterology isn’t a science at all, but (drumroll)... “science fiction”. Indeed, he uses one example (one!) of a prediction of a hurricane track that meteorologists didn’t get right. Yes, the weather remains a chaotic system with imponderables that still sometimes screw up predictions. But nowadays meteorologists mostly get hurricane forecasts right – remember Alabama recently? Maybe it was a secretly liberal-funded storm, otherwise it would surely have gone the way POTUS said... Sorry, couldn’t resist that, I’ll stay responsible from now on. And when it comes to a more general understanding of hurricanes, their frequency and behaviour patterns, science is generally getting ‘better’ all the time. It’s about trends, not individual events. And anecdotally, I know that the accuracy and time range of weather forecasts has hugely improved since my youth. Sometimes they still get it wrong – chaotic system! – but on average, over time, they get it right more often.

When Happer makes these extremely generalized statements about how unpredictable a huge system involving two fluids will be, the conclusion he seems to be drawing is that it is therefore impossible to make any well-founded predictions about the climate, because it’s just like weather, which scientists can’t predict either. But statistically speaking they can. Not to 100% certainty, as I wrote previously. Which for some scientists of a certain persuasion (and personality) invalidates it. Since I addressed this in my previous post, I won’t repeat it all here.

Happer, despite his scientific qualifications and achievements, has made some climate-science-related statements that are pretty off the wall. He has said that the idea of CO2 being a threat to climate stability has to be wrong because, paraphrasing but not distorting his words, CO2 can’t be a ‘pollutant’ because we all breathe out CO2 and without CO2 plants can’t grow. And hence it’s good that CO2 levels are rising. And at at times in the past, the CO2 level was much higher than it is now and life flourished on Earth. (Er, yeah, for instance during the Paleocene/Eocene transition about 56 million years ago, when the poles were free of ice caps, and palm trees and crocodiles lived above the Arctic Circle. Good for a future tourist industry around Hudson Bay but not good for world agriculture and for most human populations, especially ones living in coastal areas). As an established scientist, putting forward arguments of this quality, at this level, is just embarassing. Or deeply disingenuous. He also said a few years ago: “The demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler.” This is not an ad hominen attack, it is an indication that this scientist seems to be driven by some rather unrational and personal emotional issues that seriously skew his own scientific objectiveness. I mean, each individual scientist is also just a human being, and human beings have issues (albeit some more than others). That's why, just like with hurricane track prediction, it's the big view and the consensus that matters, not individual events or anomalies.

For a point-by-point, scientifically substantiated response to Happer’s article “The Real Truth about Greenhouse Gases and Climate Change”, see http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/wp-c ... Change.pdf

So really it looks like Will Happer is pretty much, by a coincidence, the imaginary physicist I described in my theoretical example of the house built on the landslide-threatened slope. The strong consensus of climate scientists and indeed the clear majority of scientists in other disciplines say if we continue as are, we’re heading for deep shit. Not 100% certain – see above etc. etc. – but with enough high probability that failing to take action is deeply irresponsible.

Of course, one can then argue that this broad scientific consensus isn’t because of lots of scientists indepdently doing their job sloppily, but because it’s a huge CONSPIRACY (with the purpose of somehow ...... us all !!!) . A cartoon you recently posted here would seem to suggest that viewpoint, But I’m not going to go there right now, or indeed at all, I think. I’ve enjoyed writing this stuff but now I have to get back to working for money. And then a couple of weeks off. So bye for now.

PS. Thanks for the beetle, Jimmy.

[Steve James]

Giles, but we know that simply having more Co2 in the atmosphere is not conducive to life from the situation of our sister planet Venus.

The atmosphere of Venus is the layer of gases surrounding Venus. It is composed primarily of carbon dioxide and is much denser and hotter than that of Earth. The temperature at the surface is 740 K (467 °C, 872 °F), and the pressure is 93 bar (9.3 MPa), roughly the pressure found 900 m (3,000 ft) underwater on Earth.[1] The Venusian atmosphere supports opaque clouds made of sulfuric acid, making optical Earth-based and orbital observation of the surface impossible. Information about the topography has been obtained exclusively by radar imaging.[1] Aside from carbon dioxide, the other main component is nitrogen. Other chemical compounds are present only in trace amounts.[1]

Venus didn't have any cars, and no trees afa we know. Anyway, when scientists talk of "climate change," they aren't just talking about carbon emissions. There is just as much concern for the elimination of forests the plant life that uses Co2 to produce the percentage of O2 that we, and other animals, need to breathe.

If the increase in Co2 is accompanied by a simultaneous increase in the number of trees, or Co2 storage media, the argument would be moot. It's not a question of too much or too little Co2; it's a question of ecological balance. Change may be unavoidable, but there's no argument for lack of preparation.

[Ian C. Kuzushi]

The arguments regarding increasing uncertainty are completely bogus. Not because they are specifically wrong about how predictions and uncertainty work, but because they are ignoring the fact that we are not only using these laws of prediction alone. We also know which and how certain processes are driving changes creating these trends. So, to act as though it all a total crapshoot and we have no idea what's going to happen or if there is even a problem at all is just disingenuous.

Besides, we don't need to look to the future to prove what's happening. It's right here to see. It's so obvious, we can see it from space. Remember, anthropogenic Climate Change and non-anthropogenic climate change are only a small part of the puzzle. Biodiversity, disruption of the lithosphere, ocean acidification, nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, and unique objects are all other possibly equally important things needed intervention, some more urgently than others.

[Giles]

@ Steve, Ian
Of course, you are both right in your argumentation here. I didn't marshall all the arguments against Happer's questionable little presentation for reasons of space and time. Thanks for making these points more explicitly here.

And to reference my original post here, I still think it would be wonderful if people like Happer (and Trump etc.) are right and things aren't going in a baaaad direction. And the rest of us have to eat humble pie in the future. Because that would be 'better'. But that shouldn't be confused with naivity on my part. I know what science says. I was out at the demo in Berlin last week. My daughter too with her friends, but somewhere else in the crowd - she wouldn't be seen dead with her embarrassing dad at a public event...

[Michael]

I guess I'm going to have to read 42 pages because I linked to a scientist who made a very odd comparison, which I wasn't aware of. Gonna take a while.

[Giles]

If you really do take a closer look at this source, Michael, then all credit to you - whatever conclusions you then draw for yourself. In which case bear in mind that the document dates from 2011, and since then a lot of further evidence (or of course "evidence" , depending on one's viewpoint) has come in and continues to come in on pretty much a month-by-month basis. Together with a further strengthening of the broad scientific consensus on this issue.

I'm on holiday now, so maybe back on the thread in 2 or 3 weeks.