Educated Opinions on Climate change - a denouement or a hoax? Part 2.0 29

[zdas04]

berkshire,
We're about the same age, and I remember the same hypothesis. I can remember wondering (many years later) if that "balance" idea was based on data or wishful thinking. The more I've learned, the more I think that no one has ever proven a single unassailable hypotheses about the global climate.

I saw some pure, unadulterated data the other day on CO2 levels at several high-altitude sample points (one of them was Mona Loa in Hawaii, I can't remember where the other points were) that showed CO2 in the atmosphere pretty constant at 290 ppm until the late 1960's and since then it has increased to around 320 ppm. I was able to accept that data as accurate, unadulterated, and unbiased. I was not able to accept it as a cause of anything, but I accept the measurements.

I saw some other data that says that the last ice age freeze-dried billions of tons of organic material that has been trapped in the permafrost since then. I've seen data that looks to me to be unadulterated that says the the latitude of the permafrost is retreating and that trapped organic material is now subject to biological processes that have been delayed in the deep freeze.

The hypotheses that this seems to me to support is that the warming earth is releasing CO2, not that CO2 is warming the earth. That is just a "belief", not a fact. Others look at this data that seems to be whole and pure and draw other conclusions.

I look at adulterated data and reject it out of hand. Others look at it and see truth. This religion will not be resolved until the next ice age.

David

 

[berkshire]

Amen
Brother
Praise the lord
( or is it politicaly incorrect to say that? )
B.E.

The good engineer does not need to memorize every formula; he just needs to know where he can find them when he needs them. Old professor

 

[beej67]

If the warming trend started in the 1890s, but the carbon spike didn't truly hit until the 1960s, then maybe carbon isn't the only culprit?

My problem with the whole dialog, is it's either "AGW doesn't exist" or it's "Kyoto Treaty." The middle ground, where maybe AGW is caused by a lot of factors and not just carbon, is ignored by science because nobody has a financial interest in funding research like that.

Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East -

http://www.campbellcivil.com

 

[jmw]

It's a chicken and egg thing.
Fist came the idea of AGW promoted by Maurice Strong and then came the "science" to support the theory along with the suppression of countervailing views.
He it was who encouraged the recognition of NGOs as influential in UN debate and policy making.
This may seem the wrong way round to many rational people but rationality has nothing to do with it.

Maurice Strong set out to become influential within the UN and had his first job there in 1947.
In 1972 he was director general of the first UN environmental panel.
He it is that is credited with starting the AGW scam.
He is also one of the principal beneficiaries and is associated with Al Gore in carbon trading schemes.
He is worth a lot of money now and spends a great deal of time in China promoting, among other things, cheap Chinese cars to destroy the US auto industry (not electric cars or environmentally friendly cars, just cheap cars).

See Zdas's thread "Anti-Human"


JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[jmw]

What an nice old gentleman he appears to be in this interview.
You Tube
He must be right.


JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[jmw]

Here is Glen Beck laying the blame at the nice old man's door: Taking Crime Inc Global

JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[KENAT]

Well jmw, now you've got me doubting anything you've said if you're using Glen Beck as your star witness (I didn't open the link, not sure I could stomach Beck at this time in the morning).

Posting guidelines faq731-376

http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?

(probably not aimed specifically at you)
What is Engineering anyway: faq1088-1484​

 

[jmw]

Beck not to your taste?
He isn't the only commentator.
That's why I suggest doing your own googling.
Actually, I am now having doubts about the validity of the proposed regulation of the internet which is supposedly about regulating piracy of copyright material (music, films etc.) and which has prompted google to go on strike. I begin to suspect that the real target might be to clamp down on the independent voices being raised against the trend of the established mainstream media.

It may seem I am entering conspiracy mode late in life but I hope not. In my youth I very nearly succumbed to the Von Daniken style of off the wall sags including the Club of Rome report, Silent Spring, the Screts of the pyramids and so on and I am resistant to 419 emails and free energy scams so I hope I have a degree of cynicism and that I do not easily succumb to such scares. But there seems to me to be just too muh evidence that there are some crazy people who ought to have been institutionalised but who were instead given the keys to the funny farm and far too few of us question it.
Too many believe that scientists are absolutely honest and ethical in all fields and believe that everything will work out for the best.



JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[cranky108]

In the middle ages they burned people who spoke agenst the church, but only for there own good.

Now we are being told to work to prevent AGW for our own good, no matter what the cost.

Even if it is real, has anyone done a cost benifit analisis on what is being proposed or done?

If it costs me a dollar, and I get a dime of benifit, I have lost something.

 

[beej67]

I would not call Glen Beck 'impartial.'



Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East -

http://www.campbellcivil.com

 

[dawei87]

I completely disagree with this. All natural lands have layers of ground cover, forests moreso than grasslands, but agricultural lands have a single plant, no layering, and no ground cover between plants. And they're hotter.

You’ve changed your argument. Before you were arguing that albedo calculations were wrong because they didn’t take into account photosynthetic effects. Now you are saying they are wrong because they don’t take into account the elevation difference between trees and crops.

So while we're ball parking it, let's say agricultural lands have a quarter the albedo delta as compared to the "untouched" condition, and cover eight times the area that urban lands do. That'd be another 0.32 C, for a total of 0.48 C.

Except my ballpark numbers were grounded in reality.

Agricultural lands have a higher albedo, not a lower one. If you want to start getting into indirect effects, then you can bring up the greater albedo after snowfall on cropland vs. temperate forest due to the cropland's relatively shorter profile. Or that albedo tends to decrease with increasing height even if leaf coloration is constant. But you can’t just call it a “lower albedo” because you think the effect of ever-so-slightly lowering the ceiling that receives direct sunlight (canopy vs. soil/crop) somehow makes the entire troposphere warmer.

Elevation--at least on the scale we're talking about--doesn’t matter, and the albedo of an object is fixed based on its color, not its location. Crops are of a higher albedo, which means that less sunlight is absorbed in the surface of the Earth. It is reflected back into space and not considered as part of the incoming energy budget. The energy budget is thereby unbalanced, with more going out than what is coming in, which (all else being equal) would force a cooling until a new equilibrium were reached. This fact is independent of whether or not a tiny sliver of the lower atmosphere became warmer than it was before the trees were felled.

Elevation difference doesn’t affect the basic balance of absorbed shortwave against outgoing longwave. Increasing the 2nd most significant greenhouse gas by a factor of 40%--or 100% or 200%--does however affect this balance by reducing the efficiency of outgoing longwave.

Hell, your simple calculation for urbanization alone is 20%. 20% is not insignificant. 20% is not something you can wish away.

I do not wish it away, I add it to the entire pot of anthropogenic albedo modification and get a net negative number. So too, for that matter, has *every* peer-reviewed study of surface anthropogenic albedo change.

Not to mention that the urban numbers were extremely conservative, and also represented a longer timeline than just the last 100 years.

The climate modelers have got agriculture all wrong, because they've never spent any time out in a field.

While I’ve seen plenty of arrogant people expressing their opinion that scientists are just a bunch of drooling morons, I have to say this is the first time I’ve seen someone imply that they were literally dumber than cows.

http://files.engineering.com/getfil...420e-a0a3-23d4cf92685d&file=cows_in_shade.jpg

Not when so much money from these very businesses and governments is being pumped into the science, in the form of research grants.

So, neither government nor business are supposed to fund science? I had no idea. After you’ve finished climatology, you may want to forward that memo to every other scientific field in the world.

You find what you're supposed to find according to the people paying the bills.

Unless you have documented evidence of a scientist having received funding with the understanding that his results had better support AGW (or else), this is pure speculation. Receiving funding for a study and having that result go in favor of AGW theory does not mean that it would have gone a different way if the funding had come from a more neutral source.

To claim it does is a surprising leap in logic from someone who clearly otherwise appreciates the pitfalls of assuming causation from mere correlation.

It's not that they're faking it on purpose, it's just that they're putting all sorts of validity into models that are calibrated against CO2, so the models show a correlation.

They don’t “calibrate against CO2 “. The radiative forcing of CO2 is very well defined based on laboratory experimentation and the long-understood laws of spectroscopy, not to mention direct observational evidence from ground and satellite stations which measure the trend in radiative flux associated with the wavelength range absorbed by CO2 and other GHGs. This radiative forcing is combined with dozens of others, incorporated into extremely complex climate models that take into account a wide variety of factors.

Known and parameterized values are calculated within a likely certainty range and fine tuned by running thousands of iterations and comparing them against temperature observations, not CO2 vs. temperature correlations. A lot of small detail is missing but the biggest players are fairly well understood. Models are not, as you seem to think, Temperature = [black box] * CO2, where that black box can be manipulated haphazardly until they stumble on a result that will please their overloards.

The methodologies of many climate models are freely available for your reading enjoyment. I suggest taking the time to gain an appreciation for their complexity before making unfounded claims as to their inadequacy.

 

[dawei87]

My problem with the whole dialog, is it's either "AGW doesn't exist" or it's "Kyoto Treaty." The middle ground, where maybe AGW is caused by a lot of factors and not just carbon, is ignored by science because nobody has a financial interest in funding research like that.[/beej67]

No, it's maybe it does exist with CO2 being the major driving force, or maybe it isn't. The question of what should be done in response to this driving force is absolutely separate.

I would completely agree with you if you said that the Kyoto Protocol is worthless. Please do not assume that just because someone is convinced of the science of AGW, that he/she must automatically endorse any solution suggested to mitigate it. I have personally never been convinced by the effectiveness of ANY government policy that I have seen on the table.

 

[cranky108]

The fact that most mitigation schemes results in taxes or mandates, is the root of the problem. Taxes and mandates are rarely fair, and are a playground for people to control things they know nothing about.

Example: How long had the Spanash-American war taxes been on our phone bills, and few of us knew about it.

 

[moltenmetal]

David, you totally discredit yourself by discounting the measured atmospheric CO2 data as biased. I can't take you seriously if you maintain that claim.

There is no question in the literature that CO2 concentrations have increased significantly as a result of human burning of fossil carbon. Unlike the global temperature issue, this is not a result of forecasts or models but is based on MEASUREMENTS- measurements any high school chemistry student can do. It is based not only on the averaging of MANY direct measurements from MANY atmospheric stations all over the world, but it is also cross-calibrated against ice core data and the many other indirect means of obtaining estimates of past mean atmospheric CO2 levels.

CO2 atmospheric measurements happen also to correlate very well with the results of a relatively simple mass balance of the fossil carbon we've burned over time, combined with an estimate of the mean CO2 half-life in the atmosphere- an estimate which is also based on measurements and which by the way needs not be very accurate to give a reasonable answer anyway.

You are defending your hypothesis that everything is OK and natural, on the basis of an ever-growing conspiracy theory. Just curious: do you also believe in caloric?

 

[zdas04]

WAHT?????? How does

I saw some pure, unadulterated data the other day on CO2 levels at several high-altitude sample points (one of them was Mona Loa in Hawaii, I can't remember where the other points were) that showed CO2 in the atmosphere pretty constant at 290 ppm until the late 1960's and since then it has increased to around 320 ppm. I was able to accept that data as accurate, unadulterated, and unbiased. I was not able to accept it as a cause of anything, but I accept the measurements.

imply that I discounted the atmospheric CO2 data? It seems that "I was able to accept that data as accurate, unadulterated, and unbiased" pretty clearly states the opposite.

I don't accept the the measured increase implies a source of the CO2. I also don't accept the amazingly tennuous correlation between fossil fuel consumption and the magnitude of CO2 change. I reject about half the assumptions that went into that analysis.

David

 

[beej67]

Every time you levy a personal attack against me or build strawman arguments, Dawei87, you only hurt your own case. This is a forum of educated professionals, not an AOL chat line. You are not awarded points for witty insults.

I do find it curious that you invoke "cows moving to a forested area to get cooler" as evidence that agricultural fields are cooler than forests. I would contend it's pretty reasonable evidence of exactly the opposite.

And my argument is not about elevation effecting albedo, my argument is about climate modelers getting the energy balance wrong if they think cotton fields cool the earth more than forests do. Cotton fields do not cool the earth more than forests do, for a host of reasons. Not the least of which is how much energy is being used up in the biochemical processes of photosynthesis in the two cases.

If you take an aerial photo of a forest, and an aerial photo of a parking lot spray-painted green, the albedo looks the same, but the effective albedo is different because photosynthetic effects are being neglected. The same error is made comparing a forest and agricultural lands, which are barren between plants and do not perform the same amount of conversion of radiant energy to stored chemical energy. This is what makes a forest cooler than a corn field, and a corn field cooler than a tennis court. The surface of the earth is a giant biochemical reactor, that uses radiant energy to turn inorganic chemicals into organic matter, on a massive, planet-wide scale. This is ignored in the modeling, as far as I'm aware, but huge changes have been made to this giant plant sized biochemical reactor by human population expansion.

Feel free to prove me wrong with a link to a study that discusses this particular effect, and then we can examine the merits of that study. But I'm not going to play the Internet Insult Game with you any longer. It's a childish waste of time. If I want that, I'll go argue about SEC football on some other website.



Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East -

http://www.campbellcivil.com

 

[dawei87]

Every time you levy a personal attack against me or build strawman arguments, Dawei87, you only hurt your own case.

Where did I personally attack you? I said you implied that they were dumber than cows, because you did. You implied scientists were not aware that standing in the open sun in a field felt hotter than standing in a forest. The cows know this, but according to your claim, the scientists do not because they have never been there.

I do find it curious that you invoke "cows moving to a forested area to get cooler" as evidence that agricultural fields are cooler than forests. I would contend it's pretty reasonable evidence of exactly the opposite.

My point was that OF COURSE it feels cooler under a tree compared to an open crop. I already said that many times. That doesn't mean that it makes the entire *atmosphere* hotter. If I stand on a hot asphalt parking lot in the sun I am hotter than if I stand under the shade of a hot asphalt roof. The energy balance of earth is the same, but the tiny volume of air in which I stand is cooler because the roof blocks radiant energy from getting to me and the ground I stand on.

Not the least of which is how much energy is being used up in the biochemical processes of photosynthesis in the two cases.

You keep saying that but have yet to back it up. Crops are engineered and hybridized to grow much, much faster than natural trees. That means they photosynthesize FASTER, which means if you are giong to invoke chemical reactions, then it only strengthens the case of a cooling effect of agriculture.

This is what makes a forest cooler than a corn field

No, it isn't. The forest feels cooler because the sunlight is being absorbed and re-radiated at the canopy, rather than on the soil and/or on your skin. The result is that the volume of air under the canopy doesn't get nearly as much radiative energy as does the canopy (or field at ground level), and so stays cooler.

A crop is warmer than a forest but if you were standing at the canopy of the forest it would be equally warm, if not warmer, than you feel at the surface of a crop (negating secondary effects like wind)

And you're ignoring the major effect of increased snow-cover albedo, which is hugely important in temperate zones that typically had thick forests replaced with flat crops.

and a corn field cooler than a tennis court.

I already said that with two equal albedos--one biological and the other not--the biological one would be cooler. The question is the difference between agriculture and forests.

The surface of the earth is a giant biochemical reactor, that uses radiant energy to turn inorganic chemicals into organic matter, on a massive, planet-wide scale.

Many biological effects are taken into account in climate models, including those dependent on tempearture, CO2 concentrations, deforestation, and precipitation.

Feel free to prove me wrong with a link to a study that discusses this particular effect, and then we can examine the merits of that study.

Again, it's your burden to research and support *your* hypothesis.

 

[SnTMan]

dawei87 VS beej67

For the life of me I can't figure out who's ahead

Regards,

Mike

 

[josephv]

From MIT Press
The Fate of Greenland
Lessons from Abrupt Climate Change

"Geological evidence suggests that Greenland has already been affected by two dramatic changes in climate: the Medieval Warm Period, when warm temperatures in Northern Europe enabled Norse exploration and settlements in Greenland; and the Little Ice Age that followed and apparently wiped out the settlements. Greenland's climate past and present could presage our climate future. Abrupt climate change would be cataclysmic: the melting of Greenland's ice shelf would cause sea levels to rise twenty-four feet worldwide; lower Manhattan would be underwater and Florida's coastline would recede to Orlando."

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12443

 

[zdas04]

Let me get my head around this, at the height of the Medieval Warm Period the Greenland ice shelf didn't exist and there is evidence of Viking exploration on Manhattan island. But this time when it melts (as it will within geologic time regardless of human activity), Manhattan will be under water? Didn't Venice, IT (with it's sea-level canals and extensive construction right down to the edge of the canals) thrive during the Medieval Warm Period? I seem to recall something called the Renaissance that happened in a lot of low lying places.

If you divide the volume of the Greenland Ice Sheet by the surface area of the world's oceans, you get a 24 ft increase in fluid level. I don't think that the earth's oceans are actually constrained to today's boundaries (neither does MIT since they say that Orlando gets a beach) and relatively small increases in the surface area make a significant impact on the magnitude of the elevation change.

Bottom line is that the amount of water captured in ice is not a constant. It has changed many times over the millenia and will change many more times before the sun runs out of fuel. Articles like you linked are simply an effort to increase the level of fear in the population. That makes for newspaper sales and for grants for climate scientists. It doesn't have to be a conspiracy for individuals to see their own personal self interest aligned with fear mongering.

David