"Educated" opinions on climate change - Part 3 42

[jmw]

At 273 posts I guess the time has come to request the old thread archived and continue in a new thread and it is in this thread that I think the latest news has its proper place.

The world has never seen such freezing heat

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/11/16/do1610.xml

Oh dear,
just what do you have to do to lose the last shreds of credibility?

Tell me honestly folks, how many engineers would still have a job with a track record like Hansen?
Actually, perhaps we'd better not answer that because I suspect the answer is that in any profession there are complete f***-ups who will never be brought to book simply because the credibility of the people who have believed them for so long is also at risk and once one goes then the domino effect comes into being.

I guess that it is only when NASA closes that we will see and end to the career of this fine purveyor of temperature data but we can be sure he will turn up in some other role on the IPCC or as an acolyte of Nobel Laureate, Al Gore.

Success, it seems, depends not on getting it right but on notoriety and why else would so many deadly politicians earn so much on the speaking circuit once they have finally left office and while their dark deeds are still fresh in everyone's mind?


You know I can't help wondering, if it weren't for those "Chads" I wonder what sort of a condition the world would be in now? And, if we are in dire financial straits now, what kind of position would we otherwise be in?



JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[mauricestoker]

I don't think that anyone has tried to understand or perform research on the subject of increasing life span and the proportional increase in menopausal women. I've noticed a severe decrease in temperature in the last few years where I live.

 

[cranky108]

Lets see, we burn our food in our cars, and we pay farmers to not grow crops. What do they have in common other than more money? Oh, and we have genetelicly modified crops to increase our food supply.

Wouden't we just be better off if we insisted farmers use horses in place of tractors? (reduse oil imports, reduce crop yields, make farmers more money with higher crop prices).

 

[csd72]

OMG I started a franchise!

3rd set already arent we opinionated!

 

[owg]

The ultimate test would be to require farmers to burn alcohol from grain and see if any net product emerges.

HAZOP at

http://www.curryhydrocarbons.ca

 

[vc66]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081209/ap_on_re_eu/eu_poland_climate_science

Well, there you go.

V

 

[Unotec]

Oh, but it gets better:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/dec/09/oil-business-climate-change-flooding

<<A good friend will bail you out of jail, but a true friend
will be sitting beside you saying ” Damn that was fun!” - Unknown>>

 

[cranky108]

We are borg, we will make you pay for global warming.

Or you can join us and plant trees in death valley.

It's all emotion, very little fact (Where's the beef).

 

[SnTMan]

Per unotecs' link we can see what it's all about.

"Give me some money".

Regards,

Mike

 

[kchan711]

Looking at unotec's article, I think it's funny how two of the failures claimed during the UK flood of 2000 were power loss and train service cancellation. The people weren't complaining when that fossil fuel energy gave them electricity and means of transportation but blame it and even want retribution when it fails. It's a clear case of don't bite the hand that feeds you.

If we start seeking financial gain from the courts because of nature's fury, where does it end? Although I feel for people stranded in the Midwest or Coastal regions (U.S) and other parts of the world with violent weather, you CHOOSE where you live. You also must accept the consequences of that decision, just like in many other scenarios. You build below sea level, expect to be flooded. Engineering can't always bail you out. Alright, I'm done venting.

Kyle Chandler

http://www.chiefengineering.net

 

[cranky108]

So kchan711, we should not be concerned about the consequences that happen to people from other than weather causes?
Earthquakes, forest fires, volcanos usually don't happen to people in the midwest US.

The issue is simply that no place is completly safe from mother nature, and deversity of living area is the best chance for a species to survive (yes also the human species).
Pitty the species that can't adapt.

 

[kchan711]

This thread is about weather and climate change, but other areas also have horrible natural disasters like the ones you pointed out. It's also noted that I never said leave concern to the wayside in any area of the world, but you need to accept and adapt to the area you live.

Oh, and the worst natural or artificial (depends how you look at it) disaster is the human being. Adaptation and working with our environment are not among our numerous attributes.

Kyle Chandler

http://www.chiefengineering.net

 

[cranky108]

Having lived in the midwest, I'm sort of sensitive to people saying no one should live there because of tornados.

We do need to adapt to where we live, or adapt where we live. And after a point it isen't cost effective to adapt, but it is cost effective to move.

We are able to adapt, but more than that, it takes technology to adapt or change our enviroment. And if we look at where that technology comes from, it is from having to solve problems.

 

[b2theory]

I am always rather shocked when I find Engineers on the this side of the argument. It seems clear to me that you all should have received the type of education required to do a high level analysis of the topic or at least trust the peer review process to ultimately give you an increasingly accurate picture of what's going on.

I can also understand how difficult it is to challenge your own base assumptions. When something becomes part of political discourse it becomes nearly impossible to back track away from any opinion or world view. So I will try to make as pleasant of an argument as I can.

First, the theoretical underpinnings of anthropomorphic climate change appears to be very robust. As with any new area of study there has been drift over the past twenty years as exponentially more brain/hours are dumped into studying the system. There has been zero research that has withstood the rigor of peer review that challenges its fundamental premise. What does this mean....? It means that the same process that yielded the solid state physics of the transistor, the nuclear physics of modern thermonuclear weapons, and the double helix of DNA says that the surface level atmospheric temperature will rise. This makes sense at a fundamental physics level. You increase the quantity of a compound with a vibrational absorption band in the IR in the atmosphere and you will increase the total absorbed energy of the atmosphere.

Second, the peer reviewed attempts to understand the implications of this indicate that the additional heating caused by doubling the amount of CO2 most likely will have serious consequences for us. There are lots of academic battles being fought in this arena. However, keep in mind that these researchers are trying to unravel an amazingly complex nonlinear chaotic system.

Third, there are "scientists", and even PhDs, that are publicly opposed to the foundations of the consensus conclusions of the climate change field. These people are pariahs. They are cranks trying to capitalize on the intense conviction of some in this country to prove to themselves that climate change is simply scare mongering. They get paraded around talk radio where they can pontificate about the folly and agendas of the climate change crowd. They publish books instead of journal papers. They give lectures instead of testing their Earth shattering hypothesis.

This whole thing reminds me the atmosphere that surrounded Relativity during the 20's and 30's. We have the benefit of growing up during the time when Einstein was considered the apex of intellectual achievement. What would you have made of it at the time when an extremely vocal group of Nobel Prize winning scientists tried to shout down General Relativity? Would you have been caught up in Deutsche Physik? Or would you have asked Nobel Prize winners Philipp Lénárd and Johannes Stark if they had any experimental evidence for their "aether" theory?

When a pamphlet was published entitled 100 Authors Against Einstein, Einstein retorted "If I were wrong, one would be enough."

 

[GregLocock]

The difference being that Einstein's 'model' makes good predictions that can be tested accurately.

Any attempt to 'test' the climate change models (by predicting what will happen over the next five years and then comparing it with what really happened) has resulted in a bit of feet shuffling and harumphing about fine tuning.



Cheers

Greg Locock

SIGlease see FAQ731-376 for tips on how to make the best use of Eng-Tips.

 

[b2theory]

"The difference being that Einstein's 'model' makes good predictions that can be tested accurately."

That is also because General Relativity is a model of a fundamental property of the natural world. Such theories are relatively easy to prove or disprove due to the nature of the experiments.

Trying to perform numerical analysis to provide predictions of chaotic systems is difficult. Trying to do that when you are still exploring the fundamentals of the systems is damn near impossible. You only end up with trend lines. The variabilities are measured in months and years.

 

[GregLocock]

Agreed. So the models are inherently noisy and cannot be used to make predictions to the accuracy claimed for them. Since anthropogenic CO2 is only around 3% of the CO2 in the total cycle it is absurd to claim that the effect of the 3% is able to be modelled given all the other effects in the models.

Incidentally how can the strength of weight of numbers of objectors to Einstein be an argument FOR the IPCC report, which claims that the consensus is in?


Cheers

Greg Locock

SIGlease see FAQ731-376 for tips on how to make the best use of Eng-Tips.

 

[LCruiser]

b2theory - You have one word correct: "apparent".

There are 12 times as many scientists skeptical of "global warming" than there were authors of the IPCC document:

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index....ecord_id=2158072e-802a-23ad-45f0-274616db87e6

or

http://preview.tinyurl.com/12xIPCC

"Study: Half of warming due to Sun! –Sea Levels Fail to Rise? - Warming Fears in 'Dustbin of History'"

 

[cranky108]

Again if the model is correct, should it also be usable to determine a best solution.
So what we have now is a unworkable model, and many forced solutions, most of which do more harm than good.

Other than the orignal predicted problem, we also have forced solutions, and more harm.

What ever happened with the reduction in CF4?
Why can't we use CF4, the rest of the world does?

 

[LCruiser]

Models are currently a joke. Computers are not yet robust enough. Models don't even predict that warm air rises.

They are supported by non-thermo types who can make money off "global warming" or original sin religious types who need some belief system.

 

[rb1957]

i'd draw another difference between relativity and global warming ... was einstein trying to politicians to part with money ? einstein's theory and models wouldn't've reached the ears of politicians of the day (well, maybe 40 years later when someone thought to make a bomb out of them).

the point is global warming is a political effort (rather than a scientific one) and IMHO politics is undermining the much vaulted "peer review". if peer review is to be trusted, then how come the original Mann "hockey stick" is now considered by many to be an artifact of someone's imagination. why didn't one of the referees challenge the data model ?

if the models are so good (ie their projections can be trusted) then why are "all" of their short term predictions wrong ? if the short term predictions are invalid, why should we believe the long term ones ?? sorry, you can't say it's because climate/weather is difficult to forecast.