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#81

An interesting article for the lay person on climate change

[quote]Deniers continue to insist there’s no consensus on global warming. Well, there’s not. There’s well-tested science and real-world observations.
[/quote]

salon.com/news/feature/2008/ … g_deniers/

I found this to be an interesting and informative article on the issues around the validity of the IPCC reports.

And my 2 cents (edit 5 cents) on the Emissions Trading Scheme and legislative efforts to minimise Greenhouse gases; regardless of the whether or not it is human contributions to GHG emissions that are screwing the planet, surely the issue is that things are broken and they need fixing. That should be everyone’s primary concern, instead of pointing fingers. /2 cents (edit 5 cents)

#82

[quote=“Malu”]
And my 2 cents on the Emissions Trading Scheme and legislative efforts to minimise Greenhouse gases; regardless of the whether or not it is human contributions to GHG emissions that are screwing the planet, surely the issue is that things are broken and they need fixing. That should be everyone’s primary concern, instead of pointing fingers. /2 cents[/quote]

You undervalue yourself. That’s at least 5c worth

#83

Interesting and somewhat disturbing article.

Of particular note are the comments that “political interference” in the IPCC recommendation reports is making them underestimate the speed that warming is happening at, that sea and other measures confirm the specific predictions of models that predict warming because of rising CO2, and that recorded warming has consistently outstripped what each IPCC report has predicted.

#84

Mike - for some reason the Greens splash page takes forever to load in IE7 for me. Works fine in Firefox.

#85

I am not sure how the slow decline in temperature that has been observed for the last 10 years can be called a rapid rise in temperature, but there is some interesting information in the magazine article.

The political interference in the IPCC has been known for many years. But as it a political and not a scientific body it has been held by political observers that they are allowed to change the results to what they want, rather than what the scientists have actually observed…

#86

Yeah, the idea that politicians were influencing numbers to paint a rosier picture than what was actually happening is disturbing.

It’s a case of ‘yes the planet’s going to hell in a hand basket’ but we’re going to make you think the countdown clock has more time than it actually does. This is why accepting there is a problem and working for the solution is more beneficial than arguing over who caused it. But humans have this lovely tendancy to blame which is not constructive in the least.

#87

I agree that the article is quite distubing, and really underlines our need to engage in taking tough measures to address climate change. The ETS is pretty weak, but the best we (the Greens) could negotiate under the circumstances. There is a lot more to do.

When you say “slow decline”, is that in terms of absolute temperature or increases to temperature ?

If the former, how does that square with this assertion:

#88

Absolute

[quote=“Mike Curtis”]
If the former, how does that square with this assertion:

According to NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) (Who are great advocate of the Greenhouse Gas Theory) the five year average change from is about .28 degrees, but this is unadjusted for the heat island effect, which will tend to decrease this total figure. Even with their data it is hard to how the warming trend in the last 10 years. One has to be a little carful how one chooses their dates. If you take 1989 to 2005 it is .25 degree rise, if you take 1994 to 2005 that shows a rise of .31 degrees. This is due primarily to Pinatubo. However if you look at recenet history you do not immediately see a rise in temperature. This is partly due to 1998 being the hotest year on recent record, i.e. since good global temperature records (about 1975).

Other things that should cause climate change but nobody really wants to tackle :[ul]

Irrigation –This is often expressing as unknowable. Almost all of the Colorado river flow of 100 years ago now travels over the USA as water vapor.)
Solar Variability - Changes in solar output in the IR and visible spectrum
Changes in shielding of cosmic radiation from the sun due to changes in magnetic storms
Changes in plant coverage (deforestation etc)
The Milankovitch cycles; changes in earth’s eccentricity, axial tilt, and precession over time.
Ground level Ozone
Changes in particles that come from the sun.
Genetic changes in ocean algae over time
Changes in earths magnetic field.
Changes in volcanic emissions (CO2 and other substances)
Aerosols - Changes in the amount and elevation of pollution particulate
Changes in CO2 absorption and emission due to changes in plant coverage and ocean temperature.
Changes in ozone thickness
Changes in methane emission by plants
Changes in ocean salinity due to water use - (causing changes in ocean currents).
Changes in land reflectivity
Snowballs from space
Changes in ice crystal reflectivity due to the temperature, water saturation, mineral content and wind speed when they are formed.
Aerosols
[/ul]

Any one of theses can render the standard General Circulation Models invalid. The standard models used to prove Greenhouse Gas Theories take none of the above factors into account.Let’s throw in some actual observed stuff. In my thesis I stated that the total amount of additional energy required to produce all of the observed warmining effects on Earth was a forcing of 0.22 W/m^2. Recently one of the articles I based this figure on was withdrawn and reissued in a corrected form. This showed that my initial estimates of 0.22 W/m^2 was wrong and rather it shoud be in the range of 0.1-0.16W/m^2. The amount of forcing observed due to Solar variations is 0.30 W/m^2 and due to Snow/Ice Albedo feedback is on the order of 0.25 W/m^2. The Solar forcing figure is a well known figure acknowledged by people like the IPCC. This indicates that the change in the suns irradiance by itself can account for all the observed global warming effects and that negative feedback mechanisms are holding the temperature back. This is further supported by the observations that the other planets and moons in the solar system are also undergoing warming. It seems unlikely that the CO2 level on Earth would cause a temperature rise on Mars. As given above, the amount of forcing required for the Greenhouse Gas Theory is about 1.6W/m^2 or over 10 times the actual observed amount.

My educated guess, based on emperical evidence, is that the current global warming trend is primarily driven by solar irradiance variations, with a component from ozone depletion, plus effects from all of the items on the list above, plus a little bit of Greenhouse gas feedback. Probably the largest human effect on climate is due to irrigation and changes in land usage.

#89

Update - December 2009

For anybody who is still interested in this thread.

What is climategate and why is it important? Recently there were some emails that escaped from the Climate Research Group (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. What these emails showed were three main themes. Firstly that the CRU had been altering the data to show a global warming trend where no such trend existed. Secondly that there was a co-ordinated campaign to stop researchers obtaining the original data. This included destroying the original data after receiving requests under the Freedom of Information Act. These actions costituted a criminal offense under British law. And thirdly, there was a co-ordinated campaign to discredit any researchers that disagreed with the CRU. Further, the Peer Review process that was used by the CRU is different from that used in the rest of science.

So why is this important? Because the CRU is the major source of temperature data for the IPCC. However, because of the destroyed data, this means the CRU’s results are non-reproducable and in a scientific context, this means that the results have no scientific validity. This means that the major evidence for global warming is at best useless, at worst, totally fraudulant.

We should acknowledge that the CRU is not the only group that has been caught altering data in non-scientific way. Recently NASA was shown to be using false information (The NASA Hockey Stick) and even our own NIWA has been shown to be doing unscientific processes. In the NIWA case they were shown to be adjusting the weather data so as to give a rising temperature trend for the last 100 years. However the original data shows no warming trend. NIWA claims to have needed to adjust the figures as some of their weather stations have changed location. This raises more questions than it answers. For NIWA’s assertations to be correct, then every weather station in NZ has, on average, been elevated by over 100m in altutude. While at first blush NIWAs explanations may appear valid, they have not been able to withstand any close examination and are not consistant with climate science as we know it.