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Post by ignorantianescia on Oct 22, 2015 18:07:31 GMT
James, I disagreed with a fair bit of what you've said, but I've mostly focused on major points that seem to be the source of disagreement. 1. Jonkon's argumentsFirst, I'd like to acknowledge you've said that you disagree with quite a lot that jonkon has said. I think what UnkleE, fortigurn and I have been showing is that despite jonkon's accurate understanding of some of the chemistry and physics, he has left some crucial aspects of the consensus case out. In some cases these are crucial relations that are completely uncontroversial in other disciplines (e.g CO 2 on Venus). So I'm not sure what is left to have more to the arguments than we would like. 2. 1.8 °C warming and some tipping point guffIt's true that climate models expect increased warming in the future and that this relies on tipping points. But it's not true that this is guff. Some of the hike in atmospheric CO 2 has been dempened by chemical buffers, such as oceanic acidification. This is an observed effect that cannot go on indefinitely - which is shown by very simple science such as water having saturation levels for the absorbation of carbon. Or consider for instance the effects of albedo - snow and ice reflect most of the incoming radiation, water absorbs most of it and increasing temperature leads to less of the former and a bit more of the latter surfacewise. These are again examples of easily understood, very basic physics. Those are vital tipping points and I have no idea what's guff about this. 3. Matt RidleyYou may find this too tribalistic from me, but I absolutely cannot consider Ridley reliable on anything related to climatology (or anything else, really). Please note his extremely bad record at representing climate science accurately - and I note that a source dependent on him apparently parrotted a claim from him that there was a consensus for cooling decades ago. So I can't trust him based on practical reason. I will read the totality of his claims later though. 4. Settled scienceThe claim that the science is settled is not about the totality of climate science being settled, but rather about things like the reality of global warming and several relatively basic things (warming continues, this will affect the climate). So the claim is quite modest and heavily reliant on the accepted in other fields. Besides, that warming occurs is a consistent trend, as fortigurn has noted before. But of course there are many unsettled issues in climate science! A good analogy is the dinosaur renaissance, when suggestions that dinosaurs were warm-blooded, could have been feathered and generally were more active than previously thought became important in the literature. These issues are now practically settled. Anybody who thinks that dinosaurs were all sluggish, scaly, cold-blooded lizards is seriously out of step with the current field. In that modest sense, the basics of climate change and global warming are settled. 5. James Hansen’s scenario A from 1988Hansen included three scenarios, so one being rather wrong isn't particularly important. Skeptical Science notes that the most serious error was an exceptionally high climate sensitivity parameter. And scenario A assumed continued exponential GHG growth. This assumption has not borne out and it is therefore pointless to focus on a scenario that doesn't apply to reality. On top of that, it's just one paper out of many. Why only pick out this one? One swallow does not make a summer. (I think this indicates the folkoristic tendencies of pseudoscience. We also see this in Mythicism, as Tim O'Neill noted about the Mythers' insane oral history about Whealey's article.) 6. The economy of sustainable energyWe seem to estimate the economic effects of renewables in the energy mix (especially the electricity energy mix) differently. As it stands, most conventional sustainable energy sources are in between coal and gas according to price efficiency. Hydropower and nuclear are expensive outliers, but on the other hand provide a reliable baseload. Coal has been arbitrarily cheap in the past few years, mostly due to the shale gas boom. Things do not look good for shale gas right now, with the industry collapsing in Poland. Coal may therefore be less economical soon, but I don't expect anything dramatic to happen. As I have said before, on-shore wind power is roughly competitive with coal power and definitely so if you include the costs of pollution from coal (if you leave this out of the equation, you effectively subsidise fossil fuels). Other forms of renewable energy are likely to become more affordable in comparison due to their relatively long lifetimes. (Unfortunately, my country has had the lack of sense to invest a lot in new coal plants, so that will raise future prices simply because the coal plants will have to be phased out prematurely in the future. I fully expect the usual suspects to blame this on renewable energy instead.) Furthermore, climate change is a regressive beast, hitting the global poor the hardest. The indications clearly are that addressing climate change will help the poor. And renewables are economically viable enough to contribute to their development.
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Post by James Hannam on Oct 23, 2015 11:53:09 GMT
Thanks for your reply. Let me just respond to the points you raise here. 2) Thank you for the admission that dangerous climate change requires the existence of tipping points and that these have not been observed. Essentially, the forecasts rely on the existence of these unobserved entities and also ignore the possible existence of other entities that may have positive effects. This is not the mark of what unkleE characterised as highly likely. Informed guesswork might be a more accurate description. This is not something anybody sensible would base policy decisions on. Even the existence of these tipping points is highly contested: www.cell.com/trends/ecology-evolution/abstract/S0169-5347(13)00033-53) Ridley is a journalist and is not infallible. He is, however, extremely valuable as a gadfly challenging the political consensus. Generally he has a much better record than the journalists who report stuff like this: news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8700000/8700472.stm 4) The claim "the science is settled" is used as a polemic device to shut down dissent. My advice: never say this. 5) I was using Hansen as an example of how the predicted temperature rises have come down over time. That is a valid point. You are correct to say his climate sensitivity parameter was too high. However, despite the fact that the models have been showing less and less warming, the level of climate hysteria just keeps on increasing. The reference to the Jesus Myth was a cheap point. 6) Shale is being affected by the Saudi's keeping oil prices down. Oil will go up again eventually and that will be good for shale. In the UK, we should not use solar (for obvious reasons) but it may work elsewhere. I welcome R&D, but subsidising electricity generation in the first world is stupid. In the third world, it is criminal. If, as you say, renewables are economically viable, they would not need subsidy. In the UK, where land is the scarce resource, nuclear would be best although its cost is artificially inflated by needless super-safety systems. You are right to say that the poor are more vulnerable to climate change than the rich. But the point is trivial because the poor are more vulnerable to all adverse change than the rich. In particular, they are much more vulnerable to artificially high energy prices, land being wasted on biofuel and protectionism masquerading as environmental regulations. Addressing climate change is, quite simply, hurting the poor. Likewise, the poor have benefitted more from global greening than the rich, and would benefit more from more rain. Of course, the best thing to do is to make the poor rich, which is something free markets and free trade are doing very well indeed. Best wishes James
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Post by fortigurn on Oct 24, 2015 1:48:01 GMT
4) The claim "the science is settled" is used as a polemic device to shut down dissent. My advice: never say this. How does that work with topics such as gravity and evolution?
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Post by unkleE on Oct 24, 2015 3:52:48 GMT
Sorry, things gummed up so posting a blank post was the only way I could get out of it.
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Post by unkleE on Oct 24, 2015 5:28:11 GMT
Hi James, We are agreed that we are unlikely to agree, which I suppose is an interesting statement in logic! But it is becoming clearer to me why that is. We seem to live in quite different universes. I say that because I know you well enough not to impute unworthy motives to you, yet it seems to me that many of the statements you have made are quite factually wrong or misleading, and I can only assume that you are reading totally different sources to what I am reading. So when I criticise your statements, please know I am not criticising you personally, but the people you trust for your information. Ignorantianescia has outlined with more erudition that I could muster some of the apparent errors or misunderstandings in what you have written, so I won't attempt to compete with him. I will simply have a go at a few of the more obvious targets. This is misleading and irrelevant. Climate change is NOT based on curve fitting, and the continued use of curve-fitting and graphical representations by climate sceptics only illustrates the poverty of their arguments and perhaps their understanding. Climate models are built on physics, as I'm sure you know, and it is physics that is pretty well understood. The difficulty is not the physics, but applying the physics globally so that it is still meaningful locally. If you want to criticise the maths, you must address complex models, not trivialise the question by mentioning a graph or a curve. I think this too is wrong. If you are using curve-fitting, then of course the test of your model is how well it fits the next few points on the curve - you have nothing else to go on. But we are not talking about curve-fitting! We are talking about models of known physical processes, and the problem becomes how well the models describe the physical processes in a statistical sense. Every new pice of data helps that calibration and understanding. This again is a misunderstanding. (I'm sorry to keep saying this, but since we are writing for others, I need to point this out.) The average increase of about 0.15 C per decade is simply a summary of what has happened so far. It has no meaning in itself, and certainly not the important meaning you have given it. Physical climate processes don't follow nice straight line graphs. There are long term trends, shorter term El Nino-La Nina effects, shorter term effects, local effects, etc. The important thing is what the physics tells us. And apparently the physics indicates that temperature rise is likely to continue and increase. And even the present temperature rises are proving harmful. For example, in Australia: - Heatwaves are becoming hotter, lasting longer and occurring more often. Climate change doubled and tripled the odds of heatwaves and their severity in recent years. Heatwaves kill, cause destructive bushfires, and are an indication of other problems.
- Hundreds of temperature, drought and bushfire records have been broken in recent years. These affect lives and faming production.
- "Since the mid-1990s, southeast Australia has experienced a 15 percent decline in the late autumn and early winter rainfall and a 25 percent decline in average rainfall in April and May. Average annual stream flow into Perth’s dams has already decreased by nearly 80 percent since the mid-1970s." Farming in the Murray-Darling Basin, the source of a significant part of Australia's agricultural production, is very much at risk.
- Significant portions of the Aussie population live along the eastern coast, and coastal flooding, storm surges and consequent damage to homes, infrastructure and businesses, have all increased in recent years.
The same is true globally. - The effects are already being felt, with glaciers retreating, ice sheets melting, plants and animals having to move to new habitat (if it is available), changes in rainfall patterns, salt-water intrusion into groundwater supplies, etc.
- Global sea levels have risen by more than 60mm in about 2 decades, hardly a small effect, and they are rising at an increasing rate, with significant effects. Economists are increasingly able to estimate the costs of sea level rise.
- We are actually NOT agreed about hurricanes. Reports on hurricanes vary, and I think it is true that we don't have enough data to draw strong conclusions, but a sample of experts suggests that there has been a slight increase in hurricanes in the North Atlantic. But the bigger effect is that severity is increasing, and this is apparently already having an effect
- We are getting many more hot days globally. "In the south-east of England, for example, temperatures used to reach 33.2C once every 1,000 days, but are now happening as much as once every 200 days."
- It may be true that the earth is greener as your source says, but that isn't all good, and obscures the fact that overall climate change is already having disastrous effects. Predictions of a massive drop in rainfall in northern Africa will only make that region's situation more dire. A friend who worked as an aid worker in Nepal reported that rainfall on hilly terrain is now (already!) much more concentrated, meaning less goes into storage, more erosion occurs, and the poor subsistence farmers face a bleak future. They may have more rain, but it is less useful. It is no wonder that major overseas aid and development organisations such as TEAR and World Vision actively campaign for more effective action on climate change.
The issue of what action is necessary is certainly one deserving of discussion and some good economics. But it cannot be properly assessed until the climate sceptic misinformation is addressed, and we accept the science. So this statement is quite wrong in my opinion. The message is that it is worse than that, its consequences are worse than that, and that message has got out to most people, but apparently not yet to you and your sources. I think this is, in my opinion, the most misleading statement of all. We do risk analysis all the time, and spend huge sums of money on the outcomes. Anyone who has house, car or life insurance has effectively done a risk assessment and decided that although the likelihood of the adverse occurrence is small in the timeframe, the consequence is large, and so we pay out large sums of money collectively to take out insurance. Dams are designed to still be able to supply town water supply in the very unlikely event of a drought way longer than expected (of course this equation is changing with climate change) and their spillways are designed to pass a maximum probable flood which is very unlikely to occur in the design life of the dam. Most countries spend enormous amounts of money on armaments and standing armies that they hope they never need to use, and in most cases they don't have to use anywhere near what they have. So risk management is a very familiar thing for us all. In the case of climate change, the consequences are catastrophic, the likelihood is high (the only real question is how slowly or fast we'll get there) and the cost of addressing the problem not nearly as great as we might fear. It is a no-brainer. You query how strong the likelihood is, but it remains that the vast majority of scientists all over the world believe the likelihood is close to certain and the only unknowns are how severe, how quickly and local effects. So I can choose between reports from 700 climate scientists and 1700 expert reviewers telling me that what I have written above is true, and you telling me all those scientists are wrong. How can this even be something we are discussing? The only way you can be right is if the majority of scientists are all wrong, a small number of scientists know it, but the vast majority are somehow conspiring together to keep the truth that the inside few know from the rest of us. This is an amazing conspiracy theory, and a bitter slander on all those scientists, as well as playing Russian roulette with our world's future. I can't believe it. No-one has shown any plausible way that conspiracy scenario could possibly be true. The reality, I think, is that there are indeed some uncertainties in climate science, particularly about short term and local effects, and people who should know better highlight these problems and make them out to be far more significant than they are. We have seen it all before. Anti-evolutionists are prone to pick up paleontological anomalies and ignore the vast bulk of data that supports evolution. Cigarette companies played games with data for years when it was clear that smoking did indeed have a bad health effect. If there is likely to be any conspiracy, it is more likely to come from big business being willing to sacrifice integrity for short term profits. So I can only conclude where I started. You seem to have a set of "facts" that seem to be contradicted by everything I read. I don't know where they come from, and I can't understand why you accept them rather than what comes from the vast majority of scientists. But I think you are sadly and dangerously mistaken. I apologise if I have said anything that impugns you personally, because I have a high regard for you both intellectually and personally, and my gripe is with those who are misrepresenting the apparent facts. Thanks for your time.
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Post by ignorantianescia on Dec 12, 2015 18:54:10 GMT
Governments have signalled an end to the fossil fuel era, committing for the first time to a universal agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions and to avoid the most dangerous effects of climate change at crunch UN talks in Paris.
After 20 years of fraught meetings, including the past two weeks spent in an exhibition hall on the outskirts of Paris, negotiators from nearly 200 countries signed on to a deal on Saturday evening that set ambitious goals to limit temperature rise and to hold governments to account for reaching those targets.
François Hollande, the French president, appealed to negotiators to approve the 31-page text, and said countries had a rare chance to make history. “We are at a decisive point in time,” he said.
France’s foreign minister Laurent Fabius, who led the negotiations, said: “It is my deep conviction that we have come up with an ambitious and balanced agreement. Today it is a moment of truth.”
Miguel Arias Cañete, the EU’s climate commissioner hailed a “historic” deal. “It is solid. We can build on it. The deal is ambitious, balanced and robust,” he said.
Six years after the chaotic collapse of the Copenhagen climate summit, the agreement now known as the Paris Outcome for the first time commits rich countries, rising economies and some of the poorest countries to work together to fight climate change.
Under the deal, adopted by consensus, all countries agreed to reduce emissions. Rich countries agreed to raise $100bn a year by 2020 to help poor countries transform their economies. The overall agreement is legally binding but some elements, including the pledges to curb emissions by individual countries and the climate finance elements, are not.www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/12/paris-climate-deal-200-nations-sign-finish-fossil-fuel-eraThe follow-up to the outdated Kyoto Protocol is finally here, with a review mechanism to ratchet targets up every five years.
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Post by ignorantianescia on Apr 11, 2016 7:24:58 GMT
Some here have mentioned a pause in global warming before, but this is cause for some pause: The idea that global warming has “stopped” is a contrarian talking point that dates back to at least 2006. This framing was first created on blogs, then picked up by segments of the media – and it ultimately found entry into the scientific literature itself. There are now numerous peer-reviewed articles that address a presumed recent “pause” or “hiatus” in global warming, including the latest IPCC report.
So did global warming really pause, stop, or enter a hiatus? At least six academic studies have been published in 2015 that argue against the existence of a pause or hiatus, including three that were authored by me and colleagues James Risbey of CSIRO in Hobart, Tasmania, and Naomi Oreskes of Harvard University.
Our most recent paper has just been published in Nature’s open-access journal Scientific Reports and provides further evidence against the pause.theconversation.com/global-warming-pause-was-a-myth-all-along-says-new-study-51208
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Post by ignorantianescia on Jul 8, 2016 6:06:17 GMT
Today’s climate scientists have a lot more to worry about than peer review. Organizations with perverse financial incentives harass scientists with lawsuit after lawsuit, obstructing research and seeking to embarrass them with disclosures of private information.
On June 14th, an Arizona court ruled that thousands of emails from two prominent climate scientists must be turned over to the Energy & Environment Legal Institute (E&E), a group that disputes the 97% expert consensus on human-caused climate change and argues against action to confront it. E&E and its attorneys are funded by Peabody Coal, Arch Coal, and Alpha Natural Resources, coal corporations with billions of dollars in revenue.www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2016/jul/07/climate-scientists-are-under-attack-from-frivolous-lawsuits
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Post by sandwiches on Sept 14, 2016 19:21:09 GMT
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Post by unkleE on Sept 15, 2016 12:52:38 GMT
Britain’s leading climate change sceptic Nigel Lawson says global warming is real I have met an Aussie guy who has just completed a PhD into the sociology of climate change (or something like that). I think it is an interesting area. My observation is that acceptance of the reality of climate change by conservatives has been a slow iterative process. Beginning with total denial, each step has been very tenaciously fought before finally being grudgingly accepted - first that something's changed, then some of the details of what has changed, then that humans had something to do with it, then that it was going to be harmful, and finally that we should do something about it. Each time ground is finally given, some make as if they never contested that fact all along, it was the next fact along the line that they have been concerned about. I know nothing about Nigel except what was in the linked article, but he seems to conform to this pattern.
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Post by sandwiches on Sept 15, 2016 17:25:18 GMT
Indeed unkleE, they retreat inch by inch. It will be interesting to see the effect of President Trump.
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Post by sandwiches on Sept 15, 2016 21:08:14 GMT
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Post by James Hannam on Sept 16, 2016 11:53:21 GMT
Britain’s leading climate change sceptic Nigel Lawson says global warming is real I have met an Aussie guy who has just completed a PhD into the sociology of climate change (or something like that). I think it is an interesting area. My observation is that acceptance of the reality of climate change by conservatives has been a slow iterative process. Beginning with total denial, each step has been very tenaciously fought before finally being grudgingly accepted - first that something's changed, then some of the details of what has changed, then that humans had something to do with it, then that it was going to be harmful, and finally that we should do something about it. Each time ground is finally given, some make as if they never contested that fact all along, it was the next fact along the line that they have been concerned about. I know nothing about Nigel except what was in the linked article, but he seems to conform to this pattern. Here's Lawson saying exactly the same thing 8 years ago: www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/134/fullIn fact, the 'retreat' by climate sceptics is just an illusion caused by the media who get excited whenever they bother read what sceptics actually think, rather than just assuming they are all blanket denialists. So sorry, Lawson hasn't budged an inch. It's just sloppy journalism. Best wishes James
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Post by unkleE on Sept 16, 2016 22:42:59 GMT
So sorry, Lawson hasn't budged an inch. It's just sloppy journalism. Hi James, like I said, "I know nothing about Nigel except what was in the linked article", so I am happy to take your word for it. But my observation remains, that conservatives, here in Australia at least, have often followed the pattern I described. And I remain more confident than ever that everyone will change in time, as the facts become even more inescapable. I know you don't agree with that (or at least you haven't in the past), but hydrology is my field and from within hydrology and climate science generally, the broad facts are as clear as science can be, even if still being worked out in detail.
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Post by James Hannam on Sept 18, 2016 11:14:24 GMT
Well, I do hope that people change their minds as the facts become clearer, and not just conservatives.
On climate change, the facts are that human induced CO2 is causing the temperature of the earth to rise.
How much it will rise, how dangerous that is and what we should do about it are not facts, but forecasts and opinions.
I suspect conservatives agree with you on the facts, but disagree on the forecasts and opinions. Luckily, as time goes by, we can test forecasts and as we do they turn into facts. At that point, one side or the other will change their minds.
Best wishes
James
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