Al Gore on 'climate crisis' : 'Worse than we thought'

[keith]

I brought it up because back in the 1970s it was the expectation of the "consensus" that the world was cooling, and some theorized that it was only the burning of carbon fuels which was keeping it from accelerating.

LoL.

Seriously.

It was not the consensus, but keep repeating it if it makes you feel better.

Perhaps a better lesson to learn from the 'global cooling' headlines is that while the media may run with a story that does not, in itself, have much correlation with prevailing scientific opinion.

[tchwojko]

What can man do to change the natural cycles of the earth and, perhaps more specifically, why should we want to interfere with the natural warming and cooling cycles of the earth?

What if we screw up those natural cycles and make it worse by our meddling?

What if we are nearing the end of a natural warming cycle and heading into a natural cooling cycle and we alter the earth such that the natural warming cycle is actually extended, will that not be worse because it will make things warmer?

Or what if we do something and we move too fast into a natural cooling cycle (think mini-ice age) will not that be even worse as millions of people will starve due to crop failures and insufficient food supplies?

Last time I checked the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was something under 1/2 of 1% or something similar so how much do we really influence it with our cars, especially when 1 large forest fire or 1 volcano can spew out more CO2 in 1 event than all the cars in Los Angeles can emit in a whole year?

I'm just asking

http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/info/warming/

It doesn't look like a natural cycle to me.

[tchwojko]

You can't understand how giving up things implies a reduced standard of living?

I'm not sure how this is such an obscure hypothesis...

I've given up commuting to an office, and my standard of living has gone up quite a bit.

I've also given up high fructose corn syrup, artificial sweeteners, pre-processed food, and cook a heck of a lot more than I used to. I'm saving money, pounds, reducing stress, etc. even though I'm "working" harder at my eating habits.

[migopod]

I've given up commuting to an office, and my standard of living has gone up quite a bit.

I've also given up high fructose corn syrup, artificial sweeteners, pre-processed food, and cook a heck of a lot more than I used to. I'm saving money, pounds, reducing stress, etc. even though I'm "working" harder at my eating habits.

I'm in the same boat almost exactly. I walk a lot more and take mass transit when possible and I've saved a lot of money from that alone. Less gas, no parking fees, better exercise and such. Cooking rather than buying pre-packaged foods and becoming a vegetarian have saved a lot of cash too... which leaves more $ in the microbrew fund. One day I'll start home-brewing I expect.

[melensdad]

http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/info/warming/

It doesn't look like a natural cycle to me.

That graph and the math used to produce it have been discredited several years ago but due to politics and the eternal internet seems to be reused (and then rebuked) constantly.

...no matter what data was introduced into the program, the result was always a hockey stick graph, explains Richard Muller from MIT's Technology Review Online...

Further:

Global Warming Bombshell
A prime piece of evidence linking human activity to climate change turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics.
By Richard Muller
OCTOBER 15, 2004

Progress in science is sometimes made by great discoveries. But science also advances when we learn that something we believed to be true isnt. When solving a jigsaw puzzle, the solution can sometimes be stymied by the fact that a wrong piece has been wedged in a key place.

In the scientific and political debate over global warming, the latest wrong piece may be the hockey stick, the famous plot (shown below), published by University of Massachusetts geoscientist Michael Mann and colleagues. This plot purports to show that we are now experiencing the warmest climate in a millennium, and that the earth, after remaining cool for centuries during the medieval era, suddenly began to heat up about 100 years ago--just at the time that the burning of coal and oil led to an increase in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide.

I talked about this at length in my December 2003 column. Unfortunately, discussion of this plot has been so polluted by political and activist frenzy that it is hard to dig into it to reach the science. My earlier column was largely a plea to let science proceed unmolested. Unfortunately, the very importance of the issue has made careful science difficult to pursue.

But now a shock: Canadian scientists Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick have uncovered a fundamental mathematical flaw in the computer program that was used to produce the hockey stick. In his original publications of the stick, Mann purported to use a standard method known as principal component analysis, or PCA, to find the dominant features in a set of more than 70 different climate records.

But it wasnt so. McIntyre and McKitrick obtained part of the program that Mann used, and they found serious problems. Not only does the program not do conventional PCA, but it handles data normalization in a way that can only be described as mistaken.

Now comes the real shocker. This improper normalization procedure tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not. To demonstrate this effect, McIntyre and McKitrick created some meaningless test data that had, on average, no trends. This method of generating random data is called Monte Carlo analysis, after the famous casino, and it is widely used in statistical analysis to test procedures. When McIntyre and McKitrick fed these random data into the Mann procedure, out popped a hockey stick shape!

story continues at link >>> http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/13830/?a=f

[keith]

stuff

http://www.skepticalscience.com/broken-hockey-stick.htm


You're welcome.

[telkanuru]

Why is science such a difficult concept for the Right?

[migopod]

Why is science such a difficult concept for the Right?

Because science requires an individual to be able to change their position as new information emerges, and the right generally has a really hard time with that.

[melensdad]

http://www.skepticalscience.com/broken-hockey-stick.htm


You're welcome.

Right back at you

http://www.climatescienceinternation...t&view=article

http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba478/

http://www.john-daly.com/hockey/hockey.htm

http://bishophill.squarespace.com/bl...sus-paper.html

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php...-hockey-stick/

[telkanuru]

Right back at you

http://www.climatescienceinternation...t&view=article

NOPE.

http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba478/

"The National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) develops and promotes private alternatives to government regulation and control."

NOPE.

http://www.john-daly.com/hockey/hockey.htm

"by John L. Daly" Who?

NOPE.

http://bishophill.squarespace.com/bl...sus-paper.html

bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2008

NOPE.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php...-hockey-stick/

OK.

[Inquartata]

It was not the consensus, but keep repeating it if it makes you feel better.

LOL. Seriously.

"In 1972, a group of leading glacial-epoch experts met at Brown University to discuss how and when the present warm interglacial period might end. A large majority agreed that "the natural end of our warm epoch is undoubtedly near." Near, that is, as geologists reckoned time. Unless there were impacts from future human activity, they thought that serious cooling "must be expected within the next few millennia or even centuries."

"Looking at the rhythmic curves of past cycles, one could hardly resist the temptation to extrapolate into the future. [b]By the late 1980s, most calculations had converged on the familiar prediction that the natural Milankovitch cycle should bring a mild but steady cooling over the next few thousand years. As climate models and studies of past ice ages improved, however, worries about a swift descent into the next great glaciation — what many in the 1970s had tentatively expected — died away."

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/cycles.htm

I await your annotated refutation---as opposed to your nonprobative snarky contemptuous remarks---with bated breath...

I've given up commuting to an office, and my standard of living has gone up quite a bit.

I've also given up high fructose corn syrup, artificial sweeteners, pre-processed food, and cook a heck of a lot more than I used to. I'm saving money, pounds, reducing stress, etc. even though I'm "working" harder at my eating habits.

Standard of living, not subjective quality of life, or satisfaction with your lot! Different animals.

A few definitions:

"The level of well-being (of an individual, group or the population of a country) as measured by the level of income (for example, GNP per capita) or by the quantity of various goods and services consumed (for example, the number of cars per 1,000 people or the number of television sets per capita)."

"The financial health of a population, as measured by the quantity of consumption by the members of that population. The measure most frequently used to estimate standard of living is gross national income per capita."

Quantity of consumption. GDP per capita. Both are almost sure to decline, at least in the industrialized nations, if the governments of the world adopt standards and policies which reduce either.

It's also not about embracing things voluntarily, but about having your options pared and having no choice in the matter.

But I'm glad that you're happier in your reduced circumstances.

[tchwojko]

Standard of living, not subjective quality of life, or satisfaction with your lot! Different animals.

An hour of time spent with my kids is orders of magnitude better than an hour futzing with iTunes App Store widgets. Your definitions do not quantify that, and that leads me to believe that your metric is not getting the important bits.

It's also not about embracing things voluntarily, but about having your options pared and having no choice in the matter.

There's a difference between having options removed vs. straightening out incentives/disincentives (e.g. corn subsidies or small business taxes).

But I'm glad that you're happier in your reduced circumstances.

Reduced waist size? Yes, I'm happy about that .

The downside is that I'll have very little excuse for missing much work from reconstructing my ACL.

[Inquartata]

An hour of time spent with my kids is orders of magnitude better than an hour futzing with iTunes App Store widgets. Your definitions do not quantify that, and that leads me to believe that your metric is not getting the important bits.

Nevertheless, it's what I was discussing, and it's the general meaning of the term.

The fact that Bill Gates might be happier living a simple primitive life in a grass hut in Tahiti does not mean that his standard of living would not be lower.

And in the aggregate, you cannot extrapolate from your personal experience and infer that everyone, or even most people, would agree and be "better off" or happier in lower material conditions. This is what a future of forced adoption of the main policy recommendations for reducing global warming would entail: Reduced material conditions for the majority, including those who did not choose that road, not just for those who happen to like it...

There's a difference between having options removed vs. straightening out incentives/disincentives (e.g. corn subsidies or small business taxes).

Indeed. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about things like sending huge amounts of taxpayer dollars to other countries, to bribe them to clear less Amazon acreage. I'm talking about things like cap and trade, and the increases not only in energy costs but in the prices of goods and services produced in industrial economies. I'm even talking about things such as a government mandating the end of production of incandescent light bulbs, in favor of CFL's...

[tchwojko]

Nevertheless, it's what I was discussing, and it's the general meaning of the term.

The fact that Bill Gates might be happier living a simple primitive life in a grass hut in Tahiti does not mean that his standard of living would not be lower.

I fail to see how that statement makes "standard of living" a useful metric. Or even correctly named.

[kalivor]

You need to wake up and realize that this is not about science anymore. It's a political cause.

It doesn't matter to you what is actually going to happen? You're against policies aimed at the mitigation of global warming, even if it exists? As a principle?

I very much do not understand you.

[Slim]

As the train wreck becomes more obvious.....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...801331_pf.html

[keith]

Right back at you

If you want to feel that you are the free minded critical thinker you go right ahead.*

On the other hand multiple independent studies of different data sets have confirmed the hockey stick. Statistical models do have some odd curiosities and I'd happily have that discussion if you want to do so. But why do I think you don't?

Probably because your sources are old, those problems have been checked. It isn't still 2004 the world moves on.

Of course you, Slim and Inq work on the principle that sources are equal. Kinda like dear old Henny Penny.

I await your annotated refutation---as opposed to your nonprobative snarky contemptuous remarks---with bated breath...

Crap it's like shooting fish in a barrel,

http://www.skepticalscience.com/ice-...s-in-1970s.htm

it's even annotated.

*My wife does tend to get worked up by this stuff, I find it at all for the good. After all these are the parents of the children my daughter is going to be competing with for college/jobs In that spirit I shall leave the free thinkers to their work, might I suggest as a future project;

Statistics, it's all just correlations.

[PretAllez]

As the train wreck becomes more obvious.....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...801331_pf.html

Is this all you got? Really?

"Copenhagen did not provide us with a clear agreement in legal terms, but the political commitment and sense of direction toward a low-emissions world are overwhelming. This calls for new partnerships with the business sector and I now have the chance to help make this happen," de Boer said. "

(emphasis mine)

The guy is leaving a public service job to work in the private sector on the same issues, and somehow this exposes the whole climate change debate as a crock?

Please try again.

[Digital Analog]

Why didn't you just start with this?

On the first page of a Google search:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...g-ice-age.html

I brought it up because back in the 1970s it was the expectation of the "consensus" that the world was cooling, and some theorized that it was only the burning of carbon fuels which was keeping it from accelerating. PBS, rather than presenting programs about melting glaciers, was presenting programs about scientists measuring the southerly creep of the permafrost horizon in Newfoundland, and the like.

The consensus has reversed, but the science is not exact enough to predict outcomes with real confidence. IMO it's entirely possible---not certain, but possible, do please note the word---that if we reduce greenhouse gasses enough without also reducing particle forcing that we might ( note that word, too ) precipitate cooling in place of warming...

Read the article you posted. It doesn' tout global warming as humanities savior against the menace of total glacial takeover. What they are saying is that because of the reversal of the global cooling cycle it has become obvious that global climate change is actually happening. In fact it will only get worse because the melting ice won't be able to reflect sunlight anymore and the melting of the permafrost will release even more greenhouse gasses.

Also Let me say that your use of If, May and Possible are particularly disingenuous. You imply that something might happen assuming that no one is going to call you on it and then we do and you back-track.

Neither politics nor opinions have anything to do with science.

[migopod]

Read the article you posted. It doesn' tout global warming as humanities savior against the menace of total glacial takeover. What they are saying is that because of the reversal of the global cooling cycle it has become obvious that global climate change is actually happening. In fact it will only get worse because the melting ice won't be able to reflect sunlight anymore and the melting of the permafrost will release even more greenhouse gasses.

Also Let me say that your use of If, May and Possible are particularly disingenuous. You imply that something might happen assuming that no one is going to call you on it and then we do and you back-track.

Neither politics nor opinions have anything to do with science.

This touches on an important fact that I know I mentioned in another thread at some point about why there is some urgency with respect to global climate change. In particular that ice melting isn't just a symptom, but also a contributing factor.

Decreasing ice coverage leads to decreased albedo which leads to increased heat absorption. Melting polar ice also releases sequestered CO2 and CH4 (CH4 actually being a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2). Additionally increased ocean temperatures cause the release of dissolved CO2, which in turn contribute to the warming effect.

It's important to remember that anthropogenic sources alone aren't the problem. The problem is that it's possible to throw a system that's in reasonable equilibrium out of whack by firing off positive feedback loops.

Think of a balance with a 1kg weight on either side and then add a gram to one side. The 1g weight alone is obviously insufficient to push the 1kg side up, but its contribution is what makes the difference in the state of equilibrium.