A new look on global warming

ok tal, i'm gonna go through it slowly. The global warming believers say that AGW is caused by the greenhouse gasses lasting so long in the atmosphere(in particular, 100 years for co2) yet the link i provided shows that co2 only lasts 5-7 years in the atmosphere. So if isn't the co2 causing the warming, why do you have such a hard time believing that it is just what a lot of scientists say it is? a natural 1,500 year cycle?

 

Quite. Mass surplus of food and dense poplulations of "mice and men" does bring diseases forth.

Malaria in europe due to little ice age? Preposterous! Read your basic biology! Malaria mosquitoes do not, I repeat do not, like cold winters!

Bahhumbug! A graph of your very own choosing points out that it was warmer in 2004 than in the medieval warm period!

Who gives a toot about polar bears! Whether they even exist or not is of no particular consequence! Pity, yes perhaps, but there's only so much pity in this world that it's wasted on polar bears!

No! There are specific consequences not even related to GW, but related to the alleged or true causes of the "so called GW believers". It's just so bloody convenient to hijack the discussion of relevant concerns into debating about whether GW is man-made or not, or whether it's even for real or not! Rubbish! Such utterly pointless rubbish! There are people dying for pete's sakes! And there will be millions of more pointless deaths. Because of drought. Because opf lack of nourishment. Because of poverty. And social darwinism doesn't quite cut it anymore when you're out of fresh water, when the glacier providing it has melted away. When you and your family's dying because of the electronic junk they're dumping in your countryside. When the local weather patterns go haywire because someone conveniently chopped down the forest to make way for a new tobacco, coffee or tea plantation.

Oh, but I know I'm guilt-free. Because I've got nothing to do with it. It's God's will that men must suffer and die! It's the Sun! S**t happens, but as long as I'm well off, then nobody's got no right to complain about anything! Except maybe, just maybe something stupid like "boo-hoo the moderator got insulted because I'm stepping on his toes". It's stupid! Stupid!

 

So, iku-turso you hate everybody?

 

Not actually, no. I hate it when there's people dying, slowly, painfully and they have no other option, no meaning and no purpose, because all of that has been taken away by ignorance and a gross lack of compassion.

So am I blaming you? No more than I'm blaming myself. Am I hating everyone? No more than I hate myself.

 

I've just done a quick bit of research on the uplink from the Hudson Institute that Maurtag posted with the umpteen names and papers purportedly "supporting" the climate sceptics viewpoint (BTW Sceptic is UK English, Skeptic is US English AKA WRONG ).

I've taken the first paper published by someone from the UK that I could access - Holocene elephant seal distribution implies warmer-than-present climate in the Ross Sea - Here http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/103/27/10213


I've read the paper. At no point does it make reference to supporting a climate sceptic's view-point that current global warming is a natural occurrence and can be ignored. Actually it makes no reference what-so-ever to what may be causing the Global Warming.

However, the first paragraph outside of the abstract (which is probably as much as most other people have bothered reading) states the following, emphasis mine:

Yes, the article states that at some point in the past, there has been significant warming in the area and this is rather obviously not going to be man-made. But this is hardly "news", it is well recognised that the World has gone through warm periods - that is not being debated. However, the "Natural" reasons for this are likely to be:

Increased sun activity
Volcanic eruptions on a massive scale
Changes in Earth Orbit
Changes in Earths orientation towards the sun
Explosions from meteors hitting the earths surface (This one is a bit of a stretch)

My issue is that I am not aware of ANY of these recently occuring to account for the current Global Warming. Therefore the most likely explanation, as supported by rather a lot of scientists, is that GW is man-made.

Actually, more in-depth reading of the Elephant Seal article is actually rather scary - even given the warm period of the Holocene, we may be in more dire straits already:

So on a personal level, I've disproved that one of the papers and it's authors, actually support the Climate Sceptics. At which point, any possible faith I might have had in Martaug's list of articles supposedly supporting climate sceptics is declared null-and-void. It appears in fact to be compiled by someone trying to clasp at any straw to support an argument that holds very little water and hoping people don't check the sources. Is this really the best they can do? It also confirms my belief that unfortunately there are rather too many people that are more concerned with short term profits rather than the long-term welfare of the planet.

 

Carcaroth, that's gotta be the best post I've seen from you. Well done.

This perfectly sums up my frustration with most climate skeptics, sceptics, schmeptics or even the dreaded shkibbedy-shkeptiks (who are not to be trifled with).

 

wow carcaroth good way to misrepresent what it says

Between 4,000 and 6,000 14C yr B.P., the two species coexisted along the VLC, indicating less sea ice than at present (a requirement for elephant seal colonies) but still sufficient regional pack ice for Adélie penguins. Land-fast ice must have been at a minimum, and seasonally open water must have persisted right up to the shore. Between 2,300 and 4,000 14C yr B.P., a decline and even possible disappearance of elephant seals suggest that sea ice returned. The penguin colonies spread, perhaps because an increase in pack ice resulted in more favorable foraging ecology. However, ice still must have been less severe than at present along the VLC (where penguins cannot survive today) and may have resembled conditions seen today adjacent to northern Ross Island (Fig. 2).

The period between 1,100 and 2,300 14C yr B.P., marked by significant expansion of elephant seal colonies and a disappearance of Adélie penguins, represents the greatest sea-ice decline (and probably the warmest ocean and air temperatures) in the Ross Sea in the last 6,000 yr. This was followed by an increase in sea ice and the development of land-fast ice 1,000 yr ago on the VLC, which we propose led to the abandonment of seal colonies. The ice regime remains too severe for either elephant seals or penguins to occupy the southern VLC today. Integration of southern elephant seal and Adélie penguin data affords a distinctly different record of Holocene sea-ice change than that previously derived from penguin data alone. For example, the disappearance of penguins from the southern VLC (2,500 14C yr B.P.), originally thought to reflect severe ice (13), is now interpreted as indicating a period of sea-ice reduction so great that Adélie penguins no longer were a viable population. Although our new reconstruction differs from some previous interpretations (13, 20, 21), it is consistent with late Holocene atmospheric circulation intensity records from Siple Dome (22) and with methanesulfonic acid data from nearby Newall Glacier that suggest expanded sea ice between 300 and 1,250 yr B.P (23). In addition, our "seal optimum" is coeval with a significant accumulation rate increase at Taylor Dome, which may have resulted from sea-ice reduction and greater moisture availability (24). The disappearance of elephant seals from the VLC is broadly contemporaneous with the onset of Little Ice Age climatic conditions in the Northern Hemisphere and with glacier advance near Terra Nova Bay (25).

Our reconstruction implies that during parts of the middle and late Holocene, sea ice was less extensive, the warm season was likely longer, and the environment was more like the sub-Antarctic than at present in the Ross Embayment. Our data on seal distribution cannot inform us about the fate of the Ross Ice Shelf during these periods. However, the lack of coastal landforms, such as beaches south of the present calving front (unpublished observation), and the dates of marine organisms on the adjacent McMurdo Ice Shelf both suggest that the Ross Ice Shelf has been continuously present over the last 7,000 yr (26). Domack et al. (27) recently showed that the Larsen B ice shelf survived warm conditions in the mid-Holocene, even though it recently collapsed catastrophically. They infer from their data (based on oxygen isotope measurements in planktonic foraminifera) that the Larsen B ice shelf has been thinning throughout the Holocene and suggest that this, together with recent warming, led to the collapse. If the Ross Ice Shelf did survive, it too may have been thinning throughout the middle and late Holocene in response to grounding-line retreat (28). However, the critical parameter for recent ice-shelf collapse is thought to be an increase in the intensity and length of the summer melt season with ice shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula becoming susceptible to rapid breakup when January temperatures have exceeded –1.5°C (1). The presence of southern elephant seal colonies (which today exclusively occupy areas where the mean January temperature exceeds 0°C, usually by considerable margins), the disappearance of ice-obligate penguins, and the inferred significant reduction in sea ice, both in intensity and seasonal duration, suggest that the front of the Ross Ice Shelf could have been subject to January temperatures that surpassed the –1.5°C threshold during two long periods at 1,000–2,300 and 4,000–6,000 14C yr B.P. It may be that the environment, although warmer than present, did not reach the critical temperature over a sufficiently large portion of the ice shelf necessary to initiate rapid collapse, or that a steep climate gradient left much of the shelf in a stable zone. In addition, pinning points, such as Ross Island, may have contributed to its stability.

i don't know how you read this to not see that it is supporting the 1500 year cycle that the scientist are saying is causing the warming we are observing now.

@taluntain, it doesn't matter how many papers you draw conclusions from when they use bad science(I.E. co2 lasting 100 years, it doesn't so any study or projection based on that is WRONG. It's just like starting an equation with the wrong value for A, no matter how you work it, its not gonna add up right)

 

Martaug, Thanks for the PM by the way, your turn of phrase is exemplary.

What part of

did you not understand? I'm not claiming there hasn't been previously warm conditions. In fact I state exactly the opposite. My entire point is that the article and authors certainly do not state any "support" for the climate sceptics viewpoint which is being claimed by your link. You might try and make the data fit a hypothesis, but you really can't claim the authors support it! Particularly when the Authors are clearly quite worried by the level of global warming currently being experienced - they use the word "Catastrophic" in case you hadn't noticed.

Have you even considered what may have been behind the warm periods? There has to be an explanation for the Earth warming up, even a natural explanation. Being as we are fairly acurate at measuring the changes in the last 50 or so years, how come no-one has proffered a satisfactory natural cause? Someone suggested sun-spots a little while back, but that got shot down in flames (pun intended). As it happens, for the previous "warm" periods there is some circumstantial data which can be "matched" to the warm periods. For example, a very simple search on the net can find a huge Volcanic explosion (150km3) in Japan 6300 years ago. As volcanos are known to influence global warming, could that account for the warming 6000 years ago? Likewise, Lake Taupo in New Zealand blew up about 181AD, could that have had an effect on the medieval warm period? I don't know and I doubt any scientists "know" for sure either. However, at least it offers an explanation rather than "The Earth just happens to have a 1500 year cycle warming cycle" which, incidently, last occured between the 10th and 14th centuries, so would be remarkably early.

You can't just have a "1500 year cycle" without some evidence going back rather longer than 6000 years (and 2 warm periods) and with a hell of a lot more evidence as to what causes the cycle and the warming. The earth doesn't just warm up for no reason!

 

Actually, if you check just about any website about the 1500yr cycle,heck even on wiki most all agree on it happening for at least the last 22,000 yrs.

It's a natural cycle so maybe....natures behind it!?! whats so hard to understand about that. the planet isn't static, it doesnt have a set tempature, just about everything in nature has a cycle. Why should the weather be any different

 

And just where is the heat supposed to come from? Thin air? Nature isn't "responsible" for Volcanos, there is a scientific explanation behind them, largely dependent on Tectonic Plates. Find a Scientific answer for a cause for global warming and you'll go part way to convincing us you at least have a case.

 

Carcaroth, are we having a language problem?
nature - the natural phenomena of Earth itself including its formation and history, weather, and geology
How can you say nature isn't responsible for volcanoes, are they not part of the "natural" world ? Or do you see some great supernatural power behind volcanoes

We see a natural cycle EVERY YEAR where the tempature swings(summer to winter) more than 75-100degrees. So why do you have a problem believing that the yearly cycle is part of a larger cycle? I don't doubt that a few thousand years done the road the people of that time will discover an even longer time span cycle.

 

ye gods no. please don't ever confuse religion with science, for there lie dragons.

 

Sorry, been both sick and project ridden for a few days, so I've got some catching up to do.

Tal:

Well, first I filter for obvious BS (i.e. The Polar Bears are Dieing when all monitored populations are either constant or expanding), then I compare the two sides. If only one makes a point on the issue, then I tend to tenatively believe that side on that point, until more information comes to light. If both sides make points, I see who's makes more sense and is based on the most hard evidence. That tends to be (though not always) the sceptics's side. Finally, I admit, I do have some powerful bias, but I believe it is deserved. You see, there have been several examples of the believers 'filtering' their data in order to achieve the desired results. Their papers were peer reviewed by the other believers and hailed as conclusive proof of global warming. It usually isn't until much later that the sceptics get enough airtime to call them on the BS research and the believers quietly stop mentioning it. This tells me two things: 1.) several of the big names among the believers have a history of essentially falsifying data and 2.) the peer review process has a history of not catching it (willfully or not, I don't know), so I tend to view any believer report with a little scepticism. On the other hand, despite all your claims of Big Oil Bias and Fringe Nut Research, I have yet to see any evidence that the sceptics significantly bias their research.

The few of those that I've had time to investigate have usually ammounted to a small fraction of their funding. For example, I've heard this of the Heartland Institute many times, but all Big Oil contributions combined ammount to less than 6% of their annual total contributions. Hardly a controlling interest.

The problem I have with the IPCC research is that it was restricted to a limited time frame both on the upper and lower range. Now I understand that politicians like to do that kind of thing, and they think that kind of way, but there's no reasonable reason that it should have been done in relation to a summary of scientific research.

Now, you see, I had almost convinced myself that you weren't buying their obvious lies, but I guess not. Taluntain, Polar Bears aren't going extinct. First off, if they survived the medieval warming period, they can survive today. Secondly, they not only are surviving today, their populations are growing. Thirdly, the majority of the deaths worldwide to polar bears are controlled hunting in Russia because the populations are too big to support and are running the risk of disease outbreaks.

No, Tal, the pages listed are the pages that the subject article appears in in a large journal of research. The articles aren't hundreds of pages long, the journals are, and are composed of many different articles. Just like if I cited a particular issue of National Geographic and gave page references of 124-158, I'm not selecting 29 pages of a 158+ page article. Again, this is standard scientific citation.

Iku:

Ok, this is ridiculous; and rediculous, for that matter. Global cooling brought famine. Famine brought dense populatios (people left farms and small villages for the big cities). Dense populations and poor pest control (a problem millenia old) lead to plague.

Malaria? I'm talking about Black Death! The Bubonic Plague! Where did Malaria come from?

No, historical descriptions of an ice-free greenland, maps of so-called Warming Island, and England growing better wine grapes than France. THAT'S SIGNIFICANTLY WARMER THAN PRESENT CONDITIONS!

See my post to Tal about that. The polar bears aren't going extinct and the evidence is obvious.

Ok, this tells me that, either you really don't know what your talking about or you're lumping about 15 wildly different topics into one. Iku, get a hold of yourself and start making sense, please.

Tal again:

Tal, can you provide any links to research supporting the 100+ year CO2 cycle? I've seen a lot of research assume it, but I haven't seen any actually support it yet.

 

Quote:
Tal, can you provide any links to research supporting the 100+ year CO2 cycle? I've seen a lot of research assume it, but I haven't seen any actually support it yet.

taluntain just read that post at wikipedia & it doesn't mention a length for co2 cycle. please provide an actual scientific link.

On a seperate issue i(&many others it seems) have is with the placement of many of the monitering stations that are used to determine the tempature.

There still hasn't been anything done to fix the problems & the ipcc is still using these faulty readings. If you would like to see a LOT of these sites go to: http://www.surfacestations.org/
Just a few of the worst:
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.co...re-part-50-how-to-make-a-rural-station-urban/
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2007/11/19/how-not-to-measure-temperature-part-34/
The first 32 in one place: http://www.norcalblogs.com/watts/weather_stations/
as to were they are supposed to be located: http://www.nws.noaa.gov/om/coop/standard.htm
check around on google, there are numerous sites showing that these sites are placed wrong & subsequently are getting higher than true readings due to exterior mitigating factors(including but not limited to Urban Heat Island principles.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_heat_island

And the big. . . well i don't want to call it a LIE, how about stretching of the truth about the wilkins ice shelf :http://icecap.us/index.php/go/political-climate/misleading_reports_now_about_antarctica/ & http://icecap.us/index.php/go/polit..._melting_antarctic_ignores_record_ice_growth/ & http://icecap.us/images/uploads/Wilkins_Ice_Shelf_con.pdf & http://climatesci.org/2008/04/07/recent-data-on-surface-snowmelt-in-antarctica/

It appears, if you look at the charts showing northern & southern hemisphere ice that as one gets lower the other increases by a corresponding amount. Last year, a record low in the artic & a record high in the antartic(you noticed not a lot of media covered that part did they?)

As far as the polar bears go: http://www.nunatsiaq.com/archives/2007/709/70914/news/nunavut/70914_498.html
that is all for now.