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New ice age? Don't count on it

newscientist.com

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Re: New ice age? Don't count on it

#91

Post by nice1 »

muppetman wrote: post #2

With these sorts of articles now I'm never quite sure what to believe. Now before you jump in to mock me, it's just that I don't have time to keep really up-to-date with climate change anymore. Are we really getting warmer? Are we cooling? What's causing it? For each article I read that tells me one thing, a few days later another comes out and tells me the previous one was wrong and here's why. I hope that this arti…

The last statement I must disagree with. NS prints utter crap so often that it is safe to ignore it completely.

Re: New ice age? Don't count on it

#92

Post by mturmon »

themal wrote: post #54
muppetman wrote: post #2

With these sorts of articles now I'm never quite sure what to believe. Now before you jump in to mock me, it's just that I don't have time to keep really up-to-date with climate change anymore. Are we really getting warmer? Are we cooling? What's causing it? For each article I read that tells me one thing, a few days later another comes out and tells me the previous one was wrong and here's why. I hope that this arti…

The original article on Hacker News - from The Register - was a bit sensational, that's just their style, a tech tabloid. To be honest, I don't think sun spots were exclusively to blame for Dickens era of cold weather in Europe. Wasn't there some talk about the Atlantic belt faltering as well? Perhaps the jet stream moved too.

You are right that it is not known for a fact that the Maunder sunspot minimum was responsible for the Little Ice Age recorded in Europe and elsewhere.

It started out as an interesting speculation and has remained there.

This was earlier than Dickens' time -- it was mid 1600s. Galileo and others first saw and drew sunspots in 1610 (due to the invention of the telescope). So their disappearance happened very close in time to their first definitive sighting (they had been seen earlier, but only huge ones, and not clearly, so it was not systematic at all, they were confused with planetary transits).

The original article in the Register was trash, actually. Utter trash.

Re: New ice age? Don't count on it

#93

Post by lupatus »

muppetman wrote: post #2

With these sorts of articles now I'm never quite sure what to believe. Now before you jump in to mock me, it's just that I don't have time to keep really up-to-date with climate change anymore. Are we really getting warmer? Are we cooling? What's causing it? For each article I read that tells me one thing, a few days later another comes out and tells me the previous one was wrong and here's why. I hope that this arti…

Since you don't have time to get mired in this debate, you may just want to dress in layers.

Re: New ice age? Don't count on it

#94

Post by theclay »

hugh3 wrote: post #74
hyko wrote: post #53

The Earth has been in an ice age since the Pleistocene. This is an interglacial period.

Yep, and we still don't understand what causes ice ages. Let's stop and think about that for a minute. We're still pretty darn ignorant of the climate. Look at a plot of temperature over the last mere million years. Climate scientists will at this point tell you they know all about the variation over the last few decades. But point to the huge swings that occur on ten-thousand-year timescales and periodically freeze…

Climate Science isn't a science. For science to be science, you have to control for variables.

When you can't--like with climate studies--you rely on intuition instead. That's a social science.

Re: New ice age? Don't count on it

#95

Post by randallsquared »

dhs wrote: post #87
randallsquared wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except your gut is wrong. Recycling is not really clean. For some things maybe but not for everything (it uses far too much water). Well, recycling might use too much energy to be clean (depending on how we get the energy), but using too much water doesn't seem a useful complaint, since cleaning and reusing water is just a matter of more energy.

Energy which, the parent argues, comes from un-clean sources - that's the complaint. How is this complaint not "useful", as long as you don't rebut it by listing those possible energy sources which you consider "clean"? Then I might be convinced and say: "He's right, dirty water doesn't matter, since we can just clean it, using this guy's clean energy sources."

The parent was arguing that recycling processes use too much water, which implies taking in fresh water and tossing it after "use". I didn't infer that the later energy discussion was part of that, since it seemed clear that filtering or distilling the water to clean it wasn't part of the assumed cleanliness of recycling. It would, of course, make it more expensive, but reducing externalities by such means makes the price reflect the true cost better, so that's all to the good, whether or not it turns out that recycling is really a good idea for a given material.

Re: New ice age? Don't count on it

#96

Post by Tycho »

muppetman wrote: post #2

With these sorts of articles now I'm never quite sure what to believe. Now before you jump in to mock me, it's just that I don't have time to keep really up-to-date with climate change anymore. Are we really getting warmer? Are we cooling? What's causing it? For each article I read that tells me one thing, a few days later another comes out and tells me the previous one was wrong and here's why. I hope that this arti…

The problem I have is the whole approach of the warmists, going beyond the basic question of are carbon emissions changing the climate.

It seems to me that nobody can show particularly convincingly that current/historical CO2 emissions are affecting the climate, hence why it's always 'the consensus is that....' rather than 'paper X conclusively showed that...'. But starting from an already shaky premise, we then move on to far shakier territory. Predicting how much the climate will warm, how much we'll have to reduce emissions by to stop the warmth, things which rely on dubious computer models. And then we get to what the effects will actually be, where the basic assumption that rising sea levels will cause more catastrophe than cap&trade etc is the just the beginning. Global warming becomes a sort of bogeyman, in which any and every undesirable environmental affect can be attributed to AGW. It's like someone just looked through a list of possible warming side-effects and wrote down any imaginable connection they could have to environmental trouble. Mooses disappearing in Canada? Warming. Hurricanes in the carribean? Warming. Famine? Disease? Drought? Overpopulation? Third world poverty? Colder weather in Britain? (we'd really love warmer weather) Warming.

Throw in the whole climage-gate scandal ('we admit that we no longer have the original data to show') and the usual 'recursive' nature of public-sector activity ('give us money to do research, and we will get results that show you need to give us more money to do research, and we will get results that show...')

It stinks. They want us to globally embrace the arbitrary for policy making. Which, AGW aside, is a horrible precedent to set for the future.

Re: New ice age? Don't count on it

#97

Post by jbooth »

Tycho wrote: post #96
muppetman wrote: post #2

With these sorts of articles now I'm never quite sure what to believe. Now before you jump in to mock me, it's just that I don't have time to keep really up-to-date with climate change anymore. Are we really getting warmer? Are we cooling? What's causing it? For each article I read that tells me one thing, a few days later another comes out and tells me the previous one was wrong and here's why. I hope that this arti…

The problem I have is the whole approach of the warmists, going beyond the basic question of are carbon emissions changing the climate. It seems to me that nobody can show particularly convincingly that current/historical CO2 emissions are affecting the climate, hence why it's always 'the consensus is that....' rather than 'paper X conclusively showed that...'. But starting from an already shaky premise, we then move…

The "warmists"?

There are numerous studies establishing that the globe is warming with > 95% confidence.

The greenhouse effect as a phenomenon is also not debated, nor is the amount of CO2 we've put into the atmosphere.

None of these thing above are contested, they're all established facts.

It's possible that some other mysterious force is causing the warming, but if that's not the case, then greenhouse gasses are the most reasonable conclusion. I'd posit that advocates of a mysterious other force behind warming have the burden of explaining what it is.

Re: New ice age? Don't count on it

#98

Post by jbooth »

Typhon wrote: post #34
ugh wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, how exactly couldn’t it be a political issue?

By focusing public attention on something else. It's not as if we had a shortage of problems. Then, the matter of climate change could be settled in a scientific manner, as opposed to a religious debate involving legions of people who don't know what they're talking about. Obviously, i'm being unrealistic. Once it's become politicized, it's already too late.

Climate change has been settled in a scientific matter. The scientists unanimously think it's happening.

The problem is that science doesn't matter in politics. A majority could vote that the laws of thermodynamics don't hold, if they wanted to.

Re: New ice age? Don't count on it

#99

Post by ChuckMcM »

muppetman wrote: post #2

With these sorts of articles now I'm never quite sure what to believe. Now before you jump in to mock me, it's just that I don't have time to keep really up-to-date with climate change anymore. Are we really getting warmer? Are we cooling? What's causing it? For each article I read that tells me one thing, a few days later another comes out and tells me the previous one was wrong and here's why. I hope that this arti…

I collect them.

You can really only know who is right after the fact, before that its all 'my model is more accurate than your model' bullshit.

I always feel like the 'rational' view point is that the climate will change for any number of reasons, some we control and some we don't. We should be prepared.

But folks who have bought into the Global Warming religion (which is to say they stepped away from the science and turned it into a political crusade) if this Solar event causes severe freezing across the northern hemisphere for decades it won't be the political zealots who get hung, it will be innocent bystander scientists, and science in general.

Re: New ice age? Don't count on it

#100

Post by hugh3 »

theclay wrote: post #94
hugh3 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, and we still don't understand what causes ice ages. Let's stop and think about that for a minute. We're still pretty darn ignorant of the climate. Look at a plot of temperature over the last mere million years. Climate scientists will at this point tell you they know all about the variation over the last few decades. But point to the huge swings that occur on ten-thousand-year timescales and periodically freeze…

Climate Science isn't a science. For science to be science, you have to control for variables. When you can't--like with climate studies--you rely on intuition instead. That's a social science.

That's going a bit far.

It's all well and good to come up with a model for what the climate should do based on basic physics. The main trouble with climate prediction is that we don't have enough data points to check whether the models are really correct.

I do physical modelling for a living, but I know not to trust a fitted-but-untested model any further than I can comfortably spit a rat.

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