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What's Really Warming the World?

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Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#431

Post by rza »

IvyMike wrote: post #358
rza wrote: post #342

This graphic really just plays into the hands of climate change deniers. No labelled axis, a timeline of only 100 years (you could also argue the dinosaurs caused global warming), and the quite proud declaration at the end the argument is really "no contest" under the assumption that correlation == causation. I could also make a graph that shows the increase in global temperature correlating with the rise in the Lati…

> under the assumption that correlation == causation Except we do have a pretty good understanding of the chemisty/physics of the greenhouse effect, too. So there's a prediction ("increased CO2 will lead to warming") and a validation. What more do they want?

Is this increase in CO2 a significant amount on the scale of Earth's history? How much of it was caused by humans vs natural cycles? A cursory search informed me C02 levels and average temperature was much higher during the dinosaur ages[0], what was the cause then? Note I'm playing devil's advocate here and I haven't studied climate much, but my point is the graphic wouldn't persuade someone who is already biased against human-driven climate change, and only encourages equally primitive arguments from their side.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesozoic#Climate

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#432

Post by astrodust »

tosseraccount wrote: post #409
astrodust wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, why don't you help us out and wget some data from CERN and give them some insight into their ongoing LHC experiments. I'm sure they could use a nudge in the right direction, and I bet a little bit of Perl or Python is all they need to solve some deep mysteries. Oh, and you have 6,000TB of disk space to download the data from the ATLAS sensor, right? Once you're done that there's all kinds of data regarding…

You're right. I couldn't process 6 petabytes in perl. I'd use C for that amount of data.

Great, so you're capable of writing highly parallel cluster-scale code in C that does intensive precision numerical analysis? Most choose vectorized FORTRAN or a combination of C++ and CUDA, but hey, knock yourself out.

CERN has a 3700 core supercomputer to crunch through this kind of data. You can rent that on Amazon for about $800 an hour, so I guess you're good to go.

Sorry to be so harsh here. While there's always desirable amount of "constructive naivety" necessary to try the impossible, you need to recognize that there's considerable amounts of expertise required to process and analyze data of this complexity at scale.

This is not like a movie where six minutes of furious typing can solve any problem.

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#433

Post by tjradcliffe »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #335
Zuider wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hans von Storch, professor at the Meteorological Institute of the University of Hamburg discussed this issue in a recent interview with Der Spiegel. He remarked that less than 2% of model runs reproduced the 'pause'. http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/interview-hans-von... SPIEGEL: Just since the turn of the millennium, humanity has emitted another 400 billion metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, yet temper…

Confused: this is the hottest year on record worldwide. In what way is this 'taking a break'?

Simple: this is exactly what you would expect on a high plateau. Think about it in terms of climbing a mountain with a fairly flat top. For a long time you're moving continuously up-slope, then when you get to the plateau you wander around randomly and frequently find outcroppings that are higher than anything you've encountered before. That doesn't mean you're still climbing, and if we were still climbing at the rate seen from 1980-2000 the "global mean temperature" (which is a thermodynamically meaningless arithmetic average) would be even higher than what we see today.

People who continually beat on extrema (like Denialists who claim that cold weather on the East Coast last winter is somehow proof that AGW isn't happening) are adding noise to the argument, not signal. The physically meaningful number is the heat content of the Earth/ocean system, and there's quite a bit of evidence it is rising, and that a significant portion of that rise is due to human activity.

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#434

Post by darkstar999 »

joeclark77 wrote: post #421
darkstar999 wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, so they collect a massive amount of taxes. Then what?

Enact the rest of the left's policy goals, of course. Don't ask why. IT'S THE SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS you denier.

Oh come on. I'm trying to have a legitimate conversation here.

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#435

Post by tjradcliffe »

bjt wrote: post #365
themgt wrote: post #346

Helpful when reading this thread to keep in mind Michael Mann's six stages of climate change denial: 1. CO2 is not actually increasing. 2. Even if it is, the increase has no impact on the climate since there is no convincing evidence of warming. 3. Even if there is warming, it is due to natural causes. 4. Even if the warming cannot be explained by natural causes, the human impact is small, and the impact of continued…

Though I wouldn't accept #5 and #6 exactly as phrased, it does seem like positive effects ought to be balanced against the negative, and the uncertainty of future technological developments ought to inform our current decision of how much to spend addressing climate change. Does that make me a climate change denier?

Yes, it does.

I am quite happy saying, "Climate change is a plausibly serious problem and the current best solution is to build nuclear (fission) power plants today to replace base load coal, to shift from income taxes to carbon taxes and tarifs immediately, to build solar power and storage immediately, and to phase in regulations that will make it essentially impossible for new thermal coal development. We should also have public subsidies for nuclear and solar to ensure rapid deployment."

When I say that I fequently get called a climate change denier, because that is a label used primarily (not exclusively) by people whose primary goal is smashing global capitalism, and who find climate change a useful stick to beat their political enemies with.

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#436

Post by [deleted] »

hackuser wrote: post #260
narrator wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple years back I read the IPCC reports trying to find out if global warming was real or not. I noticed the Vostok ice core data in the earlier reports showed the temperature rose first and then the CO2 rose. Likewise, the temperature fell first and then the CO2 fell later on. They fixed this little inconvenient data problem in the later reports.

I'm sure the IPCC has flaws, like every other human institution (but what else do we have to work with?), but the original reports came out in 1990. Also, every data set ever produced has inconsitencies. I don't feel that one inconsistency from 25 years ago, which might have a valid explanation or might be validly considered inconsequential, undermines the IPCC reports' credibility.

[deleted]

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#437

Post by tosseraccount »

astrodust wrote: post #432
tosseraccount wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right. I couldn't process 6 petabytes in perl. I'd use C for that amount of data.

Great, so you're capable of writing highly parallel cluster-scale code in C that does intensive precision numerical analysis? Most choose vectorized FORTRAN or a combination of C++ and CUDA, but hey, knock yourself out. CERN has a 3700 core supercomputer to crunch through this kind of data. You can rent that on Amazon for about $800 an hour, so I guess you're good to go. Sorry to be so harsh here. While there's alway…

I bench marked fortran vs. x86_64 SSE extensions in C and .... C's fine.

I'd rather have local clusters than Amazon or Google "cloud" any day of the week.

Spotting a methodology bias is not that hard.

Why the heck would you need CUDA ? NVIDIA ???

C'mon man.

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#438

Post by phkahler »

spdustin wrote: post #369
IanDrake wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Con-trail data would match the CO2 and temperature line. It would show another correlation that might call into question the validity of the absolute undeniable fact that CO2's correlation is causation. There are people with simple minds that would then question CO2's role in Global Warming. We can't give those deniers anything else to hang their hat on. It's the same reason we need to use the "Land Use" data instead…

I recall reading an article, but can't seem to find it, that studied changes in the atmosphere after the post-9/11 grounding of US flights. Granted, it was only free of condensation trails for a short period, but it was an unprecedented opportunity to test hypotheses related to their effect on the atmosphere. The three or so days without US air traffic showed warmer days (because of lowered albedo, and thus less refl…

Google post 9/11 cloud cover https://www.google.com/#q=post+9%2F11+cloud+cover

The effect on daily temperature range is huge (1.1 to 1.8 degree C depending how you look at it). The effect on global average temperature is harder to get at, but it looks quite likely that planes increase average temperature. How much is very much in question and I'm skeptical of 0.02 degree F - that seems really low. Unfortunately we can't repeat the experiment and good models don't exist yet.

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#439

Post by triangleman »

astrodust wrote: post #275
tosseraccount wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many hacker news readers would prefer sources such as peer reviewed science journal articles where the authors claim proof one way or the other. The best way to evaluate science is to look at the raw data and the scientist's original paper.

Yeah, I'm sure you have the time, inclination and expertise to look over billions of data points and make your own conclusions.

A layperson named Steve McIntyre did just that, after reading the IPCC's 3rd Assessment Report and seeing the prominently featured "Hockey Stick" based on a paper by Mann et al., and wondering, hmm... perhaps this study is reproducible?

The rabbit hole that McIntyre and his colleagues have found themselves in over the last 10 years has, in my view, demonstrated the value of hacker-types taking an interest in climate science.

See here for a paper detailing the point where McIntyre's descent into the rabbit hole began: http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/McKitrick-hockeyst...

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#440

Post by [deleted] »

mikeash wrote: post #305
harshreality wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't know what other explanations there might be. Trotting out a limited number of counter-explanations like solar activity or volcanoes, and showing they don't explain the phenomenon, and therefore your pet explanation is true because it matches the data more closely, is logically specious. We don't know the dynamics of the system. All we know is that for the data we have so far, the models work pretty well. We…

The science is settled, in the sense that the vast majority of people working in the field think this is probably what's happening. I think people who object to "settled" want it to mean "absolute certainty" but that's just a quibble over wording. Deniers are morons. That's not the same as saying that there's no room for debate. There's always room for debate. But it's also a fact that the loud public face of the den…

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