
Five things you should know about climate change - soundsop
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/11/five-things-you-should-know-about-climate-change.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss
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mnemonicsloth
Apparently, you aren't supposed to know that IPCC's climate change reports are
based on raw data that was lost some time in the 1980s.
[http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article693...](http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6936328.ece)
This article makes no mention of that fact.

You _are_ supposed to know that the overwhelming consensus of scientists blah,
blah, blah. How the author can gauge the scientific consensus and find it
unchanged, less than a day after this information was released, is quite
beyond me.

I'd be willing to bet that the overwhelming consensus of scientists _today_ is
that climate research needs an open audit, right now, to see which of its
conclusions are based on tainted data and which aren't. Until such an audit is
conducted, no one knows what we know.

~~~
Joeboy
> Apparently, you aren't supposed to know that IPCC's climate change reports
> are based on raw data that was lost some time in the 1980s.

I honestly don't know to what extent, if any, any of the IPCC's reports rely
that data, but strongly suspect saying they're 'based on' it is a significant
overstatement of the case.

~~~
patio11
To satisfy your curiosity I went looking for you. It didn't take long. Chapter
One. Figure One. It is the top graph.

<http://www.ipcc.ch/graphics/syr/fig1-1.jpg>

This is cited as WGI FAQ 3.1 in the text, which if you look here:

<http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/FAQ/wg1_faq-3.1.html>

is footnoted as 1) from the HadCRUT3 data set.

HadCRUT3 is (to the best of my understanding) what the dog didn't eat. (You
can download it here: <http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/> )

~~~
Joeboy
Thanks for that.

However, the inclusion of this graph still doesn't demonstrate that the report
is 'based on' the missing raw data. There are plenty of other datasets they
could have chosen that would have shown the same thing.

~~~
mnemonicsloth
How do you know? Can you provide links to some?

Remember that the key is to establish the provenance of the data, perhaps by
documenting the circumstances under which it was collected and the people who
did the work, rather than just to proffer up a set of numbers.

~~~
Joeboy
> How do you know? Can you provide links to some?

<http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/>

<http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/ghcn-monthly/index.php>

I'm afraid I don't have time to document the circumstances under which they
were collected or the people who did the work.

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SamAtt
I remain someone who is in the middle about Climate Change because I don't
feel I've studied all the factors enough to form a definitive opinion. But one
of the thing that always pushes me towards the skeptics side is the fact that
advocates (like this author) seem to simply ignore the skeptic's points.

Take his first point where he says "All things being equal, adding greenhouse
gasses to the atmosphere will warm it". Look how many times he uses the word
"simple" in that section to indicate it is just beyond dispute that more CO2
will make the world dramatically hotter.

The problem is that very point is one of the largest points of dispute.
Skeptics point to evidence that light absorption follows a logarithmic curve
as the substance absorbing the light increases. Meaning if the amount of CO2
in the atmosphere is already high enough to absorb most of the infrared
radiation we wouldn't see a dramatic increase by adding more CO2.

Now you can obviously debate that point and that's where the debate over
Global Warming should come in but the fact that this author chooses to skip it
completely and present "CO2 = linear heating of the climate" as a given tells
me where his bias is. Since the rest of the article is based on his first
point being absolute it comes across as ineffective to me.

~~~
fhars
That argument is wrong. Adding more C02 into an already IR-opaque atmosphere
wouldn't change the amount of IR radiation finally emitted into space (so much
is true, but irrelevant), but it still would move the surfaces of the same
greenhouse warming (currently ca. 35°C at the surface) into higher parts of
the atmosphere, thereby raising air and ground temperatures (which is the
relevant point). People who dispute this just dispute their own understanding
of thermodynamics.

~~~
SamAtt
See, this is what I'm talking about. We don't know anything you just said for
a fact. We simply don't. Because for us to know that, or for it even to be an
issue of Thermodynamics, we'd have to know FOR A FACT how the CO2 is
influencing our atmosphere. Which we don't know.

Again, I'm not saying you're wrong. But your treatment of theory as fact is
exactly the issue I was pointing out in my post above.

(For the record I don't think what you're presenting is consistent with Global
Warming as we understand it. What you present in your comment could cause a
slight warming but the reality is heat is still coming from the sun and if the
atmosphere is already IR opaque than the heat trapped inside our atmosphere is
limited by that meaning the Global catastrophe that is predicted doesn't
really gel. It goes back to the blanket example, no matter how many blankets
you put over yourself they can only trap the heat that's already there not
create new heat)

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Daniel_Newby
There is no such thing as a greenhouse gas. Greenhouses build up heat because
the glass prevents convection. If you made a car with windows transparent to
infrared light, a toddler locked inside would still bake to death on a summer
day.

If water and CO2 were actually greenhouse gases, it would be almost as hot
outdoors on a humid day as inside a sealed greenhouse. It is vastly cooler
outdoors because parcels of the air rise as they become hot, transporting heat
towards outer space much faster than radiation can. As the surface becomes
hotter, natural convection speeds up, transporting heat somewhat faster.

In all the dispute over AGW, I have not seen a single discussion of the
relationship between surface temperature and convective heat transport. Until
I see solid data from detailed meteorological micro-simulations, I will
continue to treat the AGW hypotheses as unproven. Show us the steepness of
your surface temperature-convective heat power curves!

