

What happened to global warming? - petewarden
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8299079.stm

======
DaniFong
I just don't understand the reasoning of the many who call themselves climate
change skeptics.

Let's pretend it's not about earth, for a moment, and just some black box,
hovering in a vacuum, with a big lightbulb shining next to it. Practically all
its energy comes from the lightbulb (the rest from the residual heat within,
and some dim source of central power), and practically all of its cooling
consists in radiating infrared back outward. Now you put a layer of glass,
which infrared cannot penetrate, over the black box, and wait, and see what
happens.

The infrared is significantly absorbed by the glass, largely radiated back to
the box, and thus the largest channel for cooling -- and pretty much the only
one that will work over a long period of time -- has been attenuated.

Now replace the black box by earth, the lightbulb by the sun, and the glass by
CO2.

The black box would have to be totally weird in order to keep from heating up.
It might, for some time, somehow redirect some of the heat into less
observable sections of its mass (e.g. the lower levels of the earth's oceans,
which have a much greater heat capacity than its atmosphere), but this cannot
last forever. It might also become more reflective, absorbing less light (e.g.
the earth's clouds, desertification)? Except clouds are totally observable,
and an opposite effect comes from the melting snows and ice caps and
constructed asphalt we add in urban areas: all of which have radiance and
albedos observable from the outside (e.g. our satellites). Finally, the black
box radiation is proportional to the fourth power of the temperature, so even
if the percentage of radiated power that reaches the outside of the glass is
diminished, if the temperature of the primary radiative bodies becomes less
even, such that ∫T(new)^4 dA &gt;&gt; ∫T(old)^4 dA, the temperature can stay
roughly constant. Other than that, there's close to nothing that can be done:
that box will very probably rise in temperature, and almost certainly the
climate will change.

Skeptics correctly points out that the lightbulb varies in power output. And
the black box is moving a bit relative to the light -- further away or closer
by -- shinier or cooler or more black parts facing the light at any given
time. They also point out that the glass isn't the only thing surrounding the
black box -- for example they have noticed also a shiny layer of dust on the
glass (aerosols), and an even bigger layer of glass underneath the glass we'd
place (water vapor). And they point out that the layer of black paint appears
to be, in a great proportion, liquid, and with a high heat capacity, and
churning cyclically, and that there's a lot of it, so that in any one instance
a cooler or a warmer parcel of that liquid is showing.

None of this changes a thing about the fact that if we put yet another layer
of glass on the box, the smart money is on it heating, and certainly on it
changing. How could it not? At this point the onus is totally on these climate
change skeptics to suggest a means by which the box is supposed to stay
exactly the same.

Which brings up an interesting point. Maybe it is not so necessary that the
Earth stays the same. Maybe there are credible arguments that explain that,
really, the box won't change that much, and for the teeming, glass
manufacturing cultures of microbes living under the glass that these changes
are not really such a big deal.

Some scientists, who I respect very much -- Freeman Dyson for example, make
this very argument. I respectfully disagree with him, as I think that there's
far too much risk in disrupting the biosphere, and that the disruption,
famine, and loss of ecosystems and species that have already occurred are too
great a price to pay, that oil wars, tyrannies, and people dying of
respiratory illness from coal plants aren't exactly positive either, and
estimates of the probability of some catastrophic event happening, like say,
Greenland melting, the consequences of which are too dire to imagine, range
somewhere between 10% and 80%.

But that's a philosophical disagreement. What we have with 'skeptics' is a
scientific disagreement: the great majority say either that it is happening,
but only as part of natural variation, and they had nothing to do with it, or
that it isn't happening at all. Which, at this point, seem more like the
antics of a child screaming 'I didn't do it,' or putting their hands to their
ears, singing 'la la la, I can't hear you!' than of a calm and reasoned
scientist -- or skeptic -- examining the assumptions of a majority opinion.
Their conclusions are already drawn.

~~~
dmm
What's wrong with a little skepticism? There is a whole lot of bs passed off
as science regarding climate change. In particular the models which claim to
predict the temperature centuries form now by modeling a chaotic system with
boxes 100mi in width using parameters with +-10% error _each year_ is
ridiculous.

Plus what do you want us to do? Spend trillions we don't have to try and
reduce our oil consumption by a fraction? Other countries will just burn
anything we don't.

~~~
DaniFong
Not if alternatives achieve unsubsidized competitiveness, which is precisely
what some are trying to achieve.

The internet is a chaotic system if you choose packets as your unit of
granularity, and yet this message still came over the wire intact. The wiring
inside a bomb impacted by an outside force is a chaotic system with plenty of
uncertainty as to what's inside, but you would still be unwise to kick it. Gas
flow in jet engines is a highly turbulent and chaotic system with measured
temperature variation from the best models exceeding in many cases 20%, and
yet jets will still fly.

You don't need a perfect model to arrive at an accurate prediction, you don't
need a terribly accurate prediction in order to arrive at a general appraisal
of a situation, and you don't even need a general appraisal of a situation to
ascertain risk worthy of action.

Frankly, it should be probably be enough to say "we know that most of the
energy the Earth receives is from the sun, and we know that most of the energy
is dissipates is through infrared. We also know that the Earth is an extremely
complex, strongly coupled, and chaotic system, in which the details of every
component can never be known, and being able to predict with a high level of
confidence what the effects of any major change would be is unlikely. Maybe we
should probably stop fucking with the Earth's primary means of cooling?"

There is nothing wrong with skepticism, per se. Skepticism is a positive, and
it is a very worthy thing to root out the bs from the science. But it must be
weighed against two things: the need to come to some decisions in a limited
timeframe, and the fact that people often managed to justify to themselves,
using any means at their disposal, their continued action or inaction. Too
often 'climate change skeptics' claim that due to unacceptable uncertainty,
they're going to continue doing what they're doing -- _or_ \-- that it isn't
happening at all -- _or_ \-- that it's just part of the natural variation,
when simple physics tells us that if you significantly modify a primary means
of forcing a system then at least _something_ about it must change.

------
prat
Solar variation and ocean effects are known cyclicals while man made CO2 is
monotonically increasing. So the worst case scenario will arise when cyclicals
get in phase with the CO2 effect, i.e. all cyclicals get in heat phase. It is
premature to discard the constantly increasing CO2 levels just because the
ocean cycles are scheduled to cause cooling in the next decade or two.

~~~
JCThoughtscream
Not to mention that increased ocean acidity via carbonic acid - ie: the
introduction of C02 into ocean water - is its own little nightmare, given its
catastrophic effects on coral reef reliant systems.

~~~
silentOpen
How greatly does atmospheric CO2 dissolve into ocean water? What's the
effective volume of water that CO2 will dissolve into? I assume that surface
water will have more carbonic acid than deep water. What's the CO2 capacity
function of water? As more CO2 goes into solution, it will get harder to put
more into solution at the same temperature and pressure.

And then: what is the change in atmospheric CO2 levels in the past several
centuries?

In all, I'm having a hard time believing that man-made atmospheric CO2 is
creating biologically significant carbonic acid concentrations in ocean water
near reefs.

[citation needed]

~~~
JCThoughtscream
Citation requested; citation given:

<http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/318/5857/1737>

------
steve19
What happened? Simple. The data and/or methodology that was used to calculate
the huge increase was incorrect.

Steve McIntyre finally got hold of the raw tree-ring data that was used in the
now famous hockey stick graph. He claims that they cherry-picked data to
support the conclusions they wanted.

He has recently got hold of the raw data (after a decade of trying) and has
rerun the data and generated a graph that seems to predict the climate of the
past couple of decades correctly (R source code included).

<http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7168>

~~~
gort
The "hockey stick" appears to have been replicated, repeatedly. Wikipedia has:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1000_Year_Temperature_Comp...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png)

~~~
steve19
The extreme tail of the graph has not been replicated as far as I can see.

------
alexgartrell
If it looks like FUD, sounds like FUD, and feels like FUD, it's probably FUD.
Just a theory, but I'd argue that it's probably easier to get grants and to
get published when you're "saving the world from disaster," as opposed to the
much less romantic title of "the cyclical nature of ocean temperature and its
effects on global climate." Probably more press and attention too.

How about we stop polluting and start recycling because it's the right thing
to do, instead of irrational fears of Waterworld-like outcomes.

(Not a global warming denier, just a global warming more evidence want-to-see-
er)

------
pmorici
They rebranded "global warming" in recent years to be "global climate change".
That way no matter which way the temperature goes they can't be wrong. Michael
Criton talks about this in his fact based fictional book "State of Fear".

~~~
skoob
Actually, the rebranding was done by the Bush administration (
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Luntz#Global_warming> ), because they
though "climate change" sounded less severe than "global warming".

~~~
Maktab
That's not really accurate. While it's true that the Bush admin focused on one
term more than the other as a PR effort, they were not responsible for either
creating or widely publicising the term.

'Climate change' has long been the more widely-accepted, scientific and
neutral term for the study of variations in the earth's climate, man-made or
not. Which is why the IPCC, launched in 1988, was named the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change and not the Intergovernmental Panel on Global Warming.
Similarly, the Kyoto Protocol is an additional segment of the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change, first written in 1992. I doubt Bush
had anything to do with the naming of either of those two.

IMHO, the term 'global warming' has done more harm than good. It's a
sensationalist term popularised by the media which obscures the real issues at
stake here. Because while the fact that the earth has warmed is in itself an
issue, the core concern is really that man's activities have succeeded in
having a measurable effect on the climate, an enormously complex system, and
we have little idea what the consequences may be. It's the change itself
that's dangerous, not just the fact that it results in warming in many parts
of the world.

