I searched the internet trying to find a reference to the study regarding the glaciers at GNP and found exclusively news stories and blogspam repeating the "removal of the signs" meme from foxnews, right-wing think tanks, fundamentalist christian organizations, and oil & gas funded "science" web sites.
I'd love to have a look at the original publication that the USGS used when it decided to create those signs, but its buried so deep under partisan schadenfreude that I can't find it to even analyze it.
With respect to Greenhouse Gases: what's hard to understand about conservation of matter?
GHGs cause some warming; you can do lab experiments on flux and gas mixtures in identical glass containers to prove this.
The Biosphere (that is, the surface of the earth and all its organisms) has some essentially fixed amount of carbon distributed between critters, plants, soil, air, and dissolved in water. It's a closed system. When something dies and decomposes, it releases its carbon into the soil and atmosphere where it is endlessly recycled. Only in rare (and extremely slow) circumstances does the carbon get removed from the biosphere and put deep into the earth as coal, oil, or natural gas.
When you dig up carbon that is currently out of that cycle and put into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels you are adding additional carbon to the system. It has to go somewhere. Some of it will temporarily become plants (until they die, rot and release the carbon again), some of it will dissolve into the ocean and raise the acidity, and some of it will stay in the atmosphere and cause some warming.
This part of "climate change" is very simple to understand. The earth previously did just fine with a higher fixed amount of carbon in the biosphere, but it was a lot warmer, wetter, and humans weren't around.
> I searched the internet trying to find a reference to the study regarding the glaciers at GNP and found exclusively news stories and blogspam repeating the "removal of the signs" meme from foxnews, right-wing think tanks, fundamentalist christian organizations, and oil & gas funded "science" web sites.
> The signs at Glacier National Park warning that its signature glaciers would be gone by 2020 are being changed. [CNN link]
> In the 1990s, some climate model predicted the eponymous glacier would be gone by 2020. Signs around the parks' entrances were erected boldly stating this claim. In January of 2020, the signs were removed because the glaciers hadn't even shrunk. [GP]
No, the source backed up the GP, because the prediction was that the glacier would be gone. Whether or not it shrank is secondary.
A theory was posited, and a testable prediction was made. Since the prediction was false, the theory should be critically examined. That's the scientific method.
A critical examination of the theory which produced the incorrect prediction seems to be missing. That's the point.
It's not reasonable to point to partial fulfillment of the claim; if that was the standard of evidence, a perpetual motion enthusiast could reasonably point out that they almost broke even.
From what I've understood, the reasonable arguments on either side boil down (heh) to the rate of change, because climate varies so much naturally and we seem to be accelerating it. If the rate is not what was predicted, that's a big deal and makes this failed prediction all the more relevant.
I think the comment you're responding to is taking issue with predictions about the specific effects of climate on a particular time table. I think your comment is talking about the general concept of greenhouse gases produced by humans causing warming. There is a large chasm between these two things.
This is also why it's important to clarify what we mean by "global warming skeptic." Are we talking about someone that denies that human behavior creates greenhouse gases that warms the climate? Or are we talking about someone who views predictions about the specific effects of that warming on our environment on a particular time scale with great skepticism? These are two very different positions to take.
You and GP both have spherical cow ideas about how GHGs impact the climate.
Yes, we can create an ideal lab "climate" and demonstrate some GHGs cause warming.
The global climate is much, much more complicated. What is the impact of GHG-caused warming on cloud formation? What is the impact of same on jetstreams? Chaos Theory was started as a result of the complexity of weather prediction, which is simply short-term climate forecasting. The two variables I mentioned are just two, and they are dizzingly complex to model. It is not as simple as "GHG++ == HEAT++".
Further, taking a step back: If we could agree on exactly how GHGs impact the global climate, then can we get a number on how much humans impact the climate at all? The way climate change alarmists seem to think, the climate would be absolutely static were it not for our industrial revolution. So what is it? If humans got GHGs to zero, how much less would the climate change? Are we responsible for 1% of overall change? 50%? 100%?
Pretending these are simple or obvious questions is absurd. I've read hundreds of papers on climate change. These topics never seem to come up. Rarely do climate scientists mention the sun, which seems to be treated like a static heat bulb in the sky that gives off an steady, constant flow of energy, which couldn't be further from the truth!
Even the name of the topic, Climate Change, describing it as some kind of problem in itself--if the climate were static it'd be a HUGE alarm! The climate has always changed.
Then a step back even further: The climate has changed throughout civilization and it appears that large-scale civilizations grow in population during periods of warming, and shrink (sometimes drastically), during periods of cooling. So how much warming is acceptable? It seems the goal is to get to zero change (lol) or to cooling. Why is that the necessarily best way?
The entire field is super-complex, and because of the political environment, even asking questions such as the above make it impossible to actually do science--only one view is acceptable.
> You and GP both have spherical cow ideas about how GHGs impact the climate.
I didn't tell you what I believe. I was trying to communicate how y'all might be talking past one another.
If anything, teasing apart these positions (and the positions inbetween) is exactly the opposite of a spherical cow. Which seems to be exactly what you're saying. So it seems like you've completely misinterpreted my comment.
"I've read hundreds of papers on climate change. These topics never seem to come up. Rarely do climate scientists mention the sun, which seems to be treated like a static heat bulb in the sky that gives off an steady, constant flow of energy, which couldn't be further from the truth!"
Appealing to complexity doesn’t make basics like conservation of matter go away.
The Climate is extremely complex, and will not be entirely understood in our lifetimes; but I’m not interested in litigating my way to a perfect climate model. I’ll leave that to climatologists or whatever.
I’ll state my policy position (the end result of whatever one’s understanding of the problem is anyway) and leave it at that:
My position is that mankind ought to follow what I was taught in scouts: “leave no trace”.
Return GHGs to preindustrial levels, control all other pollutants in a similarly strict sense. Work towards solving the problems we have with deforestation and destruction of habitats, etc. All while maintaining freedom of reproduction for everyone, and continuing to improve quality of life for humans everywhere. Not exactly an easy feat.
That world (the preindustrial world) changed according to its own whims and patterns, but it was beautiful and humans thrived in it.
Knowing that a much warmer planet would look different and likely be less hospitable makes me want to avoid that outcome; however I’ve made my peace with the high likelihood that I wont see “garden earth”. We’re working with a system we don’t understand against a timetable we can’t see while people make money every time they slow us down.
> My position is that mankind ought to follow what I was taught in scouts: “leave no trace”.
This position isn't really coherent on its own, because with enough time, it doesn't matter what we do: there won't be a trace of us left. So really, you need to say what you mean by "trace" and on what time scale. Your time scale can't be zero, because then we couldn't build anything. But it can't be arbitrarily long either, because then it ceases to be any kind of restraint at all.
I thought I laid out what I meant by that in the following paragraphs -- it was intended as a finger pointed at the moon, not a prescriptive maxim to be taken literally. A goal to work towards instead of "everyone do whatever is profitable for them in the near term"...
In the very long term it would be awesome if our industrial systems emitted only manageable waste heat and the produced good, with all waste streams recycled or otherwise kept from contaminating the environment; but this is pure sci-fi utopian optimism on my part.
> I'd love to have a look at the original publication that the USGS used when it decided to create those signs, but its buried so deep under partisan schadenfreude that I can't find it to even analyze it.
Don't you and the guy you responded to want the same thing: answers from the scientific community? You can criticize the right wing news sources all you want... the existence of the signs saying the glaciers were going to disappear is pretty indisputable. Clearly, someone at some point had enough belief in that prophesy that they made a sign.
I found it pretty easy to find non-flamebait information on this story, here it is on CNN[0]. Here[1] is some background; here[2] is the original 2003 study (which predicted the glaciers would disappear in 2030; the date was apparently pushed up based on field observations showing glaciers melting faster than the model predicted.
I'd love to have a look at the original publication that the USGS used when it decided to create those signs, but its buried so deep under partisan schadenfreude that I can't find it to even analyze it.
With respect to Greenhouse Gases: what's hard to understand about conservation of matter?
GHGs cause some warming; you can do lab experiments on flux and gas mixtures in identical glass containers to prove this.
The Biosphere (that is, the surface of the earth and all its organisms) has some essentially fixed amount of carbon distributed between critters, plants, soil, air, and dissolved in water. It's a closed system. When something dies and decomposes, it releases its carbon into the soil and atmosphere where it is endlessly recycled. Only in rare (and extremely slow) circumstances does the carbon get removed from the biosphere and put deep into the earth as coal, oil, or natural gas.
When you dig up carbon that is currently out of that cycle and put into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels you are adding additional carbon to the system. It has to go somewhere. Some of it will temporarily become plants (until they die, rot and release the carbon again), some of it will dissolve into the ocean and raise the acidity, and some of it will stay in the atmosphere and cause some warming.
This part of "climate change" is very simple to understand. The earth previously did just fine with a higher fixed amount of carbon in the biosphere, but it was a lot warmer, wetter, and humans weren't around.