Eco-Guilt

I agree that there is a lot of misinformation out there about global warming, and a lot of people with a financial interest in exploiting this information. But remember that this goes for both sides of the issue. The trouble is that the people who distort things and make shrill proclamations are the ones who get the most news coverage. I watched the first part of the P&T. They are entertaining, but I think they do fall into the category of shrill misinformation spreaders. Before you go believing everything that scientifically illiterate skeptics tell you and doubting everything that scientifically illiterate greenies say, why don't you have a look at what the scientific community actually claims rather than at what the media says.Have a look at the latest IPCC report (put together by the world's leading collaboration of scientists on the subject). For example, it directly explains the correlation versus causation issue you guys are worrying about. The full report is here, but you should look at their FAQs. On page 9 is a chart (FAQ 2, Figure 2) that summarizes the current (as of 2005) state of understanding in terms of how much the earth is warming from various sources.Clearly, people who say that there is no doubt that human activities are heating up the earth are wrong. There is some doubt, but it is very small, see the 90% likelihood error bars on each of the processes in this chart. On the other hand the Penn and Teller skeptics who claim that changes in solar irradiance are driving things are very wrong because the heating is far too small. This is easy to calculate and you can see it in the chart. The real uncertainty that remains is in how human produced aerosals interact with cloud formation, and in how much cooling that produces. But the most likely scenario is that the earth is warming and that humans are the primary cause. That is the scientific consensus.

When hundreds of scientists are selected by their nations and asked to review the current state of climate change science and report a summary for the public to digest, I am inclined to trust what they say. Maybe there are biases, but I have trouble believing in any big conspiracies to bury the truth in an organization of this size.But if you don't like the IPCC, then how about the other leading scientific organizations that are expressing significant concern about human influence on the climate? Say, the American Physical Society, the European Academy of Science and Arts, the European Science Foundation, the American Meteorological Society, or the dozens of others on this list? Can you find any dissenting scientific organizations? There are isolated individual dissenters, but mainstream science suggests that humans are probably (not certainly) responsible for most of the warming that has occurred, and that this warming will probably continue with unknown consequences. The biggest remaining source of uncertainty in determining how temperatures will evolve in the future is the aerosol issue, I think.

Who doesn't have a consensus? CATO? I don't really have time to read through all their documentation, is there some part of it that you want me to look at specifically?It seems to me that there is a pretty strong scientific consensus that global warming is probably a real phenomenon that is being caused or increased by humans. I have provided links to support my opinion of this consensus. Like I said, I completely agree with your point that there is misinformation on the left as well as the right, and many organizations are overstating the certainty and the peril that climate change poses. But we still know that we are probably having a significant impact on the earth's climate, and the consequences may be dangerous.

So you seem to believe in grand conspiracies by liberal interests to suppress (financially) dissenting opinions in many of the world's largest science organizations. I'm afraid that I would find that surprising than the possibility, just as I don't believe that petroleum and car companies have the power to radically bias findings in the other direction. What science organizations are saying such things? The IPCC gives a probability range, based on their studies (I think it was something like 90 or 95%) that global warming is a real phenomenon that is being caused largely by humans. I am sure that it is easy to find the names of smart scientists who disagree with the main scientific consensus on global warming. It is even possible to find some who disagree with evolution, though that is considerably more difficult. Since I am not an expert in this field, I tend to trust large, well respected organizations like APS are giving me credible information when they make their statements.

Perhaps you are right that the same process that is bringing us out of an ice age is also somehow causing a sudden temperature fluctuation upwards in the last century (since our oceans have not boiled off I can't believe that our current rate of warming has been sustained since the previous ice age). That would be quite coincidental for it to just happen to coincide with the time when we are producing enormous quantities of heat trapping gases. Clearly both are true. CO2 reflects infrared radiation back to the earth's surface and produces a warming effect. Simple physics. Similarly, warming the earth causes CO2 to be released from the oceans. Such feedback effects have to be taken into account (within their uncertainties) in realistic computer models. Obviously the CO2 rises in the past have followed the temperature rises for exactly this reason, which are thought to have slightly increased the amount of temperature rise. The difference is that this time around we are pumping far more CO2 into the atmosphere than the ocean has released in any of the recent warming spells.

I don't see why you care about sunspots: the only things those effect is how many cosmic rays hit our atmosphere, which have been shown to have minimal/no correlation to our atmosphere's cloud formation. A more sensible thing to show is the solar irradiance, which is a much more direct measurement of the energy that is reaching the earth's surface.It is true that the solar irradiance is very slightly higher now than it was 300 years ago, however I am skeptical that this explains the rising temperatures. a) The IPCC would have to have really screwed the pooch on this one if they were off by 10 sigmas or so in their uncertainties on the relevance of this effect, and b) you can directly see that in the last 30 years temperatures have continued to rise while the solar output has remained constant. There would have to be some very slow feedback effect in place for ancient solar variations to be causing modern temperature rises. See these plots for comparison.

I certainly am not surprised that that sometimes happens. When you are working for politicians, they may require you to conform to their views. But remember that conservatives and oil industry lobbyists sometimes apply this pressure too.But none of these are examples of people in mainstream science. People employed at universities and laboratories will have more independence. Maybe you're right and the world's leading science societies are all being bullied into obeying political correctness on this issue. That would be a very strong allegation to make. Do you have any significant evidence of this (more than just isolated examples/anecdotes)? If it's true then that would go a long way towards undermining my faith in modern science.

That's basically the point that I was making, but you can see it for 30 years, not just 5.Regarding your sunspot confusion, I've pasted a post that I made in an old thread a while back about this. The long and short of it is that this is a non-issue for climate change purposes except in the sense that there tend to be more sunspots when the sun is hotter. The numbers that really matter are the number of watts per square meter hitting the earth's surface (irradiance) from the sun, which has been changing by about 0.1% between recent solar maxima and minima, as I showed in a plot earlier in this thread.======================
(Ignore if you don't care about sunspots/cosmic rays/cloud interactions)
======================Sunspots happen more when the sun's magnetic field is strong and this magnetic field tends to drive away the electrically charged cosmic rays that bombard our atmosphere. These cosmic rays produce ions in our atmosphere that could in theory precipitate cloud formation, which could have a net cooling effect depending on the cloud's height and density. This is a favorite argument of some global warming skeptics: the sunspots drive away cosmic rays which reduce cloud formation. There are just two problems with this.a) I don't think there is any evidence of cosmic rays increasing cloud density. They form clouds in cloud chambers because before the cosmic rays pass through there is nothing for condensation to stick to. The atmosphere, on the other hand, has plenty of dust in it already that clouds can form around. Cosmic rays may not help.b) We can measure both the rate of sunspots and of cosmic rays. Both follow the solar cycles as one would expect, but there is no trend consistent with our observed warming over the last 30 years. Here is a crappy plot showing this from the University of Chicago Climax neutron monitor. It shows the rate of incidence of neutrons produced from cosmic rays overlaid with sunspot #s:Based on this evidence, I see no reason to link sunspots or cosmic rays in any way to the warming that has been observed recently. Maybe they are indicative of future sun behavior that could be relevant. But you're better off looking at the actual flux of solar energy reaching us on the earth if you're trying to understand how the sun could have influenced the current climate.

Sunspots are an indirect way of getting at the total irradiance (Watts/m2) that reaches the earth's surface, which is what you care about. They are usually correlated, but not always, I think. I am also skeptical of other people's work. Not because I think they are lying (as some people on here are essentially alleging), but because I know how easy it is to make mistakes. I think it is quite possible that the IPCC has screwed up, but since I am not an expert I think I am better off trusting what they say until I find time to dig into the papers themselves, which I may never have. I am always open to the possibility of mistakes. We discussed this at some length in an old thread. I can't remember the details anymore, but here is a plot that someone found going back several hundred years. It seems quite unlikely to me that we can see no evidence of any influence of regular solar cycles on the earth's temperature, and that we can see the temperature showing a dramatic rise over the last thirty years of nearly constant solar activity, but that the ~0.12% rise in the sun's heat over the last 100 years could be responsible for this warming. That's just intuition talking, of course, but it is also in line with the findings of the IPCC, which concluded that the increase in solar activity has had an almost negligible impact on the increase in global temperatures with a very high certainty.

As I have said, I am not an expert in this field. I will try to make what intelligent comments I can and find time to look into this more later. Can you explain what the "proxy" is? Is this the O18 measurement technique you are talking about? It is not clear to me why you think the data has lost integrity. It looks to me like the temperatures have been about flat since the last ice age ended ~10k years ago. Your plots also support this. You plots make it appear that you would have to go back about 100k years to find a warmer period than today. Well that's why this science is so crazy-hard to get right, and why there's still uncertainty. The IPCC claim that they basically have everything figured out well enough except for the amount of cooling induced by cloud formation from aerosals, and plenty of other (non-government sponsored) science societies support their findings. I'll find some time soon to look into their documentation and find out how it is that they claim to know the other effects so accurately.

I want to repeat this just so that we're clear. There are some environmental wackos, reporters, and politicians out there who try to intimidate/scare people irrationally, just like there are skeptics who are trying to do the same thing. The scientific organizations, however, aren't trying to intimidate anyone. They are simply saying that the data suggests the world is warming and that humans are probably contributing substantially to this effect, and we don't know what the consequences will be. I choose to just not listen to the shrill nutcases on either side.

Well, to be fair, you did post a video in your opening post where P&T distort the solar data to make the viewers doubt the science of global warming. But if you want this thread to be about the guilt trips of the environmental left then that's fine, I will back off on/or hide my arguments about the mainstream global warming consensus when I find more time to get back to it.edit: Can anyone remind my how I am supposed to hide text?Edited by fgarb, : No reason given.

Hi All, will hide this b/c off topic when I remember how, but I think it is still an important side-topic to discuss. No one knows that this hasn't happened in the past. The scientific consensus is that it is just unlikely (also motivated by detailed scientific studies suggesting that this would not have happened), which is what I am arguing. How about this? The CO2 rises/falls in the past were clearly natural and were probably caused by the temperature increase releasing them from the oceans/reabsorbtion when the temp falls again. I suspect the methane plot would be much more dramatic, though it is still at the level of a trace gas. The far right of the plot is, of course, caused by humans, and is clearly only the beginning of the CO2 the humans are pumping into the atmosphere. Unfortunately there is no direct historical analogy we can look at to predict what will happen to global temperatures (or perhaps more dangerously, the ocean's acidity) as CO2 continues to rise. We have to take our best guesses on the proper response to this given the knowledge that we do have.Source: United Nations Environment Program Global Outlook Report. The temperature plot looks a bit funny to me, so I suspect they have cherry picked data from particular temperature records to make it look more dramatic. But I see no reason to doubt the CO2 plot above - that's much harder to fudge.

Hi Michamus,I keep intending to look into this in greater detail, but I've just run out of time and now I'm heading out for several days so I will have no internet access for a while. I'll leave a quick response though and if you or anyone else does respond I will have a look on Monday or Tuesday. This is what I would like to investigate. I would be very curious to learn about how this is done rather than trusting the scientists' word that they are not underestimating their uncertainties. Of course, that comes down to the time issue again. Yeah, but the last one I see on the plot was >100000 years ago. That makes the dawn of human civilization seem like yesterday. I personally don't find it reassuring to say "at least we aren't as hot as that". I take it back. Now that I am looking at it again I realize that it is consistent with the other plots I have seen, it just looked wierd because it covers such a long time line that the modern era is really squished.