Climate change / global warming

[topazg]

Like I said the only thing that matters are novel and unexpected findings. As far Health Science no one really considers that a science, since fundamentally they can't do most of their experiments do to ethical issues.

I can see a lot of epidemiologists finding some issues with this post

[Bill Spight]

May I ask - without googling, what do you believe the rate of sea level rise is? (And perhaps the elevation of Manhattan or Hawaii?)

I do not know what the rate of sea level rise is. The question is the melting of land-locked glaciers.

But as I said, to me what makes global warming a serious problem is the politicization of the problem. It is not climate scientists who did that. It is laymen with an agenda.

Has anyone here who is concerned about global warming considered whether there may be benefits to more CO2 in the atmosphere, or to a warmer climate? Or does this kind of thought feel immediately ridiculous, and if so, why?

If the planet heats up enough, I can move to Canada.

As shapenaji says, the greenhouse effect and the "lack/removal of planetary countermeasures to the increasing carbon density of our atmosphere" are very important. (He also mentions melting permafrost.) If it were a question, as your questions suggest, of moving to a new normal, then we could very likely adjust. The problem is that we are now on a course of accelerating change. To use my metaphor, nobody is putting on the brakes. It is not like we can say, "OK, this is the climate we like. We'll stop here." Most likely, we won't stop until we have experienced enough disasters to know that we have gone further than we want to.

[p2501]

May I ask - without googling, what do you believe the rate of sea level rise is? (And perhaps the elevation of Manhattan or Hawaii?)

I do not know what the rate of sea level rise is. The question is the melting of land-locked glaciers.

But as I said, to me what makes global warming a serious problem is the politicization of the problem. It is not climate scientists who did that. It is laymen with an agenda.

Has anyone here who is concerned about global warming considered whether there may be benefits to more CO2 in the atmosphere, or to a warmer climate? Or does this kind of thought feel immediately ridiculous, and if so, why?

If the planet heats up enough, I can move to Canada.

As shapenaji says, the greenhouse effect and the "lack/removal of planetary countermeasures to the increasing carbon density of our atmosphere" are very important. (He also mentions melting permafrost.) If it were a question, as your questions suggest, of moving to a new normal, then we could very likely adjust. The problem is that we are now on a course of accelerating change. To use my metaphor, nobody is putting on the brakes. It is not like we can say, "OK, this is the climate we like. We'll stop here." Most likely, we won't stop until we have experienced enough disasters to know that we have gone further than we want to.

Which will be too late. If we would (in theory) stop co2 emission right now, it would still take decades for the global warming to come to a halt. As is explained in the post at the top of the link in the op, co2 is warming the athmosphere, which in effect warms the oceans etc. which then can hold less co2 and so it goes back and forth until it comes to an equilibrium.
So if sometime in the future the climate gets wild enough for us to take this more seriously, everything we do then might be to little to late.

[Bill Spight]

You don't need an enormous scientific conspiracy, you just need normal human biases (confirmation bias mainly) and intellectual fallibilities like groupthink.

Scientific training drills confirmation bias out of budding scientists. And you do need a scientific conspiracy for confirmation bias to persist, because if any scientist exhibits it, his fellow scientists will jump all over him. They score points that way. Scientists go to great length to root out confirmation bias. That is one of the main things that makes science what it is. Confirmation bias is the opposite of science.

As for groupthink, I think that the idea of a paradigm fits. A dominant paradigm affects how scientists think and, perhaps more importantly, collect and view data.

As for climate science, I do not see how global warming/climate change is a paradigm. It is not like something without which climate science, as it is practiced, does not make sense. It is not something in which any scientist need be invested. In fact, are there not potential financial rewards in opposing global warming? The typical climate scientist, as CnP indicates, has no dog in this race.

[SmoothOper]

Like I said the only thing that matters are novel and unexpected findings. As far Health Science no one really considers that a science, since fundamentally they can't do most of their experiments do to ethical issues.

I can see a lot of epidemiologists finding some issues with this post

You stated that there is much orthodoxy, politics, and business, as well as lack of concrete proof of concepts and much uncertainty, in a particular field which you claimed was scientific, maybe your field. I simply concluded that that field is not very scientific, and not well regarded among other scientific disciplines, for example at the end of the day Health is a patient service oriented field, and the only thing that is relevant is a doctor selling services to patients, which is fine and great but not science.

[Bill Spight]

Also, another question I've never really seen answered anywhere - if you need CO2 and feedbacks to explain the late 20th century, how do the models explain the warming period 1910-1940? Greenhouse emissions surely were much lower back then, but the warming occurred at a similar rate at least according to some datasets.

I sense in this question a focus on statistics. Let me pass on something I learned early in college. Statistics proves nothing. It is a heuristic.

Let me illustrate with a famous example from a few centuries ago, back when all probability was Bayesian. The question arose, what is the probability that the sun will rise tomorrow? Given that the sun has risen on the morrow for some large number of days, a satisfyingly high probability was inferred that the sun would rise the next day. Then a German professor noted that, given the same statistics, the probability that the sun would rise 5,000 years from now was only 2/3. The point is, we do not base our belief that the sun will rise on a time series, no matter how long. We base it on astronomical facts.

Yes, temperature statistics are evidence. So are tornadoes, hurricanes, and droughts. But for me the key facts are the greenhouse effect, the increasing burning of fossil fuels, the continued destruction of forests, and the accelerating rise of greenhouse gases. If these trends continue, we know where that ends.

[aokun]

Out of curiousity...
As a question for those of you who believe that global warming is a serious problem, can you say for how long you've held this belief, and how and when you became convinced? What parts of the science, if any, do you consider uncontrovertible? Are there areas where you think the science is uncertain?

1. I don't believe global warming is a problem, I conclude it is a problem. There is a difference. In other areas of life, I admit, I’d go with the word “believe” and its subsidiary meaning about concluding things, but because the confusion among its various meanings is used to great effect by deniers, I’ll opt for conclude.
2. Anyway, I concluded that global warming presents a public policy problem in 1994 after reading a rather polemical book, “The End of Nature” by Bill McKibben, which prompted me to read up on the science of it all.
3. If it is incontrovertible, it isn’t science. It might be math. It might be religion. It isn’t science.
4. Your questions confuse two things, things to which difference standards apply, the question of a certainty in science, which is a technical matter with philosophical difficulties, and the question of certainty in public policy and ordinary life. The claim that global warming “is a serious problem” is a public policy claim layered on top of climate science. It is a claim, by the way, based on information and reasoning of much higher quality than that underpinning many of our major pieces of legislation, including some criminal laws, as well as some of the wars we’ve started. When fending off a terrorist WMD attack, Cheney with some justification proposed a 1% certainty rule. Rather distant from "incontrovertible."
5. For a citizen judging a public policy issue, I think the following things are established well enough by scientists and others to support the claim that global warming is a problem. (a) humans are making large scale changes to the chemical composition of the atmosphere (b) those changes are changing the energy balance between space and the surface of the earth (c) those changes are predicted, albeit with much uncertainty, to have significant effects on climate, with consequences for the environment and our capacity to sustain the human economy (d) the predicted changes have been taking place, albeit faster than predicted, and (e) the consequences for us are, with significant likelihood, bad.

[aokun]

Like I said the only thing that matters are novel and unexpected findings. As far Health Science no one really considers that a science, since fundamentally they can't do most of their experiments do to ethical issues.

I can see a lot of epidemiologists finding some issues with this post

You stated that there is much orthodoxy, politics, and business, as well as lack of concrete proof of concepts and much uncertainty, in a particular field which you claimed was scientific, maybe your field. I simply concluded that that field is not very scientific, and not well regarded among other scientific disciplines, for example at the end of the day Health is a patient service oriented field, and the only thing that is relevant is a doctor selling services to patients, which is fine and great but not science.

I think is slightly unfair to the medical field. Indeed, medicine is an industry and a matter of providing services to people and there are a lot of things about medicine that are not science. However, the fundamental basis of the field is the application of scientific method to human health. The standards of practice change based on observation and experiment. A great deal of the science is distorted, delayed, manipulated by money, tradition, career and other factors, but in the long run, the science tends to win out.

[aokun]

I just want to underscore the value of falsification. Unlike people in most other fields of endeavor, scientists strive to prove themselves wrong.

Things may be somewhat different in the field of climate science. There's the famous quote from Prof. Phil Jones to a skeptic: "We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it."

Things are not different at all in the field of climate science. They work constantly to challenge and improve the science. This one cherry-picked quote from one e-mail where one scientist was responding to one person who he believed was asking for data in bad faith is not evidence for your charge that climate scientists don't apply scientific method and suppress information that is at variance with their claims. That charge is falsified by the behavior of other climate scientists, the gargantuan amount of data they release and more importantly the limited and temporary situations where they don't provide some information, the behavior of this scientist in the periods both before and after this e-mail and a lot else.

[aokun]

May I ask - without googling, what do you believe the rate of sea level rise is?

Without googling, eh? Why without googling? Are you suggesting that to maintain his opinion, the person speaking needs not only to have read something about sea level rise change in the past, but to have kept it in mind? How much detailed climate data do you keep in mind? Why didn't you ask "why do you think sea levels are rising dangerously? what evidence is there?"? Do think folks who ask pop quiz questions liable to make their interlocutor trip up have an agenda in mind?

And do you think we can also put things in question form and use might and perhaps to cast doubt on things without ever saying anything ourselves, hoping you answer with a declarative sentence and we can attack it?

Has anyone here who is concerned about global warming considered whether there may be benefits to more CO2 in the atmosphere, or to a warmer climate? Or does this kind of thought feel immediately ridiculous, and if so, why?

Have you ever considered for a moment that you post something without a question mark? Why do you not say something like "CO2 increase will likely benefit mankind more than harm it; here are references to work on that subject."? Is it because there isn't any?

Or he might just find a mistake that the scientist with an agenda has ignored because he got his desired result. In any case, to me the quote indicates a deep lack of understanding of how the scientific method is supposed to work.

Ah! Declarative sentences! At last you're saying something. You are drawing a conclusion about Phil Jones. From one line in one e-mail. Time to get back to the questions.

Do you think condemning this guy's whole career from that one e-mail to McIntyre is fair? Do you know how much of the data that was mentioned in that e-mail has since been released? Do you know what effect that data, if released, has had on the temperature record? Do you believe that the temperature record being discussed in that e-mail should have shown cooling rather than warming? Without googling or otherwise looking it up, can you quote five other things Phil Jones said in his life?

[SmoothOper]

I think is slightly unfair to the medical field. Indeed, medicine is an industry and a matter of providing services to people and there are a lot of things about medicine that are not science. However, the fundamental basis of the field is the application of scientific method to human health. The standards of practice change based on observation and experiment. A great deal of the science is distorted, delayed, manipulated by money, tradition, career and other factors, but in the long run, the science tends to win out.

I feel medicine claiming to be a science with all of its unscientific warts is unfair to science. If you work in medical research, you will have a doctor as a PI and his primary interest will be ethics and health service, not science, and the doctor will most likely not have training in a scientific discipline.

[jts]

Vis a vis sea level rise - it is painful to be forbidden to use google, which I think of less as a website than as a third hemisphere, but off the top of my head I can tell you that in the geological record, we can see sea level fluctuating from 120 meters lower than it is today, to 300 meters higher than it is today. Given that we're getting increases in global levels of greenhouse gases that are unprecedented in their rapidity, we really don't know what is going to happen. We could deal with a 10 m rise or a 20 m rise, if it were spread out over four or five centuries, but we can't deal with a 100m rise; that would be the end of anything recognizable as Western civilization.

Now, as best I can recall, the mean projection for sea level change for the next century is less than 5m. (Is it 1m? 3m? Idrc. I don't even know if I'm thinking of projections for 2100, or projections for 2113.) The important thing to remember is that this is a mean projection. Already, a 1m rise in sea levels is going to be pretty severe, since most dense population centers, industrial activity, commercial activity clusters around natural harbors. So we have a lot of people living close to sea level in the developed world, and many more living on river deltas at sea level in the developing world. But we shouldn't be worried about the mean projection. If we cross paths on a dark sidewalk in the middle of the night and I ask you if you can help me with something, your mean projection is that I'm a nice man who's out on a walk; what worries you is the small chance that I'm about to beat you up and steal your wallet. But getting your wallet stolen isn't really that bad, although I'm sure if it has ever happened to you, you thought the world was ending. Even flooding displacing millions of people in Bangladesh wouldn't be that bad; well, I mean it would be bad, but but not bad enough to bother the American electorate, who will surely be asking questions like "Are you sure you know how many refugees there are in Bangladesh? How many were there before the flooding? Can you tell me without googling it?" Returning to the sea levels of the Cretaceous would be bad.

[crux]

May I ask - without googling, what do you believe the rate of sea level rise is? (And perhaps the elevation of Manhattan or Hawaii?)

I do not know what the rate of sea level rise is. The question is the melting of land-locked glaciers.

Thank you for your answer.
The current rise is 3.2mm/year (with large regional variations, see http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends.shtml). The last IPCC report (the official summarization of climate science for policy purposes) predicts a worst-case scenario of a 60cm rise by 2100 and an optimistic one of 18cm (earlier reports predicted a higher rate, and the next one is apparently going to predict a higher worst case of 100cm again according to one source I could find - take that with a grain of salt). A recent report I could find (http://www.uibk.ac.at/public-relations/presse/archiv/2012/333/) predicts that the contribution from melting glaciers could be 22cm by 2100; the text there suggests that melting nearly all the world's glaciers would produce a rise of 42cm.

Even with minimal mitigation, none of that is capable of flooding Manhattan let alone Hawaii, especially if you consider the time scale (examine photos of New York in 1913 and I think you'll agree that cities change a lot in 100 years). From your comment it appears that you think that these are realistic scenarios. However, even orthodox climate science does not support this view. Where, then, does this belief come from? As I see it, at every step beyond what is discussed in scientific papers, from what scientist tell journalists, to what journalists tell the public, great exaggerations occur and taken together serve to mislead the public so that they are no longer able to distinguish between realistic and unrealistic scenarios. Even the media get confused at times and report truly outlandish claims (the "snowfall a thing of the past" thing is one example, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/sep/20/times-atlas-incorrect-greenland reports on two other such instances). The result is that the public has a strong opinion on climate science, as shown in this thread, but little accurate knowledge (for example about such basic things as actual sea-level rise).

Skeptics are known to point out some of these exaggerations, and they promptly get painted as "laymen with an agenda", implying a nefarious motive. In my view it's the scientists who should work to avoid giving the public misconceptions, we will all need to apply the best known information to make correct policy choices, otherwise we may be focusing our efforts on the wrong problems to solve. You mention destruction of forests and you'll get no argument from me about that - there are many environmental issues we should be paying attention to. In terms of fossil fuels, there's sufficient reason to be concerned about the increasingly risky business of extracting them and the effect that has on the environment.

[speedchase]

Has anyone here who is concerned about global warming considered whether there may be benefits to more CO2 in the atmosphere, or to a warmer climate? Or does this kind of thought feel immediately ridiculous, and if so, why?

Have you ever considered for a moment that you post something without a question mark? Why do you not say something like "CO2 increase will likely benefit mankind more than harm it; here are references to work on that subject."? Is it because there isn't any?

This is was a reference to an opinion by a wealthy oil executive. It was later disproved by a study he funded (so much for confirmation bias).

[topazg]

Like I said the only thing that matters are novel and unexpected findings. As far Health Science no one really considers that a science, since fundamentally they can't do most of their experiments do to ethical issues.

I can see a lot of epidemiologists finding some issues with this post

You stated that there is much orthodoxy, politics, and business, as well as lack of concrete proof of concepts and much uncertainty, in a particular field which you claimed was scientific, maybe your field. I simply concluded that that field is not very scientific, and not well regarded among other scientific disciplines, for example at the end of the day Health is a patient service oriented field, and the only thing that is relevant is a doctor selling services to patients, which is fine and great but not science.
.....

If you work in medical research, you will have a doctor as a PI ....

So by this argument you consider any research into cancer not science? Interesting philosophy, I'm not sure how widely held it is.

The last section of my quote of your post is so painfully wrong factually ...