A Balanced View of Climate Change

[mamooth]

The stages of denialism.

1. There's no warming!
2. There is warming, but it's not human caused!
3. There is warming, and humans caused it, but it's not that bad!
4. There is warming, and it's bad, but it costs too much to fix!
5. There is warming, and it's awful, and it's too late to fix it, so every person for themselves, screw the poor!

The OP embraced stage 4. I suppose that's progress.

The deniers were all completely wrong about stages 1-3. Yet for some reason, they expect to be taken seriously when they declare stage 4 is the true situation now.

Nope. They got everything wrong before because they wre parroting bad political propaganda, and they're wrong now on stage 4 because they're still parroting bad political propaganda.

 

[ding]

The stages of denialism.

1. There's no warming!
2. There is warming, but it's not human caused!
3. There is warming, and humans caused it, but it's not that bad!
4. There is warming, and it's bad, but it costs too much to fix!
5. There is warming, and it's awful, and it's too late to fix it, so every person for themselves, screw the poor!

The OP embraced stage 4. I suppose that's progress.

The deniers were all completely wrong about stages 1-3. Yet for some reason, they expect to be taken seriously when they declare stage 4 is the true situation now.

Nope. They got everything wrong before because they wre parroting bad political propaganda, and they're wrong now on stage 4 because they're still parroting bad political propaganda.

The geologic record is littered with warming and cooling trends that weren't cause by CO2. What makes you believe this one is?

 

[mamooth]

The geologic record is littered with warming and cooling trends that weren't cause by CO2. What makes you believe this one is?

There's no natural cause for it.

To normal people, that's a dealbreaker.

You can't just yell "DERP! NATURAL CYCLE!" and expect to be taken seriously.

Natural cycles have causes. What's the specific cause of what you say is the current natural fast warming cycle? Be specific, and provide evidence.

If you can't name a specific natural cause, you're just invoking fairy magic as a cause, which makes you a person that nobody will take seriously.

 

[ding]

There's no natural cause for it.

To normal people, that's a dealbreaker.

You can't just yell "DERP! NATURAL CYCLE!" and expect to be taken seriously.

Natural cycles have causes. What's the specific cause of what you say is the current natural fast warming cycle? Be specific, and provide evidence.

If you can't name a specific natural cause, you're just invoking fairy magic as a cause, which makes you a person that nobody will take seriously.

Sure there is. The planet is warming back up to it's pre-glacial temperature like it always has.

But seriously... your argument is that it can't be anything else? Temperature has gone up and down in glacial cycles and interglacial cycles. Climate variability is a natural phenomenon.

So I will ask again... What makes you believe this one is being caused by CO2? How do you rule out natural causes?

 

[mamooth]

Sure there is. The planet is warming back up to it's pre-glacial temperature like it always has.

That warming peak happened 6000 years ago. It's been slowly cooling every since. The hard data says your theory is wrong, so your theory is wrong.

So, while your explanation was an attempt to explain what was pushing the natural factors, it was just plain wrong.

But seriously... your argument is that it can't be anything else?

As I never said or implied such any such thing, you look really bad for making that statement. If you can't debate what I actually say, just admit it. Don't make up dishonest strawmen to attack.

Climate variability is a natural phenomenon.

So are forest fires. Your logic would say how that means humans can't cause forest fires. Your logic is really bad.

So I will ask again... What makes you believe this one is being caused by CO2? How do you rule out natural causes?

Because the natural factors have been causing cooling for 6000 years, and they haven't changed. They're still trying to cause cooling.

Suddenly, the slow cooling reversed into fast warming. Since the natural factors didn't change, that means something else had to have changed.

Golly, what could that be? Oh that's right. It's the thing that caused the increase in downwelling backradiation, stratospheric cooling, the decrease in outgoing longwave in the GHG bands, the polar amplification, the more warming at night, and the more warming in winter. None of those directly observed things has any "natural" explanation.

The hard data says the warming is human caused. That's my reason.

 

[ding]

That warming peak happened 6000 years ago. It's been slowly cooling every since. The hard data says your theory is wrong, so your theory is wrong.

So, while your explanation was an attempt to explain what was pushing the natural factors, it was just plain wrong.



As I never said or implied such any such thing, you look really bad for making that statement. If you can't debate what I actually say, just admit it. Don't make up dishonest strawmen to attack.



So are forest fires. Your logic would say how that means humans can't cause forest fires. Your logic is really bad.



Because the natural factors have been causing cooling for 6000 years, and they haven't changed. They're still trying to cause cooling.

Suddenly, the slow cooling reversed into fast warming. Since the natural factors didn't change, that means something else had to have changed.

Golly, what could that be? Oh that's right. It's the thing that caused the increase in downwelling backradiation, stratospheric cooling, the decrease in outgoing longwave in the GHG bands, the polar amplification, the more warming at night, and the more warming in winter. None of those directly observed things has any "natural" explanation.

The hard data says the warming is human caused. That's my reason.

We are still 2C below the peak temperatures of the previous interglacial periods. The present warming trend began 400 years ago before man's influence. The planet is still in an interglacial period and is still warming back up to its pre-glacial temperature. Everything is perfectly normal. The most 120 ppm of incremental CO2 could warm the surface of the planet is 0.5 C. The least being 0.22C. Everything above this is natural warming from the ocean heat warming the NH. Ocean temperatures and sea levels have been rising since the last glacial maximum. Just like it has after every glacial maximum of the past 3 million years.

 

[Flopper]

Sure there is. The planet is warming back up to it's pre-glacial temperature like it always has.

But seriously... your argument is that it can't be anything else? Temperature has gone up and down in glacial cycles and interglacial cycles. Climate variability is a natural phenomenon.

So I will ask again... What makes you believe this one is being caused by CO2? How do you rule out natural causes?

Increased concentrations of CO2 and other green house gases causes temperature in the atmosphere to rise. Likewise falling concentrations causes atmospheric temperatures to fall. It has been proved experimentally in the lab and observed in the atmosphere. If we do not have enough CO2 in air we freeze and too much we cook.

For millions of years nature maintained the level of CO2 in the atmosphere. Volcanic eruptions, wild fires and decay of organic matter increased CO2 levels. Plants, trees, algae in the ocean turn CO2 into oxygen through photosynthesis and the ocean itself absorbs and stores CO2. For millions of years, nature maintain the level of CO2 then man entered the picture burning fossil fuel which produced ever increasing amounts of CO2 while destroying nearly 1/3 of the world's forests.

 

[Fort Fun Indiana]

Any balanced view of climate change starts with the fact that human activity is almost completely responsible-- if not completely -- for the current, rapid, observed global warming and accompanying changes to the climate.

Otherwise it's just a balanced view of the inside of your own colon.

 

[Libby von H]

Paraphrased from my source for this thread: more than a million people are killed and multi millions injured in traffic accidents every year that goes by. We could reduce that carnage to near zero if we just reduced traffic speeds to 3 miles an hour. Anybody willing to agree to that to save all those lives? I think 99.9% of people world wide would think that an unreasonable remedy for the problem.

So let's look at unreasonable 'remedies' for the climate change problem.

I have long argued that whether human activity is the driving force behind climate change or not, human kind is here to stay for now. The world's population has expanded from one billion people at the beginning of the industrial revolution to more than eight billion people now. And there is no realistic way to convince eight billion people that, for our foreseeable future, living in a fossil fuel free world is either desirable or even possible unless they are clueless re the facts and the cost.

Instead of confiscating so much of the world's financial resources to 'combat climate change' that obviously isn't combating climate change, a much better approach would be to find ways for humans to constructively adapt to inevitable climate change.

Bjorn Lomborg, President of the Copenhagen Consensus, presents the reality of how governments deal with climate change and, while he does not deny that climate change is occurring and will continue to occur, he has a much more realistic and honest approach to how the world should 'follow the science.'

Emphasis in the quoted material is mine:
". . .A new peer-reviewed study of all the scientific estimates of climate-change effects shows the most likely cost of global warming averaged across the century will be about 1% of global gross domestic product, reaching 2% by the end of the century. This is a very long way from global extinction.

Draconian net-zero climate policies, on the other hand, will be prohibitively costly. The latest peer-reviewed climate-economic research shows the total cost will average $27 trillion each year across the century, reaching $60 trillion a year in 2100. Net zero is more than seven times as costly as the climate problem it tries to address.

Our goal in forming climate policy should be the same we bring to traffic laws and any other political question: achieve more benefits than costs to society. A richer world is much more resilient against weather extremes. In the short term, therefore, policymakers should focus on lifting the billions of people still in poverty out of it, both because it will make them more resilient against extreme weather and because it will do so much good in a myriad of other ways. For the longer term, governments and companies should invest in green-energy research and development to drive down the costs and increase the reliability of fossil-fuel alternatives.

Careful science can inform us about the problem of climate change, but it can’t tell us how to solve it. Sensible public debate requires all the facts, including about the costs of our choices. Some of the most popular climate policies will have costs far greater than climate change itself. When politicians try to shut down discussion with claims that they’re “following the science,” don’t let them.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/follow-the-science-leads-to-ruin-climate-environment-policy-3f427c05?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

”

IF you reduced speed of traffic in your way.
Poverty would ensue as people could not get to jobs as they have to now.
Ambulances and other necessary conveyances would increase mortality
IF you look up how those rates are defined they are defined by cost-benefit tradeoffs that mirror what you are trying to do. Current rates are better than your solution, which does not save lives. at those speeds you have increased pollution, increased road rage (who can doubt that) and probably such an increase in bikes that car sales would plummet and we would be in a depression.

 

[ding]

Increased concentrations of CO2 and other green house gases causes temperature in the atmosphere to rise. Likewise falling concentrations causes atmospheric temperatures to fall. It has been proved experimentally in the lab and observed in the atmosphere.

Sure, but it's a relatively weak GHG. For every doubling of CO2 the theoretical surface temperature from simple physics is 1C. And even that ignores the convective currents which whisks heat away from the surface such that the entirety of all GHG's in the atmosphere only traps 44% of its theoretical surface temperature.

 

[Foxfyre]

IF you reduced speed of traffic in your way.
Poverty would ensue as people could not get to jobs as they have to now.
Ambulances and other necessary conveyances would increase mortality
IF you look up how those rates are defined they are defined by cost-benefit tradeoffs that mirror what you are trying to do. Current rates are better than your solution, which does not save lives. at those speeds you have increased pollution, increased road rage (who can doubt that) and probably such an increase in bikes that car sales would plummet and we would be in a depression.

Which is of course why 99.9% of people, at least those capable of critical thinking, logic and reason, would see that as a totally impractical solution to the problem of deadly/injurious traffic accidents.

The author of the quoted piece suggests that the current proposed 'solutions' to climate change are just as impractical with just as harmful outcomes.

So far you are the person who actually is getting close to discussing that concept.

I despair sometimes that we will return to a world where we can actually discuss the pros and cons of something without dragging ideology, partisanship, attack the other person into it. When did we become a society incapable of abstract/critical thinking?

 

[ding]

If we do not have enough CO2 in air we freeze and too much we cook.

The simple physics of radiative forcing says otherwise. Prior to the industrial revolution CO2 was a function of temperature. As the ocean warmed, CO2 was released. As the ocean cooled, CO2 was absorbed. 94% of the earth's CO2 is stored in the ocean. After the industrial revolution CO2 was primarily a function of emissions and not temperature. So the correlation between CO2 and temperature is broken with CO2 only contributing 1C per doubling of CO2 which is not much.

 

[ding]

For millions of years nature maintained the level of CO2 in the atmosphere. Volcanic eruptions, wild fires and decay of organic matter increased CO2 levels. Plants, trees, algae in the ocean turn CO2 into oxygen through photosynthesis and the ocean itself absorbs and stores CO2. For millions of years, nature maintain the level of CO2 then man entered the picture burning fossil fuel which produced ever increasing amounts of CO2 while destroying nearly 1/3 of the world's forests.

Yes, but deforestation and urbanization are bigger impacts to the planet than an incremental 120 ppm of atmospheric CO2.

 

[ding]

Any balanced view of climate change starts with the fact that human activity is almost completely responsible-- if not completely -- for the current, rapid, observed global warming and accompanying changes to the climate.

Otherwise it's just a balanced view of the inside of your own colon.

Why? The geologic record is littered with warming and cooling trends not caused by CO2. It's literally filthy with them and their frequency and magnitude increased when the planet transitioned from a greenhouse planet to an icehouse planet. The current landmass distribution and ocean heat circulation is what is driving the planet's climate. The vast majority of heat is stored in the oceans and not the atmosphere.

 

[Flopper]

Yes, but deforestation and urbanization are bigger impacts to the planet than an incremental 120 ppm of atmospheric CO2.

I believe the massive deforestation that’s occurred over the last two hundred years is slowly ending but the burning of fossil fuel is going to take just as long.

 

[Fort Fun Indiana]

Why

All of the evidence. All of it. The scientific community actually gets together periodically and reports on it all.

 

[ding]

All of the evidence. All of it. The scientific community actually gets together periodically and reports on it all.

You mean the evidence that shows a warming trend in an interglacial period that is still warming up to its pre-glacial temperature like it has been doing for the past 3 million years?

 

[Fort Fun Indiana]

You mean the evidence that shows a warming trend in an interglacial period that is still warming up to its pre-glacial temperature like it has been doing for the past 3 million years?

Don't feed the sealions.

Or the uneducated slobs who copy paste blogs and think they outsmarted the scientific community.

 

[ding]

Don't feed the sealions.

Or the uneducated slobs who copy paste blogs and think they outsmarted the scientific community.

Have you ever checked the oxygen isotope curve to see what the temperature threshold is for extensive continental glaciation?

 

[ding]

Don't feed the sealions.

Or the uneducated slobs who copy paste blogs and think they outsmarted the scientific community.

Have you looked into possible causes for the D-O events which saw 5C temperature swings - up and down - over a few decades?