We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Climategate ten years on. Remember “Climategate”? There has been a TV show made about it. Lucy Mangan of the Guardian gives it four stars:
Climategate: Science of a Scandal review – the hack that cursed our planet
In 2009, a vicious attack was launched against groups fighting global warming. Scientists still can’t get over the death threats. And the world is on fire.
I dunno. As I always say whenever I post about these matters, I am willing to believe in global warming caused in significant part by man. But ten years after Climategate cursed the world and set it on fire you would have expected more of a… temperature rise.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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I’ll summarize Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) – mostly for myself; I have a few hard-core relatives whom I’ll likely encounter over Christmas, and I’m marshalling my facts. I’ll freeze them out, or leave. Those of you who can correct these figures, PLEASE do so; I want to be unchallengeable – my tiny remaining amount of sanity is at stake.
The atmosphere is 79-ish% nitrogen, 19-ish% oxygen and less than two percent other, including greenhouse gases. Mentioning at the start; Earth is outside the Sun’s water band, and if not for greenhouse gases, our little blue-green planet would be a little white planet. So hurrah for greenhouse gases, I guess. The above percentages from SCUBA training; sub-aqua for Britons in the audience. The rest of the numbers (unless indicated) are from an article out of WattsUpWithThat, “Monckton’s Schenectady Showdown”. Several of my ‘friends’ despise Monckton; as I say to them, please argue with what he says, not the man, and none of them have so far (other than to say that they don’t believe him, of course).
CO2 is 0.4% – i.e., 0.4 of one percent, or four-thousandths of the total atmospheric gases. CO2 is ~3.5% of all greenhouse gases, of which the majority is water vapour – I believe I saw 68% somewhere, but this number is widely variable considering where you are and what’s happening overhead at the moment. I imagine that it’s higher in India during the monsoon, and lower in the Atacama desert. Methane is billed as a big player, but I recall 35% of methane is termite farts so we’ll leave methane at that.
So. CO2 is 0.4% of all atmospheric gases. Of that four-thousandths, humans contribute ~3.5% – few alarmists are prepared to believe this, so please verify it for yourselves. So the total of anthropogenic CO2 is 0.004 x 0.035, which works-out (I worked it out today) to 0.00014% of all the gases in the atmosphere. CAGW alarmists stoutly maintain that CO2 has an outsized effect on CAGW, and that a little goes a long way, but they’ve been singularly unsuccessful proving it – if they had, I’m sure we would’ve heard.
It gets better. Monckton mentions the Australian experience – he says that they’re all about the same, and he chose the Australian case because he was time-limited in the talk, and had to settle-on one example. Australia brought-in a carbon tax, with the stated intent of reducing Australia’s CO2 emissions by 5% between 2011 and 2020. But Australians only contribute 1.2% of the anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere; Monckton did the math, and says that over the life of the program, if it succeeded in reducing all of the 5% from the start of the program in 2011, it would reduce global temperatures by 0.000085 of a degree celsius, at an all-in cost to the taxpayer of $130 billion Australian dollars.
In sum, an affordable program will be ineffective – an effective program will be unaffordable. Which ties-in to the U.N. I.P.C.C. telling us it wants $122 trillion to save the Earth, to be provided by a $245-a-gallon tax on gasoline. And I haven’t even gotten-into arguments yet about whether CO2 is really the villain of the piece, or “nature’s best free fertilizer” as botanists call it.
Expected? Hell, yearned for.
When I woke up Tuesday morning, it was 7 degrees F. That’s -14 C for the rest of you. I’ve gotten stuck in snow twice this month. I had to cancel one planned trip because of 3′ of snow on the approach roads.
I’m already tired of winter. Next year, the desert!
(Minnesotans For Global Warming)
(I see they’re still going on about a “hack”. What rot. It was a leak.)
Y, the numbers you’ve got there are right in the broad strokes, but wrong in important details.
1) Water vapour is a major greenhouse gas, but the amount of it in the air is almost entirely a function of temperature, because the planet is so wet and water is so prone to evaporation. For these purposes, it’s better thought of as a feedback loop on the more persistent gases, not a GHG in its own right, even if it does provide a majority of the warming effect.
2) Human carbon emissions are a small percentage of the gross amount released annually, but the annual gross amount is almost entirely the natural cycle of plants growing and dying, often seasonally. The net carbon in the atmosphere is basically unchanged from that. While the human emissions are fairly small compared to that, they aren’t sucked up by annual growth in the same way – they’re new carbon, which doesn’t have a corresponding sink. As a result, global CO2 has gone from about 280 ppm before industrialization to about 400 ppm now. That’s a fairly meaningful jump. And that much is obviously anthropogenic – there’s no plausible alternative explanation.
3) While carbon taxes are sometimes stupid, a properly designed carbon tax (i.e., one that offsets other taxes, instead of being a government slush fund) has no net cost to the taxpayer. The effects are small, especially in any one country that isn’t the US/China/India, but the costs are also quite small. Providing anti-pollution incentives at a low net cost is a good call, IMO. Would that all government “fixes” were as simple as raising one tax, cutting another, and declaring mission accomplished. (And as a side note, one of the reasons I like a carbon tax is that it will not be “effective” as the far left defines the term. It won’t fundamentally remake the economy, it’ll just adjust a few things on the margins. I wouldn’t want any plan that fundamentally remade the economy, so avoiding it is a plus in my books.)
Catching them altering temperature records all over the world was pretty much the final nail in the coffin for me. They were corrupt, dishonest and they knew the data didn’t support their claims, so they changed it at the source with an expectation that no one would think to drive out to weather stations to look at 50 year old books. Well, people did. Until someone comes forward and admits past dishonesty, corrects the record and shows what it really is, nothing they say should be given any benefit of any doubt.
“That’s a fairly meaningful jump. And that much is obviously anthropogenic – there’s no plausible alternative explanation.”
I’m not sure that is correct, I don’t think that the CO2 cycle is well enough understood to be able to make that statement. Also, the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere has varied in the distant past and has gone up following temperature rises.
Regarding water vapour. The alarmists have only been able to get their doomsday scenarios up and running by claiming that there will be some kind of positive feedback loop in play. If there really were such a thing, the global temperature would be wildly unstable and would have spiralled off into thermageddon already. It seems far more likely that there is a negative feedback effect due to cloud cover increasing when temperatures go up.
Lastly, if more CO2 in the atmosphere causes temperatures to rise, then why doesn’t it? The complete lack of correlation between CO2 levels and temperatures is now too obvious to ignore. As Mr. Black says, the alarmists have had to stoop to falsifying data in order to hide this simple fact. If, as it appears, the Earth is entering a cooling phase, this fraud will become completely self evident.
“….I am willing to believe in global warming caused in significant part by man”.
What caused the global warming which ended the last ice age? I believe that Neanderthal’s overuse of diesel engines has been discounted.
Gas solubility in water decreases as temperature increases (the opposite of solid solubility), so we would expect an increase in temperature to lead to (previously dissolved) carbon dioxide being released from the oceans.
The point here is that on the basis of computer models – AND NOTHING OTHER THAN COMPUTER MODELS – which have, time and again over the last 30 years or so – SHOWN THAT LONG TERM PREDICTIONS BASED ON THEM ARE ESSENTIALLY MEANINGLESS – we have a completely manufactured “crisis” which is being used as the rationale (for want of a better word) for remoulding the world in its entirety.
In the west (nobody else seems to be paying any attention other than to see what they can grab for nomenklatura gain) we have:
“Renewables” – obviously and demonstrably incapable of supplying meaningful and reliable POWER – in vaguely useful amounts (please don’t say hydro, that is a reliable source of power which is why it’s been used for electricity generation since C19. Everybody knows what “renewables” are in this context).
The mass hyping of milk floats, probably the stupidest idea in transport since (admittedly it was a atory) Domingo Gonsales flew to the moon in a chariot towed by geese (probably more practical than charging tens of millions of milk floats with windmills and solar panels though!)
The fantasy of a “zero carbon” economy by (enter year of choice) which will be perfectly capable of providing millions of wanky overpaid non-jobs for the desperately intelligent and important who actually believe all this cockpit.
I could could on but I think you get the picture.
And the less said about “carbon trading” the better!
All of this phantamagorical “green” nonsense prevents genuine problems being solved, or often even identified. Just try saying “you know nuclear power really isn’t that bad” or ” petrol really a fantastic and convenient fuel” to a “green”.
The “science” behind the CAGW meme was always rather specious, but now we are asked to believe the man-made CO2 increases the greenhouse effect, thereby causing the colder climate; a contradiction increasingly hard to hide – despite their best efforts to falsify the historic temperature records, and label the unchanged space-measurements as ‘a pause’.
Events are catching up with the scam, and time is running out. Hence the increased desperation to declare “an emergency”. Indeed, there is an emergency, in a year or two no one but the insane & corrupt will believe this CAGW story any more, and the money-grubbers will need to find a new trough.
We should perhaps hold a lottery on what the new-age religion to replace CAGW will be.
It needs to include Western self-hatred, survivor guilt, and Marxism.
Anyone care to punt a suggestion?
We are dealing with a religion. That explains the sort of crap in the Guardian.
Never mind the “models”. It is all pure Marxist shite designed to promote socialist takeover and tyranny because otherwise “WE’LL ALL BE DED IN 10 YEARS!!!!!!!
Bullshit. Time to start punishing and taking down eco-freak and leftist organisations.
Alsadius: “you’ve got there are right in the broad strokes, but wrong in important details. ….. Human carbon emissions are a small percentage of the gross amount released annually, ”
If we are going to be pedantic, can we at least say ‘Carbon Dioxide emissions’, please?
Alsadius: … “they’re new carbon,”
Self evidently wrong. The ‘carbon’ as you insist on calling it, originates with the carbohydrates and proteins we’ve consumed, the ‘new carbon’ is nothing of the sort, since no new Carbon has been created since around the time of the Big Bang, 14b years ago. If you subscribe to that particular hypothesis.
Presumably you mean additional ‘carbon’ dioxide released into the atmosphere as a result of industrial processes?
But I guess my question is this*. The planet is in a vacuum and half of it spends half of its time facing away from its only source of energy. Clearly for several billion years the planet has been in a rough equilibrium, the amount of heat arriving onto the surface of the planet on the day side is equal to the amount of heat radiated away from the planet on its night side.
Mars for example, with a much thinner atmosphere but much higher Carbon Dioxide (~95%) content, doesn’t have a runaway greenhouse effect. And in fact is much colder (-120C – +20C) than good old Terra firma. One might postulate that Carbon Dioxide has no impact on planetary temperature at all.
From a superficial view point, one might even say that it must be Nitrogen that moderates the Earth’s atmosphere. Since the more extreme temperature range on Mars is not moderated by the 2% of Nitrogen nor the 95% of Carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere compared to the 80% Nitrogen we have in the Earth’s atmosphere.
Further, Nitrogen plays as important a role in supporting the carbon cycle and both are critical for living creatures. Here, Mars is deficient in Nitrogen by comparison to the Earth.
*What evidence is there that Carbon Dioxide has any impact on Earth’s atmospheric temperature at all?
Mr Ecks: “It is all pure Marxist shite designed to promote socialist takeover and tyranny because otherwise “WE’LL ALL BE DED IN 10 YEARS!!!!!!!”
And if they succeed in their takeover, we’ll all be dead in ten years!
Oh! And ‘the green house effect’ is not a result of elevated levels of Carbon Dioxide within the greenhouse ( frequently deliberately introduced to promote plant growth ), but of the glass glazing of the Green house.
In sum, an affordable program will be ineffective – an effective program will be unaffordable.
FALSE. It’s worse than that.
There ain’t any program, affordable or not, for reducing CO2 emissions in any significant way.
Windmills and solar panels are just an illusion, their energy production is next to nothing.
An arbitrary ban on fossil fuel energy will lead to immediate civilization collapse. Our civilization cannot survive without energy.
(I see they’re still going on about a “hack”. What rot. It was a leak.)
You haven’t got the message.
When you publish our secrets it’s a hack, when you publish theirs it’s a patriotic leak.
For the record, Earth’s latest interstadial remission, her 12,250-year Holocene Interglacial Epoch that began c. 14,400 YBP, ended 12,250 + 3,500 – 14,400 = AD 1350 (Roman calendar, adjusted for the 1,500-year Younger Dryas “cold shock” from 11,950 – 10,450 YBP). In context, this coincided with the end of Earth’s Medieval Warm, driven by Kamchatka’s strato-volcano Kambalny Eruption, a 70-year Grand Solar Minimum similar to that of 1645 – 1715, and a 500-year Little Ice Age crashing global temperatures through AD 1850/1890.
Combined with continental plate-tectonic dispositions, galactic Cosmic Radiation penetrating our system’s Solar Magnetic Field, episodic Magnetic Pole reversals corrolating with Earth’s long-term axial-precession/orbital Milankovich Cycles affect global temperatures via fluctuating total solar irradiance (TSI). With periodic sunspot maxima and minima, these astro-geophysical climate determinants constitute a chaotic/fractal, random-recursive, complex dynamic system impossible to foresee in near-term detail.
Meantime, in December 2017 Australian researcher Robert Holmes published his peer-reviewed “Mean Molar Mass version of the Ideal Gas Law” whereby any planet’s Global Atmospheric Surface Temperature GAST = PM/Rp, ie. GAST with zero error-margin reflects Atmospheric Pressure P times Mean Molar Mass M over a world’s Gas Constant R times Atmospheric Density p. Confirmed by Finnish researchers in July 2019, since CO2 is a benign trace-gas present in only 420 ppm (.042%), absent from Holmes’ equation altogether, this so-called “greenhouse gas” can have no global warming consequences whatsoever.
we have a completely manufactured “crisis” which is being used as the rationale (for want of a better word) for remoulding the world in its entirety.
NO, not remoulding. Destroying. Destroying human civilization and the Human species which pollutes this Earth.
a properly designed carbon tax (i.e., one that offsets other taxes, instead of being a government slush fund) has no net cost to the taxpayer.
And how do you implement a “properly designed” carbon tax? Since it won’t be you implementing it but the usual suspects, chances are it won’t be “properly designed”. Or, rather, it will be “properly designed” from their point of view – more money for the government.
But, this is beside the point.
A carbon tax doesn’t produce energy. It’s just a tax. Taxes (properly designed or not) don’t create what is physically impossible or unknown – namely – “clean” sources of energy. Since economists don’t understand physics they tend to think that tax (their favorite tool) can do what physics hasn’t done.
You seem to accept the basic idea of the green nuts: that there exists “green” energy and “black” energy, and they are interchangeable, and the problem is how to transition from the second to the first.
This is totally false. Green energy is an illusion.
“a properly designed carbon tax (i.e., one that offsets other taxes, instead of being a government slush fund) has no net cost to the taxpayer” – please, Alsadius, surely you know more of governments than that.
As I mentioned, I didn’t go into whether increased CO2 was / was not harmful; I don’t believe it is, and the Earth is greening as we speak, which both suggests it isn’t and questions your ‘new carbon’ suggestion – how does the planet distinguish between ‘old carbon’ and ‘new carbon’, so as not to permit any ‘new carbon’ into established sinks? With the Earth greening, I’d suggest the planet’s flora is happily soaking it up, just as botanists say it will. And Stonyground, Willis Eschenbach – a REAL PhD climate scientist, btw – has identified just such a cloud feedback loop over the Pacific on hot days; you can find his work in WattsUpWithThat.
And Alsadius, your statement at the top is exactly what the government of Canada is saying to us – that our carbon tax is ‘revenue-neutral’, and we’ll even get more money back than we put in. I call bull$hit on them. I have relatives in Ottawa, the nation’s capital – a crummy place, very cold in winter (it had the dubious distinction of world’s coldest national capital last winter) – and more to the point, chock-full of great big government buildings, all full-to-the-rafters with highly paid civil servants; they’ve got to be highly-paid to afford to live in Ottawa. Our carbon tax is paying their salaries and office space – and Parkinson described with cutting accuracy how civil bureaux hunger for power, expand at any opportunity, and soak-up all public monies within their purview; they’re enormously expensive, so how can they ever be revenue-neutral? I postulate from this that the Canadian Carbon Tax Reimbursement Programme (or whatever they call it) will be an enormous sink in its own right, for carbon tax revenues; and I’d be willing to bet a decent sum that I never, ever see a rebate cheque for my carbon tax paid – indeed, I confidently expect it to only increase.
And there’s powerful evidence to that effect already. Our Environment Minister, Katherine McKenna (a.k.a. “Climate Barbie”), whose clownishness in office is exceeded only by our Prime Minister’s, posted a new government website during our recent election campaign, showing Climate Change in Canada. Her projections and data were entirely from models – and she omitted more than 100 years’ actual Canadian climate data, data which included our highest recorded temperatures. Why would she do that? – well, she’s said that she’ll be using this website to pencil-in future increases to the carbon tax.
Anybody can see where this is going.
I stopped worrying about this issue when I saw a graph out of Huntsville showing global temps 1998-2014. The trend was flat. Not going up. No global warming. So, yeah, now it’s a religion, absent new contrary data.
I think this was the graph, or close: https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/clip_image00210.png
“Those of you who can correct these figures, PLEASE do so; I want to be unchallengeable – my tiny remaining amount of sanity is at stake.”
OK, talking about greenhouse effect physics is the wrong place to start. You quickly get bogged down in technicalities, the detailed physics is quite complex and difficult to explain succinctly, and it’s not a particularly strong argument.
The basic position of scientific sceptics like Richard Lindzen, Judith Curry, Nic Lewis, Steve McIntyre, Andrew Montford, Anthony Watts, and so on is that the rise CO2 is very probably (although not certainly) anthropogenic, that the basic greenhouse effect is valid and well-established physics and should on it’s own raise temperatures about 1.2 C for every doubling of CO2, but this is multiplied by a very-much-unknown number to account for feedbacks, and it’s this multiplier that is where the scientific argument is centred. The climate models think it’s about 3. Nic Lewis, using the climate scientists own data and methods, has empirically measured it to be about 1, and got that published. The argument isn’t about the greenhouse effect itself, it’s about the feedbacks.
On the question of whether a change in climate has been observed, and attributed to anthropogenic CO2, the correct answer is “We don’t know”. We haven’t been measuring the temperature at a *global* scale for very long, probably only since the 1940s, and what data we have is *extremely* flaky, and the signal we’re trying to measure is tiny, and buried under a ton of random ‘weather’ noise, we don’t actually know what the distribution of the normal background weather is that precisely, so we can’t tell for sure whether the variations we see are natural or not. There are all sorts of complicated statistical issues around the question. Climate data has a property called ‘autocorrelation’, which means that a lot of simple textbook tests and methods don’t work on it, and when you apply heavyweight statistical methods like Box-Jenkins ARIMA models, they start talking about ‘unit roots’ and ‘cointegrated random variables’ and stuff, and that’s just impossible to explain to your relatives after the third glass of port. The summary version of it is that the temperature appears to behave a lot like a ‘random walk’. The temperature this year is equal to the temperature last year plus a random value representing the amount of heat that has entered or left the climate system over the year. It’s a cumulative total. And if you look at a plot of a random walk you see that if you take any short section of it you get what look like rising and falling trends, but they’re spurious. There’s no actual change in the average. We know that it can’t actually be a random walk precisely, in the long run it does get pushed back towards an average. But it appears that on the scale of the changes observed, that ‘long run’ is longer than a century, which is more data than we have, so the statistical methods are saying they don’t have enough data to identify what it is doing.
However, that’s not really a debate you want to get into unless your family contains a lot of mathematicians!
For an easy-to-understand discussion for the layman, I would suggest starting with the HARRY_READ_ME.txt file, that came out in Climategate. This is understood to be the private log of Ian ‘Harry’ Harris, a researcher at CRU, who was responsible for updating the CRU’s “flagship” climate database called CRU TS 2.1 having taken it over from some other researchers there. The database has been published in the peer-reviewed literature (Mitchell and Jones 2005), and the data used in climate studies, and cited in the IPCC reports.
Here’s an extract:
Amazing, huh?
It’s quite easy, even for a non-coder, to see that this is not how ‘Software For The Mission To Save The World From Planetary Catastrophe’ should be written! Not even CRU are able to replicate the data. Well, bad code happens. But the thing to emphasise is that Nobody Noticed! The quality crew at CRU didn’t notice. The journal it was published in didn’t notice. The global climate science community didn’t notice. The IPCC didn’t notice. And even after the news came out, nobody said or did anything about it. This is considered ‘normal’ in climate science. I’ve even seen people get papers published after Climategate happened using this data!
Not only that, but it’s a hell of a good read! Harry had a good sense of humour.
The other document you need to get is the book ‘The Hockeystick Illusion’ by Andrew Montford. It tells the full history of how Michael Mann’s Hockeystick graph got slowly taken apart and utterly debunked, explaining the science in layman’s terms. It’s also a very good read, and makes an excellent Christmas present! (But if you do, you can expect to get lots of ugly socks next year.) It’s an essential read if you want to get into debating climate.
“Mars for example, with a much thinner atmosphere but much higher Carbon Dioxide (~95%) content, doesn’t have a runaway greenhouse effect.”
Given the physics of the greenhouse effect, you wouldn’t expect one.
The greenhouse effect is caused by the average altitude of IR emission to space being above the solid surface, combined with the adiabatic lapse rate resulting from compression arising from vertical circulation. In a thin atmosphere like that on Mars, the top of the atmosphere is much nearer the surface than on Earth, so the effect is less.
See here for lots more discussion.
“And how do you implement a “properly designed” carbon tax?”
You don’t. Markets deal with investment today in the face of uncertainty about the future by using a futures market. You need a climate futures market, in which you trade financial instruments whose value depends on what happens to the climate in future.
For example, suppose you issue a negotiable bond that pays out 10%/yr on the day that sea level rise passes one metre, but becomes void in the year 2100. How much is it worth today? Well, if you believe, it’s worth about 10%/yr, and if you don’t believe, it’s worth nothing. You can sell other bonds that work vice versa. So on anything where the two sides disagree about the price, you can pay for it in climate bonds and keep both sides happy.
Whoever turns out to be wrong about climate change then pays the price for all the action taken.
The problem, I suspect, is that if anyone actually issued one, it would reveal to the world exactly how much all the various parties really and truly believe in it. (Which we already know, from the fact that Climate Scientists are perfectly prepared to fly to Bali for their climate conference…)
Recommended reading?
After you’ve read ‘The Hockeystick Illusion’ by Andrew Montford:
“A Disgrace to the Profession” by Mark Steyn and Josh.
The world’s climate scientists – in their own words – on Michael Mann and his hockey stick.
My favourite part of the ‘The Hockeystick Illusion’ was reading how Mann & Co took the absolute values of any changes. So *decreases* in temperature (negative values) magically became positive values – which *proved* the model was true and accurate.
I wonder what became of Ian ‘Harry’ Harris? Too honest for his own good perhaps.
If manipulations like these were done with clinical trials or financial data, the miscreants would have been convicted of fraud and/or embezzlement and locked-up a long time ago.
“The data doesn’t matter. We’re not basing our recommendations on the data. We’re basing them on the climate models.”
– Prof. Chris Folland, Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research
“The models are convenient fictions that provide something very useful.”
– Dr David Frame, climate modeler, Oxford University
“What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multi-decadal natural fluctuation? They’ll kill us probably…”
– Kevin Trenberth, a lead author of the 2001 and 2007 IPCC Scientific Assessment of Climate Change
– And the answer, Bobby b, is just what they’ve actually done – “Don’t tell anybody!” It’s been astoundingly successful.
Unfortunately.
And thank you, Nullius, I’ll follow your suggestions. My goal in attacking them from that direction is to show them how little CO2 there is to change, and how much any serious effort to change it will cost them. No, we’re definitely not mathematicians – and we’re all wedded to our buffoonishly uninformed opinions, and deeply in love with them…
From my own observations and to paint a broader picture; people who believe we are destroying the planet think that nature is fragile,finely tuned and balanced. I tend to think it is fairly robust and works in overlapping cycles poorly understood. To see how quickly volcano slopes recover from being covered in molten lava; plants and animals surviving in the most unviable places; even the deep water horizon spill recovered quicker than most people thought through the discovery of oil devouring bacteria.
To me, it reeks of hubris to believe we can control every aspect of such powerful forces.
Pedantic correction, not relevant to the main points of this thread:
– no Carbon was created in the Big Bang
– burning (fusion) in stars is believed to create carbon
– the solar system was made from remnants of one or more first generation stars, therefore has carbon. If we were not living on the site of a nuclear disaster, no life (no life as we known it 🙂 ) could be.
These statements are based on complex theories verified by subtle interpretations of measurements of distant phenomena, so are potentially subject to later correction even if I have correctly stated the current latest scientific assessment.
If the Grauniad likes it then I fear this film may be the climategate equivalent of the Robert Redford rathergate film that reinterpreted the transparent lies of Dan Rather and friends as a noble pursuit of truth, on whose accidental derailing at the hands of a cruel fate the ‘Republicans pounced’.
In climategate reality, a lawful freedom of information act was denied by blatantly specious excuses of academics who in private had emailed each other about the need to delete some (other) embarrassing emails. The archive to answer the request, which due diligence on the part of an IT maintainer had caused to be created when the request arrived, was put into the public domain almost immediately after the academics presented their specious explanation of why it would be denied, in accord with that section of the UK Freedom-of-Information law which specifies such a release may be done by an employee who has reason to anticipate deletion of FOI-requested information.
Rewriting history in the minds of the young by making a film ‘based on real events’ is PC SOP.
CO2 is 0.4% – i.e., 0.4 of one percent, or four-thousandths of the total atmospheric gases.
Y Knott,
I’m surprised no-one spotted this. You’re an order of magnitude out. CO2 is about 400 parts per million, so about 0.04%.
This is a joke, yes? 😆
“no new Carbon has been created since around the time of the Big Bang, 14b years ago. […] Pedantic correction, not relevant to the main points of this thread”
Well, if we’re allowed to be pedantic 🙂 , Carbon-14 (the stuff they use for carbon-dating organic archaological finds) has a half-life of 5730 years, so very little of it would last billions of years. It’s produced by cosmic rays slamming into Nitrogen atoms in the upper atmosphere and turning them into Carbon atoms. So there are detectable amounts being made on Earth right now.
And of course there are stars up there burning right now, making carbon.
Not relevant to the discussion, but I thought it might be interesting.
“I’m surprised no-one spotted this. You’re an order of magnitude out.”
Thank you very much, Silverite – amended! So CO2 is now four TEN-thousandths of the atmosphere, and anthropogenic CO2 is 0.035 of 0.0004, or 0.000014, vice 0.00014 – even better! And it now has as many decimal places as the temperature decrease brought-about by Australia’s carbon tax, so it’ll be that much easier to remember.
“Floor, meet relatives” – err, isn’t that the purpose of getting together at Christmas anyway? I seem to recall that’s always how Christmas at my house ends-up; only, usually by using one’s mouth for another activity than talking…
Climategate revealed what a shoddy lot some climate scientists were, and what shonky data and disgraceful attitudes they had. Here is a piece which gives good insight into this with many illustrative examples:
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2019/11/ten-years-after-climategate/#
As that piece notes, there were several superficial ‘inquiries’ after the event to try to exonerate the bad players, but they are not convincing.
As for arguments with others, Nullius has good advice above. But in a nutshell, the doubling of CO2 levels would be wonderful for plant life (and so us as well), and a direct, all else being equal, impact on the notional global mean temp of around 1C. Getting much higher temp rises than that calls for much hand-waving, much in the way of implausible positive feedbacks (remember the geological record shows periods of far, far higher CO2 levels without any breakaway events that positive feedback would lead to), and of course much use of that new resort for rascals, computer models.
“Thank you very much, Silverite – amended! So CO2 is now four TEN-thousandths of the atmosphere, and anthropogenic CO2 is 0.035 of 0.0004, or 0.000014, vice 0.00014 – even better!”
Mmm. So suppose one of your relatives replies: “Skimmed milk is about 0.3% fat. Dilute it by a factor of 10. Even in a cup of coffee, you can still see it turn white. Now imagine that the whole atmosphere looked as opaque as this. Do you think you would be able to see through 10 km thickness of that foggy mix?” How would you reply?
It’s a tricky argument to sustain. And the bit about only 3.5% of it being anthropogenic is blatant cheating!
The thing which stuck with me was the complete despair and contempt which came through in the ‘readme’ document, written as standard practice by the computer guys who had to try and make sense of the way in which the unit had ‘constructed’ its global temperature time series. A cascade of elementary dodges and errors utterly imcompatible with serious science, statistical competence, or even bottom-line honesty.
No-one who read that ‘readme’ document could harbour any illusions that the ‘climate science’ occupation has historically had any plausible or useful expertise.
“… without any breakaway events that positive feedback would lead to …”
There are several different definitions of “positive feedback”, and I think you’re thinking of the wrong one.
You start off with a rise in temperature by T. This causes more water to evaporate, which raises temperature an additional f*T. That new warming causes *more* water to evaporate, raising temperature by another f*f*T. And so on.
The total temperature rise from all the contributions is T + f * T + f^2 * T + f^3 * T + f^4 * T + … which is T/(1-f). (To see this, multiply the series above by (1-f).)
So long as f is less than 1, the series converges on a finite temperature increase. If f is about 2/3, then temperature rises get tripled by the feedback. If f is zero, they’re left unchanged.
Y. Knott: NiV and a few others walked me through this a few months back, and I found it a persuasive argument, and am more easily able to persuade others to “calm down” by using this. It doesn’t require hard maths, and so doesn’t lead to that glazed “you’re just baffling me with numbers, what, you think you know more than the scientists????” response.
It also doesn’t lead to that “yeah, well, of course you’ll deny it, since you’re so anti-government regulation” response that I’m sure we’re familiar with.
The argument, as I use it, is basically “No, I’m not denying climate change is a thing. On the contrary, as far as I’ve been able to work out, it absolutely is a thing. The bit that no-one’s sure of is how severe it is – that’s what people are trying to work out, and it’s bloody difficult – I can’t even begin to get my head round it. It might be, but most likely not – and all of the worst case scenarios just haven’t come true, so I’m leaning towards not.
“So the reason I don’t jump on the bandwagon is that some of the proposed solutions have very, very bad consequences for developing nations, especially those reliant on exporting food products, and I’m not keen on imposing those sort of consequences on other people, especially poor developing 3rd world countries”
(dial up or down the appeal to emotion by invoking images of starving Peruvians/Ethiopians as appropriate to your family members)
It kinda short-cuts any “you’re arguing from bad faith” responses.
Nullius, your maths is impeccable, but my language was not.
‘Breakaway events’ is not well-defined, but I was thinking of excursions such as this one posited by one of more alarmed alarmist scientists of note, James Hansen who has talked of a ‘runaway greenhouse effect’ (see https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/jul/10/james-hansen-fossil-fuels-runaway-global-warming )
Or as claimed more recently by leading UN climate alarm promoters e.g. ‘“If we do not change course by 2020, we risk missing the point where we can avoid runaway climate change, with disastrous consequences for people and all the natural systems that sustain us,” Guterres warned. ‘
https://apnews.com/71ab1abf44c14605bf2dda29d6b5ebcc/UN-chief:-World-must-prevent-runaway-climate-change-by-2020
“And the bit about only 3.5% of it being anthropogenic is blatant cheating!”
Pretty sure that can’t be proven with any confidence; but it’s the number I’ve seen, lots of scientists are taking a real close look at it, and you’re always more positive in a ‘debate’ trotting-out a number they have to refute and don’t know anyways, than asking “What is it then?” and having to defend yourself against their spurious number, that they grabbed out of the ether to reinforce their view. And my reply to their skepticism is “Oh yeah, well prove me wrong, Fred!” At least, he’ll shut-up; at best, he’ll retire to his computer in the basement to look-up stats to try proving me wrong, get distracted by WoW (at least, we think that’s what he’s being distracted-by down there), and we won’t see him again for hours, by which time the topic will have irrevocably changed and everybody will be so sick of CAGW they’ll sandbag Fred if he tries to bring it up again.
“what, you think you know more than the scientists????”
– Oh my, I HOPE they go down this road! I HOPE they use the ‘scientists’ word on me! Cook’s infamous “97% consensus” is the pillar that underpins way, way too many alarmists’ worldview, it’s all you hear from CBC, the rest of the UNIFOR media, Gore, Suzuki and many, many others. Well, the statistics on that have been published and I know them; it’s been as thoroughly debunked as Mann’s hockey-stick graph. They go that way, I tell ’em they have no idea of the topic at all, then I trot-out the truth and the sources. At least, they’ll sit there glassy-eyed and reticent, and look to change the topic; at best, they’ll shut-up and we can get back to drinking.
And I should be proof against their “yeah, well, of course you’ll deny it, since you’re so anti-government regulation” by hitting them with actual numbers – they can refute the numbers or box themselves in because they can’t.
And I’ve got the statistics on the recent “11,000 scientists” exercise, too; including its most famous signatory, “Micky Mouse”. And the heavy, dolorous air the CBC announcer put on “11,000 SCI-EN-TISTS…” was delightfully pilloried by Ezra Levant. “Have you seen Rebel media on that 11,000 scientists?” “No I HATE Ezra Levant!” “Well argue with his facts, not me – you haven’t watched him so you have no idea what he – or I – or you – are talking about!”
Christmas get-togethers… As a good friend puts it, “Family – the original F-word!”
“Nullius, your maths is impeccable, but my language was not.
‘Breakaway events’ is not well-defined, but I was thinking of excursions such as this one posited by one of more alarmed alarmist scientists of note, James Hansen who has talked of a ‘runaway greenhouse effect’”
Oh, yes, I see. My apologies. I assumed that as I had just been talking about feedbacks, that we were still on the same subject. I misread what you meant. And I agree. The ‘Runaway Greenhouse’ nonsense makes even most of the actual climate scientists cringe.
“Pretty sure that can’t be proven with any confidence; but it’s the number I’ve seen, lots of scientists are taking a real close look at it, and you’re always more positive in a ‘debate’ trotting-out a number they have to refute and don’t know anyways, than asking “What is it then?””
This is a case of a number that is technically correct but grossly misleading.
Take a big water tank. An automatic system fills it up with 1000 gallons of water at the start of the day, and empties out 1000 gallons of water at the end of the day. At the start of each day, you add 10 gallons of dyed water. So after the first day the tank has 10 gallons sat in the bottom, after the next day 20 gallons, after the third day 30 gallons, and after 100 days there’s 1000 gallons left in the tank overnight. So now the automated system pours in another 1000 gallons, you pour in 10, making 2010, the automated system pours out 1000 gallons, leaving 1010 gallons, and so on.
How much of the 1000 gallons in the tank is water that you put there? Well at the start of the first day you add 10 gallons, the system adds a 1000, so about 1% of the total is yours. It all gets mixed up. Then when it pours out, 99% of the water you just added, mixed into the bulk, is poured out with it. There’s 10 gallons left in the tank. Are you seriously going to say that you only put 1% of it there? The next day, with 20 gallons in the tank, 1% of it is the water you added that morning, and 1% of 1% of it is water you added the previous day.
After 100 days, it’s diluted in half, so you’ve got 1/200 from this morning, 1/400 from yesterday, 1/800 from the day before, and so on. So it’s still about 1% yours in total.
Because all the water gets mixed up together, most of the water you add is poured out at the end of the day, and most of the water left in the tank was provided by the automated system. That’s a true statement. But that’s not the question. The question is: who is responsible for there being 1000 gallons more in the tank at the end of 100 days?
And yes, you can win a few hours respite from the argument while your relative goes and reads the internet. But when they’re done, they’re going to come back and spread the story of the dirty mathematical trick you just pulled!
Now, maybe that doesn’t bother you. You only have to survive Christmas! But in the long run it doesn’t help persuade anyone you’re right. And if you pulled a dirty trick in one part of the argument, they’ll likely assume the rest of your argument is just the same.
Stick to Harry’s readme. Then all the dirty tricks are going to be theirs.
On the subject of climate change being like a religion, I thought of that quote by Seneca.
“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.”
It goes without saying that the wise that are being referred to in this case are the Samizdata commentariat.
Nial Kilmartin: “– no Carbon was created in the Big Bang”
NiV: “If we’re allowed to be pedantic , Carbon-14 (the stuff they use for carbon-dating organic archaological finds) has a half-life of 5730 years, so very little of it would last billions of years. It’s produced by cosmic rays slamming into Nitrogen atoms in the upper atmosphere and turning them into Carbon atoms. So there are detectable amounts being made on Earth right now.”
Yes, thanks both. After posting it did occur to me to wonder how we had any carbon on the planet at all, let alone enough to mine and burn in a furnace. It’s the 14Carbon isotope that undergoes decay.
NiV: “You start off with a rise in temperature by T. This causes more water to evaporate, which raises temperature an additional f*T. That new warming causes *more* water to evaporate, raising temperature by another f*f*T. And so on.”
Which would be true in a closed system, but the earth isn’t a closed system. It radiates energy into space all the time. And in fact, there has been occasions when water vapour in the atmosphere has been know to solidify ( because it’s cold up there ) and fall to the ground.
@Y. Knott
So. CO2 is 0.4% of all atmospheric gases. Of that four-thousandths, humans contribute ~3.5% – few alarmists are prepared to believe this
FWIW, this is not a particularly good argument, as any scientist in your group of Christmas relatives would know.
If, for example, you had 0.000001% of Plutonium in your body you would be in for a very bad day, or if the air had a concentration of 0.1% mustard gas you’d quickly realize that small amounts of stuff can have very large effects.
When I was in high school they did an experiment where they ran a current through hydrochloric acid to show the gases forming at the electrodes. I saw the bubbles but didn’t believe it, so I decided to have a smell…. let me tell you a very low concentration of atmospheric Chlorine gas does not make for a pleasant day. I spent several hours choking and vomiting in the nurse’s office.
The better argument is simply: the world evidently isn’t getting hotter, and none of the dire predictions that have been made over and over and over again have ever come true. Ask your relatives what CAGW has actually successfully predicted. Then pull up wikipedia to show them that, no, there has not been a change in the number of hurricanes. I have actually looked and counted.
Notwithstanding what the “scientific consensus” is, the ultimate “scientific” consensus is whether the “Science” actually makes useful predictions. Whether the experiments actually work.[*].That is, after all, what science is for. And in this case, it simply doesn’t.
[*] Though there is a widely recognized exception to this rule — if a high school physics experiment doesn’t work, then Newton was still right….
Stonyground (November 15, 2019 at 6:18 pm), I think that was Gibbon in the 1700s, not Seneca in Roman times. In ‘The Decline and fall of the Roman Empire’, Gibbon wrote:
(Christianity was the exception, of course.)
“But in the long run it doesn’t help persuade anyone you’re right.”
Good heavens, you don’t think my ego is that out-of-control, do you? Convince my relatives of ANYTHING??? I will never convince them they’re wrong about global warming – it can’t be done, and the more data I lay at their feet the more firmly they’ll remain unconvinced. Humans are like that.
But what I will do is make them really uncomfortable; a central pillar of their world has been grabbed and shaken, violently; and they’ll be a little less sure of themselves, and a little more wary of crossing swords with me on this and other matters where I’m the old fart who’s once again, ‘not with the (leftist CAGW SJW &c &c) program’:
“Mom, would you believe Grampa still doesn’t believe in ___________ (fill-in the blanks)?” “Yes dear, but he can’t be convinced – and it’s better not to bring it up at the dinner table tonight…” And grandchild wanders-off, confused at mom’s hesitancy; can it be that mom is secretly a non-believer too? Which is very definitely not the case, mom has never questioned her belief in _______, she’s never even thought about it, it’s what all her friends have droned so endlessly it’s a part of her now – but grandkid has the weight of uncertainty on her head for the first time ever, and she just might.
And Nullius, I do not understand your point, nor what the gallons of water signify, nor how I am being deceptive about anything. There is a total % of CO2 in the atmosphere, and a sub-total % of that is human-emitted, and 3.5% is the number I saw and that’s one more number than they’ve ever bothered to learn, and researching it might just show them how hollow their case really is, which would be a win-win for all concerned – rather than their endless “global warming just IS, so shut-up!” And the % is rising steadily but very slowly, and has been much higher in the past, and is still 0.04 of a % and will eventually make 0.05, and our contribution is (or isn’t) 0.035 of that; is that significant?
“We don’t know”.
So tell me again Fred, only clearly and with relevant data this time; why are you at panic-stations about it? And disclose your sources; if they’re Mann or Cook or the Hadley CRU, I’ve got some more bad news for you.
“Which would be true in a closed system, but the earth isn’t a closed system. It radiates energy into space all the time.”
It’s true in an open system, too. 🙂
“And in fact, there has been occasions when water vapour in the atmosphere has been know to solidify ( because it’s cold up there ) and fall to the ground.”
I’m dreeeaaming of a whiiiite Christmasss…
Climate has been changing for four and a half billion years. It would be more of a concern if it stopped changing.
“The better argument is simply: the world evidently isn’t getting hotter”
This argument is a non-starter, for the simple reason that the UNIFOR Media, which they swear-by, is howling at volume-11 that it is, and that every passing year is “The Hottest Year EVAR”, with lots of bogus doctored stats from official government agencies to back them up. And wildfires in California, and the Arctic ice all melting, and the polar bears all dying, and Venice flooding, and the snows of Kilimanjaro all melting, and hurricanes in Florida and earthquakes in California and volcanic eruptions in Hawaii – these are all because of global warming and all PROOF of global warming and they know that for a fact because the nice lady on CBC SAID so!
How do you argue with that? I can dig through my references and disprove all their innuendo, line-by-tedious-line, and they can come right back with their own disproofs of my disproofs, and theirs are bogus and mine aren’t – but they say the same thing about mine. We’re way down in the “he-said-she-said’s” by now, and all I’m conveying to them is how tedious and unreasonable I am.
And all I’m proving to myself are how much I wish I was somewhere else, and how much I need another drink. Maybe I’ll just mail gifts this year…
I put off reading this comment thread because i did not expect to learn anything new, but i was wrong.
For now, though, let me just give some advice to Y.Knott (whose preferred pronouns i’d like to know, btw…) about dealing with disagreeing relatives.
My advice is not to get stuck on the facts, especially the numerical facts. Facts are boring; and besides, if you give facts to your opponents, they’ll question your sources.
NB: of course you should know the facts, well enough to feel confident: there is no point in defending a position which you do not know is worth defending. I am just saying, facts that convince you, are not going to convince more than a few percent of your opponents.
I am less confident about what alternative strategies you could use.
I believe that you should go to the meta-level: accuse them of being tools of the ruling class. Accuse them of arguing for giving more power to the State.
This strategy has the advantages that (a) you are stating the truth and (b) you are going to get them wrong-footed.
You’ll have plenty of time to think about that before Christmas.
That’s a big part of what convinced me too, along with their attempts to hide the Medieval and Roman Warm Periods.
I actually had a global warming advocate try to argue that adjusting data is a common practice as new evidence is gained. But that’s adjusting the conclusions. The raw data is always preserved in case techniques for analysis improve. This amounts to outright fraud.
What I would put as an inscription on a statue of Ludwig von Mises, Ecomonist.
Y. Knott (November 15, 2019 at 1:58 am), if your relatives’ imagine that everyone credits AGW except some ‘deniers’, you might communicate by telling them to read specific posts of Anthony Watts or Steve McIntyre and giving them the URLs. People who will not read, e.g. Andrew Montford’s book, might be persuaded to look at a blog-post or two. My point here is not just to make the specific point of e.g. “The Smoking Gun at Darwin Zero’ and suchlike selected posts you should have them examine. My point is that if you can get them to look, they might become aware, by scrolling up and down, that a huge corpus of sometimes demanding but always scientific work had been assembled by some hard-working people who make a poor fit to the PC science-denier stereotype.
“But what I will do is make them really uncomfortable; a central pillar of their world has been grabbed and shaken, violently”
How does that help? And why do you care?
If you don’t want to discuss it, refuse to discuss it. If you don’t care about convincing them, then there’s no point in putting forward any sort of argument. Simple disagreement won’t shake the pillars of their faith, they’ll just think you’re wrong. Just say you don’t agree. Say it’s not true. But you know they’re not going to change their minds, so there’s no point in discussing it. Then change the subject.
Or if they keep on bringing the green propaganda up, talking like everyone agreed, you can respond with quotes from the dire environmental predictions of the 1960s, and talk about how sad it was that the oil ran out and all the minerals ran out and everyone died two decades ago, like everyone agreed. Take the mickey. Don’t take it seriously. And don’t let it get to you more than it gets to them.
“There is a total % of CO2 in the atmosphere, and a sub-total % of that is human-emitted, and 3.5% is the number I saw and that’s one more number than they’ve ever bothered to learn, and researching it might just show them how hollow their case really is, which would be a win-win for all concerned”
That’s the problem. It would show them how hollow *your* case was. I presume that’s not the effect you’re after. You said above: “Those of you who can correct these figures, PLEASE do so; I want to be unchallengeable” Do you?
“And Nullius, I do not understand your point, nor what the gallons of water signify, nor how I am being deceptive about anything.”
The 3.5% figure is talking about something different, and something completely irrelevant, to the question they’re interested in, which is why CO2 has increased from 280 ppm to 415 ppm. (415-280)/415 = 33% of the CO2 in the atmosphere has been put there *as a result of* anthropogenic CO2 emissions. That does *not* mean that 33% of the CO2 molecules currently in the atmosphere came from fossil fuels. Only 3.5% of them do. But we don’t care about where the *specific* set of molecules currently there came from, we only care about the net *number* of molecules.
I’ll try a different analogy. Suppose we start with an atmosphere at 280 ppm and add another 135 ppm to it all in one go. Now 33% of the atmospheric CO2 is anthropogenic. The CO2 level is 415 ppm. Now wait a while. The CO2 in the air mixes with the CO2 in the oceans, so a lot of that 33% goes into the ocean. The CO2 level in the atmosphere is still 415 ppm, but now 20%, 10%, 5%, … is the specific CO2 you added. The rest is in the oceans. The atmospheric CO2 is still 48% higher than it was, because of you, but you’re trying to imply that because it’s mixing in a larger system, and has swapped places with non-anthropogenic CO2, that you’re somehow not responsible for increasing the level. That’s not so.
“How do you argue with that? I can dig through my references and disprove all their innuendo, line-by-tedious-line, and they can come right back with their own disproofs of my disproofs, and theirs are bogus and mine aren’t – but they say the same thing about mine. We’re way down in the “he-said-she-said’s” by now, and all I’m conveying to them is how tedious and unreasonable I am.”
It depends if you enjoy arguing. If you do, it doesn’t matter whether they’re convinced or not, you’re having fun. If you don’t, and you’re not achieving anything useful by convincing them either, there’s no point in doing it. All it’s doing is making you miserable.
Everyone is entitled to their own beliefs. That includes global warming believers, and non-believers, just as much as it does the religious. They have their beliefs, and you have yours, and it doesn’t matter because you’re family, and that’s important, and also you’re all good and tolerant people who can tolerate other people holding different beliefs to you. Ask them to treat it like you would if one of the granddaughters brought her Hindu boyfriend round for Christmas dinner. It wouldn’t be polite to harrass them about their beliefs and foreign ways. Present it like that, in terms of tolerance for differences, and try to subtly imply that they’re as-good-as-racists if they don’t accept that you’re as entitled to your beliefs as they are. Then shut up about it, and enjoy your Christmas!
Y. Knott (November 15, 2019 at 7:12 pm), I’d concentrate on the Arctic ice all melting, and the polar bears all dying, both of which were predicted long enough ago that the growth in polar bear numbers and the healthy survival of polar ice can be contrasted with past predictions. I’ll make the wild guess that these AGW believers have further motives to deny that California’s government – not least because it mistakes greenie hysteria for science – might have something to do with wildfires.
If living in the UK, your grandchild might be amused to learn that children born this millennium do not know what snow looks like. Circa 2015, the Independent hid its 2000 cover story on that, but the internet is forever.
For older relatives, just ask how many decadal cycles of “we have 10 years to save the world” they will hold out for before admitting it was rubbish, then subtract the two (or three, see below) that have already elapsed from whatever integer they state and suggest the topic be left till the first Christmas thereafter. If they question your confidence, point out, with quotes, that you’d have won already had it been 60s, 70s or 80s greenie “we’re doomed” predictions.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/07/29/a-brief-history-of-climate-panic-and-crisis-both-warming-and-cooling/
https://angusmac.net/2018/11/19/the-1970s-global-cooling-consensus-was-not-a-myth/
https://paradigmsanddemographics.blogspot.com/2019/04/earth-day-predictions-of-1970-reason.html
and of course some of the original stories are themselves still out there, e.g. this from 1989
https://apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0
assuring us we only have till the year 2000 if that.
Climate changes, get over it. TPTB rely upon the innate hubris of humankind to believe that our meagre existence influences the climate of our planet rather than cosmic radiation, ocean current variation over decades, centuries, perhaps millennia, variations in solar and planetary gravitation affecting our orbit, the wobbles (there are several) of the earth on its axis (ref Milankovic) and we haven’t even mentioned tectonic movement and the internal fluctuations in our own star which vary its energy emission.
In the Roman period temperatures (worldwide ) are now known to have been between one and two degrees higher than they are now (they had extensive vineyards in the north of England). The Medieval Warm Period was at least one degree warmer than present when the Vikings had extensive settlements in Greenland, the clue is in the name. These settlements died away in the Little Ice Age when worldwide temperatures decreased again. We all know (in the UK at least) about the ice fairs on the Thames, perhaps less well known is the fact that in 1658 Swedish king Charles Gustav invaded Denmark. Nothing unusual until you read that he marched his army and hauled his cannon across the frozen sea, a place where there is seldom any sea ice now. We have come out of the LIA which is why temperatures have risen through the industrial age, a rise which has slowed right down in the last decade.
Our world has been warmer than it is now for more than 90% of its life since water first appeared, indeed for over 90% of the Holocene (since the last ice age), yet it has at times been an ice ball with carbon dioxide levels at ten times the current value.
The global warming lie started by Gore et al, perpetuated by Obama who televised widely the “97% of scientists” myth, is now being used (as intended) to increase taxes, energy costs, poverty, and wealth of the top one percent, previous commenters have covered these points.
For the last million years our climate has cycled approximately every 110,000 years, ice ages lasting 100,000 years followed by inter-glacial periods of 10,000 to 15,000 years. The most recent 10,000 years of human civilisation during which we changed from hunter gatherer to settled development have occurred during the latest inter-glacial. Not a coincidence. However you measure it, this period is nearing its end and the next ice age (if there is to be one) will soon be upon us. Perhaps in 500 years, perhaps 2000, perhaps 5000, but our northern capitals might again be under a kilometre of ice. As we teeter on the edge of the next ice age the ecoloons will have us all back to stone age life, what chance then that our technology will evolve to be able to combat the effects of the next ice age.
All you really need is a good memory, a bit of age, and some knowledge of history. There have been prophecies of catastrophe for as long as we have good (or even fair) historical records. The remedy used to be “put the priests in charge, give them your money, do as they say, and abstain/scourge yourself”. These days, it’s “put the left in charge”. Everything else is the same.
I was there when they were frightening us with the coming Ice Age. Then we had Global Warming. But we didn’t get an Ice Age (yet), and the warming to date is less than impressive. So they went over to Climate Change and Chaotic Weather. It’s hard to falsify that.
The only true prophecy of catastrophe was the Y2K mess, though I believe the Unix clocks were scheduled to run out of time at 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038. These would have been real catastrophes if nothing were done – but changing year encoding to four digits instead of two fixed Y2K, and moving over to 64-bit computers will take care of Unix. When it’s possible to predict the exact second of the catastrophe, and explain how it will happen, that’s a different matter. Neither priests nor the left are needed.
I’m more worried about another Carrington Event than climate change. https://www.history.com/news/a-perfect-solar-superstorm-the-1859-carrington-event I wish the Great and Important would worry about that.
Ellen, thanks very much for the link. I was vaguely aware of the event, but of none of the details (including the date).
Mother Nature is not only averse to being fooled (remember the old Parkay Margarine ad? *g*) but is surely out to Mess Us Up. BAD Mother Nature!
Seriously, I am with you in worrying about that one. I wish more people were aware of the possible outcomes if the electrical grid went down over an area of some size, and couldn’t be brought back up for some time. The Carrington Event today would surely be a disaster. For instance, it seems to me that even the hospitals with their own generators would need to have a Faraday cage built around them.
The Mormons with their requirement to build up a year’s supply of food are not crazy. Even so, hospitals, medicine, transportation to same — horses I suppose….
.
So let me take this opportunity once again to encourage everyone to keep his important records and data in hardcopy. Yes, fires. But since for now we have a working electrical grid, we can keep backups locally on peripheral storage, and reprint as soon as we can.
P.S. The Year After by W. Forstchen is a disaster novel in which is told the story of how a small locale in the southern Appalachians had to make do without electricity. Turned to steam where they could, then re-invented basic electrical technology. Definitely a Conservatives’ book, not a great one but still very interesting. Liked it enough to read again.
HedzUp. Currently at the top of Watts Up With That is a feature by Judith Curry, “Legacy of Climategate – 10 years later.” Charles the Moderator says it’s hot stuff.
Haven’t read it yet, so now I’ll toddle off. :>)
This may have already been covered but, one critical point is the accuracy of estimated global temperature in the past; like say the Roman warming period or the Medieval warming period. They have to be “estimated” as lower than today because if they are the same as today (or higher) that would refute the man-made global warming hypotheses. If 500 + Giga-tons of CO2 added don’t make us warmer than those past warm periods the theory is in trouble. Also if direct temperature measurements from say the 70’s and 80’s had to be “adjusted” to make the reported warming hiatus of a few years ago go away what does that say about the accuracy of estimates of past global temp? Like the aforementioned Medieval & Roman warming? If you can’t trust direct measurements of only a few decades ago how can you possibly trust an indirect calculation of temps 1000 + yrs ago? Also I would love to hear from climate scientist(s) an answer to the following question; setting aside for the moment the issue of “cooked” earlier data, what percentage of the observed warming they claim is going on is caused by natural climate variation & what percentage is caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions? Don’t believe I have ever heard even an approximate breakdown; what is it 80:20, 60:40, 90:10, etc.?
@Tim – The temperatures of bygone eras are primarily measured by proxies such as analysis of tree rings and ice cores taken from Greenland and such places. As to their accuracy, I can’t say, but there is a lot of anecdotal evidence that both the Roman and Medieval period were warmer than today (growing grapes in Northern England for example).
As for whether the global warming over recent decades is “real” or not is debatable, largely because of patchy coverage of weather stations in places where you would really need them (i.e. most of the 3rd world), so they’ve had to guess what the temperature is at those places.
Equally, increased urbanisation means that at least some of the weather stations, originally located in relatively undeveloped parts have been surrounded by buildings causing localised temperature increases through the “urban heat island” effect. There are many more such examples where data has simply been made up or adjusted (not necessarily maliciously). The underlying data itself is at best hopelessly flawed and at worst fraudulent.
If your job is a climate researcher then your bias is inevitably going to be to support the argument that pays your mortgage. It’s a human failing that we are all subject to even if we try not to be influenced by it. So when you’re having to create or adjust data for weather stations which don’t exist then who wouldn’t err on the side of caution and assume that the temperature in the past was lower than the temperature in the present.
There is simply too much money and politics involved in the whole “climate industry”, money that wasn’t there before the IPCC decided to politicise what was previously a very marginal science.
The old joke was that politicians would find a way to tax air if they could. The whole CAGW scaremongering is a way to do exactly that.
“… that California’s government – not least because it mistakes greenie hysteria for science – might have something to do with wildfires…”
I regret to admit that I derive great amusement, and not just from my own relatives either, about one very popular CAGW alarmist stance. It’s now commonly accepted that politicians lie all the time about everything, and the only thing you can believe from a politician is that he’s lying. The next big stretch to people’s credulity, one that is stretching naturally even in my relatives, is that so does the Press. This one has been a challenge for them – they still take CBC as gospel, even my workmates do.
“So tell me then, Fred – you accept that the Press is lying to you. Yes? – yes; good, we’ve settled that. So now, you tell me that the Press is lying to us about everything EXCEPT global warming???”
I mind-me one of the first big current-event crises I called correctly – and this from a time when I was more proto-marxist than all of my relatives put-together. It was the night Saddam marched into Kuwait; I was sitting in front of the TV, watching a CBC panel discussion on the subject – and one of the panelists declared, “Well, Saddam has the western world by the short-and-curlies right now; if I was him I’d start shooting one hostage an hour until they give me everything I want.”
An image instantly formed itself in my mind – Dubya and his Generals, sitting in their La-Z-Boys around a big-screen TV, Havana cigars in one hand, tankards of draft in the other, watching this. And immediately a big cheer sweeps the room – “Yeah. YEAH! Go Saddam, go Go GO! Give us an excuse!” But I realised then, that I was different from 90+ percent of Canadians watching – I knew something about military, they didn’t; and they were likely cowering in the darkness, blubbering.
And I said to myself, “Who. Is. This. BOZO, and where does he get-off spouting such egregious TRASH? And more-to-the-point, what in HELL is he doing on the TV, and why in the world would CBC even invite a clown like that into the live studio audience, much less onto the panel as an “expert”? He obviously doesn’t know $hit-from-Shinola* about the topic!”
But then I realised that this was a glimpse into the true, terrible power of the Press – he IS an expert, and he does NOT have to establish his bona fides; they are prima-facie established for him, simply because he’s up there on CBC News Hour, telling us about it.
I learned a lot from that; and it was just about then that I stopped watching CBC.
*Yeah, some of us still use that – and it’s still devastatingly effectivr.
@Y. Nott – I think you’re mixing up your US President George Bushes. The invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein happened in August 1990 which was during George Bush (senior).
Gotta say though that your point about both press and politicians lying all the time is pretty spot on. I haven’t paid serious attention to either in decades.
The viewpoint of “Why are these lying bastard lying to me again? the bastards” works pretty well in almost all circumstances involving both press and politicians and is seldom wrong.
Here’s the problem I have with this common and well-grounded view of pols:
I know a number of politicians – local and state level mostly – and most of them strike me as well-intentioned, smart, concerned people who got into it all certainly to serve their egos but also to do good things. Some of them aren’t really bright enough to be there, and some of them just have some crazy gawdawful ideas about what society needs, but they’re not venal or evil people at heart.
The few I know who ARE like that are mostly the long-lived ones, past four or five winning campaigns, and I think they were transformed into what they are because of the constant re-election and fundraising pressures, and by the psychological harm of having been treated like philosopher kings for so long.
So, while I don’t like the idea of mandatory term limits, I think the voters ought to be quicker at replacing people who get too comfortable “governing.” The role changes people, and the benefits of your rep being “senior” might well be outweighed by the cost of keeping them past their evil sell-by date.
It seems to me that there’s a lot of people with strong opinions on how to argue with relatives. ‘Oh, there’s no point arguing it that way, you have to argue it this way’. ‘No, there’s no point arguing it that way, you have to present it like this’. The fact is that there’s no right or wrong way to argue on AGW, and it depends a lot on your audience, and your own strengths. What works on one group of people won’t necessarily work on another. And as we know, nothing really ‘works’ on most AGW believers anyway. (But if you don’t argue back at least sometimes then don’t be surprised when you find yourself living in a cave later in life).
@Bobby b – I am told that the US is very different at the local level than what we have in the UK. This maybe so, I don’t know since I don’t live in the US. However when I’m talking about “politicians” – I’m primarily talking about national ones rather than local council types.
Although the local council type politicos here use the same language as the national ones, the UK ones are bound by direct accountability for their screw ups in ways that national politicians aren’t. If anything, I wish the same applied to our national politicians.
On another point, I’ve worked as a consultant with the UK government in the Environment Agency, DEFRA (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) and MHCLG (Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government).
All of them were universally awful, delivered projects which frequently overran on time and cost and which would never have even been started in any rational system of government because they their costs far exceeded their benefits. The only reason they were undertaken was because the law (i.e. politicians in Parliament) required them to be done. Deceit and lies were to be found at every level.
So, I stand by my viewpoint of “Why are these lying bastard lying to me again? the bastards” in fact I would add government bureaucrats to the list.
Y. Knott said:
>So the total of anthropogenic CO2 is 0.004 x 0.035, which works-out (I worked it out today) to 0.00014%
In addition to the other corrections that have been pointed out, there shouldn’t be a percentage sign at the end here. It’s either 0.00014, or 0.014%.
And when we make the other corrections we get: 0.0004 (concentration of CO2 in atmosphere, ie. 400ppm) x 0.3 (app. percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere attributable to human activity, 120ppm out of 400ppm) = 0.00012, or 0.012%. So a little over one hundredth of one percent of the atmosphere is ‘man-made’.
Personally I never present such figures as any sort of argument, because it isn’t, it’s more of a scene-setter for non-scientists who don’t know much about the basics of climate science. It’s amazing how many people are convinced by AGW yet are under the impression that much of the atmosphere is comprised of man-made CO2. Some — not many, but some — do become more sceptical once they realise that this is wildly wrong.
Is global warming a hoax?
Let us ask Donald Trump, the world’s smartest man.
In the year 2009, Mr. Trump saw climate change as a catastrophic danger and, together with other business leaders, called for urgent action to save the planet.
https://grist.org/politics/donald-trump-climate-action-new-york-times/
In the year 2012, he saw that there is no danger, global warming is nothing than Chinese hoax. The Chinese may be smart, but not enough to fool The Donald.
https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/265895292191248385
The question is: what evidence, what scientific research made Mr. Trump to change his mind? Anyone ever asked?
Y. Knott (November 16, 2019 at 9:02 am), I had exactly the same experience of the lying press about exactly the same issue – the day Saddam invaded Kuwait. The BBC 9 o’clock news (it was at nine, not ten, back then) screened Bush senior’s announcement and then ‘summarised it’ as “there is nothing the west can do” – which was not at all what he said, as those watching with me in the room instantly remarked – “But that’s not what he said at all!” – nor what he meant, as soon became clear.
That was interesting to me because it was not conscious propaganda. To show what someone said and then instantly misrepresent it so obviously that watchers comment on it suggested an addiction to the narrative so strong that beeboids could hardly hear what those they reported actually said. Throughout my life, the BBC’s instinctive and overwhelming reaction to every situation that raised the question of whether the UK should go to war was that the evil, but fortunately now weak, west both should and could do nothing. (They came around during the Falklands War but started that way then too.) They reported their instinctive reaction as what Bush said – because they ‘knew’ it was so – right after showing us the rather different thing that he said (which on this occasion turned out to be a better guide to what he intended).
Y. Knott, I chanced to hear Sky news this morning, which (I think) tends to outperform even the beeb in its devotion to the AGW narrative. They reported Venice was experiencing “its worst flooding for decades.”
I’m guessing you don’t need me to point out to you how to use that and similar ‘accidentally not reviewed for narrative consistency’ remarks that get through. 🙂
“In addition to the other corrections that have been pointed out, there shouldn’t be a percentage sign at the end here. It’s either 0.00014, or 0.014%.”
You are perfectly correct; they’d just invented mathematics when I was in school (they’d just invented school, for that matter – writing and reading were in-the-offing and ‘rithmetic was too new for the teacher to know enough to teach it; but MAN, did they have the hickory stick down-pat!), so I’ll have to polish my delivery a bit. And thank you for your “depends a lot on your audience”; I’ve been baffling my relatives with bull$hit long enough that they’re starting to catch-on, so I must have some solid numbers that they can look-up for themselves 😉 And a little correction of my own – sorry – 0.0004 x 0.03, not 0.3 – 3% instead of 30%.
“@Y. Nott – I think you’re mixing up your US President George Bushes.” – Perfectly correct as well, it was indeed. To quote one youtuber I follow, “I have a bad memory – but at least I don’t have a bad memory!” Or as I tell my coworkers, “There’s two things you lose as you get older – your memory, and… err… d@mn, what was I talking-about again?” Re: my math skills, I should also toss-in “There are three kinds of people in the world; people who can do math and the rest of us.”
“Let us ask Donald Trump, the world’s smartest man.” – Do you think anybody would believe his answer? – or that he’d give the same answer if he was asked twice? Don’t get me wrong – I’m generally a Trump fan, he’s a FAR better President than Obama was – but he’s a politician now, and “politicians lie”… 🙁
bobby b (November 16, 2019 at 10:55 am), Edmund Burke pointed out over two centuries ago that in a competition of cynicism between the electors and their representatives, the representatives will win. So I agree with you that the understandable but mentally-lazy approach of dismissing all politicians as liars is not the way to go. It rewards the worst by making them equal to the best and punishes the best by making any political honesty they display of no electoral value to them.
Scepticism can be wise. Cynicism is, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, not the reverse of gullibility but a form of it.
@Niall Kilmartin
I agree with you about the need to be sceptical of some politicians rather than cynical of all. What is regrettable is that when politicians come together to form government the group morality, like that of the members of a drugs gang, tends to descend towards that of the least moral members. The majority of humans in a civilised society accept and live by a set of accepted ethics, what happens to them when they have the chance of governance over the rest of us?
A similar thing seems to have happened in the sphere of climate science. It is statistically just not possible that all the least moral scientists (with a few honourable and notable exceptions) have by chance ended up in this particular branch of science. As noted by others above, when your mortgage and the welfare of your children depend on the perpetuation of a myth then “good men do nothing”.
Until those you are arguing with realise that the basic human defects of greed and the lust for power are the basis of and motivation for the CAGW movement (and its offspring by whatever name) the scientific arguments are of little use.
““Let us ask Donald Trump, the world’s smartest man.” – Do you think anybody would believe his answer? – or that he’d give the same answer if he was asked twice? Don’t get me wrong – I’m generally a Trump fan, he’s a FAR better President than Obama was – but he’s a politician now, and “politicians lie”… 🙁”
Politicians say whatever will get them elected. Voters vote for liars. Hence politicians lie.
It’s a form of evolution by natural selection. There are, presumably, politicians who don’t lie. But you never normally hear about them, because they don’t get voted in.
—
As regards the advert, it’s primaraily an appeal for supporting innovation in developing clean energy technologies to create jobs and stimulate the worldwide economy. Taxpayer subsidies to industry, in other words. It’s noteworthy that the phrase used “We support your effort to ensure meaningful and effective measures to control climate change” pretty much matches the wording of the Byrd-Hagel resolution, which has been the policy of the American government on *both* sides of the aisle since 1997.
The official bipartisan policy has been that the American government does believe in climate change, and the need for international action on the same, and will join in just as soon as the rest of the world makes a proposal for action that would be meaningful and effective at doing so, and not simply a transparent scheme to wreck the American economy and transfer all its wealth to China. So far, the rest of the world has declined to do so. And on that basis alone, I think it’s fair to conclude that they don’t believe it’s a real emergency either.
Donald never cared about the climate. But as a businessman, he was of course interested in grabbing a share of the green subsidies the government was handing out. I don’t think he cares much one way or the other now, either. He says what his base wants to hear. He’s listened to the voters, and is offering them what they’re asking for.
The first rule of business is to give the customers what they want. Identify a market for a product, an unsatisfied demand, and then supply it.
And that’s a lot better idea (more democratic, anyway) than telling the customers they’re wrong and they shouldn’t be wanting that, and we’re not going to give it to them.
“It is statistically just not possible that all the least moral scientists (with a few honourable and notable exceptions) have by chance ended up in this particular branch of science.”
Scientists need to earn a living, and they follow the money. If the government offers lots of grants for alarmist climate science, the market will provide.
I would have expected those who tell us of the impending climate apocalypse to have started to take serious measures to cut their own CO2 emissions, if only as an example to the rest of us.
But no.The Guardian still runs motoring and travel sections. Caroline Lucas still takes transatlantic flights.My eco-campaigning niece has not refused the car my brother and his wife bought her recently so she can drive to and from university in a nearby city which is served by frequent train services from a station less than a mile from her house.
Y. Knott said:
>And a little correction of my own – sorry – 0.0004 x 0.03, not 0.3 – 3% instead of 30%.
No, it’s 0.3, or 30%. There’s 400ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere. About 120ppm is caused by humans, or so we think, as it was about 280ppm before industrialisation. (Possibly there are other causes of some of this extra 120ppm, but let’s accept it for now. And forget the ‘3.5%’ figure, it’s highly misleading, as has been explained.)
120 out of 400 is 30%, or 0.3.
Let me write our calculation out more clearly:
0.0004 (concentration of CO2 in atmosphere, ie. 400ppm)
x 0.3 (app. percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere attributable to human activity, 120ppm out of 400ppm)
———-
= 0.00012, or 0.012%.
Or: About an eightieth of one percent.
Or: one in 8333 (app.)
Or: 120 parts per million, as we already said.
Good luck with the rellies this season!
“I would have expected those who tell us of the impending climate apocalypse to have started to take serious measures to cut their own CO2 emissions, if only as an example to the rest of us.
But no.The Guardian still runs motoring and travel sections. Caroline Lucas still takes transatlantic flights.My eco-campaigning niece has not refused the car my brother and his wife bought her recently so she can drive to and from university in a nearby city which is served by frequent train services from a station less than a mile from her house.”
And Barack Obama just bought a nice ocean front property at considerable expense. An odd choice for someone convinced that the sea level is going to rise rapidly in the near future…..judge their actions, not their words…….
One point that I always make, that I never hear anyone else bring up is that by definition all the fossil fuels we are burning contain carbon that was once in the atmosphere anyway, because fossil fuels are far less old than the Earth. Coal is about 300-350m years old, oil and gas about 200m, all of which contain carbon extracted by one means or another from the CO2 in the atmosphere. Given the Earth didn’t enter a self destructing death spiral in the billions of years prior to coal and oil being formed, presumably it won’t if we release all said carbon back into the atmosphere……..which of course we won’t because huge amounts of fossil fuels are not economic to extract anyway.
Given what you say about your pols being more akin to our (USA) national-scope pols, and also that you’ve included bureaucrats in your grouping, I can hardly disagree with you any longer.
Unionized government ‘crats are like the hyenas that follow the lions in order to take “their share.”
Which is why any serious attempt to “drain the swamp” must include public sector unions being illegal (as they used to be in both the US and the UK), since it allows the unions to put forward their own reps into political office and create effective capture of those councils by their unions (q.v. most Labour councillors who are current or former public sector union reps)
This was part of the reason why the GLC was dismantled in the 1980’s and why there are legal limits preventing local councils in the UK from increasing local taxes above government approved levels, because some councils (like Liverpool) were totally captured and raising local taxes to extortionate levels to pay for their excesses.
“No, it’s 0.3, or 30%. There’s 400ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere. About 120ppm is caused by humans, or so we think, as it was about 280ppm before industrialisation.”
– Not sure who to believe on this one. I’m personally inclined to believe your number – it’s indisputable we put a whole lot of CO2 into the atmosphere, particularly in Asia – but then a quick search turned-up an article from 2017 that says 1-in-20, or 5%…… Or I’m reading it wrong, which is very possible:
edberry.com/blog/climate-physics/agw-hypothesis/human-co2-not-change-climate/#comment-44900 – his abstract starts with:
“The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claims human emissions raised the carbon dioxide level from 280 ppm to 410 ppm, or 130 ppm. Physics proves this claim is impossible.”
It gets better. The caption to his Figure A reads: “Fig. A. Inflow into the Atmosphere is 5 percent human and 95 percent natural. The Model shows the Atmosphere will be a fingerprint of Inflow. This contradicts the IPCC claim that human emissions cause 30 percent Atmosphere carbon dioxide.”
It’s too late in the day to get into this tonight; and to be blunt, I’d believe Ronald McDonald before I’d believe the I.P.C.C.
@ Tim the Coder:
We should perhaps hold a lottery on what the new-age religion to replace CAGW will be.
It needs to include Western self-hatred, survivor guilt, and Marxism.
Anyone care to punt a suggestion?
Islam? One out of three, but it covers “Western self-hatred” in spades.
“If your job is a climate researcher then your bias is inevitably going to be to support the argument that pays your mortgage. It’s a human failing that we are all subject to even if we try not to be influenced by it. So when you’re having to create or adjust data for weather stations which don’t exist then who wouldn’t err on the side of caution and assume that the temperature in the past was lower than the temperature in the present.”
Which also goes allot to explain nonsense like warming causes cooling:
“Global Warming May Trigger Winter Cooling”
“It seems counterintuitive, even ironic, that global warming could cause some regions to experience colder conditions. But a new study explains the Rube Goldberg-machine of climatic processes that can link warmer-than-average summers to harsh winter weather in some parts of the Northern Hemisphere.”
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2012/01/global-warming-may-trigger-winter-cooling
In other words the observed cooling which they don’t deny not only doesn’t refute the global warming hypotheses it is actually proof of it; i.e. warming causes cooling.
Or maybe just maybe…cooling causes cooling:
“Oscillations of the baseline of solar
magnetic field and solar irradiance
on a millennial timescale”
“…Furthermore, the substantial temperature decreases are expected during the two grand minima47 to
occur in 2020–2055 and 2370–2415, whose magnitudes cannot be yet predicted and need further investigation.
These oscillations of the estimated terrestrial temperature do not include any human-induced factors, which were
outside the scope of the current paper.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-45584-3.pdf
@Bruce
Nope, don’t think that ticks any of the 3 boxes. Western Obsequiousness to Islam, mebbe, but that’s hardly new.
“The War on Plastics” is a possibility, it seems almost manufactured as a stop-gap, to take over as “Global Warming” starts to lose credibility.
Another might be radical Animal Rights (again) and hence violent veganism.
Or perhaps, an attack on the morality of one person employing another. That ticks a lot of the boxes and taps into the current “nationalise everything” and statist agenda.
But I’m sure the clientele here will have deeper understanding and ideas, thus the question.
“Not sure who to believe on this one. I’m personally inclined to believe your number – it’s indisputable we put a whole lot of CO2 into the atmosphere, particularly in Asia – but then a quick search turned-up an article from 2017 that says 1-in-20, or 5%…… Or I’m reading it wrong, which is very possible”
I’ll try one last time.
We have 100 units of stuff.
Nature adds 100 units, making 200. Nature takes away 100 units, making 100.
We have 100 units of stuff.
Nature adds 100 units, making 200. Nature takes away 100 units, making 100.
We have 100 units of stuff.
Nature adds 100 units, making 200. Nature takes away 100 units, making 100.
Now man comes along.
We have 100 units of stuff.
Nature adds 100 units, and we add 5, making 205. Nature takes away 100 units, making 105.
We have 105 units of stuff.
Nature adds 100 units, and we add 5, making 210. Nature takes away 100 units, making 110.
We have 110 units of stuff.
Nature adds 100 units, and we add 5, making 215. Nature takes away 100 units, making 115.
We have 115 units of stuff.
Nature adds 100 units, and we add 5, making 220. Nature takes away 100 units, making 120.
We have 120 units of stuff.
Nature adds 100 units, and we add 5, making 225. Nature takes away 100 units, making 125.
We have 125 units of stuff.
Nature adds 100 units, and we add 5, making 230. Nature takes away 100 units, making 130.
So, we started with 100 units, and now have 130. Who put in that extra 30%? It can’t be us, because we’re only putting in 5% each year, right?
So where did the extra 30% come from?
There are already 4 cults closely related to the CAGW cult:
Third-wave “feminism”: the Struggle against “the patriarchy”;
Multiculturalism: the Struggle against “racism” and “Islamophobia”;
LGBT++: the Struggle against “homophobia” and “transphobia”;
vulgar Marxism: the Struggle against “capitalism” and “neo-liberalism”.
These 5 cults, although incompatible in minds such as mine, with little tolerance for cognitive dissonance, appear to be somehow mutually reinforcing in weaker minds.
(Added in proof: veganism might be considered a 6th cult with little or no logical relation to the above, but closely related in practice all the same.)
@NiV
If atmospheric CO2 rises, as it has, then that increases the take up of CO2 by plant growth, so your “Nature takes away 100” should increase also.
This is why vegetable producers deliberately increase the CO2 in their greenhouses.
The issue is whether there is any causality between partial pressure of CO2 in the atmosphere and global temperature, and that is far from proven. The normal “greenhouse” explanation is nonsense. Putting one thermos inside another thermos doesn’t make the contents heat up. CO2 make the atmosphere opaque to the specific IR band at far lower concentrations. So does water vapour. Or to put it another way, paint over a window, it gets dark. Paint over it again, and it doesn’t get twice as dark. At best, a minor reduction from any gaps you left the first time. Likewise CO2, at best a minor increase on the absorption band edges.
CO2 has increased, although still far below some historic levels. And? So what?
The temperature record shows an embarassing failure to rise (“the pause”) after a small rise over the last 100 years or so, from “The Little Ice Age”.
That should be enough for our OP’s family dinner 🙂
In this case, The Donald got it the wrong way around: all the evidence that i am aware of, indicates that CAGW is an Anglo-American hoax. Not least, the fact that Climategate involved British (and American?) scientists. The fact that some other people have been fooled in higher percentages than the American people, just goes to show that Americans are not easily fooled by other Americans.
Further, since China is the largest emitter by a wide margin, it is not implausible to think that the CAGW hoax was devised to get the Chinese to consume less oil, so as to lower world prices.
(I hope that nobody took the above too seriously: it is just an example of the sort of arguments that one can use with alarmists.)
“If atmospheric CO2 rises, as it has, then that increases the take up of CO2 by plant growth, so your “Nature takes away 100” should increase also.”
It does, but only by about half the increase.
The models of the carbon cycle are a fairly complicated set of simultaneous differential equations. There’s certainly room to question whether they’re complete and correct, and whether there may be other potential causes besides direct contributions fossil fuel. (For example, worldwide trade has spread invasive species into new areas. A new species of phytoplankton could potentially change the natural balance of CO2 absorption by the oceans. We have no evidence that it has, but no evidence that it hasn’t, either.) But that’s not an easy topic to explain, and I’m after trying to explain something far simpler here.
I’ve deliberately made the example as simple as possible, to try to explain the misunderstanding inherent in thinking that because we only contribute 5% or whatever of what nature does, or because only 3.5% of the carbon dioxide molecules currently in the atmosphere are anthropogenic, that we therefore can’t be to blame for the 30% increase.
If we start using that sort of numerical sleight-of-hand to win arguments, then we’re just as bad as the worst of the climate scientists and vulnerable to being debunked. The climate activists cherry-pick all the bad sceptic arguments they can find, debunk them, and then imply that all sceptic arguments are just as bad. Which means the more bad sceptic arguments there are out there, the easier it is for climate activists to stop the more educated people crediting the good sceptic arguments.
Yes, I probably should have emphasised that the real carbon cycle is a lot more complicated than my simple example. It’s just an illustration to demonstrate the concept.
“In this case, The Donald got it the wrong way around: all the evidence that i am aware of, indicates that CAGW is an Anglo-American hoax.”
Yes, primarily promoted by Marxist campaigners in the West – but it’s aim is to cripple the capitalist West and transfer its wealth and technology to the developing world – the largest part of which is China. China (probably) didn’t invent it, but they’re happy to exploit it.
“Further, since China is the largest emitter by a wide margin, it is not implausible to think that the CAGW hoax was devised to get the Chinese to consume less oil, so as to lower world prices.”
The developing world are exempted from emissions controls.
“So, we started with 100 units, and now have 130. Who put in that extra 30%? It can’t be us, because we’re only putting in 5% each year, right?”
I’m not sure this is valid, Nullius. You’re assuming that there’s only so much CO2 the Earth can rid itself of – and that we are adding above-and-beyond that so it must inevitably increase by 5% a year, and it’s all our fault. Well first, the non-human CO2 keeps getting added as well; everything that fuels itself with carbon emits CO2, with one wonderful exception – photosynthetic plants – and forest fires, volcanic eruptions &c as well, so with 95% of the CO2 being emitted continually, it seems a bit harsh to blame it all on us (although I admit CO2 is increasing and a lot of it’s likely our fault).
But it’s not increasing by 5% a year, and it certainly hasn’t increased by 30% in the last six years or 100% in the last 20 – so our 5% of the CO2 is not straight-additive to the global total as you infer; furthermore, if it isn’t it must be going somewhere, so where’s it going? You’re aware that the world is greening; I suspect that our flora is quietly delighted (I love plants as I get older – they’re SO quiet!) to have a higher concentration, and they’re happily lapping it up. I postulate – no scientific background, so it’s a SWAG – that plants absorb CO2 at whatever percentage they can get; and if there’s more than they’re used to, all the better – it’s free fertilizer, so they’ll use it.
And with 14 years of cooling trends behind us despite the increase of CO2 – “the decline” the Hadley CRU went to such lengths to “hide” – increased CO2 doesn’t seem to be doing any harm to anyone. It’s well below zero here this morning, and what pi$$es me off the most about Global Warming is that it isn’t. And the sun’s steadily-increasing quiescence during that period is a factor the alarmists resolutely use their horse-blinkers to ignore – the IPCC’s models were formulated specifically to not consider any factor except manmade CO2 in their predictions – so to quote John Galt, “Why are these lying bastards lying to me again? the bastards”
– My 2c’ worth…
The alarmists do need the human CO2 to stay in the atmosphere for very long times, really long compared with the removal rate of atomic bomb C02 for example. But simple models (e.g. Hermann Harde. What Humans Contribute to Atmospheric CO2: Comparison of Carbon Cycle Models with Observations. Earth Sciences.
Vol. 8, No. 3, 2019, pp. 139-159. doi: 10.11648/j.earth.20190803.13) can fit the data very well using the core assumption that the flux of CO2 out of the atmosphere is proportional to the concentration in it. In other words, Nature does not always take away the same number of units. If the concentration has risen, Nature will take more. Naturally, this sort of talk sends the alarmist scientists to action-stations, to spin or obfuscate as a matter of urgency.
“I’m not sure this is valid, Nullius. You’re assuming that there’s only so much CO2 the Earth can rid itself of – and that we are adding above-and-beyond that so it must inevitably increase by 5% a year, and it’s all our fault.”
I’m not assuming anything. The atmosphere is a lot more complicated than that. I was just giving the simplest possible numerical example I could think of to explain why “Inflow into the Atmosphere is 5 percent human and 95 percent natural.” does *not* logically contradict “the IPCC claim that human emissions cause 30 percent Atmosphere carbon dioxide.”.
“furthermore, if it isn’t it must be going somewhere, so where’s it going?”
Most of it goes into the oceans. Some goes into biomass, yes.
But you’re missing the point. I’m not arguing that higher CO2 is bad. I’m arguing that if you try to use a fact like “Inflow into the Atmosphere is 5 percent human and 95 percent natural” to try to say that “the IPCC claim that human emissions cause 30 percent Atmosphere carbon dioxide” is wrong, you risk discrediting your entire position as being based in dishonest/innumerate arguments. It’s a well-known argument, easily debunked, with numerous websites available to believers debunking it, and just makes it look like climate sceptics have got their science/maths wrong.
You said in your original comment “Those of you who can correct these figures, PLEASE do so; I want to be unchallengeable”
Do you really? Because every time I try to correct your figures, you fight me over it.
—
“The alarmists do need the human CO2 to stay in the atmosphere for very long times, really long compared with the removal rate of atomic bomb C02 for example.”
This is making the same sort of confusion between changes in the overall amount of CO2 and the mobvement of a specific set of CO2 molecules. They’re not the same. One changes a lot faster than the other. There’s nothing contradictory about that, in need of spin or obfuscation. It just makes it really, really easy for alarmist scientists to debunk the basic misunderstanding.
There are plenty of other points they’re vulnerable on. They’re not vulnerable on this one.
“Because every time I try to correct your figures, you fight me over it.”
– I’m sorry – am I being tedious and unreasonable again? The problems with your correction are twofold: first, I don’t believe the IPCC, if only because it’s the IPCC and they’ve lied about everything else to do with global warming. Your explanation of how this works rests on an IPCC figure (30%), and if I don’t believe the IPCC, I likely won’t believe your figure either. What if the IPCC is dishonest (as they’re known to be), or just wrong as the paper I quoted baldly states, considering ( – second – ) that atmospheric CO2 is NOT increasing at 5% per year, as you imply it must? It may be disingenuous to claim authority on this – as you point-out, one can easily find arguments on teh interwebz to debunk ANY position re: global warming, in either direction, made worse by the manifest bias the warmists (in general) and the IPCC (in particular) have displayed throughout the debate. So are you actually correcting my figure, or merely posing another while saying mine is wrong?
Forgive me, please – I remain unconvinced. And in the end analysis, what’s the real truth of this matter? – “We don’t know”.
“first, I don’t believe the IPCC, if only because it’s the IPCC and they’ve lied about everything else to do with global warming.”
That’s known as the Genetic Fallacy – holding a statement or argument to be untrue because of the characteristics of the person saying it, rather than the content of the argument or evidence. That’s even worse than simply misunderstanding the maths!
Also, I’m not the IPCC!
“Your explanation of how this works rests on an IPCC figure (30%)”
It’s not the IPCC’s figure! It’s measured by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Earth System Research Laboratory. It’s also widely reproducible – lots of people have the instrumentation to measure it. In fact, much of the original research on this was done by the military, who need to know how infrared propagates through the atmosphere so they can predict the performance of IR cameras and seekers. It’s not a number anyone can lie about.
This is like saying you don’t believe in rain, because the IPCC said that it sometimes rains!
“What if the IPCC is dishonest (as they’re known to be), or just wrong as the paper I quoted baldly states, considering ( – second – ) that atmospheric CO2 is NOT increasing at 5% per year, as you imply it must?”
Whether the figure is right or wrong, the *reasoning* you are using is *definitely* wrong. Mathematically, it’s perfectly possible for humans to be contributing 5% of what nature is, and at the same time to be responsible for a 30% increase. It’s not correct to say they’re contradicting one another. If you want to prove the 30% figure wrong, you will have to find some other way to do it. Because this way doesn’t work.
And second, what if you show your family that *you* are dishonest? Or just plain wrong? What’s more important to you? To win the argument? Or to be right? Because if you don’t care about being right, if you don’t judge arguments and evidence by whether they make sense, but by whose side they support, then in what way are you any better than the IPCC? If you refuse to accept any number supporting the IPCC, not on the basis of the evidence, but simply because you object to the conclusion, then aren’t you showing exactly the same sort of bias as the warmists? It’s not enough to *say* we’re better than them, we actually have to *be* better than them!
I repeat: You said in your original comment “Those of you who can correct these figures, PLEASE do so; I want to be unchallengeable”. Do you really? Or do you just want to reflexively deny anything and everything the IPCC says, irrespective of its correctness, out of some sort of desperate emotional need to shut your opponents up? Because if you do, I can’t help you.
The IPCC are right about some things and wrong about others. This is not one of the things they’re wrong about.
“Forgive me, please – I remain unconvinced.”
There’s nothing to forgive. It makes no difference to me whether you believe in arithmetic! I was just trying to help you get it right.
In reply to NiV:
Our disagreement is of minor relevance in this specific context, but in a larger context i think it important to point out that the end result of a given policy is hardly ever the same as the intended goal.
The very fact that anti-AGW policies favor (at the moment!!!) the developing world, and China in particular, should make you suspect that that was NOT the intention.
*sigh* “Whether the figure is right or wrong, the *reasoning* you are using is *definitely* wrong.”
I’ll paraphrase you. “It’s THIS way, it’s ONLY this way, and no other explanation is possible!” You sound just like the alarmists, you know – like my relatives, in fact – and that as much as anything, is why I don’t believe you. And NOAA? – you do yourself no favours quoting them.
Knott out+
“but in a larger context i think it important to point out that the end result of a given policy is hardly ever the same as the intended goal”
Agreed. The aim of Marxism isn’t generally the result of Marxism. But that doesn’t mean that’s not the aim.
“I’ll paraphrase you. “It’s THIS way, it’s ONLY this way, and no other explanation is possible!””
I showed you the arithmetic. If you think some other arithmetic is possible, good luck!
“You sound just like the alarmists”
No, I give the evidence and an explanation. The alarmists have a BELIEF, which they cannot tolerate being contradicted, and will reject any counter-evidence presented as tainted, biased, or untrustworthy. The only argument they know is Argument from Authority, and they don’t consider you an authority, so there is no possible argument you can make they will accept. You know who that sounds like, don’t you?
But if all you wanted was for me to tell you that you was right, even when you wasn’t, you should have said. It would have taken a lot less time and effort on my part.
Good luck with the relatives.
🙂 (I guess your past, like mine, included a time of expressing oneself by voice procedure ? 🙂 Maybe that’s why I’m so longwinded now.)
Hopefully the thread has given usable advice about what line of arguments would be most effective.
IIUC (I read those comments with attention when written but have not scrolled back to remind myself), one point emerging from Nullius’ remarks was just that the basic physics of greenhouse gas claims has content, so makes a doubtful point of attack. That such heat as the alarmists can claim to find (even before correcting for the smoking gun at Darwin zero, the automated-parsing errors at Nuuk, the dying thermometers in California and etc.) does not appear distributed where the physics of greenhouse gases says it should be, is a more serious challenge than debating the ratios in the conditional if … then … aspects of the basic physics. But beyond even that, specific predictions that have proved wrong (e.g. polar bears are multiplying, your grandkids know what snow looks like), specific deceits that show their willingness to deceive the despised masses and their ability to deceive themselves (e.g. the hockey-stick’s deliberately-doctored hide-the-decline and its unintentionally-imbecile statistics that extract a hockey stick from random noise) and specific lies (e.g. the Darwin Zero ‘adjustments’) will serve you better.
By analogy, a gun-grabber screaming that if you shoot someone it kills them could be told that in war it takes a thousand bullets to kill a man, that crime does not so greatly outperform this ratio, etc., but it is not an aspect of the argument I would use first, or perhaps at all. There’s a kind of basic true-though-irrelevant aspect to the gun-grabbers shout. Communicating the fact that many defensive used of weapons never appear in statistics because they don’t kill, often don’t even shoot – preferably by telling a specific actual story of one case and then moving to that conclusion from it, not the reverse – makes a more effective start to a conversation.
Have a happy thanksgiving – and may the ceremony remain on the far side of the pond, where it belongs (we’re getting black Friday sale ads here ! – it’s insidious, like trick-or-treating!! 🙂 ).
Nullius:
‘This is making the same sort of confusion between changes in the overall amount of CO2 and the movement of a specific set of CO2 molecules. They’re not the same. One changes a lot faster than the other.’
I know of this point, Nullius, but it does not contradict Harde’s model. It contains the rising levels of CO2, and of course the human contribution to that cannot and should not be ignored. But his conjecture is that natural processes, driven by rising temperatures, also contribute increased emissions, and therefore to the rising ambient levels. He also finds his simple model does not need the notion of an ‘adjustment time’ to fit with the data. He needs only the ‘residence time’ to do that. This seems to me to be resolvable by improved knowledge of the carbon cycle, not least of the abundance of CO2 sinks.
Frank S (November 19, 2019 at 11:30 am) that relates to one criticism of Gore’s ‘inconvenient’ graph: when examined on a less gross timescale, it appeared that carbon lagged temperature, not the reverse. As I assume Nullius would at once concede, the water model commented above (each day 1000 gallons automatically pour in, then 1000 gallons automatically poured out, with that pesky human pouring 10 gallons in on top) eventually overflows only because it has no responsive capacity, only a fixed capacity to pour out every evening the 1000 gallons poured in every morning. Warmenists claim things are even worse – those 10 extra gallons from the human are creating a positive feedback loop. In a very general sense, negative feedback loops are more normal in science but ‘catastrophic’ positive-feedback-loop theories (e.g. the oxygenation of the earth’s atmosphere, or the pre-Cambrian freeze-up) exist and are not known to be false – though you know my opinion of the AGW one. 🙂
Yes indeed. When it warms up, the sea outgasses dissolved CO2 into the atmosphere. Solubility of gas in water is inverse with temperature. High school physics.
Sea has large thermal inertia, so long lag.
This is why the two graphs are always shown side by side, and never aligned vertically, or heaven forbid, superimposed.
Alternatively, the CO2 rise does cause the temperature increase as per CAGW, but using a ‘Z transform’ predictive function aka time machine./sarc 🙂
“IIUC (I read those comments with attention when written but have not scrolled back to remind myself), one point emerging from Nullius’ remarks was just that the basic physics of greenhouse gas claims has content, so makes a doubtful point of attack.”
It does have content, but the mechanism by which it works isn’t the one most debaters think it is, so if you really understand the physics in depth, it can make an excellent point of attack. However, if you’re not really good at physics, and bear in mind I’ve come across professors of physics who have got this stuff wrong, then it’s like a huge minefield of traps for the unwary. There are a whole bunch of people out there who have come up with all sorts of bogus physical arguments about the greenhouse effect, and it often takes considerable physics knowledge to spot the errors.
Incidentally, the real mechanism was first developed by the astrophysicist Schwarzchild in the 1930s for explaining the convective layers in the atmospheres of stars. Climate scientists didn’t come across his work until the late 1950s.
“That such heat as the alarmists can claim to find (even before correcting for the smoking gun at Darwin zero, the automated-parsing errors at Nuuk, the dying thermometers in California and etc.) does not appear distributed where the physics of greenhouse gases says it should be, is a more serious challenge than debating the ratios in the conditional if … then … aspects of the basic physics.”
Yes, although it’s actually a consequence of the feedbacks – the water vapour feedback specifically. As I said originally, you get a 1.2 C warming from CO2, which then causes all sorts of other effects that have additional warming or cooling effects. One of the major ones is the predicted increase in water vapour. This has an additional effect, in that it decreases the lapse rate – the rate at which temperature drops with altitude – because of the latent heat of condensation of water vapour. The change in lapse rate is actually a negative feedback – it tends to cool the surface layers below the average altitude of emission to space and warm the upper troposphere above the emissive layer. So the clear observation that the upper troposphere is not warming strongly implies that they’ve got the water vapour feedback wrong in their models.
Like I said, it’s not the greenhouse effect itself, but the feedbacks that are at the heart of the scientific argument.
But if you’re not a physicist, I don’t recommend trying to explain the moist adiabatic lapse rate to your relatives at Christmas!
“But his conjecture is that natural processes, driven by rising temperatures, also contribute increased emissions, and therefore to the rising ambient levels.”
As I noted above, it’s certainly possible to come up with plausible alternatives and modifications to the current carbon cycle model (which is undoubtedly iffy!), but it’s not straightforward to do so. It’s not as simple as natural processes contributing emissions – the total cumulative amount of CO2 emitted is roughly double the increase in atmospheric content, so if the natural world wasn’t absorbing about half our emissions, the level would be even higher. But there are certain non-linear effects that can change the causal explanation, independently of the quantitative flows.
The problem is, we’ve got absolutely no evidence that any such non-linear mechanisms are in play. The mechanisms hypothesised in the standard model, on the other hand, are based on basic chemistry, known to apply. So while it’s not “settled science” by any means, the standard model is currently the favoured one. As a rule, we don’t multiply entities beyond necessity – we don’t believe in things unless there is positive evidence for them. But if you like, you could say the answer is “We don’t know”.
“Alternatively, the CO2 rise does cause the temperature increase as per CAGW, but using a ‘Z transform’ predictive function aka time machine./sarc”
*Both* of them cause the other! It goes both ways. Remember my feedback example above? Warming causes evaporation causes more warming causes more evaporation ad infinitum? Well, it’s like that with CO2 solubility.
“I know of this point, Nullius, but it does not contradict Harde’s model.”
I’ve only had a very quick look at the paper. I got as far as: “Under steady state conditions for f_in = f_out then the total amount of water in the pool m_W is exchanged within t = m_W / f_in = m_W / f_out”, which I don’t think is true. That assumes the water in the pool is following a first-in-first-out (FIFO) rule, rather than mixing. I might get around to reading the rest later, but I’ve seen Muir Salby’s arguments before, and this seems to be following in the same footsteps. If the observed modern 1 C temperature rise had resulted in a 40% rise in CO2, as seems to be being suggested, then the 10 C global temperature rise at the end of the last ice age ought to have led to a CO2 rise ten times greater. And it didn’t.
In the meantime, you might be interested in other places it’s been discussed. There’s a series of four posts on Watt’s Up that give a good summary of the main arguments – the following is a link to the last post in the series, which has links to the first three at the top.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/24/engelbeen-on-why-he-thinks-the-co2-increase-is-man-made-part-4/
This part is particularly relevant to the current discussion.
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/co2_origin.html#Extra:_how_much_human_CO2_is_in_the_atmosphere
and there’s a bit of a discussion around the Bern model here: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/05/06/the-bern-model-puzzle/
There’s a good bit of discussion in the comments, too! But really, to do it properly takes months of study – if you happen to like coupled differential equations, that might be fun, but for most people, life’s too short. Whereas HARRY_READ_ME.txt is easy and immediate, harder to argue with, funny, and a lot less boring! Stick with Harry!
Thank you Nullius for all these links. You are both erudite and patient, and I look forward to more comments from you – somewhere, sometime. But in the meantime, I now have a lot of reading to do.
“I showed you the arithmetic. If you think some other arithmetic is possible, good luck!”
Nullius? As I said, the rate of CO2 increase in the atmosphere is not 5% a year; from 2017 to 2018 it was 2.5 ppm, or 0.0000025 a year despite our 0.05 annual contribution. From 1975-2019 a total 70 ppm increase; or, 1.6 ppm per year average over 45 years – clearly increasing, but at a few ppm, nowhere near 5%. So your “95% plus 5% plus 5% plus 5%” argument does not represent conditions in our atmosphere.
The figures are from NOAA: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide
“Nullius? As I said, the rate of CO2 increase in the atmosphere is not 5% a year”
Yes, agreed, I didn’t say it was.
I was just giving the simplest possible numerical example I could think of to explain why “Inflow into the Atmosphere is 5 percent human and 95 percent natural.” does *not* logically contradict “the IPCC claim that human emissions cause 30 percent Atmosphere carbon dioxide.”. Nothing else.
And in case the point is confusing, neither does “Inflow into the Atmosphere is 5 percent human and 95 percent natural” imply that “the rate of CO2 increase in the atmosphere is [] 5% a year”.
Consider:
We have 500 units of stuff.
Nature adds 100 units, and we add 5, making 605. Nature takes away 100 units, making 505.
We have 505 units of stuff…
Now you can see that in this example man contributing 5% of the inflow increases the total amount of stuff by only 1% a year. You can get any other pair of percentages, just by adjusting the other details.
There is no requirement for the percentages to be equal. That’s *all* I’m saying.
The real atmosphere doesn’t work this way. Even the simplified model the IPCC use is *loads* more complicated than this, and the ways it could be wrong are more complicated still, and if I was to try to explain the point using the *real* atmosphere as an example, you’d just get lost in all the coupled differential equations and matrix eigenvalues and whatnot.
This is what I mean about this being a bad choice of topic to debate with non-physicists! It’s too complicated to explain correctly and comprehensibly, and misunderstandings abound. Go get Montford’s book (‘The Hockeystick Illusion’), and use Harry’s entertaining document. It’s far harder to go wrong with that.