UK flooding again

[RonJeremy]

An interesting article,

http://www.dailywire.com/news/2071/most-comprehensive-assault-global-warming-ever-mike-van-biezen

 

You, Sir, are a heretic and you must be burned at the stake having made a full confession and conversion....

[unbeliever]

You, Sir, are a heretic and you must be burned at the stake having made a full confession and conversion....

 

Shhh. Don't question the almighty "consensus".

[RonJeremy]

Shhh. Don't question the almighty "consensus".

 

I wasn't. It wasn't me. It was my neighbour - burn him (and HIS wife).

[retep]

I wasn't. It wasn't me. It was my neighbour - burn him (and HIS wife).

 

Think of the carbon footprint:hihi:

[tzijlstra]

I'm a professional scientist in an actual hard science and have been for 20 years.

 

Thanks for the laugh! Now explain to me how the average annual global temperature going up is not climate change?

 

[unbeliever]

Thanks for the laugh! Now explain to me how the average annual global temperature going up is not climate change?

 

 

What a ridiculous question.

 

This is the problem with the term "Climate Change". Are you referring to climate change in general, the principle of anthropogenic global warming, or the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming hypothesis?

 

This is a critical question for framing the debate. Climate change refers to any long term change in the climate, not just temperature and certainly not just anthropogenic. The principle of anthropogenic global warming is not in question, CO2 is a greenhouse gas (albeit a weak one) and mankind certainly produces a lot of CO2. The catastrophic anthropogenic global warming hypothesis is a product of anthropogenic global warming, and a lot of crude modelling awash with guesses and assumptions which hypothesises very large positive feedbacks in the climate system greatly magnifying the established anthropogenic global warming effect.

 

So when you say to "climate change" to which of the above are you referring?

[sgtkate]

Given the flooding of the Somerset levels two years since I'd have to disagree. Dutch engineers made the levels work in the 17th century. For the EA to stop dredging, mothball pumping stations and then say "Ooo innit awful what can yer do, eh?" when the levels then flooded was not impressive.

 

I'm from Somerset. I saw the damage caused to some of my friends, thankfully my family live on the hills so were ok. I would also say you've done very little research or reading into the problem. The Somerset flooding was unprecedented for many reasons, but the main one was the high tide and not the rain. Having such a high tide meant that no water could actually be pumped out for almost a third of each day. This also caused water to back up down the rivers across the moors. The rain added to this caused the Somerset sea.

 

Dredging is only needed because of abysmal land management by farmers. They are encouraged to leave fallow land which has poor surface run off, and each and every heavy rainfall erodes the top soil into the rivers meaning dredging is now needed. If this land was better managed, farmers paid (potentially, although the idea of once again paying farmers to do the blindingly obviously irks) to make flood plains of some their lands or at the very least put in 'base' crops to help slow the surface run off.

 

---------- Post added 05-01-2016 at 09:17 ----------

 

I can see that you've been in a bad mood this week, and I've been letting you get away with it up to now, but you've finally exhausted my patience.

 

I'm a professional scientist in an actual hard science and have been for 20 years.

You're a sociologist, which is probably the second softest science around, after climatology.

I'm not surprised you don't understand my scepticism on these matters since you'll be used to the kind of wooly, vague pseudo-science the climatologists come out with.

 

I expect quantitative, specific predictions, inconsistent with the null hypothesis, with uncertainties and confidence levels. I further expect hypotheses to be re-evaluated if these predictions fail. That is science.

Climatology has some proper hard science in it, combined with a lot of assumptions and estimates. Taken collectively the "science" of climate change is unworthy of the name.

 

Take a look at the global temperature predictions from the early IPCC reports and compare them with what actually happened.

Then take a look at very many "extreme" weather predictions that respected heavily published climatologists have come out with and see what fraction of them actually came true.

Science my foot!

 

---------- Post added 04-01-2016 at 18:37 ----------

 

 

You can test it by making a prediction and then collecting data like for anything else. Astrophysicists make predictions about stars, galaxies and even clusters of galaxies. Okay so you can't make a prediction and then test it the next day, but there are predictions from over 20 years ago which were founded on the same assumptions and made by a lot of the same people.

 

Apart from the basic CO2 warming effect, what parts of the science of climate change have you determined to be "sound"?

 

I'm interested. Perhaps on a new thread, but lets have a science based climate thread.

 

Are you saying that the earth isn't getting warmer at all? Or are you saying we don't know? I was under the impression that *all* scientists accepted the earth was warming up but disagree as to the extent of human impact causing it over natural reasons.

[unbeliever]

Are you saying that the earth isn't getting warmer at all? Or are you saying we don't know? I was under the impression that *all* scientists accepted the earth was warming up but disagree as to the extent of human impact causing it over natural reasons.

 

The statistic often used as the basis of the "consensus" is a survey of papers published in the field. A subset of those papers expressed an opinion on the matter of anthropogenic global warming, and of those 97% were generally in line with the idea that there is at least some anthropogenic contribution.

 

Your summary is pretty accurate, although you should probably replace the term "scientists" with "scientists active in the field of climatology", and perhaps "all" with "very nearly all".

 

There are also problems with the primary temperature data set. I'm not sure how big these are, but they should not be ignored.

This comes from a large array of small, simple temperature monitoring stations throughout the world. Recent data from these monitoring stations is generally taken in the morning, whereas older data was taken at mid-day. In addition, the thermometer technology has changed on the same time scale; the new technology tending to read lower than the old. This means that later records have to be adjusted upwards and/or earlier records downwards. Are they being adjusted correctly?

 

There is satellite data as well, but that only goes back about 40 years, and has other problems.

 

I get annoyed when people who obviously lack the training in a real scientific field, take a condescending attitude towards those who have doubts and questions.

The debate tactics are also quite dubious, as is the use of statistics.

 

Just above, you can see the case put forward that since it's warmer one year than a previous year, the "climate" has "changed", therefore climate change is a real thing, therefore catastrophic anthropogenic global warming must be accepted without further question.

The sheer lunacy of that line of reasoning is so obvious that I find it hard to understand how somebody could put it forth without the heavy use of a wide range of banned substances.

Edited January 5, 2016 by unbeliever

[sgtkate]

The statistic often used as the basis of the "consensus" is a survey of papers published in the field. A subset of those papers expressed an opinion on the matter of anthropogenic global warming, and of those 97% were generally in line with the idea that there is at least some anthropogenic contribution.

 

Your summary is pretty accurate, although you should probably replace the term "scientists" with "scientists active in the field of climatology", and perhaps "all" with "very nearly all".

 

There are also problems with the primary temperature data set. I'm not sure how big these are, but they should not be ignored.

This comes from a large array of small, simple temperature monitoring stations throughout the world. Recent data from these monitoring stations is generally taken in the morning, whereas older data was taken at mid-day. This means that later records have to be adjusted upwards and/or earlier records downwards. Are they being adjusted correctly?

 

There is satellite data as well, but that only goes back about 40 years, and has other problems.

 

I get annoyed when people who obviously lack the training in a real scientific field, take a condescending attitude towards those who have doubts and questions.

The debate tactics are also quite dubious, as is the use of statistics.

 

Just above, you can see the case put forward that since it's warmer one year than a previous year, the "climate" has "changed", therefore climate change is a real thing, therefore catastrophic anthropogenic global warming must be accepted without further question.

The sheer lunacy of that line of reasoning is so obvious that I find it hard to understand how somebody could put it forth without the heavy use of a wide range of banned substances.

 

I'm reasonably science savvy, but no way near an expert. Do you have any links or documents that show a more 'rounded' opinion explaining some of the things you've just said in a laymans language? I can't find anything on Google. It's either written for 5 year olds or it's over my head with science.

[unbeliever]

I'm reasonably science savvy, but no way near an expert. Do you have any links or documents that show a more 'rounded' opinion explaining some of the things you've just said in a laymans language? I can't find anything on Google. It's either written for 5 year olds or it's over my head with science.

 

Rounded is a big ask.

skepticalscience.com (pro-consensus despite the name) is useful. In particular their summary of the temperature data adjustments: http://www.skepticalscience.com/understanding-adjustments-to-temp-data.html.

wattswiththat.com is also useful, as it makes it its business to question the consensus.

In the papers, Christopher Booker's column in the telegraph is anti-consensus and George Monbiot's column in the guardian is pro-consensus.

 

The debate is almost invariably badly framed by the pro-consensus side. The issue for most (certainly for me) is what is the CO2 sensitivity of the climate system. This is the amount of warming expected from a doubling of the CO2 concentration on the atmosphere. A sceptic would typically put it around 1ºC and a believer at about 3-5ºC. The believers like to couch the debate in absolute terms: Is there any human contribution at all? If so then jump to the worst case of about 5ºC, or even to the wild ideas about massive runaway warning, without any intermediate discussion.

Current CO2 levels are around 0.04%, up from about 0.02% 100 or so years ago.

 

The primary positive feedback effect hypothesised to get from 1ºC to 3ºC or more is from water vapour. Small warming from CO2 -> more water vapour in the air -> more warming and so on. Whether water vapour is warming or cooling depends on whether it forms clouds and what kind of clouds it forms. High cloud is cooling as it reflects light from the sun back into space. Water vapour itself is warming as it acts as a second greenhouse gas.

 

Biological feedbacks also play a role which is not well understood. Photosynthesising life feeds on CO2, so simplistically ought to do better in a CO2 rich atmosphere. On the other hand it is adapted for lower CO2 levels, and largely lives in the sea. Higher CO2 decreases the pH of the sea.

 

I certainly haven't listed all the possible feedbacks here. But the references I've given should cover the others.

 

Low CO2 sensitivity would not justify aggressive cuts in CO2 production as it would be more beneficial and economic to take advantage of higher crop yields etc and gradually adapt to a gently changing climate. High CO2 sensitivity might make things change dangerously rapidly to the extent that it might be worth the enormous expense and disruption of trying to reduce or limit our CO2 production.

Edited January 5, 2016 by unbeliever