Junk Science

senojekips said:
My argument in a nutshell. In the mean time I will continue to act in accordance with my own experience.

For all of the accumulated knowledge and scientific papers written by and available to the experts, I find it frustrating that I seem to get it right at least as often as they do, without spending millions,... billions of dollars.
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But once again the "politicising" of the issue is the problem, there can be no end to the expenditure when you constantly have to spend your time proving the same point over and over.
Its like politics even if the opposition devises the best policies known to man and can solve all the problems it is the role of the other side to sink them and as such you can never have consensus.
 
I dunno that the problem is the politicising, so much as hungry groups scrabbling for research money. There's an almost bottomless money pit there, if you can just panic the population enough to force the government to do be seen to do something about it.
Perhaps it's just the pessimist in me, but I feel that if the crisis were as bad as some would have us believe, every major energy corporation and food producer would be out there raising their own venture capital to find solutions. Because if they do succeed, they would have a licence to print their own money.
 
+1 on that. Then again there's always that urban legend that the oil companies do have a solution and they're hanging on to it until oil really runs out.
 
senojekips said:
I dunno that the problem is the politicising, so much as hungry groups scrabbling for research money. There's an almost bottomless money pit there, if you can just panic the population enough to force the government to do be seen to do something about it.
Perhaps it's just the pessimist in me, but I feel that if the crisis were as bad as some would have us believe, every major energy corporation and food producer would be out there raising their own venture capital to find solutions. Because if they do succeed, they would have a licence to print their own money.
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So whats more dangerous panicking people into doing something pointless or lulling them into a false sense of security?

Seems to me that there isn't hell of a lot of good in either approach.
 
There is a television drama about at the moment, I believe it is called Burn. It concerns the combination of global warming+ high oil problems. The difference is that it is claimed that these very serious concerns are those secretly held by the top oil industry men, the real top cookies. What they just do not want to tell us. It stresses that they really know that we DO NOT have 40 years to side-step - but 10 years! Funnily enough, his conclusion is one of optimism that we may JUST avoid the catastrophe , due to one thing - the coming shortage of oil!

I haven't caught up with it yet, but hope to do so.
 
Oddly enough most of the geologists I speak to say that technically there is no oil shortage, there are plenty of oil reserves the problem is that what has been tapped to date are the "easy" fields, large pockets that can be easily and economically extracted but what remains untouched are large numbers of smaller pockets in more rugged locations making extraction difficult and expensive as well as the less efficient shales and tar fields.
 
Senojekips/ Monty Not sure what all this complex discussion on Fourier analysis is for (waves). The graph Senojekips posted was for Central England, what relevence is this? As Monty said in one of his other posts the trend since the industrial revolution and particularily for the last few decades has been highly marked on a global level. To dismiss this as a natural trend is crazy, dare I say irresponsible.

2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png


Two millennia of mean surface temperatures according to different reconstructions, each smoothed on a decadal scale. The unsmoothed, annual value for 2004 is also plotted for reference.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming
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senojekips said:
More Doubts
The greenhouse signature is missing. We have been looking and measuring for years, and cannot find it.

Each possible cause of global warming has a different pattern of where in the planet the warming occurs first and the most. The signature of an increased greenhouse effect is a hot spot about 10km up in the atmosphere over the tropics. We have been measuring the atmosphere for decades using radiosondes: weather balloons with thermometers that radio back the temperature as the balloon ascends through the atmosphere. They show no hot spot. Whatsoever.
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I have been following climate change on a semi-professional level for a quarter of a decade and it is all too easy to get bogged down in 'rocket science' and overlook the obvious. No-one claims that climate models will predict temperatures accurately at a local level. It is also all too easy to just sift through the literature and pick out anomolies and use these to discredit the main points. If you are looking for a more pragmatic local anomoly just look at the north polar ice cap where (being next to greenland glacier) it is most important. No need for complex measurements there, the ice is literally melting away. We may not even have summer ice at the pole within a few decades.
 
perseus said:
Senojekips/ Monty Not sure what all this complex discussion on Fourier analysis is for (waves). The graph Senojekips posted was for Central England, what relevence is this? As Monty said in one of his other posts the trend since the industrial revolution and particularily for the last few decades has been highly marked on a global level. To dismiss this as a natural trend is crazy, dare I say irresponsible.

2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png


Two millennia of mean surface temperatures according to different reconstructions, each smoothed on a decadal scale. The unsmoothed, annual value for 2004 is also plotted for reference.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming
​
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Hehe yes that was an interesting graph because you rarely see such noticeable changes in such a short space of time. I have been doing a fair bit of reading on the mass extinction period of 250 million years ago and there are claims that what happened then was very rapid version of what is happening now.

But I have to admit to being side tracked by the work of Walter and Luis Alvarez (Asteroid collision theory via Iridium layers) and a theory that mass extinctions are regular occurances (65 million years) caused by dislodged debris fron the Van Oot belt so it may be quite some time before I get back to it.
 
The CET is relevant, because it is the only set of actual (not extrapolated or interpreted) temperature measurements available in the world for the period we were talking about.
 
perseus said:
We may not even have summer ice at the pole within a few decades.
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We may have many things. All of which have happened before, and will no doubt happen again. Maybe we are just lucky enough to be experiencing such a change now.

But that's not the debate, the debate is as to whether this change is being bought about by the intervention of man.

If theories were a dime a dozen we would all be rich beyond belief.
 
senojekips said:
The CET is relevant, because it is the only set of actual (not extrapolated or interpreted) temperature measurements available in the world for the period we were talking about.
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But we are extrapolating spatially not temporally in this case, from a populated area (there may have been plenty of smoke even before the IR) to the rest of the world. Still I can only see the long term trend the rest is noise.
 
The history of reliable temperature measure is short and a world wide effort in measuring world temperature is at best fifty years old. At BEST.
The graph in that sense is very misleading. It's basically a series of theories and estimations that have been plotted as if they were raw data collected by averaging temperatures of the earth through instruments at least as accurate as a regular thermometer.
Not to mention it matters WHERE you put the instruments.
Were the early measurements taken mostly in monestaries which like to be in high ground where the temperature is cooler?
Are the locations of the instruments the same and whereas before they used to be in the countryside, these areas are now urbanized and therefore the urban heat island effect has come into play?
All those things that the graph does not explain.
 
the_13th_redneck said:
The history of reliable temperature measure is short and a world wide effort in measuring world temperature is at best fifty years old. At BEST.
The graph in that sense is very misleading. It's basically a series of theories and estimations that have been plotted as if they were raw data collected by averaging temperatures of the earth through instruments at least as accurate as a regular thermometer.
Not to mention it matters WHERE you put the instruments.
Were the early measurements taken mostly in monestaries which like to be in high ground where the temperature is cooler?
Are the locations of the instruments the same and whereas before they used to be in the countryside, these areas are now urbanized and therefore the urban heat island effect has come into play?
All those things that the graph does not explain.
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Don't you think scientists allow for these effects? All the temperature estimates in the graph are based on independent measurements, tree rings, ocean cores, pollen, beetles, ice cores etc. Whilst any one of these isn't reliable, taken together they form compelling evidence that the temperature has substantially increased in the last hundred years or so relative to the last thousand because we can track how these change in relation to temperature now.

The other issue is statistical, if you have a lot of data even with substantial spread you can know the actual average to a high degree of certainty. It's a bit like throwing a coin ten thousand times, you will find it will be heads 50% of the time to within a few %.
 
Still not as accurate as walking outside, picking the right spot and taking an actual reading.
Scientists are wrong quite often, what makes you think they're 100% on this one?
 
perseus said:
Still I can only see the long term trend the rest is noise.
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Agreed!... in aces and spades.

Now,... I'm not saying we shouldn't listen to the noise, but so long as it is only noise, I feel that it's not wise to be issuing warnings based only on selected parts of that noise.
 
the_13th_redneck said:
Still not as accurate as walking outside, picking the right spot and taking an actual reading.
Scientists are wrong quite often, what makes you think they're 100% on this one?
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Nothing in the world is 100% certain, scientists know this better than anyone, it is just that they are so certain about some things it makes little difference for policy decisions.

The IPCC officially claim they are 90% sure GW is due to anthropogenic effects, although I think their arm was twisted by the politicians, it is probably more like 99%. 90% is more than enough to take action, especially considering that new energy sources will be required anyway soon. Problem is that the sceptics know they can always dig up an odd anomaly here then blow it up out of all proportion to confuse the layman. The inaction then drags on another few years.

Most evidence is that the earth will go into a positive feedback mode where reduced ice leads to less reflected light and greater warming still, so wait ten years and it will be probably be too late. This was hushed up to some extent in the last IPCC report. Valid scepticism should be aimed at why the IPCC don't use up to date information. The latest data always seems to indicate things are worse than the official position, due to time lags in the process of peer review, then re-checking with politicians etc. If accelerated feedback is occuring this is exactly what would be expected.
 
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