HippieSmell
Occupy Reef Central
Wow, I did a double take when I saw that you posted. Where have you been?
Greenhouse emmisions.........are we doomed by 2050
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HippieSmell
Occupy Reef Central
I like capitalism because it is the best financial system to date, but unrestricted capitalism has major faults, this being an example. There is also WAYYYY too much business influence in politics to even suggest a completely free market anyway. The vast majority of people want this technology to move forward, but there is a lot of pressure to keep the status quo.
Don't want to necessarily take this discussion another direction, but even as a capitalist pig, I am all for and will do anything I can to contribute to the development and use of alternative energy. I find it rediculous that we pay for the means of our own distruction, terroristly speaking. The sooner we no longer need the raw materials of the middle east the better.
Dafur fact. United States and its allies is reluctant to interfere in the genocide of Dafur because it doesn't want to **** off China, who gets alot of oil from Sudan. I don't care who you are, that's just not right.
And if the air gets cleaner and the reefs do better, nice side gravy.
Mike
Dafur fact. United States and its allies is reluctant to interfere in the genocide of Dafur because it doesn't want to **** off China, who gets alot of oil from Sudan. I don't care who you are, that's just not right.
And if the air gets cleaner and the reefs do better, nice side gravy.
Mike
chrissreef
New member
"The vast majority of people want this technology to move forward, but there is a lot of pressure to keep the status quo."
that's because the lowest bidder wins and moving forward costs $$. the US consumer and industries hold the importance of monitary cost of something very high - even above quality... the government as well (I work for a govt subcontractor and whoever bids the lowest wins 95%+ orders and it requires a TON of justification paperwork if the lowest bidder isn't used). Look at the success of walmart... do you think many of those consumers care about the environment?
that's because the lowest bidder wins and moving forward costs $$. the US consumer and industries hold the importance of monitary cost of something very high - even above quality... the government as well (I work for a govt subcontractor and whoever bids the lowest wins 95%+ orders and it requires a TON of justification paperwork if the lowest bidder isn't used). Look at the success of walmart... do you think many of those consumers care about the environment?
As a kinda new member of this site and a new "reefer", I found it interesting, but not surprising, that there would be a section on this "global warming" matter. I probably have more age on me than most writing here. I have no real science background, so I can't authoritatively contribute much but ask probably stupid questions. Like, how do we reach such grand conclusions about natural events on this planet when the planet is over 4 billion years old and our ability to record observations is less than 200 years? Is it not true that there is evidence to suggest the earth cycles, i.e., moves from warm to cold to warm to cold, etc.... and that this cycle has been ongoing well prior to man even finding the value of carbon? If that is the case, then how can we so dramatically reach these almost religious like conclusions about how man is responsible for what is otherwise thought by some experts to be a totally normal and natural event, i.e. warming (like where did the great lakes come from). What concerns me the most about all of this is the fact that it is now political, harshly so. A lay person like me has nothing to rely upon except screaming idiots pounding away on their positions. Being no fool, I smell a rat, I smell an agenda that is not limited to just the issue of man's contribution to "warming". I smell a political movement that is unlimited in its view of what the world should look like at all levels. Now with that, I have a fox face, it is beautiful, but I want to put more fish in the tank, a 120 gal. all paraments very good. Any ideas?????
chrissreef
New member
hdodd - good points. I disagree but yes there are "factual" opinions on both sides of the fence (just as there are many many other things). The only thing we can do is make personal choices based on what the "screaming idiots" are saying.
Personally, I wish everyone would pile all of their garbage in their garage for a year and tell me with a straight face that we aren't impacting the world. or have an aquarium for 15yrs without doing a water change... this would easily illustrate that a balance needs to be made. Imports need an equal export... and right now it's not equal which makes me believe things (Co2) are piling up in the atmosphere (and with increasing populations it's increasing at a faster pace every year)... thus the fat person keeps getting fatter.
i take my global warming position outside of the "facts" people say about global warming since our records only go back 200 yrs and can be measured further through analysis. I believe it merely because of the import/export balance that needs to occur.
Personally, I wish everyone would pile all of their garbage in their garage for a year and tell me with a straight face that we aren't impacting the world. or have an aquarium for 15yrs without doing a water change... this would easily illustrate that a balance needs to be made. Imports need an equal export... and right now it's not equal which makes me believe things (Co2) are piling up in the atmosphere (and with increasing populations it's increasing at a faster pace every year)... thus the fat person keeps getting fatter.
i take my global warming position outside of the "facts" people say about global warming since our records only go back 200 yrs and can be measured further through analysis. I believe it merely because of the import/export balance that needs to occur.
greenbean36191
Premium Member
We have proxy data that overlaps with our 200 years of direct observations. Proxy data is basically an indirect measure of something else. Ice cores are one of the most publicized sources of proxy data. You can look the thickness and structure of snow layers and tell how wet, cold, or windy a year is. You can also look at the amount and composition of dust or ash in the snow and tell how dry or windy it is where the dust came from. The ice also traps microscopic bubbles of air that allow for direct measurement of ancient air. You can also look at the ratios of different oxygen isotopes and tell how much sun was hitting the upper atmosphere. You can do similar things with cores from coral reefs, ocean and lake sediments, and tree rings (from live and dead trees). The 200 years of direct observations plus occasional observations before that give us a check on the calibration of the proxies. Obviously I'm oversimplifying a lot, but Richard Alley has a great book called The Two Mile Time Machine that does a really good job of explaining how we know what we know in easy to understand terms.
There is no doubt. Dr. Alley's book does a great job of putting past and recent trends into perspective too.
I know of no experts on the subject that believe that the current trend is a totally normal and natural event. They certainly aren't publishing anything in the scientific journals to that effect. Even John Christy has acknowledged that humans are having an impact, though he disagrees with most scientists on the extent of our impact.
I think this question is a great example of the false dichotomy that's been set up by skeptics. They would have you think that the only options are that either humans are causing the current warming (and that that's what scientists are claiming) or that it's caused by natural variations. Given that we have good records of huge changes that predate humans, the second of the two seems like the obvious choice. In reality there is also the option that the current trend is the result of natural fluctuations being amplified by the impact of humans. That's the option supported by science. There is currently no scientific debate over whether or not we're a factor. The only debate it how much.
So how do we know that we're partly to blame? We know what greenhouse gases like CO2, water, and methane do in the atmosphere. We know that we produce a lot of them- more than the planet can sink. There is no way we know of that the excess can not have an impact so the question becomes how much. To figure out that impact we have to know how much of those gases we've produced vs how much is produced naturally and how much is sunk as well as feedbacks like changes in the reflectivity of ocean water vs. ice or clouds vs. clear skies. When you combine all of that you can make a model. If you only include natural things like volcanoes, orbital changes, changes in the sun's output, etc. The model matches the real world data up until about the time of the industrial revolution, where it starts to underestimate the trend. If you add in the human impacts suddenly the model starts matching the real world data the whole way. No, it's not perfect, but the fact that we can get the model to fall that closely to what actually happened shows that we have a pretty good understanding of what caused the changes- at least well enough to predict the trends.
chrissreef
New member
great writeup greenbean, thanks =)
Thanks for the book reference, will get it. The description of proxy data is very helpful. It certainly makes sense, and even I can understand this, that human presence on the planet contributes something to the environment, good or bad. Well over my head, but a possible question is so, okay, we are bad for the environment, so what? If the natural course of things is for that to be, then???????????????? In other words, we take a leap from the hard and fast "science" and move into the "whys?". That, I suppose, becomes more a philosophical discussion. On the proxy data, if I were to create a line representing the length of time the earth has been around, (or more relevant, the length of time the earth's environment is similar to today's), what percentage of that time would be covered by the proxy data? All of that time, only a fraction of that time? My point is that proxy data seems to be very important to the analysis and I sense that it is a very powerful tool used for the development of "models", then the degree of confidence in the data must be high. If my low level understanding is at all close, then is there a generally accepted level of confidence in the proxy data and how is that confidence determined? But more important, no one has answered my fish question, what next folks, what next????
There have been at least four major ice ages in the Earth's past. Outside these periods, the Earth seems to have been ice-free even in high latitudes.
The earliest hypothesized ice age, called the Huronian, was around 2.7 to 2.3 billion years ago during the early Proterozoic Eon.
The earliest well-documented ice age, and probably the most severe of the last 1 billion years, occurred from 850 to 630 million years ago (the Cryogenian period) and may have produced a Snowball Earth in which permanent ice covered the entire globe. This ended very rapidly as water vapor returned to Earth's atmosphere. It has been suggested that the end of this ice age was responsible for the subsequent Ediacaran and Cambrian Explosion, though this theory is recent and controversial.
Sediment records showing the fluctuating sequences of glacials and interglacials during the last several million years.A minor ice age, the Andean-Saharan, occurred from 460 to 430 million years ago, during the Late Ordovician and the Silurian period. There were extensive polar ice caps at intervals from 350 to 260 million years ago, during the Carboniferous and early Permian Periods, associated with the Karoo Ice Age.
The present ice age began 40 million years ago with the growth of an ice sheet in Antarctica. It intensified during the late Pliocene, around 3 million years ago, with the spread of ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere, and has continued in the Pleistocene. Since then, the world has seen cycles of glaciation with ice sheets advancing and retreating on 40,000- and 100,000-year time scales. The most recent glacial period ended about ten thousand years ago.
Ice ages can be further divided by location and time; for example, the names Riss (180,000â€"œ130,000 years bp) and Würm (70,000â€"œ10,000 years bp) refer specifically to glaciation in the Alpine region. Note that the maximum extent of the ice is not maintained for the full interval. Unfortunately, the scouring action of each glaciation tends to remove most of the evidence of prior ice sheets almost completely, except in regions where the later sheet does not achieve full coverage. It is possible that glacial periods other than those above, especially in the Precambrian, have been overlooked because of scarcity of exposed rocks from high latitudes from older periods.
The above is from Wikepedia, and I hate being a pest about this. The book referred, and I haven't read it just yet, seems to talk about looking at 100,000 years, yet the total history of climate change is so very much longer. I know nothing about the other forms of proxy data gathering, but as a lay person, you may see my problem. Thanks for indulging.
The earliest hypothesized ice age, called the Huronian, was around 2.7 to 2.3 billion years ago during the early Proterozoic Eon.
The earliest well-documented ice age, and probably the most severe of the last 1 billion years, occurred from 850 to 630 million years ago (the Cryogenian period) and may have produced a Snowball Earth in which permanent ice covered the entire globe. This ended very rapidly as water vapor returned to Earth's atmosphere. It has been suggested that the end of this ice age was responsible for the subsequent Ediacaran and Cambrian Explosion, though this theory is recent and controversial.
Sediment records showing the fluctuating sequences of glacials and interglacials during the last several million years.A minor ice age, the Andean-Saharan, occurred from 460 to 430 million years ago, during the Late Ordovician and the Silurian period. There were extensive polar ice caps at intervals from 350 to 260 million years ago, during the Carboniferous and early Permian Periods, associated with the Karoo Ice Age.
The present ice age began 40 million years ago with the growth of an ice sheet in Antarctica. It intensified during the late Pliocene, around 3 million years ago, with the spread of ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere, and has continued in the Pleistocene. Since then, the world has seen cycles of glaciation with ice sheets advancing and retreating on 40,000- and 100,000-year time scales. The most recent glacial period ended about ten thousand years ago.
Ice ages can be further divided by location and time; for example, the names Riss (180,000â€"œ130,000 years bp) and Würm (70,000â€"œ10,000 years bp) refer specifically to glaciation in the Alpine region. Note that the maximum extent of the ice is not maintained for the full interval. Unfortunately, the scouring action of each glaciation tends to remove most of the evidence of prior ice sheets almost completely, except in regions where the later sheet does not achieve full coverage. It is possible that glacial periods other than those above, especially in the Precambrian, have been overlooked because of scarcity of exposed rocks from high latitudes from older periods.
The above is from Wikepedia, and I hate being a pest about this. The book referred, and I haven't read it just yet, seems to talk about looking at 100,000 years, yet the total history of climate change is so very much longer. I know nothing about the other forms of proxy data gathering, but as a lay person, you may see my problem. Thanks for indulging.
Loehle, C. 2007. A 2000-year global temperature reconstruction based on non-treering proxies. Energy & Environment 18(7-8): 1049-1058.
Note: Data presented in Figure 1 is available in a CSV file.
Historical data provide a baseline for judging how anomalous recent temperature changes are and for assessing the degree to which organisms are likely to be adversely affected by current or future warming. Climate histories are commonly reconstructed from a variety of sources, including ice cores, tree rings, and sediment. Tree-ring data, being the most abundant for recent centuries, tend to dominate reconstructions. There are reasons to believe that tree ring data may not properly capture long-term climate changes. In this study, eighteen 2000-year-long series were obtained that were not based on tree ring data. Data in each series were smoothed with a 30-year running mean. All data were then converted to anomalies by subtracting the mean of each series from that series. The overall mean series was then computed by simple averaging. The mean time series shows quite coherent structure. The mean series shows the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and Little Ice Age (LIA) quite clearly, with the MWP being approximately 0.3°C warmer than 20th century values at these eighteen sites.
Copyright © 2007 by Multi-Science Publishing Co. Ltd. All rights reserved. Article posted on this website with permission.
Note: Data presented in Figure 1 is available in a CSV file.
Historical data provide a baseline for judging how anomalous recent temperature changes are and for assessing the degree to which organisms are likely to be adversely affected by current or future warming. Climate histories are commonly reconstructed from a variety of sources, including ice cores, tree rings, and sediment. Tree-ring data, being the most abundant for recent centuries, tend to dominate reconstructions. There are reasons to believe that tree ring data may not properly capture long-term climate changes. In this study, eighteen 2000-year-long series were obtained that were not based on tree ring data. Data in each series were smoothed with a 30-year running mean. All data were then converted to anomalies by subtracting the mean of each series from that series. The overall mean series was then computed by simple averaging. The mean time series shows quite coherent structure. The mean series shows the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and Little Ice Age (LIA) quite clearly, with the MWP being approximately 0.3°C warmer than 20th century values at these eighteen sites.
Copyright © 2007 by Multi-Science Publishing Co. Ltd. All rights reserved. Article posted on this website with permission.
greenbean36191
Premium Member
I don't have access to the Loehle paper since E&E isn't a very widely distributed "journal," but here's a fun critique of it. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/12/past-reconstructions/
If the criticisms he points out are true then maybe I'm not missing out on much with E&E. :lol:
Towards the very old end of the spectrum you get more into areas where you can tell that it was hotter or warmer but you can't tell by how much. That's fairly immaterial for studying future trends though. We already have records for a long enough time period (including large changes) to verify the models.
If the criticisms he points out are true then maybe I'm not missing out on much with E&E. :lol:
That really is a bad place to take the temperature for use in trend analysis and it's true that it's not unique. However it's not a surprise to climatologists. The heat island effect is already accounted for in the analysis. There are enough land based sites that aren't suffering from the heat island effect to say that the trend really does exist and provide us with reliable data. We also have a significant amount of corroborating data taken at sea along with sea surface temperatures. That same data is also what allows us to tell that the heat island effect isn't just theoretical.
The Earth is about 4.6 billion years old and in some sense we have proxies dating back to about 3-4 billion. As you go farther back in time though the number of proxies, the types of measurements you can get, and the resolution all decrease. For the modern era you could look at things such as direct observations, tree-rings, coral cores, sediment cores, and ice cores and the overlap and large number of data points provide a lot of clarity. If you want to look back a few thousand years though, you lose the tree rings. After about 100,000 years you start to lose the majority of the ice cores. After 800,000 years all of the ice cores end and beyond that eventually all you have is the geologic record, which doesn't provide a whole lot of precision.
Where they overlap you can compare the proxies between each other and the observational data. The amount of variation between datasets allows you to statistically determine the margin of error with a defined confidence level. 95% is pretty much the the standard confidence interval, so that there's a 95% chance that the actual value falls within the margin of error. As the variability of the data decreases or the number of data points increases the uncertainty shrinks. For the most recent data we have lots of data points, so from a statistical point of view, low uncertainty and 95% confidence. As we go farther back we still have 95% confidence but uncertainty increases if that make sense. Basically after we calibrate the data using known values it comes down to statistics to tell us what we can make of it.
Alley was one of the scientists involved in drilling the Greenland ice cores, which only go back about 100,000 years, so that's what he talks about most. However other proxies including other ice cores go back much further and the book does talk a fair bit about those other data sources.
Towards the very old end of the spectrum you get more into areas where you can tell that it was hotter or warmer but you can't tell by how much. That's fairly immaterial for studying future trends though. We already have records for a long enough time period (including large changes) to verify the models.
While not a social scientist, I spent many years in criminal justice management where data and the analysis of such became more and more refined. My use of that data was critical but awfully difficult to communicate to others. Again, my skepticism comes from too many years working with people who were paid, in effect, to have a particular outcome notwithstanding the data. That I hasten to add, was true on all sides of a given issue. I think one of my problems is that it appears the data analysis is actually very limited, in terms of earth time. What I mean is that there seems to be some pretty good stuff recently, (for the sake of argument, 10,000 years). But beyond that, the analysis becomes very, very weak. My brain says well when you are missing such a huge piece of the picture, then one needs to become very careful. I guess what I am missing is the confidence in the analysis of the proxy data which apparently shows changes associated with human history (industrial revolution). Is that for instance, simply correlation? Are there other possible explanations aside from human activity? Fascinating stuff I say. But, please, I need fish selection help, really. I also wonder if natural events, volcanic activity for example, of which were are not aware have contributed to the temp history?
Greenbean, thanks for the replying, am learning much. As a simple mind, let me pose the following:
Assume we have single temp measuring device that is able to accurately record temps for 2 million years. This device is located in my back yard, meeting the accepted standards for measuring temps and so forth. Assume the device records the temp every hour and stores the data so we can retrieve it and play with it whenever we want. IE, the hypothetical temp gauge, perfect in every respect.
Am I wrong is saying that such a device and method could provide us with accurate temp readings and we could then model the future based on the huge amount of data we have collected? If so, what things would be interesting to look for in the record?
Assume we have single temp measuring device that is able to accurately record temps for 2 million years. This device is located in my back yard, meeting the accepted standards for measuring temps and so forth. Assume the device records the temp every hour and stores the data so we can retrieve it and play with it whenever we want. IE, the hypothetical temp gauge, perfect in every respect.
Am I wrong is saying that such a device and method could provide us with accurate temp readings and we could then model the future based on the huge amount of data we have collected? If so, what things would be interesting to look for in the record?
greenbean36191
Premium Member
If you only have the record from your backyard you can't really say much of anything regardless of how long you collect. You don't have any replicates or other locations that allow you to separate the signal and the noise. If you have a few hundred of these placed at various places around the world then you could make a very good plot of global temperature trends, but you really can't make any predictions about the future because you don't know what caused the changes in the data. To model the future you need to know the mechanisms of change. To do that you would need to look at measurements of other factors like cloud cover, wind, rain, amount of light, etc and see how they interact.
I think it's important to point out that the proxies are simply measurements. You can tell past trends with them, but you can't use them singly to forecast. When combined they can be useful to understand how factors influence each other and to predict whether a trend is likely to continue, but they don't factor in feedbacks. Modeling is a separate discipline that does use proxies, but really relies more on physics. Without the proxies you could still in theory make models, but you would only have about 200 years worth of data to verify them against. So with enough data but no models or with models but no proxy data you could still make good predictions, but when you combine the two you can refine those predictions.
It's also important to point out that when real world data is used to create models, the same data can't be used to verify them.
That's the difference between a scientist and a consultant. :lol: In all seriousness though, that is a big problem with privately produced research and to a much smaller degree in "pure" science. In academia usually the researchers have a set salary regardless of what kind of research the produce or grant money. There is a very low cap (usually a month's salary) placed on the additional money they can receive from grants. To get those grants, each application is reviewed independently and without the reviewers having any knowledge of who wrote it (to remove bias based on previous work). The money is usually given out prior to the start of the research or in phases based on progress, but it's never dependent on the end result. When you go to publish you have to go through more review where the job of the reviewers is to find methodological or reasoning errors in the paper. If it stands up to that it's still subject to audit and refute by other researchers after publication. Unless you're good enough at fudging numbers to avoid other experts noticing, it's not likely to pass. Sometimes it happens, but usually it's restricted to more obscure journals. The process is designed to be self correcting whether the errors were due to limited knowledge or intentional fudging.
Well it's a lot longer than that, but the real question is how long does the record really need to be? The amount of different forcings changes with time, but the physics behind their impacts doesn't. Like I mentioned before, even without the proxy data we can still create the models based on physics. 100 lbs of CO2 today has the same impact as 100 lbs of CO2 100,000 years ago. We have excellent data going back long before civilization which gives us plenty of time to look at what was going on without the influence of humans. You could do away with all but the last 20,000 years of data or add another million years to the tail end and it wouldn't change the understanding or predictions.
Not that we know of. We know roughly how much sinking/ production of greenhouse gases and aerosols we can be accounted for by natural events like volcanoes. Things like orbital changes, sun spots, and feedbacks like clouds are also accounted for. Still we can't account for the discrepancy between the real world numbers for the 20th century and the models unless man made factors are included too.
Correlation only shows relationships, never causes. We can show that there is a correlation between atmospheric CO2 and temperature, but either one can be a cause for the other. The confidence in the causation comes from estimates of anthropogenic greenhouse production combined with physics, which ultimately give rise to the models, which are then in turn confirmed by observational data. Basically it's a result of the intertwining and agreement of various pieces of evidence, any one of which could be taken away and not cause the collapse of the theory.
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Thanks greenbean for all you have written, very, very helpful. I could go on and on with questions, but you have been grateful enough. I must see about finding a course or something to provide me with an opportunity to learn much more. I used to present to governmental agencies, legislative committees, public groups, etc.......... One of the greatest tools I found was "simple is best." That is, if one can reduce a complex subject to simple terms, then you may find success in getting the message out. Is there a document, web site, or whatever, that takes the evidence about the human contribution to warming and effectively sums it up in some understandable detail? Is the UN report(s) worth finding and reading for example? Again, thanks.
greenbean36191
Premium Member
IMO the IPCC reports are very long, boring, and can get too technical at times. I've read large parts of them and wouldn't recommend it.
I'm a fan of www.realclimate.org, which covers most of the major new developments in the science, but realize it's written by "mainstream" scientists so it doesn't really represent the side of the "skeptics" except to refute them. At times they get too technical too.
Like I mentioned earlier, The Two Mile Time Machine is definitely worth a read. Alley keeps things really simple and has a fun writing style as scientists go. The book also stays very neutral. It's a great intro to paleoclimatology and modeling.
I would NOT recommend An Inconvenient Truth.
I'll try to come up with a better list tonight, but that's all I can think of right now. I'm visiting the family and don't have anything good saved to my favorites on this computer.
I'm a fan of www.realclimate.org, which covers most of the major new developments in the science, but realize it's written by "mainstream" scientists so it doesn't really represent the side of the "skeptics" except to refute them. At times they get too technical too.
Like I mentioned earlier, The Two Mile Time Machine is definitely worth a read. Alley keeps things really simple and has a fun writing style as scientists go. The book also stays very neutral. It's a great intro to paleoclimatology and modeling.
I would NOT recommend An Inconvenient Truth.
I'll try to come up with a better list tonight, but that's all I can think of right now. I'm visiting the family and don't have anything good saved to my favorites on this computer.
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