All that tells me is the scales are way too long and open ended for anyone to claim that they know what is driving the current warming trend or that it is more than a momentary blip in the constantly changing pattern of world temperature.

I'll be going to Texas one day. I'll let you know if it causes the temperatures to fluctuate.

Hey perhaps human cause global warming is all that's keeping the next Ice Age at bay and if we stop emitting gasses we'll all freeze. :hmmm:

:o

http://files.sharenator.com/its_a_tr...-44104-580.jpg

You've trapped yourself there.

When in a relatively short time frame you see changes that are in excess of changes that before have taken a hundred and a thousand times as long, from warming trends to extinction of species, then right this is the argument that natural causes are unlikely and that an artificial intervention has taken place. If you also see a correlation between warming-related variables and roughly the beginning of the industrial age, then this deserves some thought.

The symptom to be alarmed by is not that there is warming or extinction of species - these things happened always, and repeatedly. The symptom that deserves utmost attention is the speed at which it happens. I preaching this since years now . It's the speed that rings the alarm bell. ;)

I dunno if there's enough room even in this state for two Augusts :o

You can't be seriously trying to claim that worldwide temperatures for the past 200,000 years have been recorded with anything like the same degree of detail and accuracy they are nowadays. As far as you or anyone knows temperature spikes of this nature have occurred hundreds of times in the past.

:haha:It's warmer here than it is there!:D I tell ya Neal, you need to fly out here and I'll take to see the Spruce Goose, The PT Boat, and the USS Blueback.:hmmm:

August,

From all what science and research on past eras tells us, a rise of 0.8 °C in just 4 decades or so is racing down the autobahn with lightspeed - it represents a warming process taking place several hundred - sometimes it is even calculated as up to a thousand - times faster than in any previous eras about whose climatic conditions and changes we can make reasonably founded statements, basing on geologic findings for the most, or deep core drillings and deep ice drillings.

Taking a trip in the time machine and setting up sensors 200,000 years ago has little to do with it, August. Geology is a very interesting science, and there are other subbranches of sciences that focus on analysis of petrified seeds, for example - and maybe you underestimate how much such findings and the geological layers in which they are being found, can tell us about past conditions of climate and geography. Sediment analysis also can give us explicit information not only on the mix of agents in past atmospheres, but about the processes that made the content of the atmosphere change, and at what time. And both sciences combined, plus several others, allow us to make quite reasonable models of past climatic conditions. ;)

In fact some researchers in these fields say it is easier to reconstruct past atmospheric and climatic conditions, than to predict the change of the present climate. :O:

All of which represents barely a sliver from the huge tree of time. It's like saying you've compared a few dozen blurry snapshots taken at random times and places over the past few hundred thousand years with today and can fomulate from that what it's going to be like in 50 years. Oh wait...

... Really? For all their fancy computer models, ice cores and petrified tree rings and they still find short term prediction difficult? Why then should we have such blind faith in their ability to do so or more pointedly their recommendations on what we should do about it?

Then they are telling untruths. Sorry, but the proxy data is very weak.

In order to prove that their models (for relating proxy data to temperature) work, they must try and calibrate to known time periods. They don't work well. It also requires many assumptions about the past climate that are plausible, but again, unproved. It's a great science to be in cause you can say anything about the past (as long as that "anything" is that it's warmer NOW) and there is no possible way to check your answer to the same precision that we can measure temperature now.

BTW, the proxy models need to be able to be predictive, or they are simply wrong. You cannot claim the model accurately works as a proxy if it is not predictive.

Back in school we used to call astronomy (our field of study (well, astrophysics)) a "zeroith order" science. We did so because first terms in expansions were often as good an approximation as we were ever gonna get.

Climate science would be lucky to make the grade to be "zeroith order."

Not to say they shouldn't try, but they're just not there yet.

From a policy standpoint, all that matters is cost-benefit. To access cost of AGW, you need to have an accurate, predictive model (how can you mitigate, if you cannot say that an X% reduction means Y temperature change?)

Funny, the models tend to use short (geologically) time frame rolling averages. They are looking at shorter time frames than you let on. In addition, they very carefully pick the "origin" year, as well as the time frame for the rolling averages to maximize "change."

I remember someone asking Meave Leakey a question about how a new find of hers fit into the big picture. She said "we just don't know." I already liked her before that (worked with them for a bit), but that made me like her so much more. Other people in paleo-anthro... showboats... would put their find to always be THE lynchpin. She's the type to draw a cloud instead of a line. THese climate guys get very political, and—even if it is for the "benefit" of lay people, talk in very delineated terms. Very black and white. That lessens them as scientists. Science is probability. It's electron probability distributions, not the Bohr model.

"We think human pollution might possibly have some effect on global climate, but we are unsure, and our models don't work well yet."

^^^that's what they should say.


"The Earth is warming due to man (the science is settled, damn it!), and if we don't act at great expense... yesterday, we're all going to die."

^^^what they say, instead.


BTW, as I said up the thread, I think the basic AGW hypothesis is very plausible. In fact, I'd say it would be unlikely if our pollution did NOT affect the climate. It's like a horse race, we all know that one horse will win, but which one? How much the effect is matters from a policy standpoint. Matters a lot. And it needs to be understood to great accuracy, and with a reliable, predictive model so that mitigation schemes can be designed in a useful way (assuming the human component exceeds any natural one and is in fact driving things). I'l admit bias as an astrophysics person, but I want to see models that include good models of the sun output (of course those don't work well, either, as the current, weak sunspot cycle demonstrates). A climate model is only as good as the weakest part of it.

This ^

2011 is off to a great start, I post my only troll thread in a long time and the end result is the most civil and thoughtful discussion between Skybird and August ever. I should get an award!

Give yourself a free Subsim mug. :know: :up: :D

Magic