Hacked Emails Show Climate Science Ridden with Rancor

[August]

Originally Posted by NeonSamurai

We won't know if the trend is continuing or not for several more years (10 or 20).

Yep. I would go further to say that we won't know for that long what are the true average numbers of storms per year.

The thing is Neo in the last 40 years we're really come a long way when it comes to identifying and monitoring the weather out at sea. Before the 60's the only way somebody knew there was a storm was if they happened to fly or sail through it. So i'd be surprised if there wasn't a big increase in the count since we've put those electronic eyes up in the sky.

I would say its both human numbers and human activities are equally to blame. As for a solution, I don't see a ready one available yet, but does that mean we should just ignore it?

Nobody is ignoring it but i'm wary of throwing lots of money at things that won't actually address the problem.

[Pacific_Ace]

We have exactly one planet, and no where else to go. It is far better to err on the side of caution and discover later we didn't have to because the other option is we pay no attention at all and end up extinct or back in an iron age society.

[NeonSamurai]

Originally Posted by CaptainHaplo

Neon - I think we agree on some things here.

So let me ask you. Should we, as the animals at the apex, be taking steps to insure our own survival against the cycles of nature? If so, wouldn't it stand to reason that nature will react drastically should we do so? To borrow from "The Lion King" - it is the circle of life that your saying we should be altering.

Well we have done exactly that for much of human history. We have (I think foolishly) tried to dominate, subdue, and control nature. We use technology to overcome population limits, and medicine to limit the effectiveness of natural population controls (disease, etc). Honestly I don't think we will be stopping that any time soon. We have already stomped all over the circle of life.

I think we need to learn how to control ourselves, for our own sake if for no other reason.

In one sense, yes - our existence alters the environment. However, isn't that alteration "natural" given the makeup of our species? Thus, our actions and its impact are in effect, a "natural" occurance. They are a product of humanity's "evolution" from its primitive roots. When people talk about modifying society's behavior to keep from "altering the natural course" of things, are they not altering the natural course of things by that very modification?

Is it? We are not purely creatures of instinct, but are capable of escaping those bonds and able to consider our actions. If not we never would have gone far beyond our hunter/gatherer origins, which is what we are most naturally suited for. If we hadn't use our intellect beyond basic instinctive needs, the world probably wouldn't be in the mess it is in now. Most of our problems are due to our natural instincts to survive, thrive and reproduce, coupled with our intelligence, and developed technology. Though in spite of all our foolishness and hubris we are still just as bound to nature (the ecosystem) as we ever were.

Climate change proponents state that we must change our society to maintain an ecosystem. Just a postulation - but wouldn't that change alter not just the forecasted weather - but the entire fabric of nature in all its facets by changing the track of natural evolution? Isn't maintaining an ecosystem, when the natural progression is to have that ecosystem change, a worse meddling in the affairs of what we all fail to understand in its entirety?

The question is, if our species is responsible for the changes to the ecosystem, and if so how much are we responsible for. I think in most cases the answer is that we are responsible for a lot of it. Obviously we cannot control the paths nature itself takes, the warming and cooling cycles which have gone on since the planet was formed we can't do much about. But we can try to control how much we negatively affect those cycles, and our negative impact on the global ecosystem. We are already meddling with nature by releasing the massive quantities of greenhouse gasses we do, by hacking down the forests (which consume C02), by causing the mass extinction of species, by overfishing the oceans and over cultivating the land, by creating massive amounts of pollution and dumping it into the environment, by overpopulating and putting local ecosystems under severe strain to maintain our numbers and continue our growth, etc.

Sure we are not responsible for everything, but I do think we are responsible for a lot of what is going on. The basic solutions are less people, less man made carbon and other emissions, more trees and other CO2 consumers, lower pollution, putting a halt to our expansion into the natural world, etc. Problem is I don't see this happening until it is way too late, which means nature will either take our species out (after a major global extinction, probably caused by our last gasps to survive, destroying everything around us), or cut our numbers down drastically (which has already happened more then once).

Granted, these questions border more on the philisophical, but they are thoughts that are rattling around my head at the moment.

I don't mind discussing philosophical things, and thinking is always a good thing.

Originally Posted by August

Yep. I would go further to say that we won't know for that long what are the true average numbers of storms per year.

The thing is Neo in the last 40 years we're really come a long way when it comes to identifying and monitoring the weather out at sea. Before the 60's the only way somebody knew there was a storm was if they happened to fly or sail through it. So i'd be surprised if there wasn't a big increase in the count since we've put those electronic eyes up in the sky.

Yep which is why such studies tend to look at data starting in around the 1970s onward (we can though calculate how many damaging storms made land before that, but that data is incomplete as many storms do not make landfall). Of course the obvious problem is we have a very small window of data to work with. So we can't say for certain if the data we do have is following a pattern (natural or otherwise) or not as that pattern may be beyond the scope of our more recent solid data.

I will say though that it is pretty certain that warmth increases the power of storms, and that this has been demonstrated under laboratory "storm in a bottle" conditions.

Nobody is ignoring it but i'm wary of throwing lots of money at things that won't actually address the problem.

That I can understand. I do think we better damn well start addressing the problems though, or pay the consequences later on. I do feel though that many people are trying their best to stuff their fingers in their ears and pretend its not happening, that is human nature too.

[Skybird]

Haplo,

I had typed in a long reply, and then hit two wrong keys in the down right corner, deleting it all. Fan-tas-tic. Don't currently feel like wanting to type all that again.

Great way to start a Sunday. Happens when I type not in Words, becasue I don't expect it to become long, so I type directly into the forum browser, but then it necomes long, and then...

[Skybird]

I should have known myself better.

This is just a shorter versons of what I typed before, I cut some things short.

Haplo,

I do not gloss over your medieval ice age argument. I just fail to read so much into it like you do, because as you say it is part of a natural fluctuation. And that is the reason why the medieval temperatures do not serve well as a parallel that could explain the even faster rise in temperature we see in the present. Because the natural conditions back then and in the past 150 years or less, do not compare. The warming today is being caused by different factors then the warming phase back then. later some comments more to that.

I do not want to spend another hour of typing, so I cut it short and link to two findings, that aimed at what I tried to say (and probably in a more complicated manner, as always ). the first is this article in the New Scientist, describing doubts why the medieval climate maybe cannot be used as an explanation for global warming today, because it may have been not a global phenomenon, but caused by just different patterns of heat distribution than today.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...iscovered.html

the second is a german article mentioning a project regarding the present, and I summarise it in short words therefore.

http://www.focus.de/wissen/wissensch...id_448626.html

In that article they say that in Octobre, AP has ordered four statisticians to analyse - independently from each other - data sets provided by the american NOAA that included weather and temperature data, but the nature of the data was hidden from the analysts. All four statisticians came to the result that the data does not allow a conclusions that in the immediate past (the last years) a "cooling" has taken place. The statisticians were not aware of that the data they analysed was weather data - they did not know it, just dealth with the data formally and checking it with methodological tools of their profession. Even more: the conclusions of the statisticians mean that the American weather data by the NOAA indicate that the past years, including 2009, have been the warmest decade in the past 130 years since the beginning of recording weather data. According to that, 2005 has been the warmest year ever. the warmth record years of 1998 and 2005 are already lagging behind in people's minds, and the sceptic's argument that a cooling has taken place is being attacked by statisticians of the university of South Carolina for referring exclusively to the immediate past and trying to formulate a global, lasting trend by picking just the "rosins" from the past one or two years. They say that if you look at data since 1998 only, indeed that seems to indicate a minitrend downward, but doing so is simply misleading and wrong, because you just look at a very short timespan that happens to include a slight down-movement in the constant natural fluctuation of the general trend curve.

So much for that article.

We know for sure that in the past 11 or 12 centuries there have been 3 phases of relative coolings, followed by phases of relative warmings (logically! what naturally goes down, must naturally come up again). That this has been tried to hide in graphs linked to the IPCC reports, indeed is unforgivable, and bad science, or better: no science at all. But we are not sure about the quality of these phases, and currently the socalled medieval mini-ice age is beeing re-evaluated in temperatures, once it was said the phenomenen was global, it now gets seen as more regional, once it was seen as beeing all-low (and afterwards all-high) throughout the year, now one starts to think that the mean temepratures over the year possibly did not vary to the present by those excessive 3-5 degrees that once were assumed, but probably only differed by less than 1°C, but that the seasonal weather pendulum was swinging more extremely to the warm and cold poles: the summers were warmer, and the winter were colder. I think this is the most reasonable assumption indeed. In yearly averages, the weather was not that drastically different, probably, but the seasonal weather was far more extreme.

No serious scientist doubts that there are natural weather cycles, of various timespans, reaching from just 10-20 years, over a 300-400 year cycles to one including timespans of several thousand years. Occasionally I read the same three such cycles getting mentioned time and again. But there are huge differnces between scientiists and the sceptics camp in to what degree these could be held respinsible for the global weather trend of the modern era.

The point is that this natural fluctuation does not seem to be fit to explain the current acceleration in warming that we see, making it the fastest happening climate change and warming known in history. On the other hand we do know that we are emitting a lot of gasses that are proven in their effects on changing the temperature behavior of an atmosphere. And we see the close coincidence between the climate change starting to become conspicious in a statistical, methodological understanding, and the setting-in population explosion and industrialisation and environmental destruction done by man. These factors do not get explained by the medieval ice age at all (I also wonder why they call it the medieval ice age or mini-ice age, it wasn't an ice age, compared to a real ice age the climate still was pretty much moderate).

And let's not forget another thing: global warming can cause paradox effects. When you have ice melting in the arctic, the water vaporises into the air - and condenses (?) on the still present ice areas in other parts of the arctic that are still coller in relation, making the ice thicker there for a temporary time only. The melting ice is sweet water, but sea currents, amongst others depend on salienity differences, so the adding of huge ammounts of sweet water into the salt water ocean changes the pattern and energetic intensity of global currents, with all effects on climate that brings. If the Gulf Stream lowers it's activity, it brings less warmth to Europe, which translates into a relative REGIONAL cooling that is caused by global waming nevertheless. In the past years, there have been reports saying that some experts said the Gld Stream already has lost 18% in activity in the past years. Factors like this have been predicted and explained since the mid or late 80s, but still get picked out of context and then serve as an excuse or should I say: axe-cuse? - to doubt global warming - in principle the same distortion of methodology as the statisticians complain about in the article I summarised above.

I repeatedly said that science is no religion, claiming to have the ultimate, the final, the total truth, but I said that science tries - or at least should try - to bring observations made and systematically gained data into explanation models that combine and explain them in the currently best way possible, which means: logically, and as uncomplicated as possible, the models then get tested and usd for prediction, and eventually altered, which often is a constantly running process, making theories change over time, eventually. This is no treacherous or cheating behavior trying to supoort an agenda, but just natural acting in science. If sticking to this principle, I cannot do different than to assume that currently the theory of man-made emissions and environmental changes causing the major drive for an non-natural acceleration in global climate change - is the most appropriate explanation model available to us at the present moment. The emails do not change that in principle or detail, to me the "scandal" very much is a fabricated conspiration theory only.

I leave it here, it already is longer again then planned, and I already have typed so much this morning.

[Skybird]

Maybe I must correct my definitions of "summary" and "cutting it short".

[Respenus]

For a short recount on the for/against camp, I recommend this article. It is in no way comprehensive, considering its length, yet it gives good starting point for debate. Guess which side has more scientific arguments?

Oh, and it's the medieval warm period. The little ice age was later on, during 17-19th centuries. The fact that Europe was overpopulated at the time of the Black death is because of the warmer climate and consequently the surprisingly high amount of grain produced considering their "primitive" farming techniques.

Edit: Thank you Neon.

[Torpex752]

My Concern isnt wether Climate Change is real, not real, caused by Humans or whatever....Its the Political storm of Control, Taxation, regulation and policing that "taints" this issue. And its not that I would mind paying a little extra, however we are already paying enough, and now with our economy in shambles the boneheads dont seem to realize that every bill that costs the American Tax payer $ makes any chance of recovery take two steps back. Who in their right mind plans taxing whne the unemployment rate is heading to over 20%.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Torpex752

My Concern isnt wether Climate Change is real, not real, caused by Humans or whatever....Its the Political storm of Control, Taxation, regulation and policing that "taints" this issue.

I share that attitude. I just say "energy-saving light bulbs", "CO2 footprint of my pizza for dinner" etc.

It would be easier business if global warming theory would not be corrupted
by political opportunism and mass hysteria. It gives it a bad name.

And its not that I would mind paying a little extra, however we are already paying enough, and now with our economy in shambles the boneheads dont seem to realize that every bill that costs the American Tax payer $ makes any chance of recovery take two steps back. Who in their right mind plans taxing whne the unemployment rate is heading to over 20%.

On the one hand the private household'S concern'S over the monthly budget available to it, are real and cannot be ignored. But on the other hand if thing sreally should become bad and time already is of the essence, we must weigh the stressed economical situation versus elemental survival.

And let's be realistic: since generations the politicians as well as most private persons silently expect the next generation solve the issues that we do not wish to touch ourselves during our life span. "Let them fix it!" and "Wait for the economical growth start accelerating again!" are our most favourite mottos.