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Fri 22 Feb, 2008 10:38 am
According to some scientists the Little Ice Age was triggered when a period of higher than normal temperatures melted ice in the Arctic. The freshwater from this melted ice flooded the Atlantic Ocean and this disrupted the oceanic currents that carried warm water from the tropics into the North Atlantic. The loss of this heat allowed Europe and North America to cool enough to enter the Little Ice Age.
Now, if today's global warming is causing as much catastrophic damage as the global warmongers claim, has anyone measured any appreciable change in ocean salinity? What the direction and/or intensity of oceanic currents?
... and some other scientists say (in more polite language) that the "little ice age" theory is BS.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), based on Bradley and Jones, 1993; Hughes and Diaz, 1994; Crowley and Lowery, 2000 describes the LIA as "a modest cooling of the Northern Hemisphere during this period of less than 1°C," and says, "current evidence does not support globally synchronous periods of anomalous cold or warmth over this timeframe, and the conventional terms of 'Little Ice Age' and Medieval Warm Period appear to have limited utility in describing trends in hemispheric or global mean temperature changes in past centuries."
You rather childishly call those who you disagree with "global warmongers". Very scientific, that. I could call you a "GW denier", but I don't see the need to cheapen the debate.
Some global warming critics believe that Earth's climate is still recovering from the Little Ice Age and that human activity is not the decisive factor in present temperature trends, but this idea is not widely accepted. Instead, mainstream scientific opinion on climate change is that warming over the last 50 years is caused primarily by the increased proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere caused by human activity.
contrex wrote:... and some other scientists say (in more polite language) that the "little ice age" theory is BS.
By some accounts, the Thames River in London routinely froze over during the Little Ice Age. The ice was so common that Londoners began holding an annual market festival on the ice.
And then in the Alps some glaciers grew to the largest size that they've ever been in recorded human history.
So just how was there no Little Ice Age?
Quote:You rather childishly call those who you disagree with "global warmongers". Very scientific,
Global warming is not a scientific issue; it is a political issue and you learn to recognize contempt when you see it.
Quote:Instead, mainstream scientific opinion on climate change is that warming over the last 50 years is caused primarily by the increased proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere caused by human activity.
When the government schools in Britain tried to incorporate global warming dogma into their curriculum, British courts ruled that information counter to global warming had to be included as well. The courts declared that this counter information is from mainstream science.
And notice that instead of answering my question you have attempted to divert this thread by spouting global warming dogma.
Have you evidence that this is false?
Quote:Current evidence does not support globally synchronous periods of anomalous cold or warmth.
Yes flaja, this work is going on at the Woodshole Center and the thermal diffusivity and advection currents are being mapped and modeled. This is quite relevant .
Quote:When the government schools in Britain tried to incorporate global warming dogma into their curriculum, British courts ruled that information counter to global warming had to be included as well.
Not exactly. What happened was that a High Court judge ruled that there were a series of errors in the Al Gore film, An Inconvenient Truth, and forced the Government to alter guidelines sent out with it, making it clear it was a polemic and not a documentary.
(However, Mr Justice Burton said that in its presentation of the causes and likely effects of climate change, it was "broadly accurate".)
contrex. well work by Alley et al disagrees with you. LIA and current climate change are real, however, no compelling evidence show many that its anthropogenic
Quote:"current evidence does not support globally synchronous periods of anomalous cold or warmth over this timeframe, and the conventional terms of 'Little Ice Age' and Medieval Warm Period appear to have limited utility in describing trends in hemispheric or global mean temperature changes in past centuries
It supports A LIA where people lived
farmerman wrote:Yes flaja, this work is going on at the Woodshole Center and the thermal diffusivity and advection currents are being mapped and modeled. This is quite relevant .
Then, has any of it been published?
contrex wrote:Quote:When the government schools in Britain tried to incorporate global warming dogma into their curriculum, British courts ruled that information counter to global warming had to be included as well.
Not exactly. What happened was that a High Court judge ruled that there were a series of errors in the Al Gore film, An Inconvenient Truth, and forced the Government to alter guidelines sent out with it, making it clear it was a polemic and not a documentary.
(However, Mr Justice Burton said that in its presentation of the causes and likely effects of climate change, it was "broadly accurate".)
I don't remember where I heard it (it may have been Glenn Beck's TV show) that the British court called mainstream science that which does not accept global warming as fact.
But regardless of what I've already heard, the court didn't simply find errors in the government's teaching guidelines. The court declared that the government had to make it clear that Al Gore's film was a political work that presents only one side of the argument and if teachers don't make this absolutely clear they would be in violation of a law that prohibits teachers from engaging in political indoctrination. The court then went on to identify 9 errors of fact in the film itself (and there were just in the errors that the court found in the small sample of the film that it examined:
http://www.newparty.co.uk/articles/inaccuracies-gore.html
Mr Justice Burton said that in its presentation of the causes and likely effects of climate change, it was "broadly accurate".
Only the very lame Conservative radio hosts totally deny climate change. The real discussio among the legion of climatologists and glaciaologists is whether theres any human causes. Ive already posted about the Dansgaard Oeschger Cycles .
Woods Hole publishes on line and their staffers publish in SCience and NAture and AGU quite regularly AGU has a number of pubs in which you can see all the climate data and models. You just cant get em on the web, except maybe the abstracts. (You have to pay by subscription). I just read AGU at the library. Its not one of my journals
I was just struck by a curious thought.
Rightwingers accuse "liberals" of being "global warmongers". Many middle-of-the-road social democrats (in European terms) call US GW deniers "blowhards". But the earth and its climatic processes operate independently of human political views.
contrex wrote:But the earth and its climatic processes operate independently of human political views.
So? What's your point?
We're important, and we're powerful. We're more important and powerful than any damned environment, than any damned climate. AND IF WE YELL LOUDLY ENOUGH, ANYONE WHO DISPUTES THIS WILL BE DROWNED OUT.
Is that the last serving of fossil fuels? Do you mind? Thanks very much.
waitll we start serving up the gazillions of barrels of oil shales that are in the earth. (OF which the US and CAnadia have about 75%.
The reason that scientists can honestly differ on the topic is because it's a subject that's poorly understood by the scientific community.
The environment is quite resistant to experimentation. We can't say "okay, go take your own Earth and run it forward fifty years, note the results, and see if we weren't right." That's normally how science is run and double-checked - if someone makes an extraordinary claim, several other scientists will attempt to duplicate it. If it works, you have a breakthrough; if it doesn't, you have cold fusion. ;p
Because we don't have Earths handy to experiment upon, we settle for computer models. These are not very good computer models, in the sense that there are things that we're pretty sure are extremely important to the functioning of the environment, but since we don't really understand how they work, we don't actually represent their function in the computer model. That's not done out of malice or a desire to fool people, it's done because this is really, really, really hard stuff to model.
Even worse, not only are the models of dubious utility, but the data we put into the models has its own set of problems. Put simply, for a significant proportion of the world, we don't have jack. Even the developed industrial societies of the West only have so much temperature data available, and that's subject to all sorts of changes in conditions too; only in the last fifty years do we have reliable temperature data to plug in to our model, and even that needs some massaging to account for things like the urban heat island effect. And for the rest of the world, it's even worse - even the recent data isn't that great, and it doesn't stretch back too far before you're relying on what amateur records were available.
We've tried to compensate for the poor input data quality by using proxies - this is where the ice cores come in. We don't really know if the proxies are particularly good, though. This is one reason the Warm Period keeps on showing up in conversation, however. We don't have good temperature data from that period, but we have plenty of anecdotal evidence that we can be pretty sure is true - the whole "dairy farms in Greenland" and "drag the cannon across the frozen Potomac" kind of thing. If the ice core data doesn't reflect the anecdotal data, that suggests that the ice core data is a poor proxy of actual temperature (or, alternately, that a lot of history is bullshit, but we can rule the latter out pretty easily.)
Avatar ADV wrote:The reason that scientists can honestly differ on the topic is because it's a subject that's poorly understood by the scientific community.
But according to the left global warming is a settled issue that requires an immediate response with things like the Kyoto Accords. Global warming is a political issue, not a science issue.
Quote:The environment is quite resistant to experimentation. We can't say "okay, go take your own Earth and run it forward fifty years, note the results, and see if we weren't right." That's normally how science is run and double-checked - if someone makes an extraordinary claim, several other scientists will attempt to duplicate it. If it works, you have a breakthrough; if it doesn't, you have cold fusion. ;p
Because we don't have Earths handy to experiment upon,
Something that I've been saying all along. No experimentation = no science. Any hypothesis that is untestable by experimentation is faith, not science.
Quote:These are not very good computer models, in the sense that there are things that we're pretty sure are extremely important to the functioning of the environment, but since we don't really understand how they work, we don't actually represent their function in the computer model. That's not done out of malice or a desire to fool people, it's done because this is really, really, really hard stuff to model.
It is done out of malice and it is done to fool people whenever there is a political agenda behind it. The Left, which is inherently hostile to the United States and our capitalist way of life stands to gain if it can shackle our economy with Kyoto in the name of stopping global warming and university scientists stand to gain millions in government money if they can convince us that global warming must be researched.
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