Global Warming...New Report...and it ain't happy news

okie wrote:

blatham, the climate constantly changes, and always has.

I know that weather changes quite often.
And learnt in my metereology clsses at the naval academy that such happened quite often.

But thanks, okie, for this additional information.

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Anytime, Walter. Laughing

I realize it was an elementary point, but I was just trying to balance blatham's claims and allay his worries of impending disaster.

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okie said

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Change is healthy and normal.

We'll address your certainty in this magicl axiom again when your cousin changes from the effects of brain cancer...or when New Orleans reflooods...or when power shifts with a Dem presidency...or when you pick up a urinary parasite while travelling...or when Disneyland is changed due to a terrorist bombing.

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thomas said

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Remember, we're talking about 4-10° Fahrenheit over 100 years. Ecosystems and populations are flexible on this timescale.

What does "flexible" mean in this context? Capable of avoiding extinction? We can be pretty confident that most populations of life forms and most ecosystems would be flexible enough to continue on even if nukes were dropped on the twenty major cities of the world. You aren't working from a terribly demanding standard here, thomas.

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Quote:

I have no problem with your assertion that agriculture will be affected. Just with your implication that the effect will overall be spectacularly bad for humanity.

This is another one...what ranks as "spectacular" and why is that your measure? Would your notion be otherwise if you lived somewhere else than you do and with fewer resources than you and your neighbors have?

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blatham wrote:

thomas said
Quote:
Remember, we're talking about 4-10° Fahrenheit over 100 years. Ecosystems and populations are flexible on this timescale.

What does "flexible" mean in this context?

Applied to human populations, it means that global warming will be a negligible factor (compared to other factors) in causing people to move to different places. Applied to agriculture, it means that global warming will be a negligible factor (compared to other factors) in causing farmers to change the crop on any given plot of land, and in changing global food prices. Applied to ecosystems, it means global warming will be a negligible factor (compared to other factors) in the stability of ecosystems. Off the top of my head, I can't put a number to the word "negligible". I would expect, though, that we would agree about what's negligible when we see it.

I hope that answers your other question too.

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Walter Hinteler wrote:

okie wrote:
blatham, the climate constantly changes, and always has.

I know that weather changes quite often. ...

okie wrote:

I realize it was an elementary point, but I was just trying to balance blatham's claims and allay his worries of impending disaster.

Might be, you live a couple of hundred years and look on such changes as being "constantly".

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Thomas wrote:

Applied to agriculture, it means that global warming will be a negligible factor (compared to other factors) in causing farmers to change the crop on any given plot of land, and in changing global food prices.

I need to rephrase this, because I do expect that global warming will shift every crop's optimal growing region -- towards the poles generally, inland where global warming brings more rain, towards the coasts where global warming brings less rain. So farmers will change the crop on a given plot of land as the local climate becomes more hostile for some crops and more hospitable for others.

I continue to expect, however, that global warming will have a negligible effect on the supply of any given crop we now eat, compared to other factors shifting this supply. Global warming will shift where any given crop is grown, but won't much affect that it is grown.

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blatham wrote:

Quote:
I have no problem with your assertion that agriculture will be affected. Just with your implication that the effect will overall be spectacularly bad for humanity.

what ranks as "spectacular" and why is that your measure?

Because I was responding to a claim of Cycloptichorn's, which was that agriculture would be "heavily" affected. My "spectacular" is paraphrasing Cyclops's "heavily".

blatham wrote:

Would your notion be otherwise if you lived somewhere else than you do and with fewer resources than you and your neighbors have?

In absolute terms, probably yes. In relative terms, compared to other problems I might be facing "somewhere else" -- genocidal governments, religious fundamentalism, lack of access to potable water, lack of even the most basic vaccines, lack of law and order -- probably not. No matter where I lived, global warming would rank low on my list of political priorites.

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US specific... report from Union of Concerned Scientists

Quote:

Reports and Research
Atmosphere of Pressure
Political Interference in Federal Climate Science

http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/interference/atmosphere-of-pressure.html

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Blatham, citing concerned Scientists, wrote:

Political Interference in Federal Climate Science

Yup, that's a part of the picture that you and I agree on. I very much hope the next president will be reality-based.

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Walter and Thomas, you Germans must be tough! This one survived some pretty severe change.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,252405,00.html

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But not climate changes.

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occasionally i find it's a good idea to look back , because there are certain "fads" that don't stand up over time .
here is a report from CNN dating to january 2000 .
it's interesting to me , that at that time certain measurements re. arctic ice melting were taken - to be confirmed in the following years .
IF you are interested in the subject , please go to the link - if you've got your mind already made up , don't bother .
hbg

Quote:

But -- like the Arctic ice itself -- military secrecy seems to be thawing. About a year ago, Rothrock convinced Navy brass that measurements taken in the 1950s could be helpful in figuring out whether the data from the '90s was statistically significant. Armed with a pile of new numbers, Rothrock guessed that they might show that the polar cap had shrunk perhaps 18-20 inches over the past half century.

He was wrong. The actual shrinkage left him astonished.

On average, the University of Washington team found that ice had thinned by four feet (1.3 meters) -- a 40 percent decrease since 1953. The "trend" of the 1990s seemed to be an indisputable fact.

THE THINNING ARCTIC ICE

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blatham wrote:

US specific... report from Union of Concerned Scientists

I always thought UCS stands for "Union of Con Scientists", this bunch of binocculared anti-nuclear IRrationnalists who took the street in the 70s with slogans like "Rather Red Than Nuked". :wink:

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hamburger wrote:

occasionally i find it's a good idea to look back , because there are certain "fads" that don't stand up over time .

You're so right for Arctic ice "thinning". BTW, I should add, for those who haven't viewed An Inconvenient Truth that submarine sonar secrete data have been declassified thanks to Al Gore, the future ex-president who invented Internet.

Quote:

Much of the reported thinning of Arctic sea ice that occurred in the 1990s [if real, as per Winsor (2001)] was not the result of CO2-induced global warming, as suggested at the time by many climate alarmists. Rather, it was a natural consequence of changes in ice dynamics caused by an atmospheric regime shift, of which there have been several in decades past and will be several in decades to come, totally irrespective of past or future changes in the air's CO2 content.

Source

Winsor, P. 2001. Arctic sea ice thickness remained constant during the 1990s. Geophysical Research Letters 28: 1039-1041.

Dumas, J.A., Flato, G.M. and Weaver, A.J. 2003. The impact of varying atmospheric forcing on the thickness of arctic multi-year sea ice. Geophysical Research Letters 30: 10.1029/2003GL017433.

Holloway, G. and Sou, T. 2002. Has Arctic Sea Ice Rapidly Thinned? Journal of Climate 15: 1691-1701.

Kwok, R. 2000. Recent changes in Arctic Ocean sea ice motion associated with the North Atlantic Oscillation. Geophysical Research Letters 27: 775-778.

Proshutinsky, A.Y. and Johnson, M.A. 1997. Two circulation regimes of the wind driven Arctic Ocean. Journal of Geophysical Research 102: 12,493-12,514.

Rigor, I.G., Wallace, J.M. and Colony, R.L. 2002. Response of sea ice to the Arctic oscillation. Journal of Climate 15: 2648-2663.

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miniTAX wrote:

blatham wrote:
US specific... report from Union of Concerned Scientists

I always thought UCS stands for "Union of Con Scientists", this bunch of binocculared anti-nuclear IRrationnalists who took the street in the 70s with slogans like "Rather Red Than Nuked". :wink:

Well, anyone who points at altering reports by the Environmental Protection Agency on global warming and that the Bush administration ischoosing members of scientific advisory panels based on their political views rather than scientific experience must be a commie and irrationalist.

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Walter Hinteler wrote:

Well, anyone who points at altering reports by the Environmental Protection Agency on global warming and that the Bush administration ischoosing members of scientific advisory panels based on their political views rather than scientific experience must be a commie and irrationalist.

Perhaps it is rather "a case of choosing members of scientific advisory panels based on their less biased political views......"

It is all about whos ox is being gored here and how you spin what is actually happening.

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I understand.

And now it's clear even for me that in such cases you certainly have to alter reports.

Where would we be if such biased irrationlists would and could publish what they want.

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There are as many complaints leveled at the pro-AGW group in that they redact and/or omit scientific opinion that disagrees with the conventional consensus of the day, not to mention that they also attempt to otherwise stifle the opinions of those who disagree with them.

Even on this thread, there is far more verbage expended by the pro-AGW group on attempts to discredit, ridicule, or trash the skeptics than there is any effort made to discuss their scientific opinions.

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Global Warming...New Report...and it ain't happy news

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