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

Periodical fluctuations are not trends. One must find trends in periodical motions.

0 Replies

According to NASA,the polar ice caps on Mars are also melting...

http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/watchtheskies/8aug_mars_melting.html

So I have a question.
Is this global warming also?
If it is,did man cause it,or is it a natural phenomenon?

If it occurring naturally,then why cant the same thing be happening on earth?
If man caused it,please explain how?

0 Replies

georgeob1 wrote:

This is Blatham's response to a point made by Thomas in reference to Londborg's published opposition to the conventional environmentalist dogmatists in Europe.

Actually, a good number of the dogmatists -- probably more than the number of European ones -- teaches at Stanford and Berkeley. It's you Californians, not us Europeans, who are the left-wing loonies here. Wink

0 Replies

satt_fs wrote:

Periodical fluctuations are not trends. One must find trends in periodical motions.

Why must one?

0 Replies

Thomas wrote:

Why must one?

It is a role of experts of statistics.

0 Replies

Well, I have spent several years crunching experimental data for a living. This has made me something like an expert in statistics, and I have never heard of such a compulsion. But I'll leave it at that.

0 Replies

Seasonal changes (as on Mars as well as Earth) often appear to be simple cyclical changes. However if one finds a trend in the cyclical changes then one can talk about a "global" trend.

0 Replies

At least, the Least Squares Method, which finds a trend, is a rudimentary task in a textbook of statistics.
(Whether you believe it or not, I taught economics in universities.)

0 Replies

Whilst I agree with you Thomas that it was naughty of the BBC to put a straight line through a very limited set of data points, here is what Prof Morris says interviewed in the same article

"All data goes through cycles, and so you have to be careful," she said, "but it's also true to say that we wouldn't expect to have four years in a row of shrinkage.

"That, combined with rising temperatures in the Arctic, suggests a human impact; and I would also bet my mortgage on it, because if you change the radiation absorption process of the atmosphere (through increased production of greenhouse gases) so there is more heating of the lower atmosphere, sooner or later you are going to melt ice."

What we have to be alarmed about is not so much the melting of arctic ice, but the Greenland ice shelf (being on land) and whether these processes are indicative of a potentially catastrophic feed back mechanism.

...........................................................................

On the other hand...Michael Crichton (of Jurassic Park) has been in Wasington appearing before the Senate.

He gave a detailed critique of the work of Michael Mann, US climatologist who was instrumental in setting the whole global warming show on the road..

'any study where a single team plans the research, carries it out, supervises the analysis and writes their own final report carries a "very high risk" of undetected bias.'

But he ends

"In closing I want to state emphatically that nothing in my remarks should be taken to imply that we can ignore our environment, or that we should not take climate change seriously. On the contrary, we must dramatically improve our record on environment management. That's why a focused effort on climate science, aimed at securing sound, independently verified answers to policy questions, is so important now."

On reading a brief biog of Crichton, I was quite impressed, until I read this

"Crichton has also had many experiences in the "psychic" and "spirital" realms and has also done such "mystic" things as seeing auras, spoon bending, and an exorcism."

which perhaps explained why Hilary Clinton walked out. Smile

0 Replies

Steve (as 41oo) wrote:

What we have to be alarmed about is not so much the melting of arctic ice, but the Greenland ice shelf (being on land) and whether these processes are indicative of a potentially catastrophic feed back mechanism.

I think there are two separate issues here. One is Greenland's ice, which contributes to sea level rise when it melts. That doesn't create feedback because the ice is thick, so the area it covers wouldn't change much if it melted. The second issue is the free floating arctic ice cover. Its melting won't increase sea levels (Archimedes' principle), but will involve positive feedback because the covered area decreases, thus making the globe darker, thus absorbing more solar radiation. This feedback would be a big concern if it went on forever. But we know it won't go on forever, because the feedback will vanish together with the floating ice cap whose melting creates it.

0 Replies

satt_fs wrote:

At least, the Least Squares Method, which finds a trend, is a rudimentary task in a textbook of statistics.
(Whether you believe it or not, I taught economics in universities.)

The problem here is that what they are fitting the line to is not a trend. They say themselves there is an oscillation on the timescale of decades which is currently swinging down. They also say that current ice coverage is smaller than the previous minimum in this long term oscillation, but that's not what they are fitting their line to. When you taught economics, did you ever fit a line through the downswing of a business cycle and predict that the economy would slow to a halt in 100 years? I thought not.

Also, satt: Even assuming the line fit is valid -- what do you make of their 4-th grader error in arithmetics?

0 Replies

"did you fit a line through the downswing of a business cycle and predict that the economy would stop dead in 100 years?" Smile

Thats exactly why I said it was naughty of the BBC.

Regarding feed-back. Agreed once all the ice has melted, there cant be further exposure of dark sea to absorb heat to melt the ice...

except that there's a lot more ice in the Antarctic!
and thats on rock like Greenland so will contribute to sea level rise.

But what I was thinking of was warming triggering other mechanisms which themselves contribute to warming, such as release of methane (much more effective heat trap than co2) from permafrost.

0 Replies

"did you fit a line through the downswing of a business cycle and predict that the economy would stop dead in 100 years?" Smile

Thats exactly why I said it was naughty of the BBC.

Regarding feed-back. Agreed once all the ice has melted, there cant be further exposure of dark sea to absorb heat to melt the ice...

except that there's a lot more ice in the Antarctic!
and thats on rock like Greenland so will contribute to sea level rise.

But what I was thinking of was warming triggering other mechanisms which themselves contribute to warming, such as release of methane (much more effective heat trap than co2) from permafrost.

0 Replies

Thomas..
I do not think there is a foundation on your part that one could assert that the fitted line was not a trend. And the fitted line, I hope, has a statistical basis.
(In economics, one should think about the rate of economic growth as well as the trade cycles.)

0 Replies

georgeob1 wrote:

This is Blatham's response to a point made by Thomas in reference to Londborg's published opposition to the conventional environmentalist dogmatists in Europe.

blatham wrote:
You misunderstand. I have neither the time nor the interest to ground myself sufficiently in the mathematics and the sciences necessary to evaluate whether the writer is doing a snowjob on himself or on me, or whether he might be mistaken but with benign intent. I certainly do have an interest in environment/climate matters, but wend my way through by sussing out, so well as I can, what the speaker's interests seem to be. If a group is funded by the energy industry, I am going to trust it exactly like I would trust a group of lung doctors who are being paid by the tobacco industry. Another group of such doctors, working independently at universities around the world, I'll trust rather more.

Nice turns of phrase and refreshing candor. However the thoughts expressed would do a Miedeval monk proud - such slavish acceptance of preferred authority! If I have understood Blatham correctly he prefers to trust the propaganda of single issue interest groups to either thinking for himself or studying the opinions of those who combine scientific understanding, technical competence, and economic interest in specific applications of the issues in question. He has a point - as the overwrought metaphor concerning tobacco purveyors suggests. However does he suppose that the representatives of the environmental establishment are themselves free of the entanglements of related economic interest, persoinal status and ambition?

It is interesting to observe the degree to which the practicioners of correct political thought adopt the same absolute faith in their own evangelists that they ascribe to those of the "religious right' whom they despise so much.

Gad, george. I do hope your mathematics demonstrate more integrity and precision than what results when you set to fumbling about with the English language. By the by, you really ought to order the Oct 6 volume of NYRB for this piece.

0 Replies

satt_fs wrote:

Thomas..
I do not think there is a foundation on your part that one could assert that the fitted line was not a trend. And the fitted line, I hope, has a statistical basis.

Oh but I do have a foundation. My foundation is the BBC article itself, which mentions that ice coverage of the arctic sea went through a cyclical minimum in the 30s and 40s.

BBC wrote:

An NSIDC analysis of historical records also suggests that ice cover is less this year than during the low periods of the 1930s and 40s.

It also says there has been a decline since the 70s. What, I wonder, happened in the 50s and 60s? As a matter of elementary calculus, the arctic ice cap must have grown in spite of any long-term global warming trend. This means that what the BBC's straight line fits for the time since 1978 is at least in part a cyclical downswing. But they are neither mentioning the 50s and the 60s in their text, nor are they covering them in their plot. This is not so much about the statistics of the data as it is about choosing the time interval that supports your story over the most representative interval.

0 Replies

I don't think, they had had passive microwave satellite data before 1978.

And: the BBC is only using the press release of the "Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES),University of Colorado at Boulder" [CIRES is a joint institute of CU and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration]. Obviously, they don't have other data as well - or they really hide them.

0 Replies

Walter Hinteler wrote:

I don't think, they had had passive microwave satellite data before 1978.

Maybe they didn't. But while microwaves are useful for temperature measurements, they are unnecessary for seeing the circumfence of the Arctic ice shell. For that, all you need is plain vanilla black and white photography, where data has been available since at least the very early 60s.

Walter Hinteler wrote:

And: the BBC is only using the press release of the "Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES),University of Colorado at Boulder" [CIRES is a joint institute of CU and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration]. Obviously, they don't have other data as well - or they really hide them.

Yes, but the BBC has a responsibility for the quality of its sources. In this case, their source in effect told them that hundred percent divided by eight percent per decade gives six decades when it really gives 12.5. This was a misreporting of elementary arithmetics that should have made BBC suspicious, and evidently didn't.

0 Replies

The extent and thickness of the ice cap around the North Pole are hard to determine as the data are not available back to 1930's or erlier.
Let me see another aspect of the ice melting. Here is one of the examples of the glacier retreat..

http://www.nrmsc.usgs.gov/images/grinnell.jpg

Quote:

Grinnell Glacier viewed from the top of Mount Gould during late summer 1938 (left) and 1981 (right), Glacier National Park, Montana. In just 43 years, dramatic climatic response is evident, including loss of volume and formation of the proglacial lake. By 1993, the glacier had shrunk about 63% in area and the terminus had receded about 1.1 km since the end of the Little Ice Age (1850 moraines, right).

http://www.nrmsc.usgs.gov/research/glacier_retreat.htm

0 Replies

On the lively topic of "political correctness"...the following seems to be a case of that term in violation:

Quote:

Bill Bennett: "[Y]ou could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down"

Addressing a caller's suggestion that the "lost revenue from the people who have been aborted in the last 30 years" would be enough to preserve Social Security's solvency, radio host and former Reagan administration Secretary of Education Bill Bennett dismissed such "far-reaching, extensive extrapolations" by declaring that if "you wanted to reduce crime ... if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down."

Go get them niggras, Bill. After aborting all the mistakenly-colored fetuses (good christian doctors won't want to do this, but jew doctors have their uses after all) you'll want to do some organized nut-cutting too so as to prevent more of the little blighters. Round 'em up in one location (a big football stadium, perhaps) and start snipping. Keep the gene-pool clean.

Of course, Bill ought to be allowed to say all this. And say it without fear that someone might come along, tie him down, and shove a military light-stick up his ass. Even my quoting him here is a case of political correctness and liberalism gone mad. Bork would agree. And nobody wants to hear that a light-stick has been shoved up Bork's ass, that's for sure. Well, I guess I do but am I allowed to say it under the present rules of propriety in speech. Would I, for example, violate the parameters if I were to advance the notion that "If you wanted to increase intelligence...if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every christian baby in this country, and your overall intelligence scores would zoom up like an evangelist's boner when he's beating a black whore senseless."

Can you fill me in on the rules of 'political correctness', george?

0 Replies

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

Related Topics

Quick Links

My Account

able2know