Is the Human Race on a Suicide Mission?

Petty shots to try to "embarass the IPPC" never helped anyone. Shooting the messenger never helped anyone. Don't hate the truth and don't resent the truth-tellers, George. That's narrow minded and debilitating. Embrace it instead, with humility. Yes, you've blown a scientifically and morally wrong horn for all these years. Yes, the professional CC deniers lied to you about it being a 'hoax' and yes, you were naïve enough to believe them. And yes, the next generations -- your kids and grandkids if you have some -- will only suffer more as a result of all this denial.

I haven't blown anyone's horn at all. You are of course free to check IPCC forecasts over the last decade and compare them to published actual temperature data ( beware there's no thermometer for the earth, and there have been some well-documented, unscientific fudging of data selections out there.) However, you can also find some acknowledgments by the IPCC of previous errors and the rather elementary steps they took to reduce them.

Global warming is real, and, though it can't be proved, increasing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere are the most likely cause, in that in the current age, they correlate better with observed temperature changes than do any other factors. The trouble comes in predicting future temperatures & seal levels, etc. in that these involve highly non linear dynamic processes that can't be solved mathematically and involve sometimes fast-growing numerical instabilities (i.e. errors) in the effort to numerically model them in the long term ( that's also why our standard numerical local weather forecasts are accurate for only about six days - what they yield after that still looks like plausible weather patterns, but rapidly departs from the actual weather after that. Long term climate models are based on ASSUMED relationships with known relevant parameters like CO2 Concentrations, anthromorphic emissions, the rates of CO2 absorption by both green plants and the oceans, as well as a number of other factors. Errors in those assumptions yield errors in the predictions, and such errors have occurred and they have been significant. Interestingly these errors have all consistently tended to raise the forecast temperature and sea level rises

I have a very extensive scientific background in fluid mechanics, thermodynamics and digitally modelling non-linear systems …. more, I suspect than do you.

I'm under the impression you've been a part of the a2k CC denial club in the past (like a lot of regulars here). Correct me if I'm wrong.

You can read my posts on the subject and decide for yourself. My impression is that in the current parlance a "CC denier" is one who disagrees with any part of the prescriptions of CC zealots for dealing with it. Perhaps by that idiotic standard I am a "denier"

I believe I have made clear that I believe CO2 induced atmospheric warming is real and continuing, though the magnitudes and effects of it have been frequently and repeatedly exaggerated. More importantly the largely political prescriptions of AGW zealots regarding what we should do about it are largely ineffective and based on inadequate technologies, while, at the same time, they (inexplicably) reject other far more effective, economical and in hand alternatives like nuclear power. In addition I believe that the concentration of authoritarian political power required to truly enforce their prescriptions for the use of fossil fuels on unwilling populations will go far beyond the worst tyrannies of the last century. Such power does not yet exist, but the requirement for it is real, but unacknowledged by AGW zealots.

President Macron of France is a good illustration of both points. He has announced an intention to cut down significantly on the number of operating pressurized water nuclear reactors, while replacing them with increased wind and solar power, and economic restrictions on the use of petroleum. The proposal is absurd in that wind and solar power cannot efficiently replace nuclear power and the increased use of coal will be the inevitable result, as it was -and still is - in Germany after Chancellor Merkel did, the same. The economic restrictions (taxes) Macron placed on petroleum caused an immediate, widespread and sometimes violent public reaction in France which forced him to back down. I don't see that changing. What will be his next step?? More "education" for a stupid proletariat? I don't think that will be effective. Even "stupid" proletarians know what in their self-interest.

Even more important has been the lack of any rational evaluation of the economic costs and tradeoffs of lowering CO2 emissions vs. dealing with its effects as they occur. It will take time to develop new technologies for safe, emission-free power, and nuclear power can give us that time. Subsidizing inadequate wind and solar technologies merely destroys otherwise powerful economic incentives for the speedy development of these technologies. Signing (with great fanfare) unenforceable treaties that don't accomplish what is needed, among nations which chronically fail to meet treaty goals, doesn't work either. However it does appear to give some comfort to AGW zealots, who want to believe they've done something, and who appear not to have considered the concentration of authoritarian political power required to achieve meaningful goals, absent natural economic incentives for it. Macron recently got a taste of that one.

Oh I'm pretty sure that if I did dig into your post history on the topic, I would not fail to find all the colors, hoes and nuances of denial, all the posturez; all the lies. From "it ain't warming" to "it's not because of us", to "we can't do anything about it", all very well writen and liberally seasoned with gripe about bad bad environmental fanatics.

Where was your science then? Where is it now? If you know anything about thermodynamics, you know that the basics on the matter have been settled since the late 19th century, with the work of Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius, who estimated that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 would give a total warming of 5–6 degrees Celsius. For over a century, it has been a known, experimentally proven fact that CO2 traps heat better than N2 or O2. It follows that the potential human effect on climate change of the industrial revolution, and the mechanism for same, has been proven since over a century by thermodynamics. It's been further proven empirically since the 1970s in terms of climate warming up in synch with CO2 rise in the atmosphere.

You can dig away. Until you do, and find such confirmation, please stick to what I have actually written here on the matter.

The rest of your post contains nothing new, and nothing that either contradicts or modifies in any way anything that I have written here. It appears you simply ignore stuff you either don't understand or don't wish to deal with.

You said: "though it can't be proved, increasing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere are the most likely cause". Rest assured that it can be and has been proven. Over a century ago.

You are wrong about this rather narrow point. Arrhenius identified the possibility that increased CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere could cause greenhouse warming. He estimated a temperature rise of about 8 Deg. C in the Arctic regions if CO2 concentrations increased by a factor of 2.5 to 3.0 times its then current value. Many acknowledged assumptions were required to produce this estimate. It was indeed a prescient work in the field, however it was, by no means a proof that CO2 concentrations were either the only or the most potent drivers for temperature changes. In particular, from a scientific perspective , it was not at all a proof that CO2 concentrations were the cause of the warming observed in the last century, and that was the reason I made the reference to correlations.

The correlation study I had in mind, was a very sophisticated statistical comparison involving values of CO2 and virtually every other potential factor that might influence the observed temperature changes, and which demonstrated that none correlated better than atmospheric CO2 levels known to have occurred in the last century. This study was done by a friend, Richard Muller, a Professor of Physics at UC Berkley and published in 2012.

Even the atmospheric gasses aspect of this matter is a bit complicated. For the first few decades after Al Gore wrote his "Earth in the Balance" touting the problem, we experienced some global cooling - no warming at all. Ironically It turned out that this was a result of other man-made gases being introduced in the atmosphere ( sulfur and nitrous oxides - the ingredients of smog ) that are very highly potent "anti greenhouse" gasses, promoting the thermal-range transmissivity of the atmosphere, then overcoming the effects of CO2 rises, Because of the smog effects the sources of these gases were being regulated out of production, thereby enabling the relatively inoccous CO2 to do its work.

As I told you, national identification is an empty concept because everyone is a global person and we are just branded by assigning citizenship based on birth.

If someone talks about you in terms of 'your race' or 'your gender,' does that make sense to you? Do you feel you are similar to everyone else who identifies with your race or gender? Aren't we all different?

Fine, so I shall speak of "the USA"rather than "your country".

It's not narrow at all. The science of climate change is clear, and it's been clear for a very long while. I studied it in high school 40 years ago. All that while, you doubted it. I did check a few posts of yours on the topic from the 2000's - no surprise there. You doubted that climate change would happen, at the very same time as it was already happening. Instead of alerting your a2kers here about the danger, you kept telling them there was nothing to worry about, except those darn Nazi-like environmentalists.

So much for all your scientific education, my general...

Global Warming Testimony to Washington State Committee 3 -26-2013.

This guy presents the facts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BKBzc8vJtQ

I don't believe him.

I believe you.

Dr. Tim Ball, an academic with 50 years’ experience in Historical Climatology, explains that CO2, which comprises only 4% of Earth’s greenhouse gases, does not cause significant change in temperature. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (an agency of the UN), limited its study of global warming to human causes only. It never looked at causes in nature or from the Sun. That means they are saying humans are the primary cause of global warming without knowing what else causes it. [That is not sloppy science, it is corrupted science. They did not examine natural causes because the people who write their paychecks want to pretend they are saving the planet while they increase taxes and controls.

The plants need more atmospheric CO2 not less. Current levels of 400 parts per million (ppm) are close to the lowest levels in 600 million years. This contradicts what the world was told by people using the claim that human production of CO2 was causing global warming. They don’t know the UN agency, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), established to examine human-caused global warming, were limited to only studying human causes by the definition they were given by Article 1 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It is impossible to identify the human cause without understanding and including natural causes. Few know that CO2 is only 4 percent of the total greenhouse gases. They assume that a CO2 increase causes a temperature increase. It doesn’t, in every record the temperature increases before CO2. The only place where a CO2 increase causes a temperature increase is in the computer models of the IPCC. This partly explains why every single temperature forecast (they call them projections) the IPCC made since 1990 was wrong. If your forecast is wrong, your science is wrong.

I studied weather as aircrew with the Canadian Air Force, including five years of search and rescue in Arctic Canada. After the Air Force, I went to university to study weather and climate, culminating in a Ph.D., in Historical Climatology from the University of London, England. When I began in the late 1960s global cooling was the consensus. I was as opposed to the prediction that it would continue cooling to a mini-Ice Age, as I later was to the runaway AGW claim. I knew from creating and studying long-term records that climate changes all the time and are larger and more frequent than most know. I also knew changes in CO2 were not the cause.

https://needtoknow.news/2017/06/carbon-dioxide-co2-accounts-4-greenhouse-gases/

Is Global Warming Caused by Rising CO2?

No tangible, physical evidence exists for a cause–and–effect relationship between changing atmospheric CO2 and global temperature changes over the last 150 years. The fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and that CO2 has increased doesn’t prove that CO2 has caused the warming phases observed from 1915 to 1945 and 1977 to 1998. As shown by isotope measurements from ice cores in Greenland and Antarctica and by measurements of atmospheric CO2 during El Nino warming, oceans emit more CO2 into the atmosphere during climatic warming. The ice core records indicate that after the last Ice Age, temperatures rose for about 600–800 years before atmospheric CO2 rose, showing that climatic warming caused CO2 to rise, not vice versa. The present high level of atmospheric CO2 may be the result of human input, but the contribution that it makes to global warming is very small.

Global warming of ~0.4° C occurred from about 1910 to 1940 without any significant increase in atmospheric CO2. Global cooling occurred from the mid 1940s to 1977 despite soaring CO2 in the atmosphere (Fig. 12A,B). Global temperatures and CO2 both increased from 1977 to 1998 but that doesn’t prove that the warming was caused by increased CO2. Although CO2 has risen from 1998 to 2008 no global warming has occurred. In fact, the climate has cooled. Thus, global warming bears almost no correlation with rising atmospheric CO2.

http://myweb.wwu.edu/dbunny/pdfs/CO2_atmospheric-carbon-dioxide.pdf

Yes, that would be a more polite way to refer to whatever it is you're talking about in reference to 'the USA.'

Really, though, I would implore you to think more deeply about whatever it is you're talking about and be more specific regarding the causes and factors involved. E.g. you might refer to a national or state government or to (some) people living in a region.

For example, I hope you realize that what's going on in the US to cause climate-altering emissions is also contributed to by people/banks/companies that are investing in US markets and even sending citizens from abroad to the US to do business, even if only temporarily.

So if some business person travels to New York to make a big deal that brings a lot of money into some European pension fund, or even if they don't travel to the US to do the business, they are still investing in US economic activities in order to make/extract money from that 'national' market.

In reality, there is no 'national' market, precisely because the social-economic/business networks that form 'national' markets/economies are not bounded by national borders. So every 'national' economy or market is actually more like a world wide web of business deals and supply chains.

So the 'the USA' is greatly influenced by all sorts of people and factors globally. Nations today are basically all colonies of a global economic network that is not limited to any one nation.

Still, it's a fact that the US is the main financier of CC denial, the country that went out of the Paris accord and Kyoto before that and disparaged them profusely, and the country with the highest emissions per capita. The US behave as far worse an an enemy of mankind than other nations..

What does it matter who the leader is? Small countries like big countries to lead them in directions they want to go so they can blame someone besides themselves for global problems.

In reality, everyone is to blame for contributing to problems in all the ways they/we do. If you blame the US over other countries, then people and corporation/businesses operating in the US can blame the government or other corporations/businesses for being more the problem than they are.

Face it, wealthy European pension funds and other global investors are pumping money into the US and other harmful economic markets so they can get money to spend on products produced globally. Don't shirk responsibility for problems by mentally dividing the world into separate nations and then pointing the finger at the US or any other(s).

Look at your own economic participation and carbon footprint and realize you are a global individual like so many others. There might be someone who shares your own national identity or another in the US or elsewhere driving more and using more electricity and other energy for various reasons, but the question is still whether you can reduce your own household energy consumption.

Can you reduce your geographical footprint by walking/bicycling more and using transit so less land can be paved and more trees planted to absorb more CO2 and restore ecological patterns that naturally mitigate climate as they did before humans began radically altering land?

Ask yourself whether it would solve global problems if all humans globally adopted the economic and cultural behaviors of people in the country where you live, and if not how can those behaviors be changed for the better, and what can you as an individual do to contribute to and participate in such change?

Instead of nationalizing global problems and blaming others, why don't you think about what you can do as an individual to promote and effectuate changes at every level, including local/regional/national/supernational etc.? It's not all about government. It's about reaching individual minds so that they understand and act in ways that make the future sustainable for the eternal future.

You appear to be uninterested in a discussion involving the real scientific, economic, and political issues affecting the containment of man made CO2 increases in the atmosphere, and in mitigating the effects of the ongoing warming . Instead you appear to prefer a doctrinaire, theological, and somewhat Medieval approach in which you advocate "acceptance " of a vague theology for it, and pronounce anathema on any and all, who depart from the vague prescription you advocate (whatever it may be) , labelling them as "unbelievers" and "deniers". There is a tragicomic element in this in that your "acceptance" and belief based approach, and your unwillingness to deal with the contradictions, tradeoffs and issues at hand represents, far from the scientific basis you claim, instead a near reversal of everything in Western Civilization since the Enlightenment.

I'm not sure just what you were taught in high school on the matter , but I see little scientific understanding or even curiosity about the matter on your part, instead only condemnation of any expressed skepticism or concern about the effectiveness and costs of the economic and political and engineering merits of the being applied and proposed. This you appear to take as conclusive evidence of heresy. It is evident that full achievement of the goals of the Paris accord, implementation of planned programs to subsidize wind and solar power generation, and reduce the use of nuclear power and fossil fuels; will not reverse the ongoing CO2 increase. Indeed Germany and apparently now France will increase their use of low quality European coal for power generation to achieve planned nuclear reductions. President Macron appears to have, perhaps temporarily, abandoned his efforts to reduce petroleum consumption in the face of widespread public resistance to the taxes he proposed. Apart from blaming the rural proletariat, what will he do next?

The United States has pursued wind and solar power with about the same energy as have the European states (our non hydroelectric "renewable" power generation has more than doubled in the last eight years alone.) However that has achieved less in the way of CO2 emission reductions in the same period than has the enormous increases also achieved in our use of natural gas (from fracking) in combined cycle gas plants to replace coal fired power stations. Oddly "true believers" like yourself appear not to count such advances, treating them instead as heresy. Even more odd is the ongoing and planned replacement of nuclear power in Europe with coal - and your apparent acceptance of that. I'll add that we too are, by default, slowly abandoning our use of nuclear power as existing plants age without planned replacements.

The issues I have raised about the foolish abandonment of nuclear power and the economic and political challenges posed by environmentalist's proposed forced reduction on the use of petroleum are both real and immediate. Your preferred theological approach doesn't address them at all.

It is, apparently, time to point out that climate change is happening, without regard to political polemic. Whether one chooses to claim the United States is the bad guy (while ignoring that China dumps greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at twice the rate of the United States); or one introduces a lame polemical claim about what or who is, or is not the villain--the fact remains that the climate is changing. There is abundant historical, archaeological and geological evidence for both warming and cooling events in the past. It just so happens that the last cooling cycle bottomed out at the beginning of the 18th century, and we are now well past the 300 year cooling cycle which those historical, archaeological and geological records suggest have been the case in these cycles. It is stark, staring madness to contribute to greenhouse gases, no matter who is doing so, when the overwhelming evidence of these cycles show that we are in a warming trend, which very like will not reach its peak any sooner than he twenty-sixth century, and probably no later than the thirtieth century.

George and the alleged Frenchman attempting to make this a political, polemical issue doesn't help any more than attempting to ignore these facts does.