Is the Human Race on a Suicide Mission?

No claims, vague or otherwise. it was instead statement of the problem as it is understood today, together with a fairly compact list of the main drivers of climate change, and an accurate statement of the mathematical limitations affecting such predictions. I'll agree I provided no reference, but I believe that solar radiation, variations in earth's orbital mechanics and variations in the constituents of earth's atmosphere and the prevailing currents in the oceans and atmosphere are an accurate statement of the well-known drivers of such change.

The only thing I didn't elaborate on is the limitations to the mathematical solutions (or numerical simulations of) highly non linear differential equations and the physical chaos such non linear systems can create, and as well which results from attempt to integrate them over the time (or first order differential ) variable. Any text on Chaos Theory ( or even just a reference on turbulent flow in a viscous liquid) will provide you that background. However, one can, without much effort, simply take note of the various weather forecasts based on numerical integration of these equations using initial values of current weather conditions, and note their fast decreasing accuracy over time - by the sixth day out the forecasts aren't worth much. Twenty iterations of Moore's Law on our computing power have yielded only a one or two day increase in accurate weather predictions in the last forty years.

That's a good idea! It would be good to let the kids know how the 97% consensus was arrived at; that of 11,944 papers considered, only 41 (0.3 of 1%) of them actually claim global warming is caused by man-made CO2, and that those that disproved global warming were dismissed.

They should also be informed that these passages:
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-- "None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed [climate] changes to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gases."

-- "No study to date has positively attributed all or part [of the climate change observed to date] to anthropogenic [man-made] causes."
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. . . were included in the approved report, but deleted from the supposedly peer-reviewed published version.

And it probably wouldn't hurt to tell them that a former professor of climatology and lead author of numerous alarming U.N. climate reports made the following unguarded statement:

We need broad-based support to capture the public's imagination, we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.

Kids should know that he was telling his like-minded colleagues that they not only must conceal evidence that casts doubt on global warming theory, but also craft their research in dishonest ways designed to create terror in the minds of a trusting public.

It's good to give kids balanced input so that they can do some critical thinking on the issue.

Tell u what. We should have let the hole in the ozone layer widen a bit more for a decade or two, before dealing with CFCs through an international effort coordinated by the UN. That would have fried a few Aussies but who cares?

You were making claims about the effects of volcanism, which is why I addressed that topic. There is little point in attempting to converse with you when you are so willfully and transparently dishonest.

I did nothing more than list volcanism as one of several inputs to changes in atmospheric conditions that have, in the geological record, affected climate in both large and small ways. That is a relatively well-known and widely recognized fact.

Nowhere did I suggest it was a significant part of the current phenomenon. If that is what aroused your ire, it is an issue of your own creation. I'll agree there is some dishonesty and evasion going on here, but it is not mine.

I'll leave it to explain the connection between ozone layer depletion and anthropogenic sources of co2.

And then you can address my post.

The bottom line is we need to start going beyond speculating about things like volcanism as more-or-less random events and look at them as part of larger geological processes.

Do we think that volcanoes have always provided an outlet for fossil fuel deposits to release their energy and carbon back into the atmosphere? Or do we think that there was/is some other ultimate fate that awaits fossil fuels that have built up through the ages?

I cannot imagine that in the history of the planet, fossil fuels have only ever built up and never been consumed/used in any way by the geological mechanisms of the planet. If nothing else, they provide energy for rock transformations and other processes that occur deep underground.

I highly doubt that they are all used up in volcanic eruptions, but even if they are, then shouldn't we consider what the natural function of volcanoes are? E.g. isn't it important for volcanoes to spew lava and build up new rocky land that is more resistant to erosion than softer top soils that have been weathered through time?

If volcanoes aren't allowed to build up new land in this way, won't erosion outpace new land formation and the sea levels will rise as a result of eroded debris being carried out into the ocean?

Even if humans would use the fossil fuels consumed by volcanic eruptions to dredge the oceans and move dirt and rocks back onto land, would that really be a more efficient way to build up new land than to allow fossil fuel deposits to build up and then boil up as volcanic lava?

Plus, if we would dredge up material from below sea level to build up new land in the form of concrete, for example, would that just undermine the coasts (literally) and cause them to erode away into the oceans that much faster?

You mistook me for someone who cares what you believe in, Glennn.

I don't understand your comments above. The energy released in volcanic eruptions is in no material way affected by fossil fuels. The energy comes from the hot magma beneath the earth's crust and the source is gravitational pressure. Such eruptions have long been regarded as "part of a larger geological process", and while they often appear to be random events, they are indeed part of that process. Unfortunately our ability to make accurate predictions of them is quite limited.

When they occur, large volcanic eruptions scatter widespread dust and debris into the atmosphere, which reduces incident solar radiation and causes cooling.

Oh I'm sorry. I thought you were talking about preparations for the coming global warming. In fact, you were . . .

No, the dishonesty and evasion was yours. You brought up volcanism in the overall context of you incredulity about climate change--or global warming, whichever label you prefer. So I responded by pointing out that the Deccan Traps event, played out over tens of thousands of years, and more than 65 million years ago, was only such known event to have a significant impact on global temperatures. I then pointed to the Tambora eruption, the culmination of five major eruptions between 1812 and 1815, and the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, neither of which had a long-lasting effect on the continuing warming of the global climate.

You claimed I was erecting straw men, when in fact, I was responding to a specific part of your overall claim. That was dishonest. Now you're trying to pretend that the remarks you made were not in the context of your incredulity. That is certainly an attempt at evasion, and it is certainly dishonest.

Well you are right about the effects of volcanism - except that they contribute to cooling, not warming As for the rest you are dead wrong, and I suspect are reacting your own preconceptions which you read into my post, but which I did not express. (Perhaps you should go back and read it again.)

I believe that growing CO2 concentrations are indeed the most likely driver of the warming that has occurred, and which appears to be continuing. I am skeptical of some of the extreme predictions about future rates of warming and extremely skeptical ( critical?) of the conventional prescription for dealing with it (i.e. meaningless international treaties which ignore the largest current contributors, and which impose goals generally not met by the signatories; plus the irrational shutdown of nuclear powerplants, and the evident belief that we can get there with wind and solar power, plus the rationing of fossil fuels - a process that no representative government is likely able to achieve).

Yes, that’s exactly what I am talking about. It’s high time to move beyond denial. Societies who can adapt will have a better chance of surviving than those who can’t, me think.

It's not the ability to predict them that's relevant to climate science. The issue is that they release CO2, so they seem to be part of the larger carbon cycle of the planet in some way. You say casually that they are gravitationally-pressured into ejecting hot magma beneath the Earth's crust, but have you really thought that through, or do you just assume it to be true?

We generally assume that the fossil fuel buried deep underground is the result of dead biomass sediments accruing over geological time (i.e. 'dead dinosaurs') but that is not the only possibility. Mantle plumes tend to correspond with extinction events, which are also sometimes attributed to large meteor strikes. As deus-ex-machina-esque as it may sound, it is possible that Earth's core heat is replenished every so often by large meteor strikes containing radioactive material from distant supernovae. If that is the case, then it may be that fossil fuel is formed by deep ocean vents. If so, then the question is how the carbon for that biological activity gets down there. Is carbon plentiful throughout the Earth's layers or is there a carbon cycle that precipitates carbon from the atmosphere into plants and animals, which then die and otherwise cause sediments that accrue long term to form fossil-fuel deposits? If the energy and carbon are progressing from lesser to more dense forms as they get buried deeper over time, then we should be asking what natural role this carbon and the (solar) energy it contains ultimately play in the geological functioning of the planet.


Maybe the cooling is only localized due to the relative shading and absorption of sunlight by the dust, which would cause it to warm up and prevent condensation of atmospheric humidity into cloud cover.

When cloud condensation is averted due to local warming for whatever reason, the high pressure formed pushes the heat and moisture in the direction of low pressure systems (storms). I believe this is also the reason monsoon season cleans out a lot of the air pollution released by industrial activities in Asia.

Boy that's for sure . . .

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released “Global Warming of 1.5 C,” dubbed SR15, an IPCC special report last week, claiming that, unless governments virtually eliminate human production of carbon dioxide (CO2), we are headed toward a climate catastrophe.

The UK’s The Guardian reported that the report authors say, “urgent and unprecedented changes are needed to reach the target, which they say is affordable and feasible although it lies at the most ambitious end of the Paris Agreement pledge to keep temperatures between 1.5C and 2C.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change climate forecasts were wrong from their earliest reports in 1990. They were so inaccurate that they stopped calling them forecasts and made three “projections”: low, medium, and high. Since then, even their “low” scenario projections were wrong.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change created an illusion of certainty about their science, and therefore their forecasts. They let people think that they study all causes of climate change when they only look at human-caused change. That is impossible unless you know and understand total climate change and the mechanisms, and we don’t. It allowed them to ignore all non-human causes of change, including the Sun.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/oct/15/why-un-climate-report-cannot-be-trusted/
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The participating scientists accepted "The Science of Climate Change" in Madrid last November; the --- full IPCC accepted it the following month in Rome. But more than 15 sections in Chapter 8 of the report -- the key chapter setting out the scientific evidence for and against a human influence over climate -were changed or deleted after the scientists charged with examining this question had accepted the supposedly final text.

Few of these changes were merely cosmetic; nearly all worked to remove hints of the skepticism with which many scientists regard claims that human activities are having a major impact on climate in general and on global warming in particular.

The following passages are examples of those included in the approved report but deleted from the supposedly peer-reviewed published version:

-- "None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed [climate] changes to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gases."

-- "No study to date has positively attributed all or part [of the climate change observed to date] to anthropogenic [man-made] causes."

-- "Any claims of positive detection of significant climate change are likely to remain controversial until uncertainties in the total natural variability of the climate system are reduced."
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What could it mean?

I did not state or even imply that volcanism contributes to warming--maybe you're just reacting to your own preconceptions; perhaps you should go back and read my original response again. I pointed out that the Deccan Traps event is the only event of which we know when such an event had any significant and long term effect. I specifically brought up the Tamboro and Krakatoa eruptions to show that ordinarily, with only the exception of the Deccan Traps, volcanism has no long term effect on climate.

Personally, I don't think that the warming is a product of anthropogenic CO2 pollution. That is a point I have made more than once in this thread. There are warming and colling cycles. This was first recognized, obliquely, by historians, then confirmed by archaeologists and geologists, and finally adopted by climatologists. This was about cooling events, and three particular events were dubbed the 8.2 kiloyear event, the 5.9 kiloyear event and the 4.2 kiloyear event. Interesting in themselves for their historical significance, they are germane here because after each such cooling cycle, a warming cycle occurs.

We are now well into the latest warming cycle. The last cooling cycle did not attract the attention of historians, archaeologists and climatologists precisely because it occurred in historical times, and its effects have only been seen piecemeal. But that event bottomed out in the early 18th century. The winters of 1708-09 and 1709-10 were particularly severe, and came after a century or more of precipitous cooling. By 1600, lakes in northern Scotland froze over by the beginning of August. The Thames river routinely froze in the winter, and froze so solidly during many winters, that booths selling just about anything, and even playhouses were erected on the ice.

However, the significance is that those cold spells, which in geological terms can be seen to have been cold snaps, occurring precipitously but only lasting a few centuries, is that they are followed by centuries, several centuries, of steady warming. Based on the patterns of the kiloyear events, we are likely a couple of centuries into a warming event which will reach its peak in five to eight centuries (perhaps longer), before the next sudden cooling event. The climate is warming; no matter how much money the energy industry and other self interested capitalists spend on their anti-warming propaganda, that is a fact which only the willfully ignorant are going to ignore.

Sure politicians run around making gestures, most of which are ineffective. That's what they do for a living. But doing nothing is stark stupidity. If your basement is flooding, it is not a good idea to piss down the stairs and invite all your buddies over to do the same.

Furthermore:

An Australian IT expert and independent researcher, John McLean, recently did a detailed analysis of the IPCC climate report. He notes that HadCRUT4 is the primary dataset used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to make its dramatic claims about “man-made global warming”, to justify its demands for trillions of dollars to be spent on “combating climate change.” But McLean points to egregious errors in the HadCRUT4 used by IPCC. He notes, “It’s very careless and amateur. About the standard of a first-year university student.” Among the errors, he cites places where temperature “averages were calculated from next to no information. For two years, the temperatures over land in the Southern Hemisphere were estimated from just one site in Indonesia.” In another place he found that for the Caribbean island, St Kitts temperature was recorded at 0 degrees C for a whole month, on two occasions. TheHadCRUT4 dataset is a joint production of the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre and the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. This was the group at East Anglia that was exposed several years ago for the notorious Climategate scandals of faking data and deleting embarrassing emails to hide it. Mainstream media promptly buried the story, turning attention instead on “who illegally hacked East Anglia emails.”

Astonishing enough when we do a little basic research, we find that the IPCC never carried out a true scientific inquiry into the possible cases of change in Earth climate. Manmade sources of change were arbitrarily asserted, and the game was on.

It means that you are a very gullible dunce who never met a lie he can’t believe.

The truth is that the IPCC projections were indeed incorrect in that they systematically UNDERESTIMATED the degree and speed of climate change. They did so “to be on the safe side”; or because they had to reach consensus on complex issues; or because they thaught the US wouldn’t deny science so bitterly for so long; or because there was no way they could foretell the industrial rise of China. There was many reasons but overal it amounted to a strong optimistic bias.

The reality is worse than any IPCC projection.

http://www.climatecentral.org/news/report-ipcc-underestimate-assessing-climate-risks-15338

No. It means that, despite the fact that the following passages were deleted form their report, you nevertheless remain a very gullible dunce when it comes to what that means.
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-- "None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed [climate] changes to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gases."

-- "No study to date has positively attributed all or part [of the climate change observed to date] to anthropogenic [man-made] causes."

-- "Any claims of positive detection of significant climate change are likely to remain controversial until uncertainties in the total natural variability of the climate system are reduced."
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Now before you slip back into a mental stupor, it means that no study to date has positively attributed all, or part, of the observed climate change to man-made causes.

Now why don't you tell me what you think it means that those passages were deleted from the finished report.

You should move beyond thinking of the climate in terms of either natural or human causation. Humans have always been part of the natural ecology and climate, only we have cleared and altered land more radically as we've progressed, and we have also learned to harness deep carbon-energy that previously stayed underground.

For comparison's sake, let's take two comparable processes of stone-formation, one natural and one artificial: volcanism and concrete. In the case of volcanism, long-stored energy bubbles up from underground to add layers of rock to the land. In the case of concrete, humans use fuels to bake limestone into portland cement so it can be mixed with aggregate and poured to form artificial 'stone.'

Which of these two processes is more sustainable for building up land for use in the distant future? Some concrete can last millennia, if you go by ancient Greek and Roman architectural examples, but if you leave the fuels in the ground that would be used to make and transport the concrete, the heat will be better insulated underground, where it can have more far-reaching solidifying effects. In a sense, building with concrete cashes in a large amount of underground energy wealth for a relatively minute above-ground gain, only you get the results 'right now' instead of having to wait millennia for natural geological changes to occur.

Plus add the fact that making aggregate for concrete requires pulverizing natural rock, which is like an accelerated form of weathering/erosion, then you should be able to see that our industrially-powered economy is wasting geological energy and thus milking the planet dry. How many millennia of industrialism do you think the Earth has in it at the current rate of energy expenditure? CO2 buildup and warming are just an immediate side-effect of a deeper problem, which is that we are using up planetary resources at a rate much greater than they can be replenished naturally.