Global Warming, Where do you stand? Poll

[beaslbob]

Global warming is a hoax based on sketch data by people who want to change the whole industrialized countries' life styles.

The latest "fad" is the whole carbon tax idea. co2 is food for plants so all that does is increase our farming output and phyto in the oceans. The carbon tax idea is just another scam to take money for people who are successful (countries) and give it to people who are less successful (countries).

 

[Areseebee]

Just curious, do you really believe the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is a limiting factor in the rate of crop production?

 

[beaslbob]

Just curious, do you really believe the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is a limiting factor in the rate of crop production?

nope.

But more co2 along with more nutrients=more crops

 

[jgvergo]

You forgot the second part of that famous expression and it's made you miss the point. In a model you always compress and ignore details, the role of theory in general is to ignore the right details and give predictive capabilities from a subset of parameters. The interplay between theory and experiment is perhaps the most important aspect of quantitative sciences, I'm not sure I would call it "not science".

You can point to a regime of length or time scales where every theory we know breaks one way or the other, that doesn't mean they aren't useful in getting us to the moon, predicting where a ball will land or predicting the orbits of planets.

Yes, some models are useful. Newtonian mechanics were proved inaccurate by Relativity, but they were (and are) very powerful in their predictive power at non-relativeistic speeds and scale. The current crop of climate models are very inaccurate. That means the theories they embody are weak or wrong. Either the sensitivity constants are wrong of the basic climate dynamics are wrong.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

Sad that people even debate this. :(

 

[Areseebee]

Yes, some models are useful. Newtonian mechanics were proved inaccurate by Relativity, but they were (and are) very powerful in their predictive power at non-relativeistic speeds and scale. The current crop of climate models are very inaccurate. That means the theories they embody are weak or wrong. Either the sensitivity constants are wrong of the basic climate dynamics are wrong.

I'm only pointing out that you manipulated the "famous expression" to try and call modeling "not science", in reality theory and modeling are extremely important to science.

 

[Waterjockey]

I appreciate your nuance and analysis of the data. As I said in another comment, media representation of science can be quite problematic. You seem to spend much more time reading climate-related works than I, but this quoted statement doesn't seem to make sense. Earth loses heat to space through radiation. Different molecules absorb different wavelengths, so the amount of heat lost to space is contingent upon which molecules are in the atmosphere. If the cooling feedback loop were independent of atmospheric molecules or other conditions, then 1) Earth would be extremely cold because a significant amount of electromagnetic radiation would be reflected and 2) We would not observe fluxuations in global temperature over geological time. As far as the greenhouse effect, you can do a simple demonstration: take 3 glass boxes: 1) Shine full spectrum light; 2) Shine full spectrum light but line the inside of the box with tin foil; 3) Shine full spectrum light and have a high carbon dioxide concentration in the glass box. Measure the temperature over time.

Thank you for your thoughtful reply. No, that isn't what I was trying at, I described it poorly. Yes, the terrestrial earth absorb incoming radiation, and energy is radiated back out to space. Greenhouse gases (of which water vapour is the overwhelming gas comprising of close to 97% of the effect) also absorb and radiate energy back to space. *One* of the problems with Anthropogenic CO2 further warming theory is at the frequency band that CO2 absorbs, the atmosphere is already opaque, injecting additional atmospheric absorbers in that ban has no significant greenhouse effect. To use the analogy in the link you provided of roof dampers, imagine instead, there were hundreds of dampers in the ceiling letting out heat.....and the one called "CO2" is already "closed". Adding more CO2 will have marginal effects...i.e., once the damper is already shut, you can't really close it up much more :). CO2 does not absorb heat across all frequency bands emitted by the terrestrial earth, energy obviously still escapes throughout all those other dampers that are still open in the roof, including the ones at the peak energy band the earth radiates energy at. I wasn't trying to suggest that cooling was independent of greenhouse gasses, but rather we have seem pretty much the maximum effect that one particular gas, CO2, can have....for example in the geologic record where there was much higher CO2 concentrations, and yet falling temperatures. That would indicate there are limits to how much effect CO2 will have, and we've already, imho, based on known physics, reached that limit.
The concept of a particular average global temperature vis distributed temperature stations and averaging the anomalies is very strange in my mind as well, considering the dynamics of all the various systems that can affect any particular region for a period of time...it's a half-done silly metric

 

[Centerline]

Sad that people even debate this. :(

In what way?

 

[neuwave]

I am not a climatologist either, I'm an Engineer who probably spends more time surfing (closed) climate forums with scientists of various disciplines (geologists, physicists, climatologists) than I do surfing reef related forums :)

There is so much basic physics and thermodynamics *missing* from "climate science", that for anyone to suggest the currently popular (in the mainstream media) alarmism is "settled science", shows, in my humble opinion, an ignorance of the "science" "

You mentioned above that basic physics and thermodynamics are missing. As an engineer, basic physics and basic thermodynamics are apart of our college curriculum. What basics are missing?

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

In what way?

If there weren't big economic consequences and lots of vested interests pushing the idea that the science is "unproven", it would be no more debated or discounted than every other scientific observation, starting with the earth revolving around the sun or being flat.

Almost nothing in real science is ever "proven' aside from mathematical proofs.

 

[Areseebee]

Furthermore, if it is missing, why not develop it, publish it and have a nice career? Thermodynamics is a solved field, why wouldn't an entire field of science be picking the lowest hanging fruit that you've so easily identified?

 

[jgvergo]

I'm only pointing out that you manipulated the "famous expression" to try and call modeling "not science", in reality theory and modeling are extremely important to science.

My point is that laymen (including media) point to the output of climate models and claim that "the science says" that temperatures will rise and storms will rage and cities will flood. The models in question mix the mathematics (models) of established science with the mathematics of unproven theories. The results have not aligned with empirical observations. Science is a process of generating an hypothesis and testing it. When the data do not support the hypothesis, science demands the failure to reject the null hypothesis.

 

[Mattrg02]

Another issue with science is that statistics get slanted according to the agenda of the presenter.

This will probably be one of those things that doesn't get accepted until common people begin to become affected by it, like most anything.

If there weren't big economic consequences and lots of vested interests pushing the idea that the science is "unproven", it would be no more debated or discounted than every other scientific observation, starting with the earth revolving around the sun or being flat.

Almost nothing in real science is every "proven' aside from mathematical proofs.

So what do the scientists want us to do?

I work in the utilities. To go full solar would cause our Members bills to go up BIG TIME. Same goes for putting ANY kind of cost onto the generating companies to change. They'll just charge the utility more which just gets passed down to the consumer.

It would be a complete lifestyle change that many can't afford, just like the ACA and tripling premiums.

Scientists that believe this is a real thing need to start offering fixes that we ALL can afford to adopt, not just telling us that things have got to change.

Electric cars maybe? Where does the electrons come from? How about the energy and meterials to create the Electrical components.

Priorities will need to be straightened out before ANYTHING can be done about the possible issue. If you ask people to downgrade the quality of life or to start walking, well, you'll see the oceans take back quite a bit of land at some point.

 

[Centerline]

If there weren't big economic consequences and lots of vested interests pushing the idea that the science is "unproven", it would be no more debated or discounted than every other scientific observation, starting with the earth revolving around the sun or being flat.

Almost nothing in real science is ever "proven' aside from mathematical proofs.

Ah!

 

[Areseebee]

Another issue with science is that statistics get slanted according to the agenda of the presenter.

Which journal do you find this with? You aren't correctly identifying where the "slant" originates.

 

[Mattrg02]

Which journal do you find this with? You aren't correctly identifying where the "slant" originates.

I'm not picking on any particular journal,
I'm picking on statistics in general.

 

[beaslbob]

If there weren't big economic consequences and lots of vested interests pushing the idea that the science is "unproven", it would be no more debated or discounted than every other scientific observation, starting with the earth revolving around the sun or being flat.

Obviously the sun goes around the earth. I see it every day. :rolleyes: Or it could be just that the equations of a sun centered solar system are much simplier to work with.

Almost nothing in real science is ever "proven' aside from mathematical proofs.[/QUOTE]

Agreed. Things cannot be proven just verified based upon the basic assumption of science. Like there is always experimental error. Nothing is "black or white" but rather some shade of gray. All we can get is some hypothesis verified through experiments. There is always something beyond what we have (or know now). Everything came from whatever was before and will change into whatever is in the future. There will always be that one or more experiment (like 1 out of a million experiments) that do not verify the hypothesis and points to some completely different hypothesis. and so on.

 

[Maacc]

If there weren't big economic consequences and lots of vested interests pushing the idea that the science is "unproven", it would be no more debated or discounted than every other scientific observation, starting with the earth revolving around the sun or being flat.

Almost nothing in real science is ever "proven' aside from mathematical proofs.

Isn't that the point though? No one is proposing policies that have costs and consequences in the trillions of dollars for different interpretations of relativity or quantum mechanics.
Whenever policy that will compel people to act through coercion or appropriation of property people tend to get rather heated about it.
Unfortunately, it becomes much harder to have an academic or even civil conversation when the costs are so high and the time frame for discussion and corresponding action is immediate.

 

[Gravadlax]

Eh, quoting something from 4 chan is probably not the best way to get your point across.

Mmm yes. Science bad. Blind speculation good

 

[cloak]

I apologize for not reading through the entire thread, but I voted voted yes. (at this point in time) The Earth has been heating up and cooling down for years on end. (and then some) Humanity comes into play and a buck is to made one way or the other. Hmm...

Somebody said it to me one time, "We need the World, the World does not need us."