[Closed] Global warming update!

Mega, that's true but if cavemen can get through it we should be alright shouldn't we? Of course if it upsets agriculture it'll be a right pain in the arse for millions of people.

As for worrying about green issues.. I just see it as common sense, yes it's an added expense but it means we can keep on supporting a growing population without it catching us out in a big way at some point. e.g. if we were all veggies we could support c.20-32bn people, so plenty of potential there. In the end we just use too much stuff, if 7bn of us lives like a US citizen we'd need 5 planets, like a UK citizen 3ish, global average is 1.6 and a Bangladeshi is 0.3. So from that we can see the massive potential for developing countries to increase consumption so long as we sort ourselves out. (Considering the USA and Europe will skew that 1.6 from a lower figure in a big way) Rockström et al 2009 did a really good paper on this type of stuff - places where we're well within limits and those where we;re exceeding them - identifying where efforts are best placed and where we can let ourselves go a bit to compensate. Summarised [url= http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_boundaries ]here[/url]

Ta will take a read of that.

thing is there are a small number of very selfish people, unfortunately they have disproportionate power and influence- only by running the world to benefit , not exploit, can these issues be addressed-- trotsky was right , only a worldwide revolution can save humanity ...nos da

mega - Member

I'm an advocate of doing what the * I like as something bigger and badder will get us all in the end and it wont give a monkeys if we are 'developed' or not.

Honestly don't get your knickers in a twist about pollution and green issues. In a few million years it won't matter.

We owe everything we have to the people that went before us. What sort of *s do we have to be to leave less to our kids?

nihilistic crap from mega man-- not sure he really thinks much-if he does then there is a problem,but yep , the concious will always carry the torch of enlightenment..

fluck --i'm sounding like an old hippy 😯

Honestly don't get your knickers in a twist about pollution and green issues. In a few million years it won't matter.

No, but in 30 or 40 it might. I have kids, I don't want everything to be shit for them. Hells bells, I'll still be alive then. I don't want to see millions plunged into suffering and everything I love trashed.

Doing whatever you feel like is selfish. Most human beings consider that to be a bad thing.

I'll still be alive then.

mystic moley --you been sneaking a peep into the future--naughty boy..

Erm no

I'm an advocate of doing what the **** I like as something bigger and badder will get us all in the end and it wont give a monkeys if we are 'developed' or not.

Excellent - please take a walk to the middle of Afghanistan and start writing some graffiti about prophets. Take a video camera too so it will give us all a giggle.

Besides most developing nations are the worst polluters.

I think the plane has gone so far over your head you didn't see it. 1) They do our pollution for us by making crap we buy. 2) developed nations could quite easily help developing nations skip the dirty step of industrialisation - it just takes political will

Honestly don't get your knickers in a twist about pollution and green issues. In a few million years it won't matter.

With a few less people who share your selfish attitudes around, and it won't matter much sooner either.

But when a super volcano goes off there isn't much you me or bambi can do about it.

Just a thought. How about you don't worry about that then, but try a little harder about considering the consequences of things we can control. Pollution and destruction of habitat being obvious examples.

The ban hammer has been used to curb some posters' lack of control during this debate. If you can't contribute without losing your temper and throwing insults about then please go away.

Well the sun came up this morning and most of us are still here. Nice to be able to express an opinion without personal insults being thrown which is why STW is an interesting place

mega-- your 'comments' were designed to provoke i hope, not really your 'thoughts' ??

I'm still here (wonders who got banned), the sun is indeed up and shining through the windows, who needs central heating eh?

developed nations could quite easily help developing nations skip the dirty step of industrialisation - it just takes political will

Indeed - and this is exactly the sort of thing which gets forgotten in the rush to build more windmills in order to try and limit our direct CO2 emissions.

Correlation, not causation. Lots of other stuff going on - far too much to suggest that the rises are definitely caused by the changes in the gas concentrations

The point I'm making here is that the impression the AGW fundamentalists often try to give is that we can tell exactly what will happen and that increasing the emissions by X will result in an increase of Y in the temperature

They dont what they face is a powerful and politically motivated lobby group who go all out to misrepresent , befuddle and confuse the public abut what the scientists are saying. As for AGW fundamentalist when we are into the realms of using lazy slurs like that for the consensus view of the scientific community [ no credible scientific organisation disputes AGW] then I stop debating.

Its not me who is a fundamentalist here - I am simply following the evidence . if you can shwo how the increased greenhouse gas concentrations dont lead to forcing then i am happy to see your evidence and I suspect you will get a noble prize to boot.
Good luck

Nihilism gets us nowhere.

Why bother because in a 100 years none of us will be alive to worry about it.
Why bother because in a million years our species will probably be extinct
Why bother becuse in a billion years the Sun will have boiled the world oceans
etc etc.

The fact is we are probably the first generation of humans who are [i]knowingly[/i] making the world worse. And lots of us want to carry on ignoring this fact and pretend everything will be okay.

Exactly richmtb
Seize the day and live for now.

Regardless of what we do or don't do it won't be ok in the long run for our species so enjoy life now. Dont go out of your way to pollute.

How about kids? ive got two, am i allowed any more or will they use up too much of earths resources?

drivel

Dont go out of your way to pollute.

So we agree after all

Zokes, indeed we do and probably always have done despite all the noise that tries to prevent us. So:

Greenhouse gases and the greenhouse effect are necessary and natural conditions for human survival - accepted
Current levels may/may not be at optimum level - accepted, I believe
There is a relationship between temperature and CO2 - accepted
it's a re-enforcing system rather than a simple causation one - accepted by some?
CO2 rises lag temperature rises - debated
CO2 rises them amplify temperature change and increase its diffusion - debated
Hence, majority of GW (the variance) occurs after CO2 rises - accepted
Increases in CO2 levels are caused by natural (release from oceans etc) and man-made reasons - accepted
Relative importance of natural versus man made factors - debated
The latest Met Office release indicates that cooling natural forces are countering warming man made ones - accepted?
The Met Office stresses that man made activities are still having a warming effect - accepted?

[b]So attempts to reduce man-made effects are important - accepted.[/b] Are they the principal factor behind LT average weather trends - not accepted. To what extent do they affect the variance - the current debate!

The interesting thing about the Met Office stuff is that it focuses on surface warming measurements when the bulk of warming takes place in the oceans. To which they indicate that a lot more further work is required to aid our understanding and hence, by their own admission, scientific knowledge lags as our understanding of the oceans remains very limited. So scientists bring me neatly back to Bertrand Russell and a rejection of dogmatic force feeding of causes of GW - debated!!!! 😉

One thing not many people truly understand the concept of is the various "step" events, that we don't know the true trigger points for. In particular methane release from permafrost and the oceans that will be caused by temperature rises. The trouble is, we don't quite know how much the temperature needs to rise to trigger these events, or how bad (ranging from bad though very bad all the way to catastrophic). Consequently it's not much of a surprise that models aren't perfectly accurate, as the extent to which these step events will be triggered by what temperature is very much up for debate

the interesting thing about the Met Office stuff is that it focuses on surface warming measurements when the bulk of warming takes place in the oceans.

The worry is that as we don't really understand the effect the oceans are having, we could be stumbling towards a cliff edge we don't know is there.

The oceans are currently a carbon sink - the biggest one in fact. We know this because we know how much carbon is going into the atmosphere and we know how much atmospheric CO2 is increasing by.

The figure don't match, CO2 levels are actually rising much slower than they should as the oceans are absorbing a lot of it.

If this stops happening or if the oceans become a source of carbon then we are well and truly ****ed. The trouble is we have no real idea of when or if this will happen.

I haven't got time to read all of this. Has anyone produced any evidence that disagrees with all the scientists? Or, should I continue believing all of the peer-reviewed studies?

I haven't got time to read all of this. Has anyone produced any evidence that disagrees with all the scientists? Or, should I continue believing all of the peer

Nope. Mega doesn't give a deck about anyone but himself, thm is a sceptic, rather than a denier, aracer didn't do chemistry at school. I think that's just about got it covered

And lots of us want to carry on ignoring this fact and pretend everything will be okay.

Actually, most of us want other people to solve the problem so we can carry on as we are.

It's this marvellous age of no accountability we're living in - everything is someone elses fault or someone elses job to sort out 😀

Thanks, that's what I thought 🙂

Interesting question Mike but how can anyone disagree with "all the scientists" when they continue to disagree among themselves?

Zokes, as an aside it was interesting that you have drawn on the Ganges river basin and the concept of MDCs helping LDCs leapfrog certain aspects of the development phase. I would argue that the evidence on this is mixed at best. I have just been supervising GCSE geography revision (sadly a dangerous place to reject force fed ideas about GW!) and sustainable farming systems including subsistence rice farming along the Ganges. So nature (edit and other factors) provides a sustainable farming system, albeit only a subsistence one. MDCs try to impose the "Green revolution" and high yield variants across much of the LDC world. Fortunately lessons were learned about the failures here in the rest of Asia and the Ganges area has rejected many of these so-called advances and maintained a more sustainable farming system. And geography students get to learn all about "appropriate technology" (2 marks) !!

Interesting question Mike but how can anyone disagree with "all the scientists" when they continue to disagree among themselves?

I think it's fair to say that there's an overwhelming consensus among climate scientists that the average global temperature is rising and that the causes of this are man-made. There may be some scientists who disagree, but they're in the minority. On specifics, the climate scientists might disagree but not on the overall picture.

The latest Met Office release indicates that cooling natural forces are countering warming man made ones

So since the Met Office didn't understand these natural forces which have buggered up their forecasts could it be other natural warming forces which accounted for some of the warming in the 1980s and 1990s. After all the temp rise in the first half of the twentieth century was greater than the temp rise in the second half despite manmade CO2 emissions being far less.

Likewise the temps didn't rise over 40 years from 1940 - 1980 despite rising CO2 emissions.

While man's CO2 will affect the climate perhaps the models are wrong in the amount of forcing they attribute to it compared to natural variations.

http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/info/warming/

teamhurtmore

the "disagreements" amongst scientists tend not to be about the fundamental big picture stuff, but tweaks at the edges....often these "disagreements" are nothing more than revisions by one group of anothers figures in the result of more evidence, datasets, research etc. It's quite wring to categorise this sort of stuff as disagreements...there's good examples of this process going on now with ice sheet melting rates and sea level rise. The state of knowledge of ice sheet dynamics when the last IPCC report was done was very limited, everyone knew that, so the assumptions they made about it and the subsequent resultant sea level rise over the coming 100 years was cautious and couched with terms like "low confidence". In the interveneing 4 years loads of different groups have been studying intensively some quite different aspects of Ice sheet dynamics, that waork is now finding itself into tightly coupled air/ocean/cryosphere models, and numbers for sea level rise are now being generated which look a bit different to the numbers in the IPCC report from 2007, and confidence about their validity is aslos becoming quite a bit higher

Is this a "disagreement"...on one level yes, but the people who did the assessments from pre 2007 will quite happily accept the more current work, but their origial papers are still out there, and will no doubt be misquoted by the usual crowd in an attempt to generate confusion, or mislead the great and the good into thinking the latest work is controversial and untrustworthy

It's frankly a bit of a shocker to see someone who is a geography teacher who thinks the evidence is mixed, I'd suggest you just haven't understood the science and you should rewind back to first principles a bit.

People who tend to study it for a living tend to disagree with you.

Zokes, as an aside it was interesting that you have drawn on the Ganges river basin and the concept of MDCs helping LDCs leapfrog certain aspects of the development phase. I would argue that the evidence on this is mixed at best. I have just been supervising GCSE geography revision (sadly a dangerous place to reject force fed ideas about GW!) and sustainable farming systems including subsistence rice farming along the Ganges. So nature (edit and other factors) provides a sustainable farming system, albeit only a subsistence one. MDCs try to impose the "Green revolution" and high yield variants across much of the LDC world. Fortunately lessons were learned about the failures here in the rest of Asia and the Ganges area has rejected many of these so-called advances and maintained a more sustainable farming system. And geography students get to learn all about "appropriate technology" (2 marks) !!

Given that I work in something called the Sustainable Agriculture Flagship, you're preaching to the converted here! What I was mainly talking about was LDCs skipping the profusely burning oil and coal part of development. One things for sure: we don't need to grow more food, we just need to do much better at managing what food we do grow. I think gwaelod covered the rest

I would agree that there are significant attempts to generate confusion and mightily relieved to note that confidence is "quite a bit higher". Perhaps in time that will be high in absolute terms rather than relative!

No need worry about the teaching bit - I was merely supervising 😉 Have no fear the candidates know what is best for them, and they will regurgitate the force fed ideas. In much the same way I was forced to do as a geography student albeit in those days we had to describe global cooling rather than warming.

Zokes - yes, my comments were an aside. It was the posting of the Ganges map that was just a co-incidence with what I was doing. That must be very interesting work. In the past I was involved (largely indirectly) with the application of mobile telephony to the provision of banking services in Africa. Happily that was a more positive case study but not without it's own hiccups!!!!

No need worry about the teaching bit - I was merely supervising Have no fear the candidates know what is best for them, and they will regurgitate the force fed ideas. In much the same way I was forced to do as a geography student albeit in those days we had to describe global cooling rather than warming.

Actually, I'll revise my earlier statement to mike. It's clear you are merely a denier, as opposed to a sceptic after all

No you were correct first time!

irc could you draw a line of best fit through your data and let me know what temperature was doing during the period you are discussing

[img] [/img]

Most data sets include land , air and sea temperature as well

Does Vostok Ice core data have any relevance today? It looks like a clear pattern over history even though this data is quite dated. I'm quite ignorant of the issue TBH so be gentle 😳

[img] [/img]

it relevant in the sense that it shows us [ whihc no one disputes] that temperature has changed over time [ the forcing effect is the sun generally [ see below] and this is then made worse by the rise in C02 levels.

When the Earth comes out of an ice age, the warming is not initiated by CO2 but by changes in the Earth's orbit. The warming causes the oceans to release CO2. The CO2 amplifies the warming and mixes through the atmosphere, spreading warming throughout the planet. So CO2 causes warming AND rising temperature causes CO2 rise. Overall, about 90% of the global warming occurs after the CO2 increase.

and the two graphs together
[img] [/img]

*[url= http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles ]Milankovitch cycles CLICKY[/url]

basically the earth orientates towards the sun as it "wobbles on it axis" and warms and cools over large periods of time due to this - we should be cooling now for example. No one disputes that natural climate change occurs the issue is whether the current change is natural or man made.

Good source of info and debunking of the myths about it from link below - it does "believe" in man made changes - plenty of poor science out there if you want a sceptics site but there is not one I could rate

http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php

JY - you are correct to highlight that website, which I have used before. Its a great of example of the excellent [u]and the[/u] annoying. The very first section typifies the current debate. It starts with the categorical statement that "Climate reacts to whatever forces it to change at the time; [b]humans are now the dominant forcing[/b]." We then get a lot of very interesting analysis including the (widely accepted 😉 ) view that CO2 levels amplify temperature changes. Sadly, little specifics on just how much of this is man-made but, no fear, we reach the equally categorical conclusion that, 'it tells us that climate is highly sensitive to the greenhouse warming [b]we're now causing[/b]."

Enough said!

Sadly, little specifics on just how much of this is man-made

Manmade CO2 emissions are much smaller than natural emissions. Consumption of vegetation by animals & microbes accounts for about 220 gigatonnes of CO2 per year. Respiration by vegetation emits around 220 gigatonnes. The ocean releases about 332 gigatonnes. In contrast, when you combine the effect of fossil fuel burning and changes in land use, human CO2 emissions are only around 29 gigatonnes per year. However, natural CO2 emissions (from the ocean and vegetation) are balanced by natural absorptions (again by the ocean and vegetation). Land plants absorb about 450 gigatonnes of CO2 per year and the ocean absorbs about 338 gigatonnes. This keeps atmospheric CO2 levels in rough balance. Human CO2 emissions upsets the natural balance.

[img] [/img]
http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-natural-cycle.htm

This wouldn't make sense either, not only because scientists keep track of volcanic and oceanic emissions of CO2 and know that they are small compared to anthropogenic emissions, but also because CO2 from fossil fuels has its own fingerprints. Its isotopic signature is depleted in the carbon-13 isotope, which explains why the atmospheric ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-13 has been going up as anthropogenic carbon dioxide goes up. Additionally, atmospheric oxygen (O2) is decreasing at the same rate that CO2 is increasing, because oxygen is consumed when fossil fuels combust.

The burning of fossil fuels and changes in land use results in the emission into the atmosphere of approximately 30 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year worldwide, according to the EIA.

Fossil fuel emissions rose steadily in recent decades, contributing 8.7 ± 0.5 gigatonnes of carbon in 2008. This is 41% greater than fossil fuel emissions in 1990. CO2 emissions from land use was estimated at 1.2 ± 0.4 gigatonnes of carbon in 2008. Note the proportionally higher uncertainty compared to fossil fuel emissions.

If you are still in doubt [url= http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch2s2-3.html#2-3-1 ]THIS LINKY[/url] gives actual measures, sources, references and rationale. like I said no one can possibly doubt that man is creating c02 its preposterous to suggest otherwise.
To summarise we are responsible for th increase the cycle can cope with the natural stuff and is absorbing about 45 % iirc of our emissions

In short all the C02 increase is down to us pretty much

Didn't the Greenland Ice core data have readings as high as that of Mauna Loa before the timeline in the graph above? (a million graphs on this topic on the web, a bleeding nightmare to find out which ones are considered acceptable.)

I'm not skeptical as such just a bit ignorant of all the issues and would like to understand more, (sorry to waste the time of those that already understand.)
I will do a bit more research on some of the facts and figures quoted in the thread.
Interesting debate.

Didn't the Greenland Ice core data have readings as high as that of Mauna Loa before the timeline in the graph above?

No one is saying that temperature and C02 levels would remain constant if mankind was extinct they would continue to naturally fluctuate.
The debate is about whether we are creating C)2 and whether this is causing any warming.
Its hardly difficult to work out that human activity is producing C02 - if there is debate [ its largely from non scientists of the right wing persuasion] it is about what this will do to temperature even though everyone accepts its a greenhouse gas. Very few now argue temperature is not rising though they used to.

One figure that amazed me when I was researching some stuff at uni was that until c.1955-1960, the biggest anthropogenic source of GHGs was from simply ploughing fields.

As has been alluded to, one of the main issues is threshold events and feedback loops such as loosing albedo from snow/glaciers, ocean acidification, methane release from submarine sediments (potentially cataclysmic if sudden), Antarctic terrestrial ice melting etc etc.

Add to that the fact that places like the Gangees delta, East Anglia etc will be rather Atlantis-like in <100 years and it's not something that we can simply ignore really.

Www.chasingice.co.uk I went to see this last night. It's touring round the uk at the moment.

Very beautiful photography and all the evidence you will need that climate change is happening and we have accelerated it at a pace never before seen to occur naturally.

One figure that amazed me when I was researching some stuff at uni was that until c.1955-1960, the biggest anthropogenic source of GHGs was from simply ploughing fields.

I doubt that, but you're in the right industry...

Try methane from rice paddies

Surprised at the rabidness of the greenies - seems to stem from a heightened sense of self importance

The end is nigh, the end is nigh.
yes it is, global warming (if it is happening..) could bring that on quicker but equally something else could **** us up so try and enjoy it while it lasts eh?

Get on with enjoying your life, be sensible and relax a little and you'll probably live longer.
I fear more for a future where militant Eco warriors dictate how many kids we can have or how often we can plow our rice paddies.

Obvious troll is terribly obvious