So who here reckons humans don't cause climate change

It’s difficult to explain without getting into some fairly serious science and bamboozling people. But the evidence points to it, almost all scientific papers on it say that it exists and once you read some of these it becomes very difficult to deny.

If you’re a republican its very easy to deny – ‘Scientists’ broadly speaking are ‘Liberals’, science, evidence, fact, being right about stuff, those are all the things the other side do. Republicans aren’t interested in whats ‘true’, they are only interested in the ‘the sort of thing that should be true’.

It’s difficult to explain without getting into some fairly serious science and bamboozling people. But the evidence points to it, almost all scientific papers on it say that it exists and once you read some of these it becomes very difficult to deny.

Thing I can’t get my head around is that reasonably accurate climate data goes back around 300 years. And changes in the climate take place over billions of years.

Quite. There’s no doubt it’s happening, but once you start thinking in geological time scales the whole thing looks like nitpicking.

And as I said, if it’s holding back a catastrophic ice age, it’s actually a good thing.

Won’t stop us all dying out eventually, though.

Pack up your shit, folks.

but once you start thinking in geological time scales the whole thing looks like nitpicking.

Why would you want to look at it in geological time scales?

What’s important is human lives, now.

It’s difficult to explain without getting into some fairly serious science and bamboozling people.

I tihnk you need to bring the science out, just to demonstrate to the deniers that there is actual science here and not just a load of wasters sitting around pulling poorly thought out ideas out of their beards.

The big scare for the future in terms of climate change is really what we’re doing to the ocean. The amount of CO2 we are producing is increasing the acidity of the oceans- the oceans draw down a large amount of the CO2 we pump out, limiting the global temperature rise. Unfortunately this increases their acidity which impacts on calcareous life (corals etc) in the ocean. They are a major cause of the oceans drawing down CO2 and without them what would go into the oceans will go into the atmosphere. Then we’re really stuffed.

That’s a good post, munrobiker, but do you not feel the cognitive dissonance at work in forecasting doom?

ie All the signs point to very serious, anthropogenic, climate change – because the science says so and you have total faith in science.

Yet we might be stuffed (your words), doomed (others on this thread), fked (general guardian wingey-ness) because you contemporaneously have zero faith in science. In respect of science representing the apex of human creativity, invention and problem-solving – there is no greater force for societal change – yet it’s going to come up empty-handed when faced with global warming? No chance.

it is complicated and when I think about it if you’ve not seen all the graphs, data and read the reports I can see why you may be a little reluctant to accept that we are a major factor.

As a layperson one of the things that made me realise we could have an influence was volcanoes.

I think most folk would be fairly comfortable with the idea that the global output of volcanoes could alter the climate. That seems like a natural thing.

BUT…

The global CO2 emission rate for ALL volcanoes (land and sea) is in a range from 0.13 gigaton to 0.44 gigaton per year.

Anthropogenic CO2 emissions are somewhere around 35 gigatons per year!

We’d need an extra 11,200 volcanoes like Mount K?lauea to match the human CO2 output.

And I’m pretty sure if 11,200 big volcanoes sprang up then people wouldn’t need too much convincing that it was a bad thing.

Source: http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/hazards/gas/climate.php

And as I said, if it’s holding back a catastrophic ice age, it’s actually a good thing.

really, and there was me thinking it could be about another 16,000 years to the next one, give or a take a few 1000 years

It’s not just serious for humans Molgrips we’re changing the climate faster than the living part of our world can adapt to it, were already in an anthropogenic mass extinction and there’s all the crap we’re doing releasing toxins like plastic and metals from mineral overburden. We’re basically setting evolution back millions of years. In the short term (100 years sort of magnitude) were going to see entire ecosystems unable to cope with this and the survivors wont have the kind of time they need to re-fill the niches as they do in (most) natural extinctions as well us struggling to cope once we’ve lost massive amounts of the capacity of the ecosystem services we’re dependant on (insect pollination, filtration, photosynthesis, etc) to provide us with what we need. It’s a pretty shitty state of affairs and I don’t think there’ll be the political will or the technological innovation to prevent the worst of it.

I don’t go in for the apocolyptic end of it but we’re going to lose so much and there’s no bringing it back.

Thing I can’t get my head around is that reasonably accurate climate data goes back around 300 years. And changes in the climate take place over billions of years.

Not necessarily so- we have records from coral and ice that go back much further. Coral records can go back 30,000 years, the Greenland Ice Core (for all its flaws) goes back 5,000 years. Information from sedimentary rocks takes us back millions of years.

Climate changes on a tens of thousand years basis, not billions, and so it’s relatively easy to look at all this information and determine whether we are in something normal or unusual. The rise in CO2 in the atmosphere since the 1850s is unprecedented in the climate record, and the temperature is going with it. Because at no other time in the data CO2 rises so rapidly it’s fairly easy to then link the rise in CO2 to us and the industrial revolution. As temperature rises with CO2 it’s almost certainly our fault, or a major coincidence.

Here’s another nice graph showing global temperatures going back half a billion years. The earliest 400 million years are certainly a bit woolly, but if you look at the current projections then we’re heading for a temperature that’s not been seen for 5 million years in a period of 200 years after 10,000 years of temperatures being relatively steady. Life can’t adapt at that rate and this will be the major problem for the future.

Garry Lager- stuffed may be a bit strong. But there’ll certainly be problems of such a large scale that they can’t be solved in time by science. And some things, like rising sea levels, are essentially impossible to solve. Where would all that extra water go? The earth is a closed system.

Humanity will survive relatively easily the issues of climate impacting crops, we can genetically engineer stuff to survive, increase the productivity of soil etc. But much of nature will not cope and I don’t think it should really be up to us to say that it doesn’t matter and we’ll be alright so it’s fine.

What’s important is human lives, now.

I suppose it is.

Suntan

In simple terms…
Over 90‰ of the scientists who study climate acknowledge that there is human influence in the current climate change and that it may be possible to alter the current trajectory.
A bunch of people who don’t spend their lives studying the climate disagree with them.

Who do you think has it?

“We must look to a sustained greenhouse effect to maintain the present advantageous world climate. This implies the ability to inject effective greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the opposite of what environmentalists are erroneously advocating.”

Luke Skinner said his group had anticipated this kind of reception.

“It’s an interesting philosophical discussion – ‘would we better off in a warm [interglacial-type] world rather than a glaciation?’ and probably we would,” he said.

“But it’s missing the point, because where we’re going is not maintaining our currently warm climate but heating it much further, and adding CO2 to a warm climate is very different from adding it to a cold climate.

“The rate of change with CO2 is basically unprecedented, and there are huge consequences if we can’t cope with that.”

Mikewsmith has it.

Here’s a graph showing the historic link between CO2 and temperature.

I can see how the naysayers could use that graph to say human activity is not having an impact. The pattern is for very sharp rises in CO2 and temperature followed by a slow decline on what looks like an incredibly regular return period. A Republican could easily be fooled into thinking it;s just “one of those things”.

In respect of science representing the apex of human creativity, invention and problem-solving – there is no greater force for societal change – yet it’s going to come up empty-handed when faced with global warming?

It won’t come up with anything if noone works on it. And given the scale of the challenge it needs a lot of people working on it. And that won’t happen unless people can be made to realise what a big deal it is.

Hence the campaigning and awareness.

Slowoldman- indeed, but you need to look carefully at the right hand side of the graph. You’ll see the red line actually continues up very steeply, to the point where it actually looks like an axis of the graph, to well over 350ppm. The maximum in the previous 400,000 years is around 290ppm. That’s the issue- an unprecedented rise in CO2 in the last 150 years. CO2 has been proven to be linked to temperature in the past, therefore the link between the increase in temperature in the last 100 years or so is likely to be linked to this rise in CO2.

I can see how easy it would be to be fooled by that graph, though.

I think this commentary from Reuters[/url] sums it up.

We can begin by taking climate change seriously and putting pressure on those who pollute.
We must work to halt the spread of weapons of mass destruction; combat violent jihadism; revitalize civil societies; assist developing countries in keeping their citizens by cleaning up government and reforming their economies; seek agreements with Russia on Syria and Ukraine;
encourage citizens everywhere to hold, not just governments, but themselves to account for their choices and public actions.

*The natural climate change cycle is promising huge numbers of dead humans in the short term.
*Humans are destroying the planet and the population has gone from 2 billion to 7 billion in 100 years. (estimations of over 9 billion by 2050).

Not all negative is it? 8)

Err… Yes?

Re volcanoes…need to throw in that the carbon isotope signature of co2 out gassed from volcanoes is different from carbon isotope signature of co2 released from fossil fuel burning, and the record of carbon isotopes in the atmosphere has changed at a rate that is commensurate with fossil fuel use since beginning of industrial times. So whilst a large chunk of CO2 in the atmosphere is of natural/volcanic origin, it’s fairly obvious that the recent slug thats taken levels up to 400ppm and beyond is fossil fuel derived

No problem admitting it exists, just really sick of how a contrived financial burden is being placed on tax-payers for precious little progress.

samunkim – Member

No problem admitting it exists, just really sick of how a contrived financial burden is being placed on tax-payers for precious little progress.

eh?

any examples of these ‘financial burdens’?

as far as i can see, most of our most destructive, selfish activities benefit from subsidies from the taxpayer.

as an example: personal transport. Car travel is heavily subsidised. whereas public transport is run with the aim of making a profit.

and that’s before we start looking at the taxes not applied to aviation…

The funny thing about “who pays for it” is, burning hydrocarbons is potentially the most subsidised activitiy of all time- it’s just that it’s a post-pollution subsidy. The bill for damage caused, from lung diseases to holes in the ground to environmental catastrophe potentially up to and including the collapse of technological civilisation, is paid for by other people. But people get uptight about wind or nuclear subsidies.

The physics of energy retention resulting from CO2 and other greenhouse gases (including water vapour) in the atmosphere are irrefutable. The fact that there is more CO2 from fossil fuel combustion in recent times is easily demonstrable.

The science behind the physical processes is robust. That there is an increase in global average temperature is easily measured and place to the industrial revolution.

Where it gets harder is the ability to demonstrate cause and effect.

There are supercomputers across the globe running some of the most complicated mathematical models ever, running millions and millions of monte-carlo computations each containing millions of data points to produce credible, rigorous, statistically significant results on how the climate behaves and, based on historic observations and measurements, how it might behave in the future.

As far as I am aware all current respected models indicate that despite natural variation in global climate, the observed increases in global average temperature are statistically likely to be the result of anthropogenic fossil fuel combustion.

IMO the failure is communication and understanding.

The scale of the global climate is enormous. People just don’t get it. its just stupendously enormous. Its mind boggling incomprehensible and requires some deep thought that frankly, some people just can’t manage. a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil, we get a storm type stuff. Its so big, people can’t easily see or understand the links. This is the reason you see people confusing weather and climate.

Scientists tend to use common words to carry a very specific meaning, and talk in terms of their overall paradigm. Unless you understand this, its reasonably likely that you’ll misinterpret what’s said. Its easy to see this in the press – how many times have they got it wrong when talking about something you know a ton about? Mountain biking in the mainstream press anyone?

Science needs to do much better to communicate. The problem is, ‘people’ have a short attention span and want sound bytes and simplicity. There’s only so far you can go with simplifying global climate systems for mass consumption.

I’d not worry about it anyway. Yellowstone will deliver the coups de grâce when it decides to go.

Nothing that will happen now will save the planet. Basically we are all on our way to a fireball death. They can have as many climate talks as they want, they wont do squat to reverse what has already happend.

Yellowstone will deliver the coups de grâce when it decides to go.

In its two-million-year history mankind has survived several equal if not bigger volcanic explosions.

I’d quite like the planet to remain a reasonable place to be for junior and a few more generations. Get seven billion people (and counting) on board and its possible.

Does anyone have faith in politicians delivering the change required without protecting their mates/business interests/national interests and **** the public over with huge downstream tax burdens, spin off contracts for their business mates and to buoy their green investment portfolios?

the torygraph ran a poll on a page, an article about iirc the hottest year on record, asking the same question. Came out about 75% no we are not responsible for climate change.

The arguments in the comments were along the usual lines, data is bollox (it was warmer in 76 I should know my lawn was frazzled and everything), it’s the sun and scientists ignoring the sun, Environmental scientists are all left wing scum and want my cash for LGBT wind farms and are falsifying the data to get it.

It’s all very depressing.