Man Based Global Warming....

Question for Alric, Megansprius and others. For a moment humor me and pretend AGW is eventually determined to be not true or at least nowhere near the problem Al gore today said it is. How does someone like Al Gore save face, or NASA or the UN. Do they just walk away from all of the money and grants? How about the fame that has been generated. What happens to the carbon-trading industry? My point is there is a lot at stake for some of the AGW champions. If the hypothesis is eventually proven false or at least false to the degree that "catastrophe" is around the corner, it will be an earth-shattering revelation for many with an incredible vested interest, emotionally, financially and historically.

 

I'd prefer that to the alternative.

 

Gore's "narration tells the audience that, due to global warming, melting ice could release enough water to cause at 20-foot rise in sea level “in the near future.â€

In any case, my data is from IPCC 4th Assessment, via Wikipedia.

Lowest value is 18 cm, highest 59 cm. A far cry from 7 meters.

I haven't heard any valid study claim that a 7 meter rise is at all plausible "in the near future".

 

Me too. I hoped that AGW was a farse - inconvienent that it ain't.

 

Why do people on either side cite Al Gore as some authority on the subject. He made a movie that opened lots of eyes to the subject. It is up to the scientists to move the argument forward.


I for one think that Alric (and others) posts a pretty compelling argument using the the data pretty convincingly. To think that the global warming "advocates" are doing out of some "profit" motive to preserve their grants or chairs or what have you is just plain silly.

The counter argument that the deniers have a MUCH more vested interest is much more plausible. Don't you think that Big Oil, Big Coal, Big Auto, Big whatever, wants to delay as long as possible any regulations or change to their operations until the last possible moment to preserve profits,,, at the expense of future generations? I do!

In short, regardless how how accurate you believe the science is, the consequences of erring on the cautious side are small while the consequences of erring on the other side could be catastrophic.

I know where I will err!

Icarus

 

Al Gore was the witness before a senate committee on AGW. I would say that makes him some kind of expert.

Why would carbon regulations dip into Big oil, big coal big auto(what profits) etc profits? the cost of regulations and such is passed onto the end user. Now over the long term, big coal and big oil could be affected in a large way through the use of alternative energies.

I have always found that no matter how large or how small a turf a person has to protect they do their best to protect it. why would scientists be any different. I have served on a couple boards with scientists and when it comes right down to it they are very human too. They worry about funding just like the rest of us. Do you really think if you were in charge of a research department with 5 year research grant of say $10,000,000 to study AGW you are going to come out in the first year of the grant and say what next? AGW is not real? Would never happen.

 

Very well said.

 

You totally would if you had data to support it and it passed peer review. You would be an instant celebrity in the scientific community and get even more grant money next time.

And granting agencies don't put out 10 million at a pop. More like 50,000 to 100,000.

 

No way, the first scientist to come forward would be tarred and feathered. Look at the reaction the skeptical scintists get right now.

As for the grants, a non-profit environmental organization I was a board member of administered a three-year AGW grant for $2.4 million and we kept a $15% "administration" fee. This was a federal grant which was part of an AG bill.

 

Are you kidding? That's how careers and reputations are made. Someone who could conclusively prove global warming theory wrong would be assured of respect and tenure. Science is often based on proving one's predecessor wrong, from slight to large degrees. Think of Einstein proving Newton wrong. It's like winning the science lottery when you can do that.

 

Various statistical run rules can be used (but put in too many and you overcontrol.) It's been some years since I did operations SPC.

As you admitted originally your example was a poor one so I didn't address that aspect before. But since you are now using your inappropriate application of SPC as a counter argument, I'll state what I wanted to say before: First, it's not a particularly good idea to try to apply statistical process control to something you claim to have no control over... You aren't controlling, you are observing.

Second, if you did prepare control limits you would do so on some time period data set...and doing so would give you tighter limits in a case where the long term averages were slowly drifting. In other words, recent values indicate we are well outside previous confidence limits. Couple this with first principles and an assignable cause and there is reason to take corrective action.

BTW when operators failed to take appropriate action (or otherwise flubbed) and the process went skidding out of control, at least one unit's operators would enter a cause of "PPO." PPO pointed to perceived mistakes by prior shifts and stood for "P*** Poor Operation." (That one was removed from the choices so that it would not have to be explained to ISO auditors in the future.)

Except in this case there is no doubt that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. There is also no doubt that if we do nothing, CO2 concentration is going to get a lot worse rather quickly as coal demand increases. (There was a lot of denial about whether the CO2 rise was due to humans at first...that argument was settled.)

And in this case the expenditure will be necessary anyway because of fossil fuel depletion--the real difference being timing of the expenditure, not whether or not it is necessary.

And of course there are various other economic benefits such as reducing pricing whipsaws for inelastic energy demand. Companies that survive long term tend to adopt strategies that minimize dependence on such volatile pricing.

So if the engineer's tools point to warming being a CO2 issue, the project has other major economic incentives, and it strengthens the long term position of the "company", it is unlikely that his/her job will be on the line even in the unlikely case that the connection does not exist. Competence is not likely to in question if the engineer demonstrated credible judgement even if the answer were to prove incorrect. (In my own experience some of the biggest successes came from analyzing unexpected failures.)

CFC's and ozone depletion arguments followed a similar path of denial. There was healthy skepticism at first, a flurry of study, then increasing confirmation, and finally decisive action that some denialists claimed would be the end of our "American way of life." Yet here we are, having addressed the problem and all the denial claims turned out to be false. Our economy didn't founder as a result of removing CFC's from aerosol cans, refrigeration, and the like.

 

People refer to Al Gore because he is the most famous advocate for AGW, at least in the US. He is the spokesperson for the movement and won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the topic. For many of us An Inconvenient Truth was our introduction to the topic of AGW. The problem is the An Inconvenient Truth WAY overstated the case of AGW and the consequences. The melting of the ice caps, 20 feet of sea level rise, flooding of coastal cities, etc, etc. When these radical things don't happen people tend to doubt the entire theory.

An Inconvenient Truth came out at a very inconvenient time. It was release after a steady 30 year trend of rapid warming and projected that warming to continue and accelerate. Instead global temperatures have fallen since the release of the film. I predict that if this cooling continues for another 5 to 10 years, the general public will dismiss the entire theory of Global Warming.

It seems evident that the supports of AGW feel the same way. That is why the stakes have been risen and AGW is transitioning to Acute Climate Change. Now if we don't take drastic actions right now, the window to act will close and we will be doomed to 1000 years of apocalypse. AGW supports know that they have a very short time to get the general public behind their cause.

 

Actually I was asking how you knew the "process" was out of control. You claim to be an expert on SPC "been doing since I was in elementary school" (which I have no reason to doubt) and I was guessing some of the criteria that you may be using. I don't claim to know whether the current rise in temperature is statistically significant.

For the record I don't claim to be able to control climate, AGW believers do. I don't claim to know what has caused the earth to warm. I do doubt that CO2 is the driving factor.

 

You know, this really hurts your argument. If you weren't paying attention to this at all 15+ years ago then you must have been head down in the sand (looking for oil?) If An Inconvenient Truth was what got your attention, then you really weren't paying much attention at all.

The current trend is still hotter than the prior decade. It's telling that you are basing your whole argument on a single year HIGH temp spike (1998). Climate scientists do anticipate both variability and other factors to impact the averages and short term trends.

God forbid that we should reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and have the same productivity with greater energy efficiency and independence. That would be the end of capitalism as Dubya/Cheney/conservatives know it.

No, instead you would have us continue to do irreversible damage (1,000 years) to our atmosphere, twiddling our thumbs investing in ways that are counterproductive to our economic health and the global environment.

If there is a very short window for doing things that are in our own best interest then folks are even dumber than I thought.

 

15 years ago I was 15 years old. Forgive me if I wasn't worried about global warming.

We should reduce or dependence on fossil fuels. I have been a loud and vocal supporter of that cause. You can find some very radical ideas I have in this very thread. I just think that National Security and resource depletion are good enough reasons.

I'm also concerned that AGW research is siphoning funds away from research where there is absolutely no question of the benefit. Take CARB for example. CARB was founded to deal with air pollution issues in California, specifically smog. They have a very full plate with that issue alone. Take the issue of diesel particulates. It will take a full two decades for regulation that effect current light duty vehicles to fully go into effect for heavy duty and off-highway vehicle. However, now instead of concentrating on their founding mission they have decided to get into CO2 caps.

 

Why would carbon regs dip into big oil or big coal profits??? Because as the regs begin to add expense, then alternatives emerge. Witness PV Solar. Currently comes in at a cost of ~ $.20 kwh vs average grid power of ~$.10. If we were to pay the true cost of coal fired power, just to cite one example, the price would be very much higher, and PV solar would be competitive today. (Witness the cost of coal ash clean up, acid rain, dead lakes, destruction of habitat/environment due to hill top mining! Not to mention the C02 issue!)

No, me thinks you are are wrong. A $10 million grant to study climate is way less incentive to "fudge the numbers" relative to the BILLIONS of profits from big oil and big coal in one fiscal quarter!

As for big auto=no profit. They have been fighting increased cafe' standards for years, and when the fuel crunch came coupled with the economic melt down, they were left flat footed,,, with the possible exception of Honda. Why Honda? Wait for it,,, they have never made a large SUV or Pick up, and they haven't staked their future on it!

Finally, Gore is no expert,, Gore is a messenger, a showman. I can speak out with my opinions and back them up by citing primary research doesn't make me an expert.

Icarus

 

Ahhhh, but they don't have any data to back their argument - that's the difference.

Environmental organizations aren't the same as university research labs. I work at a university. I know what research grant money is typically like and most of the time it's less than 100,000 for 3 years. That's where the research is done. An environmental organization has other goals.

 

Oh, be serious. Who's got the bigger turf?

Are you suggesting scientists are sacrificing their integrity and risking their careers (to gain a relative pittance in research grants), yet the oil and auto industries (nothing at all to do with their massive investments, of course) are continuing as the wonderful champions of truth, justice and freedom they've always been?

 

While money always provides incentive to please the money sources, this has been recognized by most high end science publications for quite some time. This is why most funded studies require reporting the raw data and direct analysis and ensuring that all opinions are eliminated in the publication. As a result, the government funding for climate research depends not on the political view of the scientist, but the accuracy of the raw data (with occasional lapses as expected).

The vast majority of studies I follow are usually reporting detailed measurements. A good example would be ice core data. It takes quite a bit of funding to bore ice cores in Greenland. Yet what is published is not something "proving" AGW, but just a lot of raw data of chemical and isotope compositions of air captured at different layers. The same is true for tree rings, sedimentary deposits, etc. Basically, there are few grants for "AGW", but most grants are to collect raw data.

The rub starts to occur when these studies are invoked or used by others to support a particular point of view. However, a lot of this comes from a different source of funding, one that often depends on the viewpoint sought.

 

Not true. Funding is for the data and its interpretation. A scientist does not just collect data but uses his expertise to create a theory and a proposal for further work to prove or disprove the theory.

The ice core data and its interpretation result in papers published in scientific journals. Publication furthers the prestige of the scientist which in turn may result in higher chance of obtaining funds for the next round of research.

Rarely does an author uses someone else's data to publish his own interpretation. It does happen in some instances:

1) A review paper on a subject written by a recognized expert.
2) Further theoretical work based on already published data. Although usually the investigator that obtained the data in the first place is included as an author in this kind of paper.