“Why Scientists Disagree about Global Warming”

heartland = coke brothers?

 

Are you referring to "Roosters of the Apocalypse"?

 

I don't speculate about the contents mentioned above. But I am am less interested about scientists disagreeing than I am about their work products (data and analyses) seeming to disagree.

If I've not been clear hereabouts, a brief review. Ice in many forms and places is melting more rapidly. Otzi the Iceman and other archaeological ephemera are 'melting out'. Sea levels are rising at (10 to 100 year) rates apparently much faster than the (1000 year and longer) rates revealed by corals and other paleo-evidence.

In the other corner, we have paleo-proxies for air temperature suggesting that only in the most recent decades are exceeding a (slower) temperature hump of ~8000 years ago. Mojo has offered 'affinity website' evidence for this, but there's really no need to go that far down market. I provided a recent Marcott publication in a different thread. Another popped up for me today:

Holocene climate variability and change; a data-based review
H. Wanner, L. Mercolli, M. Grosjean & S. P. Ritz (2015)
Journal of the Geological Society 172: 254–263.
doi: 10.1144/jgs2013-101

There are thus 2 areas where evidence is internally concordant, but between the two, not. I am troubled by this and perhaps y'all should be as well. If paleo-T proxies are (demonstrably) flawed, that would be a tidy solution. But I don't find it to have been demonstrated.

If paleo-T proxies 'hold', then other problems present themselves. Very small .CO2 changes from 8000 to 200 years ago suggest it was not 'the control knob' during that time at least. There are appeals to Earth-orbital parameters, (small) variations in solar output, and volcanic outgassing changes through time. That control knob appears to work on much longer (human-irrelevant) time scales, and on short time scales (where we live).

It appears that we occupy a very complicated planet. As such it seems difficult to narrowly predict future-T changes, even as future CO2 is all but certain to reach (and perhaps exceed) 500 ppm. I find this very unsatisfying.

Even with all the above, it makes sense to increase our reliance on renewable E vs. fossil burning. The latter requires large amounts of water (needed for agriculture etc.) and presents undesirable externalities (extraction, transport, mercury from coal burning etc.).

We have to make the human enterprise scale up to 10 billions. If this can be done gracefully, well, great.

But I am not sure that, in all cases, we are arguing about the right things. Who benefits, I wonder, if we continue to argue about the wrong things?

 

Ah!!!!
Who indeed????

Excellent post, BTW.

Lots of light.
Very little.....ah......heat (pun nearly unintended.....)

 

...taking ownership?

 

For me, both ice loss and +T (on about century scales) are robust. Along with currently faster sea-level rise.

Difficulties come from paleo-T proxies over thousands years scale. If somebody could just convincingly show that CO2 rate-of-change makes it now the thing, would be enough. It seems obvious from our daily lives...

If I walk down 17 flights of stairs my knees hurt a bit, but the potential energy -> heat conversion is acceptably slow (minutes). If I jump out the 17th story window, my stop at the end (milliseconds) is unacceptable.

Surely all these thing are fun to think about. At our leisure. But, to the extent they may affect the human enterprise, there may a bit more urgency.

"efficiency is its own reward" says Bob; perhaps an understatement. Efficiency is the (secret?) driver of evolution, we abandon that at our own grave risk.

 

The brother's name is koch, as in koch industries, their daddy founded and helped america industrialize.

that other coke was short for coca, but they didn't want it pronounced like cock, and their was a k in kola, so they made it ke. Coke or coca-cola hasn't had the active ingredient since 1929.

OK on to heartland. Charles koch has donated directly through his families foundation, but its a tiny amount. Big funding comes from ALEC, which is funded by the koch brothers but many other sources, and many congress critters pledge allegience. Presure people that fund alec to stop funding it, and heartland fades away. Alec is the real power.
ALEC Politicians - SourceWatch

 

Is it just me or doesn't anyone else picture these guys (Randolph & Mortimer) whenever the Koch brothers are mentioned?

 

I think ALEC does the most damage, but those guys are more like bloomberg, steyer, and singer than koch brothers. Those 3 gave more in elections than koch, but alec as a vehicle is a money multiplier for koch brothers.
Top Individual Contributors: All Federal Contributions | OpenSecrets

 

For folks interested in sea level and T for a few thousand past years, this should merit a trip to the library


Temperature-driven global sea-level variability in the Common Era
Robert E. Kopp et al.
Proc. Nat. Acad Sci. USA
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.151705611

 

Well I think 30 years ago you could have put 30 scientists in a room, and they would agree about what they knew, what was in question, and ways to check the questions as it pertained to global climate change, natural and man made influences.

Somehow in the last 20 years we have politicized the whole matter. When I say we, I don't mean you and me, but various organizations and individuals. They are easy to name, and its not hard to find out about funding. Billionaire Jeff Skoll funded the movie inconvient truth. Believe it or not, the movie although it helped get the government to ban incondecent lights, did not slow fossil burn. It did help get the government to help mr. skoll's investments. Mr Soros, also a friend to skoll and gore, was anti oil, but now is investing in it now that it is cheap.

On the flip side there are around 30 millionaires and billionairs that fund ALEC that helps fund heartland. They get richer if the government does the oposite things that help mr. skoll and gore. Both sets of bilionairs make lots of money if we use good science, but none of the billionaires interested in climate change really want to tell the truth about the science.

 

I have this odd view that most scientists studying all aspects of Earth climate are not into politics or policy. They are into their own (narrow) things, and want to present those as well as possible. Surely they want their manuscripts in highfallutin journals; who would not?

Do such journals only accept the most aggressive 'we are climate killers' studies? I have put up references that are not so. That premise falls. Evidence is otherwise.

How have the last few thousand years gone, in T and SLR? I've posted all that I know, and ALL paleo proxies have ambiguities. A persistent problem remains, that 'long-time-constant' proxies cannot be neatly joined with "short-time-constant' instrumental records. It is not clear to me that this lack of neat joining ought to work entirely to the favor of fossil-C burners.

I've already suggested that this century (at least first half) might not be a climate disaster. Actually I am less concerned about T than about water. Water for agriculture and energy are in local competition. Later the CO2/T relationship may do more, but only over several human lifetimes. Now, not so much, and we will just leave our successors with 500 ppm CO2 (or more) and they can work with that.

According to a very few climate scientists who lean towards politics, those successors will curse our souls for not having held CO2 lower. Maybe, though, they will have enough insight to realize that we (now) have done all that we possibly could against the success and narrow profitability of big fossil C burning. It is not so easy to rail against the greatest success that humans have known so far.

Continued (and greater) success of our human enterprise is the only defensible goal. Whomever narrowly profits in the short term, well, you will certainly hear lots about them. Better to avoid such distractions. In your own ways (small or large) see that goal and do whatever seems right to you.

 

I certainly sense a lot of politics in the "science" in the USA.
Here is a recent discussion of it.

SCIENCE: Mainstream scientists say a warming slowdown occurred -- Thursday, February 25, 2016 -- www.eenews.net

 

Yes I have been using EE News a lot lately for Clean Power Plan. I tried to ask for trial subscription and they turned me down. I could probably try harder next time. So I just get the public stuff and headlines of stuff I'd like to hear more about.

 

I don't thing that E&E is the point here. One might do better to read the Fyfe et al. in Nature Climate Change (journal). The apparent 60ish year ocean heat cycle was enough to cause 2 decades of flatness last time around. This time, it brought slowness not flatness. It has been contemporaneous with higher CO2.

Before we can have models that reflect that, there is a real need to understand mechanisms related to this 60 year thing. One could empirically 'dial it in' but that will dissatisfy a large part of the audience.