Cancun Climate Summit on Global Warming.

But, compare 1993 and 1999 -- more than a degree C warming in 10 years. We're going to burn up! But, compare 1999 to 2009 -- more than a degree C cooling in 10 years. We're going to freeze!

The trend, as measured by the (e.g.) Roy Spencer at UAB, was 0.14 degrees C (EDIT: per decade) over this period. Yes it's statistically significant.

What is not statistically significant is looking at short periods of time or cherrypicking years, as above.

Now, do climate scientists say that year-to-year or even decade-long temperature changes are supposed to rise in lockstep with C02? No. There are a lot of factors affecting global temperature, and there's a lot of random variation.

So when temperature changes don't rise in lockstep with C02, that proves what, exactly? Well, nothing. Because climate scientists don't say that they should. The issue is what's going to happen in the long run.

Is that 0.14 C/decade increase small? Compared to what, exactly?

Is it small compared to what climate scientists predicted? Well, let's see. After smoothing the data (averaging over years to remove the jiggles), the black line is the observed temperature change, the red band is a confidence interval around the IPCC ensemble of general circulation models (ie., the prediction). . (The blue band is what you'd get if you ignored the anthropogenic factors.)



So, as the picture shows, the observed temperature change is pretty much exactly as large as the climate models predict it should be, over the long haul.

Yet, the people who run those models seem to think that's a problem. They don't seem to think that's small. Why not?

One reason is that C02 emissions are largely a one-way street. A large fraction of what we put in the air will stay around for a very long time. How much? Best estimate is that half is absorbed after 30 years, but between a quarter and a third will still be in the atmosphere two centuries later. So, it cumulates. Slowly. As anybody who can do arithmetic can figure out for themselves, at least roughly, from the basic data. Presently, we release about 10 gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere every year. Cumulatively, we've raised atmospheric carbon by about 200 gigatons, since the start of the industrial revolution. Clearly, a pretty big fraction of prior annual releases is still hanging around in the atmosphere.

That's why, among all the factors affecting climate, you hear so much about C02. Water vapor? Totally passive in the troposphere. It can't cumulate, because it rains out. It can't dissipate, because 70% of the planet's surface is water. It just reflects other factors driving climate.

So the problem isn't what's happening now, as much as it is what's likely to happen if we continue on this path.

Is the current warming "natural", just something that had to occur after the end of the "Little Ice Age". See the graph above. Climate scientists say no -- observed temperatures lie outside the blue band (the estimate of what temperatures would be absent manmade factors). (More fundamentally, the notion that we "must" rebound from a cold era to a warmer era is just wrong. Surface temperature reflects the various inputs and climate forcings. There's nothing about it that guarantees regression to the mean.)

If you want to assert that this is "natural" warming, not much I can do, other than to point out the odds. It's not like that question hasn't been studied a whole, whole lot. The IPCC's assessment in their last report was that there is less than a 10% chance that the recent warming is natural, given our current state of knowledge.

So you have to get your mind around the appropriate time scale. These are slow changes.

How slow? Well, just from the C02 already in the air now, if we kept C02 levels constant at the current level, we'd still expect maybe another 0.5 C or so warming, over the next four or five decades. There's that much lag in the process.

Another perspective: Sunlight at the top of the atmosphere has an intensity of about 1400 watts per square meter. At present, the entire man-made climate forcing, including feedbacks, amounts to about 3 watts per square meter. It ain't much. But that steady imbalance will, over time, gently heat the earth. Slowly. In fits and starts.

Is that a problem? Depends on your timeframe. Take the models above. They seem to have done a decent job of accounting for 20th century temperature changes. Seems reasonable to run them forward and see what they project for the 21st century. The finding that catches my eye is the median forecast that the continental interiors will dry out (precipitation less evaporation). When I look at those projections, it sure seems to me that the best guess for the US Midwest is that, under business as usual, pretty much south of the Nebraska border and west of the Mississippi is dust bowl territory.

Am I going to have to deal with that? No. Is it guaranteed to happen? No. Do the odds look pretty good that it will happen? Yes. Simple as that. Will the C02 we emit now contribute to that. Yes. That's what this is all about.

 

Exactly, and that is exactly why it doesn't matter if this year is the hottest year, or the 5th hottest. What matters is changes over decades. The fires in russia and the cold in Europe are weather and you can't be fixated by it. Those anti-scientists that say we have more hot events than cold ones are also missing the point.

Can anyone in the room see what is wrong with using those graphs to prove the point? Bueller, Bueller? Its the same as using carefully selected people with your point of view to peer review, then withhold the methods by others that want to replicate your work. The creator poked the pooch. They used historical data that was used to create the models to validate if the models were true. How could it not be? I can also construct a model that has 2 degrees per decade global cooling that agrees with data in the past, it simply is mathematically incorrect to use this as a validation.

There is however strong correlation between temperature and ghg, whether they are "natural" or "man made". Correlation does not prove causation, but the theory does seem sound.

 

No, the models aren't fit to the data. Plus or minus a few nuisance parameters that are "tuned" to give realistic-looking responses for individual areas that cannot be modeled from the ground up. (And, within a short timeframe like a few decades, the models work about as well with our without those, e.g., holding cloud cover constant doesn't give a vastly different answer from allowing to respond to rising temperatures, for short time periods.) Fundamentally, the models are calculations based on the laws of physics. And, rest assured, the individual models within the ensemble do not match that black line nearly as well as the ensemble (average) shown. (So if they had been "fit" to the data, the individual investigators did a crap job of it.) They are models of the laws of physics. They are not statistical fits to the temperatures.

The causation is addressed by the underlying physics, plus our certain knowledge of where the GHG increase is coming from -- us. I mean, it's not like the only piece of evidence is the time series data on temperatures and C02. Absent some offsetting factor, there's no known physical way in which large increases in GHGs won't cause temperatures to rise. The few remaining holdouts among actual climate scientists divide into two camps. One appeals to some as-yet-unobserved negative feedback that will offset the warming. Or the future warming. Or some such. Typically, they appeal to clouds (probably the least well understood aspect of this whole process). My amateur reading of the literature is that, if anything, the net effect of cloud feedback is small and positive. It might be small and negative. The other group offers an incomplete explanation: They'll point to something else that might cause the warming (cosmic rays leading to cloud formation is a favorite), but never bothers to explain why GHGs therefore don't warm the atmosphere (because if they did, and there's some other source as well, you'd get twice the warming).

The point about individual events being hard to interpret is true, mostly. Even there, you'd want to look up the statistics on all-time records, as all-time records can be relatively rare events, and hence can provide information.

The point about " more hot events than cold ones" is not correct. At least not as I read that. Enough events and enough areas and it's meaningful. For example, the upward trend in global temperatures is just the average of more hot events than cold events, where the events are thermometer readings (or microwave sounder readings, for the satellite data). I would say that the finding that US all-time daily highs increasingly outnumber US all-time daily lows, when averaged by decade, is similarly a meaningful comparison of a count of hot and cold events. Large number, large area. Similarly, the scholarly literature reviews showing that about 80% of changes in flora and fauna are in the direction of warmer temperatures. Again, large number of events over a large area. But if you mean somebody is counting incommensurate events -- count of snows versus count of fires -- in a year, say -- then obviously there's no underlying metric. I couldn't tell you what a snow is worth relative to a fire. I believe that all the IPCC would say is that it's more likely than not that climate change is raising the probability of certain types of extreme events (where that particular phrasing means the odds are two-third in favor, one-third against that statement being true.) (I didn't bother to look that up, so they might have given it better odds than that, but not by much.)

 

Oh, the snarky bit about withholding methods went right past me. Just not looking for nastiness, so it didn't register.

If you want to see what data and models are available, just take a peek here. The fact of the matter is, it has only recently become a standard to make code and data routinely available. And then only in the hard sciences. In my area (health services research), nobody does that. A lot of people whine that something is somehow hidden, withheld, and so on, but as of today, that's just a load of crap. And besides, real science is doing your own analysis, and seeing how it compares, not re-running somebody else's model, so you can make the same mistakes and assumptions that they made.

Here, a few places to get the links for data and models:

RealClimate: Data Sources

NCDC: Online Climate Data Directory

Climate Data Sources

Shoot, there are multiple organizations and websites devoted to porting the most important models to open-source code (in case, e.g., you can't read FORTRAN or R). Here:

http://www.metafilter.com/88337/Open-source-climate-data-and-algorithms

Access to information is not the issue. Being smart enough to run it is (for me, at least). Being smart enough to better what's out there, that's the real hurdle.

 

Global Warming is a misnomer. Climate Change is more accurate. We went through a decade of year round drought from about 1995-2008 in the Midwest, mild winters and summers. Now we're experiencing extended winters, record breaking snowfall and hot summers with exceptional rainfall. Both poles have warmed considerably, that's where to measure the warming. Everything else is in a considerable state of extreme flux.
Every reputable climate scientist will verify this. And if they're wrong are you willing to risk your/my grandchildren's life on it?
This isn't opinion or politics.

 

If I was grading I would think this explanation deserved an F. You are hunting for explanations for bad methods and are trying to rationalize a bad piece of evidence. Ofcourse accepted models are back tested and coefficients formed from this back testing. Since I am related to a couple of people putting forth models, I firmly disagree they all did a crap job. You simply can not use data used to form a model to prove a model is true. It is as simple as that.

This is the correct way to state the evidence. We expect that increases in GHG will raise temperatures. We can ignore water vapor for analysis as tochachu wrote since it must be a constant for any given temperature given the physical laws, but we can not ignore how this vapor forms are other reactions such as the ozone hole, volcano activity, sun spots, plant growth and deforestation, etc.
More evidence seems to comfirm that co2 levels are part of the warming, there are other factors. That is why skeptical analysis should be taken seriously, then accepted or rejected as the evidence piles up.

 

No that was not directed at you, it was directed at the GW establisment that though that Mann was right in hiding his model from his critics. These critics were after all not in the club. When Mann eventually did release his methods we found that one of key estimaters of gw based on co2 actually increased its growth more on co2 than on heat. Mann eventually re found the warming periods and cooling periods that those deniers were talking about. I prefer to call those denyers skeptics since they never denied gw or agw, only that the graphs look statistically incorrect. When we correct the hockey stick with the skeptics imput, we get still get a strong case for agw, but we don't have the clarity that some seemed to want of CO2 being the only cause for warming.

 

Mainer

That maybe true, but CO2 is but one contributor to greenhouse gases. Additionally the average CO2 molecule stays in the atmosphere ~ 5 years, and some stays indefinitely hence the increase over time, and ergo an increase in the insulating effect. (water vapor on the other hand stays only a few days and water vapor concentration is relatively stable.

The big un spoken gas, and that which poses a very real thread from permafrost (and ice) melting is methane which is ~80 times more insulating than either CO2 or water. The issue with permafrost is in addition to the potential release of CO2 from melting, there are huge concentrations of Methane Hydrates currently captured in permafrost and ice. (as well as liquid water under a certain temp) Melt some ice, melt some permafrost, raise the temperature of some water and pretty quickly you have a situation that you have no hope of controlling.

That my friends is why controlling CO2 now is vitally important. Any suggestion to the contrary is, IMHO just whistling past the grave yard!

 

Let me see if I understand this.

First, you realize that these models are not literally statistical fits to the data. They aren't like regression models, where you are in some sense guaranteed to reproduce something like the existing trend. The blanket statement about not evaluating a model based on the data it's fit to, sure, that's true for statistical fits, like regression models. You do a split-sample test, you reserve some portion of the data for an out-of-sample test, or at the least, you resample the data (as in the jackknife) to show the extent to which estimates reflect the idiosyncracies of the particular datapoints used to generate an estimate.

But these aren't statistical models.

Second, despite the fact that you understand that these are not statistical models fit to the data, you assert that the good agreement between the IPCC model ensemble and the 20th century temperature trend data is a tautology, because they have in some ill-defined sense been fit to the temperature trend data. So that all these Ph.D. climatologists are just fooling themselves -- whereas you, without any detailed understanding of what they do, know that the models have to fit the data by construction.

Wow.

Whereas, my position is the following: I've stated that the empirically important process are all pretty well nailed down by laws of physics. The models first and foremost have to make correct sense in the context of physical laws. To the extent that there are "tunable" parameters, they are not tuned to mimic temperatures, they are tuned to reproduce the phenomena that they are there to represent.

Let me give an example, taken from Realclimate's explanation of GCMs. Literally modeling ocean evaporation as a function of humidity and wind speed and ocean surface conditions, from first principles of physics, would be hard, to say the least. Instead, most models use a simple formula that gives an approximation. And the parameters of that formula may be tuned -- to give the best fit to observed evaporation data. Not to give a specific temperature output, but possibly to give a decent match to observed humidity of the air over the ocean. If you've ever worked with complex, nonlinear models, you'd realize that in most cases you wouldn't be able to "tune" a minor parameter to generate a desired outcome from the emergent property of the model (e.g., to fudge up the mean global temperature), even if that were the goal.

So I claim that, to the contrary, those models are highly constrained, and have a hard time matching much of anything. The basic processing has to match the laws of physics. The "tunable" parameters have to match the individual micro-phenomena they are meant to represent. So, for example, climate sensitivity runs from about 1.5C to about 6C in the models IPCC uses. If they'd had vast degrees of freedom available for fittting to the 20th century data, you'd think they'd have done a better job of agreeing on at least that key parameter.

OK, let me leave aside the philosophy of science aspects of this. I've downloaded and looked at climate models, but I can't claim to have run one ... yet. I'm saving that for my retirement. So clearly, at the micro level, this is my second-hand understanding of how these models work. The descriptions of modeling, by modelers, all seem fairly consistent. But perhaps the sources I've looked at on this issue are all feeding me a consistent line of baloney.

So let's do this empirically instead. What would be an adequate test of these models, if capturing the 20th century temperature trend is not?

Like, if they have been arbitrarily "fitted" to the unique conditions of the 20th century, clearly those same models couldn't possibly do a decent job of explaining, eh, ancient climate, would they? But they do. Do a nice job of fitting (e.g.) what is known about the Maunder Minimum. Do a good job of estimating (e.g.) estimated temperatures over the past few ice ages. People take (e.g.) the NASA GISS model, run it based on what's known about ancient conditions, and compare it to what's known about ancient climate.

That's a pretty good trick, for a model that was fudged up to mimic 20th century trends, to do a good job of explaining ancient climate as well. There's a whole little field devoted to seeing how well the models do at explaining ancient climate.

Paleoclimate Modeling - Obtaining and Visualizing Data

If they'd been faked up to produce that 20th century trend, OK, you wouldn't then expect them to reproduce the exact geographic variation in the heating, would you? But they do. That's a pretty neat trick to match each continent, in the diagram above, just by gosh-and-by-golly. I'm pretty darn sure there's not a separate free parameter for each continent. Amazing how they managed to fudge up that fit geographically, on average, not coordinating their work, across all these independently generated models that, individually, don't fit the data all that hot.

Does the phrase "natural experiment" ring a bell? Do you think that climatologists correctly anticipated Pinatubo and had already pre-fudged their models so they'd correctly predict the temperature drop after the eruption?

NASA GISS: Science Briefs: Pinatubo Climate Investigation

Did they refine their models in response to what they learned about Pinatubo? I sure hope they did. That's kind of how science works. But is there a tunable parameter that labeled "volcanic eruption, set to 20th century value"? No.

Are you familiar with the phrase out-of-sample prediction as a test of a model? Hansen published a set of model outputs, based on three scenarios for GHG emissions growth, about the time he testified in front of the Congress (1988 or so). Made a 20 year prediction. Heck of a trick for his faked-up model "fitted" to pre-1988 data, to have predicted much of the geographic variation (warm Arctic, cold Antarctic other than the West Antarctic penninsula). His mid-range scenario predicted modestly too much warming. Certainly closer than a naive forecast of no warming. Perhaps he was just lucky.

As with anything to do with Hansen, you'll find a bunch of people out there trying their best to discredit anything he did. I trust Realclimate at least to get the technical details of the evaluation correct, as here:

RealClimate: Hansen’s 1988 projections

I've said enough, I think.

If you want to read a reasonable explanation of modeling, from one of the best, look at the explanation in Realclimate, here:

RealClimate: FAQ on climate models

Please don't come back and throw the answer with "We are still a long way from being able to simulate the climate with a true first principles calculation" until you've at least read through Part II, where he talks about tunable parameters.

The extras-for-experts part would be to google "climate model attribution". That's where they really get into why they think they know what they know, based on the 20th century data. But it's tough going.

As with all these things, it's your choice. You can believe that climate scientists are simply deluded fools, who are too stupid to understand that the agreement between models and observations for the 20th century is a tautology. Because they've in some ill-defined way forced them to fit. (Do they force some things to fit? Sure. We could talk about the sketchy 20th century particulate data, but that isn't going to change my mind on this.) Or you can realize that there's an entire science devoted to evaluating model "skill", and that if that were true -- if the fit to 20th century data were merely a tautology -- then, probably, these models would not work at all for paleoclimate, for forecasting, for natural experiments, for detailed geographic distribution of the warming, ... and that, given that the model code is, as I noted above, freely available, probably, somebody probably would have convincingly demonstrated that fakery by now.

GCMs are useful tools. There's still a lot of uncertainty, for sure. But the main point is that they provide much more information than any other alternative. That's why they're used. And in particular, they fairly convincingly demonstrate that you can't get 20th century warming without the manmade factors. Let me put it this way: If you can find a physics-based model that demonstrates the 20th century warming without those manmade factors, and shows that those manmade factors didn't generate the warming, please give me a reference, because I'd like to look at it.

 

Good points about AMO and PDO as well as about the models being a "mess". Yet I do agree it is prudent to reduce CO2 to the point where there is economic benefit (or break-even) for doing so. There are other reasons as well (security issues being one as well as non-climate related environmental issues with respect to energy extraction). I'm sure on these points we are in agreement.

We also agree CO2 - all else being equal - will drive some warming (though perhaps disagreeing on amount). However, I'm not sure all else is equal. For instance we know very little about many of the factors affecting climate (I'm not really convinced we've even identified all the factors). And even among those we've identified, there is a significant degree of uncertainty surrounding 75% of them (that is from the NAS report and IPCC). Many of these are parameterized in the models since there is no measured data upon which to base modeling scenarios. So those "minor parameterizations" that Chogan talks about may be anything but minor. In fact they may be everything - we really don't know.

Just as we should exercise some prudence in the release of excess CO2, we should also exercise some prudence in implementing significantly costly policies on the basis of today's scientifically immature climate models.

 

Tim,, It almost sounds like you are coming around! That said, if one bases ones actions solely on the economic benefit, you will never get the reductions! It seems that the real impetus to reduce CO2 (even if you are not concerned about the global warming issues) is a confluence of energy security with ancillary national security issues, economic security (by moving to renewable/sustainable energy you create a stimulative effect on the economy as well as locking in some know price of that energy) The side benefit of moving to RE then becomes the reduction of CO2.

Icarus

 

Anyone seen this British documentary done at least since 2005? I watched most of about 9 parts. Wonder who this Mike Baker is who presents the videos. These scientists debunk the Global Warming idea.

If anyone watches all of it, let's hear what you think versus the EPA / IPCC, etc ... view.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpWa7VW-OME"]YouTube - The Man-made Global Warming Hoax (Part 1)[/ame]

 

No, sorry, total baloney..

Put aside the inflammatory language ("Hoax") and inflammatory pics and such.

At 1:14 or so in this clip, there's some guy, " ... but the ice core record shows just the opposite".

Basically, if they're willing to highlight that, this is just propaganda. (I mean, sure, I should view the whole thing, but I figure one big lie is enough to tip me off.)

What are they talking about there? I'm tired of explaining things, but briefly:

Over the ice ages, C02 amplified temperature changes that were started by changes in the orbit and orientation of the earth around the sun. The Milankovitch (sp?) cycle. For years, scientists didn't believe M.s theory of the causes of ice ages, because the orbital changes alone were clearly insufficient to account for the temperature changes.

Then they figured out that C02 change was a feedback. Gasses are more soluble in cold water than in hot water. Heat the ocean, and the dissolved gasses will be forced out, just like heating a Coke. (Ah, yeah, it's a little more complicated than that. But that's the gist.) Slowly. In small amounts. But the C02 feedback there was enough to roughly double the temperature change that you would otherwise expect from the orbital forcing alone.

And you saw C02 change by 100 parts-per-million, over the course of about 10,000 years in the warming phase of the ice age cycle. By being driven, slowly, out of solution in the ocean. By the change in temperature.

That ain't what's happening today. The C02 is not being driven out of the ocean. It's being produced by the burning of fossil fuels. Change of 100 parts-per-million, in 100 years, not 10,000 years. C02 in the ocean is rising, not falling.

So that bit of the clip is there to convince you that, because atmospheric C02 was driven out of the ocean during the ice ages, at slow rates, and reinforced the Milankovitch orbital "pacemaker" for the ice ages, and lagged the temperature changes, that, therefore, pumping C02 into the atmosphere, at vastly more rapid rates, through a completely different mechanism (burning fossil fuels), now, cannot possibly be linked to temperature increases.

Total nonsense. It's there to gull people who really don't know anything about the subject. It's there for people who can't quite grasp that carbon can enter the atmosphere in different ways. I figure if they'll do that, I'm sure not going to trust the rest of it.

 

You guys do realize that this is likely some sort of drinking game for Trebuchet? He posts this same ol' crap, and sits back to see how long it goes. Maybe bets on who posts the first graph. Gets a beer for every new post. Here's another one for you, Tre!

Only thing we know for sure is that he just loves to stir the pot... and we all love to jump right in. Hey, could be worse. He could actually believe the stuff he posts.

 

Chogan2, first off, I, like the vast majority in society are not scientists, nor climatologists who spend countless hours researching.

What I can tell you is climate change or global warming topics are highly controversial in society as you likely know. Turn on AM conservative talk radio, you get Brian Sussman, a former well liked Bay Area weatherman saying global warming from CO2 is a hoax, not possible. One can talk to well meaning, inquisitive people who say the same.

This 9 part series 3 posts above starts off showing a recent chart of temps - incresing to year 1940, decreasing to 1975, then increasing again. First they show CO2 does not correlate to that. Then they scale back to show CO2 lags temps by 800 years and conclude CO2 cannot cause temp changes. They go on to state human activity puts out a small fraction of CO2 compared to that from volcanoes, animals, oceans, leaves fallen from trees, etc...

Then they correlate sun activity to temp changes, and sun atmospheric particles which in turn combine with water vapor to form clouds that do correlate to temp changes. They debunk the hockey stick, Al Gore, IPCC, the environmental movement, and question models for future predictions. They say global warming is used politically to quell growth of countries that want to develop.

They make it all sound quite convincing. But, it's only one documentary and its view.

 

They are part of the well funded, politically motivated, obfuscation, denial, moronic campaign to sucker in otherwise well thinking folks like yourself into buying this line. If nothing else,, follow the money. Who wins and who loses with any real effort to effect climate change. Hint: it isn't environmentalists!

 

All I can say is, take any one item, research it thoroughly, and make up your own mind. If you catch them in one obvious lie, then that's good enough reason to ignore them. So, take one item, look at both sides, and if you have any sense, you'll realize those guys are out to lunch.

If I were you, I'd start by using the search function here. For example, I know I have explained that mid-century failure to warm, in great detail, half-a-dozen times here. If they didn't discuss the role of aerosols, and the increase in man-made aerosols post-WWII, and the fact that aerosols tend to have a cooling effect, then they didn't even begin to tell you the full story.

Nobody says that C02 is the only factor affecting climate. In fact, climatologists construct their detailed, physics-based models exactly because you need to get all the factors in one one place, and deal with them in ways that reflect what physics actually tells you can happen.

So here's a general rule: Whenever anybody asserts that scientists claim that short-term temperature change is only driven by C02, they're full of crap. That's not what climate scientists say (though there is good reason to focus on C02 in the long run.) When they "debunk" by correlating temperature and C02, in isolation, or sun and C02 in isolation, and so on, they're probably full of crap. In general, when their only tool is a correlation study (not a physics-based model), chances are pretty good (but not certain) that they're full of crap.

I'll start you off with your first points: "global warming from CO2 is a hoax, not possible." "CO2 cannot cause temp changes" "human activity puts out a small fraction of CO2 compared to that from volcanoes"

Oh, before I start, another rule: If the material is logically inconsistent with itself, that's another red flag. Here, if you truly believed that C02 didn't matter .. then you wouldn't care where it was coming from. To say "we know C02 is irrelevant, now let me try really hard to convince you that we're not responsible for it" ... that ought to raise a red flag. But near as I can tell, all denialist websites do exactly that. In succession, you'll see: Here's why it's not actually warming, here's why the warming is caused by the sun, here's why C02 is irrelevant, here's why the C02 is caused by something other than humans. Get it? If they actually had a valid, consistent explanation, they'd offer it to you. If they don't -- if they just splatter a bunch of logically inconsistent factoids -- that's a pretty good sign they don't have any logic behind what they're doing.

Volcanoes first, that's the easiest one.

Whom do you trust when it comes to geology? I trust the US Geological Survey, headquartered right here in Reston, VA. Let's see what the USGS says about volcanoes:

First the overview:
Volcanic Gases and Their Effects

Now specifically this topic:
Volcanic Gases and Climate Change Overview

"Do the Earth’s volcanoes emit more CO2 than human activities? Research findings indicate that the answer to this frequently asked question is a clear and unequivocal, “No.” Human activities, responsible for some 36,300 million metric tons of CO2 emissions in 2008 [Le Quéré et al., 2009], release at least a hundred times more CO2 annually than all the world’s degassing subaerial and submarine volcanoes (Gerlach, 2010). "

That's pretty clear. Asserting that volcanoes emit more C02 than human activities, right now, is just ludicrously wrong. That's a lie. I've found their first lie, I don't really need to listen to them further.

Then how can they say that? Here's my final tip. The best propaganda does not offer outright lies, it just gives you selected parts of the truth. So, not having bothered to look at that video, I bet that they actually said was something like this:

(Over the earth's history), volcanoes have emitted vastly more C02 than all the activities of mankind.

Now, that's a true statement. Volcanoes have been around a lot longer, and they used to be a whole lot more active than they are now. Over the earth's history, volcanoes have emitted more C02 than all human activity. It has absolutely nothing to do with current global warming. It's what was termed "the unattached figure" in How to Lie With Statistics. And if that just happens to give you the impression that, right now, volcanoes emit more than humans, well, hey, they didn't actually tell you a lie. You just didn't pay close enough attention to exactly what they said.

The worst of the liars, though, they'll take some reputable figure who said something like that above, and gave the full discussion as I did above, and edit it down to just those words that they want you to hear. And, when caught, their defense will be that those words, did in fact, come out of that person's mouth, in that order.

Alternatively, maybe they just outright lied. I'm not going to take the time to track it down.

What I can tell you for sure is that if you actually find people who are bona-fide experts in volcanoes, they'll tell you exactly what the USGS said. Current volcanic C02 emissions are tiny compared to emissions from human activity.

C02 doesn't cause warming? Well, clearly wrong. Whom would you trust on this? How about one of the trade organizations for scientists. You trust weeathermen, apparently (though in fact, it doesn't take much to get certified as a weatherman, you can do it over the internet). Let's see what the American Meteorlogical Society has to say.

They say, we agree with the National Academies of Science on this:

http://www.ametsoc.org/policy/jointacademies.html

Here's the National Academies of Science statement:
http://nationalacademies.org/onpi/06072005.pdf

It starts off with the statement "Climate change is real" and continues from there. Give it a read, it won't hurt you. No waffling there -- they clearly state that C02 is warming the earth.

So, the US trade organization for meteorologists says that C02 causes warming. No waffling.

What did the people in your clip actually say, in full context? I don't know. Could be outright lies. Could be one of those sneaky little "unattached figures". I'm not going to bother to look at it. Instead, why don't you ask yourself whom you would trust? Smithsonian Institution? The US Navy? MIT? American Geophysical Union. The Audubon Society? The Catholic church? National Geographic? Encyclopedia Britannica?

Sometimes I think half the problem is that people will look at the first 3 websites that come up on Google. Not realizing that that's no guarantee of quality, for a general question like this. (Once upon a time, I think you could even pay Google to be ranked higher, but I'm not sure that's still true.) For sure, the rankings can be manipulated.

So be pro-active. Figure out three reputable organizations you would trust. Then go look them up and see what they have to say.

NOT what somebody else SAYS they said. Go find their official websites, and see what they, themselves actually have to say. So for example, if you start by Googling "US Army Global Warming", make sure you're looking at a milnet (.mil) website.

Then, if they all say "C02 causes warming" ... and even though I didn't check, I'm pretty sure that every one I cited will say that ... then you have your answer. The folks in your clip are way, way out in left field.

 

[deleted]

 

Thanks, I needed that. I'm done here.

 

Thanks chogan2.

I'm currently reading the NOAA/NESDIS/NCDC site and spent time on EPA site. I trust them and the like much more than 'Mike Baker's documentary' , etc...