Climate Change - Man made or not?

[Jack-Arb aka Tiago Sinclair-Julio.]

I found Dagmar's posts most informative, they ain't that long, do you not read books? do you stick to comics?

 

Also Dagmar backed up her points with real data.

 

Is it a case of she ain't saying what YOU want so you don't like it?

 

Hi skyhuck,

 

Im glad to know that! Because I was reading trough them and not being able to follow.

 

Yes I do read books but what does that have to do with this I dont know?!

 

What do you mean by real data, does it have to be an article from a news paper or magazine? Its just someone else's views isn't it?

In fact you probably were the one not understanding what my view is, because I do agree with her about people believing whatever theories come out, just the thing I thought was a bit over the top was the thing about all greens are crazy!

 

However she has a opinion about this subject, not quite clear about yours apart from burning trees and offsetting it with new plantations! I wish it was as simple as that.

 

What I really think is interesting is what individuals think about this subject and why or what makes them believe who is responsible. And what kind of things can one do about it.

 

Because I really believe that all this talk about climate change and global warming is no longer a theory but a fact created by few organisations that Dagmar wrote about. And its quite bizarre that a theory becomes a fact in a few years just because a few scientist say it. Thats my worrie, with no real evidence its believed over the world that man is responsible.

 

Still Im a firm believer that we are responsible for the poor state of the planet and for this theres lots of evidence!

 

Jack

[Mr Ed]

you seem to be implying that dagmar was trying to pass these words off for her own

 

Nope. I did'nt imply anything of the sort.

[skyhuck]

.

 

 

What do you mean by real data, does it have to be an article from a news paper or magazine? Its just someone else's views isn't it?

 

By data I mean facts and figures, IE, annual average temps for various years. Something that if often missing from all the hype we hear in the media.

 

The fact that in recent years their has been more polar ice in the winters not less, in fact I heard that polar bears have been starving due the vast expanse of ice.

[skyhuck]

Hi skyhuck,

 

however she has a opinion about this subject, not quite clear about yours apart from burning trees and offsetting it with new plantations! I wish it was as simple as that.

 

 

I do wish you would read my posts, I did not say "offsetting", you seem to be so brain washed by the media term that you read them when they are not there!

 

What I said was a simple statement of fact, if you cut down a tree and burn it and then grow a new tree you have produced NO carbon!

 

As for my opinion, I really do not have enough "real" information on which to make an informed view, but my gut feeling on what I do know is that we are like a group of ants on the bonnet of a car, we have been hear for 2 hours when the engine of the car starts, we are convinced that we are responsible for the engine starting, because we have been here for 2 hours and it had never started before! what we do not realise is that the car starts this time every day.

[Dean Lofthouse]

what I do know is that we are like a group of ants on the bonnet of a car, we have been hear for 2 hours when the engine of the car starts, we are convinced that we are responsible for the engine starting, because we have been here for 2 hours and it had never started before! what we do not realise is that the car starts this time every day.

 

Your thinking again Dave

[Mr Ed]

From new scientist -

 

The Earth may be much more sensitive to global warming than previously thought, according to the first results from a massive distributed-computing project.

 

The project tested thousands of climate models and found that some produced a world that warmed by a huge 11.5°C when atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations reached the levels expected to be seen later this century.

 

This extreme result is surprising because it lies far outside the 1.4°C to 4.5°C range predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for the same CO2-level increase - a doubling of CO2 concentration from pre-industrial times. But it is possible the IPCC range was wrong because its estimate is based on just a handful of different computer models.

 

"We have anecdotal evidence that people tend to tune their models to be similar to other people's," says David Stainforth, from the University of Oxford, UK. "Nobody wants to have a model that's terribly different, particularly when there are only 8 or 10 in the world," he explains.

 

Stainforth and his colleagues set up http://www.climateprediction.net to see what happened when models were not tuned in this way. They start with a climate model that divides the Earth's surface into boxes hundreds of kilometres square and then change some of the 29 or so parameters that govern aspects of the atmosphere and weather.

 

These tweaked models are farmed out to volunteers who run them on their home computers via a screensaver. Models that accurately simulate today's climate are then dosed with carbon dioxide, to give double pre-industrial levels, and projected forward 45 years to see how the climate responds.

 

"Quite scary"

Since the project launched in 2003 (New Scientist, 12 September 2003) more than 95,000 people from over 150 countries have donated spare computing time. The results have now come back from 60,000 simulations and the team have analysed around 2000 of these, focussing on six parameters.

 

While most of the models showed the global mean temperature rising by between 3°C and 4°C, some experienced much stronger heating. "When you see large areas of the northern hemisphere at 11°C above pre-industrial levels, you think this is quite scary," says Stainforth.

 

Geological data shows the Earth's climate has been much warmer in the past. Temperatures were around 6°C higher during the Cretaceous period, for example, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. But Bob Spicer, an expert in the palaeoclimate at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, says there is no evidence that temperatures have ever been as high as in some of the climateprediction.net simulations.

 

Missing factors

Some iterations of the models showed the climate cooling after an injection of CO2, but these were discarded after close examination because the temperature fall resulted from an unrealistic physical mechanism, says Stainforth. In these scenarios, cold water welling up in the tropics could not be carried away by ocean currents because these were missing from the models.

 

There are no obvious problems with the high temperature models, he says. The climateprediction.net team were left with a range of 1.9°C to 11.5°C. "The uncertainty at the upper end has exploded," says team-member Myles Allen.

 

Clouds, which climate scientists have already recognised as the Achilles' heel of climate prediction (New Scientist, 24 July 2004), were the main cause of the variability in the high temperature models. The two most sensitive parameters governed the humidity at which clouds form and convection in the tropics. More observations of these critical processes could now help to narrow the uncertainty in the climate models' prediction.

 

But the climateprediction.net team stress that they are not saying we will see double-digit temperature rises if CO2 emissions go unchecked. "We're saying we can't rule it out," says Stainforth.

 

The next batch of climateprediction.net models will be making predictions of the timescales over which these changes might be seen, says Stainforth. "We need a lot more help, and we encourage people to continue getting involved."

 

Journal reference: Nature (vol 433, p 403)

[Mr Ed]

New scientist 2008-

SANTA is skating on very thin ice. In 2007 the sea ice at the North Pole was at its thinnest since records began.

 

Christian Haas of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany, and his team estimated the thickness of late summer ice at the North Pole in 2001, 2004 and 2007. They found that the ice was on average 1.3 metres thick at the end of the summer in 2007. By contrast, its depth was 2.3 metres in 2001 and 2.6 metres in 2004.

 

"In 2007 the ice was 1.3 metres thick on average, compared with 2.6 metres in 2004"The team went to the North Pole aboard the German icebreaker RFV Polarstern in August and September of 2001, 2004 and 2007. While there, they used helicopter-borne instruments to determine the thickness of large swathes of ice by measuring its conductivity (Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1029/2008GL034457).

 

Previously, glaciologists had measured ice thickness in spots by placing instruments directly on the ice. Records from 1991 show that the summer ice that year was 3.1 metres thick.

 

While the ice at the North Pole used to be thick "old" ice, much of it now is thinner first-year ice, which has had only a single winter to grow.

 

Earlier studies had already shown that the extent of Arctic sea ice reached its lowest level in 2007, 23 per cent below the previous minimum set in 2005. Taken together, the studies suggest that the Arctic could soon be ice-free during summer.

 

From issue 2667 of New Scientist magazine, 02 August 2008, page 7

[Mr Ed]

I'd advise anybody who wanted simple information on Climate change to read the link below, Its the special article published by the New Scientist, and draws on all the current information

http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/dn11462

[Mr Ed]

Climate change sceptics sometimes claim that many leading scientists question climate change. Well, it all depends on what you mean by "many" and "leading". For instance, in April 2006, 60 "leading scientists" signed a letter urging Canada's new prime minister to review his country's commitment to the Kyoto protocol.

 

This appears to be the biggest recent list of sceptics. Yet many, if not most, of the 60 signatories are not actively engaged in studying climate change: some are not scientists at all and at least 15 are retired.

 

Compare that with the dozens of statements on climate change from various scientific organisations around the world representing tens of thousands of scientists, the consensus position represented by the IPCC reports and the 11,000 signatories to a petition condemning the Bush administration's stance on climate science.

 

The fact is that there is an overwhelming consensus in the scientific community about global warming and its causes. There are some exceptions, but the number of sceptics is getting smaller rather than growing.

 

Even the position of perhaps the most respected sceptic, Richard Lindzen of MIT, is not that far off the mainstream: he does not deny it is happening but thinks future warming will not be nearly as great as most predict.

 

Of course, just because most scientists think something is true does not necessarily mean they are right. But the reason they think the way they do is because of the vast and growing body of evidence. A study in 2004 looked at the abstracts of nearly 1000 scientific papers containing the term "global climate change" published in the previous decade. Not one rejected the consensus position. One critic promptly claimed this study was wrong – but later quietly withdrew the claim.

[treedave]

Personally,I take little notice of academic research and its creators. Their motives can be "swayed" by funding i.e. The british sugar bureau research and their advice on healthy eating. As with many scientific topics, you can find statistics and reports to support you're own opinion.

The point I was trying to make (and obviously failed!) was that even if the world heats up the local consequences can be totally different. I prefer to look at the whole issue as climate change, sometimes rapid and unexpected change, but the world has gone through it before. Last time mammals ended up with an evolutionary leg up, my bet for next time is the insects - ants if you push me to pick a front runner.