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calmac_man

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  1. Saying the science is settled reflects the fact that, on the fundamentals, the science is settled. The predictions are a different matter. Nobody has a problem with accepting the science is settled on any number of incredibly complex areas of science. The science is settled on whether you can send music, see things, heat your dinner and kill things using the same time of wave. Nobody takes the hump with that. In my opinion there are two main reasons for climate change scepticism and denial (they're different things). The first is that responding to climate change requires a collective response, led by government, across the globe. That sits very badly with a lot of people. There were objections to controlling CFCs to protect the ozone layer; I imagine they would be a million times louder in the age of social media. It also requires limitations on individual freedoms like flying, driving, having a big hoose and lining the walls with three-bar fires, and it means making sacrifices to benefit people in Bangladesh and Vietnam. It's antithetical to the politics of a lot of people, and I genuinely respect that. The second reason is that people don't like the people who are saying that humans are changing the climate. A self-appointed cadre of elitists, speaking in terms nobody else can understand, most of whom have clearly green, left of centre politics, and have always been happy to tell other people how to live their lives from the comfort of their ivory towers. Superior sunsofbitches. Like me, for instance, only with qualifications. There's maybe a third thing, that some people can't accept that knowing vastly less than someone else is a barrier to having an opinion. I don't have a scooby about trade and the impact Brexit will have on it, or the best way to organise hospitals, or what to do about North Korea. I'll leave those things to people who know a helluva lot more than me. It seems that on the internet, a little knowledge is a licence to believe anything. Climate science is really only a live political issue in the USA, probably because of the nature of their politics. There are plenty of sceptics and deniers elsewhere in the world, of course, but there are very, very few mainstream political parties representing that view. Even here, the Tories are by European standards pretty right wing for a centre-right party, and they've introduced some of the strongest climate legislation and policies around. And with that, I'll bid you goodnight.
  2. Each of the last three years has been the warmest recorded. Given the number of different organisations taking different measurements in different ways and getting the same results (or close enough), it doesn't look like there's cause to doubt the data. Measuring temperature isn't a particularly complex thing to do, at least not for organisation who land spaceships on comets or create the coldest place in the universe in a lab, so the range of uncertainty is small. Climate scientists like those at NASA, the Met Office and the NOAA have become much more confident in the past few years about AGW.
  3. That's a great way of putting it. For slow moving lumps of carbon like ourselves, monkeys in shoes, Newtonian physics explains our lives just fine. Saying it hurts when we jump from a high thing because mass curves spacetime isn't terribly useful information.
  4. Methane: CH4 + 2xO2 = CO2 + 2xH2O + heat. Octane: 2xC8H18 + 25xO2 = 16xCO2 + 18xH2O + heat. So for methane there are two moles of water for ever mole of carbon dioxide; for octane there are nearly equal moles of water and carbon dioxide. This is because, as the hydrocarbon gets longer, the ratio of carbon to hydrogen atoms changes. You're right, this is fairly fundamental stuff. I did it in O Grade Chemistry. Please tell me this isn't your job or anything.
  5. And yet, is there any branch of science under more attention than climate science? Over time and through scrutiny AGW theory hasn't weakened one iota, in fact it is firming up.
  6. If the temperature is going to 22 degrees in a million years time, that's not something I'm worried about. If the temperature is going to 17 degrees in 80 years time, that's something I'm very worried about. If the temperature is going to 17 degrees in 80 years time because of human actions, that's a cause for the world to get together and sort it - which is what's happening, regardless of contrary opinions on the internet.
  7. This "doubt" thing is exploited to muddy the waters, and sadly a lot of people fall for it. Some things are certain, some near certain, some probable, some uncertain. As you'll doubtless know from having read them, the IPCC are very clear throughout their reports how sure they are about what they say. Whether possible - which is in most of it - they're basing those assessments on probabilities from evidence. So the bits that are certain - CO2 is the key greenhouse gas - though it's much less common than water vapour, water vapour tends to be regulated by temperature too, while CO2 regulates temperature; CO2 has risen by about 40% since the start of the industrial revolution, with most of that coming since 1970; that increase is almost entirely attributable to human activity. The bits that are near certain: global air and ocean temperatures have risen since the start of the industrial revolution, with most of it coming since 1970; an increase in global temperatures is causing changes in climate systems. The bits that are probable: without a huge reduction in human GHG emissions, global temperatures will continue to rise, causing rises in sea levels and more extremes of weather. The bits that are uncertain: how much will temperatures rise if GHGs continue to rise; how much will sea levels rise; what will be the impacts on weather in specific regions. If you want to disagree with that, you better have evidence at least as good as that on which the IPCC reports are based.
  8. Technical point first - doesn't the ratio of CO2 to H2O produced not depend on the particular hydrocarbon burned? I'm assuming that it's different for methane than octane, for instance. The main thing that determines the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere is the temperature. Generally speaking a warmer atmosphere will hold more moisture. If you add water vapour to the atmosphere without increasing the temperature, it just falls back out of the sky pretty quickly - IIRC, within days. One way we see this is in the evening, when the air cools, excess moisture forms as dew or ground frost. I'm not actually sure what happens to the water produced in most fossil fuel combustions. I'm guessing that in coal, oil and gas fired power plants in comes out as vapour, but I've no idea, nor am I sure how it comes out in cars. I know the IPCC aren't concerned about it though as they don't cover it in the ARs. Exactly how water vapour will behave in an atmosphere with more CO2 is, I think, the main source of uncertainty in models. If it leads to more clouds then it would likely have a cooling effect. At the moment global temperatures are sitting nicely near the centre of the models, but it's fairly early days and there could be significant feedback loops.
  9. I've seen that chart before. I can't remember all the comments about it, but they include: The original version of this chart has huge error bars. Going back to Pangea means the evidence gets pretty weak. The time scale is vast; if you broke it down into charts that are comparable to those we use to show the last half million years or so, they may show more correlation between CO2 and temperature. This chart flattens out detail as it's covering that period in a couple of pixels. Of course, we couldn't meaningfully produce such a chart because we wouldn't have enough data that far back. Plant and animal life were very, very different further back in time. This chart includes a long period before the evolution of grass, for instance. The carbon cycle was completely different. We have a reasonably good idea of how much CO2 the natural environment can process, and how much humans are producing. We know what the excess is and we know that it's driving a sharp increase in atmospheric CO2. Nothing in the historical record can re-assure us that this increase won't cause warming. There are lots of other factors that have a bearing on global temperatures, like the ocean currents, the location of land (when there's land at the equator rather than sea, more solar radiation is absorbed), whether there are ice caps or not, Milankovitch cycles, etc. None of these can explain recent changes.
  10. That's exactly right. It's easy to wonder how burning a bit of coal can make much difference, but the amount of CO2 in the air is very small - it was under 0.03% (or 300 parts per million) before the industrial revolution, while water vapour makes up only 0.4%. Over 99.5% of our atmosphere does practically nothing to retain heat. A very small part of our atmosphere plays a huge role in temperature regulation, and if we didn't have them we'd be bloody freezing every night as heat radiated into space.
  11. Funnily enough he didn't literally say that. Newtonian physics is predicated on space and time being absolute, and separate. Einstein's two papers on general and special relativity showed that space and time are relative, and are the same thing. These turned science on their head. Most scientists we've heard of became famous because they overturned what went before.
  12. Ok. But we don't really need to wait and see. The amount of carbon dioxide in the air is up by 40%, about a third higher than at any time in the last half million years and probably much longer, and we know that's from human activity. Other greenhouse gases have rocketed too. Methane is 25 times worse as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxide is almost 300 times worse. Both of these have shot up, mostly through agriculture and land use. Air temperatures are over 1 degree warmer than pre-industrial times, with most of that coming since the 1970s. It would be very weird if the increase in temperature was due to something other than the increase in greenhouse gases. The vast bulk of the warming has gone into the oceans, having impacts on measured sea levels, ocean circulation and marine life.The effect closer to home is that Scotland is notably warmer and wetter, with most of the additional rainfall coming in the summer. We have far, far fewer days of ground frost in the winter. You sometimes hear people say the models are rubbish, but that's not remotely true, we've been within the margins of the models for many years now, and the past three years has pushed us ahead of what they projected. There are many debates in climate science, but there is no debate about the fundamentals - that the planet is warming, and that it's due to greenhouse gases that humans are causing. I can only theorise why people argue against that, but there's a paper in the Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Climate Science this month looking at this: http://climatescience.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228620.001.0001/acrefore-9780190228620-e-328#
  13. Any questions, fire them my way. The "obvious political and financial gain" thing is as much horsehsit as flat earthers screaming "conspiracy!" about the ISS. For one thing, there a helluva lot more to be gained, by people with a pretty shitty track record, from climate change denial than there is from climate science. And it misses the pretty obvious point that scientists don't achieve fame, glory and money by confirming the consensus, they get it by proving everyone else has been wrong all along. Einstein was a low-level office worker who sent a paper to some physicists saying "see that Newton? Yeah, he was wrong about everything." Those physicists immediately hailed a new hero. Any scientist who could present a strong case against AGW theory would rocket to prominence overnight. In the meantime, can I ask, do you question the science behind landing space probes on comets, using relativity to tell the cheap, tiny device in your pocket precisely where you are in the world, and detecting the background radiation from the big bang? Or is it just measuring how hot it is that you question?
  14. I can see what you're saying. It's always worth challenging what we know and how we know it. What, in my opinion, is a waste of time is demonstrating clearly to someone why their idea is definitely wrong, only for them to ignore everything you've said and carry on regardless. Flat earthers don't have an answer to how triangulation shows the curve of the earth, or how you can see beyond the horizon as you gain height, or any one of the things I put in my long posts. And the things the do have answers for are mental. For instance, their only explanation for gravity that doesn't see people in Australia sliding northwards is that this disc we're on is accelerating upwards at 9.8 ms-2. At this rate we'd be past the speed of light within a single year. That's maths that anyone can do. We know that's not possible, but just in case it is, if we were doing that speed we wouldn't be able to see things below is because the light couldn't reach our eyes. It's a worrying trend of our time that people seem to increasingly be believing in things that are manifestly stupid. And it doesn't matter how often their ideas are trashed, or that they have no answers, they just scream "conspiracy!" and carry on regardless. I'll end with this: there was a time when the Islamic culture led the world in philosophy, science and art. For a whole bunch of historical and theological reasons they regressed into unquestioning obedience and the celebration of faith without doubt. We live in a time when half of the people in the richest, most powerful country in the world believe the Earth to be less than 10,000 years old, and now they've elected a barely functioning cretin who said climate change is a hoax invented by China, and he doesn't exercise because that uses up your energy. What happened to Islamic culture has happened to the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Chinese, Ottomans and many others. Civilisations fall when they abandon reason for absolute bullshit and we're no different from those who have gone before.
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