Climate Change!

[steveo73]

I tell you what is interesting. I offer facts, I offer proof, no one responds on those issues. It's basically a put your head in the sand approach and yell as loud as you can that "you are wrong despite the facts".

I can debate the issue calmly, rationally and logically. It's the believers who don't have that ability.

I'm actually though getting over trying to reason with you. If the evidence proves you wrong and you want to believe I say good on you. What I am interested in now though is why you believe. This is what I find extremely interesting.

My hypothesis on the belief of alarmists is that some people want to believe that somehow human beings are scourges of our planet. So when a theory like global warming comes up they want to jump on that cause.

You keep asserting this without offering anything other than links to blogs offering discredited evidence, some of them even accept AGW which you say isn't happening. You continue to call people alarmists or warmists whilst they politely debate the subject. Jacob has made several very detailed posts offering plenty of strong evidence which you refute with a link to a YouTube video. I'm sorry but I can't take anything you say seriously now.

I have been completely calm and polite. Jacob has not provided any evidence at all. I suggest you watch and read all of the links that I provided.

I understand that you refuse to do this because you don't want to know the truth of the subject.

I have provided a preponderance of evidence against AGW. I accept it could be occurring but if it is the impact is completely trivial. Jacob has not been able to refute this nor has anyone else.

I have facts and everyone else has beliefs.

[steveo73]

Another political argument that misses the facts and can't explain the massive problems that I've clearly articulated.

The facts are clear cut. No one has disputed it rationally or logically at all. Let's have a guess why that is the case ?

Going back to the previous climate change thread a few years ago, Jacob and others have made multiple attempts to engage you on the science. Jacob has given up this method of persuasion, as suggested by his linking to the Gish Gallop article, since it requires intense effort in order to meet the standard of rigor required by careful reasoning (Gish Rebuttal), and there are a number of tactical downsides to employing such rebuttals. That is the reason that nobody is disputing your claims "rationally and logically," since clearly those kinds of attempts haven't persuaded you in the past and everyone is becoming skeptical that it ever will. From what I gather his most recent post was largely for those of us who have been engaging with you and following the thread all along and so it is not a political argument directed towards you in support of the truth of AGW.

The reason nobody is engaging with you the way you want is because your plethora of facts are not based on a well developed understanding of the science but from blogrolling and watching youtube videos of people who agree with you. For obvious reasons, this is a bad standard for evaluating the truth of scientific claims.

This is not true. I am the one with the facts. You can keep telling yourself that you have the facts however clearly you don't. No one within this thread has tried to engage me on the facts. I find that extremely telling.

[George the original one]

LOL. Good to see that we have that settled.

[steveo73]

LOL. Good to see that we have that settled.

Unfortunately you and others simply don't want to look at the facts but it is what it is. I honestly don't understand it and I find it bizarre when inaccurate simplistic beliefs are posted and people state that the facts have been provided. The idea of the way that CO2 works in the environment directly is well understood. The previous post that described the way CO2 works in the atmosphere was factually incorrect and this is very easy to check.

Anyway - back to the regular programming.

[fiby41]

@chenda - Yeah, I found this interesting:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilgamesh_flood_myth ... which is a much earlier version of the story about Noah's ark, featuring Sumerian gods playing different parts and more technical detail too.

@DSKla

The story of a great deluge is found in many civilizations; this fish narrative, and saving of knowledge, are specifically Hindu. Similar floods also exist in ancient Sumer and Babylonia, Genesis Noah's Ark, Biblical Jonah and Whale, Greece, Maya of Americas and Yoruba of Africa.

Matsya मत्स्य was the first avatar of Vishnu who saved the humans, who were led by Manu, seeds of plants, walking living things and the knowledge books Vedas from the flood.

I think this flood everyone keeps talking about might be the melting of the last ice age, remnant in our civilizational memory?

[Gilberto de Piento]

Steveo, what's your motivation for putting so much time into this? You must have hundreds of hours into researching this and keeping up on it and posting here.

If people take action on climate change it will mean less use of fossil fuels. What would be the problem if people limit the use of fossil fuels? Why do you personally care?

[Gilberto de Piento]

Generally, what is the best way to fight climate change?

My lifestyle means I'm not contributing a lot of emissions though I could do better. Is there a group that seems effective that I should work with or contribute to?

[steveo73]

Steveo, what's your motivation for putting so much time into this? You must have hundreds of hours into researching this and keeping up on it and posting here.

If people take action on climate change it will mean less use of fossil fuels. What would be the problem if people limit the use of fossil fuels? Why do you personally care?

I have a lot of time on my hands and I find it a fascinating topic. I've never seen something with in my opinion such poor scientific evidence supporting a claim along with such virulent and confident social and community support. My wife though asks me the same question. I suppose I studied this topic at university and even then I thought the science was abysmal. Interestingly since that point say 20 years ago I think the science has actually gotten a lot worse. The evidence is now getting stronger against the theory and the catastrophic AGW claims I think have been pretty close to completely debunked. Even the IPCC keep amending their forecasts down.

I studied other environmental issues that I thought were much more problematic - acid rain was one of these topics. That is clearly and easily verifiable and an issue.

I just came to post some more high quality information:- https://judithcurry.com/2016/11/12/clim ... r-lawyers/

This is fascinating because it breaks down where we really are with this hypothesis.

There is nothing in there different to what I've stated so far however some of the details are fascinating. The models are looking really poor which if we were talking about any other topic would invalidate the hypothesis. It should be a simple proposition - if the model works then the science is valid if it doesn't then it isn't valid. We are so close to basically stating statistically this is an invalid hypothesis. The likelihood of this being a valid hypothesis is really really really low.

The climate though is extremely complicated. If anyone is still an uneducated believer (which I think all believers must be) you really need to grasp this concept. Climate is not a simple increase CO2 increase temperatures proposition. I keep harping on this but it should be something that anyone discussing this topic should acknowledge - CO2 is not via proof in whatever way you shape it the big factor in determining climate.

At the moment AGW could be real but probably not as per the idea that it's the burning of fossil fuels that is causing any anthropogenic warming. I think though that now it's becoming increasingly apparent and even acknowledged that the potential impact is also significantly less than what the general layperson believes. I don't think that believers/alarmists should be taking the high moral ground here. If anything I think the reverse is more likely to be true. The benefit of minimising fossil fuels when it comes to the climate appears to be non-existent but the potential costs could be significant and I'm not talking about those of us who are relatively rich suffering.

Just to answer the second part of your question. I think it's a really tough one when it comes to using less fossil fuels. So it sounds good in theory. I personally don't use a lot of fossil fuels compared to the average person. We have a family car but my wife uses it mostly and we try to use it as little as possible. I ride my bike and use public transport. We also use solar electricity within our house plus our energy use is extremely low in comparison to the average person (our bill typically has a comparison). I personally don't care about using less fossil fuels. I actually think that we (rich people in developed countries) should be trying to live more efficiently and that means using less energy.

The only problem with minimizing fossil fuel usage is that I think there is a high probability that poorer countries and poorer areas could be made poorer. At the moment fossil fuels provide the cheapest most efficient energy available. If we take that away or even minimise it we could actually be making those communities that are poorer even poorer.

[ducknalddon]

At the moment fossil fuels provide the cheapest most efficient energy available. If we take that away or even minimise it we could actually be making those communities that are poorer even poorer.

Fossil fuels are cheap if you ignore the externalities (such as global warming) and it's likely the poorest parts of the world that will suffer the most from it.

[steveo73]

At the moment fossil fuels provide the cheapest most efficient energy available. If we take that away or even minimise it we could actually be making those communities that are poorer even poorer.

Fossil fuels are cheap if you ignore the externalities (such as global warming) and it's likely the poorest parts of the world that will suffer the most from it.

Just to qualify this. You are agreeing with me in that any measures that we take will probably impact the poorest parts of the world negatively the most.

[ducknalddon]

At the moment fossil fuels provide the cheapest most efficient energy available. If we take that away or even minimise it we could actually be making those communities that are poorer even poorer.

Fossil fuels are cheap if you ignore the externalities (such as global warming) and it's likely the poorest parts of the world that will suffer the most from it.

Just to qualify this. You are agreeing with me in that any measures that we take will probably impact the poorest parts of the world negatively the most.

I think you know what I was saying.

[BRUTE]

the poorest parts of the world always suffer, because they don't make the decisions.

[steveo73]

Fossil fuels are cheap if you ignore the externalities (such as global warming) and it's likely the poorest parts of the world that will suffer the most from it.

Just to qualify this. You are agreeing with me in that any measures that we take will probably impact the poorest parts of the world negatively the most.

I think you know what I was saying.

I was just trying to be extremely clear on this point. I assumed what I said was correct but I wanted to confirm. I'll take it that you agree with the statement that I made.

[7Wannabe5]

@steve73: It seems to me that these are the two most relevant points from the article "On the Causal Structure Between CO2 and Global Warming" I linked above.

The whole new formalism (IF)is derived from first principles, rather than as an empirically defined ansatz, with the property of causality guaranteed in proven theorems.

Conclusions: Using the IF concept we were able to confirm the inherent one-way causality between human activities and global warming

Also, I would note that although I have no doubt about this causation, I don't necessarily believe that current proposed political/economic solutions are particularly brilliant. In fact, my lazy skim armchair analysis of the Paris Agreement would be that it is attempting to shove a complex problem into a simplistic and ridiculously arbitrary solution set with low-barrier to non-compliance and little thought to consequences, and I don't believe "Well, we have to start somewhere.." is sufficient justification. Global warming is not inherently a political problem, and any attempt to dress it up as one is likely bound to fail.

[steveo73]

7Wannabe5 - I believe it's basically impossible to derive a causal relationship between CO2 and global warming. The climate is simply too complex and there could be so many other factors involved in increasing temperatures. There definitely isn't a simplistic linear relationship such as an increase in CO2 leads to increased temperatures. This may be partially true but it's like such a trivial factor that it's basically pointless to mention. So I think I was way too nice in relation to that report. It's basically not worth the paper it was written on.

The science - i.e. what we know and agree is that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and all else being equal increasing CO2 should lead to trivial temperature increases (we will state trivial because CO2 is basically a trivial greenhouse gas). Note that I don't believe that anyone would really dispute this. It's not the basis of catastrophic AGW or AGW. The point to make here though is that the climate is always changing and there are so many factors that contribute to the climate that it's basically impossible to proof causality of increasing CO2 and increasing temperatures.

Maybe a better test is a falsifiable test. We basically have this with the climate models that are used for predictive purposes and they aren't working at all well. This is why I state AGW is basically disproven now. It's at the extremely low level (close to getting below 5% likelihood) of statistical significance. So we are getting close to stating statistically that AGW in relation to its predictive capability is not occurring. If it goes below the 5% band there shouldn't be a debate about this any more.

That paper you choose to look at was basically playing a game. I'll give a simplistic example as an analogy. When I was younger I coded a MS Access database to determine when to trade foreign currency. It worked pretty good with in sample data. It worked poorly with out of sample data. This is basically what they did within that paper.

I have real concerns with any political measures being taken now in relation to AGW. I think it sounds good to certain people but I think it's only going to hurt poor people whilst making some rich people who play the game richer. If there was some validity behind the whole thing then I'd agree to it but I think it's honestly in tatters at the moment.

[BRUTE]

I believe it's basically impossible to derive a causal relationship between CO2 and global warming.

should be simple enough. simply reproducing 2 identical planets in identical solar systems, and injecting one with CO2, then closely monitoring for the next, say, 5 centuries, should do it.

oh, and it should probably be double-blinded and crossover as well.

[ducknalddon]

I'll take it that you agree with the statement that I made.

No I do not.

[steveo73]

I believe it's basically impossible to derive a causal relationship between CO2 and global warming.

should be simple enough. simply reproducing 2 identical planets in identical solar systems, and injecting one with CO2, then closely monitoring for the next, say, 5 centuries, should do it.

oh, and it should probably be double-blinded and crossover as well.

Exactly with the key proviso that both planets have to be completely identical in all other factors being keep fixed. So the sun has to remain identical etc. It's never going to happen.

On the flip side we are getting some pretty good evidence now to dispute AGW or maybe better put catastrophic AGW. I'm not sure if it's too early to make the call or not but it appears extremely likely that there will be no issues at all with AGW. We should all be stoked.

[steveo73]

I'll take it that you agree with the statement that I made.

No I do not.

So you think that taxes on fossil fuel derived energy sources would help poorer countries or at least not impact them ? Do you also believe that no rich people will get richer from a scheme like this ?

[ducknalddon]

I hate to resurrect this thread but:

2016 marks three consecutive years of record warmth for the globe.