Author Topic: Global warming thirty years later  (Read 885 times)

Hawkmoon

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Global warming thirty years later
« on: June 23, 2018, 07:13:47 PM »
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230RN

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Re: Global warming thirty years later
« Reply #1 on: June 25, 2018, 12:10:36 AM »
Quote
A Prophet of Doom Was Right About the Climate
By Justin Gillis
Contributing Opinion Writer

^  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/23/opinion/sunday/james-e-hansen-climate-global-warming.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FHansen%2C%20James%20E.

Not to be contrarian, but just to illustrate that nobody can tell from a mere 200+ year sample what the heck is going on, and to either "confirm or deny" global warming means you don't know what the heck you're talking about.  This, given the best long term , i.e., ~500,000 years, temperatur records.  And "best" means "pretty noisy," but still showing a regular cycling of the earth's temperature.  (By the way, looking at these records  from a baseline of Zero Kelvin, the changes are miniscule.)

As I have said before, call me in 50,000 years and I'll let you know how good any current predictions were.

Terry, 230RN

Hawkmoon

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Re: Global warming thirty years later
« Reply #2 on: June 25, 2018, 02:02:12 AM »
Terry, don't get me started about people who show graphs with most of the Y axis omitted to make a tiny difference appear to be huge. It's one of my pet peeves. Any time you see a graph in which the numbers on the Y axis don't start at zero, you can pretty much figure that whoever used that graph to illustrate his or her point is lying.
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230RN

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Re: Global warming thirty years later
« Reply #3 on: June 25, 2018, 05:11:23 AM »
Sometimes you have to, but engineering ethics dictates that you put a break in the ordinate if you have to show only part of the scale.  Four or five °F is only about 1% of the entire temperature scale.   Not that this isn't significant in terms of ice ages versus warm periods, but it gives you a better perspective of the big picture.

To me, (to me) the noisy "big picture" looks like we're actually heading into one of the regular cold periods (which was speculated fifty years ago IIRC).  However, as I have said, look me up in fifty years and let me know how it's turning out.

Ice core data.  Note they cop out on the Zero problem a little by graphing the ordinate as Δ K.

(Actually, they effed up by calling it "delta °K" and the Kelvin scale does not make use of "degrees," at least the last I heard, but that's another issue.)



Essentially the same knd of data but with the abscissa reversed:



To the disinterested observer, the regular long-term periodicity jumps out and smacks  you in the intellect, as opposed to the paltry (if accurate) measurements of the past 200 years which supposedly shows the infamous "curved upward like a hockey stick" predictions.



And the acute observer will note with a grin that this graph has a negative slope, tee hee. :D

Terry, 230RN

Image credits in properties.
« Last Edit: June 25, 2018, 05:53:20 AM by 230RN »

De Selby

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Re: Global warming thirty years later
« Reply #4 on: June 25, 2018, 06:41:38 AM »
So about those graphs....what’s the current carbon dioxide ppm? Seems mighty high on the scale of your middle graph (considering that entire chart displays measurements nowhere near modern levels)
"Human existence being an hallucination containing in itself the secondary hallucinations of day and night (the latter an insanitary condition of the atmosphere due to accretions of black air) it ill becomes any man of sense to be concerned at the illusory approach of the supreme hallucination known as death."

230RN

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Re: Global warming thirty years later
« Reply #5 on: June 25, 2018, 07:32:05 AM »
With all due respect, I think you're missing the point.  Whether the long term temperature cycles look like they are related to CO2 or methane or vulcanism or the average size of dinosaur tongues, there are obvious long-term cycles and sub-cycles going on independent of industrialization or even (apparently) human presence.

Or the size of dinosaur tongues.

To pretend that you can make predictions of "global warming*" based on short-term samples of contemporary temperatures is simply and plainly dishonest.

Terry, 230RN

* Or any gross climate disruption.

ETA
Correction to previous:

"Four or five °F is only about 1% of the entire temperature scale" is technically incorrect, and should read "Four or five °F is only about 1% of the entire temperature scale in terms of normal human activities."
« Last Edit: June 25, 2018, 07:51:52 AM by 230RN »

Hawkmoon

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Re: Global warming thirty years later
« Reply #6 on: June 25, 2018, 10:56:22 AM »
Sometimes you have to, but engineering ethics dictates that you put a break in the ordinate if you have to show only part of the scale.  Four or five °F is only about 1% of the entire temperature scale.   Not that this isn't significant in terms of ice ages versus warm periods, but it gives you a better perspective of the big picture.

You never "have to." The whole point of a "graph" is to provide a "graphic" presentation of the data. Once you screw with either axis, the "graph" no longer represents a graphic depiction of the data.
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MechAg94

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Re: Global warming thirty years later
« Reply #7 on: June 25, 2018, 11:30:37 AM »
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/06/22/thirty-years-on-how-well-do-global-warming-predictions-stand-up/
Here is another link which may be the same article. 


When I did the search, I came across this.  Funny how the debate is little more than name calling and a war of internet links. 
https://www.debatepolitics.com/environment-and-climate-issues/322171-thirty-years-well-do-global-warming-predictions-stand-up.html
“It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones.”  ― Calvin Coolidge

MechAg94

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Re: Global warming thirty years later
« Reply #8 on: June 25, 2018, 12:05:04 PM »
IMO, this just shows that Yes, we were on a moderate warming trend at the time, but the doomsday predictions of extremely high temperature increases were nonsense and based on lots of bad assumptions and rigged climate models.  IMO, it is still unclear if CO2 was the driver of the warming trend or if it was just a natural cycle. 

The biggest thing to remember is there was a great deal of money and politics pushing this issue and encouraging the doomsday research and predictions.  A lot of well connected people were set up to start carbon credit banking systems that would have kicked in if the US had given in to this nonsense.  I am not sure how much of that was done in other countries.  For all the complaints about Big Oil opposing climate change research, there was a great deal more money backing the doomsday research in order to push the political end of it. 
“It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones.”  ― Calvin Coolidge