Why would someone push an agenda that is wrong? Lots of reasons that most of us are familiar with: ignorance, their parents did it, being reactionary, people like to feel they are part of a bigger group (there is strength in numbers, and strength is comforting), misguided principles, etc., etc. But things like ignorance can be cured, IF the ignorant person doesn’t have a significant vested interest in maintaining their current belief.
A related but different question: why would someone push something they know is wrong? Usually, it’s because they profit from it personally in some way, via research grants, accumulation of political power, they own the “alternatives” being pushed, it is a structural part of a larger belief system, or whatever.
Most global warmists / climate-change pushers can get binned into “profit from it” or the “scaring people is good for pushing more / larger government controls and regulations” view. You know the type. So here are a couple of very short, simple things about it all.
Cause MUST come before EFFECT. This isn’t even scientific method 101, this is toddler-learning-about-gravity level stuff. And if you graph CO2 and temperature, temperature change leads CO2 change. Ergo, CO2 CANNOT be driving temperature.
OK, a warmest replies, then what alternatives are there? Answer: The sun.
But, they say, the sun is constant. Ahem. No, it is NOT.
So how does it change that we can test or measure, the smarter ones counter, what’s the mechanism; it’s 93,000,000 miles away? (yes, yes, I know – it’s a darn small percentage of them that goes here, but let’s go there anyway).
Answer: Sun-spots. Sunspots, they reply, you must be joking.
Nope. Sunspots are indicative of magnetic field activity. The stronger the sun’s magnetic field, the more Galactic Cosmic Rays it deflects from Earth. You see, GCR passing through the Earth’s atmosphere interact with it in a way and at a rate that they act to seed cloud nuclei. Clouds are white and reflective. So:
Lots of sunspots -> few GCR -> less cloud cover -> lower albedo, -> more energy absorbed from the sun -> planet warms.
Few sunspots -> more GCR -> more cloud cover -> higher albedo, -> less energy absorbed from the sun -> planet cools.
In the 400+ years of actual sunspot observation, the correlation between long-term sunspot patterns and climate is well established. Now we know HOW. We’ve tested it in the lab. (Svensmark at CERN) And hey, what do you know – 700 million years ago, the sun was in a part of the Milkey Way that had much higher levels of GCRs – and it was an ice-ball, pole to pole.
And the other side: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/12/a-review-of-cosmic-rays-and-climate-a-cluttered-story-of-little-success/
A not very reputable site, but even if you grant it a bit of credence, it still doesn’t address the “cause must come before effect” issue.
There you done it!
You went and messed with Ubu’s religion.
And Ubu’s Religion is one of those nasty fundamentalist ones that DEMAND we all believe in the same dogma.
Also if the “Science is Settled” why was there such a HUGE conspiracy (which again all lead to grant money profits for what was an overall quiet sector of research) from the East Anglia University Emails?
It truly warms my cockles at times, to see non-sciencey people at non-sciencey sites show actual sciencey knowledge. At the same time, you can see the sciencey types at sciencey sites be aware of non-sciencey matters. A lot of smart folk out there. The problem comes from almost none of them being in positions of power.
Had an interesting conversation yesterday with one of my city councilcritters re: creating islands of sanity when SHTF. Not a position of power large scale, but then, that boat has sailed.
Just read that the number of solar flares? has dropped to near nothing, which should show a lower level of energy reaching the earth. I think they were saying it’s never been seen historically. A colder world is just what we need to add to the upcoming troubles. Food production, anyone?
It’s not a direct relatonship, e.g. more flares = more Total Solar Radiation (TSI). Flares do correlate with TSI, but very small percentage wise. Though a difference in TSI of just 2% is a lot of wattage coming down or not. As was addressed in Rolf’s post, the theory is that flares are indicative of magnetic energy, affecting the intarstellar cosmic rays. There’s far more circumstantial evidence for this than it being The Evil Gas ™ as well as recent experiments at CERN confirming the GCR theory.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-global-warming-advanced.htm has a lot of interesting data/cites that might be relevant.
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen the “cause must come before effect” argument (or data) before, but I’m pretty sure that climate scientists have never said that CO2 was the _only_ cause of climate change. For instance, depending on the timing of this lead (do you have a cite for that, BTW?), it might have been increased use of CFCs, or sulfur compounds from volcanic activity, or any number of other things that might have bumped temps up for a while before CO2 forcing started to become relevant.
Not saying you are wrong, but you might not be right either. 🙂 Clearly, more research/data/science is needed here. 🙂
I think that this perfectly illustrates the whole climate science discussion. There are SO many factors that contribute to the temperature of this planet that you cannot pick out one thing and say “AH HA! This does not fit in, thus it disproves the whole thing!”, and conversely “AH HA! Look at the correlation on this thing! This proves the whole thing!”.
It’s going to take a lot of science to figure this out. However, in the meantime, one has to examine the risks that one takes on if one is wrong. I personally think that it’s reasonable to think “you know, if I’m wrong, it would suck a lot more than if I’m right. Maybe I could do something right now while the cost is relatively low to make sure that I won’t be screwed if it turns out that I’m wrong.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_paralysis is a real risk here. I think _that_ is actually a lot more interesting discussion to have.
Speaking of risks, I find the insurance company argument pretty interesting too. If insurance companies wanted to merely profit from global warming, they would keep writing policies rather than pulling out of markets like Florida and North Carolina. (http://insurance.lbl.gov/availability-affordability.html) They would just raise their rates accordingly.
I’m sure insurance companies would raise premiums if they could; the reason they leave states is that profits have been outlawed.
Here’s the thing about the “prudence principle”: it has two sides. What the AGW proponents push is the downside risk of AGW is bad. What about the other side? We KNOW that if we do everything the AGW proponents say we should do, it WILL destroy the economy. It WILL greatly reduce quality of life in the developed world, and will hurt the developing world even more. Their stated goal is to raise the price of fossil fuels so high that other energy systems become cost-competitive. Forget the background reasons, just examine the basic economics of it. For (one) example: The biggest difference between advanced and not-advanced economies is energy use to make human labor more efficient. What fraction of an American’s income goes to food and energy? It’s a large number, but a small percentage. Compare that to much of the developing world, where food might be a third, and energy (cooking fuel, heating, lighting, a bus-ride into town, etc) is another third of income. If you burn more corn ethanol, and double the cost of coal, you just made their entire budget go to food and energy; that means riots, wars, famines, and tremendous unrest and problems. THAT is a real, life-and-death, here-and-now problem. for a typical American, it means going from something like 10% to 13%. Raise it enough for Americans to significantly change their habits, what happens? Tourism dies, and the jobs associated with it die. That takes the economy another step down into the death spiral. How many fewer people would attend Boomershoot if the cost of attending were two or three times higher to get there, and hotels were twice as expensive?
The time-lag between CO2 and temp is about 800 years. The ocean circulates (top-to-bottom) about every thousand years. Basic chemistry says that the warmer the water, the less CO2 it can dissolve; so, as it warms up and circulates, it out gasses, and as it cools down, it gradually absorbs more from the air.
That Wiki article cites no sources or outside reference – it’s one of many reasonable-sounding opinion-pieces on the topic in the Wikipedia.
Another problem is that pretty much all the major models of AGW fail to explain the last 15+ years of flat temperatures. Here are the facts
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1997/plot/rss/from:1997.9/trend/plot/esrl-co2/from:1997.9/normalise/offset:0.68/plot/esrl-co2/from:1997.9/normalise/offset:0.68/trend
The Earth is a complex system, no doubt. The models are complex. They are also wrong. Exactly why, how, and by how much, I don’t know. But I know that if they are wrong, and they can’t be trusted to predict the future with any accuracy, then we shouldn’t be enforcing policy based on those predictions.
The entire premise of Al Gore’s movie was that CO2 caused climate change….
Henrik Svensmark’s book on this is an interesting read. He presents data that shows a correlation of climate change with cosmic ray change that covers a period *quite* a bit longer than mankind has been around.
The thing that’s been damaging my calm is that the Carrington Event occurred during a very low solar maximum, such as we seem to have just about now. If you are reading this, it hasn’t happened again (yet).
The Russians still depend on Winter Wheat, raised with little chemical support on the Steppes, for feeding their populace. They have been interested in the Sun’s role in climate change since far before we ever got involved in the income-redistribution scam called “Global Warming”. They devote a much greater percentage of their considerable scientific resources to Sun & Climate, and when the Russ say that they can find NO credible evidence of man-made climate change, I believe them, not our politically-motivated “scientists”.