Climate change - new view of the models?

[TimG]

Also - Where is the construction I asked for.

Buried in the Mann SI for another paper. http://4.bp.blogspot... FigS8-rev0.jpg

Figure S8: Sensitivity of NH mean reconstruction to exclusion of selected proxy record. Reconstructions are shown based on “all proxy” network (red, with two standard error region shown in yellow) proxy network with all tree-ring records removed (blue), proxy network with a group of 7 long-term proxy with greater uncertainties and/or potential biases as discussed in ref. S1 (brown) and both tree-ring data and the group of 7 records removed (green; dashed before AD 1500 indicates reconstruction no longer passes validation).

BTW: Mann's refusal to correct his 2008 paper has led to falsehoods being incorporated into the IPCC report:

http://climateaudit....kes-pnas-trick/

Edited January 15, 2013 by TimG

[Guest]

??? dropping links to British tabloid blog articles, particularly those authored from the likes of your referenced link

Yeah, I should have included the winky emoticon. I didn't think it was necessary.

[Michael Hardner]

Buried in the Mann SI for another paper. http://4.bp.blogspot... FigS8-rev0.jpg

So he did do it ? Does that not look like a hockey stick ?

[waldo]

BTW: Mann's refusal to correct his 2008 paper has led to falsehoods being incorporated into the IPCC report:

absolute blather! Like I've said, repeatedly.... year, after year, after year goes by (over a decade+ now from the original), amd McIntyre refuses to formally challenge the paper. Meanwhile, he's free to keep to the isolated confines of his blog and forever say anything/everything. And you eat up every last word! What's he waiting for, hey? What's McIntyre waiting for? Do you have any updates on his paper/reconstruction?

now... even if the claim had merit... since you know AR5 is still in draft, you've certainly taken liberty with your statement. Which also begs the question concerning the illegitimate release of the various draft sections throughout your denierBlogWorld. Seems to me I recall you starting a MLW thread over the Gleick/Heartland document 'release' affair... you certainly had a lot to say about Gleick - you spun that wildly! Will you also be starting a thread to chastise and denigrate those deniers who ignored their oaths to the IPCC, promising not to release the drafts early? When will we see that thread from you, hey? Like never, right?

[TimG]

So he did do it ? Does that not look like a hockey stick ?

Again - you are missing the point in your rush to declare Mann exonerated.

First, all Mann has done is publish the series that shows McIntyre is right in the SI of a different paper. He never issued a correction to the original paper and that means that the IPCC AR5 now has falsehoods in it. If a paper has an error and it is pointed out in journal comments then a correction to the paper should be submitted to the journal so future readers are aware of the error. This never happened and it should have.

Second, the issue is NOT the shape. The issue is the validation. Without the tree rings and the lake sediments the reconstruction is not valid prior to 1500. Therefore it cannot show that temperatures are higher than those in the MWP which is what the paper claims to do.

Edited January 16, 2013 by TimG

[Guest]

The sensible response to a crisis would be to set the baseline at what needs to be done to avert disaster; not how can we tweak the dials of our present economic system to minimize the damage we're doing right now.....and that's where the light bulbs come on! Big Green responses to climate change and related environmental degradation, is to go the route of energy efficiency and build windmills and solar panels. If the core problem is that energy and resource consumption has to keep rising to feed economic growth ( more correctly it would be to feed the growing share that bankers and currency manipulators carve out....but, that's another issue), then all of the big green, feel good solutions won't amount to a hill of beans! At best, they will just delay the inevitable for a few more years.

The core problem is that energy and resource consumption have to keep rising to feed population growth. I'll agree to any ideas you come up with to stem that. (As for the bankers comment: is that the real problem? Rich people who won't share?) The highlighted bit we agree on completely.

What we have are two choices:

1. organize now to make the changes necessary to move towards permanent, sustainable human societies or

2. just keep doing what we're doing now, and wait for it to collapse.

Option Two, not surprisingly, is the most likely scenario. But, if that's our future, odds of individual survival in the coming decades are going to depend largely on expectation and preparation. In other words, the people who are really F#$%^& right now, are the ones who think the good times will never end.

Option two is the most likely scenario because option 1 is never going to happen.

and

make no sense combined in the same post, let alone following each other! If you acknowledge global warming, what sense does it make to advocate tar sands development? A source of petroleum that's more than twice as carbon intensive as conventional oil, and will leave behind huge, toxic tailing ponds for future generations to deal with. Just recently we learned:

How can one not acknowledge AGW? I don't know of anyone who seriously says that climate change is not happening.

The argument is not whether AGW is happening. The argument is that there is nothing we can do to stop it. Shutting down the oil sands is a leftist reaction to big business making money from natural resources, not any kind of reaction to climate change. It wouldn't have any noticable effect.

Unless you could get the rest of the world to follow suit, and then it would probably be touch and go.

Canadian researchers have used the mud at the bottom of lakes like a time machine to show that tar sands oil production in Alberta, Canada, is polluting remote regional lakes as far as 50 miles from the operations..................

Smol says he worries that as the industry ramps up production, the contamination will get worse, and he's hoping that the industry will install more pollution controls to prevent this.

This pollution wasn't picked up by the industry-funded monitoring program that was supposed to track environmental risks from tar sands over recent decades.

http://www.npr.org/2...sands-pollution

Further evidence that the full extent of the damage caused by exploiting tar sands deposits won't be fully realized for years or decades into the future.

I too, hope that industry installs more pollution controls to prevent this. I hope they develop ways of using less fresh water, and I hope they develop better ways of dealing with the tailings. And if they won't, I hope they are forced to. No brainer.

Really! You mean the converted want to dig up tar sands to recover the oil? I'd hate to know what the unconverted have in mind.

Realistically, the first step is carbon taxes, and nothing less than a serious tax on carbon will begin the shift away from carbon fuels consumption. The present system, which has allowed the growth of carbon fuels over the last 150 years, has been to externalize most of the pollution costs onto the commons, and 100% of the costs of increasing greenhouse gas levels is externalized without a carbon tax. If carbon taxes are punitive...which they will have to be to be effective...there will be a shift away from policies like moving to suburbs miles away from work, and shifting from private automobile use to mass transit.

There already is a shift in patterns for people who are among the working poor. Many of them have already had to give up their cars and take buses or trains to work. And that's why a civilized society should be planning to meet everyone's needs, not just the rich and the powerful! Because, those people who have become dependent on transit so far, have the least amount of economic and political clout in this system. So, local governments have no incentives to reduce the cuts they've made over the decades to transit, even as riderships increase.

The Big Green environmentalists who talk windmills and solar panels never get around to discussing the problem of transportation fuels. At best, there may be the odd comment about electric cars....which would presently add to the already strained electrical grids and have prohibitively expensive batteries made with large quantities of rare earths. The long term solution is going to require a shift away from the building of millions of cars and miles of highways, to mass transit and re-localization and de-globalization of economies. A lot of the solutions will be simply a matter of whether we can unwind alot of bad choices made when energy and resources were cheap...and were pushed through by lobbyists for oil companies and car manufacturers.

A permanent, sustainable economy will not be possible as long as we have the present banking and monetary systems. In brief, fractional reserve banking leads to the necessity of creating more and more debt by banks....which are payed back through continued inflation of the money supply....and that means economic growth is forced to increase or the economy stagnates....and the bankers earn their profits by seizing property and assets of borrowers, whether they be mortgage-holders or entire nation states! Governments have to get back into the business of creating and managing the money supply that they are ultimately responsible; and it has to be taken away from the banks.

Imagine if you were teleported 50, 100, 200 years in the future! In a world where the remaining ice has melted or will soon melt...accompanied by sea level rise that will eventually top out at about 270 feet; global average temperatures are anywhere between 5 and 9 degrees C warmer than now; the oceans are dying from the anoxic effects of the slowing of the thermohaline circulation, acidification and declining oxygen levels; the Earth's Tropic Zone is often averaging temperatures above 140 degrees F (which will be lethal to all plant an animal life in that zone); most of the world's animal species are extinct or endangered....including humans......what are you going to tell them about why it was so important to extract petroleum products from tar sands in 2013?

Imagine that very same world, at the very same time, given that I managed to shut down the oil sands tomorrow. How would it be different? And how long would it take to catch up?

Your ideas are great, but they are of the "Let's find a way to cure all diseases" variety.

There is no way at all that the human race is going to get it together enough to have an effect on the climate. Look at all the meetings, conferences, etc that have taken place, without any real agreement worth mentioning. Everyone wants someone else to feel the pain when in all reality, it probably wouldn't work if everyone felt it.

I suppose if everyone switched to nuclear power all over the world it might give us an extra year or two. Good idea?

(An aside: Carbon tax. I don't mind paying more for gas, from a curbing pollution perspective. It wouldn't bother me if the price of gas doubled or tripled. I would ban all recreational use of fossil fuels, too, were I in charge. No Snowmobiles, ATVs, Seadoos, etc. All gone. I would ban gas lawnmowers and leaf blowers. I would ban lawns. But none of it would make any difference to the climate. I just don't like the idea of polluting for fun.)

[WIP]

[/size]

nice misrepresentation of my statements! This subject has been beat on to no end in blog/forum worlds - and you/TimG keep resurrecting it here on MLW... if I'd really taken the bait, we'd be into another 10+ page diversion. As it is, MLW member WIP's recent interesting comments have been, for all purposes buried/lost to others who may casually run at this thread at its open end... taken over with yet another round of this whirlingDervish! And again, if you feel a burning need... if anyone feels a burning need to raise this issue, yet again, could there be a decision made to concentrate it within one of the many other threads where the many, many page discussions on the subject occur!

Thanks, I'm glad somebody noticed it! Because a lot of people will just look at the last page of a thread they've been following and miss any posts that have linked sources and have taken a substantial amount of time to write. But, that's the whole strategy behind sandbagging on internet forums! Just blather back and forth between a two or three friends with chatroom level comments and rebuttals become unnecessary. I notice this happen a lot on other popular threads, where a few highly motivated frequent posters want to drown out their opposition with quantity, rather than quality.

And yes, this isn't 1993! The science is in and settled on AGW; so those arguing against evidence have to follow the same strategy that evolution-deniers go to: provide no alternative explanatory theories for the evidence, and just attack the accepted theories around the edges - looking for discrepencies. Why anyone would consider it a big deal that climate modelling isn't an exact science is beyond me. The Earth's biosphere is an extremely complex system that is not going to be fully understood for a long time. But, the basics, such as the Greenhouse Effect and that CO2 and methane are greenhouse gases has been understood for centuries. In more recent times, the rapid and accelerating rates of increase in atmospheric CO2 and methane have added urgency to do something about it. While the few oil and coal-funded scientists who churn out muddled studies claiming that CO2 has an upper limit in forcing temperatures....defying the physics of these gases....are always on the lookout for data that is below predicted limits, while never commenting on the stacks of data showing IPCC and other reports have dangerously underestimated temperature increases and ocean acidification. We've been warned for years now that there will come a time when tipping points are reached, and permafrost and methane hydrates will start to surface and enter the atmosphere. We are probably into this stage already, and dealing with climate change is going to become an issue of trying to manage and minimize future increases, rather than stopping the increase in carbon entirely....the horses seem to be already out of the barn on that one!

And that's why a lot of brave scientists like Michael Mann and James Hansen have gone beyond what their jobs ask of them, and sounded the alarm about the present business strategy of exploiting the last and most carbon-intensive sources of petroleum (shale oils and tar sands), at the risk of legal harassment, political interference and even death threats. Considering all the carbon that's being added already, putting all of this sequestered carbon into the atmosphere, really could be the end of the human race as Hansen warns.

[WIP]

The core problem is that energy and resource consumption have to keep rising to feed population growth. I'll agree to any ideas you come up with to stem that. (As for the bankers comment: is that the real problem? Rich people who won't share?) The highlighted bit we agree on completely.

No, they don't have to keep rising! And they cannot keep rising indefinitely because, if nothing else, we live in a finite world with finite resources. The Earth cannot just grow larger and put more stuff in the ground to meet our expectations and demands. Nor can the Earth keep recycling more and more of the crap that we are dumping into the commons for nature to just recycle somehow and keep the place liveable. One very old scientist - James Lovelock, who is in his 90's now, but still writing and publishing research, has been considered a crank ever since he came up with the Gaia Hypothesis with biologist - Lyn Margulis almost 50 years ago. Supporters and opponents thought they were trying to resurrect goddess-worship or something with the claim that the Earth's ecological systems are part of a cooperative, rather than a competitive system. A lot of the findings generated by the Gaia approach to studying planetary systems is considered conventional science today.....like the generally accepted theory now that temperatures, and air and water circulation systems move up and down rapidly by reaching "tipping points," rather than gradually moving up and down. The Earth is alive and reacts like a living organism to change. And the reactions are often unexpected and unpredictable from just looking at a simple analysis of the major inputs into the system. Point being: if we were smart, we would be very, very cautious about all choices we make which increase the demands we place on the Earth's biospheric systems. We won't know whether we have pushed the planet into a dangerous, fatal positive feedback cycle until it is too late! So, if that's not good enough reason to put a halt to demands for more and more growth of all sorts, I don't know what is!

Option two is the most likely scenario because option 1 is never going to happen.

Could be right! But, option 2 means eventual total collapse of civilization and survivors returning to some sort of hunter/gatherer existence of our ancestors. The difference is that, during the long era of the Pleistocene, hunter/gatherers were constantly on the move because of cold weather causing dramatic weather changes. Future survivors would be trying to do the same thing and avoid the stresses of living on a hot planet. Trying to survive that for the following 100,000 to 1 million years would be a venture into totally unexplored territory.

How can one not acknowledge AGW? I don't know of anyone who seriously says that climate change is not happening.

Don't ask me! But some apparently do.

The argument is not whether AGW is happening. The argument is that there is nothing we can do to stop it. Shutting down the oil sands is a leftist reaction to big business making money from natural resources, not any kind of reaction to climate change. It wouldn't have any noticable effect.

Refer to paragraph one I suppose! Because my thinking on economics and politics is framed around the fact that we are already in an emergency caused by growth in consumption and population. I might have been moving left already because I was starting to see the shift to the right as a move towards the extreme, but most of my recent shift to radical left and steady state economics is because the conventional conservative and liberal capitalist ways of doing things are unsustainable.

Unless you could get the rest of the world to follow suit, and then it would probably be touch and go.

If we're talking of the undeveloped world, we could have brought them on board 20 years ago by leading through example. But, instead we've allowed our corporations and bankers to plunder the undeveloped world for resources and outsourced many of our polluting industries to foul their environments. I don't have Canada's numbers off the top of my head, but even with the outsourcing, the U.S. still consumes 25% of the world's resources while being less than 5% of world population. The western demand for energy and products is at the center of this problem. If the West had scaled back, and refrained from economic colonization of most of the third world, it wouldn't be an issue today.

I too, hope that industry installs more pollution controls to prevent this. I hope they develop ways of using less fresh water, and I hope they develop better ways of dealing with the tailings. And if they won't, I hope they are forced to. No brainer.

The tailing ponds that are growing in size and posing greater and greater potential dangers, are exhibit A for how counter-technology solutions often lead to even bigger problems. Sure, the companies can say they are trying to develop ways of reprocessing those tailings, but how likely is that? They are full of heavy metals and all sorts of toxic chemicals.

Aside from the carbon-intensive aspects of going after unconventional oil sources, the problem still remains that demand for oil keeps increasing! Until steps are taken to stop increasing demand for energy, there is no permanent fix.

Imagine that very same world, at the very same time, given that I managed to shut down the oil sands tomorrow. How would it be different? And how long would it take to catch up?

Again, economic growth and the demands for more and more energy has to stop. That is non-negotiable; because the negotiating partner is ultimately Planet Earth, not political adversaries.