climate change

[mistermack]

25 minutes ago, MigL said:

I do believe it was you, Misterstraw, who referenced the ( non ? ) retreating Arctic ( mostly ) floating ice, in an on-going discussion about rising sea levels.

If it was not your intent to link the two effects, you should clearly state so.

 

Why don't you quote me then? It's easy enough to do. If you look, you will find that I was replying to to a point made by theVat, and I quoted his words in my reply to make that clear. 

[Intoscience]

18 hours ago, dimreepr said:

Off the top of my head, site the factory next to a big arsed shit farm and use the waste material; making both the shit farm and your company profitable (without taxing the people), worthy of a sizeable investment, no

Ideal in an ideological world. Find me someone who has the funds, is prepared to make the investment, and is happy to deal with the whole logistical nightmare of re-locating 480 people. Oh, and that's if you get planning permission and approval from the environmentalists who don't want industry within agricultural or park land areas.

There are thousands of ways all of us big or small can, and maybe, should reduce our waste in general, especially that which contributes to carbon emissions.  It's beneficial all round to encourage renewable energy (except those that profit from fossil fuels).Unfortunately, profit takes precedence over everything else as we all know. The world is full of greed and selfishness. How do you encourage the have's to help the have not's?  

I'm not arguing against the need to reduce carbon emissions, I have conceded to it. I'm arguing that government's and agencies are not (at least in my experience so far) doing enough to support the efforts required to achieve net zero, especially so if the deadline is going to be brought forward.   

[dimreepr]

5 hours ago, Intoscience said:

Ideal in an ideological world. Find me someone who has the funds, is prepared to make the investment, and is happy to deal with the whole logistical nightmare of re-locating 480 people. Oh, and that's if you get planning permission and approval from the environmentalists who don't want industry within agricultural or park land areas.

There are thousands of ways all of us big or small can, and maybe, should reduce our waste in general, especially that which contributes to carbon emissions.  It's beneficial all round to encourage renewable energy (except those that profit from fossil fuels).Unfortunately, profit takes precedence over everything else as we all know. The world is full of greed and selfishness. How do you encourage the have's to help the have not's?  

I'm not arguing against the need to reduce carbon emissions, I have conceded to it. I'm arguing that government's and agencies are not (at least in my experience so far) doing enough to support the efforts required to achieve net zero, especially so if the deadline is going to be brought forward.   

Indeed, in an ideal world this wouldn't even be a question (with proof of concept).

And we're back to what we can do, what is affordable to us; I use my wealth, which is essentially a computer and internet connection, to digitally point the finger at anyone who'll listen and ask "how are you using your wealth to benefit others?" (Greta has a bigger audience) having pointed out that ("no man is an island complete and of itself" - Donne) no man is a self made millionaire, and anyone who claims they are, are worse than children, because their ignorance is willfully embraced.

 

[Genady]

5 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

"how are you using your wealth to benefit others?"

I use it to benefit the animal shelter. 

[dimreepr]

9 minutes ago, Genady said:

I use it to benefit the animal shelter. 

Good for you, I love dog's.

But I have to check, does that put you in the Mistermack camp?

Who thinks the problem would be solved if we artificially reduce the odds, by artificially reducing the number of human's?

Because I also love, some, humans... 

[Genady]

1 minute ago, dimreepr said:

But I have to check, does that put you in the Mistermack camp?

Who thinks the problem would be solved if we artificially reduce the odds, by artificially reducing the number of human's?

No, it does not.

[mistermack]

1 hour ago, dimreepr said:

Who thinks the problem would be solved if we artificially reduce the odds, by artificially reducing the number of human's?

What's wrong with that? We've artificially hugely increased the number of humans. 

[TheVat]

23 hours ago, mistermack said:

I've been seeing dire predictions about sea ice for the last forty years. The Arctic should be ice free by now. In reality, here's the current extent : 

This is turning into an argument with Creationists: deflect one bit of nonsense, they quickly post another.  Your graphic is from early March.  LoL.  No one has predicted an ice free Arctic in March - an absurd cherry pick of data.  It is summer sea ice which is shrinking, and year to year comparisons are made in September when it's at its minimum extent. 

 https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/arctic-sea-ice/#:~:text=Summer Arctic sea ice extent,covered in ice) each September.

As for prediction, look at the overall.  The earth got warmer, as predicted, in a sudden spike that followed the Industrial Revolution and usually takes thousands of years when its part of a natural cycle.   You can cherry pick data about ice or temperature fluctuations or whatever the Heartland Institute (or other oil industry sponsored think tanks) is peddling these days, or you can try to learn what changes are happening  NOW, and what climatology and atmospheric physics have found to be causative factors.

And no, climate science is not some idiot infant of a field.  Indeed, its roots go back to Eunice Foote, who did research on the warming effects of CO2 in the mid-1800s, so one could point out that it is an older scientific field than subatomic physics, relativistic theory, genomics, virology, and others that we consider quite respectable.

[mistermack]

4 minutes ago, TheVat said:

an absurd cherry pick of data. 

Yeh right, I cherry picked today's image. How very dishonest. Anyway, the relevant thing about the image is the comparison of todays ice, compared to the long term average, which is there for all to see. 

And from your own link : 

   the

Which is showing a flat graph for the last fifteen years. 

[Peterkin]

 I can just about discern an overall trend. By no means conclusive, of course. If a patient's chart looked like that, without intervention we could say, "We won't have a definitive diagnosis until after the autopsy." 

[CharonY]

2 hours ago, Peterkin said:

 I can just about discern an overall trend. By no means conclusive, of course. If a patient's chart looked like that, without intervention we could say, "We won't have a definitive diagnosis until after the autopsy." 

That is the thing, one would normally not just eyeball things arbitrarily but one can calculate trends. And if one look at the calculations associated with the graph, it is shown that that the current shrink rate is about 12.6% per decade. Visually, the 2012 data point is misleading as it has huge drop which kind of makes the subsequent movements more shallow.

Basically the fluctuations (or noise) in the system makes eyeballing trends difficult. A different way to look at the same time is to add more months and then plot averages over several decades , which smoothes out things a bit.

Here you can see that especially starting around 2001-2010 not only the overall loss was quite a bit steeper, but also that recovery did not reach previous levels anymore, resulting in an increased net loss (red dashed line is the aforementioned extreme case of 2012). That being said, the situation is likely more dire, as newer methods including measuring the depth of ice (as these are only measuring the extent) suggest that the ice is also getting thinner. So the volume of ice lost, is actually a fair bit higher.

 

 

 

[MigL]

 

15 hours ago, mistermack said:

Climate science is not like physics or biology or maths.

I beg to differ.
The 'greenhouse gas' effect is  well understood, and related to the characteristic black body re-radiation of heat fron the Earth at about 10^o ( in the microwave range whre it causes bending/stretching of intermolecular bonds ), as opposed to incoming solar, centered at 4000^o ( the visble range which mostly affects electron energy levels ).
The absorption and re-emission of this microwavw radiation is upsetting the equilibrium ( because a lot of it can be re-directed back to the Earth, instead of into space ) and causing the Earth to retain more heat, and I'm sure someone has probably quantified this effect by now.

This is a large simplification, but it is Physics, Chemistry and Math.
So do keep in mind we are a science forum.

[TheVat]

1 hour ago, CharonY said:

Here you can see that especially starting around 2001-2010 not only the overall loss was quite a bit steeper, but also that recovery did not reach previous levels anymore, resulting in an increased net loss. That being said, the situation is likely more dire, as newer methods including measuring the depth of ice (as these are only measuring the extent) suggest that the ice is also getting thinner. So the volume of ice lost, is actually a fair bit higher.

Was going to point this out to Mack, as well as the importance of looking at longer trending from 1980 to now, but I'm getting the message that his knowledge is as complete as he wants it to be on this topic.  

 

[CharonY]

3 hours ago, MigL said:

This is a large simplification, but it is Physics, Chemistry and Math.
So do keep in mind we are a science forum.

I think the original argument was worse, as it appears that the claim was that the natural sciences had to be hundreds of years  old to be valid. This is of course silly as modern methodologies and theoretical frameworks have shifted especially in the life sciences, with rather few concepts being several hundreds years old (but still heavily modified).

But that all being said, climate science is actually fairly old though it was not a separate science. Mathematicians and physicists like Fourier and Tyndall looked at factors affecting Earth's temperature back then, for example.

 

17 hours ago, Intoscience said:

I'm not arguing against the need to reduce carbon emissions, I have conceded to it. I'm arguing that government's and agencies are not (at least in my experience so far) doing enough to support the efforts required to achieve net zero, especially so if the deadline is going to be brought forward. 

I think most environmentalists, activists, but also climate researchers would agree with you. There was economic argument that starting earlier would have been way cheaper, but we sat on our collective arses until things got really urgent. Generally speaking, politicians do not like big changes as they (similar to companies) dislike uncertainty. Up until it is certain to be bad, so they are forced to make some moves. It is a tragedy of commons all over, and denial seems to be one of the few ways to feel good about it.

But not to sound too fatalistic, one could argue that some movement is better than no movement.

[Ken Fabian]

10 hours ago, mistermack said:

Yeh right, I cherry picked today's image. How very dishonest. Anyway, the relevant thing about the image is the comparison of todays ice, compared to the long term average, which is there for all to see. 

And from your own link : 

   the

Which is showing a flat graph for the last fifteen years. 

Makes me think of an inverted version of this -

Pick any relevant measure or indicator of ongoing climate change and you can find (too) short periods when they go down rather than up (or for ice, up rather than down... whilst the overall trend, as predicted, remains. Still the facile arguments that seek to interpret the downward temperature variability as trends but not count the upward variability at all continue - along with the willingness of people who should know better to believe that this is incompatible with sound global warming science.

My own preferred measure of real change to the heat balance of our world now rarely goes more than a single year without hitting a new high - without showing any of that "warming has stopped" that Arctic sea ice is claimed to be showing -

[StringJunky]

Mistermack is talking the weather, not the climate.  

[Intoscience]

10 hours ago, CharonY said:

Generally speaking, politicians do not like big changes as they (similar to companies) dislike uncertainty.

They don't like the idea of losing big sums of money that will affect their current wealth and/or status in order to mitigate a disaster that is (to most of them) far enough in the future that it's not likely to impact them personally. 

And if it does, they will just up sticks with along with their wedge of cash and find the highest hill to live on. 

[dimreepr]

21 hours ago, mistermack said:

What's wrong with that? We've artificially hugely increased the number of humans. 

Well firstly, how did we manage that? Did we keep the fetus' in a box?

And AFAIK the only way to artificially alter the number of humans on the planet, is murder and there's A LOT wrong with that.

We could ask for volunteers, I assume you'd be first in the queue... 😇😉 

10 hours ago, StringJunky said:

Mistermack is talking the weather, not the climate.  

He's talking more than that, which also affects the climate. 😉

Edited March 30, 2023 by dimreepr

[mistermack]

39 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

Well firstly, how did we manage that? Did we keep the fetus' in a box?

No, we massively improved the infant mortality rate, using modern medicine, and also increased life expctancy in the same manner. Did you not notice any of that?

41 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

AFAIK the only way to artificially alter the number of humans on the planet, is murder

Is that really true, or are you playing dumb? There are many ways to affect population growth, including education, free and available contraception, and financial moves like pensions for the elderly. In many countries that have this sort of thing, the population naturally begins to fall with hardly any need for murder.

[dimreepr]

1 minute ago, mistermack said:

No, we massively improved the infant mortality rate, using modern medicine, and also increased life expctancy in the same manner. Did you not notice any of that?

I think we have a vastly different interpretation of the word artificial and how we are different from nature.

7 minutes ago, mistermack said:

Is that really true, or are you playing dumb? There are many ways to affect population growth, including education, free and available contraception, and financial moves like pensions for the elderly. In many countries that have this sort of thing, the population naturally begins to fall with hardly any need for murder.

It's you who are playing dumb, I said " the number of humans on the planet" not, the number of potential humans on the planet, for example, a pregnant woman does not equal two human's on any spreadsheet...  

[mistermack]

2 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

I think we have a vastly different interpretation of the word artificial

We certainly do

 

5 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

I said " the number of humans on the planet" not, the number of potential humans on the planet,

Pointless semantics then. But even then, you've got it wrong. The number of humans on the planet is artificially altered every time they send someone to the space station. Or bring someone back.

[dimreepr]

1 minute ago, mistermack said:

We certainly do

 

Pointless semantics then. But even then, you've got it wrong. The number of humans on the planet is artificially altered every time they send someone to the space station. Or bring someone back.

LOL, how is that supernatural???  

[mistermack]

2 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

LOL, how is that supernatural???  

Now you're being weird.

Edited March 30, 2023 by mistermack
spel

[dimreepr]

8 minutes ago, mistermack said:

Now you're being weird.

Am I, what is your definition of artificial?

[mistermack]

17 hours ago, MigL said:

On 3/29/2023 at 5:04 AM, mistermack said:

Climate science is not like physics or biology or maths.

I beg to differ.
The 'greenhouse gas' effect is  well understood, and related to the characteristic black body re-radiation of heat fron the Earth at about 10^o ( in the microwave range whre it causes bending/stretching of intermolecular bonds ), as opposed to incoming solar, centered at 4000^o ( the visble range which mostly affects electron energy levels ).
The absorption and re-emission of this microwavw radiation is upsetting the equilibrium ( because a lot of it can be re-directed back to the Earth, instead of into space ) and causing the Earth to retain more heat, and I'm sure someone has probably quantified this effect by now.

This is a large simplification, but it is Physics, Chemistry and Math.
So do keep in mind we are a science forum.

"Climate science" in modern parlance means the study and prediction of climate change, to practically everyone on the planet. And in particular, predicting the effect of human-caused greenhouse gases on the future climate. Physics, chemistry and maths are of course involved in that, but the attempt to model future climate change is brand new and has no track record, unlike maths, physics and chemistry.