andyx1205 wrote:UN climate talks see 'delayer countries' throw away the 2C goal

The goal of holding global warming to 2C will be missed if the world's largest economies insist on delaying negotiations

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2 ... es-2c-goal

When psychologists identified the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance – the ability to believe two contradictory things at the same time – they might have been describing the world of international climate change negotiations.

(snippage)

Do we have a death-wish or what?

It sure looks that way. Too bad those of us who don't will get swept away by the same climate change that'll do in all those who do!

NOTE FOR THE MODS: I wish andyx1205 had posted this in (what I think is) the relevant thread, "Climate Can Kicked Down The Road," and to that end I'll ask you to consider merging the two. Thanks!

Globe wrote:

FACT-MAN-2 wrote:
Well, not really.

In AR4 IPCC presented four different scenarios for its projections to the year 2100. Each was thoroughly explained as to its assumptions and methdologies. The key difference in these scenarios is their forecast of GHG emissions, with some assuming more and others assuming less based on differences one can easily assume in industrial output, deforestation, ocean uptake, and other similar factors.

The IPCC most assuredly does not "ask" anyone to accept their work at face value, they simply present their work, the data that it's built from, the methodologies and assumptions employed in it, the GCMs its derived from, and the results. Nobody has to accept any of this at face value and in fact are perfectly free to question any part of it.

That's right.... you are American.

No. I'm a Canadian Citizen residing in the country; I'm also a US citizen. I get the best of both worlds, what few there are to be had.

Globe wrote:
Which means that you have been spared the brunt of being asked to take it at face value.

(Btw IPCC = Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They make their reports to the governments who then in turn apply the measures they find prudent)

Why don't you tell me something I don't know?

At the same time, IPCC makes their Assessment Reports available to anyone who has use a computer and a browser and an Internet connection, all in easily readable PDF files, and at no charge I might add.

Globe wrote:
Just yesterday ANOTHER tax was put forward in Denmark, and the law will be passed. Simply asking us to cough up (once more on yet another area that can, remotely, be connected with CO2-emmissions.

When asked, the most coherent and intelligent answer to the taxes you get from the government and officials, drawing up the tax-proposals, is basically that IPCC have predicted that if we don't tax (pick something) we wont be able to stop global warming.

I put it a bit crude, but that's the gist of it, and they (the government that is partially employing the IPCC) tell us to to accept the findings on face value.

So.... for the majority of the population here, who don't read anything more challenging than an occasional Mankell novel, it has to be taken on face value.

To be frank, I don't care about any of this. Internal squabbles that go on in other countries have to be worked out by the people of those countries, to include better education for them if that appears to be in order (which I admit it does here).

Those kinds of squabbles have little to do with the science. They have everything to do with individual government's responses to what's reported. In this case and depending to some degree on the actual intent of this new tax to which you refer, if one accepts the idea that AGW is viable as an explanation for the warming we are experiencing, a properly targeted and scoped tax that will curb GHG emissions has to be seen as a good thing. The Australians just did it.

Globe wrote:

However, when they do so they have to do it scientifically, that is, they have to present their criticisms by scientific means, means that provide alternative explanation or conclusions the critic thinks are of better scientific efficasy. And, this has to be done in a peer-reviewed published paper or study, because, afterall, we cannot critique peer-reviewed science using non-peer-reviewed work and especially not just mere opinion.

Governments don't.

Actually, most accept the findings, they're own representatives are in on the final drafting of IPCC reports, they get an editorial round. Why wouldn't they accept what they themselves helped to create?

And much sound policymaking has occurred, it's not like it's zero or anything, far from it. The State of New York commissioned a highly regarded scientific group to develop a plan for them on how to deal with oncoming climate change; the US Department of Defense has studied what climate change means in terms of its national security mission. The Dutch are busy figuring out what they can do about rising sea levels; Many government now feature climate change agencies or commissions.

All of these things are being guided by he IPCCs reports, and especially the volume of AR4 that's titled "Guide or Policymakers."

Globe wrote:
Most people don't. They eat it.

There is some perverse streak in the human mind that somehow LOVE to feel guilty of something.

Speak for yourself. I don't suffer the slightest guilt, never have, never will. Conscious people usually don't.

Globe wrote:
Religion has thrived on that for millenias.

"millennia" will do. It is plural.

But religion has thrived on lots of different kinds of fears and misconceptions and misunderstandings and threats.

Globe wrote:

One of the reasons why the IPCC attached a 90 per cent probability to the forecasts it presented in AR4 is because there are uncertainties extant in various aspects of their analysis and synthesis, one of them being the affect that clouds have in the whole equation.

Agreed.

And exactly THAT is my beef.

That the 90% surety is magically transformed to 100% "we are going to burn in a self-made hell" as soon as it hits the streets.

You don't think we should be dealing with high probability realities?

If you went to bed some evening knowing there was a 90 per cent probability your house would catch fire sometime in the night, would you remain in bed?

Of course you wouldn't.

Same thing here, dude.

IPCC describes it this way:

Quantitatively calibrated levels of confidence .

Terminology Very High confidence
Degree of confidence in being correct At least 9 out of 10 chance of being correct

and

> 90% probability means "very likely."

Now, when IPCC's projections hit a 90 per cent degree of probability you don't think that's enough to prompt us to act? Most especially given the time lags that are involved?

I say you don't have the right to gamble with my life in this manner, or the lives of my offspring and theirs, not to mention countless others too numerous to mention.

See how that works?

Globe wrote:

The point you appear to be missing is that clouds cannot possibly have impacts on warming or cooling that would push IPCC's 90 per cent confidence level below that and reduce it to, oh, say a 30 per cent confidence level, or even an 82 per cent confidence level. And that's simply because the degree of forcing that clouds can possess in any case are vastly less than the forcings represented by C02 and other GHGs. The degree of forcing represented by clouds, whether positive or negative, is almost infintesimally smaller than these other gasses.

Read up on it.

Your assumption that I haven't is miles off the mark, Bubba.

Let's repeat the paragraph, maybe this time you won't miss it:

The point you appear to be missing is that clouds cannot possibly have impacts on warming or cooling that would push IPCC's 90 per cent confidence level below that and reduce it to, oh, say a 30 per cent confidence level, or even an 82 per cent confidence level. And that's simply because the degree of forcing that clouds can possess in any case are vastly less than the forcings represented by C02 and other GHGs. The degree of forcing represented by clouds, whether positive or negative, is almost infintesimally smaller than these other gasses

A little added emphasis with the underlining. I thought that might help you get it.

Globe wrote:
CERN was mentioned earlier in the thread. CERN confirmed a theory put forward in 1996 by a Danish professor about the cosmic ray flux on global cloud cover. Solar influence is important in that respect because, just as the magnetic field around earth, the solar magnetic field fluctuates. In the sun that is cause by the solar activity.

Henrik Svensmark was his name.... it got lost in the corners of my mind.

He was laughed out of the room by IPCC and the vast majority of climate scientists.

And you know this because you were there, right?

Globe wrote:
I suppose they will have to change their opinion about the effect of clouds, or lack of same, on global warming.

Well, actually, they won't, to wit:

The CERN/CLOUD results are surprisingly interesting…

Filed under: Aerosols Climate Science Sun-earth connections— gavin @ 24 August 2011
By Gavin Schmidt, NASA climatologist

see at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/ar ... teresting/

The long-awaited first paper from the CERN/CLOUD project has just been published in Nature. The paper, by Kirkby et al, describes changes in aerosol nucleation as a function of increasing sulphates, ammonia and ionisation in the CERN-based ‘CLOUD’ chamber. Perhaps surprisingly, the key innovation in this experimental set up is not the presence of the controllable ionisation source (from the Proton Synchrotron accelerator), but rather the state-of-the-art instrumentation of the chamber that has allowed them to see in unprecedented detail what is going on in the aerosol nucleation process (this is according to a couple of aerosol people I’ve spoken about this with).

This paper is actually remarkably free of the over-the-top spin that has accompanied previous papers, and that bodes very well for making actual scientific progress on this topic.

The paper first confirms some results that are well known: aerosol nucleation increases enormously when you add H2SO4 into the air (the biggest contributor to human aerosol impacts via the oxidation of our emissions of SO2), it increases further when you add ammonia (NH3), and it increases even more when you increase ionisation levels from neutral, to ambient ground levels, and to upper atmospheric levels (as long as you are below what is called the ‘ion-pair’ limit). However, the most intriguing result is that despite going to a lot of trouble to make sure the chamber was ultra-free of contaminants, the researchers found that within most of the aerosols that formed, there were traces of organic nitrogen compounds that must have been present in almost undetectably low concentrations.

The other intriguing finding is that aerosol nucleation rates in the chamber don’t match (by a an order of magnitude or more) actual formation rates seen in real world near-surface atmospheric layers at realistic temperatures (only in unrealistically cold conditions do rates come close). The authors speculate (quite convincingly) that this is precisely because they didn’t have enough volatile organic compounds (which are ubiquitous in the real world) to help get the nucleation started. This result will surely inspire some of their next experiments. All-in-all this is a treasure trove of results (and potential future results) for people tasked with trying to model or understand aerosol processes in the atmosphere.

However, aerosol nucleation experiments are not usually front page news, and the likely high public profile of this paper is only loosely related to the science that is actually being done. Rather, the excitement is based on the expectation that this work will provide some insight into the proposed cosmic ray/cloud/climate link that Svensmark (for instance) has claimed is the dominant driver of climate change (though note he is not an author on this paper, despite an earlier affiliation with the project). Indeed, the first justification for the CLOUD experiment was that: “The basic purpose of the CLOUD detector … is to confirm, or otherwise, a direct link between cosmic rays and cloud formation by measuring droplet formation in a controlled test-beam environment”. It is eminently predictable that the published results will be wildly misconstrued by the contrarian blogosphere as actually proving this link. However, that would be quite wrong.

We were clear in the 2006 post that establishing a significant GCR/cloud/climate link would require the following steps (given that we have known that ionisation plays a role in nucleation for decades). One would need to demonstrate:

… that increased nucleation gives rise to increased numbers of (much larger) cloud condensation nuclei (CCN)
… and that even in the presence of other CCN, ionisation changes can make a noticeable difference to total CCN
… and even if there were more CCN, you would need to show that this actually changed cloud properties significantly,
… and that given that change in cloud properties, you would need to show that it had a significant effect on radiative forcing.

Of course, to show that cosmic rays were actually responsible for some part of the recent warming, you would need to show that there was actually a decreasing trend in cosmic rays over recent decades – which is tricky, because there hasn’t been.

Data showing normalised changes in cosmic rays since 1953 do not reveal a significant downward trend. The exceptional solar minimum in 2008-2010 stands out a little.

The CLOUD results are not in any position to address any of these points, and anybody jumping to the conclusions that they have all been settled will be going way out on a limb. Indeed, there is a lot of evidence that (particularly) point 2 will not be satisfied (see for instance, Pierce and Adams (2009), and a new paper by Snow-Kropla et al).

So what changes did they show as a function of the CR activity? In going from neutral (shielded) conditions to ambient CR levels typical of the lower atmosphere, the ionisation changed by a factor of 2 to 10 (depending on the temperature – colder conditions are more sensitive). However this is a much bigger change (by an order of magnitude or more) than the percentage change in CR activity over a solar cycle (i.e. ~10-20%).

A rough calculation (by way of Jeff Pierce) that takes into account the square root dependence of ion concentrations on GCRs and the neutral nucleation in the CLOUD results, suggests that for average conditions the solar modulation of GCR would impact nucleation by about 1% – rising to perhaps 12% for the biggest changes in GCR seen in figure 2 at very cold temperatures. Thus the nucleation change as a result of real world GCR modulation is going to be much smaller than seen in these experiments, and much less important than the amount of pollutants.

In summary, this is a great example of doing science and making progress, even if it isn’t what they first thought they’d find.

Svensmark has, we might also note, recenty undergone a change of heart and has altered his views on AGW rather remarkably, from "No way, Jose" to "Well, I think AGW is probably right."

In other words, the man finally saw the light and was man enough to admit it.

Globe wrote:

In this light, your assertion that IPCC "Still use this in their models without fully understanding exactly WHAT IS GOING ON," becomes so much hogwash. What does "exactly" mean? I suspect it means you're not happy with a 90 per cent probability and think it ought to be 95 or 98 or even 100 per cent before it's acceptable, but rare is the science that goes that far. There's always a range of probability. Science doesn't even award the sun comig up tomorrow a 100 per cent probability.

That mean that as long as the effect of Stratospheric Clouds are still up for discussion and interpretation, they can't use THAT factor with any kind of precision, much less understanding in their models. And the error is double because they don't know whether those strato-clouds have a positive or negative effect on global warming.

That's just one of the factors that they do not understand.

So their 90% certainty of AGW should be 90% certainty of AGW "as far as we understand and can use the factors involved".

It is so by definition, you dope.

I thought you said you've read AR4?

Globe wrote:
Something that is taken into account in the material handed in to IPCC, but which is toned down to almost nothing or completely missing in the reports they release to the governments who pay the bill.

Hmmm, examples por favor?

And please none from unpublished science.

Globe wrote:

What we're really interested in learning is whether the atmosphere is warming, remaining steady, or cooling, and within the limits of the science at this point of its development, the results are clear, the planet is warming, and it is warming at an alarming rate not heretofore seen in the records outside of major events such as large scale volcanic eruptions or large releases of Methane, both of which have occurred from time to time over geologic time spans.

Absolutely. No argument there.

Good! We've made a little progress!

Globe wrote:

We are given added confidence in IPCC's forecasts by the fact that its GCMs hindcast the climate over geologic time frames that comport with paleo records and the reconstructions that have been built from them (ice cores, sedimentary rocks, tree rings) and if they can do that then we can have confidence they can also do it in forecasts. Moreover, shorter term predictions made by the IPCC have been consistently accurate.

Actually the predictions have not been all THAT accurate.
They have consistently predicted temps higher than later registered.

And they have, with each new report, adjusted their predictions downward.



They are still off, but getting better.

And you don't think that adjustments made over a 12 year period are just normal progress in the development of GCMs?

Isn't it interesting how in the top graph most of the entities reported cluser about a very narrow range of difference and that IPCCs 1990 report appears wildly off the mark but it's really only .2 degrees C higher?

I think the second graph's scale biases the presentation. But it still shows that IPCC;s 1990 reporting was only .03 degrees C higher than it reported out for 1995 and 2001, which interestingly are nearly identical.

I'd like to know the context in which these graphs were presented by their publishers.

Globe wrote:
Rather denialist websites citing IPCC than AGW-alarmist websites stating stuff like "End of the World" and "Saving our World" in their headers.

Besides.... NASA IS one of IPCC big contributors. Where do you think that IPCC get all the satellite data from? You know... those satellites put up there by NASA.
And...
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/SC11/demos/demo29.html

You think NASA's the only agency on the planet that puts sats up? Hell. NOAA has more up than NASA and the ESA has their share and the Japanese too, and the Russians.

Now go read and stop just grabbing graphics at your whim.

My overall impression from all that you've posted is that you are very angry with someone, I don't know who, and this somehow inspires you to beat up on scientists in general and climate scientists in particular and make exceeingly strong and entirely unwarranted claims about the way they go about doing their work, tinged perhaps with a little jealousy over them being taken seriously when you're not.

But as you yourself noted, life isn't always fair.

You appear also to be fixated on the way people and government take IPCC reporting, which you think is out of whack and yet seem unable to make a cogent case that this is indeed so. Instead, what you've really been good at is waffling.

I don't know how much more waffling I can take. You've given me a run for my money on that score.

For starters....
COuld you TRY not to be so freaking defensive as soon as something doesn't correlate 100% with your opinion?
Sensible discussions would be so much easier if you read what is written, rather than what you interpret it to be.

FACT-MAN-2 wrote:
No. I'm a Canadian Citizen residing in the country; I'm also a US citizen. I get the best of both worlds, what few there are to be had.

So.... you are American. Just as I would be Belgian if I ever got around to applying for citizenship.

Globe wrote:
Why don't you tell me something I don't know?

At the same time, IPCC makes their Assessment Reports available to anyone who has use a computer and a browser and an Internet connection, all in easily readable PDF files, and at no charge I might add.

And exactly how many do you think READ it?
Most take it from journalists and the (secondary) interpretations made by governments and experts employed directly by governments.

To be frank, I don't care about any of this. Internal squabbles that go on in other countries have to be worked out by the people of those countries, to include better education for them if that appears to be in order (which I admit it does here).

You should care though.
It's also called "Opinion-forming" in order to further a political ideology while making excuses for same ideology in order to make people accept it.

Those kinds of squabbles have little to do with the science. They have everything to do with individual government's responses to what's reported. In this case and depending to some degree on the actual intent of this new tax to which you refer, if one accepts the idea that AGW is viable as an explanation for the warming we are experiencing, a properly targeted and scoped tax that will curb GHG emissions has to be seen as a good thing. The Australians just did it.

Exactly. Doesn't have shit-all to do with science. It has to do with political ideology and interest. Something I hope you will agree with me doesn't belong anywhere near science.

Globe wrote:
Actually, most accept the findings, they're own representatives are in on the final drafting of IPCC reports, they get an editorial round. Why wouldn't they accept what they themselves helped to create?

I could call this naive, but I wont.
Governmental representatives have NOTHING to do in drafting reports on scientific findings.

And much sound policymaking has occurred, it's not like it's zero or anything, far from it. The State of New York commissioned a highly regarded scientific group to develop a plan for them on how to deal with oncoming climate change; the US Department of Defense has studied what climate change means in terms of its national security mission. The Dutch are busy figuring out what they can do about rising sea levels; Many government now feature climate change agencies or commissions.

Yet.... we don't see significantly more windmills. Or wave-pistons. Or encouragement to place solar cells on the roofs of private homes. Or cars that are cheaper because they have no emissions. Or decentralizing that will cut commuting and emissions. Or "Buy Local".
There are heavy financial interests tied up on this which cause them to treat the symptoms rather than going to the root of the cause.
Until they do that I wont give a farthing for all their rhetoric and projects.

All of these things are being guided by he IPCCs reports, and especially the volume of AR4 that's titled "Guide or Policymakers."

None of it is addressing the real problem. The pollution. Which is the cause of all this.
Actually in the summary the IPCC repeatedly emphasize "Sustainable development". Something the measures of a Dike or any other measures along those lines DOES NOT address.

"millennia" will do. It is plural.

But religion has thrived on lots of different kinds of fears and misconceptions and misunderstandings and threats.

Which wouldn't work if people were not driven by guilt.

You don't think we should be dealing with high probability realities?

But not translate it to 100% as soon as it's out of the hands of the scientists.

If you went to bed some evening knowing there was a 90 per cent probability your house would catch fire sometime in the night, would you remain in bed?

Of course you wouldn't.

Same thing here, dude.

Climate and you house are two different things.
Besides.... I grew up right below a windmill. It was placed about 20 meters from my room.
I learned to live with the risk that the wing-tip would come crashing through my ceiling. Something that, at that time, was a substantial risk every time the wind rose about 18 Beaufort.
Sorry.... I don't really worry about my own life. Much as I enjoy it, something will eventually kill me.

IPCC describes it this way:

Quantitatively calibrated levels of confidence .

Terminology Very High confidence
Degree of confidence in being correct At least 9 out of 10 chance of being correct

and

> 90% probability means "very likely."

Now, when IPCC's projections hit a 90 per cent degree of probability you don't think that's enough to prompt us to act? Most especially given the time lags that are involved?

I say you don't have the right to gamble with my life in this manner, or the lives of my offspring and theirs, not to mention countless others too numerous to mention.

See how that works?

And I say you don't have the right to dictate to me what I can and cannot believe or think.
See how it works.

Your assumption that I haven't is miles off the mark, Bubba.

Let's repeat the paragraph, maybe this time you won't miss it:

The point you appear to be missing is that clouds cannot possibly have impacts on warming or cooling that would push IPCC's 90 per cent confidence level below that and reduce it to, oh, say a 30 per cent confidence level, or even an 82 per cent confidence level. And that's simply because the degree of forcing that clouds can possess in any case are vastly less than the forcings represented by C02 and other GHGs. The degree of forcing represented by clouds, whether positive or negative, is almost infintesimally smaller than these other gasses

A little added emphasis with the underlining. I thought that might help you get it.

You provide no link, and I am not going to search all the links posted in this thread.

And you know this because you were there, right?

No. Because he has been ridiculed publicly since he put his theory out there.
http://www.physicstoday.org/daily_editi ... /1.2603412

Jolis recounts the CLOUD experiment’s background, including the work of Henrik Svensmark, whom she portrays as a victim of the unscientific suppression of climate contrarianism. She also insinuates that anti-contrarian politics caused long delays in the start of the CLOUD experiment. She stipulates that “while the cosmic-ray theory has been ridiculed from the start by those who subscribe to the anthropogenic-warming theory, both Mr. Kirkby and Mr. Svensmark hold that human activity is contributing to climate change. All they question is its importance relative to other, natural factors.”

and...
The cosmic-ray theory have been sneered at for decades.

I suppose they will have to change their opinion about the effect of clouds, or lack of same, on global warming.
Well, actually, they won't, to wit:

....snip.... (Sorry. The posts get too long)

In other words, the man finally saw the light and was man enough to admit it.

*cough*
He never denied the effect of GHG or the possibility of AGW. He merely pointed out that there was a factor, may be strong may be not, that was not taken into account.

It is so by definition, you dope.

I thought you said you've read AR4?

Please refrain from name calling. It's highly unflattering... to the one doing the name calling.

Yes I read it. And I probably noted different things than you did.
I say again.... It's not IPCC as such I have a beef with. It's not even the work done I have a beef with.
It's the fact that they make predictions based on not too well understood factors.
And then pass it on to the political system, which then make their OWN predictions and policies.
Each layer add to the distortion of what should be science.

Hmmm, examples por favor?

And please none from unpublished science.

Can't give examples on something that doesn't exist.
However the uncertainty about the precision of the models are not mentioned in the "Summary for Policy Makers".

Good! We've made a little progress!

No we are not. We are establishing that you don't pay attention to what I have posted in previous posts.

And you don't think that adjustments made over a 12 year period are just normal progress in the development of GCMs?

Isn't it interesting how in the top graph most of the entities reported cluser about a very narrow range of difference and that IPCCs 1990 report appears wildly off the mark but it's really only .2 degrees C higher?

I think the second graph's scale biases the presentation. But it still shows that IPCC;s 1990 reporting was only .03 degrees C higher than it reported out for 1995 and 2001, which interestingly are nearly identical.

I'd like to know the context in which these graphs were presented by their publishers.

Link says it all. Nature.com.
And it went completely over your head that I actually COMMENDED IPCC for correcting their predictions over time??v

You think NASA's the only agency on the planet that puts sats up? Hell. NOAA has more up than NASA and the ESA has their share and the Japanese too, and the Russians.

Still doesn't mean that NASA doens't contribute quite a lot. Which was what you claimed they didn't.

My overall impression from all that you've posted is that you are very angry with someone, I don't know who, and this somehow inspires you to beat up on scientists in general and climate scientists in particular and make exceeingly strong and entirely unwarranted claims about the way they go about doing their work, tinged perhaps with a little jealousy over them being taken seriously when you're not.

I'm angry??
I think I'm the only one here not getting riled up enough about disagreeing on AGW (note AGW not GW as there is substantial evidence showing that the planet a the moment is in a warming period) to resort to name calling, accusations and direct personal attacks.

But as you yourself noted, life isn't always fair.

You appear also to be fixated on the way people and government take IPCC reporting, which you think is out of whack and yet seem unable to make a cogent case that this is indeed so. Instead, what you've really been good at is waffling.

I don't know how much more waffling I can take. You've given me a run for my money on that score.

So you are not at all worried that science is getting so tangled up in politics that it's getting hard for the Average Joe to tell one from the other?

Doesn't really matter if it's for the cause of Global Warming.
I think it's despicable that they wont cut pollution for any reason.
Pollution kills and make people seriously ill, which in turn is very expensive for society as a whole.

Edit----------
Oh crap. Merger.

This post is an answer to THIS post.
http://www.rationalskepticism.org/news- ... l#p1095083

Globe wrote: For starters....

COuld you TRY not to be so freaking defensive as soon as something doesn't correlate 100% with your opinion?
Sensible discussions would be so much easier if you read what is written, rather than what you interpret it to be.

I think my reading comprehension skills are well in order, thank you.

And I at least know how to use my <Enter> key to properly space paragraphs.

I'll cop to being somewhat aggressive against what I perceive to be wrongheaded thinking, and on this issue I've run into more of that than I ever cared to so it gets a little old, a bit boring and tiresome. This conversation's feeling too much like 2003 to me. I've been here and done this a thousand times.

A word of caution here, I'm not going to spend the inordinate amount of time it takes to plow through your post, the way I did last time. I'll be hitting a few highlights and leave it at that. I have better things to be doing and long posts in this software do become tedious editing jobs.

Globe wrote:
So.... you are American. Just as I would be Belgian if I ever got around to applying for citizenship.

I was born and raised and grew up and served in the armed force of the United States. Then I came to Canada, where I am a naturalized citizen.

Globe wrote:
You should care though.
It's also called "Opinion-forming" in order to further a political ideology while making excuses for same ideology in order to make people accept it.

I'm not Danish. It's not my usual behavior or practice to butt my nose into other people's affairs. I'm insufficiently well informed to do that anyway.

So I still don't care.

Globe wrote:

Those kinds of squabbles have little to do with the science. They have everything to do with individual government's responses to what's reported. In this case and depending to some degree on the actual intent of this new tax to which you refer, if one accepts the idea that AGW is viable as an explanation for the warming we are experiencing, a properly targeted and scoped tax that will curb GHG emissions has to be seen as a good thing. The Australians just did it.

Exactly. Doesn't have shit-all to do with science. It has to do with political ideology and interest. Something I hope you will agree with me doesn't belong anywhere near science.

Absolutely.

Globe wrote:

fact-man-2 wrote:
Actually, most accept the findings, they're own representatives are in on the final drafting of IPCC reports, they get an editorial round. Why wouldn't they accept what they themselves helped to create?

I could call this naive, but I wont. Governmental representatives have NOTHING to do in drafting reports on scientific findings.

Absolute bullshit.

You apparently have no idea about how the IPCC's working groups go about their business of finalizing the texts of their respective parts of an AR. There is an editorial round in which policymakers and analysts from member countries participate in the writing of final drafts. Some huge pitched battles have gone on in this round between climate scientists and these others, which have been covered in the news, or at least in environmental news. They'll often argue over the choice of a single word in a sentence. There's a couple of rather infamous cases of these kinds of arguments.

Eventually, they all get resolved however, becuse IPCC operates on the basis of concensus, votes are not taken or held. The participants ultimately have to agree on some rendition of the texts. And they do. This sort of contentious finalizing became so intense in getting AR4 done it delayed publication of the report several months.

It's best if you don't comment on things you don't know anything about.

Globe wrote:

And much sound policymaking has occurred, it's not like it's zero or anything, far from it. The State of New York commissioned a highly regarded scientific group to develop a plan for them on how to deal with oncoming climate change; the US Department of Defense has studied what climate change means in terms of its national security mission. The Dutch are busy figuring out what they can do about rising sea levels; Many government now feature climate change agencies or commissions.

Yet.... we don't see significantly more windmills. Or wave-pistons. Or encouragement to place solar cells on the roofs of private homes. Or cars that are cheaper because they have no emissions. Or decentralizing that will cut commuting and emissions. Or "Buy Local".

There are heavy financial interests tied up on this which cause them to treat the symptoms rather than going to the root of the cause.

Until they do that I wont give a farthing for all their rhetoric and projects.

Actually, we are seeing "significantly more windmills" and solar generating plants, the California desert is awash with both, and there are renewable energy projects underway everywhere round the world.

And alternatively fueled autos are being adveertised in American and Canadian media and we're seeing more and more of them on our roads.

And airlines are taking a close look at biofuels and testing them for adoption in the near future, Lufthansa being a leader in this.

I can't help it if you choose to look the other way.

Mind you, I don't think that what we're seeing is anywhere near enough, but the growth of it is accelerating. I've already conveyed this kind of information. Use Google, go look for yourself.

Globe wrote:

All of these things are being guided by he IPCCs reports, and especially the volume of AR4 that's titled "Guide or Policymakers."

None of it is addressing the real problem. The pollution. Which is the cause of all this.

Thats simply not true. Every alternatively powered auto that's sold is one less internal-combustion auto on the road; every windfarm and every solar power facility takes some load off fossil fuel generation, which means they burn less fuel. The massive changeover of light bulbs that's gone on in recent years means there's less draw from the grid, less fossil fuel burned to generate juice. Cities and towns across North America have "gone green" and committed to reducing ther carbon footprints, and are in fact reducing them.

It's all coming a bit late to the party but that doesn't mean it isn't coming.

Globe wrote:
Actually in the summary the IPCC repeatedly emphasize "Sustainable development". Something the measures of a Dike or any other measures along those lines DOES NOT address.

I don't get what you mean here.

Globe wrote:
But not translate it to 100% as soon as it's out of the hands of the scientists.

Ever hear the saying "for all practical purposes"?

Globe wrote:
Climate and you house are two different things.

Not in my analogy they weren't. Do you get how an analogy works? Apparently not.

Globe wrote:
Besides.... I grew up right below a windmill. It was placed about 20 meters from my room.
I learned to live with the risk that the wing-tip would come crashing through my ceiling. Something that, at that time, was a substantial risk every time the wind rose about 18 Beaufort.
Sorry.... I don't really worry about my own life. Much as I enjoy it, something will eventually kill me.

Talk about completely missing the point!

Don't be so self-possessed, it's not your life we're talking about, it's the lives of millions or billions of other human beings out there and tens or hundreds of millions of them yet to be born.

Get a fucking grip!

Globe wrote:
And I say you don't have the right to dictate to me what I can and cannot believe or think.

Ahh! But that's not what I'm doing, now, is it? No. By no means.

I want YOU to do that yourself, to become better educated about the science and to become better informed about the issue so that you too can join the ranks of the well educated and well informed on this subject and make better decisions, all by yourself. If you elect to not do this, it won't matter to me.

But if you did maybe then you'd come to agree with every recognized national academy of science in the Western world and 50 or 60 of the world's leading science professional groups and associations, and accept that AGW is a valid hypothesis.

Globe wrote:

fact-man-2 wrote:
Let's repeat the paragraph, maybe this time you won't miss it:

The point you appear to be missing is that clouds cannot possibly have impacts on warming or cooling that would push IPCC's 90 per cent confidence level below that and reduce it to, oh, say a 30 per cent confidence level, or even an 82 per cent confidence level. And that's simply because the degree of forcing that clouds can possess in any case are vastly less than the forcings represented by C02 and other GHGs. The degree of forcing represented by clouds, whether positive or negative, is almost infintesimally smaller than these other gasses

A little added emphasis with the underlining. I thought that might help you get it.

You provide no link, and I am not going to search all the links posted in this thread.

Link? These are my own words, dude, there is no "link."

Here's the deal, you have to apprehend what these words mean all by your lonesome. Think you can handle that? It doesn't appear that you can, despite the fact that it's pretty simple proportional thinking.

Globe wrote:
He never denied the effect of GHG or the possibility of AGW. He merely pointed out that there was a factor, may be strong may be not, that was not taken into account.

If you say so, that's not the way he was portrayed in North America. He was generally acclaimed for being a rather staunch denialist. No matter, he's not one now.

Globe wrote:

fact-man-2 wrote:
It is so by definition, you dope.

I thought you said you've read AR4?

Please refrain from name calling. It's highly unflattering... to the one doing the name calling.

Regardless, you have to admit I was right, it is the case by definition.

If the shoe fits, wear it. Otherwise, offer a disclaimer.

Globe wrote:
I say again.... It's not IPCC as such I have a beef with. It's not even the work done I have a beef with.
It's the fact that they make predictions based on not too well understood factors.

And then pass it on to the political system, which then make their OWN predictions and policies.

Each layer add to the distortion of what should be science.

"Based on not too well understood factors" is your invention, it doesn't comport with the facts of the matter, including the idea that we have a ten per cent margin on probability that accounts for the uncertainties and any unknowns in a well reasoned logical scientific manner.

You say your climate "specialty" is clouds. Can you not get the idea that whatever forcing clouds may represent, positive or negative," is basically out in the decimal places of total forcings? Does that somehow escape you? Do I have to draw you a picture? You can go on and on all day about clouds, but at the end of the day it won't matter a lick, because the potential that clouds have to act as a forcing agent are infinitesimally small when compared to the other GHGs, and can never be any larger just in terms of their pure physics.

Globe wrote:

fact-man-2 wrote:
Hmmm, examples por favor?

And please none from unpublished science.

Can't give examples on something that doesn't exist.

You're the one who claimed "existence," you talked about things IPCC refused to use in its deliberations and reporing.

Globe wrote:
However the uncertainty about the precision of the models are not mentioned in the "Summary for Policy Makers".

There are some fifteen different GCMs used by climate modelers. They usually use the average of what a number of them produce, e.g., four or five, ones that are selected for their efficasy in terms of a particular model run and the characteristics of its input dataset.

These GCMs all have names or nomenclatures by which they are known. They represent the development of climate models as it has unfolded over the past 30 years or so, during which they have become more robust and more inclusive. Some are older than others; some are tuned to look at things one way, others are tuned to look at things another way, again depending on the nature of their input datasets. You could search those GCMs out and study each one in turn and no doubt discover what they're bands of uncertainty are. But in any case, it'd be a bit hard to boil it all down into one increment of a probability assigned to, say, a temp forecast.

Globe wrote:

Good! We've made a little progress!

No we are not. We are establishing that you don't pay attention to what I have posted in previous posts.

Call it "progress of the moment" then, if you prefer, but you did agree with something I said and I call that progress.

Globe wrote:

fact-man-2 wrote:
And you don't think that adjustments made over a 12 year period are just normal progress in the development of GCMs?

Isn't it interesting how in the top graph most of the entities reported cluser about a very narrow range of difference and that IPCCs 1990 report appears wildly off the mark but it's really only .2 degrees C higher?

I think the second graph's scale biases the presentation. But it still shows that IPCC;s 1990 reporting was only .03 degrees C higher than it reported out for 1995 and 2001, which interestingly are nearly identical.

I'd like to know the context in which these graphs were presented by their publishers.

Link says it all. Nature.com.

And it went completely over your head that I actually COMMENDED IPCC for correcting their predictions over time??v

Easy to say in hindsight. What you were really doing is trying to show that the IPCC's forecasts have not been accurate and have been all over the map. That was your entire reason for including those graphs. You did say "they're getting better."

Globe wrote:

You think NASA's the only agency on the planet that puts sats up? Hell. NOAA has more up than NASA and the ESA has their share and the Japanese too, and the Russians.

Still doesn't mean that NASA doens't contribute quite a lot. Which was what you claimed they didn't.

What I did was think about those 10,000 scientific papers the IPCC gets every five years that form the informational basis of its reporting ... and try to imagine more than even a hundred of them coming from NASA, or ten per cent. That may be "quite a lot" in your book, but it isn't in mine. I also made note of the fact that what data NASA does provide is crucial to IPCC's process.

Globe wrote:
So you are not at all worried that science is getting so tangled up in politics that it's getting hard for the Average Joe to tell one from the other?

Average Joe doesn't stand a much of a chance of making any sense of this in any case, especially not given the ongoing tsunami of propaganda that's constatntly uttered and spread by the denialosphere on the subject

Tell Average Joe to go see "An Inconvenient Truth" if they want a layman's explanation or to read Robert Henson's "Climate Change," second edition, published in 2008, for an even better layman's explanation.

What I'm confident of is that the science will remain unadulterated. Politicians and leaders will do what they do and for better or worse things will go on. The physical evidence of our changing climate will continue to mount, further corroborating what the science is telling us and plain for all to see regardless of how confused they may be about it. An ice-free summer Arctic ocean is a bit hard to deny, ever rising acidification of our oceans is hard to deny, ever more frequent wild weather events are hard to deny, melting permafrost is hard to deny, rapidly retreating mid-latitude glaciers are hard to deny, northward migration of species is hard to deny ... there's lots of evidence and it is piling up.

Eventaully, governments will be forced to act by mere dint of circumstance. They won't have a choice. I expect that day will arrive sometime in the next decade at the latest, very likely sooner. The IPCC is slated to publish AR5 in the early months of 2013 and that could be the bombshell that kicks governments in the teeth and wakes them up. That and mounting physical evidence will seal the deal.

All we'll be able to do then is hope we've not waited so long to act that we'll never avoid a greater than 2C increase in Earth's mean annual temp come the year 2100.

Dear FACT-MAN-2
I would love to discuss with you. Both the political aspects, the "measures" being taken", the way different countries do NOT encourage more green development (Belgium just cut tax-benefits for installing solar cells and solar heating... as an example), and the theory behind AGW.
But I simply wont discuss with someone who attempt to drag everything in a discussion down to a personal level where near-mudslinging is the order of the day because I don't see things exactly their way.

A typical anti-science, denier MO. Parrot a bunch of unscientific nonsense picked up from dodgy websites and then flounce off pretending the storm of protest they've stirred up is some kind of personal attack and not the inevitable result of their intellectually dubious behaviour.

mcgruff wrote:A typical anti-science, denier MO. Parrot a bunch of unscientific nonsense picked up from dodgy websites and then flounce off pretending the storm of protest they've stirred up is some kind of personal attack and not the inevitable result of their intellectually dubious behaviour.

Thank you for proving my point.
This post in one long personal attack littered with ad homs.

Please note that I didn't refuse to discuss the subject. I merely said that I wouldn't take part in a discussion where adults can't behave like adults.

I think you won't take part in a discussion where matters of science are decided by careful research and rational analysis.

mcgruff wrote:I think you won't take part in a discussion where matters of science are decided by careful research and rational analysis.

IF that would be the case there would be no need for any kind of personal "observations" of the other participants in the discussion, now would there....

Globe wrote:Dear FACT-MAN-2
I would love to discuss with you. Both the political aspects, the "measures" being taken", the way different countries do NOT encourage more green development (Belgium just cut tax-benefits for installing solar cells and solar heating... as an example), and the theory behind AGW.

But I simply wont discuss with someone who attempt to drag everything in a discussion down to a personal level where near-mudslinging is the order of the day because I don't see things exactly their way.

This is weak. I've stood by the science, you've stood by your worries that governments are blowing the science out of all proportion and imposing draconian tax measures or simply getting it wrong while at the same time spewing a lot of nonsense about the role clouds play in climate and disingenuously flip-flopping on your assessment of the IPCC's credibility.

I don't want you to see things "my way" i want you to see them the way the science says they are.

Those who can't stand the heat in the kitchen usually leave the kitchen.

In closing I'll leave you with yet another example of how climate change is bringing severe weather situations round the world, this time in the Balkans:

Balkans: Worst Drought In Decades

By MARKO DROBNJAKOVIC and AMER COHADZIC 12/ 2/11 12:02 PM ET Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/0 ... n&ir=Green

BEZDAN, Serbia — The waters of the mighty Danube are so low that dozens of cargo ships are stuck, stranded in ghostly fog or wedged into sand banks on what is normally one of eastern Europe's busiest transport routes.

A lack of rain has triggered the worst drought in decades for this time of year, dropping river levels to record lows and sounding an alarm in parts of central and eastern Europe.

Power supplies are running low in Serbia, drinking water shortages have hit Bosnia, and crop production is in jeopardy in Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary. The Czech Republic is at its driest since records began in 1775.

Meteorologists say they are not sure why the region has had far less rain than average since August – but they don't see any more coming quickly. That is bad news for shipping companies that are already reporting big losses.

"This is a disaster," said Branko Savic, the manager of a privately owned Danube shipping company in Serbia that he says is operating at only a third of its capacity. "Traffic on the Danube is practically nonexistent. . . We are in dire need of enormous amounts of water, rain, or melting snow in order to better the situation."

About 80 big cargo ships are stranded at the Serbia-Hungary border on the Danube, Europe's second largest river, which winds 2,860-kilometer (1,777-mile) from Germany, passing through eight countries before flowing into the Black Sea.

"In my many years of experience as a boat captain, I don't remember a drought as harsh as this one," said Anton Balasz, whose ship is among those stuck where exposed sand banks are preventing boats from passing.

Sunken German World War II-era ships have surfaced on the Danube and unexploded bombs that fell during the 1940s emerged from the Sava river in Serbia. At the normally bustling northern Bosnian port of Brcko on the Sava river, workers have been told not to expect any work until further notice.

"If the situation continues, we could easily send all of our work force home," said Mustafa Nukovic, the port's general manager, pointing to the empty cargo terminals and boats parked in the docks.

In Bosnia, drinking water restrictions have been introduced at night in Sarajevo and other cities.
"The Bosna river is so low, you can walk from one bank to another," said Emir Emric, a fisherman. "People catch fish with bare hands – and not only any fish – but 20-kilogram (44-pound) catfish."

Electricity supplies are also running low in Bosnia and Serbia because hydropower plants cannot produce enough power due to the low river water levels. If there is no rain in the next couple of days, hydroelectric plants will be shut down, said Bosnian Serb Energy Minister Zeljko Kovacevic.

Environmentalists are also worried. A World Wildlife Fund report noted a sharp drop in bird populations along the lower stretch of the Danube because of the persistent drought.

The current level of the river along the Bulgarian bank is at its lowest since 1941, and shipping on large stretches of the river has ground to a halt, according to the Bulgarian Executive Agency for Exploration and Maintenance of the Danube River.

The Bulgarian section between the ports of Somovit and Silistra has a total of 14 spots where the Danube level is below the river navigation minimum of 250 centimeters (98 inches), and 6 spots were the waters are as shallow as 160 centimeters (63 inches).
In Romania, officials say that though the country had a bumper wheat harvest this year, the drought looks set to severely damage next year's production.

"If the drought continues, the wheat crop will be down by at least 20 percent," said Marcel Cucu, the spokesman for the Romanian League of Agriculture Producers Associations.
After having to deal with large areas of farmland under water in 2010, in 2011 Hungary faces the opposite problem – the lack of rainfall.

While the 2011 harvest has resulted in good yields, expectations for 2012 are not very encouraging, said Gyorgy Czervan, state secretary at the Ministry of Rural Development.

Czervan said the average rainfall measured across the country so far this has year has been between 240 millimeters (9.45 inches) and 500 millimeters (19.7 inches), around half the normal amount.

The dearth of rain has caused the soil to harden in many parts of the country, making autumn planting of some products very difficult.

The state of Texas in the US and the five northernmost states in Mexico are struggling through similar drought conditions, which began in the region last spring when annual rains did not come. Crop lossses in Texas this year have mounted up to more than $5 billion and some 5,000 homes have been lost in wildfires, and in Mexico half the crops in those five states have been lost and 1.7 million beef cows have died of thirst/malnutrition. The Mexican government is having to deliver water by truck to 1,500 villages across the region and spend big dollars to provide work for farmers and their field hands who have nothing to do, and ship in food supplies to keep them from starving.

These events are precursors of what's to come.

Globe pontificated

Doesn't really matter if it's for the cause of Global Warming.

and you want to have an "adult discussion".....

let me guess a Canadian that voted for dino of the day Harper et al.



Now if you want to have an adult, evidence based discussion you drop the if which immediately labels you a flat earther in climatology circles and discuss appropriate responses to the reality of IS.

Until that point becomes evident ...your posts become pathetic in light of the overwhelming evidence that even back in the mid-nineties scientists on the payroll of fossil fuel companies said

Industry Ignored Its Scientists on Climate

By ANDREW C. REVKINPublished: April 23, 2009

For more than a decade the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming.

“The role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood,” the coalition said in a scientific “backgrounder” provided to lawmakers and journalists through the early 1990s, adding that “scientists differ” on the issue.

But a document filed in a federal lawsuit demonstrates that even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/24/scien ... .html?_r=1

So 'd not be patronizing given your floundering stance of IF ...you neither deserve nor will get any respect

@ FACT-MAN-2

As for the drought in Texas and Mexico is hardly a new phenomenon.
The area in question has always been at least semi-desert if not full desert, and settlement of a large population and extensive farming have relied on one thing only.
The Aquifers.

Aquifers are underground water reservoirs that are created millions of years ago, and replenishes excruciatingly slowly, if at all.
The depletion of the Aquifers in Texas and Northern Mexico is due to farming. Not solely, but farming is the biggest culprit here.

And once you remove the natural vegetation, which was originally arid-region vegetation, and replaces it with crops that gobble up water without retaining it in the soil, and which leaves stretches of soil bare for periods every year, you break the natural water cycle in the region. Which causes less rain and encourages drought.

This is not a result of global warming, but can very well be a contributor to it.

As for the Balkans.
The area in question is ringed by mountains, which makes it heavily dependent on the micro-climate in the region.
Water-bearing clouds have trouble getting over the mountains and will, if possible, "deposit" the excess water content before rising to an altitude where passage of the mountains, also called the Foehn effect (In the Balkans known as the Bora Wind), which leaves the lee-side of the mountains dry and arid.
In this region the natural water cycle is very important, and over the past decades this region have seen a blooming in farming, thus removing the natural growth.

To quote (and they do know why):
http://www.usf.uni-kassel.de/ftp/dokume ... ts_low.pdf

From the conclusion:

A separate analysis, looking at the impact of a change in water use only, indicated that
the direct anthropogenic influence on future droughts through water consumption is of the
same order of magnitude as the simulated impact of climate change. In particular, the
supposed strong increases in water use for Eastern European countries due to increased
economic activity can cause or intensify severe drought events in these areas in the future.

You are discussing CONTRIBUTORS to at least local warming, as EFFECTS of Global Warming.

At the last global warming talk-fest and navel-gazing exercise in Copenhagen, our then-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was critisized for burning hundreds of tons of jet fuel flying half way round the world with a simply huge staff of followers and assorted hangers-on, while telling us how pollution was killing us all and we had to cut back and change our lifestyles and live with less.

If these conferences were honestly worried about pollution, they'd do it via video hookup from thier own countries instead of flying all over the world...but then they always do seem to be a case of "do as we say, not as we do"...

johnbrandt wrote:At the last global warming talk-fest and navel-gazing exercise in Copenhagen, our then-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was critisized for burning hundreds of tons of jet fuel flying half way round the world with a simply huge staff of followers and assorted hangers-on, while telling us how pollution was killing us all and we had to cut back and change our lifestyles and live with less.

If these conferences were honestly worried about pollution, they'd do it via video hookup from thier own countries instead of flying all over the world...but then they always do seem to be a case of "do as we say, not as we do"...

But... but... but....

Then no one would know just HOW much they care and HOW important the problem is to them.
And if the did it by vid-link it wouldn't be a press event where they can parade their own importance.

Globe wrote: @ FACT-MAN-2

As for the drought in Texas and Mexico is hardly a new phenomenon.

It is new in terms of white settlement in these regions, which dates back 200 years. No drought in Texas or Northern Mexico has been as bad in all those years as what's happening today. Both areas have been taken almost completely by surprise by these events. Drought this severe is indeed a "brand new phenomenon" for those folks.

Globe wrote:
The area in question has always been at least semi-desert if not full desert, and settlement of a large population and extensive farming have relied on one thing only.

The Aquifers.

Aquifers are underground water reservoirs that are created millions of years ago, and replenishes excruciatingly slowly, if at all.
The depletion of the Aquifers in Texas and Northern Mexico is due to farming. Not solely, but farming is the biggest culprit here.

Not that it matters in this case, or these cases, but there are difference among the thousands of aguifirs that underlay natural terrain around the world. Some, like the great Ogallala Aquifir that underlies six or seven US Western States, are indeed remants of the last Ice Age and are slow to replenish, if they replenish at all; others, like the many aquifirs that lie along the Rio Grande River in Colorado and New Mexico are replenished seasonally on a regular basis.

Globe wrote:
And once you remove the natural vegetation, which was originally arid-region vegetation, and replaces it with crops that gobble up water without retaining it in the soil, and which leaves stretches of soil bare for periods every year, you break the natural water cycle in the region. Which causes less rain and encourages drought.

This is not a result of global warming, but can very well be a contributor to it.

As for the Balkans.
The area in question is ringed by mountains, which makes it heavily dependent on the micro-climate in the region.
Water-bearing clouds have trouble getting over the mountains and will, if possible, "deposit" the excess water content before rising to an altitude where passage of the mountains, also called the Foehn effect (In the Balkans known as the Bora Wind), which leaves the lee-side of the mountains dry and arid.
In this region the natural water cycle is very important, and over the past decades this region have seen a blooming in farming, thus removing the natural growth.

To quote (and they do know why):
http://www.usf.uni-kassel.de/ftp/dokume ... ts_low.pdf

From the conclusion:

A separate analysis, looking at the impact of a change in water use only, indicated that
the direct anthropogenic influence on future droughts through water consumption is of the
same order of magnitude as the simulated impact of climate change. In particular, the
supposed strong increases in water use for Eastern European countries due to increased
economic activity can cause or intensify severe drought events in these areas in the future.

You are discussing CONTRIBUTORS to at least local warming, as EFFECTS of Global Warming.

These droughts are the worst experienced in both the Balkans and in Texas and Northern Mexico in a hundred years and probably the worst ever in the latter. Neither area pumps water from aquifirs to any great extent, certainly not in that region of Mexico. They rely on annual rainy seasons to fill reservoirs.

Both Texas and Northern Mexico are known as "dryland" farming regions, which means they do not irrigate their fields. They grow field crops that are long adapted to the climate of those regions and have traditionally produced abundant crops on rainfall. But rainfall has simply not occurred in these regions this year and the annual rainy season doesn't begin until next June, if indeed it will ever begin again.

The Balkans are watered mainly by the Danube River, Europe's second largest, and you'll note in the article I posted about it that it's flow is at a record setting low, true also of other rivers in the region. These rivers are low because precipitation has not been at hisorical levels in their headwaters.

IF the causes of these extended and severe droughts were, as you've claimed, attributable to rising populations and the growing of "crops that gobble up water" and the drawing down of aquifirs ... the changes this would induce wouldn't occur abruptly in a single year, they would occur gradually over time as the population grew and more "plants that gobble up water" were farmed and water tables gradually fell.

This has not been the case. First, dryland farmed crops do not "gobble up water," and second the population of Texas and West Texas in particular has been generallly stable for a long period and while the population in Northern Mexico has grown in recent years it has not exploded to gain huge numbers over what's been traditional in the region.

You need to go back and read both of the articles i posted on these events and read them thoroughly so that your understanding of what's going on in these droughts might be more fully fleshed out. You said some things that are directly contravened in those articles; if you look hard enough, you'll find them.

For example, in the article about drought in the Balkans, we get this (emphasis added by me):

A lack of rain has triggered the worst drought in decades for this time of year, dropping river levels to record lows and sounding an alarm in parts of central and eastern Europe.

Power supplies are running low in Serbia, drinking water shortages have hit Bosnia, and crop production is in jeopardy in Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary. The Czech Republic is at its driest since records began in 1775.

The driest in 236 years. The worst drought in decades.

This is also true for Texas and Northern Mexico.

The conclusion you quoted says this, in closing part:

In particular, the supposed strong increases in water use for Eastern European countries due to increased
economic activity can cause or intensify severe drought events in these areas in the future.

My reaction to this is that 1) we're' not talking about the future; 2) the sentence part "the supposed strong increases in water use for Eastern European countries" is made questionable in this context by the word "supposed," which indicates that either someone doesn't know or is relying on some prediction of "supposed increaed economic activity;" and 3) the sentence part "can cause or intensify severe drought events in these areas in the future" does not address what's happening today, this very moment, which is the subject at hand.

And of course it makes sense that overconsumption of water is always a risky proposition in an atea that's vulnerable to drought conditions.

Climate science has not reached a point where it will attribute specific extreme weather events to global warming or climate change. All its has said on this front is that we can expect the both the frequency of extreme weather events to increase and the intensity of such events to become greater over time, and this has indeed been the case, most especially over the past decade.

Nor did I make the assertion that these particular droughts were "caused by global warming or climate change,' merely noting instead that they are "precursors of things to come."

So please, don't accuse me of saying things I didn't say.

It isn't difficult to predict that extreme weather eventy will increase in frequency and in intensity given that the atmosphere is becoming warmer, which means it contains more energy and will, therefore, become more active as that increased energy content seeks equilibrium. A warmer atmosphere also holds more water than a cooler one and thus we can expect higher volume rainfall and snowfall events to occur but typically not in traditional patterns.

It's entirely possible that man's activities in these regions might have made the current droughts worse than they'd otherwise be, but I don't think this is the case in either Texas or Northern Mexico, where human activities and their scale have been in a general state of equilibrium for many decades and only rising slowly over time.

If you had better grounding in climate science, not to mention geography and atmospheric behavior, you could speak to these questions in a much more cogent manner. As it is, you're just flopping like a tuna, doing lots of guessing, and relying on quickn' easy Google searches. It ain't enough.

Globe wrote:

johnbrandt wrote:At the last global warming talk-fest and navel-gazing exercise in Copenhagen, our then-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was critisized for burning hundreds of tons of jet fuel flying half way round the world with a simply huge staff of followers and assorted hangers-on, while telling us how pollution was killing us all and we had to cut back and change our lifestyles and live with less.

If these conferences were honestly worried about pollution, they'd do it via video hookup from thier own countries instead of flying all over the world...but then they always do seem to be a case of "do as we say, not as we do"...

But... but... but....

Then no one would know just HOW much they care and HOW important the problem is to them.
And if the did it by vid-link it wouldn't be a press event where they can parade their own importance.

Both of these posts exhibit the standard condescension, arrogance, foolishness and cheap shot artistry commmonly heard from the denialosphere.

If you think these folks shouldn't be flying to their meetings then you should never again fly yourselves and demand that nobody else fly anywhere either. See how far that gets you.

This line of bashing is older than dirt, more boring than watching paint dry.

GHG emissions from aeroplanes account for less than two per cent of total emissions, a fact of reality you two are apparently unaware of or don't care about in your zeal to bash these people and try to make them look foolish, while instead making your own selves look foolish, and none too smart either.

Who the hell do you think you're talking to here? Save it for those denialist blogs you hang out on, they'll cheer you on. Here, all you're gonna get is some loud and boisterous booos, as in

BOOOOOOOO!

So there is a big difference between the "supposed" said by the arguments that puts incidents directly in the lap of AGW, and those which can supposedly be ascribed to other factor.

Nice to know.

Besides.... you haven't given ANY counter arguments to my description of cause/effect.

Neither area pumps water from aquifirs to any great extent, certainly not in that region of Mexico. They rely on annual rainy seasons to fill reservoirs.

Now THAT is about as wrong as it can be.

Nearly 60% of the total groundwater extracted is withdrawn from overexploited aquifers. As expected, the over-exploited aquifers are in the heaviest populated and the most arid areas. Total water extraction exceeds recharge in Mexico City, Monterrey and other large northern metropolitan areas as well as irrigated areas of Sonora, the central northern plateau, the Lerma basin and Baja California.

http://geo-mexico.com/?p=5320

As of 1990, 14 billion gallons per day was being withdrawn for irrigation of farmland and an additional 332 million gallons per day was being withdrawn for public use. At these rates water in the Ogallala should be available for about another 190 years. But unlike fossil fuels, where alternatives to their use exist, there is no substitute for water. We need water to live. We need water to grow our crops. As our population increases, the need for food increases, which means the need for water to grow the food also increases. Therefore, 190 years is probably a best-case scenario. Some people in the area understand this; others think it is their right to take as much water as they want to whenever they want to. It's easy to forget about things we take for granted.

http://www.oswego.edu/~schneidr/CHE300/ ... Inv12.html

The Ogallala Aquifer is a vital source of water since it supplies 81% of the water used in the High Plains area.

http://web.mit.edu/12.000/www/m2012/fin ... ater.shtml

Similarly, Mexico is depleting ground water reserves in some agriculturally important regions at rates exceeding 3 meters per year. The implications for global food security are enormous. It is estimated that nearly 10% of the global food supply (160 million tons of grain) is currently based on the unsustainable practice of depleting groundwater.

http://www.usaid.gov/our_work/environme ... _mgmt.html

Mexico’s aquifers too are amongst the most
overdeveloped; IWMI researchers based in Guanajuato State, one of Mexico's agriculturally dynamic
regions, found water tables in 10 aquifers they studied declining at average annual rates of 1.79–3.3
meters/year during recent years (Wester, Pimentel, Scott 1999,9).

http://www.bvsde.paho.org/bvsacd/cd47/global.pdf


http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/global/h ... jandro.pdf

Edit.......
For missing negation.

johnbrandt wrote:At the last global warming talk-fest and navel-gazing exercise in Copenhagen, our then-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was critisized for burning hundreds of tons of jet fuel flying half way round the world with a simply huge staff of followers and assorted hangers-on, while telling us how pollution was killing us all and we had to cut back and change our lifestyles and live with less.

If these conferences were honestly worried about pollution, they'd do it via video hookup from thier own countries instead of flying all over the world...but then they always do seem to be a case of "do as we say, not as we do"...

Don't you ever get embarrassed, spouting this kind of bullcrap? I would. If you're sincere you're being very naive. An international conference can be held without anyone actually meeting... really?

PS: government is not "lifestyle".

mcgruff wrote:

johnbrandt wrote:At the last global warming talk-fest and navel-gazing exercise in Copenhagen, our then-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was critisized for burning hundreds of tons of jet fuel flying half way round the world with a simply huge staff of followers and assorted hangers-on, while telling us how pollution was killing us all and we had to cut back and change our lifestyles and live with less.

If these conferences were honestly worried about pollution, they'd do it via video hookup from thier own countries instead of flying all over the world...but then they always do seem to be a case of "do as we say, not as we do"...

Don't you ever get embarrassed, spouting this kind of bullcrap? I would. If you're sincere you're being very naive. An international conference can be held without anyone actually meeting... really?

PS: government is not "lifestyle".

Hey no, I don't feel embarassed...after all, I'm in good company...most of our media and a lot of other groups, including environmentalists, were asking the exact same questions I did there when it was on...if the government is so concerned about pollution and restricting every single bit of extra CO2 they can, then why didn't they "meet" by video linkup and not fly a huge cavalcade of people around the world? Big businesses do it all the time to save on costs...but then "saving on costs" has never been high on the list for people with thier snout deep in the public trough, has it...