[dohboi]

jed wrote: "SCORE LEVEL -- This seems to be where we are headed if we take worst case scenarios. Would this give us enough time to do foolish things? Who knows."

OK, I'll bite: Since you consider this the most likely scenario, what do you think the 'foolish things' are that we might have time to do?

[Ibon]

Ibon, normally I would side with your point of view as it is very sensible and reasonable. However, what I have already read especially from Cid's postings truly sounds catastrophic. Just to list some key points as I see it.
First: Vast methane releases are implicated in most Mass Extinction Events on Earth
Second. We have a humongous world population that we must feed
Third. The Arctic and in particular the East Siberian Shelf has stored very large amounts of methane.
Fourth: This methane is very vulnerable to escape because of shallow ocean depths and solely being imprisoned by the permafrost which NOW is increasingly melting and becoming permeable and ruptured.
Fifth: Experts on that area have sounded the alarm that a release of a catastrophic amount of methane can happen at any time.
Sixth: Because of the GHG properties of methane, it would deliver probably a death blow to many agricultural areas on the planet by rapidly increasing global temperatures.
Seventh: With the methane released the process would play out logically as an extinction level event given the celerity of the warming and the scientific understanding that runaway global warming is a process that has happened and can happen again.

The role methane release will play in affecting climate going forward is one of the many factors that will possibly play a role in disrupting the juggernaut of industrial civilization. It may very well tighten constraints in our species ability to continue to expand its foot print on our planet. In other words, it represents a possible catalyst to disrupt what has been a straight shot of exponential growth in our population and consumption for the past 200 years.

I definitely consider this to be one of the factors that may play a role in restoring balance.

[dohboi]

Ummmm...

Faster global warming is not likely to be a solution to global warming.

Not sure why this isn't blindingly obvious.

I actually do think, though, that, in the long view, Archer's idea that the methane will take a long, long time (hundreds to thousands of years) to dissociate is actually the worst case scenario for the recovery of the earth. That would mean that our forcing will continue to affect the world for a long, long time.

[KaiserJeep]

As noted above, you don't need models or computing to figure out that AGW is real and dangerous. Arrhenius figured out the basic physics 120 years ago without any computers or models. The electromagnetic wavelength absorption spectrum of CO2 is about as well established as the temperature that water boils at. The further confirmation that this basic physics is now playing out around us is just basic measurements of how much we burn, how much CO2 concentrations have gone up, and how much global temperatures have gone up.

Oh, the other requirements are a tiny amount of honesty and a couple of brain cells to rub together to connect these glaringly obvious dots. Hard to tell which (if not both) are lacking in JK's case!

I know all about the greenhouse effect, since I did the science class experiment in 1965. That does not mean that a computer simulation of climate is at all accurate or should be used for making important decisions.

As I have told you many times, there is a 15,000 year warming trend in place as we continue to distance ourselves from the Pleistocene Glacial Period. Evidence of warming is not evidence that the AGW theory is correct. You must both prove that unprecedented warming is occurring, and positively link that to carbon dioxide or some other pollutant.

The present warming trend is neither unprecedented nor positively linked to burning FF's. There is a reasonable suspicion in place that there may be a causal linkage, but the complete lack of a functional model of global climate renders any such linkage suspect.

KaiserJeep wrote:
?...thousands of idiots who are running "climate models" using PC spreadsheets, which are four orders of magnitude too weak for global climate modelling.


Actually global climate models are run on the fastest supercomputers currently available.

AND a next generation "exacomputer" ----faster then any current supercomputer----is being planned to further improve climate modeling.

exacomputer for GCM

Cheers

Look, I'm aware of the state of the art in computing, I still get my IEEE Computer Society periodicals. The computer I linked to a picture of above is a water-cooled HP supercomputer, the fastest I ever saw, from two years ago before I retired. I heard a nice lecture from the manager of the group that was gonna be using it to model the electrical grid. We had a nice laugh together about the fools who think they can model global climate.

If either of you know of a working climate model, link to it. Because I don't. I understand full well that there are hundreds, if not thousands of climate models. Some are run on large supercomputers, some are run on 4-year old PCs, and everything in between. They all share one common characteristic: they do not work, they cannot be used to predict either actual temperatures or even temperature trends - whether warming or cooling will occur.

This of course does not preclude many thousands of "scientists" from claiming to be climate modelers. I believe that this is because it is relatively easy to get funding that way, versus what actually interests them, and what they actually use the grant money for.

Now I didn't really care when I learned this, years ago. After all, I was designing and building computers, and such BS was good for business. I find I do care a bit more now, when I'm retired and the major expense in my life is taxes.

What is happening today is a result of scientists skipping one vital step in the process of analysis. Engineers who tackle large and complex projects such as global climate modelling are taught first to assess the suitability of the tools they have for the task at hand. (The tool used for such assessment is an obscure branch of Numerical Analysis.) It is not uncommon to find that one must first build the new tools needed to perform a new task, before commencing the task itself.

Back in the 1970s, this was a necessary first step to every project, because one never knows if the tools you have are adequate until such an assessment is done. A handheld tablet has more computing power today than the largest mainframe "supercomputer" from the 1970s. The state of the art in computing then became so advanced so quickly, that it became popular to skip the first step of tool assessment, because the computers of today are adequate for most tasks.

They certainly are not adequate for modelling global climate, and knowledgeable engineers have been laughing at scientists for decades as we built and sold more and more powerful computers to them. Now as a taxpayer, I find less humor in the practice. As a member of PO.com, I find even less humor in debating with people who have never used and couldn't use the climate models they are defending.

[eugene]

I continue to find the "analysis" of people who know zip about what they are talking about who make various claims stating they know more than the people who are actually qualified. If you're against climate change, change models or climatologists in general, just say so. Don't attempt to rattle on proving your point. Long ago, I realized a person doesn't have to know a thing about a subject, they just have to sound like they do. I've been watching climate change for 3 decades and lived in Alaska for yrs where it's in your face. To people in areas where it's not so blatant, it's very easy to laugh it off.

As far as models, I give the climatologist a bit of slack. This has never been observed before so they struggle making models. They know they are not a 100%. But it's the best we got and sure as hell better than some "nerds" sitting around giving opinions which the internet if over full of. I don't need a model to tell me it's going on and that it's accelerating. Untold millions are sitting around with their heads in dark places ranting their own bias.

You may have been a salesman selling computers and you were a salesman. Just because you had an opinion and it was/is an opinion based on nothing but a sales pitch. And if you knew your product was insufficient, it says little for you. In fact, the climatologists may well have seen through your "amusement" but needed to work with what was available. Frankly, the longer I hear/read the bullshit I do, I have even more respect for climatologists. In the face of mockery, amusement, hecklers, political pressure and all the rest, they struggle on. Why don't you do the same.

[dissident]

Deniers yap about models as if they know anything about climate models. One of the core denier memes is "variability". They treat this as some sort of actual process and not the noise associated with real processes and the underlying nonlinear dynamical system. Being the uneducated (on the subject) opinionated dirtbags that they are they have no clue that variability is constrained by the energetics of the dynamical system like every other aspect of it. Conservation of mass and energy is paramount.

Changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere-ocean system directly affects its energy balance. Variability cannot offset this much like a the tail cannot wag the dog. Deniers love to argue that climate change is a hoax because their ass supposedly froze off in winter due to all the extra snow (these retards don't even know that snow is actually an indicator of warmer temperatures and not colder ones; they just freeze in their heads when they see it). They make infantile assumptions that warming must be spatially homogeneous and have no concept of the total energy content of a system which requires the integration of state variables globally. I see this denier sh*t "logic" practically every year even if the whole winter was warmer than the previous one. It is as if these clowns have a compulsion to deny the possibility of climate change. They must be pathologically insecure.

[Hawkcreek]

One of my sons has his BS in math and MS in meteorology, and he believes in AGW. He is one of the smartest people I know (even if he is my son), so that would be enough for me, even if I didn't already find it difficult to believe that the rise in CO2, along with the rise in temps and erratic weather, is just a coincidence. I don't believe that coincidence can cover the data coming from many different areas in GW.
Some people build positions on things before they take in enough data, and then it is very hard for them to ever change that position. They have no evil intent, but their sense of self-worth would decline too much if they admit any error.
So don't count on changing any minds via this forum. Just gather data and sources from the many smart people who contribute, and make up your own mind.

[KaiserJeep]

I continue to find the "analysis" of people who know zip about what they are talking about who make various claims stating they know more than the people who are actually qualified. If you're against climate change, change models or climatologists in general, just say so. Don't attempt to rattle on proving your point. Long ago, I realized a person doesn't have to know a thing about a subject, they just have to sound like they do. I've been watching climate change for 3 decades and lived in Alaska for yrs where it's in your face. To people in areas where it's not so blatant, it's very easy to laugh it off.

As far as models, I give the climatologist a bit of slack. This has never been observed before so they struggle making models. They know they are not a 100%. But it's the best we got and sure as hell better than some "nerds" sitting around giving opinions which the internet if over full of. I don't need a model to tell me it's going on and that it's accelerating. Untold millions are sitting around with their heads in dark places ranting their own bias.

You may have been a salesman selling computers and you were a salesman. Just because you had an opinion and it was/is an opinion based on nothing but a sales pitch. And if you knew your product was insufficient, it says little for you. In fact, the climatologists may well have seen through your "amusement" but needed to work with what was available. Frankly, the longer I hear/read the bullshit I do, I have even more respect for climatologists. In the face of mockery, amusement, hecklers, political pressure and all the rest, they struggle on. Why don't you do the same.

I am a retired EE who worked on new computer design from 1978 to 2015. My career spanned the mainframe era to the WWW networked personal computing. I retired from the third corporation I worked for, which is today called HP Enterprises. My specific work product was fault tolerant online transaction processing machines - medium sized computers which count money, enable online commerce, cell phone messaging, run all stock markets and commodity exchanges, nuclear power plants, oil pipelines, healthcare record keeping, etc. etc. If you "bet your business" on having a computer online and available, you used a NonStop® computer. In fact if you carry around a phone or tablet, or use the WWW from a desktop, you probably do transactions on a NonStop® computer dozens of times per day, even if you don't know the name of an obscure part of the WWW infrastructure, sitting quietly in a secure and secret room, quietly counting money.

My personality says I don't tolerate BS, from you or climatologists. But my field of expertise is computers, and I do know their limitations.

[KaiserJeep]

One of my sons has his BS in math and MS in meteorology, and he believes in AGW. He is one of the smartest people I know (even if he is my son), so that would be enough for me, even if I didn't already find it difficult to believe that the rise in CO2, along with the rise in temps and erratic weather, is just a coincidence. I don't believe that coincidence can cover the data coming from many different areas in GW.
Some people build positions on things before they take in enough data, and then it is very hard for them to ever change that position. They have no evil intent, but their sense of self-worth would decline too much if they admit any error.
So don't count on changing any minds via this forum. Just gather data and sources from the many smart people who contribute, and make up your own mind.

I'm in this forum because fossil fuel depletion is a topic that interests me. When it comes to climate, the world's climate is linked to Milankovitch cycles - aka the periodic Ice Ages, aka glacials/interglacials. There have been at least 262 glacials and interglacials recorded in the fossil records. The peak global temperatures of an interglacial (aka the "climatic optimum") are typically 10 degrees C warmer than today. This would seem to indicate that either we are in an uncharacteristically cool interglacial, or that we have not yet reached the peak or climatic optimum for this cycle.

You should ask your son two questions. First, what is it that justifies the words you used "the rise in temps and erratic weather"? Because I don't believe that we have even got recorded weather observations for much of the globe for more than about 100 years, and only isolated point observations from Jesuit monks and the like for the century before that. Which means that we have only observed weather for 0.00002% of one Milankovitch period, which averages about 100,000 years. Most of the warming seen is certainly the result of our continued withdrawal from the Glacial in the Pleistocene era, warming is expected, and the burden of proof falls on the AGW modellers, who have failed to build working computer climate models after decades of trying. Meanwhile we now have accurate temperature measurements of an entire global hemisphere from Earth-facing satellites, and there are two embattled scientists who are defending satellite data which is disproving any model that says the world is warming as a function of carbon dioxide.

Secondly, does an observation period duration of 0.00002% of the cycle justify drawing conclusions about the entire cycle, or calling the weather observed "erratic"? People tend to draw conclusions based on personal experiences, and I much doubt that your son has observed the weather for more than about 40 years - and even that 40 years is 20% of the total duration that regular weather observations have been recorded at all by anybody.

[Hawkcreek]

One of my sons has his BS in math and MS in meteorology, and he believes in AGW. He is one of the smartest people I know (even if he is my son), so that would be enough for me, even if I didn't already find it difficult to believe that the rise in CO2, along with the rise in temps and erratic weather, is just a coincidence. I don't believe that coincidence can cover the data coming from many different areas in GW.
Some people build positions on things before they take in enough data, and then it is very hard for them to ever change that position. They have no evil intent, but their sense of self-worth would decline too much if they admit any error.
So don't count on changing any minds via this forum. Just gather data and sources from the many smart people who contribute, and make up your own mind.

I'm in this forum because fossil fuel depletion is a topic that interests me. When it comes to climate, the world's climate is linked to Milankovitch cycles - aka the periodic Ice Ages, aka glacials/interglacials. There have been at least 262 glacials and interglacials recorded in the fossil records. The peak global temperatures of an interglacial (aka the "climatic optimum") are typically 10 degrees C warmer than today. This would seem to indicate that either we are in an uncharacteristically cool interglacial, or that we have not yet reached the peak or climatic optimum for this cycle.

You should ask your son two questions. First, what is it that justifies the words you used "the rise in temps and erratic weather"? Because I don't believe that we have even got recorded weather observations for much of the globe for more than about 100 years, and only isolated point observations from Jesuit monks and the like for the century before that. Which means that we have only observed weather for 0.00002% of one Milankovitch period, which averages about 100,000 years.

Secondly, does an observation period duration of 0.00002% of the cycle justify drawing conclusions about the entire cycle, or calling the weather observed "erratic"? People tend to draw conclusions based on personal experiences, and I much doubt that your son has observed the weather for more than about 40 years - and even that 40 years is 20% of the duration that weather observations have been recorded at all by anybody.

Ok, it all must just be that coincidence thing coming up again.
Temps going up - CO2 going up.
It is easier to say that things are just beyond our capacity for understanding, and this weak thing called humanity should not try to understand, because clearly, we will have to wait for at least 100,000 years to see if we are correct in our thinking.
Problem is, people with a much better understanding of climate than you have, already made their decisions about the subject, and the vast majority have decided you are wrong.
You deciding that all of them are wrong is just funny.

[jedrider]

jed wrote: "SCORE LEVEL -- This seems to be where we are headed if we take worst case scenarios. Would this give us enough time to do foolish things? Who knows."

OK, I'll bite: Since you consider this the most likely scenario, what do you think the 'foolish things' are that we might have time to do?

Glad you asked

I don't know exactly: Geo-engineering? Nuclear exchange on the basis that reduced population and nuclear winter would be GOOD or, at least, BETTER. Certainly, a series of wars over the last remaining resources, especially arable land. Could the wars be contained? Would they always be asymmetrical?

(KJ is a denier. AGW is a F-A-C-T, not a theory. Abrupt Climate Change appears to be a F-A-C-T as well, although it is a relatively newly acquired insight.)

[Ibon]

Ummmm...

Faster global warming is not likely to be a solution to global warming.

Not sure why this isn't blindingly obvious.

I actually do think, though, that, in the long view, Archer's idea that the methane will take a long, long time (hundreds to thousands of years) to dissociate is actually the worst case scenario for the recovery of the earth. That would mean that our forcing will continue to affect the world for a long, long time.

Restoring balance is actually quite agnostic to the fate of humanity. If human activity has caused global warming or as KJ points out possibly contributed to an acceleration of an already warming trend then surely anything that impacts human footprint is part of the restoration of a balance of sorts. Nature operates very eloquently in this regard.

[Ibon]

I posed the question awhile back about the need to pinpoint accurately future outcomes. What does more accuracy really provide us in terms of the present? We are not exactly seeing much meaningful adaptation globally with increasing consensus around the fact that humans are influencing global warming. We are as far away from meaningful mitigation today as 40 years ago. In fact it is worst than 40 years ago since mitigation today requires far more draconian sacrifices than it would have 40 years ago.

I appreciate many of the links and graphs and studies that Cid and others post regarding the threats. I read most of them. My conclusion is that we have unequivocal data with ice melting and co2 levels rising that global warming is happening. We do not have unequivocal data as to the severity of the impacts that this will cause to our biosphere and to these impacts I therefore maintain a healthy ambiguity. Ambiguity in this regard is not denial or avoiding confronting painful consequences. For the benefit of my species long term resilience and that of our fellow flora and fauna I have been impatient for several decades waiting for consequences that restore the proper balance between the death rate and birthrate of our species population back to a sustainable balance. (I look at global warming much like a Trump supporter who on one hand wants Donald to shake up the establishment at the same time as he is scared that he might destabilize the whole world order).

I can remain ambiguous at the same time as I recognize the bias that one poster may have over another in terms of their positions.

We have unequivocal data with ice melting and co2 levels rising that global warming is happening. We do not have unequivocal data as to the severity of the impacts that this will cause to our biosphere, the variation of impacts throughout the planets bio-regions, the impact on human population and culture, the impact of extinction rates or the ability or inability of species to adapt to abrupt climate changes. We do not know the winners or losers in these changes.

Why stand on a soap box defending concrete outcomes when a healthy ambiguity seems so much more intuitive.

The complexity of the topic should make the question mark (?) larger than the exclamation point (!)

The question mark risks that we do nothing or that it will be used by those in denial. Who cares? We are already doing a great job at the moment around the planet of doing absolutely nothing even though there is consensus with the majority that global warming is a real threat.

I remain ambiguous but hopeful.......

[KaiserJeep]

jed wrote: "SCORE LEVEL -- This seems to be where we are headed if we take worst case scenarios. Would this give us enough time to do foolish things? Who knows."

OK, I'll bite: Since you consider this the most likely scenario, what do you think the 'foolish things' are that we might have time to do?

Glad you asked

I don't know exactly: Geo-engineering? Nuclear exchange on the basis that reduced population and nuclear winter would be GOOD or, at least, BETTER. Certainly, a series of wars over the last remaining resources, especially arable land. Could the wars be contained? Would they always be asymmetrical?

(KJ is a denier. AGW is a F-A-C-T, not a theory. Abrupt Climate Change appears to be a F-A-C-T as well, although it is a relatively newly acquired insight.)

It amazes me. People actually believe that they have infallible truth detectors in their heads, and that they can tell whether what they read online is truth or BS. Not to mention, they have never perused a global climate model, and don't possess the skills or the inclination to decide whether one works or not. But they have an opinion on a topic that I'm about 99% certain is not subject to valid computer modelling.

It sue ain't Science, that's for sure. Except that some people have excised Religion out of their lives, and claim they believe in Science. But the things they firmly believe in - among them Anthropogenic Global Warming - are matters of Faith alone, because we don't have working ground-up models of climate.

But maybe you know of one. Prove you do by pointing me at it.

[Ibon]

Some people build positions on things before they take in enough data, and then it is very hard for them to ever change that position. They have no evil intent, but their sense of self-worth would decline too much if they admit any error.

This happens in academia as well. You know this applies as well to those who forecast the most extreme consequences of global warming as well as to those who deny it.

My position has not remained fixed. I would say that information posted on this site and other sites along with conversations I have had with guests in the sciences who have visited our eco resort in Panama have made me consider climate change, especially the possibility of abrupt accelerated change, as moving closer to the top of the list of game changing consequences.

Having no real position to defend makes that easier. My only bias is for consequences to act as a herbicide on Kudzu Ape's rapacious growth on the planet. Frankly, I don't care if it comes from climate change or wars or a pandemic or peak oil. I am ambiguous as to the agent of change but I do confess to a bias that consequences happen sooner rather than later.

[dissident]

If you want quantification of impacts then you need to resort to models. But as we have seen with the ice melt the models are behind the curve. So treat their "predictions" as lower bounds to the coming impact.

We have already had good studies on drought and agricultural impacts done on the basis of previous IPCC round model results (not the current batch):

http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/ ... e1633.html

http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/adai/papers ... ES2010.pdf

[Ibon]

If you want quantification of impacts then you need to resort to models. But as we have seen with the ice melt the models are behind the curve. So treat their "predictions" as lower bounds to the coming impact.

We have already had good studies on drought and agricultural impacts done on the basis of previous IPCC round model results (not the current batch):

http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/ ... e1633.html

http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/adai/papers ... ES2010.pdf

We can move this discussion toward two pertinent questions

1) Will there ever be unequivocal data that will drive global consensus around acknowledging climate change?

2) Will we make any meaningful efforts to mitigate before consequences force us to our knees?

[jedrider]

KJ, On 'infallible truth detectors':

I CANNOT verify 'abrupt climate change', but does it pass the 'truth test'?

We do have a great science. We can measure things on so many levels. We have a giant truth detector from, literally, an army of scientists.

However, we do have to sort through the claims we hear about. The F-A-C-T that abrupt climate change may be detected in the record (I don't know how to detect it, though) and that great extinction events are in the record (I don't know where to find this either), has to lead one to admit that it is certainly not a far-fetched conclusion by any means. It certainly passes the 'this is a real possibility scenario' test!

[Ibon]

I have read KJ's posts since a couple of years. I do notice some subtle shifts in his positions during this time. First of all he has increasingly come down to planet earth to engage in the nuts and bolts of climate change theory and seems to be somewhat less focused on space colonies. He acknowledges global warming but disputes AGW (human caused climate change). Every once in awhile he throws in there lines like...."even if the warming is being aggravated by humans ........." This shows that he is being a bit less dogmatic in denying that humans are the source or a source. I anticipate that KJ will continue to shift as time goes forward.

I think KJ brings up some really valid points regarding computer models not being able to pinpoint consequences going forward.

There is a bandwidth of unknown consequences. I am comfortably ambiguous in hanging out in that bandwidth of unknown consequences between slow changes with high levels of adaptation and all out extinction level disruptions.

Why argue over a complexity that no current computer or human can grasp.

For those that need absolute clarity as to future outcomes I suggest palm readers, fortune tellers, tarot card readers, astrologists, divining rods, etc.

[KaiserJeep]

-snip-
My conclusion is that we have unequivocal data with ice melting and co2 levels rising that global warming is happening.
-snip-

I can remain ambiguous at the same time as I recognize the bias that one poster may have over another in terms of their positions.

We have unequivocal data with ice melting and co2 levels rising that global warming is happening.-snip-

The question mark risks that we do nothing or that it will be used by those in denial. Who cares? We are already doing a great job at the moment around the planet of doing absolutely nothing even though there is consensus with the majority that global warming is a real threat.

I remain ambiguous but hopeful.......

You assume facts not in evidence. I suppose, for example, that the IPCC is the largest organization promoting the concepts of AGW. When they published the last report , they claimed IPCC membership of 195 countries and a little over 6800 scientists (people who paid dues is more accurate, as Al Gore who is a lawyer is a member). The Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) had 830 authors and 1400 reviewers, and although it was a majority opinion that AGW was real, concurrence with this conclusion has fallen from 97% in AR4 to 94% in AR5.

Even if we cheat and assume that all of the 830 authors and 1400 reviewers conclude that AGW is real, that is 2230 people out of 7.4 Billion humans on Earth, or about 0.0000000003% of the people on Earth.

What "majority"? I'd venture to guess that there are less than 100,000 people worldwide (0.000014%) who even HAVE an opinion about AGW.

Probably fewer than that are thinking about FF exhaustion. I mean, the PO.com membership is very atypical, not your average human.

By the way, if 99.9999999997% of the people on Earth don't believe or even think about AGW, I'd say they are part of MY majority, not yours as an AGW believer.