Obama on Climate Change: Act Now or Condemn World to a Nightmare

[Alflives]

Public transit is crap in a lot of places. I can drive to work in about 20 minutes. To take transit It would be around an hour and a half. I had to depend on transit for a while. I'd rather drive in a car by myself than in a bus that full of people that don't shower, play their music too load, and for the most part lack manners.

I respect that we each get to choose the way, or ways, we try to make a difference. I think the message is that if we want to make a difference, it will be uncomfortable, no matter the method. Plus, doing the right thing is often difficult. There are those who choose to pick only the low hanging fruit, and others who choose to climb, and get the fruit which is more difficult. The fruit may all taste similar, but one has a flavour that cannot be explained, only tasted. I hope one day you get to experience that special taste.

[thedestroyerofworlds]

[Mr. Ambien]

Is the climate armageddon here yet?

[MadMonk]

While all this data is compelling, one could argue that it doesn't show clear proof of climate change caused by humans.

When you take into consideration how little data we have on our planet's climate (less than 150 years) it may be entirely possible to see fluctuations in the planet's climate over a period of time. While the glacier data is represented as 'long term' data, it only goes back to 1980, which is within my lifetime, so I don't know if it really qualifies as 'long term'.

Personally, I think it's foolish to think that human activity doesn't have a direct impact on the environment, but it's important to be skeptical of all data, because there are groups out there who will misrepresent information to further their agendas.

Sure, but what is being circulated in the media is only a tiny fraction of our understanding of the climate system; many data or findings do not make it out to the public, because unlike surface temperature records, their significance is more difficult to understand by the general public. For example, few talk about the fact that the Stratosphere is actually cooling significantly, because unless one has some training in the radiative physics, it is not obvious that this is in fact a strong indication that the current climate change is driven by an increase in greenhouse gas, and not by changes in the sun's activity for example.

What is also not commonly is know is that global warming is not some theory proposed over the past few decades to explain the temperature increase, nor is it a simple correlation between fossil fuel use and temperature increase. The basic physics (e.g. greenhouse effect, water vapour feedback) was established around the turn of the 20th century, and thus the modern temperature records is in fact a confirmation of the theory; of course new data has allowed us to fine tune our understanding of the climate system (role of aerosols being a notable example), but our basic understanding has not changed.

The thing is, how CO2 changes the energy balance of the earth is very well understood because it is something that can be measured precisely in labs, and you can also verify its effect directly through satellite measurements, and there is no way around the fact that the amount we have released into the atmosphere is sufficient to explain the warming we have experienced. This is a basic fact of physics, and to deny this is akin to denying evolution or tectonic theory.

I'm not saying that everything is settled and there aren't uncertainties. To name two just off the top of my head: having meaningful decadal and regional prediction is still sorely lacking, our understanding of clouds can still be improved significantly, but it is a grave mistake to think that these unknowns means we have no understanding of our climate.

Yes it is good to be skeptical, but you can't be skeptical unless you are informed, and one has to realize that one may not be sufficiently informed to hold a contrary position: You can't say "Nirvana is overrated" after only hearing a 10 second clip of a song.

[Lockout Casualty]

I would love to see Ambien answer this post. As the most prominent mocker of those environut liberals and scaremongering, greedy scientists, I can only assume he is just as well versed in the topic.

Sure, but what is being circulated in the media is only a tiny fraction of our understanding of the climate system; many data or findings do not make it out to the public, because unlike surface temperature records, their significance is more difficult to understand by the general public. For example, few talk about the fact that the Stratosphere is actually cooling significantly, because unless one has some training in the radiative physics, it is not obvious that this is in fact a strong indication that the current climate change is driven by an increase in greenhouse gas, and not by changes in the sun's activity for example.

What is also not commonly is know is that global warming is not some theory proposed over the past few decades to explain the temperature increase, nor is it a simple correlation between fossil fuel use and temperature increase. The basic physics (e.g. greenhouse effect, water vapour feedback) was established around the turn of the 20th century, and thus the modern temperature records is in fact a confirmation of the theory; of course new data has allowed us to fine tune our understanding of the climate system (role of aerosols being a notable example), but our basic understanding has not changed.

The thing is, how CO2 changes the energy balance of the earth is very well understood because it is something that can be measured precisely in labs, and you can also verify its effect directly through satellite measurements, and there is no way around the fact that the amount we have released into the atmosphere is sufficient to explain the warming we have experienced. This is a basic fact of physics, and to deny this is akin to denying evolution or tectonic theory.

I'm not saying that everything is settled and there aren't uncertainties. To name two just off the top of my head: having meaningful decadal and regional prediction is still sorely lacking, our understanding of clouds can still be improved significantly, but it is a grave mistake to think that these unknowns means we have no understanding of our climate.

Yes it is good to be skeptical, but you can't be skeptical unless you are informed, and one has to realize that one may not be sufficiently informed to hold a contrary position: You can't say "Nirvana is overrated" after only hearing a 10 second clip of a song.

[SaintPatrick33]

So is Obama going to stop corporations from pillaging and polluting "third world nations"? Just like he was going to be tough with the banks on their bailouts ehh... I love how politicians tell people they need to clean up their act when most of the processes involved with going greener are corporate or government entities.

[aGENT]

So is Obama going to stop corporations from pillaging and polluting "third world nations"? Just like he was going to be tough with the banks on their bailouts ehh... I love how politicians tell people they need to clean up their act when most of the processes involved with going greener are corporate or government entities.

All meaningful change demands the will of the people.

[Mr. Ambien]

All meaningful change demands the will of the people.

Obama's actions are the will of the people. They voted him in, not only once, but twice.

[Kaner]

I find it pretty crazy that, not terrorism, war, will not end life on earth, but climate change will.

Absolutely amazing, and terrifying at the same time.

[Mr. Ambien]

I find it pretty crazy that, not terrorism, war, will not end life on earth, but climate change will.

Absolutely amazing, and terrifying at the same time.

I think it's funny that global warming econutters believe that life on Earth ends because climate (which is never static and has only been human-friendly for but an ever so brief moment of the planet's history) eventually will become less hospitable to humans. How hilariously egocentric is that?

Who needs religion or bibles when you have environmentalism?

[hsedin33]

These global warming activists are becoming so desperate. No one cares anymore, a lot of believers don't believe anymore. They keep claiming we need to change... What do we need to change? Give them more money. Do some research and shut up. One hot temperature somewhere is irrelevant when cold records are constantly being broken, and glaciers are getting bigger ect. No one should even care to debate this fear mongering tactic any longer

Literally one of the most ambiguous, uninformative, unscientific, useless posts I have read in sometime. Such a cliche denier post I can't even tell if this is sarcastic or not.

[Lockout Casualty]

I think it's funny that global warming econutters believe that life on Earth ends because climate (which is never static and has only been human-friendly for but an ever so brief moment of the planet's history) eventually will become less hospitable to humans. How hilariously egocentric is that?

Who needs religion or bibles when you have environmentalism?

How come you never address MadMonk's posts? Do you have him on ignore as well? Because your post looks downright hilarious after reading his a few posts above.

The 3% of studies that reject global warming are filled with errors

A new study has found they’re riddled with cherry picking, curve fitting, and disregarding known physics.

By now, most of us are aware that 97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree that global warming trends over the past century are most likely due to human activities. But what about the remaining 3 percent that reject this conclusion based on their own scientific investigation? How did they come up with such different results, and do their analyses render the climate consensus incorrect?

To answer these questions, an international team of scientists has attempted to replicate the findings of a selection of climate contrarian papers. Publishing in the journal Theoretical and Applied Climatology, they report that these papers are riddled with false dichotomies, inappropriate statistical methods, and misconceived or incomplete physics, and displayed much the same methodological flaws, with cherry picking - selecting and omitting evidence to suit a bias - as the most widespread.

"We found that many contrarian research papers omitted important contextual information or ignored key data that did not fit the research conclusions," one of the team, Dana Nuccitelli from Skeptical Science in Australia, writes at The Guardian.

For example, when analysing a 2011 paper by Humlum et. al. they found that in order to support the "vague idea" that the lunar and solar cycles can somehow affect Earth’s climate, the authors discarded 6,000 years' worth of data because their model couldn’t reproduce the temperature changes during that time. "The authors argued that their model could be used to forecast future climate changes, but there’s no reason to trust a model forecast if it can’t accurately reproduce the past," says Nuccitelli.

Curve fitting, which is where you construct a curve that best fits a given series of data points (in this case temperature data), was also present throughout the 3 percent, the researchers report. "Good modelling will constrain the possible values of the parameters being used so that they reflect known physics, but bad ‘curve fitting’ doesn’t limit itself to physical realities," she writes at The Guardian. "For example, we discuss research by Nicola Scafetta and Craig Loehle, who often publish papers trying to blame global warming on the orbital cycles of Jupiter and Saturn."

Which brings the researchers to their third big criticism of these papers - they not only ignore the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change, but on basic physics as well, Nuccitelli citing a "clear lack of plausible physics" as a common theme.

The researchers say this with two very clear caveats: one is that they only examined 38 contrarian papers, so can’t say that these errors run through all climate contrarian papers, and the other is that they didn't include a control group of papers. Nuccitelli says they have no doubt that if their replication approach was applied to consensus papers, methodological errors would also be uncovered. So yep, that's them making their own error because they didn't include 38 consensus papers in their analysis. "However, these types of flaws were the norm, not the exception, among the contrarian papers that we examined," writes Nuccitelli.

Lead author Rasmus Benestad from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute makes clear at realclimate.org that the papers they analysed weren’t a random selection of climate contrarian papers, which means what they've completed is not a statistical study, but rather an analysis of how valid these papers are based on the replication process. Benestad writes:

"We had been up-front about our work not being a statistical study because it did not involve a random sample of papers. If we were to present it as a statistical study, then itself would be severely flawed as it would violate the requirement of random sampling. Instead, we specifically chose a targeted selection to find out why they got different answers, and the easiest way to do so was to select the most visible contrarian papers."

These different answers are the biggest red flag when it comes to contrarian papers,says Nuccitelli. The consensus papers have all come to the same conclusion, and the contrarian research papers are "all over the map, even contradicting each other".

While it's great that analysis like this is being done, we'd love to see it done again with a proper control group, scrutiny of consensus papers, and a larger, random sample size of contrarian papers so we can see how widespread these errors are across the board. But in terms of achieving what they set out to do, Benestad's team has done so, and now it's up to the authors of the targeted papers to explain themselves.

http://www.sciencealert.com/errors-common-in-the-3-of-climate-studies-that-reject-the-global-warming-consensus-study-finds