Educated" opinions on climate change - Part 4 27

Yes, its a new thread. and at an appropriate point to introduce a new topic in this section of the "debate".

It is Polar Bear time....
It appears that a world expert on Polar bears has been excluded from the Polar Bear Specialist Group meeting in Copenhagen because of his "unhelpful comments on AGW and because he signed the Manhattan Declaration.

Now that's censorship!

The Telegraph reports here:

And on Watts up with that?



JMW

While thinking about large cuddly anthropomorphisable animals; here is some interesting info on sea ice:
You will have seen from the link in the previous post that 0degC is late this year, the latest fro 50years and since this is plateau time it will be interesting to see what happens during the summer months.


JMW

I watched the ice trying to make it around the tip of Greenland from 1979 to 2008 and did not detect a trend. I especially looked for change during that hot year 1998. I have to admit to a bias against Global Warming. I think if we all became Sun worshippers we could control the heat input better.

HAZOP at

"Educated Opinion??" Educated on what? Some engineers since they are educated in a rigrous discipline they are experts on everything.
The whole subject is politically charged, people who don't have a clue are talking like experts ( even in these 4 threads). What a waste of server space.
If your achedemic traing and experience qualifis you to answer please do so. If your answer is a non-scientific politically motivated "opinion: chect google groups and find a political forum.

Oh dear.

In Eng Tips we have our discussions and rants where appropriate.

I don't think we (m)any of us claim to be expert but we do hope to be sufficiently well educated to have some sort of opinions.

This is an important subject, so much so that some engineer websites do have a special enclosure for this topic,
for example, and I think that if engineers want to discuss it with other engineers (and without Greenies and bubbles heads chiming in) then it is appropriate.

Evidently the site operators are happy for this too or else we wouldn't have reached the fourth thread after three very long previous threads.

But, if climate change is beyond our ability to discuss sensibly, are there any other topics we shouldn't discuss?

If you don't think climate change has anything to do with us, please say so and say how we are able to exempt ourselves from the taxes and consequences of policy enacted on our behalf.



JMW

BJC,
You are out of line. There is no need for this debate to be only conducted by scientists. Of course it is political in nature, and we all need to inform ourselves. Scientists may one day agree on what needs to be done, but engineers will have to figure out how to do it.

Hokie hit the nail on the head.

The reason why I started the original thread was not to debate if climate change was real, it was more to debate if some of the so called solutions were real or just pseudo science. This is mostly the realm of engineers.

Policy is determined by politicians who are no better educated or qualified to judge environmental issues than any other lay group.

What politicians rely upon is properly researched, presented and authenticated reports to inform their decisions.

The Blomberg links suggest that decision taking should be rational.
However, we note that there is contention about the nature of the IPCC report which while the source information is from scientists (some) the summary is political and some of the contributors disputed the final report and campaigned to have their names removed from the credits.

We also note that then and subsequently much of the noise has been deliberately emotional and using emotive words. This is admitted in some quarters as a deliberate attempt to influence policy.

Indeed, I went so far as to consider one aspect of environmental legislation (marine pollution) where there were two different reports that I referenced, the one a report commissioned by the UK's Department of the environment on particulates and air quality and another about marine sulphur emissions. The one talked about morbidity and the other talked about annual deaths.

The language differences were dramatic as was the overall style and content of the reports. One was a report designed to inform policy in a neutral manner. The report's authors were not themselves overtly demonstrating any preferred outcome. The other was a blatant attempt to influence policy.

Another example just recently was the UN report on deaths caused by Global warming that warned that an increase in temperature would result in an increase in deaths in the summer months. It did not indicate how many fewer people would die in the winter due to elevated winter temperatures.

This is increasingly the real problem, that a fully informed scientific debate is not being allowed but instead we have a number of people who are determined on a solution and want to promote that through propaganda.

There are a number of attempts ongoing to provide the most basic of tests of the computer models which is to discover the source code. There was a similar battle to discover the original "undigested" temperature data. There are attempts on both sides of the Atlantic to access computer source code which, unless we are to transform the process of scientific method, is a pre-requisite of the evaluation of the science.

In too many fundamental areas there is obscuration and propaganda.

If we are not to discuss the science then I am quite sure that the members of these fora are well qualified, more qualified than most, to understand the issues with computer modelling, with meaningful data and thus at the very least can consider and comment on the nature of the manner in whci evidence is derived and presented.

Indeed, one might even say that it is fora such as this that in their own way add to the efforts of surface temperature.com and watts up with that in showing the "deniers" among climate scientists that they are not fighting a lost cause (especially if that cause is the preservation of the proper scientific method) and that the debate is not over.





JMW

What a great piece of kit..

"Data from the craft, published last year, also suggested that the solar wind - the stream of charged particles billowing away from the Sun - is at its weakest for 50 years"

Wonder if that has any influence on climate change?

jmw, well stated.

Is there a book published on this topic.
Not a watered down 'for the public' book but one with all the details of the mathematical models, and the modeling of extraneous sources???

It's the only way to get a grasp on this issue as it has become SO politicized with legions of half qualified nuts chiming in at every angle with their opinions about the methods. Any reading of this stuff leave one with unanswered questions that are fundamental to the validity of the opinion.

NOTE i am not referring to any posters here on this board specifically. I just think this would be the most likely place to find a qualified reference.

I guess Educated Opinion means people that have read at least one book on weather in their lifetime?

I only mention it because I bought my first couple weather books over the past few months and haven't done much more than look things up.

Now when the topic comes up I now can't help but to wonder, did they read their books on weather when I couldn't find to?

kontiki99 - we're not talking about weather here, although weather is a by-product of climate. We're talking about climate, or more specifically the global climate.

I too would be very interested in having the actual climate models (source code) discussed. While my comprehension of climate is not near what these climate scientists have, I have considerable experience in computer simulations of complicated system (that's what the climate scientists claim their models are of - complicated systems). Therefore, I would consider myself qualified to offer opinions on the computer modeling. However, in the event that my opinion of said model were not in line with the current orthodoxy regarding AGW, I would be labeled "unqualified". If, OTOH, my opinion were inline with the AGW orthodoxy, then my opinion would be hailed as "cross-discipline confirmation".

jmw is right, in my opinion, that we as engineers are highly qualified to opine on the costs of implementing corrective actions to such problems (as may or may not exist) - that's what we do on a day to day basis.

Further to that - we should also be at the forefront of discussions such as "Is the cost of going back to the climate of (insert date here) more costly than simply adapting to the present (or future postulated) climate?"

On that topic - jmw discusses the UN report about global warming deaths. What that report doesn't do a good job of discussing is how those deaths could be prevented (dams/dikes, deep-water wells, desalination, etc). If the interest is in saving lives, then let's look at saving those lives directly, and not trying to do something that might indirectly save them. No?

Everybody clamors for 'data!' when discussing global warming.

I do not believe that any such singular metric or data presented will ever concisely reflect climate change from a historical perspective. Delta T, CO2 emmision, Solar Radiation; all discrete measures of an indiscrete system.

The grand system of climate is far too complex, too intracate, too inter-related, too massive, and too subtle to ever exhibit data signals so strongly they can be claimed as 'proof' no matter which side of the debate you fall.

The only value such data offers is validation that the Eath is earfully and wonderfully made; and perhaps it is only human arrogance that presents that we are so powerful as a species to independently change climate of our own will.

This is the surprise news:
The UN will announce that Global warming isn;t going to be as bad as thought:

I take this badly. This is the French variation of how to stuff the tax payer and a policy much plagiarised by the UK Government.
You proclaim something really bad like, for example, road tax at £1.40 per mile (I did 20,000 miles last year) and when everyone screams loudly enough and long enough they are so relieved when the Government recants and says "Sorry, just kidding; it will only be £0.50 per mile." everyone is supposed to be so releved they will forget they didn't want to pay any road tax since they already pay three times as much money in car tax and fuel tax as is spent on the roads that paying more just means even more money will not be hypothecated.

So here we are expected to see this as reasonable (actually, probably more "affordable") when what we really want to question is whether AGW exists or not and whether we are warming or cooling before we spend anything.

Oh well, we are just a little bit pregnant I guess.

Incidentally, what I was looking for was an article on Orpheus or whatever which is now to be swicthed off but which has measured that the solar wind is at its lowest in a 50 year cycle. But that doesn't matter because the sun has nothing to do with climate (but everything to do with weather?)

The IPCC has been forced to halve its predictions for sea-level rise by 2100, one of the key threats from climate change. It says improved data have reduced the upper estimate from 34 in to 17 in.[/data]

How can data be "improved"? surely we either understand the data better or have more of it? Improved is what they did to the GISS data to "correct" it.

However, what this suggests is that the data so far was so por that some magical "improvement" has reduced estimates significantly. SHould that happen? should it not refine the data better?
How should we measure it? shouldn't the new data mean that instead of 300% errors from the climate computer model we should get 1505% errors not drop below the previously declared limit values?

JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

Click to expand...

rhodie - I wasn't clamoring for data, just the source code for the climate models (i.e. what affects what by how much, what are the coefficients to the various multi-variable equations, etc.). I suppose that it would be possible to do some empirical curve-fitting that would "reproduce" the past, but if none of that is based on hard, scientific correlations, then future predictions are mere extrapolations from a (potentially) crazy curve-fit. We've all experienced the 3rd or 4th order curve that is perfectly acceptable for a small range of applicability, but becomes very very wrong outside that range.

jmw - I know what you mean. Data is data. It doesn't get better or worse, you either have more of it, or you, as you say, "correct" it. They likely incorporated additional data points into their curve-fit, found out that the older curve fit didn't "fit" anymore, and reworked it. I'd be willing to bet that there are some data points that were thrown out because their inclusion in the set didn't fit with the orthodoxy of the investigators (maybe sea levels will go down, or maybe do nothing...).

I read today an article in the NYTimes that equates anyone who questions AGW with treason - treason against the planet! How does one have any sort of reasonable discussion when the politics becomes Me-Good, You-Bad/Evil.

Hokie66 I am on base, some people are in wrong ballpark.

"The reason why I started the original thread was not to debate if climate change was real"
Your not going to find out if it’s real listening to a bunch of “educated” engineers.

It's not really the realm of engineers. I don't recall seeing one post by a climatologist, a paleo-climatologist, a geophysicist or any other real scientist. For all their "education" listening to engineers on this topic is just a couple of froghairs above listening to the same debate in a truck stop.
The debate on the subject has become more political because it will mean someone has to spend money. Our government is wonderful because if you think your going to have to spend money you can always hire someone to agree with you. Lobbyist can always find experts to agree with their view. They will do what they can to stir the debate amongst the public.
After hundreds of post there has been nothing original said about global warming, few if anyone has changed their opinion.
A debate on String Theory-Is it Real? Where’s the dark matter in the Cosmos or Intelligent Design might go on for a long time but when you squeeze the gold out of the mercury there won’t be any thing there.
Whats wrong with global warming? I am already working to set –up a Carbon Dixode removal system in a power plant. Global Warming or not it’s green to me at the moment.
.

BJC,

And you won't see any posts by those "real scientists" on this site. But when they want to sequester carbon or decide that we need more nuclear power plants, they will come running. And when they want to set up a carbon trading scheme, they will listen to the lawyers, accountants, and other rip off merchants.

Anyway, good luck with your CO2 removal. You will need it.

BJC,
If you find this discussion irrelevant or offensive, then you should not waste your time reading or throwing stink bombs into the middle of it. I didn't open any thread on this discussion for nearly a year because I was sick of each side simply talking to themselves and no one ever convincing anyone to change their point of view.

My position hasn't changed in years--the climate is changing. The climate has always changed. The climate will always change. Computer models NEVER EVER prove anything, at best they can only help lead human beings to insights at worst they can be used to manipulate public opinion. The best data I've reviewed is inconclusive, contradictory, and filled with human manipulation (of the data, not the environment). If this were a purely scientific/technical discussion then it would be a hoot, but when you add the dimension of governments basing policy on sanitized data then the discussion goes from an interesting academic exercise to a real possibility that ill-informed policies will result in unnecessary injury and death of actual human beings.

Again, please stow your ad hominem arguments and either bring data or just don't open the thread.

David

rhodie: I'd argue that it's wishful thinking that we humans are incapable of changing the climate as a by-product of what we do.

The Earth will be fine- on the geological timescale. But we humans have, incontrovertbily, altered the composition of the atmosphere significantly in a geological nanosecond.

The nature and extent of the consequences is unknown- but it would be foolish to assume that there won't be any. It would similarly be foolish to just continue blindly down the same path that produced the step change in atmospheric composition in the first place. Doing so flies in the face of all we know and practice in relation to risk management as engineers.