Map Makers Admit Mistake in Showing Ice Cap Loss in Greenland

[P4man]

You are mistaken. The simple answer is: no one knows.

No one knows 100% for sure. No one knows anything 100% for sure. Ever.  Maybe we live in the Matrix?
So if you jump out of a plane, you may not fall to your death. No one knows. Maybe God will catch you. Maybe Newton was wrong.  So why dont you?
Rational humans dont jump out of planes without a parachute because they make decisions based upon the best available science and knowledge. If you jump out of a plane without parachute there is a near certainty you will die. The chances of us changing our climate are about the same. But yeah, "no one knows!".
What a stupid argument.

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[RandyFolds]

You are mistaken. The simple answer is: no one knows.

No one knows 100% for sure. No one knows anything 100% for sure. Ever.  Maybe we live in the Matrix?
So if you jump out of a plane, you may not fall to your death. No one knows. Maybe God will catch you. Maybe Newton was wrong.  So why dont you?
Rational humans dont jump out of planes without a parachute because they make decisions based upon the best available science and knowledge. If you jump out of a plane without parachute there is a near certainty you will die. The chances of us changing our climate are about the same. But yeah, "no one knows!".
What a stupid argument.

Alright, descartes...

The sample size is too small to draw inferences about the greater picture. The simple fact is, we don't know a goddamn thing about a goddamn thing. Anyone who blindly believes otherwise is liable to get burnt. Thalidomide babies, anyone?

[P4man]

The sample size is too small "

Another great point; clearly not a single climate scientist ever thought of that or there wouldnt even have been an IPCC report.
Do tell them, Im sure they will revisit the whole idea once they realize their complete folly.

The simple fact is, we don't know a goddamn thing about a goddamn thing.

Some people dont.
http://theflatearthsociety.org/cms/

[bb113]

P4man, skepticalscience is a PRO-AGW site. Stop assuming everyone is dumber than you. Lindzen is not my hero at all, stop basing your arguments on him. Hero worship is exactly what I have been advising against doing. Watch the video of him debating another climate scientist (who believes in AGW and was a contributor to the IPCC doc). They both agree with me, not with you. You are once again drawing us off track into philosophy of science...and ignoring what everyone else is saying about the quality of the actual evidence. If you know nothing but just accept scientific consensus, then fine. I did that for years and lived happily. However, it is wrong of you to act like you know what you are talking about or look down on people who don't share your view when it is based completely on an appeal to authority.

If you look for the evidence man is causing the warming, all you will find is the correlation between CO2 and temperature. If you look for the evidence the earth will continue to warm until it causes catastrophic effects, all you will find is the correlation between CO2 and temperature, plus a theory of positive feedback that is not based on evidence. It is logical, and makes sense, I agree. I think is a good, plausible theory. The fact is though, there is no real evidence for it yet. At the very least, please read the IPCC report for yourself rather than relying on press releases, etc.

If I am wrong about this please correct me. I will be looking more into it myself to see if I have misunderstood, but any help along the way ("just listen to the experts" is not helpful) would be appreciated.

Also:
Catastrophic= whatever makes flipro think human society will get wiped off the planet.
You meant Hawking not Dawkins
Please stop turning the debate into "which authorities should we trust", I am capable of assessing that for myself.

[bb113]

Also Lindzen is still publishing on cloud data as of last summer, so I am not sure what your quote is referring to. Anyway, focusing on him is a distraction. All climate scientists admit the clouds are an unknown, it is just that there is reason to think any negative feedback effect will be weak. I have not examined this yet so I can't say much more.

[P4man]

Catastrophic= whatever makes flipro think human society will get wiped off the planet.

There is no scientific consensus on that happening or, afaik,  even being possible. I do not claim it, the IPCC doesnt, very few scientists do.
If thats your point, or flipro's, well clearly there is no convincing scientific proof we are about to render the earth in to a Venus like planet, or that there is even such a possibility, so im not going to argue for or against that. I dont think it has been convincingly ruled out either, but thats besides the point.

What there is ample evidence for however, to me is reason enough to consider serious measures regardless of the potential for a truly cataclysmic run away greenhouse effect, and I find the shallow attempts to discredit the extremely thorough science on the matter, particularly by politically or religiously motivated non scientists appalling.

The discussion on whether or not earth may become inhabitable because of our carbon emissions  is not something I want to debate, so if that is the point I missed, carry on.

[Kettenmonster]

I understand that CO2 carbon dioxide has been on the rise since the start of the industrial revolution.

Which holds only true for exactly that period of time, thus pretty irrelevant for any kind of proof.
In fact temperature started rising before industrial revolution came along.
We can´t safely predict the weather for more than 3 days, but climate for the next centuries?
If a reliable extrapolation method existed, it would be used on stock exchanges.
Those climate predictors could earn a fortune, just if it would work.
Look at the math inside the computer climate models. It is pure crystal orb contemplation.

This not rocket science, and any discussion justifying why we should stay on fossil fuels for 1 second longer is idiotic.
That's what it gets down to for me..

1.) It is more than just rocket science. Rockets are meanwhile very well understood while climate is not.
2.) Who wants to stay on fossil oil for what reasons? Plus where is the "connection to rockets"?
Impressive! You just prooved f ^ f => t  
Which is correct plus your conclusion is correct, but for totally another reason.
I hate it when people come along with brilliant ideas, good plans but then spoil it all with wrong arguments.
Because then while the arguments are prooven wrong, people might think the idea is prooven wrong as well.

Fossil oil, coal and gas are better used for reasonable things if used at all, than just being combined with oxygen to achieve some warmth.
That is in fact pretty idiotic plus rather expensive. But the system is established and very well connected people earn a lot of money with it..
That is why this system is so hard to break apart.

Just for some homework figure out the following numbers for your country.
- How much wood in kg is regrown in a forrest per km² = A? (Depends on lots of factors, rather tricky question)
- How many km² of forrest do you have = B. (should be quite easy to google)
- Calculate A x B x 5 and compare this to the gross energy consumption of your country and be amazed.
How comes this magic 5 along? Each kg of wood gives you roughly 5kWh, provided you keep it dry and burn it well.

We end up ...
- with lots of work for unemployed people. Bad thing because unemployment keeps wages low.
- less dependent on fossil energy supply. Bad thing as already mentioned above.
- needing a plan how to crop forrests sustainably. Which is at hand, but where is the politician grasping the term "hundred years".

Wood is only one example for the general concept on how to solve the problem.
In Reykjavik they are heating the roads, guess how surely not with oil or coal. (google hint: perlan icelandic for pearl)

[Hawker]

You are mistaken. The simple answer is: no one knows.

No one knows 100% for sure. No one knows anything 100% for sure. Ever.  Maybe we live in the Matrix?
So if you jump out of a plane, you may not fall to your death. No one knows. Maybe God will catch you. Maybe Newton was wrong.  So why dont you?
Rational humans dont jump out of planes without a parachute because they make decisions based upon the best available science and knowledge. If you jump out of a plane without parachute there is a near certainty you will die. The chances of us changing our climate are about the same. But yeah, "no one knows!".
What a stupid argument.

Its not entirely stupid.

http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/02/features/trials-and-errors?page=all

Climate is exactly like the cholesterol problem that they are grappling with in that industry and the causation problem is one that is killing all modern science research.  In these complex systems, causation is simply not understood.

[Nachtwind]

Which holds only true for exactly that period of time, thus pretty irrelevant for any kind of proof.

Thats wrong. You can check the data from GRIP, NORTHGRIP and similar projects for at least 100k years.. CO2 has been raising and sinking for a while, but when looking at the Eemian, the previous interglacial one cannot see the high raise of CO2 that we have today. So yes, this raise of CO2 is special - but it is hard to say how much it in fact influences the climate, but there IS a correlation..

In fact temperature started rising before industrial revolution came along.

That is right, but as said above.. its hard to judge if this change we have now is still "natural". Milancovic cycles as well as the Eemian would suggest a warming - yet none that is as rapid as the one we have at the moment. Looking at the fossil records there are only very few examples of such rapid climate changes in the Quaternary, and those were afaik(!) all related to events.

We can´t safely predict the weather for more than 3 days, but climate for the next centuries?

We're not talking about the weather. Here we talk about climate.

If a reliable extrapolation method existed, it would be used on stock exchanges.

The stock exchange is, as stupid as it sounds, much more chaotic than any climate patternsince chaotic factors like human behaviour isnt part of the climate. There are some good models for climate but so far none was possible to 100% model the past - so there is no model that could predict the future. But that is why scientist talk about scenarios and not about predictions. Our crystal balls are as useless as everyone elses.

Look at the math inside the computer climate models. It is pure crystal orb contemplation.

If you look into the climate models you will see a lot that is certainly not crystal orb contemplation. Its just the vast amount of variables that really makes the job hard..

1.) It is more than just rocket science. Rockets are meanwhile very well understood while climate is not.

Rockets are now studied for almost 70 years whilst the climate is still a very young scientific topic. Sure, Milancovic was able to relate certain climatic fluctuations to astronomical influences, but true climatic modelling couldnt be done without the computing power we see today.. Give climate sciences some time.. if it is as old as rocket science much much more stuff will be known...

[P4man]

Climate is exactly like the cholesterol problem

Unlike human body chemistry,  the basic science behind green house effect is so simple a  6 year old can understand it. There is no debate about that.
Modeling that in to accurate simulations with all the interactions is of course, an enormously complex task. Which is why despite all the efforts, most predictions still have relatively large error margins. But turning that in to "we dont know what is cause and effect, so we have no clue" is simply untrue.

We do not understand all the interactions, but to use a Rumsfeld; these are known unknowns, ie, we know what we dont know and can and do account for that. Their impact is modeled as statistical uncertainty. The chances of those unknowns reversing the conclusions made so far is statistically irrelevant. We are heating up the earth and the broad lines of the results of that, are known. We may not be able to predict with certainty if it will be 0.6C or 0.8C in x years, but I fail to see how thats a reason to just pretend there is no evidence.

If you want to draw any parallels with medicine, consider the planet a patient. If despite some statistical uncertainty all specialists in the world state with very high confidence the patient is ill with some specific poisoning and they all universally agree on the most likely cause and cure; do you wait until they agree if the patient has 5 or 7 months to live,  until its determined if his fever will spike to 40C or 41C, if the poisoning will cause rashes on his left or right arm first?  Do you wait until he dies, or do you take action based upon the best available science? Even if the treatment may be uncomfortable, and the cure may not be 100% guaranteed.

BTW, the patient in this analogy, is your son. Because its dubious climate change will impact us terribly,  at least the older ones among us. The effects will be felt mostly by our children and grandchildren. I find it disgusting enough that they will inherit a planet thats mostly devoid of one of nature's most versatile and useful products, namely oil, because we carelessly burned it; burned unspeakable amounts, like some cavemen burning Van Gogh paintings to keep warm.

[kais3r]

how about this summer like winter on the east coast?? this is a form of global warming if u ask ME!

[bb113]

Ok, so we agree that climatologists are not the ones saying the earth may turn into venus so we can stop talking about that. This is a possibility but deemed very unlikely. The usual scenario for lets not say catastrophic, but "bad" for humanity, is a rise of 3-5 K. This is predicted to lead to increased extreme weather, droughts, flooding of populated coastal areas, mass migration, etc. I haven't looked at what the evidence for these predictions are so I won't say any more on that for now.

I would note here that the predicted rise of 3-5K is dependent on positive feedback, not CO2 itself. The way all these feedbacks interact is not simple enough for a 6 year old to understand.

The question then is whether we can do anything about it and whether trying to "do something" is a better option than doing nothing and adapting. If humans pumping CO2 into the atmosphere is the cause, then there is an obvious way "do something". If it is not, then what we do may be useless and needlessly restrict our ability to adapt to the coming change.

[bb113]

Climate is exactly like the cholesterol problem

If you want to draw any parallels with medicine, consider the planet a patient. If despite some statistical uncertainty all specialists in the world state with very high confidence the patient is ill with some specific poisoning and they all universally agree on the most likely cause and cure; do you wait until they agree if the patient has 5 or 7 months to live,  until its determined if his fever will spike to 40C or 41C, if the poisoning will cause rashes on his left or right arm first?  Do you wait until he dies, or do you take action based upon the best available science? Even if the treatment may be uncomfortable, and the cure may not be 100% guaranteed.

Usually the "cure" to a new disease isn't figured out until many people have already died and trial and error has provided evidence for what works or not. So your analogy doesn't work.

[bb113]

Also I will give an example from my field:

Until around the 1970s, an accepted idea across neuroscience was that the nervous system was essentially fixed throughout adulthood, both in terms of brain functions, as well as the idea that it was impossible for new neurons to develop after birth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity

For a hundred years it was "the consensus" that the nervous system of adults was fixed. The few neuroscientists saying otherwise were ignored. Now we have multiple drugs in clinical trials meant to increase neuroplasticity, neuroplasticity is thought to underlie the success of rehab (when it is successful), there are iPhone apps meant to "keep the brain sharp" (i.e. plastic).

Similarly it was thought that GABA was always an inhibitory neurotransmitter. This was supported by much evidence (recording neurons firing) and theory (GABA receptors open up to allow Cl- into the cell thus hyperpolarizing it). Then it was discovered that chandelier neurons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandelier_neurons) release GABA but it is excitatory. How could this be so when it was backed by so much evidence? They synapse directly on the axon hillock where there is an unusual Cl- concentration gradient, so Cl- flows out of the cell rather than in.

Scientific consensus is not useless, but it should not lead you to attach even 90% credibility to an idea on its own. The fact is all these sciences are still young (neuroscience, economics, climatology), thinking we know the whole story is folly.

[FlipPro]

I AM NOT saying that sudden changes due to man are not happening. I am saying that blindly accepting what "experts" tell you is bad, accepting what the media says is even worse.

Why do you put experts between quotation marks?
And why is it somehow smart to blindly disbelieve what is the overwhelming consensus among the worlds best scientists and instead do your own cherry picking "research"?  Do you consider yourself such a wold authority on climate science that you know better than all the worlds scientists combined, that you think you can do a better syntheses of all the available science than the IPCC  ? I find that notion as ridiculous as thinking you would be able to build a better space shuttle than NASA in your garage. They are only "experts" after all, what do they know.

+1

[bb113]

I AM NOT saying that sudden changes due to man are not happening. I am saying that blindly accepting what "experts" tell you is bad, accepting what the media says is even worse.

Why do you put experts between quotation marks?
And why is it somehow smart to blindly disbelieve what is the overwhelming consensus among the worlds best scientists and instead do your own cherry picking "research"?  Do you consider yourself such a wold authority on climate science that you know better than all the worlds scientists combined, that you think you can do a better syntheses of all the available science than the IPCC  ? I find that notion as ridiculous as thinking you would be able to build a better space shuttle than NASA in your garage. They are only "experts" after all, what do they know.

+1

You put too much faith in science. No one really knows what they are doing, and humans are fallible and subject to biases. There is an exceptional amount of noise in climate data due to overlapping cycles and black swan events. This REQUIRES subjectivity to interpret, so the field is unusually subject to bias. Add in the obvious political consequences and you should trust the findings even less. Getting funding is not easy, especially in a young field with a few top-scientists that see things the same way and review grants according to their own biases. Ever submit a grant? One person loves it the other hates it, often whether you get funding or not comes down to who you know. It is a very imperfect system (not that I have a better idea).

[Nachtwind]

No one really knows what they are doing, and humans are fallible and subject to biases.

Well.. in paleoclimatics we mostly know what we are doing. It would be a lie to say that we know everything we do, but at least "understanding" the past works. Applying it on todays systems is hard due to the human impact.

There is an exceptional amount of noise in climate data due to overlapping cycles and black swan events.

Oh there is? I dont really know much about that noise. D18O is quite a strong proxy - most of the time correlating to milancovic cycles, not really giving any noise. If you look at CRU and other recent datasets they are also quite good... It becomes noise or very imprecise if you goo very far back or into the closer past.. thats true. But for the times that matter much of the data is very good..

This REQUIRES subjectivity to interpret, so the field is unusually subject to bias.

Yes and No.. But most of the analyses are done with statistical methods so that the subjective interpretation of raw data shouldnt matter much. The overall interpretation is normally clear enough to not to be prone to human biases. If D18O shows warm climate, palm trees were growing and CaCO3 did accrete you can pretty much say: Yes it was warm..
Also peer review is a nice measure against bias..

Add in the obvious political consequences and you should trust the findings even less.

See above. ALso political consequences are always quite over estimated. You pretty sure know your governments..

Getting funding is not easy, especially in a young field with a few top-scientists that see things the same way and review grants according to their own biases.

What about the normal grants from institutions like NSF, DFG and others? Normally they arent granting just because a topic is sexy.. also its normally not just a few top-scientists who decide..

[bb113]

Awesome. If you are in the field please correct me where wrong.

[bb113]

So you think politics play little role in determining climate funding, and there is a varied set of reviewers. I have read some of the peer reviews (PNAS publishes them) and they looked like they were written by people legitimately assessing the paper. So I don't really know the inner workings.

[Nachtwind]

Remember its not just those few people that run arround IPCC meetings that make climate science. There are thousands of scientists worldwide doing climate stuff and only the loudest part - the most annoying most of the time - are those getting media attention and therefore access to journals like PNAS, Science or Nature.. you must have either something groundbreaking or really really (publicly) interestering to get into those.. if you are jsut someone who works with that stuff youre normally not politically orientated and do your work..

sorry if i get too "excited" here but when doing climate research you often enough have to listen to the argument that youre either bought by the oil companies or the other side... but truth is: most people are not as biased as media makes the crowds think..