Thread: Big Freeze and Climate Change- Stupidity or cynicism?

Originally Posted by Visbek

No, it's that "climate change" is broader. If we are talking exclusively about temperatures during the present era, then "global warming" is still a useful term.



Yes, it has. That fact alone, however, does not disprove AGW.



Denier says what now?

Global temperatures were cooling, not warming, in the centuries before the Industrial Era (which starts in 1750). We don't know exactly what caused or ended the LIA, and it's a safe bet that some of its end was due to natural causes. However, there is no scientific reason to doubt that human activity quickly overwhelmed any natural impacts by, say, 1850; and that most of the warming since then is due to human activities.




And no, there weren't "decades of cooling" during the Industrial Era. The trend is up, and in tandem with CO2 levels (along with other GHGs, not included in the chart).

Attachment 67249730

We're around 400 PPM CO2 these days. Have you any idea what the CO2 level was during past Ice Ages?

Your own graph shows a pause between 1950 and 1975. Was there a CO2 pause during those 2.5 decades? (there were other pauses including one that started around 2000).

CO2 is a minor player, not a driver.
If you think about it even a little bit it should be obvious that the sun and earth with their behavior in cycles within cycles and the influence on climate that cyclical behavior causes on earth is the driver.
The climate system is one of chaos. Too complex to be driven by something as conveniently simple as one greenhouse gas.

'The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing,'
'We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books – mine included – because it looked clear cut, but it hasn’t happened.
'The climate is doing its usual tricks. There’s nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world.
'[The temperature] has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising - carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that.'
James Lovelock
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...te-change.html

I'm looking for proof that CO2 is the driver of climate that some claim - a reasonable request.

Originally Posted by Threegoofs

IPCC ? Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

I looked for a good illustration of bible thumping. I thought it would be easy to find.
We all know what that looks like, some true believer shoves the "Good Book" in your
face, telling you that's where we can find the answer all the while thumping it.

Well anyway, Threegoofs is essentially a bible thumper.

Originally Posted by Visbek

...except that the proof is all saying that humans are having huge impacts on the environment, and things are not doing just fine in recent years -- as evidenced by more extreme weather events; hurricanes that are larger, more intense, travel slower, and produce larger storm surges; larger and more intense heat waves; loss of glacial and other ice mass; loss of fresh water; rapid rise in sea levels; increased acidification of oceans; massive loss of coral reefs; rapid increase in CO2, CH4 and other GHG concentrations in the atmosphere; rapid increase in global temperatures; more intense storms, that in turn are more likely to cause major floods; permafrost that has locked up carbon for millennia, which is just starting to melt... The list goes on.

And yes, that includes some cold-weather events affecting small portions of the globe -- the US is, after all, only about 2% of the surface of the planet. (E.g. most Americans have no idea that right now, Australia is experiencing a heat wave that is shattering temperature records.)

I.e. this is your idea of "just fine:"





And yes, what you're doing is denying the science. That is exactly like denying that tobacco is harmful or the Earth is round. A refusal to actually think does not make one a "free thinker."

My such a long list for being false. Where did you hear it? Don't be so susceptible to such gobbledegook without verification. Is that what "free thinker" means to you?
For example ...
"Recent papers (Vecchi and Knutson 2008; Landsea et al 2010; Vecchi and Knutson 2011.; Villarini et al. 2011) suggest that, based on careful examination of the Atlantic tropical storm database (HURDAT) and on estimates of how many storms were likely missed in the past, it is likely that the increase in Atlantic tropical storm and hurricane frequency in HURDAT since the late-1800s is primarily due to improved monitoring."

Originally Posted by Steve Case

I'm looking for proof that CO2 is the driver of climate that some claim - a reasonable request.

I looked for a good illustration of bible thumping. I thought it would be easy to find.
We all know what that looks like, some true believer shoves the "Good Book" in your
face, telling you that's where we can find the answer all the while thumping it.

Well anyway, Threegoofs is essentially a bible thumper.

You might have recognized by now that he posts links to things he's never read and wouldn't understand if he did.

Originally Posted by flogger

My idea of 'just fine' is our current temperatures being well within the the range of the natural variability of the last few thousand years in both its level and rate of change.

*bzzt* wrong

Current temperatures are higher than they've been in 120,000 years. They have also obviously risen much, much faster than what we've seen in just the past 2000 years. As already posted in this thread:



In addition, as also already posted, we know that this is happening because of increases in CO2 and other GHGs, which are in the atmosphere because of human activity.

All the rest isn't any kind of empirical science at all its just political agenda driven bunk.

Spare us the denier bull****. Temperature records are real. Precipitation records are real. Sea level measurements are real. Ocean acidification measurements are real. Ice mass measurements are real. Your dislike for what the data is telling you is no excuse to deny what it's telling you.

Originally Posted by humbolt

AGW is a classic example of correlation assuming a cause. Such things must be proven, and we currently lack sufficient knowledge of climate to do so.

*bzzt* wrong

We have plenty of evidence to display that CO2, CH4 and so on are greenhouse gases, which are causing almost all of the warming in the Industrial Era. We also have lots of evidence to show that other factors (like changes in solar radiation) are not sufficient to explain what we see.

It's proven. That ship has sailed.

Originally Posted by bubbabgone

You might have recognized by now that he posts links to things he's never read and wouldn't understand if he did.

If he's read any, some or all of it, isn't the point. He links to the whole thing
and implies that your answer is in there. That's exactly what the classic bible
thumper does. It's another example that shows that Global Warming/Climate
Change is a religion. After all, Rajenda Pachauri said:

"For me the protection of planet Earth, the survival of all species
and sustainability of our ecosystems is more than my mission,
it is my religion."

As they say in New York, you can look it up.

Originally Posted by bubbabgone

We're around 400 PPM CO2 these days. Have you any idea what the CO2 level was during past Ice Ages?

Yep. It was around 180ppm when the Ice Age was at its coldest, then rose to 260, and stayed around 260 for thousands of years.

JatWo0URX3.jpg


You have to go back about 900,000 years to find CO2 levels of around 400ppm.


Proxy CO2 and Direct CO2.jpg


Wanna guess when it started to rise? Guess. Go ahead, guess. Surprise! The Industrial Era, when humans started spewing massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere.

Proxy and Direct CO2 1500 to 2015.png

Your own graph shows a pause between 1950 and 1975. Was there a CO2 pause during those 2.5 decades?

Good grief.

The effects of CO2 and other GHGs is not like flipping a switch. These are complex systems, where increases in GHGs can take decades have their full impact on temperatures. As in, even if we stopped all CO2 emissions today, global temperatures would continue to warm for several more decades (as, for example, the oceans will slowly release stored CO2). There are also short-term impacts on temperatures like volcanic eruptions. That's why we look at much longer terms.

Focusing on the "pauses" is mere cherry-picking. The long-term trends are obvious: CO2 and temperatures are both up, as predicted, and are not going to drop any time soon.

CO2 is a minor player, not a driver.

**bzzt** wrong. CO2, while a trace gas, is a critical component in the changes in temperatures during the Industrial Era -- and in other eras as well. We have tons of evidence of that. Next...

If you think about it even a little bit it should be obvious that the sun and earth with their behavior in cycles within cycles and the influence on climate that cyclical behavior causes on earth is the driver.

**bzzt** wrong. While we don't know every single impact or aspect of every single natural cycles, we do know enough about climate and human activity to determine that natural cycles are not causing what we are seeing. That's the whole point of decades of definitive research into both natural cycles and human impact.

The climate system is one of chaos. Too complex to be driven by something as conveniently simple as one greenhouse gas.

**bzzt** wrong, BS denialist talking point. Weather is chaotic and difficult to predict more than 10 days out. That fact does not make it impossible to say that "winters are cold, and summers are hot." We also look back at past eras to estimate the impacts of, for example, higher surface temperatures, or ice loss, or higher sea levels. So yes, we can make effective predictions about climate, despite the well-known difficulties in making short-term predictions.

'The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing,'....

Daily Mail is an extreme right-wing tabloid -- not exactly a neutral source for discussions of climate change. The section you quoted in this thread obviously omitted critical context from that interview. For starters, Lovelock predicted levels of doom and destruction that is well outside the consensus -- e.g. "Before long, we may face planet-wide devastation worse even than unrestricted nuclear war between superpowers. The climate war could kill nearly all of us and leave the few survivors living a Stone Age existence." As in, most scientists, climate activists and journalists were routinely calling him out for his over-the-top predictions (e.g. https://thinkprogress.org/lovelock-s...-c8ef7f9a1be5/) Meanwhile, in the very interview he quoted, he explicitly stated he was not an AGW denier. Funny how you left that out.

In other words, he walked back his own extremism, which was not a reflection of the scientific consensus or mainstream view.

These kind of compounded fallacies (cherry-picking and appeal to authority), combined with a near-total lack of research and data conducted by the deniers, only serve to show the intellectual bankruptcy of the denialist ideology.

Better luck next time.