Re: A choice of words
Not necessarily the best comment ever, but it does highlight the real requirement for questioning and confrontation.
Boffins: Antarctic glacier in irreversible decline, will raise sea levels by 1cm
A massive Antarctic glacier is in irreversible decline and will add up to a centimeter to world sea levels in the next 20 years, claim polar scientists. A new paper in Nature Climate Change describes how the Pine Island Glacier (PIG) has been shedding ice into the ocean at a dramatically increasing rate. Using observations on …
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Wednesday 15th January 2014 15:46 GMT Tyrion
Re: A choice of words
>> You may wish to stop reading right wing media about global warming...
You may wish to stop portraying anyone who doesn't agree with AGW as right wingers. I don't agree with AGW and I'm not right wing, nor do I read right wing media. But as is typical of AGW, it's all about politics. It has nothing to do with real science.
>> Take a look at this page, which highlights just how much of a consensus anthropogenic global warming has..
The way you AGW proselytising zealots bang on about the consensus, one would almost think that you're unsure of yourselves and your ideas. Why does all this somehow remind me of religion? Denouncing non-believers who don't follow the so called consensus, of which there is none, as heretics (right wing?).
>> The idea of a sea level rise isn't "fear-mongering". It has happened already, and is >>continuing to do so. It has a direct effect on low lying countries (such as Tuvalu).
I'm going to break with tradition here and not write a rebuttal of that, but instead pose a question: So what do we do about it? Is it possible in real terms to reverse it? If not, what the hell point is there in worrying about it. Are you willing to give up your modern life and revert back to caveman status in order to stop it? Or are you just going to spout premonitions of apocalypse. I'd really like to know.
>> Loss of glacier ice is worrying, as it takes a *long* time for it to form in the first place.
I'm not worried. We'll all be dead long before it'll be a problem anyway. I'm more worried about job security and how I'm going to pay my mortgage than whether ice is melting or forming at the poles in all honesty. That might be selfish of me, but f**k it. I like to focus on the here and now, not a hundred years in the future.
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Friday 24th January 2014 19:34 GMT Naughtyhorse
Re: Not right wing?
Are you sure?
and i quote;
"I'm not worried. We'll all be dead long before it'll be a problem anyway. I'm more worried about job security and how I'm going to pay my mortgage than whether ice is melting or forming at the poles in all honesty. That might be selfish of me, but f**k it. I like to focus on the here and now, not a hundred years in the future."
just another me-me-me-fuck-everyone-else right wing fuckwit
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Wednesday 15th January 2014 16:07 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: A choice of words
I am a professional statistician, and one glance at the link you gave: "http://climatecrocks.com/2014/01/14/about-that-global-warming-consensus/" highlights it as being biased. It searches through a set of academic articles looking for ones that explicitly state a very strong negative conjecture (that anthropogenic CO2 is not the fundamental reason for observed climate change). It does not however provide a summary of which of those article explicitly state the opposite, that anthropogenic CO2 IS the fundamental reason for observed climate change. The vast majority of papers are actually highly ambiguous on what they believe are fundamental reasons for climate change. Many are looking at specific observed trends (for example: the receding or advancing of individual glaciers; or global temperatures measured by a particular satellite), the small percentage that try to attribute blame usually do so through models, and even then often have a variety of standards of statistical backing. It is interesting reading pro-climate change news organisations (like the BBC) who have, every few years, published an article that essentially says, "Climate change proven to be caused by anthropogenic CO2". The reason that those articles still appear is precisely because very few papers actually make that claim. It is probably not as low as 1, but I sincerely doubt that more than 1% of the 2259 papers mentioned actually make the exact opposing claim; although I am confident that you will find more papers stating the strong conjecture that Anthropogenic CO2 is to blame rather than the strong conjecture that it is not to blame.
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Wednesday 15th January 2014 09:58 GMT Benchops
> transporting fallen snow to the ocean
One correction here where your model falls over. There is practically no falling snow in the antarctic (I think it's the equivalent of 5cm of rain per /year/). It's technically the biggest desert in the world! I think that would tend to imply rate of loss is not affected by fallen snow.
The problem, especially in Antarctica, is that this ice has been on ground for ... some time, and now it's not going to be. Melted or not it's going to raise the sea level.
What I do find confusing in the article though is it says both "the rate of loss will continue at this rate for the foreseeable future" and later on "increasing the speed with which it slides into the ocean". So do they mean the rate of increase of loss?
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Wednesday 15th January 2014 12:43 GMT andreas koch
A paper in "Nature Climate Change".
Completely disregarding the validity or lack thereof of the paper, what does one expect in a publication named "Nature Climate Change"?
If you want the other view, subscribe to "Constant Climate Quarterly".
It's like looking for a positive article about Windows 8 in "macUser", a favourable report about Ford's new Focus in "Vauxhall Astra Fan Magazine" or recipes for beef and bacon casserole in "The Vegan Weekly".
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Wednesday 15th January 2014 14:01 GMT stratofish
Re: A choice of words
You might want to brush up on a dictionary before you start bashing people about choice of words.
'Rate' is the speed of change, not the change itself. If you plot ice thickness over time, the rate is the slope or trend of the line, not any absolute measure on it, which of course change all the time. For the rate itself to be changing indicates a significant occurance.
In this case it means that not only is the ice thinning as was known but crucially the speed of thinning is getting faster. This IS reportworthy and of scientific interest no matter what you believe about the cause.
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Wednesday 15th January 2014 11:17 GMT MondoMan
Re: Ice Ice Baby
Actually, it was a PR junket to publicize the "signs" of human-caused climate change they expected to find 100 years after a famous Australian-led expedition. The alarmist scientists who organized it ended up with more than they bargained for, but at least all participants will now have great after-dinner stories about the time they were trapped by not-so-melted Antarctic ice.
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Wednesday 15th January 2014 14:15 GMT NomNomNom
Re: Ice Ice Baby
Climate skeptics made up the "fact" that the expedition was going to Antarctica to prove the ice had melted. That fitted their caricature of scientists so they felt no need to check.
In fact the expedition was to investigate the increase of ice in that area, ie the exact opposite of what climate skeptics presumed.
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Wednesday 15th January 2014 16:56 GMT NomNomNom
Re: Ice Ice Baby
reverse spinning? is that where I undo the spin? ok good.
Plenty of folk with a 2D view of science assumed that if scientists go to Antarctica it must be to "prove the ice has melted".
Even though that makes no sense. If you want to see how the ice is doing you'd look at satellite measurements. The last thing you'd do is visit the ice personally in a ship.
But it was a nice story for climate skeptics to be able to say "ah those scientists got stuck in the ice that they were trying to prove had melted!"
Had no basis in fact though.
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Wednesday 15th January 2014 08:12 GMT RIBrsiq
I like how many climate-change denial "arguments" seem to boil down to "[X] is cold, right now. Therefore, there is no global warming!".
That's not how it works, people. Unless you think "global warming" means Earth will turn into Venus overnight.
Let me point anyone interested in reality at a nice resource to help:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/01/14/climate_change_another_study_shows_they_don_t_publish_actual_papers.html
TL;DR: out of 9136 authors who published articles in peer-reviewed literature during the last 13 months, only one denies anthropogenic global climate change. There really should be no need to say anything else.
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Wednesday 15th January 2014 08:27 GMT Anonymous Coward
Appeal to authority
If the peers doing the reviewing for publishing take global warming as a fact, they aren't any more likely to publish articles that counter it than journals in the field of primates are likely to publish articles on Bigfoot.
I'm not trying to equate the two, but I'm hoping you see the flaw in your argument. AGW may be fact. Probably is fact. But establishing whether it is indeed IS fact can't be done by counting journal articles. It is done by having those papers present testable hypothesis and seeing how the predictions made from those hypothesis come out.
I know it is tedious to actually DO SCIENCE rather than run computer simulations based on backtesting using possibly questionable historic data and tell everyone you know what the world is going to look like in 2050 or 2100, but that's how science works. There are no shortcuts.
The problem with some of the more rabid AGW believers is that they say the consequences of AGW are so severe (if you take the more dire predictions) that we can't wait around to see if they're right, we have to immediately take all possible measures to reduce further warming. And if we do take all those measures, and global warming doesn't happen, we'll be told it would have happened had we not acted and they'll still think they were right.
If global cooling happened over the next decade they'd just retool their models and find a reason why there was a brief spurt of cooling but promise that global warming will redouble from that point on. Because if there's no global warming, then few people are interested in giving grants to climate scientists and they go back to having small offices in the basement next to the Egyptologists.
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Wednesday 15th January 2014 09:53 GMT Bunbury
Re: Appeal to authority
Y2k is not the best analogy. In that one there was a lot of scaremongering in the run up to 2000. So there was over reaction and a lot of money spent on projects to fix systems. Not surprisingly, there were few failures on 1.1.2000. Without any preventative work to fix systems in advance there would have been many more failures.
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Wednesday 15th January 2014 15:03 GMT John 156
Re: Appeal to authority
Ignorant twaddle. The Pensions Administration system which I corrected for y2k would have had over 80 serious errors with the ability to cause serious financial data corrpution and system failures, quite apart from unknown others from feed-in systems, nor would they have all shown up on 1.1. 2000 - more ignorant twaddle. Obviously you have never had experience of complex financial systems.
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Wednesday 15th January 2014 12:29 GMT Mad Mike
Re: Appeal to authority
Y2K is a great example.
The reality is that the problem did exist in some places, but was blown up out of proportion and a load of people (me included :-) ) made a lot of money out of it. Just as it was blown out of proportion by some, it was also derided as a con after the fact by those who wanted to see carnage and failures galore. It was really a no win situation. If it happened, you would be torn apart for allowing it to happen; if it didn't, you were accused of hysteria etc. and profiteering. The reality was somewhere in the middle.
Same is probably true for climate change. Some is probably quite normal and not impacted by man. Some is probably caused by man. A mixture of the two. Unfortunately, the situation is actually worse than Y2K as nobody really knows the truth. In Y2K, people could work out what the truth was and where the problems were etc.
In climate change, nobody really has any real understanding at the moment, so after the event, it'll be even more of a bun fight. Did the measures actually prevent it, so good one to the climate scientists. Alternatively, were they simply making it all up? Similarly, if it does happen, were they wrong and it would have happened regardless, or have they mitigated the effect at least. Unless you have a baseline (which we don't), nobody will ever know.
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Thursday 16th January 2014 02:16 GMT Fluffy Bunny
Re: Appeal to authority
Mad Mike, you have a good point. So I will propose an experiment that will solve the problem quite definitively. Take three or four planets, just like Earth. Planet one take as a control, don't change anything. Planets two on, vary select variables such as CO2 concentration, solar output, etc (but no other changes)
Then, we can definitively assert that variable x had y effect. When the "climate scientists" have run this experiment (and I don't mean in a computer), I will accept that it is a real science.
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Wednesday 15th January 2014 22:13 GMT Tom 13
Re: Y2K
I won't deny it. My employer and I made good money in the year before that running scans and shifting boxes in the year before the great catastrophe was supposed to happen. It was 70% crock. Fixing the actual critical systems could have been done for far less money than was spent. And the worst offender on that front was MS not issuing patches to fix DOS because they wanted everyone on Windows 98. But hey, at least everybody got spiffy new processors and roomy hard drives right?
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Wednesday 15th January 2014 09:19 GMT RIBrsiq
Re: Appeal to authority
That's not how it works.
No one gets Nobels, or any other recognition in science, for regurgitating old facts. Well, I'm too harsh: a B.Sc. and maybe a M.Sc. can be had this way. So any number of scientists would clamor to turn *any* accepted theory on its head if they could. Because that way they would at least ensure immediate recognition by their peers and, if lucky, their name(s) might be printed in textbooks hundreds of years in the future. Assuming there is one.
As to the severity of the consequences of climate change and whether we can afford to wait to "verify" them, well: they will indeed be quite severe, and I understand it's accepted that we're now past the point of no return as far as some of the milder consequences, so we will be seeing *something* -- I personally would argue that we are, right now, seeing quite a few somethings, in fact.
The argument now is whether humanity can afford to stick to its denial until the more severe consequences become inevitable as well.
Right now, the collapse (or at least the radical transformation, and not in a positive way) of human civilization in a few hundred years is tentatively on the table, I believe.
Care to raise, Sir...?
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Wednesday 15th January 2014 09:52 GMT codejunky
Re: Appeal to authority
@ RIBrsiq
"No one gets Nobels, or any other recognition in science, for regurgitating old facts. Well, I'm too harsh: a B.Sc. and maybe a M.Sc. can be had this way. So any number of scientists would clamor to turn *any* accepted theory on its head if they could. Because that way they would at least ensure immediate recognition by their peers and, if lucky, their name(s) might be printed in textbooks hundreds of years in the future. Assuming there is one"
Have you any idea how science works? How long it takes for something to get accepted and how long for something to get changed? Proving the climate models are hokum has been done over and over and anyone predicting they would fail has been proven right over and over so far. The only people to yet get it right are those pushing the theory of MMCC.
But a scientific win requires predicting within a range of values and being right so those saying the models wont work aint doing science, they are hedging the most likely bet (unless they have a working prediction). Those pushing MMCC would need to predict correctly to prove their point, they still havnt.
This doesnt mean the science isnt worth doing, but it does mean you have to be in serious incompetent denial to think we know what is going to happen when we cant seem to get it right. MMCC might turn out somewhat true in the end, or it could fall on its face. But we need to have the science to prove something instead of this religious certainty and calls of denier (equal to heretic or witch).
"Right now, the collapse (or at least the radical transformation, and not in a positive way) of human civilization in a few hundred years is tentatively on the table, I believe."
What about those who believed an invisible planet would destroy earth? Or the many predicted comings of christ/apocalypse? Your beliefs are as valid. You may be as certain as they were, but you cant be any more certain. You have no proof or solid facts to do anything with.
"The argument now is whether humanity can afford to stick to its denial until the more severe consequences become inevitable as well."
This is the perfect statement I am turning to you. Can the country and maybe the world survive with the insane policies of increased price for reduced power? Can economies survive the raping the markets are suffering to pay for your monuments to your sky god (which turn when he/she blows)? Can the people survive the disaster of these damaging policies and will there be any money left to deal with a real emergency/crisis?
Will humanity in the psychological or physical sense survive the harm being inflicted upon us because of religious beliefs like yours? And will science come out of this stronger and with some integrity left intact or will it be looked back on like a misguided religion followed by the clueless witch hunters and deity worshippers like the others?
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Wednesday 15th January 2014 11:15 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Appeal to authority
>No one gets Nobels, or any other recognition in science, for regurgitating old facts. Well, I'm too harsh: a >B.Sc. and maybe a M.Sc. can be had this way. So any number of scientists would clamor to turn *any* >accepted theory on its head if they could. Because that way they would at least ensure immediate >recognition by their peers and, if lucky, their name(s) might be printed in textbooks hundreds of years in >the future. Assuming there is one.
Usually the people who buck the trend get ignored, fail to get past peer review and find themselves ostracized by the wider scientific community and struggle to get grants.
>As to the severity of the consequences of climate change and whether we can afford to wait to "verify" >them, well: they will indeed be quite severe, and I understand it's accepted that we're now past the point >of no return as far as some of the milder consequences, so we will be seeing *something* -- I >personally would argue that we are, right now, seeing quite a few somethings, in fact.
Climate has changed over the last 4.5 billion years since the formation of the planet, with five known major periods of glaciation (including the one we are currently in) interspersed by warmer epochs. If you drew a graph showing that (1mm=1year scale), it would stretch (just about) from Boston to Dublin, and the accurate data on it would cover the last couple of meters at best. As a scientist, just extrapolating the natural variation in global climate would be impossible from that, without having to then work out how the action of man would then change it.
>The argument now is whether humanity can afford to stick to its denial until the more severe >consequences become inevitable as well.
The severe consequences of climate change will happen naturally at some point. Global temperatures will rise and fall, both from variations in the output of that big fiery ball in the sky and changes to the atmosphere and surface of the planet (volcanic eruptions, etc). At some point in the future, sea levels will rise and the island nations will fall below the waves *and* at some point they will fall and we will be able to drive across the floor of the North Sea - if we can avoid the return of the glaciers.
>Right now, the collapse (or at least the radical transformation, and not in a positive way) of human >civilization in a few hundred years is tentatively on the table, I believe.
The future of human civilization is always on the table, irrespective of how much we manage to alter the climate. All it needs is a big enough lump of rock to play cosmic billiards or the wrong disease to mutate.
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Wednesday 15th January 2014 12:58 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Appeal to authority
"Usually the people who buck the trend get ignored, fail to get past peer review and find themselves ostracized by the wider scientific community and struggle to get grants."
Yes, usually because they're dead wrong. There are a miniscule amount of examples of a lone maverick overturning consensus.
The other day I read about a guy who claimed to be a scientist, who could had a free energy machine, it just took a AA cell to run and delivered far more power than put into it. Guess what? He was wrong, but loudly protesting that the scientific community were ignoring him because they couldn't understand his work and its worth.
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Wednesday 15th January 2014 22:37 GMT Tom 13
Re: cover the last couple of meters at best.
Meters? Really? Try maybe an inch, and that's being generous. The US National weather service was founded in 1870. There were still 10 states to be admitted before you've got the continental part covered. Which gives you the outer limit for records on our continent. While services in other areas could have existed before then you have real problems with getting reliable equipment. The barometer dates to circa 1640, the thermometer maybe 40 years earlier. That's the outermost limit on reliable data. Everything else is a proxy which is subject to unknowable variations.
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Wednesday 15th January 2014 21:25 GMT Anonymous Coward
@RIBrsiq
Right now, the collapse (or at least the radical transformation, and not in a positive way) of human civilization in a few hundred years is tentatively on the table, I believe.
COLLAPSE OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION? Due to global warming? This is the kind of ridiculous, mindless, stupid, ill-informed utter bullshit that deniers can easily point to to claim the alarmists are being, well, alarmists.
Even if Greenland and Antarctica entirely melted human civilization will not collapse. Anyone who argues it would is assuming a lot of things about politics and human psychology well beyond the anything that climate science any business speculating on. If you want to make logical leaps that large, I could equally argue that utterly destroying Earth's environment to the point that all life would be ended in 500 years is a good thing, because it'll force us to colonize space and not have "all our eggs in one basket" as it were, in case a 10 mile wide asteroid with Earth's name on it came knocking.
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Thursday 16th January 2014 02:08 GMT Fluffy Bunny
Re: Appeal to authority
" far as some of the milder consequences, so we will be seeing *something*"
Not sure where this one came from. What consequences? If you're talking about Tuvalu, somebody should have told you that the sea isn't rising, Tuvalu is sinking. Pretty much what you'd expect if you started farming a coral atol.
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Wednesday 15th January 2014 11:14 GMT Robert Grant
Re: Appeal to authority
Yeah agreed - counting articles isn't how to prove/disprove anthropogenic global warming. I'm sure the same methodology was used to "prove" Galen right for a long time.
Any article that doesn't care whether it's anthropogenic, as it stands either way, or otherwise assumes AGW, e.g. if it studies its effects without checking too closely its causes (when AGW is a "presupposition") is just bias in your stats.
In fact, stats are often pointless here. Just pick all the articles that question AGW, read them, and see which is for, which is against, and why.
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Wednesday 15th January 2014 14:37 GMT Naughtyhorse
Re: Appeal to authority
"aren't any more likely to publish articles... ...in the field of primates are likely to publish articles on Bigfoot."
LOL
that's cos bigfoot is a bear!
http://news.nationalgeographic.co.uk/news/2013/10/131021-yeti-abominable-snowman-bigfoot-polar-bear-cryptozoology/
doh!
just how do you suggest we DO THE SCIENCE relating to our entire global climate? there is really only one way I can see, use the real thing.
As we don't know if there is some magical thing driving CC or if it's all man made or a mix of the two, the only practical approach is;
cut mankind's emissions to 0% (with threats backed by nukes against the developing world, or indeed the developed world if need be!) and let that run for a couple of 100 years and see what happens....
yeah cos that's going to happen.
Just imagine the chagrin of the scientists if it turned out they'd made a better world for nothing!
The SCIENCE is irrelevant, this is politics.
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Thursday 16th January 2014 03:15 GMT Rastus
@RIBrsiq - and based on your own argument, I like how many climate-change alarmists "arguments" seem to boil down to 10/20/30/100 years of warming in a cycle of tens of millions of years. Therefore, there is global warming!
That's not how it works, people. The world has warmed and cooled over millions of years. We're in a cycle.
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Thursday 16th January 2014 05:32 GMT DiViDeD
'I like how many climate-change denial "arguments" seem to boil down to "[X] is cold, right now. Therefore, there is no global warming!".'
That happens on both sides, and if you've not noticed, you've not been paying attention.
In Australia, every time we have a colder or wetter winter than normal, the Greens dismiss it as a 'statistical blip', but every talking head right now is pronouncing that the warmer summer we're having right now is 'clear evidence of man made climate change'
As I said, people take the bits that suit their personal prejudice and ignore the rest. And that's ALL sides, not just the 'deniers'
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Wednesday 15th January 2014 08:43 GMT Dalek Dave
Hmmm...Antarctic Sea Ice Growing?
http://phys.org/news/2013-10-antarctic-sea-ice.html
3.6% larger!
I do wish there was some kind of consistency between what scientists say and what is actually happening.
(And I use the words Scientists completely incorrectly, perhaps 'Media Whores With a Vested Interested in Continued Funding For Crackpot Ideas About Climate Who Have Joined The Gravy Train And Do Not Wish To Get Off')
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Wednesday 15th January 2014 13:28 GMT Anonymous Coward
"Hmmm...Antarctic Sea Ice Growing?"
Due to climate change altering wind patterns which in turn caused increased rainfall and ice thickness in the Antarctic. Unfortunately not anywhere near enough to offset ice losses overall - and a temporary situation as southern ocean temperatures continue to increase - and therefore ice levels will eventually go into decline:
http://www.washington.edu/news/2013/09/17/stronger-winds-explain-puzzling-growth-of-sea-ice-in-antarctica/
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Wednesday 15th January 2014 15:58 GMT Bunbury
If you read the article you linked to it points out that sea ice is only 1 or 2 metres thick. So a 3.6% increase in sea ice area would surely represent a rather small increase in total ice volume in Antarctica. Also, if glaciers are shedding ice faster then perhaps the cooling effect of that up the upper layer of water contributes to sea ice growth?
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Wednesday 15th January 2014 09:46 GMT Hubert Thrunge Jr.
Glaciers have always moved out to the sea, it happens because of physics more than climate. And as they move, they wear out their own "groove" in the surface, making is smoother as they go, effectively reducing the friction caused by the rock that they move over. Therefore, the accelerate.
This information has only recently been "realised" by scientists.
Engineers would have told them years ago if they'd ask.
AGW is still utter bollocks.
The climate IS changing, it's natural, stop using it as a excuse to tax people, and combat the biggest threat to the planet - people. There are too many. Population explosion is a far bigger threat to the planets resources.
This topic is closed for new posts.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
