Re: Forget the science

Granted, I have not yet lived quite a half decade, but I recall when I was about 12 reading in one of those environmentally aware nature magazines that parents bought for their kids about how we were guaranteed to run out of oil within 70 years, and how within 25 it would be unreasonably expensive for the average person to buy what little quantities were still available. We are more than a decade past that point and the only thing so far that has made gas unreasonably expensive for the average person to buy has been political interference in the production of oil.

Re: Forget the science

"Granted, I have not yet lived quite a half decade,"

Half century, surely!

"but I recall when I was about 12 reading in one of those environmentally aware nature magazines that parents bought for their kids about how we were guaranteed to run out of oil within 70 years, and how within 25 it would be unreasonably expensive for the average person to buy what little quantities were still available."

So it was scaremongering, was it? In fact, I remember being taught about the limited lifespan of coal, oil, gas reserves at school, and I doubt that Thatcher was on a green kick, somehow. The only thing at play here is the usual inability to predict the future: people didn't think that there'd be much more oil that easily found, but the exploration techniques have obviously improved over time to make certain oil discoveries viable.

"We are more than a decade past that point and the only thing so far that has made gas unreasonably expensive for the average person to buy has been political interference in the production of oil."

You can argue that the only reason the US imports so much tar/shale-based oil from Canada is because it gives a degree of flexibility in the oil supply, lessening political considerations and constraints, and if only everyone in the Middle East would just settle down and sell oil at cost then we'd all be OK, but the fact is that new exploration does need to enter new and more difficult/dangerous places (in the general, not political sense). Whether the Saudis have a clearance sale on oil or not, the industry would ultimately need to do deepwater drilling in places like the Arctic, which isn't a walk in the park by any means, even if the technology gets developed to do it in a not completely reckless fashion.

The sensible thing to do is to consider that releasing gigatonnes of stored carbon into the atmosphere is probably not a wise move (naysayers should consider things like ocean acidity alongside the greenhouse effect) and that doing most of your energy shopping with one industry is a good way of channelling money through a single pipe with plenty of opportunities for corruption and generally bad stuff. The oil business knows that giving oil away now and then hiking the price is bad for business, so it's obviously going to walk a fine line between undercharging and provoking price shocks and overcharging and making people look for something else.

What's most interesting is how easy it is to keep everyone coming back to the pump even as prices rise to supposedly record levels, and how easily people can be coerced into deriding even the possibility of alternative sources of energy.

Yeah, Greenland - the paradise of the North...

That they called it "Greenland" was more spin than truth, to attract settlers. Life was always marginal. Read Diamond's "Collapse" for a short introduction.

BTW, Greenland's South coast isn't currently icebound anyway.

@AC (unsurprisingly)

>>"It seems to be a matter of faith with climate scientists that Greenland has been covered in ice for millenia. "

So they *all* claim it was /totally ice-covered/ until the last few decades?

As you're such an expert on what they think, maybe you could show us where they say that, and also when they variously claim it started to become inhabitable.

Obviously, if any of them do think it was totally covered in recent centuries, they must presumably also have some thoughts as to when that stopped being the case.

Honestly, it's a wonder how anyone thinks they have the right to call themself a scientist when there are anonymous geniuses like you around.

No doubt you can accurately reconstruct the entire climate history of an area on the basis of your totally unbiased interpretations of a few placenames.

PR?

The idea that Erik called it Greenland as some sort of PR is purely based on the opinion of a few academics. Firstly there is the question of what he would gain by encouraging others. If he were looking for trading opportunities, as is widely believed, then he wouldn't want to encourage others to go the same way. Quite the opposite. Secondly there is the question of Iceland, had he wanted to encourage others to follow him then he would have given that a

Oh and how could he have got Iceland and Greenland confused, unless he knew they were both there? And since Iceland was pretty much the same barren volcanic lump then as it is now it's unlikely he would have called that Greenland isn't it?

Lacking GPS? OK so it's not so easy as using a Tomtom* but Viking navigation techniques were somewhat more accurate than those used by Columbus some 500 years or so later.

*Although Viking navigation seldom sent them up a private driveway in the belief that it was a public road.

Good News!

"what was, in the 10th century, a frozen hellhole"

And thanks to the latest bit of "climate research", we now know it's going to stay this way for even longer!

So...

So, AC with a chemistry degree, you're actually agreeing with the original poster here? Only he stated C02 made up 0.038%, citing it as a very low figure. You however contest that it is in fact 0.00039%, thereby aiding his argument, and the figure of increase is even lower?

Where in the name of holy hell did you get your chemistry degree? The online univercity (sic) of Hooville?

@Anonymous mathematician

>>"Thats 0.390% which is virtually the same number as he suggested."

a) If correcting people's maths, it's probably best not to lose a zero after the decimal point.

b) If responding to a post with a link, it might be worth trying to understand why the link is there, even if that might involve the difficult issue of considering someone's opinion other than your own (I'd suggest the 'and rising by 1.9ppm/year' might be significant)

c) If implicity trying to defend an original poster, it's probably worth trying to understand whether that poster is actually making any kind of sense, assuming that is within your capability.

The original post seemed to be claiming (on the basis of no particular evidence) that all combined human effects on CO2 levels are so small as to be effectively unmeasurable, which seems a bizarre claim, since even the fossil fuel companies don't seem to be trying that argument, let alone the overwhelming majority of more or less honest AGW skeptics.

Not only that, but the original post was simultaneously claiming that humans have no real effect on CO2 levels, but also that the activities of some humans release loads of CO2.

@yet another anonymous mathematician

>>"So, AC with a chemistry degree, you're actually agreeing with the original poster here? Only he stated C02 made up 0.038%, citing it as a very low figure. You however contest that it is in fact 0.00039%, thereby aiding his argument, and the figure of increase is even lower?"

Making it very simple:

100% -> 1,000,000ppm

10% -> 100,000ppm

1% -> 10,000ppm

0.1% -> 1,000ppm

0.01% -> 100ppm

so 0.039% is 390ppm.

Which you would, of course, have noticed if you'd bothered to read the link he posted.

As for the figure for CO2 being 'very low', from your performance so far, I'm not entirely sure you're really qualified to comment on the meaning of any particular figure.

>>"Where in the name of holy hell did you get your chemistry degree? The online univercity (sic) of Hooville?"

Wherever it was, I think I'd rate it rather higher than the place you got your maths degree.

May I most heartily thank...

...the entity who has been running through the thread downvoting posts that they'd rather didn't exist, even when those posts are so narrowly defined and factually-based that they couldn't really hope to argue with them without looking like an idiot.

Especially given the general subject of the thread, though the irony of your actions may well have completely passed /you/ by, it is pretty apparent to many people here, and is also touchingly amusing.

It's so nice that there's a mechanism around to allow even those who can't contribute in writing to participate, and let the world know of the depth of anger that genuinely exists in their bedroom.

Seriously speaking, for people who have genuine and honest concerns about either specific items of climate science, or actual or suggested political policies, the actions of knee-jerk fingers-in-ears deniers must be as frustrating as the actions of the scientifically illiterate fringes of various green organisations must be to people who have rational concerns about the environment.

True, but he does seem to be more somewhat more clueful

than the moron who said volcanoes produce less CO2 than mankind has over his history of burning fossil fuels (although I think I am going have to take up calling them "fossilized" fuels just for fun of it) when it is the reverse which is true and routinely mentioned on the Discovery Channel Mega Disaster episode about super volcanoes.

@Tom 13

I guess a lot there depends on exactly how things are specified - per specific year, per specific time period, etc.

I'm sure that people being choosy enough could come out with a vast range of 'true' comparative statements, which (especially if described insufficiently accurately) could no doubt then be exaggerated into an even wider range of bogus statements.

It's really down to why anyone is asking the question, and whether they are prepared to be specific enough about exactly what they're saying, and what they claim it means.

If someone hasn't been specific, then it's probably best not to draw too solid a conclusion form their claims.

If someone, when asked, still fails to be specific about what they're really saying, that is likely to be because they're either honestly uncertain about what they meant, or they were trying to be deceptive.

It seems that in recent times, annual fossil-fuel-sourced CO2 output is something like 100x larger than the highest estimates of volcanic CO2 output.

How much CO2 supervolcano eruptions or flood basalt events might release, while possibly being very interesting, isn't actually relevant if the question being asked is "What are the current/recent influences on atmospheric CO2", which seems to be a typical kind of question if the issue is potential human effects on climate in recent decades/centuries.

@gimbal

Presumably you're not suggesting that 'More accurate rate of icecap melting determined' is an argument against the existence of /any/ warming-related melting?

Blind leading the blind

"2003 was the hottest summer in France ever recorded."

Not necessarily the hottest it's ever had. The end.

So?

The North Pole used to be balmy in Dino-time and we weren't to blame. Doesn't mean we want to put it back to that state.

France was under big ol' sheets of ice at another time. Doesn't mean we want to want to put those back there. Oh, wait...

@Marcus

>>"El Reg has long taken the waste water out of scientists. This is perhaps because Computing is really more of an engineering discipline than a scientific one,"

Well, there are engineers, and then there are journalists.

From looking at the general media, it seems that even journalists with zero scientific understanding are quite happy to write about science as if they understood it, or complain about what 'The Scientists' are doing, as long as they think there's a market for what they write.

The fact that someone is being somewhat hostile to science isn't necessarily an indication that they understand what they're talking about.

Ultimately, you have to judge a journalist on how informed and even-handed they seem to be being, and whether they seem to be saying more than the odd thing that flags up as either irrelevant, misleading, or wrong.

As for engineers v. scientists, most of the engineers I know seem pretty open to science - not necessarily jumping on every speculative bandwagon on the fringes of theoretical physics, but neither stomping round with a smouldering inferiority complex or multiple chips on their shoulders.

At least, that's true for the engineers who are still doing engineering.

re El Reg and the scientists

"This is perhaps because Computing is really more of an engineering discipline than a scientific one, and an engineer only believes a scientific theory when he has built something that successfully uses the theory."

or maybe it's just an adjunct of the Salem Hypothesis:

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Salem_hypothesis

I feel there's been a major shift in editorial direction and style - Andrew O seems to have set the agenda and it's moved to some pretty extreme and frankly irrational viewpoints. They seem to prefer to get their climate science from economists and geologists. Or site single author papers as authorities, not the raving of cranks that they are.

pity...

@system 11

>>"It's astonishing how many climate campaigners and scientists never, ever talk about it."

It's also astonishing how many /other/ people never talk about it either.

Typical media stories about famine in a given country where the population is now far larger than the last time they had a famine there almost never point out that if food supply is marginal, having a continually and rapidly increasing population is not merely asking for trouble, but is pretty much guaranteeing it.

Frequently, even the fact that the population has doubled or more in a generation or two isn't even mentioned, as if the problem was entirely down to failures of food distribution and nothing to do with having many more people to feed.

Such population increases are likely to be a problem for the places involved even in the absence of any human-induced climate change, and quite possibly a serious political problem for other countries as well.