Hope in the battle for our climate

This week was the 2015 U.N. Climate Change Conference held in Paris. Each day this week astronomer and blogger Phil Plait has written a small piece about information that came out of that conference that day. Today's was by far my favorite and here's a little taste of why:

Phil Plait wrote: So yeah, there’s hope. Look: Climate scientists are on the front lines of all this, and if they can find reason for hope, then it must be there.

The America that science-denying GOP sees is one that’s reactive, one that’s scared, one that can’t face challenges. That’s not the America I know, the one we really live in. Climate change is a huge issue, and a frightening one, but it’s not insurmountable. Instead of denying it, we need to accept its reality and to think of it as a challenge.

When Americans are challenged, we rise up and do our best. I honestly and truly think that we can, that this is an opportunity to show the world that we won’t stick out heads in the sand. We’ll face this issue, and we’ll figure out how to minimize it, how to circumvent it, how to manage it. I don’t believe in phony platitudes, or empty motivational slogans, so my words here don’t ring hollow to me. They’re simply the truth. We went to the Moon, we put rovers on Mars, we look outward to the Universe and forward into the future. That’s America.

Climate change is one of the largest existential threats we face today. It’s time to face it down.

For the full article click here .

We do really need to take action against individual and corporate polluters, humans are definitely destroying the environment which definitely can mess with the climate. However the climate changes naturally and we have had periods where CO2 levels were a lot higher. My skeptical mind turns on about all this though because there is a lot of hypocritical behavior and what appears to be scientific misconduct going on and the media and politicians are pushing this to such an extreme level by saying the debate is over and deniers should be jailed. No doubt we can't just shut down industrial society, and we won't have renewable and cleaner technological processes right away, so new taxes and regulations are definitely some of the starting tools. Unforunately I think most of the environmental movement has been hijacked by big business interests and there's a lot of information out there on this. Like with all these highly controversial politicized issues there are extreme opposite ends fighting for our belief and support. I'm a skeptic but I can still understand how just by knowing all the cars on the planet driving right now as I write are emitting both heat and toxic crap if breathed would kill me in minutes.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/08/08/climate-change-the-hoax-that-costs-us-4-billion-a-day/

https://youtu.be/52Mx0_8YEtg

Check out this lengthy article on "Climategate" it's very interesting:
http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/climategate.php#article

Thank you Lightstrider for posting that documentary - I have not seen that yet. I am also skeptical of the extremism and paranoia being parroted by the same people who stand to gain politically and financially from advocating the climate change crisis. There is something wrong when scientists and climatologists have to fear losing their jobs for questioning any of the data that supports certain view points in the debate. There is a reason they had to change meme from Global Warming to Climate Change. They were afraid the earth might actually be due to enter a cooling trend, and there is a lot of money and power to be made off of a 'crisis' like this. Kind of reminds me of what happened when people used to argue against the world being flat...

Now don't get me wrong, I do believe that we need to be good stewards of the Earth, and I am opposed to pollution and practices that are harmful to nature. I do believe we have an overall negative impact on the Earth that we need to minimize, though there are other instances, such as the ability to control forest fires that emit carbon dioxide and greenhouse gasses, that we have a positive impact on. But the hysteria and elevation of the topic of climate change to almost religious status (hence the term denier) is completely unnecessary, other than to benefit a small and powerful minority. The sky isn't falling, and if you look at long term trends for the planet, as of yet we are not treading anywhere the Earth hasn't been before.

Of course, since I don't goose-step to the ideology of hysterics, and still believe that science should be open, free, proven and based on facts, I guess I would be called a 'denier', but so be it...

new zenpencils

I'm just going to leave these here...

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20160120/

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2016/01/2015-temperatures/

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/news/releases/archive/2016/2015-global-temperature

http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/tcc/tcc/products/gwp/temp/ann_wld.html

http://berkeleyearth.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/2015-Hottest-Year-BE-Press-Release-v1.0.pdf

Admittedly two of these are from NASA so while it's six different articles it's only from 5 different sources including ones from Japan and the UK. They do all say the same thing though. 2015 was the hottest year on record, the second hottest was 2014.

Most of them show the temperature anomaly (variation in the average earth temperature), taking that average from a variety of time frames. One uses the average from 1951 - 1980. Another uses the average from 1981 - 2010 (which is hotter than the average from '51 - '80). Another uses the average from 1961 - 1990 (which would be somewhere between the two).

They all show that same upward trend. :whistle:

There are huge problems with the thermometer data sets: their limited distribution, the fact that many of the data points are computed (not actual observations) and that's before you get into growth of urban heat islands and poor siting of thermometer stations. The worst part is that they don't even use raw data - they use adjusted data. This is what the US data look like when you compare the raw data with the adjusted data:




The effect is to cool the past by 0.2C and warm the present by 0.4C. This may all be scientifically justifiable but it looks fishy to me!

The satellite data have long been viewed as much more accurate, although there are certain special interest groups going after that now - its not as scary as the thermometer data sets after all . . .

Having said all of that - it still makes little sense to pump large quantities of CO2 into the air (even though the plants LOVE it):
The CO2 greening effect is already having a significant impact - especially in the arid regions of the world:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/07/130708103521.htm

This technology looks promising - converting CO2 in the air into Methanol:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/07/130708103521.htm

If (and it's a big IF) they can commercialize this process CO2 production could be perfectly offset by CO2 capture.

It won't stop the climate changing (the climate always changes) but it would remove what is believed to be the major contributing factor to anthropogenic climate change.

Here's hoping . . .

Loudzoo wrote: The worst part is that they don't even use raw data - they use adjusted data. ...The effect is to cool the past by 0.2C and warm the present by 0.4C. This may all be scientifically justifiable but it looks fishy to me!

It can look kind of fishy (just ask Ted Cruz who requested all of the raw data be sent to him as if he even knows how to read it) but it is, from my understanding, scientifically justified. Some even say necessary. The way I understand it is that the adjustments are to account for observational bias. They account for margin of error expected from certain means of collecting data. Plus, as you've pointed out, the difference between the adjusted data and the raw data are really small and still show the same upward trend.

I can't find the article I read that talked about it right now, but when I find it I'll post it here.

It's when (if) people stop talking about it that I am concerned that there is no hope.

The hippies were right! :woohoo:

Its funny no matter how much we think we know or can track or log and speculate, the weather will still do as it pleases.
Humans can only watch nature we can pen but never explain nor control.