On 11 Mar 2014, at 22:06, Jesse Mazer wrote:
On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 1:50 PM, John Clark <[email protected]>
wrote:
On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 3:58 PM, Jesse Mazer <[email protected]>
wrote:
>> because before you initiate a policy that will impoverish the
world for many generations and kill lots and lots and lots of people
> What "policies" are you talking about that would have these
supposed effects?
Shut down all nuclear reactors immediately.
Stop using coal.
Stop all dam construction and dismantle the ones already built.
Stop all oil and gas fracking.
Stop using geothermal energy.
Drastically reduce oil production and place a huge tax on what
little that is produced.
Don't Build wind farms in places where they look ugly, reduce wind
currents, kill birds or cause noise.
Don't use insecticides.
Don't use Genetically Modified Organisms.
Don't use herbicides.
Do exactly what the European Greens say.
So, like a creationist you're unwilling to accurately depict the
beliefs of those you disagree with, and instead you attack a
boogeyman that has sprung mostly out of your own fevered imagination.
John Clark did this for years when mocking the mechanist First Person
Indeterminacy.
Some people seems to reason well, but only when the reasoning fits
their philosophy. If it doesn't fit, they get in a state of deny, and
attack usually they own delirium, that they attribute to those they
disagree with.
I keep asking myself if they are aware of this strange behavior. Are
they sincere, or just irrational. It is quite typical, especially in
forum or mailing list discussions.
Bruno
There may be some radical environmentalists who believe these
things, but the mainstream environmental groups (all the ones with
any real influence) favor policies that will gradually scale back
emissions without causing any abrupt changes in our living standards
or power generation.
> The EU has been on track in their goals of emissions reductions,
already cutting them by 18% from 1990 levels,
And Germany alone spent 110 billion dollars to accomplish that,
about $660 for every ton of CO2 they're cutting. And the net outcome
of that staggering amount of money and effort is that by the end of
this century global warming will be delayed by about 37 hours.
Did you just made that number up? And why focus only on Germany,
when the effects of the entire E.U.'s collective emissions
reductions are presumably larger than those due solely to any
individual country? Also, I brought this up to counter your wild
claim that this would lead to economic depression and starvation--
since it hasn't in the EU it presumably wouldn't in other countries
like the U.S., and if the whole world (or even just the U.S.)
followed the E.U.'s lead, do you deny that according to mainstream
climate models, this would lead to significant temperature reduction
from "business as usual" scenarios where no effort is made to curb
emissions?
Global warming is real and if it turns out to be a bad thing then
we're going to have to fix it, but we need to do it in a smart way.
> When there is widespread expert consensus on how "sure" we should
be about a scientific matter, and I have no expertise in the matter
myself, I tend to assume as a default that the scientific experts
likely have good grounds for believing what they do. Of course it's
possible on occasion that expert consensus can turn out to be badly
wrong but [...]
There is consensus in the scientific community that things are
slightly warmer now than they were a century ago, but there is most
certainly NOT a consensus about how much hotter it will be a century
from now, much less what to do about it or even if it's a bad thing.
The study I linked to wasn't just about the fact that warming has
occurred, it was specifically on the question of whether the recent
warming is PRIMARILY CAUSED BY HUMAN ACTIVITIES, and it found that
97% of peer-reviewed papers that addressed the issue agreed with the
consensus that it was. Obviously pretty much any scientist who
agrees with this would also say that human emissions over the next
century will have a large determining effect on the temperature in
2100. And note that the only way to reach such a consensus about the
cause of past warming is if there is a consensus that climate models
are broadly reliable in how they model the effects of various
"climate forcings" like greenhouse gas emissions and solar input.
Although there is plenty of range in what the models predict about
temperatures in 2100 under any specific emissions scenario, if you
look at a large number of models the likely temperature range goes
up significantly under scenarios where we make no concerted effort
to curb emissions vs. those where we do. I would say the
precautionary principle applies here, if the higher ends of the
likely range for a given emissions scenario are just as plausible as
the lower ends, and if the higher ends of the likely range (or even
both ends, under certain emissions scenarios) would be disastrous
for human civilization, then we should make an effort to prevent
that emissions scenario from becoming the reality.
If anyone reading wants to know the actual ranges predicted by
models (probably not John Clark, who will likely just make some
vague comment about models being unreliable), the last IPCC report
picked a number of possible future emissions scenarios and then
applied a large number of different climate models to each one, the
figure at http://www.climate-lab-book.ac.uk/2013/near-term-ar5/
(Fig. 11.25 on p. 120 of http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/uploads/WGIAR5_WGI-12Doc2b_FinalDraft_Chapter11.pdf
) shows a messy graph with a large number of different bumpy lines
representing different model predictions up to 2050 (not 2100),
color-coded by which future emissions scenario they were given. The
meaning of these different "RCP" scenarios is discussed at the
bottom of the page at http://www.easterbrook.ca/steve/2011/09/the-cmip5-climate-experiments/
-- RCP6 and RCP8.5 represent scenarios where no concerted effort is
made to reduce emissions, but with different guesses about how the
use of renewable sources will grow. You can see from the graph that
RCP6 and RCP8.5 are represented in red and orange, the red lines for
RCP8.5 seem to range from 1 - 2.5 degrees by 2050, while orange
lines for RCP 6 seem to be between about 0.6 and 1.2 degrees by 2050
(just eyeballing them). Meanwhile, on the graph at http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-blogs/climatechange/ipcc-report-part-iii-future-gl/18400212
you can see the ranges of all the models out to 2100, though only
for RCP 8.5 and RCP2.6. But on the right of this graph are bars
showing the range over 2081-2100 for both RCP8.5 and RCP6 (the 'no
effort to reduce emissions' scenarios), it looks like the models
gave a range of about 1-3 degrees under RCP6, and about 2-5 under
RCP8.5.
Just yesterday there was an amusing story on National Public Radio
(a place not known for being unfriendly to environmentalists) about
the zany confusion and utter lack of consensus of how much the sea
will rise in a hundred years, you can listen to it here:
http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2014/03/10/florida-sea-level
From what I understand there is more uncertainty in predictions
about sea level rises than predictions about global temperature. For
example, the page at http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/science/future.html
says "The contribution of thermal expansion, ice caps, and small
glaciers to sea level rise is relatively well-studied, but the
impacts of climate change on ice sheets are less understood and
represent an active area of research. Thus it is more difficult to
predict how much changes in ice sheets will contribute to sea level
rise." Likewise the page at http://centerforoceansolutions.org/climate/impacts/ocean-warming/sea-level-rise/
says "Sea level rise is hard to predict, mainly because of the
uncertainty in the rate and magnitude of changes in the Greenland
and Antarctic ice sheets. "
>> So CO2 at 3000 parts per million will lead to worldwide
glaciation but CO2 at 380 parts per million will lead to
catastrophic warming. Huh?
> You're forgetting that the radiation from the Sun has changed
significantly between then and now,
The sun was a few percent weaker then, but that didn't stop the
Earth from being 18 degrees hotter during the Carboniferous than now,
With much higher CO2 levels, of course. Do you have an alternate
explanation other than the greenhouse effect for *why* it was 18
degrees hotter back then, if the Sun was weaker? For that matter,
any alternate explanation for why Venus' surface is much hotter than
Mercury's, despite being about 1.9 times as far from the Sun (and
thus receiving about 3.6 times less energy per unit area, by the
inverse square law, leaving aside that Venus's cloud cover is very
light so it reflects a good amount of that).
and you're forgetting that life just loved it when things got that
warm.
I'm not forgetting, this is a point you've already made before and
I've already responded--I said that life could certainly adapt in
the long term to a rise to levels it had reached in prehistoric
times, but that the fossil evidence suggests that when large
temperature changes happen too quickly they are associated with mass
extinctions, and that furthermore human civilization would be likely
to experience many other negative effects not directly connected to
extinctions.
> What difference would 4-5% less incoming solar energy make?
I could be wrong but I would guess about 4 or 5 percent.
Why would the effects be linear? Do you understand the difference
between linear and nonlinear systems in physics, and are you aware
that nature is full of systems that give nonlinear responses to
changes in external conditions, especially those with multiple
coupled elements such that changes in one cause changes in others?
> Global climate models, calibrated to today's conditions predict
that [blah blah]
Well that sounds nice and glib but exactly how in the world do you
"calibrate" something as astoundingly cpmplex as the global weather
machine?
These simulations always involve both "forcings" whose dynamics
aren't themselves simulated the model, but just fed into it as
boundary conditions (like solar input, volcanic activity, and
emissions from human civilization), and there are also other
boundary conditions like the different elevations of different parts
of the crust which lead to continents above sea level and oceans
below it (though sea level changes may be simulated dynamically). So
I'm pretty sure when they say the models can be "calibrated" to
conditions of today vs. the Ordivician, they mean that the dynamical
rules of the simulation can be kept the same while changing boundary
conditions that are thought to differ between eras in ways that are
roughly known, like solar input and the different prehistoric
arrangement of continents.
I suspect they worked backward and figured out the outcome they
wanted and then, surprise surprise, they did.
Yes, that sort of handwavey "suspicion" that creationists typically
respond with when confronted with the consistency of evidence in
fields they dislike for ideological reasons, like the consistency of
DNA-based evolutionary trees with fossil-based ones, or the
consistency of radiometric dating results for different geological
layers (and the consistent pattern of fossil species seen in each
layer).
Note that the article I linked to actually mentions a reference for
the claim about calibrating to Ordovician conditions comes from, it
can be found here:
http://droyer.web.wesleyan.edu/PhanCO2(GCA).pdf
This paper itself references other papers on the matter:
"Importantly, global climate models and energy balance models
calibrated to Late Ordovician conditions also predict a CO2-ice
threshold of between 2240 and 3920 ppm (Crowley and Baum, 1991,
1995; Gibbs et al., 1997, 2000; Kump et al., 1999; Poussart et al.,
1999; Herrmann et al., 2003, 2004)."
I couldn't find any of these papers online, but I did find another
paper about Ordovician conditions by one of the authors (Herrmann)
in a chapter of a book with a google books preview, see the
"Methods" section on p. 30-31 at http://books.google.com/books?id=hVFNw8vgc7EC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA30
which mentions the use of preexisting models for ocean
circulation--"Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory Modular Ocean
Model (MOM) version 2.2"--and atmosphere--"the atmospheric general
circulation model GENESIS", but with altered continental conditions
shown in Fig. 2, and other alterations like "pCO2 levels of 15x
preindustrial atmospheric levels".
Are really you so confident they did it correctly that you are quite
literally willing to stake your life on it? You'd better be because
that's what you're asking us to do.
"Are you really so confident that evolutionists do the science
correctly that you are willing to stake your eternal soul on it?"
Your predictions of mass death due to adopting EU-style emission
reduction goals seems to have about the same level of basis in
evidence and reasoned thought as a creationist's predictions about
eternal damnation for those who believe the lies of secular humanism.
And as I said, I don't take anything scientists say as gospel truth,
I just take it as a *default* that they most likely know what
they're talking about when discussing issues in their field, unless
I see something to suggest otherwise like seeing that a lot of other
scientists in the field disagree, or enough knowledge of the field
to understand the precise basis for their claims. If you're familiar
with Bayesian reasoning, I could say that my "prior" assigns a much
higher probability to scientists being right about claims in their
fields than them being wrong. On the other hand, your default/prior
for scientific questions you have no detailed understanding of seems
to depend heavily on whether it fits with your political ideology,
and your gut feelings about how you'd expect things to work.
>> For example, The sea has risen about 6 inches during the last
century, and it has risen about 6 inches a century for the last 6
thousand years.
> I don't think that claim reflects the mainstream view so it's
probably something you've gotten from a fringe or outdated source,
See Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_sea_level_rise
"From 1950 to 2009, measurements show an average annual rise in sea
level of 1.7 ± 0.3 mm per year"
That's 6.7 inches a century.
I was talking about your claim "it has risen about 6 inches a
century for the last 6 thousand years", which you used to pooh-pooh
the idea that there should be anything worrying about the RECENT
rise (which of course I would not dispute). Do you have any source
for your claim that it rose about 6 inches in 1700-1800, 1300-1400,
1000 BC-900 BC, etc.?
Jesse
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