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Original post by Trapper Zoid
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Original post by Eelco
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Original post by HodgmanSome might back him up on the economics or futility of it, but I don't think any would say anything like this though - Quote:
Over the last 15 years, global temperatures haven't been going up and, therefore, there hasn't been in the last 15 years a period of global warming.
I guess if it is so obviously false, you should have no problem presenting us with a concise argument as to why.
Concise? How about because the people who measure and analyse the data say so? [wink]
Which people?
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I'm not sure what facts Senator Fielding is using to back up his statement, or where the figure of "15 years" comes from. The questions he asked our Environment Minister (Penny Wong) were mainly based around the El Nino year of 1998. Her response is here. From my skim through the page, it seems like most of these arguments against climate change are only focusing on air temperature, while the bulk of the changes is happening in the warming of the oceans.
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The observational evidence clearly indicates that the climate system has continued to warm since 1998. During this period ocean heat content has risen, ice and snow have continued to melt, and there has been no material trend in global air temperatures.
Factoring in recent data, there is no trend in sea-ice over the recent years either.
That is, insofar it makes sense to talk about trends over such a short period of time. Mostly, it doesnt.
If you want to focus on long terms trend, as you should, one concludes that current temperatures are about equal to the way they were in the early 20th century, and lower than they were during the medieval optimum (note that they used to label warm periods an optimum before AGW came around, and thats not in a mathematical sense, but in a 'gee, life seemed to flourish then' sense). To say we have been significantly influencing temperature either way so far, whether you talk about a 15 year or 30 year timespan, is bogus. There is far too much noise in the data, on any timescale, to draw any such inferences whatsoever.
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The greenhouse effect is a well-understood physical phenomenon, like gravity.
Misleading to the core. The advection of smog is 'a well-understood physical phenomenon' too. Much more well understood, actually. One of my collegues just graduated on the subject of why all models that tried to predict the smog over bejing were completely and utterly wrong. He didnt know either. Thats only a tiny component of what goes into a global climate simulation. Over deccades, instead of hours.
Fuck off, stupid politician. Dont pretend you know anything about physics, or numerical modelling.
Numerical models depend on many unknown and roughly estimated factors. Depending on how you set them, the world will be a hunderd degrees in ten years, or global warming by CO2 is a complete non-issue. Looking at the long term data that we have, coming from icecores, we see that CO2 lags temperature. If there was a strong feedback from CO2 leading to more temperature, that should show as a distinct fingerprint in said data. It simply isnt there. That doesnt prove there is no positive feedback from CO2 to temperature, but it does allow you to estimate an upper bound. 'runaway global warming' is about as disproven as such things can get.
May the earth warm a few degrees over the next century? Certainly: with or without global warming, it might. Something to keep in mind would be that the IPCC also acknowledges the first 1-3 degrees are likely to be beneficial, as far as human carrying capacity is concerned.
[Edited by - Eelco on July 7, 2009 11:58:32 AM]
