Climate Change Banter

[Jonger]

Latest IPCC WG II report is out. Report notes potential negative impacts are global but unsurprisingly will be greatest for the global south and regions that are already impoverished.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/31/science/earth/panels-warning-on-climate-risk-worst-is-yet-to-come.html

Edit: wunderground rundown. Most important parts are food and freshwater security, and their follow-ons

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=2656

 

That's a ballsy prediction with the fact that global food production keeps going up and up.

 

Prices are high, but a good chunk of that can be attributed to expensive diesel.

[AvantHiatus]

That's a ballsy prediction with the fact that global food production keeps going up and up.

 

Prices are high, but a good chunk of that can be attributed to expensive diesel.

How long before demand grows faster than production? 0.1% production growth per year is not that significant other than it was not a decline. Alot of surplus foods are used for cattle and meat industry, etc. This is why we still have massive hunger issues throughout the world outside of America.

 

On the flipside, population growth still continues unabated, conditions must not be that bad if people can afford to have so many kids. I think IPCC is really focusing on that factor but we don't really know how large the global population will become by 2050.

[Jonger]

How long before demand grows faster than production? 0.1% production growth per year is not that significant other than it was not a decline. Alot of surplus foods are used for cattle and meat industry, etc. This is why we still have massive hunger issues throughout the world outside of America.

 

On the flipside, population growth still continues unabated, conditions must not be that bad if people can afford to have so many kids. I think IPCC is really focusing on that factor but we don't really know how large the global population will become by 2050.

 

We need the population to go down regardless of what the future climate holds, fossil fuels have resulted in the greatest advancement in human history, but they aren't limitless. Beyond that, who really wants a crowded planet anyhow.

 

I'm not so sure the population is growing unabated, birth rates are decreasing in most of the developed world.... The Chinese are suffering from localized pollution and this looks to halt runaway growth, India is in a similar situation. Many anthropologists see a peak of 10 billion humans before a gradual decrease.

[sokolow]

That's a ballsy prediction with the fact that global food production keeps going up and up.

Haven't had a chance to sit down and look but I wonder how much they attribute to coast and delta saltwater intrusion.

And yeah the general case seems to be that industrialization, universal secondary / widespread tertiary education, contraception, and women gaining social and legal equality push birthrates to replacement or slightly below. Has been true across a diverse array of countries including some with extemely pro-reproductive national religious identities (Italy, Austria. Both well below replacement and showing an increasing tendency to late marriage and first child) and turns out to be largely true for immigrant populations via rapid generational change.

Interestingly enough, survey data has suggested that for women and their partners in some of the Eurozone countries, actual family size is less than stated ideal family size. As in, they'd like to have more children but don't find it socially or financially feasible.

Edit the upshot is like you say there really isn't a "population bomb" because bithrate drops with elimination of poverty, access to education, medical care, contraception, female equality &c

[AvantHiatus]

Haven't had a chance to sit down and look but I wonder how much they attribute to coast and delta saltwater intrusion.

And yeah the general case seems to be that industrialization, universal secondary / widespread tertiary education, contraception, and women gaining social and legal equality push birthrates to replacement or slightly below. Has been true across a diverse array of countries including some with extemely pro-reproductive national religious identities (Italy, Austria. Both well below replacement and showing an increasing tendency to late marriage and first child) and turns out to be largely true for immigrant populations via rapid generational change.

Interestingly enough, survey data has suggested that for women and their partners in some of the Eurozone countries, actual family size is less than stated ideal family size. As in, they'd like to have more children but don't find it socially or financially feasible.

Edit the upshot is like you say there really isn't a "population bomb" because bithrate drops with elimination of poverty, access to education, medical care, contraception, female equality &c

The vast majority of the population gain would arise from third-world nations and India/China. Though after reading into it, seems the overpopulation issue is over-emphasized by the few who choose to acknowledge it. I think we could be doing better with more efficient land use and agriculture. Possibly with all cards on the table, 10-12 billion could be supported with a decent standard of living without driving up the population to insane levels and wrecking ecosystems.

 

My main thought after reading the IPCC analysis was that climate disasters would keep Africa in check in terms of population, probably a few other regions as well. Of course, we don't want to go down that road either.

[Jonger]

Big funding slashes in Austrialia climate studies.

 

I knew big-climate was profitable, but never to the tune of $5 billion a year in Australia alone!

 

http://guardianlv.com/2014/05/climate-change-research-axed-in-australia/

[A-L-E-K]

so glad i live in a city with enough of a buffer zone to deal with AGW, it's about to get real for so much of the country

[sokolow]

Probably everyone has read through and gotten heartily sick of the Tol-Cook showdown over the Cook (2013) consensus paper.

However, and regardless of your stake (if you have one) on that argument, Dan Kahan at the Yale rhet-scicomm project on cultural cognition has a series of posts up challenging Cook & co's consensus angle on the grounds of whether or not its a worthwhile approach.

Fascinating analysis of how rhetorical strategy is employed & recieved in a climate science conflict context:

http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2014/6/20/response-an-externally-valid-approach-to-consensus-messaging-1.html

What is the *message* of real-world "scientific consensus" messaging? 

This is part 3 of a series on external validity problems with climate-science-communication studies.The problem, in sum, is that far too many researchers are modeling dynamics different from the ones that occur in the real world, and far too many communicators are being induced to rely on these bad models.

In my first post, I described the confusion that occurs when pollsters assert that responses to survey item that don't reliably or validly measure anything show there's "overwhelming bipartisan support" for something having to do with climate change.

In the second, I described the mistake of treating a laboratory "messaging" experiment as better evidence than 10 yrs of real-world evidence on what happens when communicators expend huge amounts of resources on a "scientific consensus" messaging campaign.

This post extends the last by showing how much different real-world scientific-consensus "messaging" campaigns are from anything that is being tested in lab experments.

Cook offers a reply:

http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2014/6/20/response-an-externally-valid-approach-to-consensus-messaging-1.html

[dabize]

http://dialoguesonglobalwarming.blogspot.com/2014/06/first-10000-and-1000-challenges.html

 

This guy has the patience of Job

 

Makes for entertaining reading

[sokolow]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/06/22/americas-recent-drought-history-animated/

Check out the animated drought map.

[ben4vols]

so glad i live in a city with enough of a buffer zone to deal with AGW, it's about to get real for so much of the country

 

It's about to get real as people try and find ways to pay their power bill. 

[sokolow]

i am incredibly impressed by imminent solar parity and i look forward to the major utilities tanking one by one as the ratepayer defection spiral takea hold

[Wow]

It's about to get real as people try and find ways to pay their power bill.

Indeed... There will be more of an influence felt from those attempting to change climate change than climate change itself... At least in the short term.

[Jonger]

i am incredibly impressed by imminent solar parity and i look forward to the major utilities tanking one by one as the ratepayer defection spiral takea hold

I find trying to be efficient is gratifying. If I had the money I would put solar panels on my roof and possibly go to geothermal heating and cooling.

Bought LED lights, started a lease on a Prius, it all adds up.

My snowmobile habit is probably the most wasteful thing I do, but even so, it's a drop in the bucket compared to the auto fuel.

[ben4vols]

Well some people can rest easy now, "Steve Goddard" has given his real identity.  He is also making waves in the media with his current claim that 40% of NCDC is manufactured and this manipulation leads to a warm bias. 

[Jonger]

Here would be a better place to discuss and possible repercussions of a warmer world.

[Snow_Miser]

Well some people can rest easy now, "Steve Goddard" has given his real identity. He is also making waves in the media with his current claim that 40% of NCDC is manufactured and this manipulation leads to a warm bias.

It's comments like this that deter people from a skeptical position on this issue.

[ben4vols]

Really good read from Watts' site regarding ocean heat content.  LINK

 

Two of the world’s premiere ocean scientists from Harvard and MIT have addressed the data limitations that currently prevent the oceanographic community from resolving the differences among various estimates of changing ocean heat content (in print but available here)^.3 They point out where future data is most needed so these ambiguities do not persist into the next several decades of change. As a by-product of that analysis they 1) determined the deepest oceans are cooling, 2) estimated a much slower rate of ocean warming, 3) highlighted where the greatest uncertainties existed due to the ever changing locations of heating and cooling, and 4) specified concerns with previous methods used to construct changes in ocean heat content, such as Balmaseda and Trenberth’s re-analysis (see below).¹³ They concluded, “Direct determination of changes in oceanic heat content over the last 20 years are not in conflict with estimates of the radiative forcing, but the uncertainties remain too large to rationalize e.g., the apparent “pause” in warming.”

 

Wunsch and Heimbach (2014) emphasize the many uncertainties involved in attributing the cause of changes in the overall heat content concluding, “As with many climate-related records, the unanswerable question here is whether these changes are truly secular, and/or a response to anthropogenic forcing, or whether they are instead fragments of a general red noise behavior seen over durations much too short to depict the long time-scales of Fig. 6, 7, or the result of sampling and measurement biases, or changes in the temporal data density.”

 

Given those uncertainties, they concluded that much less heat is being added to the oceans compared to claims in previous studies (seen in the table below). It is interesting to note that compared to Hansen’s study that ended in 2003 before the observed warming pause, subsequent studies also suggest less heat is entering the oceans. Whether those declining trends are a result of improved methodologies, or due to a cooler sun, or both requires more observations. 

[sokolow]

Moving the OHC banter to the banter zone

That's a good statement. The genesis of AGW hypothesis was probably 90% "pushing" of global temps, via the climate models. Back in the 80's, very little was mentioned as heat potentially being "stored" in the oceans....well.....until the temps flattened out and then we were introduced to the phrase "....in the pipeline.."........Where was this potential pipeline when they were pushing the climate model progs. showing accelerating warming, virtually unabated???

I guess I'd thought Rossby put that on the table before he died, in advance of IGY 57-58 -- shows up all the time via the two bullet points that get quoted around from "Current Problems in Meteorology"

a) The assumption that our planet as a whole stands in firm radiation balance with outer space cannot be accepted without reservations, even if periods of several decades are taken into account.

Anomalies in heat probably can be stored and temporarily isolated in the sea and after periods of the order of a few decades to a few centuries again influence the heat and water-vapour exchange with the atmosphere.

[Sophisticated Skeptic]

any chance we could get a Climate Change non-banter thread ?   I'm looking forward to reading the latest on what's actually going on, yet all i'm seeing is arguing back and forth.  

[SVT450R]

any chance we could get a Climate Change non-banter thread ?   I'm looking forward to reading the latest on what's actually going on, yet all i'm seeing is arguing back and forth.  

I recommend going through the forum pages tons of good info over the years if you have a question just post in the thread to bump it to the top and I'm sure someone will respond.

[sokolow]

Looking for an update could just as we.l unleash a back and forth argument on what the right summary is for what's going on. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Try the BAMS yearly state of the climate summary or the monthly summary via the NCDC

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/bams-state-of-the-climate/

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/

If you care about glaciers & land ice its the WGMS bulletin

http://www.wgms.ch/gmbb.html

http://glacierchange.wordpress.com/2014/07/19/alpine-glaciers-bams-state-of-the-climate-2013/

With a recent global field state of field survey in:

Quaternary Science Reviews

Volume 28, Issues 21–22, Pages 2021-2238 (October 2009)

Holocene and Latest Pleistocene Alpine Glacier Fluctuations: A Global Perspective

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/02773791/28/21

[sokolow]

FYI if you don't have access to an academic library with journal access, your local public library likely will. They can get most of these articles for free via inter library loan. Open access is preferable, but the access is attainable with a minimum amount of legwork for almost everyone as it stands.

You have to understand that this system is a relic from a time before the internet. Its easy to publish an entirely electric publication without much overhead, but that wasn't the case when journals were actual paper journals with no other means of distribution. The research is paid for by grants, but the publication/review costs have to be covered as well.

Most reviewers (and many editors!) for most journals don't get paid. No-one I know has been paid as a referee or a reviewer. Probably we all know but never really say out loud good review is incredibly time consuming specialist work that requires a person to simultaneously carry out the most brutal attacks on someone's work you can think of while simultaneously imagining & suggesting constructive ways those critiques might be answered. How many reviewers can do that, or choose to, or have the time to? Even complying with quality metrics to figure that out in a standardized way would be a giant timesuck pain in the a$$.

Too, most papers get two, maybe three referees. The referees are bought into trying to deconstruct what might be an elaborate interdisciplinary and multi-method analysis by several authors who are each deploying his or her expert training in novel ways. A stunning amount of peer review manages to totally miss blatant errors because two sets of eyes working in their spare time (anonymously & apart from their own research) are not sufficient. It wouldn't be possible to have peer review full stop if people actually charged consulting rates that reflected their training; it's almost neccessary that it's mostly volunteer work donated in the name of science & scholarship.

The editorial staff of journals and journal services add a lot of value -- but a huge chunk of the value is straightup dealing with vast numbers of document pages, basic quality control, managing the metadata, getting all the text & figures & citations into a common format, and corralling a months long communication & revision process between authors and their reviewers. I know a guy whose sole job it is to fix shoddy figures and graphics submitted by actual big -S scientists leading multimillion dollar labs. Some of which graphics are constructed from improperly used clip art, textbook figures, and GIS results they don't own the rights to.

Re: access the practical test IMO is that access is attainable but every man and woman reading threads like the ECS or FSU tornado study who wants to participate has to haul down to the library and ILL / dl the pdf for themselves -- even on a huge forum full of weather nerds, how many people can do that, and how does that change the timeframe for discusison? Unless there's an open discussion copy, or that its been unlocked. Fair use limits the kind of sharing we can do without getting the board (any board) in trouble.

[forkyfork]

it took the staff almost a year to figure out the obvious

[LithiaWx]

it took the staff almost a year to figure out the obvious

 

Bethesda?

[nflwxman]

Bethesda?

yep.

[A-L-E-K]

it took the staff almost a year to figure out the obvious

 

 

 

any how many posts pointing out as much were deleted?

[chubbs]

it took the staff almost a year to figure out the obvious

 No big deal its just the CC forum

[nflwxman]

No big deal its just the CC forum

Agreed. No reason we can't all just get along.

[Jonger]

I'm not suggesting some conspiracy, but what exactly was the reason behind tripling my anomaly?

 

My figures don't show that.

 

This is one of the first times I ran an anomaly map since the new version became the main version. I'm quite shocked at the upward adjustment.