Global Warming | PUNT ROAD END | Richmond Tigers Forum
  • IMPORTANT // Please look after your loved ones, yourself and be kind to others. If you are feeling that the world is too hard to handle there is always help - I implore you not to hesitate in contacting one of these wonderful organisations Lifeline and Beyond Blue ... and I'm sure reaching out to our PRE community we will find a way to help. T.

Global Warming

LeeToRainesToRoach

Tiger Legend
Jun 4, 2006
33,186
11,546
Melbourne
But surely if your conspiracy was true they wouldn't have moved the BOM instruments away from the city.
They changed sites because the old one had developed an obvious flaw. The data for many terrestrial stations is coloured by urban development.

Probably 98% of climate scientists are funded to find evidence for man-made global warming. I know it's galling when the 2% finds evidence of solar influence like in the article above. I expect the walls will continue to close in on flawed modelling as knowledge advances.
 
  • Like
Reactions: 1 user

DavidSSS

Tiger Legend
Dec 11, 2017
10,523
17,874
Melbourne
They changed sites because the old one had developed an obvious flaw. The data for many terrestrial stations is coloured by urban development.

Probably 98% of climate scientists are funded to find evidence for man-made global warming. I know it's galling when the 2% finds evidence of solar influence like in the article above. I expect the walls will continue to close in on flawed modelling as knowledge advances.

So, they changed sites despite the claim you make that they are funded to find a particular outcome. Yeah right, they do the right thing and you twist it to claim it as part of the grand conspiracy of climate science, of course if they didn't do the right thing you would have a go at BOM too. This is reminiscent of your claims about the timing of BOM observations, ie: total crap.

Solar influence on La Nina, yep that's a smoking gun right there, pity how it missed the target.

As for the flawed modelling, as that NASA article shows, the modelling is within 1/20 of a degree, lot better than the multiple changes Spencer and Christy have had to make to their modelling to sort out the satellite data.

Meanwhile, the impacts of climate change continue:


DS
 

AngryAnt

Tiger Legend
Nov 25, 2004
27,017
14,792
This is the hilarious/tragic aspect of the denialist woo around "doctored data".

The physical evidence of climate change is all around us. Sea ice and permafrost loss, glacial ice loss,shift of tropical/ sub tropical/ temperate borders, impact on farming and habitat, sea level rise and the list goes on.

I've pretty much given up on this thread as lee trots out the same sad old denialist tropes time after time.
 
  • Like
Reactions: 1 users

LeeToRainesToRoach

Tiger Legend
Jun 4, 2006
33,186
11,546
Melbourne
This is the hilarious/tragic aspect of the denialist woo around "doctored data".

The physical evidence of climate change is all around us. Sea ice and permafrost loss, glacial ice loss,shift of tropical/ sub tropical/ temperate borders, impact on farming and habitat, sea level rise and the list goes on.

I've pretty much given up on this thread as lee trots out the same sad old denialist tropes time after time.
Only responding to the same old stuff from DSS which has been done to death.

Yes, it's warming. No, it's not unprecedented. Yes, the warming has been largely beneficial to the planet. No, it's not warming catastrophically.

How much can we do about it? I'm skeptical.

e.g. contrary to David's pretty Antarctic propaganda blurb above:

The sea ice satellite record dates back to October 25, 1978. Unlike the Arctic, where sea ice extent is declining in all areas in all seasons... Antarctic-wide sea ice extent—for the annual average, winter maximum, and summer minimum extents—showed a slightly positive trend overall

Antarctic_Sepmax_1979-2020_620.gif


 
Last edited:

DavidSSS

Tiger Legend
Dec 11, 2017
10,523
17,874
Melbourne
Meanwhile, the impacts of climate change continue:


Hey, maybe NASA should change their baseline for sea ice extent to 1991-2020, would make it look less like there is a problem.

DS
 

LeeToRainesToRoach

Tiger Legend
Jun 4, 2006
33,186
11,546
Melbourne
Meanwhile, the impacts of climate change continue:


Hey, maybe NASA should change their baseline for sea ice extent to 1991-2020, would make it look less like there is a problem.
Stop posting propaganda garbage.

No coral atoll nations are going under the waves. In fact many of them are increasing in size.
 
  • Like
Reactions: 1 user

Al Bundy

Premiers 2017, 2019, 2020 ...2021?
Aug 27, 2003
7,141
616
Melbourne
Just watched the netflix special Seaspiracy. Very interesting.

Highlighted the impact from high commercial fishing, affecting oceans & its ability to absorb the carbon dioxide
I had read elsewhere ages ago of a lot of methane in the oceans too that impact climate change.
Not sure if the facts being presented are distorted but it did highlight the huge impact of heavy commercial fishing is having & all govt not truly caring.

Anyone else seen this (unsure if already raised sorry)
 

DavidSSS

Tiger Legend
Dec 11, 2017
10,523
17,874
Melbourne
Haven't seen that one but Attenborough did some shows on extinction and the way the oceans are being stripped of life is truly scary.

We need to stop crapping on this planet, there ain't another like it.

DS
 
  • Like
Reactions: 1 users

Al Bundy

Premiers 2017, 2019, 2020 ...2021?
Aug 27, 2003
7,141
616
Melbourne
Haven't seen that one but Attenborough did some shows on extinction and the way the oceans are being stripped of life is truly scary.

We need to stop crapping on this planet, there ain't another like it.

DS
Ok, went along similar lines. over 80% of various types of large fish gone.
They show the farce they are of a few big name so called conservationist, eg plastic drive, dolphin safe label.
Of memory I think they mentioned 48% of all plastic in the ocean are from commercial fishing fleet dumping old nets into the ocean, yet no-one will tackle that as the $$ trail of donation comes from the fishing fleet coys. Hypocrasy.
Straws for instance 0.001% yet the focus was on straws. Not sure how much might be distorted facts to prove the shows point but it is an eye opener. Worth the watch
 

Brodders17

Tiger Legend
Mar 21, 2008
17,661
11,699
Ok, went along similar lines. over 80% of various types of large fish gone.
They show the farce they are of a few big name so called conservationist, eg plastic drive, dolphin safe label.
Of memory I think they mentioned 48% of all plastic in the ocean are from commercial fishing fleet dumping old nets into the ocean, yet no-one will tackle that as the $$ trail of donation comes from the fishing fleet coys. Hypocrasy.
Straws for instance 0.001% yet the focus was on straws. Not sure how much might be distorted facts to prove the shows point but it is an eye opener. Worth the watch
peoples eating habits contribute so much damage to the environment, but many individuals choose to ignore it, and no politician is willing to mention it.
 
  • Like
Reactions: 1 users

LeeToRainesToRoach

Tiger Legend
Jun 4, 2006
33,186
11,546
Melbourne

How physicist Steven Koonin became a climate truth teller (paywalled)​


Barack Obama is one of many who have declared an “epistemological crisis,” in which our society is losing its handle on something called truth.

Thus an interesting experiment will be his and other Democrats’ response to a book by Steven Koonin, who was chief scientist of the Obama Energy Department. Mr Koonin argues not against current climate science but that what the media and politicians and activists say about climate science has drifted so far out of touch with the actual science as to be absurdly, demonstrably false.

This is not an altogether innocent drifting, he points out in a video-conference interview from his home in Cold Spring, New York. In 2019 a report by the presidents of the National Academies of Sciences claimed the “magnitude and frequency of certain extreme events are increasing”. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is deemed to compile the best science, says all such claims should be treated with “low confidence”.

In 2017 the US government’s Climate Science Special Report claimed that, in the lower 48 states, the “number of high temperature records set in the past two decades far exceeds the number of low temperature records”. On closer inspection, that’s because there’s been no increase in the rate of new record highs since 1900, only a decline in the number of new lows.

Mr Koonin, 69, and I are of one mind on 2018’s US Fourth National Climate Assessment, issued in Donald Trump’s second year, which relied on such over-egged worst-case emissions and temperature projections that even climate activists were abashed (a revolt continues to this day). “The report was written more to persuade than to inform,” he says. “It masquerades as objective science but was written as — all right, I’ll use the word — propaganda.”

Mr Koonin is a Brooklyn-born math whiz and theoretical physicist, a product of New York’s selective Stuyvesant High School. His parents, with less than a year of college between them, nevertheless intuited in 1968 exactly how to handle an unusually talented and motivated youngster: You want to go cross the country to Caltech at age 16? “Whatever you think is right, go ahead,” they told him. “I wanted to know how the world works,” Mr Koonin says now. “I wanted to do physics since I was 6 years old, when I didn’t know it was called physics.”

He would teach at Caltech for nearly three decades, serving as provost in charge of setting the scientific agenda for one of the country’s premier scientific institutions. Along the way he opened himself to the world beyond the lab. He was recruited at an early age by the Institute for Defence Analyses, a non-profit group with Pentagon connections, for what he calls “national security summer camp: meeting generals and people in congress, touring installations, getting out on battleships.” The US federal government sought “engagement” with the country’s rising scientist elite. It worked.

He joined and eventually chaired JASON, an elite private group that provides classified and unclassified advisory analysis to federal agencies. (The name isn’t an acronym and comes from a character in Greek mythology.) He got involved in the cold-fusion controversy. He arbitrated a debate between private and government teams competing to map the human genome on whether the target error rate should be 1 in 10,000 or whether 1 in 100 was good enough.

He began planting seeds as an institutionalist. He joined the oil giant BP as chief scientist, working for John Browne, now Baron Browne of Madingley, who had redubbed the company “Beyond Petroleum”. Using $US500m of BP’s money, Mr Koonin created the Energy Biosciences Institute at Berkeley that’s still going strong. Mr Koonin found his interest in climate science growing, “first of all because it’s wonderful science. It’s the most multidisciplinary thing I know. It goes from the isotopic composition of microfossils in the sea floor all the way through to the regulation of power plants.”

From deeply examining the world’s energy system, he also became convinced that the real climate crisis was a crisis of political and scientific candour. He went to his boss and said, “John, the world isn’t going to be able to reduce emissions enough to make much difference.”

Mr Koonin still has a lot of Brooklyn in him: a robust laugh, a gift for expression and for cutting to the heart of any matter. His thoughts seem to be governed by an all-embracing realism. Hence the book coming out next month, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters.

Any reader would benefit from its deft, lucid tour of climate science, the best I’ve seen. His rigorous parsing of the evidence will have you questioning the political class’s compulsion to manufacture certainty where certainty doesn’t exist. You will come to doubt the usefulness of century-long forecasts claiming to know how 1 per cent shifts in variables will affect a global climate that we don’t understand with anything resembling 1 per cent precision.

His book lands at crucial moment. In its first new assessment of climate science in eight years, the UN climate panel — sharer of Al Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 — will rule anew next year on a conundrum that has not advanced in 40 years: How much warming should we expect from a slightly enhanced greenhouse effect?

The panel is expected to consult 40-plus climate computer simulations — testament to its inability to pick out a single trusted one. Worse, the models have been diverging, not coming together as you might hope. Without tweaking, they don’t even agree on current simulated global average surface temperature — varying by 3C, three times the observed change over the past century. (If you wonder why the IPCC expresses itself in terms of a temperature “anomaly” above a baseline, it’s because the models produce different baselines.)

Mr Koonin is a practitioner and fan of computer modelling. “There are situations where models do a wonderful job. Nuclear weapons, when we model them because we don’t test them anymore. And when Boeing builds an airplane, they will model the heck out of it before they bend any metal.”

“But these are much more controlled, engineered situations,” he adds, “whereas the climate is a natural phenomenon. It’s going to do whatever it’s going to do. And it’s hard to observe. You need long, precise observations to understand its natural variability and how it responds to external influences.”

Yet these models supply most of our insight into how the weather might change when emissions raise the atmosphere’s CO2 component from 0.028 per cent in pre-industrial times to 0.056 per cent later in this century. “I’ve been building models and watching others build models for 45 years,” he says. Climate models “are not to the standard you would trust your life to or even your trillions of dollars to.” Younger scientists in particular lose sight of the difference between reality and simulation: “They have grown up with the models. They don’t have the kind of mathematical or physical intuition you get when you have to do things by pencil and paper.”

All this you can hear from climate modellers themselves, and from scientists nearer the “consensus” than Mr Koonin is. Yet the caveats seem to fall away when plans to spend trillions of dollars are bruited.

For the record, Mr Koonin agrees that the world has warmed by 1C since 1900 and will warm by another degree this century, placing him near the middle of the consensus. Neither he nor most economic studies have seen anything in the offing that would justify the rapid and wholesale abandoning of fossil fuels, even if China, India, Brazil, Indonesia and others could be dissuaded from pursuing prosperity.

He’s a fan of advanced nuclear power eventually to provide carbon free base-load power. He sees a bright future for electric passenger vehicles. “The main reason isn’t emissions. They’re just shifted to the power grid, and transportation anyway is only about 15 per cent of global greenhouse-gas emissions. There are other advantages: Local pollution is much less and noise pollution is less. You’re sitting in a traffic jam and all of these six- or four-cylinder engines are throbbing up and down burning fuel and just doing no good at all.”

But these are changes it makes no economic sense to force. Let technology and markets work at their own pace. The climate might continue to change, at a pace that’s hard to perceive, but societies will adapt. “As a species, we’re very good at adapting.”

The public now believes CO2 is something that can be turned up and down, but about 40 per cent of the CO2 emitted a century ago remains in the atmosphere. Any warming it causes emerges slowly, so any benefit of reducing emissions would be small and distant. Everything Mr Koonin and others see in the science suggests a slow, modest effect, not a runaway warming. If they’re wrong, we don’t have tools to apply yet anyway. Decades from now, we might have carbon capture — removing CO2 directly from the atmosphere at a manageable cost.

He’s less keen, except in the most extreme circumstances, on what many see as the cheaper, easier fix of augmenting the aerosol effect, which already partially offsets the warming caused by greenhouse gases, by injecting particles into the upper atmosphere. The political and practical unknowns are large. “You could have some country or even some individual do it. The policy community is just starting to grapple with that.”

Mr Koonin does not drive an electric car. He drives what he jokes is the official car of Putnam County, a Subaru Outback, while he and his wife weather the pandemic in a woodsy enclave along the Hudson River. An Audi meant to haul them and the dog back to New York City, where he started and ran New York University’s Centre for Urban Science and Progress, collects dust.

Mr Koonin says he wants voters, politicians and business leaders to have an accurate account of the science. He doesn’t care where the debate lands. Yet his expectations are ruled by a keen sense of realities. I mention, along with some names, that I never met anyone of serious judgment who didn’t privately pooh-pooh the idea that humanity will control CO2 by means other than the mostly unregulated progress of markets and technology. Mr Koonin nods his agreement.

He speaks of “could,” “should” and “will” — and what “will” happen is a lot less than elites, in response to current reward structures, are pretending will happen. Even John Kerry, Joe Biden’s climate tsar, recently admitted that Mr Biden’s “net-zero” climate plan will have zero effect on the climate if developing countries don’t go along (and they have little incentive to do so). Mr Koonin hopes that “a graceful out for everybody” will be to see the impulse for global climate regulation “morph into much more impactful local environmental action: smog, plastic, green jobs. Forget the global aspect of this.”

This is a view widely shared and little expressed. First, the mainstream climate community will try to ignore his book, even as his publicists work the TV bookers in hopes of making a splash. Then Mr Koonin knows will come the avalanche of name-calling that befalls anybody trying to inject some practical nuance into political discussions of climate.

He adds with a laugh: “My married daughter is happy that she’s got a different last name.”
 

DavidSSS

Tiger Legend
Dec 11, 2017
10,523
17,874
Melbourne
Yeah, nothing happening, we don't need to do anything.


The impact of climate change is clear and it isn't about to happen, it isn't something we need to worry about in the future, it is already happening.

DS
 

RoarEmotion

Tiger Champion
Aug 20, 2005
4,939
6,450
Yeah, nothing happening, we don't need to do anything.


The impact of climate change is clear and it isn't about to happen, it isn't something we need to worry about in the future, it is already happening.

DS
Yep I think for all the debates you can have about models then the evidence in front of our eyes would seem to overwhelm that.

Bit like smoking and cancer.
 
  • Like
Reactions: 1 user

Bunnerz

Richmond are cool man
Aug 12, 2003
3,136
437
Geelong
Where i live, Warrnambool is 21 degrees here for 3 days next week. Unthinkable this time of year!
Normally 14
 

AngryAnt

Tiger Legend
Nov 25, 2004
27,017
14,792
Yep I think for all the debates you can have about models then the evidence in front of our eyes would seem to overwhelm that.

Bit like smoking and cancer.

Exactly. No wonder they insist on having esoteric debates about satellite vs ground station data.