fnarf999

"Scientists are no different from everyone else; in particular, they are no better. They are not particularly objective, despite their egotistical beliefs to the contrary. They believe what they want to believe, then they look for "proof" that supports their beliefs, just like everyone else. That's why science takes centuries to figure out anything useful; the truth percolates into the mainstream with glacial slowness, thanks to the obstinacy and prejudice and narrow viewpoints of scientists."

I've certainly never read a wronger statement here on Fodors. And possibly no where else. "Centuries"? Are you sure? Have you ever had a look in a history book to see what the state of science was 200 years ago? Here's a hint: phlogiston.

Virtually every aspect of your daily life was developed in the past two centuries. Virtually all of the scientific concepts that we take for granted today are from the past two centuries. You are completely, utterly, unbelievably wrong on the facts. Do you believe in a flat earth too?

Your description of the scientific method is completely upside down as well.

I'm absolutely shocked to read such an opinion coming from a person who apparently knows how to read or write.

PalenQ

<And scientists are hardly alpha dogs. In fact, they've been so cautious that even when they issue a 90% confidence level in human effects on warming, they couch it in the most cautious language possible, which has probably left room for the skeptics to try to depict their findings as uncertain.>

yes never let knowledge get in the way of scepticism -

ira

>Deniers of global warming like Ira....

My dear PQ, I do not deny that the Earth is warming. It has been warming for 25,000 years or so (end of last Ice Age).

I have even come to accept that a goodly fraction of the current rate of increase in global temperature is due to anthropogenic greenhouse gases (GHG).

I also accept that the increase in temperature will continue for as much as a thousand years, unless it reverses.

What I don't accept is that teeny, weeny tweaking by a few well-meaning people is going to have any effect at all.

More fuel efficient cars will not help - you have to subsitute mass transit for cars.

More efficient fossil-fueled electric plants won't help - you have to go nuke.

Reducing everyone's "carbon footprint" by 20% won't help if the population is going to double in 100 years - you need population reduction strategies.

Janis wrote
>the climate has been hotter before and will be hotter then colder again . . . . . (just like it has forever)

fnarf999 replies
>With the slight difference, janisj, that this time a billion people or more are going to die.<

That is true and it is very unfortunate. It is even calamitous. However, they are not going to die tomorrow, and they are going to die anyway, whether from disease or starvation.

There are just too many people.

>When the oceans go -- as they are well on the way to going -...

The oceans are evaporating? And here I was hoping to have waterfront property because the oceans are supposed to be rising.

>how many of the presidential candidates have given up traveling in their private planes to help save the planet?

How many of the rock stars who put on concerts to save the planet?

>..He attributes the increased rainfall to the big guns going off in Europe.

In the 50's it was because of the Roosians and their Aye tomic bombs. (Ours, of course, were benign.)

PQ writes:
>>there is no parallel in today's rate of increase ...

I respectfully rise to disagree.

It was once possible to walk on dry land from the north of England to Denmark. In less than 100 years the North Sea intruded.

this was recently shown to have been caused by a flood - not temperature change.<

Ummmmmmmm, what caused the flood? Did it rain for 40 days and 40 nights?

You might want to do a search for evidence of temperature spiking, both up and down, over periods of centuries rather than millenia.

PalenQ

Well my son, studying aeronautical engineering at one of the top such schools in the U.S. just took a class on climate change and he's told me the prof said that indeed the rate of increase is totally unparalleled in Earth history - alarmingly so. I don't know science but i'll take that over what you say.

Things can be done - right mass transit, etc. but the gas flares in places like Nigeria and Russia - if they were extinguished all the efforts of all humans to limit emissions would be equalled (this from BBC or NPR)

I have faith that my son's professor probably is basing his comments on well found info.

bilboburgler

I guess the issue is not that the planet is changing. Surely the issue is the rate of change growing. Evolution requires a species to breed and evolve inside the rate of change (hence moths in manchester went brown in 1950 and have gone white now) trouble humans take so long to go to the next generation

smueller

"...the rate of increase is totally unparalleled in Earth history..."

Absolute nonsense. Unparalleled in modern history, yes. Unparalled in "Earth history," nonsense.

Does this professor claim that climate is changing more rapidly now then the climate modifications that immediately followed the Cretaceous-Tertiary impact event responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs, ammonoids, pterosaurs, and large marine reptiles? Does this professor claim that the coming climate change will be more profound than that associated with the end-of-Permian extinction that purged approximately 90% of life on Earth?

I suspect that the opinions of this fellow may have been misrepresented. Who is this person that you offer as an authority on the subject. What is this "top school" and what department was the class offered in?

smueller

Here is the official NOAA position on abrupt climate change -
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/abrupt/story.html

At one point the article describes a change of 10C (18F) within a decade - an event that was quite recent in geologic time.

20-21st century temperatures have not risen at a rate even remotely close to that.

It should come as no surprise that a "doomsday mentality" pervades this subject. The rumors and fallacies that are routinely accepted as fact (unprecendented in Earth history, the certainty of a billion dead, etc.) are frightening.

PalenQ

that one professor no doubt represents the body of current thought among climatologists - the rate of warming in the next century will be much much faster than any century in history - changes that usually take thousands of years - not cataclysmic events like meteors hitting that may skew the data for a relatively brief period - anyway i don't care - au revoir

JeanneB

Weather changes?! Amazing. Now who was the chap who discovered that weather patterns of the last 50 years were the "ideal"?

smueller

The notion that climate changes requires timescales of thousands of years has been discredited.

fnarf999

Ira "The oceans are evaporating? And here I was hoping to have waterfront property because the oceans are supposed to be rising."

Ira, what I meant was not that the oceans are going to go AWAY but that they are not going to support the life that nearly every living thing on this planet depends. They're dying. The biggest climate upheavals currently taking place are not on the surface; they are hypoxic deep-ocean cold spots that are welling up and interfering with the normal ocean patterns. No oxygen = no food chain.

The dead zones in oceans are as big as good-sized countries, and they're expanding. There's one off the coast of Oregon; most of the upper gulf of Mexico near Louisiana and Texas is dead (from chemical and agricultural waste; basically the top twenty feet of Iowa). Altered ocean temperature cycles are also having a huge effect on weather patterns. That's most what weather IS: the reaction of the atmosphere to ocean temperatures and movement.

If you don't think you depend on the ocean because you don't eat a lot of fish, you're sadly mistaken.

Smueller, you're just plain mistaken. Or else you're blase about mass extinctions of the dominant species. I can't tell.

smueller

Specifically where am I mistaken? Offer some facts, arguments or references. Not just non-specific opinion that I am mistaken.

Here is an example. A specific argument-based criticism. You are mistaken about the nature of marine life. Most of the oceanic food chain is not concentrated in the "deep cold" regions. The bulk of marine life exists in shallow waters, especially near continental margins, where sunlight is available.

PalenQ

Smueller you should be a Prof yourself without all knowledge. The scientific community needs to be set straight - do it for your country.

fnarf999

Right, the life is in the shallow warm parts. Which is why having big parts of the deep hypoxic cold bits welling up and killing all the life in the warm bits, it's a problem. You can blather on about your "argument-based criticisms", but you're not reading or understanding what I wrote -- because you're not interested in the truth.

ira

>Well my son, studying aeronautical engineering at one of the top such schools in the U.S....the prof said... <

Having spent 30 some years in the Professor business, having an earned PhD in Nuclear Engineering, and having risen to the position of what the Germans would call a Herr Geheimrat Professor Doktor, I am not intimidated by your remark.

I take it that "the prof" is a leading climatologist?

>... the gas flares in places like Nigeria and Russia ....

Not to mention the mass burning of the forests in the less developed and developing countires.

Which is why I have been ranting about people who think that if we all buy compact fluorescent light bulbs, that we will make a meaningful contribution to decreasing GHGs.

Hi fn,

>Ira, what I meant was not that the oceans are going to go AWAY but that they are not going to support the life that nearly every living thing on this planet depends.<

Thank you for the clarification.

I agree that climate change is going to have a profound effect on the capacity of the oceans to support marine life.

I also suggest, that overfishing will be even more important, eg, the near collapse of the George's Banks.

People are doing far more to harm the ecology than just emitting GHGs.

I'm particularly struck by the habit of watering golf courses in Tucson, AZ. This is high desert that gets about 12 ins of rain a year, yet every morning from about 2-7 they water the golf courses to keep them green.

Then there are the swimming pools....

ira

BTW,

On a less serious note, does anyone else remember back in the early 70's when leading scientists declared that we would run out of petroleum in 35 years?

Boy, was I castigated for not accepting the current scientific opinion.

scrb

Was it scientists or just the oil companies who said that?

Obviously they've improved their oil exploration and oil field development techniques in that time.

But then, it's impossible for us now to do anything about carbon emissions.

smueller

fnarf -

Fair enough. I offered a specific criticism, as opposed to a sweeping generalization that you are simply wrong about everything, and you offered a reasonable response - in this case a clarification. That is how debate is supposed to work.

The fact that we disagree is not evidence that I'm disinterested in the truth. Nor is disagreement "blathering".

I am also not "pretending nothing's happening." I have stated repeatedly in this thread that climate is changing and that we should be prepared to deal with the consequences.

I will summarize our disagreements, as I see them...

1) I expect problems, but I reject the Malthusian "doom-and-gloom" scenarios, such as anoxic lifeless oceans and the certainty of one billion human deaths.

2) I don't accept the "unprecedented" hyperbole. Neither the magnitude nor rate of change is unprecedented in Earth history. Climatologists and geologists now believe that climate change can be extremely abrupt (see my reference to NOAA in a previous post).

3) I don't believe that we should expend large amounts of resources trying to "fix" an unfixable problem. As I stated in a previous response, we cannot stabilize climate. Such an accomplishment truly would be unprecedented in Earth history.

4) I do believe that there is a considerable amount of hypocrisy on this subject. Demonizing someone for driving an SUV and then flying to Europe for a vacation is unfair, unreasonable and suggests a "someone else is always at fault" mentality.

FlyFish

fnarf -

What in the world makes you think that upwelling is either (1) a new feature of oceanic circulation, or (2) harmful to ocean life? Oceanic upwelling is a fundamental phenomenon that's been occurring for as long as the planet has had oceans. Far from being harmful, it's a process that's critically important to maintaining oceanic productivity via nutrient recycling. The most productive areas in the oceans are those that are characterized by upwelling, e.g., off the coasts of Peru, California, and Portugal, among others. Don't take my word for it - just do a simple Google search or, better yet, read a book. One classic text that's approachable by non-scientists is "Fundamentals of Ecology" by E.P. Odum.

ira

Hi scrb,

>Was it scientists or just the oil companies who said that?<

It was leading scientists.

At my own humble level, when I pointed out that Saudi Arabia had another oil field, at least as large as the one being exploited at the time, I was told that that was merely oil company propaganda intended to keep us buying petroleum at the outrageous price of $7 per barrel - about $40 at today's prices.

Hi SM,

>I don't believe that we should expend large amounts of resources trying to "fix" an unfixable problem. As I stated in a previous response, we cannot stabilize climate. <

I agree. We would be better off preparing for the changes than trying to prevent them.

However, I do not wish imply that we shouldn't take reasonable steps to reduce GHG production worldwide and stop the destruction of the forests.

BTW, has anyone heard of predictions regarding the flow/movement of the Gulf Stream and/or the California Current and/or the Humboldt Current?