I said about climate CHANGE. As in, major climate change. Not farming.

You can call it global warming. The name hasn't been changed in the scientific community, and there never has been any reason to.

Quote from Jack[RCDF

I said about climate CHANGE. As in, major climate change. Not farming.

So you didn't actually answer my question, then.

@Sac
In the scientific community no it has not been changed but it still can be called global cooling but someone should really change the term to something else... Maybe Global Weather Anomalies.

Quote from Tempz

@Sac
In the scientific community no it has not been changed but it still can be called global cooling but someone should really change the term to something else... Maybe Global Weather Anomalies.

I'm not aware of any cooling.

Quote from Tempz

@Sac
In the scientific community no it has not been changed but it still can be called global cooling but someone should really change the term to something else... Maybe Global Weather Anomalies.

CLIMATE IS NOT THE SAME THING AS WEATHER.

@Lant
Bad choice of words lol.

@Sac
The cooling effect is caused by global warming to move a large quantity of water to another area or something like that.
(This was the most concise link i could find)
http://www.dinosauria.com/jdp/news/freeze.html

The gulf stream cooling thing? It's been covered.

Quote from Lanthanide

Quote from Jack[RCDF

I said about climate CHANGE. As in, major climate change. Not farming.

So you didn't actually answer my question, then.

Your question was "What other subtleties have you missed in your interpretation?" I contended with the word "other", as you seemed to falsely claim that my not mentioning what the Bible says about farming is somehow relevant to us talking about what the Bible says about global climate change.

Quote from Jack[RCDF

Your question was "What other subtleties have you missed in your interpretation?" I contended with the word "other", as you seemed to falsely claim that my not mentioning what the Bible says about farming is somehow relevant to us talking about what the Bible says about global climate change.

Actually no, if you look back my original statement was this:

Quote from Lanthanide

Can't we take the bible, see what it says about the climate in general, and then decide whether we've had warming or not just based on that?

I asked for what the bible says about climate. Not what it says about climate change.

Quote from Lanthanide

Quote from Jack[RCDF

Your question was "What other subtleties have you missed in your interpretation?" I contended with the word "other", as you seemed to falsely claim that my not mentioning what the Bible says about farming is somehow relevant to us talking about what the Bible says about global climate change.

Actually no, if you look back my original statement was this:

Quote from Lanthanide

Can't we take the bible, see what it says about the climate in general, and then decide whether we've had warming or not just based on that?

I asked for what the bible says about climate. Not what it says about climate change.

Then you're going excessively offtopic; this topic is about environmental isues, specifically climate change.

Ze double post:
Global warming, and for that matter, cooling, can't be proven or even considered for numerous reasons. The first is the difficulty in actually measuring the temperature of the earth. What do we measure? Air, water, earth? If air, what part of the atmosphere do we measure? Same with water and earth. In addition, the amount of weather stations over the past 100 years has grown enormously but originally there were very few, and they were largely focused on the Western countries. This means that we have more information in Europe and the USA, but little in Asia and Africa and Australia; to be accurate enough there needs to be a fairly large distribution of stations over each continent to be able to get useful data for global temperature measurements. If there were 5 stations in Africa at the year 1900, statistically you can give them a higher weight than the stations in Europe; however, individual chance of error is also much more problematic in the African stations. If just one of the stations in Africa is reading 5 degrees out then 20% of the Africa stations are 5 degrees out, which would be huge. Now, currently there are many more, and one would think that at least we have accurate data from the last, say, 30 years, right? Except in the USA, 92.1% of the surveyed stations have a greater than 1 degree error, 70.6% have a greater than 2 degrees error, and 6.2% have a greater than 5 degrees error. When people are trying to get information accurate to the tenth of a degree minimum, and only 7.9% of their data is likely to be near that accuracy, then it makes a mockery of any study amd tests done with that data! [Source: http://www.surfacestations.org ]

Then we have the problem of Climategate and supposed scientists who twist data to meet their beliefs, rather than having the data define what they currently understand; especially with Harry's Readme file (very interedting read); these scientists take likely incorrect information, LOSE some of that information, half program a program to model what they think will happen, get Harry to finish it, and then he finds out that there is no documentation at all of what the program does. After 2 years of work trying to figure it out, his boss tells him to make a program which will generate a hockey stick graph no matter what you throw it out.

So we can't yet trust the data, we can't trust the major scientific bodies giving us reports based on that data, and even if they had accurate data we couldn't be sure of them. Now, I think it is certainly possible for humans to have an impact on the climate through pollution, CO2 emissions, etc. But currently we do not have the hard facts to prove anything about climate change other than it does change and humans may have an effect on it. Until we do, I see no reason to get all excited about carbon credits (now there's a laughable thing ) and doomsday scenarios.

Quote from Jack[RCDF

The first is the difficulty in actually measuring the temperature of the earth. What do we measure? Air, water, earth? If air, what part of the atmosphere do we measure? Same with water and earth.

Wow. All you have to do is measure the same spot over time. If the temperature goes up over time, then you know that it has warmed. That doesn't tell you *anything* about other areas, or why it rose or anything, just that there was a rise in temperature at that location. That's a factual data point.

Take many many factual data points, and you can begin to construct a theory as to how they could all be changing. Then use that theory to make predictions: I think that 5 years from now, we will see that 75% of these weather stations will have registered an increase in temperature. Then after 5 years, see what happened with your prediction. I predict that in 5 years time from now, the arctic ice sheet will have decreased by X mass. I predict that in 5 years time from now, the number of record-setting days in Arizona will have increased.

That's how science works.

Quote

In addition, the amount of weather stations over the past 100 years has grown enormously but originally there were very few, and they were largely focused on the Western countries. This means that we have more information in Europe and the USA, but little in Asia and Africa and Australia; to be accurate enough there needs to be a fairly large distribution of stations over each continent to be able to get useful data for global temperature measurements. If there were 5 stations in Africa at the year 1900, statistically you can give them a higher weight than the stations in Europe; however, individual chance of error is also much more problematic in the African stations. If just one of the stations in Africa is reading 5 degrees out then 20% of the Africa stations are 5 degrees out, which would be huge. Now, currently there are many more, and one would think that at least we have accurate data from the last, say, 30 years, right? Except in the USA, 92.1% of the surveyed stations have a greater than 1 degree error, 70.6% have a greater than 2 degrees error, and 6.2% have a greater than 5 degrees error. When people are trying to get information accurate to the tenth of a degree minimum, and only 7.9% of their data is likely to be near that accuracy, then it makes a mockery of any study amd tests done with that data! [Source: http://www.surfacestations.org ]

Did you know there's a satellite that can determine how much water is present underneath a part of the earth's surface based on a gravitational displacement from it's predicted position by as little as 1 nanometre?

Scientists are actually really smart when they want to solve certain problems.

Quote

Then we have the problem of Climategate and supposed scientists who twist data to meet their beliefs, rather than having the data define what they currently understand; especially with Harry's Readme file (very interedting read); these scientists take likely incorrect information, LOSE some of that information, half program a program to model what they think will happen, get Harry to finish it, and then he finds out that there is no documentation at all of what the program does. After 2 years of work trying to figure it out, his boss tells him to make a program which will generate a hockey stick graph no matter what you throw it out.

So we can't yet trust the data, we can't trust the major scientific bodies giving us reports based on that data, and even if they had accurate data we couldn't be sure of them. Now, I think it is certainly possible for humans to have an impact on the climate through pollution, CO2 emissions, etc. But currently we do not have the hard facts to prove anything about climate change other than it does change and humans may have an effect on it. Until we do, I see no reason to get all excited about carbon credits (now there's a laughable thing ) and doomsday scenarios.

There have been 6 official investigations into "climategate". None of them how found any evidence of wrongdoing or fraud.

I've never heard of this apparently important "harry's read me" and it's difficult to find much on the net other than things published in 2009 when it first came to light: http://www.google.co.nz/search?q=harry+read+me&hl=en&tbo=1&tbas=0&biw=1680&bih=938&prmd=imvns&sa=X&ei=gGyfTqKZOImjiAeDl_S0BA&ved=0CDMQpQI&tbs=tl:1,tlul:2008,tluh:2011#sclient=psy-ab&hl=en&tbo=1&tbs=tl:1&source=hp&q=%22harry-read-me%22+-%22harry+potter%22&pbx=1&oq=%22harry-read-me%22+-%22harry+potter%22&aq=f&aqi=&aql=1&gs_sm=s&gs_upl=8015l8960l2l9582l2l2l0l0l0l1l1463l1463l7-1l1l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.,cf.osb&fp=98bdfa95cf718d1c&biw=1680&bih=938

It's barely mentioned on the wikipedia page about "climategate". I did find this in the CRU documents page on wikipedia:
"Myles Allen, head of the Climate Dynamics group at the University of Oxford, said that the code investigated by Newsnight had nothing at all to do with the HadCRUT temperature record used for climate reconstructions, which is maintained at the Met Office and not at CRU."

My take on this is that it's something deniers somehow see as the smoking gun and have gotten their panties in a twist over it, when really it isn't anything important. It's pretty easy for lay people to find a document like that and draw all sorts of conclusions about it to support whatever cause they like (much like the bible was used to support slavery).

Quote from Lanthanide

Quote from Jack[RCDF

The first is the difficulty in actually measuring the temperature of the earth. What do we measure? Air, water, earth? If air, what part of the atmosphere do we measure? Same with water and earth.

Wow. All you have to do is measure the same spot over time. If the temperature goes up over time, then you know that it has warmed. That doesn't tell you *anything* about other areas, or why it rose or anything, just that there was a rise in temperature at that location. That's a factual data point.

Take many many factual data points, and you can begin to construct a theory as to how they could all be changing. Then use that theory to make predictions: I think that 5 years from now, we will see that 75% of these weather stations will have registered an increase in temperature. Then after 5 years, see what happened with your prediction. I predict that in 5 years time from now, the arctic ice sheet will have decreased by X mass. I predict that in 5 years time from now, the number of record-setting days in Arizona will have increased.

When trying to measure the earth as whole, what do we measure and what part? It's all very well saying that X number of locations had an increase in temperature over a period of time, but that's not the temperature of the earth as a whole, and we don't know the temperature of the earth as whole. We know what parts of the earth's temperature probably is. Different parts of the atmosphere have different temperatures and change at different rates and in different directions, as does water and the ground.

Quote

That's how science works.

Quote

In addition, the amount of weather stations over the past 100 years has grown enormously but originally there were very few, and they were largely focused on the Western countries. This means that we have more information in Europe and the USA, but little in Asia and Africa and Australia; to be accurate enough there needs to be a fairly large distribution of stations over each continent to be able to get useful data for global temperature measurements. If there were 5 stations in Africa at the year 1900, statistically you can give them a higher weight than the stations in Europe; however, individual chance of error is also much more problematic in the African stations. If just one of the stations in Africa is reading 5 degrees out then 20% of the Africa stations are 5 degrees out, which would be huge. Now, currently there are many more, and one would think that at least we have accurate data from the last, say, 30 years, right? Except in the USA, 92.1% of the surveyed stations have a greater than 1 degree error, 70.6% have a greater than 2 degrees error, and 6.2% have a greater than 5 degrees error. When people are trying to get information accurate to the tenth of a degree minimum, and only 7.9% of their data is likely to be near that accuracy, then it makes a mockery of any study amd tests done with that data! [Source: http://www.surfacestations.org ]

Did you know there's a satellite that can determine how much water is present underneath a part of the earth's surface based on a gravitational displacement from it's predicted position by as little as 1 nanometre?

Scientists are actually really smart when they want to solve certain problems.

I note that you didn't actually refute anything I said and gave me an entirely irrelevant piece of information. Thank you.

Quote

Quote

Then we have the problem of Climategate and supposed scientists who twist data to meet their beliefs, rather than having the data define what they currently understand; especially with Harry's Readme file (very interedting read); these scientists take likely incorrect information, LOSE some of that information, half program a program to model what they think will happen, get Harry to finish it, and then he finds out that there is no documentation at all of what the program does. After 2 years of work trying to figure it out, his boss tells him to make a program which will generate a hockey stick graph no matter what you throw it out.

So we can't yet trust the data, we can't trust the major scientific bodies giving us reports based on that data, and even if they had accurate data we couldn't be sure of them. Now, I think it is certainly possible for humans to have an impact on the climate through pollution, CO2 emissions, etc. But currently we do not have the hard facts to prove anything about climate change other than it does change and humans may have an effect on it. Until we do, I see no reason to get all excited about carbon credits (now there's a laughable thing ) and doomsday scenarios.

There have been 6 official investigations into "climategate". None of them how found any evidence of wrongdoing or fraud.

While Climategate may not have been legally fraud, to the best of my knowledge they hid data that they shouldn't have hid, and twisted data that shouldn't have been twisted. In other words, they didn't behave in an open manner which scientific studies should be conducted in.

Quote

I've never heard of this apparently important "harry's read me" and it's difficult to find much on the net other than things published in 2009 when it first came to light: http://www.google.co.nz/search?q=harry+read+me&hl=en&tbo=1&tbas=0&biw=1680&bih=938&prmd=imvns&sa=X&ei=gGyfTqKZOImjiAeDl_S0BA&ved=0CDMQpQI&tbs=tl:1,tlul:2008,tluh:2011#sclient=psy-ab&hl=en&tbo=1&tbs=tl:1&source=hp&q=%22harry-read-me%22+-%22harry+potter%22&pbx=1&oq=%22harry-read-me%22+-%22harry+potter%22&aq=f&aqi=&aql=1&gs_sm=s&gs_upl=8015l8960l2l9582l2l2l0l0l0l1l1463l1463l7-1l1l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.,cf.osb&fp=98bdfa95cf718d1c&biw=1680&bih=938

It's barely mentioned on the wikipedia page about "climategate". I did find this in the CRU documents page on wikipedia:
"Myles Allen, head of the Climate Dynamics group at the University of Oxford, said that the code investigated by Newsnight had nothing at all to do with the HadCRUT temperature record used for climate reconstructions, which is maintained at the Met Office and not at CRU."

My take on this is that it's something deniers somehow see as the smoking gun and have gotten their panties in a twist over it, when really it isn't anything important. It's pretty easy for lay people to find a document like that and draw all sorts of conclusions about it to support whatever cause they like (much like the bible was used to support slavery).

http://www.anenglishmanscastle.com/HARRY_READ_ME.txt
I suggest you read it. Some of it is complicated, but it's understandable enough that you can see what I was talking about.

Quote from Jack[RCDF

When trying to measure the earth as whole, what do we measure and what part? It's all very well saying that X number of locations had an increase in temperature over a period of time, but that's not the temperature of the earth as a whole, and we don't know the temperature of the earth as whole. We know what parts of the earth's temperature probably is. Different parts of the atmosphere have different temperatures and change at different rates and in different directions, as does water and the ground.

You know there are satellites that can measure the temperature of the entire surface of the earth, right?

Quote

I note that you didn't actually refute anything I said and gave me an entirely irrelevant piece of information. Thank you.

Because there wasn't anything to refute. Your argument was basically "gosh, scientists aren't clever enough to filter out all the problems in their data!".

Quote

While Climategate may not have been legally fraud, to the best of my knowledge they hid data that they shouldn't have hid, and twisted data that shouldn't have been twisted. In other words, they didn't behave in an open manner which scientific studies should be conducted in.

Yes, so now we must discard all of their research. Here's what wikipedia sums it up as:
"Six committees investigated the allegations and published reports, finding no evidence of fraud or scientific misconduct. [82] The scientific consensus that global warming is occurring as a result of human activity remained unchanged by the end of the investigations.[83] However, the reports criticised climate scientists for their disorganised methods, bunker mentality and lack of transparency."

Quote

http://www.anenglishmanscastle.com/HARRY_READ_ME.txt
I suggest you read it. Some of it is complicated, but it's understandable enough that you can see what I was talking about.

I read a few posts with the apparently most damning excerpts. They seem pretty bad to a lay-man without the context to properly interpret them.

Quote from Lanthanide

Quote from Jack[RCDF

When trying to measure the earth as whole, what do we measure and what part? It's all very well saying that X number of locations had an increase in temperature over a period of time, but that's not the temperature of the earth as a whole, and we don't know the temperature of the earth as whole. We know what parts of the earth's temperature probably is. Different parts of the atmosphere have different temperatures and change at different rates and in different directions, as does water and the ground.

You know there are satellites that can measure the temperature of the entire surface of the earth, right?

No there aren't.

Quote

Quote

I note that you didn't actually refute anything I said and gave me an entirely irrelevant piece of information. Thank you.

Because there wasn't anything to refute. Your argument was basically "gosh, scientists aren't clever enough to filter out all the problems in their data!".

No, my argument was that scientists have got data which is majorly flawed. First (second?) step of the scientific method is observation; if your observations are incorrect you can not proceed.

Quote

Quote

While Climategate may not have been legally fraud, to the best of my knowledge they hid data that they shouldn't have hid, and twisted data that shouldn't have been twisted. In other words, they didn't behave in an open manner which scientific studies should be conducted in.

Yes, so now we must discard all of their research. Here's what wikipedia sums it up as:
"Six committees investigated the allegations and published reports, finding no evidence of fraud or scientific misconduct. [82] The scientific consensus that global warming is occurring as a result of human activity remained unchanged by the end of the investigations.[83] However, the reports criticised climate scientists for their disorganised methods, bunker mentality and lack of transparency."

We don't discard what they said, but they showed a very unprofessional attitude and as such should be treated as amateurs.

Quote

Quote

http://www.anenglishmanscastle.com/HARRY_READ_ME.txt
I suggest you read it. Some of it is complicated, but it's understandable enough that you can see what I was talking about.

I read a few posts with the apparently most damning excerpts. They seem pretty bad to a lay-man without the context to properly interpret them.

You still haven't read it, have you?

Quote from Jack[RCDF

No there aren't.

Right, so not quite direct measurements of surface temperature:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_temperature_measurements

Note the section on sea surface temperatures indicates that it's a bit easier to find out the surface of the ocean than it is to find out the surface of the land.

Quote from Jack

No, my argument was that scientists have got data which is majorly flawed. First (second?) step of the scientific method is observation; if your observations are incorrect you can not proceed.

When your experiment is impossible to reproduce and your observations aren't ideal, you take the data that you have and work with it to the best of your ability.

The alternative is to throw it away and say "this data is completely useless and cannot tell us *anything at all* so we should not use it". That's not true - the data from 1900 might not be as accurate or complete as we'd like, but that doesn't mean that it is flat out wrong and cannot tell us anything. This is especially true when the reasons for the data being flawed are fully known and errors can be corrected for with a high degree of certainty. Like my first example - there's a satellite whose variation in orbit by 1 nanometre can be used to determine how much water is in the ground underneath it. Try and think about the myriad of factors you have to correct for to be able to determine if an orbit is off by 1 nanometre, and yet scientists have done it (or at least believe they have).

Quote

We don't discard what they said, but they showed a very unprofessional attitude and as such should be treated as amateurs.

LOL. You must behave exactly how I proscribe and if you don't then I won't trust your work, no matter how hard and how long you worked on it or how many people worked on it.

In fact, you're essentially say these people aren't experts, they're amateurs and therefore amateurs such as yourself are on a level playing field when you debate climate change with them, despite that fact that they have decades of expertise in the field and you don't. But hey, they acted unprofessionally in your opinion, so who cares what they say?

Quote

You still haven't read it, have you?

No, I haven't read it. But I have read the (apparently) most "damaging" parts. I'm sure reading the whole thing wouldn't change my opinion either - that I'm a lay person when it comes to climate change and that I don't know the context in which the readme was written and therefore I'm incapable of forming any sort of reasoned opinion on the document. If you think you're such an expert at climate change and can fully comprehend what the readme says, then more power to you.

Good timing for this article to turn up: http://www.economist.com/node/21533360

tl;dr version: new study conducted by non-climate scientists, prompted partly by the Climategate kerfluffle, examines the existing data using data methodologies and comes up with a result that is within 2% of the other 3 main projections.

Here's the concluding paragraph:

Quote

Yet the Berkeley Earth study promises to be valuable. It is due to be published online with a vast trove of supporting data, merged from 15 separate sources, with duplications and other errors clearly signalled. At a time of exaggerated doubts about the instrumental temperature record, this should help promulgate its main conclusion: that the existing mean estimates are in the right ballpark. That means the world is warming fast.

This article is illuminating for what is really going on in the government:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/04/opinion/04krugman.html?_r=1

Quote from Paul Krugman

The ringers (i.e., nonscientists) at last week’s hearing weren’t of quite the same caliber, but their prepared testimony still had some memorable moments. One was the lawyer’s declaration that the E.P.A. can’t declare that greenhouse gas emissions are a health threat, because these emissions have been rising for a century, but public health has improved over the same period. I am not making this up.

Oh, and the marketing professor, in providing a list of past cases of “analogies to the alarm over dangerous manmade global warming” — presumably intended to show why we should ignore the worriers — included problems such as acid rain and the ozone hole that have been contained precisely thanks to environmental regulation.

...

But what we had, instead of high seriousness, was a farce: a supposedly crucial hearing stacked with people who had no business being there and instant ostracism for a climate skeptic who was actually willing to change his mind in the face of evidence. As I said, no surprise: as Upton Sinclair pointed out long ago, it’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

2011 is the 9th hottest year on record. 9 of the 10 hottest years have been since 2000. The earth is undeniably getting hotter. All evidence suggests that human activity (CO2 emissions) is the major contributor to this rise in temperature.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/01/20/2011-the-9th-hottest-year-on-record/