収束ゾーンでのライフ: Life in the Convergence Zone

Thank goodness some countries allow their scientists to do science without requiring them to be politically or religiously correct!

Now, where should we put that two mile ice core? Hmmm....

Cathy

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Quite a lot of climate research is done by US universities too, surprisingly. And not just that funded by Exxon. :)

I just checked out the contributor list of www.realclimate.org: Gavin Schmidt, Michael Mann, Eric Steig, Raymond Bradley, Caspar Ammann, Raymond Pierrehumbert, David Archer, and Thibault de Garidel all currently work at US institutions (which is a large majority of contributors, only leaving one from Norway, one from Germany, and one from Britain). I'd be pretty sure that all those are scientists and not 'climate sceptics'. What's more, one of the non-US ones received a large grant from a US foundation...

I don't know if that's a reliable selection, obviously it is just one website, but overall I get the impression that US educational institutions have a good record on climate research. So it's not being suppressed... just not necessarily accepted or promoted by the political establishment.

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vtslick.livejournal.com

Wow. We really suck.

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I was under the impression that there is no ice as old as these people are claiming in the antartic. Also I'd like to see some proofs that the levels they found are what they claim. What are they comparing their results to? How do they know that the levels of what they found did not change over time? That the C02 didn't change to C2 and O2?

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solarbird

I can't speak to any impressions you had about age of Antarctic ice. However, I did find a good reference collection of methods used to date ice cores

The methods used in the determination of the ages include 18O/16O isotopic analysis [1], independent ice-flow calculations [1], comparison with other ice cores [1], paleoclimatic comparison [1], comparison with deep sea cores [1], 10Be/9Be isotopic analysis [2], deuterium/hydrogen isotopic analysis [3], comparison with marine climatic record [3], CO2 correspondances between dated ice-cores [4] and CO2 correspondances with dated oceanic cores [4].

The results determined from these various samples were consistent between the continuous and discontinuous slices within the sections that overlapped. They were also consistent with Greenland ice-cores, other Antarctic ice-cores, dated volcanic records, deep sea cores, and paleoclimatic evidence.

That's how they dated the previous Russian core samples also taken in Antarctica. Given that all of these are accepted methods of age-checking and are highly redundant, I would suspect that they are reasonably accurate.

Details about their evidentiary material would be in their paper, which I don't have. The suggestion that they are committing fraud would not likely survive peer review, and for the most part, clueless asshats don't get to do research in Antarctica. Those who try it on their own tend to die. It is not a forgiving continent.

That the C02 didn't change to C2 and O2?
It's been a while since I've taken any chem, but iirc, presuming you mean 2CO₂ -> C₂ + 2O₂, then the energy arrow is pointing the wrong way.

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solarbird

Sorry, forgot the footnotes for the ice-core sampling.

[1] C. Lorius et al., NATURE 316 (1985) 591-596.
[2] F. Yiou et al., NATURE 316 (1985) 616-617.
[3] J. Jouzel et al., NATURE 329 (1987) 403-408.
[4] J.M. Barnola et al., NATURE 329 (1987) 408-414.

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epawtows.livejournal.com

If it was possible for legit research to settle this issue it would have been settled some time ago.

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I'm not sure I understand this comment. As it stands, it sounds like we should already know, so any further research isn't legit?

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I don't have access to the full text of this Science article online, but the author they cite has quite an impressive CV.

http://www.climate.unibe.ch/~stocker/publications.html

A number of his other publications are available there in .pdf format and they appear to be quite methodologically rigorous. There appears to be a convergence of data, not just a single finding, bolstering the results.

Cathy

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c2 isn't a reduction of CO2. A quad bond is VERY unlikely in O-chem; I'm not an organic chemist, so I won't say "impossible," but really, really unlikely. The simplest molecules that have 2 carbon atoms are ethane, ethene (rare), and ethylene, which are C2H6, C2H4, and C2H2 respectively. In all of those cases, the hydrogen atoms have to come from somewhere, usually water, and breaking the water bonds and putting together the hydrocarbons involves a net energy loss.

The simplest allotrope of carbon is as a tetrahedron, C4. Again, though, some of those bonds are double bonds, which also requires an energy influx. Unless you can show where that energy comes from, there is no possible way to get 4CO2 => C4 + 4 O2. That's how they know.

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epawtows.livejournal.com

Sorry- I was in a bad mood yesterday, and was too snippy.

What I meant was that climate research has been sufficiently clear on GW that anyone who is willing to look at the results and form an intelligent opinion has already done so. People who make up their minds based on political or personal feelings are already rejecting so much information that adding more isn't going to change their minds.

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Oh, yeah, that. Eventually the weight of evidence becomes insurmountable...or all of the old unbelievers die. ;)

Cathy

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Er... it was settled some time ago, with the UN IPCC. Read the article on realclimate.org about the 'consensus' if you need more information on it.

(Assuming by 'it' you mean 'is global warming happening' (yes) and 'is it largely due to human production of greenhouse gases' (yes). I believe even the Bush administration have accepted both these things, the latter recently; they have just decided not to take drastic action to address it. There are very many issues which aren't settled, such as exactly what the results will be, how serious the effects are, which bits of the world will get warmer and which might get colder, whether global warming is responsible for increased incidence/strength of hurricanes, etc.)

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So what do you think of this then:

Is the Sun heating up? (http://www.earthfiles.com/news/news.cfm?ID=1017&category=Science)

This would apparently take the entire affair out of the hands of anyone or thing on Earth (notice the Mars polar cap is shrinking too).

The problem I have with a lot of science and researchers these days, is that a lot of them aren't doing science, they're doing politics. So I'm highly skeptical about anyone doing environmental science these days.

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That doesn't mean anything really. I'm highly skeptical of a lot of environmental science and scientists these days because so many of them aren't doing science anymore, they're doing politics.

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It has been ages since I've done chemistry as well, however I do know that in our environment there are a number of things that break CO2 down and that these things do exist even in sub-zero temperatures. Considering the amount of politics in environmental science these days as compared to actual science, I am highly skeptical of anything I read or see in it until it has a lot more serious proof and analysis.

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Consensus is not science, and science is not consensus.

The experts are still out on the causes of global warming, and there is no consensus among them. The UN IPCC is pure politics and nothing more. Saying that humans are causing the earth to warm is still speculation.

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There are things, sure. But they all require the local level of entropy to go down, which doesn't happen without energy going in. Also, there's no evidence of any of the products of that breakdown -- allotropic carbon is a solid, it won't evaporate or go away. Without evidence of 1) where the energy came from and 2) where the allotropic carbon went, this is a fantasy story.

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Could have sunk down through the ice. Ice isn't a solid like most other solids. My point is, I'm not willing to take this initial survey and results as meaning that we not only have global warming, but that man is the cause of it. I'd like to see more analysis and corroborating evidence.

I keep being reminded of that whole ozone whole and flurocarbon BS where Flurocarbons got banned even though there was never any proof that they were the cause of the hole. Oh we got promised all sorts of proof, but none was ever delivered, no one ever proved the theory. Yet all of our lives got changed and a substance was banned. Not unlike DDT. There is so much science that is really no more than politics dressed up in a lab coat that I'm skeptical until they can prove it to me, clearly, concisely, and all the major experts in the field don't look at it and go 'oh that's bullshit'.

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Could have would have should have. "Could have" isn't even a hypothesis, it's just a supposition. Dismissing basic, well-known chemistry -- I learned the stuff above in high school -- in favor of a supposition sounds a lot more like a political position than a scientific one to me.

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Right, speculation like gravity - hey, everything could start falling up tomorrow. Or like evolution - hey, maybe the world was created 4,000 years ago.

There's a definite consensus, with very few climate scientists out of hundreds worldwide now suggesting anything different. (A decade ago there was some doubt; most of the doubters have come around.) Most of those who object either aren't scientists at all, or are scientists in totally unrelated fields.

The consensus doesn't extend to politics. Where politics enter into it is in potential action or inaction. 'The earth is warming due largely to human greenhouse gas production' is the scientific consensus. 'We should/shouldn't do something to slow this down' is politics.

I won't argue this further in Dara's LJ (& in truth probably shouldn't have started it...) If you really want to learn more, read this post outlining the scientific consensus (http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=86). I'm sure you don't, which is fine by me.

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solarbird

That's 6,000 years ago. As in, approximately 4,004BC.

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Funny, as I understand it 90 percent of the climate scientists still don't think humans are causing it. If you are going to claim otherwise, please show proof.

Remember that the UN document forged all those signatures on it. The people who's names were put on it, had them put there without their knowledge or permission.

And consensus IS politics. Science doesn't practice consensus.

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spazzkat.livejournal.com

Where is the 90% figure from?

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So how exactly does saying that you're skeptical show us the methodological flaws?

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It means that I'm not willing to accept their findings until it has had some serious peer review, and I've had the time to sit down and go over it myself. I see lots of papers published every year, and a quite a few don't stand up when examined.

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Science doesn't practice consensus.

Yes it does. It's called peer review.

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solarbird

I would say a few things. 1. The author clearly wants to blame global warming on sun variance and tie it to sunspots and flares, but can't get the expert he's interviewing to go along. The interviewer specifically tries to tie global warming to activity on Mars and Pluto and is shot down by his own authoritative source. 2. Even aside from that, he can claim no more than 10% to 30% cause is solar. As the article itself says, flares are spectacular looking, but don't produce all that much heat. 3. I'm going to be very skeptical of any site pushing a book on crop circles that takes them seriously, and tying them to the September 11th terrorist attacks doesn't help either.

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From the link you posted:

"So, in terms of a straightforward link between the two, an association between the Sun and Earth, it looks like the Sun has not been the cause of most of the late 20th Century warming. It could have made a contribution."

The top-end estimate is 30% of the recent warming, which is consistent with the consensus that the bulk of warming is due to human activity. The article itself concedes that industrial C02 and other human-created gases are the main cause. The effect of the sun is a factor, but not the main one.

Climatologists are doing science, not politics. As already mentioned, the politics come in when we decide what to do about the science. While I'm sure there are some people who exaggerate the scientific consensus in order to further political goals, the biggest political manipulation I see is by those that deny the reality of the underlying science altogether. That science, as the original article demonstrates, has contructed a consistent climatic theory based on observations and data that explains recent warming and makes predictions about the future that are already beginning to be confirmed. Those observations strongly support the idea that the level and speed of climate change in the industrial era is unprecedented in the Earth's history.

So what do we do about it? I can respect someone who acknowledges the problem but says that it can't be affected at a cost less than the costs of doing nothing. I think they're wrong, but that's at least an arguable position.

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...*laughs*. I did show proof: I linked to a well-respected website that's scientific rather than political and that has contributions from a number of climate scientists, most of whom are from US institutions and a few from others. You'll see a lot of argument in the comments to that post; but you won't see scientists at major institutions claiming that the consensus was 'forged', or that their name on it was a lie.

Where's your proof of the 90%? Where's your proof of the forgeries? Where are the genuine climate scientists (not scientists in other fields, politicians, moralists, or has-been novelists *cough* Crichton *cough*) speaking out as to this dramatic misrepresentation of their opinion? Do you have one climate scientist claiming their 'signature' was forged? Two? Ten? Or 'all' of those in the IPCC who agreed to the report, as you claimed? That's funny, because one contributor to the RealClimate website says on his bio he was a lead author on that report. You wouldn't expect him to make that claim if his signature had been forged and he'd had nothing to do with it.

Science most certainly does practice consensus. Scientific consensus is a general agreement on the interpretation of available evidence. It's where you start from, if you're new to a field; and, yes, it's where politicians do - or ought to - listen for advice. If you have one leading expert in a field saying something, that's interesting. If you have a hundred of them agreeing on something, that should inform policy.

Consensus itself isn't politics (is it politics that scientists agree on evolution?); it's formed from evidence and rigorous analysis. Politics is when a politician ignores the hundred who agree and picks the few, lone, maverick voices to give full prominence - something not exactly unheard of in US politics.

That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with being a 'maverick' scientist. If you follow a new, surprising path and it turns up genuine evidence - that can get through peer review and really does indicate what you say it indicates - then you might change the consensus.

In the meantime, if the vast majority of experts in a field agree on certain points, and a handful aren't yet convinced... when you're taking decisions you are far better off betting with the majority. I mean, sure, you *could* launch a space rocket based on the theories of the Flat Earth Society, but personally I wouldn't trust its guidance system.

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No, it is not a 'well respected website' and it is not politically neutral. It has a bias and shows it fairly often. When it comes to science I try very hard to be neutral, I am interested in facts, I don't give a damn about politics.

Niether realclimate nor yourself (apparently, I may be wrong) practice that belief. If someone can show me that mankind is causing global warming and that it is a bad thing, I'll be all for doing something about it. Unitl then it is simply an excuse to attack the US by the socialists who have co-opted the envirnomental movement. (which is the only reason I'm no longer in the environmental movement, it's no longer about teh environment, it's about the politics)

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A point of interest, while looking over some stuff I came across an interesting comment in a paper that it is 'well known that CO2 dissipates from ice thus making it appear that CO2 levels were lower in the past than they actually were'. I haven't had the chance to go look for where this 'well known' fact comes from and the article (as typical in many web articles) had no citing.

But I know you're pretty good at digging those things out and probably have more spare time currently than I do. I'll look for it if I get the chance, but I just thought you might by interested.

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Okay, was talking to a physicist today and I asked him about CO2 levels in the ice cores. He told me that CO2 dissolves into anything, including ice. He said that what they do is go into bubbles in the ice and pull out the gases. The CO2 in the older ice has disolved into the ice, so of course they don't see it.

He suggested that I take an ice cube with a bubble, suck out all the air in it and replace it with air with a know mixture of Nitrogen, oxygen and CO2 and come back in a while and check it out. Sadly I don't have the ability to do this. But, I find it interesting that this is supposedly a known property of CO2 that the person writing this paper and doing this experiment seems to have ignored.

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