Climate Change / Global Warming Discussion

[tigerade]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet...t-changes-natural-variability-says-study.html

So, I guess the science isn't really settled.

Being a well-armored skeptic, I would never take a single article title at face value.

"Our climate models are WRONG: Global warming has slowed - and recent changes are down to ‘natural variability’, says study": Sounds a bit sensationalist doesn't it?

I did a Google search on "patrick brown duke university" and here are some of the results I found. I first noticed that other conservative news outlets were quick to pile on:

Bad News for Global Warming Alarmists, According to New Study | TheBlaze.com
Man-made Global Warming Likely to Be Moderate, Says Study - Hit Run : Reason.com
Global Warming ‘Pause’ Extends Nearly 18 And A Half Years | The Daily Caller
New evidence against global warming
Happy Earth Day! The Computer Models Are Wrong! - The Rush Limbaugh Show

I don't claim to have read all of this drivel. But the essentially I got the point. This is proof that global warming is a hoax, is not happening, or isn't something to be concerned about.

Rush Limbaugh even gifted us with this gem of an image:

Rush Limbaugh's website also apparently said this:

On the April 22 edition of his show, Limbaugh touted the Duke University study as "ad news for the climate change crowd" and claimed the Duke researchers are part of a "consensus" of people who think "there isn't any warming going on." He went on to assert that the study, which examines temperature records over the past 1,000 years, shows that "there's no evidence whatsoever to suggest that long-term warming over the next 100 years is going to be anything even noticeable, abnormal."

So I guess that's it right? It's all a big hoax right? For an unskeptical mind, it sure is over. Well, now let's actually hear from the author of the study, Patrick Brown.

Duke Researcher Denounces Rush Limbaugh's "Ridiculous" Distortion Of His Global Warming Study | Blog | Media Matters for America

But the study itself said nothing of the sort. Rather, the study stated that, out of the range of warming projections outlined by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), temperature records suggest that at present time the "middle-of-the-road warming scenario" is more likely than the most severe warming projections. One of the study's authors, Duke doctoral candidate Patrick Brown, confirmed as much in an email to Media Matters, and called Limbaugh's assertion "ridiculous":

The idea that there 'isn't any warming' is ridiculous. Over the past century there are countless datasets indicating warming (weather stations, sea level, ice mass, ocean temperatures, etc.).

[...]

Our study shows that we are probably not on the worst-case IPCC scenario but that we may be on an IPCC middle-of-the road scenario. The IPCC does not make predictions they make hypothetical projections. So this result does not contradict the IPCC conclusions at all.

​

The study also stated that natural variability "can slow or speed the rate of warming from decade to decade," and cited this as a reason not to be over-reliant on "short-term temperature trends."
Limbaugh claimed this meant the study was saying that "the sun" could be responsible for recent global warming. But the vast majority of scientists would say otherwise. Indeed, Brown explained to Media Matters that Limbaugh is "wrong" to attribute recent warming to solar activity, and added that human activity is a much bigger contributor to warming in the past century than natural variation:

[O]ur study confirms that the warming of the past century could not have happened without human-caused increases in greenhouse gasses. This is because the warming over the past century is much larger than what could have come about due to natural variation.
[...]
Rush is wrong in his interpretation. The solar contribution to recent temperature change is probably minimal and/or negative (i.e., the sun has probably caused cooling, but human increases in greenhouse gasses have overwhelmed that small cooling to cause a net warming).

​

Science writer Greg Laden wrote that the Duke study will receive "criticism from climate scientists" because it includes language that suggests it is assessing the likelihood of different warming scenarios by predicting the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that will occur in the future, which it can't possibly know. However, Laden noted the study doesn't actually "say that one or another scenario is likely or less likely" and "says nothing about the validity of climate models." Rather, according to Laden, the Duke researchers "have provided an insight, if their work holds up, on how random wanderings of reality from projections, in both directions (cooler than expected, warmer than expected) will emerge depending on what we do with our greenhouse gases."
Laden concluded that the study's findings do not provide a "change in how we think about global warming," but rather a "refinement." But he warned that the results are likely to be "abused by denialists" and are being misrepresented, "willfully or through misunderstanding, by climate science contrarians." Limbaugh is a case in point in this regard.
Limbaugh, who frequently attempts to deny climate change, concluded his segment by claiming that he was helping Brown get his message out: "We've gotten your message out for 25 years, the message that there isn't any warming, and there isn't in the specifically past 18 years. There isn't any, and we've gotten that message out."
Limbaugh may have been spreading the same message for the last 25 years, but it's clearly not the message of Patrick Brown -- or the rest of the 97 percent of scientists who agree on man-made climate change.

Here is another article that I found on the study:

Middle-of-the-Road Warming Scenario Most Likely, according to New Study - Climate Change Weather Blog

A new Duke University study based on 1,000 years of actual temperature records suggests that global warming is not progressing as quickly as it would under the worst-case emissions scenarios set forward by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Best estimates and likely ranges for global average surface air warming below for six SRES emissions marker scenarios are given in this assessment and are shown in Table SPM.3. For example, the best estimate for the low scenario (B1) is 1.8°C (likely range is 1.1°C to 2.9°C), and the best estimate for the high scenario (A1FI) is 4.0°C (likely range is 2.4°C to 6.4°C). Although these projections are broadly consistent with the span quoted in the TAR (1.4°C to 5.8°C), they are not directly comparable. Image below courtesy of the IPCC.

To no surprise, this latest study, led by Patrick T. Brown, a doctoral student in climatology at Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment and Wenhong Li, assistant professor of climate at Duke showed that natural variability in surface temperatures, which are caused by interactions between the ocean, atmosphere and other natural factors can account for observed changes in recent rates of warming from decade to decade.
To test how accurate climate models are at accounting for variations in the rate of warming, Brown and Li, along with colleagues from San Jose State University and the USDA, created a new statistical model based on reconstructed empirical records of surface temperatures over the last 1,000 years. (via Duke Environment)
The research team found that the IPCC climate models largely get the "big picture" right but underestimate magnitude of natural decade-to-decade climate "wiggles", according to Brown.
Image courtesy of NASA GISS.

Brown explains that some of these "wiggles" have been big enough to have accounted for a reasonable portion of the accelerated warming that went on between 1975-2000, but also the reduced rate of warming from 2002-2013.
Other key excerpts from the Duke Environment story.....
"At any given time, we could start warming at a faster rate if greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere increase without any offsetting changes in aerosol concentrations or natural variability," said Li.


"Statistically, it's pretty unlikely that an 11-year hiatus in warming, like the one we saw at the start of this century, would occur if the underlying human-caused warming was progressing at a rate as fast as the most severe IPCC projections," Brown said. "Hiatus periods of 11 years or longer are more likely to occur under a middle-of-the-road scenario."

Under the IPCC's middle-of-the-road scenario, there was a 70 percent likelihood that at least one hiatus lasting 11 years or longer would occur between 1993 and 2050, Brown said. "That matches up well with what we're seeing."

But screw all this, this is all just the media news articles right? What about the actual study? Just as before, I know enough Google-fu to be able to find it and the full text is here:

http://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/10161/9593/srep09957.pdf?sequence=1
Comparing the model-simulated global
warming signal to observations using
empirical estimates of unforced noise

This is what a really scientific article looks like, not that mumbo-jumbo that Rush was spewing with the polar bear holding a "hoax" sign.

Here are some interesting tidbits from the actual article:

This is why I strongly encourage you to read deeper into what the science actually says, rather than to take things at face value. Daily Mail, Rush Limbaugh and WorldNetDaily really didn't say much about what the scientific paper actually said or meant, nor did they tell you what the paper was called or where to find it. They only told you what they thought it meant by using emotionally appealing headlines and silly graphics like a polar bear and the earth on fire. This kind of stupidity may work on some people, but it does not work on me. Read the scientific journals, I have been preaching that like a fiery southern baptist pastor ever since I came to this forum. Read the friggin scientific journals.

 

[ggies07]

Beautiful post tigerade! +1

 

[Raffy.Roma]

Beautiful post tigerade! +1

+ 2

 

[Skotty]

We really need conservatives to lead the way on a solution that isn't just ignoring the science and pretending nothing is wrong. Conservatives are looking like the bad guys far too often these days, and climate change is an opportunity to restore the faith of now left leaning independents that their ideology has good merit and they aren't just the puppets of dispassionate big corporations.

If things continue as they are now for too long, I personally see nothing but bad and worse outcomes. The bad outcome is that the conservative side dies away as they continue to hold on to increasingly indefensible positions and lose all public support, and the liberals take over completely, many of our personal freedoms and some of free market dying in the process. The worse outcome, a deep seeded fear of mine, is everyone holding fast to their positions until the situation becomes so bad that it leads to open revolution and war in the streets. Many people believe the planet is truly in danger, and if it goes too far, they will fight and kill if necessary in the name of saving humanity and life diversity on Earth; climate change activists will be labeled as terrorists and climate change denialists will be labeled as a cancer killing the Earth; both sides will fight for the others destruction.

 

[beeeerock]

What needs to happen IMHO is for the politicians to recognize that this isn't, and can't be about partisan politics. It's about people and our ability to have confidence in our kids having kids and so on...

It has never been about saving the planet - it's about saving ourselves! The planet will do just fine once we're gone, and find a new equilibrium during the next few thousands of years.

Like in so many movies, people have to figure out how to work together for a common goal just as they would if they were fighting invaders from Zargon...

 

[ZsoZso]

It has never been about saving the planet - it's about saving ourselves! The planet will do just fine once we're gone, and find a new equilibrium during the next few thousands of years.

+1 This is a very key point that is not emphasiz4ed enough. We need to act now to save humanity. This isn't about polar bears or the planet. The planet has came through just fine the 5 previous mass extinction events and it will come through this one just as fine. However, the leading species on the other hand have never fared too good in those ME events...

 

[Raffy.Roma]

What needs to happen IMHO is for the politicians to recognize that this isn't, and can't be about partisan politics. It's about people and our ability to have confidence in our kids having kids and so on...

It has never been about saving the planet - it's about saving ourselves! The planet will do just fine once we're gone, and find a new equilibrium during the next few thousands of years.

Like in so many movies, people have to figure out how to work together for a common goal just as they would if they were fighting invaders from Zargon...

Well said!

 

[EchoDelta]

Well said!

Inspiring, but that's not the primary role of politicians and nation-states, by design.

 

[beeeerock]

Inspiring, but that's not the primary role of politicians and nation-states, by design.

Well, it seems to me that the general population looks to the leaders with an expectation that they're looking after our interests. If they aren't going to take them on, who will? If nothing else, there should be full disclosure from them...: "We aren't going to deal with the important stuff - it's up to you, good citizens! Save yourselves, and while you're at it, save us politicians too, because you *really* need us!"

If we want to survive as a species, we must evolve. For most animals, simply adapting to the surrounding world is enough. We, however, modify the world. So we'd better be able to adapt to the changes we've made. That means our evolution isn't simply genetic improvements and adaptations. We must also cause our political, economic and religious ideas to grow and adapt to our changing world as well. Unfortunately, we're too self-centered as a species to believe that the world might not depend on US... and too stupid to recognize that we actually depend on IT.

If there is to be change, and politicians and nation-states aren't going to spearhead it, I guess we'd better. That means acting, on some level. What are we as individuals doing???

 

[EchoDelta]

Well, it seems to me that the general population looks to the leaders with an expectation that they're looking after our interests. If they aren't going to take them on, who will? If nothing else, there should be full disclosure from them...: "We aren't going to deal with the important stuff - it's up to you, good citizens! Save yourselves, and while you're at it, save us politicians too, because you *really* need us!"

If we want to survive as a species, we must evolve. For most animals, simply adapting to the surrounding world is enough. We, however, modify the world. So we'd better be able to adapt to the changes we've made. That means our evolution isn't simply genetic improvements and adaptations. We must also cause our political, economic and religious ideas to grow and adapt to our changing world as well. Unfortunately, we're too self-centered as a species to believe that the world might not depend on US... and too stupid to recognize that we actually depend on IT.

If there is to be change, and politicians and nation-states aren't going to spearhead it, I guess we'd better. That means acting, on some level. What are we as individuals doing???

I agree the most important set of variables to improve is planetary governance patterns.


" the general population looks to the leaders with an expectation that they're looking after our interests"
That is a *very* recent trend in sentiment and the perception is not supported by evidence.


"there should be full disclosure..."
There is. If you read actions, not words.


I'm helping myself and other families move to permaculture farms, use renewable energy for as most needs as possible, and as a job i try to slow drives to urbanization and farmland mismanagement in low income counties (which means improving access to basic things like maternal health, water and slowing exploitative land use) (a job which puts me at a vantage point in seeing how the planetary systems work, firsthand)

We can all do a lot. I remind myself "Know thyself", I to try not to be fooled by words of a system that is not set up in the interests of my grandkids; and know that it's not enough to change my light bulbs to LED and car to a Tesla. Saramago once said in this world now there are two superpowers: one is the USA, the other one is you.

Onwards and upwards, this is the good fight.

 

[Canuck]

It has never been about saving the planet - it's about saving ourselves! The planet will do just fine once we're gone, and find a new equilibrium during the next few thousands of years.

That reminded me of George Carlin's bit:

"The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles … hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages … And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn’t going anywhere. WE are!

We’re going away. Pack your sh!t, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam … The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas.

The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, ’cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?”

Plastic… a#shole.”

 

[gg_got_a_tesla]

Another disturbing stat:

CO2 levels reach monthly record - BBC News

 

[ggr]

Australia's at it again; government advisor states that climate change is a UN plot: Australia PM's adviser says climate change a UN hoax - BBC News

 

[ggies07]

Another call-to-action piece by Bill Mckibben, head of 350.org. This guy inspires me and is the one who really pulled me into what's going on with our planet. Great author as well.

The Next Decade Will Decide What the World Looks Like for Thousands of Decades to ComeBill McKibben

 

[Raffy.Roma]

Australia's at it again; government advisor states that climate change is a UN plot: Australia PM's adviser says climate change a UN hoax - BBC News

IMO in a period of danger for the Earth because of the Climate Change issue we cannot afford to have Climate Skeptics in power.

 

[nwdiver]

Climate Skeptics

No such thing... they're climate DENIERS :wink:

 

[Johan]

Australia's at it again; government advisor states that climate change is a UN plot: Australia PM's adviser says climate change a UN hoax - BBC News

Don't ever underestimate how much coal is still in the ground in Australia that some very wealthy people there want to be able to capitalize off of before it goes all out of style. They influence high level government, just like they're doing the US.

 

[ggr]

Don't ever underestimate how much coal is still in the ground in Australia that some very wealthy people there want to be able to capitalize off of before it goes all out of style. They influence high level government, just like they're doing the US.

I wasn't underestimating, I was disgusted. These are the idiots I voted against, but failed. The current Oz government is one of the most disliked in the history of the country.

 

[Raffy.Roma]

I wasn't underestimating, I was disgusted. These are the idiots I voted against, but failed. The current Oz government is one of the most disliked in the history of the country.

Agree 100%

- - - Updated - - -

No such thing... they're climate DENIERS :wink:

Yes you are right :wink:

 

[ggr]

More Australian madness, with a small dose of sanity finally. The Federal Government gave the University of Western Australia a AU$4m grant to set up a "consensus center" to support climate-change-denier Bjørn Lomborg. Western Australia has a large part of the coal and gas reserves. The academics all protested, now UWA wants to give the money back and not proceed. But the Federal "Education" minister vows he'll find another venue.

Climate contrarian Bjorn Lomborg's centre dropped by WA university

It's interesting to note that the articles about this stuff happening in Australia are mostly coming out of England. The Australian media often ignores or downplays anything that opposes the government and fossil fuel industry "consensus".