I'm getting more pleased with my diagnosis of the roots of irony blindness. Mental saturation. Trippy's link was not bare, btw. It was embedded in a completely adequate explicatory sentence, with a visible meaning Trippy is accountable for, and is held to account for. Whereas if Photizo were held to account for his posting, it would change radically or he would not be here at all. The privilege of that kind of posting is restricted to very narrow political/religious range of assertions, here and generally in the US public discourse.
Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Interesting. Now,consider the possibility as to why it is so hard for the humans to recognize (let alone admit) the depths of their depravity.
Upon deeper investigation I believe there is little direct oil company influence upon the IPCC. Article in the Daily Telegraph in January 2010 about the head of the entire IPCC alleged potential conflicts of interest related to Pachauri's membership of the board of ONGC[23] and to research grants for TERI, a non-profit institution of which Pachauri is director general.[24] They further alleged that financial anomalies existed at TERI Europe; However it has since been retracted with apology (21 August 2010) as independent investigation by KPMG examining payments made by private sector companies and found that payments amounting to $326,399 were made to TERI itself, not to Pachauri.[29][30] He had received only his annual salary from TERI, amounting to £45,000 a year, plus a maximum of about £2,174 from outside earnings. He received no payment for chairing the IPCC.*[31] Part of my confusion was based on the following different IPCC sponsored conference: http://www.mazeejevents.com/ipcc201...ational-pipeline-coating-conference-speakers/ - All speakers directly related to the oil industry. Interestingly most recent articles I found that were critical of the IPCC were from “deniers.” - Claiming they exaggerated the seriousness – just the opposite POV from mine. They must be reasonably “even handed” to draw fire from opposite sides. I will not imply more and retract prior assertion based on old information of questionable validity, that the oil companies have direct impact on the IPCC. The direct impact comes from the report review and approval by 190 nations, some of who make changes in the text, and many are hard pressed economically, so don't want more expenses; Or think later generations and technology like electric cars, etc. will contain the problem.** * Fact that he has no scientific education is OK with me - He can still lead others who do if a good administrator. ** I fear we may already be beyond salvation - I.e. due to 40+ year lag of heat now being stored in the oceans (slightly more than half what is absorbed from the sun, with less than half re-radiated as IR) plus the many mutually amplifying positive feed backs (I listed 10*** just related to Artic ice melting) man could reduce CO2 emissions by 50% (an impossible target) and still GW would increase - so only when 35C wet bulb is reached is delayed a couple of decades at most. The quickest path there, I think, is large tropical forest fires, aided by Hadley cell circulation converting high clouds from 2/3 reflectors of sun light into 3/4 absorbers of it. Again, I note these clouds now reflect by many (50 or more on average) very small angle forward scatterings (not once like a metal mirror). So the sunlight may be more than a dozen meters inside the cloud before it has net random walked thru angle space by more than 90 degrees to be again headed on its way back out of the cloud. Thus only 1 soot particle for ever 100**** or so water droplets in the outer dozen or so meters of the cloud's "skin", makes the conversion from high reflectivity to nearly complete absorption. *** See list here: http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?97892-Climate-gate&p=3225546&viewfull=1#post3225546 **** Actually 1 in 10,000 may be a better guess as to what gives 75/25 chance that in the very long PATH the sun light photons take into and and then out of the cloud, it will hit just one soot particle. Some one needs to do a "Monte Carlo study" to get the correct fraction of soot to water drops. The probably of scatter by any angle, x degrees, (very well known) and cloud's droplet distribution, (surely not too many too consider) density as function of drop radius, (surely not too many too consider) all need to be chance variables in the Monte Carlo study. Soot diameter is also a Monte Carlo variable (need distribution for that too, but LASL has done recent study of that.)***** That angle scattering function gets very complex and fine scaled for droplets in the Mie diameter range so different parts of the solar spectrum should be considered separately. Also the "edge" of the cloud is a density gradient as a variable, but at least these last two factors are not part of the Monte Carlo problem. - Just a "2D" parameter space for many different Monte Carlo runs. I.e. were probably speaking of more than $1000 of computer time. ***** Hell this is a Ph. D. in mathematical physic problem - Is any reader looking for an important one? Or knows someone who is?
This thread was originally about Climategate. It was derailed long ago, meandering along many different 'paths' over time. It has truly taken on a Life of its own
I'm watching the Reid Report, on msnbc, and Bianca Jagger is in studio discussing the ongoing march (around the world) to inform our world leaders to get off the duff with respect to climate change. BTW The Colin Goldblatt paper was very informative for me.
Not necessarily. "Climate gate" has two quite diferent meanings. The one you had in mind with the OP - Scientists joining forces trying to blow the problem all out of proportion to its merits (for various personal reasons) OR Fossil fuel interests, with many shills and paid fronts (like Heartland of "no harm in smoking" fame now saying same about GW) acting in big conspiracy to avoid any reduction in their profits. Are you a paid shill, or just ignorant?
Which should have closed it immediately, or moved it to wherever the threads on Acorn vote fraud, chemtrails, Obama's birth certificate, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 9/11 as an inside job, the 100mpg carburetor GM won't let you buy, and so forth, go to die.
The Roxkefellers are divesting association with fossil fuel industries. Sounds like the Rockefellers are exercising intellectualal honesty and figure the bottom line doesn't have anything to do with profits for this situation.
Ok, I thought maybe there was something else going on. I couldn't find recent allegations, which is why I asked. So that leaves me wondering whether you have other objections to the mission statement of the IPCC, or whether there is some reason to believe they can't report truthfully according to "best evidence". As I read your posts, I have in mind the way the science was handed up the chain, first from Roger Revelle (closely associated with the founding of NOAA through his mentoring of Charles David Keeling, whose CO[sub]2[/sub] charts appeared in US textbooks as early as the 1960s) through his report to LBJ, and, thanks to interest in Revelle's work by by Sen Patrick Moynehan, who told Nixon's staff (Erlichman) that global monitoring should be done -- "It is a natural for NATO" -- the seed was planted for creation of the IPCC. It's that legacy which is under attack, whether by the Sock Puppet Army of Zealots (SPAZ) or the objections you have raised here. I can understand their position; they are fraudsters, liars and propagandists. I'm just looking for where continuity was lost from 1969 when Moynihan picked up the ball and handed it to the UN. Do you mean you assume so, or can you cite an example? That assumes countries are purely capitalistic monoliths. But we know they all sponsor the research which gave birth to climate science. The US, which was "hard pressed economically" to join Kyoto, hasn't been stingy in investing in monitoring stations, satellites, agency and academic campuses, labs, experiments, expeditions, supercomputers and personnel, etc. Don't you think that defeats preference for the economic goals (of limiting carbon regulation) over the quality of work being done by independent researchers? Further, wouldn't you expect there to be a strident debate taking place between researchers from Kyoto countries vs. the non-Kyoto countries? He has a PhD in Industrial Engineering. As you probably know, it deals with systems optimization theories, statistics, modeling and finite element analysis of mega systems. His dissertation involved a large complex model. I can't explain his selection over any other expert, but it speaks volumes to me that Industrial Engineering is understood to offer many of the analytical techniques needed to address the data sets IPCC is assessing. Success in driving policy effectively boils down to the largest computer software architecture yet devised. Who better than a god of IT -- an industrial engineer. I'm guessing this has something to do with his selection, but it's pure speculation. In any case I wouldn't assume that he has been reduced to a non-technical administrator. The question of leaving it to future generations was decided at Kyoto, not within the IPCC. And to my knowledge IPCC doesn't make any assumptions about how many electric cars are coming into service. Their reports are designed around the sensitivity of climate to a doubling of CO[sub]2[/sub]. "We" are not going to die from climate change. The future is dismal, but that prognosis doesn't affect you or me. There isn't any evidence supporting an apocalyptic ecosystem crash in your lifetime or mine. The concern which motivated Patrick Moynihan to deliver Roger Revelle's report over to the UN for a global treatment of the matter, was Moynihan's concerns that future generations in low lying areas would be under water. "Goodbye New York" he wrote in his letter to Nixon's White House, which probably led to the formation os NOAA. Obviously the list of concerns has grown. But you are premature in your analysis. Even the experts can't forecast that far into the future. What 40 year lag are you referring to? Look at the list under "Cited By" for this paper. All of these people are/were studying what we know about insolation of the oceans. What do you think of their work? http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/1520-0485(1977)007<0482:OEIOTO>2.0.CO;2 Ice melt feedback is in the suite of simulations IPCC is assessing. If I were you I would start at Scripps Institute for information about cloud modeling. Here is some of the research they have done. As you see modeling the plume itself is problematic. Once that has been done, I think the rest of what you're talking about is relatively trivial; as you see that part is basically complete. Consider the plume that forms over the Indian Ocean, largely affected by anthropogenic emissions. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! This is one of the original papers associated with the Indian Ocean Experiment (INDOEX): http://www-ramanathan.ucsd.edu/files/pr93.pdf Here is a 2006 paper on the same topic, evaluating MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) http://www-ramanathan.ucsd.edu/files/pr138.pdf They would no doubt be at Scripps or any of many excellent institutions involved in this kind of research. A spot check reveals that Stockholm University has had 16 dissertations on cloud modelling in the past 20 years. You may be surprised to find some your concerns taken up by those bright-eyed candidates. One paper I see there is titled Aerosol particle properties influencing cloud droplet nucleation. It doesn't specifically mention Monte Carlo simulation, but it's reasonable to assume that all noise modelling is done that way (pseudorandom number generators).
There's a bit of the future happening in California right now. Listening to a discussion on msnbc, the Ed Show, it was reported that the US has reduced it's CO2 contribution by 10% between 2005 and 2012 if I remember correctly. Let's see what comes out of the conference being held in New York tomorrow. Time to quit bickering over predictions and get to work. 310,000 folks said so in New York on Sunday.
Yeah you would think the abundance of evidence favoring ratification of Kyoto (or some other regulatory protocol) would have reached consensus decades ago. But the modelling must and will go on. The bickering I was responding to was directed at IPCC and the research, which isn't the point. The point is that carbon has to be regulated. As you say, there seems to be a substantial reduction in the US, which goes to show that these arguments are counter productive to two essential aims: (1) the ongoing education about AGW which seems to be slowly working and (2) the acceleration of carbon regulation which seems to be at a standstill. Another aim of my post was just to add some research perspectives to what was posted, in hopes of steering the conversation into the "here's what we know" category. I don't buy into the argument "well if carbon is only adding around 2 deg per century then we can ignore it." So you see it doesn't matter whether someone takes the hard view that we're all going to die. The depletion of the cryosphere, and all the signals coming from the biosphere that fragile species are crashing, is more than enough incentive for me personally to get behind regulation. And I don't particularly care what it costs. Gas has risen 1000% in my lifetime, and that was a matter of economic rape. So what difference would it make to pay another 1000% to begin to soften the blow to the planet (if that were the measured against, say Joules of renewable energy) ? At least for once the money would be going to a good cause. The answer for me is simple. We pay our way, and we clean up the mess we made before we leave this place. The rest is just ignorance -- at best -- and at worst it's downright evil. But that doesn't deter me from wanting to suggest that readers should consider the state of the science that's being pummeled here. After all researchers tend to be pretty mild mannered, not at all like the mad scientists in the cartoons. Those folks are always greedy. There is no money in research (except, say, royalties, which has no bearing on this). It's pretty obvious which side of the controversy stands to get rich from caricaturing climate research. So part of winning the war on carbon should include the endorsement of all climate science research. The more the merrier. That's my position and it seems to be the position of the vast majority of the scientific community. So I'm pretty sure I'm on the side of history. Some day, people are really going to start listening. 300,00 New Yorkers is a good start, but we need a much stronger showing. Nationwide it looks like 46% are still in denial. BTW maybe there will be some newsworthy stuff to post about CimateWeek. I notice the Empire State tower is lit in green.
No mission statement is fine - even the review of reports before release by 190 governments may be necessary as the over all objective is to get action / regulations etc. However, there are powerful interest in continuing or even increasing the profits of burning fossil fuels and building cars that use them. In the US the "representatives" of the people need campaign funds - lobbyists and ultra rich like Koch brothers, supply most of that. Hence for example US has not signed on to even the relatively weak Kyoto agreements. In summary: the IPCC may be doing all that is politically possible, but IMO that is not enough. I was very happy t see thousands marching in the streets, in many countires - that is how major change has been achieved in the past. I was part of Dr. King's "March on Washington" and several others for end of racial discrimination. I still march in Sao Paulo's "Gay Parade" (world's 2nd largest) despite being as "straight" as they come. I have been listening to speech by co-chair of IPCC's WGI at: http://www.climatechange2013.org/report/ now for the second time as I type. He gives what seems to me to be balanced truth. I especially like how he has reduced the problem to a few simple equations reflecting what our choices are (More than just the fact that waiting increases the cost, etc. If you don't want to watch all hour & 9 minutes, at least jump in at 39 minutes into the talk to see this compressed math summary which ends with his talk at 52 minutes. - These 13 minutes are the best and most important discussion of GW problem I know of. If instead of a more than million word reports, the IPCC just published a transcript with the graphs of these 13 minutes, I would be singing their praises! I am ignorant of this history and don't care - only what I see now seems important to me. Not exactly a pure assumption as something must be happening during the more than year long period that governments are reviewing reports before they can be released. I don't have access to first drafts of reports, so don't know how governments have changed reports. There are many interest at work in addition to the fossil fuel interest. Even within the government - For example, NASA wants to justify its budget, reduce chances it will be reduced so does a lot of good and needed climate research. DoD likewise - even just within its plans for defense, needs to model how the world it operates in will change. Etc. These various interest are often in conflict - coal interest have been losing recent battles with EPA, etc. When you get to be my age, even if you still have clear mind and healthy body, you cease to be much concerned about how many more years you will live, at least I have. My concern now is for my grand children, and their grand children, or to generalize: my species an even many others that will go extinct if business as usual continues. Currently slightly more than half the net absorption of solar energy is heating the oceans. That will cease to be the case. When it does in 4 or 5 decades, the land will feel the full effect of the net solar heating - and worse - of the greater rate of water evaporation from the oceans. I doubt man will know as 95F wet bulb temperatures will have killed almost all and completely abolished civilization's nice advantages like drinkable water coming out faucets, food stores, and electric power for lights, etc. I disagree with both (1) & (2) but I have not searched to see if my concern for large fires, aided by Hadley (or the two other) cell circulation patterns as rapid reducers of albedo of very high and now very reflecting clean white clouds has been done. This is totally different question from that cloud formation - your link's concern; however here too the effect of soot aerosols can be the opposite from other aerosols during day time, at least. I.e. by absorbing sunlight they become much warmer than the droplets of water of the cloud. When hot black speck collides with water drop, part or all of that liquid becomes vapor (an "anti- cloud forming process") which both reduces the scattering that drop (if part still exists) of sun shine back into space AND add to the concentration of the strongest of all GHGs blocking IR escape - a "double whammie." I have been thinking more about my "Ph. D. problem" suggestion. I think an approximation solution of it may be feasible without too much work or computer time cost. I may start a thread on this in Physic & Math,* to see if others agree my ideas for an approximate solution are valid. Some of the approximations are: All drops, the soot included, are spheres of same size, large enough that Mie scattering can be neglected. The distance between successive scatterings is constant (could be the mean free path, but think that if constant the actual value drops outs of the equations.) A one time calculated table of scattering angle probabilities is OK, say 360 entries for the angle by integer number of degrees AND can neglect fact that sometimes it is up, and sometimes it is down from the horizontal plane (Only change in distance from entry point of photon from cloud with flat surface is important. That flat surface can be the x, y plain of Cartesian coordinate system with photon approaching it along the +z axis.) I.e. program just draws random number to add next step away (or back towards) the z=0 entry plain (the x, y plain) in Monte Carlo analysis of many photons to learn the average number of scattering required for escape back to space. (z > 0.) If, for example, that turns out to be 1000, then one soot sphere per 1000 water drops, cuts the expected reflectivity in half, I think. One per 500 drops cuts the expected reflectivity by factor of 4, etc. I think, but need to think some more about this. May need to have another random number draw for each scattering to see if absorption, instead of scatter, took place. * by edit: New thread is there now. It is called: Math approach to evaluation of potentially very serious Global Warming problem - Valid?
That's definitely a good thing, but unfortunately much of it has been caused by the recession of 2008. Thus once the economy recovers to 2006 levels we'll see an increase again, unless we get some kind of greenhouse gas regulation in place. (Both methane and CO2.) It seems to me that we're not going to get much more in the way of carbon regulation. With the collapse of carbon-credit trading in Europe we've lost that system and gained an example of "things that don't work." We will get some form of power plant CO2 regulation from the EPA in 2015 but most of the improvements, IMO, will come from secondary effects. For example, increasing CAFE requirements will indirectly cut carbon emissions because cars will be required to become more efficient. The increase in solar and wind power will help, but to really get coal power plants shut down we need to build out more nuclear generation. And yet ironically one of the biggest criticisms of the green movement is "it's all about money" and "Al Gore is rich."
Thanks for your comments. Always informative for me. I believe research is a great pastime for humans. LOL. More research=more literature (knowledge). More research would be a key component for 'get to work'.
I didn't exactly follow some of the controversy here, but I like to throw in with you guys because it's one of the more active topics, and the contributors (cranks excluded) are educated people with sometimes surprising ideas and outlooks. And we are fortunate to have this really great Earth Sciences expert as moderator. He is out there actually fighting some of this war only to come here and be insulted by cranks, or at least to have to police them when they start going off the chain. I think I was mistaken in calling billvon a power industry employee (which is a great perpective to add to the mix) but at least as an EE he is on top of that perspective better than the average poster. One of the advantages of research is that it keeps the pressure on the public in headlines that continually corroborate the stark realities of AGW. The pressure can induce people to move into that progressive "can-do" frame of mind that seemed to sweep the 2008 elections. It has a lot of tangible benefits, too, like now we have all kinds of assets in place to determine that there was a drop in emissions. That was Roger Revelle's indirect way of selling climate science research (even though his field was oceanography) to unlikely investors like the DOD: by convincing them that the more we understand the atmosphere, the better our chances of detecting a Soviet or Chinese nuclear test. With all these assets in place today, we can now monitor the carbon "nukes" everyone is cavalierly setting off. And the upside of this is that we can also tell when things are improving. That will potentially be a huge daily undertaking decades from now, when people start watching CO[sub]2[/sub] the way we watch the daily temperatures, or [gawd forbid] the stock market! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! It would be good to know if some of that is the benefit of adding wind and solar farms to the grid. Without a doubt growth is bad for the planet. Even if we could magically end all AGHGs today, total human impact cannot conceivably be contained. I mean I can imagine some hypothetical low-impact medieval style hippie communes that would come close, but average people wouldn't want to live there. And they could only be optimized. There simply can't be zero-impact anything. Even if we could regress back into our ancestral arboreal form -- back to foraging for apples or whatever -- there are far too many of us to relinquish enough of the habitats we occupy. I don'd like to think I'm a fatalist. I just don't see the apocalypse as Billy does, or any of the other popular versions. To me the apocalypse is not even physical. It's the forward creep of profound sadness, that the planet is slowly crashing and we are helpless to stop it. By the same token I'm not advocating that we shouldn't make it our top priority to stanch the bleeding. But to really get behind that idea is to concede that the best humans can ever do is to embrace the impact-optimized medieval hippie lifestyle, or whatever anyone else might call it. Short of some historic technological breakthrough, of course. Without some fully baked end solution like a cheap easily implemented sequestration technology it's hard to see carbon credits winnowing their way back into focus. De facto carbon taxes like the federal excise taxes on gasoline remain as the bitter pill to swallow. But at least the implementation is trivial. Either that or begin to phase out coal when solar and wind reach some magic percentage of total capacity. Then I guess you pay some nominal cost to keep the coal plants available for backup, perhaps indefinitely. I don't recall that they were that antagonistic. I spot checked Google and nothing quite that bad popped up. Greenpeace suffers from a dearth of technical skills, if not an actual aversion to science. It's probably connected to their genetic memory of the evils of the military industrial complex. Too bad; they have a lot of noble ideals. But since doing right depends on being right, they will never be able to realize those ideals without first striving to be right. And that requires building bridges with the international science academies, which isn't likely to happen. I thought the need for action was a settled matter, and henceforth the reports are merely assessing the confidence intervals in simulations of climate sensitivity to a doubling of carbon, as those confidence intervals begin to narrow. I agree that those people are rich but their powers over IPCC are intangible at best. Unless you think the scientists are taking bribes I can't see what the connection is. But Kyoto was entirely political in nature, in that it sponsored a treaty that member nations were given to ratify. IPCC is purely scientific in nature. It assesses the state of climate science from the deposit of public evidence created by independent research as well as agencies like NOAA. And as you say, the US effectively insulted Kyoto -- yet it produced the vast majority of that research. So while it's fair to say that powerful energy companies are attacking science politically, that's not the same as saying the IPCC is being manipulated by energy moguls, or that research is being obstructed by Big Energy. I think the other case applies. They are doing all that is scientifically possible. The policymaking is in the hands of voters around the world and their delegates -- legislators, Paliamentarians, whatever. The chip falls on you and me, Billy. We have to make this happen. Imagine carrying that message up into the favelas of Sao Paolo. That's a pretty tough nut to crack, methinks. Here in the states we are confronted by the Tea Party dropouts, fundies and the rest of the numbskulls that make up the 46% who are still in denial of climate change. Something tells me working the favelas would be easier! In my mind the only march sorely needed is the one that rages against propaganda in favor of science. That 46% of Americans who deny climate science -- that's where policy intervention by the energy companies has dragged us closer to the impending doom you are forecasting. The influence of well funded con artists on the most naive and illiterate groups in American society -- that's the outrage of modern times that enslaves minds the ways the Jim Crow laws enslaved the persons who happened to be the wrong color, back when the Northern European complexion was the propaganda tool that programmed the morons of the day. It hasn't occurred to me that anyone needs more than the findings that human carbon loading is accelerating the ice melt, crashing ecosystems and threatening future disaster. I suspect that only better educated people, who already embrace the IPCC, are the only ones who know or care about the facts. But I agree that such a speech should be used to counter the chronic propaganda from the con artists which is feeding all the moronic denial. And hopefully everyone who hears this speech who was in denial will experience the scales falling from their eyes. But that's giving the average knothead far too much credit. My point was that climate science enjoyed two centuries of unfettered development. That legacy is only in recent years declared fundamentally broken. In your objections they are broken in the opposite direction -- inadequate science, as opposed to overblown science. My question is: when and where did it break? I suspect you would agree that all was well with climatology in the 1960's when a scientist (Roger Revelle) first alerted a president (LBJ) that AGW could crash the cryosphere and cause unlimited harm to civilization and the environment. When did pure science like that become manipulated by the wealthy? I don't think it ever did. I think the science has remained constant, continually chipping away at the mysteries and exposing new facts, and ever becoming more complete, more certain of the mechanisms that promote AGW, and those which deter it. I'm not sure what you're referring to. The member nations are supposed to furnish reports of their GHG inventories. Other than information like that, I don't understand what any government has to add to any IPCC report. The stuff I've read purports to be reviewed by the working groups of scientists from member nations, not any political or business people. The data being discussed in the reports, and the simulations, are either the work products of government agencies, like NOAA, or independent researchers (such as biologist Camille Paremesan, who is periodically attacked in these threads by the Sock Puppet Army of Zealots [SPAZ]). It's all public domain, so it's impossible to understand how the reports can be altered by the will of member nations. They either match the published findings or they don't, and if they don't those authors will raise holy hell, right? And so will the million or so professionals around the world who actually keep up with this stuff. Imagine the backlash if even one obscure researcher detected that IPCC had deliberately lied. It would go viral and there would be a Congressional inquiry that would put the McCarthy hearings to shame. BTW the DOD funded the stations like Maua Loa where Keeling collected his first evidence of rising CO[sub]2[/sub] - back around 1959. The DOD was heavily dependent on fossil fuels and the US had intervened in Iran, only a few years earlier, to install the Shah as our puppet. It was clearly done not only to strengthen our hold on listening posts in the Elburz mountains (facing Russia across the Caspian Sea) but also to secure our grip on Iranian oil. Yet that same monstrous branch of the government sponsored the first climate monitoring stations which gave birth to the report Revelle gave LBJ which Moynihan carried to the UN which eventually founded IPCC. And I doubt the DOD is interfering in NOAA today, which means the IPCC is getting objective data sets from NOAA. I just don't believe any of these huge organizations act as evil monoliths without any disparity of opinion from within, with complete secrecy, no whistleblowers, and that similar cabals are operating in 190 member nations around the globe, without so much as attracting the curiousity of reporters who thrive on exposing conspiracies. And for what? The reports simply condense what the independent research has already published. There really is no smoking gun. If anything it's pretty obviously consistent with everything in the public domain. Ok. So that's consistent in general with Roger Revelle's 1965 report which suggest global ice melt would raise sea levels enough to threaten future generations. And that theme has been consistent with every IPCC report, only that we have a lot more details about the nature of ecosystem crashes as well, of higher energy levels to feed dangerous storms, of increased flooding and drought etc all of which threaten your grandchildren and possibly your children as well. IPCC has only channeled more and more evidence of the scale of damage from AGW. So at this point IPCC looks like the organization best qualified to represent your interests to protect future generations such as your family. At what water temperature does sunlight cease to transfer energy into the oceans, and what happens if there is no energy transfer? How do the land masses get hotter? And how or why does that take 40 years or so? I don't follow this. It would be more meaningful to talk about average surface temperatures. Suffice it to say that temperature rises are contributing to the retreat of the cryosphere. Glaciers feed all the major rivers of the world, and thus the eventual disappearance of those glaciers, exacerbated by the evaporation of soil moisture and shallow surface water will accelerate the human depletion of ground water. Large fresh water sources will conceivably be limited to reservoirs replenished by rain, and droughts will be disastrous. Reliance on desalination might drive an urgent rush to dominate fresh water production the way oil production was dominated by a small elite. You think carbon regulation is working? It's known to be a cause of dissipating cloud formation. I don't understand what you mean. I would have to rely on the experimental observations. Here is narrative made for general consumption which tells the story of the discovery that smoke tends to dissipate clouds. You can get more following the links. And there are more detailed explanations in the papers mentioned which may interest you. http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/SmokeClouds/ It seems to me the actual modelling issue is to figure out where every particle is, and where it's going, and what the temperature and humidity are as each particle moves through the sky, and then when the conditions are right for the condensation of water vapor on that particle, and then how the particle dynamics changes, it becomes less buoyant, and as it falls it collides with other microdroplets -- at some point producing a droplet of a given volume which represents the average size of a raindrop, hailstone, sleet or snowflake falling to Earth. And then that has to be coupled into the models that account for circulation and weather, air-sea coupling, land-dust coupling, anthropogenic aerosol coupling and these hypothetical fires. It's huge! Since actual cloud albedos have been measured, as well as the amount of heat absorbed, it would seem that the main problem is writing a simulation as above that creates the actual amount of cloud formation expected at a given altitude at a given moment -- and to be able to simulate cloud formation, then apply the measured albedos and absorption amounts to those types of clouds as they form in the simulator. Then these need to be tested to predict actual cloud formations from historical records. That's a mighty tall order. No wonder the project is so elusive.
And that's a big part of the problem, and suggests the simplest solution - population control. Get a handle on that and a lot of the other problems suddenly become a lot more manageable.
Why do you say that? Population declines in first world countries as women gain power and access to education, and as birth control becomes available. That's why our population is not as increasing as rapidly any more; indeed, in most areas, it is declining. There are three general periods for any developing society: 1) Women have many kids to ensure a few reach adulthood 2) Standard of living improves, but old traditions die hard, and thus they have huge families (since most or all of their children survive.) 3) Women gain power and access to birth control and the birthrate declines. Thus if we can hasten the transition to 3) for third world societies, we can get to a zero population growthrate all the faster.
Yes, certainly within the IPCC, and almost all well educated in science (except for a few with vested interest in blocking any meaningful action - Heartland had well educated scientist telling there was no harm in smoking, and now has some telling global warming is just normal climatic variation, and other groups supported usually via other fronts for the oil industry are actively MIS-educating the voters.) I mistakenly did think that some IPCC report writers were on leave from the oil industy; but don't think that is the case and have both apologized and retracted my statements to that effect (as the Daily Telegraph did too) - see my post 1543. I agree with this; however, in a democracy with many poorly educated (I have many posts attacking the US only concept of local funding of pre college schools.) and basically parrots following TV propaganda as they went the schools of very low quality that their poor neighborhood could afford, it is via the ballot box that the rich and interested corporations prevent meaningful action. Mass marches can, and have, change voting habits / counter act paid propaganda for the status quo. Their difficulty in finding a job that pays more than washing cars or manning a cash register, etc. also makes them fearful about disruption of the status quo. Not as I understand the process. Certainly the IPCC's finished drafts are not in the public domain. I cannot prove that text of draft is changed but if not, why does it take more than a year to get the report released after the draft of report is done? Why is even called a "draft" if the final stage (government review) is powerless to alter it? Also, I hope governments do supply inventory data and their plains to reduce CO2 release, etc. to the IPCC, BEFORE the draft is completed - AFTER the draft is sent out, that data is of little value for the report waiting for 190 approvals but may be useful for the next report ~6 years later. Evaporation Rate is answer to all this. Hotter surface of ocean evaporate more. It is happening now - not only with more and more destructive floods, but every gram evaporated and later falling as rain transfers 80 calories to the land it falls on (plus a little KE too). At some future point in time, the tropical ocean will have permanent fog/ low cloud on them. - That is when "sunlight cease to transfer energy into those oceans." I'm not sure there will still be humans to see this - fog is ~100% humidity - Most mammals will be gone if the temperature of this fog is 95F. Yes, if your main concern is for the cryosphere, but mine is for the biosphere. Even if sea level rise puts NYC under 100 feet of water, etc., that alone while bad is not extinction of mammals. It will happen, if it does, slowly. Not a collapse. You have used what to me is an oxymoron: "slow collapse." NO. But I think it may have collapsed for different reason - The exchange closed, I think, as the price per ton fell for the original ~$25 to ~0.25/ ton. Not enough profit to keep them running. The problem was not that cost of Carbon release off set by buying carbon credits was too high - it was because they were too cheap. I have in a few posts mention I was planning on patenting an idea for economically removing CH4 from the air - I have the provisional patent application all written and was building a semi-working model to make a promotional video with. - Getting a process certified as removal of ton of C in CO2 (or even in CH4) is very expensive - upward of $100,000 typically. Two CH4 removals / abatements from mines have been approved, so arguments about the correct equivalence have been solved. But I stopped all efforts on the demonstration model as value of carbon offset fell so low, firm or people could not make my invention turn a profit. Also a strong factor was I no longer think CH4 is the near term threat I once did for several reasons. Finally I think idea of someone else's is better than mine and can make profit from selling electric power, not carbon credits - will post about it soon. I'm almost sure I disagree, but need you to tell why you say this. Forming a cloud, aided by aerosol to nucleate on is I different from lower "white" cloud's albedo. I forget the number but super clean water vapor can be cooled down to something like or near to 0 degrees F and remain vapor! Two H2O molecules banking into each other just bounce off each other even if much cooled than 32F. I'll coin a truth: "Aerosols are the catalysis of clouds." - you can quote me on that.
