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Linking Australia's natural disasters to climate change is intellectually dishonest. As climate change has (apparently) gripped the very fabric of our planet neither the frequency nor intensity of natural disasters (from flooding to fires to cyclones) has increased or even decreased in any significant fashion. Every time there's a big disaster the alarmists latch onto it as if it were some metaphorical smoking gun. They did it with the drought (no rain because of climate change), they did it with the floods (too much rain because of climate change), they did it with the completely normal cyclical fire season (it was so intense because of climate change... no... it was worse because the God-damned Green party blocked back burning efforts) and you can guaran-fething-tee that yesterday’s mini-cyclone that tore the roof off a shopping centre a block away from where I live will be blamed on climate change as well (if it hasn’t already).

Even the recent distaster in the Philippines has had people going "See! See! We were right!" and claiming it the most damaging storm of all time (ever!)... even though it isn't, becuase the Philippines (like Australia's bushfires, floods and so on) has had worse storms in the past, and will have worse storms again in the future.

 sebster wrote:
There is scientific consensus that carbon emissions from human industry are driving a constant increase in global temperature that underlies other cyclical climate patterns, yes.

You mean that 'constant' increase that hasn't been all that 'constant' for nearly 2 decades? That one?

Ok.

 djones520 wrote:
NASA is infallible? Hardly.

http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/1400/20130416/nasa-duping-washington-regards-global-warming.htm

"the team acknowledges in their report that "climate science is not one of our data technical specialties," but that, nonetheless, given their experience in their separate fields of physics, chemistry, geology, meteorology and others, they felt the need to speak out"

So we've got a bunch of people who don't work in the field saying they don't believe it. Shockingly enough, if you look in to their claims you'll find they're based largely around the problems with an outdated model. Which is the kind of mistakes that people who don't work in the field make... which is why we don't care what they think. If you want an opinion on physics you ask a guy who's active in physics research. If you want an opinion on climate science, you ask a guy who's active in climate science research, unless you want someone to give you some nonsense that questions it, in which case you go find some engineers and geologists.

The UN has been shown to be wrong.

http://junkscience.com/2013/09/19/ipccs-own-graph-shows-climate-models-embarrassingly-wrong/

The claim is made by the guy who signed up to this;
"Earth and its ecosystems – created by God's intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence – are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting"

Oh, and he isn't even a scientist, he's in econometrics. Which has a place in climate science - estimating the scale of climate impacts on the economy, but in terms of qualifications for questioning the climate change predictions, the guy effectively has no qualifications at all.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/10310712/Top-climate-scientists-admit-global-warming-forecasts-were-wrong.html

Did you read the story, or just the headline? Think carefully and read this paragraph from the story before replying;

"The “summary for policymakers” of the report, seen by the Mail on Sunday, states that the world is warming at a rate of 0.12C per decade since 1951, compared to a prediction of 0.13C per decade in their last assessment published in 2007."

So what's your answer? You didn't actually read the story, or you think that an adjustment of 0.13C to 0.12C is so massive that the whole scientific field can be rejected?

 djones520 wrote:
NASA is infallible? Hardly.

http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/1400/20130416/nasa-duping-washington-regards-global-warming.htm

Comprised largely of ex-NASA engineers and scientists, the team acknowledges in their report that "climate science is not one of our data technical specialties," but that, nonetheless, given their experience in their separate fields of physics, chemistry, geology, meteorology and others, they felt the need to speak out.

They aren't climate scientists, and their report pretty much is "we shouldn't trust the climate scientists." Sounds like a very credible report.

 djones520 wrote:

The UN has been shown to be wrong.

http://junkscience.com/2013/09/19/ipccs-own-graph-shows-climate-models-embarrassingly-wrong/

I'm not sure where the 0.1 degrees C thing is coming from. Data seems to suggest it's more than that and in line with IPCC predictions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_temperature_record#Warmest_decades
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata_v3/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt

 djones520 wrote:

Hell, people admitting they were wrong just seems to be the vogue thing nowadays.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/10310712/Top-climate-scientists-admit-global-warming-forecasts-were-wrong.html

Wait, wait, wait. You mean the IPCC predicted 0.13 degree C increase, and only 0.12 degree increase happened? LE GASP! Such a huge difference must CLEARLY mean that climate change isn't happening. We'll just sweep that 0.12 degree C change under the rug and call it 0.00 degree change, eh?

I'm only extremely sarcastic right now.

Also, to address the "pause" in warming. From wikipedia (which has done a lovely job citing to sources in its footnotes, btw): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_temperature_record#Internal_climate_variability_and_global_warming

One of the issues that has been raised in the media is the view that global warming "stopped in 1998".[30][31] This view ignores the presence of internal climate variability.[32][31] Internal climate variability is a result of complex interactions between components of the climate system, such as the coupling between the atmosphere and ocean.[33] An example of internal climate variability is the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO).[31][32] The El Niño in 1998 was particularly strong, possibly one of the strongest of the 20th century.[31]

Cooling between 2006 and 2008, for instance, has likely been driven by La Niña, the opposite of El Niño conditions.[34] The area of cooler-than-average sea surface temperatures that defines La Niña conditions can push global temperatures downward, if the phenomenon is strong enough.[34] Even accounting for the presence of internal climate variability, recent years rank among the warmest on record.[35] For example, every year of the 2000s was warmer than the 1990 average.[36]

EDIT: Sebster, coming in spicy!

Geez guys...

When Mt Pinatubo erupted... at that time, it surpassed the amount of greenhouse gas released into the atmosphere than the history of mankind.

o.O

That's the scale what we're dealing with.

Don't feth with Mother Nature.

Even if AGW is true, its clear that all our current solutions are woefully inadequate.

Most renewable sources of energy are unreliable, or lack the support and political will to make good use of them.

Wind energy is gak, horribly expensive and inefficient. To get any useful amounts of energy from it, we'd have to build wind farms all over the country, ruining the countryside and (ironically) causing damage to ecosystems and habitats. The [British] Government subsidies are wasted on these, but because British MPs gambled on Wind Energy and lost, we're so heavily invested that our leaders aren't going to admit their mistakes anytime soon.

Solar energy technology is advancing rapidly, but lack the government subsidies that our government wasted on Wind farms and our leaders don't want to lose face, so we won't be mass producing solar energy anytime soon.

Nuclear energy is very productive, but comes with serious and extremely unpopular risks, and so lack the subsidies required to encourage investment in expensive and difficult to build nuclear power plants.

Due to our dependence on fossil fuels, severely restricting our energy usage and CO2 emissions will cripple economies, and will be unworkable in the long term anyway due to rapidly expanding populations (7 billion now) and.the industrialisation of the Third World.


At this point, I think its going to take a miracle to reverse things. We need to find fuels that can replace fossil fuels altogether, so we need to be investing in and researching new technologies...Hydrogen fuel, Cold Fusion etc.

But even if we do solve our energy problems, we'll be victims of our own success, and will be faced with severe overpopulation. I agree with Stephen Hawkings, the future of the human race is not on Earth but in space. If we havn't started colonising our solar system by 2100, we're ****ed.

Nah... we need more nukes.

We can roll out a gak ton of nukes via different fuel types that could practically replace our entire fuel source for our power grids.

But, noooooooooooo... the greenies don't like nukies.

Which is oddly ironic... as it's the cleanest/efficient/profitable power source we can have on this planet. RIGHT NOW!

 whembly wrote:
Geez guys...

When Mt Pinatubo erupted... at that time, it surpassed the amount of greenhouse gas released into the atmosphere than the history of mankind.

o.O

You've got that a bit confused. While large amounts of carbon and other greenhouse gases gets released in to the atmosphere, the dominant impact from volcanic explosions like Pinatubo is that lots of sulphur dioxide gets converted in to sulphuric acid, which mean an overall net cooling effect, shown by the image below;



This has actually led to one suggestion for human geo-engineering, that we could offset the global warming by releasing cooling agents in to the upper atmosphere. The general consensus is that it's a pretty bad idea, though, as the impact of Pinatubo was far from uniform, with some areas in the northern hemisphere experiencing a warming, particular through winter. Given the incredible complexity of the climate, efforts to offset warming may well introduce more climate pattern changes than they prevent.


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Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
Most renewable sources of energy are unreliable, or lack the support and political will to make good use of them.

Wind energy is gak, horribly expensive and inefficient. To get any useful amounts of energy from it, we'd have to build wind farms all over the country, ruining the countryside and (ironically) causing damage to ecosystems and habitats. The [British] Government subsidies are wasted on these, but because British MPs gambled on Wind Energy and lost, we're so heavily invested that our leaders aren't going to admit their mistakes anytime soon.

Solar energy technology is advancing rapidly, but lack the government subsidies that our government wasted on Wind farms and our leaders don't want to lose face, so we won't be mass producing solar energy anytime soon.

Nuclear energy is very productive, but comes with serious and extremely unpopular risks, and so lack the subsidies required to encourage investment in expensive and difficult to build nuclear power plants.

The trick is to realise that no single solution is complete in and of itself. A combination of technologies, perhaps combined with some carbon capture will provide a solution.

Due to our dependence on fossil fuels, severely restricting our energy usage and CO2 emissions will cripple economies, and will be unworkable in the long term anyway due to rapidly expanding populations (7 billion now) and.the industrialisation of the Third World.

World population is set to peak around 2050, as the impacts of growing material wealth have their effect on the populations of Asia. The issue is providing the enery requirements for the newly middle class people in those countries, and there's some really fascinating work going in to that. The trick is in realising that what think of as middle class is far from what middle class in this future Asia will mean, and their energy consumption will likely be much lower than our big suburban homes. Look in to stuff like the solar leaf for an idea of how their new power needs can be met.

Honestly, I'm all for kidnapping the best physicists in the world, shoving them into a state of the art facility, and throwing money at them until they develop an energy efficient nuclear fusion reactor.

I haven't checked up on projects recently, but I remember things were mildly promising a few years back, at least from a theoretical perspective.

 DogofWar1 wrote:
Honestly, I'm all for kidnapping the best physicists in the world, shoving them into a state of the art facility, and throwing money at them until they develop an energy efficient nuclear fusion reactor.

I haven't checked up on projects recently, but I remember things were mildly promising a few years back, at least from a theoretical perspective.

That's why we should be using thorium, it provides more energy per unit than uranium (although at higher cost), is more abundant, has much safer waste products, it cannot be weaponised, and arguably the most important, the very physics which lets the reactor work means that human error cannot cause a core meltdown so no Chernoybl 2.0.

But people are making money of nuclear weapons using plutonium and uranium fuel cycles so...

I dunno. The wiki on liquid fluoride thorium reactors has a pretty significant list of difficulties.

Well yeah, but in the long term they are cheaper and easier to overcome than the build up of waste from plutonium and uranium reactors.

But I think taking human error out of the equation completely is the most appealing aspect.

 sebster wrote:
There will be a considerable increase in average temperatures by 2050, which is within the lifetimes of most people who post on dakka.

What's considerable? Twenty degrees? Ten?

 sebster wrote:

 whembly wrote:
Geez guys...

When Mt Pinatubo erupted... at that time, it surpassed the amount of greenhouse gas released into the atmosphere than the history of mankind.

o.O

You've got that a bit confused. While large amounts of carbon and other greenhouse gases gets released in to the atmosphere, the dominant impact from volcanic explosions like Pinatubo is that lots of sulphur dioxide gets converted in to sulphuric acid, which mean an overall net cooling effect, shown by the image below;

Right...

I'm confused... that graph actually supported my statement.

We can only hope to have as much affect to our climate from that one eruption. That was my point.

Just don't believe that Hockey Stick Graph.

So, to cool off the Earth and reverse global warming...

We should nuke some volcanoes?

 kronk wrote:
So, to cool off the Earth and reverse global warming...

We should nuke some volcanoes?

Nah... we're already cooling... check this out:


Another nice graphs:


Sorry kronk... I'm no fun.

The money shot:

For the first time, researchers have now been able to use the data derived from tree-rings to precisely calculate a much longer-term cooling trend that has been playing out over the past 2,000 years.

Their findings demonstrate that this trend involves a cooling of -0.3°C per millennium due to gradual changes to the position of the sun and an increase in the distance between the Earth and the sun.”This figure we calculated may not seem particularly significant,” says Esper. “However, it is also not negligible when compared to global warming, which up to now has been less than 1°C. Our results suggest that the large-scale climate reconstruction shown by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) likely underestimate this long-term cooling trend over the past few millennia.”

That graph has a lot of noise.

 djones520 wrote:

 Co'tor Shas wrote:

 djones520 wrote:

 Cheesecat wrote:

 Seaward wrote:

 sebster wrote:
Because most of us aren't stupid or arrogant enough to reject the scientific consensus.

Has the scientific consensus indeed become that climate change occurs because of industrial output?

It may not be the only thing that causes climate change but there's tons of studies out there showing the effects that industrial output has on climate.

That "consensus" is a fething joke, and I want citation for your bs 97% claim.

I quite enjoy the fact that his argument is several paragraphs, and your's is you cursing at him.

Sometimes saying less is better.

I was talking about the fact that he gave information and facts, and you gave curses. I am all in favor of believing you if you provide facts, figures, and scientific evidence to support your claim, but you didn't. The more facts you put on either side can change my point of view, but mud-slinging makes me less inclined to believe you.


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 DogofWar1 wrote:
Honestly, I'm all for kidnapping the best physicists in the world, shoving them into a state of the art facility, and throwing money at them until they develop an energy efficient nuclear fusion reactor.

I haven't checked up on projects recently, but I remember things were mildly promising a few years back, at least from a theoretical perspective.

Cold fusion FTW!

A decrease of -0.3 degrees C per millennium is very easily offset when you have a per decade increase in temperature of .12 degrees C. In less than 30 years, we would have undone a millennium of cooling.

In addition, the volcano eruption thing is not exactly something we want to emulate, especially when we consider that the warming we cause will not dissipate in a couple years, but rather stick around for a millennium, as CO2 is trapped in the oceans and then slowly released over long periods of time.

 DogofWar1 wrote:
A decrease of -0.3 degrees C per millennium is very easily offset when you have a per decade increase in temperature of .12 degrees C. In less than 30 years, we would have undone a millennium of cooling.

Yeah... I doubt that very much.

The biggest issue with all this hopoola is that we still don't know, what we don't know.

In addition, the volcano eruption thing is not exactly something we want to emulate, especially when we consider that the warming we cause will not dissipate in a couple years, but rather stick around for a millennium, as CO2 is trapped in the oceans and then slowly released over long periods of time.

Agreed... don't aggravate the Gods of the Volcanos! Pele and Vulcan needs to rest!

We might not know everything, but studies have done a better and better job of nailing down variables and predicting what will happen and explaining what we've seen.

Heck, much of what we didn't know up until recently actually made things worse, as it dealt with the effect the oceans had/have on warming. The big thing is that we were so busy testing air temperature that people didn't realize the oceans were basically gathering CO2 and storing it, heating up.

One of the most important revelations of "recent" climate science (I don't know exactly when it came about, but based on when I started reading reports about it, it seems to have been in the past decade or less), is that climate change isn't simply a switch we can turn on and off, that is, for a long time people thought if we stopped emitting CO2, the climate would fix itself. That simply isn't the case, and in fact even if we cut emissions massively, all we'd see if a flattening of temperature at a newer, slightly higher than before baseline, as opposed to reverting to pre-industrial temperatures.

 whembly wrote:

 kronk wrote:
So, to cool off the Earth and reverse global warming...

We should nuke some volcanoes?

Nah... we're already cooling... check this out:
Sorry kronk... I'm no fun.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
You mean that 'constant' increase that hasn't been all that 'constant' for nearly 2 decades? That one?

Ok.

Read the sentence again. Notice this bit "a constant increase in global temperature that underlies other cyclical climate patterns".

There are seven cyclical climate patterns, the most famous of which is el nino. These patterns range in duration from a few years up to a couple of decades. Underlying this is a base level temperature, which is steadily increasing thanks to the increasing number of greenhouse gases put in to the atmosphere.

As such, the claim 'look global temperature goes down as well as up' is basically the same thing as arguing that it doesn't really get hotter in Summer, because we keep having these periods when it gets cooler called 'night time'.

Ok.

 sebster wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
You mean that 'constant' increase that hasn't been all that 'constant' for nearly 2 decades? That one?

Ok.

Read the sentence again. Notice this bit "a constant increase in global temperature that underlies other cyclical climate patterns".

There are seven cyclical climate patterns, the most famous of which is el nino. These patterns range in duration from a few years up to a couple of decades. Underlying this is a base level temperature, which is steadily increasing thanks to the increasing number of greenhouse gases put in to the atmosphere.

As such, the claim 'look global temperature goes down as well as up' is basically the same thing as arguing that it doesn't really get hotter in Summer, because we keep having these periods when it gets cooler called 'night time'.

Ok.

Winter is coming.

 Seaward wrote:
What's considerable? Twenty degrees? Ten?

A lot less than that, I believe it's modelled to be about 3'. But that won't be a uniform increase, and will produce considerable changes in weather patterns.

The financial impact of that 3' will be something close to 10% of GDP in lost economic activity and new infrastructure requirements.


EDIT - And I just realised you would have been asking in fahrenheit, not celsius . In fahrenheit it would be about 5'.


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 whembly wrote:
Right...

I'm confused... that graph actually supported my statement.

We can only hope to have as much affect to our climate from that one eruption. That was my point.

That eruption, which was a one-off release of particles that both increased and decreased temperature, produced an overall movement in temperature downwards by half a degree. The idea that that somehow proves that our release of entirely warming particles in to the atmosphere isn't having an effect is really dubious.

Just don't believe that Hockey Stick Graph.

Science doesn't care if you believe in it


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 whembly wrote:
The biggest issue with all this hopoola is that we still don't know, what we don't know.

There is a lot we don't know, but the field has come a long way in 30 years and there's certainly a solid foundation of knowledge that isn't seriously questioned. We now have models that have demonstrated strong predictive power, and these all include a calculation of human carbon emissions, and they demonstrate an increase in temperature that gets faster year on year.

Now, what we might not know is every single, very subtle warming and cooling trend (such as one moving temperatures 0.3' every 1,000 years), and exactly how the increasing temperature will play out - the impact on weather patterns, on rates and severity of bushfires, on the spread of malaria etc... But those unknowns are a powerful reason to act even more strongly on this issue - risk adversity and all that.

 kronk wrote:

 Cheesecat wrote:


That's not entirely true Kyoto was successful with some countries.

Kronk is sometimes smart, but sometimes Kronk needs a hand.

Is a negative number good? If your green number is more negative than your red number, is that good?

Kronk is confused.

Yeah you want your green to be going to down if you're trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

It's so nice to see the former Soviet states taking greenhouse emissions reduction seriously. Or perhaps they really don't care and this is just the result of modernizing their trash Soviet era energy infrastructure and equipment?

 Breotan wrote:
It's so nice to see the former Soviet states taking greenhouse emissions reduction seriously. Or perhaps they really don't care and this is just the result of modernizing their trash Soviet era energy infrastructure and equipment?

Yeah, things aren't looking too good for them.

 Breotan wrote:
It's so nice to see the former Soviet states taking greenhouse emissions reduction seriously. Or perhaps they really don't care and this is just the result of modernizing their trash Soviet era energy infrastructure and equipment?

That's exactly what it is. It's easy to reduce emissions when your current infrastructure is dirty. New Zealand can do little to reduce ours as we have next to no heavy industry. Much of our emissions are due to agriculture, they actually count the methane produced by cows for instance as a GHG. Similarly when we signed up for the carbon credit scam it was deemed that we would make money because we're a "green" country heavily underpinned by a rural economy. Problem was, all those forestry blocks contributed towards our carbon sink so anytime they were felled the government was required to pay out.
None of this nonsense has done anything to reduce pollution or deforestation. Even recently Norway is looking at cancelling the remaining money pledged to Guyana to prevent deforestation as deforestation increased to make way for mining. Meanwhile lots of money has changed hands.

I personally think a long term solution would be to require or incentivise all buildings to have solar power and/or water heating where structurally feasible.

It reduces peak stress on the grid, saves money on everybody's bills once the panels are paid for and makes our current energy reserves last longer, its a win, win, win, once you get the money together for them anyway.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
And I can tell you that Australia contributes next to nothing, making any sort of Carbon Tax a complete waste of time. We need rid of it. Fast.

While our overall emissions aren't that large a piece of the world's total emissions, our emissions per capita are very high - one of the highest in the world.