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from the climate-change-simply-happens dept.
Papas Fritas writes "Patrick Michaels writes in Forbes that atmospheric physicist Garth Paltridge has laid out several well-known uncertainties in climate forecasting including our inability to properly simulate clouds that are anything like what we see in the real world, the embarrassing lack of average surface warming now in its 17th year, and the fumbling (and contradictory) attempts to explain it away. According to Paltridge, an emeritus professor at the University of Tasmania and a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, virtually all scientists directly involved in climate prediction are aware of the enormous uncertainties associated with their product. How then is it that those of them involved in the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) can put their hands on their hearts and maintain there is a 95 per cent probability that human emissions of carbon dioxide have caused most of the global warming that has occurred over the last several decades? In short, there is more than enough uncertainty about the forecasting of climate to allow normal human beings to be at least reasonably hopeful that global warming might not be nearly as bad as is currently touted.
Climate scientists, and indeed scientists in general, are not so lucky. They have a lot to lose if time should prove them wrong. "In the light of all this, we have at least to consider the possibility that the scientific establishment behind the global warming issue has been drawn into the trap of seriously overstating the climate problem-or, what is much the same thing, of seriously understating the uncertainties associated with the climate problem-in its effort to promote the cause," writes Paltridge. "It is a particularly nasty trap in the context of science, because it risks destroying, perhaps for centuries to come, the unique and hard-won reputation for honesty which is the basis of society's respect for scientific endeavor.""
(Score: 1, Interesting) by phenonadhominem on Thursday February 20 2014, @03:56PM
To use the conspiracy 'theory' meme is unscientific. We should not just close down conversation but debate it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interglacial_period [wikipedia.org]
We are due an ice age so carbon is not necessarily bad.
Benefits of more carbon in atmosphere:
Increases growth rate of plants and timber
More precipitation
Increased temperature prevents snowball earth scenario feedback loop as ice cover increases and reflects.
Open up tundra to crops (this is happening in Russia)
Negatives:
More variable temperature trending upwards
Flooding from precipitation
Higher sea levels
Black swan:
Going back into Ice age could be mitigated by preventing carbon from being locked up. On the other hand methane cycle not fully understood and could cause massive warming either from exposed tundra or volcanoes.
Temperature output from Sun may dim more quickly over time so requiring CO2 just to stay the same. Same for nuclear reaction in earth.
(Score: 2, Informative) by linsane on Thursday February 20 2014, @04:19PM
Quite a big negative:
Carbon Dioxide being absorbed by the sea and dissolving the shells off little animals at the bottom of the food pyramid.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by mcgrew on Thursday February 20 2014, @07:48PM
Going back into Ice age could be mitigated by preventing carbon from being locked up.
You haven't thought about it much. We don't need any more warming now, we're already in the normally hot period so we certainly don't need to heat the climate any more right now. Keep those fossil fuels in the ground for another 5000 years when the normal cyclical cooling starts, then burn, baby, burn. But keep going the way we are and in 5000 years there will be no fossil fuel left to warm the cooling planet.
The industrial revolution came 5000 years too soon. Right now we're really warm, 10,000 years from now it's going to be damned cold. Save that fuel! We're going to need that CO2 blanket 5000 years from now, but it certainly isn't needed in the present day.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org