Climate Change is a Hoax

[Professor Buzzkill]

6 hours ago, Doug1o29 said:

I think it was elderberries that were tested to the limits of low CO2.  All test plants made it down to 90 ppm.  All had died by 60 ppm.  Several C3 species have been tested.  As far as I know, no C4 or CA species have been tested.

Doug

Interesting. What do you think the ideal CO2 levels are globally? Surely the plants were struggling at 90ppm

[Noxasa]

On 9/17/2018 at 4:51 AM, Essan said:

I am not aware of any who think that - even sceptics like John Christy accept AGW, they just question how significant it is/will be.

As for numbers, don't forget this is a conspiracy that has been going on for 150 years now and involves people from every single country in the world.  Not just the USA    

I guess if you include those scientists that might attribute maybe 5% of global warming to human activity then yes, I guess they could be included in the group that believe in anthropological global warming but I wouldn't include those.  Secondly, it's quite a different statement to say someone thinks humans contribute to global atmospheric CO2 levels, that's a pretty solid fact that humans do, and have done, the problem is that science does not yet know how much CO2 plays in any climate model and they don't understand all the other natural feedback processes that deal with increased CO2 in the atmosphere.  The amount of CO2 contributed by humans is comparable to putting $100 dollars in pennies on a table (that's 10,000 pennies) and then picking up one penny and saying, this is how much CO2 humans have contributed to the atmosphere since the industrial revolution, the other 9,999 is nature.  In the end, scientists really have no idea how much CO2 is unmanageable by nature and the natural climate feedback loops that exist.  The reality is that these scientist just don't have it figured out regardless of what they say, which is why their models have failed so miserably.  

Now I'm not against reasonable movement to renewable and more environmentally friendly forms of energy production.  I'm only against doing it at such a pace that our electricity bills skyrocket for no good reason.  Instead of trying to do it in 20 years they can do it in 200 and people wouldn't have to economically suffer because environmentalists are crazy.

[Noxasa]

On 9/17/2018 at 2:24 PM, Doug1o29 said:

Same with the rise in temps.  That happened.  There's NO doubt about it.

That rise in temp happened prior to 1998.  There has been no significant increase in temps  for 20 years even though CO2 levels have continued to increase.  Its even been documented that climate scientists have tried to modify the historical record to show some warming that the raw data just doesn't show.  The fact is that climate scientists have been baffled as to why they haven't seen the same increases they saw in the prior 20 years before 1998.  Theories abound about some kind of delayed effect due to ocean currents and oxygen turn over but they really don't know as much as you think they know. 

And I don't know where you live by my electricity costs have gone up hundreds of percent over the past 20 or so years.  And no, the energy companies won't lose their investments into clean energy because they'll pass on any losses onto consumers and consumers won't have anything to say about it than to just pay up as they do now.  I have a neighbor who put in solar and it was great for the first year as their energy bill was very low.  Then after that year they got a bill from the power company asking them to pay almost $4,000 dollars in what they called a "true-up" statement in which they essentially billed them for all the money they saved on the monthly bills plus more, and get this, some of its line items was to pay for the clean energy the government forced them to convert to.  After solar was installed my neighbors ended up paying more than they did before they spent tens of thousands of dollars to put it in.  That's the kind of BS that this panic about climate change is creating for not good scientific reason, all because people believe what these scientists say while not looking to see if what they're saying is holding up to scientific review of the hard data.  It's not!  Movement to cleaner energy sources does not have to cause people to suffer so when there's no evidence that it's a catastrophe on the horizon.  

[Tatetopa]

On 9/15/2018 at 4:43 AM, FurriesRock said:

Climate change is an outright hoax peddled to the masses to provide justification for the further erosion of our human rights.

At first I couldn't figure out why a Russian troll would be interested in climate change.  Then it hit me.  You don'rt care about this at all except to start an argument.  You are trying to distract us while your communist masters destroy Western Culture.  We are on to you bub.

[AnchorSteam]

On 9/16/2018 at 3:10 AM, Black Monk said:

Why "especially" the US?

Because this Con-Game has many targets; Stop Growth, stop prosperity, stop progress and most of all, Stop the Great Satan, the USA.

Global Whing is an entirely Political movement with the added benefit of scamming Billions of Dollars from the most gullible people in the world; the geeks of the West.

On 9/16/2018 at 3:10 AM, Black Monk said:

Most governments around the world aren't bothered about "climate change" and probably don't even believe it. The Chinese and Indian governments certainly aren't doing anything to combat this non-existent thing. China is to build 700 coal-fired power plants over the next few years.

The Chinese may be choking on smoke so dense you can't see through it half the time, but they are not going to fall for this baloney for a second. They only just got to the point where they traded their bicycles for cars and they very much like it.

Every tried commuting on a bike in the winter? It ain't no fun.

On 9/16/2018 at 3:10 AM, Black Monk said:

It's only mainly PC Western governments that are obsessed with "climate change". The rest of the world, meanwhile, doesn't give a damn and just carries on as normal.

Common sense defeats scams like this.

[RoofGardener]

15 hours ago, Doug1o29 said:

Did you deliberately cut off the graph in 1936?  We've had 0.75 degrees C warming since then.  If you extended that to 2018, you'd show that we're off the top of the chart.  Your chart is misleading.  Did you know that before you posted it?

Doug

There is a dotted line going up to the 2000's. And no, I didn't deliberately cut it off. And are you SURE that it is warmer today than it was during the medieval warm period ?  

[Emma_Acid]

5 hours ago, Noxasa said:

Its even been documented that climate scientists have tried to modify the historical record to show some warming that the raw data just doesn't show.

Just need to pull you up on this, as its a claim many climate change-deniers make, usually just parroting conspiracy theories without actually questioning them.

Can you please detail what you mean by this please?

[+and-then]

On 9/17/2018 at 6:50 AM, Aaron2016 said:

The Earth is naturally changing, regardless of human presence.  What about the growing world population?

 

1900 World population - Just 1.6 Billion

1950 World population - Just 2.5 Billion

Survival rates boom!!!!!

2018 World population - 7.6 Billion

2050 World population - 10 Billion (projected)

 

Bound to affect global resources.  This should be the world government's main focus.

 

 

It sounds like climate change may lead to a major die-off.  That'd be a bonus!    Nature has a way of balancing things.

[oldrover]

5 hours ago, Tatetopa said:

At first I couldn't figure out why a Russian troll would be interested in climate change.  Then it hit me.  You don'rt care about this at all except to start an argument.  You are trying to distract us while your communist masters destroy Western Culture.  We are on to you bub.

Whoa! There's two conspiracies?  Which one should I worry about first? The insidious communist plot to take over the west, or the one world government one which is trying to do something dreadful ( though conveniently amorphous)?

I'll consult the Mail. 

[Essan]

3 hours ago, RoofGardener said:

There is a dotted line going up to the 2000's. And no, I didn't deliberately cut it off. And are you SURE that it is warmer today than it was during the medieval warm period ?  

What makes you think it isn't?

[RoofGardener]

46 minutes ago, Essan said:

What makes you think it isn't?

Ummm..... I don't ? I don't have definitive information either way ? That's why I asked the question ? 

[FurriesRock]

1 hour ago, Essan said:

What makes you think it isn't?

1.  There's no way to prove that temperatures were higher or lower during the medieval period.

2.  The established authorities have a history of lying to the "common rabble" since the beginning of time.  Why trust them now?

[Doug1029]

11 hours ago, Professor Buzzkill said:

Interesting. What do you think the ideal CO2 levels are globally? Surely the plants were struggling at 90ppm

Probably about 300, or a little higher.  That would maintain the climate prevalent during the 1950s and 1960s.

Certainly they were struggling at 90 ppm.  That's right at the margin.  Only three or four species have been tested, though.  I'd want to test a larger sample before saying that that is the limit.

Doug

[Doug1029]

11 hours ago, Noxasa said:

That rise in temp happened prior to 1998.

And since.

The current temperature excursion started about 1910.  There was a minor peak in 1936 and a larger one in 1956.  Temps then trended downward until the late 1960s when they slowly started up again.  In 1977 they took off for the stratosphere, peaking in 1998.  They trended slowly down until 2005 when they started to climb again, reaching an all-time high in 2014.  Since then, they have been trending down.  Currently, we are about 1 degree C above the 1951-1980 mean.  NOAA has a list of temperature anomalies here:  http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata_v3/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt  The JD column is on a calendar-year basis.

Doug

[Doug1029]

6 hours ago, RoofGardener said:

There is a dotted line going up to the 2000's. And no, I didn't deliberately cut it off. And are you SURE that it is warmer today than it was during the medieval warm period ?  

The upper limit of your own graph is 0.8 degrees.  Current temps are about 1.16 degrees above that graph's mean.  They're off the chart - literally.

There are over a dozen papers that look at that issue:

Mann, M. E., R. S. Bradley and M. K. Hughes.  1998.  Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries.  Nature 392 779-787.  https://www.nature.com/articles/33859

Mann, M. E., R. S. Bradley and M. K. Hughes.  1999.  Northern hemisphere temperatures during the past millenium:  inferences, uncertainties, and limitations.  Geophysical Research Letters.  15 March 1999.  https://doi.org/10.1029/1999GL900070  https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/1999GL900070%4010.1002/(ISSN)1944-8007.GRL40

Moberg, A., D. M. Sonechkin, K. Holmgren, N. M. Datsenko and W. Karlen.  2005.  Highly variable Northern Hemisphere temperatures reconstructed from low- and high-resolution proxy data. Nature 433 613-617.  https://www.nature.com/articles/nature03265

For more information than you ever wanted, use Google Scholar.  Type  "tree rings northern hemisphere" into the search engine.

Doug

[Doug1029]

6 hours ago, Emma_Acid said:

Just need to pull you up on this, as its a claim many climate change-deniers make, usually just parroting conspiracy theories without actually questioning them.

Can you please detail what you mean by this please?

I think I might shed a little light here.  NOAA has updated its sea surface data four times over the last 20 years.  Each time the result is a temperature graph with a higher rate of slope.  Deniers regard "new" as "wrong," so they automatically dismiss these results.  There are several instances of this type of thinking in climate-debate history.  Some of them (in this very thread) are still trying to use Lamb's free-hand drawing of Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age temps as their standard over Mann's tree-ring model (There are at least seven papers since Mann's that confirm Mann's results.).

Doug

 

[Doug1029]

3 hours ago, FurriesRock said:

1.  There's no way to prove that temperatures were higher or lower during the medieval period.

2.  The established authorities have a history of lying to the "common rabble" since the beginning of time.  Why trust them now?

1.  Tree rings do it.  The current method is called the Regionally Standardized Curve (RCS).  This is a model of tree growth in the absence of climate change.  The model is constructed by first dividing the time period we are investigating into convenient segments, usually decades.  We then search through our collection of local tree ring series (all of the same species) and find at least ten (hopefully 30) segments of each age that grew during each time period.  So we end up with 30 segments that were age 1-9 that grew in 1950-1959, 30 segments of age 11-20 that grew in that same decade and so on until we have 30 such segments in each period.  We then establish average annual growth rates for trees 1-10 years old in each period, 11-20 years old, 21-30 years old, etc.   This is our growth model in the absence of climate change (Actually, the change is just averaged out of existence.).  We then construct a series of tree ring widths using these averages.

The next step is to compare each original series with the model.  Differences are due to climate change.  Partial analysis of variance is used to separate carbon dioxide effects, like fertilization, from temperature effects.  We can then tell you how temperature has changed year-by-year over the life-span of our chronology.

It's a statistical model, so it has some unexplained variation left in it.  We use 95% confidence limits to test whether the change was real, or just a statistical anomaly.  So the "proof" is probabilistic in nature.  But that's real-life science:  there is no absolute "proof" of anything.

 

2.  Don't trust the authorities.  Science is not that hard.  Assemble the data and run the tests yourself.  Don't take anybody's word for it.

 

Remember Grandpa's stories of how tough it was when he was a kid?  He had to walk three miles to school through a blizzard - uphill both ways.  Well, he wasn't lying - except maybe about that uphill bit.  The worst winter storm in American history occurred in early February 1886.  It set records clear across the country that weren't broken until 2011 and some still stand.  There was a god-awful ice storm in 1911 that didn't recur until 2001.  The all-time record low barometric reading was set in 1911 at Soo Ste. Marie, MI.  On the Great Plains, the all-time high temp was in 1936.  He was telling the truth.  You can simply look through newspaper morgues for climate information (or google "Chronicling America" for back issues of dozens of American newspapers.).  Watch out, though:  the Wichita Eagle reported 42 degrees below zero when their local weather station reported 5 below.  And the Hopkinsville (Kentucky) Gazette reported 100 below - if you believe that, I'd like to sell you some beach-front land I own in Omaha.  There are clues to climate in vegetative cover reported by early explorers.  Indian calendar hides show the "resting summer" - in 1855 drought had so damaged grazing that travelers had to stop frequently to let the horses graze.  And Chief Black Hawk drew a series of pictures in colored pencil, showing the great snow storm of 1881.

These all fit into a coherent story of climate change in America.

Trust your own eyes:  when you travel, watch the dead grass.  If it's still standing in June, it was a mild winter - snow knocks it down.  Look where the grass is standing and where it isn't.  Where are armadillos found that they weren't found 30 years ago?  Prolonged snow cover buries the armadillo's food, causing them to starve to death.  So their range is controlled by snow cover.  If you see dead armadillos along the highway, you are in an area where snow quickly melts off following a storm.

I grew up on the south shore of Lake Erie.  The lake would freeze over every year.  Then in the late 1960s it froze over for the last time.  Until 2007 when it started freezing over again - the Polar Vortex relocated over Greenland, pushing winter storms far enough south to freeze the lake.  Do you wonder why the Northeast is getting severe winter storms every year now when for almost 50 years they didn't get any?  Why have the Colorado Rockies experienced two thousand-year storms in less than 50 years?  Why were Hurricanes Hugo and Florence such flood producers (They set the second and third all-time records for 24-hour rainfall in the US.)?

The evidence is out there.  All you have to do is look.

Doug

 

 

[RoofGardener]

2 hours ago, Doug1o29 said:

The upper limit of your own graph is 0.8 degrees.  Current temps are about 1.16 degrees above that graph's mean.  They're off the chart - literally.

There are over a dozen papers that look at that issue:

Mann, M. E., R. S. Bradley and M. K. Hughes.  1998.  Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries.  Nature 392 779-787.  https://www.nature.com/articles/33859

Mann, M. E., R. S. Bradley and M. K. Hughes.  1999.  Northern hemisphere temperatures during the past millenium:  inferences, uncertainties, and limitations.  Geophysical Research Letters.  15 March 1999.  https://doi.org/10.1029/1999GL900070  https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/1999GL900070%4010.1002/(ISSN)1944-8007.GRL40

Moberg, A., D. M. Sonechkin, K. Holmgren, N. M. Datsenko and W. Karlen.  2005.  Highly variable Northern Hemisphere temperatures reconstructed from low- and high-resolution proxy data. Nature 433 613-617.  https://www.nature.com/articles/nature03265

For more information than you ever wanted, use Google Scholar.  Type  "tree rings northern hemisphere" into the search engine.

Doug

Thanks for that Doug. However, I'm still puzzled. The most recent NOAA report puts 2018 at around +0.85 anomaly, rather than 1.16 degrees ? 

https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/201806 

[Doug1029]

1 hour ago, RoofGardener said:

Thanks for that Doug. However, I'm still puzzled. The most recent NOAA report puts 2018 at around +0.85 anomaly, rather than 1.16 degrees ? 

https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/201806 

NOAA's number is based on the 1951-1980 average temp.  I was basing mine on the tip of the solid blue line in your graph.  That, plus 0.75 degrees is approximately 1.16 degrees.  If we put them on the same basis, they should be the same.  That, plus reading the temp at the end of that solid blue line is a bit iffy.

Doug

[Doug1029]

17 hours ago, Noxasa said:

I guess if you include those scientists that might attribute maybe 5% of global warming to human activity then yes, I guess they could be included in the group that believe in anthropological global warming but I wouldn't include those.  Secondly, it's quite a different statement to say someone thinks humans contribute to global atmospheric CO2 levels, that's a pretty solid fact that humans do, and have done, the problem is that science does not yet know how much CO2 plays in any climate model and they don't understand all the other natural feedback processes that deal with increased CO2 in the atmosphere.  The amount of CO2 contributed by humans is comparable to putting $100 dollars in pennies on a table (that's 10,000 pennies) and then picking up one penny and saying, this is how much CO2 humans have contributed to the atmosphere since the industrial revolution, the other 9,999 is nature.  In the end, scientists really have no idea how much CO2 is unmanageable by nature and the natural climate feedback loops that exist.  The reality is that these scientist just don't have it figured out regardless of what they say, which is why their models have failed so miserably.  

Now I'm not against reasonable movement to renewable and more environmentally friendly forms of energy production.  I'm only against doing it at such a pace that our electricity bills skyrocket for no good reason.  Instead of trying to do it in 20 years they can do it in 200 and people wouldn't have to economically suffer because environmentalists are crazy.

Here is an article, written in 1997, that outlines the uncertainties in climate forecasting.  There have been major improvements in climate models since then.  Note that in 1997 "climate models do a reasonably good job of capturing the essence of the large-scale aspects of the current climate and its natural variability."  Over the years, climate models have become more specific until now researchers are trying to get them to predict weather - they still aren't very good at that, but neither is your local weather forecaster, who is depending on climate/weather models to make his forecasts.

My own opinion is that it's a good model if it predicts the 30-year average and standard error of temps, precip and wind speeds and the extremes thereof.  Let the weathermen tell you what is going to happen tomorrow.

Toward the end of the article is a section on what climate science DOES NOT predict.  Among them:  that there will be an increase in tropical storms, hurricanes and typhoons, a subject we have discussed here on UM.

Doug

Mahlman, J. D.  1997.  Uncertainties in projections of human-caused climate warming.   Science 278 (5342) 1416-1417.  http://science.sciencemag.org/content/278/5342/1416

P.S.:  Most of that 1.8 degrees in temperature rise since 1826 correlates with CO2 increase - human-caused.

Doug

Edited September 19, 2018 by Doug1029

[Doug1029]

On 9/16/2018 at 5:10 AM, Black Monk said:

Why "especially" the US? Most governments around the world aren't bothered about "climate change" and probably don't even believe it. The Chinese and Indian governments certainly aren't doing anything to combat this non-existent thing. China is to build 700 coal-fired power plants over the next few years. It's only mainly PC Western governments that are obsessed with "climate change". The rest of the world, meanwhile, doesn't give a damn and just carries on as normal.

Could you tell us where you found the 700 coal plant figure?

China has done more than any other country to curb emissions (What do you think the Three Gorges Dam was?).  It is well ahead of us in terms of kilowatts generated from wind and solar.  That it is still badly polluted is testimony to how bad things were under Mao Tse-Tung and how large its population is - its power needs are enormous.  For that reason, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that they were still building coal-fired plants, but 700?  Are you sure?

Developing countries, especially in Africa and India are benefiting from our research into wind.  Building new windmills is a lot cheaper than building new coal plants.  AND:  you don't need railroads to haul wind.  Whether they care about climate change or not, they care about their costs.  And that is the driving force behind conversion everywhere you go.  Politicians are only too happy to jump on the bandwagon and pretend that they're doing this altruistic thing when the driving force is money.

Doug

Edited September 19, 2018 by Doug1029

[Doug1029]

On 9/16/2018 at 2:20 PM, Noxasa said:

30% increase in CO2 in the atmosphere and yet no appreciable rise in global surface temperatures regardless of all the dire predictions by so called "scientists" that said that we should be significantly warmer.  Every climate model put out 15-20 years ago that we can test against is completely 100% wrong in their predictions of what the climate should be today.  *mic drop*

Global mean temps have risen 1.8 degrees since 1826, most of that since 1977.  During that same time, global CO2 levels have doubled.

Hansen's Climate Model (1998) has predicted every parameter it used correctly.  The "climate models don't work" argument is mostly right-wind propaganda; albeit, there are different models and what we really need are models accurate enough to make usable forecasts, like how high will that next flood get?  If you're going to argue that climate models are 100% wrong, then cite which model it was, who tested it and when.

Doug

Hansen, J. E., M. Sato, R. Ruedy, A. Lacis and J. Glascoe.  1998.  Global climate data and models:  a reconciliation.  Science 281(5379) 930-932.  http://science.sciencemag.org/content/281/5379/930

 

[ChrLzs]

21 minutes ago, Doug1o29 said:

Could you tell us where you found the 700 coal plant figure?

Pretty sure this comes from some report that said Chinese companies had plans to build a total of 700 coal-fired plants *worldwide*.

So it was self-reported projected estimates, probably included padding to ensure their shareholders and prospectus were appropriately optimistic, and it is unclear how many of those 700 were guesstimated as for China.

However, it seems the actual global figure was more like 621, and the number was for coal powered *generator units* NOT power stations .  According to this:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/16/world-going-slow-coal-misinformation-distorting-facts

..China recently (2017) canceled a whole pile of coal stuff, and the figure given there is more like 120 (includes 74 expansions and 46 new stations).

 

So, it just goes to show what you can do with creative statistics, and the real truth may be in there, somewhere....

 

[lost_shaman]

8 hours ago, Doug1o29 said:

And since.

The current temperature excursion started about 1910.  There was a minor peak in 1936 and a larger one in 1956.  Temps then trended downward until the late 1960s when they slowly started up again.  In 1977 they took off for the stratosphere, peaking in 1998.  They trended slowly down until 2005 when they started to climb again, reaching an all-time high in 2014.  Since then, they have been trending down.  Currently, we are about 1 degree C above the 1951-1980 mean.  NOAA has a list of temperature anomalies here:  http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata_v3/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt  The JD column is on a calendar-year basis.

Doug

In 2000 the data clearly showed 1934 as the hottest year on record in the U.S.. Of course this did not fall in line with Hansen's global warming theme and the data has been adjusted multiple times since to the point they fall in line now with the Global warming theme. 

[lost_shaman]

20 hours ago, Noxasa said:

Its even been documented that climate scientists have tried to modify the historical record to show some warming that the raw data just doesn't show.  The fact is that climate scientists have been baffled as to why they haven't seen the same increases they saw in the prior 20 years before 1998.  Theories abound about some kind of delayed effect due to ocean currents and oxygen turn over but they really don't know as much as you think they know. 

This is true and you can see it documented via temperature adjustments that have been made over and over since at least 2000 and every time the recent years get adjusted hotter and hotter and past years get adjusted cooler and cooler.