Climate Change Prediction Record 0-41

[Essan]

How many are actual scientific predictions. made in published papers, based on the most likely scenario?  And how many tabloid newspaper headlines based on misunderstandings of the least likely, most extreme, possibility,  comments made by "celebrities" who really haven't got a clue, or just plain old made up?   

Meanwhile, here in the UK, the media assure us every winter that experts predict the coldest/snowiest winter on record .....

[Guest]

Item 3:  The false ice age scare of the 1960s got started when a research paper on the Milankovich Cycles was published with an arithmetic mistake.  In one of the equations, the author did not multiply by two, as required.  This somehow made it through peer review.

In the late 1960s, the earth had been in a warming "hiatus" for about 15 years.  Temps, which had been stable, dipped a few hundredths of a degree.  The publication and declining temps were picked up by the popular press which proclaimed a "new ice age," largely without scientific backing.

It seems that using one's head to think with is beyond the popular press' ability.  Just looking at the temperature record for the 20th century would have shown that temps were still well above the low-point of 1910.  And a quick review of glacial history would have revealed that it would take about 3000 years for a full-blown continental glacier to form.  There was no urgency, but scare tactics sell newspapers and nobody stopped to read the corrections.

The new ice age scare was mostly conjured up by the popular press.

Doug

[Guest]

On 9/21/2019 at 12:35 AM, the13bats said:

dont jump thinking i support the idea of climate change even though its weird to say don got something right,

but clue me in, i lived in florida all my life, born in jacksonville, then orlando 46 years now eustis,

as a kid in the 70s i recall colder weather and longer from late august to feb i had to bundle up for school now its rare to get a freeze here, its been indexing over 100 a lot lately,

back then we would freeze on halloween and i cant recall an adult halloween that wasnt too hot,

not saying climate is changing but does it perhaps cycle?

 

Weather goes through cycles of about seven years duration in which we get first higher, then lower temps.  This is not a true cycle, more like random variation, but the result is still periods of cold and periods of warmth.

Global warming is least in marine environments, so you will not have experienced much, if any, of it in Florida.  It is greatest in warm, dry deserts and in Arctic areas.

Also, we are not yet at two degrees of warming, so that is going to be very difficult to detect with the senses.  A better way to detect climate change in Florida is with the increasing number of hurricanes.

In 1999 I applied for a job in Brooksville, Florida.  I specifically asked about hurricanes.  They told me that those hit the east side of the penninsula and don't much come over to the west side.  Since then five hurricanes have hit Brooksville.  Sure glad I didn't get the job. Increasing numbers/intensity of storms is a result of global warming.

Doug

Doug

[Guest]

On 9/21/2019 at 12:01 AM, Gwynbleidd said:

An old letter to the President back in December 1972 from Brown University re what we now refer to as climate change.  

This is why you check your arithmetic before you publish.  By 1972 temps were already starting up again.  They climbed slowly until 1976 when they began their meteoric rise.

Doug

Edited September 23, 2019 by Doug1o29

[Essan]

26 minutes ago, Doug1o29 said:

Item 3:  The false ice age scare of the 1960s got started when a research paper on the Milankovich Cycles was published with an arithmetic mistake.  In one of the equations, the author did not multiply by two, as required.  This somehow made it through peer review.

In the late 1960s, the earth had been in a warming "hiatus" for about 15 years.  Temps, which had been stable, dipped a few hundredths of a degree.  The publication and declining temps were picked up by the popular press which proclaimed a "new ice age," largely without scientific backing.

It seems that using one's head to think with is beyond the popular press' ability.  Just looking at the temperature record for the 20th century would have shown that temps were still well above the low-point of 1910.  And a quick review of glacial history would have revealed that it would take about 3000 years for a full-blown continental glacier to form.  There was no urgency, but scare tactics sell newspapers and nobody stopped to read the corrections.

The new ice age scare was mostly conjured up by the popular press.

Doug

The 70s scare, in the UK at least, was almost entirely down to Nigel Calder, a "doom merchant" whose apocalyptic predictions of an imminent new ice age, beginning with weeks and weeks of snow, was popularised by a BBC2 documentary.   
~
Notwithstanding which, even in his book (The Weather Machine, pub 1974) he admitted that many climate scientists thought that global warming, due to rising CO2, would prevent any such ice age from occurring .....   Though I think he just said that to hedge his bets.     Calder died a couple of years ago.  But  I think he was still predicting a new ice age, any day now ....
 

[Guest]

Item 9:  Ozone.  This is a climate success story only because CFCs are a greenhouse gas.  CFCs destroy ozone high in the atmosphere.  We banned CFCs worldwide and the ozone hole is gradually closing.  You don't hear about it because the scientists were righjt and the world listened.

Item 11:  Acid rain.  Ever been to Kellogg, Idaho?  I have.  Back in 1971.  It was a barren moonscape, the result of acid rain caused by sulphur pollution from the smelters.  If you go there now, it is a lush forest with new stands of Douglas-fir everywhere you look.  What happened?

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is what happened.  It required companies to put scrubbers on their emissions and remove the acid before it reached the outside air.

The Black Forest of Germany was nearly wiped out by acid rain from the Saar and we had acid rain poisoning lakes in tehAdirondacks in New York.

The world wised up and did something about it.  Anoither environmental succsess story.

Doug

 

Edited September 23, 2019 by Doug1o29

[Guest]

Item 12:  What 30-year cooling trend?  Temps peaked in the early 1950s, then more-or-less leveled off into the early 1960s.  The dip in temps ended in 1976.  By my math, that's 26 years start-to-finish.

Doug

P.S.:  The 26-year hiatus consisted of 16 years of more-or-less constant temps, followed by a ten-year dip in temps.

Doug

Edited September 23, 2019 by Doug1o29

[Guest]

Item 16:  Sea levels are rising at about a foot per century.  There is nothing we can do to stop it.  This one is coming true.

There probably wasn't anything we could have done before 2000 that would have made a difference.  All the measures being discussed - coffer dams, storm barriers, etc. - are only temporary fixes.  The only option left is to get out of the way - move to higher ground.

This is the only facet of global warming in which I despair.  We can stop climate change by 2050 and we can reverse it by 2100, but sea level will likely continue to rise for two or three centuries.  Either move or grow gills.

Doug

[Guest]

Item 18:  Snow.  This was the result of a rather stupid comment made by a British climatologist and pertained to Britain only.  He should have known better.

The Polar Vortex moves around so as to stay over snow and ice-covered areas during the winter.  It started spending its winters in Greenland in about 2005-2007.  Winter storms have to divert south to get around it, bringing severe winter weather to Northeast United States and Europe.  But all this happened five years after he made his remark.

To turn rain into snow, all you have to do is freeze it.  That happens when the temp dips below 32F.  Temps are currently only about 3.6F higher than they were in 1750.  So its plain to see that we're going to keep getting snow for the foreseeable future.

This was never backed up by any sort of scientific research.  You need to be careful where you're getting your false claims from.

Doug

[Guest]

Items 22-25:  Al Gore, Prince Charles and the prime minister are not climate scientists.  Your article's headline is misleading to outright fraudulent.

Doug

[Essan]

6 minutes ago, Doug1o29 said:

Item 18:  Snow.  This was the result of a rather stupid comment made by a British climatologist and pertained to Britain only.  He should have known better.

I consistently argue that it was, in fact, quite an accurate prediction - for the most populated parts of Britain, a decent snowfall (sufficient to build a small snowman or have a snowball fight, and lasting on the ground for more than a few hours) is becoming an increasingly rare event, only occurring every few years.   And disruption, when it does occur, increases due to drivers being so unused to it.
 

[Guest]

Items 31-35:  Peak oil was in 1970.  But that was before the discovery of the Bakken and the Permian Basin.  Each added about twenty years to the peak oil estimate.  So we're still past peak oil, no matter how you cut it.

But then, it starts to look like running out of oil is not going to be a problem.  We have a huge amount of natural gas and with climate change, we can't continue burning them, anyway.  We won't run out of oil - we'll just start using something else.

Doug

[Guest]

Items 36 and 37:  Super Storm Sandy.

Doug

[Essan]

The thing with peak oil (and many other scientific predictions) is that you can only predict based on what you know at the time. 

So, it's usually a case of: "All else being equal, and based on what we currently know, x may occur in y years time"

The problem is that the media - and politicians -  don't like uncertainties, so they report it as: "Scientists say x will occur in y years time"     And when it doesn't happen, the public (and the media and the politicians) then blame the scientists for getting wrong a prediction which, actually, they never expressed.


 

[Guest]

Item 38:  Resolved by EPA until regulations repealed by tRUMP.

Most industries are continuing under the old regulations, mostly because they are run by people who have to live on this planet and raise their children here.  Also because once tRUMP is out of office (and probably in prison), the regulations will be reinstated with a vengeance - anybody who made a mess will have to clean it up and there's talk of not allowing corporate law to protect corporate executives.  In other words, jail time if they don't clean it up.

Doug

[Guest]

1 minute ago, Essan said:

The thing with peak oil (and many other scientific predictions) is that you can only predict based on what you know at the time. 

So, it's usually a case of: "All else being equal, and based on what we currently know, x may occur in y years time"

The problem is that the media - and politicians -  don't like uncertainties, so they report it as: "Scientists say x will occur in y years time"     And when it doesn't happen, the public (and the media and the politicians) then blame the scientists for getting wrong a prediction which, actually, they never expressed.


 

All else is never equal.

Doug

[Guest]

Itemn 39:  Nitorgen buildup will not make most land unusable.  Farmers simply don't add fertilizer when the land gets too "hot."  Whoever made this prediction wasn't thinking.

Nitrogen buildup, however, is a problem off the mouths of major rivers where it creates "death zones" devoid of marine life.  Global warming also causes this, so the development of large dead zones is a bit of a puzzle as to cause.

Doug

[Guest]

Item 40:  Eutrification.  Extra nutrients (pollution) added to a stream cause an algal bloom.  During the day, algae conduct photosynthesis, adding oxygen to the water.  But at night, they consume it in their normal respiration, just like other living things.  And that depletes oxygen in the water, killing fish.

Your article was published in 1970, two years before the EPA outlawed many common pollutants, like phosphate laundry soap.  Fish kill was a common problem at the time.

But then EPA stepped in, turning this into another environmental success story.

You never hear of the successes -only the failures.

Doug

[acidhead]

And the Oscar for Best Child Actress goes to......

 

[acidhead]

Just now, acidhead said:

And the Oscar for Best Child Actress goes to......

 

Anyhow....

 

[Dark_Grey]

2 minutes ago, acidhead said:

Anyhow....

 

Is using kids to push an agenda the highest form of sociopathy?

[Essan]

41 minutes ago, Doug1o29 said:

All else is never equal.

Doug

Indeed!

[Guest]

On 9/21/2019 at 4:40 AM, Not A Rockstar said:

Extinctions are normal (?) and nothing to be worried about, easy come easy go, what idiots people are to be concerned and ask the questions and be very wary of scientists being paid by and dependent upon corporate payrolls who mock folks who wonder. I know it sounds all conspiracy theorist and wildly far fetched, but I do wonder if maybe some data is skewed by people who profit by how things are being done today... it could happen. Maybe.

SOME extinctions are normal.  As I recall, the normal rate is about 0.4 per thousand per year.  But we are now well above that.  Think of the earth as an airplane.  Individual species are parts of that plane.  We are running one big experiment to find out how many of those parts we can do without.  Every time we lose another species, we endanger the functioning of the ecosystem that keeps us alive.  So how many parts can we remove before the plane can't fly?

I am paid indirectly by the US Forest Service.  I do not work for any commercial company.

I try not to mock those who differ with me, but that is sometimes very difficult to do.

Skewed is the wrong word.  Skew can be tested for statistically and corrected if it is found.  Nothing unusual about skewed data.  It's faked data that you should be concerned about.  I suppose it is possible to fake data and I have heard of cases in which it happened.  But I know that others will be checking my work.  I have used other people's chronologies in my studies and I expect that other people have used mine.  If I fake something, I take a risk that somebody will find a problem in how my data relates to theirs and dig into it.  If they find faked data, my career could well be over.  So I don't fake data.  Besides, the fun part of science is analyzing the data.  That's where you make dicoveries.  And knowing that my discovery isn't real would be very depressing.

Doug

[Guest]

On 9/21/2019 at 4:40 AM, Not A Rockstar said:

Ecological concerns and looking for cleaner ways to live and power our toys is really needless, though it does keep some folks off the streets and employed, I guess. I mean if most of the past (what was it? 100 million years?)  we did not have ice here, then it probably is nothing to be concerned if we lose it all, since we aren't polar bears. Silly of us to even wonder. (/sarcasm)

My wife has a severe allergy to 2,4-D.  It's an herbicide and it causes cancers in dogs and children that are exposed to it on lawns where its major use is to kill dandelions.  It's one of those "toys" you're talking about.  It is long since past time to outlaw it for home use.  BUT:  the law says that a chemical can't be outlawed unless there is an equivalent chemical to replace it, thereby guaranteeing that we will be poisoned.  Those laws need to change.

Sometimes natural controls are superior to chemical ones.  Control spittle bugs with a garden hose; give them a bath.  It destroys their bubble home and exposes them to predation.  To get rid of box-elder bugs, sweep them up with a vaccuum cleaner.  Vaccuum cleaners are effective against fleas, too - they suck up the egg cases and there go the fleas.  The easiest way to control tent caterpillars is to wait until evening when the insects return to the tents.  Then cut them off, put them in a bag and burn them.

At any rate, some of us scientists are researching natural controls.

Doug

[+Not A Rockstar]

A few people have been quoting me and they have all left out that it began with "rant ON" and had "/sarcasm" in there to make clear my real position without being too obnoxious.

That video of "scientists" sneering at the concerns vocalized set me off, as it is typical. Most of us out here are CONCERNED and while man did not cause all the issues, we have caused some and should modify our behaviors and learn better, IMO. Science gets thrown in our faces as the holy grail, the only sure and certain guide and they rarely address things in the middle of the road with what seems to be happening and what we can do right now to slow it down and reduce the parts we are aggravating.

Economics silences the chemicals we need to be ceasing to use to reduce the impacts on bees and other things, it always comes down to that in anything if you look under the hood. We will never reduce our usage of fossil fuels until the corporations have made their fortunes as much as they can off that, THEN they will turn to the alternatives as if they are noble.

I am not out there protesting, twerking, setting dumpster fires and littering the streets with confetti to "help" the environment, but, I am angry over how our own elected and appointed officials are corporate shills under it all or else muzzle their troops to go along with that sort of policy. The climate is changing. I expect information as available about the natural causes and a fair assessment of what we are causing or adding to and how we are going to change that factor we can control. 

If it is factual that China won't change and causes 40% of the damage then STOP buying from them. If plastics are corrupting the oceans and food chain, then BAN them in all usages that do not require them. The only thing that stops us is greed and spineless leaders.

It may not change the end result fully, but saying we cannot do anything and this is all natural and normal is lazy.

The nice thing is much of it is due to over population, and if this does run its course, that issue will be taken care of.

...and I am not sure I am being sarcastic there.

anyway, this is how I see it. One opinion among millions.