What climate change is not

Discussion in 'Earth Science' started by billvon, Jan 28, 2020.

  1. Quantum Quack Life's a tease... Valued Senior Member

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    And you think climate change rendering the top say, 25% of land mass (in the Arctic) unable to be built on is a good thing?
     
    Last edited: Feb 4, 2020
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  3. Quantum Quack Life's a tease... Valued Senior Member

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    "Stupid is what stupid does"~FG
    Mutated 3 eyed fish here we come...lol
    Wonders how Australias barrier reefs will mutate...
     
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  5. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    For the ecosystem? Definitely. Less people = healthier ecosystem. For the people there? Definitely not.

    However, keep in mind that even today, melting permafrost is causing building collapses and evictions. People are still there. (Google Norilsk for a city going through this right now.)
    Yep. Not good - but certainly better than mutated 3 eyed kids.
     
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  7. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    old memory
    OK a russian born Dane (can't remember his name ---think people called him Si-- he may have coined the word permafrost)
    Loaned from the usgs to the army to help solve their alcan highway problem.
    Much of his knowledge on the subject was from reading russian texts---then some experimentation

    normal road construction involves digging ditches on either side of the roadbed and putting the material on the roadbed---ergo "highway"
    Ok until the permafrost begins to thaw---then it swallows machinery.
    So, that did not work well with permafrost
    solution
    first---after clearing the roadbed-- One needs to insulate the permafrost ---add brush, then logs laid perpendicular to the roadway then more brush and then more logs to create a corduroy roadbed then gravel.
    so far ok
    but still not good enough
    then you will need a berm on either side of the roadbed to prevent slumping. (No ditches!)

    if memory serves, only about 7% of the highway ran over permafrost.
     
  8. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    Once again, as so often before - please reread:
    What the very conservative and politically timid IPCC presents as "scenarios" is far from exhaustive of the visible and significant threats.
    Again: You are not using the worst possibilities visible in the IPCC data, or even the IPCC's various analyses of factors, let alone the scientific literature in general. (These include such unlikely but nevertheless possible events as a "methane bomb" runaway, a sudden Gulf Stream current shutdown, a Siberian/Canadian wildfire apocalypse, etc. Your "worst case" is within the likelihood ranges of the published estimated futures - these are set at the standard 5% statistical likelihood, one in twenty chances based on very "conservative" assumptions and featured in more than twenty different factor analyses).
     
  9. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    I'm not interested in peddling bs in a silly attempt to manage the US Republican media feed's propaganda in advance, or pretend to negotiate some kind of understanding whereby if we all ignore the worst of the possibilities the Republican base will somehow become rhetorically reasonable and speak in good faith.

    Nothing and no one can prevent people (like you, right here) from misrepresenting the plain and sober discussions of the calmly informed. It's not worth trying.

    Look at this, for example:
    That's irrelevant to my quoted point.

    That's obvious, of course - the low confidence of the cloud effects is visible in the range of error etc. All you would have to do is read my posts (and the IPCC reports, etc) in good faith. Low confidence in reported estimates or assessments does not make all possibilities equally, or even comparably, likely.
    The only question is: Do you know that? You would, surely, on your job, in your accountable life. But this is a matter that illuminates the ongoing fascist takeover of the Republican Party.

    In other words: Since you are doubling down on the Republican media feed bs, joining the addled mob, we need to ask the standard question that always comes up when dealing with that barrage of garbage:

    Are they lying, or are they stupid?
    Nonsense. We assess risks based on unlikely but significant threats all the time - it's simple, standard, ordinary procedure. It's almost the definition of risk assessment.

    The odd thing is that the entire category involved - risk denial - seems to be invisible to the Republican (fascist) media feed addled. They don't recognize it in tobacco, leaded gas, GMOs, vaccinations, etc., either.
     
    Last edited: Feb 11, 2020
  10. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    21,635
    Then stop doing so. Simple.
    Ah, so you are going beyond the IPCC and into more speculative scenarios. That's fine. But that approach is every bit as valid as the approach that climate change deniers take, where they cherrypick scenarios where nothing much happens to the climate due to a lack of sensitivity to CO2 forcing.

    So far the IPCC has done a good job of predicting the actual climate change, back as far as 1990. It is unlikely that they will suddenly prove disastrously wrong, and have the actual climate exceed their worst case (or best case) scenarios. Indeed, the odds of both those cases - that climate change is much worse than predicted, vs. much more mild than predicted - are both small and similar.
    Correct. It means that the likelihood of those estimates being correct is low.
    There you go. You got the words fascist, garbage, BS and mob into a discussion of climate change. You can end the day on a high note, proud of your 'contribution.'
     
  11. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    Into a response to your deflection of a discussion of climate change.
    But not equivalently low, equally low, etc. There are large differences in the relative likelihood of various unlikely outcomes.
    It has been significantly (more than one standard deviation) underestimating the onset rate and scale of various major changes, including some specifically mentioned in these threads (glacial and permafrost melting, methane boosting, variability in temperature and precipitation distribution, oceanic warming, ecological alterations, etc).
    That is false.
    The probabilities of greater severity of many major features are much larger and growing - the mounting evidence of incoming greater severity, including both the trends of the various deviations from official predictions of the past, and the changing odds of outcomes exceeding the standard deviation range (error bars sometimes visible, etc), of the politically sensitive and influenced official predictions of the past (none of which present anything like an absolute limit or "worst case", in the first place. You invented that.).
    No. Explicitly the opposite.
    You are now trolling.
    "Cherrypicking"? Familiar abuse of that term - but in only one context: You have adopted the bullshit vocabulary of the Republican media feed.

    That is not plausibly a coincidence - such dishonesty and poor reasoning is far more likely to have been provided to you from the familiar sources than invented by you for this thread.

    In other words: On your job, in your life, you probably know what cherrypicking refers to - this post of yours, like a couple of others noted, presents to the public a basic error of reasoning that I imagine (from your other posting here, in less politically addled matters) would get you fired for incompetence in your normal life.

    My approach, clearly stated here in multiple posts you are invited to reread for yourself, involves no cherrypicking whatsoever. None. The concept does not apply.

    Almost the opposite, in plain fact - my approach is more inclusive of the entire range of IPCC data and report and analysis, the entire context, rather than less. And that is explicit - I explicitly, in the posts, in clear language, based my reasoning on that greater inclusiveness. It's central to my posting, a major point of differentiation between your approach (narrower, arbitrarily selective) and mine. There is no way for the competent and honest to miss that.

    That is a serious misrepresentation - and one typical of the Republican media operations, which are simply dishonest propaganda operations. You are now posting bald-faced Republican propaganda, complete with the familiar vocabulary in exactly the context and with apparently the same intentions we find in the spewings of James Inhofe, Lamar Alexander, the various hired Fox TV "experts", and the like.

    (Your attempted restriction to certain "scenarios" found in the media feed of the politically influenced IPCC is much closer to "cherrypicking" than my insistence on paying attention to the entire range of data, research, etc, published and used by the IPCC. In your attempted narrow focus on "scenarios" lifted from partial data and arbitrarily restricted aspects of research as reported, you even create and invoke such nonexistent features as "absolute worst case" estimates and the like - not just cherrypicking, but inventing the cherrypicked item).


    Again: the data and findings and research and so forth evaluated and employed by the IPCC, the published graphs and estimates of the IPCC, and so forth, inform my posts.

    Nothing "beyond" the IPCC. Just beyond the selected and restricted and politically vulnerable IPCC scenarios you chose to describe as "absolute worst case".
     
    Last edited: Feb 13, 2020
  12. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    21,635
    They have both underestimated and overestimated at times.

    In 1990, the IPCC's business-as-usual case had an expected temperature rise of .25C per decade. Actual has been .15C per decade. The issue was CO2 sensitivity; they thought the sensitivity was higher than it was.

    This is to be expected in any attempt at modeling a complex system like the climate. You are going to get it wrong initially before you understand all the factors that go into the model. Nowadays predictions are getting better.
    Great. So we're good.
     
    Michael 345 likes this.
  13. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    But not equivalently or equally or net/overall. https://www.climatecentral.org/news/ipcc-predictions-then-versus-now-15340

    The IPCC in its official, public, media feed has - net - significantly underestimated and/or lowball predicted both the severity of AGW, and the risks inherent in its continuing as it is, as visible in the data and research upon which the IPCC media feed is supposedly based.
    Air temperature. You are restricting your reference to air temperature.
    And you continue to deal in fixed numbers rather than ranges and probabilities. That conceals the differences in risk.

    The IPCC underestimated the temperature increase in deeper ocean waters, and the amount of absorbed energy that went to melting ice and thawing dirt, and a couple of other factors. The result was an underestimate of the severity of AGW over the decades since 1990, partly hidden (at least for those willing to cooperate in the deception) behind an overestimate of the short term air temperature increase.

    AGW refers to Anthropogenic Global Warming. The globe is not made of air.
    https://www.climatecentral.org/news/ipcc-predictions-then-versus-now-15340

    And the main issue is not climate "sensitivity", which is bedeviled by either its basis in equilibrium assumptions or the lack of data and capability for handling non-eq assumptions - the global climate is not going to be in equilibrium for a long time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_sensitivity
     
  14. James R Just this guy, you know? Staff Member

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    The recent fires in Australia are estimated to have killed 1 billion individual animals.
     
  15. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    Likely a lot more than that if you take ALL the animals into account (mammals, birds, spiders, insects, worms etc)

    Of course, there are about 20 quadrillion insects in Australia to begin with, so even 100 billion would not be a sizeable fraction of that.
     
  16. Quantum Quack Life's a tease... Valued Senior Member

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    23,328
    Well you could quite easily work it out for yourself.
    17 million hectares with a small to large animal population density of what? ( forget about insects )

    1 billion animal destroyed is most likely a conservative estimate...

    add in the mount of C02 released by the fires and then multiply by many orders for the next fire season...and the next and possibly there wont be any fire seasons as such...as there could be nothing left to burn.
     
    Last edited: Feb 20, 2020
  17. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    I'm still good.
    You're still buried in the bad faith and stereotypical political warp of this shit:
    1)
    2)
    3)
    4)
    5)
    Essentially, you have discarded any possiblity of an adult discussion of evidence and probability in favor of repeating a juvenile bothsides political viewpoint fed to you by the media wing of the US Republican Party.

    (In short, and these were simply grabbed from the bag of every post you've made on this thread:
    1) The rate of even the moderate case AGW, the rate rather than the eventual scale being the main source of harm, is about ten times anything in the past except large meteor strike - and the worst case of AGW consequences, such as the methane bomb possibility, outpaces anything survived in the past by Canadian land vertebrates over 20 kilos.
    2) Australian fires 1000 times as bad probably would kill every land mammal on that continent over 20 kilos.
    3) The probability of seeing Canadian forest and peat fires - not "methane fires", or whatever you are trying to talk about - that force evacuation of major cities and large areas of the country is substantial and rising. The permafrost is melting and drying much faster than expected, the boreal forest becoming much more vulnerable to wildfire for various AGW-related reasons.
    4) The IPCC overestimates have been rare, restricted, confused, and trivial; the underestimates common and significant and growing in that significance. Overall, the IPCC has been officially downplaying the range of possibilities indicated by its own analysis of the research it has considered, and officially underestimating AGW's likely severity in most respects.
    5) And that is the result of such an approach - fratboy rhetoric, which (fair warning) you will find harder to quit than to adopt. ).
     
  18. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    21,635
    Well, the fire season will change (not disappear) and the biome will also change.

    We see catastrophic fires here about once every five years or so - and they are getting worse all the time. But the next year there's always another fire season again. The rains come, the brush that has adapted to burning grows back, and in five years (in that area) there's more fuel next year for fires.
     
  19. Quantum Quack Life's a tease... Valued Senior Member

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    23,328
    True.... and get worse every year until there is nothing left to burn...an amazing CO2 producer that will keep repeating while regrowth and further burning is available.
    A permanent an uncontrollable source of annual CO2 production on a massive scale.

    The 17 million hectares burned in 2019-20 would only be a small percentage of what is available to be burned in Australia (probably at a wild guess about 1-2% or less). As every year is getting hotter, dryer and next year we may see even worse catastrophic burning. Most of our forests are highly combustible.
    To imply or suggest that it is business as usual and down play the significance is nothing short of denial.
    Your fear based denial posting is obvious. Unfortunately the Australian bush doesn't and simply can not heed your desire to bury the reality under your deluded unscientific optimism.

    The CO2 produced this last year was over 2/3 of the entire nations Co2 output in under three months. Next year will most probably be worse, depending on how dry it is.
    The CO2 produced by these fires is estimate to be approximately 2% of Global green house gases.
    It is worth a read if you have the courage ...
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushfires_in_Australia

    The problem of global CO2 reduction is further rendered futile as some would say it is simply way too late.
    To me, it is obvious that it is a runaway global warming situation and our resources need to be applied to facilitate surviving in an increasingly hostile environment. When that ultimately means self sustaining envro protected cities and agriculture with minimal CO2 footprints we would be prepared for that survival. ( re: Noah's Ark analogy)
    If done well, we survive relatively easily ( for a speculated 25% survivors). If done late and badly we may not survive at all...

    The IPCC fails in so many aspects to report how collateral CO2 production, including massive annual wild fire production of CO2 and the occasional Volcanic eruption or two, can impact on their predictions.

    My Summary assessment:
    We as a race are already living in a runaway global warming and there is not a lot we can do to stop it.
    We as a race can only adapt or perish.
     
    Last edited: Feb 20, 2020
  20. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    21,635
    Well, no. Not a net CO2 producer over time. You might (and likely will) get a CO2 "slug" but you won't see an increase over time.

    We might see one of two extremes:

    1) Everything burns and nothing ever grows back. In that case there's a massive "slug" of CO2 added to the atmosphere - then it ends, because there are no more fires (no more fuel.)
    2) Fires get more intense and more grows back in the winter. In that case CO2 release (fires) is balanced by CO2 uptake (by regrowth.)

    What we will most likely see is some balance between the two extremes. But beyond releasing the carbon inherent in the plants that exist right now, you won't see net, long term, increase in carbon releases from that phenomenon. That carbon has to come from somewhere.

    Right - and all that carbon to grow them came out of the air.
    It's not business as usual. It's also not the end of the world as we know it.
    Well, if you are calling me a denier, and the right wingers are calling me an alarmist, I must be doing something right!
    That's type 4 denial.

    The four kinds of denial:
    1) The climate is not warming.
    2) The climate is warming but it's not our fault.
    3) OK it's our fault but all the changes will be good.
    4) OK the changes might be bad but there's nothing we can do about it.

    I subscribe to none of those claims.
    Unadulterated science fiction nonsense. You don't need "enviro protected cities." You just need to put less carbon in the atmosphere. Burning megatons of coal/oil/gas to build "self sustaining enviro protected cities" is a fool's approach.
    OK so no worries for you then. Keep burning all that coal and oil.
     
  21. Quantum Quack Life's a tease... Valued Senior Member

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    23,328
    nope...way off...
    It takes 3 months to burn 17 million hectares but more than 3 years for solid regrowth (CO2 sequestration) so you have an over lapping CO2 production with little Carbon sequestration before the next wild fire. (assume 12 month cycles) The sum outcome is massive CO2 with out any time for regrowth to sequester the CO2 produced.
    Think on it a bit more perhaps... you can do it!
     
  22. parmalee peripatetic artisan Valued Senior Member

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    Precisely the sort of thinking that's brought us the already catastrophic mess we find ourselves in today.
     
    Quantum Quack likes this.
  23. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    Ocasio-Cortez: "The World Is Going To End In 12 Years If We Don't Address Climate Change"

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    Have we got a count down app for the predicted end of the world?

    If not can someone make one, please

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