Munich Re warns climate change could cost billions

Nonsense. Climate change is just a scam. I know this because some ill-informed idiot on an Internet chat forum said so. They're just looking for an excuse to raise taxes!

It seems most of the media in the world are pushing very hard to have all of the 'global warming' scare stories deluging the public.

There seems to be a concerted effort, to also drown out the seeming scam the great political entities, the media, and a group of so called 'scientists' in England have perpetrated upon the world.

Pushing what by the incident of discovery of a scam, shows as a lie, and not covering the (NOW PROBABLE TRUE) outing of the scam would imply collusion.

Now, many reputable scientists acknowledge the scam seems true. The same scientists mentioned as 'the bad guys' so to speak, by the scammers.

The scammers plead that they have been harmed, as opposed to their trying to deliberately harm the world, and throw it (with the cooperation of the owners of the scammers) into world dictatorship and real climate disaster.

Nice to know, if there are sides, which one who is on...

So insurance premiums go up also. Greeeeaaaaaaat!

And still the political groups are going to Copenhagen, to make every one return to the 1900 levels of carbon emissions the truth is out there but they have ignored these truths and are planning to go ahead with the reduction of carbon emissions by up to 80% with notable exceptions being excluded from the required reductions' like China with emissions over 6,000 million metric tons. Mexico produced more than 430m tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2006, making it the 13th largest emitter in the world. The use of the per capita CO2 emissions as a rule of measure is sort of lop sided when you consider that the population density of the populace regions makes the statistical reference unacceptable, it is like dividing a pie into shares the more people the smaller the share, thus the per capita CO2 for five million is less than that for one million, and thus statically the million will have a burden a lot higher than the five million all be it that the five million will produce more CO2.

And we are going to let the UN police the efforts they who can not even stop Iran from developing Nuclear weapons, what will one of those do to the carbon emissions?

Something very wrong is going on here, and it amounts to treasonable behavior on many of those involved. And Still the lie is believed

Even if you've got your head so far stuck in the sand you can deny the mounting evidence about global warming, why would you oppose reducing CO2 emissions and renewable energy? I guess you don't give a damn about the future of your own children.

It's really scary that, after the extreme left (CDU/CSU and FDP) bought into this scam, now Munich Re (another known nest of dangerous communists) is contributing.

Next thing, somebody will suggest to carpool instead of going around one person per car, infringing the basic human right to transform urban roads in parking lots.

Anyway, the conspiracy has extended to Swiss Re

Scary

Natural Disasters never cost the insurance industry any money in extra settlement payments. The only thing that results in extra settlement payments is poor risk estimation on their part.

The only people who will have to pay more as a result of global warming should be the people who chose to build and insure their houses on unstable beach-front property

Yes it is a scam. I studied climate at University and am pleased that more and more people partially due to the internet are discovering the truth. Mainly that the IPCC and Al Gore have a political agenda to meet and have consistently manipulated and used choice statistics to panic people instead of painting the whole picture. Many of the so called IPCC experts are not actually scientists they are "climate experts" etc.

Fact is that today we have less hurricanes,floodings serious storms and other natural disasters than 40 years ago,however the media attention they get is disproportional so that the masses get a distorted view.

I do however find it interesting that Munich RE says " climate change" which purports to be natural rather than global warming which is the man made variant to suit big business and tax policy.

I really do wish more people would inform themselves more with real facts before discussing this issue with newspaper and RTL style shock facts. Most people know as much about it as they do about the details of treating a rare cancer!!!But... everybody knows something about cancer facts and shocks from the media.

For those who are really interested I would recommend the following :

A great overview " The real global warming disaster- Is the obsession with climate change turning out to be the most costly scientific blunder in history?" by Christopher Booker

Ian Plimer " heaven and earth:global warming,the missing science"-this book has 100`s of accurate scientific references on every aspect of climate change. A must read if you are really interested.

"Unstoppable global warming every 1500 years" by Fred Singer and Dennis Avery.

Remember that the IPCC is a politically funded body and that Al Gore is currently being sued by real scientists for the bullshit presented among others in "An inconvenient Truth".

I find it interesting that George Bush came in for widespread criticism for lying about WMD in Iraq,but nobody discusses the tradition of presidents lying to meet an agenda when Obama said "The science is clear and the facts are beyond dispute" in 2008 when challenged on global warming.

This is a serious issue and most people are ignorant on it. I hope my rant will at least inspire a few of its readers to do some research.

About the 30000 scientists and the lawsuit

I am sure you can provide a link to the US court where the Al Gore lawsuit has been deposited.

@Barkingmad

Spot on!!

Most of the ill informed pro lobby aren't aware that the earth has cooled down in the last few years, that temperature measuring is inconsistent, and that sunspots have a bigger correlation to global warming than co2 levels.

Barkingmad has picked a suitable username for himself, and for that he earns a point in my book. He however goes on to lose all his points for his conspiracy theory like babbling.

Interesting feedback already!!

I should mention that barbett is correct that the case against Al Gore has not yet come to court. It`s an expensive business in the States.Of the 30,000 scientists only a paltry 9,000 have a PHD!! Not all of them.

Hutcho I don`t see where you find a conspiracy theory in my post.Please enlighten me. I added the point about Al Gore more as a footnote.If you read the post again you will see that my intention is to get more people to study the facts. John Coleman`s case against Al Gore loses merit because he has a left wing agenda that overshaodows his expertise,I don`t really give a about that. What I do care about is facts on a subject I majored in at university.There have been many publications by real scientists that dispute global warming in the last 12 years.A peer review? By who?.Peer reviews of Gore and the IPCC claims are however rife. Most genuine research anyway involves looking at data over the whole period in discussion not cherrypicking the juicy bits for headline attention.

I just thought that a few people might appreciate some interesting factual reading tips. Sorry if I was misunderstood because I don`t like conjecture and the way the media is being used on this issue.

Those who are genuinely interested may like to Google Professor Richard Lindzen, the world`s leading atmospheric physicist. There is also much to be found about how Gore tried to use lawyer tactics rather than scientific fact to discredit him. This is unfortunately the problem that faces this discussion,mixing lawyers and politics with science.What remains is that the IPCC quoted figures do not stand up to scrutiny even if Gore is left out of the equation.

It's your insistence that you know the "truth" and the "facts" that make your claims all the more unbelievable. The fact that (like me) you took a few classes at university in weather and climate does not put you in a position to categorically state what will happen in the future. While the IPCC has put forward a range of scenarios precisely because they can't predict exactly what will happen, conspiracy theorists like you claim to know the "truth", want to tell us the "facts", and claim that climate change predictions are definitely "lies".

Wow I`m still being tagged as a conspiracy theorist for recommending some reading!! I haven`t claimed to know anything about the future in my previous posts, only about the way the IPCC has presented it`s case until now. There are clearly 2 sides to every story and it would just be kinda good if people informed themselves a bit better. I also think that studying oceanography and climate at university for 5 years qualifies as more than taking a few weather classes! I have also not claimed that climate change is a lie.Climate change is natural (see my reading tips)and cannot be controlled by man anymore than weather patterns can. An important distinction I think.

Al Gore and the IPCC claim to know "facts" and "truths"? They are automatically more believeable or what? When someone challenges a view held in the mainstream media they are seen as conspiracists,nice one.

Many people were also ridiculed for correctly predicting the finance crisis. For speaking out against the ridicule of the Millenium bug only to be be proved correct at a later date.

Instead of ridiculing me do some research.

Anthropogenic Global Warming is the largest FRAUD in human history. The same community of criminals were crying wolf over global cooling nearly forty years ago. The alarmists, who scream crisis, whenever they want to stampede people into rash and unconsidered action, know that their only hope of getting their way is for people to react without thinking.

So, extreme weather is causing more destruction - to towns, cities, life, etc...

But maybe - just maybe - there are billions of more people on earth than there used to be, consuming ever and ever more, and living in all kinds of places they never lived before. Thuuuuuusssssssssssssssssssss....................., more and more people and places are affected by weather..

According to this rationale, anything in Holland should be uninsurable.., or??

Thank you for showing just how dumb 'common sense' can be. The majority of growth, indeed the worlds population, is in existing urban centers.... hardly "places they never lived before". Presumably these aren't new cities in brand new locations with fascinating new weather.

Right.. All those cities in China just existed 100 years ago, and have since built up vertically... Same with all of SE Asia where all these horrible tsunamis have taken place.. Katrina in NE?? All global warming too I suppose.. So, (paying exorbitantly to build..) more windmills will prevent a new Hurricane Katrina, genius?

We respond to life-threatening disease by taking the best advice from top medical experts - and not from corporate-corrupted politicians or ignorant anonymous bloggers. Similarly , in relation to the worsening climate emergency, we should take the advice from top climate scientists (e.g. Dr James Hansen, head, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research., Germany, and the Coral Working Party of the prestigious UK Royal Society) who are telling us that the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration should be urgently DECREASED from the current circa 390 parts per million (ppm) to a safe and sustainable level of 300-350 ppm. Unfortunately, world governments are getting their advice from corporate lobbyists and want to INCREASE atmospheric greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution. In particular, in climate criminal Apartheid Australia, the Developed World's worst per capita GHG polluter, recently proposed a bipartisan plan to permanently exclude agriculture from any GHG cap, thereby committing to over 50% of its current annual GHG pollution FOREVER. Climate criminal corporations and countries should be held responsible for the climate damage - as suggested to Congress by America's top climate scientist Dr James Hansen in relation to CEOs who deliberately mislead the public over the worsening climate emergency.

The evolution of global weather trends towards ever more natural catastrophes is a growing concern, as illustrated by the surge in frequency of hurricanes and ice sheet melting.

But the most frightening thing is that this evolution has such an inertia that, even if suddenly man disappeared from Earth and all human activities ceased, certain phenomenons would be irreversible and could not be offset. Even more frightening, the situation would keep on worsening for years before making a halt, the reason for this being that some gases take time before they really become dangerous for the environment.

So honestly those conspiracy arguments may be true, but I think that people should keep in mind the fact that we are going towards a totally uncontrollable situation where each country acts solely as if we were not all in the same boat. Let's see what comes out of the Copenhagen summit.

Good points from the undertaker. I still wish people would refrain from using conspiracy theory in this debate though. Co2 is still nothing more than a trace element in the atmosphere and there seems to be no consensus on its working on the greenhouse effect. There has never been a conclusive study which has proved this link. Many serious researchers are now looking at the influence of other gasses in the atmosphere,especially methane. Conclusive Satellite data has shown that the phenomenon known as global warming stopped in 1998 when world temperatures levelled off. The IPCC predicted that co2 levels rise in step with temperature increase.Since 1998 co2 levels have continued to increase( in 1958 315 parts per million in 2008 385 parts per million) although we are now experiencing global cooling.This contradicts the model and theory put forward by the IPCC. This warming trend in the last years of the last century has been attributed by many scientists (not conclusively agreed upon I hasten to add for the quick to accuse among you) to the fact that sun spots and solar activity in the last 24 years of the 20th century worked in combination with changing ocean currents to create this phenomenon. Since 2002 no possible computer simulated scenario put forward by the IPCC and its`supporters have correlated with any real world data and the predictions are way off the mark.

The impact of CO2 on climate has been studied for over 100 years, and there is no doubt that it has a greenhouse effect. It is the only view that is actually consistent with the known physics and chemistry of the atmosphere. The effect of CO2 is important because the CO2 molecule is the only significant atmospheric molecule that absorbs in the 15-micron band of infrared, so even though there is lots of water vapor, the CO2 effect can show up. Indeed, a 100% increase in CO2 concentration results in an additional radiative forcing of 3.8 Watts/meter^2, which is better than 1% of solar power; estimates of the increase of global average temperature due to this range from 2 to 4 degrees C. We are currently at 35% CO2 increase over the pre-industrial period, and continuing to rise fast.

The "it hasn't warmed in 10 years" is an artefact: Due to the El-Nino oscillation, 1998 was an extremely hot year, so everything looks down from there. But 5 of the past 10 years have still been hotter than anything in the last 400 years, at least. To understand the climate, you have to look at trends, not a year-to-year picture; and on trend, the last 150 years have been running very hot upwards, by the timescales for natural climate change.

When we see the oceans acidifying, harming coral reefs; North-American pine forests dying from the devastation of pine-beetles that are no longer killed by the cold of winter; further and further melt-back of the north polar icecap, promising an ice-free northwest passage by 2030; birds migrating further and further north each decade; with this kind of news of real events emerging almost weekly, you have to have your head in the sand to miss global warming in action. Overall, consequences will be rather negative: Flooding in warm coastal regions (Bangladesh), water shortages in India and China, dust-bowling in the western U.S.; leading to food shortages and large-scale emigration and concommittant effects.

The average rate of increase of global average temperature over this period is about 0.1 degrees C per decade. This may not seem like much, but it means that your climate isotherm is running northward at the rate of 6 km per decade, or climbing upwards at 15 meters per decade. That doesn't work well for trees that can't move; or for animals that have territorial boundaries (like the boundaries of parks, or shorelines).

I don't doubt that any of that is true. I have no way personally of knowing. Everything you say sounds reasonable.. So no conspiracy theories here..

I do however think it preposterous that we in Germany should be paying exorbitantly inflated energy prices when the rest of the world is doing whatever the hell they want. The short of it - there's nothing we can do against global warming.. The scale of civilizational changes needed to deal with something so big could ever only be brought about through some kind of global cataclysm - most likely war on a massive scale never yet seen. So global warming, sure.., is a problem, but scarcity and ever increasing competition of natural resources, specifically fossil fuels, are FAR more pressing things to be worried about IMO.

I always read that every year a chunk of the Amazon the size of Belgium is destroyed and converted to farmland. A bunch of nice "democratic" "initiatives" and bullshit Copenhagen like conferences or whatever won't change that. 100 million fewer Brasilians might.. That's where we're heading.. That's just a miniscule silly example. Wait for peak oil and the real oil wars to come thereafter. Then it won't be 100 million Brasilians, but a billion Chinese.. There IS no way to peacefully distribute ever dimishing fossil fuel supplies among seven billion people. And the notion that we can just give up fossil fuels, and nuclear.., is just stupid talk. Especially in Germany for ex, where what, 1 in seven people's jobs or something like that have some connection to the auto industry(in a country with an already high level of unemployment..)

Listening to some BS report on CNBC right now, where Nike is concerned about "reducing its carbon footprint".. Please.. What, all Nike stripes will be green now, or what?... It's all such a crock..

Water vapour accounts for 90-95 % of the 33 deg. C increase in the Earth's temperature attributable to the atmosphere. CO2 accounts for 4.2-8.4 %, or 2 deg. C - in other words, the majority of the non-water warming, but a small proportion of the total.Actually, by using historical data and comparing the temperature increase with the CO2 increase and then extrapolating we get a figure of a 1 deg. C temp. increase if the CO2 concentration doubles from pre-industrial levels. And if it doubles again the temperature increase will be less (Beer's law). The IPCC's 2 to 4 deg. C rise is alarmism and does not fit with historical data.You aren't making sense here. If the oceans get warmer they drive off CO2 (Boyle's law) which forms carbonic acid when dissolved in water, therefore they'll become less acidic. And it has been 5 deg. C warmer than this before and corals and the rest are still with us (Eemian period, 140,000 years ago - I haven't linked to Wikipedia's article on the subject as the warmists have got at it).Apart from the last decade, you mean?

Hear hear Herr Dinksbumps.Copenhagen will not add anything to the debate,only more spending and panic making based on what they believe to be unrefutable fact. I actually said in my last post that co2 levels are increasing already but it is still such a miniscule part of our atmosphere. Climate change is happening , IMO (no qoutes or figures here) global warming is not. many people confuse or are confused by the deliberate interchanging between the 2 terms. It is indeed the biggest failure of the IPCC not to look at long term trends.Most of their work tries to fit what has happened to future predictions from it`s simulation programmes instead of analysing real data.Data from satellites since 1998 has indeed shown that the global warming trend has been reversed. this is a matter of record and is open information to both sides of the debate.

Herr Dinksbumps:

"There's nothing we can do": One country acting alone can't do anything. That is why there has to be an international cooperative effort. Nobody wants to be the one holding the bag. What it really takes is a change in power-generation technologies. It is not impossible, it is just very very challenging.

As you point out concerning peak oil, we are eventually going to have to get away from oil anyway, because it will run out. Why not do it sooner rather than later, and avoid the climate-change problems?

Wheel:

- CO2 is only a small % of the amount of greenhouse gases, water is much more common. But, as stated before, CO2 hits a spectral gap at 15-micron wavelength that water vapor does not catch. So it still turns out that adding a factor of 2 (+ 100%) of atmospheric CO2 adds a radiative forcing of 3.8 W/m^2, equivalent to more than 1% of the solar flux.

- The other aspect is that the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere is not appreciably changing (although, in fact, it will increase with increasing temperature). The atmospheric water vapor is in equilibrium with the oceans. Whereas, when we add CO2 to the atmosphere, it stays there for several hundred years.

- The historical data alone don't guide, because they have to be understood in the context of the atmospheric events that have been going on. From the 1940s to the 1970s, the dirtying of the atmosphere by sulfate aerosols from unscrubbed burning of coal had a net cooling effect, as if there were additional clouds. Calculations that take into account solar variations, volcanoes, sulfate aerosols and CO2 match the industrial era's temperature history pretty well. The IPCC's work is based on the published scientific literature, and it's the best we know. Beer's law, in particular, is not the right way to understand the greenhouse effect: It is an issue of radiative transfer theory, not a matter of absorption.

- There will be both the effect of increasing the CO2 in the atmosphere (the gas in contact with the oceans), which will increase the equilibrium concentration in the ocean (Henry's law) as well as the effect of warming (which will decrease the solubility). Given that the CO2 has already risen 35% in 150 years, acidification is going to win.

- The reason why you can't draw much comfort from the oceans being warmer before was that it took thousands and thousands of years for big temperature shifts to take place before, and now we're forcing it to do this on human timescales. Evolutionary adaptation doesn't happen fast enough to cope with that. Biologists are now talking about preserving coral-reef samples on ice, and also trying to raise them in aquaria, so they might someday be able to re-seed the ocean. Target date for coral-reef wipe-out is about 2050.

- The average rate for climate change is calculated on long-term trends. Climate oscillation is too variable over a few years to get proper trends, because there are multi-year oscillations to noise-up the signal. The El-Nino oscillation is well-known, and notorious for producing extremely hot weather (which explains 1998). If you look at the trends over the last 150 years, it becomes clearer. See, for example,

http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/?src=/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/figspm-4.htm

Barkingmad:

- CO2: As stated before, it doesn't take much, because what matters is the % increase of CO2, not the ratio of CO2 to water vapor. The calculations show that a factor of 2 gives 3.8 W/m^2 of additional heating; the solar flux incident just above the atmosphere is about 344 W/m^2, so this is more than 1%.

- The IPCC results come from more than 100 years of study, discussion and measurements. The warming is expected on the basis of straightforward (though difficult) radiative-transfer physics, on the basis of which they have arrived at the radiative forcing stated just above. The reaction of the entire earth towards this forcing results in the actual heating: This is obviously complex, because the Earth is the most complicated thing on the Earth.

- It is NOT the case that the warming trend has been "reversed". What is the case is that the trends are defined over decadal periods, not from year to year. Trying to figure out the trend from the year-to-year signal is like trying to figure out the water-level trend in a bathtub when the kids are jumping in and out: You will have to average for a long time to notice that what is really going on is that the water tap is running. Look at the graphs indicated above: There is a lot of jitter in the graph, but when you add together both the natural inputs (solar variation and volcanoes) with human-generated (CO2 and sulfate aerosols), the gray envelope captures the red-graph measurements quite well. In particular, you will see that if you take into account only a] the non-human inputs, you have a big divergence between the envelope and the red graph starting in the 1980s. And if you take into account only b] the human inputs, the model runs too cool in the 1950s. Include both inputs c], and it is quite a good match.

I also think Herr bumpsidumps is being a bit pessimistic.

Take a look at these figures:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8380106.stm

It is clear that there is a lot of pressure on developing countries at the moment. Global warming is on the agenda!!

So please let's avoid making silly comments like "we have to pay for this, developing countries don't". Diplomacy is also crucial and the leaders of developing countries understand the dangers of climate change.

Agreed. But H2O is also the major greenhouse gas. CO2 is a minor factor.Trenberth et al give a figure of 26% for CO2 contribution to warming. This is way too high. Others agree at about the 5% mark.It will go up. But so will cloud cover, which will increase albedo.Only the IPCC thinks the half-life of atmospheric CO2 is hundreds of years. Geologists think it's 5-10 years. In fact, if it's not a short per…[/quote]If you want to discard historical data your models had better be rock solid, and all data and code available for public scrutiny. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.Need a bit more than this really. Beer's law is a good approximation for a lot of atmospheric behaviour. If there was no absorption there wouldn't be any warming, and the more absorption, the more warming.Yep, sorry, that was wrong - it is Henry's law which says that the amount of gas dissolved in a liquid decreases as temperature increases. Still, I was correct about the effect of the law. The ocean will get less acidic as dissolved CO2 is driven off by increased ocean temperature. Indeed, this effect has been shown in the past, as it's responsible for the increase in CO2 levels which follows increased temperature in the past.Past temperature changes have been very rapid. See the Vostok cores, terminations I & II.

(attached image)The Eemian was 3 degrees C (not 5, that was from memory) warmer than now and corals survived.Yep. Which is why the only way to falsify the AGW is to wait. For decades. In fact, at least 100 years. Otherwise it's not falsifiable and hence does not qualify as a scientific theory.

Wheel:

- CO2 vs. H20: The point is that the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere is substantially constant, because the atmosphere is in equilibrium with the oceans, so (to 1st order) there is no secular trend in the concentration of H2O in the atmosphere. The increase in the greenhouse gases is mostly CO2, so that's where the concern is focused.

- Effect of increase of H2O: Most climatologists seem to think that the increase in H20 due to warming will be a positive feedback, increasing the greenhouse effect. A few (Lindzen and a couple of collaborators) think that there will be enough increased clouding to provide a negative feedback. Neither idea is crazy, but at the moment Lindzen's idea is a minority opinion. In any case, it is a 2nd-order effect: to 1st-order we can approximate the amount of H2O vapor as substantially constant.

- Residence time of CO2: When you state this to be a few years, I believe you are talking about the lifetime of a molecule before it interacts with something and gets temporarily absorbed into plants, the ocean, etc. However, that is not a particularly useful number when one is considering the time taken to change the concentration of the CO2 in the atmosphere as a whole, because just as some CO2 molecules get absorbed into the water, other CO2 molecules get evicted; so those processes cancel out. In order to reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, the CO2 has to go someplace that it's not coming back from. The main mechanism: CO2 is taken up by oceanic critters called foraminafera, that incorporate the molecules in their exoskeletons. When they die, they drift to the bottom of the ocean. Over millennia, they are covered over and buried, and "baked" into carbonaceous rock. Overall, this is rather a slow process, but the sticking point is the uptake of CO2 by foraminafera. The timescale is generally quoted as being several hundred to 1000 years.

- "No point to reduce because..." Yes, by analogy, since you won't get the nutritional benefit of eating for a good 30 minutes after going to the trouble of eating, it's hardly worth the trouble. Much more sensible to simply fast to death.

- Historical data: The point is that you can't just look at the data and extrapolate behavior without having an understanding of what is going on. The behavior of the climate is not determined by one parameter, but depends on many influences. If you try to pretend that it can all be pinned on one variable, CO2, then you will misunderstand the dependence on all of them (including the CO2). The code and data are available in many cases, although if you aren't trained to use it, it won't be very usable. That's why people write papers describing their measurements, methodology and results. That's the way science is normally done: People READ ABOUT other peoples' experiments, and DO their own.

- Beer's law: The explanation of the greenhouse effect works is actually quite different from the high-school explanation. In particular, the idea that the upward radiation dies away exponentially is just wrong, because it does not take into account that the upward beam of radiation is also fed by CO2 through which it is passing. To give a brief idea: If you imagine a beam of infrared light radiated from the ground towards space, as you examine the beam, you find that its intensity is reduced by scattering (absorption by CO2 and re-radiation out of the beam) but also fed by scattering (of heat radiation, off the CO2 molecules). If you consider the case that the atmosphere is at a constant temperature, the intensity of the beam eventually settles down to the amount appropriate (via the blackbody formula) to the temperature of the CO2, for the specific frequency of interest (which in this case is 15-micron wavelength). The case becomes more complicated when the atmospheric temperature is changing along the direction of propagation; in that case, the intensity of the beam reflects the temperature a bit earlier in the beam (lower by the amount of optical depth 1). The end result is that intensity of the beam at ground level is highest, and the intensity at the "top of the atmosphere" (basically, only within optical depth = 1 of outer space) is lowest; and that intensity reflects the temperature at the top of the atmosphere, it is not simply an exponential decay from the ground-level intensity, as one would naively expect by application of Beer's law.

This is how an increase in CO2 changes the greenhouse effect: When more CO2 is added, the point at which the optical depth is 1 (relative to outer space) moves further out and up: You can say that the photosphere for 15-micron radiation has been expanded. But because its altitude has been increased, the temperature is lower (due to the adiabatic temperature lapse rate), so the final beam intensity at the top of the atmosphere is lower than it was before. Therefore, the cooling effect of the infrared radiation has been reduced. However, the incoming radiation from the sun has not been affected, so the change in the radiative forcing is net positive. As stated previously, the calculated amount of radiative forcing is logarithmic in a change in concentration, so a 2X in concentration gives an increased forcing of 3.8 W/m^2.

So it's not a matter of "no absorption", but of more going on than simple absorption.

- Ocean acidification: The point is that the concentration of carbonic acid in the water will be determined by both factors: temperature and CO2 concentration in the gaseous phase. If you fix the CO2 concentration and increase the water temperature, the dissolved carbonic acid will decrease. If you fix the temperature but increase the gaseous CO2 concentration, the dissolved carbonic acid will increase. In this case, both the temperature is increasing and the CO2 concentration is increasing; but since the CO2 increase is already more than 35%, and the temperature increase is only 1 degree (out of about 280, so about 0.3%), I think it's clear that the net result will be increased acidification. The reason the past is not a guide in this case is that in the past the increased CO2 was driven out by the increase in temperature, but in this case it is the reverse: the CO2 is driving the temperature, because a new element is involved: HUMAN BEINGS are burning fossil fuels to increase the CO2. That's the point: We are doing something that has not been done before. It's not hard to see what will happen, but it is new.

- Sharp transitions: Termination I looks like it took about 4000 years, Termination II looks like about 6000 years. Whereas we are looking at the possibility of changes on the order of 4 degrees in a couple hundred years. Plus, when you look at the Vostock temperatures, remember that these are local temperatures, derived from oxygen-isotope ratios. If the polar temperature changes are greater than the more tropical regions (which I suspect is the case; it certainly is now), not only the timescale was much more gentle, but the range. In any case, the coral specialists are worried: See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8324954.stm .

- "Real science must wait 100 years." I'm sorry, but that's a schoolboy's definition of science. Real scientists do what they need to do to find out what the heck is going on. And there is often more than one way to skin the cat. Inasmuch as the confidence in the theory comes from the consistency with the rest of physics, one doesn't have to wait for the reaction of the whole Earth to see if the theory makes sense: there are other places to check the explanation. According to the theory discussed above, even while the lower atmosphere is warming up, the upper atmosphere (stratosphere) should be cooling, because it is being "deprived" of infrared radiation by the increase in CO2. By contrast, I think that every alternative mechanism propounded to explain the warming would lead to a warming of both the lower and the upper atmosphere. I believe this point has been confirmed.

Wether one believes in a man-made global warming conspiracy or not the central question of wether the small amount of warming experienced over the last 30 years is unusual? It is indisputable that the earth was warmer than today during the Medieval Warm Period (MEP). This is why Greenland was "Green". This fact is not only backed up by the ice core data but also historical records as well and is one of the reasons why Mann et al tried to remove the MEP from the IPCC temperature trends in the infamous hockey stick graph which is now discredited. So what the IPCC now have to do is rely on computer models to predict future climate trends or scenarios. They use the word scenarios because there are no probabilities associated with these scenarios. How a computer model can predict a chaotic system 100 years in advance is actually beyond belief and the arrogance of the computer modelers is believing they can do so is even more astonishing. Computer modeling is a black art can be manipulated to give what ever result that you like. The fact the models have not predicted the static or slightly declining warming trend since 1998 is case in point. Yes the world is warming and no one is disputing this but the man-made component is vastly exaggerated. It is also emerging that the temperature record data has been "massaged" by the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University, which is used to feed the IPCC reports. Please read the following link to a respected newspaper:

My link

If you Google "Climategate" you will find much more. The story is still only a week old so is developing rapidly now. The hacked emails from the Climate Research Unit are now shedding light on the corrupt and closed peer review process of climate change science and highlights the tribal mentality amongst the pro global warming lobby that has lost touch with science (and in my nature their own credibility). Global warming is about politics and nothing else.

I don't mean it as a personal attack - really..., but I think your position is very, VERY naive.

I just went in to take a leak, and yes turned on three lights on my way to do it. I could have managed without the lights, but there would have been a risk of pissing on the floor.. I do believe the time will come in my lifetime where that risk will be part of everyday life. But I just don't think the gov't should suck any more of my money away, in order to put that point off by ..., I don't know, six months..

I'm less interested in the science, and more interested in the human nature involved. Yes, I am a pessimist(studied History.. Who could and not be??.. Thinking you can look the other direction and everything will be OK is utterly, completely naive..) We should expect the worst IMO, and work to achieve something better than that. But what I see happening is a bunch of fruit-cake politicians(especially in fxxxing Brussels.. - spit..) taking ever more of my money (which represents my life-blood.. Sounds funny I know - but it is true.. I don't work for the hell of it with a smile on my face every day as my alarm clock goes off..)for things, for which I have absolutely no faith that it will lead to any benefit for me whatsoever. Which brings us back to human nature. I for one don't even like the EU, because from what I understand it means rich countries like Germany have to pay for poor countries like Portugal or Poland to increase their standard of living, what.., so that they'll be able to buy more VW's than they could before?? Has that really happened?? If so, will it continue?.. Whatever, I don't go to work to increase the standard of living in Poland or Portugal. I live in East Germany and see how many people have to live on stupidly low incomes here.. Life here isn't exactly rosy for millions of Germans. Yet Germany pays for Portugal and Poland?.. Whatever, that's getting a bit - but not completely... - off topic...

Self interest has ALWAYS ruled - and ALWAYS will rule - the world. Period. So whatever we try to do, that has to be kept in mind. The last major movement to pretend that human nature doesn't exist was communism. And however left-leaning you are, you'd have to be a nutcase to think Stalin was good - or communism at all really..

I don't think people realize how big seven billion - the human population - is... Who here thinks we can just keep on going(reproducing, laissez faire..)? Who here knows how to determine who gets to keep on going, and who doesn't?? Nobody does - and war is how it will be determined. Where do we draw the line in telling Brasil to stop devouring the Amazon? Yes, we can stop buying Brasilian products, but then they'll use the land for something else - they have 300 million mouths to feed - and growing probably.. The FAR more pressing point about peak oil is NOT that we're gonna run out, but that we're gonna fight over it like hell before it does. Water, food, oil, gas, etc.. ALL absolutely necessary to fuel our entire lifestyle - no, lifestyle is too small a term - our civilization. Our civilization is an oil junkie, and we'll go to all kinds of murderous lenths to keep the fix going(I don't like that metaphor - our civilization is not an abberation.. It's a huge historical achievement, with, like everything, a huge price..) That's just natural. To pretend or hope for one second that we can kick the habit is utter poppycock. Who here can REALLY imagine a time when flying will be history? Where maybe even long-distance driving will be? Rationed electricity - or heat?? Only cold showers.. - in dirty water.. Who here wants to take a cold shower in dirty water one day before they have to? I don't think anybody really appreciates the magnitude of those kinds of civilizational upheavals.. There's going to be some serious conflict going on to prevent those kinds of things, to protect national interests, etc.. THAT is the thrust of human nature(and not only human..), so to think we all have to just get along and get on the same page and all work together to solve this big bad problem.... - sorry, over the long term it's about as realistic as communism.

StuSney:

- Medieval Warm Period: It is NOT indisputable that the Earth was warmer during the MWP. As I see it, the MWP warm areas were more limited in extent. A nice website reviews the most recent status on this discussion, with links to supporting studies, at http://www.skepticalscience.com/Was-there-a-Medieval-Warm-Period.html :

"The Medieval Warm Period spanned 950 to 1250 AD and corresponded with warmer temperatures in certain regions. During this time, ice-free seas allowed the Vikings to colonize Greenland. North America experienced prolonged droughts. So just how hot was the Medieval Warm Period? Was it warmer than now? A new paper Global Signatures and Dynamical Origins of the Little Ice Age and Medieval Climate Anomaly (Mann et al 2009) (see here for press release) addresses this question, focusing on regional temperature change during the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age."

"What does this all mean? To claim the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than today is to narrowly focus on a few regions that showed unusual warmth. However, when we look at the broader picture, we see that the Medieval Warm Period was a regional phenomenon with other regions showing strong cooling. Globally, temperatures during the Medieval Period were less than today."

- The continued harping on the "hockey stick": The problems with that graph (a mistake in applying a new statistical technique, by a graduate student) were fixed ten years ago, and the basic point of it (that the temperatures are higher than they have been for at least 400 years, and probably for 1300 years) is accepted. The "skeptic" community keeps beating it to death because they've never found anything else to contribute; but it's never been more than one line of evidence for climate history. Here's a review of the controversy: http://www.alexlockwood.net/2008/08/20/hockey-stick-grab/ .

- Computer models: Guess what, computer models are just computer programs. Remove them from science today, and there isn't much you would be able to do. I don't understand why skeptics are so scared of computers: Without them, your car wouldn't even start anymore! If you want to understand the science and the models, you'll have to do some reading: I have a page reviewing certain books, at: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0497116/board/thread/64426867?d=64426867#64426867 .

- Climate science is complicated, but the people working on it do so out of interest in arriving at the scientific truth. Otherwise, if they were so interested in money, they'd make a lot more becoming programmers (and all of them can program). So the idea that someone is going to take a reduced standard of living in order to promote some political agenda is silly, really. And, yeah, scientists are a bit arrogant. Do you believe that in the sixties, some of them thought it would be possible to land on the Moon? Unbelievably arrogant.

- The models are designed to calculate trends, not weather: They are not dynamical models, they operate on averaged-over influences. So they don't pick up oscillations, like the El-Nino/La-Nina cycle, that caused 1998 to be especially hot (a peak year) and are now reducing the temperature to below trend. The estimates of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) are complex calculations, but I don't what basis on which you can say they are "exaggerated": Where is YOUR crystal ball?

- ClimateGate: This is kind of embarrassing in showing the human side (sometimes kind of mean-spirited) of science, but doesn't really change any scientific conclusions. Most of what you have been reading about is taken out of context, because a lot of things are left out in email discussion among colleagues. There has been a lot of media focus on "tricks" that seem to have been used to emphasize aspects of a graph. There is a lot of detail that could be examined; but if you actually cared about what was really intended by these exchanges, you could look at the beginning of: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack-context/ . Gavin Schmidt knows many of the people involved, and provides detailed explanations for many of the points that some people are running around screaming about. Most of it is actually quite innocent; some of it is over-personalization of concerns for scientific integrity (They got very very upset by the publication of the Soon & Baliunas paper, which was extraordinarily bad science (many of the authors of the papers referenced in that paper wrote back to explain how the authors had misinterpreted their work) published through the legerdemain, to avoid peer reivew, of the editor of one journal; and they discussed what they could do to prevent that sort of thing from happening again.); I am a bit troubled by the handling of some of the freedom-of-information requests, that appear to reflect bad judgment. But the bottom line is that none of the results or conclusions of studies are affected at all by the media fuss.

- "A respected paper": The Wall Street Journal is a respected business newspaper, but their material on climate studies is from the review/editorial side, and it has been consistently wrong: wrong on actual black-and-white facts, as well as completely one-sided on interpretation. Even the scientists they put on from time to time (like Lindzen) feel free to misinterpret things in WSJ op-eds that they would never say in their scientific writings, without fear of being questioned - since the WSJ doesn't accept questions on op-eds.

HerrDinksbumps:

There are distinct issues:

- The situation we are facing: global warming due to emissions of CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels over the last 150 years;

- What can be done technologically to forestall the consequences of current trends;

- What would be needed institutionally to implement the technological solutions.

In principle, the question of what we do and how we do it is separate from the issue of what is happening and why. In practice, people who are focusing on the third issue are frightened by the political implications and, in some cases, the harm to their bottom lines, are trying to INVALIDATE the first question. It is actually well documented that some of the major oil companies, like ExxonMobil, have spent millions funding "skeptical" science that is not really science: It is similar to the "skeptical" science that was employed by the Tobacco Institute to discourage concern for the harm of smoking - and some of the very same skeptical scientists (like S. Fred Singer) are involved, having made marvelous transformations from tobacco-protecting "science" to oil-protecting "science". Seems weird? It is - but the funding is in the public record.

My primary interest has been in the science, because it has many interesting aspects, some of which I have the intellectual tools to examine. And my conclusion is that there are large sections of it that are very well determined - and the remaining uncertainties are by no means guaranteed to break in our favor. Nature, as the physicist Richard Feynman famously said, cannot be fooled; nor can it be bribed. It is to our advantage to unemotionally understand and face our actual situation as well as possible, if we see ourselves in any way as responsible for our own futures, and that of our children and their children.

I also appreciate the fact that the human issue, What shall we do about the situation?, is actually the much harder problem than the scientific question, What is going on? As a matter of requirements:

- Ultimately, we will need a solution that is based on sustainability, or else it will not last.

- Ideally, we will preserve the biodiversity of our planet from devastation: Otherwise, we will not only be degrading our world, but rendering the livings systems (human and non-human) unstable against the unexpected.

- Practically, we need a solution that does not make politically unacceptable demands on humanity.

These points seem pretty clear to me. However, that does not mean that there actually IS a solution that satisfies all these requirements. I am not sure there is the political will, or sufficient sense of personal responsibility to generate the political will, to push the world to find and implement a solution, even if one is possible.

To be honest, it reminds me of 2003, when Bush was pushing to convince the world that Iraq should be invaded. In recent days, it has come out that Blair's government knew a year beforehand that Bush's administration had already decided to invade; but at the time, my perceptions went through phases: At first I thought that it was a threat, intended to get Saddam Hussein to back down; but then it became clearer and clearer that Bush was not willing to accept "Yes" for an answer, and Hussein was too diplomatically inept (or possibly afraid to show weakness in front of his internal rivals) to realize that he wasn't going to be able ride through the storm; and that the US was moving into a war mode, with the compliance of the news media, the rise of Fox News. It was a sick feeling, watching the country hypnotize itself and slow-walk down the road to war. I'm not a politician, but I wondered if I should do anything, or what I could do.

In the end, I myself didn't do anything. On the day of the invasion, I was hit by the conviction that the US would be in Iraq for about 15 years (not the ridiculous 15 weeks or 15 months claimed by Rumsfeld). We are now on year 6; and although the new administration wants out, I don't believe anyone believes the US presence will be far from the scene for a very long time. I'm sticking with my original timetable.

I'm getting the same sick feeling about the global warming problem. It is completely clear to me that the problem is real, and cannot be argued away; and that there are an awful lot of people in the room who don't want to deal with it, and thus don't want to believe it. (People who would never worry about the aerodynamics of the airplanes they're using to go on vacation now feel the need to second-guess climate-prediction software, and clamor to have non-experts untrained in the field to examine its inner workings.) I don't know for sure that there IS a good technological solution, although there are promising directions. I do know that if we don't start TRYING to do something about it, we will not find any solutions.

The need to look at climate change, whether warming or cooling, over a long period is exactly my point. I fail to see the consistency with the IPPC`s claims on this point. It can be generally agreed upon that the average temperature has increased by around 1 degree C since the mid 19th century and that there has been around a 30% increase in co2 over this time. Nothing that the IPCC has put forward has proven that this increase is man-made. We all seem to agree that the co2 component of the atmosphere is minimal. When you consider the man-made contribution to this minimal component (around 3-5%) the alarmism is unfathomable. The increase in animal and human population since the mid 1800`s has also an effect on the minimal total.

If the IPCC models are correct,global warming reduces the temperature difference between the poles and the equator. When you have less difference in temperature,you have less excitation of tropical storms,not more. Sir John Houghton of the IPCC claimed that a warmer world would have more evaporation, with latent heat providing more energy for disturbances. The problem with this is that the ability of evaporation to drive tropical storms relies not only on temperature but humidity as well and calls for drier,less humid air.Claims for starkly higher temps are based on there being more humidity not less. Hardly a case for more storminess with global warming!! Science hijacked by politics,it is unfortunately very difficult to separate the 2 on this issue.

Well said Neal..

I for one don't doubt the science. I've read about the tobacco connection, and believe that vast amounts of money have been spent to spread misinformation to make people doubt science. I believe all that. I as an insignificant individual in the big picture cannot say one way or the other what will happen with the climate. But if anything I'm inclined to believe in climate change/global warming/whatever, because I know the simplest fact of life is, you can't get something for nothing, so it's only natural that we as a species will have a price to pay for all our progress, our lifestyle, and our unwillingness to really plan for the future.

All that said, I do feel like I understand human nature, human history, and human ignorance. And all that taken together indeed makes me a pessimist, especially in the face of something as huge as the future of the climate and its implications for humanity. Hell, remove global warming from the equation, and I'd be equally pessimistic. Seven billion and going, and still enough nukes around to destroy it all a hundred times over..* We as a species, thanks to religion mostly.., refuse to acknowledge that we are part of nature, and not separate from it. Being part of nature frankly means being part and parcel of a bloody, violent competition to survive - no, not only to survive, but to thrive. But we think we can all get along, everybody has the right to live, to eat, now to drive a car, eat a steak, etc.. We do all kinds of genetic engineering to produce the best cows, pigs, race-horses, tomatoes, corn, whatever.. But we take a laissez faire approach with ourselves, and let anybody reproduce as much as they want, to hell with where it all leads. We have no aim as a species. Because we can't get over WWII, anything to do with such topics leads to a kind of Godwin's Law-induced ethical dead-end. Well, wearing blinders into the future like that is not going to lead to a nice future where 11 billion people all have enough to eat, enough water, a car, and god knows whatever else.

I for one want a warm shower every day. And, strange as it sounds, eventually people will die for it..

People forget - nature is very, very cruel. Just watch the discovery channel. That little baby gazelle being ripped to shreds on the plains of Africa is not entertainment, or some exception to an otherwise peaceful rule of existence(which does not exist, needless to say..) It is the rule. We like to pretend that it's not, and that willed ignorance is precisely what will prevent us - well, at least some of us - from getting beyond all these issues...

Just read in the paper that outdoor cafe heaters are the new controversial thing. First the smokers get kicked out of the cafes(I have no problem with that..) Now they can't have a heater out front for their smoke breaks. Ha ha.. The law of unintended consequences is hilarious.. A minor little thing, no doubt. But after peak oil if fighting a war is the difference between ?3 a liter petrol, and ?10 a liter petrol..., well, we'll see how that works out..

* A VERY interesting topic IMO - the sheer destructive force of the world's nuclear arsenal. What we dropped on Hiroshima is literally a drop in the bucket.. No, a drop in the sea..

It is important context to the argument, which is why I mentioned it and it's worth repeating. H2O is responsible for 90-95 % the warming effect, and even Trenberth agrees it is at least 74 %. And the proportion of CO2 emissions due to man are a fraction of the total.Well, we already have 100-150 years' worth of data about temperature & CO2 levels. Having been actual measurements of the entire climate system, we can say that feedbacks have already been incorporated and show no signs of running out of control.Incorrect, I mean the half-life of the concentration increase due to emissions. The highest estimate after the IPCC's is 38 years, and that model includes current sink rates.The historical data includes all the other factors you mention, and as such is an important sanity check for climate models. As I understand it, the vast majority of the IPCC's climate models fail to match the data when hindcasting, even before the last 10 years' hiatus in temperature rises is considered.[My bold] Are you serious? Please tell me you're not. The point of scientific publication is that independent scientists can check the work of others by replicating the experiment. Getting something published in a peer reviewed journal is the start not the end of the process, which is the basic means of catching and preventing scientific fraud. In order for this to work, materials and methods have to be specified, in the case of climate science that means and data and code have to be made available. The warmists have spent the last 20 years dodging requests for code and data, in some cases 'losing' or (apparently) deleting it. This is the point of the recent CRU hoo-hah. After years of trying by normal means, the sceptics have had to resort to Freedom of Information requests. Since the institutions are publicly funded they are obliged to hand over data, and the leaks demonstrate prima facie evidence of criminal conduct or conspiracy or incitement, in that it's illegal to delete data that's the subject of an FOI request.Haven't got much time at the moment so I'm going to snip a bit here. I'd like to come back to this.That's the times for the total transitions, which are of the order of 12 deg. C. As you can see, there are several periods where temperatures rose almost vertically, as in 2 deg. C within a couple of decades, and such rapid changes have been noted in IPCC reports. In other words, rapid changes are nothing new, and are not evidence of the climate being in uncharted territory.Let me repeat: for a theory to be scientific, it must be falsifiable. Global warming doesn't get a pass, indeed because the suggested responses would mean the biggest change in human behaviour since the invention of agriculture, it's even more important that protocols are followed.

I suggested 100 years because the warmists are always saying that you need at least 30 years to spot a trend. Therefore confirmation would have to wait a fair bit longer than that.

You suggest that individual parts of the theory can be shown to be correct. That may be true. However, climate is a system with many inputs, some of which are not understood or even known about. Climate models have shown themselves woefully inadequate as a means of falsification. They fail the hindcast test, and do not account for the recent warming hiatus. In short, they cannot be relied upon.

Wheel I agree with your sentiments exactly. We are talking about planet earth and a time span that is unimaginable in comparison to the 150 years called in question by the IPCC.This is like a milisecond when you consider the whole evolution of the planet. my biggest problem with IPCC data is that they take global warming caused by co2 increases as a given, they brook no discussion on this point and rather than spend time and money on either really proving or disproving this theory they base future predictions and policy recommendations on something that not concrete : (ie the major impact of man on climate change). Real scientists should remain impartial and evaluate the real data and also not be so agressive to other eminent peers who beg to differ.

Sometimes I also despair that man is arrogant enough to believe that through more spending and legislation we can somehow have a major impact on the evolution of our wonderful planet.

Barkingmad, #31:

- Increase in CO2: It is quite clear that the increase in CO2 is man-made: studies of the carbon isotope ratios in Vostock ice-core bubbles show dramatic changes over the last 150 years, indicating that the source of increase in CO2 is due to carbon that has NOT been exposed to cosmic rays that generate different isotopes of carbon. (This is the same general concept behind the carbon-dating mechanism: the carbon in a critter that has died is no longer circulating in the atmosphere & ocean, so its isotope ratios are not the same as for a living critter.) The obvious solution is that the new CO2 is generated from the burning of fossil fuels, which have been out of circulation for millions of years. Records and calculations show that about half of the fossil-fuel CO2 is in the atmosphere, the rest seems to be in the ocean.

- Impact of CO2 negligible? Not really: The mass of a bullet is small, but it can kill if well-aimed. In the same way, regardless of how small CO2 is as a fraction of the total gas in the atmosphere, the impact of a factor of 2X in CO2 concentration is to increase radiative forcing by 3.8 W/m^2, which exceeds 1% of the solar energy flux just above the atmosphere. This is extremely well accepted. A 1% change is quite significant; we are already at 35% increase over pre-industrial by now, and at the moment CO2 emissions are still increasing as a global total. Under a business-as-usual approach, reaching the 2X by the year 2100 is quite possible. This is the basis for the scenario of reaching +2 C by that date; and even +4 is not out of the question, due to the complexities of the calculation. This is not alarmism, this is the best estimate people can make. If you have a better prediction, please present and publish the workings of your crystal ball.

- Tropical storms: I am not an expert on the impact of GW on tropical storms, and I very strongly suspect that you are not, as well. It is sufficient for me to know that the particular issue about whether the impact of GW has shown up in the tropical storm record is a current topic of controversy among experts, and so any claim about knowing the answer by non-experts is a waste of time. Lindzen has made the argument that you quote, and endless websites have posted it: But the fact remains that a large number of true experts on this matter disagree. Let's stick to the science that is well-understood - and there is quite a bit of it. I refer you again to a list of standard textbooks that I have spent some time with: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0497116/board/thread/64426867?d=64426867#64426867 .

HerrDinksBumps, #32:

Well, I'm hoping and expecting that we don't have to make a choice between hot baths and a sustainable planet. I think there is plenty of scope for technological advance. It has not been encouraged in the last US administration, but there seems to be a dramatic change of philosophy.

The US administration estimated that the cost of implementing CO2 cap & trade to move the US economy away from dependence on fossil fuels will be about 50 cents/day per family. The cap & trade alarmists claim it will cost $4,000/year, about 20X as much. The truth probably lies somewhere between; although I think history suggests that technology transitions usually cost a lot LESS than feared, because smart people faced with immediate problems find cheaper ways to do things than people who are anxiously anticipating a change to their familiar ways of doing business.

Of course, a reduction in world population would probably be a good idea, from the point of view of the load on the planet. It would of course entail interesting retirement-system problems, as is becoming clear in Germany, Italy, Japan, China ...

Do any of you see beer in jeopardy anytime in the near future?

Wheel, #33:

- CO2 vs. H20: Yes, H2O provides a large chunk of the greenhouse effect. No, that doesn't mean that the impact of CO2 is negligible. The fact is that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing, and the amount of H2O in the atmosphere is not.

- Importance of human addition to CO2: The difference between human-generated (fossil fuel) CO2 and that produced by breathing is that the CO2 introduced to the atmosphere by breathing has been generated from the carbon taken from the atmosphere/earth/ocean system by ingestion. Breathing has to be understood as part of a short-term cycle that moves carbon among the land/sea/sky components of the biosphere. The burning of fossil fuels, by contrast, inserts carbon into the system that was previously buried far underground and isolated from the biosphere. The point is that you can breathe as much as you like without affecting atmospheric CO2; but burning fossil fuels does increase the concentration.

- Feedback and control: Positive feedback does not always lead to a system going out of control - nor was that my suggestion. The point is that heating will increase the amount of H2O vapor, which will increase the greenhouse effect of water; but could well increase the amount of clouding. These two impacts on radiative forcing are in opposite directions, so it is not clear (it is a matter that is open among experts) whether there will be a net positive or a net negative due to this H2O effect. Even if it were proven positive, the evaluations I have seen do not suggest that it will lead to a situation like Venus. So let's take that off the table: Nobody is projecting Planet Oven.

- Residence time of CO2: If you seriously think the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere can be changed in some 38 years by natural processes, please show a respectable reference by somebody that can explain the mechanism of removal. I find that flatly unbelievable.

- Historical data: There are large sections in the IPCC reports dedicated to the historical data and explanations for them. Have you read any of them yourself? I refer you again to one graph on this topic: http://www.greenfacts.org/en/climate-change-ar3/toolboxes/figspm-4big.htm .

- Scientific publication: You are in error. It is not typical to provide other people with your data and software. It is not done in particle physics, it is not done in atomic physics; in fact I've only heard of it being done in open-source software development - which is a new development paradigm. The point is two-fold: data are generally considered proprietary (read "the product of MY damn hard work") and often can be mined in several different ways to provide different insights and different papers. It is not necessary for scientific purposes to provide data, because the test is not that people should re-analyze YOUR experiment, but that they can provide ANOTHER experiment that confirms (or fails to confirm) your results. It is important to provide methodological details so that ANOTHER experiment can be meaningfully designed and compared; but it is NOT necessary to provide software. Indeed, software is probably very specific to fine details of the data collection mechanism, and can be pretty confusing to someone not involved in the immediate tasks of the experiment. You should understand that the procedures of science are designed to provide a way that the scientists do not fool themselves, they are not designed or intended to provide legal proof that the scientists are not trying to fool someone else: The principle that an equivalent experiment should be done means that there is no advantage, ultimately, in trying to fool someone else: You will be caught out, because someone will eventually do an experiment that casts your results in doubt.

- With regard to the email break-in: It might be useful for you to look at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack-context/ , to understand how this matter looks from the inside. As I see it, some of them felt so harassed by McIntyre & Co. that they developed a very antagonistic attitude towards them - which was unwise. They did not delete data; they deleted THEIR copies of data that were provided by others (and which they were not legally allowed to forward to others). The one aspect I find problematic was Jones' suggestion to delete email correspondence to cover tracks: That seems unwise (at least!) and also naive.

- Beer's law: The issue of radiative transfer in the greenhouse effect is quite challenging, but there are good books on this. I bought an old classic, Goody & Yung, for this purpose. Probably it's the most complex area that can still be addressed reasonably reliably by self-study. I have textbooks on other aspects, such as modeling, but I haven't read them yet. And I'm not sure how comfortable one can get with a climate model without actually using it...

- Sharp transitions: The issue is not whether the temperatures are unprecedented in all time, but how much stress was being placed on the "evolutionary adaptive" capabilities of the biosphere. This is not just a matter of the total temperature change (which could differ significantly between the poles and the tropics) but also the length of the period over which the change occurs. Currently, the coral reef experts are worried about losing their subject of study.

- "It takes 100 years for a theory to be scientific": I repeat: Nonsense. That would logically imply that any statement made about the year +101 is unscientific. That would limit the scope of science to a very narrow range, and it's nonsense. With regard to confirmation: As emphasized in relation to the radiative-transfer physics, the enhanced greenhouse effect (which implies global warming) is the ONLY theory that is consistent with the physics we know, so it is the null hypothesis. It is the challenger that must be confirmed. So even trying to use your 100-year criterion, we would have to say that the alternative explanations (incoherent as they are) cannot be considered scientific for another 100 years. I wouldn't kick them that hard; I would say they are not unscientific - just wrong.

Barkingmad, #34:

- IPCC takes global warming as given: This topic has been studied well over 100 years, since Fourier. That gives it a "seniority" that exceeds that of relativity and quantum mechanics. The calculations on radiative forcing came into general consensus in the early 1960s. How many times a day should an "open-minded" scientist be counting the number of fingers on his hand?

- We are already having an impact on the evolution of our planet: We are at the point of driving fish populations to zero, indeed the scientists involved with bluefin tuna warn that there is a 50% chance that this population is headed for a total wipeout. North-American pine forests are undergoing devastation due to the winter survival of pine beetles. You should rather despair that man is arrogant enough to think that we can do anything we like and Mother Nature will pick up after us.

NoBullJim:

Just to Beer's law.

I guess as long as there is grain, there will be beer.

So, no worries that way.

Oh thank you, thank you. A green to you sir.

Table from Segalstad, T. V. (1998) Global Warming the Continuing Debate, Cambridge UK: European Science and Environment Forum, ed. R. Bate, 184-218:Providing complete or only minimally processed data is common in life science papers. I understand physics has mostly moved away from publication of papers in peer-reviewed journals to another system so it's less relevant to our discussion.

Regarding proprietary data you may be correct, however if insufficient information is provided for an experiment to be reproduced, then the paper should in theory not be accepted, at least according to the conventional process.

There are additional factors regarding global warming science - the data is often historical and so cannot be reproduced. The correct way to audit would be for all data and correction methods to be released. It is understandable that a scientist would feel ownership, however because many of the institutions in which this work is done are publicly funded, they must release data and code on request or break the law. As I understand it that applies to CRU data and NASA etc.. The fact that these papers are being used to formulate public policy makes it doubly important that everything is verified.I disagree strongly. It is especially important that custom code used to adjust data is released so it can be audited. The quality of code released by the CRU leak confirms how important this is.Reproducibility is key to preventing scientific fraud. I've never heard anyone say otherwise before.Jones said he'd delete data and some has been 'lost'.Of course it's nonsense. And of course that's not what I said. I said that because the warmists claim that looking for trends in a period of l…[/quote]Picking the assumptions and methods of the theory apart is enough. So what if there is no other explanation? That doesn't make the theory correct if a problem is found with it. Darwin had no theory to explain how Natural Selection worked. It didn't mean he was wrong. In the case of global warming, there are a lot of things we know we don't know yet.

Til the Greens force us to use the land currently used for grain to make beer, to.., I don't know, grow corn for Africans - or ethanol, or god knows what..

Soon we'll be hearing about the carbon footprint of a glass of beer..

Conan Obrien made some comment the other day, I think referring to a study showing that one dog is responsible for more Co2 emissions than an SUV over the course of the year.. Something about all the energy, land, etc.. needed to produce dogfood. May have misunderstood the reference, but wouldn't surprise me..

Well there are a lot of products on the market in the UK that actually already do have the carbon footprint numbers printed on the packaging so why not on a pint?

The bottles already have a mass of information printed on that interest no one except a certain types of puritan finger waggers who have now jumped on the envioronment as the latest stick to beat people with so it won't be long before you start hearing about how many baby polar bears your beer has helped kill.

Wheel:

- CO2 residence time: Your reference is not really useful. In order to verify that the concept being discussed is the time required to remove CO2 from the biospheric system (atmosphere/ocean/flora&fauna), rather than just cycling between these components, the reference must be internet-accessible and state: what it means by ?residence time?, how long it is, and what mode of transition is being discussed. As I said before, I believe that what you have been discussing is just the time for transition between phases of the biospheric system; but this is not relevant for the question of how long it will take to reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Analogy: The speed at which water swirls around a tub doesn?t tell you how fast the tub will empty; for that, you have to consider the speed at which water can empty through the drain. If you have anything that fits the bill, please provide a link.

- Providing data in scientific papers: The scientific articles I have looked at, whether in life science or physics, never seem to show, e.g., the exact measurements on every single Petri dish over the entire period of study. Those are the data you?re talking about. A paper that contained all that stuff would be 50 ? 100 pages long: I?ve not seen any journal that routinely publishes papers that long. Please link to an example.

- Reproduction of an experiment: This means doing an independent experiment that tests the same issues and arrives at substantially the same results. It does NOT mean checking the data and arithmetic of the original experiment. Think about it: Scientists are in competition with each other, so they don?t give away their data. The only circumstance that could arise is if two groups keep getting consistently different results: Then they can get together and go ?open kimono? in order to resolve differences in assumptions, data-collection methods, or other procedures. But this is a very rare situation, that arises when there is a continuing failure to resolve the differences by normal procedures (i.e., everyone going back to check their own data and analysis based on identification of likely sources of difference).

- I believe you are getting your notion of what "should be done" from a paradigm of a legal audit, from the financial world. This is not what has been done traditionally in science: The fact that someone else will do an independent experiment means that there is no long-term advantage in lying about your results, because you won?t be able to stop your competitor from doing the experiment right. The main purpose of scientific protocols is to prevent the scientist from fooling himself. Now, in the situation where data can be measured only once, there could be some point in making it available as a public resource. But let?s be clear: This would be a new requirement, not part of traditional science. Traditional science respects the right of scientists to compete on the basis of innovative experimental technique and on ideas. That means that my data are MY data.

- Lost data: As far as I can tell, the only thing that was deleted was CRU?s copy of other people?s data, which they no longer needed after they had digested it into their own data-management format (uniformizing into their own grid points, etc.). The source of the data kept their original files, of course. So, no loss of data.

- Quality of code: All that has been shown in the email stash are programmer?s notes, which show sections of code being fussed with. This is not the code, this is someone trying to screw around with it to understand how it works. Programmers do this. But to attribute this to the code is like judging a finished journal article on the basis of the rough drafts that are taken from the garbage. It?s off-base.

The justification for the expectation for global warming is our best understanding of the atmospheric physics and chemistry involved. It was not based on people graphing the temperatures, it is a prediction of the theory, which has been supported by the observations. So, on the one hand, you have a theory that is consistent with the rest of science, well-supported by the observations within the expected noise of the system; and on the other, you have people saying ?this must be wrong? but who cannot come up with a logically coherent theory of their own. This isn?t even a close decision: You can?t beat something with nothing.

I'm not sure it makes sense to compare the impact of a dog to the impact of an SUV:

- The dog is a critter we support because we want a dog

- The SUV is something we buy and operate because we want transportation

So there are alternatives to the SUV, but not to the dog.

Unless you consider that what we want from the dog is companionship; in that case, we could compare the carbon footprint of the dog with that of a child, or with a Japanese robot dog. The dog would probably lose to the child, but might win over the robo-dog.

wrt the impact of a beer: The purpose of a carbon tax, or of cap & trade for CO2, is intended to fold the negative impact into the cost. So then the CO2 impact shows up in the ultimate cost of the pint/liter and need not be considered by the drinker, explicitly.

Arguing strictly though, nobody really needs a dog.., except maybe blind people. Nobody really needs a hot shower either, or meat every day.. Who here is willing to live with cold showers and Purina "Human Chow", so we can limit our carbon footprint, and ensure that every African can have a nice life too?...

It becomes clear very quickly how difficult - no, impossible - it will be to "carbon-tax" everybody to death.. As idealistic (that being a bad word, in this case..) as a communist utopia. Ain't gonna work..

HerrDinksBumps,

The intention is NOT to discourage people from taking showers. As you said, that is rather difficult! (And as a hot-bath type myself, I wouldn't find that plausible either.)

The intention is to provide a tangible incentive for suppliers of hot water to find less (or non-) CO2-producing methods. The technology for this exists, and will likely get cheaper with experience.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6936328.ece

"[so called] SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based. "

Yep, very scientific.

MrNosey,

I suspect that statement on timesonline is wrong. Unfortunately, the page on the CRU website they reference seems to be unreachable at the present. I'll keep checking on it...

Neal,

Well, the obvious solution would be to RELEASE THE ORIGINAL DATA together with the methods used to 'correct' and their modelling software source code, which under the FOI Act they MUST do and which they apparently NEVER HAVE DONE.

So I suspect CRU is talking out of its ***.

In other words, another team should be able to reproduce the experiment using the materials, methods and data analysis techniques published in the pap…[/quote]I agree to a point - normally you get summarised data. In the case of the CRU the 'data' relevant to climate science is actually adjusted observation data known as an observation dataset e.g. CRUTEM3, HadCRUT3. Observations are assembled, adjusted and then combined. Nothing wrong with that in principle.

The thing is, this is not what is normally called 'data', which is experimental results. Experimental results are transparent. Do experiment, get results. Easy. Or less so. But the origin is obvious - measurements of one sort or another. They often need to be massaged with statistical tools - as long as you show what you did, no problem. But the datasets aren't like this. They aren't experimental results. They are really more like methods or constants and as such, unless very obvious their origins and/or derivation should be documented and published. Otherwise it would be like the paper I mentioned inventing a new statistical tool to interpret the results without saying where it came from or what it does.

Both the datasets mentioned were introduced in Brohan et al 2006. Have a look at that paper. AR4 references it. There is no chance whatsoever that anyone could reproduce either dataset from the paper even if they had access to all the raw observations. Any conclusions reached from either dataset are therefore opaque.

Secondary point: as shown by the emails, the climate scientists aren't really in competition. Although they bitch about each other's data in private (ironically often in the same terms as sceptics) they almost never challenge it publicly because they are all working towards the same goal, which is to promote global warming. This is quite obvious from the emails.It may be off-base, but that's only because the code used to produce the datasets hasn't been released as it should have been to satisfy normal scientific practice and FOI regulations.

I haven't got into the climate models yet, but they should be subject to exactly the same criteria as the datasets. These are hugely important as they are being used to fix policies. Even if FOI laws didn't mandate it, the code should be available IMO. And these are the tools used to produce results, not results themselves.

MrNosey:

As I had suspected, the timesonline article was wrong: No data were destroyed. From the "Little Green Footballs" site at http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/35233_Did_Climate_Scientists_Destroy_Data_A-_No: (emphasis added)If you give me a photocopy of your data, and I digest what I need of it and then throw away the photocopy, I have cleaned up my desk, but I have not lost/destroyed any data: Your original data still exist, with the owner - YOU. That is exactly the situation with the data "deleted" by CRU. The timesonline article is a lie.

Wheel:

- You've proved my point: The stuff that you reference in the article is very far from being raw data. The data behind all of those results would fill many many notebooks. They are not distributing that; and unless someone sees a problem with the results, no one is going to want to look at it. What is distributed to people is the article: It explains the point of the research, the assumptions, the methods, the results and the implications. It does NOT present raw data.

- I'm not sure what your point is about data sets. They explain what they're doing to process it, process it, and present the results. For a non-expert (like myself), the results are already kind of overwhelming. What would you do with GBytes of raw data?

But if you did want it, guess what? From [url]https://www.uea.ac.uk/mac/comm/media/press/2009/nov/homepagenews/CRUupdate: (emphasis added)- Scientists are always competing with each other, but they're also colleagues, because they all trying to find out what is actually going on. What was clearly shown in the email was their anger with some people who are dedicated to obfuscating the truth, like Soon & Baliunas, who wrote a notorious article that really distorted the contents of the papers it pretended to be reviewing. That really pisses them off.

- Release of code: Unless you're writing an article on software, it is absolutely not normal to release software. In the article you pointed to above, where was the code that drew the graphs? How were the averages calculated? Nobody wants to see that stuff, so nobody includes it. That's not only true of the life sciences, but also in the mathematical sciences: the discussion is at a higher level of abstractions (equations, not code) because human beings understand words and equations better.

In fact, as a discipline, climate models have been much more open than any other branch of science. For example, NASA/GISS has made their global climate model software available for many years: [url]http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/modelE/; but this is really unusual in the sciences. The fact that the people baying for the code are completely unaware of the fact that it has always been available is an indication of how unimportant that point really is. It's just an excuse for a witch hunt.

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