Is global warming/climate change a crock?

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Originally Posted by Mark in Oshawa

Fiero, many of the same people were saying we were doomed for an ice age back in the 70's. I don't know what we can do if we are the cause, and short of stopping life as we know it, it likely should have been done 30 years ago. There is no way of knowing exactly what is causing it, but climate modelling is a bit of a joke IMO, and I say that after taking 2 climatology credits in University and having an weather observors certificiate at one point in my life. I know how the weather is forcasted and collected, and I can tell you, there is a great unknown out there on what will happen 2 days from now. To forecast 10 years or 50 years hence is a lot more of a crap shoot....

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Those same people you mention were the minority who chose to speak out to the public at that time. At that time most climatologists knew they were just identifying the factors and weren't willing to issue public warnings. It was all part of the process of reaching where we are today, with an actual consensus.

Its not forecasting weather its completely different and you should know that. Whether or not you have 2 climatology credits at University the actual climatologists are significantly more qualified than you to judge whether climate modelling is a joke or not...

Weather is the effect of the climate on us. So climate and weather are related and therefore if you know what's going to happen to the climate you should still be able to predict what the weather's going to be like within reason of course. Yes there are microclimates and places that will buck the trend. But when scientists are telling us that the planet is warming and then there are stupid amounts of rain in Northern Europe that they didn't predict then that suggests that they possibly have it wrong.

Climate modelling is a joke if they can't predict a MAJOR event like the wet weather in July. That wasn't a mere blip. It was a speedbump which they should have seen if they actually know what's going on.

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Originally Posted by Daniel

Climate modelling is a joke if they can't predict a MAJOR event like the wet weather in July. That wasn't a mere blip. It was a speedbump which they should have seen if they actually know what's going on.

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Again, climate and weather are two different things. Climate is the long-term average - weather is an event like we say in July.

Just because you say that doesn't mean it's true.

Weather IS the way that the climate manifests itself to us. I can't walk outside and see the climate. If the climate gets warmer then it has an effect on the weather. To say that the climate doesn't manifest itself in the weather is to totally disagree with the climate change arguments.

As I explained we're not talking about a microclimate or an event like flooding in one particular city. We had an event which affected the whole of Northern Europe which these people failed to predict........

If climate doesn't influence weather that much then why are scientists so worried about the effect of climate change on the weather? :rotflmao:

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Originally Posted by Daniel

Or course. But as I said and you seem to have ignored. Not so long ago there were vineyards in the north of england and as we know vineyards tend to prefer warmer climates which the north of england still to this day doesn't really provide.

There is also the hockey stick controversy. How long has world temperature been shown to be rising so rapidly? How long have we been accurately measuring termperature? Roughly the same amount of time!?!?!?!?!?!?

As I said I do not doubt that there is warming happening. But I feel that climate study is in it's infancy and although we have lots of tools at our disposal do we nearlly know what the data means? Typically the more complicated an experiment the more data you need to draw a conclusion. Now if we were simply seeing if we could make gold our of plastic and you did whatever you did and made gold out of plastic then that's proof enough. But we're talking about something that's infinitely more complex than our level of current understanding and even if we have computer models they're only interpreting data in a way that we instruct them to.

A lot of theories that seem perfectly reasonable and have data to back them up have been disproven. Up until recently it was said that nothing could travel faster than the speed of light. Guess what! A few weeks ago this was said to have been broken. Of course it could all be smoke and mirrors but I suspect it's probably right.

As I think Mark said previously Einstein was considered a nut back in the 20's and then suddenly he turned everything on it's head and is now considered one of the great minds of the 20th century. Food for thought?

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I did not ignore it. As I said in a previous post, there are vineyards right now in England. Evidently (I am still searching for confirmation) there is even one in Scotland.
This is a link to some vineyards in England and Wales. http://www.english-wine.com/vineyards.html

It is possible to grow grapes in cooler climates, however it is not commercially viable.

What hockey stick controversy? You need to do a little research on the hockey stick graph. If you do you will see that the results come from a wide variety of data.

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Originally Posted by Daniel

What if in 20 years it doesn't exist?

Have you thought of that possibility?

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Sure, but it is happening now. I am pretty confidant. There are a few issues that might slow it down, such as peak oil or a large volcanic eruption.

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Originally Posted by Daniel

You're suggesting that all people who do studies which don't agree with popular concensus and so on are biased. Is this the case? Who knows!

Is it natural? Is it not? Who knows? No one can say for certain. Not like I can go outside and measure the temperature and say without a doubt that it is 16 degrees celsius exactly. As I said it's a theory and as we all know theories are not fact. We don't know that it's going to get worse. As has been shown many times there really is very little correlation betwen CO2 levels and temperature. There have been times of extreme cold where CO2 levels have been through the roof.

What is an extreme weather pattern? Does weather necessarily follow predefined patterns? We would like it to but it never seems to and these models never seem to predict events such as the hugely abnormal weather patterns in the UK and the rest of Northern Europe. We're not talking a microclimate here. We're talking about a huge part of the world that had totally unexpected weather. Food for thought?

Your body is not a climate. A climate is extremely complicated. If lots of people smoke and have lung problems and the ones who don't smoke don't have problems then that's quite easy to understand. But we don't have another planet to test this theory on ;)

I never said lets ignore a possible problem. You are putting words in my mouth ;)

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Nuclear physics is a theory but it doesn't stop it nuclear power stations working. There comes a time when a theory is significantly ratified for it to be used as a fact. The theory of man made global warming HAS reached this level. If it is proven wrong then that is OK but any alternative theories have a long way to go before reaching this level. Another thing is that carbon dioxide levels are only causing the climate to change this time, other times it was other things. I cannot understand why can believe that factors can change the climate yet not believe that greenhouse gases can despite the fact that of all the known factors it is the one rising significantly at a rate that would cause a temperature rise similar to the one that is occurring even with all other factors considered. Scientists and Governments are so sure about this that they are willing to invest large amounts of money. The only reason you don't know for sure is that you have not critically examined every relevant study in detail. Considering the interdisciplinary nature of climate research it is beyond the means of any one person to do that as no one really posesses all the necessary knowledge. The discovery and acceptance of man made climate change one of the greatest scientific achievements in mankinds history. Its a shame that the main opposition seems to be one that promotes a disbelief in the scientific method and of scientists as well as the idea that of promoting ideas for the current global warming that are generally ignorant.

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Originally Posted by Daniel

I agree. Biofuel is merely another way of releasing CO2. Just like electric cars. Something is burnt to fuel it. So unless the power behind it is clean then it's useless. Biofuels are going to come from Brazil and what are they going to do? Cut down forest (carbon sinks) and create cleared land which when ploughed will absorb more heat from the sun and contribute to the problem. Yeah good one you short sighted environmentalist plonkers! I consider myself someone that cares about the environment. We recycle, compost, have a wormery and recycle when possible even though the local council makes it hard (they don't recycle cardboard ffs!) and I get pissed off when I buy a packet of something and it's sealed in a celophane wrap, has a stiff plastic base and inside the biscuits or cakes or whatever have individual wrapping. I think that by not being wasteful in this way, turning heating on when a jumper could suffice, not buying a new car every three years and so many other things. If there is this problem and it is caused by us we need to really look deeply at the full implications of the technology we are going to use to combat this and not go for the "Lada Samara" solution which is cheap, seems nice at the time but ends up costing more in the long run and doesn't actually solve the problem.

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Biofuels is more a solutions for a liquid fuel crisis (peak oil). However it is less damaging to the environment than fossil fuels. That is of course if fossil fuels are not used to make the biofuels. The best options for biofuels are not the ones involving food crops. That plan is just shortsighted.

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Originally Posted by Daniel

Just because you say that doesn't mean it's true.

Weather IS the way that the climate manifests itself to us. I can't walk outside and see the climate. If the climate gets warmer then it has an effect on the weather. To say that the climate doesn't manifest itself in the weather is to totally disagree with the climate change arguments.

As I explained we're not talking about a microclimate or an event like flooding in one particular city. We had an event which affected the whole of Northern Europe which these people failed to predict........

If climate doesn't influence weather that much then why are scientists so worried about the effect of climate change on the weather? :rotflmao:

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Try reading that again to see if it makes any sense now that it's written down.

Climate is the long term average and variations of the weather. We know that this is the wettest summer "on record" as we have measuring systems and records that go back about 400 years in the UK. Now tell me how we can infer whether or not the UK had rain/weather events such as we recently have experienced before records began? Tree rings / C14 records only tell us about the climate, i.e. how the seasons or the yearly "average weather" or climate affected the living beings at that time. It doesn't tell us that all the rain in that particular year fell in one day and it was beautiful sunshine for the rest of the year, nor does it tell us that it drizzled non-stop for 365 days. They're called "weather forecasts" and not "climate forecasts" for a reason.

Back to my original point - climate modelling is just that - simulating changes in the parameters that define air temperature, sea temperature and so on in order to better understand what happens if such events were to occur. These simulations do not account for the day-to-day variations in climate, i.e. what we defined as the weather, and only give mean estimates within certain percentage errors. Modern supercomputers can barely forecast the weather for a week in advance as the parameters that affect the development of weather systems are inordinately complex. Climate modelling, in contrast, is much easier due to the recorded information that we have, and our (reasonable) understanding of the local (i.e. Earth-bound) parameters that affect the climate.

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Originally Posted by rah

I did not ignore it. As I said in a previous post, there are vineyards right now in England. Evidently (I am still searching for confirmation) there is even one in Scotland.
This is a link to some vineyards in England and Wales. http://www.english-wine.com/vineyards.html

It is possible to grow grapes in cooler climates, however it is not commercially viable.

What hockey stick controversy? You need to do a little research on the hockey stick graph. If you do you will see that the results come from a wide variety of data.

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Wide variety of data. So you're saying that it's a different set of data to the set of data that we're basing historic "observations" on? We once had different scales for carbon dating which we used and then we discovered that these were wrong. As I said we've only been measuring the temperatures with exact instruments for a historically short period of time....... It's not good science to base historic observations on what we "think" of course it's better than nothing but it's not fact.