What do conservative policy intellectuals think about climate change?

a reply to: johnwick

You are comparing apples to oranges. Never in geo record is there an point in time where CO2 increased 40% in half a century.

What is happening now on the planet will likely appear as an anomaly on the geo-records. The amount of CO2 and other stuff we release in the atmosphere is truly mind blowing.

Thinking climate change is a right-left issue just shows we Americans don't even read international news. How can we have a firm grasp on science if we don't even pay attention to Canada?

Google translate can give you a glimpse of what is happening outside the U.S. And the translations are often hilarious.

originally posted by: Look2theSacredHeart
Thinking climate change is a right-left issue just shows we Americans don't even read international news. How can we have a firm grasp on science if we don't even pay attention to Canada?

Google translate can give you a glimpse of what is happening (and information on climate change) outside the U.S. And the translations are often hilarious.

a reply to: jrod

it about those who are aware of the problem and those who are ignorant and unwilling to accept there is even a problem to begin with.

No it is NOT about that,... it is about how one perceives the influence of man on this planet...NOT if man ignores our influence...

Never in geo record is there an point in time where CO2 increased 40% in half a century.

Ooo... half a century,... that is like, gee maybe a whole second in real earth time...get over yourself!... arrogance is a two way street... you think climate change deniers are arrogant because they seem to not acknowledge the concept of "climate change"

It is equally arrogant to think you know what really affects the earth on a scale that covers BILLIONS of years...we humans are but a speck, and to think that our smoke stacks and car exhaust and plastic cups are going to forever destroy this great planet is pathetically self-important in the grand scheme... me thinks...

originally posted by: jrod
a reply to: johnwick

Are you going to try to tell us that an observed 40% increase of CO2 concentrations over the past half century is not a significant one?

Well since the amount of life exhaling co2 since the ice age(age of death mind you) has increased nob stop since the ice age began ending, yes I am.

Guess what happens when an ice age ends.

Life regrows.

All life that we know if is dependent on carbon.


All plant requires it to live!!!.

If co2 drops below 280 ppm in the atmosphere all plant life dies.

We are just above this.

Hence farmers adding it to greenhouses, so they can grow plants better.


The atmospheric co2 levels are at basically all time lows by the geological records.

It has been way higher throughout most of the earths history.

We are in an atmospheric co2 drout at present honestly.

Do you even research before forming an opinion?

Try I forming yourself first, it works!??

originally posted by: Quetzalcoatl14

originally posted by: johnwick
a reply to: FyreByrd

Oh look another bash righty thread made by a lefty, wow how original.

Psst. Don't know if you know this, but you pitical trolls throwing up baited threads are getting sooooooo boring.

The lefties are all idiots.

The eighties are all idiots.

Us not indoctrinated by a idiotic political ideology are all very put off by your constant zealot level blind obedience.

Plz stop!!!!

Plz!!!!

We get it, you think the right are evil, because they don't believe your religion.

So what!!!!

Why is it so important that you get to force your religion on them?

No wonder the lefties like Islamic extremists so much, you guys run with the exact same MO.

Believe as we demand or else!!!!!!

It's not an issue of "belief," but science and evidence. The old saying goes, "you are welcome to your own opinion but not your own facts."

We do have a right to deride anyone who denies hefty serious scientific evidence supporting a major threat to all of us, not just you or a small group. We do have a right to say something if a group (mostly Republicans) either denies that there is a problem or refuses to do anything about it.

At that point, assuming climate change is a real threat, such people actually threaten my own children and community, as they are blocking action against a threat that affects us all.

You see, here is the problem. You THINK you can actually do something about it.

Now, the Carbon Credit Scam is the only fake "solution" they want to implement which has been proven in Europe to do absolutely nothing but make middlemen, investors, stockbrokers, and government coffers rich at the expense of the common people.

The Solutions are SCAMS. Enron wanted this scam and we have been waiting for a problem to implement it.

Seriously, One very good Volcano eruption and you won't be worrying about warming for years.

a reply to: Look2theSacredHeart

The rest of the world understands climate change. It is almost exclusively a US problem that so many will argue that the science is not settled yet.

Science is rarely settled, and what is accepted as true can change with time when new more accurate information becomes available.

There is nothing scientific about debating this subject. We have sufficient observations to conclude that our activity is causing changes to this planet's chemistry and this may lead to great changes to this planet's climate and ultimately survival. Big changes in this planets chemistry in the past has coincided with mass extinction events.

The concern over the changing climate is a valid one.

a reply to: johnwick

You obviously missed my opening post when I cited how you guys always fall back to CO2 is plant food, therefore more is better argument.

That type of reasoning is actually a logic fallacy. (appeal to nature)

The fact that you insist on trying to ELI5(explain it to me like I am 5), the CH4 problem as well and many more, just demonstrates that you are more concerned about making me look wrong than actually addressing the topic at hand.

originally posted by: jrod
a reply to: johnwick

You are comparing apples to oranges. Never in geo record is there an point in time where CO2 increased 40% in half a century.

What is happening now on the planet will likely appear as an anomaly on the geo-records. The amount of CO2 and other stuff we release in the atmosphere is truly mind blowing.

Why does a tiny, in comparison jump in a short time equal instead cataclysm instead if acreturn to total normality?

In short.

If you are dying from lack of "air" why is it, giving it to you is bad?


I don't get the extremism.

It is obvious plants do much better with more.

It is not ever even once besides "models" proven it is bad.

Not inany millions of years of known factual data.


It is wanted hysterics, not facts.

a reply to: johnwick

Grim, I respect your contributions in the discussions on this sight.

I think you are very!!!! Intelligent!!!!

But you are honestly going to try to tell me that a over thousand fold increase in co2 ( the devil) combined with a 4% decrease in solar activity is the same example as.

Thousands of times less of co2 ( the dreaded trace gas of death) combined with 4% more solar output is a dead mans scenario?

Come on man!!!!

I don't claim to be a climatologist I didn't major in science either, but just because I don't understand exactly how they were able to measure c02 and solar irradiance from 400 million years ago I do not dismiss their findings. It is my own fault that I didn't push myself to learn more about the field. I do understand the scientific method and I have read some published papers explaining how they got their numbers to where I understood enough that I am confident in their findings.

I wish they could dumb it down more for me to grasp all of it, but that is just wishful thinking. I do know that 4% increase or decrease is a lot when talking about solar irradiance. From what I understand the difference between summer and winter is about 3% and that is due to the earths hemisphere being tilted further or closer to the sun. So 400 hundred or so million years ago if c02 levels were what they are at today the entire earth would have been completely ice covered. If c02 had dropped to 3000ppm back ten it would have entered an ice age.

I find it odd that climate science is the one field where laymen believe they know more than those who have actual educations in it.

originally posted by: coastlinekid
a reply to: jrod

it about those who are aware of the problem and those who are ignorant and unwilling to accept there is even a problem to begin with.

No it is NOT about that,... it is about how one perceives the influence of man on this planet...NOT if man ignores our influence...

Never in geo record is there an point in time where CO2 increased 40% in half a century.

Ooo... half a century,... that is like, gee maybe a whole second in real earth time...get over yourself!... arrogance is a two way street... you think climate change deniers are arrogant because they seem to not acknowledge the concept of "climate change"

It is equally arrogant to think you know what really affects the earth on a scale that covers BILLIONS of years...we humans are but a speck, and to think that our smoke stacks and car exhaust and plastic cups are going to forever destroy this great planet is pathetically self-important in the grand scheme... me thinks...

You are right.

Sadly these agw zealots can't see that.

originally posted by: coastlinekid


Ooo... half a century,... that is like, gee maybe a whole second in real earth time...get over yourself!... arrogance is a two way street... you think climate change deniers are arrogant because they seem to not acknowledge the concept of "climate change"

It is equally arrogant to think you know what really affects the earth on a scale that covers BILLIONS of years...we humans are but a speck, and to think that our smoke stacks and car exhaust and plastic cups are going to forever destroy this great planet is pathetically self-important in the grand scheme... me thinks...

Big changes in this planet's ocean and atmosphere in SHORT amount of time have correlated to mass extinction events.

Because this change has occurred in such a short amount of time, it is of great concern.

What is the point of these chemical substances in relation to climate change?

a reply to: johnwick

Can you at least show a residence time calculation for CO2 that backs up your view point?

It is obvious you are ignoring that challenge because until you checked out the wiki link, you did not even know what residence time truly meant and why that is significant in the climate/chemistry problem.

en.wikipedia.org...

a reply to: jrod

Because this change has occurred in such a short amount of time, it is of great concern.

I wouldn't compare man's paltry influence to a giant asteroid darkening the sky for a serious amount of time...

again,... get over yourself...

a reply to: jrod

You are comparing apples to oranges. Never in geo record is there an point in time where CO2 increased 40% in half a century.

What is happening now on the planet will likely appear as an anomaly on the geo-records. The amount of CO2 and other stuff we release in the atmosphere is truly mind blowing.

Actually there is such on the records during the Permian extinction event, but c02 wasn't the cause it lagged behind. There was a massive methane release which caused a runaway warming event and the death of 96% of species which also raised c02 levels.

I had forgot about that runaway warming event.

originally posted by: coastlinekid


again,... get over yourself...

Please quit the petty insults.

Here is some information on why some are concerned about an extinction level event:
Can animals and plants adapt to global warming?

What the science says:

A large number of ancient mass extinction events have been strongly linked to global climate change. Because current climate change is so rapid, the way species typically adapt (eg - migration) is, in most cases, simply not be possible. Global change is simply too pervasive and occurring too rapidly.

More on the subject:

Humans are transforming the global environment. Great swathes of temperate forest in Europe, Asia and North America have been cleared over the past few centuries for agriculture, timber and urban development. Tropical forests are now on the front line. Human-assisted species invasions of pests, competitors and predators are rising exponentially, and over-exploitation of fisheries, and forest animals for bush meat, to the point of collapse, continues to be the rule rather than the exception.

Driving this has been a six-fold expansion of the human population since 1800 and a 50-fold increase in the size of the global economy. The great modern human enterprise was built on exploitation of the natural environment. Today, up to 83% of the Earth’s land area is under direct human influence and we entirely dominate 36% of the bioproductive surface. Up to half the world’s freshwater runoff is now captured for human use. More nitrogen is now converted into reactive forms by industry than all by all the planet’s natural processes and our industrial and agricultural processes are causing a continual build-up of long-lived greenhouse gases to levels unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years and possibly much longer.

Clearly, this planet-wide domination by human society will have implications for biological diversity. Indeed, a recent review on the topic, the 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment report (an environmental report of similar scale to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment Reports), drew some bleak conclusions – 60% of the world’s ecosystems are now degraded and the extinction rate is now 100 to 1000 times higher than the “background” rate of long spans of geological time. For instance, a study I conducted in 2003 showed that up to 42% of species in the Southeast Asian region could be consigned to extinction by the year 2100 due to deforestation and habitat fragmentation alone.

Given these existing pressures and upheavals, it is a reasonable question to ask whether global warming will make any further meaningful contribution to this mess. Some, such as the sceptics S. Fred Singer and Dennis Avery, see no danger at all, maintaining that a warmer planet will be beneficial for mankind and other species on the planet and that “corals, trees, birds, mammals, and butterflies are adapting well to the routine reality of changing climate”. Also, although climate change is a concern for conservation biologists, it is not the focus for most researchers (at present), largely I think because of the severity and immediacy of the damage caused by other threats.

Global warming to date has certainly affected species’ geographical distributional ranges and the timing of breeding, migration, flowering, and so on. But extrapolating these observed impacts to predictions of future extinction risk is challenging. The most well known study to date, by a team from the UK, estimated that 18 and 35% of plant and animal species will be committed to extinction by 2050 due to climate change. This study, which used a simple approach of estimating changes in species geographical ranges after fitting to current bioclimatic conditions, caused a flurry of debate. Some argued that it was overly optimistic or too uncertain because it left out most ecological detail, while others said it was possibly overly pessimistic, based on what we know from species responses and apparent resilience to previous climate change in the fossil record – see below.

A large number of ancient mass extinction events have indeed been strongly linked to global climate change, including the most sweeping die-off that ended the Palaeozoic Era, 250 million years ago and the somewhat less cataclysmic, but still damaging, Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum, 55 million years ago. Yet in the more recent past, during the Quaternary glacial cycles spanning the last million years, there were apparently few climate-related extinctions. This curious paradox of few ice age extinctions even has a name – it is called ‘the Quaternary Conundrum’.

Over that time, the globally averaged temperature difference between the depth of an ice age and a warm interglacial period was 4 to 6°C – comparable to that predicted for the coming century due to anthropogenic global warming under the fossil-fuel-intensive, business-as-usual scenario. Most species appear to have persisted across these multiple glacial–interglacial cycles. This can be inferred from the fossil record, and from genetic evidence in modern species. In Europe and North America, populations shifted ranges southwards as the great northern hemisphere ice sheets advanced, and reinvaded northern realms when the glaciers retreated. Some species may have also persisted in locally favourable regions that were otherwise isolated within the tundra and ice-strewn landscapes. In Australia, a recently discovered cave site has shown that large-bodied mammals (‘megafauna’) were able to persist even in the arid landscape of the Nullarbor in conditions similar to now.

However, although the geological record is essential for understanding how species respond to natural climate change, there are a number of reasons why future impacts on biodiversity will be particularly severe:


A) Human-induced warming is already rapid and is expected to further accelerate. The IPCC storyline scenarios such as A1FI and A2 imply a rate of warming of 0.2 to 0.6°C per decade. By comparison, the average change from 15 to 7 thousand years ago was ~0.005°C per decade, although this was occasionally punctuated by short-lived (and possibly regional-scale) abrupt climatic jolts, such as the Younger Dryas, Dansgaard-Oeschger and Heinrich events.

B) A low-range optimistic estimate of 2°C of 21st century warming will shift the Earth’s global mean surface temperature into conditions which have not existed since the middle Pliocene, 3 million years ago. More than 4°C of atmospheric heating will take the planet’s climate back, within a century, to the largely ice-free world that existed prior to about 35 million years ago. The average ‘species’ lifetime’ is only 1 to 3 million years. So it is quite possible that in the comparative geological instant of a century, planetary conditions will be transformed to a state unlike anything that most of the world’s modern species have encountered.

a reply to: jrod

cont..

C) As noted above, it is critical to understand that ecosystems in the 21st century start from an already massively ‘shifted baseline’ and so have lost resilience. Most habitats are already degraded and their populations depleted, to a lesser or greater extent, by past human activities. For millennia our impacts have been localised although often severe, but during the last few centuries we have unleashed physical and biological transformations on a global scale. In this context, synergies (positive or self-reinforcing feedbacks) from global warming, ocean acidification, habitat loss, habitat fragmentation, invasive species, chemical pollution (Figure 2) are likely lead to cascading extinctions. For instance, over-harvest, habitat loss and changed fire regimes will likely enhance the direct impacts of climate change and make it difficult for species to move to undamaged areas or to maintain a ‘buffer’ population size. One threat reinforces the other, or multiple impacts play off on each other, which makes the overall impact far greater than if each individual threats occurred in isolation (Brook et al 2008).

D) Past adaptation to climate change by species was mainly through shifting their geographic range to higher or lower latitudes (depending on whether the climate was warming or cooling), or up and down mountain slopes. There were also evolutionary responses – individuals that were most tolerant to new conditions survived and so made future generations more intrinsically resilient. Now, because of points A to C described above, this type of adaptation will, in most cases, simply not be possible or will be inadequate to cope. Global change is simply too pervasive and occurring too rapidly. Time’s up and there is nowhere for species to run or hide.

I seriously doubt many will take the time to read thru all of this. I just figured I put this information out there.

The argument that man plays an insignificant on this planet is a null one.

a reply to: jrod

Thanks for all those big paragraphs...

Gee, I can do that too...

1 - Scientists have accurate historical temperature data
Historical temperature records taken near the surface of the Earth are subject to various biases and recording errors that render them incorrect. In the early days thermometers could only show the temperature at the moment of reading and so the data recorded from that time was for just one reading each day. Later the thermometers were able to record the minimum and maximum temperatures, and so the daily readings were those extremes in the 24 hour period. Only in the last 20 or 30 years have instruments been available that record the temperature at regular intervals throughout the 24 hours, thus allowing a true time-based daily average to be calculated.

The so-called "average" temperatures both published and frequently plotted through time are initially based on only a single daily value, then later on the mathematical average of the minimum and maximum temperatures. Although time-based averages are now available for some regions they are not generally used because the better instrumentation is not uniformly installed throughout the world and the historical data is at best a mathematical average of two values. The problem is that these averages are easily distorted by brief periods of high or low temperatures relative to the rest of the day, such as a brief period with less cloud cover or a short period of cold wind or rain.

Another serious problem is that thermometers are often located where human activity can directly influence the local temperature.[1] This is not only the urban heat island (UHI) effect, where heat generated by traffic, industry and private homes and then trapped by the man-made physical environment causes elevated temperatures. There is also a land use effect, where human activity has modified the microclimate of the local environment through buildings or changes such as land clearing or agriculture. Only recently have the climatic impacts of these human changes started to receive detailed scrutiny, but many older meteorological records are inescapably contaminated by them.

The integrity of some important historical data is also undermined by reports that various Chinese weather stations that were claimed to be in unchanged locations from 1954 to 1983 had in fact moved, with one station moving 5 times and up to 41 kilometres[2]. The extent of this problem on a global scale is unknown but worrying, because shifts of less than 500 metres are known to cause a significant change in recordings.



The observed minimum and maximum temperatures that are recorded, albeit with the inclusion of possible local human influences, are sent to one or more of the three agencies that calculate the "average global temperature" (NASA, NOAA, UK Hadley Centre). These agencies produce corrected data, and graphs that depict a significant increase in average global temperature over the last 30 years. However, this apparent rise may at least partly result from the various distortions of surface temperature measurements described above. No-one has independently verified the temperature records, not least because full disclosure of methods and data is not made and the responsible agencies appear very reluctant to allow such auditing to occur.

In reality, there is no guarantee, and perhaps not even a strong likelihood, that the thermometer-based temperature measurements truly reflect the average local temperatures free from any distortions. There is also no proof that the calculations of average global temperatures are consistent and accurate. For example, it is known that at least two of the three leading climate agencies use very different data handling methods and it follows that at least one of them is likely to be incorrect.

It is stating the obvious to say that if we don't know what the global average temperature has been and currently is, then it is difficult to argue that the world is warming at all, let alone to understand to what degree any alleged change has a human cause.

2 - Temperature trends are meaningful and can be extrapolated
That temperature trends plotted over decades are meaningful, and understood to the degree that they can be projected, is one of the greatest fallacies in the claims about man-made global warming.

Any trend depends heavily upon the choice of start and end points. A judicious selection of such points for can create a wide variety of trends. For example, according to the annual average temperatures from Britain's CRU:

trend for 1900-2006 = 0.72 °C/century

trend for 1945-2006 = 1.05 °C/century

trend for 1975-2006 = 1.87 °C/century,

None of these trends is any more correct than either of the others.

Despite the common use of temperature trends in scientific and public discussion, they cannot be used to illustrate possible human greenhouse influences on temperature unless episodic natural events, such as the powerful El Nino of 1998, are taken into account and corrected for.

Trends cannot be extrapolated meaningfully unless scientists:

(a) Thoroughly understand all relevant climate factors;

(b) Are confident that the trends in each individual factor will continue; and

(c) Are confident that interactions between factors will not cause a disruption to the overall trend.

The IPCC's Third Assessment Report of 2001 listed 11 possible climate factors and indicated that the level of scientific understanding was "very low" for 7 of them and "low" for another. No similar listing appears in the recent Fourth Assessment Report, but it does contain a list of factors relevant to the absorption and emission of radiation that shows that the level of scientific knowledge of several of those factors is still quite low.

Scientists are still struggling even to understand the influence of clouds on temperature. Observational data shows that low-level cloud outside the tropics has decreased since 1998, but scientists cannot be certain that the decreasing trend will continue, nor what such a decrease would mean. Perhaps clouds act as a natural thermostat and higher temperatures will ultimately create more clouds and this will have a cooling effect.[3]

Again, if random natural events dictate the historical trend, then extrapolation of the trend makes no sense. Even if those natural events can be expected to continue in the future, their severity – which often dictates the short-term trend – is unknowable.

3 - The accuracy of climate models can be determined from their output
A common practice among climate scientists is to compare the output of their climate models to historical data from meteorological observations. (In fact the models are usually "adjusted" to match that historical data as closely as possible, but let's ignore that for now.)

The accuracy of a model is determined by the accuracy with which it simulates each climatic factor and climatic process rather than the closeness of the match between its output and the historical data. If the internal processing is correct then so too will be the output, but apparently accurate output does not confer accuracy on the internal processes.


scienceandpublicpolicy.org...

Climate change is the result of the solar system heating up according to them.