Peaceful Discussion on Global Warming

Started by Atomm · 7 posts · 1,169 views

  1. #1
    Be nice or I'll censor you.... And yes, I'm pushing my own agenda, but at least take the time to look at the facts....

    First up, a story from /. last week.

    "According to an article at DailyTech, a blogger has discovered a Y2K bug in a NASA climate study by the same writer who accused the Bush administration of trying to censor him on the issue of global warming. The authors have acknowledged the problem and released corrected data. Now the study shows the warmest year on record for the contiguous 48 states as being 1934, not 1998 as previously reported in the media. In fact, the corrected study shows that half of the 10 warmest years on record occurred before World War II."

    http://www.dailytech.com/Blogger+finds+Y2K...article8383.htm


    Next, Freeman Dyson, a Physic's professor at Princeton goes on to say this about Global Warming....

    My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.

    http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge219.html#dysonf


    It gets better from there.....

    Be nice, don't mention AG and let's look at some startling new evidence that we simply don't know what we think we know or as I like to call it, everyone thought the world was flat and the sun revolved around the earth once........ This is another one of those times..... :-)
  3. #3
    Atomm wrote:
    Be nice or I'll censor you.... And yes, I'm pushing my own agenda, but at least take the time to look at the facts....

    First up, a story from /. last week.


    You should really call it climate change - Global Warming is a misnomer and misses the bulk of the issue which is that the weather is getting more erratic be it colder, hotter, or just nastier storms. The places that are warming the most are the Arctic and Antarctic regions and surrounding areas that we usually think of as "cold". The weather here in the US seems to be more extreme than I ever remember but that is purely anecdotal in that I haven't looked for anything to try and verify that observation.

    After spending too much time looking at this info, I think I understand it. If you take the mean temperature from 1880 to the present and then plot each year on a graph you get 1934 being the warmest on record in terms of having the largest deviation from the mean during the time period examined. No one directly addresses how the Y2K bug that effected the 1998 data effected other years but from the charts and data it looks like they have been revised lower as well.

    What is the significance of a 1.25 degrees (1934) versus 1.23 degrees (1998) deviation from the mean?

    There is another article on the NASA site from February (pre-discovery of this error) that states that 1998 wasn't the warmest year on record, 2005 was - followed by 1998. http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20070208/

    I took the data that they discuss in the article and graphed it out using Excel. One thing that pops out at me is that through most of the data, an upward spike was almost always accompanied by temperatures dipping below the mean within a couple years. When you look at the most recent data however, we haven't been below the mean since 1995. That to me is more critical to look at than whether 1934 was the hottest year or 1998 or 2005 was.

    This is the same data with a NASA graph: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.D_lrg.gif
    I don't really get what the 5 year mean is exactly still....

    A good point to come out of that article is that the data being collected is poor. The question is, does that make the situation any different? If so is it better or worse?
  4. #4



    🙂
  5. #5
    Sarge, thank you for a great reply!!!!

    I think I have a better understanding than I did before reading it....

    One other thing I would like to point out. It is my understanding that the current data is corrected for the concrete jungle effect. Basically, the amount of asphalt and concrete concentrated in an area plays a big part in the amount of heat the area retains. This tends to skew major metropolitan areas higher when you look at the data over the last 100 years simply because the surface area that retains heat has grown.

    Which brings me to an interesting thought. What if CO2 emissions isn't the biggest reason for the drastic change? What if the real problem is the amount of surface area we have covered with heat retaining materials is actually causing a global shift in temperature?

    I am a little more inclined to say there is a problem, but I am also with the professor. There is so much we don't know that it doesn't make sense to start crying the ozone is falling.....

  6. #6
    Atomm wrote:

    One other thing I would like to point out. It is my understanding that the current data is corrected for the concrete jungle effect. Basically, the amount of asphalt and concrete concentrated in an area plays a big part in the amount of heat the area retains. This tends to skew major metropolitan areas higher when you look at the data over the last 100 years simply because the surface area that retains heat has grown.

    Which brings me to an interesting thought. What if CO2 emissions isn't the biggest reason for the drastic change? What if the real problem is the amount of surface area we have covered with heat retaining materials is actually causing a global shift in temperature?



    The Albedo Effect - solar heat gain from reflectivity and absorption - is caused by replacing vegetation with pavement and plays a big part in urban heat gain and is the reason that cities have a heat bubble around them and are a few degrees warmer than the surrounding areas. However, I don't believe that we have covered enough of the surface of the planet to have that be the sole cause. It certainly contributes however.

    One of the things on the NASA site said that it is in fact the most isolated areas that are seeing the most drastic changes of temperature. Hence the arctic ice pack is the smallest it's ever been - or at least since we started paying attention.

    Again, I think the focus on the global warming is unfortunate because it's not something that we can grasp and say explicitly that yes we are causing it or no we aren't, and I doubt we will ever know, even when we lose the coasts to sea level rise. What we do know is that pollution is bad for people and we should minimize it. That is a known quantity with relatively clear cause and effects. There are economic costs to dealing with that pollution, but there are significant gains to be made as well in terms of better overall health, less asthma, less respiratory illness, and less money going to insurance companies and doctors.