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  #31 (permalink)  
Old 08-March-2008, 06:51 PM
Disinfo Agent Disinfo Agent is offline
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Originally Posted by ggchuck View Post
My back arched because I felt the article was being criticized for saying something that it did not.
Fair enough.
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  #32 (permalink)  
Old 08-March-2008, 07:17 PM
korjik korjik is offline
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A nitpick? It's the whole focus of the article!

And here's why I don't buy it:


It looks like the new study mentioned in the OP is "solving" a problem that does not exist.
What are you talking about? This article says that the old models use an infinite depth to the atmosphere, and that it would be more accurate to use a finite depth, and that when the finite depth is used, runaway greenhouse effect shouldt happen.

There is no claims about wether the climate is changing, just that runaway greenhouse should not occur.

Heck, the article says that a CO2 spike should cause a temp spike then a slow return to the baseline.

You seem to be getting stuck in the article author's inherent bias, and then dismissing the whole article because you disagree with his premise.

I am looking at the science in the article, which is confirmable.

Either there is a atmo depth truncation in common models or there isnt. That term will lead to a negative feedback or it wont. That feedback will prevent runaway greenhouse or it wont.

The rest is fluff.
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  #33 (permalink)  
Old 08-March-2008, 07:19 PM
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Originally Posted by korjik View Post
You seem to be getting stuck in the article author's inherent bias, and then dismissing the whole article because you disagree with his premise.
I am poiting out a factual error in the news article -- which incidentally casts the new model in a better light than it perhaps deserves --, but you seem to want to sweep under the rug because you happen to share the author's bias.
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  #34 (permalink)  
Old 08-March-2008, 09:12 PM
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All your bias are belong to us.

Good should come from this debate as long as it remains a debate. Contrary evidence and opinions should drive GW promoters to refine calculations to accuracy.
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  #35 (permalink)  
Old 08-March-2008, 09:37 PM
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GW promoters
"Hurry, hurry! Get your red-hot planets here! It's like giving a free sauna to everybody in the world! Limit one per customer!"
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  #36 (permalink)  
Old 08-March-2008, 11:32 PM
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Originally Posted by ggchuck View Post
I'm skeptical too... mostly because there hasn't been a large outpouring of confirmation despite the importance of the finding and the apparent transparency of the theory...
"new scientific theories supplant previous ones not because people change their minds, but simply because old people die" - Planck

Even scientists can be stubborn.
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  #37 (permalink)  
Old 09-March-2008, 05:08 AM
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Can you say "anecdotal"?
Can you explain severe winters in a world that has grown so warm??
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  #38 (permalink)  
Old 09-March-2008, 05:27 AM
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Can you explain severe winters in a world that has grown so warm??
Can you tell the difference between climate and weather?

A charted trend can have spikes and dips, but still keep going up on average.
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  #39 (permalink)  
Old 09-March-2008, 05:44 AM
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Can you tell the difference between climate and weather?

A charted trend can have spikes and dips, but still keep going up on average.
If they are spikes and dips. There seems to be a bit of disagreement on that issue. There has also been a lot of comment on the nature of scientific inquiry into such a politically charged issue. It makes for very educational reading for a girl like me.
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  #40 (permalink)  
Old 09-March-2008, 05:44 AM
Ronald Brak Ronald Brak is offline
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You know, summers do seem cooler and and winters colder nowadays. It's hard to put my finger on just when it started, but I certainly noticed the effect that year I lost 40 kilos. I'd better let the IPCC know about this.
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  #41 (permalink)  
Old 09-March-2008, 05:58 AM
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There seems to be a bit of disagreement on that issue. There has also been a lot of comment on the nature of scientific inquiry into such a politically charged issue.
Yes, that's exactly the problem. It's why there's so much misinformation, exaggeration, and flat-out lies being passed off as "climate science"-- too many studies with an agenda. That's why it pays to get educated about it, so we can filter out the bias from the overall useful information and see the
overall picture. It's a bad idea to rely on any one single report, but instead we need to examine the overall weight of evidence.
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  #42 (permalink)  
Old 09-March-2008, 07:30 AM
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It's a bad idea to rely on any one single report...
Unless you find the one single report that is correct.
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  #43 (permalink)  
Old 09-March-2008, 08:26 AM
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Originally Posted by ggchuck View Post
Unless you find the one single report that is correct.
And you know it's correct because...?
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  #44 (permalink)  
Old 09-March-2008, 09:16 AM
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Originally Posted by ggchuck View Post
Unless you find the one single report that is correct.
Well, there's the trick. Crystal Ball anyone?

I prefer to rely on the weight of evidence instead of a single report. It seems that the "single correct report" is easier to identify in hindsight instead of ahead of time. Even then, I think that someone comes up with a direction and others flesh it out; from evolution to relativity, it seems to be the way of things.
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  #45 (permalink)  
Old 09-March-2008, 04:09 PM
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Originally Posted by Noclevername View Post
And you know it's correct because...?
I knew I'd get static on that one.

Quote:
Originally Posted by TheHalcyonYear View Post
It seems that the "single correct report" is easier to identify in hindsight instead of ahead of time
Yeah, that's why I always go to the answer section in the back of a book. It works about half the time.
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  #46 (permalink)  
Old 09-March-2008, 07:34 PM
blueshift blueshift is offline
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Science is based upon experimenting with a hypothesis in a controlled risk environment where the consequences of failure are affordable. Science is not based upon some unarguable truth that cannot be disproven. Pseudoscience is. Science seeks falsification and realizes ideas that are less false. Science is dynamic.

Are the consequences of failure affordable on each side of this argument concerning GW? It appears that if one side gets its way wnd turns out to be incorrect, the amount of CO2 will be reduced and, provided we don't reduce all CO2 emissions, we will survive. If the other side gets its way and is incorrect, we all die.

I think of stronger arguments for both sides than what I have heard from the press but I think the above possible consequences dictate we side with caution.
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  #47 (permalink)  
Old 09-March-2008, 07:39 PM
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Here's a serious comment. I assume that most posters here are Americans. Well, it seems that North America has indeed been having unusually cold winters these past few years. It's possible that the average temperature has gone down in North America (I seem to recall reading something to that effect a while ago).

But here's the thing: North America is not the whole globe. You just have to take a trip across the ocean to Europe, to see that temperatures have been rising dramatically in the last decade, and summers have been unusually hot. And what's been hapenning in Europe is typical of what's been happening in most parts of the world. North America's recent cold winters are the exception, not the rule.
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  #48 (permalink)  
Old 09-March-2008, 08:07 PM
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I think of stronger arguments for both sides than what I have heard from the press but I think the above possible consequences dictate we side with caution.
Siding with caution requires that we understand whether there is a problem, what's causing it, and how to fix it. If some of you do, please share with me.
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  #49 (permalink)  
Old 09-March-2008, 08:43 PM
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Actually, the winters here in Chicago have been very mild. January was the warmest month of winter again this year. Jupiter was behind the sun, tugging us a little closer than normal. Since we now see it in the morning, our weather has become more winter-like. There has been severe snows but that is associated with warmer, not colder winters.

In the 1970s and early 1980s it was not uncommon to see the high temperature fail to exceed 0* F for up to two weeks each January. Ice storms are more common now because of the warmer weather in which they occur. The temperature here has not dropped below zero more than four or five times all winter. That is very mild. I delivered mail for 35 years from '69 until '04 and winter has been a piece of cake in the United States for over the last decade. In 1982 I delivered in wind chills that exceeded -85 F. We left our vehicles run all day.

Pollutants are still the biggest problem and the release of freon gases into the atmosphere by air conditioning and refridgerator mechanics was strong enough to punch a hole wider in the ozone. That affects the atmospheric cycle which, in turn, affects the water cycle. Change the chlorine content of the oceans just slightly and you change their capacity to transfer heat to the polar regions from the equatorial regions.

Can we FIX it? We cannot fix what the astronomical events are going to do to it anyway. The planet's wobble that gives Cincinnati and the Ohio Valley a hotter rainforest (in January no less) than South America or Africa every 20,000 yrs or so cannot be stopped. Density waves in the galaxy that seem to match up with our ice ages cannot be stopped. Salinity changes in the oceans that occur during those ice ages ( Great Lakes pouring fresh water into a then downhill St. Lawrence and out into the Atlantic) cannot be stopped. But we can stop our contributions and if that means losing jobs, then we do it anyway. The standard of living does not come first.
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