Is Global Warming real?

[Janx]

I've been reading State of Fear by Michael Crighton. It's about Global Warming and eco-terrorists.

I would preface this discussion with some things:
generally speaking, pollution and mass destruction of nature are bad things. Arguing against global warming might be mistaken as support for these things.
Folks who disbelieved in Global Warming might have been assumed to be in cahoots with BigOil or Ignorant. I posit there might be a third option.
Climate Change is not the same as Global Warming. Technically, the climate is always changing, moving from one ice age to the next, etc.

------------- To the discussion at hand --------------------


I got this book for a $1 off Amazon. I could not tell you if all his "facts" are correct or not. But knowing Crighton, there's a nugget of truth or issue in his book.

The premise here is that some folks are manipulating the message about the science to promote Global Warming as an issue. The glaciers are melting, when it might be only that SOME glaciers are melting, while the vast majority are not.
Or that cities are hotter because of more concrete, not because of global warming because other places are actually cooling. Or that increased CO2 is actually better for the crops, not worse. Or that the Sahara has been shrinking since the 1980s per satellite photos.

So, given that before I assumed Global Warming was a thing, I hadn't actually read any science. Who's got time for that?

Now, I have to ask, how do WE actually know if Global Warming is a real thing going on, or just a scare tactic?

Back to my disclaimer, I certainly bet a demographic exists who resisted the idea of Global Warming because it was inconvenient. They liked the benefit of polluting. Or that they had their head in the sand. But it is possible there are folks looking at the data who actually don't see the proof.

I'm curious if it can be figured out here to some degree.

 

[Morrus]

Climate Change is the preferred phrase these days, I think.

So, given that before I assumed Global Warming was a thing, I hadn't actually read any science. Who's got time for that?

Well, I don't think I'd personally choose a science fiction author as my source of information. There are thousands of actual scientists studying this sort of thing.

I would say that Wikipedia's page on the subject is a decent overall view, but I read just the other day about how it was one of a couple of dozen Wikipedia pages which are edited constantly by PR firms and other organizations.

I think it's a bit of a struggle if you're position is that climate change isn't happening; the discussion ground is - as far as I can tell - more in the area of what's causing it: is it man-made climate change or not?

I do enjoy it when people mistake the the weather right there where they are right now for the global climate, though. That's always funny! It's rather like me claiming Americans don't exist because there aren't any here right now.

 

[Kramodlog]

Climate Change is the preferred phrase these days, I think.

Climate disruption, some suggest. http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcm...nd-climate-change-call-it-climate-disruption/

But global warming is a better term. Climate change was suggested by Republican propaganda guru Frank Luntz because it sounded less dangerous and urgent to USian voters. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2003/mar/04/usnews.climatechange

 

[Homicidal_Squirrel]

I think John Oliver can help out here.

[video=youtube;cjuGCJJUGsg]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjuGCJJUGsg[/video]

 

[Umbran]

I got this book for a $1 off Amazon. I could not tell you if all his "facts" are correct or not. But knowing Crighton, there's a nugget of truth or issue in his book.

And, don't all the best lies not have some basis of truth in them? There is a "nugget of truth" in Jurassic Park, too. There are actually mosquitoes trapped in amber. That doesn't mean we can have T-Rexes wandering around eating people.

The premise here is that some folks are manipulating the message about the science to promote Global Warming as an issue.

"Some folks"? Let us be clear about something....

A search for peer reviewed articles from 1 January 1991 and 9 November 2012 that discussed whether the globe is warming found 13,950 such papers. The number of those that said the globe was not warming? 24. Two dozen. So, about two-tenths of one percent of scientific papers on the subject in the past decade don't agree that temperatures are rising.

Of those nearly 14,000 papers, only about 4,000 touch on the cause of global warming (this is not surprising - most astronomy papers are about measurements observations of stars, not about how galaxies form). Of those 4000, 97% agree that our current change in climate is due to human action.

So, if Chrighton actually suggests as you say, he can go fold his conspiracy theory five ways, and put it on the dark side of his moon. THERE IS NO CONTROVERSY in the scientific community on this.

This idea has the same flaw as "the Moon landing was faked". It requires hundreds to thousands of people to be in on it, and keep their mouths shut, for years and decades. This is not plausible.

Citations for my points above:
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/2/024024/article
http://www.desmogblog.com/2012/11/15/why-climate-deniers-have-no-credibility-science-one-pie-chart

And, from a decent science-communication blogger (and scientist himself) Phil Plait, who often covers the topic:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astr...why_don_t_they_publish_scientific_papers.html
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astr...ts_overwhelmingly_agree_it_s_real_and_is.html

The glaciers are melting, when it might be only that SOME glaciers are melting, while the vast majority are not.

Nope. Sorry. They are melting wholesale. Arctic and Antarctic ice is melting. Permanent ice is melting all over the place. Polar bears are having a bad day. Your sea is rising. Hope you weren't planning to leave your coastal real estate to your grandkids....

So, given that before I assumed Global Warming was a thing, I hadn't actually read any science. Who's got time for that?

See above. You have specialists whose job it is to know this stuff for you, and tell you about it. Why do you doubt them? The same basic method produced not just climate science, but pretty much every technological advance since the Renaissance. Why doubt it on this, when we accept it everywhere else? To quote Randall Munroe, "Science! It Works, B*tches!"

When you have a question about your health, you go to a doctor. When you wonder about that doctor's diagnosis and treatment plan, you go to another doctor. If you go to 100 doctors, and 97 of them agree that you have cancer, do you listen to the 3? Or, do you accept that maybe you're actually sick?

 

[Legatus Legionis]

.

 

[Janx]

Well, I don't think I'd personally choose a science fiction author as my source of information. There are thousands of actual scientists studying this sort of thing.

In the case of Michael Crighton, I wouldn't look at it that way.

His more recent novels have had an activist bent to them. He finds a science point, writes some fiction about how that could be bad, but the point is to raise awareness that "this thing isn't quite right."

I couldn't tell you if his charts and graphs are accurate, but he's the kind of writer to go grab real charts and graphs and paste them into his work.

I've also read the Freakonomics' guys work prior to this, and they raise some similar points about the data not indicating what the common folk think is going on.


So, the question raised is whether climate change (formerly known as Global Warming) is really happening in a significant way. Let alone based on man made factors. Levitt and Dubner reference how volcanoes impact the global weather (cooling it down) and contrast that to certain kinds of pollution.

Factoids I'd be curious to confirm:
Of all the glaciers on Earth, is there growth/shrinkage happening?
Of the sea level, what has been it's trend over time?
Of temperatures around the world, how have they charted outside of cities over time?

 

[Ryujin]

Climate Change is the preferred phrase these days, I think.

And there's a reason for that. Far too many people, when addressed with the expression "global warming", come back with comments like, "Then why was I buried in six feet of snow last winter?" The average person doesn't understand that adding more energy to a system results in more chaotic reactions. They don't understand that an overall increase in temperature doesn't necessarily mean that their garden thermometer is going to show a couple of degrees higher all the time.

Then you have the people who break it down into "climate change" and "anthropomorphic climate change." they'll accept the former, deny the latter, and throw up their hands saying, "There's nothing that we can do."

 

[Umbran]

The earth goes thru cycles of warmer and colder weather. Who is to say that this is not just another one of them?

People who have spent their lives studying the phenomenon, and can see the difference between what we are going through, and the natural cycles, that's who.

The data the scientist/media are using does not go back far enough to justify there conclusions.

I don't know upon what you based that assessment. We have evidence from rocks, sediments, tree rings, ice cores, corals, shells, and microfossils. "paleoclimatology" is a real thing. We can speak to climate on geologic timescales. Sure, we know more about the most recent 11,000 years or so, but there is still basis to speak on how current changes are not part of the regular cycles of the planet.

 

[Umbran]

Then you have the people who break it down into "climate change" and "anthropomorphic climate change." they'll accept the former, deny the latter, and throw up their hands saying, "There's nothing that we can do."

I think the term you want is "anthropogenic". Anthropomorphic climate change would be climate change that is shaped like a person

"There is nothing we can do," is a great self-fulfilling prophecy. There is a point when you don't actually worry too much about who is at fault - it will ultimately destroy world economy who/what ever is at fault, so we'd better do something about it.