Well I rarely post here or anywhere on the IC forums anymore but since I am mentioned by name I've been tempted into feeding the troll...

Firstly, my views are based on what I believe to be a weight of evidence, if I believe the weight of evidence to have shifted I will change my views accordingly and yes I would say that I was previously wrong. However I don't believe that has happened in the debate about whether human activity is affecting or will affect our climate. The fact is the climate is an extremely complicated system with an extremely large number of influencing factors.

Secondly science is not and should not be influenced by political ideology. Suggesting that "liberals" (whatever that means) will believe in man-made climate change and that (presumably) non-liberals will not is a bit meaningless. Whether or not the bonds in carbon dioxide and methane molecules have energy levels differences just right to absorb infra-red radiated from the Earth does not depend on the observer's social or economic viewpoints.

Cloud formation is indeed an influencing factor with the amount of cloud cover both affecting the Earth's albedo and also acting as an insulating layer over the Earth. Additionally clouds themselves are a part of our weather, so anything affecting cloud cover will in turn affect both our weather and our longer term climate. Following the links through to the publications page gets you to this paper http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v476/n7361/full/nature10343.html#/supplementary-information which I unfortunately can't see the full text of because I'm not a subscriber and no longer have a university log in. From the abstract it looks like they were investigating a mechanism for cloud formation involving sulphuric acid, ammonia and cosmic rays which they believe could be the origin of less than 50% of clouds.

However it seems you have interpreted this as "cosmic rays affect the amount of cloud cover therefore emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants caused by human activity don't affect the climate" which doesn't really follow logically. What this study has not done is say that emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouses gases do not influence our climate. Additionally it does not seem to describe how much variation in cosmic rays we get (admittedly this probably exists in other studies) and how much variation in cloud cover we would expect to see based on the variation in incident cosmic rays we experience, and it has not looked at how much of an effect this would have on our overall climate.

This paper has not disproved the effects of atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations on the climate. It has not disproved that rising levels of greenhouse gas concentration are due to human activity, and it has not evaluated how much of an effect variations in cosmic rays (which are probably available in other papers?) have on our weather or climate. For those reasons the authors did not say "global warming false" as you advertised in the thread title nor did it deny that humans don't have an effect on any global warming observed or predicted.

I think this is an interesting study, but I don't believe the conclusions you draw from the study are either the conclusions of the study or are there to be drawn, you are looking at too big a picture from too small a study and your interpretation is biased. You could look at the same paper and blow out of all proportion the effect of the concentration of ammonia or sulphuric acid in the atmosphere - which would be equally wrong as your conclusions but just demonstrates the bias with which you have read the paper (or reports of the paper).

Einstein, would appreciate it if you zipped it when it comes to science. Your arrogance and ignorance insults the name you've borrowed for your pseudonym, as it clearly shows your lack of understanding of the philosophy. Coupling science with the dogma of politics and the fallibility of man, that you clearly demonstrate, is deadly.

We do not know how significant our effect on the climate is. If it is worse than we hope, and we do nothing to prepare, we are in a heck of a lot of trouble. If we do something and it turns out that the Earth just happens to be more of a sustaining regulatory systems than we imagined, then relative to the potential catastrophic loss, we spent some pocket change and developed a few useful technologies. Oh dear.

On a side note SD: With the development of graphene, once nanotechnology has matured a bit, we'll be able to make a far more efficient generation of batteries (regards electric cars vs fossil fuel cars). Will see if I can get that paper for you when I get into uni tomorrow.

> Pixies wrote:

We do not know how significant our effect on the climate is. If it is worse than we hope, and we do nothing to prepare, we are in a heck of a lot of trouble. If we do something and it turns out that the Earth just happens to be more of a sustaining regulatory systems than we imagined, then relative to the potential catastrophic loss, we spent some pocket change and developed a few useful technologies. Oh dear.

While I'm not in any way qualified to make any sort of judgment call on global warming itself, there's two things I need to say regarding this specific notion:

1: Depending on what sort of climate change solutions we're talking about, your risk analysis may not be entirely accurate.  Now, if the only policies you advocate are, for example, alternative energies, there aren't many people who would have a problem with it because the technologies have alternate uses.  I'm pretty sure most of us, regardless of political ideology or stance on global warming, would have no problem with alternative energy because it has external benefits.

However, there's a separate class of proposed solutions which I, and others would claim are uniquely dangerous.  Let's say, for example, a business has a factory in the US which emits 1 ton of CO2 into the atmosphere each year (I actually have no idea of how air emissions are measured... science is someone else's field, not mine), earning $1 million per year in profits.  Assume the government places a cap which limits that business to .5 tons of CO2 emissions each year, requiring a structural adjustment.  How does the business solve this?

The business could cut production.  In this case, our model business would need to cut production by actually more than 50%, because factories actually produce greater profit with larger quantity of production (factories have a fixed cost of maintaining the factory that must be paid regardless of production... a concept called economies of scale).  So you're actually cutting its production by more than 50%.  Add to this the ripple effects (employees that made those additional goods would be fired, a sudden, short-term shortage would occur for that product).  This may not matter for the market as a whole if a single business has the problem, but for every polluting industry in an economy simultaneously, that's a pretty big economic shift.

Alternatively, perhaps there's some technology which could cut the business' emissions.  Assuming the technology exists, the cost is still going to factor into production.  First of all, the cost would have to be cheaper than the cost of simply cutting production by that amount.  Any additional cost for the cleaning effort would effectively act as a tax on production, cutting production similarly to the effects of just cutting production entirely.  Whether these technologies exist in a fashion which could effectively offset emissions is still up for debate, as is the question of how much such an offset would actually cost, relative to production.

The third option is to simply outsource.  Not all countries will have the same environmental regulations.  Even the Kyoto Treaty put a giant exception in for developing nations to allow them to pollute.  With the growth of skilled and unskilled labor in East Asia, there's no reason a polluting company can't simply move its operations to another country to dodge the law entirely.  Considering the only temporary expenses an expanding interconnected nature of commerce, this is a relatively simple way a business can abide by the legal requirement.  Not only would this have absolutely no net effect on emissions, it would cost jobs through outsourcing created not as a result of comparative advantage but instead as a result of a race to the bottom, the bad form of outsourcing.

There may be some research possible to develop emission-reducing production methods.  However, research is a long-term solution.  The company would still need to adopt a short term solution, and would also need to find a way to pay for the additional costs of research (further magnifying the economic impact on the industry).

2: The very act of your risk calculus is a practice in bad science.  You could, in theory, post counter-examples and say "Well, Flint, your article on global warming may be wrong for X, Y, and Z reasons... here's a scientific study to disprove your scientific study..."  You know... actually debate global warming.  Instead, you resort to precautionary principle risk calculation.  That's a terrible idea for a couple reasons.

First, we're no better off in knowing whether or not to buy the global warming issue.  So we're just shooting dice at this point.

Second, I'd say you undercalculate the risk of economic downturns, especially now in an interdependent planet.

Third, and most important, your principle justifies ignoring argument claims in favor of precaution.  In effect, it justifies policy actions based not in truth value but on the most extreme possible action that may result if one side is true.  It's essentially fearmongering.  It also justifies the following:

We should establish a series of orbital nuclear weapons platforms to fight an alien invasion, because if aliens exist and we're not ready, they could wipe out humanity.

We should all become Catholic, because if you're not Catholic and Catholicism is correct, you're going to hell (Yes, the ever-famous Pascal's Wager).

We should stop all development of nanotechnology because nanotechnology research may trigger a gray goo reaction, destroying the planet.

See the problem?  I don't have to prove the existence of aliens, God, or gray goo.  The mere threat is enough to justify policy action.  Good policy?  Hell no.  And yet these and other risk calculus scenarios.  In fact, I didn't make up any of those...

EDIT: Oh, right... if you buy the precautionary principle, you shouldn't be advocating development in nanotechnology since it might destroy the world through self-replicating nanobots.  I'm gonna be honest... some animals may be able to adapt to higher temperatures, even if it requires serious evolution... but it's hard for biology to adapt to machines turning all matter into more matter-eating robots. 

Hehe, cheers for that Zarf. I'm going try and cover all that in as little effort as I can, otherwise I'm going to be late for work, will try and expand on this later .

When it comes to anything in the world around me, I am a "militant agnostic" - though I do privilege myself with varying degrees of skepticism. There is a lot of very good science, very good evidence, for and against our effect on climate change, and it is a very heated topic in the scientific community. The very reason for this and the potential consequences carried makes it an important topic for humanity (over some of the examples you mentioned). I could not hope to understand the intricacies of it all to make an outright decision on the matter, though it interests me it is well out of my field (though I am involved in conceiving and developing greener technologies). But then again, I don't think anyone else has a right to claim it one way or the other because I don't think any individual expert in the field has a full grasp on this broad matter. I dare say, I could say that about any field in science and engineering. These things are complicated and we've only delved into it for a few decades. Science as it is, is very young. As someone once said "we have invented just about ... nothing".

Regards aliens, it would be pointless to make any investment into defence. If a civilisation has survived it's technological adolescence (having things like nukes with the wisdom of 12yo's), it is likely to be very old and likely totally beyond our comprehension. It would be like ants developing better sand walls in a fight against artillery. But then, this is just speculation. Who says aliens that old are violent or interested in ants.

Email me on a.dale (at) liv.ac.uk and I can pass that paper to you Einstein/SD.

In response to Flint's dinosaur argument, wouldn't the excess carbon have been in the form of biological matter, not carbon dioxide... meaning it wouldn't have the qualities climate change people are claiming since biological carbon an carbon dioxide are two inherently different types of molecules?

"Fossil Fuels are called thus cause supposedly they come from prehistoric dinosaurs and flora/fauna. If when these were alive the world was a tropical paradise, and there was no fossil fuels (being that they were alive), then how come the world was sustainable with some much carbon above ground?

Consider it for a while, honestly consider it.
"

Fossil fuels take millions of years to form. We are releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at a faster rate than it is being absorbed and locked into "carbon sinks" such as trees, the deep ocean or the formation of fossil fuels, therefore the concentration of atmospheric greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane is increasing.

I agree with Flint that both solar power and wind power in their current form are inefficient and don't save their own production costs in energy. The encouragement of schemes to put solar panels on house roofs is in my opinion another example of politics getting science wrong, Flint is only so aghast at such a thing because it is contrary to his own politics though.

Flint.  Being in a research institute I have free access to the journal articles that have come from the facility.  So far there are just two, so the experiment is in its very earliest stages.  Of the two, I have just read the Nature Letters article which is the first one and only article with experimental results.  The second article actually discusses a piece of apparatus that they have developed for the experiments at CLOUD. 

First and foremost, the Nature article says that there are many causes for cloud formation.  Fundamentally you need some kind of condensation nucleus with sulphuric acid being one.  Ion-induced nucleation (i.e. from cosmic radiation) is one possible mechanism for *aiding* cloud formation, but it is not the only method and isn't even that significant under some atmospheric conditions

It is also quite a claim that clouds *ONLY* form due to cosmic radiation.  After all, you are chucking away a rather large body of knowledge called thermodynamics.  Ever wondered why clouds have flat bases?  That's simply due to temperature gradients and the lifting condensation level. 

This is all very simple physics, but physics I just don't think you know.  And like all bad news websites, the writers have latched onto something they think they know and have spun a yarn for arrogant laymen to cling on to. 

So I'm sorry to say Flint, but everything in your original post is either a gross exaggeration or entirely false.

http://0.tqn.com/d/politicalhumor/1/0/5/6/3/What-If-Its-A-Hoax.jpg

/thread

Damn you social science students. You don't win arguments by making up lines between what I say and arguing against them, or assuming I fall into one area and then arguing against that ... or by writing a response to death . It's like you loosely read what I wrote and then put up the standard response you've given and rehersed or heard in debate classes. Though CONCISELY, I have worded things carefully so as not to fall into those "traps". I will respond briefly (I don't have much time), but first suck on this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaO69CF5mbY

Paragraph 2-7:
I covered all of that by saying "no matter how much you vary the boundaries". All you did was "vary the boundaries". Yes there is an instance in history where a global depression led to a world war, but that does not mean it will happen again .. pretty poor science for you to make that jump. But if it does happen, surely it will still be a better option than having a world war with the weather in chaos and the environment in tatters . A lot of things could spiral us into a nuclear war and winter, and civilisation as we know it could be snuffed out in a couple of hours .. but that is the threat we face everyday. Surely controlling our depression over a few decades, with set milestones and goals is better?

Paragraph 8: In 20 years those developing countries will be where we are today, and we will still look on them as "poorly lowly developing countries". With our burgeoning intelligence we've been able to produce food by exploiting our environment for an ever increasing population. Instead of controlling our environment for the benefit of our welfare maybe we should control the population for the longevity of the our environment and hence what we have developed so far.

Paragraph 10: The simple fact is, in a very brief time-frame our population has exploded and we've pumped a whole load of stuff into the air around us, devastated the flora (the environments respiratory system), and wiped out the biodiversity (98% of the land-animal mass is now domesticated, 50 years ago it was the other way around). If you shrunk our planet to the size of a snooker ball, our atmosphere would be thinner than the varnish on it. It is only recently that we have come to realise these issues and how small our environment really is. We're now arguing about whether or not we've affected the environment significantly. Man has a tremendous talent for deceiving himself. We are not yet advanced enough to draw a scientific conclusion on the matter, but we have a huge amount of evidence point both ways. Are we teetering on the balance, or are just too dumb to realise we're screwed already? The Earth will be fine whatever happens.

Paragraph 12: When the heck did I say we should only jump straight onto "emssion caps"??

Right .. out of time. xx

btw .. thirdrock won this argument already

The posts in here got a bit too long for my short attention span, but just to respond to Zarf

"If you have a problem with current alternative energy programs... how would a President SD, fully abiding by what he believes to be effective science, attempt to fix global warming?"

You have hit the nail on the head on answering the question about why I'm not President:P. My answer would be that I don't think global warming can be fixed or that the emission of greenhouse gases can be curbed due to rapid development in countries such as India and China and general apathy of the populations of western countries - it makes me think that we are defeated before we even start. But I do think living more sustainably   for example cycling/walking instead of driving short distances, reducing food waste and excess packaging makes everybody better off in terms of finances, health and sanity. On a larger scale things like electricity generation schemes need to be evaluated in a much more critical manner. As far as I am aware Flint is correct in that solar panels take an enormous amount of energy to manufacture for example and I am not convinced this is taken into account in schemes to encourage people to use solar panels ostensibly "to reduce our carbon footprint". Solar panels also only produce electricity when the sun is shining, but we use far more energy in winter than summer. Equally wind turbines only produce electricity when really we want on demand constant supply so we have a problem of energy storage. I don't know what the answer is but what I was trying to say is that I don't think enough criticism is made of certain options before we rush headlong into them, largely for what I believe to be political reasons.

@... well, everyone else debating alternative energy here

Just curious... why do we always assume only one energy tool can be used?  Yeah, there are flaws with each energy system.  However, each system has strengths which are best used in different parts of the world.  Where I live, solar power is the clear best choice, even in winter time  Other large-scale energy systems accommodate for energy use when solar power is less than optimal (such as at night).  In regions with high winds (high-altitude regions), wind power... another region may have a better geothermal environment.

Long story short, debating the merits of any single system ignores the benefit of the energy system: that different energy systems can be adapted to different regions for maximum efficiency.  It's not up to us to determine what is the best cookie cutter solution to every place on the planet.  Otherwise, you ignore, and thus fail to utilize, the resources each region has.

@Pixies

I'm getting to you... I actually had a post... but it got erased in a random backspace error.  X(