Global Warming Stuff

[mrswdk]

I don't even understand the concept. Building something so that you can leave a memory of yourself is such a waste of time, regardless of whether you end up being remembered by the entire human race or whether you are forgotten the second you die.

[Metsfanmax]

I don't even understand the concept. Building something so that you can leave a memory of yourself is such a waste of time, regardless of whether you end up being remembered by the entire human race or whether you are forgotten the second you die.

My example had nothing to do with leaving a memory of yourself; it had to do with building a place where people could see the works of the great artists.

[mrswdk]

Same difference. It's all about what happens after you die.

[mrswdk]

Okay, I reread the article sober. I don't agree with it at all. It's fairly ridiculous to suggest that people would suddenly stop doing anything if they knew that the world was going to end 20 years after their deaths.

To take one example given by the article: social activists. Would someone who is upset about new chemical plants being built near their home suddenly stop caring if they know that the world will end in 50 years? No, because those chemical plants affect them right now, and will continue to affect them right now regardless of the world's future death by asteroid. Those activists campaign because they want the system to change now, for their benefit, not because they want it to change in 200 years.

The same goes for people's jobs. The reason that the vast majority of people get jobs is because they want money, and the vast majority of employers pay people to do those jobs because their is some immediate benefit to them in having that person do that job. Telling those people that human society will end in 100 or so years won't change that.

[khazalid]

Okay, I reread the article sober. I don't agree with it at all. It's fairly ridiculous to suggest that people would suddenly stop doing anything if they knew that the world was going to end 20 years after their deaths.

To take one example given by the article: social activists. Would someone who is upset about new chemical plants being built near their home suddenly stop caring if they know that the world will end in 50 years? No, because those chemical plants affect them right now, and will continue to affect them right now regardless of the world's future death by asteroid. Those activists campaign because they want the system to change now, for their benefit, not because they want it to change in 200 years.

What about fossil fuel activists? etc. Cherrypicked that one; plenty other examples that obviously contradict your logic.

The same goes for people's jobs. The reason that the vast majority of people get jobs is because they want money, and the vast majority of employers pay people to do those jobs because their is some immediate benefit to them in having that person do that job. Telling those people that human society will end in 100 or so years won't change that.

#bullshit jobs

[mrswdk]

What about fossil fuel activists? etc. Cherrypicked that one; plenty other examples that obviously contradict your logic.

I imagine they would pipe down and give everyone else a bit more peace and quiet to just get on with things. The vast majority of people on this planet are not philanthropists or Good Samaritans dedicated to the future security of human civilization.

#bullshit jobs

Not really relevant to the point I was making, but okay.

[Metsfanmax]

To take one example given by the article: social activists.

Well it's probably fair to lump me in this category on this issue since I spend a non-negligible amount of time working with Congress on climate change. And I am pretty sure that if I was certain the world was going to end in the year 2100, I wouldn't give a shit about working on climate change.

[mrswdk]

People whose job roles or primary motivators involve working for the good of future generations are the exception that proves the rule, really.

Everyone has immediate concerns (they want to eat, keep themselves entertained etc.), and those immediate concerns would not go away just because the expiry date of humankind has been brought forwards. If you told me the world was going to end the day after my death, my job would continue to exist and I would continue going to it. Why wouldn't I?

[WingCmdr Ginkapo]

I work in Infrastructure. If the world was going to end after my death I wouldnt worry about making sure bridges actually stand up as it really wouldnt matter.

Its not the exception.

[mrswdk]

If you make a bridge and it falls down then you're going to lose your job.

[WingCmdr Ginkapo]

Its easy to make bridges that wont fall down tomorrow, its takes effort to make ones that wont fall down in 20-50 years.

[WingCmdr Ginkapo]

easy may not be the correct term, but it is a lot simpler to do the former than the latter.

[Metsfanmax]

People whose job roles or primary motivators involve working for the good of future generations are the exception that proves the rule, really.

Essentially all jobs at least indirectly are working for the good of future generations. Even service workers are doing so, say, when they wait tables, because the people they're serving are significantly motivated to do what they do by the thought of success of their future generations.

[mrswdk]

People whose job roles or primary motivators involve working for the good of future generations are the exception that proves the rule, really.

Essentially all jobs at least indirectly are working for the good of future generations. Even service workers are doing so, say, when they wait tables, because the people they're serving are significantly motivated to do what they do by the thought of success of their future generations.

Dude, you are really stretching now. As I said in the second half of that post:

Everyone has immediate concerns (they want to eat, keep themselves entertained etc.), and those immediate concerns would not go away just because the expiry date of humankind has been brought forwards. If you told me the world was going to end the day after my death, my job would continue to exist and I would continue going to it. Why wouldn't I?

[tzor]

OK, you can believe whatever you want to. As a scientist, I'm pretty confident that a global conspiracy to fake massive amounts of data would be... rather tricky.

Ah but here is were I switch hats. (Off goes Physics on goes Computer Science) You are dealing with a question of BIG DATA. You don't have to "fake" massive amounts of data (although many researchers are refusing to share their original data sets so it's hard to apply the scientific method of verification to their results). Since you have all sorts of disparate data with all sorts of date ranges you have to apply correcting material to get all the different sources to provide uniform results for long term analysis.

Where do data quality problems come from?
Many places.
For example, the source data could be dirty on its own,
or transformations that you apply to the data
could corrupt the data.
And this is a challenge with the complexity of the software
pipelines that we build process data for data science.
We can also have clean data sets that are screwed up
because of the integration, where
we combine multiple data sets together
and do that incorrectly.
Things that are rare errors can become frequent errors
after we perform a transformation or integration.
And even a clean data set can suffer
from bit rot-- that's data that loses either its value
or accuracy over time.
Or any combination of the above can
cause data quality problems.
So again, looking at the big picture,
where does dirty data come from?
It can come from the extract, transform,
and load process, where we have to deal with integrating data
from multiple different data sources, such as application
databases, files, and logs.
We need to clean this data when we move it
into our data warehouse.

It is the isotopic ratio that is relevant here. Plants generally have a lower ratio of carbon-13 to carbon-12 than the atmosphere does, since the energetics favor usage of carbon-12 over the heavier carbon-13. The ratio of carbon-13 to carbon-12 in plants is fairly constant over time since photosynthesis doesn't change its nature, so the ancient organic material that decayed to form fossil fuels has about the same C13/C12 ratio that modern plants do. So then fossil fuels have about the same C13/C12 ratio as plants now do; that is, a lower C13/C12 ratio than the atmosphere had when the industrial period started. Consequently the burning of fossil fuels means that the ratio of C13 in the atmosphere is decreasing, because the typical CO2 molecule is now more likely to come from the C13-depleted fossil fuel burning.

That of course doesn't mean that C13-depleted carbon dioxide has a different global warming potential, since the extra neutron doesn't much change the absorptive properties of the CO2*. But that's not relevant to the point I was making to Phatscotty, which is that there's indisputably a human fingerprint on the current CO2 emission rate, which gives the lie to the possibility that what we are seeing now could have happened at any time in the past.

*This means, naturally, that there may be quite a bit we can learn from past ice age-interglacial transitions in relation to what might be in store for us. But I wanted to make it absolutely clear that there is nothing natural about what is currently happening.

I love the expression "Nothing natural." But that is a side issue. And you also need to consider C14 as well. But wait. the C12 guy is the EVIL one, not the C13 and C14. SOURCE

Carbon-13 in CO2 is decreasing, as the fraction of atmospheric CO2 that is realized from combustion of fossil carbon is increasing. Ratios of 13C/12C in CO2 tend to be lower in the Northern Hemisphere, suggesting a fossil-fuel source that resides mainly in the Northern Hemisphere.

Carbon-14 in CO2 is decreasing, and 14C/12C ratios are lower in the Northern Hemisphere than in the Southern Hemisphere, suggesting a northern hemisphere source of 14C-depleted carbon (e.g., fossil fuels). However, things are not quite that simple; although 14C from bomb testing has largely been removed from the atmosphere by the biosphere, the biosphere is now giving some back, precluding any simple interpretation of the rate of 14C decline. For more on this topic, see Levin et al. (2010).

So industrial CO2 is BETTER for plants than natural CO2 because as you said, or rather as SOURCE says

Atmospheric carbon dioxide contains approximately 1.1% of the non radioactive carbon-13 and 98.9% of carbon-12. During photosynthesis, plants descriminate against C13 because of small differences in chemical and physical properties imparted by the difference in mass.

So plants are scrubbing out the er not natural CO2 before the natural CO2, eh?

But the notion that we can use this or rather that because your argument was the opposite of the above sources to argue that the past is no guide is nonsense. If anything the biosphere should have a preference for incorporating non natural C12 than it does natural C13 or even C14. But, dammy, they both are incorporated into the biosphere, not not at the same rate. (Again see above, how else did the nuclear C14 get removed from the atmosphere to be released at a later date.)

But again the isotope has no function with regards to global temperatures, and that is the key measurement here.

SOURCE

Scientific studies have shown that atmospheric Carbon Dioxide in past eras reached concentrations that were 20 times higher than the current concentration. Recent investigations have shown that the current change of climate is part of a larger cycle known as climatic lowstand phase which precedes a sequential warming period known as transgression phase. The purpose of this evaluation is to demonstrate that the Earth is actually cooling, in the context of the total geological timescale, and that the current change is equivalent to a serial climate phase known as lowstand.

On this assessment, the evidence points to a current natural climate change which happens sequentially in two main climate periods, icehouse and warmhouse.

It also reveals the succession of four natural climate phases known as transgression, highstand, regression and lowstand. The transgression phase consists of a rising Sea Level, flooding continental areas. Highstand is a phase where the marine level remains relatively stable but oscillating into the transgression phase. The regression phase consists of a gradual diminution of the marine level, leaving a greater area of the continents uncovered. The phase of Lowstand consists of a permanence of low marine level. Currently, the Earth is passing through a lowstand phase, which will revert to Transgression phase. The succession of these phases show the Earth is cooling.

At the moment, the area of continental flood is almost 7%; according to climatic succession, we expect the area of continental flood to increase to almost 10%, but never so massive that it will put human populations in danger, as the IPCC has taken to suggesting almost every day. Allow me to clarify that most of the claims regarding catastrophic climate change filling the newspapers are overblown and based on data that is being arbitrarily exaggerated to blame humanity for climatic changes which are absolutely natural.

[Metsfanmax]

Ah but here is were I switch hats. (Off goes Physics on goes Computer Science) You are dealing with a question of BIG DATA. You don't have to "fake" massive amounts of data (although many researchers are refusing to share their original data sets so it's hard to apply the scientific method of verification to their results). Since you have all sorts of disparate data with all sorts of date ranges you have to apply correcting material to get all the different sources to provide uniform results for long term analysis.

This has little to do with "big data" as it is generally understood now; temperature records and things like tree ring records are actually fairly small datasets compared to the size of the datasets generated by (say) contemporary global climate models. There is difficulty in getting temperature reconstructions from varied sources (tree rings, ice cores, temperature monitoring stations) to harmonize together, but that's a statistics problem, not a big data problem. As for the question of not sharing original data sets -- most researchers will, if you ask nicely. I haven't seen any evidence that climate researchers are less likely to share data than anyone else. And in any of these fields, it's possible to outright lie or to massage data to get the conclusion you want, but what's the motivation for suggesting that climate researchers are any more likely to do this than anyone else?

More to the point, you're just throwing out wild accusations and hoping something sticks instead of being familiar with the field, which is rather dangerous.

(Also, as someone whose work lies at the intersection of high-performance computing and physics, I kind of laugh at the idea that one should have to wear different hats to talk about this issue.)

And you also need to consider C14 as well. But wait. the C12 guy is the EVIL one, not the C13 and C14. SOURCE

I have no idea what you are talking about. As I said, from the perspective of the effects of radiation trapping, all of these isotopes are nearly identical. I pointed out that the isotopic ratios allow us to pinpoint the source of the emissions independently. The point was no more or less than that.

So industrial CO2 is BETTER for plants than natural CO2 because as you said, or rather as SOURCE says

It is kind of a moot point -- plants need more nutrients than just CO2 to grow, and even if you increase the amount of CO2 or change its isotopic ratio, that doesn't necessarily mean they can grow much better.

But the notion that we can use this or rather that because your argument was the opposite of the above sources to argue that the past is no guide is nonsense. If anything the biosphere should have a preference for incorporating non natural C12 than it does natural C13 or even C14. But, dammy, they both are incorporated into the biosphere, not not at the same rate. (Again see above, how else did the nuclear C14 get removed from the atmosphere to be released at a later date.)

I have no idea where you're going with this. Again, I was not making any arguments about what effect the isotopic ratios have, only that it is useful in determining the source of the emissions. I am not sure what argument you are intending to attack but I didn't make it.

Once we accept that the emissions are anthropogenic and therefore the current climatic changes bear no exact resemblance to past climatic events, we can start to answer Phatscotty's question. In particular, the rate of CO2 increase is substantially higher than at any time in the past that we know about (I think), and that's the part that is most worrisome for human timescales. As it is the concept of having to transition between an ice age and an interglacial (say) is worrisome, but if we had 5000 years to do it, it is at least plausible. But if we've sped it up by a factor of 20 or 50, then we ought to be rather concerned.

[Dukasaur]

OK, you can believe whatever you want to. As a scientist, I'm pretty confident that a global conspiracy to fake massive amounts of data would be... rather tricky.

Ah but here is were I switch hats. (Off goes Physics on goes Computer Science) You are dealing with a question of BIG DATA. You don't have to "fake" massive amounts of data (although many researchers are refusing to share their original data sets so it's hard to apply the scientific method of verification to their results). Since you have all sorts of disparate data with all sorts of date ranges you have to apply correcting material to get all the different sources to provide uniform results for long term analysis.

Where do data quality problems come from?
Many places.
(etc.)

The point is not that bad data exists (rather a trivially true statement with which no scientist would disagree) but that bad data is not sufficient to support a false conclusion. Errors of the type you describe are like wobbles in dice. They will cancel each other out. The number of errors supporting theory A will be about the same as the number of errors opposing theory A. Bad data, in short, is just static in the phone line. It doesn't fundamentally alter the conversation on the phone, although if it gets bad enough it might make the conversation impossible.

Supporting a false conclusion cannot be done by sloppy data-set combining. Supporting a false conclusion requires deliberate and intentional monkeying with the data. Getting back to mets' point, supporting this particular allegedly false conclusion would require a conspiracy on a scale that has not been seen before.


Speaking of bad data....

SOURCE

[bigimg]http://www.biocab.org/Geological_TS_SL_and_CO2.jpg[/bigimg]

There is nothing that should arouse your suspicions about the quality of a source as much as a graph with an undefined axis.

[tzor]

There is nothing that should arouse your suspicions about the quality of a source as much as a graph with an undefined axis.

What undefined axis, it's in millions of years.

[WingCmdr Ginkapo]

Vertical axis

[tzor]

Vertical axis

There are multiple vertical axes, you want them all populated with scientific values that are generally meaningless to the average person. I believe this is supposed to show correlation.

[Dukasaur]

Vertical axis

There are multiple vertical axes, you want them all populated with scientific values that are generally meaningless to the average person. I believe this is supposed to show correlation.

It doesn't do a very good job of showing correlation, but even if it did, the vertical axis needs to be defined so that you can use it to judge how strong the correlation is.

And yes, it's perfectly possible to show multiple axis, even though they are not in the same units.

[WingCmdr Ginkapo]

the vertical axis needs to be defined so that you can use it to judge how strong the correlation is.

Correlation strength is not affected by the magnitude of the scale.

[Dukasaur]

the vertical axis needs to be defined so that you can use it to judge how strong the correlation is.

Correlation strength is not affected by the magnitude of the scale.

Of course it is. If the scale of something is from -1 to 1, then huge loopy sine waves definitely mean something significant. If the scale runs from 98 parts per million of something to 99 parts per million, then those same scary-looking sine wave loops are nothing but signal noise.

[Phatscotty]

Okay, I reread the article sober. I don't agree with it at all. It's fairly ridiculous to suggest that people would suddenly stop doing anything if they knew that the world was going to end 20 years after their deaths.

To take one example given by the article: social activists. Would someone who is upset about new chemical plants being built near their home suddenly stop caring if they know that the world will end in 50 years? No, because those chemical plants affect them right now, and will continue to affect them right now regardless of the world's future death by asteroid. Those activists campaign because they want the system to change now, for their benefit, not because they want it to change in 200 years.

The same goes for people's jobs. The reason that the vast majority of people get jobs is because they want money, and the vast majority of employers pay people to do those jobs because their is some immediate benefit to them in having that person do that job. Telling those people that human society will end in 100 or so years won't change that.

I think there might be something to said about your premise. As far as what people do, 'people' pretty much sit around and talk about what their leaders do. Just look at the USA entitlement brick wall. In the year 2008, USA was projected to go bust in the year 2030. That is to say, if we don't change our entitlement program spending, the USA would epic fail in 2030.



So what did 'people' do? I guess they voted 51-48 'as a country' to borrow trillions more dollars,Obamacare for another trillion (and counting), another trillion over a few years time in expanded medicair and medicaid benefits as well as softened social security disability requirements along with 10 million more people enrolled in these programs than expected, followed quickly (of course) by repeated credit rating downgrades to the USA, which isn't gonna help in keeping interest rates low. In fact, most likely the multiple US credit rating downgrades is going to play a factor as a major reason why the interest rate is higher than predicted/accounted for. What is the result of borrowing even more trillions in the face of a deadline like 'You got a generation from now to fix it'? Now, US debt is exponentially growing so rapidly that the interest payment on our debt will surpass US military spending in 2021, which probably means 2019. Maybe when all the chips are on the line, a person in power just goes nutz bringing about the end, so that it can be dumped on a political opponent?



Not to mention, the whole idea behind spending these trillions was because it was going to create jobs, which to the government means increasing tax payers, equals more money to pay off the debt and grow the kind of economy that we'd need to sustain back-to-back-to-back trillion dollar annual government spending deficits. Despite people freaking out about the tremendous success based on a 5.3% unemployment rate, we at the same time have the lowest labor participation rate since the Great Recession of the late 70's. We just set a new low today. Even thought reports find 221,000 new jobs were created, we lost more jobs than that, making for a net negative.




So, when you say

It's fairly ridiculous to suggest that people would suddenly stop doing anything if they knew that the world was going to end 20 years after their deaths.

I automatically think about my country, and offer up '....and sometimes the 'people' literally go balls to the wall, figuring the harder we slam into that wall the less pain will be felt. But hey, maybe it's the perfect way to go?

[WingCmdr Ginkapo]

the vertical axis needs to be defined so that you can use it to judge how strong the correlation is.

Correlation strength is not affected by the magnitude of the scale.

Of course it is. If the scale of something is from -1 to 1, then huge loopy sine waves definitely mean something significant. If the scale runs from 98 parts per million of something to 99 parts per million, then those same scary-looking sine wave loops are nothing but signal noise.

The three vertical axis' dont go below zero (assuming kelvin for temperature).