Melting permafrost switches to nasty, high-gear methane release

Re: The fat lady has sung

quote: "And yet atmospheric CO2 passed 400 ppm for the first time in 3 million years - just as was predicted by scientists almost 50 years ago. Or would you like to doubt direct atmospheric measurements?"

Err, if you have direct atmospheric measurements from 3 million years ago I'd love to see them :)

Also, from memory the planet is >4 billion years old, so 3 million is less than 0.1% of the planet's lifetime; for the first billion years (?) it was covered in volcanoes and magma, like some sort of planet acne.

According to this nice graph 300 million of the last 303 million years we have had more atmospheric CO₂ than today. Maybe. I could be reading it wrong, although that spike at ~450Mya seems to indicate more than 4000ppmv, or 10 times more than now? It also doesn't dovetail that well with this temperature graph of a similar time period; ~450Mya we were in a cold slump with >4000ppmv CO₂, and again from 300Mya to today, temperature seems to be at odds with the CO₂ concentrations, with the high temperature points seeming to be at the lower (sub 1000ppmv) CO₂ concentrations.

Obviously paleontologists are unfamiliar with CO₂ being such an important greenhouse gas or they would have revised those graphs by now ^^;

Also I quite like this one because it looks quite like a cardiograph. It does seem to suggest that ice core readings would indicate that we got warmer at the poles 120Kya than today though, and the CO₂ graph looks like it had more in the ice from 320Kya ago than today as well.

I have no doubt either I'm reading them wrong, or that the data is wrong though, because it all seems so at adds with the doom and gloom of current climate science. We know today that we're on a rollercoaster ride to thermal hell (literally) and that it is all human's fault. Paleontologists (or paleoclimatologists?) would seem to think that this happens by itself on a recurring cycle ^^;

Re: The fat lady has sung

quote: "This is why I don't believe in Evolution or Gravity, after all, they are just theories.

And earthquakes are just God having a sneeze presumably since Tectonic plate theory is just, um, a theory."

Do the current models, upon which all current economic policy is made, and all catastrophic predictions are being made, support the ability of the planet to be colder than it is today with 4000ppmv (or more!) atmospheric CO₂ and a sun running at 95% luminosity?

That's all I'm asking. It is obvious that we are slowly getting warmer. It is obvious that this has happened before (assuming the maths done by paleoclimatology to be robust). What is most definitely not obvious (to me, at least) is that without us being on the planet it would not be warming. Given those previously quoted estimates of conditions up to 450Mya, it is also obvious to me that either: paleoclimatologists are full of shit, and know nothing about climate (possible but IMO unlikely), or: atmospheric CO₂ as the climate devil is being overplayed deliberately as a political tool (far more likely IMO).

As in, tell the public "shit guys it's only gonna get warmer, you'll need to ditch those beachfront houses because they'll be under water in a couple hundred years and there's nothing we can do" will piss people off, and you are not going to get elected. The people getting elected are the ones that will say "shit guys, it's getting warmer but I can fix this! Vote me in and I can stop all this warming so the planet stays at just the right temperature for ever!".

Potentially I am the only person coming to this conclusion using this data set, but it's a pretty logical conclusion IMO. The Earth has had a "climate" for all of it's 4.5 billion years, ignoring all but the last 200 is not scientific. Including even just the last 0.5 billion gives you a more complete picture, and doing so calls into question a lot of the "climate facts" being fed to us by politicians, especially the "fact" that all current warming is "obviously" anthropogenic. IMO it's "obviously" not as the last million years have apparently been the coldest "on record" for 300 million years. Using that background, try this phrase out for size: "the last decade has been the hottest on record in the last hundred years, showing that we seem to be rising out of the million-year cold spell. Global temperatures over the next few hundred thousand years are expected to rise up to 2C, affecting polar glaciation and seal levels accordingly."

I may well be a deluded idiot, but my delusions fit with current climate "facts", and are more pessimistic than most CAGW proponents. I only really differ in that I'm pointing the finger at nature as the warming culprit, rather than anything specifically anthropogenic.

Re: The fat lady has sung

You see Scientific Method is based on the idea of observing nature, creating a hypothesis that explains the observations, then identifying what would falsify the hypothesis then trying to disprove it by carrying out falsifications.

This approach has been carried out with both Evolution and Gravity and nobody has yet falsified the hypotheses. There are lots of different ideas about how gravity works but its existence can be shown by repeated experiment.

With Anthropogenic Global Warming the 'green house gas' hypothesis was that small amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere would lead to warming that would increase the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere and as a more powerful green house gas water vapor would increase the warming leading to more water vapor evaporating and so on to thermageddon. Unfortunately, the 'tropical tropospheric hotspot' that should appear with this hypothesis has not appeared - and there has been a lot of searching for it. FALSIFICATION 1. The models all built on the basis of the hypothesis project considerable warming even if the amount of CO2 emitted was to be kept at 1998 levels - all show a considerable amount of warming ... yet the actual global temperatures have remained statistically unchanged for more than 17 years. FALSIFICATION 2.

There is more but I would remind you of Feynman's statement on this:

:""n general we look for a new law by the following process. First we guess it. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what would be implied if this law that we guessed is right. Then we compare the result of the computation to nature, with experiment or experience, compare it directly with observation, to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is – if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. That is all there is to it. ""

Using this approach Anthropogenic Global Warming Theory - is wrong - the computed projections have been compared directly to observation and they are incorrect. That is all there is to it.

Re: The fat lady has sung

"Now make a convincing case that we should care whether the rock cares, or whether we should care about whether we care."

I would but I don't care to.

Re: The fat lady has sung

>>"There is no 'Mother Earth' or 'Mother Nature' (where the Daddy?)"

Hey, when your sex is pushed into doing most of the child-raising for a few millennia, then you can have life-sustaining / nurturing entities anthropomorphised as your sex by default. Until then, reap what you sow.

Re: The fat lady has sung

"(ii) the exponential growth in the number of humans" - SumDood

There is no exponential growth, a slow down in population growth is already built into the system, current average number of children per family (or woman) across the world is now about 2.4, which is about the number you need for a stable population. The population is still going up as all those born in the population boom time have to have their 2.4 children, and those children have to have their 2.4 etc, replacing the fewer people who existed before the boom. It also means there is still a few billion in growth left to go.

There seem to be very few people who realise this who bleat on about population control when it is in fact an impossibility (without nukes or something draconian) the growth is already in the pipeline, and not necessary - it will stabilise anyway

Re: "Amount of CO2 in the atmosphere because of human activity is a known quantity"

Really ?

Because you have measured and recorded every single charcoal fire, log burning and every single emission of coal-burning furnaces all over the world ? Every year ?

Nice to know. So what are the exact figures, down to the kilo ?

Of course not. Nobody can. We can, however, agree that with 7 billion people on the face of this planet, the consequences of our activity are more important than when we were just a billion. That is obvious.

The issue is that everyone is approximating everything without exact figures because we don't have them because it would be prohibitively expensive to record and measure all we need in order to know what it is we need to measure.

So please do not go around spouting nonsense like we know the quantity of CO2 that we pump out. We don't. We approximate it more or less accurately and then we start deriving conclusions because we have to in order to make mistakes and correct our conclusion-making process in order to make better predictions the next time around.

Re: The fat lady has sung

Thanks for this.

The people who say "humans can't influence the atmosphere" are almost entirely those who have never studied any atmospheric science or geochemistry.

We know how much carbon has been burned in the past 200 years, we know how much CO2 is produced, we know (to a pretty good extent) where that carbon cycles in the atmosphere, ecosystem and oceans. And yet people who haven't studied this and haven't read anything about the subject continue to see "we don't know". No, *you* don't know because you haven't got any background. Those of us who study the field do know and have been worried and sounding the alarm for the past 30 years.

What is unknown is the nature of the reactions within the atmosphere and ocean to this rapid loading of greenhouse gases - this is what models are trying to determine. We have a control in the actual planet which we have altered substantially. Not the best way to test theories in atmospheric chemistry and dynamics, but interesting nonetheless.

In the interest of science I will say there is a vanishingly small possibility that the reaction of the palate to this greenhouse gas loading is that a previously unknown or underestimated feedback takes place to manage the levels. It is much, much more likely, though, that the results will be significant changes to climate and weather systems across the globe - as have already been seen in high latitude and high altitude locations (as also was predicted by science 30+ years ago)

Re: The fat lady has sung

The physics is perfectly good - UNTIL- it is moved from the laboratory and put in a real chaotic atmosphere with overwhelming convective effects and water with its continual swapping of latent heat. Then somehow the physics in the real world with unknown inputs and unknown values for those inputs into a non-linear chaotic system of chaotic systems just don't follow nice simplistic laboratory hypotheses. And people claiming that basic physics applies and drawing straight linear projections through chaotic values just display their abject ignorance - or malfeasance.

Re: The fat lady has sung

"There hasn't been any serious doubt for at least a decade now that global warming is primarily caused by man." Can you explain how the Earth warmed into the Holocene interglacial in that case? A far more rapid warming of a greater extent. Or are you just chanting a mantra?

Re: The fat lady has sung @ SumDood

>A site with a large number of readers well versed in technology and science and statistics

A large number who pretend to be well versed - in almost everything.

Re: The fat lady has sung @ SumDood

"A site with a large number of readers well versed in technology and science and statistics is one of the places where we see more scepticism of claims made by CAGW proponents? Gosh."

>A site with a large number of readers

OK.

>Well versed in technology and science and statistics

Some are, some are patently ignorant of such things (but still interested in reading what the site has to offer). Some have an image of their own competence well beyond their actual competence. Some of those open their mouths wide and talk as if they know what they're talking about.

Some listen to the latter with mild amusement at their exaggerated sense of self-importance, and then just quietly smile or move swiftly on.

>One of the places where we see more scepticism of claims made by CAGW proponents

if you don't recognise the opinionated, unscientific point-of-view epitomised in that statement you are clearly one of the subset with an exaggerated sense if self-importance and a level of scientific understanding towards the bottom end of the readers of this site.

Re: Get your facts sorted!

Beef rises to record prices in U.S. due to drought. Wheat, corn harvest apocalypse.

Perhaps not caused by climate change. Perhaps not caused by humans dumping CO2 into the atmosphere. Perhaps. But most definitely caused by no human attempts to reverse the problem.

So glad Britain is self sufficient in food stocks. I hear Soylent Green is yummy.