talkmagic.co.uk

themagicwand wrote:Warmer weather.

Sorry Paul, Britain is as warm as it is because of the Gulf Stream, and a change in sea levels will change the direction of that stream - global warming means we'll get colder. Just look at the other countries on the same latitude as us.

Grimshaw wrote:My beef isn't that the climate is or isnt changing, it is doing because that's what it's always done. It's that humans are both arrogant and dumb enough to think they're responsible for it. Let history be your guide (and i dont mean just average temperatures in your life, i mean look back into history even before this Jesus chap came along), and hopefully common sense can help dictate the future.

However, the Earth's climate is changing out of line with the previous changes occurring over a much longer time scale - funnily enough scientists are aware that climates change naturally, and have taken that into account.

Surely the only stupid or arrogant behaviour would be to decide, contrary to the evidence, that we aren't having an effect on the earth's climate because you don't trust the gorvernment?

Without meaning to sound confrontational, are you getting your opinions on this matter from anywhere other hearsay and the media? If we're going to talk about religion, I would suggest that the people saying "It isn't happening, we surely couldn't have an effect on the earth" without anything to back them up seem to be the ones relying solely on faith.

Serendipity wrote:
Sorry Paul, Britain is as warm as it is because of the Gulf Stream, and a change in sea levels will change the direction of that stream - global warming means we'll get colder. Just look at the other countries on the same latitude as us.

But I thought that climate change meant that the UK would experience wetter and warmer winters and a Mediterranean style climate in the summer - hence vine yards, flowers coming into bloom earlier etc?

Seems to me that if we have a warm year that's down to climate change, and if we have a cold year that's down to climate change also.

Me no understand.

Serendipity wrote:Surely the only stupid or arrogant behaviour would be to decide, contrary to the evidence, that we aren't having an effect on the earth's climate because you don't trust the gorvernment?

Even Rajendra Pauchari admits there is no evidence for man made global warming. So this evidence you speak of? Send it to him, because he'd love it.

Serendipity wrote:Without meaning to sound confrontational, are you getting your opinions on this matter from anywhere other hearsay and the media? If we're going to talk about religion, I would suggest that the people saying "It isn't happening, we surely couldn't have an effect on the earth" without anything to back them up seem to be the ones relying solely on faith.

I dont want you to get confrontational, because i dont want this thread to get locked. I will put it to you though, that if i were getting my opinions from hearsay and the media, surely i'd be agreeing with everyone else and saying ' Yes, its all our fault!! '. As this is what the media would have you believe.

On the 18th of April last year, a story came out that Antarctica was growing in size, not shrinking as was first thought. The story was discredited and attacked from all sides until no more was said about it. It's very difficult to get those kind of stories into the press without getting beaten up by Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, the readers of the paper, and any other hand wringer looking to score points.

My opinions come from books. Books i can spy on my groaning book case such as Global Warming: The Complete Briefing, and The Real Global Warming Disaster. My opinions also come from various web sites. You have to be careful there of course, as information submitted to the internet is not checked and confirmed by an independent body, but reliable sites using reliable sources are pretty much......well, reliable. I've also ploughed through the climategate emails....and thats a task believe me. As i said earlier, if anyone wants them i'd be glad to forward them.

I'd like to ask you, Serendipity, what your sources are, and indeed everyone else who has an opinion on this because if im discussing this with a bunch of people who believe everything they hear on the news, I'm done.

If you know the history of how anthropogenic global warming was brought up as an idea, you'll know that the IPCC was set up to prove this idea. It was not set up as a group looking into climate change and trying to find out the truth one way or the other, it was set up to prove it. Period. It was also not a scientific body either, it was and still is, a political one.

You can bring it all back to a very sneaky episode involving a Dr James Hansen, who worked for NASA. A certain Senator Tim Wirth was one of the first US politicians to take global warming seriously, and wanted to move it up the political agenda. To do this, he set up a press conference on what was suspected to be the hottest day of the year in 1988. He got Hansen to speak to the press and other members of the senate (including one Al Gore) because Hansen was very outspoken on the issue and he needed some drama to make the headlines.

Wirth made sure with the Weather Bureau that it was still set to roast on that day, and then this is what he admitted in a tv interview in 2007;

"....we went in the night before and opened all the windows so the air conditioning wasn't working......so when the hearing occured it was really hot....."

The IPCC has carried on in this underhand vein ever since.

And for the media, well.......the media is global warming's bestest buddy.

Sir John Houghton who was the first chairman of the IPCC said;

" Unless we announce disasters, no one will listen "

And my favourite quote on a lot of this comes from Stephen Schneider. A man who claimed we were all going to freeze to death, then changed his mind and said we're all going to fry instead;

" Each of us has to strike the right balance between being effective and being honest ".

The global warming story features Schneider a lot. He has a big part to play in it. As i said in an earlier post, scientists are subject to the same character flaws as the rest of us, and greed and status can effect a man's thinking.

Lester Lave was a professor of economics in Pittsburgh who told Senator Wirth's commitee that the issue of global warming was still controversial and that by no means were all scientists agreed on it, and that they were still uncertain as to what the cause of climate change might be. Gore went loopy and said "...anyone claiming such a thing couldn't know what he was talking about...." and suggested there was no point in the senators hearing anymore of Lave's evidence. Does this sound like a rounded argument?

I'd better finish here lest i have a touch of the Craig Browning style post length. There's a whole lot more to global warming than you hear about on the news or read in the papers. I've read quite a bit on it in books and on web sites on both sides of the argument, but need to read so much more. From what i have read, i have formed my opinions on.

I don't know anything about the science behind global warming and/or our contribution (or not) to it, and frankly, I don't have time to learn - so, in a Pascal's Wager-y sort of way, I try to "do my bit" because I have a great life and I can afford to try to make decisions that lower my carbon output.

However, I haven't got past this most basic of stumbling blocks (and I'm not trying to be a wise-ass here, I genuinely don't know the answer, however stupid that probably makes me look): why is our sea level set to rise due to melting ice, when ice displaces an amount of water equal to it's mass? If have a glass full of water with an ice cube in it and leave the ice to melt, the glass doesn't over flow. Why won't the polar ice caps simply melt, and disappear, that that'll be the end of that?

It's melting of continental glaciers rather than floating sea ice that will increase sea level, but I think that some of the calculations that have been done by non-specialists for the media have inadvertently included sea ice in sea level calculations.

I think this should prove interesting in weighing the arguments for truth: http://tinyurl.com/yhh534j

Tomo wrote:I think this should prove interesting in weighing the arguments for truth: http://tinyurl.com/yhh534j

Wow! Hats off to the chap who pieced all that together. I appreciate his comments at the end where he said a lot of counter arguments are hard to come by. They certainly are.

I hope people look at it Tomo, and take some of it on board. I like how it says ' Climate Change Deniers Vs The Consensus '. I agree with Michael Crichton when he said that 'science has nothing to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right.'

A good example of this of course, is Galileo, who thanks to his endorsement of the heliocentric view, was griefed left right and centre, not least by the Catholic Church.

Gordon Brown's comments that climate change deniers are ' flat earthers ' was incidentally one of the things that really started me looking into this, as i figured that anyone who questioned something is surely the exact opposite of a ' flat earther '.

Tomo wrote:I think this should prove interesting in weighing the arguments for truth: http://tinyurl.com/yhh534j

Very good link. It sounded like an argument between Al Gore and Glenn (or is it one "n") Beck.

nickj wrote:It's melting of continental glaciers rather than floating sea ice that will increase sea level, but I think that some of the calculations that have been done by non-specialists for the media have inadvertently included sea ice in sea level calculations.

As well as inland ice melting, there's also the fact that a warmer climate causes the ocean water to expand, so it comes up higher onto the shore. If memory serves, this is usually more important than ice-melt when it comes to determining sea level.

Robbie wrote:

nickj wrote:It's melting of continental glaciers rather than floating sea ice that will increase sea level, but I think that some of the calculations that have been done by non-specialists for the media have inadvertently included sea ice in sea level calculations.

As well as inland ice melting, there's also the fact that a warmer climate causes the ocean water to expand, so it comes up higher onto the shore. If memory serves, this is usually more important than ice-melt when it comes to determining sea level.

...Really? I'm not disputing that; as I said, I'm pretty ignorant in these matters, but I'd have thought that even if the sea was just under boiling temperature, the amout it would actually rise as a result would be minimal... I mean, the surface area is vast, think how much extra water you would need to raise the level by even 1cm...

Still, happy to be proven wrong!

Robbie wrote:As well as inland ice melting, there's also the fact that a warmer climate causes the ocean water to expand, so it comes up higher onto the shore. If memory serves, this is usually more important than ice-melt when it comes to determining sea level.

Yeah, but the question I was responding to was solely to do with melting ice!

As for thermal expansion here goes with a quick and dirty calculation:
Looking at map from http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/OC5/WOA05F/woa05f.pl (annual mean sea surface temperature to 10 metres depth, but it seems to remain pretty constant down to about 200 m) I would say that about 25% of the water is below 4 ºC (ie has a negative expansion coefficient), the rest I'm going to guess at a mean of about 20 ºC.
At this temperature, an increase of 2 ºC would result in a decrease in density of 0.06 % and hence an increase in volume of that top 10 m of 0.06 % (http://www.simetric.co.uk/si_water.htm). If we can assume that all of that expansion is in depth, then that would be an increase of 6 cm. That other 25 % would actually decrease in volume as it warms, and using the same assumptions and going for a mean of 2 ºC would result in a decrease of about 0.0015 % or 1.5 mm so a total rise of 5.85 cm. If we were to assume a full 0.06 % increase to affect all of the water in the oceans (3790 m average according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean), which is clearly wrong as the increase will be less at the lower temperatures of the deep ocean, the increase would be about 2.3 m

In comparison, based on the minimum values of the volumes of the Greenland and Antarctic glaciers found at http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2000/Han ... blit.shtml, total melting and addition to the sea at 10 ºC (resulting in a decrease of the volume of the ice as it warms to 10 ºC of 8%) would be an addition of 25.4 x10^6 km^3. Estimate of the volume of the oceans is about 1.3x10^9 km^3 so that would be an increase of about 2%. Using the same assumption that the increase would only be in depth would fail as it would result in an increase of 76 m which would obviously cause widespread flooding and increase in the area of ocean and hence less overall depth increase. Since this is significantly worse than even Al Gore claimed I reckon I've done something wrong and hence wasted a lit of time trying this calculation!

Of course, complete melting is not the same as a 2 degree increase in temperature but even a 10 degree increase would only increase the volume of the oceans by 0.2% and hence depth by 7.6m.

And, of course, feel free to pull my calculations apart; the assumptions are probably too drastic and my understanding is naff, it was only an exercise to avoid doing work this evening!

Just a thought, if the sea expands with heat, doesn't the land do the same? Not sure whether that would add to the problem or help negate the rise in sea level!

Well, I'm a biologist/animal behaviourist and not an oceanographer. I believed what I was told by what I thought was a reputable source.

...And you can tell, can't you?

Sorry Robbie, I wasn't trying to prove you wrong, just do an exercise with the numbers. The problem is that anyone can get hold of numbers and crunch them and you never know what they are trying to prove or how valid those calculations are. I can be certain that the actual sea level rise due to ice and thermal expansion will be nothing like the numbers I've worked out!