Global Warming Concensus Broken

[MSimon]

But if you were a policy maker now in China seing how bad are the pollution problems caused by rapid industrialisation, and how loud the demand of a largely impoverished peasant class is for development and more money, you would not feel that overpopulation is an issue that ha gone away!

Obviously the thing to do is an industrial strength population reduction. The Germans proved you can reduce population by 3 million a year without outside help. With outside help they nearly doubled that.

Now I figure with the advances in technology achieved since then the Chinese could probably reduce their population by 30 million a year. In 10 or 20 years they could reduce their population by 20 to 40%. Arbeit macht frei.

Lebensraum!

===

The Chinese do not have an overpopulation problem. They have a lack of resource use problem.

Coal to the rescue. Until something better comes along.

[djolds1]

Let us play chance. You say there s a 5% chance my scientific experiment will set off a quantum inversion which destroys the whole world. I say: its OK 95% probability nothing will happen. I guess you want to stop me.

Actually, no. Progress requires some risk. ~5% risk? I'll throw the on switch for your Large Hysteria Creator (LHC).

The greater the cost of a problem, the more worthwhile it is to prevent it even if the chances are low. Everyone has a different risk tolerance but to be fair you multiply the cost of the problem by its likelihood.

Cost-benefit. Huge expenditures vs a small chance of "maybe."

The Precautionary Principle is idiotic.

As for population growth. If all in the world had US average standard of living there would be no growth - also there would be no food, no water, etc.

Nice try at moral equivalence. Poor attempt, but at least you tried. Read a manual on debating tactics and try again in a week.
Population growth is dropping even in 3rd world countries. And you darn well know we'd have enough water. Trying to say we wouldn't is just ludicrous and only undercuts your credibility.

The resources are not there. China & India are moving rapidly towards greater wealth and the planet will struggle to support all.

Odd thing about economics. Humans find resource replacements at need. Go figure. And if the entire world has US levels of prosperity, even holding current levels of technology at ceteris paribus, we'd be mining the Near Earth Asteroids. There are no resource limitations.

Club of Rome was wrong because of agricultural advances made possible by intensive agriculture enabled by fossil fuels.

The Club of Rome predicted mass famine, Malthusian overpopulation, and critical shortages of industrial metals. All by the '80s. Backing the Boy who was proven to have Cried Wolf 25 years ago is foolish beyond words.

Maybe there will be more advances. I hope so. (Maybe Polywell will be one But if you were a policy maker now in China seing how bad are the pollution problems caused by rapid industrialisation, and how loud the demand of a largely impoverished peasant class is for development and more money, you would not feel that overpopulation is an issue that ha gone away!

China's problem is not overpopulation. It is a lack of arable land and too many bare branches. Per reports, land in Africa is being bought up at a prodigious rate for agriculture, and there is a proven precedent on how to deal with too many unattached males in any society.

Duane

[djolds1]

The better example are the economic models funded by the various finance banks. Both climate and the economy are massively complex chaotic systems. The finance modelers are among the best that mathematics has to offer. They have billions of dollars of motivation to tweak their predictive models right, moreso than the climate academics, and even then the absolute best they can manage is barely 1-2 quarters.

Just ran this by a finance banker friend of mine. The best three models can manage ~6 quarters, the rest are good for toilet paper.

Duane

[MSimon]

The better example are the economic models funded by the various finance banks. Both climate and the economy are massively complex chaotic systems. The finance modelers are among the best that mathematics has to offer. They have billions of dollars of motivation to tweak their predictive models right, moreso than the climate academics, and even then the absolute best they can manage is barely 1-2 quarters.

Just ran this by a finance banker friend of mine. The best three models can manage ~6 quarters, the rest are good for toilet paper.

Duane

And if all the models were that good the prediction accuracy would go down because the economy is a feedback system.

[tomclarke]

Let us play chance. You say there s a 5% chance my scientific experiment will set off a quantum inversion which destroys the whole world. I say: its OK 95% probability nothing will happen. I guess you want to stop me.

Actually, no. Progress requires some risk. ~5% risk? I'll throw the on switch for your Large Hysteria Creator (LHC).

I am a big fan of LHC and anyone carefully reading the many risk assessment reports, challenges, and replies would view risks as being essentially zero. But if risk were 5% I doubt the scientists there would want to switch it on!

The greater the cost of a problem, the more worthwhile it is to prevent it even if the chances are low. Everyone has a different risk tolerance but to be fair you multiply the cost of the problem by its likelihood.

Cost-benefit. Huge expenditures vs a small chance of "maybe."

The Precautionary Principle is idiotic.

If you refer to GW, opinions will differ about the cost of the alternative, the cost of doing nothing, and especially the likelihood. The Stern Report makes an economic case for early action - but you will not agree with its assumptions.

As for population growth. If all in the world had US average standard of living there would be no growth - also there would be no food, no water, etc.

Nice try at moral equivalence. Poor attempt, but at least you tried. Read a manual on debating tactics and try again in a week.
Population growth is dropping even in 3rd world countries. And you darn well know we'd have enough water. Trying to say we wouldn't is just ludicrous and only undercuts your credibility.

Well, enough water if you have free power and desalination everywhere. Otherwise much of Europe & Asia is already at fresh water limits, primarily becase of large qtys of water required for agriculture. I was not saying US was short of water (if that is what you udnerstood) but that it might run short of food if the central plains stop being productive. I believe there have been some issues about this though I am sure there are solutions.

The Pentagon report on 21st century risks to US says that international fighting over water is likely.

The resources are not there. China & India are moving rapidly towards greater wealth and the planet will struggle to support all.

Odd thing about economics. Humans find resource replacements at need. Go figure. And if the entire world has US levels of prosperity, even holding current levels of technology at ceteris paribus, we'd be mining the Near Earth Asteroids. There are no resource limitations.

This is an interesting, and historically US, argument. historically US because settlers able to expand into effectively all the resources of a large, fertile, and unpopulated with effective competition continent has quite a different view of the world from Europeans living together for centuries and fighting over fixed land resources.

Of course the argument now is that scientific & technological advance will solve any resource problem. Theoretically there is no reason why this should be true. Practically space offers very large resources, at a cost. Whether they will be energetically cost-effective remains to be seen. If you mean that effectively infinite resources are available if the price goes up enough that is true but irrelevant.

More interesting to me is how much on this planet can science & technology continue to supply more resources. Most minerals, even ones which are "scarce", become less so with more efficiet prospecting, extraction, and a slightly higher expected future cost. But even with this we exploit the cheapest sources first and resource costs will go up when technological advances do not outstrip increasing costs of supply. If Chian, India have same rate of resource use per capita as US & Europe that would be dramatic increase in supply required and prices may increase long-term, and will increase very long-term as cheap resources dwindle.

Club of Rome was wrong because of agricultural advances made possible by intensive agriculture enabled by fossil fuels.

The Club of Rome predicted mass famine, Malthusian overpopulation, and critical shortages of industrial metals. All by the '80s. Backing the Boy who was proven to have Cried Wolf 25 years ago is foolish beyond words.

As I said, exponential expansion => crash at some point. Those who point this out never get timing right and are all seen to look foolish except the last one - when the crash happens. Look at the stock market crashes for good examples of this syndrome.

Maybe there will be more advances. I hope so. (Maybe Polywell will be one But if you were a policy maker now in China seing how bad are the pollution problems caused by rapid industrialisation, and how loud the demand of a largely impoverished peasant class is for development and more money, you would not feel that overpopulation is an issue that ha gone away!

China's problem is not overpopulation. It is a lack of arable land and too many bare branches. Per reports, land in Africa is being bought up at a prodigious rate for agriculture, and there is a proven precedent on how to deal with too many unattached males in any society.

If by this you mean war - it is the standard human regulating mechanism for overpopulation. A pity that in modern wars non-combatants get killed more often than combatants, since this reduces effectiveness at balancing sex ratio. And war between india & Paskistan now would be a nuclear conflict with consequences that go beyond those countries (& the fallout would reach US).

But "lack of arable land" and "overpopulation" are usually synonyms.

Best wishes, Tom

Duane

[MSimon]

As I said, exponential expansion => crash at some point.

Which directly contradicts what we know. When a society has enough free energy birth rates decline. So expansion tends to be self limiting. If you climb to the enough free energy point fast enough population growth is limited.

The dire scenarios all begin with "if things keep going the way they are going now....."

With biotech the "limited arable land" is not as much a limit as it once was. Esp with output rising and population declining (soon enough).

[tomclarke]

I too hope for a soft landing with all the world becoming like the developed countries. But this is not historically very common - we live in unprecedented times!

Tom

PS - biotech is another problem I have with the greens. they should be embracing it, but do not. It is not helped by the fact that the first few trials for biotech are for products that do not do much except tie farmers into buying seed. But of course that is just one commercial strand, and biotech does offer great promise, if it is directed correctly.

[MSimon]

The seed deal has been with us since hybrids crops were developed.

[bcglorf]

If you refer to GW, opinions will differ about the cost of the alternative, the cost of doing nothing, and especially the likelihood.


And here in lies the biggest problem. Opinions differ on what temperature will look like in 2100 if human CO2 contributions continue at current rates. Opinions differ on what temperature will look like in 2100 if human contributions to CO2 completely disappeared. Opinions differ on the economic cost of reducing CO2 emissions by set amounts. Opinions differ on the economic costs of adapting to climate change. And all of these points are FUNDAMENTAL to any calculation on what kind of cost/benefit there might be to taking action on CO2 emissions. Sorry, we are no where near knowing what is and is not worthwhile yet. Even if Al gore is right and it's time to panic and take immediate action, we simply don't yet know enough whether what action to take. Adaptation though is a good idea no matter what. Prevention is expensive and may end up being money very poorly spent if halving human emissions changes 2100 temps by less than 0.5 degrees. It'd be money catastrophically badly spent if we found natural climate change driving us into a cooling period the next 100 years.

[djolds1]

Just ran this by a finance banker friend of mine. The best three models can manage ~6 quarters, the rest are good for toilet paper.

And if all the models were that good the prediction accuracy would go down because the economy is a feedback system.

Yup. They're jealously guarded in-house tools at the finance banks. Entirely separate from the "predictions" foisted on the rabble of investors. If the bankers actually pay much attention to their best models is another matter.

Duane

[djolds1]

Cost-benefit. Huge expenditures vs a small chance of "maybe."

The Precautionary Principle is idiotic.

If you refer to GW, opinions will differ about the cost of the alternative, the cost of doing nothing, and especially the likelihood. The Stern Report makes an economic case for early action - but you will not agree with its assumptions.

Massive economic disruption and an associated loss of prosperity based on century predictions by faulty computer models that can be made to say anything? Whacked, and absolutely not cost-benefit justified.

A woman in the US has an ~0.032% chance of being raped, per annum, and any male in her life is the likely perpetrator. Accordingly, she should buy and always wear full Level-4 soft body armor, and keep an MP-4 submachine gun in hand at all times when interacting with male friends and relatives in any way?

W.H.A.C.K.E.D.

And the rape is far more high probability than the eco-lypse.

Well, enough water if you have free power and desalination everywhere.

You specified US standards of living for everyone, Tom. The infrastructure would be put in place and paid for.

Odd thing about economics. Humans find resource replacements at need. Go figure. And if the entire world has US levels of prosperity, even holding current levels of technology at ceteris paribus, we'd be mining the Near Earth Asteroids. There are no resource limitations.

This is an interesting, and historically US, argument. historically US because settlers able to expand into effectively all the resources of a large, fertile, and unpopulated with effective competition continent has quite a different view of the world from Europeans living together for centuries and fighting over fixed land resources.

No different from people going to Alaska for 6 months to make a load of money. Resources are shipped home just like the Europeans did during the Age of Exploration. Yes, resources are not the only reason that peoples fight, but claiming that we are resource limited is laughable.

Of course the argument now is that scientific & technological advance will solve any resource problem. Theoretically there is no reason why this should be true. Practically space offers very large resources, at a cost. Whether they will be energetically cost-effective remains to be seen.If you mean that effectively infinite resources are available if the price goes up enough that is true but irrelevant.

QUE?

Expansion of resource base in response to price indicators is an economic fundamental.

The Club of Rome predicted mass famine, Malthusian overpopulation, and critical shortages of industrial metals. All by the '80s. Backing the Boy who was proven to have Cried Wolf 25 years ago is foolish beyond words.

As I said, exponential expansion => crash at some point.

And since that exponential population expansion is not happening and the resource limitations have been shown to be nonexistent, your point is irrelevant. New Age acid heads are free to predict the coming of the space brothers to their heart's content; in no case will the space brothers actually show up.

Those who point this out never get timing right and are all seen to look foolish except the last one - when the crash happens. Look at the stock market crashes for good examples of this syndrome.

Massive changes in infrastructure, economy and lifestyle are not justified on the basis that the space brothers might land at Bozeman Montana in 2063.

China's problem is not overpopulation. It is a lack of arable land and too many bare branches. Per reports, land in Africa is being bought up at a prodigious rate for agriculture, and there is a proven precedent on how to deal with too many unattached males in any society.

If by this you mean war - it is the standard human regulating mechanism for overpopulation. A pity that in modern wars non-combatants get killed more often than combatants, since this reduces effectiveness at balancing sex ratio.

The West's Post-Westphalia rules of war, designed to limit collateral damage, are dying by our own hand. Non-combatant deaths will be irrelevant in a few generations, when we complete the transition back to the natural form of human warfare. Carthaginian Rules. But after we do complete that transition, women go back to being the booty of war and your demographic concerns zero out.

And war between india & Paskistan now would be a nuclear conflict with consequences that go beyond those countries (& the fallout would reach US).

The danger of fallout is hyped waaaaaaay beyond the reality.

Duane

[djolds1]

The dire scenarios all begin with "if things keep going the way they are going now....."

Linear projections are always the reliable way to get things wrong.

Duane

[seedload]

4) Scientists have not agreed on any other factors that correlate as well to this long-term trend.

There is a theory that the Pacific Decadal Oscillation is doing most of it. The PDO, in it's warm phase, is known to be a period of generally more warmth and generally less clouds/rainfall. The PDO, in its cool phase, is known to be a period of generally less warmth and generally more clouds/rainfall. This is known.

There exists theory that indicates that less clouds reduces reflection of light increasing the energy absorbed (warm phase). More clouds increase reflection and decrease visible light energy absorbed. (cool phase). It only takes about a 1% change in reflectivity to completely explain 20th century warming.

Now, from wikipedia on the phase shifts of the PDO:

Although there are several patterns of behavior, the most significant one seems to be in regime shifts between "warm" and "cool" patterns which last 20 to 30 years.

1750: PDO displays an unusually strong oscillation.[2]
1905: After a strong swing, PDO changed to a "warm" phase.
1946: PDO changed to a "cool" phase. [See the blue section of the graph on the right]
1977: PDO changed to a "warm" phase.[3]
1998: PDO index showed several years of "cool" values, but did not remain in that pattern.[4]
2008: The early stages of a cool phase of the basin-wide Pacific Decadal Oscillation.[5]


Check out the dates listed. Notice anything? Major shifts in climate warming and cooling are coincident with major shifts in the PDO. Seems like a potential correllation. How good is that correllation? I just posted about how good it is. It is sick good.

viewtopic.php?t=976

[tomclarke]

Why is Roy Spencer's model non-Physical? (see discussion on thread referenced above by seed).

Here is a great but highly polemic post rom realclimate on the details of how Roy got his PDO data that matches so precisely. He selected to indices, and linearly combined them, and then added a big damping factor.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/ar ... y-lessons/

The point here is that this type of selection & comparison can be done very easily, but it must be physically believable for the results to be taken seriously as a candidate for a possible causative correlation. In this case the scale factor needed to convert th index into W/m2 radiative forcing is unphysically large because it gives results much bigger than observed changes in radiation.

Seedload - from where did you get your for matching? If from Roy Spence or equivalent the problem is fudged DATA, as explained in the above link.

Now what convinces me is not only that the data could be fudged, as explained, but also that the coefficients needed to get a match are totally non-physical. If chosen they result in an annual effect on temperature which is much higher than observed. Spencer gets round this by assuming that the top 1km of the ocean mixes (so called mixing layer) thereby damping out the otherwise ridiculously large osicllation from the fudged PDO data.

But this assumption is contracry to what everyone else does (they assume 50m)! Now see post #47 for somone robustly criticising this view of the matter and asking why should 1km not be an oceanographically reasonable depth for "mixing".

The answer depends on the timescale of course, but on annual timescales, needed for the effect to damp the unphysical swings in temperature that would result from the data otherwise, the answer is 50m.

Read the comment #47 & the reply. Also read the other comments, for more insight into how these apparently very convincing anti-AGP stories get created and propagated.

The problem we have, reading this stuff, is that there is a lot of detailed background we do not have. Without this, we can be persuaded either way too easily. Only solution if you want the truth, read both sides and compare the details very carefully!

Best wishes, Tom

[MSimon]

The point here is that this type of selection & comparison can be done very easily, but it must be physically believable for the results to be taken seriously as a candidate for a possible causative correlation.

There is one little fly in that ointment. The IPCC believes that the PDO is responsible for a cooling trend that will continue until 2015. (I think it will be longer - but no matter).

I'd be fine with using their PDO numbers to see its effects on the warming. Funny thing - the IPCC's modelers don't seem to have performed that calculation.

Kind of makes you wonder.

Like why does everything work in one direction? Sort of. Except when the data is so out of touch with the models that corrections must be made.

So my question is - how much did the PDO contribute to the unprecedented (since at least the 1910 to 1940 era) warming trend? And while we are at it - how much did it contribute to the 1940 to 1980 cooling trend?

We await Hansen's answers with bated breath. Holding breath would be unwise. It might cause a personal cooling episode (to room temperature).